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.
I never played Dark Souls, but I recently tried Elden Ring due to hype around it and holy shit was it a bad game for me. I expect at least some scenario and dialogue, you know ? and not too much grinding. Disappointed on both counts, it just sucked. So I'm not gonna try Dark Souls.
I'm with you. I never liked any Souls game except Sekiro but my friends promised me Elden Ring would be the one I loved. I didn't.
Need more of a story hook than just "go do stuff" to get invested in going and doing stuff in the game anyway.
I honestly think this is a big dividing line for people. I personally don't care about a story and will stop playing games that have too many unskippable cutscenes or long, annoying lines of dialogue.
Some people just want to play games that are fun and that's all, some people want an engaging storyline and gameplay can take a backseat to that. My wife loves the witcher but i found it to be boring, the combat was so easy even on the hardest difficulty and the ai can't even play the card game properly.
I mean, this is the killer for me. If your game has no or bad story, but makes up for it with sick gameplay, then that's a 10/10 design for me. The gameplay for Dark Souls just Aint It Chief as far as I'm concerned.
Souls games just give you a vibe and that's all they worry about. It's great if you're of the type that gets immersed solely by atmosphere.
Like fucking bloodborne is absolutely incredible at that, from sound design, to subtle weird changes in enemies as the game goes on.
I'm curious, what do you mean by grinding? Imo, the only real grinding required is upgrading a second or third weapon to higher tiers before you unlock the materials in the Roundtable Keep shop. Unless you count all of the side dungeons as grinding, I guess.