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I thought souls- like fans love tough bosses. Enjoy it then. I think they should git gud. /s
For full disclosure, I suck at souls-like and I beat Elden Ring by cheating(completely offline). I have been called Mentally removed for wanting an easy mode. I don’t like souls like fans, not all, just some of the more hardcore ones.
I play them offline because no way am I playing with that mostly asshole fanbase
If you're playing solo you can't be invaded.
Agreed. I'm glad there's so many difficulty sliders built into this game: big variety of guns, NPC summons, spirit summons.
Honestly, it was not enough. With Easy Mode mod, I could actually explore the game world and immerse myself more than I would ever have. One of my favourite moments is when I was fighting Dragonkin boss in front a giant throne occupied by a massive skeleton in first underground city. It was amazing. I could never experience it without that mod. I am too easily frustrated.
As someone who has never used story mode/easy mode options, I agree with you completely.
Nine Sols, Celeste, Hades. Some of my favorite ‘hardcore’ games with great stories and great difficulty options. The only result of their presence is letting more people play the games who wouldn’t have otherwise. I don’t feel like my experience is cheapened in any way if others use the options.
And even if I don’t use them now, maybe there comes a day when my hands can’t keep up anymore, and I’ll be very grateful to be able to keep participating in my favorite hobby. Just an unambiguous good imo
You really need to be zealously masochistic and self-flagellant to enjoy that kind of shit. I don't know how people do it.
Once you've played enough, the fact that it's hard makes it better. I remember the first time I played dark souls, (dark souls III) I beat the 2nd boss months after the first try (i didn't play continuously for those months obviously). I was just unable to beat it. I looked at the wiki for builds, for that specific boss starts and so on.
Once I beat it, though, I kinda knew how to play, and the fact that the bosses were hard made it better, since now I got a big dopamine hit after I finally killed them after tens of tries.
Now, most games I play I beat them on the first try. Not because I'm good, but because the games are easy. I watch other people play and they kill them first try too. I don't get that same sense of "oh this is a boss, it's gonna be hard but fun." Instead I think "oh no, I was having fun oneshotting everyone and now here comes the bullet sponge".
Have you tried being zealously masochistic and self-flagellant? Gitting gud is another option.
But really though there's something endearing about a game being ruthlessly difficult with no easy mode slider. I'm normally the type of guy to crank everything down to easy to have a relaxing time, but when I'm in the mood for it Souls games scratch that itch juuuuust right.
Some people like developing an artistic skill. This is that. Fuck up on the piano? Start that part over and get it right this time. Fuck up in elden ring? Start that part over and get it right this time. Both have acceptable amounts of variation that lead to success. Elden ring is in fact easier, because things can change that aren't solely your skill level (stats/gear). There's a lot of reasons the souls series and similar games are conducive to speedrunning, this loop of self-improvement is a major one.
When I read comments like yours, they come across as saying "practicing anything is stupid and I do not see the benefit". It's easy: practicing anything is fun and you only get to see the benefit after you fail, then succeed. If there's some mental disconnect you have where you can't envision success for yourself, or you think succeeding won't be fun, it certainly isn't the fault of the game or the community.
I've been playing video games my whole life and I've never been able to "git gud" at any game. I'm not going to put a significant amount of time and effort getting good at a game to figure out if I even like it
I don't do difficult games cause of physical issues. I tried Elden Ring and was very impressed, but ultimately it was unplayable for me even trying to go easy.
What do you recommend cheat wise? I'm running on Linux and I really don't care about online.
My only issue is that since the DLC was released I can no longer play online on linux. It says "Inappropriate behavior detected" no matter what. Didn't even buy the DLC.
Is your proton set to experimental? because mine is working on arch. If it is, try verifying files, or if that doesn't work, back up your saves and nuke the prefix.
No, it's set to whatever the default is. I'll try what you suggest, thanks!
Fromsoft is just checking up on you. Have you been acting differently since the dlc came out?
I've been spontaneously singing a lot
I caught a ban as soon as the DLC launched. Dont even have any mods installed. Had to appeal.
To add to what everyone else said, it's a known issue. Easy Anti-Cheat isn't working properly on Linux unless you own the DLC. It's working fine on my end since I own it.
I’m working my way through it now. They’re not really much different from the main game. The problem is the bosses in the main game were also pretty frustrating. A lot of absurdly long attack chains where it’s hard to read when you have an opening. Delayed attacks you have to memorize the timing for. Attacks where the enemy either dashes or stretches their model an absurd distance to hit you so it’s hard to get away from them or gauge distances. Damage values that will kill you in a few hits even with high health and armor. Attacks that start and execute so fast that anything with a cast time gets punished.
Outside bosses we have the enemies behind half the corners, we have platforming sections in a game that doesn’t really support that, etc.
I’ve always like their games in spite of a lot of the flaws. The level design, world building, atmosphere, weird writing, etc all are still great and what draws me to the games. In what in what other games can you see: bald scam man, onion man, sunny d man, “dip head in wax”, rolling lightning goats, doot doot boat ghost, etc?
But it feels like in terms of gameplay design it’s kind of stagnated. A lot of the same design patterns for difficulty plus the pressure to keep making the game feel hard to people who have played all their games before has led to them stretching their design about as much as they can. In my first play through of Elden Ring for the first time I gave up trying to play my usual Ooga booga strength build in favor of that stupid comet azure magic combo to just anihate the bosses rather than deal with their bullshit. And in previous games I happily smashed my face against things like Nameless King or Madam Butterfly and Dancer well before I was supposed to fight then.
I think at this point I just want to see FROM do some different things. Sekiro was a nice mix-up on the basic formula and while it wasn’t really my cup of tea, Armored Core 6 felt like a breath of fresh air. The mainline souls style games feel like they’re trying to keep linking the fire over and over.
Let's not forget how blatantly the bosses read your inputs. FROM bosses have always done this, but it's never been so obvious; it kinda breaks the "tough but fair" illusion.
My take is that since players have gotten so powerful, bosses had to adapt...but the only ways to make them stronger have upset the balance between "tough" and "fair". Hit boxes for attacks have gotten larger, which hurts readability; attacks that you used to be able to dodge now land, even though it didn't look like it. Bosses hit harder, combo their attacks, and they can even cancel into different combos now.
All of this happened because bosses are balanced around Spirit Ashes and the new insane weapon arts. It's harder than ever to SL1 the game, because if you don't have a good Ash summon or a crazy weapon art or didn't grind for upgrade materials, main quest bosses are stupidly hard. If you did do all of those things, they're almost trivial.
It's weird. The bosses used to be the highlight of Soulsborne games, and now they're the worst part because they're just not fun anymore. Dragonlord Placidusax is my favorite fight, and it's not even close. I either trivialize my way through the rest, or just wanted them to be over. The satisfaction of fighting a worthy opponent is gone, because it's almost always just unfair for the player, or unfair for the boss.
Yeah that's basically how I felt. It was binary. The game was unfairly and frustratingly hard when I was trying to play fair and take the game on its terms. And then when I went to cheese everything it was so trivial that it felt empty. Sometimes I think about going back to the game to try to get the "real" experience, but then I remember the frustration and just can't bring myself to do it.
Although part of my reluctance to replay the game has less to do with boss difficulty and more to do with the repetitiveness of the open world. Without the sense of exploration and discovery you get on the first playthrough, the world becomes a checklist of places you need to go to grab stuff for your build with little desire to go replay the other content because so much of it is copy pasted filler. Even going through the DLC now, with it being smaller in scope than the full game, but still pretty huge, I'm already seeing a lot of repeat content.
As much as I appreciate the attempt at putting a twist on the formula, I think the open world was a net negative for the game. The flaws in the reward systems of the previous games were exacerbated by the structure which led you to explore all the boring repetitive stuff on a first play-through because you don't know if the thing you need might be in catacomb #20 and then on subsequent playthroughs you just skip vast parts of the game which aren't relevant to you.
It also just doesn't seem like they have the content output necessary to fill an open world with content that is of a comparable level of novelty and quality to what we'd come to expect from their level design. There's a good dark souls game in Elden Ring, it's just that it's spaced out and everything in between is padding.
The funny thing is, despite all of that, Elden Ring is still one of the top 3 open world games alongside the 2 Zelda titles. But I think that says as much about the state of the industry and genre as much as it does about the skill of FROM's and Nintendo's designers.
A lot of absurdly long attack chains where it’s hard to read when you have an opening. Delayed attacks you have to memorize the timing for. Attacks where the enemy either dashes or stretches their model an absurd distance to hit you so it’s hard to get away from them or gauge distances.
That's also my main critique with Elden Ring. There's so many spin to win enemies in the game that will just keep attacking for 10 seconds straight, it gets old so quickly.
I miss the slow and methodical attacks from DS1 and to some extent DS3. DS3 was already a lot quicker than DS1 but most attacks were really well choreographed so I didn't really mind. When an enemy pulled their sword back in DS3 you knew they were about to attack. In Elden Ring they will hold that sword back and hold and hold and hold and then after you rolled 3 times they hit you. It's almost impossible to read an attack on the first try, which feels really unsatisfying.
Not to say I don't like Elden Ring, I do. But out of all From games it's one of the weaker entries.
The article title seems to oversimplify things a little with the "too hard" bit. I read a couple dozen negative reviews, and most cite poor performance, copy-paste boss design, too much hp and/or too little player damage, and unfair mechanics. Sure, those last two aspects could be seen as "too hard", but they read like there's a difficulty spike from the base game. Whether this is a case of players needing to adapt or whether there's an actual issue here, I don't know, but seems there's more to this than just a case of players complaining about a hard game being hard.
That's video game journalism in a nutshell right there. They'll always do anything they can to downplay legitimate criticisms from consumers. They're common tactic is to reduce everything to absurdity so that people just read the headlines won't look further. They truly are the lowest form of Journalism. Absolutely lowest.
Please note this article is 100% BS. The DLC currently has a Mostly Positive rating on Steam with 87% of the people leaving a positive review.
The people complaining are mostly about stuff like crashes, bad net code and poor fps. This is not a dlc thing, but a base game thing. The pc port simply has some issues, for most people it's totally fine. For others it's unplayable. With the amount of different systems out there, there is always going to be a group of people with issues. I feel like this is a very vocal minority though.
Check again, sitting at mixed reviews at 63% positive.
There's going to be a lot of people confused because there are actually TWO Shadow of the Erdtree listings.
One is the premium bundle which is at mostly positive and there is the DLC by itself which is mixed.
Check listings under publisher: Fromsoftware Inc
Oh lol, that explains it
There's actually two listings for the DLC which is confusing but one is mostly positive and the other is mixed.
Check listings under publisher: Fromsoftware Inc
It's typical click bait from a once, long ago, enjoyable magazine about PC games. Now PCG just outputs game guides and incessantly complains about AI.
The level designs are pretty top notch and feel much closer to the dangerous mazelike web of shortcuts and ambushes that worked for the Dark Souls series.
The base game spread content across dozens of small short dungeons. The DLC appears to feature fewer but longer dungeons, which I am inclined to agree with as 'a good thing'.
Personally I have complicated feelings about this DLC.
The world design is a 10/10 for me but the rest...
For a start the Open World feels a bit unrewarding. I don't really have a problem with the abundance of empty space but the rewards you get for exploration feel a bit weak to me. I would have liked a few more weapons in chests and other places instead of Smithing Stone 8 #1241. Case in point: They added 8 new weapon categories but from what I can see barely one of these new categories has more than a single regular weapon in it. Definitely a missed opportunity.
As for the combat it's fine outside of the bosses. The enemies hit like a truck but once you figure out the gimmicks it's quite manageable. The bosses however are some of the worst in the entire game. I'm not an outstanding player, I'm not even good. But me being bad is not quite the problem I have with these. The problem I have with these bosses is that they are frustrating. For example the first Dancing Lion Boss has such an arsenal and length of combos that, when coupled with its flowing moveset, I cannot find a reliable gap to exploit. I think I found one only for the boss to switch up the Combo the 3rd time around (not HP related changes) and kill me anyway. Add to that the camera being absolute garbage and it feels like I'm fighting a duo boss. The cooldowns between their combos also are annoyingly uncertain, sometimes you have a gap to heal after a combo and sometimes they start the next combo almost immediately. Now mind you there might be gaps I don't see but if the only people who can even find the gaps are the top 20% of players then negative reviews will be inevitable.
What makes this entire thing worse is that as soon as you employ spirit summons the entire charade is exposed. The only reason these bosses are "hard" is because they hit you in a relentless torrent of combos. The moment there is any other target to take the heat off of you the difficulty plummets into the core of the planet. Oh and also their pathfinding is absolutely shot, I've had multiple cases where Bosses (and regular enemies) got stuck path finding towards me because I was standing on a little pebble or behind a pillar. I think mages are also completely fucked because almost every boss I've stumbled upon was in permanent distance closing mode. No or extremely rare walk phases where a mage could fire off a few spells but instead just constant pressure.
I think the Bosses can't even be easily rebalanced because the problem is not that they are too tanky or deal too much damage, they are imo just terribly designed to where they are too hard when in a 1v1 and too easy in a 2+v1 due to their move-/attacksets. If they rebalance anything maybe the frequency between combos could be tuned a bit but I really don't think that's going to change much about how people perceive these bosses.
None of the bosses have been easier for me with more then one person, and I've beaten 3 so far.
I'm at the end of Journey 3 level 200 with a character that I am using for the DLC. The only thing left for me is Melania in the main game, but I'm not rushing it because she's the only boss that really whooped my ass in the main game the first 3 times I fought her. The DLC bosses are giving me that Melania rush, again. When I beat one, I feel like I fucking WON that fight. Hell, I think 80% of the fights I've had so far I haven't even been able to summon my spirit buddies, which has admittedly been a crutch in the main game. I love it. It's a fucking challenge.
I'm almost done with the DLC and most bosses are in-line with the last few bosses in the main game. I never felt like it was overly unfair, that said I did notice stuttering every now and then, but nothing major. Wish that got fixed.
People need to stop being bitches
Uh oh
I beat the first major boss: Dancing Lion from trailers. I'm not good at these games. Took me a dozen+ tries. I used the NPC summon because they tend to have story elements.
NPC doesn't do much damage and dies quickly in phase 2. It helps but not that much.
So far it's not that hard. Biggest hurdle is even with +24 weapons I cannot do sufficient damage to the wickermen or new dragons. I assume it's the leveling items? But their moves aren't hard, it just feels like chip damage.
I haven't played it yet myself, but based on the pre-release info I've read, I am assuming it's the separate progression system the DLC uses.
The normal strength of weapons in the rest of the game doesn't matter as much, there's a different way of powering up exclusive to the DLC content. So anyone who was buffed up like a god before the DLC is not that far ahead of someone jumping in early during their first playthrough.