Just because the game has a safety net for novices doesn't mean your enjoyment of the challenge is in any way affected, unless you really care about how other people play their game.
I care about game balance being fair and interesting. Giving a newbie a way to effectively skip a boss sets them up for failure and it snowballs from there.
No it fucking doesn't and it never snowballed anywhere. If anything their games have gotten harder over time, which in fact is what spurred our original argument (bosses in Elden Ring being more "obscure" and hard to understand than previous Souls games. Also, there were no summons in Sekiro where is this snowballing exactly?).
Also, summons exist precisely because FromSoft didn't want to bother trying to balance different difficulty settings or compromise anything in their game. Instead of designing "easier" versions of the same boss, they basically gave you a way to get past them if you are stuck, with the idea you can always try again next time. If anything, this system encourages people to get better beause i'm sure getting past a boss with summons would bother most players even if they don't want to admit it and i very much doubt summons is something most people rely on most of the time. It's just there to avoid people getting stuck and quit the game out of frustration. There's also the fact it's not guaranteed you can get past a boss even with a summon. It's very much intended that you would try the boss on your own first before being forced to rely on a summon because even with a summon you still need to have a basic understanding of what the boss does (and so does the guy who came to help. Don't forget it's not guaranteed you gonna get a pro every time. Sometimes your summon is just a scrub too).
There's also one last point about this that is worth mentioning, and that is that summons are basically co-op and some people actually enjoy playing with others as a matter of principle. I am one of those people (as long as the co-op is instanced at any rate). While i NEVER compromised with a boss in my own game, i'm an avid Sunbro. In fact, i probably put more hours helping others in co-op than i ever did in PvP in all the FromSoft games. I'm just wired that way. I never enjoyed ruining people's game. All my PvP is mostly duels or playing cop.
If you don't learn now to beat the godskins solo what chance do you have of beating them together when it's mandatory later?
It's their game people can do whatever they want. If someone is using summons on every boss that would beg the question of why they even bothered paying money for this but in either case it's entirely their choice. Not sure how that affects you. Like i said, it's not like FromSoft had to sacrifice anything in the game to allow for this. The game is untouched by the existence of summons. It's an option that is there for people who want to take it. Not a big deal.
Could you take From's dick out of your mouth already? It's getting tedious with you fanboying them no matter what.
Maybe it's you who needs to stop making shit arguments.
The souls community was built on a foundation of doing it yourself and finding your own solutions and this is clearly part of the game design with multiplayer originally designed as a last resort with a major risk in using it.
Not sure what changed here. Elden Ring still works that way.
"Original intentions" lol. Double fights were a problem because they created situations where a player couldn't avoid damage. If two enemies did the right attacks together you had no way to dodge both of them and Elden rings damage is so high it was unfair. This was even worse when enemies would attack from off camera and blast you with a huge attack. The reason for the change was the angelic knights doing their swooping attack at you while another enemy pressured you. And it's a lesson games like DMC learned back on the PS2 and From are so retarded they only just figured out it might be unfair to have unavoidable damage. It doesn't matter if you use summons or coop because the multiplayer AI is so bad with it's target selection you could randomly get both enemies aggroing you and setting up unavoidable damage any way. So if From "designed the fights for multiplayer" why the fuck is multiplayer AI utterly broken and not actually fit for multiple players?
The AI being broken is not the issue. It would have been great if they had come up with better AI. They didn't, which is unfortunate, but that has nothing to do with the issue, not the least because given that those multi-boss fights were intended to be challenging EVEN with summons in mind, it's clear the AI was actually working as intended.
The fact remains that once they introduced the spirit summon mechanic, they had to design the game to account for it. That's why there's no many multiple boss fights. And in most cases, those fights went like this if you tried to do them solo:
This was before the AI nerf. Keep in mind i was too retarded then to understand all i had to do was parry the spear guy to make this fight go down much easier, but this video is a good rapresentation of how most people dealt with those multiple boss fights. Just run around like an idiot for 10 minues while occationally trying to squeeze in an attack.
Doing the above was anything but fun, but of course you weren't
meant to do them solo. They were designed with spirit ashes in mind (and like a said to be challening WITH summons, which is why the AI was so aggressive and relentless). People didn't get that, they all tried to fight them solo, complaining those fights were just boring and long winded, and FromSoft caved and "adjusted" the AI.
FromSoft did have multi-boss fights before but those were designed for solo play and they were actually better balanced. Ornstein and Smough is a good example, but also the Gargoyles. Most of the duo or trio fights in Elden Ring don't compare to that because most of them were designed with spirit ashes in mind or at the very least the "unfairness" factor was upped because they factored in that option (most of the time the reason the AI can't work toghether is because those monsters were designed to be dealt solo on their own, and were just put in a room toghether like that because they expected people to just use spirit ashes as a defence).
Personally, i could have easily done without spirit ashes altoghether but it's obvious that once they were put in the game you were going to find situations where you were compelled to use them.
