12mo ago

Did I miss the Elden Ring DLC discourse?

From https://dudevsdawg.com/7

58 comments

This is the first comic that expresses why I rage quit so many games with overly difficult boss fights ( if there's any delay measured in more than microseconds between retries ).
I played (and still do) the original one hit kill arcade bullshit. Hell, I beat Alladin on SNES. I'm not allergic to a challenge.
But, today, I have no time to repeat anything that isn't fun in a video game. I could be filling out tax forms with that time.
Edit: Rogue Legacy 2 is so good at this. It has deeply adjustable difficultly, short boss intros, and a fast forward function for when even the short intro is too long.
- Bro, for real. I just want to practice phase two Radahn with my build, but it's such a slog just to get him there and then survive long enough to figure out the moveset.
  
  If it's a slog to get to phase two, practice phase one more or change your build to do more damage.
- This is a big reason I farmed hard in Elden Ring and have 356 hours. I spent a lot of that time leveling my health up so I can take more damage. Level 156 and my health bar is like half the width of my TV lmao.
  
  Sure, but farming isn’t really playing a game though. A boss should be beatable in some clever, but challenging way at a reasonable level range.
- I beat the original Ducktales and Battletoads back in the day. But, back then I had the luxury of time. Ain't nobody got time for this shit!
  
  Man, I recently introduced my kid to both the NES Battletoads and Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!
  I beat that one Battletoads stage (you know the one) on the third try. And Mr Sandman on the fourth try (did not play against Mike).
  I was super stoked. Third try! I'm old now. Apparently my time put into it as a kid stuck with me.
  Doesn't really relate to anything in this thread, I just needed to brag to someone because my kid and couple of friends totally did not get it.
  
  Are people going around playing like duck tales was hard now? You could just pogo jump through most of the game and be fine.

It's lazy game design to make a fight "harder" by just adding increasingly long periods where all you can do is dodge.
- The soulslike genre is simply bullet hell where you don't always get to see the bullets before they hit you, stuck inside a metroidvania.
- Learn to parry

Delayed attacks as a form of increasing difficult are just extremely unfun. Yeah, you made the boss harder, you also made it extremely frustrating, congratz.
- It's literally helping you actually learn to dodge perfectly instead of just spamming it and getting lucky. Like instead of rolling when they do the back swing, you now have to actually wait for them to swing their attack.
  If this was the first game like this you played, it wouldn't even be that much harder to learn. It's actually harder having played all the games prior to Elden Ring that conditioned you to dodge on the back swing.
  
  It’s usually not a matter of just waiting - it’s a matter of memorizing. I get the impression if the AI bosses could manually set different delays on their swings after winding up each time, they would literally be impossible.
- In Elden Ring you can often attack during the windup and then dodge. Creating a posture break during those delays can be quite a fun experience.
  Plus you can do things like jumping attacks to dodge and duck a lot more of those spinning combos than you'd expect.
  The ascetic with the hoops at the very start whiffs most of his chained attacks without you even having to dodge once you figure it out.
  FromSoft games are fun to learn, and that frustration is often the appeal as the tricks are discovered.
- That's my biggest problem with FromSoft games. They are not challenging, they're just slow HP sponges that can one-shot you. That is not challenging, it's just unfair, and frankly boring.
  I think the game would be funner even with the simple tweak of making the animations faster. No fighter EVER wins IRL by telegraphing their attacks for three seconds.
  
  Have you played their previous games? It's only an issue in Elden Ring.
  
  Vigor check missed

The base game was way more accessible than any other Soulslike which pulled in way more players than any other soulslike and now all the players that got used to the base game are mad that the DLC is as hard as any soulslike ever has been.
I think it's hilarious seeing all the players half the item descriptions in the game make fun of.
- All the souls dlcs have been much harder than the base games. Artorias, fume knight, ludwig and gael all stomped me until i changed up tactics. The dlcs have always been aimed at late/post game characters.
  
  I went back to DS3 a few weeks ago and its insane how easy Gael and Friede are compared to like everything in Elden Ring.
  
  Except this time the DLC scales so being late/post game doesn't even save you
- Boiling down the descriptor to one word - “hard” - really doesn’t serve the discussion well.
  Someday, I want to make “The hardest game ever made”, just to show raw inability to win is not fun on its own.
  
  You should play I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game.
  https://kayin.moe/iwbtg/
- That makes sense to me. DLCs come after you finished the rest so of course difficulty has to rise. It's the same in all games with an escalating difficulty and force balance I would think. Doom Eternal does the same.

Meanwhile streamers are beating the dlc just throwing roundrocks.

Wish cheat codes were still a thing. Sometimes I just need a little help getting past one part but don't have time to grind it out like I would have before.
- You mean like mods that are easily accessible? God i wish.
  
  Or trainers, equally ready to access. There's even tools like wemod that offer trainers for all your games at a convenient single click.

Based middle-aged lady Elden Ring player.

58 comments