Youtubers don't count as
Because they did it better a decade ago. And just to iterate, it fucking sucks. You can't excuse it by just arguing I just don't understand, it's objectively bad design. A boss like The Dancer in DS3 did the mistiming shtick without raising a hammer over her head for five seconds.
He does now, but he got his start just by uploading really aggressive and stylish Sekiro boss kills. He didn’t get good by incentive of money, he was already good beforehand and as a result got popular just by uploading videos of himself playing normally.
Bosses a decade ago don’t offer nearly the same challenge that they do now. Their moves are so much simpler and more predictable to the degree that even Nameless King is a joke to the average Shadow of the Erdtree player.
By what metric, the “it’s not like DMC so it sucks” scale?
People in 2016 were complaining about the exact same thing you’re complaining about with Slave Knight Gael and Nameless King. The only reason bosses like that and Dancer are acceptable to you now is because they are comparatively far easier bosses with SOTE bosses in mind, and gaining mastery over the game’s controls and mechanics (a necessity in SOTE) gives you more freedom to play with and against bosses, something that’s more readily achieved with the simpler bosses in DS3. In other words, stop bitching and actually play the game and get good at it; or better yet, go play another game that satisfies the arbitrary requirements you want FromSoft to.
Elden Ring is far and away the hardest Soulsborne game. That’s the point. Every mainline FromSoft game has been progressively more difficult than the last, and the DLCs even more so than their respective base games. This has been consistent since fucking Artorias of the Abyss.
It’s so perplexing to me that delayed attacks are the single most controversial aspect about FromSoft. It’s like DeS through Bloodborne raised an entire generation of idiots who think that spamming the roll button is a win button and DS3 collectively broke their minds when they found out that you’re expected to react to the actual attack itself and not just panic roll at the first sign of movement.
I wasn’t aware that Fire Giant and Malenia have the exact same fighting style and boss mechanics, but now that I think about it, you’re right! We need to go back to more bosses like Dragon God and Wolnir who exist solely to be made fun of.
It's not though, it's the easiest. Parrying is at its peak and has never been easier to pull off, Magic is still overpowered now with added items to negate MP cost, rings and weapon buffs that boost magic damage, Bloodhound step (RIP), SONAF, Scarlet Rot, Flask of Wondrous Physick and the nut busting spell. You can always count on enemies attacks being delayed and bait them into a punishable state and they added stealth to the game making it easier to backstab everything. I'm just scratching the surface, if you think its still hard that's okay you can always just git gud, it's easy to do as ER is an easy game.
Most bosses can’t be parried reliably, if at all, and the ones that can have the added layer of requiring multiple parries to achieve a riposte. Compared to DS3’s wonky parrying that had nonsensical timing that only hardcore PVP sweats bothered to familiarize themselves with, the return to DS1/DeS (because that’s what it really is) parrying timing just opens up more options for killing bosses depending on build.
Sounds like you should be celebrating this massive swathe of options; and not just options, but viable ones too. How many cool spells and abilities in previous Souls games have been completely neutered by their lack of viability in actual gameplay?
In that case, you can, in fact, do whatever you wish to enemies instead of having to wait for them to finish their animations like a QTE. Glad that controversy has been settled.
Pre-nerf Consort Radahn is still the hardest boss in any mainline Souls game (for the wrong reasons, btw) and Malenia, Maliketh, Godfrey, and Rellana are still just hard if not harder than the most difficult bosses in DS1, Bloodborne, and DS3. The availability of options does not change the fundamental difficulty of the mechanics the bosses themselves present.
There are no hard bosses in souls game. Except Sekiro, Sekiro had hard bosses, way harder than any boss in ER. The soulsborne games have never been hard (Only Sekiro would fall under being hard) , obtuse and esoteric would be the better words to describe the "difficulty" and how "hard" the bosses are.
Why? My point was that with the diversity of choice, the difficulty of ER is non existent, it's a question of how long do you want to spend smashing your head against the wall until you decide to go around it. (really you can ask the same with all the souls games)
I never said you couldn't, I just said that every enemy just plays the same due to them having delayed attacks that can be exploited. Gets boring after a while when every enemy does the same thing, what really differentiates the bosses from one another aside from appearance and lore when they all fight the same?
Bosses can be difficult relative to each other, you know.
Speak for yourself, I had a much easier time with Inner Isshin and Inner Owl than I did with Consort Radahn at launch. As it turns out, experience and difficulty is subjective.
What’s obtuse and esoteric about a boss like Godfrey or Messmer?
And part of the appeal of these games is the smashing your head against the wall factor. It’s been like this since Demon’s Souls, even that game had broken shit like walking Firestorm. Badly tuned abilities haven’t impacted the popularity or success of FromSoft’s games even a little bit.
So having consistent mechanics and rules every enemy plays by is a bad thing…?
Well last time I checked, all the different bosses had different stats with damage, stagger, elemental resistances, etc. But maybe I’m just blind and Malenia really just is Rellana copypasted. In that case, I don’t see what makes Genichiro a wildly different boss from Madam Butterfly or Isshin either, considering they can all effectively be beaten with 3 buttons.
Would you complain if Commander Gaius and Putrescent Knight were replaced by bosses more similar to Rotten Greatwood and Wolnir
Putrescent Knight is a fun boss that royally kicked my ass at launch, so yes, I would absolutely complain if he was replaced by a pushover gimmick boss. Commander Gaius isn’t all that interesting in comparison because horseback combat just isn’t that nuanced in Elden Ring. I could give or take him, but a gimmick boss as a replacement would be sorely out of place in Elden Ring.
This is going to sound retarded, but I find Elden ring to be the most difficult Souls game, not because it's actually hard, but because I want to play it like I did the older Dark Souls games, where being just a knight with a great sword was viable. If you knew what you were doing and played carefully you could use a sub optimal build and still have fun. Now the game has become so obtuse and demanding with its difficulty that if you aren't using every exploit available to you, you will get outclassed by nearly everything you haven't memorized.
Rykard is just another Storm Ruler boss. It’d be weirder to not have one in a brand new mainline title at this point. Comparatively, DLCs have largely been pretty bereft of gimmick bosses, so one would be out of place.
I don’t understand this line of thinking. I’ve done multiple runs of the main game without ever relying on exploits and even deliberately using shitty weapons and spells, and I’ve beaten basically all available content on every character I’ve started. You’re fundamentally just complaining that you don’t have the time investment or skill to learn the boss fights and game mechanics, and that’s okay, but why blame the game on that? Would removing Rivers of Blood spam or Mimic Tear suddenly make bosses easier for you?
In the paragraph after, you sing the praises of Sekiro, which is fundamentally the same thing except with a parry button instead of rolling. How is one acceptable and the other not?
If it's true you've beaten Elden Ring without cheesy strats or busted weapons, good on you. You hold more patience for the game than I do. But bringing up rivers of blood and mimic tear kind of proves my point. How confidently can the devs design enemy encounters knowing players can dismantle them with little to no effort?
Sekiro is not just parrying, you have unique shinobi arts like Mikiri, which I brought up, as well as a bunch of others on top of shinobi prosthetics that give you way more versatility in how you respond to attacks. Every boss in Sekiro has unique interactions with each of your moveset and prosthetics, but figuring out their weaknesses is not a sure fire victory, you still have to be able to read and anticipate their attacks.
I'm so tired of the "this character was interesting 400 years ago but now they're just craaaaazy" formula. It's why I was so disappointed that Miquella just turned out to be evil in the end, why can't we have a consistent villain or companion that isn't supposed to be mysterious or insane? I bet so many people would forgive Miquella being evil if he actually had a relationship with the player.
Yeah, having a job makes you realise that the soulsbournes are overrated time sinks that are purposely designed to waste your time and make you feel your mortal existence decay every time you die. Great games none the less but there are better games.
Parrying in Sekiro damages the enemies posture bar, rolling only drains my stamina and does not damage the enemy in any way at all. Yes, you could use the armour of thorns set as the substitute but you're not given it from the start of the game whereas parrying is core to the combat for Sekiro in the same way as rolling is for the soulsbournering.
The games feel to me like the devs design enemy encounters with average players using average weapons in mind. Remember, RoB was actually a terrible weapon at launch because the weapon scaling wasn’t functional. Stuff like Moonveil was nerfed after launch. I think the intention has always been to be able to beat the game as an average John Eldenring sword-and-board build, but the scope of these games (and FromSoft being sloppy about balancing as always) means people will always find some broken build to stomp all over it. Like I said before, this goes all the way back to Demons Souls.
No one can ever design for the second guy. It’s comically unrealistic. I think that Elden Ring was designed for a mix of that first guy and a little bit of “guy who has played prior Souls games and sorta knows what they’re doing and what to expect from bosses”. Of course, this means there is a steeper learning curve with a (literal) gatekeeper boss like Margit, but I can also say that I had way more memories of fighting Margit for the first time than Taurus Demon or Vordt of the Boreal Valley, so is that a bad thing?
No, Waterfowl Dance isn’t a fair move and I don’t like it. But it’s one move in a boss fight with dozens, in a game with over a hundred bosses. It alone doesn’t impede my enjoyment of the rest of the game, and I can still find enjoyment in fighting Malenia after the fact.
Elden Ring has jumping like Sekiro, tons of defensive weapon arts, and with the DLC you even get a parrying flask that brings you a little bit closer to Sekiro (and frankly should have been a default ability in the base game). The tools are there, you just have to seek them out.
…this isn’t any different with bosses in Elden Ring, or any other Souls game.
Again, this can literally be rewritten word for word to suit Elden Ring:
See?
Fundamentally speaking, the only difference between these two things is the visual aspect of what the player character is actually doing. At the end of the day, you’re just pressing a button in time with the boss’ attacks and making sure a bar on the screen doesn’t deplete. It’s really not that deep.
With exception of certain attacks (eg. Waterfowl Dance) and certain bossfights (eg. Consort Radahn), I don’t think there is any less player accountability in Elden Ring than there is in Sekiro. It is no one’s fault but yours that you got smacked by Margit’s hammer because you got greedy with attacks and ran out of stamina, so on and so forth.
You say this, but how many bosses actually have bullshit attacks that take the question of survivability and responsibility out of the player’s hands? I’ve already named two well known ones, but are there really very many aside from that? Or are we shitting on a massive 100+ hour game because of two poorly designed bosses, one of which has already been nerfed?
Then why not play them instead of arguing about games you self-admittedly don’t like all that much?
This comes with the tradeoff of basic attacks in Sekiro being effectively useless while basic attacks are what damages the enemy in Elden Ring. They’re really not as different as you guys seem to think.
I quite enjoy them actually but if anything that isn't unwavering slavish devotion that makes you cope type paragraphs and spend every waking moment playing them means you don't like them then so be it. You know you can enjoy something and criticize its flaws, ultimately if you do like the games you are fully aware of that they have things that can be criticized and pointed out as the bullshit they are and notice the improvements made, like jumping finally being one button (Sekiro did it first, you're welcome)
Except they're not, you can beat the entirety of Sekiro using only basic attacks and parries, don't even need to charge it. The rhythm game is just better than the open world game and that's okay. You don't need to defend it, you can enjoy it, it's just that I've seen what came before it and they did the same things better than it and it's also taken things those previous games did poorly and improved upon them.
