yeah, the legacy dungeons have all been beautiful elaborations on the nonlinearity of Sekiro’s Ashina Castle, it feels like such a strong corrective to the increasing linearity of the souls games + bloodborne
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Couldn’t have walked through the back door, but there’s a path through the cliffs on the east of the castle that’ll take you to Liurna with needing to go through the castle. It starts right next to the finger reader who says a broken bridge wouldn’t stop someone like you.
yeah to be clear i was in liurna long before i beat godrick, and i was like 6 feet away from that door but just never saw it. i was curious afterwards if i could have just walked in the back door when i was 6 feet away from it
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It turns out From games really did need a jump button all along
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Yes, but also more cheese tactics. Ash summons alone are broken, and I’ve also discovered more and more depraved tricks involving AoW skills, talismans and physicks. I’m starting to think of this as a game of overwhelming the boss with my bullshit so they don’t have the chance to pull theirs
In Elden Ring, whenever I think of a trick and immediately think “wait a minute, this synergy can’t be as strong as it sounds, games usually balance this kind of thing away”, at least half the time it really does turn out to be broken beyond my wildest gamer desires
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Just beat the Putrid Crystalian Trio with two buddies. I was getting real frustrated by this one and by my lack of properly upgraded strike weapons to deal with them, so I decided to get a Cold mace set up so I could slow these guys down, and to otherwise play as a healer/crowd control support to some summoned toughs.
And by god we did it. Traditional tank/DPS/healer strategy against this trio of horrible shits. I used the perfumer ally buff craftable, Uplifting Aromatic, which gives allies damage negation shields and increased attack damage. I ran around putting cold debuffs on everybody. It ruled. The rush I feel at being able to wedge a traditional MMO trio strategy into this game is incredible, haha.
But more seriously–it’s really cool that it was so quick and easy for me to change my strategy and approach this fight successfully. I have so many weapons and armors and AoWs by midgame and I can control the strategy of the fight even without player comms or anything more than crouching, shield wiggling, and a couple ridiculous consumables. I love it.
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Interested to hear everyone’s favorite cheese strategies. I saw using gravity magic through fog walls, and summoning Jellyfish to split boss attention. What else have people got that’ll completely clown these Elden Fools?
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mimic tear has completely trivialized everything, a 2nd me using whatever I was wearing when I summoned it
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Lol this is also the strategy I’ve been using for these bosses
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I present the boss with a wall of shields from hell. I’ve been casting Barricade Shield on my greatshield and summoning five Greatshield Soldier spirits. The bosses start to get a vibe of actively intimidated and helpless as they barely manage to move, let alone do any damage
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First off, you don’t have the right
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8 hours later this is now 100% (secret boss took years of my life)
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furthermoreO you don’t have the right
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Another cheese I recently realized actually works: I wear the heaviest armor on top of heavy weapons and shield and go into Overloaded status, but then I drink the “reduce load” physick which gets me all the way back to “Light” while it lasts. Then I’m like an Evangelion who’s overpowered until I suddenly run out of battery and grind to a near-halt
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are you having trouble with a boss? consider summoning me, miffy
i am literally a magic cannon for you to point at your foes
step one:
step two:
step three:
step four:
i did like 16000 damage to a boss this way with @HOBO i am unstoppable
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I have no idea how much I want to write, but fair warning, this post might come out pretty long… which will make 90% of the people that watch this post scroll down while rolling their eyes.
Uh yeah, killing myself before the start… feeling ready now.
As I said before my laptop died. Died midway through the Saturday right after the game came out.
Motherboard’s chipset got split in half for no known reason.
Since then I’ve been really depressed around the house. Binge watching pseudo-medical TV shows, reading Lovecraft and Bradbury, even disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled both my PS4 and my Xbox360 (might go for the Cube next).
Stopped posting a few days back. But I haven’t stopped reading the thread.
In fact I am 100% positive I’ve read every post.
It’s weird… doing it makes me incredibly depressed because being out here discussing this game with you guys is what I’ve been wanting most for the past… year maybe? I was expecting it maybe even more than the game itself.
In equal measure to the sadness it brings me when reading this thread, it also brings me joy. So many of my ideas and opinions about FromSoft games that I’ve been having for the past years, open and discussed around this thread with a higher level of openess I can find anywhere else. On top of that you guys seem to be going for the details that really matter imo.
SUPER VERY LONG 8 PAGES TEXT
So… I was hoping this game would break the “souls-like” or “soulsborne” genre.
This things always felt absolutely stupid for me at every level because for me so far… all these FromSoft games were pretty much Metroidvanias (I could explain this right now, but I’ve been actually trying to gather my thoughts properly on this… so maybe another huge post).
But I’m not denying that there was “something” there that made general public feel the need to call it a name, a genre even, that would identify it with FromSoft creations.
This “something” has been discussed around here quite extensively imo, but still hasn’t been cornered. That is because it is so many subjects and details that you can’t really pin it down to “one genius like idea”. Pretty much as FromSoft is mentioned much more frequently as the company, and not Miyazaki. Opposite to this I would like take the example of Metal Gear and Kojima. Even though MGS as design features that are shared and perfected since the first Metal Gear all the way up to Metal Gear Solid V, Kojima is just that thing to give focus.
Imo this is all due to a society very oriented to protagonisms, idolizing the “idea” guy, find the genius. This just broken any possibility of finding what made MGS great in terms of it’s “gameplay”. The same happens in plenty of other tittles and franchises but with FromSoft… I honestly think this cycle can be broken.
Btw I see this “tendency” happen much less around this forum because there’s actually a great number of people that are honestly interested into searching what works on videogames. But then again sometimes it feels like it gets a bit too focused.
So the thing about FromSoft games. I’ve taken a real interest in FromSoft.
This following paragraph will sound like boasting, and whatever, but I only wish to express and put into words how much interest I took, and how invested I was in analyzing these games, and the methods FromSoft uses.
For the past 4, maybe 5 years, since I first played Dark Souls I’ve played little else beyond FromSoft games.
Took every game to the maximum difficulty NG+, some of them like Sekiro and Bloodborne twice and a few extra runs to boot. I’ve never done a speedrun or took any interest in doing them, and always went around doing my run as I always did getting every shiny that I no longer needed, exploring each deadend, and killing every enemy at least once. In Sekiro, Bloodborne, and Dark Souls III I even got to play the “clear the area” where I would simply kill every enemy for a specific area (I.E. Ashina Castle, Cathedral of the Deep) and then spend some time just fucking around the place without any enemies.
I’ve also played every main Armored Core twice, the second time took almost every single one to 100% (parts, weapons, missions and objectives and shit).
So what is this thing of a “souls-like”?
Definitely not the exploration. Even with all the complain around here about the linearity of Dark Souls III and Bloodborne the fact is that the entire game is made out of paths. Even Demon’s Souls where you don’t have a physical connection between each of the world I would stamp the Metroidvania there (but this is really a very thin limit here). You can name places but you can’t really call them “dungeons” because you are never outside that way of designing levels. Sure when you get to one of these “places” things get hairy and more complex, but the same kind of paths that make the dungeon where the paths that took you there.
So it’s all about the fighting system?
I also don’t think so… like someone mentioned above, one good way to look at fighting in FromSoft games is imagining it as a fighting game. I played plenty of those. Absolutely fanatic for Street Fighter III and King of Fighters previous to 2001. Also did a bit of Tekken with friends. So in very simplistic terms you have the importance of positioning of a Tekken, the turtling of a Street Fighter specially if you go shield, and the predominance of the roll if not like in a King of Fighters. Damn I would bet that those 13 iFrames for Dark Souls are the same as in King of Fighters… that’s how close they felt.
But here’s the plot twist. Everything works under a completely Zelda setting. The various animations of attacks, the various choices of weapons (see it as various characters), priorities of some attacks over others, which leads at always breaking the opponent’s animation (either you or the enemy) into some kind of stagger (twist again, if poise allows… this was a nice touch FromSoft), that you expect to kick in combos. All this while locking into an enemy and going around it, no matter the size and only constrained by the scenario, just like in Ocarina of Time.
I don’t think the fighting system is it but it is the part of these games that mostly give away this “special thing” that created the concept of a “souls-like”. It is where the evidence are stronger and plainer to see. Getting back to it later.
How about the plot? Lets include main story, how it is presented, and all the around subquests.
Now here we are hitting something soft. This is always a very though subject for me to talk about because I know there are plenty of people that are very sensitive to this subject. The plots in video games.
These talk directly to people, and it hasn’t been just a few times that I saw people, myself very included, being absurdly defensive or aggressive over a game because the plot talked to them so directly.
Anyways… I’ll try.
Fucking Zeus like dude constantly insecure about being surpassed by anything around him throws lighting at dragons to eradicate them he doesn’t have to fear them, and slaves an entire race with a curse to forever continue with his way of life by throwing himself to a fire.
Sure… it’s above a OK plot to be honest. But it is not a writing masterpiece. Books, films, theater, even video games, good ideas are very little imo for the actual writing. They are important, very, because it is a kickstart.
But how many times as everyone around here watched something that had an incredible plot idea just to be utterly disappointed with the final product?
All this I just said above was a try to separate plot ideas, from writing and plot, to how it is presented in the medium it proposes. While plenty of it is a matter of taste, and those lead to getting defensive (for obvious reasons), what truly matters in the end is how the message is convened.
And FromSoft knew that writing masterpieces would not work.
In fact this is the part where they went further apart from other video games. Expositions are SO rare and far, until you get some character to give you a handful of meaningful lines you have to work pretty hard for it, and the forever mentioned on the intrawebs that item descriptions give you the insight of the work building and it’s stories.
The big twist here seems to be… Archaeologic Story Telling.
The developers take full advantage that they are doing a videogame to tell the story. As any interactive piece out there, the piece is waiting for the user’s input to “advance”. That same principle applies to how they tell the story, but instead of “press X to move to next sequence”, you have to search for it… dig it withing the world game.
That digging always felt to me pretty much as I imagine archeology. You dig, you inspect, you learn, and build the story in your head with the proof you have.
The same is seen in Armored Core in fact, specially 4 and 4 Answer (the ones with Miyazaki intervention), but if you play carefully it really feels like a methodology that was building up before it.
Armored Core’s are pretty flat… linear. Yes since Armored Core 1 depending on which missions you took, you would block others and each run could be a unique set of missions. But still you only move forward in missions, and you do what you get with limited choices. Still you would get very little information of what was going on on the overall. In fact you could completely ignore everything else and just go for objective. But if you listened to the briefings carefully, and read all the mail that came your way (basically item descriptions), you would get plenty of information about the world you inhabited. STILL… none of this information was absolute, mostly because they were points of view or plain propaganda from factions in the game. You would have to construct the story in your mind.
In4 and 4 Answer that way of presenting a plot sees a step forward, with very ambiguous cutscene saying the state of things from a very personal narrator point of view. While the missions, in mission communications, and again mail, were the biggest sources of connecting and understanding those cutscenes and the state of the world. Character’s interactions were another very important source of information because who knew who, who fought with and against you, and which factions there were, basically moved the plot forward… always waiting for the player’s interaction to discover, and the choices to develop.
This souls a lot like Dark Souls to me, but I admit that might just be me.
Still it is undeniable this kind of writing might not have been born from videogames (interactive books), but found a very comfortable home in it.
What FromSoft brings is the not “Press X to Continue”, not the “Choices define a path”, not even the “Go get the information”. They created the “I’m not gonna bother you with information”. As plenty of people said in this thread about Elden Ring’s world exploration the game is not trying to constantly parade you with rivers of information. You always have to go looking for it and even get the choice to ignore it without having to furiously having the press X to skip.
I think I greatly diverged from my point here. What I mean to say in the end is that FromSoft could have the worst plot and idea ever… and I still think they could make it work to become engaging. That imo is proper writing for the medium they create.
And how about the fact that these FromSoft games have RPG-ish elements? Is that what makes “souls-like”?
Really not… I won’t even go around this point at length, but imo that is more about japan-y than game-y.
Also it is a very far and wide practice for years, it is simply a way to give a “false” impression of progress to the player.
I would like to however focus a bit on my notion of “false” or “fake”.
Hard to get this one but… everything in videogames is false. This “false” is everything you have in a video game. In example that might be a bit too technical is moving in the world. Since the tile graphics consoles the character doesn’t move, the world does. This illusion or false sense of movement was all you had. There kicks the suspension of disbelieve that should kick in artistic human creations, and you perceive the message someone is trying to convey to you. The character is moving through a world.
So this “false” sense of progression is the “real” sense of progression because that’s the proposed message.
You might not like it. You might want another one, a different one. And that’s fair because there are other works that do it, but this one proposes the advance of levels to get stronger instead of having the same stats from the start and all enemies balanced to those stats.
Imo I don’t think videogames can really get away from this way of doing things right now? FromSoft tried with Sekiro. If the games before Elden Ring where Metroidvanias, then Sekiro was the most Metroid and the previous the most Castlevania. Sekiro really tried to go for the “get skills to advance” but the player’s expectation for customization ended up making the game fall into the same routine of “get resources, spend on getting stronger”.
So to summarize, this is definitely not what defines the “souls-like”.
And this is it. You can actually call the FromSoft games plenty of genres. Metroidvania, Fighting Game, Interactive Story, Roll Playing Game. But nothing in here feels new enough to call it a genre by itself.
Then how about the unique composition of all these elements into a game?
Yes and no. In fact I think this aspect of FromSoft games is a good hinge to start unfolding the “souls-like”.
I’ll start arguing the “no”.
I think plenty of games do it. In fact doesn’t every game do it now a days? We are no longer working with very limited processing machines, with strict hardware restrictions on how things show up on a screen. Very few games now a days are only one genre, and plenty are even genres by themselves on their own right. I bet that only on the Indie market is where you can find games that are purely one genre out of old times nostalgia. But even the older games… people were always stealing each other’s ideas and incorporating on their own games. That’s just how cultural evolution happens.
But on the other hand they seem to be conscious of which aspect of which game they had to pick to create their own world. In fact it goes deeper. Someone in the thread mentioned that they could see or feel how FromSoft picked aspects of their games to make this game work better. I mentioned that this felt like a “FromSoft’s greatest hits”.
This is not something new to them. You can see it done in Demon’s Souls with all the genre’s and methods mentioned in this text. And then they kept furthering their design methods, picking more and more from fighting games, narratives, exploration, and fans expectations to create further games.
In example Dark Souls III. Many in here see it as a back step for the FromSoft creations but I keep noticing that specially around this thread the population if very focused on things that were not in that game. Non linear exploration, not getting walled, less Devil May Cry/older God of War dodging, more attention to plot. But as a speedrunner’s game, probably the biggest population of spectators and players at the time, the game incredibly well built, tuned… designed.
I understand and partially share the opinion around this thread that more attention to other aspects would be better. But I also can’t close my eyes to everything that works incredibly well in that game. It is admirable the level of perfection and polish that FromSoft developed for the aspects the game proposed. In the end all that matter was that experiment, how the game would be if it was that way and those were the results.
How far could they take that focus singular vision and where it would taken them.
So… taking aspects of other games, incorporating them into your vision, and design them with crafting hands.
Does that make the “souls-like”? Again I think it is incomplete, again I think even Ubisoft does that. So where does it differ?
Good thing I talked about Ubisoft because I’ll just go ahead and get Ninja Team and add it to the mix.
Ninja Team always did exactly the methodology previously mentioned, always making the games “their own thing”. This I always and still admire about them profoundly, every time with a hint of cheesyness that is just so damn charming. In fact that could be traced as far back as Tecmo and the first Ninja Gaidens.
Platformers… Not enough, we need a ninja, and it has to have a grappling hook.
Tekken and 3D fighting games… nice game, but not enough action and ninjas, make it simpler and faster and add breasts and stuff.
Devil May Cry and 3rd person hack and slash… NOOOOOOooooo… make it a ninja, actually get Ryu back and lets make it insanely fast and full of action and hard… HAAAAARD.
Dark Souls and 3rd person RPGs… AGAIN all wrong… customization is not complex enough, and not enough action, step on that accelerator and take it too 200mph, while being careful not to be greedy obviously.
This is why I can’t call Nioh a “souls-like”. It’s even insulting in my mind to do it, to a company that had the exact same methods as them, and they still did the game their own. And how could they make it their own, so unique in fact that even other “souls-like” games pale in comparison to have that one thing in common.
Maybe because they already had it all along?
But then again, what did Ninja Team got from FromSoft that Ubisoft didn’t?
What was that “thing” that completely shattered, ruptured forever the field of videogame design to a point that people felt the need to call that a genre and not more accurately a methodology, or simply immerse themselves in the details of the design choices?
Here goes, and SelectButton won’t like it. In fact there’s a long history in this forum for people rejecting importance to this field of videogames.
Percision oriented software design.
In other world, programming.
This is where most failed, almost everyone failed. And I call it software design, and not programming, because it is a field that is not the simple “make it more efficient to show more complex geometry on screen” kind of programming. It is also not the designer that writes very long documents about how things must be, animations and details about priorities and sizes, and all that.
It is a middle ground, many times taken as design, other times taken as programing, depending greatly on how people wish to look at it from their “emotionally moved (or not) by the game” player’s point of view.
It’s that field that picks up the libraries, the “game engine” and creates a base that will accommodate the meshes, the quest event triggers, the animations timings, and make it work like clockwork.
You can even go deeper, and it is that person that is calculating and analyzing how players dodge reacting to animations, and extends the enemy animation to that exact point in time where 80% of the people are finishing the iFrames of their roll animation.
It is also that person who is placing that enemy on that place because he knows you won’t look that way, and you will be smashed in the head by it.
It is that person that imagines how confused you will be with the lack of information the NPCs give you, but and on top of that places 5 things on the way to your objective that are just as interesting and makes you forget yout objective to get a deeper sense of discovery when you come to it by chance.
It is, as many on this thread call it, craft. Crafting to create precision and a robust world.
Ninja Team had that since day one. They games as much as they copied from others, they were absolutely precise in their design. Ninja Gaiden Shadow. Just a platformer, but you had to keep distances, nothing ever went to fast or too slow, calculate, evaluate… you never knew what came next, but you always knew what expect when it was coming.
Same with PS3 generation Ninja Gaidens. They picked up a genre that even in Devil May Cry you just had that deep sense to expect something that didn’t made sense at all, as an enemy jumping position, animations being interrupted without reason… and they made all those arriving with the precision of the Japanese Train System. Faltering so few times that you noticed… no you cared when it failed.
That method of designing a game with precision and robust programming existed since ever on fighting games, car games, FPSs. But those shine when you play against another player, and that’s when you absolutely care that you both have a fair stand and no advantage other the other.
What Demon’s Souls broke, and Dark Souls perfected, was that level of dedication to a vision. To that message of the fake, of the imaginary world created by the developers. Taken to bosses, small enemies, path and dungeon construction, enemy placement, items placement rewarding the player at a dead end.
All that precision need a robust world. One that will not fail.
That needs an incredible attention to software design right into that middle ground between the programmer that communicates with the machine, and the designer that scripts the world.
That attention to that layer of pure information that FromSoft and Ninja Team have been giving for so long, that changed how other companies gave attention to that precision and gave way to other games like the recent God of War. Precise. Has bugs, obviously, but you notice them and care so much.
That’s where Ubisoft has been failing for years. I’ve recently played all main line Assassin’s Creeds and it came from a fairly precise game with the first, a bit better on the three games under the 2 tittle, into an absolute mess of every programming detail failing everywhere. Missions bugged mid way, enemies that you can’t predict how they are going to react, not because their next move is unpredictable. The opposite in fact, you know what the move is going to be because they are so limited on those, but you never know what timing the game engine is gonna throw at you this time. if the animation interrupts with frames that get stuck and then jumps right into the attack hitbox frames at a completely stupid timing.
The only that actually saw some effort in coming closer was Assassin’s Creed Origins, moderately nice game, I’m a sucker for the theme but still… always seemed to be breaking at the seams. Everything before and after had even less attention to precision and robust-ness.
I’ll even go further with my opinion and I suspect I’m going to burn myself in this forum.
Ubisoft methods to create games are a direct consequence from a mentality of creating videogames that gives increasing priority to design in determent of programing.
Programing is not the art in video game. This kind of view when the more artistic side of a game is important. When artists, the people that do the graphics and shit, they are simply graphical designer. Why is software design so looked over when it create the base for the entire interaction. Without a solid base, you are building sand castles.
This lack of attention result into one very unfortunate truth.
There is a great lack of consistency in the narrative you read with your hands/interaction.
People care if a plot, or the written narrative in a game shows is not consistent. People point it out, makes no sense, that character there did what? This catches your attention which makes perfect sense. It is the same methods of conveying a message as other media, films, books, even songs. Everyone has plenty of practice with those, and knows when to expect that solid story telling, how things connect properly, how robust it is.
Someone in this thread said something along the lines that AAA videogames now are so full of crap, that people stopped caring, in fact expect it.
This was the rapture FromSoft did, with a game big enough to get noticed, on a platform that you are invested.
Demon’s Souls, unique to PS3, a console you invest a pretty penny to get. And you see things working. Wonky, true, but it was right at the time when the market was started to get flooded with titles that couldn’t maintain a consistent gameplay. Frame rates, animations interruption, collisions failing.
You can have the best plot, the best idea, and the best design capabilities in the world. If the underlying engine fails at every turn, the best design can do is accommodate for that fact and that will show.
Also, FromSoft better than Ninja Team, know the limits of this underlying engine.
Their craft in design only becomes more apparent because of it. Don’t put too many features in the game, enough to be satisfying and engaging, but never too much to break the system. Again what Ubisoft fails because for them more is always better and they always end up overloading their engine.
Metal Gear was also like that. People go around and around about Kojima’s script and plot and what not, but they play the game. Sure that the plot is the kick for the title to go above, but so is the actual game.
Not even in MGSV the enemies acted very naturally, but you can feel the same clockwork AI doing the same kind of thinking from MGS on PSX. The design of the game increased incredibly since the first Metal Gear, but the underlying robust and precise (while unpredictable) engine kept the game a fertile field for the designs of the team, and Grand God of us all Kojima to have it’s plot ego masturbation.
Yes FromSoft games are a mastery in design, crafted with love and care, limits that are hidden from the player as they should.
Yes FromSoft has a very interesting and unique way to present plot and world building that promotes exploration and a bit of hoarding.
Yes FromSoft has increadibly unique bosses, that give that exact feeling of a climax that is necessary in a narrative, which is a very dry well now a days in so many games without bosses that are not reused as enemies.
Yes FromSoft pics up the best ideas in videogames out there, the ones better suited to their vision and prefect them within the limits of the game development.
But none of those would work without a robust base where they can work on.
This is “souls-like”. This methodology (not design, not focus, it is a method) of attention to the underlying engine that allows to create a consistent interactive narrative. Either on a metroidvania, or an open-field, or whatever they chose to do next, but you will still read it with your fingers (don’t want to be offensive for the people who don’t have fingers and play these games, see it more as a metaphor).
Both FromSoft and Ninja Team, and others, share this. But FromSoft took it open-world PVE, and other companies care more about their in-game micro transactions.
Yeah, I guess this is it.
Give me 1 week and I would change things here and there, give me 2 years and I would probably have a completely different text written.
But I feel this is pretty much the culmination of what I have thought so far, leaving so much out, cause I simply don’t remember.
I really tried to get to some kind of truth over these past years, I still feel this text doesn’t come very close to it, but as close as I can get from writing it these past hours.
BTW… I really panic when writing… like… a lot. Been having small panic attacks ever since I started, but killing myself before even starting to write actually worked a bit.
[edit]
Sorry I didn’t do proper quotes… really.
But the thread is a bit to big, so I got a bit lazy to do a thing that I’m already horrible at.
This is why I didn’t have a great grade on my master’s thesis… most quotes and references were non-existent.
[/edit]
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ah, did you get to it through the cliffside mines? i thought it was really cool when i realised there was a second way up there