This question comes out of the Waypoint podcast and also @bib in quick questions:
What makes Nioh or Bloodborne a soulslike? What makes them not a soulslike? The Waypoint folks suggest high and low factors like enemy respawn-upon-checkpoint and animation priority.
I think e.g. Monster Hunter is not a Soulslike because of the choppy world design. A Monster Hunter could be a roguelike if the world was contiguous and more populous.
Contiguous world requirement out Demonâs, though.
Behind-the-back melee combat with right-stick camera seems pretty important. For example, I wouldnât say Salt & Sanctuary is a âSouls-likeâ because it has an entirely different combat/movement system.
the combat & the way death works are definitely both way up there, even if you take a âgreater than the sum of their partsâ view neither of those was done as well and as accessibly elsewhere and theyâre both pretty huge
Hard to say! Like Halo 1, it landed like a bomb nearly fully-formed with a half-dozen stealable ideas.
Iâd still love it 90% as much without the mp, and cover bands like Lords of the Fallen still make it obvious what theyâre going for without including the multiplayer âtwistâ.
A more fruitful way of looking at it: how much of the emotive experience of playing a Souls game comes from the multiplayer? Iâd argue mp supports the isolated, deadly feeling without being its primary component.
Itâs weird because I know Patrick knows Demonâs and he judiciously calls it the Souls series to include it but headlines always fall into this. Obviously we wouldnât have this problem if it was called Demonâs Souls 2 but âSouls seriesâ is too clunky and nonspecific for a headline.
Is one smart decision the economy? Souls are in infinite supply most of the time, but not all items are, and some items help you mitigate risk. In order to make anything liquid or usable you have to risk losing it.
Contrast with rupees/hearts/arrows/bombs which are always in the grass.
While Souls clearly evolved out of Kingâs Field I think itâs definitely a strong break from it, this doesnât bother me.
Zelda doesnât feel like a strong tie to me because the focus is very different. Especially since the N64 days when Zelda was no longer the âbiggestâ or âmost epicâ Nintendo has struggled to define it; I think they believe âadventureâ defines it and try to support that through a mythic tone and the variety of activities. They will never go all-in on any aspect though and so wonât tip over into action game or puzzle game. This philosophy is closer to AAA open-world games which ask a small participation on everything.
Souls, on the other hand, is a well-developed action game that demands precision, as well as a competent loot-RPG. Maybe Zelda birthed action RPGs but even then Kingâs Field feels like it descends from dungeon crawlers and not ARPGs, and from dungeons is birthed Souls.
shadow tower has souls too, but they are not the only form of currency (not really a form of currency at all, just a collectible that allows you to increase your stats). i definitely think the souls mechanic is a pretty integral part of the actual souls series, but i donât think itâs a requisite for a game to be âsouls-likeâ for me
the death mechanic is actually really important, too. that one is a lot closer to requisite.
i donât know. find me things that are remotely like souls in 3d before zelda and iâll move in that direction. when i inquired before, no one had much
3d zelda with castlevania theming feels adequate summary to me, but ymmv
I donât really see Zelda as like souls at all. Just because there werenât many console-style 3D melee combat games before 1998 and souls has Z-targeting doesnât make them all that similarâŚ
Yeah. My belief is that they trimmed the stats and equipment and systems to give themselves scope to redo and tighten combat and holy helldogs it paid off.
Yeah, after I played a couple of the KF games I realized that Demonâs Souls was that, just faster and capitalizing on the main strategic mechanic of circling around enemies, and an external explosion of the level design