vivi-n

@tinyvalor

will never have the shoes

she/her

vivi-n @tinyvalor2/18/2023, 3:14 AM

so the runes might be mended

i got the ending in elden ring last night. fia's, specifically-i really liked her, and i hated most of the boss fights i had to do for that quest, so i might not do it again for a long time, lol

this game feels like a culmination of the stuff they've been building since demon's souls, and since that game is coming up on 15 years old it kind of feels like there's not a lot in common between the two of them...which isn't really that true of course, and if anything the team's commitment to weird mystery shines as bright as ever in this game, which is really impressive given not just the state of game design these days but also the fact that i still felt like they could surprise me a lot, given that DS3 is the only one i haven't played at all by now. not that they always got me-by around leyndell i started to feel like most of the "there's going to be a boss/miniboss" ambushes were not very surprising, and in a couple cases i said something like that about two steps before it happened.

i really hated all the hero's graves i went to, the red light green light encounters have never been my favorites and they all just felt so long and frustrating. and most caves were forgettable or only memorable for bad reasons...my favorite is actually the one where just like the bottom 2 floors are just all shallow poison water. out of all the small dungeon types, i thought catacombs tended to be pretty fun, with lots of weird gimmicks or tricks that made me laugh, either because they were just silly and i couldn't believe the commitment to the bit (there's one where the linear route forward is a dead end and you have to go through like 8 invisible walls in a row to reach the switch), or just like, doing something and then realizing i got tricked. got got. something like that. and some of the random platforming and overworld puzzles were really funny for similar reasons. and the main dungeons are really good and intricate, and also hilarious in the way you can really just run through a lot of them if you're in the know

bosses are...well this probably isn't that surprising after what i wrote last time, but i really do feel they're getting pretty overdesigned for the mechanics by now, like they've put a lot of thought into what makes difficult fights (attack speed mixups and long/convoluted combo chains) that can't be cheesed (ranged attacks to prevent people from running and kiting easily while also having good space making options so you don't get so many opportunities to wail on them for free) and then just apply those concepts to basically everything. and even when you get miniboss type enemies who aren't so fully rounded as opponents the game doesn't wait long before pairing them up with somebody else so that they can still just totally fuck you up. it just becomes a little arduous knowing you're inevitably going to have to spend a while just getting used to what everything looks like at the very least, or just get kind of lucky handling a really annoying add, and it means a lot of the boss fights are just like, big slugfests between you and another guy. which i think is why the two super large boss enemies late in the game were probably my favorite bosses, because they felt less like another test-of-your-reflexes duel (even if the second one also has some crazy combos and godlike zoning). especially the one where you can ride the horse

but then the game also has the most powerful and versatile version of the npc summoning systems for boss fights, including a thing i guess lots of people use to literally become twice as powerful when they already have a super-powered build, and tons of strong buffs in general, so it feels really easy to overwhelm a lot of the bosses once you give up on doing them perfectly (however long that takes). i guess this is a good way to give people a very high challenge ceiling while still clearly making things manageable for a broader range of people, but i still feel like it's kind of just...a lot. it's just such a huge game! and that does mean sometimes things are just so easy bc you come back 50 levels too high, but...sometimes things could still be easy. i think

but i still really liked it, and want to play more and figure out more things and try some ideas i had. it's pretty good

#Elden Ring #from software #(with love)

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in reply to @tinyvalor's post:

@vorpal2/18/2023, 9:20 PM

The various mini-dungeons really did get to be kind of a pain in the ass. There were some neat things in there though... I guess with how many they were, they'd have to hit on something neat every so often by default? My favorite was the one later game catacomb that had a 5-10 room core loop, and then two other copies of that core loop adjacent to it, and you'd have to figure out which version of the loop you're in and how to move between them to find progress or loot (door switch is in one, door is in another, third is mostly useless but has a hard-to-get chest, etc).

it feels almost like the constraints of the game forced their level design to wrap back around to oldschool dungeon crawler mechanics. was neat. shame there were like 20 elemental variants of the giant dog statue in that dungeon tho

agree 100% on the boss and enemy design. my big opinion is basically that from is trapped by each game having to be considered more difficult than the previous, and that's causing them to make combat more homogenous chasing that difficulty (no cheese, everything has to move at least this fast and have 20-hit combos, etc). and the end result of that is that each fight feels more and more similar to each other fight. and when you have 150+ bosses in the same game.....

this is part of the reason i like sekiro so much. the game's mechanics are so much better at supporting the direction from wants to take its combat.

glad you liked the game. its a good one

vivi-n @tinyvalor2/19/2023, 5:19 AM

yeah, i love sekiro, i gotta finish it sometime when i feel like setting up the ps4 again lmao. even so, it's easily my favorite of the modern fromsoft games, and should've just bought it on pc...it's just so hard not to play this game without feeling sometimes like "they already did this right!"

i feel like draconic tree sentinel really stands out as possibly the game's worst designed enemy (that i've fought) in that regard, as an boss whose moveset is full of hard-hitting moves with enormous hitboxes, implemented in such a ruthlessly efficient way that trying to heal means committing to a really long sequence of running away with perfectly timed dodges, and the only sensible approach is to just commit to standing directly next to it and perfectly countering every move (or just hard cheesing it by landing dots and running away...he leashes pretty aggressively on the leyndell gate at least, i guess bc people figured out how to lure him to the cliff and push him over?). and the fact that it's all for this guy who is just arbitrarily standing on the road in front of a door that leads to actual climatic moments in the game, TWICE, and who is clearly not considered important enough to have anything like critical animations or a dismounted moveset, just feels like such a bad choice to me. what could possibly justify this aside from deciding that you just never want to hear anybody complain that it was easy? especially when people will anyway bc they're insane

ironically, i feel like this game has the opposite problem i used to have with dark souls, where particularly in the first game i spent a lot of time going "am i supposed to be this weak?" damage wise. player damage is, in a lot of cases, really high in this game, even with mediocre builds! but on the other side you can feed levels to get more HP constantly and still have the entire game feel like you get 100-0'd in 2 seconds by almost anything you haven't wildly outleveled. which i think again contributes to that kind of samey feeling...but it also just makes it feel like the HP levels aren't worth it even though they clearly are, lmao

and yeah, they've clearly always had that kind of trickster streak in terms of level/game design that...is often worth doing one time but sort of inevitably lands on meaningless or obnoxious if you have to do it every time. like, i have only beaten dark souls one time because i wanted to keep playing for a while but i didn't want to do anything that opens between O&S and the kiln, nor the stuff in the dlc from kalameet on, so i had a bunch of characters that i just never played past londo. but weird little disconnected spaces is the perfect venue for those ideas because the player can seek them out and do them because they're there while knowing they don't ever have to come back if they don't feel like it