i have a topic that’s always pissed me off about the whole game is when you go to do a visceral after staggering and you end up just slashing them instead of triggering the critical
Adding to this: hills/ramps/stairs making critical hits impossible sucks.
Losing out on damage to the slightest of elevations making it impossible for you to get within critical activation range is so frustrating.
The giant fucking sunflower has certain attack animations that, if they die during it, will just begin floating up into the air. Considering the boss mechanic of that fight, that is exceptionally fucked, but thankfully it's so rare I've only seen it once, and it was during phase 1.
It ain’t even just terrain. Giants, golems and dragons when falling over and you can’t get past their body parts lmao.
Like fuck it, I’ll just keep swinging.
Biggest gripe with this rn are the furnace golems. Multiple of them are on uneven terrain and if you stagger and they fall the wrong way you can't crit
Ye, I ended up killing most of them all with only 1 crit the rest of the damage was done by normal attacks.
The tears aren't even worth it... Except one, the duration of the others is worthless. Sekiro tear is 5 minutes... The other 30 secs?
It's crazy because the game has such tight hit box's, but when comes to any sort of magic that travels across the ground, the game is janky as hell.
Also, why is the target lock SO bad. Anytime their is more than a couple people, gl trying to target the right one. Or even someone slightly behind a wall.
This right here is the key. In the early days I got so frustrated by screwing them up. It’s still not good game design in my opinion, but I’m glad I found the solution.
For my is moving my character “pressing” against the enemy, kinda like really making sure is making contact, basically…. Otherwise criticals and stealth are RNG-like
After missing like half a dozen crits today, I told myself to take my finger off the stick and then go for the hit. Haven’t missed one yet! So far it seems to be helping. Definitely give that a shot!
Lie of P hit the mark with it red circle ⭕, if you set foot on it and R1 it will trigger visceral attack immediately, it's a good design for visual que and game play.
I think lies of P had a lot of innovations that even fromsoft could learn from the red circle definitely being one of them but also other stuff like how they kind of show when a stance break is possible or being able to charge your last flask.
I also personally love how they tied in heavy attacks to be more involved in combat and their fp/mana mechanic being tied to attacking rather than just a different flask.
Fantastic. IMO, it's easily one of the best games in the genre and seriously rivals the mainline Souls game. It has some of the best and most satisfying boss fights I can say I've experienced.
My singular criticism of the game is that enemy diversity can be meh at points, but I'm willing to give it a pass since this was the first AAA quality game ever made by its studio.
You should give it a try. It has a very expansive 3\~ish hour long demo for you to play with, and ssuming you're not on PS, it's on game pass, so it's cheap to give it a try.
I loved how your ergo/runes/souls from the previous failed attempt sit outside the boss fog for easy pickup before either going back in or going off and doing something.
Weapon durability is better in this game than anything from soft have ever done with it by a country mile. A less important one but that I want in from soft is your soils total glowing when you can afford a level up
Or worse, when you do a backstab, the attack registers and the animation begins, but then the enemy moves out of your way and you don’t get the backstab.
It’s an issue inherited straight out of DS3.
I wouldn't call it an issue, it was an intended nerf to backstabs originating from DS2.
It was way worse having backstabs deal damage when your animation eats air, or rubber banding someone back into the sword.
You have to stop your combo and then hit r1 again. You can use it to your advantage by getting a free hit as long as the attack doesn’t do enough stance damage to knock them out of the stagger and it’s fast enough that you can still do the critical after. Unless you mean when you want to do a critical and ur barely not in the right spot and it doesn’t let you cause yeah that is a bit annoying.
you get used to how you need to kind of walk into the enemy and stop before pressing r1.
i can’t explain it very well bc it becomes intuitive after a few FS games.
Dlc critique I have:
Gaius hitboxes need tweaks, especially charge.
Final boss phase 2 needs more visual clarity, with how much clutter he has. Maybe more transparency on the after images and gold beams because they flashbang too hard. Phase 2 special attack at 10% hp (you know it) needs not to completely obliterate your fps and flashbang at the same time.
Hornsent swordsmen dont need literally infinite poise. Nothing has staggered them from what Ive tried.
Fix rolling sparks.
Bayle biss fight is literally the camera boss battle.
Use blood hound step and watch your player nowhere close to the geometry get hit for 3/4 of your health as soon as you materialize. Either this was never play tested, the play tester suck that much at their job, or they just lie to management because they think they can hide behind difficulty.
Mesmmers phase 2 is fucked up hit box whise as well. The snakes will slam down a good "torrents length" away and tag you if youre not in iframes. I had it with the spears pop up as well. The hitboxes in the dlc are jank city
Last boss pissed me off Fr with how bad it murked my pc. Went from being a spectical to “I can’t do anything cuz I’m getting 15 fps right now”. And with how tight everything In that fight is, it kind of ruined it for me. I get it’s a “hardware issue” but also, why design a boss that throws 9000 particle effects at me in a 4 second window.
> I get it’s a “hardware issue”
People with a 7800x3D / 14900k and 4090s are dropping to 30 fps during that attack. If the best available hardware on the market is getting nuked, its definitely not your fault.
I have not beaten him yet, can somewhat reliably go to phase 2 but I have zero idea what any of his moves are there. I can't see shit, constantly getting flashbanged and the camera angle is always from down low when locked on.
Meaning I often can't even see most of his weapons when close, so how am I to learn what he is doing in the five seconds I last?
This might be a hot take, but I learned to get along well with Fire Giant and Elden Beast. For all their stupid moves and attacks, they are slow and well telegraphed, meaning you can easily dodge them, if you use free cam.
Here I don't even know how to learn yet, simply because I can't observe what he is doing. And that takes all the fun out of it for me.
I think it's weird that there are only exactly as many scadutree fragments as there are upgrades to get them. With such a big open world, you'd think they'd toss in a few extra for the players that missed one or two. Even in the base game there were a couple extra Golden Seeds, and way more Stonesword Keys than you actually need.
The worst thing about this is that it feels like a Ubi tier collectathon. Too many, too scattered, easily missable--and they are the most vital items in this DLC. There should have been 25 crosses around the map, in very obvious places, and you need to find 20 of them and that's it.
There are some shadow enemies that have pots over their heads that you need to kill before they throw their pot in order to get a scadutree fragments. Atleast 3 of em from what I remember. Seems like such a weird and specific thing to know in order to get such a necessary item.
Throw the abyssal woods into this list. From an atmospheric perspective, it's great. Meanwhile, it's just a giant barren area that has nothing in it except some rats and some cool sneak elements. There's literally no point in exploring this area unless you want the scadutree fragments across the zone. It feels incredibly incomplete. And I can't even use torrent? If you're not gonna let me mount up, don't make the zone so big.
There is a medium sized dungeon there though. And yeah, there is a lot of empty space, but that is to make the location of the dungeon more obscure. The dungeon can't be spotted on the map so you have to go out and look for it, while sneaking around the enemies.
I thought it was a nice change of pace from the rest of the game.
My critique is more so with the entire dlc map design. It looks beautiful, but there are many zones that are shockingly devoid of any items, or the few items they do have are some more smithing stones and gloveworts that nobody needs more of. Throw in some cookbooks and that feels like 90% of the loot table.
I love the dlc so far, but almost at the end and it feels like they just didn’t have much stuff to place around the world given how huge it is.
For Bayle, don't lock on. At all. He's massive and doesn't move as much as other dragons (since, ya know, he's missing an arm and a leg) so you can hit him without locking on at all no problem. I found I didn't have many camera issues after that
The hornsent knights literally have more poise, HP and aggression than Crucible knights, and those are single spawn "elite" fights that are meant to chew through a ton of your healing and time and give you that "fuck yeah that was almost a boss" feeling.
Hornsent knights respawn infinitely and feel like a poorly designed large mob.
I thought it was just my bad skill that I was unable to dodge the charge, no matter how hard I tried.
On top of this, I think the divine beast's hitbox is also pretty weird.
I think what it really boils down to is that Fromsoft games used to feel like the bosses were beholden to the same/similar rules as the player. "You choose your actions, and once you've committed to that action, you see it through."
But they've really gone in the direction of Bosses (and some mobs) don't really obey the rules of anything. When they attack, they're not committed to the attack because they can spin 360 degrees on a dime during any attack. I think this breaks the most fundamental aspect of 'Souls' combat in that: choice -> action -> vulnerability. When they had those hammer dudes with infinite stamina and turn-on-a-dime turret-ing going in Dark Souls 2, people didn't like it.
The problem with making the discussion about 'difficulty' is that it's not about difficulty. They could quadruple scudatree blessings effect and it wouldn't fix things. It would make the game stupidly easy, but it wouldn't fix what's wrong which is that bosses don't have to follow any rules. They have no stamina limit, they have no rotation speed cap, they have no distance traversal limit, they can animation cancel, and they have nearly no downtime between actions.
As a result Fromsoft has created an arms race between players and bosses by providing players with tons of tools to overcome what they've put in front of us. But if you look at what it's actually done to the fights, it's made them less interactive than ever. You really are just hanging back waiting for the 17 attack combo chain to finish for that momentary window to plink the boss. Tossing in summons and AoW so you can maximize output while getting ready to avoid the boss until the next window. It no longer feels like a fight, doesn't feel like a dance between opponents, it's just loadout vs whatever that boss does - and it doesn't even matter what the boss does anymore. Who cares? It literally doesn't matter, they're all the same now.
In contrast, the Artorias fight remains seared in my memory. The tight attack pattern, the rushing to smack him before he buffed himself, the careful dodges and getting the hits in. But you know what he never did? 360 noscope me. His attacks went where they were aimed and if I messed up, it was on me. Right now, the best way to fight bosses, is to not fight them as much as possible.
This post hits the nail (or multiple nails) on the head.
The bosses not only seem to have increasingly lengthy combos (unrestricted by any stamina limitations) that deal very high damage (making even one bad dodge potentially result in a death, even with a full health bar), minimal cooldowns (which sometimes the player cannot even punish if they just dodged several meters away to avoid some AOE), but properly telegraphing attacks seems to be less and less of a focus. It feels like I have to artificially react to my memory of the attacks from past encounters rather than organically react to what I’m seeing unfolding right in front of me.
Throw in their anime-style “flash stepping” speed blitzes that almost instantly close the distance between themselves and the player and their attack tracking (where they can adjust their direction mid-swing even after having committed to it), and it feels like they’ve created bosses that wouldn’t be too out of place in a Devil May Cry or Bayonetta-style game.
I see a lot of people mistake criticism for an inability to beat the game, but that is almost never true - people making these criticisms usually have beaten these encounters and are writing about why they didn’t enjoy them.
Don't forget about how some bosses and enemies also have true combos that will lock you in for multiple hits if you get smacked early on, like Rellana's moon attack. Fail to jump/dodge the first hit and boom, you're now locked into a 3 hit combo that will deal insane damage.
That's one I feel is one of the better executed ones, honestly. I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with a boss having a murder attack that just sort of completely brutalizes you, lots of bosses have highly damaging grab attacks that serve a similar function, but that power has to come with a tradeoff and Rellana's seems pretty fair. The first time you run into it you're probably getting bounced like a basketball, which I did, but it's slow and the counter is fairly intuitive, as well as being simple to execute.
In contrast, a combo I would call poorly designed is Radahn's gravity pulse thing. If you're anywhere within the massive AOE, you have about half a second to react to him doing the pose and roll, and if not, too bad, you're taking the hit and getting shredded by the followup.
As long as the gravity pull doesn't knock you down, if you *immediately* sprint away you can escape the second part of the attack. I've done so very reliably.
>I see a lot of people mistake criticism for an inability to beat the game, but that is almost never true - people making these criticisms usually have beaten these encounters and are writing about why they didn’t enjoy them.
Yep. Most bosses going down in 1-3 attempts, so far only Bayle (5), Gaius (stopped counting, but somewhere 10-15 attempts), Blackgaol Knight (7), Putrescent Knight (6 or 7), I'm almost done with the DLC just have Romnia up next and then on to Radhan.
Most bosses also fall apart when you bring out summons or use an ash that they're not good against. I have no idea what most boss movesets even are, and yet they still went down.
Lol fanboys really think that getting ragdolled as soon as you enter the boss arena by a huge boss which covers 90% of the camera with its ass is good boss design...
Imagine how frustrating the encounter would be, if the camera didn't zoom out during the Midir fight in Ringed City. Half of the time you can't even see what the boss is doing.
>its made fights less interactive than ever, as all you’re doing is waiting out a 17 hit combo just to plink the boss
I said in another comment that this is exactly why Sekiro and Armored Core 6 have the best combat out of all the fromsoft games.
You get rewarded for actually daring to fight back and pressure the boss.
I've played both games through several times. It's very good but A: I don't think it's comparable to sekiro and B: I definitely wouldn't call it better even if it's also good.
Sekiro bosses in particular feel amazing and nothing has topped sword saint ishin thus far imo.
All the bosses are so good in Sekiro, I love Ishin but Genichiro is still probably my favorite boss in the game. His combos flow so fell and reflecting back the lightning arrow, not the melee attack, is peak satisfaction.
And in Sekiro you're rewarded when you're on defense as well because perfect parries will eventually break their poise. Means the boss fights are engaging the whole way throw. Genius.
I should give Armored Core 6 a go it sounds like.
Just to push you over the edge, AC6 is a fantastic game. Not enough people played it because they were up in their eyeballs with Baldur's Gate 3 or Starfield. For me, it was my GOTY.
And it won't suck up all your time to enjoy it. It's a relatively quick game. Even doing 3 playthroughs in a row (because I couldn't think of anything else when I woke up) it still took a very small time investment.
>Boss gets a hit on you but doesn't knock you away or down
I have about 95 poise and EVERY SINGLE ATTACK FROM ALL BOSSES either knocks me down or interups my attacks, whats the meaning with poise against these bosses?
Honestly, even DS3 was that way a lot of the time. If you were good at parrying, you could pressure bosses *super* hard most of the time. It's most obvious with like... Pontiff and Iudex Gundyr? But I managed to no-hit Champiom Gundyr on my first playthrough purely through parries. Still probably my best souls fight ever.
But that's just... not there in Elden Ring. They basically made parries a complete non-option for most bosses. Like, why does it take multiple parries to stagger *Margit*? And why are so few boss attacks actually parriable? It was such a fun and rewarding playstyle in the Souls games, but it's just missing now.
This is probably my biggest and longest-standing beef with the game. Because just like the parent comment said, you just have dodge through ridiculous combos now, whereas in the past you could take advantage of those to get a parry and riposte off, which made combat much more interactive.
(And as an addendum to that, just everything about Malenia makes me so mad about the parry situation. The fact that it takes so many parries to stagger her when I can just stunlock her with poise breaks from Carian Piercer or something is just *stupid*)
Bloodborne and Sekiro (and AC) were peak at this. Miyazaki went out of his way to take those tools away from us and reverted us to DS characters for reasons beyond me.
Yup, and it’s not like any of those games were any easier like someone may think. Isshin and C Spider were unbelievably difficult, despite the player character being strong as fuck and having better offence/defence options compared to typical souls.
It’s simply just superior combat design, and it shows that from know how to make better combat systems.
I really like AC6 but "jump in your face & 4xgatlings go brrrrr" carried me through almost every mission through newgame++. I think there should have been more heavily armored enemies or ones that actually punished you for just sticking to them like glue.
>As a result Fromsoft has created an arms race between players and bosses by providing players with tons of tools to overcome what they've put in front of us.
This is part of why I think there's such a disconnect in this discussion. Half of the aisle doesn't like that it's become this way, and the other half thinks that this is the point of the game. Some people just look at these games as challenges to be overcome, and they don't really care about whether a solution is fun or well designed, so long as there is a solution. Other people, like myself, see these games as ARPGs who's difficulty served a greater purpose, but wasn't there just for the sake of it.
I have to say I credit a lot of the design to infinite stamina and being able to run the fuck away vertically.
So many enemies in this dlc follow you, fly, or run faster than you, to the extent every encounter becomes tedious.
The tit for tat nature of Sekiro is why it won GotY. It made YOU the bad ass versus a bad ass enemy. Bloodborne was similar. I dont think its a coincidence that both games had a tighter leash on the player's "Build" as opposed to ER with its 1000 weapons. From is developing its bosses as a catch all to everything the player could possibly do. And its made them into freak frankenstein combats that nobody is actually enjoying.
Some of my most fond memories of Sekiro were fighting the bow guy and having that back and forth of attacking him until he "parries" me and starts a combo on me, which I parry through and start my attacks back, and us repeating that until he does an attack that forces me back for him to do his bow attacks.
It just felt so badass, like one of those hype anime sword fight moments.
true magic happens when Fromsoft tightens down the experience and shows the players much more what their "intended gameplay" is
If you dont lean into how Sekiro and BB combat works then it won't be fun for you, once you do though omg.
The shame of this is I think Dark Souls 3 started getting good at varying boss designs around enough to make different builds suffer at different times in the playthrough.
Like if you’re a Sorcerer many bosses get a lot easier but Crystal Sage is suddenly a chore. Went with a dinky dex build that spews damage but doesn’t clear areas well? That pope fight gonna take a minute, hope you can dodge all the fireballs!
Haven’t played SotE yet but Elden Ring never really felt like that. Every boss was the same timed dodges and openings for any build.
Yeah Artorias and Gael from DS3 are still my pinnacle boss designs for this series. Fluid fights that are tough but fair. In all my time playing soulsborne games I have never felt the need to respec my build until this DLC.
Preach. Genuinely, if they just extended the downtime between combos I think the bosses would be miles more fun. Enough time to get hits from a big weapon in, but you still have to know when your time is up so you don’t get locked into an animation.
Exactly what I think and pray for them to do. I'll cope with the rest as long as I can punish properly after those sickass long combos. What makes me rage so much is the fact I have to wait so damn much just for the boss to keep going in an out of combos in a dime.
I definitely won't cope with the 360 turns, but fixing the lack of downtime would be at least a start. If I can't rotate 360 degrees once I'm locked into an animation, especially a jump attack, there's no reason Blackgaol Knight should be able to jump up, spin 720 degrees, fly 80 feet across the room, spin another 1440 degrees, and then smack me for over half of my health even at +4 Blessings with 60 Vigor and heavy armor, all with infinite poise to prevent knocking him out of his jump attack because he's touching the sword with a second hand.
Although a completely different game genre, kingdom hearts does this if you look at the data fights the bosses go hog wild until you conter attack and a invisible timer starts on how long you can attack for(revenge value). A good player would stop and let the boss recover and a bad player will keep attacking and ultimately get punished for it, for example young xehanort in kh3 will either tp away or time stop you
I think this is a pretty insightful post. I am cautiously optimistic they will go deeper into the direction of Sekiro, which gave the player the power with the deflect system to have more control over the flow of combat. Bosses in Sekiro had to respond to player attacks by deflecting, and vice versa, and that made combat into more of a dance. ER never achieves the same interactivity.
From and their games as an extension got hit by real life flanderization. After so many years of "git gud" memes and people acting like the Souls games are the hardest games on the planet, It really feels like From is leaning hard into that public opinion.
Back in the day before DS3 came out, Miyazaki said "our objective is to make the game possible to accomplish”, not just pointlessly ball bustingly difficult for its own sake. That design philosophy feels dead and gone at this point.
I don't think they've fully crossed the line yet, but if they decide to double down and increase the difficulty like this again, I predict that it will take one or two more games before it really starts to fall apart
This is a fair criticism and well written. I agree with everything you said and feel as though Spirit Ashes were included in the game to swing the balance of difficult bosses back into the player's favor. Clearly there are people who can perform no-hit runs on any boss in the game but this comes with many hours of practice, to the point where it resembles more of a mechanical or robotic exercise.
Bloodborne introduced aggressive bosses and a system where health could be regained given how fast the attack patterns were. There were lore implications to this as well, I suppose. Elden Ring has aggressive bosses and it's encouraged to summon a Spirit Ashe just to draw aggression for a few moments while you get your turn. It feels like a shift in design philosophy. I enjoy learning a boss fight and I don't want easy wins. Therefore, if we're required to fight a boss 50-100 times or whatever your build/skill level dictates I don't see how including RNG elements encourages this whatsoever. Personally I end up feeling like I have to brute-force my way past the fight just based on how unpredictable some of them are. With all of this being said, I think the games can still pride themselves on the boss fights (mostly) being a spectacle.
I will never forgive the final boss of this DLC for having a jump attack that makes it look like he should be vulnerable afterwards as he stands back up, only to initiate a SECOND one because you saw an opening and decided to capitalize on it. I. Hate. This. Design.
Why the fuck would I try to punish any perceived openings if they are just as likely to be a trap as an opening? Souls combat used to be a dance that complimented your ability to read the boss and react to what it does. Now? It's a fucking memorization game. Can't remember the boss's attack sequence to the tiniest frame data? Go fuck yourself.
Spacing is also gone, as every boss seems to have antigravity hoverboots on. You'll walk backwards to space an attack, and they'll Koopa backdash waveslide hoverwalk moonlanding towards you in the middle of an attack. Who thought that one up? So the only way to avoid damage is to dodge, but you made every boss have 12-hit combos, some of which come out so fast that they will catch you once your I-frames are gone? I sincerely hope this shit dies in the next game. I'm out if it doesn't.
This is also the biggest problem with Metyr and Bayle. Sometimes Ill get hit bevause what I thought was a punish window is actually just a lead up into the next move and sometimes I’ll miss a punish window because I thought that they would attack again, and this is usually for the same exact move
Oh god stupid Bayle and his tail swipe that he only does *some* of the time after his dash. Or when he punches the ground and only *sometimes* finishes off with an AOE, but you can't tell which move it is until he actually *does* it
That was my problem with Messmer. He has two attacks that have almost the same exact moveset, except one ends in the spears aoe and the other is a punish. There is almost no tell between the two.
And then 2nd phase, he moves so fast and every movement is an attack in 360 direction. I killed him because I genuinely got lucky where he decided to do two non-flame buffed attack sets in a row, and my bleed and frost proc'd. Otherwise, I could not get a hit in.
I tried every weapon combo. Fast, slow, ranged, magic. I ended up with BHF with frost grease, and summoning the nokstra ladies as a hail mary, and Hornsent as my usual npc summon (why the hell is the summon in the arena? I'm lucky to use my spirit summons before getting locked in a combo).
I've got Bayle, the npc trio fight, and the final boss left.
I've found that Bolt of Granssax fully buffed absolutely *chunks* boss health. It's definitely made easier when I've got a spirit to draw some aggro and let me punish, but it still does *so much damage*. I'm getting 3k damage per hit in on NG+ Messmer, it's kind of disgusting. (Though I do question how aggro works for some of these bosses. My summon just hit you 4 times, why are you still aggroed on *me*? Or better yet, when they change who they're attacking mid-combo? So fun)
And to answer your question about why Hornsent is *inside* the arena. It's so summoning him doesn't do the normal "increase boss health" thing that summons do. If he's summoned once the boss has already spawned, you just get the solo health but with a summon. It was pretty great vs Bayle when I had me, Mimic Tear, and Igon. Essentially 3 players against a boss that was only scaled for one player
> I will never forgive the final boss of this DLC for having a jump attack that makes it look like he should be vulnerable afterwards as he stands back up, only to initiate a SECOND one because you saw an opening and decided to capitalize on it. I. Hate. This. Design.
This is an obnoxious problem of design with the base game as well. There are numerous examples people have pointed out where an animation clearly pauses for an unreasonably long time to bait you into rolling just so it can catch you. Its especially egregious on the bosses who hover in the air then suddenly plunge down with no sense of momentum or warning, its just artificially designed to catch the player out.
The reason its obnoxious is very simple; the game is purposefully misleading you in a very artificial fashion. In previous games you would have bosses like the Fume Knight who caught the player off-guard by mixing up his slow and fast attacks. Every time you got hit though, you knew it was your fault for reacting to the wrong one with the wrong timing. With Elden Ring though, the timing isn't based on your reactions, its based exclusively on your knowledge of the deliberately misleading animation. The game lies to you just so it can get hits in.
The DLC bosses just took this design choice and ramped it up even further with hyper aggressive combos and extreme damage scaling. If they want to design bosses with this level of aggression and misleading animations, then player combat needs to evolve to be faster paced with shorter animation recovery because the two design choices are incongruent with one another.
The worst for this is the Scadutree Avatar's last phase. They come back in with this new attack where it starts to power up and most players would think "this fucker is gonna explode" and roll back out. They do and the player will then notice that after the attack the boss hangs it's vulnerable head down, ripe for punishment, but players might be too far back to really take advantage of it. "Next time, I'm doing to be ready for it" they think to themselves and then when it happens again they run in after the explosion only to be surprised because the boss does not one, but TWO more and now the player is dead. What hateful "fuck you", trail and error design to put in the last phase of a THREE fuckin' phase fight. I don't think I've ever seen that kind of thing in a From boss before where they show you an attack at the start of a phase and then change it up immediately the next time it's used.
Also, when a boss grabs a summon it will be invulnerable, you basically have a gigantic sitting duck that you can’t make him pay for his mistake because it is literally invulnerable.
While obnoxious, it's the equivalent of us getting intangibility frames while doing a critical hit, so at the very least that's the ONE thing where they're playing by the same rules we are (which is probably just spaghetti code).
> they have nearly no downtime between actions
I think if this ONE thing was changed I'd be the most happy. I'm fine with screen filling bullshit, fine with global range projectiles, fine with long combos but when these things happen back to back to back to back, it falls apart.
I'm either chasing the boss all fight or taking a 50/50 that it's safe to try and damage stuff.
Completely agree with everything you said here.
I played through the DLC up until Gaius/Romina and I think I genuinely enjoyed 2 bosses, the rest including a lot of the areas have just felt like major slog to get through even though objectively the aesthetics and art design and all that are top tier.
It got to the point where I actually dreaded seeing a Fog gate, thinking "what kind of bullshit is this going to be", in the base game it was more "Damn I can't wait to see what this boss is"
I'm not saying the DLC is bad but, for me the hyper aggressiveness of a lot of the bosses/"elite" enemies just feels way too tedious to learn and want to get better and playing.
I also feel like all the endless spinning and jumping and writhing bosses do now just doesn't look good, aesthetically. There seems to be nothing in between enemies that are so lumbering they're defenseless and enemies that act like living cyclones.
not to mention all of these idiotic anime spins and gravity defying moon jumps make it literally impossible to sightread and react accordingly because you have no idea what you’re looking for
Valiant Gargoyles fight exemplifies everything obnoxious about From's "arms race" as you put it in my opinion. Many bosses are masters of all traits and the kitchen sink and it just gets tiring. Add in so many weird hit boxes, camera issues with building-sized models etc. and ER has the worst approach to bosses out of all their games since DS to me.
FUCK man, you got it so damn right with everything you said here. Every time someone makes a critique on bosses there's a shit storm in the comments about how people shouldn't play this games if they don't want difficulty. When in reality most of us are talking about mechanics and fairness, not difficulty. We were always okay with the second, cause the first is the one that matters.
That's why simply saying "hey, it's doable, everybody killed the bosses, quit crying" just isn't a valid argument. We don't fucking care if it's doable or not, the point of the challenges in this games is and always was the engagement with the enemies and the bosses. What you had to face and how to react to it. It just doesn't matter if they added a ton of new options for players to exploit, if the very base of the gameplay feels way undertuned in contrast to what you have in front of you (and it does) is bad design and at least a part of the community is gonna notice. Cause we remember how Dark Souls was and this is not it.
You just have to see people fighting the last boss on the DLC to understand how most players really don't engage as much as they did. They change their build to strength, pick a bonk weapon and hope after 500 tries they can poise break the boss to death while the mimic does it's thing. What did they learn from the fight? Absolutely nothing. Meanwhile you have a ton of assholes online saying the only thing that matters is "getin gud".
In the eyes of some people you just can't even suggest Fromsoft did wrong. And that's it.
The thing that popped into my head the other night while playing the dlc (stuck on last boss because ng+ scaling is beyond stupid) is how terribly designed the boss fights have become. It's a very odd situation to me too. I started to actually look up overpowered builds so I could respect into something that would be able to kill the last boss. The thing that killed my enjoyment was realizing that at this point, I'm not even fighting a boss anymore, I'm just looking to cheese it and move on. The dlc bosses almost as a whole made me realize that the way the game scales difficulty is incredibly stupid. When I used to play dark souls 1 2 or 3, or any of their previous games for that matter, the most I'd ever feel like I need is some more levels to push out slightly higher damage or health stats. In Elden Ring, the process is always "what 8 different buffs can I stack together and abuse so the boss fight feels fair and doesn't take 8 minutes to beat?" and this gets to be incredibly draining after a while. I don't like feeling like I'm prepping for a fucking mmo raid boss every time I try to fight a boss in a God damn single player game. At that point I'm not fighting a boss anymore, it's as Asmongold had said before, we're now just fighting the devs. While I think the dlc is mostly great, most of why I like it is just the exploring. The fighting is probably the worst and least enjoyable mess we've ever received and I'm tired of pretending that from soft went and did the unthinkable again. They fucked up on multiple fronts with the dlc, and while I'll still agree it's a great piece of content overall, people need to take a step back put feelings aside and realize what things just aren't good design.
One of my main complains with bosses ties a lot with what you said. It literally feels as if the two options right now are either have a genuinely bad time coping with the overtuned mechanics or trivialize the fights using summons, bufs and overpowered weapons. I just don't feel like I wanna learn the fights anymore or get better cause it's just a lot for the sake of being a lot. While we're still playing with the rules of DS3. It doesn't make any sense.
Yes exactly, it's as if the game isn't actually difficult, it's just a gear check. Use the op thing or have a bad time unless you're a special case who enjoys frustration. I really hope their future souls like games don't follow this type of balancing, I actually might consider not buying their next game if it is this way. I used to have fun learning bosses in their previous games, I don't have fun with learning more than half of the bosses in elden ring. Genuinely think the best designed fight in the entire game is Romina because it's the only fight I can think of that feels completely fair and doesn't rely on any cheap shots to be difficult
Couldn’t agree more! However, I’d say even the exploration is kinda fucked up. The map doesn’t feel cohesive for the most part and it’s rather empty. When you risk your life and think you found something cool- it’s either something you will never use or a damn cookbook.
Can't stand that shit. Why are they giving us garbage smithing stones when the devs know everyone and their grandma has the bell bearings for stones on endgame characters. Cookbooks I don't mind as much because at least those have things I can read in the item description.
Even if you didn't get the bell bearings, you have to beat Mohg to get to the DLC, you know, the boss that's in the zone where you get an Ancient somber stone, somber 9, and smithing stones 6 through 8. Why would the place that comes after him have shittier stuff?. It's like they expect us to beat Mohg with a +0 weapon maybe? So then when we find a smithing stone 2 on the DLC we lose our minds.
I definitely lost my mind when in the last zone of the DLC I was picking up ARROWS & BOLTS, because there was no way I could get those beforehand right?, and endangering my life by doing so too.
Exactly! How many people out there who are like "Oh actually this boss is fine, sure it's difficult but you all need to suck it up!" beat it with Mimic Tear and/or summons and/or bleed and/or frost and/or rot? How many people, to beat the final boss, switched to a blocking playstyle with a spear or thrusting sword to jab? I'm not saying doing that makes you bad; I ALSO did some of those things. The problem is that many, many people felt compelled to do those things at all. Great boss design, in my book, is one where it can be approached from several directions and still feel reasonably challenging. Any boss that compels you to use a Larval Tear to completely upend a certain number of builds - not just tweak it, but turn into something else entirely - is, in my book, a boss design that has failed. The key words there being "certain number" - obviously, one might have to change their fire build if they're facing the Fire Giant, and similar cases. But if wide swathes are made irrelevant, that just sucks.
I'm sure there will be people beating the final boss blindfolded on NG+7 without scadutree blessings on a dancepad in the coming days and weeks. I'm very sure that as the months roll by, people will find strategies that don't involve blocking and poking with the final boss and instead rolling, even mediumrolling, on a solo build becomes viable for some players. But games are designed to be played by thousands, even millions of players. If a very significant chunk of them have a bad experience, you cannot simply dismiss it. You might disagree with their proposed solutions, and maybe you even disagree that it's a problem that needs fixing, but if you do nothing then they won't come back and they will reviewbomb your game - people will generally spread negative comments more commonly than positive ones.
"Git gud" is an individualistic solution. It's like telling somebody with a shitty job to just grind at it and get a better one - sure, THAT single person MIGHT get a better job, but that shitty job still exists and somebody else will work it and be miserable. Similarly, you can tell somebody to git gud and give them tips on how to beat bosses, and they might then beat it, but that doesn't form a systemic solution to the problems of the bosses. I'm talking on the scale of millions here, not individuals.
And here's the thing: we're actually seeing this occur in real time! The dev team have posted, on Twitter and on the Steam page, reminding people to use their Scadutree blessings. When that was insufficient, they buffed the blessing effect early on and very slightly increased its lategame effect. The people who are in the "Nothing must change, Miyazaki is god and can literally do no wrong even if he burned my house down, everybody must git gud" camp are literally not even aligned with the game company they're defending.
Even with that job analogy, most "git gud" holds people to a standard that in a lot of cases I think a significant number of people literally physically cannot adhere to. I'm not talking about everything of course, but some of the timing on things is so fucking precise that it comes off as "Oh yeah an Olympian can do it, so why can't you loser".
> The problem is that many, many people felt compelled to do those things at all.
I can't agree with this enough. If you have a boss in a game like this that makes the player feel the need to change their entire build to overcome it, you have a serious issue at hand. When you have a situation where players feel disempowered in an RPG with such diverse player expression, something has gone very wrong.
i’m still pissed about having to respec just to finish the base game because radagon & elden beast both have 80% holy resist and i was doing a coded sword build
I agree on your larval tear change for ultimate build to win is faulty.
However, I have never once thought using affinities was a bad move. You've been able to use affinities since Demon's Souls. Bleed gonna bleed, frost gonna frost - same with fire and lightning.
Granted whatever works is the thiing
The problem with bleed/frost builds is that they are even more overpowered compared to other builds in the DLC then they were in the base game due to their reliance on percent health damage being unphased by the bosses over-inflated health pools. It offsets the difficulty experience between someone who uses them versus someone who doesn't even more. This puts people in a position where they get upset when all their criticisms are dismissed outright because the person dismissing them felt the difficulty was "just right" for their min-maxed bleed build when of course they did, their build is still chunking the same amount from the dlc bosses health bars as it did the base game bosses. Also bleed builds somewhat negate the damage scaling aspect of the scadu system because 10% health damage is 10% health damage regardless of what you're scadu blessing rank is, so someone with a bleed/frost build will probably find a fight "fair" at a lower rank than someone using any other damage type will.
Exactly. This is my biggest problem with it so far. How come I’m stunned so much that I can’t get back up after the bosses next attack? They aren’t governed by anything they are free to completely attack full go all the time. I’m all for hard, I’m all in with them on these games, but this is just so ridiculous, it’s been ruining the fun of learning move sets, I cannot seem to learn or see any move sets when I’m 2 shotted with a 17 blessing and 99 vigor.
Thank you. You took the words right out of my mouth, especially the part on how all bosses feel the same. They all have aoe, they all have arena transversing attacks, they all have seemingly endless combos, and they all have a 360 roundhouse kick (mostly kidding) to punish your aggression.
Never mind a boss being easy or difficult, what about a boss being fun? I can't speak for others, but I dont find it engaging at all when 95% of the fight is evading/rolling before i get my 1 attack in and have to rinse and repeat until the boss dies. Sadly, this is how most of the DLC bosses feel to me. I'm tempted to start a NG in DS3 again to get that dance of combat I wanted out of this DLC rather than a frustrating dodgefest.
If I say I think some boss combos are unfair or the hitboxes might not be right there's guaranteed gonna be 5 replies telling me to get good or that I'm not reading an attack right
It really annoys me when people say this and the git gud comments when I'm critiquing from the point of view of someone who finished the game and experienced most of the content there is.
Like thanks, I already killed it, you can't dismiss me with this.
As much as I hate to agree with that statement. It really does make the game more forgiving. I just wish many of them weren't in really obscure spots. I had to look up a guide to find the last 5 that I needed.
I keep seeing people saying this, but it makes no sense at all from a game design perspective. Elden Ring isn't a mostly linear game like Sekiro, it's an open world game. They don't want you to boss rush main path, they want you to explore the world. Punishing difficulty if you don't engage with the side content is one of the core design principles, ever since Margit.
They know there are plenty of players who would just take their dual spear full bullgoats basegame build in a straight line to the end if they had the chance. Incentivising players to engage with as much of the game as possible, and get the most out of the experience, instead of optimising all of the fun out of the game as many players would with no incentive not to, is one of the most basic fundamentals of game design.
Main posts yes. People in the comments tho are usually the "git gud" crowd. And if you check, most people respond with "no, the DLC is fine".
You also tend to see less of the "the DLC is fine" posts because if people are not bothered by something, they usually won't go to reddit to sing it's praise.
>You also tend to see less of the "the DLC is fine" posts because if people are not bothered by something, they usually won't go to reddit to sing it's praise.
Correct! Instead I'm just playing the DLC
Tbf there is a lot of people complaining just because of tilt, a while ago there was a flood of rellana bad posts and there isn't anything to add other than no, the boss is good you are just bad.Specially since they don't ask for help on how to dodge a attack or anything they just complain.
I feel like people are complaining because they’re so used to being familiar with the base game and now they’re dying over and over again. The DLC is harder than the base game but the principles you need to be good at it are the exact same. We saw a lot of the same complaints about base game bosses when the game first came out. I swear you could copy paste the complaints about Rellana and substitute “Rellana” with “Morgott” or “Malenia” and it’d be just like 2 years ago.
I think in a couple weeks it’ll be back to normal once people become familiar with the dlc and stop overreacting.
I saw a comment saying people never complained about malenia like rellana, because malenia is fair. I read it and thought, were you living under a rock?
LMAO I guess they missed when every 2nd post here was "why does this bitch keep healing, trash game design" or getting waterfowl'd to death from full hp, or people having a shitfit when they find out she has a 2nd phase.
There was a multi-video back and forth about the difficulty of the bosses with Melania being a main focus on YouTube a while back. A challenge runner no hit the entire base game just to prove it could be done because the guy critiquing said it couldn't
But to a lot of people the DLC is fine and isn't insanely hard like some people are making it out to be. Currently I find it pretty much just as hard as the base game. I had more issues with previous From Software DLC's like Bloodbornes. And I don't recall there being such a huge uproar on how difficult that was.
Yeah "git gud" does get annoying when it's all that's said. There's more specific advice that can be given to help, such as weaknesses and counters. For instance, raptor of the mists can be used to dodge last boss' orbital laser. But ultimately you still just have to try over and over again to get the timings and directions right. That's what "git gud" means to me anyway.
I don’t think it’s the git gud crowd who are vapidly defending the dlc from real criticism. The git gud crowd is part of the people who have complaints because they’re part of the group who aren’t using spirit summons.
I agree with this, however the caves and catacombs that ARE there are so much bigger and better than any of the main game. But I think I still would've enjoyed some small ones sprinkled here and there as well.
This same thing happens with almost every game in every sub. Including this post. I frequent r/boardgames and you see similar stuff there. It's just what you get with the internet. You think this is bad, you should've seen r/thelastofus. Just ignore the opinions you don't find valuable and move on, no need to over-analyze people's internet personas.
Made a post here about how my charged heavy with 20 blessing, dealt 1.5k damage, which only moved the final boss’s health bar down by 2 ricegrain widths on a flatscreen tv. People still defended that shit.
I think it comes down to people mixing objective facts about the game with their subjective thoughts as to whether or not it's good or bad. It's also tied to Dark Souls in most minds even though from clearly wants you to approach problems in far more complex ways than just the standard "roll left". The base game just did a bad job of showing this.
Most common arguments stem from difficulty from what I'm seeing. It is objectively true that you have all sorts of time to mix in lights, heavy, charged attacks, and even the odd dragon incantation. There's no room for debate because it's true.(- maybe final boss. Haven't fought him yet.)
The game is just asking more of it's players than it has ever before. Whether this is good or bad can't really be objectively weighed because the "fun" comes from different places for everyone. So people appeal to the divine non argument of "it's bad design" because the game isn't what they want it to be.
As a dragon incantation noob I can confirm. Dragon maw into a stance break is totally doable and carried me through a few bosses now.
Edit: stance break, not stagger.
People don’t understand that if no one will criticize bad design choices how developer are going to decide what to change? If everyone say that it’s 10/10 next game will have exactly same problems.
It seems to be the opposite? Everyone is banging on about how we have to use spirit summons and that the game is balanced round them when it’s not. When someone mentions they want to play the game without them people go insane. The toxicity seems to have flipped
It absolutely did. It's fascinating to watch. I think this sub went through 5 stages of dominant narrative:
1. Playing without summons is intended, summoning is kinda shameful
2. Playing without summons is normal, summoning is understandable
3. Both playing with and without summons is normal
4. Playing with summons is normal, not summoning is an optional challenge
5. Playing with summons is intended, not summoning is masochistic
Every other post now is people summoning patting each other on their backs and making fun out of in reality almost exctinct "elitists".
Fandoms are generally annoying and obnoxious.
I think a while back someone wrote an article or something about how “git gud” isn’t toxic behavior, and that it’s a message of encouragement or something and once they finally learned how to “git gud” they developed a deeper love for the game.
Good for them I guess, but I don’t think that’s how people actually intend it a lot of the time.
Riders gonna ride my friend, don't expect to have an objective conversation on this subreddit filled with mega fanboys that think this game is fucking perfect.
Elden ring discord isn't any better. I mentioned the network issues and frame drops that were never present in the base game and got told my new PS5 must be a piece of shit or I have to be on DSL internet, ans was told to get good.
These people are just miserable losers. Best to ignore
I've played and beaten every souls game to date, while this dlc is very fun, I find the boss fights to be a slog. Base ER had the same issue past Lyndell, everything can 2 shot you even with 60 vigor and the game just isn't as fun from that point on much like the boss fights in this dlc, even at 16 shadow level bosses will still 2 to 3 shot you in the middle of a 2000 hit combo where you can swing at them once before they start again. Outside of that tbh some of the bigger enemies are a chore too like that big dual wielding guy in first legacy dungeon, can't stagger him no matter what I try.
God you're so right it hurts. People don't want to discuss
mechanics, details and specifics in general anymore, the only thing that matters to them is if you are against or in favour of difficulty. As if it was that simple and there weren't so many different factors about it from a designers point of view, from the players point of view, from the industry's point of view.
Also there's just this obnoxious obssesion with insisting on the fact everything '"isn't even as hard" or that "there's this player that did it naked with a single dagger". And this constant set of stupid expressions like "git gud" or "skill issue", the "stop complaining, you're a crybaby" mentality...
There used to be far more critical thinking in this community, now everybody's argument is "if the game is doable, is fair". And that's it. You have to be a fucking zombie liking everything, defending everything. Is just so boring to try and have a discussion online unless you're lucky enough to find people who're free of this mentality. It genuinely makes me sad.
Social media posts making it a point on just how difficult Elden Ring is by releasing clickbait content probably created a new fanbase of people looking for an ultra-hardcore experience because that's what was sold to them - even if it means at the expense of the games that came before it. I think the nuance here is that the older games were difficult and appealed to a niche audience, not players looking to come in and get their badge of honor so they can brag about it later.
I do hope you're right. It happened the same with the base game. People seem to completely forget how many things were wrong in past games it seems. Kapra Demon anyone?
I agree, it's all over the place. I found the difficulty progression (pre patch) very good in context to which areas I ended up exploring. I beat all of the more hidden optional bosses and found them extremely reasonable, dying sometimes only once or twice until beating them. Literally, the entire DLC up until the last boss felt like an exceptionally well tailored experience for me. But then I got to the end and was floored for hours... I tried everything, respec even, changing strategies, with and without summon ashes.. nothing worked. Finally I decided to summon someone and then pretty much beat the boss for me. Left me a bit unsatisfied but it was still just a small part of my overall very positive experience.
Of all the DLCs this is both one of the best and worst.
The final boss of this DLC is straight up horse-shit, no other way to put it. The lore is trash, phase 2 is visual vomit, the boss shouldn't even be here because we already beat him, the boss won't even let the player get more than a hit in between stupidly long combos and aggression, and I know others think the same way.
The blessing "buff" was a good step, but how about nerfing the VFX issues before touching the blessing that should be a no-brainer?
from how people talk both the base game and the dlc are simultaneously too hard but also not hard enough, and the easiest game to cheese but also the bosses are badly designed and also shadow blessings are useless but also the game forces you to collect them
I think you're falling into the trap of conflating multiple different comments into an amalgamation. Happens quite a bit on Reddit across most communities.
I'd venture to say a person complaining about one isn't complaining about the other. Both of those sentiments exist in the community because people have their own opinions. And of course as a user, you're subjected to a constant deluge of everyone's opinions all the time, so it probably all runs together.
I feel like ego and pride goes the other way too. A lot of people seem to think they’re better at the game than they actually are, and instead engaging with the new mechanics, they complain about how unfair the difficulty is. It doesn’t even occur to a lot of people that they may be the problem and not the game.
That doesn’t mean the dlc is perfect or Miyazaki is a god. It just means some people are bent out of shape because they can’t steamroll the bosses like they used to. I give it a month before people change their tune and start praising the dlc after they figure out new strategies and adapt.
There’s plenty of valid criticism too. I haven’t got there yet, but everyone says phase 2 of the final boss is shit. Lots of valid complaints about bad camera and performance, dropped inputs, and other various glitches. I just don’t think it’s nearly as valid to complain about difficulty, all the bosses are beatable and have openings, you just need to figure them out. Use what the game gives you. Let go of your ego and experiment a bit and you’ll probably enjoy yourself more.
Youre assuming people arent experimenting. Maybe they just are not enjoying the game theyre playing. Maybe its just that straight forward. All these people obviously enjoyed the base ER to bother buying the DLC right? So something happened.
I love FromSoftware’s commitment to difficulty, I respect it, but I will say that Malaenia has just a bit too much bullshit.
I eventually beat her, but I had to completely change my build to get it done and that felt bad.
Obviously a skill issue on my end, but she’s a Sekiro boss in Elden Ring and it’s not that fun and the Waterfowl Dance feels like an exercise in Vitality Check and not timing.
tbf all malenia has going for her is waterfowl dance and lifesteal, while a certain fuck in the dlc does like 20 attacks in 10 seconds with no downtime between combos that also ends in massive aoe
Her lifesteal working on a shield that 100% blocked her damage was my biggest gripe lol, seemed like a bug that they just decided to leave in after discovering it
i have a topic that’s always pissed me off about the whole game is when you go to do a visceral after staggering and you end up just slashing them instead of triggering the critical
Adding to this: hills/ramps/stairs making critical hits impossible sucks. Losing out on damage to the slightest of elevations making it impossible for you to get within critical activation range is so frustrating.
Especially awful when you have huge enemies falling over small rocks, and they end up high enough to get out of crit range (Furnace Golems)
The giant fucking sunflower has certain attack animations that, if they die during it, will just begin floating up into the air. Considering the boss mechanic of that fight, that is exceptionally fucked, but thankfully it's so rare I've only seen it once, and it was during phase 1.
It ain’t even just terrain. Giants, golems and dragons when falling over and you can’t get past their body parts lmao. Like fuck it, I’ll just keep swinging.
Biggest gripe with this rn are the furnace golems. Multiple of them are on uneven terrain and if you stagger and they fall the wrong way you can't crit
This especially hurts since criting them does something like 500k dmg
Ye, I ended up killing most of them all with only 1 crit the rest of the damage was done by normal attacks. The tears aren't even worth it... Except one, the duration of the others is worthless. Sekiro tear is 5 minutes... The other 30 secs?
I love how people are calling the Deflecting Hardtear the Sekiro Tear. LOL!
It's crazy because the game has such tight hit box's, but when comes to any sort of magic that travels across the ground, the game is janky as hell. Also, why is the target lock SO bad. Anytime their is more than a couple people, gl trying to target the right one. Or even someone slightly behind a wall.
Hills ramps stairs not being able to handle Darkmoon greatsword beam
I hate the fact that you lose lock on after doing a critical attack
This shit blows my mind that anyone thought it was a good enough idea to keep it through all of the games
You know I’ve been playing since DS1 and I don’t think I ever noticed it, but now it’s going to bug me every single time.
you kinda have to stand still for a split second and then hit light attack to trigger it consistently.
This right here is the key. In the early days I got so frustrated by screwing them up. It’s still not good game design in my opinion, but I’m glad I found the solution.
For my is moving my character “pressing” against the enemy, kinda like really making sure is making contact, basically…. Otherwise criticals and stealth are RNG-like
Thanks for the advice I thought I was just not good enough for crits lol
After missing like half a dozen crits today, I told myself to take my finger off the stick and then go for the hit. Haven’t missed one yet! So far it seems to be helping. Definitely give that a shot!
Lie of P hit the mark with it red circle ⭕, if you set foot on it and R1 it will trigger visceral attack immediately, it's a good design for visual que and game play.
I think lies of P had a lot of innovations that even fromsoft could learn from the red circle definitely being one of them but also other stuff like how they kind of show when a stance break is possible or being able to charge your last flask. I also personally love how they tied in heavy attacks to be more involved in combat and their fp/mana mechanic being tied to attacking rather than just a different flask.
The quest design was a QOL that was appreciated
Yeah, I didn't feel like I missed out on anything in Lies of P.
Genuinely such a good feeling not getting fomo thanks to weird quest design (Looking at you elden ring)
Right? I basically felt like I had to follow a guide to get an ending in Elden Ring bc I felt like I was missing something much
How good is Lies of P? Worth buying? I am an old time gamer, only games I have enjoyed the last 10 years are Elden Ring and Red Dead Redemption.
Fantastic. IMO, it's easily one of the best games in the genre and seriously rivals the mainline Souls game. It has some of the best and most satisfying boss fights I can say I've experienced. My singular criticism of the game is that enemy diversity can be meh at points, but I'm willing to give it a pass since this was the first AAA quality game ever made by its studio. You should give it a try. It has a very expansive 3\~ish hour long demo for you to play with, and ssuming you're not on PS, it's on game pass, so it's cheap to give it a try.
It’s great, takes a while to get used to the intricacies of the combat though, but once you do it feels amazing
It's unironically my second favorite soulslike after Sekiro.
In Lies of P they also invented this brand new, previously unheard of feature, a working camera in a soulslike game.
I loved how your ergo/runes/souls from the previous failed attempt sit outside the boss fog for easy pickup before either going back in or going off and doing something.
Weapon durability is better in this game than anything from soft have ever done with it by a country mile. A less important one but that I want in from soft is your soils total glowing when you can afford a level up
Yep, great idea by them
Or worse, when you do a backstab, the attack registers and the animation begins, but then the enemy moves out of your way and you don’t get the backstab. It’s an issue inherited straight out of DS3.
I wouldn't call it an issue, it was an intended nerf to backstabs originating from DS2. It was way worse having backstabs deal damage when your animation eats air, or rubber banding someone back into the sword.
You have to stop your combo and then hit r1 again. You can use it to your advantage by getting a free hit as long as the attack doesn’t do enough stance damage to knock them out of the stagger and it’s fast enough that you can still do the critical after. Unless you mean when you want to do a critical and ur barely not in the right spot and it doesn’t let you cause yeah that is a bit annoying.
you get used to how you need to kind of walk into the enemy and stop before pressing r1. i can’t explain it very well bc it becomes intuitive after a few FS games.
If you're too far or moving as you R1, that happens
I agree with 95% of this, but the Hello Kitty Island Adventure slander is utterly unacceptable.
Hello Kitty Island Adventure requires more dedication and patience than any fromsoftware/soulslike game
Butters, that you???
Dlc critique I have: Gaius hitboxes need tweaks, especially charge. Final boss phase 2 needs more visual clarity, with how much clutter he has. Maybe more transparency on the after images and gold beams because they flashbang too hard. Phase 2 special attack at 10% hp (you know it) needs not to completely obliterate your fps and flashbang at the same time. Hornsent swordsmen dont need literally infinite poise. Nothing has staggered them from what Ive tried. Fix rolling sparks. Bayle biss fight is literally the camera boss battle.
I've seen my Night Comet go straight through Gaius's body and not register a hit far too many times.
Gaius' model and hitbox straight up don't match on some moves but charge is most egregious
Gave up attempting to even roll through the charge at some point and just blocked it. Never found a successful timing for it while mid-rolling.
Only way I found to consistently dodge it was with the raptor of the mists ash of war, which I promptly used to destroy him.
I need my L2 for him so not an option for me :(
Raptors is so busted, I put it on the new hand2hand arts and its supidly powerful.. to the point it might've been overlooked in testing.
Use blood hound step and watch your player nowhere close to the geometry get hit for 3/4 of your health as soon as you materialize. Either this was never play tested, the play tester suck that much at their job, or they just lie to management because they think they can hide behind difficulty.
Mesmmers phase 2 is fucked up hit box whise as well. The snakes will slam down a good "torrents length" away and tag you if youre not in iframes. I had it with the spears pop up as well. The hitboxes in the dlc are jank city
Last boss pissed me off Fr with how bad it murked my pc. Went from being a spectical to “I can’t do anything cuz I’m getting 15 fps right now”. And with how tight everything In that fight is, it kind of ruined it for me. I get it’s a “hardware issue” but also, why design a boss that throws 9000 particle effects at me in a 4 second window.
> I get it’s a “hardware issue” People with a 7800x3D / 14900k and 4090s are dropping to 30 fps during that attack. If the best available hardware on the market is getting nuked, its definitely not your fault.
People be aboosing greatshield shield poking for a reason. It completely invalidates any skill of the boss but it helps with the visual noise
I have not beaten him yet, can somewhat reliably go to phase 2 but I have zero idea what any of his moves are there. I can't see shit, constantly getting flashbanged and the camera angle is always from down low when locked on. Meaning I often can't even see most of his weapons when close, so how am I to learn what he is doing in the five seconds I last? This might be a hot take, but I learned to get along well with Fire Giant and Elden Beast. For all their stupid moves and attacks, they are slow and well telegraphed, meaning you can easily dodge them, if you use free cam. Here I don't even know how to learn yet, simply because I can't observe what he is doing. And that takes all the fun out of it for me.
They do stagger after a few close guard counters with a colossal weapon, but good luck not getting wrecked in that time.
They also truecombo 70% of your hp
Yeah and they don’t have any chill. Nothing to exploit with these fellas. Just gotta panic and burn.
Another critique I forgot. Some of the scadutree fragment placements are too deep in ohio man. Too hidden
I think it's weird that there are only exactly as many scadutree fragments as there are upgrades to get them. With such a big open world, you'd think they'd toss in a few extra for the players that missed one or two. Even in the base game there were a couple extra Golden Seeds, and way more Stonesword Keys than you actually need.
I knew something felt off about this, you're right!
The worst thing about this is that it feels like a Ubi tier collectathon. Too many, too scattered, easily missable--and they are the most vital items in this DLC. There should have been 25 crosses around the map, in very obvious places, and you need to find 20 of them and that's it.
They should have just tied them to bosses like they did in sekiro.
There are some shadow enemies that have pots over their heads that you need to kill before they throw their pot in order to get a scadutree fragments. Atleast 3 of em from what I remember. Seems like such a weird and specific thing to know in order to get such a necessary item.
Throw the abyssal woods into this list. From an atmospheric perspective, it's great. Meanwhile, it's just a giant barren area that has nothing in it except some rats and some cool sneak elements. There's literally no point in exploring this area unless you want the scadutree fragments across the zone. It feels incredibly incomplete. And I can't even use torrent? If you're not gonna let me mount up, don't make the zone so big.
There is a medium sized dungeon there though. And yeah, there is a lot of empty space, but that is to make the location of the dungeon more obscure. The dungeon can't be spotted on the map so you have to go out and look for it, while sneaking around the enemies. I thought it was a nice change of pace from the rest of the game.
My critique is more so with the entire dlc map design. It looks beautiful, but there are many zones that are shockingly devoid of any items, or the few items they do have are some more smithing stones and gloveworts that nobody needs more of. Throw in some cookbooks and that feels like 90% of the loot table. I love the dlc so far, but almost at the end and it feels like they just didn’t have much stuff to place around the world given how huge it is.
For Bayle, don't lock on. At all. He's massive and doesn't move as much as other dragons (since, ya know, he's missing an arm and a leg) so you can hit him without locking on at all no problem. I found I didn't have many camera issues after that
The hornsent knights literally have more poise, HP and aggression than Crucible knights, and those are single spawn "elite" fights that are meant to chew through a ton of your healing and time and give you that "fuck yeah that was almost a boss" feeling. Hornsent knights respawn infinitely and feel like a poorly designed large mob.
I thought it was just my bad skill that I was unable to dodge the charge, no matter how hard I tried. On top of this, I think the divine beast's hitbox is also pretty weird.
Haaaa the divine "fuck your fps just enough to get you killed" beast. That one. Yeah.
I think what it really boils down to is that Fromsoft games used to feel like the bosses were beholden to the same/similar rules as the player. "You choose your actions, and once you've committed to that action, you see it through." But they've really gone in the direction of Bosses (and some mobs) don't really obey the rules of anything. When they attack, they're not committed to the attack because they can spin 360 degrees on a dime during any attack. I think this breaks the most fundamental aspect of 'Souls' combat in that: choice -> action -> vulnerability. When they had those hammer dudes with infinite stamina and turn-on-a-dime turret-ing going in Dark Souls 2, people didn't like it. The problem with making the discussion about 'difficulty' is that it's not about difficulty. They could quadruple scudatree blessings effect and it wouldn't fix things. It would make the game stupidly easy, but it wouldn't fix what's wrong which is that bosses don't have to follow any rules. They have no stamina limit, they have no rotation speed cap, they have no distance traversal limit, they can animation cancel, and they have nearly no downtime between actions. As a result Fromsoft has created an arms race between players and bosses by providing players with tons of tools to overcome what they've put in front of us. But if you look at what it's actually done to the fights, it's made them less interactive than ever. You really are just hanging back waiting for the 17 attack combo chain to finish for that momentary window to plink the boss. Tossing in summons and AoW so you can maximize output while getting ready to avoid the boss until the next window. It no longer feels like a fight, doesn't feel like a dance between opponents, it's just loadout vs whatever that boss does - and it doesn't even matter what the boss does anymore. Who cares? It literally doesn't matter, they're all the same now. In contrast, the Artorias fight remains seared in my memory. The tight attack pattern, the rushing to smack him before he buffed himself, the careful dodges and getting the hits in. But you know what he never did? 360 noscope me. His attacks went where they were aimed and if I messed up, it was on me. Right now, the best way to fight bosses, is to not fight them as much as possible.
This post hits the nail (or multiple nails) on the head. The bosses not only seem to have increasingly lengthy combos (unrestricted by any stamina limitations) that deal very high damage (making even one bad dodge potentially result in a death, even with a full health bar), minimal cooldowns (which sometimes the player cannot even punish if they just dodged several meters away to avoid some AOE), but properly telegraphing attacks seems to be less and less of a focus. It feels like I have to artificially react to my memory of the attacks from past encounters rather than organically react to what I’m seeing unfolding right in front of me. Throw in their anime-style “flash stepping” speed blitzes that almost instantly close the distance between themselves and the player and their attack tracking (where they can adjust their direction mid-swing even after having committed to it), and it feels like they’ve created bosses that wouldn’t be too out of place in a Devil May Cry or Bayonetta-style game. I see a lot of people mistake criticism for an inability to beat the game, but that is almost never true - people making these criticisms usually have beaten these encounters and are writing about why they didn’t enjoy them.
Don't forget about how some bosses and enemies also have true combos that will lock you in for multiple hits if you get smacked early on, like Rellana's moon attack. Fail to jump/dodge the first hit and boom, you're now locked into a 3 hit combo that will deal insane damage.
That's one I feel is one of the better executed ones, honestly. I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with a boss having a murder attack that just sort of completely brutalizes you, lots of bosses have highly damaging grab attacks that serve a similar function, but that power has to come with a tradeoff and Rellana's seems pretty fair. The first time you run into it you're probably getting bounced like a basketball, which I did, but it's slow and the counter is fairly intuitive, as well as being simple to execute. In contrast, a combo I would call poorly designed is Radahn's gravity pulse thing. If you're anywhere within the massive AOE, you have about half a second to react to him doing the pose and roll, and if not, too bad, you're taking the hit and getting shredded by the followup.
As long as the gravity pull doesn't knock you down, if you *immediately* sprint away you can escape the second part of the attack. I've done so very reliably.
>I see a lot of people mistake criticism for an inability to beat the game, but that is almost never true - people making these criticisms usually have beaten these encounters and are writing about why they didn’t enjoy them. Yep. Most bosses going down in 1-3 attempts, so far only Bayle (5), Gaius (stopped counting, but somewhere 10-15 attempts), Blackgaol Knight (7), Putrescent Knight (6 or 7), I'm almost done with the DLC just have Romnia up next and then on to Radhan. Most bosses also fall apart when you bring out summons or use an ash that they're not good against. I have no idea what most boss movesets even are, and yet they still went down.
Lol fanboys really think that getting ragdolled as soon as you enter the boss arena by a huge boss which covers 90% of the camera with its ass is good boss design... Imagine how frustrating the encounter would be, if the camera didn't zoom out during the Midir fight in Ringed City. Half of the time you can't even see what the boss is doing.
>its made fights less interactive than ever, as all you’re doing is waiting out a 17 hit combo just to plink the boss I said in another comment that this is exactly why Sekiro and Armored Core 6 have the best combat out of all the fromsoft games. You get rewarded for actually daring to fight back and pressure the boss.
I didn't play Armored Core, but yeah Sekiro is an absolute masterclass of combat ballet.
You have to play AC6, it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played and the combat is just as good, if not better than in Sekiro
I've played both games through several times. It's very good but A: I don't think it's comparable to sekiro and B: I definitely wouldn't call it better even if it's also good. Sekiro bosses in particular feel amazing and nothing has topped sword saint ishin thus far imo.
All the bosses are so good in Sekiro, I love Ishin but Genichiro is still probably my favorite boss in the game. His combos flow so fell and reflecting back the lightning arrow, not the melee attack, is peak satisfaction.
And in Sekiro you're rewarded when you're on defense as well because perfect parries will eventually break their poise. Means the boss fights are engaging the whole way throw. Genius. I should give Armored Core 6 a go it sounds like.
Just to push you over the edge, AC6 is a fantastic game. Not enough people played it because they were up in their eyeballs with Baldur's Gate 3 or Starfield. For me, it was my GOTY. And it won't suck up all your time to enjoy it. It's a relatively quick game. Even doing 3 playthroughs in a row (because I couldn't think of anything else when I woke up) it still took a very small time investment.
Bloodborne as well. Boss gets a hit on you but doesn't knock you away or down? LOOKS LIKE IT'S SAW CLEAVER TIME RIP AND TEAR and you get that HP back.
>Boss gets a hit on you but doesn't knock you away or down I have about 95 poise and EVERY SINGLE ATTACK FROM ALL BOSSES either knocks me down or interups my attacks, whats the meaning with poise against these bosses?
BB and Sekiro on another level still
Honestly, even DS3 was that way a lot of the time. If you were good at parrying, you could pressure bosses *super* hard most of the time. It's most obvious with like... Pontiff and Iudex Gundyr? But I managed to no-hit Champiom Gundyr on my first playthrough purely through parries. Still probably my best souls fight ever. But that's just... not there in Elden Ring. They basically made parries a complete non-option for most bosses. Like, why does it take multiple parries to stagger *Margit*? And why are so few boss attacks actually parriable? It was such a fun and rewarding playstyle in the Souls games, but it's just missing now. This is probably my biggest and longest-standing beef with the game. Because just like the parent comment said, you just have dodge through ridiculous combos now, whereas in the past you could take advantage of those to get a parry and riposte off, which made combat much more interactive. (And as an addendum to that, just everything about Malenia makes me so mad about the parry situation. The fact that it takes so many parries to stagger her when I can just stunlock her with poise breaks from Carian Piercer or something is just *stupid*)
Bloodborne and Sekiro (and AC) were peak at this. Miyazaki went out of his way to take those tools away from us and reverted us to DS characters for reasons beyond me.
Yup, and it’s not like any of those games were any easier like someone may think. Isshin and C Spider were unbelievably difficult, despite the player character being strong as fuck and having better offence/defence options compared to typical souls. It’s simply just superior combat design, and it shows that from know how to make better combat systems.
I really like AC6 but "jump in your face & 4xgatlings go brrrrr" carried me through almost every mission through newgame++. I think there should have been more heavily armored enemies or ones that actually punished you for just sticking to them like glue.
Ac6 bosses were excellent but the missions were lackluster
>As a result Fromsoft has created an arms race between players and bosses by providing players with tons of tools to overcome what they've put in front of us. This is part of why I think there's such a disconnect in this discussion. Half of the aisle doesn't like that it's become this way, and the other half thinks that this is the point of the game. Some people just look at these games as challenges to be overcome, and they don't really care about whether a solution is fun or well designed, so long as there is a solution. Other people, like myself, see these games as ARPGs who's difficulty served a greater purpose, but wasn't there just for the sake of it.
Years of circlejerking about "git gud" and "Souls games SO HAAAARD" have done such intense damage to the series.
The prepare to die marketing has ruined an entire generation of gamers.
To this day, I think fromsoft nailed their bosses in Sekiro, especially Isshin.
I have to say I credit a lot of the design to infinite stamina and being able to run the fuck away vertically. So many enemies in this dlc follow you, fly, or run faster than you, to the extent every encounter becomes tedious.
The tit for tat nature of Sekiro is why it won GotY. It made YOU the bad ass versus a bad ass enemy. Bloodborne was similar. I dont think its a coincidence that both games had a tighter leash on the player's "Build" as opposed to ER with its 1000 weapons. From is developing its bosses as a catch all to everything the player could possibly do. And its made them into freak frankenstein combats that nobody is actually enjoying.
Some of my most fond memories of Sekiro were fighting the bow guy and having that back and forth of attacking him until he "parries" me and starts a combo on me, which I parry through and start my attacks back, and us repeating that until he does an attack that forces me back for him to do his bow attacks. It just felt so badass, like one of those hype anime sword fight moments.
true magic happens when Fromsoft tightens down the experience and shows the players much more what their "intended gameplay" is If you dont lean into how Sekiro and BB combat works then it won't be fun for you, once you do though omg.
The shame of this is I think Dark Souls 3 started getting good at varying boss designs around enough to make different builds suffer at different times in the playthrough. Like if you’re a Sorcerer many bosses get a lot easier but Crystal Sage is suddenly a chore. Went with a dinky dex build that spews damage but doesn’t clear areas well? That pope fight gonna take a minute, hope you can dodge all the fireballs! Haven’t played SotE yet but Elden Ring never really felt like that. Every boss was the same timed dodges and openings for any build.
Yeah Artorias and Gael from DS3 are still my pinnacle boss designs for this series. Fluid fights that are tough but fair. In all my time playing soulsborne games I have never felt the need to respec my build until this DLC.
Preach. Genuinely, if they just extended the downtime between combos I think the bosses would be miles more fun. Enough time to get hits from a big weapon in, but you still have to know when your time is up so you don’t get locked into an animation.
Exactly what I think and pray for them to do. I'll cope with the rest as long as I can punish properly after those sickass long combos. What makes me rage so much is the fact I have to wait so damn much just for the boss to keep going in an out of combos in a dime.
I definitely won't cope with the 360 turns, but fixing the lack of downtime would be at least a start. If I can't rotate 360 degrees once I'm locked into an animation, especially a jump attack, there's no reason Blackgaol Knight should be able to jump up, spin 720 degrees, fly 80 feet across the room, spin another 1440 degrees, and then smack me for over half of my health even at +4 Blessings with 60 Vigor and heavy armor, all with infinite poise to prevent knocking him out of his jump attack because he's touching the sword with a second hand.
Although a completely different game genre, kingdom hearts does this if you look at the data fights the bosses go hog wild until you conter attack and a invisible timer starts on how long you can attack for(revenge value). A good player would stop and let the boss recover and a bad player will keep attacking and ultimately get punished for it, for example young xehanort in kh3 will either tp away or time stop you
I think this is a pretty insightful post. I am cautiously optimistic they will go deeper into the direction of Sekiro, which gave the player the power with the deflect system to have more control over the flow of combat. Bosses in Sekiro had to respond to player attacks by deflecting, and vice versa, and that made combat into more of a dance. ER never achieves the same interactivity.
Fromsoft has become obsessed with these anime boss fights
From and their games as an extension got hit by real life flanderization. After so many years of "git gud" memes and people acting like the Souls games are the hardest games on the planet, It really feels like From is leaning hard into that public opinion. Back in the day before DS3 came out, Miyazaki said "our objective is to make the game possible to accomplish”, not just pointlessly ball bustingly difficult for its own sake. That design philosophy feels dead and gone at this point.
I don't think they've fully crossed the line yet, but if they decide to double down and increase the difficulty like this again, I predict that it will take one or two more games before it really starts to fall apart
This is a fair criticism and well written. I agree with everything you said and feel as though Spirit Ashes were included in the game to swing the balance of difficult bosses back into the player's favor. Clearly there are people who can perform no-hit runs on any boss in the game but this comes with many hours of practice, to the point where it resembles more of a mechanical or robotic exercise. Bloodborne introduced aggressive bosses and a system where health could be regained given how fast the attack patterns were. There were lore implications to this as well, I suppose. Elden Ring has aggressive bosses and it's encouraged to summon a Spirit Ashe just to draw aggression for a few moments while you get your turn. It feels like a shift in design philosophy. I enjoy learning a boss fight and I don't want easy wins. Therefore, if we're required to fight a boss 50-100 times or whatever your build/skill level dictates I don't see how including RNG elements encourages this whatsoever. Personally I end up feeling like I have to brute-force my way past the fight just based on how unpredictable some of them are. With all of this being said, I think the games can still pride themselves on the boss fights (mostly) being a spectacle.
I will never forgive the final boss of this DLC for having a jump attack that makes it look like he should be vulnerable afterwards as he stands back up, only to initiate a SECOND one because you saw an opening and decided to capitalize on it. I. Hate. This. Design. Why the fuck would I try to punish any perceived openings if they are just as likely to be a trap as an opening? Souls combat used to be a dance that complimented your ability to read the boss and react to what it does. Now? It's a fucking memorization game. Can't remember the boss's attack sequence to the tiniest frame data? Go fuck yourself. Spacing is also gone, as every boss seems to have antigravity hoverboots on. You'll walk backwards to space an attack, and they'll Koopa backdash waveslide hoverwalk moonlanding towards you in the middle of an attack. Who thought that one up? So the only way to avoid damage is to dodge, but you made every boss have 12-hit combos, some of which come out so fast that they will catch you once your I-frames are gone? I sincerely hope this shit dies in the next game. I'm out if it doesn't.
This is also the biggest problem with Metyr and Bayle. Sometimes Ill get hit bevause what I thought was a punish window is actually just a lead up into the next move and sometimes I’ll miss a punish window because I thought that they would attack again, and this is usually for the same exact move
Oh god stupid Bayle and his tail swipe that he only does *some* of the time after his dash. Or when he punches the ground and only *sometimes* finishes off with an AOE, but you can't tell which move it is until he actually *does* it
That was my problem with Messmer. He has two attacks that have almost the same exact moveset, except one ends in the spears aoe and the other is a punish. There is almost no tell between the two. And then 2nd phase, he moves so fast and every movement is an attack in 360 direction. I killed him because I genuinely got lucky where he decided to do two non-flame buffed attack sets in a row, and my bleed and frost proc'd. Otherwise, I could not get a hit in. I tried every weapon combo. Fast, slow, ranged, magic. I ended up with BHF with frost grease, and summoning the nokstra ladies as a hail mary, and Hornsent as my usual npc summon (why the hell is the summon in the arena? I'm lucky to use my spirit summons before getting locked in a combo). I've got Bayle, the npc trio fight, and the final boss left.
I've found that Bolt of Granssax fully buffed absolutely *chunks* boss health. It's definitely made easier when I've got a spirit to draw some aggro and let me punish, but it still does *so much damage*. I'm getting 3k damage per hit in on NG+ Messmer, it's kind of disgusting. (Though I do question how aggro works for some of these bosses. My summon just hit you 4 times, why are you still aggroed on *me*? Or better yet, when they change who they're attacking mid-combo? So fun) And to answer your question about why Hornsent is *inside* the arena. It's so summoning him doesn't do the normal "increase boss health" thing that summons do. If he's summoned once the boss has already spawned, you just get the solo health but with a summon. It was pretty great vs Bayle when I had me, Mimic Tear, and Igon. Essentially 3 players against a boss that was only scaled for one player
> I will never forgive the final boss of this DLC for having a jump attack that makes it look like he should be vulnerable afterwards as he stands back up, only to initiate a SECOND one because you saw an opening and decided to capitalize on it. I. Hate. This. Design. This is an obnoxious problem of design with the base game as well. There are numerous examples people have pointed out where an animation clearly pauses for an unreasonably long time to bait you into rolling just so it can catch you. Its especially egregious on the bosses who hover in the air then suddenly plunge down with no sense of momentum or warning, its just artificially designed to catch the player out. The reason its obnoxious is very simple; the game is purposefully misleading you in a very artificial fashion. In previous games you would have bosses like the Fume Knight who caught the player off-guard by mixing up his slow and fast attacks. Every time you got hit though, you knew it was your fault for reacting to the wrong one with the wrong timing. With Elden Ring though, the timing isn't based on your reactions, its based exclusively on your knowledge of the deliberately misleading animation. The game lies to you just so it can get hits in. The DLC bosses just took this design choice and ramped it up even further with hyper aggressive combos and extreme damage scaling. If they want to design bosses with this level of aggression and misleading animations, then player combat needs to evolve to be faster paced with shorter animation recovery because the two design choices are incongruent with one another.
The worst for this is the Scadutree Avatar's last phase. They come back in with this new attack where it starts to power up and most players would think "this fucker is gonna explode" and roll back out. They do and the player will then notice that after the attack the boss hangs it's vulnerable head down, ripe for punishment, but players might be too far back to really take advantage of it. "Next time, I'm doing to be ready for it" they think to themselves and then when it happens again they run in after the explosion only to be surprised because the boss does not one, but TWO more and now the player is dead. What hateful "fuck you", trail and error design to put in the last phase of a THREE fuckin' phase fight. I don't think I've ever seen that kind of thing in a From boss before where they show you an attack at the start of a phase and then change it up immediately the next time it's used.
Also, when a boss grabs a summon it will be invulnerable, you basically have a gigantic sitting duck that you can’t make him pay for his mistake because it is literally invulnerable.
While obnoxious, it's the equivalent of us getting intangibility frames while doing a critical hit, so at the very least that's the ONE thing where they're playing by the same rules we are (which is probably just spaghetti code).
> they have nearly no downtime between actions I think if this ONE thing was changed I'd be the most happy. I'm fine with screen filling bullshit, fine with global range projectiles, fine with long combos but when these things happen back to back to back to back, it falls apart. I'm either chasing the boss all fight or taking a 50/50 that it's safe to try and damage stuff.
Completely agree with everything you said here. I played through the DLC up until Gaius/Romina and I think I genuinely enjoyed 2 bosses, the rest including a lot of the areas have just felt like major slog to get through even though objectively the aesthetics and art design and all that are top tier. It got to the point where I actually dreaded seeing a Fog gate, thinking "what kind of bullshit is this going to be", in the base game it was more "Damn I can't wait to see what this boss is" I'm not saying the DLC is bad but, for me the hyper aggressiveness of a lot of the bosses/"elite" enemies just feels way too tedious to learn and want to get better and playing.
I also feel like all the endless spinning and jumping and writhing bosses do now just doesn't look good, aesthetically. There seems to be nothing in between enemies that are so lumbering they're defenseless and enemies that act like living cyclones.
not to mention all of these idiotic anime spins and gravity defying moon jumps make it literally impossible to sightread and react accordingly because you have no idea what you’re looking for
Valiant Gargoyles fight exemplifies everything obnoxious about From's "arms race" as you put it in my opinion. Many bosses are masters of all traits and the kitchen sink and it just gets tiring. Add in so many weird hit boxes, camera issues with building-sized models etc. and ER has the worst approach to bosses out of all their games since DS to me.
FUCK man, you got it so damn right with everything you said here. Every time someone makes a critique on bosses there's a shit storm in the comments about how people shouldn't play this games if they don't want difficulty. When in reality most of us are talking about mechanics and fairness, not difficulty. We were always okay with the second, cause the first is the one that matters. That's why simply saying "hey, it's doable, everybody killed the bosses, quit crying" just isn't a valid argument. We don't fucking care if it's doable or not, the point of the challenges in this games is and always was the engagement with the enemies and the bosses. What you had to face and how to react to it. It just doesn't matter if they added a ton of new options for players to exploit, if the very base of the gameplay feels way undertuned in contrast to what you have in front of you (and it does) is bad design and at least a part of the community is gonna notice. Cause we remember how Dark Souls was and this is not it. You just have to see people fighting the last boss on the DLC to understand how most players really don't engage as much as they did. They change their build to strength, pick a bonk weapon and hope after 500 tries they can poise break the boss to death while the mimic does it's thing. What did they learn from the fight? Absolutely nothing. Meanwhile you have a ton of assholes online saying the only thing that matters is "getin gud". In the eyes of some people you just can't even suggest Fromsoft did wrong. And that's it.
The thing that popped into my head the other night while playing the dlc (stuck on last boss because ng+ scaling is beyond stupid) is how terribly designed the boss fights have become. It's a very odd situation to me too. I started to actually look up overpowered builds so I could respect into something that would be able to kill the last boss. The thing that killed my enjoyment was realizing that at this point, I'm not even fighting a boss anymore, I'm just looking to cheese it and move on. The dlc bosses almost as a whole made me realize that the way the game scales difficulty is incredibly stupid. When I used to play dark souls 1 2 or 3, or any of their previous games for that matter, the most I'd ever feel like I need is some more levels to push out slightly higher damage or health stats. In Elden Ring, the process is always "what 8 different buffs can I stack together and abuse so the boss fight feels fair and doesn't take 8 minutes to beat?" and this gets to be incredibly draining after a while. I don't like feeling like I'm prepping for a fucking mmo raid boss every time I try to fight a boss in a God damn single player game. At that point I'm not fighting a boss anymore, it's as Asmongold had said before, we're now just fighting the devs. While I think the dlc is mostly great, most of why I like it is just the exploring. The fighting is probably the worst and least enjoyable mess we've ever received and I'm tired of pretending that from soft went and did the unthinkable again. They fucked up on multiple fronts with the dlc, and while I'll still agree it's a great piece of content overall, people need to take a step back put feelings aside and realize what things just aren't good design.
One of my main complains with bosses ties a lot with what you said. It literally feels as if the two options right now are either have a genuinely bad time coping with the overtuned mechanics or trivialize the fights using summons, bufs and overpowered weapons. I just don't feel like I wanna learn the fights anymore or get better cause it's just a lot for the sake of being a lot. While we're still playing with the rules of DS3. It doesn't make any sense.
Yes exactly, it's as if the game isn't actually difficult, it's just a gear check. Use the op thing or have a bad time unless you're a special case who enjoys frustration. I really hope their future souls like games don't follow this type of balancing, I actually might consider not buying their next game if it is this way. I used to have fun learning bosses in their previous games, I don't have fun with learning more than half of the bosses in elden ring. Genuinely think the best designed fight in the entire game is Romina because it's the only fight I can think of that feels completely fair and doesn't rely on any cheap shots to be difficult
Couldn’t agree more! However, I’d say even the exploration is kinda fucked up. The map doesn’t feel cohesive for the most part and it’s rather empty. When you risk your life and think you found something cool- it’s either something you will never use or a damn cookbook.
or random lvl 5 smithing stone lol
Can't stand that shit. Why are they giving us garbage smithing stones when the devs know everyone and their grandma has the bell bearings for stones on endgame characters. Cookbooks I don't mind as much because at least those have things I can read in the item description.
Even if you didn't get the bell bearings, you have to beat Mohg to get to the DLC, you know, the boss that's in the zone where you get an Ancient somber stone, somber 9, and smithing stones 6 through 8. Why would the place that comes after him have shittier stuff?. It's like they expect us to beat Mohg with a +0 weapon maybe? So then when we find a smithing stone 2 on the DLC we lose our minds. I definitely lost my mind when in the last zone of the DLC I was picking up ARROWS & BOLTS, because there was no way I could get those beforehand right?, and endangering my life by doing so too.
Smithing stone x2 so that is more worth your while lol
Exactly! How many people out there who are like "Oh actually this boss is fine, sure it's difficult but you all need to suck it up!" beat it with Mimic Tear and/or summons and/or bleed and/or frost and/or rot? How many people, to beat the final boss, switched to a blocking playstyle with a spear or thrusting sword to jab? I'm not saying doing that makes you bad; I ALSO did some of those things. The problem is that many, many people felt compelled to do those things at all. Great boss design, in my book, is one where it can be approached from several directions and still feel reasonably challenging. Any boss that compels you to use a Larval Tear to completely upend a certain number of builds - not just tweak it, but turn into something else entirely - is, in my book, a boss design that has failed. The key words there being "certain number" - obviously, one might have to change their fire build if they're facing the Fire Giant, and similar cases. But if wide swathes are made irrelevant, that just sucks. I'm sure there will be people beating the final boss blindfolded on NG+7 without scadutree blessings on a dancepad in the coming days and weeks. I'm very sure that as the months roll by, people will find strategies that don't involve blocking and poking with the final boss and instead rolling, even mediumrolling, on a solo build becomes viable for some players. But games are designed to be played by thousands, even millions of players. If a very significant chunk of them have a bad experience, you cannot simply dismiss it. You might disagree with their proposed solutions, and maybe you even disagree that it's a problem that needs fixing, but if you do nothing then they won't come back and they will reviewbomb your game - people will generally spread negative comments more commonly than positive ones. "Git gud" is an individualistic solution. It's like telling somebody with a shitty job to just grind at it and get a better one - sure, THAT single person MIGHT get a better job, but that shitty job still exists and somebody else will work it and be miserable. Similarly, you can tell somebody to git gud and give them tips on how to beat bosses, and they might then beat it, but that doesn't form a systemic solution to the problems of the bosses. I'm talking on the scale of millions here, not individuals. And here's the thing: we're actually seeing this occur in real time! The dev team have posted, on Twitter and on the Steam page, reminding people to use their Scadutree blessings. When that was insufficient, they buffed the blessing effect early on and very slightly increased its lategame effect. The people who are in the "Nothing must change, Miyazaki is god and can literally do no wrong even if he burned my house down, everybody must git gud" camp are literally not even aligned with the game company they're defending.
Even with that job analogy, most "git gud" holds people to a standard that in a lot of cases I think a significant number of people literally physically cannot adhere to. I'm not talking about everything of course, but some of the timing on things is so fucking precise that it comes off as "Oh yeah an Olympian can do it, so why can't you loser".
> The problem is that many, many people felt compelled to do those things at all. I can't agree with this enough. If you have a boss in a game like this that makes the player feel the need to change their entire build to overcome it, you have a serious issue at hand. When you have a situation where players feel disempowered in an RPG with such diverse player expression, something has gone very wrong.
i’m still pissed about having to respec just to finish the base game because radagon & elden beast both have 80% holy resist and i was doing a coded sword build
I agree on your larval tear change for ultimate build to win is faulty. However, I have never once thought using affinities was a bad move. You've been able to use affinities since Demon's Souls. Bleed gonna bleed, frost gonna frost - same with fire and lightning. Granted whatever works is the thiing
The problem with bleed/frost builds is that they are even more overpowered compared to other builds in the DLC then they were in the base game due to their reliance on percent health damage being unphased by the bosses over-inflated health pools. It offsets the difficulty experience between someone who uses them versus someone who doesn't even more. This puts people in a position where they get upset when all their criticisms are dismissed outright because the person dismissing them felt the difficulty was "just right" for their min-maxed bleed build when of course they did, their build is still chunking the same amount from the dlc bosses health bars as it did the base game bosses. Also bleed builds somewhat negate the damage scaling aspect of the scadu system because 10% health damage is 10% health damage regardless of what you're scadu blessing rank is, so someone with a bleed/frost build will probably find a fight "fair" at a lower rank than someone using any other damage type will.
Exactly. This is my biggest problem with it so far. How come I’m stunned so much that I can’t get back up after the bosses next attack? They aren’t governed by anything they are free to completely attack full go all the time. I’m all for hard, I’m all in with them on these games, but this is just so ridiculous, it’s been ruining the fun of learning move sets, I cannot seem to learn or see any move sets when I’m 2 shotted with a 17 blessing and 99 vigor.
Thank you. You took the words right out of my mouth, especially the part on how all bosses feel the same. They all have aoe, they all have arena transversing attacks, they all have seemingly endless combos, and they all have a 360 roundhouse kick (mostly kidding) to punish your aggression. Never mind a boss being easy or difficult, what about a boss being fun? I can't speak for others, but I dont find it engaging at all when 95% of the fight is evading/rolling before i get my 1 attack in and have to rinse and repeat until the boss dies. Sadly, this is how most of the DLC bosses feel to me. I'm tempted to start a NG in DS3 again to get that dance of combat I wanted out of this DLC rather than a frustrating dodgefest.
I wish someone sent this straight to Miyazaki, nothing I've said so far about Elden Ring and the DLC explained how I felt as well as this comment does
If I say I think some boss combos are unfair or the hitboxes might not be right there's guaranteed gonna be 5 replies telling me to get good or that I'm not reading an attack right
People love to use the straw man argument of ‘all the people complaining obviously haven’t levelled their scadutrees’. I hate it
It really annoys me when people say this and the git gud comments when I'm critiquing from the point of view of someone who finished the game and experienced most of the content there is. Like thanks, I already killed it, you can't dismiss me with this.
As much as I hate to agree with that statement. It really does make the game more forgiving. I just wish many of them weren't in really obscure spots. I had to look up a guide to find the last 5 that I needed.
It should’ve been tied it to defeating main bosses, they perfected the system in sekiro and still fucked it up
I keep seeing people saying this, but it makes no sense at all from a game design perspective. Elden Ring isn't a mostly linear game like Sekiro, it's an open world game. They don't want you to boss rush main path, they want you to explore the world. Punishing difficulty if you don't engage with the side content is one of the core design principles, ever since Margit. They know there are plenty of players who would just take their dual spear full bullgoats basegame build in a straight line to the end if they had the chance. Incentivising players to engage with as much of the game as possible, and get the most out of the experience, instead of optimising all of the fun out of the game as many players would with no incentive not to, is one of the most basic fundamentals of game design.
Tree blessings have no affect on .5 second punish windows.
Miyazaki does many things very well and does many things very poorly.
Really all I see on this sub is discussions about criticism of the DLC lol. If anything it seems to be the other way around atm.
Main posts yes. People in the comments tho are usually the "git gud" crowd. And if you check, most people respond with "no, the DLC is fine". You also tend to see less of the "the DLC is fine" posts because if people are not bothered by something, they usually won't go to reddit to sing it's praise.
>You also tend to see less of the "the DLC is fine" posts because if people are not bothered by something, they usually won't go to reddit to sing it's praise. Correct! Instead I'm just playing the DLC
Tbf there is a lot of people complaining just because of tilt, a while ago there was a flood of rellana bad posts and there isn't anything to add other than no, the boss is good you are just bad.Specially since they don't ask for help on how to dodge a attack or anything they just complain.
I feel like people are complaining because they’re so used to being familiar with the base game and now they’re dying over and over again. The DLC is harder than the base game but the principles you need to be good at it are the exact same. We saw a lot of the same complaints about base game bosses when the game first came out. I swear you could copy paste the complaints about Rellana and substitute “Rellana” with “Morgott” or “Malenia” and it’d be just like 2 years ago. I think in a couple weeks it’ll be back to normal once people become familiar with the dlc and stop overreacting.
I saw a comment saying people never complained about malenia like rellana, because malenia is fair. I read it and thought, were you living under a rock?
LMAO I guess they missed when every 2nd post here was "why does this bitch keep healing, trash game design" or getting waterfowl'd to death from full hp, or people having a shitfit when they find out she has a 2nd phase.
There was a multi-video back and forth about the difficulty of the bosses with Melania being a main focus on YouTube a while back. A challenge runner no hit the entire base game just to prove it could be done because the guy critiquing said it couldn't
But to a lot of people the DLC is fine and isn't insanely hard like some people are making it out to be. Currently I find it pretty much just as hard as the base game. I had more issues with previous From Software DLC's like Bloodbornes. And I don't recall there being such a huge uproar on how difficult that was.
Yeah "git gud" does get annoying when it's all that's said. There's more specific advice that can be given to help, such as weaknesses and counters. For instance, raptor of the mists can be used to dodge last boss' orbital laser. But ultimately you still just have to try over and over again to get the timings and directions right. That's what "git gud" means to me anyway.
What i've seen in this sub the last few days is people getting downvoted just for saying they like a bossfight, or the dlc overall
I don’t think it’s the git gud crowd who are vapidly defending the dlc from real criticism. The git gud crowd is part of the people who have complaints because they’re part of the group who aren’t using spirit summons.
My only issue this far is the lack of side caves, catacombs, etc. Feels a bit empty at times
I agree with this, however the caves and catacombs that ARE there are so much bigger and better than any of the main game. But I think I still would've enjoyed some small ones sprinkled here and there as well.
My biggest gripe is the wonky ass camera during fights.
Fromsoft community has reached FF14 levels of dickriding
The last time From could be critiqued was DS2, cause everyone enjoyed bitching about that game. Theyve been untouchable since.
People gave insane shit to DS3 when it came out.
This same thing happens with almost every game in every sub. Including this post. I frequent r/boardgames and you see similar stuff there. It's just what you get with the internet. You think this is bad, you should've seen r/thelastofus. Just ignore the opinions you don't find valuable and move on, no need to over-analyze people's internet personas.
Made a post here about how my charged heavy with 20 blessing, dealt 1.5k damage, which only moved the final boss’s health bar down by 2 ricegrain widths on a flatscreen tv. People still defended that shit.
I think it comes down to people mixing objective facts about the game with their subjective thoughts as to whether or not it's good or bad. It's also tied to Dark Souls in most minds even though from clearly wants you to approach problems in far more complex ways than just the standard "roll left". The base game just did a bad job of showing this. Most common arguments stem from difficulty from what I'm seeing. It is objectively true that you have all sorts of time to mix in lights, heavy, charged attacks, and even the odd dragon incantation. There's no room for debate because it's true.(- maybe final boss. Haven't fought him yet.) The game is just asking more of it's players than it has ever before. Whether this is good or bad can't really be objectively weighed because the "fun" comes from different places for everyone. So people appeal to the divine non argument of "it's bad design" because the game isn't what they want it to be.
As a dragon incantation noob I can confirm. Dragon maw into a stance break is totally doable and carried me through a few bosses now. Edit: stance break, not stagger.
Ahh, and now begins the complaining about the complainers, always a cycle. Just like the elden ring, it's poetic
This has already been happening lmao. How many "guys, seriously, just use spirit ashes" posts have we gotten since the DLC came out?
People don’t understand that if no one will criticize bad design choices how developer are going to decide what to change? If everyone say that it’s 10/10 next game will have exactly same problems.
I think they need to do a bug fix with Romina get it?
Wait, so you're saying that Miyazaki isn't God??? My whole entire belief is ruined. 😭
It seems to be the opposite? Everyone is banging on about how we have to use spirit summons and that the game is balanced round them when it’s not. When someone mentions they want to play the game without them people go insane. The toxicity seems to have flipped
It absolutely did. It's fascinating to watch. I think this sub went through 5 stages of dominant narrative: 1. Playing without summons is intended, summoning is kinda shameful 2. Playing without summons is normal, summoning is understandable 3. Both playing with and without summons is normal 4. Playing with summons is normal, not summoning is an optional challenge 5. Playing with summons is intended, not summoning is masochistic Every other post now is people summoning patting each other on their backs and making fun out of in reality almost exctinct "elitists".
Fandoms are generally annoying and obnoxious. I think a while back someone wrote an article or something about how “git gud” isn’t toxic behavior, and that it’s a message of encouragement or something and once they finally learned how to “git gud” they developed a deeper love for the game. Good for them I guess, but I don’t think that’s how people actually intend it a lot of the time.
Riders gonna ride my friend, don't expect to have an objective conversation on this subreddit filled with mega fanboys that think this game is fucking perfect.
Elden ring discord isn't any better. I mentioned the network issues and frame drops that were never present in the base game and got told my new PS5 must be a piece of shit or I have to be on DSL internet, ans was told to get good. These people are just miserable losers. Best to ignore
I've played and beaten every souls game to date, while this dlc is very fun, I find the boss fights to be a slog. Base ER had the same issue past Lyndell, everything can 2 shot you even with 60 vigor and the game just isn't as fun from that point on much like the boss fights in this dlc, even at 16 shadow level bosses will still 2 to 3 shot you in the middle of a 2000 hit combo where you can swing at them once before they start again. Outside of that tbh some of the bigger enemies are a chore too like that big dual wielding guy in first legacy dungeon, can't stagger him no matter what I try.
God you're so right it hurts. People don't want to discuss mechanics, details and specifics in general anymore, the only thing that matters to them is if you are against or in favour of difficulty. As if it was that simple and there weren't so many different factors about it from a designers point of view, from the players point of view, from the industry's point of view. Also there's just this obnoxious obssesion with insisting on the fact everything '"isn't even as hard" or that "there's this player that did it naked with a single dagger". And this constant set of stupid expressions like "git gud" or "skill issue", the "stop complaining, you're a crybaby" mentality... There used to be far more critical thinking in this community, now everybody's argument is "if the game is doable, is fair". And that's it. You have to be a fucking zombie liking everything, defending everything. Is just so boring to try and have a discussion online unless you're lucky enough to find people who're free of this mentality. It genuinely makes me sad.
Social media posts making it a point on just how difficult Elden Ring is by releasing clickbait content probably created a new fanbase of people looking for an ultra-hardcore experience because that's what was sold to them - even if it means at the expense of the games that came before it. I think the nuance here is that the older games were difficult and appealed to a niche audience, not players looking to come in and get their badge of honor so they can brag about it later.
It’s just the honeymoon phase. Give it a couple months and I hope the conversation surrounding this DLC won’t be as toxic.
I do hope you're right. It happened the same with the base game. People seem to completely forget how many things were wrong in past games it seems. Kapra Demon anyone?
Bed of chaos comes to mind along with kapra demon lol
It's also irritating people say the bosses are fair but are they balanced? They negate so many spells, incantions and skills they just aren't fun.
I agree, it's all over the place. I found the difficulty progression (pre patch) very good in context to which areas I ended up exploring. I beat all of the more hidden optional bosses and found them extremely reasonable, dying sometimes only once or twice until beating them. Literally, the entire DLC up until the last boss felt like an exceptionally well tailored experience for me. But then I got to the end and was floored for hours... I tried everything, respec even, changing strategies, with and without summon ashes.. nothing worked. Finally I decided to summon someone and then pretty much beat the boss for me. Left me a bit unsatisfied but it was still just a small part of my overall very positive experience.
Of all the DLCs this is both one of the best and worst. The final boss of this DLC is straight up horse-shit, no other way to put it. The lore is trash, phase 2 is visual vomit, the boss shouldn't even be here because we already beat him, the boss won't even let the player get more than a hit in between stupidly long combos and aggression, and I know others think the same way. The blessing "buff" was a good step, but how about nerfing the VFX issues before touching the blessing that should be a no-brainer?
from how people talk both the base game and the dlc are simultaneously too hard but also not hard enough, and the easiest game to cheese but also the bosses are badly designed and also shadow blessings are useless but also the game forces you to collect them
I think you're falling into the trap of conflating multiple different comments into an amalgamation. Happens quite a bit on Reddit across most communities. I'd venture to say a person complaining about one isn't complaining about the other. Both of those sentiments exist in the community because people have their own opinions. And of course as a user, you're subjected to a constant deluge of everyone's opinions all the time, so it probably all runs together.
That was this person's point.
I feel like ego and pride goes the other way too. A lot of people seem to think they’re better at the game than they actually are, and instead engaging with the new mechanics, they complain about how unfair the difficulty is. It doesn’t even occur to a lot of people that they may be the problem and not the game. That doesn’t mean the dlc is perfect or Miyazaki is a god. It just means some people are bent out of shape because they can’t steamroll the bosses like they used to. I give it a month before people change their tune and start praising the dlc after they figure out new strategies and adapt. There’s plenty of valid criticism too. I haven’t got there yet, but everyone says phase 2 of the final boss is shit. Lots of valid complaints about bad camera and performance, dropped inputs, and other various glitches. I just don’t think it’s nearly as valid to complain about difficulty, all the bosses are beatable and have openings, you just need to figure them out. Use what the game gives you. Let go of your ego and experiment a bit and you’ll probably enjoy yourself more.
Youre assuming people arent experimenting. Maybe they just are not enjoying the game theyre playing. Maybe its just that straight forward. All these people obviously enjoyed the base ER to bother buying the DLC right? So something happened.
I love FromSoftware’s commitment to difficulty, I respect it, but I will say that Malaenia has just a bit too much bullshit. I eventually beat her, but I had to completely change my build to get it done and that felt bad. Obviously a skill issue on my end, but she’s a Sekiro boss in Elden Ring and it’s not that fun and the Waterfowl Dance feels like an exercise in Vitality Check and not timing.
tbf all malenia has going for her is waterfowl dance and lifesteal, while a certain fuck in the dlc does like 20 attacks in 10 seconds with no downtime between combos that also ends in massive aoe
Her lifesteal working on a shield that 100% blocked her damage was my biggest gripe lol, seemed like a bug that they just decided to leave in after discovering it