I couldn't get much done. I spent like 10 hours and then I gave up. At this point, I play games on normal or easy just to finish them with my complete lack of time.
I agree, ER is totally fair. There are lots of options to cheese including mimic tear and stuff like OP spells. You can of course make it harder for yourself by not using them but that's part of the fun.
I thought it was. Although it was my first souls-like game, so maybe that is to be expected. After dying a bunch, I fought a giant or something and managed to beat it for the first time.
Then the game crashed. Haven't touched it since. xD
[1/2]In the 80s and 90s, games were unfairly difficult because developers wanted to squeeze 10-15 hours of playing out of 30 minutes of content. Then, when they could start building games with 15+ hours of content, they wanted to make games less frustrating so players would actually beat them.
[2/2]The souls-like genre as a whole is partly defined by being challenging but generally fair (and unfair only when it's hilarious). For those aquatinted with classic, truly unfair/punishing game design, many souls-likes don't feel all that difficult.
I would agree. other action-adventure games def prepped me for Elden Ring. I’d say going into ER I was way more analytical when it came to boss attack patterns which is like 80% of the difficulty in these games. Still amazing tho
The people that complained about the harddity, must have ragequit as soon as they stepped out of the cave. I finished it, every boss, and can barely put a dent in Dark Souls.
I've played every soulsbourne game, they're all hard. I suck at them all. I probably can't beat a single boss without help. But I still love playing them and existing in that world
That's the best part about this game, it's as hard as you want it to be. You can go full dark souls or you can just play it like a classic RPG and overlevel to smash through bosses.
Yeah. They have a different concept of advancement than other games. I'm most games you're not supposed to die very much and if you do you have to load a save or something. In soulalikes you're expected to die constantly, and adjusting to that can be difficult.
I hadn't played a From Software game before and it was definitely one of the most challenging games I've beaten, but not as difficult as I expected from the way people talked about it.
I'm bad at games too but I enjoy cheesing souls bosses immensely. Nothing feels more rewarding than sitting 100 feet away from a scary dragon shooting long range arrows at it while it wonders why it's taking damage. I'm 100% serious, fight smarter not harder.
I cannot explain the absolute light which burst through her eyes when she realized that yes, many people do figure out the easiest way to beat a boss and no, it's not a bad thing.
Also fight smarter not harder is just necessary advice right now!
Compared to a competitive multiplayer game (Street Fighter, StarCraft, Cod, etc.) sure it's not too bad. But within the realm of single player games it's obviously harder than the vast majority.
How tf is everyone agreeing that it’s easy? 😭 It took me forever just to beat the first boss dude. Then I was ok until the moon lady. I can’t even remember their names bc I quit so long ago 🫠
Elden ring was great because it made you easily capable of leveling up over and over again until you felt overpowered enough to go fight the bosses. You got to decide how hard you wanted to make parts.
Michael how difficult did you find Hollow Knight? The teen who sold it to me at Target said it was extremely difficult, but I think modern teens maybe just haven't spent twenty to thirty years playing pretty standard platformers.
A huge number of people don't understand or engage with a lot of the games systems that were specifically included to help managed the challenge. Summons, buffs, damage vulnerabilities, jolly cooperation. I knew a guy who hated the game because he insisted it was a single player game and refused to
Summon allies. Thats a choice he made but he blamed the game. There's a lot of "I shouldn't have to" from people who don't want to learn game systems, explore, experiment, try different approaches. People dont want to engage with the game for what it is and that leads to a lot of slander.
Oh yeah, tons of that
I admit I even did that a little with Elden Ring at first. I wanted to play it the way I played Dark Souls (quality build, big sword, no magic/ash of war), and mm I'm not good enough for that
When I stopped being stubborn about using a little FP now and then, it opened up
To me, this has always been true of Dark Souls et al
But I'm really happy to use summons, be sneaky, sit out of range and hit the stupid titanite demon with arrows for 45 minutes, etc lol
Like it's not that they're not challenging, but it feels like the difficulty is exaggerated, because they are difficult in a different way from most main stream games (especially in the 2010s)
I think a lot of it is that the "git gud" meme lodged in people's minds and has been stuck their since 2011. And a lot of people just lack the patience and flexibility to learn the game and adjust their expectations. It's a very particular kind of game that isn't for everyone and that's turned in to
A mythology of extremely punishing masochistic gameplay when it's really just that you die a bunch but the game is set up so dying isn't a problem the way it is in other games
Yeah, for sure.
Like for me, "git gud" has always just meant "practice, trial and error, ask for help, etc" but a lot of people take it as you have to be perfect, high skill, etc
Like, I'm horrible at most games, cause something like TLoU (for example), I feel like I don't even know why I succeeded, I don't learn anything, so I eventually hit something the game hasn't given me any practice at solving
Though I have seen some incredibly weird takes about Elden Ring in specific.
People viewing things like using spirit ashes, summons, certain spells or abilities, and even leveling up your character as "cheating"
Like, if you're going to make the game hard for yourself, at least do it with a silly gimmick character or nuzlock style challenge run, not this imaginary "playing the game is cheating" nonsense
I just can't stick with it- it's too big, too open. The lore is too obtuse, the myriad side areas too numerous and haphazardly pull on my attention span. I have 150hrs. on Steam and I've seen less than 1/4 of the bosses while clearing Limgrave, Caelid, Siofra, Liurnia, Ainsel multiple times.
I would say it's definitely the most accessible Souls game From has made. I definitely think I had an better time with Dark Souls 2 but Elden Ring's new gameplay features never made the game so hard that a little investment or time leveling my stats wouldn't fix it.
Spirit ashes, summons and sorcery make most of it feel pretty easy (and I advocate for making it as easy as someone wants). I'm about 35 hours in and the only boss I had any struggle with was Rennala and even that struggle was fairly minor.
Patience and humility are at least as important as twitch skills. A lot of it is just learning and accepting that dying is not a punishment but rather and expected part of the game.
You are right, though. It’s only hard if you play stubbornly and only do one thing the entire game, rather than switching up your strategy and using all the tools the game gives you.
you are completely correct. many players just refused to engage with all the mechanics available to them. even basic shit like jumping to avoid ground swipes. they kept trying to block or roll through it.
The series has made enormous progress since ds2. Summoning allies is much easier, you can summon AI pokemon for many fights, movement is greatly improved, a number of mechanics have been made less punishing while others have been fleshed out. ER has many systems to help less experienced players.
It's not easy, but they've made a real effort to create aids for less skilled players to enjoy the game. One of the biggest changes is the open world. If you're stuck or frustrated you can almost always go do something else and come back later. There are huge numbers of optional areas and bosses.
I think you only need to fight six bosses to beat the game, so everything else is technically optional. And the multiplayer mechanics really support summoning friendly players all the time to goog around.
Most of what Souls-like games call difficulty is negated by patience and the ability to press the 2-second invincibility button each game gives you (rolling).
The difficulty comes mostly from dumb things players have zero way to know about until it kills them.
I would argue it's not "hard", it's just bullshit difficulty in the back half. Post-Capital everything just hits for like half your health bar and bosses are spammy messes.
That might be a build thing, or you're under levelled. I'm at 150 post fire giant and I can take quite a few hits, even a few from Malenia. Grabbing a few levels of vitality and upgrading your weapons can help a lot.
It's really not that hard and becomes insanely easy once you beat it once. The fun is using all the weird weapons and builds against the bosses. But yeah it gets boring pretty quick. Maybe multiplayer makes it more fun?
I had the exact opposite experience. I wanted to love it, explore, but it is so punishing that the only way I could even play was the rune farm and level up as fast as possible.
It's no team ninja game but the final dlc boss was still bullshit. I think a lot of the perception of difficulty comes from people not wanting to change their build or use certain tactics, because the build and tactics you use are a part of roleplay and self expression through gameplay
I completely agree. I do play at a high level in lots of games, but I played this game as a horse girl game where I focused on riding around on my horse (?) picking flowers and collecting pretty dresses and steamrolled it.
I’m a gamer who has accessibility issues with many games and I agree. Mostly, for me, it’s how flexible the builds are and how many different play styles are available.
It was hard, but satisfying hard, not frustrating hard.
Elden ring rewards persistence
That’s honestly my favorite part of it from Demon’s Souls and on - not giving up is more or less the core of it both thematically and mechanically. If you’re barely scraping by, cheese doesn’t feel so bad when “whatever it takes” is effectively you taking on an in-universe mindset.
Yep. It's only "hard" on certain playstyles, and Elden Ring gives you a ton of options to mitigate the difficulty. Mostly the perceived difficulty is because people want to import the playstyle from other games (i.e., randomly mashing buttons) and get mad when it doesn't yield results.
The game has a ton of built-in cheese and most bosses are pretty easy to trade with. Not saying this to clown on anyone who had trouble with the game but if you've been avoiding it due to the difficulty, it's not that bad!
This is extremely good to know. I don't mind difficulty but I have limited time for games these days. Did you find that the difficulty made it take a long time to progress?
Agreed. Compared to the original Dark Souls, Elden Ring is a fair bit easier and cheesier. That being said though, the cheese only really exists with some amount of system mastery. If you’ve never played a souls-like, and don’t want to have the wiki up while playing, it can be harder to grasp.
That's very much FromSoftware's approach to difficulty these days, Armored Core 6 is very similar where they give you readily accessible tools that can trivialize almost any boss/level.
I was avoiding it due to difficulty! Interesting take. I don't like to grind on bosses. I am into games but i don't need to die for a few days in a row after living a life that is already complicated.
I think it's *more* difficult than most modern AAA games, but it's FromSoft's greatest game because it makes a handful of important compromises. They ease the experience just enough to eliminate that sense of hapless frustration that defined so many of the Soulsborne games.
Bosses like Malenia are insanely hard if you attempt the game like a Dark Souls game by learning how to dodge her moveset and poking her once in between attacks. Certain Souls vets refused to play any other way, and that's where the game got its reputation
What I see a lot of folks doing with Malenia is trying to learn her moveset and the exact right times to dodge her waterfowl dance etc., but if you run in wildly and don't let up for a moment, she becomes a lot less difficult
You are absolutely right. I’ve been doing a second playthrough without summons or spirit ashes. Some of the bosses feel much more rewarding (godrick especially).
Also if you want a streamlined fromsoft experience, I cannot recommend sekiro highly enough
IMO, the game is designed to make you feel like you overcame a very difficult challenge. A lot of mechanics quickly and permanently erode the difficulty present in the first few hours, and it never comes back. Still a great game.
I think that having multiple options to make a difficult fight easier, depending on how much time or work you want to put in, isn't bad game design. Especially when some strategies can be limited in their application, like Margit's shackle
I didn’t think it was cheese, they’re all part of the ludonarrative. The try hard “do it alone” grognards are the ones who aren’t engaging with the game, imo.
And besides that, it lets you decide your experience without being pulled out into menus.
If you want an easier time with most bosses, be a sorcerer. The regular mooks you meet exploring will be harder, tho. Or the opposite, being a tough guy makes it easier to get through the dungeons but some of the bosses will be much harder.
The thing is, all of those bosses are beatable without those "cheats". The cheats are there for people who aren't good enough to beat them legit (which included me for a bunch of them).
Across the arc of dark souls games, I think that ER is the best designed across play style viability, and behavior tuned difficulty. This does make many fall victim to optimizing the fun out, but in previous entries the cheese was way, way worse than what I see most people do to make ER easier
I've never understood people who call the spirit ashes a cheat, or cheese or whatever. They're a normal-ass tool of the game! If they make the game easy then it's an easy game!
I found the spirit ashes most compelling at the start of the game, where they were mostly based on regular enemies. It was fun to experiment and find which could help with a specific boss and having to play more aggressively to keep them alive.
That’s been the direction Dark Souls took. Dark Souls 2 was much harder than 1, and 3 was harder than 2, except that the tools available to you also grew each time, in a way that if you actually utilized them, the games got easier, not harder.
Huge reason why Sekiro is my fave fromsoft- the much more limited character options narrow the focus and let you focus on mastery, rather than worrying about using the right weapon, ashes, are you leveled enough, etc etc
FromSoftware makes games with worlds that are unique, beautiful, dangerous, and sometimes disgusting. Same applies to the enemies, all of which have amazing animation work, and the sensation of being just like, a dude with a sword, against a manic arcane giant is unmatched.
I think these aspects are the core appeal of their games, and absolutely nobody is doing it like them, which is why they're so popular.
However, everything around that core (mainly the stat and gear systems) is at best overwrought and awkward, and at worst gets in the way of the core appeal.
it's not bad game design! it's just a different take on bosses. like old school hexcrawlers. the encounter table wasn't designed with balance in mind. just with what would be in the area
Everyone’s entitled to their tastes about what game design philosophies result in the experiences they enjoy the most, but it’s certainly not inherently bad game design.
My tastes line up with yours, but the route Elden Ring took allowed for very broad appeal that may have eluded a game like Sekiro
Funnily enough so many things that are standard in Sekiro are treated as cheese in Elden Ring. Throwing a pot at Melania to cancel Waterfowl Dance is seen as cheese. But chucking a shuriken at Lady Butterfly as she leaps from cable to cable is "how you're supposed to do it."
tend to agree. ultimately my beef with elden ring was less that it was hard and more that I just ultimately found the harder bosses boring. trying to learn their move sets and weaknesses wasn't fun but also cheesing them wasn't rewarding.
Overlong combos and aoes made so many fights tedious, especially with the tiny attack windows. I do think Melania is one of the best fights in all of soulsborne though because once you get the hang of it it's very fair
They view it as a way for players to decide what level of hard they want to deal with. and a way for players who can't do the reaction time or proper moves a way to progress without getting hard locked.
Funny to say, but I think that combat and boss fights are by far the weakest part of Elden Ring.
In my experience the choice to use summons or not felt like a choice of "way too hard" vs "literally winning first try". And neither of those are satisfying options imo.
I agree. Summons should really have a downside or anything that makes them worthwhile *not* to use. Because I can't think of a single situation where not using them is beneficial. Yet they really trivialize so many bosses to a point where beating them with the summons is just unsatisfactory.
Agreed. Picking "Normal" at the beginning of a game is way less interesting, especially when I might hate one boss and want to cheese it (*cough* Godskin Duo) but others I wanna 1v1 with dual katanas
Careful. The From Software bros really hate when anyone suggests you should be able to adapt the difficulty in a game. It’s best we don’t let them know those games already do that. It’s for their own good.
As someone who specifically only unga bungas in these games and refuses to use most of the tools given, I'm glad that Elden Ring is so accessible in its variety to let a bunch of different types of players experience a souls world for the first time
Every so often I do a "dad souls" run of every fromsouls game (not you sekiro). First one was oops all spells, second was sword+board, third was fast guys with knifes, and this last one was biggest bonks possible. HOLY SHIT was that fun. DS3 with the mace from the boss was my favorite.
I disagree! People who are good at the game can beat bosses without summons, but instead of having difficulty settings Elden ring has options that allow less experienced players to progress in satisfying ways.
I actually agree but also it got its rep on initial release and then they nerfed the final boss and then the same pattern played out with the DLC, they nerfed the final boss there too.
Gonna disagree with "built in cheese". It's a dynamic difficulty slider. You wouldn't say someone "cheesed" a game if they chose to play it on easy, why use that language here? The souls games have always had difficulty selection, it's just obfuscated.
I can imagine the length if his videos might put you off, but YouTuber Noah Caldwell-Gervais has a videos looking at the Souls games and their like. He points out how he gets abuse for not being good at games but how he’s been able to beat the gamut using the in game systems.
Just compare the tutorial boss of Dark Souls 3 (huge knight who turns into a kaiju for phase 2, designed to punish playing "passively") to the tutorial boss of Elden Ring (A single zombie who's weak to the move you just got taught and dies in three hits)
it also depends a lot on how willing you are to use the cheese. i wanted to play through it mostly avoiding summons and spirit ashes, but using both really helps
no it really isn't hard. it still has the trademark fromsoft obtuseness and it has plenty of rakes left out (sure, go mess with the armored horseman you see first thing) but once you get the rhythm you can make it as hard or as easy as you like
I never played a Souls game, and was told ER was the easiest. I couldn't even get past the first guard! A friend of mine was laughing and told me that Souls games are definitely NOT for me. Lol
Just a basic guard standing outside a tent, I think. I died multiple times, got very frustrated, and said "Nope! I'm going back to playing my 90s point-and-click adventure games!"
Are you talking about the golden guard on the horse? Cuz..that’s on purpose he’s WAY higher leveled to punish you if you run up unprepared. You’re supposed to sneak by and come back later.
Sneak by and come back later that's almost anathama to me so used to games being fighting stuff and moving on and you know your going right way if still live enemies
you don't even really have to sneak, you can just run past, and he doesn't chase far. But he is deliberately a "some enemies will splat you right now, but you can just leave and come back later" creature
I don’t personally mind it, it’s to show you that this game takes tactic not just mindless swinging. Plus once you get the game down you can fight him level one no armor and it’s such a satisfying defeat.
ER has many new systems that allow you to control the challeng of a fight. Open world let's you go do something else if you're stuck on a boss and come back when you're more powerful. It also has free and easy fast travel to help with that. Multiplayer summoning is cheap and easy. You can also use
AI summons to help you in many fights. The open world alone is a huge help because you'll never be trapped by one boss you can't beat, you can always go do something else.
i agree! i’m TERRIBLE at souls games. but in elden ring you can easily overlevel for an area or boss. i’m very low skill but i’ve beaten the game six or seven times.
So my question here is: are you talking strictly about the main narrative path through the game? Because if so, I'd mostly agree (though Mountaintops of the Giants is a big difficulty spike). But if we're including optional bosses, there's Malenia. Most infuriating boss I've fought in these games.
I’ve been wondering when the tides would turn on this game. It’s objectively good, maybe even great, but there’s same pretty glaring and major flaws that keep it from being the masterpiece that people seemed to think it was when it first dropped.
This applies to all Fromsoft souls games too. They're designed to be broken and it's not that hard to break them. What they are is hostile towards the player in ways that can be accepted as challenges if you want to.
Elden Ring and Erdtree were hard if I played how I wanted to. Didn’t have the patience to beat Miquella “fairly,” had to do a mimic tear with heavy armor and pickaxe w/ the skill that heals 30% on hit. Certainly effective but way less satisfying compared to learning the moves with my main equipment
I’d love to if I had the time, but trying to brute force learn the second phase of fights like Miquella is just straight up not fun in that game for me. Getting one shot with good armor, buffing incants and items, AND 60 vigor is not a good time, and I’m not willing to spend tens of hours on it.
It wasn't super hard, but it still has some dark souls bs in it.
Dark souls bs can be overcome by learning what it is and adapting or by learning how to cheese it. This can include builds, strats, or abusing bugs and map design.
Part of getting good is learning what brand of BS to use to beat it
Did you play the whole thing? I didn’t think it was either, but I only got through a handful of boss fights before deciding it wasn’t for me, and I heard later in the game it can get pretty brutal.
Ish. I think there are only five or six bosses you must fight to finish the game. Morgott, goldwimp, one other demigod, Morgit II, fire giant, bad wolf, hora lu, ginger daddy. You can summon other players to help with all of them except maybe radagast.
I appreciate this post because I’ve been hesitant to try the game because of difficulty. My reaction time and the amount of time I have to devote to learning mechanics have dwindled with age. Maybe I’ll give it a shot
It’s definitely way more accessible, it was my first fromsoft game and I really enjoyed it. Once you make a proper build it’s so much fun. I don’t think fromsoft wanted it to be super hard tho they wanted it to embrace new players.
There’s a handful of bosses I’d say were difficult, but that’s about it. Maybe this is due to me having played every Fromsoft Soulsborne game they’ve made, but I’d agree that the actual overall gameplay of Elden Ring isn’t particularly that difficult
I think that a lot of what made Elden Ring hard wasn't the combat, but how difficult it can be to finish quests without looking things up! I think they anticipated a robust online repository of knowledge to spring up.
If you want a combat challenge, Sekiro is very fun and sometimes very punishing.
True. The whole souls series is notorious for extremely obscure quests. Most of them don't bear directly on the plot, which makes them very different from other dogs but it can still be a frustration.
As a completionist, it's pretty frustrating. Even something as simple as receiving the bell to call Torrent would have stumped me for a while if not for online guides.
I think this is the biggest obstacle for me. Sometimes there's a particular story I really want to follow, but there's literally nothing to indicate what the next step could possibly be.
/1 This is my kryptonite! I have no problem watching YouTube videos to advance in a game. I want a challenge, but i love games that allow for an “easier” play.
I get the argument that there are no quest markers in real life, and I think it's awesome that games exist for people who want that sort of challenge! But I don't have the time or patience to figure this stuff out, I want to play games to get away from real life bullshit like "no quest markers" 😂
/2 I played Assassin’s Creed back in the day & enjoyed it on hard, but i don’t have that kind of time nor grind in me now. I have AC: Origins that I tweaked easier, and it has been really fun to play through. I’m hopeful I can do the same for Elden Ring.
Arguably it is the easiest of their games as you have a lot of tools you can use to make encounters significantly easier. Even before you get into specific cheese strats like stacking buffs.
I don’t think it was necessarily that hard, but I do think it was really bad. There was no real story and no real character with a role to develop. Just tons of really mind-numbing grinding from boss to boss.
Yeh. It's important to learn the game systems and use all your advantages - summons, damage vulnerabilities, buffs, potions, outright cheese. The lead dev stated that he's not very good at the game and uses every advantage he gets, which was a nice clarification about how the game should play.
and there's a LOT of toys and tools, some of which can trivialise some problems - you can sometimes just find something, play with it, and find it makes a boss massively easier
Elden Ring has a few things that make it 'easier' Firstly, you can summon an ally to fight bosses, some of which are crazy strong. To the point that hardcores consider the summon bell cheating.
Secondly, there are a ton of places that are full of farmable enemies. One zone nets over 100k a run.
It's hard for newer or first time players, but I feel like souls veterans in particular think it's one of the easier entries because it's so open. In other entries, eventually you MUST go certain places...especially in bloodborne and sekiro, and have little choice but to 'git good'.
When I play Bloodborne now I just sprint past everyone and unlock the shortcuts/grab the gear I want. Once I realized I could do that I went from being cautious to feeling like I was on a playground. (Also having several playthroughs under my belt helps.)
Basically every from souls game except maybe Sekiro is an exercise in learning what the game expects and how to use the tools it gives you more so than it is actually technically demanding, but the culture around those games metastatized around it being "wrong" to engage with more than r1 and circle
Part of it is that if you run into something “hard,” you can just go do 20 other easier things to get stronger and get better equipment. Probably my least favorite of the Soulsborne games honestly, never found it very rewarding.
I think a lot of folks bounce off of Souls games not because of the difficulty of the combat, even though, yes, the lowest-level grunt can kill you in three hits if you aren’t paying attention.
I think it’s that these games make their stats, systems, interactions, and quest lines so arcane and obtuse as to be walls unto themselves. In a game where a totally viable strategy is “big club go bonk” it’s almost antithetical to have so much be hard to decipher on its face.
None of the Souls-games are *that* hard, they just require attention and active participation. It's reputation is a meme cultivated through of game of telephone, lol
I got as far as Godrick the Grafted and it took 40 hours and I chose to call that the final boss for me, but I'm really terrible at 3D action games. still fun tho
i feel there's just a steep s curve of skill where once i get it i've got it i just don't have the time of day to climb that hill, and that goes for all of the souls games
That's actually fair
Elden Ring gives you a lot of goodies and toys to play with. All of the games are easy when you know what to look for, but Elden Ring has more junk that you can rely on and abuse.
Yeah, compared to dark souls games, there are a lot more ways to make the game easier if you want it to be. ER can def be hard if you want it to be too
I genuinely had a lot harder time with Elden Ring than I had with any of the Dark Souls games.
I know it's probably a 'me'-problem, but open World games often leave me completely puzzled about where I even have to go.
Like, I have 74 hours in Elden Ring now, and the furthest I ever got was killing Godrick before giving up. Maybe I'll continue the game somewhere in the future, but probably not anytime soon.
I just started Elden Ring and it’s definitely the most approachable game in the genre. It’s easy to learn things and is so much more forgivable than other FromSoft games.
It’s still a shit-ass game designed for masochists, but it’s fun, I like it, and I hate my girlfriend for getting me into it
Comments
Then the game crashed. Haven't touched it since. xD
it is Time
Sometimes I just fo death runs to open a door in etc knowing I won't survive.. but that the door will be open.
If you die in skyrim etc you go back to the last save and that whatever door you opened is closed again.
There's no boss you can't out level
The mimic spirit guy was key for me and there was some blade that did like dark magic bleeding or something that helped me on tougher fights
Loved it
Pun intended.
I cannot explain the absolute light which burst through her eyes when she realized that yes, many people do figure out the easiest way to beat a boss and no, it's not a bad thing.
Also fight smarter not harder is just necessary advice right now!
Are you "You're Wrong Abouting" Elden Ring difficulty? Lmao good yes
I admit I even did that a little with Elden Ring at first. I wanted to play it the way I played Dark Souls (quality build, big sword, no magic/ash of war), and mm I'm not good enough for that
When I stopped being stubborn about using a little FP now and then, it opened up
But I'm really happy to use summons, be sneaky, sit out of range and hit the stupid titanite demon with arrows for 45 minutes, etc lol
Like for me, "git gud" has always just meant "practice, trial and error, ask for help, etc" but a lot of people take it as you have to be perfect, high skill, etc
People viewing things like using spirit ashes, summons, certain spells or abilities, and even leveling up your character as "cheating"
I won't be judgy, I'm just super curious
That was like 10 years ago though
( that’s what she said )
Like the decline of Crash Bandicoot’s difficulty after the first game is a good metric for tracing it.
(I’ve heard the 2020 game finally rallies but haven’t played it yet.)
Camera and controls being messy ain’t count.
The difficulty comes mostly from dumb things players have zero way to know about until it kills them.
It was hard, but satisfying hard, not frustrating hard.
Elden ring rewards persistence
Maybe this summer. I said that last year, but last summer ended up being BG3 instead.
https://bsky.app/profile/ianofmanycolours.bsky.social/post/3lid2eybsjs2m
Also if you want a streamlined fromsoft experience, I cannot recommend sekiro highly enough
And besides that, it lets you decide your experience without being pulled out into menus.
Mimic tear in particular can feel like cheating at times since its basically a stronger you which can be customised however you like.
However, everything around that core (mainly the stat and gear systems) is at best overwrought and awkward, and at worst gets in the way of the core appeal.
My tastes line up with yours, but the route Elden Ring took allowed for very broad appeal that may have eluded a game like Sekiro
And I find the "do it again until you get it right" style of gameplay tedious.
It mostly works I think.
It only barely exceeded bloodborne's sales.
Funny to say, but I think that combat and boss fights are by far the weakest part of Elden Ring.
In my experience the choice to use summons or not felt like a choice of "way too hard" vs "literally winning first try". And neither of those are satisfying options imo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3QTTXZ_8zA
You actually play the game
I did a run maximizing as magic user and it was a breeze.
The random exploration of with no clear path is just not for me.
one $100 shotgun and two Buckshots, please!
Dark souls bs can be overcome by learning what it is and adapting or by learning how to cheese it. This can include builds, strats, or abusing bugs and map design.
Part of getting good is learning what brand of BS to use to beat it
The games literally cheat against you in a lot of cases. Cheat back
Oh you beat Halo Legendary using guuunnnnnsss??? You didn’t really beat it than. I only punched the aliens.
If you want a combat challenge, Sekiro is very fun and sometimes very punishing.
In Elden Ring, if you are stuck at a boss, you have a big world full of stuff, and you can come back to the boss occasionally to see how he's doing
There's some serious gaslight gatekeep girlboss action in The Lands Between
Secondly, there are a ton of places that are full of farmable enemies. One zone nets over 100k a run.
So I was fully prepared to go into Elden Ring, no summons, sword only, and all bosses run.
It gets so, so tiresome when you see they re-used so much, everything is fast unlike Souls, and the world has meagre content.
Elden Ring gives you a lot of goodies and toys to play with. All of the games are easy when you know what to look for, but Elden Ring has more junk that you can rely on and abuse.
I know it's probably a 'me'-problem, but open World games often leave me completely puzzled about where I even have to go.
It’s still a shit-ass game designed for masochists, but it’s fun, I like it, and I hate my girlfriend for getting me into it