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Vidya thread.
49.4% of players have the "Defeat the Paintress" achievement. 49.0% of players have the "Go back to Lumiere" achievement.
0.4% of players have quit the game mid-cutscene and never launched it again.
Maybe I'll start a new playthrough with a character for whom faith is not a dump stat.
Yeah, the Dark Souls game mechanics are very counterintuitive. In fact, arguably much of the games' difficulty is rooted in the fact that players don't know how the games work. In Elden Ring, you can one-shot (up to phase transitions, which are often hardcoded) every boss in the game by doing the correct buff incantations, which basically renders the entire game trivial. And it's not like this is some glitch or exploit -- it just falls out of basic understanding how buffs stack and doing the obvious thing.
Then again, this is hardly unique to Dark Souls. Basically every single-player game is like this, in the sense that actually knowing how the mechanics work is a game-breaking superpower, rather than the baseline expectation.
I've never really found this complaint really compelling. In fact, I'll top it: You can beat most parts of all DS games by summoning another (often ridiculously overlevelled) player and letting them do everything for you. You don't even need to know anything.
DS is imo very clearly, very deliberately designed to accommodate large differences in player skill without resorting to outright different difficulty levels. That's also the reason why I usually say that DS games are better grouped as high casual, but not quite hardcore.
That's mostly an inversion of reality in practice; Plenty of bad players who don't know how the game works follow some online guide for an OP build to do exactly the stuff you're complaining about. Better players deliberately avoid the OP things bc they don't need it and just do a run with some weapon/spells they like. Even better players deliberately use gimmick gear (not me, sadly) or other limitations.
I agree with much of this. My issue is that Elden Ring is saturated with mechanics that compound unnaturally well in favor of knowledgeable or skilled players and are either useless for casuals or actively counterproductive for them. Take Bloodboil Aromatic: it's extremely expensive to make (requiring an Arteria leaf), meaning you can only use it sparingly. Yet it increases your damage taken by 25%! As a casual player, by far your number one concern is bosses killing you before you have a chance to heal, which this item (and many others, e.g., Fire Scorpion Charm) exacerbates. So what exactly is the point of this item? "Well, if you're good enough to not need it, it makes the game a lot easier!" Yay?
If I were the designer, I'd just remove the penalties on these items. Similarly, the Great Rune system is only useful if you're good at the game and don't need it anyway. I'd just remove rune arcs entirely: once you have a great rune, you can just set it and it's active. These changes make things easier for bad players, while not changing anything for skilled players (and if you want to rebalance the game around this by increasing boss HP, the net effect is the game is the same difficulty for casuals, while being harder for good players).
Even potions (ahem, Flask of Crimson Tears) run afoul of this. Good players don't need these at all: just don't get hit, yo. But for bad players, attempting to use a potion often causes you to get hit, as the animation is painfully long and many bosses are coded to input read it. Again, this could be trivially redesigned in a way that's better for everyone: make potions fast or even instant, and increase boss HP to compensate. For casuals, potions would actually feel useful; for better players who weren't using potions anyway, the game gets harder.
Sorry for the late reply. I understand where you're coming from, but I find your perspective a bit one-sided. On many of these, the DS devs (and many players) simply have a different view, and they would be less happy with the game you would design. Which is fine - imo games, like most art, should be designed first and foremost to your own vision, with as little accommodation to others as possible. But it wouldn't be, strictly speaking, an improvement.
"Increase damage inflicted at the cost of increased damage taken" is a common design choice in DS games. As you say, these actually mostly make the game harder, but they allow you to do content faster if you're good enough. It's intended as a reward for skill, as I see it.
DS already has pretty minor penalties for dying unless you're really careless. Again, rune arcs are a reward for skill.
That would be pointless, you might as well just increase player health if the potion is instant anyway. And since increasing boss hp is one of the most awful ways of increasing difficulty, the logical next step is to remove that extra player HP AND the extra boss hp to make the game more fun again.
Also, potion usage is a skill test, yes, but a fairly minor one. Generally speaking once you've passed beginner level in skill, potions are imo fairly satisfying: You get hit often enough to need them, you are good enough at timing to usually be capable of using them, but it's always risky enough to keep you on edge, and it's definitely better not getting hit in the first place. It incentives you to git (even more) gud. At the highest skill lvl, you'd just convert all flasks to mana, which can be viewed as another reward for the skill of not being hit.
Overall, imo you need everything in a good game: Some items/mechanics directly help bad players. Some are low lvl or medium lvl skill test, encouraging you to get better, but once you can reliably pass that threshold, they help you clear higher-lvl challenges. Some are just pure rewards for good play and outright require high-lvl skill to use, but allow feats not otherwise possible. Some are memes that actively gimp you, so that simply using them serves as a way of showing off your skill.
In general, I also like the DS aesthetic choice of being able to simply take a short look at another player, and I can usually tell quite reliably whether they're a complete noob, a loser, a tryhard, a "simple" good player, or a total monstrosity.
Well, Bloodboil Aromatic in particular does not allow you to do content faster: it's a huge pain in the ass to farm the recipe and materials! There is no world in which doing a boss 20 seconds faster is going to make up for 15 minutes of farming.
Bloodboil Aromatic, as far as I can divine, has exactly one use: doing nuke build tricks. If they'd make my adaptation and just get rid of the damage-taken penalty, it would have lots of uses! You'd have to do this arcane farming routine, but it would indeed give you a big boost that might help you beat a boss you were having trouble with.
Now, damage-gamble talismans (as opposed to consumables) like Fire Scorpion Charm do have a much more common use: they're good for level 1 challenge runs. If you're going to die in one hit anyway, then it makes no difference if you take more damage, so equipping something like the Fire Scorpion Charm is all buff and no downside. And unlike Bloodboil, skilled players do use it since, it's not a consumable so you don't have to farm it each time you want to use it--you just pick it up once and equip it.
Anyway, I do agree that having a variety of items with weird cost/benefit analyses can make the game more interesting. But even here, what you'd want is "complicated" items for skilled players to not require farming (as good players will just skip it if it does), and all-good-no-downside items for unskilled players to be the sort of thing you'd be able to craft from naturally exploring the world and having an inventory full of materials. Bloodboil is the exact opposite of this principle.
Finally, you have to compare these things not in a vacuum, but to other stuff that exists in the game: compare Bloodboil Aromatic to Flame, Grant Me Strength. The latter is a spell, meaning you pick it up once (right from the start of the game, if you know where it is) and use it as many times as you want, it grants +20% to both physical and fire damage, it occupies the same "internal" buff slot as Bloodboil Aromatic (meaning you can't use these two at the same time), and there's no damage taken penalty!
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Agree with much of what you say, but strongly disagree with this. Great Runes are my reward for killing an actual demigod, master of their domain, and stealing a chunk of the fundamental force powering the universe from their corpse. And then finding their rune tower and beating whatever bullshit is guarding it. The whole plot was about how the Elden Ring's shattering and Queen Marika's disappearance sparked a power struggle trying to grab hold of these things! They should be an actual serious meaningful upgrade to reflect my ascension to demigodhood or super-super-demigodhood, and at least one should be permanently active.
Elden Rings isn't Dark Souls, it's epic fantasy. You are on a journey to become God-King and your acquisition of power should reflect that IMO.
That said, Elden Ring is very inconsistent with power levels. I remember beating the really hard boss who owns the second half of thesecret Haligtree medallion to open the secret path to the Haligtree and being really surprised when one of the first mobs you meet is a zombielike aristocrat trudging through the snow who dies in two hits. Like, you can barely stand, how did you get here? Did I spend ages finding the key to the front door, a quest which got an entire village and several named NPCs killed, only to find that everyone else was happily getting in and out through the back door? I suppose he could be left over from before the path closed, but then why isn't he in the Haligtree brace toasting crumpets over the fire?
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See The Power of Ten for an exploration of that. TL;DR of every book in the series: The MC is a gamer dropped into a (real) world that runs on that game's logic. By using their (relatively modest) starting boost and (absurdly OP) mechanical knowledge, they grow powerful, save the world, and ascend to immortality.
I'm not sure about recommending that series based on its merits, but it absolutely 100% demonstrates that point.
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My first introduction to Soulslike games was Bloodborne. And it was a very short introduction due to me selecting the cane starting weapon and trying to make sense of it for several hours. Cane is an ASS of a starting weapon for someone not familiar with the gameplay. I was very pissed that day. Especially when I complained to a friend and he basically said "Yeah, everyone knows the saw is way better starting weapon, DUH".
Yeah, this kind of game design annoys me (although I'm not entirely sure what to do about it). On the one hand, Souls games show you numeric stats -- in fact, you quite literally select which number to increase when you level up, which is a huge amount of freedom in control over numbers. So it looks like you're supposed to care about numbers. But on the other hand, the numbers often behave counterintuitively, and further, the games often hide numbers from you where the value of the number is the only thing of any relevance: e.g., you get an item that "boots fire damage". Ok, boosts by how much? Is it a 5% boost? A 50% boost? Double? It's like the game wants the player to think this is irrelevant, yet even 2 seconds of thought shows it cannot possibly be irrelevant: whether the item is good or not is entirely determined by how big that damn number is!
The especially silly thing is Souls gameplay in particular would be fine with all of this drastically simplified, or even eliminated. The fun part of Souls is learning boss routines and experimenting with new weapons and skills. You could almost get rid of the numbers entirely and still retain what makes the games fun.
I think it's a credit to the games' balance that ultimately I almost always find the answer is "just big enough to make a noticeable differencr without unbalancing the game". An item that adds fire resistance will add enough resistance that if you were struggling with an enemy that does fire damage it will be noticeably easier, but usually not enough to trivialize anything.
Elden Ring (and other DS games, afaik) isn't balanced, though! That's my point! You can literally kill the bosses in 1 hit with the right setup (modulo scripted phase transitions)!
And this is especially interesting because the buffs at first glance don't seem like they should be that strong. For example, the Fire Scorpion Charm only gives like +12% to fire damage, and it increases your damage taken by 10% as punishment. Compare that with, say, the Flame Staff in FFXII, which gives +50%. The latter feels much stronger, while the former feels like it barely does anything and probably isn't worth using at all as a casual player.
The reason buffs are so overpowered in Elden Ring isn't because they're so strong; it's because there are so many, and they stack multiplicatively (when they stack at all, which they usually don't). This gives them a synergy that has a net effect far more powerful than the sum of its parts, most of which don't feel particularly powerful at all in isolation.
Here's an example setup: put your stat points in strength, choose a heavy weapon (eg, Giant Hammer), set the Royal Knight's Resolve ashes of war (+80% to the next attack), equip the charge attack talisman (+10% charge attack), set your physick to strength tear and charge tear (+15% charge attack), set an aura buff (e.g., Golden Vow, +15% attack), set a body buff (e.g., Bloodboil Aromatic, +30% attack), equip Red Feather Branch talisman (+20% damage when hp low), wave the Commander's Standard (+20% damage). When you multiply all these out, it's an almost 500% boost! That is a ludicrous, game-breaking amount of damage.
There are lots of variations, especially for fire or holy-weak enemies, and you can freely tweak it around for your convenience -- I mean hey, if you do it suboptimally and it takes a whole two hits to knock the boss into the next phase, will it really ruin your day? You can even do a half-decent version of it using only ingredients from Limgrave (greataxe+6/charge talisman/charge physick tear/determination AOW/golden vow AOW/Oath of Vengeance/exalted flesh). It will take 2 hits to knock Margit to phase 2, which I'd say is sufficient to call imba and say it trivializes the boss.
For what it's worth, the reason this is so counterintuitive is that you cannot just stack buffs arbitrarily, despite the fact that it probably sounds like you can from the above. For example, if you try to use Exalted Flesh and Vyke's Dragonbolt at the same time, this will not work, because these two buffs occupy the same internal "slot" (called "body buff"). To me this is highly counterintuitive, as one of these is a consumable item and the other is a spell, and they don't have effects that are remotely similar. In contrast, you can stack Flame, Grant Me Strength and Golden Vow, despite these both being incantations and having almost the same effects. There is, of course, nothing in the game that explains any of this.
Anyway, my point is the degree of trivialization you get by actually knowing the game mechanics is not normal. Contrast Elden Ring with, say, Kingdom Hearts: there is no amount of game knowledge that will allow you to kill Sephiroth in one hit, or even get remotely close. Knowing the game mechanics does not trivialize the game.
It just feels like an excuse for FromSoftware to develop crazy anime-jumping-all-across-the-arena bosses with crazy moves. "Oh no, the player has so many bullshit combinations now, we need to create more bullshit bosses to combat this." And that way we have dlc with bosses dancing all over the floor, goddamn sunflower. The worst part of course is that even with the stakes of Marika you will spend 2 minutes buffing yourself and after a certain point I started to despise this cycle.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the DLC, aesthetically or gameplay-wise, and even the base game's combat often felt "overdeveloped" to me. There were multiple occasions where a boss uses what is obviously a finishing move (e.g., Tree Sentinel raising his weapon and smashing it into the ground) only to PSYCH! ITS NOT ACTUALLY A FINISHER LMAO with some physically-nonsensical follow-up attack to smack you in what obviously "should" have been a punish window. Also, lots of bosses have input reads, where if you try to do anything (in particular use a potion to heal) outside of a designated punish window, they'll immediately intercept your action with a fast attack. I found this extremely crass design.
It feels like FromSoft is annoyed that good players are too good at their games, but the ways in which the developers are trying to raise the difficulty are pretty lame. Though in some sense, I do understand their frustration: Souls games have a skill window that is far smaller than most other games, in the sense that beating them as a casual is quite hard, but learning to play at a near-pro level (in the sense of doing lvl 1 challenges, no-hit challenges, etc.) is surprisingly easy. It really is too difficult to be mediocre at the game, and too easy to be good at the game.
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