Regardless of the type of combat you're going for Bayo to Batman to Dragon's Dogma to Souls, you can design the combat system/controls so that fighting multiple enemies is manageable. To me, Monster Hunter is Souls combat done properly and it's far more deliberate than Souls. I think the main reason lock-on was used in prior MHs was due to being on portable systems and not having 2 sticks.
Too much color haha
Yes you CAN design it to be manageable, but it's not always easy, depending on the style of your combat system. Some games, the lockon is great, others, it's a nightmare to try and move between targets in anything remotely resembling logic. I forget which game I had played recently, where the lockon system would let you switch to another target with a flick of the right stick (pretty standard design), however, the problem was the priority it seemed to assign to different enemies, never seemed to be useful. Like I would be locked onto an enemy in the middle distance, and there are several of them 30+ feet away from me, and I'm engaged in ranged combat. However while that's going on, another enemy rushes me from the side, and I need to switch to a melee attack. And the targeting system, didn't seem to think 'Guy about to eat my face 3 feet in front of me" was the target I wanted to switch to, and instead started flicking between the other chuckleheads in the backrow.
I'm pretty sure under-the-hood for the melee combat games I've mentioned have an "autolock" so-to-speak; you press in the direction of the enemy you want to attack and the game basically locks on to them for you. Whereas Souls definitely doesn't feel like it has that going on under-the-hood. Then, many games what to clone Souls and they also make their combat the same way. It feels like we've had combat systems devolve because of that. For shooters, lock-on should be mainly an accessibility option as your shooting controls should be good enough to manually aim at this point. Though Rockstar's manual shooting has never felt right.
Plus I don’t think Souls was ever designed to deal with groups of enemies as far as melee. Maybe Bloodborne did a bit depending on weapon type, but Souls always felt more like duels were a bigger focal point, hence lock-on. I also rarely had an issue with nudging the right stick to different targets. Usually it’ll just skip to the next one left or right even if distance is staggered.
Wait...I thought FF7/Remake was your baby?
Maybe because half of any posts on any random thread about any game that's even remotely like Souls, has people make the Souls comparison? Either comparing the combat system to Souls, or the difficulty to Souls, or whatever else they want to compare to Souls? A LOT of people use it as a benchmark for their gaming comparisons, because they think it's the gold standard or something. They will take up entire pages of a thread that they've derailed to debate the Souls minutia of a game.
I have to remind certain gamers that are plenty of games harder than DS. I remember one dude tried to say Devil May Cry was like Dark Souls, but I pointed out that DMC started in 2001 and is more of an action game. He tried to say he was just joking, but I called him out on it. I am told it's okay not know stuff, not everything should be compared to Dark Souls.
I didn't say that, there's a lot souls clones out there though; Lords of the Fallen, The Surge1/2, Nioh1/2, Code Vein, Mortal Shell, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Fallen Order.
I've never understood the habit of equating harder with better. By that logic, Battletoads is the greatest game of all time, but I never see anyone praising it, the only time it's ever mentioned is to vilify it for being too hard.
It's all bout gettin' dat street cred. Just with little to no effort to claim and say "Hey, I am a hardcore gamer because I played this one series or this one hard game in the franchise. That makes me legit. Imma gaming expert now". What does not help was that games got easier. It's not inherently a bad thing, but certain games or franchises took it too far. The Wii has partial blame, but Sony and Microsoft weren't much better. Then Demon Souls and later Dark Souls comes along and is one the few hard, niche games to get mainstream success because it does not hold your hand. The players have to discover and figuring things out on their own or from people leaving cryptic messages.
