Elden Ring

[Back me up!]

So did the patch help anything for single player before I spend the time hoisting the jolly roger?

 

[Spirelord: Downfall]

So did the patch help anything for single player before I spend the time hoisting the jolly roger?

Extra runes buff and an extra life every night boss that disables the bonus runes to reward good play I guess, including the third night boss. Including guaranteed Wending Graces (one ups that take a whole inventory slot) you can get 3(4?) extra lives and up to 5(6?) without boss drops giving one (one on basic merchant which might restock between days so maybe two, one on final day, one on super merchant, extra life bonus from city shifting earth power) on top of Wylder having Tears of Denial as a passive. So while not slower it's a bit more forgiving with unoptimal routing. Unrelated to solo they allegedly made getting higher quality relics more common in both the Little Jar Casino and if you beat night 3.

 

[Disguised In Cognito]

DeS/DS1/DS2 were primarily dungeoncrawl games, which rewarded paying attention to your environment to trivialize fights or at least avoid getting squashed. Duels in flat featureless arenas happened, but were an exception.

Duels in flat featureless arenas were very much not the exception at least as far back as DS2, if not earlier. Go look at the list of bosses and think about how almost all of the later stages of the game and the DLCs are large, flat and featureless platforms/rooms.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Duels in flat featureless arenas were very much not the exception at least as far back as DS2, if not earlier. Go look at the list of bosses and think about how almost all of the later stages of the game and the DLCs are large, flat and featureless platforms/rooms.

Dark Souls has about 50% featureless arena split (depending what you define as bosses).
2 is harder due to me forgetting what 90% of the bosses were, but people gave the game shit for boss design anyways.

It's telling how bad things gotten in ER that even a giant plant monster zooms around in the arena.

 

[YumeNoHero]

You know, for all the mobility abilities you have in base Elden Ring and then Nightreign, they didn't even bother with some kind of platforming or mobility gimmicks for the bosses. The best they can do is jump to dodge certain attacks and that's it.
I was happy to see Fallingstar Beast summoning a bunch of gravity rock boulders on the ground around the arena. Think you can jump onto them to get better firing angle as Ironeye or Recluse? Nope, you can't, and you're supposed to lure the boss to charge into those.
One thing I like about Nightreign is that playing Ironeye feels really good and should've been in what's playing with bows and arrows base game from the start.

 

[Strangolapreti]

Duels in flat featureless arenas were very much not the exception at least as far back as DS2, if not earlier. Go look at the list of bosses and think about how almost all of the later stages of the game and the DLCs are large, flat and featureless platforms/rooms.

Ds2 bosses used featureless arenas less for early bosses and more for late game.
Usually you make small gimmick for your arenas to compensate for certain fights or overcome adversaries that could be too ahrd despute being medium to sma fries while they leave the arena bland for when the player bas lock it in and tackle a serious opponent with their skills alone.
This is why you get the ballistas in Pursuer's arena or are fully capable of sniping Dragonrider up until he's at 1 hp, or why you see the extra rats in royal rat authority's arenas and get the water raising during flexible sentry while you tend to see none of that when fighting a dlc boss like in sir alonne.

 

[Scream Aim Fire]

 

[ShiftyBoi]

In the same boat. Did not finish it.

ER followed the wrong path blazed by DS3. Because the fanbase were sheep, who lacked the balls to admit that spastic bosses with mandatory multiple phases, bullshit combos specifically meant to trick the player, and quests which mandated reading the guide were not good.

DeS/DS1/DS2 were primarily dungeoncrawl games, which rewarded paying attention to your environment to trivialize fights or at least avoid getting squashed. Duels in flat featureless arenas happened, but were an exception.

DS3 was the game decisively shifted towards cinematic action with focus on beating bosses. It focused on the Roll Souls gameplay, without improving it and made all other options shit or impractical. While largely trivializing dungeoncrawling at the same time.

ER just keep piling on more bullshit on top of this formula. At this point we have bosses which give only slightly bigger attack windows than Nightmare King Grimm - in the game which still has stamina - and bosses with attacks which are literally impossible to react to, unless you've recognized their wind-up animation. We have demi-bosses with effectively unlimited stamina that attack without a pause. And so on. Ashes is just a quiet admission that the balance is a mess. Paying attention to what and where you fight is pointless, because weaknesses and immunities are counterintuitive (as we all know, bleed still destroys 95% of the game, including countless undead and golem enemies) and nearly all serious fights take place in flat, featureless arenas. The same fact also makes it much easier to just cancel nearly the entire gameplay loop, once you get a broken build. While in earlier games magic, for example, tended to enable the easy mode on bosses, you still struggled in fights (both bossfights and normal ones) where opponents appeared almost on top of you. This is no longer the case with the ER meta builds.

This guy said it all ^

Dark Souls 2 and 3 normalized this and I think the series never really recovered.
In Demon's Souls you would often fight in Boss rooms that served functional purposes, like Leechmonger's arena is literally the bottom of the valley of defilement where all the filth is started to fuse together, Shrine of Storms boss arenas all serve ceremonial purposes, and King Allant's and Old Monk's arenas are literally their throne rooms. Still other boss rooms like Tower Knight's is a planned ambush and Fool's Idol's room has lots of cover because it's a church that you're not supposed to be fighting in. The smartest boss is the maneaters who decided to fight you on a thin bridge where dealing with both of them is a nightmare. One on one "honorable duels" aren't in enormous empty chambers but rather where ever the boss happened to be waiting for you. The exception being the penetrator who decided to deal with you himself after seeing how close the fat minister let you get to Allant's castle.

All of these make contextual sense, and double as interesting places to fight. You aren't fighting a scripted boss in an empty room at the end of a level, you're challenging a powerful demon in its own domain.

By the time we get to Elden Ring, every boss stands in a giant purposeless area, with the exception of Radahn who's so dangerous he basically has to be quarantined on his own island, and Margit who can teleport wherever he wants to. But we have...

Space Monster Astel: Hangs around in a flat cave
Ancestor Spirit: Hangs around in a flat cave.
Commander O'Neil: Hangs around in a rotten tree crater
Commander Niall: Is at least commanding a fortress...from the empty room upstairs
Comander Gaius: roaming boss? nope! giant empty battlefield
Dragonlord Placidusax: Hangs around in a featureless colosseum with no clear purpose
Messmer: sits in front of a statue of his mom....in a giant colosseum with no clear purpose
Renala phase 1: a library full of hazards oh cool!
Renala phase 2: alternate dimension that's just a giant empty room
Rykard: giant empty room
Mohg: giant empty room (which at least has Miquella's corpse)
Radagon: you wondered what was inside the ErdTree? Why it's a giant empty room!
Malenia: giant empty room with flowers
Femboy hypnosis Radahn: giant empty (outdoor) room
Metyr: giant empty room
Midra: giant empty room
every crypt boss: giant empty room
every goal boss: giant empty room
my wedding: giant empty room
my funeral: giant empty room

None of these arenas ask the player to account for anything besides rolling, and they also allow the bosses basically unlimited methods of movement for their giant fancy attacks. It's the same every time, you can practically predict where a boss will be in every new area. You can't use pillars for cover, or push the boss off a cliff, or lure them into poison, or even use elevation to your advantage. Strategy has been removed to serve the action. The days of tricking Taurus Demon into fighting you at a disadvantage are over, Elden ring would not allow something like that.

The rpg adventure has been completely lost in favor of character action and it's incredibly disappointing. I was already sick of this in DS3, but by Elden Ring it became insulting.

 

[Strangolapreti]

None of these arenas ask the player to account for anything besides rolling, and they also allow the bosses basically unlimited methods of movement for their giant fancy attacks. It's the same every time, you can practically predict where a boss will be in every new area. You can't use pillars for cover, or push the boss off a cliff, or lure them into poison, or even use elevation to your advantage. Strategy has been removed to serve the action. The days of tricking Taurus Demon into fighting you at a disadvantage are over, Elden ring would not allow something like that.

Again, generic arenas are for hard bosses so that the player can only rely for his skills and/or doesn't get cheap deatsh by getting stuck in the enviroment.
I can point out easily with demon souls as people nowaday cheese flamelurker by having him get stuck in the enviroment instead of properly fighting him, or how a single wall is all people need to cheese champion Gundyr, meanwhile something like firesage demon's arena causes more deaths than the skill issue because the player gets stuck on the roots.
I don't think this is a rule that should be universally enforced, dual bosses are ass to fight in empty enviroments that do not allow to break aggro (Throne watcher and defender or valiant gargoyles), but for solo fights in general you don't want players to get trapped betweent a random obstacle and the boss itself, especialy when it comes to hard dlc bosses.

By the time we get to Elden Ring, every boss stands in a giant purposeless area, with the exception of Radahn who's so dangerous he basically has to be quarantined on his own island, and Margit who can teleport wherever he wants to. But we have...

Purposeless area you mean there's no explaination in lore or what?

...Rykard: giant empty room.

BRILLIANT, WHY WASN'T THE GIANT LAVA-SWEATING SNAKE ROAMING VOLCANO MANOR AND WAS INSTEAD TRAPPED IN AN EMPTY FUCKING CAVE?!?

Renala phase 2: alternate dimension that's just a giant empty room

Sorry, do i really need to exlain you why the witch lady that summons dragons and casts spells shouldn't have taken place inside the library where you had plenty of spots to hide from?

Malenia: giant empty room with flowers

You mean the roots of the tree Miquella buried himself into before Michael Morbius took him away?

Really I struggle to get your criticism here. If you want to understand why they make empty arenas for difficult bosses, try using mods to replace Godrick with Malenia and fight her there, and try to see if you or her gets stuck on the graves at least once during the fight.

Dark Souls 2 and 3 normalized this and I think the series never really recovered

Ds2 Also included a lot of creative arena even for it's garbage tier bosses, Ruin sentinels starts with you on a smaller platform at the beginning where you can choose between either fight a single sentinel on top of it or descend get more space but also fight 3 at the same time.
Executioner chariot and the pursuer do also exists, while for Ds3, despite being a trash tier boss, the arena of deacons of the deep weren't just open areas but featured a large obstacle in the middle so that you could drag away the minions and focus on regular bosses.
The issue is less about the arena and more the increase in difficulty of the bossfight often requiring a simpler design for the player and the boss to properly move around it, otherwise you repeat the same shit that happened with Oceiros

 

[ShiftyBoi]

I can point out easily with demon souls as people nowaday cheese flamelurker by having him get stuck in the enviroment instead of properly fighting him, or how a single wall is all people need to cheese champion Gundyr, meanwhile something like firesage demon's arena causes more deaths than the skill issue because the player gets stuck on the roots.
I don't think this is a rule that should be universally enforced, dual bosses are ass to fight in empty enviroments that do not allow to break aggro (Throne watcher and defender or valiant gargoyles), but for solo fights in general you don't want players to get trapped betweent a random obstacle and the boss itself, especialy when it comes to hard dlc bosses.

You're talking about getting stuck on terrain, which is a fair point, but I'm trying to say that arenas should be designed so that they offer interesting boss fights and possibly advantages to perceptive players.
Take my example from earlier: Taurus Demon. If you're dumb you can fight him on the bridge where he has the advantage, or you can attract his attention back to the tower where the archers were and fight him where you have more room to avoid his attacks, or even plunge attack him a few times to kill him.
Another good example is armor spider, while i don't think this bossfight is very good it is distinct for putting the player in a choke point that puts the player in close proximity to the spider's projectiles but also limits the ways the boss can attack.

Purposeless area you mean there's no explaination in lore or what?

I mean they don't make contextual sense, yes.

Despite the lore in these games being used to explain almost everything, it's disappointing that every major location in Elden Ring comes packaged enormous featureless space that doubles as a convenient arena that has no strategy to navigate and no clear purpose within the world.

With Gwyn's arena in mind I'm willing to rescind a few of my arena complaints about Elden Ring, realistically where else could someone like Rykard fight. But my overall point is that more and more of these bosses are using wide flat arenas that remove interesting gameplay opportunities, and worse, they allow the devs to think less about how both the boss and the player have to navigate the arena. I'll give you props, you brought up the ruin sentinels and that's a pretty good example of what I'm talking about, the player has a choice of whether or not to isolate the sentinels up on the platform or fight all three of them on the bottom floor. That is a better use of environment than any boss in Elden Ring has, the player is almost never trusted to use their environment to their advantage.
Taking Rykard for example, he's a giant snake, and instead of fighting him in say a tunnel of some kind, where he can use his serpentine body to duck and dodge away from you, or attack you from a vantage point of his choice, he's just in a flat arena with destructible cover.

A better example of what I'm talking about is in Monster Hunter, in MH you can fight a monster almost anywhere, including rocky or hilly terrain that allow you to use elevation to your advantage, you can even use natural features as traps in order to pin the monster down. How well you know your environment gives you a huge advantage over your quarry. A souls game would never allow you to do this, because despite what From would have you believe they are no longer fair adventures that allow the player to use their wits to conquer challenges, they are character action games where the player must complete incredibly specific tasks.

Sorry, do i really need to exlain you why the witch lady that summons dragons and casts spells shouldn't have taken place inside the library where you had plenty of spots to hide from?

Rennala is a decent boss fight but even at her most difficult all she's doing is firing bullets and all the player is doing is running in circles to avoid them, her spirit ashes can be completely ignored by rolling through their attacks and rushing her down.
The initial library setting was more interesting because you had to take the layout of the room into account, chandeliers only fall in certain areas, bookshelves provide cover for the player but also places for the chanting students to hide. Combine this with Rennala's potentially reality warping powers and it becomes disappointing that we had to move the fight to a giant flat lake. Channelers were annoying in DS1 but they would always be encountered in places where they could both snipe the player and buff the weak enemies around them. I'm not saying Rennala's fight is bad but think about how interesting it could have been if Rennala was sniping you from a afar with her interesting magic attacks, while also summoning unpredictable enemies that hunt you down in a dangerous library setting, and if you're smart you can use it to your advantage by baiting them under chandeliers or even into the path of Rennala's spells. In that instance the player is being challenged but also rewarded for thinking about their surroundings.

My criticism with the arenas is that From is being less creative than they could be. Knowing what we had in the past with games like Demon's, it's disappointing to me that all we're getting for arenas now is contrived wide open spaces. Bosses aren't be as special as From thinks they are, they should be given disadvantages that involve more than just their weakness or their moveset.

 

[Strangolapreti]

My criticism with the arenas is that From is being less creative than they could be. Knowing what we had in the past with games like Demon's, it's disappointing to me that all we're getting for arenas now is contrived wide open spaces. Bosses aren't be as special as From thinks they are, they should be given disadvantages that involve more than just their weakness or their moveset.

I feel like the bosses are still special, ds3 was overall a much worse game when compared to preivious entries, but the bosses are engaging enough to partially balance it out.

Combine this with Rennala's potentially reality warping powers

I think it was less Rennala bending reality and more an illusion of Ranni that made you fight what was probably a lesser version of Rennala before Ragadon turned her retarded with the egg, the speech in phase change and the difference in fighting between phase 1 and 2 clearly tells you that.

Yes, boss arenas being large emoty spsces are oftentimes nonsensical and poorly explained lorewise. but practicality oftentimes requires you to either ignore or make compromises.

There are small cases in elden ring where you can find the arena contributing to the fight; Elmer of the briar is just a boss you have already killed multiple times, but the addition of obstacle in his boss room makes for a fight where you need to balance your position and the enviroment blocking you, also the duo abductor virgins feature water puddles where you can use lightning to deal critical damage, something the 2 are already weak to. Most crypt bosses do feature pillars that can help you manage aggro in case of multiple enemies, and in case of the ones where you fight armies of imps and a watchdog or 2 watchogs, you can additionally use crystal darts to put one against the other. Godskin duo finally has the breakable pillars, I don't know if fatty rolling over them if too close is intended or no though, but it's clearly made to break aggro and provide you a safespot.

 

[Coldgrip]

Combine this with Rennala's potentially reality warping powers and it becomes disappointing that we had to move the fight to a giant flat lake.

I always assumed it was suppose to be an ocean. Which made sense to me because of Rennala's connection to the moon.

 

[BigBadBastich]

All of these make contextual sense, and double as interesting places to fight. You aren't fighting a scripted boss in an empty room at the end of a level, you're challenging a powerful demon in its own domain.

By the time we get to Elden Ring, every boss stands in a giant purposeless area, with the exception of Radahn who's so dangerous he basically has to be quarantined on his own island, and Margit who can teleport wherever he wants to. But we have...

Space Monster Astel: Hangs around in a flat cave
Ancestor Spirit: Hangs around in a flat cave.
Commander O'Neil: Hangs around in a rotten tree crater
Commander Niall: Is at least commanding a fortress...from the empty room upstairs
Comander Gaius: roaming boss? nope! giant empty battlefield
Dragonlord Placidusax: Hangs around in a featureless colosseum with no clear purpose
Messmer: sits in front of a statue of his mom....in a giant colosseum with no clear purpose
Renala phase 1: a library full of hazards oh cool!
Renala phase 2: alternate dimension that's just a giant empty room
Rykard: giant empty room
Mohg: giant empty room (which at least has Miquella's corpse)
Radagon: you wondered what was inside the ErdTree? Why it's a giant empty room!
Malenia: giant empty room with flowers
Femboy hypnosis Radahn: giant empty (outdoor) room
Metyr: giant empty room
Midra: giant empty room
every crypt boss: giant empty room
every goal boss: giant empty room
my wedding: giant empty room
my funeral: giant empty room

None of these arenas ask the player to account for anything besides rolling, and they also allow the bosses basically unlimited methods of movement for their giant fancy attacks. It's the same every time, you can practically predict where a boss will be in every new area. You can't use pillars for cover, or push the boss off a cliff, or lure them into poison, or even use elevation to your advantage. Strategy has been removed to serve the action. The days of tricking Taurus Demon into fighting you at a disadvantage are over, Elden ring would not allow something like that.

The rpg adventure has been completely lost in favor of character action and it's incredibly disappointing. I was already sick of this in DS3, but by Elden Ring it became insulting.

I miss the days when the bosses felt more methodological and contextually relevant to the area they were inhabiting. When they actually had weight to their attacks and defense, could stagger with heavier weapons and even took breaks to recuperate their own stamina regeneration. Now they all need to do the same endless array of anime backflips that combo into a 7 sword strike attack leading up to them blasting energy out of their assholes before starting the process again. This is a huge issue that keeps getting worse with each entry, worsened by the fact that the dungeons themselves aren't as memorable or fun as they used to be.

To top it off in some cases areas don't even have unique enemies or bosses. How many times in Elden Ring do you fight the same generic soldiers and knights, the same reskinned Hollow variants or the same dragons, lobsters, DaS3 imps or dogs. It was somewhat excusable in Dark Souls with the copied Taurus/Capra Demons in Izalith because they had less time, money and resources than they do now. But every major or late-game area retains this issue. There isn't anything to make this feel like a living, breathing instance. They just feel like levels to fight enemies in, theres no environmental storytelling or effort to engage the player. The magic is literally gone.

 

[What can I say?]

I love Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3 but I do agree on the arena variety point. Even if the bosses themselves are good, sometimes even great, the arena is as much of an entity as the boss is, and I think there should be more variety.

Malikeths arena is pretty cool though.

 

[Tenshi Eating A Corn Dog!]

It was somewhat excusable in Dark Souls with the copied Taurus/Capra Demons in Izalith because they had less time, money and resources than they do now

Never mind that Lost Izalith has 3 unique enemies (that statues, worms, chaos eaters) to something like Duke's Archives' 1 (the squid women in the prison tower). How about DS2's Drangleic Castle having 2 unique enemies in only 2 rooms of the castle even after SoTFS? How about DS3's Lothric Castle (including Grand Archives and that side garden area) only having the winged knights and wax head wizards. How about Nightmare of Mensis from Bloodborne having only 3 in the entire level, all 3 of which are only around Micolash's arena (the puppets and the two types of attendant enemy). Smaller projects than Elden Ring, the latter 2 being what people consider very complete games, one of which had the extra help from Sony. Reminder that Elden Ring launched with incomplete quests before a day one patch. I'm consistently amazed by this thread and the Souls thread by people who have ostensibly played these games and yet seemingly haven't opened their eyes to actually look at what the fuck they were playing.

The conversation around arenas are also fucking stupid. You'd understand that most of what exists today was feedback of what people liked or didn't back from DeS and that conversation continuing throughtout the Souls series. People liked Flame Lurker and False King Allant more than Dragon God. People liked Artorias and O&S more than Bed of Chaos. People liked Sir Alonne and Fume Knight more than Executioner's Chariot. So, what survives today? Boss rooms that are either flat circles or multiples bosses in a room with pillars that have more complex move sets. People responded more positively to those than to a lot of the gimmick fights. This shit evolved over time at the behest of the player base. It didn't spring up out of some sort of hubris or whatever fanfiction of reality continuously gets written on this sub-forum between this thread and the souls thread.

 

[Sneedifarms]

It’s well known that everyone’s favorite fights in Demon’s Souls are pushover gimmick fights like Fool’s Idol and Adjudicator, not the impressive, large-scale skill-based fights like Flamelurker, Maneaters, or Old King Allant. FromSoft should make more puzzle fights no one cares about like Moonlight Butterfly, Priscilla, and Ceaseless Discharge to please the vicarious nostalgiaboners of the dozens of Matthewmatosis parrots on /v/.

 

[Tenshi Eating A Corn Dog!]

It’s well known that everyone’s favorite fights in Demon’s Souls are pushover gimmick fights like Fool’s Idol and Adjudicator, not the impressive, large-scale skill-based fights like Flamelurker, Maneaters, or Old King Allant. FromSoft should make more puzzle fights no one cares about like Moonlight Butterfly, Priscilla, and Ceaseless Discharge to please the vicarious nostalgiaboners of the dozens of Matthewmatosis parrots on /v/.

What gets me is that supposedly it stopped at DS3. How many people in this thread have even vouched for Yohrm, Rotten Great Wood, Crystal Sages, Deacons of the Deep, or Wolnir? Oh yeah, fucking nobody, despite them being gimmick puzzle fights in DS3. Nobody remembers those guys aside from Yohrm over fights like Nameless King, Dancer, Dragon Hunter Armor, and Twin Princes.
Edit: forgot about Ancient Drake completely. Maybe the most "interesting" arena for a boss in DS3.

 

[Sneedifarms]

What gets me is that supposedly it stopped at DS3. How many people in this thread have even vouched for Yohrm, Rotten Great Wood, Crystal Sages, Deacons of the Deep, or Wolnir? Oh yeah, fucking nobody, despite them being gimmick puzzle fights in DS3. Nobody remembers those guys aside from Yohrm over fights like Nameless King, Dancer, Dragon Hunter Armor, and Twin Princes.
Edit: forgot about Ancient Drake completely. Maybe the most "interesting" arena for a boss in DS3.

Rotten Great Wood, Wolnir, and Ancient Drake are literally the butts of multiple jokes in the larger Souls community.
Meanwhile, if you ask people for the best bosses in the Souls series? Nameless King. Slave Knight Gael. Sister Friede. All plain arenas for extremely flashy skill-based bosses. Somehow it’s a bad thing to give people what they by-and-large want.

And the best part is, the reception to Nightreign has been that the roguelike aspects are poor, but the class design and Nightlord bosses are fantastic. People absolutely love the new Nightlords despite all 8 of them having no arena gimmicks. But obviously FromSoft should ignore all this and just make more Ancient Drakes because puzzle gimmick bosses and quirky arenas > skill-based bossfights.

 

[Left Ass Cheek]

It’s well known that everyone’s favorite fights in Demon’s Souls are pushover gimmick fights like Fool’s Idol and Adjudicator, not the impressive, large-scale skill-based fights like Flamelurker, Maneaters, or Old King Allant. FromSoft should make more puzzle fights no one cares about like Moonlight Butterfly, Priscilla, and Ceaseless Discharge to please the vicarious nostalgiaboners of the dozens of Matthewmatosis parrots on /v/.

But obviously FromSoft should ignore all this and just make more Ancient Drakes because puzzle gimmick bosses and quirky arenas > skill-based bossfights.

Fool's Idol and Adjudicator aren't what people refer to when they claim that Demon's Souls' experimental bosses are (or rather, can be) better than a conventional boss fight. Literally no one gives a fuck about the Adjudicator or any of the first bosses of DeS, whereas the Maiden Astraea, Storm King, and Old Monk boss fights made enough of an impression that their mechanics/aesthetics are now woven into the DNA of nearly all the games. Every Dark Souls game has reused the concepts of those three bosses in one fashion or another because they're just really good ideas even if those ideas come from janky ass gimmick fights in a janky ass game.

I also don't see why engaging with bosses who behave differently or are fought in strange arenas is inherently seen as not being skill-based. A skilled player is always going to be more proficient at killing the Fool's Idol than an unskilled player, even if the mechanical skill floor is lower than say Flamelurker or the Maneaters. An unskilled player can and will still beat all of them because these games easily let you create hyper power builds that trivialize difficulty. Your Old King Allants and your Storm Kings (or I suppose your Godfreys and your Rykards) coexist - the goal should be to make every boss fight feel good to play. DeS bosses sometimes feel bad to play because of the horrific amount of jank that taints the experimentation, whereas ER bosses sometimes feel bad to play once you realize how homogenous they are.

 

[Sneedifarms]

A skilled player is always going to be more proficient at killing the Fool's Idol than an unskilled player

But the difference in proficiency leads to negligible results, whereas an unskilled player would not be able to kill Old King Allant without, you know, acquiring skill.

An unskilled player can and will still beat all of them because these games easily let you create hyper power builds that trivialize difficulty.

The existence of meta builds and wiki warriors shouldn’t be an argument against designing the game around fair and honest builds. Imagine if every boss in ER was designed with Rivers of Blood spam in mind.

whereas ER bosses sometimes feel bad to play once you realize how homogenous they are.

The having your cake and eating it too solution to this is Nightreign’s Night Lord bosses; all difficult, skill-based bosses that feel extremely different mechanically. And some of them even have arena gimmicks, just to put the cherry on top.