Souls fans ruined Souls games. They went from mysterious dark fantasy adventures to being Diablo'like rollslop. Always count on gamers to ruin a good thing.
Souls fans ruined Souls games. They went from mysterious dark fantasy adventures to being Diablo'like rollslop.
Applies to any fanbase getting too big. But since opinions here are usually just contrarian, as long as something is niche its bound to be liked. If the series had stopped at Dark souls, it would still be heralded as the most amazing thing even though the player base was already pretty mainstream and obnoxious around 2012 or so
Why does dark souls 1 feel like an actual adventure/experience compared to 2 and 3 where 3 had technically improved upon combat and stuff? I feel like the roll combat is the least interesting part of DS but everyone was raving about the epic difficulty which really isn't that interesting.
Map layout and level design are the biggest parts. The fresh world/story was also nice. 2 had it's own thing but as a sequel it was a very weak world/story. 3 just went with bad nostalgia grabs. Also, if if you didn't play Demon Souls, DS1 was your first intro to the franchise so it will be more fun simply because everything is new vs playing a sequel where 80% of the game is the same.
Demon's Souls required you to start at the beginning of a level every time you died, even to a boss. This has two effects: First, learning to navigate the area and find shortcuts is more important and rewarding, and second, you need to be more cautious because getting sent back to the beginning of a level is annoying.
Dark Souls is still similar to this, and has no fast travel until the second half. Also, in the original release, fast travel was much more restricted. You could only fast travel to a handful of the game's bonfires.
Putting checkpoints everywhere and being able to fast travel has two other effects: You can always instantly go restock on items, and bosses can be much harder to learn, because you spawn right next to them. So the game became increasingly focused on bosses, and less on levels. And it mattered much less if you actually stock up on an item, because you can always go teleport to get what you need. (Compare that to what happens if you don't buy a purging stone from Oswald, and then get cursed in the Depths).
Despite the fact that the idiots on this board think Elden Ring just regurgitated Dark Souls, it actually did something fundamentally different with its approach to exploration. Instead of searching for shortcuts, you search for hidden dungeons. There are some really excellent moments from this in the early game, but they didn't save any surprises for the endgame.
I tend to agree. I've always said the "it" of DS for me was its merging of old arcade games and exploration-based gameplay.
You needed a certain discipline and resource management to learn to navigate a level and beat its boss, and once this was done and it opened connections, you needed to learn to navigate and explore the now expanded playfield.
DS3 introduced a signifcant change that lingered to the games that followed, design-wise, in that, suddenly boss encounters became the focus, with levels that often became one-time trafersal that opened a shortcut to the boss, which you then tackled independently.
Same bas material, different design focus.
As for OP, well, I still play blind and am having a great time of it. The very existence of guide-abusing players doesn't impact me the least. So, hardly a problem as far as I'm concerned. While markers and other so called QoL in game would spoil it for me.
>Elden Ring actually did something fundamentally different with its approach to exploration
While I'm at it, one thing I find fascinating with From "souls" games (including Sekiro and Bloodborne) is how willing the team is to explore game-design within their seemingly narrow scope, and in so doing prove the major impact of small changes to overall gameplay.
DaS2 fricked up its development. They ended up stapling their barely finished areas together with corridors and elevators and most of the assets were placeholder and unpolished.
DaS3 was designed from the ground up with the intention of being able to take every shortcut taken by DaS2 without being obviously shit, so every rough corner that development could get stuck on was sanded down and the game ultimately ended up with levels shuffled together in a linear corridor and very formulaic enemies and bosses designed to be mildly tweaked and plopped down practically anywhere.
Being able to warp to every checkpoint also takes a sledgehammer to your sense of place and so does the abandoning of autistic upgrade paths that you can miss in favor of having everything except for flavor upgrades unlocked and available if you can find upgrade materials that were scattered statistically in the appropriate levels.
Ultimately this meant that the levels in DaS3 were very individualistic, you went through them once to pick up everything and then never came back unless you read a guide and needed to find an npc trigger before the game permanently despawned them or something.
I just wish they'd be more willing to explore their control schemes and UI. They've kept to their barely functional mess and only barely stepped out of their comfort zone with DaS2, only to retreat immediately afterward. Sekiro in particular warranted a different control scheme than the standard souls games.
>I just wish they'd be more willing to explore their control schemes and UI
Sekiro really needed a different character progression system, I think XP-tied character development often felt like counterproductive to the game's intent.
Elden Ring brings another issue altogether with its cornucopia of tools (the game is so generous with ressources, giving you concurrent ways of doing the same things) having to coexist with a UI willfully limiting input. As fas as I can see, a lot of players don't use options because juggling between them in play is deemed too cumbersome. Which it is supposed to be, but inadequately so, here I think.
I feel like a lot of games suffer from item juggling. Recently played Tunic and it only has three equipment buttons. Between the sword and the grappling hook I suddenly found myself with effectively one slot for every other item in the game. Only ended up using a few as a result. Doom Eternal had ways to use most items at once but the sheer amount of options ended up being overwhelming.
Yeah, there seems to be tough balancing act bewteen the Tunic (too much juggling) and Doom (overwhelming cointrol scheme) situation, made all the more difficult by the issue of adequation to the greater overall design that modern games seem to disregard altogether.
Random thought, I kept wondering, during my second playthrough of Elden Ring, whether making them act like Estus and thrown pots (limited quantity that repop at bonfires and can be increased) wouldn't be a better solution for limited quantity subweapons (thrown daggers, etc...) than the farming and/or crafting solution (when you even can). Would change a ot of things about the balancing, but would make a lot of players more willing to experiment with those too.
It could work. Estus was already a good solution to the healing item issue of prior games. People really seem to have trouble with limited quantity items, even if they are easily replenished in practice. I always felt Souls games suffered with items in general though. Yes, the limited use ones could give you a small advantage in a fight, but generally if you're at the point where you can beat a boss with that item, you really only need one or two more tries to beat them without. So they end up being kind of pointless.
>generally if you're at the point where you can beat a boss with that item, you really only need one or two more tries to beat them without. So they end up being kind of pointless.
But generally the issue is more normal enemies than bosses, and people never learning to use/experimenting with those items in the first place for the very fact that they are a limited ressource ("no point losing time learning something I might not even be able to use in the future", or so I was once told).
>It was a necessary evil, backtracking could be a huge chore.
It's funny, given the subconversation at hand, I was thinking, all it might take is a ultimately symbolic but important enough to *feel* significant cost to warping for limiting the issue of fast travel. At least for certain profiles of players.
It's the only game which understood that fast travel bad.
It was a necessary evil, backtracking could be a huge chore. Morrowind fast travel remains the best.
backtracking wouldn’t be bad if fromslopware filled the world with interesting locales instead of dark souls combat and npcs that say gibberish
It would still get tedious after a certain point. There's no happy medium.
Soulsgays have ruined game discussion in general. They unironically believe Dark souks invented so many things it's actually insane to me. And then throw in the entirely unwarranted elitism for beating baby dogshit ARPGs. It's a fanbase that is both stupid sbd arrogant.
Demon Souls Asian English release was the peak souls experience, everybody was on equal footing exploring and experimenting at the same time.
>Diablo'like
That's the Demon's Souls remake
How is it diablo like? Why are people in this board so fricking moronic? I know you're itching to post that stupid "flamelurker design inspired by diablo" screen.
My first playthrough is always without any guides. When DeS first came out it was great discussing the game here with other importers because everybody was clueless. Can't do that anymore because there's at least one c**t that reads the wiki on their first playthrough and is willing to spoil things and theorycraft builds.
Just call them out and don't read their posts.
Also, you shouldn't read any wiki ever, even on subsequent runs. Leave yourself some mystery and stuff to discover.
Reddit Souls must be the dullest game in the history of adventure games. Seriously, each game involving running through a repetitious overworld fighting braindead, cheesable bosses to advance the nonsensensical story has been indistinguishable from the others. Aside from the broken enemy AI and horrible controls, the series’ only consistency has been its tedious roll spam combat and bland world design, all to make exploration unmagical, to make action seem inert.
Perhaps the die was cast when Miyazaki vetoed the idea of including any story or fresh gameplay for Elden Ring; he made sure the game would never be mistaken for an independent experience that wasn't open-world dark souls, just ridiculously profitable eceleb marketing and cashing in on trends. The Reddit Souls series might be anti-Tears of The Kingdom (or not), but it’s certainly the anti-Starfield in its refusal of innovation, exploration and wonder. No one wants to face that fact. Now, thankfully, they no longer have to.
>c-critics said Reddit Ring is good
"No!"
The open world is dreadful; the game was terrible. As I played, I noticed that every time I would fight a boss, it was one I've fought 5 times already, or has movesets taken wholesale from previous games.
I began marking on the back of an envelope every time an animation, asset, game mechanic, or boss battle was recycled from another FromSoft title. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Miyazaki's mind is so governed by fake praise and mediocrity that he has no other style of games. Later I read a lavish, loving review of Elden Ring. It read something to the effect of, "If these kids are being told these uninspired games are the pinnacle of gaming, then when they get older they will go on to accept Ubishit." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you play "Elden Ring", you are, in fact, trained to accept Ubishit.
gameplay is all that matters troony
your favourite games suck
>gameplay is all that matters!
>half of the dark souls experience is watching ecelebs explain the story for 3 hours
You will now pretend like you’ve never watched a lore video because it’s an easy out 🙂
>half of the dark souls experience is watching ecelebs explain the story for 3 hours
Maybe if youre a moron who cant read
wouldnt surprise me to be honest
that's not relevant to the gameplay at all
I know the OP is bait but yeah I think they should wait like 6 months or even a year before guides are posted as well as not releasing games on ~~*PC*~~ so there's no datamining Black folk ruining everything
>From ruined souls games by trying to appease normalgay sensabilities with ds3
FTFY
A fandom will always ruin that which created said fandom.
Souls ways always designed around online collaboration and out-of-game resources. This used to be something we praised DS1 for, before 2gays and bloodBlack folk came in and demanded the games turn into rollslop.
They allow a non-moron capable of moderation to experience a genuine sense of exploration and discovery while receiving the appropriate amount of guidance, and turn the period around the game's release into a huge event with everyone discovering new things independently.