You must log in or register to comment.
Delayed attacks as a form of increasing difficult are just extremely unfun. Yeah, you made the boss harder, you also made it extremely frustrating, congratz.
It’s literally helping you actually learn to dodge perfectly instead of just spamming it and getting lucky. Like instead of rolling when they do the back swing, you now have to actually wait for them to swing their attack.
If this was the first game like this you played, it wouldn’t even be that much harder to learn. It’s actually harder having played all the games prior to Elden Ring that conditioned you to dodge on the back swing.
It’s usually not a matter of just waiting - it’s a matter of memorizing. I get the impression if the AI bosses could manually set different delays on their swings after winding up each time, they would literally be impossible.
They can do that. And one of the first dudes you’ll see doing it is Margit. They only delay the time between back swing and the actual attack. So you’ll know it’s coming, you just need to dodge (or parry) when they take a swing at you, not when they bring their hand back. Shit, sometimes Margit will just do the back swing and if you stay away or calm long enough, he just goes back to an idle animation and doesn’t attack you.
The first measuring stick dude, he makes sure you learn the mechanics. I feel like Margit and morgott are the exclusively to make sure you have a handle on them. Hell I didn’t realize jumping could dodge attacks until godfrey.
The weird thing I found in the dlc with jumping is that, for whatever reason, when the Putrescent Knight does that blue fire attack, you can jump it but not roll it. Or at least, I can’t figure out how to avoid damage by rolling it. Rolling forward should avoid a hit, but I still take one; jumping it avoids it totally. It doesn’t even seem jumpable because the flames still touch your upper body while doing it and you only have i-frames from the waist down.
The fire is a persistent hitbox that lasts longer than a roll gives iframes. The airtime of the jump lasts long enough when timed right.
Some of the channels of blue fire can also be avoided outright but I never got a handle on how that worked. And the visuals, like a lot of fires in Elden Ring, don’t look like you should be able to jump it. Looks super edgy though when you do though.
That’s my biggest problem with FromSoft games. They are not challenging, they’re just slow HP sponges that can one-shot you. That is not challenging, it’s just unfair, and frankly boring.
I think the game would be funner even with the simple tweak of making the animations faster. No fighter EVER wins IRL by telegraphing their attacks for three seconds.
Have you played their previous games? It’s only an issue in Elden Ring.
Dark Souls also has slow enemies. Supposedly Sekiro is better in that regard, but meh.
Slow and delayed is not the same thing, Dark Souls enemies won’t wait 3 seconds mid attack to throw you off.
Sekiro is much faster paced; it pays to be aggressive after all. The only time I felt like having to delay my reaction time was with the snake eyes with her weird grab iirc.
I didn’t like elden ring much, combat felt more plodding and frustrating to me (and I plat “difficult” games: HK, sekiro, STS).
Coming from someone who shares your frustration with morgott or morgit or the 3 other copy-paste boss’s stick that hovers in the air for 5 business days…
Play sekiro
This is the first comic that expresses why I rage quit so many games with overly difficult boss fights ( if there’s any delay measured in more than microseconds between retries ).
I played (and still do) the original one hit kill arcade bullshit. Hell, I beat Alladin on SNES. I’m not allergic to a challenge.
But, today, I have no time to repeat anything that isn’t fun in a video game. I could be filling out tax forms with that time.
I beat the original Ducktales and Battletoads back in the day. But, back then I had the luxury of time. Ain’t nobody got time for this shit!
Man, I recently introduced my kid to both the NES Battletoads and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
I beat that one Battletoads stage (you know the one) on the third try. And Mr Sandman on the fourth try (did not play against Mike).
I was super stoked. Third try! I’m old now. Apparently my time put into it as a kid stuck with me.
Doesn’t really relate to anything in this thread, I just needed to brag to someone because my kid and couple of friends totally did not get it.
Are people going around playing like duck tales was hard now? You could just pogo jump through most of the game and be fine.
I was kinda thinking the same thing, but lots of people do consider it hard.
The remake still freaking amazes me. It’s really good, and the voice actors (at least, the 80% from the original cast) did fantastic.
Bro, for real. I just want to practice phase two Radahn with my build, but it’s such a slog just to get him there and then survive long enough to figure out the moveset.
If it’s a slog to get to phase two, practice phase one more or change your build to do more damage.
“If you don’t enjoy doing it over and over again, just do it over and over again a bunch more times”
I have been, doesn’t mean I like it. It’s been a big time investment on my part.
This isn’t really the message of the comic, which is more about the direction of FromSoft’s boss design, but it also kinda sucks to struggle and persevere with a fun, wacky build throughout the entire DLC only to be met with a brick wall at the very end because I’m not playing the right way. So I’m faced with the options to either change the build I’ve been loving to something cheesier/easier, put in even more time at the same boss going through the motions and slowly learning over the course of hours, or just quitting because I have other games to play and there’s nothing after the boss anyways.
Ultimately, I understand that this is all to do with my own stubbornness/principles, but I still think it indicates a flaw in the ‘balance’ of the game where I could easily end the suffering by just parrying or poking with a big ass shield in hand, but quitting gets the same results, is faster, and somehow feels more rewarding. /rant
That’s what I did. Loved all of Elden Ring, it is at the top of my all time favorite games. Did not have the fun with and didn’t want to pour more time into Radahn and said fuck it. It felt bad at first but I’m sure the time and frustration I spared myself is well worth it.
This is a big reason I farmed hard in Elden Ring and have 356 hours. I spent a lot of that time leveling my health up so I can take more damage. Level 156 and my health bar is like half the width of my TV lmao.
The base game was way more accessible than any other Soulslike which pulled in way more players than any other soulslike and now all the players that got used to the base game are mad that the DLC is as hard as any soulslike ever has been.
I think it’s hilarious seeing all the players half the item descriptions in the game make fun of.
All the souls dlcs have been much harder than the base games. Artorias, fume knight, ludwig and gael all stomped me until i changed up tactics. The dlcs have always been aimed at late/post game characters.
Boiling down the descriptor to one word - “hard” - really doesn’t serve the discussion well.
Someday, I want to make “The hardest game ever made”, just to show raw inability to win is not fun on its own.
It’s lazy game design to make a fight “harder” by just adding increasingly long periods where all you can do is dodge.
The soulslike genre is simply bullet hell where you don’t always get to see the bullets before they hit you, stuck inside a metroidvania.
Wish cheat codes were still a thing. Sometimes I just need a little help getting past one part but don’t have time to grind it out like I would have before.
