jfc this is the most boring fucking game I've ever played in my life. It's not fun getting one-shotted by something that you don't know about until after its killed you at least once. There's nothing interesting about worldbuilding that's all made up of intentionally vague YoU hAvE tO fIlL iN tHe BlAnKs YoUrSeLf nonsense. There's nothing noteworthy about weapon upgrades that require you to look up a guide to see what's worth investing materials in and what's not.

And already some of you have doubtlessly gone down to comment "lmao git gud". Motherfucker it's not about difficulty. You know what was a difficult fucking game? Sekiro. That game is hard as balls and I absolutely love it, precisely because its designed in a such a way that it fixes everything about Dark Souls that sucks.

In Dark Souls, every single time you rock up to an enemy, you know exactly how you're going to defeat it. You're going to learn the patterns of its attacks, dodge at the appropriate time, and hit it in the intervals between. This is interesting once, but doing it over and over again for fifteen bosses is boring, repetitive bullshit.

In Sekiro they fixed this. Instead of literally just dodging every single attack, you have a dozen different defensive options that you have to learn and apply to different attacks. Instead of knowing how every single enemy encounter is going to go down, you have a bunch of different ninja tools that have different effects that you can experiment with.

And yet the geniuses of the gaming sphere all bashed their head cavities together and decided that SEKIRO was the bad one. The best game in the whole fucking genre, now sidelined because these morons confused a repetitive grind for difficulty. And as a result Elden Ring, which was supposed to be the masterpiece of the whole thing, is just another bland endurance test.

  • WhyEssEff [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    You’re going to learn the patterns of its attacks, dodge at the appropriate time, and hit it in the intervals between. This is interesting once, but doing it over and over again for fifteen bosses is boring, repetitive bullshit.

    In Sekiro they fixed this. Instead of literally just dodging every single attack, you have a dozen different defensive options that you have to learn and apply to different attacks. Instead of knowing how every single enemy encounter is going to go down, you have a bunch of different ninja tools that have different effects that you can experiment with.

    I could be wrong, but this to me sounds like you haven't been experimenting with different builds outside of melee dodge-focused builds. The reason that Sekiro is able to have so many options within the bounds of a single build, as you've lined out, is because it builds its entire game around the single build it grants you. Dark Souls has a multitude of builds, allowing for a multitude of playstyles, but that does spread a single build's combat thinner than Sekiro's combat. On the other hand, if you don't like the single build in Sekiro's playstyle, you probably don't like to play Sekiro, since you can't spec out of the build.

    In my limited experience, Dark Souls grants you more options to approach a fight than Sekiro, but Sekiro centers its gameplay around a single build and therefore is allowed to expand the options granted in it's actively-experienced combat. In Dark Souls, it allows more ways to approach the game, but you have to invest time into the one you prefer in order to make it work, and that does end up creating routines, but also lets a wider range of players experience and enjoy the game.

    Dark Souls is a more accomodating game, whereas Sekiro is a more tuned game. Both are valid ways of approaching game design. I don't see why we have to pit two titles from the exact same developers but with different design approaches against each other?