Pinned by LupineOs
LupineOs1 month ago (edited)
Final Stray Thoughts and some Common Responses
People always refer to the rally system in Bloodborne and praise it for enabling the player to be aggressive and have more fun. I don't think this playstyle is exclusive to bloodborne though, you can play this aggressive and absorb some hits as long as you level hp properly. The rally system only taught you to play aggro, it didn't unlock this playstyle. This is the distinction imo.
Souls games have struggled in the past to teach the player how they should play, the game can give you all the tools in the world but most people just won’t use them unless they’re subtly forced to. Just look at shields being overly easy to crutch on in souls or the spirit emblems keeping players from experimenting with prosthetic combos more. Also Joseph complains that we don't have the resources to keep up with the faster enemies but neglects to mention that endurance regenerates faster than ever now, even turbo regening when you crouch or just click crouch for half a second. I would say you could make the arguement to defend waterfowl dance if you want to but yea it's definitely an insane and polarizing attack. I can guarantee most people will have a hell of a time ever trying to figure out a roll dodge for it and probably never will on their own. For me this meant crutching on bloodhound step on my blind playthrough, then seeing Ongbal dodge it with light roll and going "oh thats how you do it" and then doing the roll dodge ever since. Even when I go into boss fights strictly to observe and take notes there is a slim chance that I think I would've ever figured out the up close dodge on my own, even though bloodhound helped me figure out the direction I should be dodging.
The thing is though, now that I know how to dodge waterfowl I fuckin love it, it's so satisfying to get the up close dodge and feels so baller when you space the first string and only use one single roll to dodge the whole combo and make it look effortless. My problem with waterfowl is that it's so fun to dodge, but learning how is an absolute ***** to figure out and usually will mean players reaching for a crutch and not getting that cool moment of figuring out a solution for the craziest attack they have ever seen. In this regard waterfowl is too hard, but I don't want them to change it now at this point. Just to further clarify my opinion on Malenia specifically I would argue she is fair but she is definitely far from the funnest boss in ER imo. My problem with her is the flow of the fight is weird with her just stringing together standalone attacks rather than having longer combos and flowcharts like Morgott for example. She was anecdotally my lightbulb moment for changing my mentality and approach to this game's combat though and I had all the days of footage of me fighting her so that's why she ended up being a focus of the video.
Another idea for dungeon rewards after some heated drunk discord debates was that we could have themed dungeons so you know what type of reward you could expect. An example would be a crystal cave for a sorcery as the main reward. That way if you are making a mage build you know it will be worthwhile to do. The problem is that a strength build would have zero motivation to do it except for minor rewards and runes. Instead of theming the dungeons then, we could add questlines and rumors to the npcs so they could point you in the right direction. Sellen could give you some gossip or a treasure map that leads to a dungeon with a high level spell. This would also help fill out some more npc questlines in a refreshingly non-cryptic way. As long as we avoid the fetch quest trap. For the dungeon rewards being unique I could also mention that if you find a spell or weapon that you want to try you can easily re-spec to try it out and it's way easier than in ds3 and completely nonexistent in Bloodborne.
Idk if there are just this many Dark Souls 1 boomers or what but it puzzles me as to why so many diehard Souls fans have such an aversion to actual rpg mechanics/systems, such as item crafting. Also wtf is this hand wringing about the hitless players. All these nerds who never bother to challenge run souls games, and have no idea what it's even like, whining that it needs to be fun while hitless so we should make it easier. Save the scrub sympathy and go try and hitless dark souls 3 right now and see just how miserable and janky it really is. Dark Soap pointed out to me that Great Runes don't carry over into ng+. Idk why this slipped my mind but yea. IF you want to do a lifesteal build then you could Blasphemous Blade, God Devourer Serpent Curved Sword, and Taker's Cameo, but this would only give hp on kills and not vs bosses. Godskin swaddling cloth talisman does give you hp on successive attacks though so there's that. Sucks but ah well. I'll reiterate that I wish there were more great runes like the Melania Rune that give playstyle altering properties. Again I still believe you can play like you might in bloodborne even without a rally system.
Also I have yet to see footage but apparently elden stars and Radahn meteor can happen multiple times in one fight. I have yet to see this in ng+5 even after I stopped leveling at 125 so anecdotally I'm going to say for most people you will almost always see these attacks just once, and both are easy to dodge anyways if you know what to do (just Google the elden stars dodge already my god I even show it in the vid). Godskin nobles Belly Wog (Noble Prescence) seems to have been solved by hitless runners and you can run backwards out of it. Still unsure if its 100% consistent but check out a fellow challenge runner and ask them about it. There are some no roll runs of this boss out there.
To the nerds who can only hyperfixate on one thing at a time yes, From tiptoeing the line between fair and unfair with a couple enemies out of hundreds in a game can be good game design. Stop pretending like they did it for every single boss and enemy. Yes I know many hitless runners have a laundry list of complaints about a few of the bosses, mostly Malenia since she is guilty of the most jank. For 99.5% of the playerbase they will not have their overall enjoyment of the entire game compromised because a few attack or hitboxes are not 100% perfectly clean, and I know this because it has existed in every souls game to date and people are now saying those were their favorites of all time, even when they too were unbalanced af on launch. I don't see people complaining that "malenias double swipe can be undodgeable into it in certain situations when you are on higher elevation," instead you see people saying Margit has undodgeable frame traps. Just because there are a handful of attacks that exist in this game out of hundreds that aren't cleanly perfect 100% of the time due to unintended bugs like projectiles getting hung up on terrain, doesn't mean that From suddenly shit their pants and forgot how to balance games. If you are a hitless runner than yes unfortunately you will have to play around bosses to mitigate certain moves because there is rng in the sense that an attack might bug out and end your run, but for the layman they will never even notice these issues most of the time.
It's the same shit as when I showed Silverbullet getting killed by an invisible attack in his Lady Maria run while Joseph is there praising her balance while being able to sweep the jank under the rug. I am aware that hitless runs are not a great indicator of how good or fair a boss is, but it is instructive because majority of the complaints I see are just this attack or that attack is undodgeable when they are sorely mistaken and just need to learn how to dodge it. I can see why my desire to spotlight many of these under-watched creators came across as me using hitless runs as proof that bosses are perfectly fine the way they are already.
There IS a myriad of legitimate problems with this game like all the rest, but once again the greater conversation about these games lost because scrubs are too busy spreading misinfo and muddying the water. There are still fucking redditors that to this very day claim that they forget to turn on poise in ds3. To the babbies saying I'm view hungry I started on this video when I had 50 subs and I just wanted to make it to share with my friends in the invader community so I wouldn't have to talk about the same shit over and over every single time we argued about Anderson's video on discord, with every person remembering what he said totally differently. I had to make my own timestamps for his video and takes notes over 5 watches just to even figure out his concrete stance on anything specific so I can understand how people end up misremembering and imprinting their own bias onto his analysis, given the wishy washy and perma-sidetracked nature of long form essays. Clip farming for ez gotcha's is one thing, but I really needed to make sure we are somewhat on the same page here at least.
One last complaint about sekiro, who are all these guys coming out of the woodwork to say how much they love sekiro in order to then complain about Elden Ring. Where the fuck were all these fans when the game was getting lambasted for being an ultrahard, over-tuned, repetitive grind of L1 spam. Posers smh. I’ve noticed a huge wave of newcomers to sekiro lately and its been fantastic, but I think people forget just how much that game got shit on the year it released. I’m honestly shocked it got GOTY considering how many game journalists had to beat it with cheats. Lastly, to all the kind folks commenting things along the lines of "Good job on the video man but but I still agree with Joseph," thank you but please give yourself some credit. You can feel that Elden Ring isnt fun or fair enough and dislike it, you don't have to agree with either me or Joseph.
