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

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

I refunded this shit and Valve accepted. The only save I had was NG+4, so I did the Mohg covenant shortcut and tried to beat Mohg. Died repeatedly. I couldn't even get to the dlc, so I refunded this shit. It would have been impossible on NG+4 anyway. Maybe one day I'll get it on discount if I want to replay the whole game, but I honestly doubt it.

If you are going to release a dlc 2 years later you can't bury it behind a high level boss. I forgot how to even play this fucking game. I usually love From, but they are idiots on this one.

"I suck, therefore game is bad" lol

 

[Cryomancer]

Is possible to get blessings past lv 10? I got recently to lv 10 and din't reached Mesmer yet.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

I refunded this shit and Valve accepted. The only save I had was NG+4, so I did the Mohg covenant shortcut and tried to beat Mohg. Died repeatedly. I couldn't even get to the dlc, so I refunded this shit. It would have been impossible on NG+4 anyway. Maybe one day I'll get it on discount if I want to replay the whole game, but I honestly doubt it.

If you are going to release a dlc 2 years later you can't bury it behind a high level boss. I forgot how to even play this fucking game. I usually love From, but they are idiots on this one.

"I suck, therefore game is bad" lol

Nah, I made it through NG+3, but that was 2 years ago. I can't remember anything about this game and I no longer care. This is just shitty way to release a dlc.

 

[kites]

Is possible to get blessings past lv 10? I got recently to lv 10 and din't reached Mesmer yet.

Spoiler

Not 100% verified fact, but it looks like it goes to +20, at around a ~4% buff/negation per level

 

[Suicidal]

Found some random side dungeon that turned out to be pretty long and had a cool, distinct-looking boss with 2 phases at the end. Base ER would never.

Now if they recycle said boss later and put it in some other dungeon I will take back my praise and call the game a piece of shit.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

best review on steam

I have just completed all the main remembrance bosses for SOTE without summoning, So now I can give an informed opinion on them.

Before I get into the issues, Let me just say that the content added aside from the bosses is a great edition to the game. The world is beautiful, The various soundtracks are some of the best they've ever done, The new weapons and abilities are awesome additions and so on. It is an amazing expansion that clearly had much love and passion put into it, but there are glaring issued in regards to the bosses that ultimately ruined my experience.

I am NOT saying don't buy the DLC just because this review is negative. I am voicing my frustrations with some of the design decisions that I will get into down below.

The reason I give SOTE a negative review is because many of the main bosses are now just simply a series of cheap tricks being spammed repeatedly at insane speed that chunk your health.They are NOT fun to fight with the Dark Souls style player combat system used in Elden Ring. I personally gained no satisfaction whatsoever from defeating any of them, instead only a feeling of the kind of relief that comes after you remove a splinter.

Before you move your greasy fingers to your keyboard to frantically type out "Git gud" or "Skill issue" to imply that my skill level is the reason I am complaining; let me show you some of my videos where I defeat many of the hardest bosses ER has to offer flawlessly without taking ANY damage or using any summons:

- Malenia, Blade Of Miquella - NG+17

YouTube™ Video: Malenia, Blade Of Miquella - NG+17 No Damage - No Freezing Pot
Views: 300
Silly red head likes to play with Samurai Swords...

- Mohg, Lord Of Blood NG+15

YouTube™ Video: Mohg, Lord Of Blood - NG+15 No Hit
Views: 240
BLO0D FOR THE BLOOD GOD 0:00 Intro 0:54 Fight 2:40 Lord Of The Dance Floor

- Mohg, The Omen - NG+15

YouTube™ Video: Mohg, The Omen - NG+15 No Damage
Views: 536
We've got the moves 0:00 Fight 2:31 Lord Of Dance

- Crucible Duo https://youtu.be/c8KJOLg0aR4
- Maliketh NG+15 https://youtu.be/bwvdEuHneuU
- Godfrey NG+15 https://youtu.be/M1CGM1hKZsw
- Commander Niall - NG+15 https://youtu.be/KAMJIyvZFlc

With that out of the way, and the seething of Fromsoft fanboys assured, lets continue.

The bosses are straight out of Sekiro with their levels of speed and agression. Put Messmer, Divine Beast, Rellana or many of the other remembrance bosses next to bloodborne bosses; Even many Sekiro bosses and you'll see that they are as fast if not even faster and more aggressive than most of them are. Insane!

I wan't you to do a test; Watch videos of Lady Maria and Rellana side by side. Now do the same thing for the Demon Of Hatred next to Divine Beast; You will see in both cases that the SOTE bosses are faster and more aggressive... IN A GAME WITH SOULS PLAYER COMBAT!

These new bosses only serve to highlight the terminal main issue I have mentioned that Elden Ring has had since day 1:

The player combat itself is not adequate for the enemies you face. It does not offer an compelling; skill based experience like Sekiro and Bloodborne did. Those games had mechanics that made facing highly aggressive enemies more engaging AND enjoyable. Elden Ring forces you to be incredibly passive; You are relegated to rolling around and keeping distance waiting to get 1 hit in on the boss (hopefully) before this tortuous loop begins again.

The difficulty at this point simply boils down to the bosses tricking you into rolling too early or late and then frame catching (roll punishing) you for not getting a frame perfect roll, a roll that has input delay on it as it only occurs after the button has been released, meaning that the roll is based on prediction instead of reaction in many cases as the bosses delay an attack only to release it instantly. I also have noticed that many times that the hit-boxes seem appear before the weapon is actually swung... This means you HAVE to learn each individual boss's timings on so many of their attacks to avoid them because they don't make intuitive sense. Rubbish!

In the past the way you'd avoid these delayed attacks is by outflanking them; but they now give most of these bosses near infinite tracking on their attacks FORCING you to time a dodge the way the devs want, and some of these attacks have way to many active frames so they will automatically hit you even if you roll into them. You will be waiting to get 1 hit in after a boss does 10+ attacks in a row, when you go to get damage to move the fight forward, the boss jumps away or has specific trading attacks that startup in reaction to the first frame of your attack animation; Not many people know this, but the bosses in Elden Ring basically input read! Because of this the wise tactic is to actually wait and roll around and only punish specific attacks instead of attacking when a boss is seemingly in neutral. This makes for passive boring game play. If you're going to do this, ADD ATTACK/ANIMATION CANCELLING so we're not trapped doing an attack that is going to be punished by the boss.

As many others have mentioned the camera is totally abysmal for many of the bosses, it's at its worst for the divine beast and the final boss where much of the time you cannot see what the hell is going on because the camera is too close to the point when the boss is clipping through the screen. This is made even worse when they're filling the area with various elemental attacks whilst being right on top of you. ♥♥♥♥ the Divine Beast and ♥♥♥♥ the redhead and his twink at the end. Those two bosses are the greatest offenders in this regard and the muscular redhead and his twink companion in particular almost seem like they are rubbing it in your face in the second phase as you are clearly being forced to stay right next to the boss because of elemental light attack extensions appearing on each attack to catch you if you roll backwards. Couple of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I dearly hope for their next game the bring back mechanics from Bloodborne and Sekiro to make dealing with these sorts of bosses actully fun as well as challenging.

I love Fromsoft, They are one of the last truly high integrity, well meaning and talented dev teams that remain in the gaming industry. So when they make a mistake we must point it out instead of heaping relentless praise upon them so that can make better games in the future.

H. P. Lovecraft's Cat dont blow a gasket.

Good read. Only question is whether or not FromSoft will head the criticism or will continue down this path while the cultists cheer them on. Toxic positivity is a blight upon entertainment.

 

[Cheesedragon117]

Update: Expansion is amazing, will post full thoughts when I've beaten the majority of (or whatever I think is the majority of) Rememberance bosses. Trying to avoid spoilers for now and doing a much better job than I did for the base game.

Divine Beast Dancing Lion was a spectacle, although somewhat jank. Half the fight is trying to keep his (their?) collision box from slamming you into a wall for too long, while he (they?) jankily jumps around as the game tries to stop him from clipping too far into the walls. One of the few times I feel like From went too hard with a boss concept, as he would have benefitted from slower, more reverent attack animations. Instead, they chose to go full Sekiro, all-spectacle anime style. Not complaining, I just hope for some variation down the line.

Rellana was a very hard but fair Malenia-style battle. Love seeing the concept of a magic knight taken even further, although some of her combos are a bit much. Good fight, no notes.

 

[H. P. Lovecraft's Cat]

Rellana is a real bag of cunts. Still got her though, took about 6 or 7 tries. Castle Ensis was a bit disappointing. I thought it was going to be way bigger like Stormveil Castle or Anor Londo.

 

[kites]

It’s just those damn magic nukes from Rellana that got me dozens of times near the very end of the fight; shit is balanced for blessings. I should’t be getting 1-tapped at scadu 3/4 and 60 vigor at that point.. you’re basically expecting people to hit 5 or 6+ blessings by then or to always avoid the magic aoe’s. I could see if the blessings were like sacred tears and you always know where to find them, but they seem haphazardly placed around the spaghetti map. Not great design.

 

[Sunri]

I refunded this shit and Valve accepted. The only save I had was NG+4, so I did the Mohg covenant shortcut and tried to beat Mohg. Died repeatedly. I couldn't even get to the dlc, so I refunded this shit. It would have been impossible on NG+4 anyway. Maybe one day I'll get it on discount if I want to replay the whole game, but I honestly doubt it.

If you are going to release a dlc 2 years later you can't bury it behind a high level boss. I forgot how to even play this fucking game. I usually love From, but they are idiots on this one.

just download save from internet for dlc

 

[Child of Malkav]

best review on steam

I have just completed all the main remembrance bosses for SOTE without summoning, So now I can give an informed opinion on them.

Before I get into the issues, Let me just say that the content added aside from the bosses is a great edition to the game. The world is beautiful, The various soundtracks are some of the best they've ever done, The new weapons and abilities are awesome additions and so on. It is an amazing expansion that clearly had much love and passion put into it, but there are glaring issued in regards to the bosses that ultimately ruined my experience.

I am NOT saying don't buy the DLC just because this review is negative. I am voicing my frustrations with some of the design decisions that I will get into down below.

The reason I give SOTE a negative review is because many of the main bosses are now just simply a series of cheap tricks being spammed repeatedly at insane speed that chunk your health.They are NOT fun to fight with the Dark Souls style player combat system used in Elden Ring. I personally gained no satisfaction whatsoever from defeating any of them, instead only a feeling of the kind of relief that comes after you remove a splinter.

Before you move your greasy fingers to your keyboard to frantically type out "Git gud" or "Skill issue" to imply that my skill level is the reason I am complaining; let me show you some of my videos where I defeat many of the hardest bosses ER has to offer flawlessly without taking ANY damage or using any summons:

- Malenia, Blade Of Miquella - NG+17

YouTube™ Video: Malenia, Blade Of Miquella - NG+17 No Damage - No Freezing Pot
Views: 300
Silly red head likes to play with Samurai Swords...

- Mohg, Lord Of Blood NG+15

YouTube™ Video: Mohg, Lord Of Blood - NG+15 No Hit
Views: 240
BLO0D FOR THE BLOOD GOD 0:00 Intro 0:54 Fight 2:40 Lord Of The Dance Floor

- Mohg, The Omen - NG+15

YouTube™ Video: Mohg, The Omen - NG+15 No Damage
Views: 536
We've got the moves 0:00 Fight 2:31 Lord Of Dance

- Crucible Duo https://youtu.be/c8KJOLg0aR4
- Maliketh NG+15 https://youtu.be/bwvdEuHneuU
- Godfrey NG+15 https://youtu.be/M1CGM1hKZsw
- Commander Niall - NG+15 https://youtu.be/KAMJIyvZFlc

With that out of the way, and the seething of Fromsoft fanboys assured, lets continue.

The bosses are straight out of Sekiro with their levels of speed and agression. Put Messmer, Divine Beast, Rellana or many of the other remembrance bosses next to bloodborne bosses; Even many Sekiro bosses and you'll see that they are as fast if not even faster and more aggressive than most of them are. Insane!

I wan't you to do a test; Watch videos of Lady Maria and Rellana side by side. Now do the same thing for the Demon Of Hatred next to Divine Beast; You will see in both cases that the SOTE bosses are faster and more aggressive... IN A GAME WITH SOULS PLAYER COMBAT!

These new bosses only serve to highlight the terminal main issue I have mentioned that Elden Ring has had since day 1:

The player combat itself is not adequate for the enemies you face. It does not offer an compelling; skill based experience like Sekiro and Bloodborne did. Those games had mechanics that made facing highly aggressive enemies more engaging AND enjoyable. Elden Ring forces you to be incredibly passive; You are relegated to rolling around and keeping distance waiting to get 1 hit in on the boss (hopefully) before this tortuous loop begins again.

The difficulty at this point simply boils down to the bosses tricking you into rolling too early or late and then frame catching (roll punishing) you for not getting a frame perfect roll, a roll that has input delay on it as it only occurs after the button has been released, meaning that the roll is based on prediction instead of reaction in many cases as the bosses delay an attack only to release it instantly. I also have noticed that many times that the hit-boxes seem appear before the weapon is actually swung... This means you HAVE to learn each individual boss's timings on so many of their attacks to avoid them because they don't make intuitive sense. Rubbish!

In the past the way you'd avoid these delayed attacks is by outflanking them; but they now give most of these bosses near infinite tracking on their attacks FORCING you to time a dodge the way the devs want, and some of these attacks have way to many active frames so they will automatically hit you even if you roll into them. You will be waiting to get 1 hit in after a boss does 10+ attacks in a row, when you go to get damage to move the fight forward, the boss jumps away or has specific trading attacks that startup in reaction to the first frame of your attack animation; Not many people know this, but the bosses in Elden Ring basically input read! Because of this the wise tactic is to actually wait and roll around and only punish specific attacks instead of attacking when a boss is seemingly in neutral. This makes for passive boring game play. If you're going to do this, ADD ATTACK/ANIMATION CANCELLING so we're not trapped doing an attack that is going to be punished by the boss.

As many others have mentioned the camera is totally abysmal for many of the bosses, it's at its worst for the divine beast and the final boss where much of the time you cannot see what the hell is going on because the camera is too close to the point when the boss is clipping through the screen. This is made even worse when they're filling the area with various elemental attacks whilst being right on top of you. ♥♥♥♥ the Divine Beast and ♥♥♥♥ the redhead and his twink at the end. Those two bosses are the greatest offenders in this regard and the muscular redhead and his twink companion in particular almost seem like they are rubbing it in your face in the second phase as you are clearly being forced to stay right next to the boss because of elemental light attack extensions appearing on each attack to catch you if you roll backwards. Couple of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I dearly hope for their next game the bring back mechanics from Bloodborne and Sekiro to make dealing with these sorts of bosses actully fun as well as challenging.

I love Fromsoft, They are one of the last truly high integrity, well meaning and talented dev teams that remain in the gaming industry. So when they make a mistake we must point it out instead of heaping relentless praise upon them so that can make better games in the future.

H. P. Lovecraft's Cat dont blow a gasket.

More and more people are waking up to this.

 

[Reinhardt]

I refunded this shit

i kinda lost here... so it's gud after all?

 

[Cryomancer]

it's gud after all?

So far is, but quite brutal. I probably died like 20x against some bosses. They hit like a truck, are very fast, can travel the arena fast, have everything to be unpredictable as possible...

 

[Odoryuk]

it reached a sales number that at the time was considered a failure for other AAA projects. For example Enslaved was considered a failure and was denied a sequel because it only sold around 700k a year after launch. So in half the time it sold almost as much as DeS did in two and it was still considered a financial failure.

You forget that Demon's Souls was not an AAA-budgeted game and Sony didn't splurge much resources into it, it was a financial success, albeit on a smaller scale

 

[MasPingon]

A lot of good things have been said, now a bad thing. Commander Gaius fight is absolutely retarded. I was chilling after walking out of Legacy dungeon with 100k runes on me, seeing an open space and meadow behind the door. The moment I took a step behind door treshhold boss music kicked in and I was raped by a fucking barbarian on a wild pig, didn't even have time to notice his health bar. He is agressive like a rabbid raccoon, you don't have time to use summons, you can't fight him on Torrent(he is way faster then you), he got terrible hitboxes, he hits you 2 times in a second like a train. This is like an inbreed, retarded, terrible version of Gyoubu Oniwa on haxes. It's not even a boss, more like a prank. But it's not just a prank bro, because he is blocking your progress.

 

[Cryomancer]

This video helped me a lot >>



About Gaius, is he worse than Mesmer? I tried like 15 times till I beat him.

 

[MasPingon]

This video helped me a lot >>



About Gaius, is he worse than Mesmer? I tried like 15 times till I beat him.

Yes, but it doesn't change the fact of how terrible this encounter is. Like they put no effort to it, made it in 15 minutes without thinking about it. It feels unfair and random.

 

[d1r]

best review on steam

I have just completed all the main remembrance bosses for SOTE without summoning, So now I can give an informed opinion on them.

Before I get into the issues, Let me just say that the content added aside from the bosses is a great edition to the game. The world is beautiful, The various soundtracks are some of the best they've ever done, The new weapons and abilities are awesome additions and so on. It is an amazing expansion that clearly had much love and passion put into it, but there are glaring issued in regards to the bosses that ultimately ruined my experience.

I am NOT saying don't buy the DLC just because this review is negative. I am voicing my frustrations with some of the design decisions that I will get into down below.

The reason I give SOTE a negative review is because many of the main bosses are now just simply a series of cheap tricks being spammed repeatedly at insane speed that chunk your health.They are NOT fun to fight with the Dark Souls style player combat system used in Elden Ring. I personally gained no satisfaction whatsoever from defeating any of them, instead only a feeling of the kind of relief that comes after you remove a splinter.

Before you move your greasy fingers to your keyboard to frantically type out "Git gud" or "Skill issue" to imply that my skill level is the reason I am complaining; let me show you some of my videos where I defeat many of the hardest bosses ER has to offer flawlessly without taking ANY damage or using any summons:

- Malenia, Blade Of Miquella - NG+17

YouTube™ Video: Malenia, Blade Of Miquella - NG+17 No Damage - No Freezing Pot
Views: 300
Silly red head likes to play with Samurai Swords...

- Mohg, Lord Of Blood NG+15

YouTube™ Video: Mohg, Lord Of Blood - NG+15 No Hit
Views: 240
BLO0D FOR THE BLOOD GOD 0:00 Intro 0:54 Fight 2:40 Lord Of The Dance Floor

- Mohg, The Omen - NG+15

YouTube™ Video: Mohg, The Omen - NG+15 No Damage
Views: 536
We've got the moves 0:00 Fight 2:31 Lord Of Dance

- Crucible Duo https://youtu.be/c8KJOLg0aR4
- Maliketh NG+15 https://youtu.be/bwvdEuHneuU
- Godfrey NG+15 https://youtu.be/M1CGM1hKZsw
- Commander Niall - NG+15 https://youtu.be/KAMJIyvZFlc

With that out of the way, and the seething of Fromsoft fanboys assured, lets continue.

The bosses are straight out of Sekiro with their levels of speed and agression. Put Messmer, Divine Beast, Rellana or many of the other remembrance bosses next to bloodborne bosses; Even many Sekiro bosses and you'll see that they are as fast if not even faster and more aggressive than most of them are. Insane!

I wan't you to do a test; Watch videos of Lady Maria and Rellana side by side. Now do the same thing for the Demon Of Hatred next to Divine Beast; You will see in both cases that the SOTE bosses are faster and more aggressive... IN A GAME WITH SOULS PLAYER COMBAT!

These new bosses only serve to highlight the terminal main issue I have mentioned that Elden Ring has had since day 1:

The player combat itself is not adequate for the enemies you face. It does not offer an compelling; skill based experience like Sekiro and Bloodborne did. Those games had mechanics that made facing highly aggressive enemies more engaging AND enjoyable. Elden Ring forces you to be incredibly passive; You are relegated to rolling around and keeping distance waiting to get 1 hit in on the boss (hopefully) before this tortuous loop begins again.

The difficulty at this point simply boils down to the bosses tricking you into rolling too early or late and then frame catching (roll punishing) you for not getting a frame perfect roll, a roll that has input delay on it as it only occurs after the button has been released, meaning that the roll is based on prediction instead of reaction in many cases as the bosses delay an attack only to release it instantly. I also have noticed that many times that the hit-boxes seem appear before the weapon is actually swung... This means you HAVE to learn each individual boss's timings on so many of their attacks to avoid them because they don't make intuitive sense. Rubbish!

In the past the way you'd avoid these delayed attacks is by outflanking them; but they now give most of these bosses near infinite tracking on their attacks FORCING you to time a dodge the way the devs want, and some of these attacks have way to many active frames so they will automatically hit you even if you roll into them. You will be waiting to get 1 hit in after a boss does 10+ attacks in a row, when you go to get damage to move the fight forward, the boss jumps away or has specific trading attacks that startup in reaction to the first frame of your attack animation; Not many people know this, but the bosses in Elden Ring basically input read! Because of this the wise tactic is to actually wait and roll around and only punish specific attacks instead of attacking when a boss is seemingly in neutral. This makes for passive boring game play. If you're going to do this, ADD ATTACK/ANIMATION CANCELLING so we're not trapped doing an attack that is going to be punished by the boss.

As many others have mentioned the camera is totally abysmal for many of the bosses, it's at its worst for the divine beast and the final boss where much of the time you cannot see what the hell is going on because the camera is too close to the point when the boss is clipping through the screen. This is made even worse when they're filling the area with various elemental attacks whilst being right on top of you. ♥♥♥♥ the Divine Beast and ♥♥♥♥ the redhead and his twink at the end. Those two bosses are the greatest offenders in this regard and the muscular redhead and his twink companion in particular almost seem like they are rubbing it in your face in the second phase as you are clearly being forced to stay right next to the boss because of elemental light attack extensions appearing on each attack to catch you if you roll backwards. Couple of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I dearly hope for their next game the bring back mechanics from Bloodborne and Sekiro to make dealing with these sorts of bosses actully fun as well as challenging.

I love Fromsoft, They are one of the last truly high integrity, well meaning and talented dev teams that remain in the gaming industry. So when they make a mistake we must point it out instead of heaping relentless praise upon them so that can make better games in the future.

H. P. Lovecraft's Cat dont blow a gasket.

More and more people are waking up to this.

And that's a good thing.

They are trying so hard to stay true with their "Prepare to die"-meme that they are making so many fatal mistakes on the gameplay front. I already hated playing Dark Souls 3, but ER really took it to a next level.

• HP bloat as a solution for the power creep that are the extremely OP weapons you can find midgame, resulting in many weapons becoming completely useless unless you want to spend three times the time to kill even normal trash mobs in mid-endgame areas. I remember a time where pretty much every weapon was viable, and where the power gap between weapons wasn't that nasty than the power gap you can find in this game (OP skills becoming pretty much necessary). Watching some fights against bosses in the new DLC just made me shake my head. It would take an eternity to finish them with for example "just" a +25 Spear (which I used as my main weapon in one of my RP runs).
• Enemies tracking your movement and attacks (I am sure that this already was a thing in the older Souls games, but it certainly wasn't that blatantly obvious)
• Damage bloat, where armor almost becomes completely useless, incentivizing a roll-spam playstyle instead of being able to take hits with the DS1 poise system, Phys res and a lot of HP. You pretty much have to roll now in this game, because so many bosses and some enemies have long combos which can completely drain your stamina when blocking.

The move towards a more faster, more spectacular combat, where dodging became pretty much the norm really hurt the whole series, imo.

 

[Retardo]

best review on steam

I have just completed all the main remembrance bosses for SOTE without summoning, So now I can give an informed opinion on them.

Before I get into the issues, Let me just say that the content added aside from the bosses is a great edition to the game. The world is beautiful, The various soundtracks are some of the best they've ever done, The new weapons and abilities are awesome additions and so on. It is an amazing expansion that clearly had much love and passion put into it, but there are glaring issued in regards to the bosses that ultimately ruined my experience.

I am NOT saying don't buy the DLC just because this review is negative. I am voicing my frustrations with some of the design decisions that I will get into down below.

The reason I give SOTE a negative review is because many of the main bosses are now just simply a series of cheap tricks being spammed repeatedly at insane speed that chunk your health.They are NOT fun to fight with the Dark Souls style player combat system used in Elden Ring. I personally gained no satisfaction whatsoever from defeating any of them, instead only a feeling of the kind of relief that comes after you remove a splinter.

Before you move your greasy fingers to your keyboard to frantically type out "Git gud" or "Skill issue" to imply that my skill level is the reason I am complaining; let me show you some of my videos where I defeat many of the hardest bosses ER has to offer flawlessly without taking ANY damage or using any summons:

- Malenia, Blade Of Miquella - NG+17

YouTube™ Video: Malenia, Blade Of Miquella - NG+17 No Damage - No Freezing Pot
Views: 300
Silly red head likes to play with Samurai Swords...

- Mohg, Lord Of Blood NG+15

YouTube™ Video: Mohg, Lord Of Blood - NG+15 No Hit
Views: 240
BLO0D FOR THE BLOOD GOD 0:00 Intro 0:54 Fight 2:40 Lord Of The Dance Floor

- Mohg, The Omen - NG+15

YouTube™ Video: Mohg, The Omen - NG+15 No Damage
Views: 536
We've got the moves 0:00 Fight 2:31 Lord Of Dance

- Crucible Duo https://youtu.be/c8KJOLg0aR4
- Maliketh NG+15 https://youtu.be/bwvdEuHneuU
- Godfrey NG+15 https://youtu.be/M1CGM1hKZsw
- Commander Niall - NG+15 https://youtu.be/KAMJIyvZFlc

With that out of the way, and the seething of Fromsoft fanboys assured, lets continue.

The bosses are straight out of Sekiro with their levels of speed and agression. Put Messmer, Divine Beast, Rellana or many of the other remembrance bosses next to bloodborne bosses; Even many Sekiro bosses and you'll see that they are as fast if not even faster and more aggressive than most of them are. Insane!

I wan't you to do a test; Watch videos of Lady Maria and Rellana side by side. Now do the same thing for the Demon Of Hatred next to Divine Beast; You will see in both cases that the SOTE bosses are faster and more aggressive... IN A GAME WITH SOULS PLAYER COMBAT!

These new bosses only serve to highlight the terminal main issue I have mentioned that Elden Ring has had since day 1:

The player combat itself is not adequate for the enemies you face. It does not offer an compelling; skill based experience like Sekiro and Bloodborne did. Those games had mechanics that made facing highly aggressive enemies more engaging AND enjoyable. Elden Ring forces you to be incredibly passive; You are relegated to rolling around and keeping distance waiting to get 1 hit in on the boss (hopefully) before this tortuous loop begins again.

The difficulty at this point simply boils down to the bosses tricking you into rolling too early or late and then frame catching (roll punishing) you for not getting a frame perfect roll, a roll that has input delay on it as it only occurs after the button has been released, meaning that the roll is based on prediction instead of reaction in many cases as the bosses delay an attack only to release it instantly. I also have noticed that many times that the hit-boxes seem appear before the weapon is actually swung... This means you HAVE to learn each individual boss's timings on so many of their attacks to avoid them because they don't make intuitive sense. Rubbish!

In the past the way you'd avoid these delayed attacks is by outflanking them; but they now give most of these bosses near infinite tracking on their attacks FORCING you to time a dodge the way the devs want, and some of these attacks have way to many active frames so they will automatically hit you even if you roll into them. You will be waiting to get 1 hit in after a boss does 10+ attacks in a row, when you go to get damage to move the fight forward, the boss jumps away or has specific trading attacks that startup in reaction to the first frame of your attack animation; Not many people know this, but the bosses in Elden Ring basically input read! Because of this the wise tactic is to actually wait and roll around and only punish specific attacks instead of attacking when a boss is seemingly in neutral. This makes for passive boring game play. If you're going to do this, ADD ATTACK/ANIMATION CANCELLING so we're not trapped doing an attack that is going to be punished by the boss.

As many others have mentioned the camera is totally abysmal for many of the bosses, it's at its worst for the divine beast and the final boss where much of the time you cannot see what the hell is going on because the camera is too close to the point when the boss is clipping through the screen. This is made even worse when they're filling the area with various elemental attacks whilst being right on top of you. ♥♥♥♥ the Divine Beast and ♥♥♥♥ the redhead and his twink at the end. Those two bosses are the greatest offenders in this regard and the muscular redhead and his twink companion in particular almost seem like they are rubbing it in your face in the second phase as you are clearly being forced to stay right next to the boss because of elemental light attack extensions appearing on each attack to catch you if you roll backwards. Couple of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I dearly hope for their next game the bring back mechanics from Bloodborne and Sekiro to make dealing with these sorts of bosses actully fun as well as challenging.

I love Fromsoft, They are one of the last truly high integrity, well meaning and talented dev teams that remain in the gaming industry. So when they make a mistake we must point it out instead of heaping relentless praise upon them so that can make better games in the future.

H. P. Lovecraft's Cat dont blow a gasket.

Good read. Only question is whether or not FromSoft will head the criticism or will continue down this path while the cultists cheer them on. Toxic positivity is a blight upon entertainment.

The funny thing here is that the review author is one of the "gitgud" fuckers, with his OMG SEE MY NG+100 ONLY PANTS NO HIT RUNS ON BOSSES, and that makes his tears especially delivious.

What makes it even funnier for me is that I was never "gud", I can't parry for shit and can't be bothered to learn the attack patterns. I started pkaying this shit from the "old" demon souls, and dealed with the difficulty by treating the bosses as some sort of puzzle that needs to be solved, by building in a specific way, using hard counters or cheesing the hell of them (ah, that combo of invis ring + toxic mist, those were some good times).

Now, I'm playing this dlc on rl150 and having a blast, with my approach, while both the hype-driven normies and gitgudnerds are getting wrecked. Amazing job, Miyazaki.

 

[Child of Malkav]

A lot of good things have been said, now a bad thing. Commander Gaius fight is absolutely retarded. I was chilling after walking out of Legacy dungeon with 100k runes on me, seeing an open space and meadow behind the door. The moment I took a step behind door treshhold boss music kicked in and I was raped by a fucking barbarian on a wild pig, didn't even have time to notice his health bar. He is agressive like a rabbid raccoon, you don't have time to use summons, you can't fight him on Torrent(he is way faster then you), he got terrible hitboxes, he hits you 2 times in a second like a train. This is like an inbreed, retarded, terrible version of Gyoubu Oniwa on haxes. It's not even a boss, more like a prank. But it's not just a prank bro, because he is blocking your progress.

Some people would say "skill issue".
Those people are retarded.

 

[Ivan]

Most of the DLC bosses have felt like this for me, pistol being me + spirit ashes. I wonder why they didn't disable spirit ashes for certain boss fights. Like, this is a git gud boss encounter. You have to master it. Isshin style. Hesitation is defeat.

 

[Ivan]

Perfect example of what I mean: looks awesome, but turns out to be extremely disappointing to actually traverse.
Dark Souls had it both: wonder and excitement.

I echo this sentiment. The overworld is largely boring. When it's more handcrafted, it's cool, but this and the finger area was a huge bore. Just a huge space with a few enemies peppered here and there. The dungeons are great, the overworld still sucks, albeit pretty.

You see these awesome-looking areas (and there are very many great vistas, in the base game as well as the expansion), and you're excited to explore them. During that process, you realise that 90% are mostly barren emptiness, you check the perimeter, which mostly consists of walls (actual walls and cliffs), then you find a grace, then you find some catacombs, which are better than those in the base game, but still shit, and/or a boss fight somewhere that's utterly spastic, because the combat was basically built for a different kind of game, but is still essentially the same.
I don't know how old Demon's Souls/Dark Souls fans can enjoy this. I really don't.

We stomach it/I stomach it to get to the legacy dungeons. But yeah, I think this DLC has the worst catacombs/ruins I've seen yet (not talking about the finger ruins, but the ones that lead to the eden-esque garden plateu with the scorpion spiders and shadow men. It's labyrinthine, dark, and just corridor after corridor. It was like Lost Izalith bad IMO.

 

[Xorazm]

Most of the DLC bosses have felt like this for me, pistol being me + spirit ashes. I wonder why they didn't disable spirit ashes for certain boss fights. Like, this is a git gud boss encounter. You have to master it..

I think that's kind of a problem, actually. You either grind your teeth against a hyper aggressive boss at the outskirts of From's already considerable difficulty... or you bring in Mimic Boi, in which case you can basically do a crossword puzzle while smacking the boss around like a pinata, which I just personally don't find to be a whole lot of fun. There's not really much in between, and I don't care what anyone says, picking up those seeds doesn't really seem to do jack.

Actually, it's not even the hyper-aggression that bothers me, it's more something nobody is talking about ...which is how fucking tanky a lot of the bosses are _combined_ with the aggression. The end result is that your windows to get in damage are so relatively small and infrequent that, when combined with the HP bars, and then also combined with the necessity of learning brand new movesets that break out over time, the fights can go on ... and on ... and on.

I get the same feeling exploring a lot of the big, beautiful, but completely empty areas. There's a dazzling first impression, it all looks amazing, and a lot of care obviously went into it, but then over time I get a creeping, unsettling, unfamiliar feeling that I've never gotten in a From game ... boredom.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

absurd criticism

prove my criticism wrong then
it is what a discussion is for

The devs just want to build what they think is cool

and it's precisely because From still puts some effort, that likewise I still have respect for the games they develop
but that is no excuse to prevent people from arguing about their increasingly flawed combat design
specially when it's a gameplay component that seems to be more and more focused on

It was never about the autism your sorry ass projects onto either game's systems.

bitch please
I've been beating this drum since DS3 and every year it rings more and more correct

 

[Lyre Mors]

or you bring in Mimic Boi, in which case you can basically do a crossword puzzle

The solution to this is don't use the mimic tear and stick to the NPC summons only. They give you some breathing room without trivializing the fight. That is your in-between. It basically seems like almost all the main boss fights I've done have been designed around this. The game reinforces it narratively by emphasizing that you're working together as a band of motley knights. There's even additional dialogue with the NPC if you beat said boss with them.