Strange Fellow
Peculiar
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2018
- Messages
- 4,048
But Souls games also allow you to go elsewhere, level up, and return later. The ratio of gitting gud to leaving and coming back later was about the same for me in Souls and ER.
What you just described is the difference between open-worlds and linear/interconnected games.The open world structure makes it fundamentally different from Dark Souls and its clones.
Whereas DS is all about getting good and overcoming the challenge ahead of you, while navigating a tightly interconnected world, Elden Ring allows you to explore an open world, go elsewhere, level up, and return later if you meet a roadblock. This changes the entire structure and approach to challenges.
Demon's Souls, the originator of the Souls-like sub-sub-genre, does not have a "tightly interconnected world" but rather five worlds entirely separate from each other, as from the Nexus. Each world has three levels (or four for the first world with the mandatory initial level) that must be completed in order, and every level must be completed. The individual levels can be quite substantial, with various shortcuts, sometimes enough to consider an individual level "tightly interconnected", but each level can be reached via teleportation from the Nexus at the beginning and (upon completion) the end of the level; the only connections between levels occur at the end of one level that forms the beginning of the next.The open world structure makes it fundamentally different from Dark Souls and its clones.
Whereas DS is all about getting good and overcoming the challenge ahead of you, while navigating a tightly interconnected world, Elden Ring allows you to explore an open world, go elsewhere, level up, and return later if you meet a roadblock. This changes the entire structure and approach to challenges.
Try, die, repeat.What is the intended way to play blindly here?
I think, originally (Demons' and DAS1) the intention was for the player to fight very defensively, focusing on rolling, blocking and running away until you understood all the ways the boss was attacking and could exploit openings. Think of stuff like the spider fight in DeS or various DaS bosses you could basically run away from all day without trouble. Later entries however, ruined that by giving the attacks weird timings and hitboxes, making most of the bosses hyper aggressive with conditional followups, weakening shields and generally just overly punishing defensive play. In anything from DaS2 onward you're basically incentivized to just run in and attack wildly, hoping you luck out and stagger the boss before dying, chug some estus and repeat. Actually figuring out how the boss behaves is left to youtube videos or people with broken builds on a third playthrough that can test what the boss does when you dodge left vs right without dying each attempt.What is the intended way to play blindly here?
I have a general Soulsy question and perhaps this is a decent place to ask it:
In general gameplay you are given a lot of freedom to pick and choose your fights, you are punished for overextending and being overconfident.
Why then, does the boss mechanic lock you into fighting to the death against something that you have no way of predicting the power level of.
What is the intended way to play blindly here? Thinking about it I've encountered the same thing in Wizardry so it might go back to the games influences.
Also, poll is missing Darksiders 3. Yet another lame souls clone