From Software Elden Ring - From Software's new game with writing by GRRM

[Grampy_Bone]

Monster Hunter has a much better difficulty curve because it doesn't do retarded shit like launch a flying tackle that pauses for 14 frames once it gets within 4 feet of the player to bait out a dodge.

Bruh, Nergigante does this exact thing. He knocks you down, and then he winds up two claw slams and if you try to dodge on reaction you will get hit 100% of the time. You need to exploit floor invulnerability instead (just lie there and take it, makes perfect sense). Not to mention Velkhana, with a dozen different attack combos that are almost imperceptibly different, all with different dodge timings and reaction traps, ridiculous tracking accuracy and (IMO) BS tail hitboxes. One of the reasons I always just bring a fire bow to fight her. Vastly easier with a weapon I suck at then fighting her up close. (And lets be real, bow/bowgun is easy mode for MH).

I also take back that luck has no effect in that game. Manuevering monsters into traps and natural hazards is a bit of luck, Pickles can always wander into your hunt and body the monster, or a horde of angry eskimo cats can pelt the monster with rocks, set it on fire, and push it off a cliff. Only the few bosses with unique arenas exclude these factors completely, and I generally think they're easier. (I.e. Xeno-jiva and that big rock monster, I forget its name, are fun but fairly tame fights.) Anyone can beat MHW if they're patient and play cautiously--i.e. retreat to heal, maintain full stock of health potion mats, abuse your cat & mantles, etc. I don't think that's true of Elden Ring/DS at all.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Maybe low tier stuff, but later hunts in MHW you'll simply time out if you play that cautiously. You need to do stuff where you'll die if you don't dodge properly to finish those hunts. The same is true of ER fights; but those can be over in like 90 seconds. You can literally win a fight just because the boss did the exact same, easy to dodge move 4 times in a row while you spanked his ass. Pure luck. That's not happening in a MHW hunt unless you're doing some speedrunning nonsense where the monsters is belly up more often than not.

And yeah, late game stuff like Nergi and Velk have some shenannigans, but it's not nearly as prevalent, and by then you're walking around with half a dozen cheat codes strapped to your armour, giving you crap like insane HP Regen, immunity to roars and winds, insane blocking, and so forth. By the time you get to Maliketh in ER the only real difference is that you've got more potions to chug; all the stats have more or less balanced out. And it's not like you need to get that far to see the retarded fakeouts in ER; the very first boss you get pointed at does that crap with like 60% of his moveset. He even fucking option selects followups! Honestly he's pretty retarded as an early boss, both Rykard and Lunalla are way, way easier.

 

[Nathir]

You guys crack me up. You're like the brainiac cartoon character who picks up a pool cue for the first time and sinks every shot because "it's just simple geometry." Talking and doing are two different things (Minnesota Fats would roll you so hard.)

Or people say certifications don't mean anything, because anyone can study and pass a test. Which is totally true, but not everyone does, do they?

The best golf pros have a win rate of 20-30%, because golf is sometimes really random. But that doesn't mean skill isn't important.

In any case, I watched my wife try Iudex Gundyr for the better part of an afternoon without beating it, and she's not even that inexperienced with action titles (okay, Zelda games.) Meanwhile you have speedrunners beating these games consistently with donkey kong bongos or DDR pads so no, I don't agree they are luck based games.

Speaking of MHW, a game I also love (charge blade main), it's definitely an easier game than any soulsborne. The fact you can die twice in the fight, or resupply your ample health pool, unlimited healing from your cat, or just crouch and whack a flower and get instant full health all make it a much more forgiving game. (Not to mention there is no way to permanently lose progress.) And while making you chase down the monster and repeat the fight five times certainly might preclude lucky wins, things like Nergigantes dive bomb attack are well within the BS window. (Yes it is easy to dodge when you know how, but the hitbox is pure magic). Nerg is a good example because he has several attacks that bait you into a fast reaction and punish, while the right move is actually to lay flat on the ground and do nothing. this magically allows you to eat the full attack with no damage because MH has very wacky ideas of i-frames (don't get me started on superman dodging). Still this is stuff you're really not going to figure out without a lot of trial and error, and it's far from intuitive. The top tier iceborne monsters require you to grind absurd amounts for endgame gear/gems/etc before you can really attempt them which gatekeeps anyone who doesn't feel like repeating the bonus boss dozens of times, which I think is BS. If MH found a way to reward a greater variety of endgame activities I'd think the post-story would be much more enjoyable, but that's a different debate.

Still, I don't know what planet you're living on where fighting a boss 20+ times to beat it doesn't constitute skill. Humans naturally get better at everything the more they do it, even if some have greater potential than others. A major league pitcher still warms up in the bullpen every game; skilled bartenders practice their pours every shift. Acting like skill is a fixed and finite quality is baffling nonsense.

Boss having 3 different attacks in total that you can avoid by just circle strafing around him = best game design.

 

[cvv]

Everytime I get excited for the DLC I remember the second half of my ER run and I immediately get very, very tired. God fucking damn this game was exhausting, especially how fucking awful were the Mountaintops and the Snowfield.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I liked the late game areas. I haven't been hyped for the DLC because I played the crap out of this extremely long game and beat it several times and have a few partial playthroughs. Thinking about building up a character to get into a DLC zone has so far been an unappealing prospect.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Maybe low tier stuff, but later hunts in MHW you'll simply time out if you play that cautiously.

Wow I guess I've never beaten Velkhana with a basic Anjanath bow, no special armor, the wrong gems and skills, and just mashing R2 and Circle.

 

[Silverfish]

a basic Anjanath bow

There's nothing basic about the Anjanath bow. Best weapon in World.

 

[Ezekiel]

Found the DLC or added content in Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition so long that it degraded the main story somewhat. Felt like the undead ignored his/her real quest for too long. Fought enemies too mighty if they intended to live and keep their sanity long enough to take down Gwyn. Or that they should not have gone through it if it did not help them reach the end goal. I think the three DLCs or added content in Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin were like that too, but I probably didn't care as much, since the sequel's story felt unneeded anyway. I never played the Dark Souls III DLC. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to make the really heavy DLC separately accessible somehow, but with the same save file so that players can use the items in the main story.

 

[Grunker]

Maybe low tier stuff, but later hunts in MHW you'll simply time out if you play that cautiously.

R2 and Circle.

No, I click my mouse, as any proper gentleman should

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Maybe low tier stuff, but later hunts in MHW you'll simply time out if you play that cautiously.

R2 and Circle.

No, I click my mouse, as any proper gentleman should

I don't really understand being married to a control scheme so tightly; I'm a pragmatist, I use whatever works best. KB&M aren't game controllers, that's the Xerox PARC GUI interface, bro. Console games usually play way better with a controller. Though I admit I started MH on the 3DS with MH4 and felt the controls were the hardest monster in the game. Said I wouldn't try the series again unless it came to a proper platform. MHW was a dream come true.

Avoiding controllers is also revisionist; back in the day everyone had a flight stick for flight sims, wheels for racing games, even arcade sticks for fighting games, etc. I do feel the modern controller has homogenized gaming to some degree. Off topic discussion really, but you notice how all games nowadays are the same game. It makes it easy to jump into any game and play it right away but it also makes them all pretty cookie cutter.

 

[Grunker]

I'm a pragmatist, I use whatever works best

So do I. That's why I use KB&M.

 

[cvv]

I'm a pragmatist, I use whatever works best

So do I. That's why I use KB&M.

KBM works best for soulslikes?

Nah.

 

[Strange Fellow]

The four-directional movement feels very constricting compared to a controller. If the games had been made with proper customisable hotkey support I could see KBM being preferable, but japs can't into that stuff. Dark Souls 1 didn't even have keyboard graphics for the menus, you had to mod it in.

 

[Multidirectional]

Dark Souls 1 didn't even have keyboard graphics for the menus, you had to mod it in.

I think Remastered included those. But DS II and III still only shows gamepad prompts. Anyway, playing Souls with keyboard is just plain retarded. It's like that "PC tard" thing BLOBERT was talking about.

 

[Zurbo]

If the games had been made with proper customisable hotkey support I could see KBM being preferable,

Yeah, rolling between usable items is the most irritating part. In the previous games I was mostly drinking estus, so there was no issue, but here there are many items between which you switch and while focusing on enemy, you sometimes end up summoning horse instead of drinking potion.
They could have done it as in Nioh 2, where you could pass different items to different keys.

 

[Nathir]

Controllers are gay.

 

[cvv]

Controllers are gay.

Bruh, they're literally clitoris thumb massage training tools.

 

[Ezekiel]

Controllers are gay.

Bruh, they're literally clitoris thumb massage training tools.

Would only buy controllers without force feedback if it was an option with the good ones. Such a gimmick. Some of Nintendo's games make it vibrate when you're over secrets. Mario Odyssey, if I remember correctly. Other than that, feels so dumb. Why would only my hands shake if my character has been hit or I am driving over gravel?

 

[Strange Fellow]

Controllers are gay.

Bruh, they're literally clitoris thumb massage training tools.

All the more reason why a true PC gamer should never touch one

 

[Caim]

Controllers are gay.

Bruh, they're literally clitoris thumb massage training tools.

All the more reason why a true PC gamer should never touch one

Consider the position of your mouse wheel and what you do with it.

 

[Ezekiel]

Also, controllers ARE gay, for sticking with a design made for games in 1996/'97. No expectation back then of using the right stick so much because developers used fixed cameras, big fields of view, auto-aim... So your thumb didn't have to leave the face buttons so much and primary actions didn't need to be moved to the shoulders and triggers. I've played plenty of games people claim are better with controllers effectively with a mouse and keyboard. Not the Souls games, though. You use four of ten digits. Brilliant.

 

[cvv]

Controllers are gay.

Bruh, they're literally clitoris thumb massage training tools.

Would only buy controllers without force feedback if it was an option with the good ones. Such a gimmick. Some of Nintendo's games make it vibrate when you're over secrets. Mario Odyssey, if I remember correctly. Other than that, feels so dumb. Why would only my hands shake if my character has been hit or I am driving over gravel?

IIRC in all games I've ever played there was a vibrations toggle. I always switch that shit off first thing.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Dark Souls's lore felt more like it was based on an eastern religion than anything European.

The central powers of the world and the civil war between the orders are literally based on symbolism and theological splits leading to conflict in the orthodoxy of the russian church in the 1700s (the schism). This inspiration seems less hidden, more direct, than most shit I encountered in DS1. It smells like a GRRM-thing.

I said Dark Souls, not Elden Ring.

That whole kindling of fire thing, the concept of rebirth, reality being an illusion etc, felt more eastern than European to me, though i will admit that for as many times as i've played Dark Souls 1, the lore is not actually something i've really followed that closely.

From what i understand Miyazaki relies on his favored mangas as inspiration and whatever themes is found on those is likely based on things the Japanese are familiar with. I never read Berserk, which is one that is often mentioned as being among Miyazaki's favorites, but i assume whatever is in there is likely more Japanese than anything else.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

I never read Berserk

Berserk avoids a lot of Animu nonsense until Isidro is introduced, who is basically a Shonen hero dropped into a grimdark world and largely oblivious to it. They occasionally joke that he was "single handedly saving the comic" since Shonen is where all the money is.

Honestly having read all 300+ chapters of Berserk, you're fine with just watching the 97 anime or even the netflix movies, it's the best part of the story. Esp. now that the author has passed away. I can see DS/Elden Ring using a lot of the Berserk European "Knightcore" visual design but nothing really matches storywise. Berserk is pretty much a love triangle with gratuitous amounts of murder.

 

[Ezekiel]

Controllers are gay.

Bruh, they're literally clitoris thumb massage training tools.

Would only buy controllers without force feedback if it was an option with the good ones. Such a gimmick. Some of Nintendo's games make it vibrate when you're over secrets. Mario Odyssey, if I remember correctly. Other than that, feels so dumb. Why would only my hands shake if my character has been hit or I am driving over gravel?

IIRC in all games I've ever played there was a vibrations toggle. I always switch that shit off first thing.

Yes, but I don't want the motors in my controller. They could sell it to me a little bit cheaper without. Not like manufacturers have store shelf space issues and it's easier for them to only make one model, since almost any not made by the big three are ordered online. Really wish gamers had cared as much about the pressure-sensitive face buttons of the PS2 and 3 controllers as they do about these silly motors.