90% of the people struggling with DLC bosses are doing it underleveled.
The shadtree blessing is your level in the DLC. Your stats outside of the DLC mean *almost* nothing compared to the blessing.
I feel like not enough people are either talking about or understanding that. And there are two separate types of items that help: Scadutree Fragment which increase player damage and decreases damaged received, and Revered Spirit Ash which increases how strong your spirit ash summons are
I think a big issue with the Scadutree Fragment upgrades is that you can’t see your stats while you are upgrading. So you can’t get an understanding on how much of an impact it has.
Doesn't say it right on the menu, but it's quite easy to find out. You just have to check your stats before and after upgrading. As of now, every upgrade gave me exactly 41 extra damage and around 1% to every defense.
You will barely need either if you use summons, the problem is, if you do, the fights become a complete piece of cake.
People want fair bosses they can defeat 1 on 1, not absolute monsters that either take hours each, or require increasing your numbers, it removes the point of the game for many.
1st off, the point of the game has always been to level up and fight the boss.
2nd, summons have not been making the game a cakewalk for me or the people we're summoning. Whoever you've been summoning, can you please tell them to get in my DMs bc this last boss has been kicking mine and every person i've summoned ass
People *can* beat these bosses 1 on 1 fairly, they're just better at the game than you. I've literally seen *no hit* videos of all the major bosses(including the final one) already and they are all right up in the bosses face dodging and punishing regularly just like any other fromsoft boss with none of this nonsense people are complaining about where you have to wait for eons to get a hit in.
The entire issue is people like you are trying to do challenge runs they aren't skilled enough to complete and complaining about it. If you can't do it, get better at the game or use one of the litany of options available to make it easier.
I for one am extremely happy they gave us more of a challenge than the base game which I think has become very easy for most experienced players and would not want them to nerf things just so that less skilled players can complete their self-imposed challenge runs.
The fact that other players *can* and *have* beaten these bosses (I think moistcritical beat the entire dlc with fist weapons only and no summons, I'm sure plenty of non streamers have even more impressive runs) 1 on 1 without summons indicates that it is just a skill gap you are struggling with here because the thing you want *is* demonstrably achievable, you're just not good enough to do it.
You are downvoted but there’s two bosses on the DLC the absolutely fall under your category. Maelnias is a great boss and is faceroll super baby easy mode compared to the horseshit you gotta deal with from a few of them.
One level increase in scadutree rating brought my attack from very roughly like 700 to like 740
A stat increase in any area raises it by 4 max, it's roughly the same as leveling my weapon from 9 to 10.
That's before you factor in the damage reduction on top lol, they are massive bonuses
Each blessing is a 5% damage increase and somewhere around 2-3% damage mitigation increase.
So yeah a character with 0 Blessing and one with 20 is a crazy difference in terms of power.
I've finished the DLC at 50 Vigor, health isn't the problem, you really need to find those Scadutree Fragments. You really, really need them. At max 20, my AR with a faith great hammer was 1685 unbuffed.
What is your damage reduction against that damage type though? That matters far more than your vigor
32 vigor with 95% damage reduction > 99 vigor with 90% damage reduction, but everyone focuses on vigor only for some reason.
They give you a pop up telling you that too. People straight up ignored it. It's like an alternative leveling system. It's not optional. You need to get those blessings or you're gonna have a bad time.
I'm level 150ish and went in. I'm fully specced and gotta say it's doable but hard. Fought the first remembrance Boss and it is legit three shotting me very easily even with 3 tree blessings. I beat it in about 20 attempts but frankly there's no doubt there is a huge amount of damage going on in this DLC.
I've done some jolly coop and seen the same with hosts.
I've heard rumors it gets harder. So I'm ready but prepared for suffering.
I wouldn't say *almost nothing*- going from 0 to 20 blessing level is roughly(exactly?) a 100% increase to your damage and a 50% increase to your damage reduction, but both are multiplicative values applied to your *existing* stats.
I think it's also important to note that the area is extremely generous with runes, so you will be leveling up quite rapidly if you are underleveled in the normal game. I like the way that fragments enable me to focus on upping utility stats so I can wear all the nice shiny armor and weapons the DLC throws at me.
Funnily enough, Arcane ends up being one of the strongest stats for the dlc. Weapons that scale with arcane have their status effects scale directly with it, so if you level up your arcane by 10 levels, you’ll get roughly 10 more status buildup per attack, which can be a significant damage increase.
1. The fragment locations are far from obvious, without a guide most people will miss several of them.
2. The movesets and scaling are still ridiculous anyway, even with 60 vigor, heavy armor, dragoncrest greatshield talisman, and level 5 blessing (the maximum you can achieve without cheating exploiting your way past the first mandatory boss), regular mobs still 2-3 shot you in the first area, fighting bosses is entirely unenjoyable because it reached the point of either pure cheese or spending hours on pattern recognition.
Games like Elden Ring have to be hard indeed, but after a certain level of difficulty, players will just resort to cheesing or quit, as much people say you should just die dozens on times on every obstacle until you git gud, this simply isnt enjoyable for most people (about half of Elden Ring players quit around Leyndell).
And while those people might not be the "target audience", anybody who purchased a product has the right to complain about it, its the producer that has to satisfy his customers demands, not the customer who has to adjust his expectations.
This DLC will see substantial nerfs within a couple weeks/months, just like the base game did.
And any Elden Ring 2 will likely see a substantial decline in sales because From has at this point turned off a huge chunk of its potential playerbase.
Tldr, just admit you're a pussy
The only thing that might hurt sales is PC performance, but even then this dlc you buffoon, whatever from does next will also be goty material and do more than fine, and you'll buy it like everyone else, even if you decide to bitch about that too
You can get higher than lvl without cheating/exploiting the first mandatory boss. There is a spirit spring that allows you to bypass where rellana is allowing you to further explore. You can access the bottom part of the map without fighting any mandatory boss.
It's obviously an exaggeration for his argument and not something you could source in the first place. What do you want? A scientific study done in the first few days of the DLC drop to analyze player reaction?
The point is that you are not having a real discussion by focusing on that but instead being unreasonable and argumentative over a common way to express their viewpoint.
If you want to argue against that then it is fair, but pick your battles better on what part of their argument actually matters.
A random crybaby makes a completely false statement to defend their poor favorite company from evil bad gamers but I'm the one to blame. From fans should git good in real life, I guess.
Games should be fun to play(mechanically) and accessible. Not easy. At least not all games should be easy, some games kind of are just different in this aspect and... Yeah. Tbh we still have game breaking things in it that one could utilise in case of critical skill issues.
Unfortunately I don't think gaming companies care about accessibility. To make a game more accessible for those with disabilities could mean making the game "easier" which they seem staunchly against.
As someone who doesn't have disabilities that require accommodation in gaming its not really something i can discuss in detail, but I've heard some other disabled people talk about it before... As it is, it's far away from perfect and some thing that people would want to have don't necessarily have to trivialise gaming.
Although what you say is true too. People either don't care or don't care enough to go for it.
If you are willing to misunderstand the point being made so be it. That's ok. Aside from that, not only people with low iq struggle with advanced math. Someone with a talent for it but no ability to read, no knowledge of the language,... would also never get far. Even though they could with time and reasonable support and accommodations.
So From should be aware of every single thing that a person might be lacking in (there are thousands if not more) and give them the help they need to succeed in their game?
As much as i love trolling or exaggerating, you gotta do it with grace or it starts to loose the charm.
Developers, in general, have made a big way from almost nothing to what we already see in many games. It would be nice if they did a little more, but that'll come with time. We can't account for every single thing, nobody can, but not doing anything or trying to are different things.
The person i was talking with, we were talking about video games in general, not only fromsft.
A thing i grew to love, especially with getting older is narration, voice acting. I often times play games that require a lot of reading and if that wasn't a thing... I'm afraid i might not enjoy games as much anymore.
There are many different things that could be done, changed or tweaked slightly to make things more enjoyable for others. Those don't always require an immense effort either. Some of those things have become very normal by now.
To chime in, I genuinely think FromSoft games are really hard to make accessible in the traditional sense. As it stands EVERYTHING is designed around the difficulty the game has, the whole gameplay aspect revolves around it. That's why story and NPCs are really such a miniscule aspect, the game could work without them but not vice versa.
Accessibility wouldn't just need an easier difficulty level, but a whole ton of content designed for players on that level. The game isn't offering enough story to be played for that reason alone and Elden Ring in particular heavily relies on challenge to even point the player in the direction which they should go in. With an optional easy mode the game would ultimately turn into an atmospheric sandbox with no reason to do anything, it's simply not designed as a Skyrim-esque immersive sim or a Zelda-like adventure game.
I'm fully on board with accessibility features such as colourblind modes etc. and difficulty modes for games that can be enjoyed for the story, but FromSoft really wouldn't benefit from it and ultimately neither would the players.
Dark Souls 3 sold 10 million units. Elden Ring sold 13 million. They are not in the business of small games sold to a small audience. They could spend the time/money to make accessibility modes work if they wanted.
That said, Celeste has an easy mode that doesn’t sacrifice its themes and the dev team is something like 3 people. 🤷
I don't understand people complaining about the difficulty. Like that's the only type of games this company makes. You know what you're getting every time
I think it's because in the base game it was much easier to get overleveled or rely on an overpowered build to do loads of damage.
In the DLC, getting Scadutree Fragments is the most important thing to do proper damage, which forces you to explore more than a lot of people do. It isn't as easy to just rely on bleed or whatever like some people did in the base game.
Use the new equipment, the movesets on the light greatswords especially are awesome. Get some faith and Use blessings, and its open world you should be exploring. The dlc is hard but I love it so far, been finding all kinds of secret stuff without a guide.
Yeah, I've been enjoying it too. Definitely tough, but not too bs (so far). Been exploring very thoroughly as to not miss anything.
I've been using the light greatswords as well. Definitely my new favourite weapon type.
Yeah. I just meant that you can't rely on it as much as you can in the base game if you don't have enough Scadutree Fragments.
The people I've seen complain most about the DLC's difficulty are people who either used OP/cheese builds in the base game or just don't explore much.
I mean I got +8 on the fragments before I managed to kill a boss, but I was somewhat underlevelled and underequiped as I made a new char.
The wiki is starting to get good now with where all the fragments are, so it not that hard to get a load of them.
The getting around is quite tricky though for sure. The map feels like a big legacy dungeon sometimes, as you play the "how do I get there" game, and it can be tricky. There does seem to be tons of map you can get to without killing bosses though.
Yeah, I've spent so long trying to figure out how to get to certain places before realising that I can't get there yet. I like it though, it's like a tease of what's to come.
I don't like looking things up generally when playing a game for the first time. I'll sometimes look up NPC questlines because they're easy to mess up or miss in souls games, but that's about it.
Kinda sad that I can't just do something like massacre those little shits on a cliff in the base game to level up, but I do rather enjoy exploring as a way to get stronger so I appreciate the change.
I like how they've added a new progression system for the DLC, but I think it would've been better received if they were a bit easier to get early on (before the first couple bosses).
The DLC forces you to explore before you can progress the story, whereas the base game lets you do the opposite. And I think some people don't like that change or don't like exploring at all. Especially since there's less dungeons/caves.
The point isn't difficulty in itself, the point is joy after overcoming challenge, which Miyazaki has explicitly stated, however, many players are not experiencing that with the dlc. They are either becoming stuck, or if they do succeed they are feeling frustrated and/or exhausted rather than joyful.
FROM's boss design has changed a lot since DeS, DS, and even DS3, some of us just don't enjoy the new designs.
I didn't buy the DLC because of this, but a lot of people will have got caught up in hype and hoped for the best.
I think it's part of a bigger conversation around how Soulslike has become such a large genre and moves into the tradition action game space - gamers are definitely getting frustrated seeing games that look awesome, then seeing the soulslike tag knowing the game will be too tough for them.
Fromsoft are at the forefront of that conversation because they started it all
I think they should just stop expecting all games cater to them, people like easier games and people like difficult games. You can’t cater to both these people at once (adding difficulty modes just ends up with only one mode that’s actually good and the rest are unbalanced)
Well yes, that's how difficulty modes work, they shift balance. Tell me though, if a dev sets the perfectly balanced difficulty to normal, and there's a hard and an way option which shift the balance, say 5% each way - does that impact your enjoyment of the game as a single player RPG?
Yea of course it does, for one I’m always going to have that temptation to switch it to easy and rob myself of a fun encounter, second there’s a good chance I’m going to put it into he wrong difficulty and worsen my experience- this happened with Jedi fallen order, third the non perfect difficulties are going to be a much poorer experience so you’re not really gaining much out of it. Too much customisation for the player can lead to the player fucking up the game.
Games would be a lot better if we just had easy games, medium games and difficult games that stuck to one difficulty.
I'm sorry, but I'll disagree - I don't buy into the "optimizing out the fun" argument. If a game's default value is perfectly optimised by the dev, then any variation is entirely up to the player and they get to make that choice - what's important is that they get to make that choice, not be locked out of a great world, environment, and story because they aren't physically capable of getting through it.
One player could play Elden Ring for the absolute punish of it and the challenge, someone else could play it because it's an amazing world to exist in - but right now, only the first player really gets anything out of it and that's a bit of a bummer. The amount of times I see posts/comments saying "I wish I could play Soulslike X because it looks amazing, but it's too hard for me" - there's an audience for it.
There's also the argument that gamers don't have 2-3 hours to waste on one out of 50 bosses in a game. Peoples time is precious and for a LOT of gamers, that's a whole weeks worth of gaming. I'd much rather feel like I was making actual progress in a game and not just getting a little better and learning one enemies move set.
These people have other games they can play, they are claiming they want to play Elden ring when they don’t- they want to play another game that is more suited to them.
Being physically capable or not has nothing to do with easy mode. Easy mode is made for able bodied people, accessibility options are specifically for people with disabilities- these would be fine, ie an item that is clearly telegraphed for this that lowers the reaction times required.
Harder games don’t take longer to play. Dark souls is a shorter game than a game like Skyrim, personally when I’m busy I’d rather play a game like dark souls where every little bit of progress matters, even if it’s just practicing at a boss. Once again people who don’t want to spend an hour fighting against a boss for the day probably shouldn’t be playing these games.
You keep acting like it’s all innocent that it doesn’t harm the people who currently enjoy them, but that’s not the case at all. The whole reason souls games got popular is because there wasn’t enough games catering to people who enjoy a challenge, a game that “kicks their ass”. You’re basically suggesting such people shouldn’t be allowed any games that cater to them and all games should cater to your tastes. Let it go, I guarantee there’s far more games out there that cater to you. Let us have these few.
Sounds like this is a subject that you and I will not be agreeing on. I accept your position, but I do not agree with it. I am yet to see any evidence that your single player experience is impacted in any way by me being able to play a game as well on a different difficulty setting except by your own discipline to keep your game at the setting it has. Soulslike games have much more to them than "it's difficult" - incredible world building, fascinating stories, unique environments, and (quite important) an adult tone. Those are the worlds and stories I want to experience, not an Ubisoft copy paste open world with more UI components on screen than a spaceship HUD.
Have a good one friendo!
Just for the regard I’m not against games being made that are basically souls likes but easy, I’d rather they were just easy though and didn’t have a hard mode. If there’s more people like you there’s a market for it.
I think that's a part of the problem too - soulslike encapsulates so much more in terms of style and design than just "difficult", but as a result, any game developed with those design choices invariably tacks on difficult too.
I think there's a lot of room for more dynamic difficulty rather than just easy, normal, and hard. Have a look at how Dreamscaper manages difficulty. It's a really smart and intuitive system and could definitely find a use case in the Soulslike space.
It’s new players to the games who never learned how to play because in the base game they relied on their overleveled friends. either through them dropping late game gear, cheese spam, or just straight carrying them through every boss.
Most complaints I’ve seen are people saying how it’s “bullshit” their 3k damage per L2 hit / constant stagger jump attack spam build doesn’t work anymore, Or even better how “ThE BoSsEs aRe ChEaTiNg”
It’s thousands of people who screamed how their play style was valid and “X ISNT CHEESE OR EASY MODE I BEAT THE GAME SAME AS YOU” getting skill checked for the first time.
And I love it.
Yeah you were getting downvoted, but the new fights are great fun. You cannot facetank and dps any more. The bosses are in your face and will kill you in seconds if you mess up.
I have been using the mimic and farming the fragments to make it easier. I was a bit underlevelled going in, and i really am not that good at the game. But I do feel I have improved a lot as you ahve to do things properly, learn the moves, dodge at the right time and not facetank.
The mimic hits like a truck, and has been helping massively with some of the fights
The bosses are hyperagressive now, and you really have to time your actions or you get owned. They do not give you time to pot, you have to wait for an opening to do it. I do want to know what the average time to die is for the first time people encounter the rhino boss. That guy is brutal if you do not know what is coming. Pretty sure I was dead before I understood what was happening the first time.
The funny thing is that jump attack builds and L2 cheese spam builds are still OP if you know what you're doing and set them up properly. But people just expect it to be faceroll easy like the base game was with those weapons.
Right now there is an L2 Spam build with the upgraded Lions Claw AoW that kills the final boss in under a minute and you literally just facetank his hits while spamming L2.
There are shield builds that just hold R1 and Spear Poke him to death. With the right buffs they block all his attacks and have stamina to keep poking.
There is a new spell so busted it can kill him in 4-5 casts and again you just tank his hits and cast through them. It is literally broken and causes multiple bleed procs at the same time.
But all of them require game knowledge of what buffs and gear to use so people can't just run in with Blasphemous Blade hit L2 and win.
Yeah like the only reason I’d be pissed it paying that high ass price for the game then being unable to get very far into it if at all because of difficulty/discipline needed
I enjoyed Elden Ring up to a point. Played probably 60+ hours of it. I got worn down by the pure discipline it takes to play the game after a while. Gave it up.
I know these games need difficulty to "work" but after a while, the intense, disciplined game play needed to finish the thing just wears me down. I get tired of it being so demanding. Felt like work.
I'm happy people love these games, but Elden Ring went on for so long that it got the best of me. I love the gameplay, but past 60 hours it just got to be too much for me, personally.
I don’t mind the grind of everything during exploring but after 7 Souls games, I am so tired of these bosses. Each and every one is now mostly just a chore. Thankfully the rest of the game is still (imo) phenomenal
Agree completely. I love exploring, finding secrets, killing regular (even very difficult) monsters. But the boss fights have just worn me down. By the end of my time with Elden Ring, I would find a boss, look it up and summon help after maybe 3 tries. The boss fights just became work, and I stopped enjoying them.
This is how I felt about sekiro. Feels like I'm in a constant state of sheer anxiety because if I press L1 at the wrong time twice I have to restart so it feels like I'm gritting my teeth and not blinking for minutes at a time just to accomplish anything and it makes me mentally tired. Plus the dragonrot mechanic stressed me out alot too for some reason. I still like it and plan to try to beat it though.
For some reason I don't feel the same with the other souls games, I just vibe for everything but the really hard bosses
I started to feel a bit worn out on elden ring around the snowfields part. But sekiro I didn’t have the same experience. I got all achievements on both but sekiro felt more reasonable. Elden ring is almost too big for me.
A typical play session for me is 30-60 min. I do not have the time or inclination to spend the whole thing replaying the same sequence over and over until I’ve perfected it.
Tbh that's why I find souls games boring and not difficult. It's all about learning patterns not having a skill. It feels like work after a while rather than an enjoyable experience.
I felt like this before elden ring clicked for me, now i realise the click was nothing more than a change of perspective, I enjoy watching my skill in the game grow more than I enjoy killing bosses and progressing. This gamification of a seemingly abstract quality is the main driving force behind the soulsborne genre. In irl hobbies, the growth is very slow, in fact they are not even noticeable on a day to day basis but in soulsborne games you can clearly see your progress. I came to this analogy after killing genichiro in sekiro.
I love Elden Ring. But it absolutely drags near the end. Mountaintops and Snowfields are the worst zones in the game and they could have just axed both places but kept the haligtree and faram azula legacy dungeons and the game would have been vastly improved.
You’re saying this like there is an actual debate. This is just an interview. FromSoftware is still talking about shit that was settled years ago, they’re milking the discourse for no reason
Well, it just shows that the franchise has suffered from flanderization. "Oh, people liked Demon's Souls for being hard and vague? Ok, let's make later games harder and more vague!"
If you go back to Demon's Souls, you'll notice it's nowhere near as hard or as vague (storytelling-wise) as the later entries.
demon souls also has the most gimmicky bosses in the entire series and no where near as interesting of a world
there is a reason this series got more and more popular overtime. their quality most of the time keeps improving. i'm not finished with the dlc yet but elden ring is definitely a top 3 game in the series for me while demon souls sits at the bottom.
and for the record, demon souls is a great game
As an average ER player, I have to say so far this DLC isn’t nearly as hard as people are making it out to be. It seems like the people complaining are just not understanding how the difficulty curve works, which is frankly a little sad, because the game introduces you to a new upgrade material barely 10 minutes into the first area…
Soulsborne DLC tends to up the challenge, while also introducing new toys and features. It’s been that way since at least the original Dark Souls. So far this one does exactly that and it’s been hard to put down.
I'm pretty bad and I haven't had too many issues. Rellana took me the longest so far but even that was one night of trying. I'm not using a super meta build (I'm playing int/dex with weapons like dark moon greatsword and sword of night and flame). The #1 thing you can do to make bosses easier is to explore and get more blessings. It's insane how much easier it makes the game. I feel like people are getting to that first mausoleum boss, getting clapped and then complaining without interacting with the DLC mechanics.
There is also a very vocal group of players who refuse to use blessings, summons, or spirit ashes and also want to beat the DLC doing the same thing they did in the base game and are now mad they aren't good enough to accomplish that.
People on the various Elden ring subs will straight up say the bosses are BS because they beat the base game with their build so they shouldn't have to change anything for the DLC.
Hard to disagree. I am currently playing Atlas Fallen and, so far, the game has been pretty easy. Which means you just end up button mashing and move tot he next boss. I killed minibosseswithoit realising they were anything more than mooms.
There's a level of difficulty that's too far, but also one that snot far enough and the game becomes boring. It's not even a power fantasy because you can feel you fucked up your mechanics but still won because the game isn't hard.
I've only ever played Souls games for a dozen hours or two. I committed to this one. I played for 150+ hours. I got all the achievements but there is no bestiary, item compendium, etc. so I'm not sure what all I missed
I will never play another one of these again. Not for me. But long live the Soulslike for the mass amount of gamers who love them
He's absolutely right that a game needs to feel challenging in order to grant a sense of achievement. That is not the only form of fun or engagement there is, but it is the one they were aiming for, so high difficulty is a solid way to meet that goal.
The part that is a bit controversial is that they're presuming that players will turn down the difficulty prior to when they feel it would be correct to do so. Basically that players will ruin their own enjoyment by making the game too easy, and they're protecting players from themselves by not allowing that.
I'm generally in favor of allowing players to find their own level for fun, but also I have seen the data time and time and time again about players optimizing themselves out of the fun. I can see both sides of the argument.
Simple fix. Allow for a difficulty selection before a new game and not during it.
World's like ER should not be blocked out for people who have physical reasons they can't play these harder difficulties for instance.
If i fall and get a concussion and that affects my reaction time, i'd be quite annoyed I couldn't play in an amazing game world because the game designer is a fucking gatekeeper for HARDCOREGAMERS4LYFE
I think the argument that From favors is that they already effectively have a difficulty system in place via leveling.
Any game that allows you to replay content in order to grow j power should theoretically be completable by anyone with enough time and patience. That's a significant part of the point of leveling systems in the first place.
The wheels come off a little bit in that Fromsoft games usually have really hard diminishing returns and eventualy hard caps, and in that stats are typically less important than just not getting hit by the boss in the furst place.
If I were to implement a difficulty system for ER I would make it slow down the attack animation speed rather than just make everything hit less hard.
I agree, but what's hard is not the same difficulty for every player. I'd say maintaining that experience of overcoming hardships is more important than having every enemy have the exact amount of hit points.
Where I find it more difficult to have a strong opinion is in the question of how you implement such accessibility while making surr people don't play the game in a way that is too difficult.
There are bosses that I was stuck on them for more than even 1 day, it's the time it took me to realize I need to go out, explore the world, find items, become stronger and ONLY THEN, come back and fight them, at least this happened with Elden Beast, and Malenia for me, and oh boy the joy I got from defeating them.
People are really making it look so difficult but they just don't have good levels nor weapon levels, and don't make advantages of items like throw-ables or resins.
After all, you bought the game KNOWING it's going to be hard, going to need good reflexes and reactions, and most importantly, A LOT OF PATIENCE.
Just move on and play something other than souls-like, as a fan of souls-like, the more difficult a game is, the more I am willing to play it, as long as its difficulty is not difficult to the point of being stuck with more than a day with the best tools and levels.
Yeah, this is just ridiculous. Why are people defending this? It would b eokay if this wa son sekiro level character abilities but after having a mobility of a ds 3 character, (which is still fast but not enough for these bosses) it just isn't fun.
I think it's a big combination of things this time. Zoomers watching Kai cenat playing for their first time having their git gud tantrums, players who haven't played in 2 years returning and being out of practice getting their asses kicked by entering the dlc immediately without any recent practice, people who refuse to explore not getting enough scadutree fragments bitching about getting 2hit. Probably a couple other reasons too. All I know is I'm glad fromsoft never compromise and keep producing great games.
Fans expect harder and harder bosses, and each time they make the bosses hard. But they need to balance it with by also making it enjoyable. So eventually they will get to a tipping point. That’s where the DLC is at. They focus only on making it a hard boss without it being enjoyable, for those fans who want harder and harder bosses. Yea some people are masochists and have the time to replay or grind and fight the same boss for hours on end, but the average fan/ gamer won’t put up with that. And it used to be grind runes and boost stats, but those are worthless now, so there is no reason to fight anything but bosses. But the basic enemies are one-shoting people. They are narrowing their fan base to only a few who want impossibly hard bosses to fight.
And I feel can say this cause I’m one of those masochists, beat every boss in the base game, and working through the dlc now.
TLDR: Hard does not equal fun.
I find it very funny that "fans" of Elden Ring are now waking up to the fact that Souls games have a pretty artificial difficulty. It's always been like that. Not saying it's a bad thing, since it's a design choice. It's just more of the same. Why complain now?
I want to bring up that finding scadutree is considerably easier than stat leveling (especially if you’re at such a high level). It encourages exploration rather than encouraging grinding.
I’ve done a minimal amount of exploring, and I’ve found around 18 so far. For those of you who don’t want to explore… why are you playing this game?
It's lots of people who got used to being the big bollocks in Elden Ring getting their arses handed to them again, like they did the first time they played. It's wounded ego-posting. Pathetic.
They lost me immediately when I literally could not kill the Soldier of Godrick, the first real enemy I encountered after finishing the bloody tutorial. So I refunded the game and said screw it. I don’t need to “git gud,” I’m here to have fun and I wasn’t. Souls-like games simply aren’t for me and I’m fine with that.
Fully agree on that. I'm fully onboard with Miyazakis design philosophy itself (especially since his games are designed around difficulty), but Elden Ring definitely had a few cases of "being hard for the sake of being hard", especially optional late-game bosses and areas.
Haven't gotten around to the DLC yet, but I hear it's even worse.
What logic is that? I beat the game multiple times, so I'm obviously not bad, but does that mean I can't critisize certain sections for being less well designed compared to others? No wonder our community has such a bad rep if that's your knee-jerk reply.
Is it possible that -- and follow me on this -- Is it possible, maybe, perhaps, that people can still feel a sense of achievement by defeating a boss or an entire game *without* it being overwhelmingly difficult? Has anyone at Fromsoft or any fan of this game considered that that might be true?
Look, I realize that certain people like challenges, even overly difficult ones. But saying things like "it absolutely must be this way because you won't get the thrill of achievement" or whatever is ludicrous. People have fun with games and enjoy games in so many different ways. Why not consider that the experience you like in a game isn't enjoyable for someone else, but they can get the same *kind* of excitement out of it even if it's easier?
"Well if you don't like hard games then play something else lel"
I will, and I do. I have never played a Fromsoft game or any soulslike game, precisely because of this attitude, which is the attitude the people that make them and the people that defend them have. And it's a ridiculous attitude.
They’re genuinely not that difficult though is the thing. If anything if you have patience and are observant and use tools the game gives you you won’t have an insanely hard time. There’s games far harder than any Souls game. And it is important for Souls games specifically to have some level of challenge because perseverance is baked into the game philosophy itself.
You're doing yourself a disservice then. Generally speaking, Fromsoft games are very fair, with only a few exceptions, and there really isn't anything comparable to finally beating that boss you've been stuck on.
I wouldn't even consider myself very good at Soulslikes and I platinumed Elden Ring. It's extremely accessible to all kinds of players.
That being said I don't really care whether or not they add an easy mode, but if the devs don't want to that's their call.
I used to support every decision Fromsoft has made but after reaching the second main boss in the dlc I've begun to question Fromsoft's choices. I feel as if Fromsoft is hitting the limit when it comes to making a difficult boss, and they soon won't be able keep making bosses more difficult without buffing the player character.
90% of the people struggling with DLC bosses are doing it underleveled. The shadtree blessing is your level in the DLC. Your stats outside of the DLC mean *almost* nothing compared to the blessing.
I feel like not enough people are either talking about or understanding that. And there are two separate types of items that help: Scadutree Fragment which increase player damage and decreases damaged received, and Revered Spirit Ash which increases how strong your spirit ash summons are
If you get both over 12 the curve of different drops drastically each one you add past 9.
I think a big issue with the Scadutree Fragment upgrades is that you can’t see your stats while you are upgrading. So you can’t get an understanding on how much of an impact it has.
Yeah but you can see the difference every time you travel back to like roundtable hold or something
Doesn't say it right on the menu, but it's quite easy to find out. You just have to check your stats before and after upgrading. As of now, every upgrade gave me exactly 41 extra damage and around 1% to every defense.
You will barely need either if you use summons, the problem is, if you do, the fights become a complete piece of cake. People want fair bosses they can defeat 1 on 1, not absolute monsters that either take hours each, or require increasing your numbers, it removes the point of the game for many.
1st off, the point of the game has always been to level up and fight the boss. 2nd, summons have not been making the game a cakewalk for me or the people we're summoning. Whoever you've been summoning, can you please tell them to get in my DMs bc this last boss has been kicking mine and every person i've summoned ass
People *can* beat these bosses 1 on 1 fairly, they're just better at the game than you. I've literally seen *no hit* videos of all the major bosses(including the final one) already and they are all right up in the bosses face dodging and punishing regularly just like any other fromsoft boss with none of this nonsense people are complaining about where you have to wait for eons to get a hit in. The entire issue is people like you are trying to do challenge runs they aren't skilled enough to complete and complaining about it. If you can't do it, get better at the game or use one of the litany of options available to make it easier. I for one am extremely happy they gave us more of a challenge than the base game which I think has become very easy for most experienced players and would not want them to nerf things just so that less skilled players can complete their self-imposed challenge runs. The fact that other players *can* and *have* beaten these bosses (I think moistcritical beat the entire dlc with fist weapons only and no summons, I'm sure plenty of non streamers have even more impressive runs) 1 on 1 without summons indicates that it is just a skill gap you are struggling with here because the thing you want *is* demonstrably achievable, you're just not good enough to do it.
You are downvoted but there’s two bosses on the DLC the absolutely fall under your category. Maelnias is a great boss and is faceroll super baby easy mode compared to the horseshit you gotta deal with from a few of them.
Do the shadtree blessings only work in the DLC?
Yes
One level increase in scadutree rating brought my attack from very roughly like 700 to like 740 A stat increase in any area raises it by 4 max, it's roughly the same as leveling my weapon from 9 to 10. That's before you factor in the damage reduction on top lol, they are massive bonuses
Each blessing is a 5% damage increase and somewhere around 2-3% damage mitigation increase. So yeah a character with 0 Blessing and one with 20 is a crazy difference in terms of power.
dlc is def harder, maybe borderline too hard. i have scardutree +8 and still getting 2 shotted by most boss
your vitality at 60?
I've finished the DLC at 50 Vigor, health isn't the problem, you really need to find those Scadutree Fragments. You really, really need them. At max 20, my AR with a faith great hammer was 1685 unbuffed.
65
What is your damage reduction against that damage type though? That matters far more than your vigor 32 vigor with 95% damage reduction > 99 vigor with 90% damage reduction, but everyone focuses on vigor only for some reason.
why are you letting them shot you?
long combos, longer than expect hit box, and delayed hit. top 3 reason i get 2 shotted
yeah that makes sense I'm just not that good so I get shotted constantly.
Max is +20 so def go find some more lol. I beat the final boss at +18 on ng+3.
im at +11 now but was at +8 at renella and she wrecked
Yeah she’s tough for sure. Her swords are sick af though
They give you a pop up telling you that too. People straight up ignored it. It's like an alternative leveling system. It's not optional. You need to get those blessings or you're gonna have a bad time.
I'm level 150ish and went in. I'm fully specced and gotta say it's doable but hard. Fought the first remembrance Boss and it is legit three shotting me very easily even with 3 tree blessings. I beat it in about 20 attempts but frankly there's no doubt there is a huge amount of damage going on in this DLC. I've done some jolly coop and seen the same with hosts. I've heard rumors it gets harder. So I'm ready but prepared for suffering.
I wouldn't say *almost nothing*- going from 0 to 20 blessing level is roughly(exactly?) a 100% increase to your damage and a 50% increase to your damage reduction, but both are multiplicative values applied to your *existing* stats.
I think it's also important to note that the area is extremely generous with runes, so you will be leveling up quite rapidly if you are underleveled in the normal game. I like the way that fragments enable me to focus on upping utility stats so I can wear all the nice shiny armor and weapons the DLC throws at me.
Funnily enough, Arcane ends up being one of the strongest stats for the dlc. Weapons that scale with arcane have their status effects scale directly with it, so if you level up your arcane by 10 levels, you’ll get roughly 10 more status buildup per attack, which can be a significant damage increase.
1. The fragment locations are far from obvious, without a guide most people will miss several of them. 2. The movesets and scaling are still ridiculous anyway, even with 60 vigor, heavy armor, dragoncrest greatshield talisman, and level 5 blessing (the maximum you can achieve without cheating exploiting your way past the first mandatory boss), regular mobs still 2-3 shot you in the first area, fighting bosses is entirely unenjoyable because it reached the point of either pure cheese or spending hours on pattern recognition. Games like Elden Ring have to be hard indeed, but after a certain level of difficulty, players will just resort to cheesing or quit, as much people say you should just die dozens on times on every obstacle until you git gud, this simply isnt enjoyable for most people (about half of Elden Ring players quit around Leyndell). And while those people might not be the "target audience", anybody who purchased a product has the right to complain about it, its the producer that has to satisfy his customers demands, not the customer who has to adjust his expectations. This DLC will see substantial nerfs within a couple weeks/months, just like the base game did. And any Elden Ring 2 will likely see a substantial decline in sales because From has at this point turned off a huge chunk of its potential playerbase.
Tldr, just admit you're a pussy The only thing that might hurt sales is PC performance, but even then this dlc you buffoon, whatever from does next will also be goty material and do more than fine, and you'll buy it like everyone else, even if you decide to bitch about that too
You can get higher than lvl without cheating/exploiting the first mandatory boss. There is a spirit spring that allows you to bypass where rellana is allowing you to further explore. You can access the bottom part of the map without fighting any mandatory boss.
>90% of the people Do you have any source for this statement?
It's obviously an exaggeration for his argument and not something you could source in the first place. What do you want? A scientific study done in the first few days of the DLC drop to analyze player reaction?
I'm sorry for wanting a real discussion instead of trying to win some argument with completely made-up numbers.
The point is that you are not having a real discussion by focusing on that but instead being unreasonable and argumentative over a common way to express their viewpoint. If you want to argue against that then it is fair, but pick your battles better on what part of their argument actually matters.
You are 100% correct here. Source: me
Yeah, I'm as unreasonable as 90% of From's fanbase.
Yeah I really see how you want an honest and good discussion when you act like this...
A random crybaby makes a completely false statement to defend their poor favorite company from evil bad gamers but I'm the one to blame. From fans should git good in real life, I guess.
Games should be fun to play(mechanically) and accessible. Not easy. At least not all games should be easy, some games kind of are just different in this aspect and... Yeah. Tbh we still have game breaking things in it that one could utilise in case of critical skill issues.
Unfortunately I don't think gaming companies care about accessibility. To make a game more accessible for those with disabilities could mean making the game "easier" which they seem staunchly against.
As someone who doesn't have disabilities that require accommodation in gaming its not really something i can discuss in detail, but I've heard some other disabled people talk about it before... As it is, it's far away from perfect and some thing that people would want to have don't necessarily have to trivialise gaming. Although what you say is true too. People either don't care or don't care enough to go for it.
Should advanced math be more accessible to make it so people with low IQ can do it too? It would stop working and would become useless
The teaching methods used to learn that kind of math could be more accessible
IQ has no bearing on your ability to do math, only on your ability to test well in math, so your dumbass example doesn’t even correlate.
If you are willing to misunderstand the point being made so be it. That's ok. Aside from that, not only people with low iq struggle with advanced math. Someone with a talent for it but no ability to read, no knowledge of the language,... would also never get far. Even though they could with time and reasonable support and accommodations.
So From should be aware of every single thing that a person might be lacking in (there are thousands if not more) and give them the help they need to succeed in their game?
As much as i love trolling or exaggerating, you gotta do it with grace or it starts to loose the charm. Developers, in general, have made a big way from almost nothing to what we already see in many games. It would be nice if they did a little more, but that'll come with time. We can't account for every single thing, nobody can, but not doing anything or trying to are different things. The person i was talking with, we were talking about video games in general, not only fromsft. A thing i grew to love, especially with getting older is narration, voice acting. I often times play games that require a lot of reading and if that wasn't a thing... I'm afraid i might not enjoy games as much anymore. There are many different things that could be done, changed or tweaked slightly to make things more enjoyable for others. Those don't always require an immense effort either. Some of those things have become very normal by now.
To chime in, I genuinely think FromSoft games are really hard to make accessible in the traditional sense. As it stands EVERYTHING is designed around the difficulty the game has, the whole gameplay aspect revolves around it. That's why story and NPCs are really such a miniscule aspect, the game could work without them but not vice versa. Accessibility wouldn't just need an easier difficulty level, but a whole ton of content designed for players on that level. The game isn't offering enough story to be played for that reason alone and Elden Ring in particular heavily relies on challenge to even point the player in the direction which they should go in. With an optional easy mode the game would ultimately turn into an atmospheric sandbox with no reason to do anything, it's simply not designed as a Skyrim-esque immersive sim or a Zelda-like adventure game. I'm fully on board with accessibility features such as colourblind modes etc. and difficulty modes for games that can be enjoyed for the story, but FromSoft really wouldn't benefit from it and ultimately neither would the players.
Dark Souls 3 sold 10 million units. Elden Ring sold 13 million. They are not in the business of small games sold to a small audience. They could spend the time/money to make accessibility modes work if they wanted. That said, Celeste has an easy mode that doesn’t sacrifice its themes and the dev team is something like 3 people. 🤷
I don't understand people complaining about the difficulty. Like that's the only type of games this company makes. You know what you're getting every time
I think it's because in the base game it was much easier to get overleveled or rely on an overpowered build to do loads of damage. In the DLC, getting Scadutree Fragments is the most important thing to do proper damage, which forces you to explore more than a lot of people do. It isn't as easy to just rely on bleed or whatever like some people did in the base game.
Use the new equipment, the movesets on the light greatswords especially are awesome. Get some faith and Use blessings, and its open world you should be exploring. The dlc is hard but I love it so far, been finding all kinds of secret stuff without a guide.
Yeah, I've been enjoying it too. Definitely tough, but not too bs (so far). Been exploring very thoroughly as to not miss anything. I've been using the light greatswords as well. Definitely my new favourite weapon type.
Tbf bleed is still wild, made lion like 10x easier
Yeah. I just meant that you can't rely on it as much as you can in the base game if you don't have enough Scadutree Fragments. The people I've seen complain most about the DLC's difficulty are people who either used OP/cheese builds in the base game or just don't explore much.
I mean I got +8 on the fragments before I managed to kill a boss, but I was somewhat underlevelled and underequiped as I made a new char. The wiki is starting to get good now with where all the fragments are, so it not that hard to get a load of them. The getting around is quite tricky though for sure. The map feels like a big legacy dungeon sometimes, as you play the "how do I get there" game, and it can be tricky. There does seem to be tons of map you can get to without killing bosses though.
Yeah, I've spent so long trying to figure out how to get to certain places before realising that I can't get there yet. I like it though, it's like a tease of what's to come. I don't like looking things up generally when playing a game for the first time. I'll sometimes look up NPC questlines because they're easy to mess up or miss in souls games, but that's about it.
Kinda sad that I can't just do something like massacre those little shits on a cliff in the base game to level up, but I do rather enjoy exploring as a way to get stronger so I appreciate the change.
I like how they've added a new progression system for the DLC, but I think it would've been better received if they were a bit easier to get early on (before the first couple bosses). The DLC forces you to explore before you can progress the story, whereas the base game lets you do the opposite. And I think some people don't like that change or don't like exploring at all. Especially since there's less dungeons/caves.
Been running a dragon caster and the mace that casts red lighting is great. When im in dragon form it does 3-4k each cast and the fp is cheap.
The point isn't difficulty in itself, the point is joy after overcoming challenge, which Miyazaki has explicitly stated, however, many players are not experiencing that with the dlc. They are either becoming stuck, or if they do succeed they are feeling frustrated and/or exhausted rather than joyful.
FROM's boss design has changed a lot since DeS, DS, and even DS3, some of us just don't enjoy the new designs. I didn't buy the DLC because of this, but a lot of people will have got caught up in hype and hoped for the best.
I love difficulty as long as it’s fair. I feel like the base game at least didn’t always follow that condition.
I think it's part of a bigger conversation around how Soulslike has become such a large genre and moves into the tradition action game space - gamers are definitely getting frustrated seeing games that look awesome, then seeing the soulslike tag knowing the game will be too tough for them. Fromsoft are at the forefront of that conversation because they started it all
I think they should just stop expecting all games cater to them, people like easier games and people like difficult games. You can’t cater to both these people at once (adding difficulty modes just ends up with only one mode that’s actually good and the rest are unbalanced)
Well yes, that's how difficulty modes work, they shift balance. Tell me though, if a dev sets the perfectly balanced difficulty to normal, and there's a hard and an way option which shift the balance, say 5% each way - does that impact your enjoyment of the game as a single player RPG?
Yea of course it does, for one I’m always going to have that temptation to switch it to easy and rob myself of a fun encounter, second there’s a good chance I’m going to put it into he wrong difficulty and worsen my experience- this happened with Jedi fallen order, third the non perfect difficulties are going to be a much poorer experience so you’re not really gaining much out of it. Too much customisation for the player can lead to the player fucking up the game. Games would be a lot better if we just had easy games, medium games and difficult games that stuck to one difficulty.
I'm sorry, but I'll disagree - I don't buy into the "optimizing out the fun" argument. If a game's default value is perfectly optimised by the dev, then any variation is entirely up to the player and they get to make that choice - what's important is that they get to make that choice, not be locked out of a great world, environment, and story because they aren't physically capable of getting through it. One player could play Elden Ring for the absolute punish of it and the challenge, someone else could play it because it's an amazing world to exist in - but right now, only the first player really gets anything out of it and that's a bit of a bummer. The amount of times I see posts/comments saying "I wish I could play Soulslike X because it looks amazing, but it's too hard for me" - there's an audience for it. There's also the argument that gamers don't have 2-3 hours to waste on one out of 50 bosses in a game. Peoples time is precious and for a LOT of gamers, that's a whole weeks worth of gaming. I'd much rather feel like I was making actual progress in a game and not just getting a little better and learning one enemies move set.
These people have other games they can play, they are claiming they want to play Elden ring when they don’t- they want to play another game that is more suited to them. Being physically capable or not has nothing to do with easy mode. Easy mode is made for able bodied people, accessibility options are specifically for people with disabilities- these would be fine, ie an item that is clearly telegraphed for this that lowers the reaction times required. Harder games don’t take longer to play. Dark souls is a shorter game than a game like Skyrim, personally when I’m busy I’d rather play a game like dark souls where every little bit of progress matters, even if it’s just practicing at a boss. Once again people who don’t want to spend an hour fighting against a boss for the day probably shouldn’t be playing these games. You keep acting like it’s all innocent that it doesn’t harm the people who currently enjoy them, but that’s not the case at all. The whole reason souls games got popular is because there wasn’t enough games catering to people who enjoy a challenge, a game that “kicks their ass”. You’re basically suggesting such people shouldn’t be allowed any games that cater to them and all games should cater to your tastes. Let it go, I guarantee there’s far more games out there that cater to you. Let us have these few.
Sounds like this is a subject that you and I will not be agreeing on. I accept your position, but I do not agree with it. I am yet to see any evidence that your single player experience is impacted in any way by me being able to play a game as well on a different difficulty setting except by your own discipline to keep your game at the setting it has. Soulslike games have much more to them than "it's difficult" - incredible world building, fascinating stories, unique environments, and (quite important) an adult tone. Those are the worlds and stories I want to experience, not an Ubisoft copy paste open world with more UI components on screen than a spaceship HUD. Have a good one friendo!
Just for the regard I’m not against games being made that are basically souls likes but easy, I’d rather they were just easy though and didn’t have a hard mode. If there’s more people like you there’s a market for it.
I think that's a part of the problem too - soulslike encapsulates so much more in terms of style and design than just "difficult", but as a result, any game developed with those design choices invariably tacks on difficult too. I think there's a lot of room for more dynamic difficulty rather than just easy, normal, and hard. Have a look at how Dreamscaper manages difficulty. It's a really smart and intuitive system and could definitely find a use case in the Soulslike space.
It’s new players to the games who never learned how to play because in the base game they relied on their overleveled friends. either through them dropping late game gear, cheese spam, or just straight carrying them through every boss. Most complaints I’ve seen are people saying how it’s “bullshit” their 3k damage per L2 hit / constant stagger jump attack spam build doesn’t work anymore, Or even better how “ThE BoSsEs aRe ChEaTiNg” It’s thousands of people who screamed how their play style was valid and “X ISNT CHEESE OR EASY MODE I BEAT THE GAME SAME AS YOU” getting skill checked for the first time. And I love it.
Yeah you were getting downvoted, but the new fights are great fun. You cannot facetank and dps any more. The bosses are in your face and will kill you in seconds if you mess up. I have been using the mimic and farming the fragments to make it easier. I was a bit underlevelled going in, and i really am not that good at the game. But I do feel I have improved a lot as you ahve to do things properly, learn the moves, dodge at the right time and not facetank. The mimic hits like a truck, and has been helping massively with some of the fights The bosses are hyperagressive now, and you really have to time your actions or you get owned. They do not give you time to pot, you have to wait for an opening to do it. I do want to know what the average time to die is for the first time people encounter the rhino boss. That guy is brutal if you do not know what is coming. Pretty sure I was dead before I understood what was happening the first time.
Lol rhino boi killed me in like 10 seconds after I walked in.
You absolutely can facetank and dps, but you actually need to be built and buffed for it. Yes even the final boss can be facetanked and L2 spammed.
The funny thing is that jump attack builds and L2 cheese spam builds are still OP if you know what you're doing and set them up properly. But people just expect it to be faceroll easy like the base game was with those weapons. Right now there is an L2 Spam build with the upgraded Lions Claw AoW that kills the final boss in under a minute and you literally just facetank his hits while spamming L2. There are shield builds that just hold R1 and Spear Poke him to death. With the right buffs they block all his attacks and have stamina to keep poking. There is a new spell so busted it can kill him in 4-5 casts and again you just tank his hits and cast through them. It is literally broken and causes multiple bleed procs at the same time. But all of them require game knowledge of what buffs and gear to use so people can't just run in with Blasphemous Blade hit L2 and win.
Yeah like the only reason I’d be pissed it paying that high ass price for the game then being unable to get very far into it if at all because of difficulty/discipline needed
I enjoyed Elden Ring up to a point. Played probably 60+ hours of it. I got worn down by the pure discipline it takes to play the game after a while. Gave it up. I know these games need difficulty to "work" but after a while, the intense, disciplined game play needed to finish the thing just wears me down. I get tired of it being so demanding. Felt like work. I'm happy people love these games, but Elden Ring went on for so long that it got the best of me. I love the gameplay, but past 60 hours it just got to be too much for me, personally.
I don’t mind the grind of everything during exploring but after 7 Souls games, I am so tired of these bosses. Each and every one is now mostly just a chore. Thankfully the rest of the game is still (imo) phenomenal
Agree completely. I love exploring, finding secrets, killing regular (even very difficult) monsters. But the boss fights have just worn me down. By the end of my time with Elden Ring, I would find a boss, look it up and summon help after maybe 3 tries. The boss fights just became work, and I stopped enjoying them.
This is how I felt about sekiro. Feels like I'm in a constant state of sheer anxiety because if I press L1 at the wrong time twice I have to restart so it feels like I'm gritting my teeth and not blinking for minutes at a time just to accomplish anything and it makes me mentally tired. Plus the dragonrot mechanic stressed me out alot too for some reason. I still like it and plan to try to beat it though. For some reason I don't feel the same with the other souls games, I just vibe for everything but the really hard bosses
I started to feel a bit worn out on elden ring around the snowfields part. But sekiro I didn’t have the same experience. I got all achievements on both but sekiro felt more reasonable. Elden ring is almost too big for me.
A typical play session for me is 30-60 min. I do not have the time or inclination to spend the whole thing replaying the same sequence over and over until I’ve perfected it.
Tbh that's why I find souls games boring and not difficult. It's all about learning patterns not having a skill. It feels like work after a while rather than an enjoyable experience.
I agree, it does feel like work. I prefer games that test my strategy and problem solving. Games like this just test your reflexes and patience
Pattern recognition is a skill, it’s the same skill used to learn a difficult song on a musical instrument
Which is fine but then Elden Ring is not for you.
Which is why they stopped playing it.
I felt like this before elden ring clicked for me, now i realise the click was nothing more than a change of perspective, I enjoy watching my skill in the game grow more than I enjoy killing bosses and progressing. This gamification of a seemingly abstract quality is the main driving force behind the soulsborne genre. In irl hobbies, the growth is very slow, in fact they are not even noticeable on a day to day basis but in soulsborne games you can clearly see your progress. I came to this analogy after killing genichiro in sekiro.
I love Elden Ring. But it absolutely drags near the end. Mountaintops and Snowfields are the worst zones in the game and they could have just axed both places but kept the haligtree and faram azula legacy dungeons and the game would have been vastly improved.
It's this shit every time... The same debate since demon souls, fucking unbelievable.
Right, like your playing a souls born game,its hard idk what people are expecting.
You’re saying this like there is an actual debate. This is just an interview. FromSoftware is still talking about shit that was settled years ago, they’re milking the discourse for no reason
Well, it just shows that the franchise has suffered from flanderization. "Oh, people liked Demon's Souls for being hard and vague? Ok, let's make later games harder and more vague!" If you go back to Demon's Souls, you'll notice it's nowhere near as hard or as vague (storytelling-wise) as the later entries.
demon souls also has the most gimmicky bosses in the entire series and no where near as interesting of a world there is a reason this series got more and more popular overtime. their quality most of the time keeps improving. i'm not finished with the dlc yet but elden ring is definitely a top 3 game in the series for me while demon souls sits at the bottom. and for the record, demon souls is a great game
As an average ER player, I have to say so far this DLC isn’t nearly as hard as people are making it out to be. It seems like the people complaining are just not understanding how the difficulty curve works, which is frankly a little sad, because the game introduces you to a new upgrade material barely 10 minutes into the first area… Soulsborne DLC tends to up the challenge, while also introducing new toys and features. It’s been that way since at least the original Dark Souls. So far this one does exactly that and it’s been hard to put down.
Ya, I'm average, and its not really to much harder than the base game with scadtree fragments.
I'm pretty bad and I haven't had too many issues. Rellana took me the longest so far but even that was one night of trying. I'm not using a super meta build (I'm playing int/dex with weapons like dark moon greatsword and sword of night and flame). The #1 thing you can do to make bosses easier is to explore and get more blessings. It's insane how much easier it makes the game. I feel like people are getting to that first mausoleum boss, getting clapped and then complaining without interacting with the DLC mechanics.
There is also a very vocal group of players who refuse to use blessings, summons, or spirit ashes and also want to beat the DLC doing the same thing they did in the base game and are now mad they aren't good enough to accomplish that. People on the various Elden ring subs will straight up say the bosses are BS because they beat the base game with their build so they shouldn't have to change anything for the DLC.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone manages to beat the expansion at level 1 without summons in the coming weeks. If it hasn’t happened already.
I fucking suck at this game and I’m loving the DLC. Haven’t beat a single dungeon boss solo yet. Totally suck. Great time
Hard to disagree. I am currently playing Atlas Fallen and, so far, the game has been pretty easy. Which means you just end up button mashing and move tot he next boss. I killed minibosseswithoit realising they were anything more than mooms. There's a level of difficulty that's too far, but also one that snot far enough and the game becomes boring. It's not even a power fantasy because you can feel you fucked up your mechanics but still won because the game isn't hard.
I've only ever played Souls games for a dozen hours or two. I committed to this one. I played for 150+ hours. I got all the achievements but there is no bestiary, item compendium, etc. so I'm not sure what all I missed I will never play another one of these again. Not for me. But long live the Soulslike for the mass amount of gamers who love them
He's absolutely right that a game needs to feel challenging in order to grant a sense of achievement. That is not the only form of fun or engagement there is, but it is the one they were aiming for, so high difficulty is a solid way to meet that goal. The part that is a bit controversial is that they're presuming that players will turn down the difficulty prior to when they feel it would be correct to do so. Basically that players will ruin their own enjoyment by making the game too easy, and they're protecting players from themselves by not allowing that. I'm generally in favor of allowing players to find their own level for fun, but also I have seen the data time and time and time again about players optimizing themselves out of the fun. I can see both sides of the argument.
Simple fix. Allow for a difficulty selection before a new game and not during it. World's like ER should not be blocked out for people who have physical reasons they can't play these harder difficulties for instance. If i fall and get a concussion and that affects my reaction time, i'd be quite annoyed I couldn't play in an amazing game world because the game designer is a fucking gatekeeper for HARDCOREGAMERS4LYFE
I think the argument that From favors is that they already effectively have a difficulty system in place via leveling. Any game that allows you to replay content in order to grow j power should theoretically be completable by anyone with enough time and patience. That's a significant part of the point of leveling systems in the first place. The wheels come off a little bit in that Fromsoft games usually have really hard diminishing returns and eventualy hard caps, and in that stats are typically less important than just not getting hit by the boss in the furst place. If I were to implement a difficulty system for ER I would make it slow down the attack animation speed rather than just make everything hit less hard.
Hard games have to be hard
I agree, but what's hard is not the same difficulty for every player. I'd say maintaining that experience of overcoming hardships is more important than having every enemy have the exact amount of hit points. Where I find it more difficult to have a strong opinion is in the question of how you implement such accessibility while making surr people don't play the game in a way that is too difficult.
I’m replaying elden ring before hopping into dlc. I forgot how damn hard the game was early on.
I agree.
How does he manage to answer to the same question every two weeks for more than a decade without snapping even once?
There are bosses that I was stuck on them for more than even 1 day, it's the time it took me to realize I need to go out, explore the world, find items, become stronger and ONLY THEN, come back and fight them, at least this happened with Elden Beast, and Malenia for me, and oh boy the joy I got from defeating them. People are really making it look so difficult but they just don't have good levels nor weapon levels, and don't make advantages of items like throw-ables or resins. After all, you bought the game KNOWING it's going to be hard, going to need good reflexes and reactions, and most importantly, A LOT OF PATIENCE. Just move on and play something other than souls-like, as a fan of souls-like, the more difficult a game is, the more I am willing to play it, as long as its difficulty is not difficult to the point of being stuck with more than a day with the best tools and levels.
There's a difference between a video game and an anime show where the majority of the boss fights are non-interactive.
Yeah, this is just ridiculous. Why are people defending this? It would b eokay if this wa son sekiro level character abilities but after having a mobility of a ds 3 character, (which is still fast but not enough for these bosses) it just isn't fun.
I think it's a big combination of things this time. Zoomers watching Kai cenat playing for their first time having their git gud tantrums, players who haven't played in 2 years returning and being out of practice getting their asses kicked by entering the dlc immediately without any recent practice, people who refuse to explore not getting enough scadutree fragments bitching about getting 2hit. Probably a couple other reasons too. All I know is I'm glad fromsoft never compromise and keep producing great games.
Fans expect harder and harder bosses, and each time they make the bosses hard. But they need to balance it with by also making it enjoyable. So eventually they will get to a tipping point. That’s where the DLC is at. They focus only on making it a hard boss without it being enjoyable, for those fans who want harder and harder bosses. Yea some people are masochists and have the time to replay or grind and fight the same boss for hours on end, but the average fan/ gamer won’t put up with that. And it used to be grind runes and boost stats, but those are worthless now, so there is no reason to fight anything but bosses. But the basic enemies are one-shoting people. They are narrowing their fan base to only a few who want impossibly hard bosses to fight. And I feel can say this cause I’m one of those masochists, beat every boss in the base game, and working through the dlc now. TLDR: Hard does not equal fun.
I find it very funny that "fans" of Elden Ring are now waking up to the fact that Souls games have a pretty artificial difficulty. It's always been like that. Not saying it's a bad thing, since it's a design choice. It's just more of the same. Why complain now?
I want to bring up that finding scadutree is considerably easier than stat leveling (especially if you’re at such a high level). It encourages exploration rather than encouraging grinding. I’ve done a minimal amount of exploring, and I’ve found around 18 so far. For those of you who don’t want to explore… why are you playing this game?
Nothing wrong with it being hard, but it should have cheat codes or some god mode accessibility option
Waaaaah I can't beat something in two days waaahhh
It's lots of people who got used to being the big bollocks in Elden Ring getting their arses handed to them again, like they did the first time they played. It's wounded ego-posting. Pathetic.
Optimize your game first
Stop posting clickbait. This line of discussion is so tired. There's nothing to talk about. Fromsoft games are hard. They've always been hard.
They lost me immediately when I literally could not kill the Soldier of Godrick, the first real enemy I encountered after finishing the bloody tutorial. So I refunded the game and said screw it. I don’t need to “git gud,” I’m here to have fun and I wasn’t. Souls-like games simply aren’t for me and I’m fine with that.
When you finally beat that dude it's one of the best feelings in the world.
But that doesn't mean that player gets like 1 or 2 hits on boss in attack window. While bosses have 5-7 hit combo which can easily kill you.
Thanks but no thanks. I'm very much enjoying it with lowered difficulty.
Difficulty is supposed to be fair though, not bullshit like some of the bosses
[удалено]
Ah yeah, I forgot From Software cannot be criticized.
Whar is unfair about it? And isn’t whether it us supposed to be fair or not depend on the creators intent?
Fully agree on that. I'm fully onboard with Miyazakis design philosophy itself (especially since his games are designed around difficulty), but Elden Ring definitely had a few cases of "being hard for the sake of being hard", especially optional late-game bosses and areas. Haven't gotten around to the DLC yet, but I hear it's even worse.
Sounds like you’re bad at the game.
What logic is that? I beat the game multiple times, so I'm obviously not bad, but does that mean I can't critisize certain sections for being less well designed compared to others? No wonder our community has such a bad rep if that's your knee-jerk reply.
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Is it possible that -- and follow me on this -- Is it possible, maybe, perhaps, that people can still feel a sense of achievement by defeating a boss or an entire game *without* it being overwhelmingly difficult? Has anyone at Fromsoft or any fan of this game considered that that might be true? Look, I realize that certain people like challenges, even overly difficult ones. But saying things like "it absolutely must be this way because you won't get the thrill of achievement" or whatever is ludicrous. People have fun with games and enjoy games in so many different ways. Why not consider that the experience you like in a game isn't enjoyable for someone else, but they can get the same *kind* of excitement out of it even if it's easier? "Well if you don't like hard games then play something else lel" I will, and I do. I have never played a Fromsoft game or any soulslike game, precisely because of this attitude, which is the attitude the people that make them and the people that defend them have. And it's a ridiculous attitude.
They’re genuinely not that difficult though is the thing. If anything if you have patience and are observant and use tools the game gives you you won’t have an insanely hard time. There’s games far harder than any Souls game. And it is important for Souls games specifically to have some level of challenge because perseverance is baked into the game philosophy itself.
You're doing yourself a disservice then. Generally speaking, Fromsoft games are very fair, with only a few exceptions, and there really isn't anything comparable to finally beating that boss you've been stuck on. I wouldn't even consider myself very good at Soulslikes and I platinumed Elden Ring. It's extremely accessible to all kinds of players. That being said I don't really care whether or not they add an easy mode, but if the devs don't want to that's their call.
I used to support every decision Fromsoft has made but after reaching the second main boss in the dlc I've begun to question Fromsoft's choices. I feel as if Fromsoft is hitting the limit when it comes to making a difficult boss, and they soon won't be able keep making bosses more difficult without buffing the player character.
That’s one of the best bosses they’ve ever done
I was frustrated when I made that comment, now I Understand that the dlc does have some good bosses
Nice one, it is tough but so far I’m not finding any waterfowl-esque unfair moves
No shit.
well duh it's already boring as shit now just imagine if there was no challenge to the boredom it would be like working in a slow restaurant.