Comment on What games did you sleep on for too long?

• Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I highly recommend spending some time with Sekiro. It is arguably their best game. It learns most of the lessons from the Souls series, innovates on that, but also doesn’t lose anything, in my opinion.

  Elden Ring is good, but I honestly think it’s a worse experience than the older games. Yeah, the combat has been perfected, but that’s a relatively minor part of the gameplay, all things considered. DS1 has the perfect world to explore, with corridors that are crafted to perfection. It’s open enough to feel like you’re choosing where to explore while being closed enough to have good encounters. Elden Ring is so open that it loses a lot of control, which essentially means the only encounters that matter are in the dungeons. Those are a small fraction of the game, so it feels like a lot of time and effort spent to make something that’s experientially worse than the simpler older style. It’s still a master class in open world design, but I feel the game would be stronger if they focused on the classic design.

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  • psyq@piefed.social ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I might go back to Sekiro but for some reason the first few bosses pissed me off so much more than anything I encountered in DS or Nioh, and I’m not good at parrying. It’s like trying to go back to Mega Man on NES, I just can’t, two bosses in and I’m twisting the controller unil it creaks :)

    I did try Sekiro three times in total so far so it could still work. It took a while for DS to click, too. Demon’s Souls lost me at Flamelurker, though, not doing that again (tried a new playthrough from scratch at least five times over the years).

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    • Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It was frustrating to start. I agree. It requires such a different skill set than the Souls games but it feels like you should be good at it already, but you won’t be.

      One key to the game is in a quote a character says fairly early on: “Hesitation is defeat.” The way to play is to put constant pressure on the enemy. In the Souls games you’re encouraged to back off and take time to recover when you need to. In Sekiro, you need to keep the pressure up to break their posture. If you back off then they recover and progress is reset. It’s tough, but it’s one of the best combat games once it clicks. It’s why almost every game since has added a posture bar, but they don’t go all the way to the logical end that Sekiro did. Even ER took the posture mechanic, but watered it down.

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• swooper@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Funny, I dropped Seiko 3/4 of the way through. Elden ring has been on the wishlist, never bought it.

  I guess it’s hard to beat the best, all the co-op and troll-invade glory that was DS.

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  • nullspace@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Elden Ring is like getting the gameplay of Dark Souls, but all encounters are on your own terms as the hard progression walls you get in linear dungeons don’t apply to most of the game. I wouldn’t call it easier, but I would describe it as more accessible.

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    • Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      They definitely turned up the dial on combat challenges for bosses, but I agree, it’s more accessible. There are so many ways to trivialize the combats, and you can even skip a lot of the bosses. It’s so much easier than ever before to come back later with a significant power increase and easily defeat any boss.

      Probably the thing that helps accessibility the most though is making it clear there are other paths, and you can come back to a boss later. That was always the intention of the Souls games, but people often slam their head against a wall until it breaks, and they think the games are (too) hard. The tools were always there to make the game easier, but a lot of people didn’t take advantage of them in the older games. ER makes the alternatives so much more obvious.

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