If this is his first phase causing you problems, note that his parry windows are very large and IIRC he staggers pretty easily as well. He’s a little bit Gywn-esque (albeit they didn’t take it so far as to make parrying mandatory).
Generally speaking, I perceived DkS3 difficulty/mechanical design philosophy to be to continually rotate the tactics effective on each enemy (without 100% denying any tactic, just ~80%). So there are two ways to succeed at the game, 1) you can be inflexibly attached to a tactic and be really optimal/skilled at it so that you always fall in the successful 20%, 2) you can be flexible and try all the tools available until you find the enemy’s weakness. Basically it’s a less literal version of Megaman design.
The heavy use of multi-phase bosses in this game also ties into this mechanical theme – a phase change generally encourages a tactics change from the player as well, and consciously toggling your mindset (often it’s from offensive to defensive or vice versa) is key to success. The Painting DLC final boss does this the best.
fwiw I NPC summoned against both sulyvahn and the painting DLC boss because I was just not up for it at the time and the game is deliberately generous with those
Hmm, i can see that Broco, and why it’s butting up against my natural approach to these games
In Dark Souls 1 (my first Souls game and still my favorite), the enemies are very predictable and placed in an almost chess-like way, so once you know the layout of each level, you have a certain mastery over it. The fun of replaying the game comes from dedicating yourself to a certain play style — if i choose to beat the game with a long sword, or a scimitar, or a zweihander, the game bends around my weapon of choice and moments of difficulty vary depending on my choice. That’s really satisfying to me and lends incredible value to repeated experience. I think the first Dark Souls is the easiest because it falls the most readily to player know-how, but i also think that’s the most personally rewarding kind of challenge, because the player can impose their own restrictions
The other games in the series vary on how well they take to that approach, but generally you can treat them the same way (2 resists it sometimes but allows you to simply grind away the friction, and Bloodborne leans all the way into it)
I’m getting frustrated with 3 because i think it circumscribes a lot of approaches. Like, im not playing a fast-moving parrying character, i’m playing a big fuck off greatsword character. She had a lot less trouble with regular mooks than my longsword mystic knight did, but this boss is a wall, and it’s frustrating to me to know that the answer is either repeat the fight 10+ times until i have a perfect understanding of the boss’s patterns, or change styles and parry him to death.
this kind of thing is why Demon’s Souls has my favorite bosses. They prioritize thematic coherence and/or unique challenge over mechanical repetition and abusing the boss weak point
Didn’t even play it. I have Bloodbourne still sitting here, laughing at me. Gotta do something with that before I can even think about DS3. Probably I will never play it honestly. There’s no way it’s ever going to get high enough on the priority list.
Yeah, DkS3 doesn’t signal its philosophy change very well, there’s a tutorialization problem there (which oddly might be needed especially for experienced players set in their ways). The first two bosses in the game are single-phase and susceptible to just about any tactic, so it’s easy to be lulled into thinking it’s the same as always.
I first picked up on the philosophy in the swamp area. I noticed the mutant creatures denied shield blocking with their overhead attacks, and attempted to deny running away with their high movement speed. Soon after, I struggled against Abyss Watchers for ~10 deaths with dodge-and-single-hit-punish tactics, and then as soon as I realized it’s weak to backstabs and staggering, instantly dominated it instead.
FWIW I played through DS3 as my typical giant club brute and it didn’t strike me as dramatically harder than the previous two games (multi-bar bosses are bullshit in all games, this one included), so it is definitely still a valid approach.
If/when they make another Dark Souls, I hope they take a hard look at For Honor. The stance switching in that game, to change your lead hand/foot to get around defense and open up attacks, is pretty brilliant. An even more careful souls approach to that, would be amazing.
For Honor’s design is built on a strong disconnect between player input and response; as a fighting game, it’s far more abstract and intellectualized than intuitive and responsive. It’s because every stance/guard matchup with every class pair plays a unique animation with varying times, so the player is very much dialing in an animation to play and is unsure of the outcome.
It’s very different from typical action game design, in which you want predictable output to button inputs to keep the player feeling in control. For Honor is not a game about learning the speed and range of different attack anims, but about playing the mental game between class strengths. Unfortunately this reliance on sync animation tends to be shared by most Ubisoft games (specifically Assassin’s Creed) and is why they normally feel so poor in the hand.
I don’t think this is inherent to the stance system; Absolver seems to do something similar but only uses it for attacks, not bothering to sync reaction animations. In this way it’s similar to Nioh – a way to stack multiple animation sets into one weapon and increase complexity.
In general I don’t think it’s a great design; it digs a hole of complexity and increases the skill ceiling and also bar to becoming good at the game. Nioh gets away with it (barely) because they have far fewer weapons, so 7 weapons * 3 stances is similar to Dark Souls’ 20+ weapon types.
Bloodborne is a cleaner implementation of this because each weapon changes into a distinctly different weapon; the differences are exaggerated and less subtle than remembering what high-stance moves are next to neutral-stance.
bloodborne and 3 veer precariously into character action territory and idk if it would be as much cuba’s thing tbh
my approach to souls is the same as sleepy’s but their experience doesn’t really reflect mine: i come up with a dedicated theme for my character basically before i even start and stick to that roleplay for the entire run, making new characters when i want to try new stuff. i’ve never used a bow in souls outside of like 2 out of the ~12 builds i’ve made across the series. i’ve done this in all of them and i didn’t find this approach to be any more prohibitive in 3 than the rest. 2 i probably had the most trouble with, actually, but that game’s design is a weirder case than 3 imo and also i was extra stubborn about it
though
i have an unreasonably high ceiling for not really caring about dying in a videogame so i guess that’s probably all it is
It’s true that the increased speed and aggressiveness is offputting but the setting is so rad that I feel I must play. The problem is it takes actual effort to be good at the game, consistent effort at that, and I don’t have that kind of effort to give at the moment, and probably won’t for quite a long time. It’s a game-object that juts fits awkwardly into my life as it is currently constituted.
Mount & Blade’s mouse-based directional swing system is a more responsive and fine-grained version of the same idea that I liked a lot and haven’t seen done elsewhere. In Mount and Blade the angle of swings is used as much to touch the enemy’s hitbox (particularly from horseback, where you lop footmen’s heads off with low sweeps) as it is to bypass enemy block stances. It probably wouldn’t work with console controls, network lag or multiplayer metagame though.
This approach of roleplay is very similar to my own. I tend to usually play a Mage on the first time through, since I find the options and variety to typically have solutions other weapon-based builds might not. Then on a second or third playthrough I play light weapon builds (Rogue-ish character) and big weapon builds (big dumb Barbarian-type character). Though once I got the Farron Greatsword it threw me for such a loop. It is just the weirdest and best weapon in so many ways. It is fun and interesting in a way I’ve never experienced in a Souls game.
Worth noting though, I have never gotten used to the weapon. Like, I feel like I get better with it each time I use it, but it is just so different that I have never learned or figured out the style. It’s not a greatsword, but it’s not not a greatsword, but it’s also a dagger (a bad one), and also a weapon with slide-y attacks as well? The special set of attacks is really weird and gives you low-profile properties, but also expands your ground hitbox and hurtbox greatly. Enemies like Pontiff or other enemies with high or mid attacks can frequently whiff while you’re in this state since these attacks assume a neutral stance. The last attack is a sword flip and will stagger just about anything, but it’s really slow and risky (and has a pretty precise hitbox to boot). One of the other things is that because of the weapon’s arcing and that it hits more reliably from the sides rather than front or back, you are generally better off not locking onto enemies. And that is really weird and takes time to get used to.