A game has dodge rolls, a mechanic thats been in games for decades
Gamers: THIS IS JUST LIKE ELDEN RING!!!1! :so-true:
(I actually like the Souls series don't kill me pls)
A game has dodge rolls, a mechanic thats been in games for decades
Gamers: THIS IS JUST LIKE ELDEN RING!!!1! :so-true:
(I actually like the Souls series don't kill me pls)
This is a silly take. When Dark Souls came out it was pretty unique; third person action games at the time were mostly going with the Assassin's Creed/Batman Arkham combat system where you have a dedicated counter button and you fight groups of guys with big flashing signs over their head when they attack. Games have mostly moved away from that and toward a more rewarding, skill based experience in part because of the influence of Dark Souls. It only feels generic now because so many of the great innovations it made were incorporated into other games.
Games like Souls existed long before that though.
Like, I enjoy Souls games and am glad they got popular enough to influence AAA titles but Monster Hunter was doing that shit long before them.
Yeah but From was doing the same thing with Kings Field and Armored Core before the first Monster Hunter came out
Also, Monster Hunter didn't gain much traction in the west until World, which was long after Souls games had made their mark. There's also some pretty big differences in their gameplay. Between the focus on boss fights, the lack of i-frames, and the totally different gameplay loop, I'm not sure it's fair to say they're quite the same thing. Souls definitely didn't invent most of the systems it uses, but to call it a "generic third person action game" seems deliberately dismissive.
A mechanic doesn't exist until it gets popular in the west
"I really like the new God of War, the slower paced combat reminds me of Dark Souls!"
:so-true: "Umm, actually Monster Hunter had slow paced combat before Dark Souls did so you're not allowed to say that"
:yes-chad: yes
monster hunter rolls do have fewer iframes without skill support but it's not zero
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Zelda has some of the same mechanics on the surface, but a lot of them function quite differently. You're not meant to roll through attacks like in Dark Souls, you don't have a stamina bar, you can use items but can't swap weapons, etc. Not to mention how different the out of combat sections of each game are. No one is suggesting that Dark Souls invented lock-on or dodge rolling, but a game isn't generic just because it didn't come up with every single mechanic it uses, and other games can still be inspired and influenced by the specific ways that it utilizes those mechanics. I mean, we all agree here that Disco Elysium was a fantastic and innovative RPG, but its mechanics are as old as the genre itself.
I wouldn't argue that it was unique. I'd argue a lot more that when Dark Souls came out around the same time in the greater context of the US/EU markets a good majority of well known devs at the time were going pretty hard into this weird idea that they need to capture the casual audience by making their hard games easier, and also a lot of japan devs at the time were going very hard into making their games more westernized for the western markets (which also involved making them easier so...). And Dark Souls came out and really wasn't doing any of that, so I would say that the reason why Dark Souls took off the way it did is simply that a lot of other devs were shitting the bed at the time.
"I wouldn't say that Dark Souls was unique, just that it did things differently from all the other games at the time."