What exactly can other action RPG devs learn from From's games besides just copying their formula with I-frame rolls, esoteric lore instead of a direct story, and intentionally limited player movesets?
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Most of what FROM does isn't impressive on a mechanical or technical level, so not much really. There's a reason most Souls-likes are pretty shit, and a reason why this "massive impact" on gaming has basically amounted to nothing outside of FROM's catalogue and a few one-offs that use similar checkpoint-based gameplay.
Why did save points go away in modern JRPGs, anyway? Could do without respawning enemies, but I like the resource management.
A lot of Japanese games are now copy-of-a-copy, so they've slowly lost the actual RPG mechanics that they started with. i.e. FROM's use of the Bonfire/Grace is just the equivalent of a Long Rest in OSRDnD where sometimes things would reset.
Modern RPGs have whittled away at their own features for so long that they're now based on previous video games over and over again, rather than the TTRPGs that inspired them.
Because they were originally a lazy dev copout, there were old JRPGs that already let you save anywhere, save points were used by people who didn't have good programmers or lazy ass devs who thought they were making their button mashers challenging
It's dead, jimbo.
Let it go
The LMBS will rise again, even if it comes from indies.
I don't think I've ever seen a mechanically impressive combat game that wasn't a fighting game. nobody wants that for their time-wasting arpg
Now if only there was a series of ARPGs that took direct inspiration from fightans.
i hope fightan dev make a proper hitbox like soulslops did
>There's a reason most Souls-likes are pretty shit
Yes, it's because alot of what they do actually is impressive but midwits can only glean hurr durr i-frames and stamina bar. None of the souls likes are good because they don't truly understand the sheer amount of work and effort that goes into souls, all the way down to the animations and hitboxes. They just try to copy at a surface level and it never works.
A lot of work goes into Souls trying to deal with the arms race of iframes vs aggression.
It’s irreparably altered the legend of Zelda(neutral), retired the character action sub-genre(bad), and showed middle budget dev teams that movie games armrest the only AAA titles that turn heads (excellent, in fact vital after the last of us and it’s consequences)
Aren’t
Enemy variety, enemy variety, enemy variety.
You can have the funnest combat system ever but if you're just chopping up the same shit all game, it gets old very fast.
FS nails that feeling of encountering something unfamiliar and going "what fresh hell is this?".
KH and Tales of Symphonia/Vesperia do this pretty well too, but I don't see people bringing those up as masterclasses as often.
>You can have the funnest combat system ever but if you're just chopping up the same shit all game, it gets old very fast.
This is the biggest failing of DD2 at the moment . The combat is great but you're fighting the same handful of monsters (that you were fighting 12 years ago) every 20 seconds.
Honestly, presentation.
I'm far from a FS dickrider but their visual art direction and design skills are top notch. It also helps that level design tends to be pretty great, too.
I, too, love killing the same fat frick with the same moveset for decades at a time.
As it turns out, they're adventure games first and foremost. A sense of wonder and payoff is what counts.
Second, good animations and feedbackl can make even the simplest games fun to play
I don't know your standard but having played BB just after TW3 it was night and day in terms of combat.
For me the things that from games do best is weapon animation + art direction.
The thing they do worse is magic build/shooting at things.
if you manage to make one game that's good then you can build a cult that will slurp up whatever mediocre slop you put out after
What exactly do they do with bosses on a mechanical level compared to other games that makes them special? Is not having difficulty settings actually that impactful?
They have cool presentations and thematics. That's basically it. DeS, DaS, and even BB to an extent mostly focused their bosses on different themes. I soured on ER pretty hard because the thematics were ignored for a lot of bosses and when every boss has a cool second phase transition, they stop being cool.
Even in that case, I still hear plenty of praise for ER's main fights.
I hear people praise Godskin Duo too. You gonna listen to them?
Souls and action RPG combat needs to move away from over reliance on i-frame rolls. I would rather have to actually dodge an attack then just press the magical invincibility button to phase through my enemy's attacks. I find it especially annoying when the best way of avoiding attacks from large targets is to roll INTO them (see Godskin Noble's roll and Ulcerated Tree Spirit in Elden Ring) it's unintuitive and doesn't make sense outside of the context of an i-frame combat system.
Play KH, Tales, Dragon's Dogma, Odin Sphere, Sifu, and SoR4.
Seems better than it was in something like "Tales of" Arise, though.
have you heard the word of our Lord and Savior Monster Hunter
Rise really took a beating on this one though. It gave almost every weapon some kind of counter, which turns the game into "hug face and maintain perfect iframes."
It was fine-ish in GU with adept dodging, but Rise took it way too far.
Those aren’t rpgs. They are action games. Action rpg is a contradiction. That stays exist change nothing. Unless they are 4 dudes standing in a row it’s not an rpg
rolls are shit and sidestepping is better,the combat in souls games is unimpressive and lore being obstuse and nonsensical is horrible,
what souls does well is a initially high difficulty that can be overcome in numerous ways,story that is out of the way and buried so people that want that feel like it's a reward while those that don't are happy in its absence
Based.
any nioh bros in here
nothing, rollslop is rollslop.
I play Stranger of Peak. Does that count?
The big one that bothers the shit out of me is having your attacks auto-target and slide you into position, as well as the enemies having that move assist too. Fromsoft games either don't have this or they only have it lightly.
It's nice to actually be in control of your positioning. I like standing inbetween 3 enemies so that my big weapon swing hits all three instead of hoping when I press R1 the game positions me right to have that happen. I like how I can dodge the bosses just by knowing the range or turn speed of each attack, or when an attack has a minimum range the boss have to move meaning I can just run into them and they hop over me.
Too many games have the enemies lock in on you and you either have to dodge or block/parry. The enemies will move as far as they need to have their attack hit you. You can watch their feet slide across the floor as they get slid into position while they're mid attack animation.
It looks cheap. It feels cheap. It is cheap.
I've been playing DD2 recently and I sigh every time I do the input that in a better game would cause me to attack where I specify, instead just send me off in some direction I had no intention of attacking into. When I use the rope pull attack on airborne enemies they get flung towards and over me, I wanna hold down on the stick and R2 to execute them, but it's a fricking gamble as to whether the game will have me attack backwards where the enemy is about to be or send me right towards them because I'm using the attack pre-emptively.
If you can easily win fights with your eyes closed, it's because the devs took away control for the most important mechanic in the game, movement.
Guess what other series doesn't have this?I will spread the good word of Tales until we get a AAA LMBS game. I don't even care if FromSoft is told to make it, at this point.
all the best weapons in ds3 were the ones with cool L1s, weapon skills, or both. Elden Ring does this too but buffs the weapon skills to be more worthwhile for every weapon. in DS3 the FGS lets you combo the l1s and r1s together, that's cool. Souls actually has 4 attack buttons depending on your weapon, make them weave inbetween each other more fluidly and you could have something neat.
it's simple, non floaty movement is mandatory especially during attacking. That's where most of these guys fail, they're trying too hard to make an action game and not trying hard enough to make a combat and exploration sim
Here's an actual important one: Most players cant multi task, if you want to have 1 or 2 bosses that require multi tasking then fine, but if the regular enemies require a lot of multi tasking, like lords of the fallen, then people will cry.
Here's one of the best bosses in the series.
Demon Princes and second phase of the Friede fight are multi-enemy bosses done right since they don't both try to face frick you at once.
Souls camera perspective is not conducive to fighting multiple enemies at once and if the multi-enemy bosses aren't specifically designed to be together (a lot of Elden Ring bosses) then the bosses just become either an exercise in patience to find a rare opening or a bum rush to get rid of one of the bosses.
add a double jump upgrade, better platforming
and a better parry/interrupt/counter/stagger system for the spazzed out bosses
>give the player just enough to understand the basics and let them figure out the rest
>don't text-dump your lore / world
>let the player trial and error and don't be afraid of exposing them to failure (the converse to a lot of game devs embracing Nintendofication of their games)
>the player is not the center of attention in an amusement park, they're just another entity in the living world that is indifferent to them
>clipping and technical polish is important (to fix)
Just a sense of variety in settings and enemies types really.
Every thing else Elden Ring does has been done better in other open world games.
The thing I love most about Souls is different builds, weapons, and planning that can get involved. I think most other actions RPGs do these things, so I really just want more of the same.
play After Death
https://store.steampowered.com/app/713160/After_Death/
https://files.catbox.moe/a1043y.mp3
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put it on sale for 5 and i will
on sale it's really cheap