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I don't own a console so I never played Bloodborne, so I'm only assuming. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
What I loved about Elden Ring as a crappy player who cheesed my way through the entire game was that there's always another path. When I couldn't beat the first dungeon, I explored other areas for like 40 hours and got better at playing.
Where in Sekiro (assuming it's like Bloodborne), I definitely hit a blocker where I literally couldn't move forward because the boss was too hard.
The power of “I’ll come back to this when I’m less stupid” cannot be overstated. Love me some procrastination mechanics.
That is pretty much the case, but Bloodborne has a few diverging paths. People seem to really hate when I say this, but Elden Ring is the Dark Souls easy mode so many had asked for. Tons of easier dungeons, alternate paths to take, most of the toughest bosses are optional, spirit summoning, its super easy to over level, plentiful items for summoning player help, and even when you get invaded the 4 player limit usually means its a 3 on 1 fight. Until Elden Ring I used to claim Bloodborne was the easiest souls game but really Elden Ring makes Bloodborne look like hell mode by comparison. Meanwhile Sekiro is in my opinion the hardest. You have limited tools, no summons for help, cannot level up - you must get skillful and meet the challenge. There’s definitely rewards that will help along the way, but ultimately they are never enough to save you on their own. Parry parry parry jump and sprint instead of dodging.
Sekiro had the hardest first playthough yet easiest NG+ playthroughs
Dark souls 2 was the easiest because you could get basically unlimited healing with the gems.
Orphan of kos fucked me up for a solid week on ng+2 (I should have just restarted a new character when that dlc dropped)
You should play Lies of P if you like sekiro and bloodborne
I've never owned a PS4 and so had to wait quite a while to play Bloodborne. Even while avoiding spoilers I had seen so much hype about Orphan of Kos and what a crazy hard fight it was. Cutscene starts, I'm getting nervous, Orphan swings on me and I parry him. Wait what? You can parry him? Proceed to beat him first try. Bloodborne parry windows are fucking massive compared to dark souls. I couldn't believe how overhyped the fight (and really, the entire game) was. Lady Maria was the only boss in that entire game that gave me any trouble. I finished it and went back to dark souls.
Sekiro NG+ was great because by that point you’ve mastered the techniques and you’re flying through shit that felt like a brick wall before.
Also Lies of P is definitely on my list to play, looks cool
I've beat all these games solo all bosses at least twice each and I completely agree with this assessment.
Dark Souls and Sekiro has a little bit of that element. There’s often more areas to explore if you’re struggling with one boss.
Not always. There are some genuine roadblocks as well. Even Ring is better in this regard.
Mesmer was a light block for me, right up until I decided to borderline negate all fire damage with talismans and a fire protection spell. He went from chunking a quater of my health to basically nothing.
I completely missed messmer on my first (blind) playthrough. I got to the tree you have to burn and was like wtf is a messmer and how do I get its ember
I actually found Sekiro easier because defending is a rhythm action game rather than a deliberately unresponsive roll button lol
I feel like plenty people asking for open worlds are actually OK with guided gameplay, they just want less obnoxious railroading.
The games lure you into the “right direction“ with their difficulty. And then there is I, an intellectual, who dies to skeletons for 4 hours straight at the start of DS1.
Playing these games for the first time was incredible ❤️
Also died to skellies on DS1 for hours. Not my fault they hid the correct path.
In hindsight, the respawning should have been a hint. But it took me a while to get it.
Imagine not immediately rushing towards the skellies to get that sweet zweihander that trivializes 1/3 of the game.
Later play throughs normalised the Fathers Mask run. Because as we all know
I used every trick I could think of bashing my head against those skeletons, then I got to the giant one and wanted to throw my controller, then I finally got underground and cried.
It was the unkillable ghosts of New Londo for me.
Open World is nice when you just kinda want to walk around and look at stuff. Maybe you're not in the mood to slog through an unforgiving death maze. Maybe you just want to ride around on a horse and look at trolls and dragons.
I'm 100% convinced that Sony lost the source code for BB and that's why there hasn't been a remaster or PC release.
That makes sense, can't they just reverse engineer the game though?
have you ever tried to turn a piece of decompiled code into sensical code that you can use to make it do new things?
I can't even take sensical code and do things with it.
When did “legendary” start meaning just normal real things that actually exist?
They are actually called Legacy, since they match the classic format.
Here's my experience:
Bloodborne: Get forced into playing a style I don't like because they took away shields and magic > get abducted to hard area > can't beat the boss or leave > quit playing
Elden Ring: Play the character I want to > go where I want to > hit a hard boss > go somewhere else and come back to beat them when I'm stronger > finish the game and praise it as one of the best games ever made
Dark Souls 1 was near perfect in terms of game world. It operates like a Metroidvania. You have multiple options for where you can go from the start, but you have to complete certain tasks before being allowed into higher level areas. Basically all meat no filler (though some areas especially late game are pretty unfullfilling.)
DS2 was similar but the areas felt less connected or consistent. DS3, Bloodborne, and Sekiro were hallways by comparison. A lot of people feel like Elden Ring was an over correction. But I had fun with the open world.
I love the open world of Elden Ring so much. I go around collecting crafting materials and recipes. Sometimes I even fight a boss in order to get the recipes. My collection of grease is unmatched. Even though my collection is never complete, I feel I have enough to retire.
As a Souls' player since PS3 Demons Souls, this concept is so foreign to me and I love it. I have opened the crafting menu to craft a furnace pot once and instead beat my head against the game over and over until I "succeeded".
Crafting used to be fairly useless (glowstones exempted) and now you've convinced me to do a "crafting only" run and make try make it ER a survival game. Not like I needed another 150 hours invested in this masterpiece.
I did a bow and consumables run of ER and it's actually pretty fun. There needs to be a little rune grinding because for some reason we can't just have infinite arrows once you find the recipe. But Mogh bird takes 5 minutes to get enough for a good few hours of gaming, so it's fine.
Bows and arrows feel very incomplete in ER. There are a lot of bows with good ashes and a lot of interesting different bolts and arrows. But that's where it ends. Crafting arrows is pretty dumb, because it's just a grind. Arrows also do basically no damage, so being only able to carry 99 of them is stupid. Enemy AI has no idea what to do when you use arrows. Some of them basically freeze up and get confused about what is actually happening.
But I had a lot of fun using arrows to inflict bleed and poison. Jumping around arenas as boss fights take a long time, focusing on dodging instead of doing damage. Pots are also fun to quickly do some damage, but are very limited. It was a cool way to experience the game and showed me different aspects of the bosses I didn't even notice before.
I'm currently doing a run with my brother where I am a dwarf with a big unga bunga axe and he's an elf with a small dagger and a bow. It's super fun to do together and incorporate a lot of elements normally not present. The new version of Seamless coop is broken af atm, but we're helping with testing and reporting bugs so I'm sure it will be better than ever before in no time.
I actively despise open world games because of the whole "Size of an ocean, depth of a pond" issue, play it for 3 minutes and you've seen all there is to see.
Not so with the more linear titles.
While I fully agree in most cases, Elden Ring has to be the best counter example. The open world nature both adds many interesting details to the lore through the relative positioning of locations/PoIs, and adds to the sense of discovery. Running through the Lands of Shadow for the first time was the best gaming experience I've ever had.
Eldenring is the poster child of open world design. I played the game 100 hours or so when it launched. I loved it but never really finished it completely. I started playing again with the seemless coop mod and it was like playing a whole new game. I found things that i missed, like a lot of things. Dungeons i just walked past, weapons i never found, bosses, complete areas. I could probably play the whole game again and take completely different routes and have na almost new game. Things like this don't happen in other open world games. Never in my life did it occur to me to replay another assassin's creed game, it was already painful the first time after 10 hours or so.
I don't think there's anything wrong with an open world, but the minute a game is described as an "open world game", my interest severely wanes.
For example the genre of management simulation games like Factorio or Satisfactory have open worlds because you can explore and expand in any direction.
Factorio and Satisfactory are open world factory games. There are probably examples of level based ones though. SpaceChem and Infinifactory come to mind but they're arguably puzzle games when viewed in that context.
What I loved about elden ring was exploring around, stumbling upon an area, and fighting my way through it, not because the game set it up as my next encounter, but because it was something random I found.
Yes, this resulted in me fighting Loretta as my second boss (including minibosses in that statistic btw) in my first playthrough, but that resulted in me spending an hour trying to beat what ended up being my favourite boss in the entire game
I do find that 'open world' is used interchangeably with 'non-linear'. I think this is a problem because they're quite different.
Open world needs some kind of sandboxing mechanic. Whether it is building something, changing the environment, or whatever. It doesn't have to be base building but it is the common go-to. There is usually less 'progression' and more isolated 'accomplishments' which may or may not have tangible rewards impacting game mechanics. Open worlds don't even have to have 'endings'.
Non linear gameplay needs things like optional and auxiliary components but also missable/altered content/choices matter, different paths/routes, and/or multiple endings affecting a core/linear game progression. Non linear games tend to 'open up' and 'close off' with lineated progression.
Open world is in contrast to the mission structure of a doom or call of duty. Games where the world is a series of single use maps progressed through once.
What do they mean by “legendary dungeon”?
Basically a bossfight area.
Most games have such areas but those are spread around the map. So you have 'normal dungeon' where you deal with average mooks (often randomly generated these days) and then you end up in a legendary dungeon where you need to kill 'the boss'.
I'm assuming Bloodborne is just bossfight after bossfight.
I interpreted it to mean a primary, necessary, and unique area/dungeon, as opposed to an optional side dungeon with reused assets or a nonspecific "overworld" so to speak. Like if stormveil castle linked directly to Raya Lucaria which linked directly to volcano manor, and so on, without an open world to traverse in between.
Perhaps "great gameplay experience"
I tried the three DS games and failed over an over again until I decided to give BB a try. It was der perfect pace, gave me some W's early on that made me continue and get better. By now I've beaten BB, ER, DS 1+3, haven't touched 2 yet.
Open world in ER works great because you can choose where to go and what to do. In "classical" DS/BB you don't have that much freedom. I find it great, because more people are getting into FromSoftware games. I see it as a gateway, as BB was for me.
Darkborne > old ring