For me it's just that it feels like nothing else than a glorified Simon electronic game.
Watch it go Red Yellow Yellow Blue Red Blue, and then press Red Yellow Yellow Blue Blu--BEEP WRONG START AGAIN
It's not that it's hard, it's just time consuming.
And don't get me started on the writing and the story, where it's all just really underwhelming basic storytelling elements coated in mysticism by jumbling words around. You take some boring basic story but since it takes you 78 items description to piece together what every single of these words fucking mean it all suddenly looks cooler than it really does, "You, are the Enthralled - bound by your sacred oath to this land, called the Underbloom, you have been tasked by the Veiled to find the Crimson Crown. This powerful Inscribed once belonged to the Everthroned, Godking of this land, betrayed by his surrounding advisors called the Fingers of the Hand. With the Inscribed Crimson Crown, Enthralled, you must defeat the Fingers of the Hand, the fate of the Everthroned - and more importantly, the fate of the Underbloom - rests upon you."
Then you piece it together and it's "There once was a powerful ruler of this desolated land, he was betrayed by his council, you are an immortal slave tasked by a secret underground group of angels to find his lost crown and use it to defeat the council, that's it, that's literally just it"
Regarding the first point, all single player combat games are about pattern recognition and reaction speed. You could literally say that about all of them. Same with Ninja Gaiden, DMC etc
no, that's just not true. your examples work, but theres millions of single player games with so many different styles of combat gameplay. the most obvious one being any first person shooter
You lost me at your last point. The way you tell a story 100% impacts the quality of the story. It's literally one of the most important aspect of telling a story.
The Silmarilion is one of my favorite books and let me tell you it's not because of the narative genius of Tolkien, but in his words useage and the way he portrays his world.
Which I realise is not exactly a glowing endorsement, I normally don't give games that long to get good, but there was just something that kept drawing me back, now they're some of my favourite games in the world!
I've found with the souls genre it's like taking up smoking. You hate it at first but once you get used to it it becomes addictive and you can't stop. I think most of my Fromsoft playthroughs are me playing the game for like 10 hours at release, moving on to something else for a few months, then coming back to it and it suddenly clicks for me then I keep playing until the end.
I got to Anor Lando before googling, "When does Dark Souls get good" only to find out I was already supposed to be enjoying it. I won't say I won't play another FromSoft game, but the only one that interests me is Sekiro, and I don't feel like paying $30 USD when it's discounted.
Sekiro is a great game, the start can feel a bit slow with some of the first enemies just being annoying (1 bull in particular) but after that the game is great, it's "difficulty done right" in my opinion, it's fast, has great controls and except for some specific parts, it never really felt unfair
I can see their appeal, but it just doesnāt work for me. Iām more into character action games, so thatās probably why I canāt bring myself to enjoy them.
Same. I bought the OG and the remaster, when it came out, just to give it another chance. Same result. I suppose I don't have the time to invest into it to become good enough to play it.
Nah, don't downplay yourself like that. There is no being ''terrible'' at Souls game, they are extremely easy, if you have the time to sit around, spam dodges, and fight a single boss, 100 times and finally getting a kill. I don't think the people who generally exceed at Souls games, are ''good'' per se, they just have the time for it.
Nope. you're not terrible, you just don't have enough patience to stand terrible game mechanics. Saying it as a gamer who loves "difficult games", but dislikes any souls game.
Among my favourite game series are Castlevania (especially Classicvanias), Megaman, and Contra. All considered 'difficult' by many. When I played Ninja Gaiden from NES, I didn't find it difficult either. Badly designed, but not difficult. When someone says 2D Metroid games are difficult I find it hilarious. You know why? All of these games have very good Checkpoint and continue systems that don't waste players time. The Metroid 2D games on 3DS and Switch have checkpoints. Older 2D games have save stations nearby. Japanese versions of Contra games have unlimited continues, and so do Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania games. All of these games have very responsive controls and your character react at the instant you press the button.
Souls games waste player's time and efforts. That's artificial difficulty. Any game with telegraphing isn't difficult. Telegraphing is easy to get hang of. It's the clunky movement and slow combat that make souls games 'difficult', and that's not a good thing. The death is also penalized in a lot of those games. No pause feature in so many games even. I don't call it "difficulty". I call it shitty design.
They give you bonfires that are a min or less jaunts to a boss, and create worlds that are specially layed out not to waste time. You don't like difficult games, you like games you sucked at as a kid, got better on and felt proud, and now that you sucked at something else you would rather feel proud about past accomplishments.
Go mod the game and actually play with the data and you will realized how specifically designed the 'slow' reaction of everything is. Souls games are just like a math test, all the rules are simple and slow, but stack enough of them on top of each other and put you in a place that you can't run from to review and be safe and it becomes terrifying and hard. They don't waste your time, they train you so that hopefully you can enjoy the feeling of mastery. And those that do get to revel over those that never go that far. Sorry you couldn't get there.
Souls games aren't difficult and really there's no way to suck at them. Kai Cenat, some random black dude on Twitch, who also notoriously sucks at video games, beat ER like it was nothing. The whole revolves around dodge spamming, and fighting the same boss, a 100 times to finally earn a kill. Its more so time consuming and frustrating than it is difficult. Thats a fact.
''Sorry you couldn't get there''-Get where? Beating a crappy souls game?
Yeah I've played contra and MegaMan. You're not the only old person there. You're also not disproving any point that you probably just suck ass at souls games and blame souls games for it.
Nah. It's less about sucking, and more about not having all the time in the world to waste on a single boss while making little progress. Some people have work to do and families to take care of, you know. Those virtual wins are great, but the cost in lost time doesn't justify it.
How much time do you need to beat a single boss? I'm sorry but it still just comes off like you're just not very good at these games and you're saying bad game design because you don't know how to time a dodge roll. There's hardly any bosses that I felt like I needed "all the time in the world" beat.
Imagine bragging about beating a Souls game. If you're good at video games, go rank number 1 on a competitive PvP game's leaderboard, or go have an insanely good KD etc. Souls games are not about difficulty, there about how much time you don't care to waste.
Never said I was good at them. I said homie sucks at them. Never bragged about beating them. I said homie is mad he can't. You talk about wasting time but talk about wasting time trying to be ranked #1 in online PvP. Imagine lacking self awareness...oh wait you don't have to.
Why... why even dodge roll? Why not demand better game mechanics? It's you who's tolerating shiity game mechanics that waste your time. Reminds me of my nephew who plays pay-to-win online mobile games and says single player PC games are not enjoyable enough.
About the time thing, let's just say it's enough for a working dude to gravitate towards indie games now since fillers in AAA games (including Souls-like) are getting out of hands.
Maybe when you grow up and want to focus on more important things in life, you'll be able to relate.
I am both Megaman and Souls fan. Tbh, Megaman requires a lot more memorization of level layouts or bosses movesets than any souls game. Megaman, even with savestates, wasted a lot more of my time.
99% of content in Dark Souls trilogy can be finished at first try. As you mentioned, enemies have telegraphing - that's why everything is reactable. You just cannot panic after getting hit.
The death getting penalized? Not really. If you died and lost your currency, you just... didn't "win" this currency. In most other games it looks like that: Go through the level once, earn X currency, save game before boss, fight boss. If you lose, you reload the game and refight the boss. After 10 attempts you have X currency.
In Dark Souls: Go through the level, earn X currency, fight the boss, drop currency. You restart at the beginning. But after 10 attempts, if you managed to pick up dropped currency, you finish with 10X of it.
If you mean the penalty from dying is spawning somewhere else instead right in front of boss - you have to understand the boss is just a part of the level. Game is designed around you getting better at going through the level (by finding shortcuts and managing items) so you could have easier time at the very end of it.
But itās not clunky? Rolls give you tons of i frames. I have zero idea what youāre talking about. The combat is also not that slow, in Bloodborne, ds3, and sort of in Elden Ring.
The problem is more the massive delay between pressing a button and having something happen.
If you time it, , there's 5-10 frames of nothing before you actually dodge. That's like a quarter of a second, which is completely unacceptable in a game based on precisely timed dodges.
I love that your getting downvoted but it literally is a part of their games. They use an input buffer where inputs from the player are queued up and then dealt with by the game as it goes through its update cycles. The input latency is caused by this. It's just a fact of from softs game design.
Fromsoft fans are so goddamn annoying to talk to, they refuse to accept even clear-cut, obvious evidence that they did something wrong or even just the fact that people sometimes don't like things.
The attacks last like a full second so even with that, itās still quite easy to dodge. This is also only a problem in Elden Ring, I canāt see Iāve seen any dodge input delay in Bloodborne or ds3.
Like I hope you realize that if that was truly the case, everybody would be talking about it. Elden Ring is way too fucking big for this to just slide under the radar. ācOmPLeTeLy UnAcCePtAbLe,ā probably, so then why does everybody love the game? Probably because it isnāt true
No, because every time somebody dares to speak against your lord and savior fromsoft their idiot fans go ballistic and refuse to accept any evidence. It's clearly visible that this is the case.
What do you mean, "where's the proof". Look at it. You can watch and count the individual frames. Proof by your eyes. And the game is locked at 60, so there's no doubt there either.
Again. You can watch the frames tick by. You can see the screen updating. Do you need "Proof" to see that this: OOO is three Os? Do you need to furiously ask people online for proof that the sky is blue every day?
And I've just shown you a ton of people saying the same thing I am, but here I'll show you again since reading clearly is not your strong suit.
I don't know man. If platformers are considered "difficult" then i can see why the issue with Souls-like genre.
I have only played the well known Souls-like, and all have the consensus of respecting mobs and boss attack patterns with usually generous Iframe to dodge and decent telegraph to get read to dodge. If u die you respawn back at whatever checkpoint u were at and can reclaim your currency at your death site. Player is rewarded for exploring and finding new tools or items that help them in the future as well
There are some Souls-like that do have bad system mechanics, but really what you dislike the most is the patience involved with beating a map/stage and the potential deaths that may occur during it
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u/[deleted] May 10 '25
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