What do you guys think of Elden Ring and its boss design? I feel like some attacks come out so fast or that some bosses attack too frequently and have long combos.
What do you guys think of Elden Ring and its boss design? I feel like some attacks come out so fast or that some bosses attack too frequently and have long combos.
I don't remember a single elden ring boss
I hate that boss and honestly to this day and have zero drive to learn his patterns. Hes not hard, his health isn't high and even his damage isn't something on the level of Malenia, Radagon or Maliketh. He just sucks period. I feel like Morgott is a satire of how this company designs bosses but it exists in Elden Ring.
Seemed to me they expected you to use the ashes of war as a crutch and didn't bother tuning them further because they were 'beatable'. The bosses when Elden Ring released were both frustrating because of their attack patterns and input reading, and due to the game being 100~hours. There came a point where I had played the game so long I didn't care to learn them anymore and I just cheesed my way to the ending of the game first try. It was a fricking mess back then but I don't know how it is now.
I gained a lot of experience in my 300+ hour playthrough, but by the time the DLC drops I will be as rusty as rusty bucket bay. Here's hoping for some muscle memory.
I actually don't mind the actual encounters but I feel like Elden Ring is the first souls game that openly "gamifies" the bosses. In every other souls game I feel relatively safe dodging away or to the side of the boss, like a real person would in that situation.
Elden Ring heavily favors rolling TOWARDS the boss because of how small the damage windows are. It just doesn't feel right and ends up making the bosses less of a physical threat and more or a rhythm challenge.
It's arguably the worst in the series, although there are a few very good ones.
For me, very disappointing.
Could you elaborate further?
Matthewmatosis made the point in his DS2 review that it felt like the developers said to themselves "how can we make this hard?" when they should have been asking "how can we make this interesting?". Elden Ring's bosses are the logical conclusion to this line of thought and also debunks the notion that DS2 was bad because of Miyizaki's absence.
Radahn is the most memorable boss in Elden Ring for this reason. He feels like a boss that could only exist in Elden Ring and that makes him unique
>He feels like a boss that could only exist in Elden Ring
Why?
horse and summons
>summons
Ivory King was a 'big' battle outside of ER
>how can we make this hard
DS2 was still through and through a classic Souls game, they only went bananas starting with BB(DS3)
A strange criticism maybe but I think they have too many animations which are too intricate. They feel more like Surge enemies in that they feel like they're animated to look cool first and to perform a function second.
I feel like this is most bosses after DS2.
Except DS2 has far more "interesting" bosses than the one trick pony gimmicks of DeS that get stale by your 2nd run because they're almost mandatory to beat the boss and take no skill to use past knowing about them, and they just nuke bosses instantly damage-wise.
DS2 implemented more subtle gimmicks and made them optional or skill based ones instead of simplistic secrets that just instantkill the boss:
>Pursuer's arena has the bastilas, you can get gud and parry him for an easy kill, you can frick it up and he'll break them. Also you can use them in COOP and even troll hosts/phantoms and kill them with it. That's soul.
>Dragonrider has the raising platforms as his default arena is insanely small and any hit will push you off. Raising one or both makes the fight easier but raising none lets you cheese him into falling off if you know how to bait him.
>Flexile's arena has water slowly fills the room, slows you down, increases his fire def by 50% but it also decreases lightning def by 50% so you can make use of the gold pine resin you find in the Wharf.
>Sinner's lamps giving you x2 lock on distance.
>Freja's baby spiders being afraid of torches.
>Chariot's whole gauntlet phase 1 with skeletons + necros then a horse fight in phase 2. Imagine if he was 100% gimmick and he died instantly when he hit the gate like Dragon God.
>Rat Vanguard being a wa better version of Pinwheel that can actually kill you because of petrification.
Also better designed because the boss spawns in after 10 rat kills so you don't just walk in, lock on to the real boss and ignore the clones like you can with Pinwheel.
>Mirror Knight and NPC/Player Summons.
>Avaa being invisible till you get the eye but 100% fightable if you're familiar enough with her moves. A lesser game would've just made the boss invincible to force you to do it using the gimmick/key item.
>Ivory King and the first phase with the ally Loyce Knights and the oblivion gates spawning enemies
i think it's extremely unfun. there are games that manage to be more difficult yet more fun at the same time but the guys at fromsoft have it in their heads that you absolutely should never be able to dodge any attack on reaction, only memorization
This. You can only do reaction-based dodging with light roll + some fast swing weapons like katanas/daggers u cant react to all move set because its too easy to be caught by his offhand and it becomes a game of waiting for the boss to use the moveset u know with atk windows rather than reacting to the swings
This is what happens when they capitalize on their reputation for making hard games. DS1 and DeS were never built to be hard, just to be different, and they were so different that people found them hard. Then came all the fame and memes about their difficulty, and fromsoft capitalized on that, making things bullshit annoying because a health sponge attacking at the speed of sound with huge aoes or long combos while you’re locked into slow combat animations is what souls fans love. They focus too much on making things difficult without making it interesting or fun, so after a decade of soulslikes, it now just feels like a stagnant formula in a bland dark fantasy world where the insecure can feel good about themselves for playing a difficult game.
It's fantastic, very similar to Sekiro's bosses that require a multitide of responses for various types of attacks if you want to play optimally.
ER bosses were were made with the expecation that you'll use a mix of rolls, guards, parries, jumps and even strafing to evade the various types of attacks
Just because you can roll everything doesn't mean it's even close to the optimal strategy.
>Big slow hard hitting hamer style attacks are the ones you should always roll and never block.
>Weak but fast swipes are easy to block and counter, and guard counters do insane posture damage to boot
>Ground area of effect attacks are easy to jump.
>Spears/pokes are easy to strafe at close range.
>There's even a bunch of attacks you can duck under.
>Also, every parriable boss has an obvious slower attack that far easier to see and go for a reaction-parry than the rest.
Mergit literally has all these attacks in order to teach you from the start about them, specifically:
-3 hit combos with a delayed last hit
-a fast combo that's hard to roll but easy to block
-hard hitting hammer in phase 2 that will break shield players hard
This mix of fast and slow attacks completely filterted low skill button mashers that spam consecutive rolls the moment they see a boss move slightly.
I’m not even gonna lie Radahn, Morgott, Maliketh, Mohg, some others are easier than Manus from DS1. Beat ER at RL1, played DS1 with my spellblade (mostly blade don’t worry) MLG fricker and Manus didn’t frick around. Think he has high magic resist which made the fight take like 10 minutes.
It made me miss the stagger riposte sustém from ER a little...
DS1 at SL1 is easier than ER with no restrictions, even Manus isn't a big deal if you play unlocked.
Yeah I know about the pyromancy. I’m just talking normally, like ER is more accepting with build variety and even if a boss has high holy resist some of that stuff still does some good damage. Also really easy to swap affinities, whereas in DS1 you gotta commit which is fine but it definitely shows for some bosses. Might do DS1 RL1 but don’t know if I wanna pyro cheese or not.
In a DS1 SL1 run you're stuck with pyros or the reinforced club.
Later games give you ways to boost stats at SL1 like rings and armors and Great Runes in ER, so you can make several builds, including a decent 30 INT mage as RL1.
Makes runs far more interesting and varied.
Yeah I managed to get the goldmask ending for the kicks in my RL1. I ended up doing a couple different play styles throughout the run, shield + morning star all the way up till after morgott, zweihander for Malenia/Fire Giant-Godfrey, then ended it with iron ball because my friend told me how crazy the iron balls were. Starscourage bow for those dragon bosses too, that thing makes placidusax even more crippled.
>endless anime combos
>blatant input reading
>stupid looking faints and aerial hang times
I hated it.
anime combos
You can literally hit bosses and roll away between indivisual swings of a combo, even with a collosal weapon.
Bosses/enemies barely have any tracking during multi-hit combos, they only have heavy tracking during the initial wind-up animation.
So you just need to roll under the first hit, got to their backside and and you won't be touched by the majority of combos.
Due to the delayed attacks, rapid attacks you have to predict and fake openings bosses in this game boil down to initial memorisation then queuing inputs together rather than actively engaging with the boss like in previous games. Every boss plays the same way. There’s no variety it’s just memorise i-frame timings and legitimate punish openings pure autism
It’s not a great game, just a dark souls game.
I think the combat improvements in Elden Ring hide how bad the boss fights are. They are way too fast, unpredictable and input reading to be fun.
Also, the combat had some serious balance issues at launch with Str being dogshit and jump attacks being too strong.
ER bosses are far slower than DS3 and BB bosses.
Jump Attacks still do more stance damage than Charged R2's.
Jump attacks do half the posture damage of a charged R2 or guard counter.
Come to mind, why they frick is there still no visible posture bar.
In Sekiro you didn't have to deal with this hidden systems bullshit and it was much more fun that way.
overall probably the best ones in any souls
i liked even lot of the mini dungeon bosses
actually had to learn lot of the bosses properly unlike in previous titles where brute forcing was bit too efficient of a strategy often