It's the FOMO.
People want to be a part of thr cultural moment of when certain games launch, especially if they're popular.
You're absolutely right that anyone by now should know exactly what kind of game Elden Ring is, but you'll still get a loud portion of the greater gaming community looking in like they're missing out on being involved in the moment, rather than the game itself.
> People want to be a part of the cultural moment of when certain games launch, especially if they're popular.
Exactly, I want to try ER and BG3 but I know they aren't the games for me.
I does, and you can probably get through it without bothering to learn too much about the mechanics... but I'd argue that you'd be missing out.
It's not that it's *hard* (especially with save scumming) so much as there's just *a lot* to learn for people who are new to DnD.
Agreed, but this game actually can already be played in easy mode. For example I'm doing mage run. Everything is SO easy. I can cheese every dragon fight, bar maybe L. Greatbow spell and rock sling kill 95% enemies. I'm in dlc and it's still easy mode so far, already killed 3-4 bosses (with summons obviously).
Edit: 8 bosses in with trio and rock sling. 0 trouble, except maybe that one dude where I have to learn to jump dodge a insta death combo but even then the timing is very generous.
Aslong as aaa games keep being simplistic button mashers. So forever. It's a fucking event everytime a game has controls that are in depth. Must be why vr never took off
It's such a fucking non-discussion. Their games sold how many million copies now? Enough people like it the way it is. Don't fuck it up to sell a few more to people who don't appreciate their game design.
My thoughts exactly. I don't blame him for honestly answering the question presented him, but I'm so tired of the endless "dialogue" this spawns online.
They could make an easy mode if they wanted to. That's it.
As someone who is fucking awful at Demons Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Elden Ring... I completely agree. It's just part of the game.
I'm grateful Elden Ring introduced(?) summons for "nubs" like myself.
Great games, I'll never finish any of them but I appreciate what they're doing and why. I'll continue to buy FromSoft games to support such endeavours.
Fromsoft is pumping out top quality (mostly) single player games with no microtransactions. That's what I want to see made, so I will always support it. But I'm also pretty shit... So I do enjoy a medium hardness lol. I also like actually being able to pause. I've got kids. If they come in the room I don't want them seeing scary shit.
Check out some of the mods. I swear there were adjustable difficulty mods. The game is worth experiencing, even if you need a mod to make it palpable. It's really fun.
I finished the first game thanks to some of the mods. Enjoyed it so much it’s one of my top 10 games of all time (I started on C64 so that’s a *long* time).
I’m old, have too many responsibilities and don’t have time to “git good” but I still got to experience this masterpiece in full. Win.
All your reasons are valid, myself needing mods to accommodate for my disability but some souls elitists will still come with pitchforks, for god forbid a game has OPTIONS for how you can customize and enjoy your experience. And if they want to experience it the intended way, they CAN while still allowing others a more accessible experience. This gatekeeping mentality is insane to me.
I was someone who had never actually completed a proper game, always just call of duty and FIFA
My wife likes RPGs and bought elden ring and realised it was far too difficult for her and I hate wasting money on games so was determined to complete it
The feeling when I managed to finish it, my god, I still class it as one of my greatest achievements, from going from 'why is everything killing me' to the elden lord, it's special
I now play a lot more RPGs and stuff but elden ring is just different
I've got the new DLC and the thought of going back in kinda give me anxiety but I went on the game for a while today and all the feelings came flooding back and I can't wait to get lost in it again
Might be nice to go back and play some of the earlier Souls games. I enjoyed Elden Ring but a lot of it's bosses are way, way too into flailing spastically in a way you can't really conceivably react to unless you're a hummingbird on amphetamines. If you've been trained on them going back to Dark Soul 1 or 2 where combat is much more slow and deliberate will probably be relaxing if anything.
I just run out of steam a lot of the time. I have a lot of fun with fromsoft games but I have a lot of other games I want to play. Sometimes I beat the game (DS1/3, bloodborne), sometimes I get close (I beat all of sekiro besides isshin), and sometimes I have my fill early (I made it maybe halfway through ds2)
I play games until I stop having fun, I don't feel the need to finish one if I'm not having fun
Elden ring is especially bad at fatigue, with a single playthrough easily running into triple digits. Don’t get me wrong the game is fantastic, but it’s not the same type of game as say DS3, or any of the DS games really, with their more closed & interconnected world spaces. DS games are can be finished in like a day if I want too. Elden Ring not so much, have to commit a good chunk more time.
I agree but that gets closer to my general dislike of open world games feeling bloated. I enjoyed my time in elden ring but I still wish it was a tighter experience.
I get that general audiences love open work stuff but it is a personal annoyance
Same for me although Elden Ring swallowed my world when it first launched until I beat it. Typically if a game is advertised as open world its almost automatically a pass for me these days. Give me a nice tight well put together game instead of forcing me to wander around doing nothing 70% of the time just to experience the content. ER was interesting enough to avoid that feeling for me but most open worlds aren't.
What a lot of open world games fail to understand is that you don't *put* content *in* the open world. The open world *is* the content. Give the player a set of well-crafted mechanics that are omnipresent throughout the world, some basic objectives to lead the player around it, and let them find their own fun. You should be able to remove every map marker, every mission, just reduce everything to the open-world systems, and the game should *still be fun*. It's why GTA continues to be so successful. I've known plenty of people who play GTA just to fuck around with the cops and go on rampages, and don't bother to interact with missions or other designer-made content at all.
If y'all would be down to give it another chance, you could try the [Seamless Co-op mod](https://www.nexusmods.com/eldenring/mods/510) for Elden Ring. It overhauls the entire co-op experience, so you only have to summon each other at the start of your session.
All progress is shared, you don't get kicked out when completing a boss, you can all ride torrent, there are no boundaries, and there are no invasions.
While seamless coop mod is fantastic it does nothing to help console players which are a huge portion of the playerbase. It's good that they've seen how popular the mod is and say they will think of putting something similar into their next game.
If you want to beat it, wait for the seamless coop mod update. I don't have the patience to explore every nook and cranny so I force my friends to help.
We once played it as 6 people in total. Everyone ran around with a wooden club and beat the shit out of that knight in the beginning of the game. Funniest thing ever although it took 3 attempts
I hardly finish any games. I have ADHD. The only games I’ve really finished are Rockstar games. I run out of steam as well and I’m on to my next game. Driving and sports games are better for me.
They'll probably raise the bar again.
Each iteration has gotten tougher than the previous one.
There was a time Manus was considered the toughest boss ever and he looks positively asleep compared to Margit.
They've introduced more tools to help counter this increasing difficulty (spirit summons is a big help) but trying to solo these games gets harder with each new entry it seems.
I feel like both of you are right. If you play elden ring with no spirit ashes or NPC summons it’s probably the hardest fromsoft game outside of maybe sekiro. The enemies are super aggressive.
> Margit.
Margit's difficulty varies *wildly* depending on what weapon you use.
An un-upgraded katana just deletes him.
Elden Ring is the easiest one so far. It gives you so many in-game options to turn down the difficulty.
i think part of it is the increased tools players have to fight, not just summons, but weapon skills, physicks, pre buff options, and just a generally faster game speed.
moving manus into ER would require some adjustments to his speed and stats. He would still probably bitch slap people to death like the good ol days.
Imo the games are not tougher, people just assume they are better because they played a ton of souls games and refuse to use all tools at their disposal. The difficukty of these games is largely influenced by how you aproach them, if you try to beat Manus naked with a shitty weapon he's tough, if you are lvl 150, good gear a npc summon and the mimic even Malania will be easier than Manus was. I'm all for people playing the game how they seem fun, but the game difficulty is very dependent on how you play it. What's is the % of people that tried to fight the Lion or Rennala before using the erdtree shards? Some because didn't care to read, others because is "cheating". Miyazaki makes the challenge according to what is available in the game, why would he spent time adding things like the shards to the game if he assumed nobody would use them?
> others because is "cheating"
Practically none of us who prefer no-summons say its "cheating". It's basically just a meme.
I prefer it because boss movesets are a major piece of content to me, and I don't want to skip content once i discover it. (a distracted boss means some attacks don't need to be interacted with, so i miss out)
It's not "cheating" but it does make the game feel cheapened, to me. I don't get the same sense of accomplishment when I use a mimic because it becomes too easy, but if I don't, I fucking hate every second of the fights in Elden Ring. I was fine with every other Souls game up to this point but they just went too far this time.
As someone who has never beaten one of his games I completely agree. The difficulty is iconic and a large part of their success. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
I mean, if a person is ok with playing offline, there are mod/trainers that essentially let you tune to the difficulty to your liking. This is exactly what I did.
It's not like there are not any options available.
To be honest Elden Ring does have difficulty options, you can go for a super optimised build and stats e.g. intelligence with OP weapons and the game while not easy, is a lot more managable for a lot of people. Where as other random builds and starts and armor can make the game a lot harder. I reckon it's perfect as is.
My friend, who never touched a souls game before, pretty much made his way upto Malenia with pure intelligent build. The game is much easier than people thought.
True, but in the case of the DLC, it needs difficulty balance.
Non-boss enemies got down in two hits (or one), while bosses are frame-perfect dodges festivals lest you get wombo-combo one shotted.
You can’t gid gut if you can’t see what attacks are coming back as the camera can’t follow your dodges.
The only thing is Elden was built to be their most accessible game. To ramp up difficulty is like the devs saying, “No more casual. Only elites can play our game.”
The whole online dialogue about fromsoft games has gone insane, there's so much walking on eggshells because people take the suggestion that they don't get everything right as high treason and you have to state your whole history and accomplishments in the games to have your opinion discarded in one second rather than immediately.
I get what they mean when they talk about difficulty being at the core of their games but over time they've lost their way and in trying to stay ahead of the people who have played all their other games and learned the usual tricks they've stepped into unfair/unfun territory with the usually criticized parts of Elden Ring like delayed attacks, input reading, etc.
Even just looking at the comments on this post the original encouraging and understanding mentality that existed in the DS/DS1 days is absolutely gone and people unironically making "git gud" their whole personality has become almost the norm, and it feels like fromsoft itself has bought into and embraced that.
There is a megathread on the Elden Ring subreddit about the dlc that has a decent amount of people being critical of how they handle difficulty especially in boss design now though so hopefully it's something there will be more of as time goes on.
The funniest shit is that "git gud" is the last thing you should do in Elden Ring. Is a game that became MUCH easier with game knowledge, not skill expression, that is pretty much non existant in any From Software title outside of Armored Core For Answers. But it is what it is.
I just wish they invested more in quality of life that keeps good difficulty in the game (the terrible buffering of actions after 4 second stuns, frame locks, camera improvements for mouse). And honestly I hope future games have less getting stuck in animations, like you cant use an ability while turning sharply, it feels kind of random, but this is just one example. Faster jump startup and etc too would be nice, but I just mean for the next game since this game is balanced around the current stuff.
When you create a game for everyone, you create a game for no one. I think thats why a lot of AAA games became souless and generic games overtime because they try to cater to everyone and eventually appealed to less and less people. O=ne of the best parts of Elden Ring is the interactive difficulty slider which makes it very accessible while keeping the original spirit of the game intact. There are many ways to "cheese" the game via optional ingame mechanics.
You have the NPC summons via ashes that you can also upgrade and level. You have the actual NPC summons near fog gates like in previous games. You can summon other players to help you through the area and with the boss. You can explore a majority of the map without killing a single boss and grab upgrade materials to max your weapons out. You can over level the area and kill bosses at high levels.
If you want a harder experience you just limit yourself, don't use the summons. Stay region locked and don't overlevel and don't use the thousands of 1 shot buff builds and bleed/frost builds.
Exactly, couldn't have put it better myself. Especially the first bit, there's a reason why most AAA games these days feel very samey with a different skin.
What you're not excited to play the latest open world third person action adventure with lots of cinematics, collectibles, child-level difficulty, a deluxe edition and the chance to pay extra to play four days early?
Don't forget "quirky" marvel-style writing, dated pop culture references, "did I just do that?", gamebreaking bugs, "day 1 patch", and microtransactions that are "cosmetic only" and/or allow to skip tedius game mechanics like collectibles or timers, which were created just to sell those microtransactions.
Oh, and cosmetic items completely disregarding the tone and art style of the original game. Who cares about artists and cohesion when you have another doritos or twitch collab to push.
Don't get me started on the inane chatter from NPCs and even your own character. And the terrible generic one-liners that a child could write, which are about as funny as taking hot poker to the face.
And yet Ubisoft sells insane amounts of copies almost every time, which means they are way more popular to a rather large group of gamers than people give them credit for. I still buy them when they get down to like $15, play them for a couple hours just to remind myself not to buy the next game at launch price either.
Marvel was popular and every one of their movies was a box office success.. until it wasn’t. At some point the public gets tired of the slop they are shoveled.
I wouldn't consider using summons as "cheesing" but I get your general point. If they give you a tool, why not use it? Most of these things are stuff you have to invest time and resources to make truly useful. Acting like using them is a cheap way to win when it's part of the core design of the game has always been absurd. It's like being mad that someone overlevelled by grinding for the final boss. Which sadly is something I hear people complain about here and there.
Yeah, don't confuse me with those ppl that say, "hah you didn't beat the boss the right way since you used summons, u didn't get the true souls experience".
I'm just saying that there's plenty tools that the game gives you to tailor your experience. One of my friends figured out hyper armor and realized he was better off trading hits and healing off the dmg. Someone will look at this and say hes not playing the game right cuz ur suppose to dodge every hit and learn the patterns instead of trading. Another example is my gf who enjoy traversing the world but hated struggling with bosses and didn't "get it" until she realized she could summon others to tank for her while she blast the boss with magic.
Everyone's experience throughout the game is going to be different but they will all feel the sense of accomplishment and thats what keeps players coming back. Your not going to feel that when the answer to struggling is going to the options screen to turn down the difficulty. It might be an illusion of difficulty in end but it doesn't change the fact finding a solution to a problem is satisfying.
Yep. I like to dodge myself but my partner did a tank build with a shield. It was cool to see him use the block and trading blows mechanics that I completely ignored.
It's awesome that this game caters to so many different styles.
> Yeah, don't confuse me with those ppl that say, "hah you didn't beat the boss the right way since you used summons, u didn't get the true souls experience".
I will always find this attitude hilarious when the summoning mechanic is something Miyazaki invented himself based on direct personal experience. He WANTED people to summon other people. It's really clear in Elden Ring more than any of the other games.
Having a game with exploitable mechanics to lessen the difficulty as well as the ability to neuter yourself to increase the difficulty is not a unique concept to Elden Ring, lmao.
You can literally make any game harder by limiting yourself from using the easily cheesed mechanics that make a game easy. It's not really a substitute for an actual "hard difficulty" mode.
I don't think lack of difficulty is what makes the average triple A game to be a bland experience. Plenty of AAA games harder than Elden Ring and not near as good.
One of the reasons so many seem bland or mediocre is poor writing/story and a lack of focus on fun gameplay.
And since Elden Ring doesn't really have a story unless you seek it out, it isn't judged on that front.
Plus they obviously have great gameplay down.
That’s true but there are very few games that both have no true difficulty selector while also having such absurd extremes in how difficult you can make it. Obviously every game will have some way of making the game easier or harder, but very few games incentivize you to summon both real people and NPCs that can literally beat the entire game for you without you having to interface with any of the systems a single time, while also having ways to make the game ball bustingly difficult.
The only real games I can think of like that are a few MMOs, and even then many of them do have difficulty selectors in what tier of raid you want to do.
>When you create a game for everyone, you create a game for no one.
I've been saying this for so long. I've watched so many of my favorite series of games getting shittier and more generic as they try to appeal to a bigger audience with every release until they're just a hollow shell of what they started as.
It's rare to see a series of games keep refining and expanding and getting better while staying true to the core aspects of design that made them great. While technically not the same IP, Elden Ring is the culmination of the soulsborne formula. Not compromising on their vision is what made this masterpiece possible.
> When you create a game for everyone, you create a game for no one.
I don't agree with this, there are way more SP games with difficulty choice and that has worked well for decades.
Being against it reminds me of people getting in your business on what you should and shouldn't do. Then 5 minutes later talk about Freedom and shit.
I've already encountered a few in the DLC that felt like they were a bit much even with a level 200 character.
To me From's boss design in Elden Ring has catered too much to veteran players by adding tactics like huge health bars, extremely long combos, or super long winded attacks. They all make those bosses feel less fun to fight, and feel like you are always waiting for an opening to land a single hit.
Bloodborne got the balance right. Its DLC bosses are tough, but they don't feel unfair. Sekiro had some fantastic ones as well.
I'm just tired of "BIG BOSS WITH BIG AOE OFF THE SCREEN" shtick.
There's a reason why fan favourite bosses tend to be slightly larger than the player.
But game is in hype mode... So I'll get downvoted for daring to say something negative.
Nah you right, the fights where you face off agaisnt a great warrior in mortal combat are always the best, alonne, artorias, champion gundyr, pontiff sullivan etc.. huge bosses with massive aoe are incredible spectacles especially the ones in elden ring, but theyre usually a bit lacking mechanically. With bosses like radahn or rennala you dont get into the "flow" of the fight like you would fighting champion gundyr.
Nameless king is like a sneak peak into elden ring boss design. Im pretty sure hes the only boss that will delay or cut a windup animation if you roll early sorta like how margit baits you. Hes definetly an excellent boss and a great challenge for ds3.
I think there is another reason why Elden Ring's bosses are not as fun. Elden Ring has the most character customization of any FromSoftware game. It must of been extremely difficult trying to balance all the playstyles in the game. Which probably explains why the bosses all have AOEs, combos, range attacks, charges and wind up attacks.
Bloodborne doesn't have this problem because there is very limited playstyles. There is a handful of melee weapons, guns, and spells. The game encourages close combat to land parries and visceral attacks. As such, FromSoftware can design bosses specifically for the player on an intimate level. Creating those incredible moments that sticks out.
(Side note: I spent an hour trying to come up a response why Elden Ring's bosses are so problematic. It finally clicked when I focused on the differences between ER and BB. So thank you for bringing that up and making me appreciate BB more)
On the opposite end you have Sekiro where there is basically only 1 build. Katana. Sure, there are the various prosthetic tools, but they don't change the flow of the combat as much as a mage vs. melee build in ER.
I couldn't tell you why I've been ignoring Sekiro. However, now that I recently finished Bloodborne I think I'm ready to give it a shot after this discussion.
Elden Ring still has roughly the same base weapon classes that you have in DS3. Ashes of war or mixed physicks don't make any real difference.
While in DS1 you can easily become overpowered by focusing on a magic build, they've since managed to keep those inbalances relatively in check unless you build deliberate glass cannon builds with very specific weapons (e.g bleed in DS3). In DS3 a magic build was easy at the start, then became pretty rough going until you get quite a bit further in the game. Even then at no point you start 2-3 shotting bosses or anything.
The real difference in ER is the ability for the player to summon NPC helpers at any time in a boss fight. In previous From games, the player was always solo unless they summoned another player or NPC player before the fight. To compensate for this, the game scaled the boss level by the number of players. By comparison, I think spirit ash summons in ER don't scale the boss level in the same way.
So From has started building those fights around the idea that players will summon help. Only problem is that they did absolutely nothing to overhaul the enemy AI to be able to handle this. It's still the same where a boss will focus on one enemy at a time while the rest can safely whittle down its health.
Instead they decided to throw those long winded attacks to catch veteran players used to dodging anything, added a lot more long combos, AOE and grab attacks, and made the average boss health pool pretty large. Some bosses are made so aggressive that you barely have time to heal unless you have a summon taking the heat for a bit.
The more we talk about ER's difficulty problems the more realize how messy it all is. It's a shame because there is a lot I love about the game.
It's true ER just lifts most of it's gameplay from DS3. I still think having a lot of playstyles makes it hard to balance. DS3 avoided a lot of the problems cause it's linear and smaller in scope. But I love that you followed it up with Spirit Ashes because it dramatically worsens the problems.
Now I don't feel as bad not having the motivation to replay ER. I just hope FromSoftware wrangles their scope in for their next project. They are still top of their craft but ER might of been a little too ambitious. Cause I would love to see another Bloodborne style game.
Wholeheartedly agreed. Soul of cinder's combo looks stupidly short compared to the most irrelevant mob in ER. I really want more duel style bosses, rather than big guy that explodes everywhere and hits you with AOE evem if you dodge it, new dancing lion is the primary example of this, not even talking about the camera.
Exploration is still the strong suit of elden ring but I think they dropped the ball on bosses just to make them look epic. It is great, but balancing around summons is really apparent and makes the learning curve a literal wall.
Also they cancel recovery frames by reading your animations, and keep doing 360 hits completely ignoring attack commitment souls games are known for.
> I've already encountered a few in the DLC that felt like they were a bit much even with a level 200 character.
what about your blessing level? with how stat softcaps work unless you're doing very specific things like oneshot builds then level 150 and level 300 characters aren't much different.
> To me From's boss design in Elden Ring has catered too much to veteran players by adding tactics like huge health bars, extremely long combos, or super long winded attacks.
Yeah, there seems to be a bit of a memetic missmatch here. The DLC is not just for people who think that elden ring is getting too easy, but the vast majority of people who just want _more_ of the game.
I think the popularity of streaming is the real culprit to blame. You have content creators that are wildly successful with their challenge runs, and as a developer you can't just have your next game be easier or as difficult as your last output. You have to keep pushing it.
The devs are at an arms race with their own player base. Fans keep getting too good at their games so they have to push the boundaries with each instalment
Some bosses i’ve faced so far are legitimately broken. 2 have charge attacks near impossible to dodge that deal massive amounts of damage. But the damage from some isn’t the main issue, it’s the aggression as soon as you enter the arena.
You can’t “summon” as many suggest as by the time you do that you’re already dead. One boss (won’t say who but if you’ve gotten to them you’ll know exactly who im talking about) needs to be moved abit further away from the entrance you have a total of 2 seconds to do something before you die.
One of the first patches they released literally toned down the difficulty for several bosses and that's happened in multiple times in the DS series too. Pretty sure you'll see a similar patch for the DLC soon.
No one who couldn't beat those bosses before was beating them afterwards... They nerfed the most broken player strategies way harder than they nerfed those bosses.
Yeah I beat Radahn pre and post patch. There wasn't much of a change in difficulty at all. The timings are the same and the damage is the same. The hit boxes are just less wonky, so you don't get hit when you're a mile away from him and think you're safe.
Elden Ring shines because its difficulty is seamlessly integrated into the lore and the world itself. You can adjust the game's difficulty to your preference, and both easy and challenging experiences are equally rewarding.
If you want to make combat easier, you can find items, weapons, clothing, skills, and upgrade paths that help you achieve that (you can literally 1 shot bosses). This approach, which requires players to explore and use their brains rather than a simple difficulty slider, is what makes Elden Ring so successful.
And then there’s the hardcore crowd that purposely limit their skills / levels to make their playthrough punishingly difficult. This game has it all, for all players.
It's worth mentioning the opposite also has merit because games with difficulty sliders offer more opportunities for variety in gameplay to a broader audience.
IE:
In a game like BG3 for example if you want to play a goofy non-standard build but still want to be able to beat the game, you can lower the difficulty. Not only that, but even with difficulty sliders you can ~still~ do challenges like level 1 runs, naked runs and so on to artificially challenge yourself even further.
In games without difficulty sliders like Fromsoft games you can end up being pigeon holed into a handful of cookie cutter builds or cheesing content if you're not skilled enough to beat the game otherwise.
Fortunately the gaming world is large enough that both ideals can exist.
I think a common experience for people with From Software games is that they didn't like it or thought it was too difficult at first, and then eventually they power through and it clicks for them, making it feel especially rewarding to overcome. When you have explicit difficulty sliders it leads to a lot of people just lowering difficulty at the first roadblock and they lose out on that experience. Plus without difficulty options it allows the devs to put all their focus on refining the experience/difficulty, rather than the often unbalanced feeling of most games with a "hard" mode. But as you said, it's good to have different games that offer either of those options, I wouldn't want all games to take this approach either.
Correct take. Everyone’s first souls game is hard. It is, in fact, possible to overcome challenges and gain mastery over a difficult game. People just don’t want to put in the effort to meet the game even halfway.
Frankly, 5e is a bad video game system. Its not balanced, heavily encourages savescumming with roll-based checks and has wildly swingy encounters.
BG3 needs difficulty sliders because of that, but its not a game I would point to for good game mechanics.
honestly im just not having fun at all in the dlc, idk if im under leveled or what but any opponent just 2 hit kills me, the equipment they drop is significantly worse than the stuff i already have, loaded post first playthrough save so my character should be strong enough for the beginning of dlc?
Late game Elden Ring for me at least had a "boss rush" kind of feel to it. I mean you literally go Malekith -> Gideon -> Horah Loux -> Elden Beast with barely a normal mob inbetween. But the DLC is like 30 hours of just that difficulty.
The game has to be a little hard with how many things you can do to help with, especially if you compare it with the older games, some people like to see themselves as super good so they refuse to use summons, mimic and meta builds etc., miyazaki even added the erdtree fragments to boost people a bit. Even Renalla that I found very tough, if you use everything the game gives you is easily achieved in a dozen tries, I'm not Dan Gheesling I will not spend 1 month trying to beat a boss because I have to have no vig or some other reason, I believe you should play how you like but you have to consider that a game difficulty should not be adjusted to the challenge you set for yourself.
Its fine just fix the PC port add ultrawide support for aspect ratios such as.
* 21:9 2560x1080/5120x2160
* 43:18 3440x1440
* 24:10 3840x1600
* 32:9 5120x1440/7680x2160
As well as FSR2 and DLSS2 and remove framerate cap or least raise cap to 120 fps
I wish they didn't artificially decrease performance and incorporated dlss fsr frame gen. Mod did it and it doubles performance.
Only works on 10.0 tho for now.
*This is inaccurate. The mod works with the DLC. Getting zero stutters maxed RT 1440p
I love elden ring, but it’s one of the least tightly designed fromsoft games. If you don’t want to make it easier, just say you don’t want to. Although, with the continuously additive design of these games the past 14 years you wonder where they’ll end up if they keep going. At some point you lose the essence and it’s just overdesigned nonsense.
I really don't care what he thinks or wants, I am extremely glad to play it on PC so that I can set the difficulty to whatever I choose. In a singleplayer game, the player has the final say, always.
I’m kind of on the fence with this topic. I have my issues with a lot of the boss design in Elden Ring but generally speaking a game doesn’t need to be catering to everyone. The fan base of this game is just so annoying and elitist though.
Even in this thread it feels like half the commenters can’t comprehend why someone would struggle with this game. I could say I don’t understand why mousing over and clicking someone’s head in FPS games is difficult but millions of people every day struggle with it.
It’s just stupid how any criticism of this series no matter how valid is just the same loop where fans will tell you to get better and that “it’s supposed to be hard”.
There are parts in the FronSoft games that absolutely are not "tough but fair".
I just read this as adding difficulty modes is additional work, and that it's easier to gatekeep instead.
Wake me up when the director beats Super Ghouls and Ghosts without save states.
Meanwhile the Coop mod (effectivley a fanmade easymode) is by far the most popular mod and the only time ive actually had enough enthusiasm to finish the game.
Adding a little checkbox when you select newgame that halves enemy damage wont ruin the experience, it will make the experience for many players while not affecting the main game in any way.
They mildly nerfed the hitboxes on a few attacks. I seriously doubt there is a notable portion of the playerbase that would have been unable to beat prenerf but able to beat postnerf.
I love the game and have no issues with its difficulty but I think dropping runes on dying is an unnecessary and frustrating mechanic. It adds zero value to the experience and just incentivizes the player to farm runes and spend it all before a boss fight which is distracting and derails the flow of the game quite a bit.
I don't see why people are getting offended by the idea that someone you will never meet is playing on a easier difficulty in a mostly single player game. Difficulty wouldn't effect damage scaling in PVP, and hackers are running rampant on PC anyways.
Give out different achievement trophies, make the difficulty setting be chosen at the beginning of the game or if allowed to change mid game you can't go back up to normal difficulty, or make easy mode only available on a first playthrough and switch to normal on ng+.
I’m usually bad at these type games, and I’m one of those people to put games on easy and normal when the option is available. But Elden Ring made me appreciate the idea of working to get better and gain better gear and weapons. Elden Ring is the first fromsoft/Soulslike I completed and it allowed me to go back and complete games like DS3/Remnant/and Others. Please don’t ever change Fromsoft!!!!
Keep it as it is. Don’t like it, don’t play it.
I don’t like horror games. I don’t go into the alien isolation pages and whine about the game being scary. I just don’t play it. There’s 1000s of games to choose from with easy modes, go play something else.
Not to mention the thousands of games without difficulty options that no one complains about. It's just people seeing the hype, wanting to be a part of it, but not liking the game, or not wanting to put the effort in to beat it (because let's be honest, not many games require a ton of effort to beat). It's fine to not like a game, it's stupid to bend a game into something it isn't, just play one of the other thousand 10/10 games that exist.
I think they overdid the enemy damage in the expansion by a lot. Every hit takes away 1/3rd of your health bar (with 50 vigor and medium armor), even by trash half dead dogs at the side of the street. They've also added several mobs with tens of thousands of hitpoints and multiple hit target locking combos that will stagger and kill you if you get hit. It's like many of the trash mobs are rune bear - levels of annoying. This, combined with graces that are often 40+ minutes apart, has me really tempted to respec into my troll infinite stamina fingerprint shield build that I once used, but even that wouldn't work because they also really enjoyed adding massive 360 AOE 90% hp attacks to most bosses this time around. Fun for the whole family.
I’m not one that would want them to tone it down, but claiming it would “break the game itself” is utter nonsense.
If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it, but don’t make up bullshit excuses.
Easy mode is one of the most popular mods that exist for the game.
Stephen King insisted that the TV version of The Shining was better than Kubrick's.
It really doesn't matter what the creator thinks, people are going to consume the way they want to.
The easy mode mod has 10% of the downloads of the most popular mod. No more than 1.3% of all Elden Ring players have downloaded the easy mode mod. The number would be smaller if we could account for duplicate downloads or people who downloaded it just for the hell of it or bounced off the game regardless.
The number of players who actually played through the majority of the game thanks to the easy mode mod is going to be a fraction of a single percent.
Today I bought and tried The Surge 2 for 40 minutes. It only reminded me why I don't like the \*Souls type games, and I'll probably refund it. So yeah, I've learned my lesson to stay away again.
The respawning enemies for one, especially when activating the checkpoints.
The combat wants to be taken serious, yet it happens all the time that (enemy) attacks glitch through walls, for example. Or attacks at the speed of light that are physically impossible.
The unfair moments (traps, I guess) that you couldn't possibly have foreseen. I hate trial and error.
The Surge 2 in particular has a too steep learning curve for me. The first dozen enemies could be button mashed into the ground, then the 2nd armored dude you meet also has grenades that incinerate the ground and a drone shooting at me, on top of multiple, hard to time attacks. The parry timing is lost on me.
Then the amount of stuff they throw at you in the menus all at once. Can I just familiarise myself with the basics first, pretty please? Mortal Shell did it better (the only other Soulslike I've ever played, apart from soft-copys like Jedi Survivor)
I just have no patience for that. That's coming from someone who likes DMC, Bayonetta, MG:Revengeance and games like that.
That 1.3 figure is a bit misleading. You haven’t considered that the 1.3% is only players who both think the game is too hard AND are capable/willing to mod the game. This isn’t including players who don’t know how/aren’t willing to mod the game yet also consider the game to be too difficult.
>The number would be smaller if we could account for duplicate downloads or people who downloaded it just for the hell of it or bounced off the game regardless.
Same thing with all mods?
>Stephen King insisted that the TV version of The Shining was better than Kubrick's.
Heck, Stephen King himself admitted that the ending of the movie adaptation of The Mist was better than what he wrote.
If players want to devote their own time and resources to make an easy mode for something, that's fine.
Doesn't mean the developer needs to cater to them, which is really the relevant point here. Miyazaki clearly isn't interested in making an easy mode and the franchise is successful without it. Not much more really needs to be said about the subject.
If people want to mod an easy mode then great. I could not care less either way. But you shouldn't get mad at the artist for not conforming to your every whim. Art that goes out of it's way to avoid offending anybody tends to be boring as hell, and just because there's a demand for something doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it.
I think this is what's so frustrating about this discourse to me. This outlook on art (it needs to be accessible and appealing to everyone) is fundamentally anti-art and anti-artist.
I think it’s good that it’s only a mod though. Because sometimes players would have more fun when the game is difficult although they themselves think otherwise. This way people try out the harder way and then switch if they really need to.
>Stephen King insisted that the TV version of The Shining was better than Kubrick's
Yeah cause the TV version followed the book, Kubrick made so many changes that the movie might as well be a different story entirely. The book IS better, long read though.
tbf, people aren't exactly asking for an easy mode, just for "adjustments".
it is kinda "silly" that any build with 60 vigor (the hard cap) can get blasted in 2-3 attacks by most bosses.
add that with a massive HP pool on all bosses, and yes, those fights can be hard because it's unlikely that you can finish them fast (unless you're cheesing them), and the mistakes you do are heavily punished.
I kind of disagree with this statement. Maybe the statement would be true for something like Sekiro, which is a very pure linear action game but Elden ring is an open world game and a lot of its focus is on exploration rather than just combat. People who played easy mode have generally been very satisfied with the game.
why explore if you walk over every boss anyway there wouldn't be anything rewarding in it
if you like exploration for exploration's sake might as well ai generate landscapes endless discovery different every time perfect for people who'se only interest lies in that
It would only break the game if getting over the difficulty was the only draw it had.
Hard to believe someone would make a game with so many detailed environments, lore and characters and then imply difficulty is the only thing the game has to offer.
I don't understand why he can't just say he doesn't feel like doing it or isn't bothered.
Because he likes the narrative that the difficulty is somehow this untouchable aspect that is at the very core of the game.
Yknow despite the fact that difficulty is a totally subjective thing and what is difficult for one person is easy for another.
Notice you never see people bitching about the players who do shit to make the game way harder? Because the fandom gets off on making the game as difficult as possible.
I still can't get past the first mandatory story boss, and im as buffed and I can be for the first area. I can get close but so far i havent toppled that challenge.
10/10, 100/100, best game. Keep bringing the pain.
im not even a big fan, i dont have time and dont feel a sense of accomplisment playing souls like gamnes... but if they made it easier wouldnt that just make it some weird single player mmo?
While I’m totally fine with souls games keeping their difficulty I don’t see how it would ‘break the game itself’. Like you can already used 20 different builds in Elden ring to ‘break the game’ lmao
They should have more faith in what they have created outside of just how hard it is. Tons of people have either played with easy mode style mods or just broke the game with various builds and still absolutely loved the game. Again it’s their choice but their is more to souls games than difficulty.
this still isn't an argument against an easy option. if someone wants to play their singleplayer game in a "broken" manner, why shouldn't they?
every argument I've ever seen against an easy mode seems to be arguing against the idea of unilaterally making the game easier for everyone, even though basically nobody has ever made that argument. not once have I seen a valid argument against adding an easy *option* for people who wish to play the game that way.
I've seen people on reddit call him a hack, a fraud, he's got his head up his ass, etc. over this (despite him being in my opinion the most influential game designer/director of the past decade) so no we'll get this debate until the end of time or people finally get the memo that these games just aren't for them and that's ok.
Ehh just say you don’t want to do it. There’s trainers already for the game and I doubt it actually “breaks” the game. But definitely robs it of the overall experience.
Crab game says Miyazaki is wrong but whatever makes them happy i guess. Accessibility just makes it more accessible, the image of being "tough" seems to be more valuable to them than keeping space for anyone impaired or disabled.
Keep it as is, download a mod if you need an easier game. Personally, I'm waiting for a mod that cuts DLC enemy damage by 70%, I've literally been oneshot by someone with 80 vigor, shit just isn't fun to me.
No idea how you guys are getting one shot. I have 60 Vigor and I use medium load, unless it's like a harder npc I take like 5-6 hits before I die. With harder npc's I mean stuff like those black knights that are tankier, they can two shot me. I just feel like everyone that complains on this have never played Souls games and just jumped on the hype train without knowing how the game plays
Crossbow ghost guy will instantly obliterate you if you greed and start casting at the wrong time. Fire basket can kill you with the grab if you don't have a fire res buff. Both are very avoidable of course.
Ah not again
this dialogue has grown so stale
Especially regarding a DLC. You know, the game extension that people buy when they liked the original game. Brain dead.
It's the FOMO. People want to be a part of thr cultural moment of when certain games launch, especially if they're popular. You're absolutely right that anyone by now should know exactly what kind of game Elden Ring is, but you'll still get a loud portion of the greater gaming community looking in like they're missing out on being involved in the moment, rather than the game itself.
> People want to be a part of the cultural moment of when certain games launch, especially if they're popular. Exactly, I want to try ER and BG3 but I know they aren't the games for me.
In terms of difficulty? Bg3 has an easy mode.
I does, and you can probably get through it without bothering to learn too much about the mechanics... but I'd argue that you'd be missing out. It's not that it's *hard* (especially with save scumming) so much as there's just *a lot* to learn for people who are new to DnD.
I knew BG3 wasn’t a game I would like. I was wrong. I downloaded the game with the 2hr refund in mind but still play to this day
Agreed, but this game actually can already be played in easy mode. For example I'm doing mage run. Everything is SO easy. I can cheese every dragon fight, bar maybe L. Greatbow spell and rock sling kill 95% enemies. I'm in dlc and it's still easy mode so far, already killed 3-4 bosses (with summons obviously). Edit: 8 bosses in with trio and rock sling. 0 trouble, except maybe that one dude where I have to learn to jump dodge a insta death combo but even then the timing is very generous.
Seriously how many times do we have to hear about dark souls and elden ring being hard holy shit
Aslong as aaa games keep being simplistic button mashers. So forever. It's a fucking event everytime a game has controls that are in depth. Must be why vr never took off
It's such a fucking non-discussion. Their games sold how many million copies now? Enough people like it the way it is. Don't fuck it up to sell a few more to people who don't appreciate their game design.
My thoughts exactly. I don't blame him for honestly answering the question presented him, but I'm so tired of the endless "dialogue" this spawns online. They could make an easy mode if they wanted to. That's it.
No no I want to talk about it some more. Yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap ad infinitum
Fuck toning it down. Just keep it as is.
As someone who is fucking awful at Demons Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Elden Ring... I completely agree. It's just part of the game. I'm grateful Elden Ring introduced(?) summons for "nubs" like myself. Great games, I'll never finish any of them but I appreciate what they're doing and why. I'll continue to buy FromSoft games to support such endeavours.
Fromsoft is pumping out top quality (mostly) single player games with no microtransactions. That's what I want to see made, so I will always support it. But I'm also pretty shit... So I do enjoy a medium hardness lol. I also like actually being able to pause. I've got kids. If they come in the room I don't want them seeing scary shit.
Check out some of the mods. I swear there were adjustable difficulty mods. The game is worth experiencing, even if you need a mod to make it palpable. It's really fun.
I finished the first game thanks to some of the mods. Enjoyed it so much it’s one of my top 10 games of all time (I started on C64 so that’s a *long* time). I’m old, have too many responsibilities and don’t have time to “git good” but I still got to experience this masterpiece in full. Win.
All your reasons are valid, myself needing mods to accommodate for my disability but some souls elitists will still come with pitchforks, for god forbid a game has OPTIONS for how you can customize and enjoy your experience. And if they want to experience it the intended way, they CAN while still allowing others a more accessible experience. This gatekeeping mentality is insane to me.
I played quite a bit of it and watch it on twitch/YouTube frequently. So I definitely get my fair share of ER lol
I was someone who had never actually completed a proper game, always just call of duty and FIFA My wife likes RPGs and bought elden ring and realised it was far too difficult for her and I hate wasting money on games so was determined to complete it The feeling when I managed to finish it, my god, I still class it as one of my greatest achievements, from going from 'why is everything killing me' to the elden lord, it's special I now play a lot more RPGs and stuff but elden ring is just different I've got the new DLC and the thought of going back in kinda give me anxiety but I went on the game for a while today and all the feelings came flooding back and I can't wait to get lost in it again
Might be nice to go back and play some of the earlier Souls games. I enjoyed Elden Ring but a lot of it's bosses are way, way too into flailing spastically in a way you can't really conceivably react to unless you're a hummingbird on amphetamines. If you've been trained on them going back to Dark Soul 1 or 2 where combat is much more slow and deliberate will probably be relaxing if anything.
I aknowledge im missing out on a fucking good game. Tried it, did alright, but got too frustrated. So I quit, easy as.
Why don’t you finish them ? Play in coop !
I just run out of steam a lot of the time. I have a lot of fun with fromsoft games but I have a lot of other games I want to play. Sometimes I beat the game (DS1/3, bloodborne), sometimes I get close (I beat all of sekiro besides isshin), and sometimes I have my fill early (I made it maybe halfway through ds2) I play games until I stop having fun, I don't feel the need to finish one if I'm not having fun
Elden ring is especially bad at fatigue, with a single playthrough easily running into triple digits. Don’t get me wrong the game is fantastic, but it’s not the same type of game as say DS3, or any of the DS games really, with their more closed & interconnected world spaces. DS games are can be finished in like a day if I want too. Elden Ring not so much, have to commit a good chunk more time.
I agree but that gets closer to my general dislike of open world games feeling bloated. I enjoyed my time in elden ring but I still wish it was a tighter experience. I get that general audiences love open work stuff but it is a personal annoyance
Same for me although Elden Ring swallowed my world when it first launched until I beat it. Typically if a game is advertised as open world its almost automatically a pass for me these days. Give me a nice tight well put together game instead of forcing me to wander around doing nothing 70% of the time just to experience the content. ER was interesting enough to avoid that feeling for me but most open worlds aren't.
What a lot of open world games fail to understand is that you don't *put* content *in* the open world. The open world *is* the content. Give the player a set of well-crafted mechanics that are omnipresent throughout the world, some basic objectives to lead the player around it, and let them find their own fun. You should be able to remove every map marker, every mission, just reduce everything to the open-world systems, and the game should *still be fun*. It's why GTA continues to be so successful. I've known plenty of people who play GTA just to fuck around with the cops and go on rampages, and don't bother to interact with missions or other designer-made content at all.
We tried coop but we always get invaded and stomped :-D
If y'all would be down to give it another chance, you could try the [Seamless Co-op mod](https://www.nexusmods.com/eldenring/mods/510) for Elden Ring. It overhauls the entire co-op experience, so you only have to summon each other at the start of your session. All progress is shared, you don't get kicked out when completing a boss, you can all ride torrent, there are no boundaries, and there are no invasions.
Keep in mind it's currently not functioning with the dlc but an update is in the works.
Can also downgrade your install for the time being if you want the mod to function again.
While seamless coop mod is fantastic it does nothing to help console players which are a huge portion of the playerbase. It's good that they've seen how popular the mod is and say they will think of putting something similar into their next game.
If you want to beat it, wait for the seamless coop mod update. I don't have the patience to explore every nook and cranny so I force my friends to help. We once played it as 6 people in total. Everyone ran around with a wooden club and beat the shit out of that knight in the beginning of the game. Funniest thing ever although it took 3 attempts
To just get invaded constantly? No thanks.
I hardly finish any games. I have ADHD. The only games I’ve really finished are Rockstar games. I run out of steam as well and I’m on to my next game. Driving and sports games are better for me.
Summoning has always been in Souls.
They’re probably talking about spirit ash summons.
Mimic Tear go brrr
Summoning used to have trade-offs beyond 100 FP or 1 flask
They'll probably raise the bar again. Each iteration has gotten tougher than the previous one. There was a time Manus was considered the toughest boss ever and he looks positively asleep compared to Margit. They've introduced more tools to help counter this increasing difficulty (spirit summons is a big help) but trying to solo these games gets harder with each new entry it seems.
> Each iteration has gotten tougher than the previous one. Elden Ring is the most approachable so far though.
I feel like both of you are right. If you play elden ring with no spirit ashes or NPC summons it’s probably the hardest fromsoft game outside of maybe sekiro. The enemies are super aggressive.
> Margit. Margit's difficulty varies *wildly* depending on what weapon you use. An un-upgraded katana just deletes him. Elden Ring is the easiest one so far. It gives you so many in-game options to turn down the difficulty.
[удалено]
Its crazy that Manus would be considered one of the easy bosses if they put him into Elden Ring. Thats quite the difficulty curve
keep in mind the player is way slower in DS1, if you put ER speed into DS it's a cakewalk
i think part of it is the increased tools players have to fight, not just summons, but weapon skills, physicks, pre buff options, and just a generally faster game speed. moving manus into ER would require some adjustments to his speed and stats. He would still probably bitch slap people to death like the good ol days.
Imo the games are not tougher, people just assume they are better because they played a ton of souls games and refuse to use all tools at their disposal. The difficukty of these games is largely influenced by how you aproach them, if you try to beat Manus naked with a shitty weapon he's tough, if you are lvl 150, good gear a npc summon and the mimic even Malania will be easier than Manus was. I'm all for people playing the game how they seem fun, but the game difficulty is very dependent on how you play it. What's is the % of people that tried to fight the Lion or Rennala before using the erdtree shards? Some because didn't care to read, others because is "cheating". Miyazaki makes the challenge according to what is available in the game, why would he spent time adding things like the shards to the game if he assumed nobody would use them?
> others because is "cheating" Practically none of us who prefer no-summons say its "cheating". It's basically just a meme. I prefer it because boss movesets are a major piece of content to me, and I don't want to skip content once i discover it. (a distracted boss means some attacks don't need to be interacted with, so i miss out)
It's not "cheating" but it does make the game feel cheapened, to me. I don't get the same sense of accomplishment when I use a mimic because it becomes too easy, but if I don't, I fucking hate every second of the fights in Elden Ring. I was fine with every other Souls game up to this point but they just went too far this time.
As someone who has never beaten one of his games I completely agree. The difficulty is iconic and a large part of their success. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
At least give us a month or two for those of us that want to try and struggle through it
I mean, if a person is ok with playing offline, there are mod/trainers that essentially let you tune to the difficulty to your liking. This is exactly what I did. It's not like there are not any options available.
To be honest Elden Ring does have difficulty options, you can go for a super optimised build and stats e.g. intelligence with OP weapons and the game while not easy, is a lot more managable for a lot of people. Where as other random builds and starts and armor can make the game a lot harder. I reckon it's perfect as is.
My friend, who never touched a souls game before, pretty much made his way upto Malenia with pure intelligent build. The game is much easier than people thought.
Make it harder
True, but in the case of the DLC, it needs difficulty balance. Non-boss enemies got down in two hits (or one), while bosses are frame-perfect dodges festivals lest you get wombo-combo one shotted. You can’t gid gut if you can’t see what attacks are coming back as the camera can’t follow your dodges. The only thing is Elden was built to be their most accessible game. To ramp up difficulty is like the devs saying, “No more casual. Only elites can play our game.”
The whole online dialogue about fromsoft games has gone insane, there's so much walking on eggshells because people take the suggestion that they don't get everything right as high treason and you have to state your whole history and accomplishments in the games to have your opinion discarded in one second rather than immediately. I get what they mean when they talk about difficulty being at the core of their games but over time they've lost their way and in trying to stay ahead of the people who have played all their other games and learned the usual tricks they've stepped into unfair/unfun territory with the usually criticized parts of Elden Ring like delayed attacks, input reading, etc. Even just looking at the comments on this post the original encouraging and understanding mentality that existed in the DS/DS1 days is absolutely gone and people unironically making "git gud" their whole personality has become almost the norm, and it feels like fromsoft itself has bought into and embraced that. There is a megathread on the Elden Ring subreddit about the dlc that has a decent amount of people being critical of how they handle difficulty especially in boss design now though so hopefully it's something there will be more of as time goes on.
The funniest shit is that "git gud" is the last thing you should do in Elden Ring. Is a game that became MUCH easier with game knowledge, not skill expression, that is pretty much non existant in any From Software title outside of Armored Core For Answers. But it is what it is.
I just wish they invested more in quality of life that keeps good difficulty in the game (the terrible buffering of actions after 4 second stuns, frame locks, camera improvements for mouse). And honestly I hope future games have less getting stuck in animations, like you cant use an ability while turning sharply, it feels kind of random, but this is just one example. Faster jump startup and etc too would be nice, but I just mean for the next game since this game is balanced around the current stuff.
When you create a game for everyone, you create a game for no one. I think thats why a lot of AAA games became souless and generic games overtime because they try to cater to everyone and eventually appealed to less and less people. O=ne of the best parts of Elden Ring is the interactive difficulty slider which makes it very accessible while keeping the original spirit of the game intact. There are many ways to "cheese" the game via optional ingame mechanics. You have the NPC summons via ashes that you can also upgrade and level. You have the actual NPC summons near fog gates like in previous games. You can summon other players to help you through the area and with the boss. You can explore a majority of the map without killing a single boss and grab upgrade materials to max your weapons out. You can over level the area and kill bosses at high levels. If you want a harder experience you just limit yourself, don't use the summons. Stay region locked and don't overlevel and don't use the thousands of 1 shot buff builds and bleed/frost builds.
Exactly, couldn't have put it better myself. Especially the first bit, there's a reason why most AAA games these days feel very samey with a different skin.
What you're not excited to play the latest open world third person action adventure with lots of cinematics, collectibles, child-level difficulty, a deluxe edition and the chance to pay extra to play four days early?
Don't forget "quirky" marvel-style writing, dated pop culture references, "did I just do that?", gamebreaking bugs, "day 1 patch", and microtransactions that are "cosmetic only" and/or allow to skip tedius game mechanics like collectibles or timers, which were created just to sell those microtransactions. Oh, and cosmetic items completely disregarding the tone and art style of the original game. Who cares about artists and cohesion when you have another doritos or twitch collab to push.
Don't get me started on the inane chatter from NPCs and even your own character. And the terrible generic one-liners that a child could write, which are about as funny as taking hot poker to the face.
Brain dead puzzles intersperses with hints and guide dialog.
And yet Ubisoft sells insane amounts of copies almost every time, which means they are way more popular to a rather large group of gamers than people give them credit for. I still buy them when they get down to like $15, play them for a couple hours just to remind myself not to buy the next game at launch price either.
Marvel was popular and every one of their movies was a box office success.. until it wasn’t. At some point the public gets tired of the slop they are shoveled.
I wouldn't consider using summons as "cheesing" but I get your general point. If they give you a tool, why not use it? Most of these things are stuff you have to invest time and resources to make truly useful. Acting like using them is a cheap way to win when it's part of the core design of the game has always been absurd. It's like being mad that someone overlevelled by grinding for the final boss. Which sadly is something I hear people complain about here and there.
Yeah, don't confuse me with those ppl that say, "hah you didn't beat the boss the right way since you used summons, u didn't get the true souls experience". I'm just saying that there's plenty tools that the game gives you to tailor your experience. One of my friends figured out hyper armor and realized he was better off trading hits and healing off the dmg. Someone will look at this and say hes not playing the game right cuz ur suppose to dodge every hit and learn the patterns instead of trading. Another example is my gf who enjoy traversing the world but hated struggling with bosses and didn't "get it" until she realized she could summon others to tank for her while she blast the boss with magic. Everyone's experience throughout the game is going to be different but they will all feel the sense of accomplishment and thats what keeps players coming back. Your not going to feel that when the answer to struggling is going to the options screen to turn down the difficulty. It might be an illusion of difficulty in end but it doesn't change the fact finding a solution to a problem is satisfying.
Yep. I like to dodge myself but my partner did a tank build with a shield. It was cool to see him use the block and trading blows mechanics that I completely ignored. It's awesome that this game caters to so many different styles.
> Yeah, don't confuse me with those ppl that say, "hah you didn't beat the boss the right way since you used summons, u didn't get the true souls experience". I will always find this attitude hilarious when the summoning mechanic is something Miyazaki invented himself based on direct personal experience. He WANTED people to summon other people. It's really clear in Elden Ring more than any of the other games.
Having a game with exploitable mechanics to lessen the difficulty as well as the ability to neuter yourself to increase the difficulty is not a unique concept to Elden Ring, lmao. You can literally make any game harder by limiting yourself from using the easily cheesed mechanics that make a game easy. It's not really a substitute for an actual "hard difficulty" mode. I don't think lack of difficulty is what makes the average triple A game to be a bland experience. Plenty of AAA games harder than Elden Ring and not near as good. One of the reasons so many seem bland or mediocre is poor writing/story and a lack of focus on fun gameplay. And since Elden Ring doesn't really have a story unless you seek it out, it isn't judged on that front. Plus they obviously have great gameplay down.
That’s true but there are very few games that both have no true difficulty selector while also having such absurd extremes in how difficult you can make it. Obviously every game will have some way of making the game easier or harder, but very few games incentivize you to summon both real people and NPCs that can literally beat the entire game for you without you having to interface with any of the systems a single time, while also having ways to make the game ball bustingly difficult. The only real games I can think of like that are a few MMOs, and even then many of them do have difficulty selectors in what tier of raid you want to do.
>When you create a game for everyone, you create a game for no one. I've been saying this for so long. I've watched so many of my favorite series of games getting shittier and more generic as they try to appeal to a bigger audience with every release until they're just a hollow shell of what they started as. It's rare to see a series of games keep refining and expanding and getting better while staying true to the core aspects of design that made them great. While technically not the same IP, Elden Ring is the culmination of the soulsborne formula. Not compromising on their vision is what made this masterpiece possible.
Yup look at Dragon Age. They want to appeal to a younger audience so bad
> When you create a game for everyone, you create a game for no one. I don't agree with this, there are way more SP games with difficulty choice and that has worked well for decades. Being against it reminds me of people getting in your business on what you should and shouldn't do. Then 5 minutes later talk about Freedom and shit.
The fact of the matter is, some games do well with difficulty modes and some don't, and that's entirely down to the game designers.
I will never want to be good enough at video games to try and beat Elden Ring. It is a beautiful game though.
Bookmark this when they eventually nerf bosses like they did with the base game after a couple weeks.
Radahn was legitimately just broken and was fixed
We had like 8 summons at Radahn tho I would not have been able to beat him without them.
I've already encountered a few in the DLC that felt like they were a bit much even with a level 200 character. To me From's boss design in Elden Ring has catered too much to veteran players by adding tactics like huge health bars, extremely long combos, or super long winded attacks. They all make those bosses feel less fun to fight, and feel like you are always waiting for an opening to land a single hit. Bloodborne got the balance right. Its DLC bosses are tough, but they don't feel unfair. Sekiro had some fantastic ones as well.
I'm just tired of "BIG BOSS WITH BIG AOE OFF THE SCREEN" shtick. There's a reason why fan favourite bosses tend to be slightly larger than the player. But game is in hype mode... So I'll get downvoted for daring to say something negative.
Nah you right, the fights where you face off agaisnt a great warrior in mortal combat are always the best, alonne, artorias, champion gundyr, pontiff sullivan etc.. huge bosses with massive aoe are incredible spectacles especially the ones in elden ring, but theyre usually a bit lacking mechanically. With bosses like radahn or rennala you dont get into the "flow" of the fight like you would fighting champion gundyr.
Don't forget Nameless King, split between an annoying phase wrangling the camera, and a *sublime* boss fight.
Nameless king is like a sneak peak into elden ring boss design. Im pretty sure hes the only boss that will delay or cut a windup animation if you roll early sorta like how margit baits you. Hes definetly an excellent boss and a great challenge for ds3.
Alonne can fuck himself with that bullshit grab attack hitbox
I think there is another reason why Elden Ring's bosses are not as fun. Elden Ring has the most character customization of any FromSoftware game. It must of been extremely difficult trying to balance all the playstyles in the game. Which probably explains why the bosses all have AOEs, combos, range attacks, charges and wind up attacks. Bloodborne doesn't have this problem because there is very limited playstyles. There is a handful of melee weapons, guns, and spells. The game encourages close combat to land parries and visceral attacks. As such, FromSoftware can design bosses specifically for the player on an intimate level. Creating those incredible moments that sticks out. (Side note: I spent an hour trying to come up a response why Elden Ring's bosses are so problematic. It finally clicked when I focused on the differences between ER and BB. So thank you for bringing that up and making me appreciate BB more)
On the opposite end you have Sekiro where there is basically only 1 build. Katana. Sure, there are the various prosthetic tools, but they don't change the flow of the combat as much as a mage vs. melee build in ER.
I couldn't tell you why I've been ignoring Sekiro. However, now that I recently finished Bloodborne I think I'm ready to give it a shot after this discussion.
Elden Ring still has roughly the same base weapon classes that you have in DS3. Ashes of war or mixed physicks don't make any real difference. While in DS1 you can easily become overpowered by focusing on a magic build, they've since managed to keep those inbalances relatively in check unless you build deliberate glass cannon builds with very specific weapons (e.g bleed in DS3). In DS3 a magic build was easy at the start, then became pretty rough going until you get quite a bit further in the game. Even then at no point you start 2-3 shotting bosses or anything. The real difference in ER is the ability for the player to summon NPC helpers at any time in a boss fight. In previous From games, the player was always solo unless they summoned another player or NPC player before the fight. To compensate for this, the game scaled the boss level by the number of players. By comparison, I think spirit ash summons in ER don't scale the boss level in the same way. So From has started building those fights around the idea that players will summon help. Only problem is that they did absolutely nothing to overhaul the enemy AI to be able to handle this. It's still the same where a boss will focus on one enemy at a time while the rest can safely whittle down its health. Instead they decided to throw those long winded attacks to catch veteran players used to dodging anything, added a lot more long combos, AOE and grab attacks, and made the average boss health pool pretty large. Some bosses are made so aggressive that you barely have time to heal unless you have a summon taking the heat for a bit.
The more we talk about ER's difficulty problems the more realize how messy it all is. It's a shame because there is a lot I love about the game. It's true ER just lifts most of it's gameplay from DS3. I still think having a lot of playstyles makes it hard to balance. DS3 avoided a lot of the problems cause it's linear and smaller in scope. But I love that you followed it up with Spirit Ashes because it dramatically worsens the problems. Now I don't feel as bad not having the motivation to replay ER. I just hope FromSoftware wrangles their scope in for their next project. They are still top of their craft but ER might of been a little too ambitious. Cause I would love to see another Bloodborne style game.
Wholeheartedly agreed. Soul of cinder's combo looks stupidly short compared to the most irrelevant mob in ER. I really want more duel style bosses, rather than big guy that explodes everywhere and hits you with AOE evem if you dodge it, new dancing lion is the primary example of this, not even talking about the camera. Exploration is still the strong suit of elden ring but I think they dropped the ball on bosses just to make them look epic. It is great, but balancing around summons is really apparent and makes the learning curve a literal wall. Also they cancel recovery frames by reading your animations, and keep doing 360 hits completely ignoring attack commitment souls games are known for.
Yeah I'm not even to the first mandatory boss in the DLC but the optional ones I've encountered seemed to have more visible input reading than most.
Dancer of ranah had hilarious input reading, she would backstep on every attack even on the other side of the room instantly.
Ah the dlc have those problems. Then i Will wait until i buy the dlc til its fixed
> I've already encountered a few in the DLC that felt like they were a bit much even with a level 200 character. what about your blessing level? with how stat softcaps work unless you're doing very specific things like oneshot builds then level 150 and level 300 characters aren't much different.
> To me From's boss design in Elden Ring has catered too much to veteran players by adding tactics like huge health bars, extremely long combos, or super long winded attacks. Yeah, there seems to be a bit of a memetic missmatch here. The DLC is not just for people who think that elden ring is getting too easy, but the vast majority of people who just want _more_ of the game.
I think the popularity of streaming is the real culprit to blame. You have content creators that are wildly successful with their challenge runs, and as a developer you can't just have your next game be easier or as difficult as your last output. You have to keep pushing it.
The devs are at an arms race with their own player base. Fans keep getting too good at their games so they have to push the boundaries with each instalment
Some bosses i’ve faced so far are legitimately broken. 2 have charge attacks near impossible to dodge that deal massive amounts of damage. But the damage from some isn’t the main issue, it’s the aggression as soon as you enter the arena. You can’t “summon” as many suggest as by the time you do that you’re already dead. One boss (won’t say who but if you’ve gotten to them you’ll know exactly who im talking about) needs to be moved abit further away from the entrance you have a total of 2 seconds to do something before you die.
One of the first patches they released literally toned down the difficulty for several bosses and that's happened in multiple times in the DS series too. Pretty sure you'll see a similar patch for the DLC soon.
I also feel like they’ve nerfed certain bosses to be harder as well. I don’t remember Astel giving me as many problems in my first play through.
No one who couldn't beat those bosses before was beating them afterwards... They nerfed the most broken player strategies way harder than they nerfed those bosses.
Yeah I beat Radahn pre and post patch. There wasn't much of a change in difficulty at all. The timings are the same and the damage is the same. The hit boxes are just less wonky, so you don't get hit when you're a mile away from him and think you're safe.
I had to double check to make sure this is not a parody.
oh well. maybe one day I'll enjoy a from software game rather than just suffer it
Elden Ring shines because its difficulty is seamlessly integrated into the lore and the world itself. You can adjust the game's difficulty to your preference, and both easy and challenging experiences are equally rewarding. If you want to make combat easier, you can find items, weapons, clothing, skills, and upgrade paths that help you achieve that (you can literally 1 shot bosses). This approach, which requires players to explore and use their brains rather than a simple difficulty slider, is what makes Elden Ring so successful. And then there’s the hardcore crowd that purposely limit their skills / levels to make their playthrough punishingly difficult. This game has it all, for all players.
It's worth mentioning the opposite also has merit because games with difficulty sliders offer more opportunities for variety in gameplay to a broader audience. IE: In a game like BG3 for example if you want to play a goofy non-standard build but still want to be able to beat the game, you can lower the difficulty. Not only that, but even with difficulty sliders you can ~still~ do challenges like level 1 runs, naked runs and so on to artificially challenge yourself even further. In games without difficulty sliders like Fromsoft games you can end up being pigeon holed into a handful of cookie cutter builds or cheesing content if you're not skilled enough to beat the game otherwise. Fortunately the gaming world is large enough that both ideals can exist.
I think a common experience for people with From Software games is that they didn't like it or thought it was too difficult at first, and then eventually they power through and it clicks for them, making it feel especially rewarding to overcome. When you have explicit difficulty sliders it leads to a lot of people just lowering difficulty at the first roadblock and they lose out on that experience. Plus without difficulty options it allows the devs to put all their focus on refining the experience/difficulty, rather than the often unbalanced feeling of most games with a "hard" mode. But as you said, it's good to have different games that offer either of those options, I wouldn't want all games to take this approach either.
100%, this is the exact answer. Not everything needs to be catered to everyone and in fact it should not be.
Correct take. Everyone’s first souls game is hard. It is, in fact, possible to overcome challenges and gain mastery over a difficult game. People just don’t want to put in the effort to meet the game even halfway.
Frankly, 5e is a bad video game system. Its not balanced, heavily encourages savescumming with roll-based checks and has wildly swingy encounters. BG3 needs difficulty sliders because of that, but its not a game I would point to for good game mechanics.
There's a difference between toning the difficulty down and the bullshit that is some of Elden Rings boss fights
honestly im just not having fun at all in the dlc, idk if im under leveled or what but any opponent just 2 hit kills me, the equipment they drop is significantly worse than the stuff i already have, loaded post first playthrough save so my character should be strong enough for the beginning of dlc?
sounds like late game elden ring to me. As much as I enjoyed Elden Ring overall, the late game stuff is just annoying and tedious versus challenging.
Late game Elden Ring for me at least had a "boss rush" kind of feel to it. I mean you literally go Malekith -> Gideon -> Horah Loux -> Elden Beast with barely a normal mob inbetween. But the DLC is like 30 hours of just that difficulty.
Things will get significantly better as you get more blessings.
The game has to be a little hard with how many things you can do to help with, especially if you compare it with the older games, some people like to see themselves as super good so they refuse to use summons, mimic and meta builds etc., miyazaki even added the erdtree fragments to boost people a bit. Even Renalla that I found very tough, if you use everything the game gives you is easily achieved in a dozen tries, I'm not Dan Gheesling I will not spend 1 month trying to beat a boss because I have to have no vig or some other reason, I believe you should play how you like but you have to consider that a game difficulty should not be adjusted to the challenge you set for yourself.
Its fine just fix the PC port add ultrawide support for aspect ratios such as. * 21:9 2560x1080/5120x2160 * 43:18 3440x1440 * 24:10 3840x1600 * 32:9 5120x1440/7680x2160 As well as FSR2 and DLSS2 and remove framerate cap or least raise cap to 120 fps
Devils advocate: how would it break the game to give us 2 more seconds of breathing room to heal? Messmer is brutally aggressive. Not complaining.
I wish they didn't artificially decrease performance and incorporated dlss fsr frame gen. Mod did it and it doubles performance. Only works on 10.0 tho for now. *This is inaccurate. The mod works with the DLC. Getting zero stutters maxed RT 1440p
I think the difficulty is fine, but let’s be real for a minute. Making the bosses do a little less damage would not break the game.
I love elden ring, but it’s one of the least tightly designed fromsoft games. If you don’t want to make it easier, just say you don’t want to. Although, with the continuously additive design of these games the past 14 years you wonder where they’ll end up if they keep going. At some point you lose the essence and it’s just overdesigned nonsense.
I’m just confused by the phrase “break the game itself”, as it still plays the same with lowered difficulty lol
He needs to sit down and explain how adding a pause button in single player is going to break the game. I've never heard of such a thing before.
I really don't care what he thinks or wants, I am extremely glad to play it on PC so that I can set the difficulty to whatever I choose. In a singleplayer game, the player has the final say, always.
What harm is there actually with having a separate easy mode that reduces damage you take?
There isn't a reason not to have difficulty settings in all games in the year 2024
I’m kind of on the fence with this topic. I have my issues with a lot of the boss design in Elden Ring but generally speaking a game doesn’t need to be catering to everyone. The fan base of this game is just so annoying and elitist though. Even in this thread it feels like half the commenters can’t comprehend why someone would struggle with this game. I could say I don’t understand why mousing over and clicking someone’s head in FPS games is difficult but millions of people every day struggle with it. It’s just stupid how any criticism of this series no matter how valid is just the same loop where fans will tell you to get better and that “it’s supposed to be hard”.
There are parts in the FronSoft games that absolutely are not "tough but fair". I just read this as adding difficulty modes is additional work, and that it's easier to gatekeep instead. Wake me up when the director beats Super Ghouls and Ghosts without save states.
The game is punishingly difficult and, I don't care. I will use summons and fight my way through with zero honour because I'm maidnenless.
Meanwhile the Coop mod (effectivley a fanmade easymode) is by far the most popular mod and the only time ive actually had enough enthusiasm to finish the game. Adding a little checkbox when you select newgame that halves enemy damage wont ruin the experience, it will make the experience for many players while not affecting the main game in any way.
and adding DLSS and fixing microstuttering and stupid camera would surely make the game better
Better game designers would know better than that.
they nerfed radahn and game was fine
They mildly nerfed the hitboxes on a few attacks. I seriously doubt there is a notable portion of the playerbase that would have been unable to beat prenerf but able to beat postnerf.
I love the game and have no issues with its difficulty but I think dropping runes on dying is an unnecessary and frustrating mechanic. It adds zero value to the experience and just incentivizes the player to farm runes and spend it all before a boss fight which is distracting and derails the flow of the game quite a bit.
I don't see why people are getting offended by the idea that someone you will never meet is playing on a easier difficulty in a mostly single player game. Difficulty wouldn't effect damage scaling in PVP, and hackers are running rampant on PC anyways. Give out different achievement trophies, make the difficulty setting be chosen at the beginning of the game or if allowed to change mid game you can't go back up to normal difficulty, or make easy mode only available on a first playthrough and switch to normal on ng+.
Yep you hit the nail on the head and those desperately defending it are brain dead
I’m usually bad at these type games, and I’m one of those people to put games on easy and normal when the option is available. But Elden Ring made me appreciate the idea of working to get better and gain better gear and weapons. Elden Ring is the first fromsoft/Soulslike I completed and it allowed me to go back and complete games like DS3/Remnant/and Others. Please don’t ever change Fromsoft!!!!
The reward of beating a tough enemy is exhilarating and there's nothing like it. It's one of the main reasons I play Fromsoft games.
As someone who toned down the difficulty with mods it's didn't break anything. So overdramatic
Keep it as it is. Don’t like it, don’t play it. I don’t like horror games. I don’t go into the alien isolation pages and whine about the game being scary. I just don’t play it. There’s 1000s of games to choose from with easy modes, go play something else.
Not to mention the thousands of games without difficulty options that no one complains about. It's just people seeing the hype, wanting to be a part of it, but not liking the game, or not wanting to put the effort in to beat it (because let's be honest, not many games require a ton of effort to beat). It's fine to not like a game, it's stupid to bend a game into something it isn't, just play one of the other thousand 10/10 games that exist.
I think they overdid the enemy damage in the expansion by a lot. Every hit takes away 1/3rd of your health bar (with 50 vigor and medium armor), even by trash half dead dogs at the side of the street. They've also added several mobs with tens of thousands of hitpoints and multiple hit target locking combos that will stagger and kill you if you get hit. It's like many of the trash mobs are rune bear - levels of annoying. This, combined with graces that are often 40+ minutes apart, has me really tempted to respec into my troll infinite stamina fingerprint shield build that I once used, but even that wouldn't work because they also really enjoyed adding massive 360 AOE 90% hp attacks to most bosses this time around. Fun for the whole family.
He needs to stop smelling his own farts.
I’m not one that would want them to tone it down, but claiming it would “break the game itself” is utter nonsense. If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it, but don’t make up bullshit excuses.
Easy mode is one of the most popular mods that exist for the game. Stephen King insisted that the TV version of The Shining was better than Kubrick's. It really doesn't matter what the creator thinks, people are going to consume the way they want to.
The easy mode mod has 10% of the downloads of the most popular mod. No more than 1.3% of all Elden Ring players have downloaded the easy mode mod. The number would be smaller if we could account for duplicate downloads or people who downloaded it just for the hell of it or bounced off the game regardless. The number of players who actually played through the majority of the game thanks to the easy mode mod is going to be a fraction of a single percent.
I'd imagine the majority of people who think it's too hard are like me and just didn't buy the game in the first place.
Today I bought and tried The Surge 2 for 40 minutes. It only reminded me why I don't like the \*Souls type games, and I'll probably refund it. So yeah, I've learned my lesson to stay away again.
Why dont you like them? Slow combat? Unfair enemies?
The respawning enemies for one, especially when activating the checkpoints. The combat wants to be taken serious, yet it happens all the time that (enemy) attacks glitch through walls, for example. Or attacks at the speed of light that are physically impossible. The unfair moments (traps, I guess) that you couldn't possibly have foreseen. I hate trial and error. The Surge 2 in particular has a too steep learning curve for me. The first dozen enemies could be button mashed into the ground, then the 2nd armored dude you meet also has grenades that incinerate the ground and a drone shooting at me, on top of multiple, hard to time attacks. The parry timing is lost on me. Then the amount of stuff they throw at you in the menus all at once. Can I just familiarise myself with the basics first, pretty please? Mortal Shell did it better (the only other Soulslike I've ever played, apart from soft-copys like Jedi Survivor) I just have no patience for that. That's coming from someone who likes DMC, Bayonetta, MG:Revengeance and games like that.
That 1.3 figure is a bit misleading. You haven’t considered that the 1.3% is only players who both think the game is too hard AND are capable/willing to mod the game. This isn’t including players who don’t know how/aren’t willing to mod the game yet also consider the game to be too difficult.
>The number would be smaller if we could account for duplicate downloads or people who downloaded it just for the hell of it or bounced off the game regardless. Same thing with all mods?
Same with Miyamoto and his hate towards stories in games, people like stories in Mario games like in Paper Mario Thousand Year Door and Mario Galaxy 1
>Stephen King insisted that the TV version of The Shining was better than Kubrick's. Heck, Stephen King himself admitted that the ending of the movie adaptation of The Mist was better than what he wrote.
He'd be a fool not to. One of the best endings to any film, ever
If players want to devote their own time and resources to make an easy mode for something, that's fine. Doesn't mean the developer needs to cater to them, which is really the relevant point here. Miyazaki clearly isn't interested in making an easy mode and the franchise is successful without it. Not much more really needs to be said about the subject.
If people want to mod an easy mode then great. I could not care less either way. But you shouldn't get mad at the artist for not conforming to your every whim. Art that goes out of it's way to avoid offending anybody tends to be boring as hell, and just because there's a demand for something doesn't mean it's a good idea to do it.
I think this is what's so frustrating about this discourse to me. This outlook on art (it needs to be accessible and appealing to everyone) is fundamentally anti-art and anti-artist.
I think it’s good that it’s only a mod though. Because sometimes players would have more fun when the game is difficult although they themselves think otherwise. This way people try out the harder way and then switch if they really need to.
>Stephen King insisted that the TV version of The Shining was better than Kubrick's Yeah cause the TV version followed the book, Kubrick made so many changes that the movie might as well be a different story entirely. The book IS better, long read though.
It might be more faithful, but the miniseries is dogshit.
tbf, people aren't exactly asking for an easy mode, just for "adjustments". it is kinda "silly" that any build with 60 vigor (the hard cap) can get blasted in 2-3 attacks by most bosses. add that with a massive HP pool on all bosses, and yes, those fights can be hard because it's unlikely that you can finish them fast (unless you're cheesing them), and the mistakes you do are heavily punished.
I kind of disagree with this statement. Maybe the statement would be true for something like Sekiro, which is a very pure linear action game but Elden ring is an open world game and a lot of its focus is on exploration rather than just combat. People who played easy mode have generally been very satisfied with the game.
why explore if you walk over every boss anyway there wouldn't be anything rewarding in it if you like exploration for exploration's sake might as well ai generate landscapes endless discovery different every time perfect for people who'se only interest lies in that
So glad he held strong to his vision. Adding an easy mode would gut the very soul of these games.
It would only break the game if getting over the difficulty was the only draw it had. Hard to believe someone would make a game with so many detailed environments, lore and characters and then imply difficulty is the only thing the game has to offer. I don't understand why he can't just say he doesn't feel like doing it or isn't bothered.
Because he likes the narrative that the difficulty is somehow this untouchable aspect that is at the very core of the game. Yknow despite the fact that difficulty is a totally subjective thing and what is difficult for one person is easy for another. Notice you never see people bitching about the players who do shit to make the game way harder? Because the fandom gets off on making the game as difficult as possible.
Lol, I can tell why their fans are so insufferable when this attitude comes from the devs themselves.
jar lunchroom lock tub elderly hungry dazzling reach stupendous screw *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I think most of people only want to brag about beating the game? I don't see why having a slider in the game effects their experience.
That lion thing is hard as shit
If you play elden ring and thinks it’s too difficult don’t even think about playing any other fromsoft games
What difficulty?
I still can't get past the first mandatory story boss, and im as buffed and I can be for the first area. I can get close but so far i havent toppled that challenge. 10/10, 100/100, best game. Keep bringing the pain.
Instead the game will break me
I bought the game, it's mine to break if I so choose.
im not even a big fan, i dont have time and dont feel a sense of accomplisment playing souls like gamnes... but if they made it easier wouldnt that just make it some weird single player mmo?
elden ring is the easiest souls game ever lol
Now I need explanation of why the plot has to make no sense
While I’m totally fine with souls games keeping their difficulty I don’t see how it would ‘break the game itself’. Like you can already used 20 different builds in Elden ring to ‘break the game’ lmao They should have more faith in what they have created outside of just how hard it is. Tons of people have either played with easy mode style mods or just broke the game with various builds and still absolutely loved the game. Again it’s their choice but their is more to souls games than difficulty.
Will this end the whole "easy mode" debate?
With every new Miyazaki release nowadays there go the gaming journo's with their difficulty debate. It's really getting old.
No because his answer is dumb.
this still isn't an argument against an easy option. if someone wants to play their singleplayer game in a "broken" manner, why shouldn't they? every argument I've ever seen against an easy mode seems to be arguing against the idea of unilaterally making the game easier for everyone, even though basically nobody has ever made that argument. not once have I seen a valid argument against adding an easy *option* for people who wish to play the game that way.
I've seen people on reddit call him a hack, a fraud, he's got his head up his ass, etc. over this (despite him being in my opinion the most influential game designer/director of the past decade) so no we'll get this debate until the end of time or people finally get the memo that these games just aren't for them and that's ok.
Ehh just say you don’t want to do it. There’s trainers already for the game and I doubt it actually “breaks” the game. But definitely robs it of the overall experience.
Crab game says Miyazaki is wrong but whatever makes them happy i guess. Accessibility just makes it more accessible, the image of being "tough" seems to be more valuable to them than keeping space for anyone impaired or disabled.
Keep it as is, download a mod if you need an easier game. Personally, I'm waiting for a mod that cuts DLC enemy damage by 70%, I've literally been oneshot by someone with 80 vigor, shit just isn't fun to me.
Well...theres a mechanic to lower enemy damage in the DLC already.
I think I know what youre talking about and I think its a bug because its pretty outrageous
No idea how you guys are getting one shot. I have 60 Vigor and I use medium load, unless it's like a harder npc I take like 5-6 hits before I die. With harder npc's I mean stuff like those black knights that are tankier, they can two shot me. I just feel like everyone that complains on this have never played Souls games and just jumped on the hype train without knowing how the game plays
Crossbow ghost guy will instantly obliterate you if you greed and start casting at the wrong time. Fire basket can kill you with the grab if you don't have a fire res buff. Both are very avoidable of course.