Basically yeah, it’s as difficult or easy as one makes it now more than ever. Also, it further confirms that FROM is as obtuse about their “easy modes” as they are about damn near everything else.
The Shattered Elden Ring Thread: Tarnished Edition - (Shadow of the Erdtree p. 85)
- Thread starter hanselthecaretaker
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Id also point out and say that ER proves that Souls games have ALWAYS had easy modes and ER simply made those modes more in the face of the player.
To add, I think it’s also because Miyazaki is a big reader and has absorbed so many different reference points from other intriguing creative works, that it eventually all gets reconfigured and repurposed for his own.
Example -
Leads to interesting comments -
My apologies if this is old news, but it just came across my YouTube feed.
TL;DW? A player going by the name "Let Me Solo Her" has gained famed throughout the FROM community for putting down his summon sign for the infamous Malenia, Blade of Miquella boss fight. I've not played the game, but have heard and seen several places that she is probably the most difficult boss in the game if not the most difficult boss in any FROM game. LMSH shows up wearing naught but a cauldron on his head wielding two katanas, and defeats Malenia (solo, obviously) without taking a single hit. He's done this HUNDREDS of times for random people, and is basically a legend within the community. Cool, feel-good story; not everyone online is an asshole.
TL;DW? A player going by the name "Let Me Solo Her" has gained famed throughout the FROM community for putting down his summon sign for the infamous Malenia, Blade of Miquella boss fight. I've not played the game, but have heard and seen several places that she is probably the most difficult boss in the game if not the most difficult boss in any FROM game. LMSH shows up wearing naught but a cauldron on his head wielding two katanas, and defeats Malenia (solo, obviously) without taking a single hit. He's done this HUNDREDS of times for random people, and is basically a legend within the community. Cool, feel-good story; not everyone online is an asshole.
FromSoft even sent this guy a care package with a full sized sword and shit. It was epic.
Melenia is the hardest boss ever made by FromSoft IF you fight her like a Souls boss. However she (and nothing in the game) is all that hard if you play the game like Elden Ring, I.E. using summons, or several of the crazy strong weapon arts, etc.
The way "LMSH" fought her was the hard way and he was/is brilliant at it. Which is what makes the achievement of over 1000 kills and people helped so awesome.
That's fucking awesome.
Makes me wonder if the notorious difficulty and aggression of ER's bosses was intentional in that FROM wanted to encourage summoning and build a community of cooperators instead of the ones of elitists its been known for, i.e.: make it so hard, players will literally NEED each other. Overly optimistic ideal, I know, but better than assuming FROM are just a bunch of sadists.
You know I'm not sure. With ER it's hard to say, because while it plays a lot like a Souls game it's NOT a Souls game. So understanding the approach Miyazaki wanted to take would likely require an interview where he spells it out for us.
My guess is that because of the open world nature, From added help systems like spirits in order to counter balance the difficulty of some fights. Because From doesn't like to give players direction and everything is vague on purpose, that means that they had to figure that players might end up anywhere at any given time. And if there was nothing the player could do except get fucking smashed at every corner it likely would have broken the experience. So the stakes of Marika, the summons, and possibly even the powerful weapon arts and spells, were scattered around so that the player was bound to find SOMETHING, and thus use it to get through the bosses in the game.
At the same time, the made bosses the hardest they've ever been in a From game to the point where I personally think the difficulty without extra game tools is unfair. There are many videos about this by Souls-veterans, where attacks and patterns and agression of these bosses have been looked at and deemed pretty unfair by Souls-Pros. However they still beat them, beating something unfair doesn't mean it wasn't unfair.
I hope for the next game they take a step back and look at the previous idea of tough but fair. Look at it this way you beat Bloodborne and it was hard as fuck, if the next game is about the same difficulty as Bloodborne you are still going to find it pretty though even if you might beat it a bit easier than Bloodborne. The beauty of the Souls formula, imo, is that the combat to a new player is brutally hard but it's learnable and as the player you can "get gud". There is an amazing joy in finally being "gud" and being able to carry it onto the next game, or even NG+ runs. That skill also can lead people to doing challenges like Level 1 runs, or bow-only, or whatever the fuck. But that stuff is only mostly possible because the game's all stay true to "Tough but fair".
While challenge runs still happen in ER, I still feel that ER has mostly crossed that line of what is "fair" for most people, leave the potential for those crazy runs only in the hands of Pro players.
Technically it was from BN, which makes it even cooler that a pretty high profile publisher doled out that kind of recognition.
From LMSH -
I use dual katana (Uchigatana+25 with Hoarfrost Stomp Cold on Right hand) and (Rivers of Blood +9 Left hand).
I only play on Steam PC, am level 179 and do not plan on leveling up anytime soon.
Basically he's still no slouch and has been playing the game as intended. Though with such a commendable record who would argue anyways?
Then there's people like this who make it look incredibly easy (I mean really, it's almost comical with the *poke...poke*)
But anyone's who tried knows it must've taken a long fucking time to curate that illusion.
*edit* same person, but showing it’s still possible to get highly OP at RL1 -
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Decided to check back in this thread and it looks like it's time for the backlash to the backlash re: difficulty and boss fights? Where Souls AHCHOOLLY always had an easy mode and we proof that the game is easy because of summons and open world and all this other crap...
So, yeah... no, just no. Souls games don't have "easy modes," ER bosses are still bullshit. That's why they keep making updates to rebalance things- this game is a confusing mess of contradictory systems with boss fights that are just annoying forcing people to work around them instead of fight them. Which is great for some gamers, fine if you like that sort of thing, but it ain't objectively great and even lazy and stupid in many ways.
So, yeah... no, just no. Souls games don't have "easy modes," ER bosses are still bullshit. That's why they keep making updates to rebalance things- this game is a confusing mess of contradictory systems with boss fights that are just annoying forcing people to work around them instead of fight them. Which is great for some gamers, fine if you like that sort of thing, but it ain't objectively great and even lazy and stupid in many ways.
I haven't played the game, so can't speak from experience, but I've watched quite a bit of it, and I must say, I agree with your analysis in the underlined bit above. Maybe that was their intent, but that doesn't look like "fun" to me. I don't mind a challenge, but some of those bosses just look TOO overwhelming.
I get where you’re coming from, but the claim rings a bit disingenuous for a game that took five years and has arguably more unique content than the Souls trilogy combined. Well maybe not literally but at least it felt that way sometimes. I think it was objectively too ambitious but also the result of being the 6th iteration on a tiring formula. Aside from Sekiro the pieces they’ve added to the core combat mechanics do make it their most playable game yet, but where it falls short is in the lack of tuning boss encounters to fully take advantage of these improvements. In that regard one could say yeah, it was easier to add things like Spirit Summons, Weapon Ashes, swappable affinities, etc. A better compromise would be just “less” of everything, but then that wouldn’t be the game they set out to make.
Could they have balanced it better regardless? Hell yes, and they are still actively updating the game which I guess beats just abandoning it (ie “We got our monies, so long suckers!”). However, in terms of difficulty there’s no denying playing the game “as Elden Ring” instead of straight up “SoulsBorne” makes it easier than any of FROM’s previous games. I think part of the reason people rag on this is they for whatever reason don’t want to jump through all the hoops that are inherent in open world design, which are kinda required to take full advantage of the new aspects to ER’s combat design. One has to either wiki locations or scour the map to fortify their character with stuff, so the tradeoff is it takes considerably longer by most metrics.
Although FWIW, I spent about as much time as any FROM game for Platinum (DS2/3 no thanks though due to the grinding), and it was the most pleasant to attain.
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Even if you don't save scum it's the easiest From Platinum by far. I did it in 70-something hours, which was about twice the time it took to do bloodborne's.
I will deny it because this largely depends on the player.
Playing it "as Elden Ring" means playing the meta, and running around finding things and experimenting with them, and using all the tools and doing that thing that critics constantly praise of "well if you can't beat this boss you can go do other things."
For myself and I'm betting many other players, that is actually harder than Sekiro where you focus on just figuring out how to beat the damn boss already. I don't have patience to run around a big map trying every ash of war on every enemy. This is fun for a certain type of gamer and especially critics and such, and again that's fine but it's not the case for all of us.
The way to beat a tough boss in ER is sometimes to STOP TRYING and do other things... ugh. I hate that. Some like it. Whatever. But it's not "objective."
Don't get me wrong if the mood strikes me I may replay it once they stop updating things. It's a mess of a game and sometimes you want a hot mess. But, man, that radical shift from the fine-tuned near-perfection of Sekiro to the hot mess of ER was quite something.
If you’re going in blind yeah I can see that. I can only speak from being exposed to the feedback on Reddit, Youtube, wikis, etc. of how overpowered certain things were like Bleed, Cold, Comet of Azur, Mimic, etc. I mean, outside of Malenia and to some extent Elden Beast I stuck to my own build and gear, but hell yes I took advantage of Corpse Piler for her. It distilled two nights of failure down to two tries.
This also brings up the aspect of, “If there is an easier method/mode, then people will be inclined to use it”. Because ER having more of that available is the only reason nothing in the game was as much of an obstacle as certain Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3, and Sekiro bosses for me.
FFS dude, I don’t even think I made it to Cainhurst inside of 35 hours lol.
That's basically the entire crux of the argument against Easy mode in Souls games. Because while a few people will play as hard as possible, most people will not put in that kind of effort.
To be fair, I played the game back in 2015 when it came out on a buddies PS4. So when I played it on my own profile to finally beat the game, I'd already seen most of the game. Also Bloodborne was really really easy for me for some reason. My first encounter on Orphan saw a kill in 5 attempts, and he was supposed to be the hardest fucker in Souls history until Melania.FFS dude, I don’t even think I made it to Cainhurst inside of 35 hours lol.
Frankly I think Midear in DS3 is still the hardest fight, I have not yet beaten him and don't think I ever will.