It's lazy game design to make a fight "harder" by just adding increasingly long periods where all you can do is dodge.
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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The soulslike genre is simply bullet hell where you don't always get to see the bullets before they hit you, stuck inside a metroidvania.
Learn to parry
This is the first comic that expresses why I rage quit so many games with overly difficult boss fights ( if there's any delay measured in more than microseconds between retries ).
I played (and still do) the original one hit kill arcade bullshit. Hell, I beat Alladin on SNES. I'm not allergic to a challenge.
But, today, I have no time to repeat anything that isn't fun in a video game. I could be filling out tax forms with that time.
Edit: Rogue Legacy 2 is so good at this. It has deeply adjustable difficultly, short boss intros, and a fast forward function for when even the short intro is too long.
Bro, for real. I just want to practice phase two Radahn with my build, but it's such a slog just to get him there and then survive long enough to figure out the moveset.
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This is a big reason I farmed hard in Elden Ring and have 356 hours. I spent a lot of that time leveling my health up so I can take more damage. Level 156 and my health bar is like half the width of my TV lmao.
Sure, but farming isn’t really playing a game though. A boss should be beatable in some clever, but challenging way at a reasonable level range.
You can just do coop to safely farm boss fights without the risk of dropping the runes. Or...
You can get 150+ in <1hr if you grab a great bow and make a beeline for the Varre quest. There's a bird you can repeatedly bait into suiciding without moving more than 10 steps from the grace. Or if you turn 180⁰ there's a whole swarm of albinaurics that give you even more runes/min if you have good AoE damage. There are plenty of extremely easy options.
I beat the original Ducktales and Battletoads back in the day. But, back then I had the luxury of time. Ain't nobody got time for this shit!
Man, I recently introduced my kid to both the NES Battletoads and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!
I beat that one Battletoads stage (you know the one) on the third try. And Mr Sandman on the fourth try (did not play against Mike).
I was super stoked. Third try! I'm old now. Apparently my time put into it as a kid stuck with me.
Doesn't really relate to anything in this thread, I just needed to brag to someone because my kid and couple of friends totally did not get it.
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Delayed attacks as a form of increasing difficult are just extremely unfun. Yeah, you made the boss harder, you also made it extremely frustrating, congratz.
It's literally helping you actually learn to dodge perfectly instead of just spamming it and getting lucky. Like instead of rolling when they do the back swing, you now have to actually wait for them to swing their attack.
If this was the first game like this you played, it wouldn't even be that much harder to learn. It's actually harder having played all the games prior to Elden Ring that conditioned you to dodge on the back swing.
It’s usually not a matter of just waiting - it’s a matter of memorizing. I get the impression if the AI bosses could manually set different delays on their swings after winding up each time, they would literally be impossible.
They can do that. And one of the first dudes you'll see doing it is Margit. They only delay the time between back swing and the actual attack. So you'll know it's coming, you just need to dodge (or parry) when they take a swing at you, not when they bring their hand back. Shit, sometimes Margit will just do the back swing and if you stay away or calm long enough, he just goes back to an idle animation and doesn't attack you.
The first measuring stick dude, he makes sure you learn the mechanics. I feel like Margit and morgott are the exclusively to make sure you have a handle on them. Hell I didn't realize jumping could dodge attacks until godfrey.
The weird thing I found in the dlc with jumping is that, for whatever reason, when the Putrescent Knight does that blue fire attack, you can jump it but not roll it. Or at least, I can't figure out how to avoid damage by rolling it. Rolling forward should avoid a hit, but I still take one; jumping it avoids it totally. It doesn't even seem jumpable because the flames still touch your upper body while doing it and you only have i-frames from the waist down.
The fire is a persistent hitbox that lasts longer than a roll gives iframes. The airtime of the jump lasts long enough when timed right.
Some of the channels of blue fire can also be avoided outright but I never got a handle on how that worked. And the visuals, like a lot of fires in Elden Ring, don't look like you should be able to jump it. Looks super edgy though when you do though.
The one he shoots at a single target in a straight line can be strafed if you're at the furthest it can reach. But you can also roll left or right and not be in it anymore.
The weird one is the first time he busts it out. There's like 1 big wave that goes everywhere. A small one that can be left or right of you, and then another big wave in front of him (which is usually facing you if you're solo). Later on he might do something similar to the Elden Beast where he created a large ring that gets smaller so it comes at you from behind. That one always fucks me up because I expect the other one.
This dude is my arch nemesis, and just like the Nameless King in DS3 I am starting to get to a point where I can avoid him forever. Not quite, though. He has this weird hitbox on one of his ride by swings where I dodge completely away from the blade and he is like 5 yards away when my i-frames end and then I take a hit seemingly from nothing.
If it is the one where he holds it one handed as a windup: that driveby swing is where he drags his hitbox as he turns and I hate it. It would trip me up so much.
strat
IIRC you unintuitively have to roll into the blade and along the path of his swing since it is 'C' shaped. Since he is turning that's like sideways I think, depending on camera/assuming lockon.
His throw attack, for some reason, I could never get the hang of though.
That's my biggest problem with FromSoft games. They are not challenging, they're just slow HP sponges that can one-shot you. That is not challenging, it's just unfair, and frankly boring.
I think the game would be funner even with the simple tweak of making the animations faster. No fighter EVER wins IRL by telegraphing their attacks for three seconds.
Have you played their previous games? It's only an issue in Elden Ring.
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Vigor check missed
In Elden Ring you can often attack during the windup and then dodge. Creating a posture break during those delays can be quite a fun experience.
Plus you can do things like jumping attacks to dodge and duck a lot more of those spinning combos than you'd expect.
The ascetic with the hoops at the very start whiffs most of his chained attacks without you even having to dodge once you figure it out.
FromSoft games are fun to learn, and that frustration is often the appeal as the tricks are discovered.
The base game was way more accessible than any other Soulslike which pulled in way more players than any other soulslike and now all the players that got used to the base game are mad that the DLC is as hard as any soulslike ever has been.
I think it's hilarious seeing all the players half the item descriptions in the game make fun of.
Boiling down the descriptor to one word - “hard” - really doesn’t serve the discussion well.
Someday, I want to make “The hardest game ever made”, just to show raw inability to win is not fun on its own.
All the souls dlcs have been much harder than the base games. Artorias, fume knight, ludwig and gael all stomped me until i changed up tactics. The dlcs have always been aimed at late/post game characters.
I went back to DS3 a few weeks ago and its insane how easy Gael and Friede are compared to like everything in Elden Ring.
I agree for the most part but with the catch that I have almost 5x (and counting) the time sunk in ds3.
Except this time the DLC scales so being late/post game doesn't even save you
Scales off of it still, the requirement of beating mohg and radahn puts you late game regardless.
That makes sense to me. DLCs come after you finished the rest so of course difficulty has to rise. It's the same in all games with an escalating difficulty and force balance I would think. Doom Eternal does the same.
Wish cheat codes were still a thing. Sometimes I just need a little help getting past one part but don't have time to grind it out like I would have before.
You mean like mods that are easily accessible? God i wish.
Or trainers, equally ready to access. There's even tools like wemod that offer trainers for all your games at a convenient single click.
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