A lot of us have an unhealthy relationship with this game
10 Likes
Even though it gets more hyped than its predecessor, Dark Souls 3 focus too much on doing references and throwbacks to previous games and it ends up being more of a Dark Souls 1 themed park than its own thing. The game has amazing boss fights but it lacks in other important stuff. Until you reach the Abyss Watchers, the game ranges from “ok” to “meh”, After that point, it starts having more highlights, but it has a lot of misses in terms of areas. Also the game is way to linear and the weapon arts and magics are poo poo to use.
Elden Ring world map is beautiful and magestic but it lacks actual stuff to do, at least non related to just hitting enemies, and FromSoftware did a huge L with the NPCs quest design. The fact that you stop seeing new enemies after Altus Plateau (with some rare exceptions) combined with the fact that there are only 11 (if you count Margit and Morgott as different) unique bosses means the game should have been shorter.
Dark Souls 2 arguments agaisnt the game are a lot of times based on “le adaptability bad” and “le funny volcano on top of windmill” and it’s kinda lame, because the game is actually a very good game with tons of fun, unique and interesting mechanics and ways to approach storytelling, narrative, characters, mechanics, map, bosses and combat that we would never see again done in a FromSoftware game. And it has its flaws (specially scholar edition) but just saying the game is not good or summarizing it based on a stat you can easily level up and enemy placement (which is a very valid argument cuz it gets REALLY BAD sometimes) its not fair for the game
I swallowed that pill more than two years ago and then tried to leave.
Anyhow, here’s what I have to offer for SS13:
-
The average player does not know what is best for the long-term health of the game, and there is even a saying in modern game development: Do not allow your players optimize the fun out of the game.
-
Nobody should lose sight of what it means to be a bright-eyed and experimental player. It’s easy to get jaded and assume malice where there is only ignorance, or perhaps even arrogance. The server is for RP, but the gameplay beyond just RP is about trial and error experimentation in many areas - Players will make innocent, and sometimes catastrophic mistakes and these are an integral part of the game. Sometimes they will even do something that doesn’t make sense IC as an OOC accident and they may be lacking an IC explanation.
Outside of SS13:
- If you’re losing at pvp in Elden Ring, it’s because you’re not good enough yet. It’s not because the game is broken or poorly balanced - it’s you and your own lacking skill. Every patch has had its meta, its strong choices. Sometimes they’re really strong, but they are not and have never been insurmountable as much as the people who want to whine claim it to be so.
4 Likes
FromSoftware still does not know how to make non laggy PVP after all this years
I experience little to no lag with North American and Western European opponents. My favorite sparring person is an ocean away even!
Fight me 1v1, no items, fox only, final destination.
1 Like
I mean that moment when you hit someone and you hear the sound of the hit connecting but it doesn’t actually do damage
Ah, the phantom hits. That phenomenon that occurs even with a near zero latency connection. I’m fairly certain this is an intentional aspect of the game for pvp rather than being caused by latency, but I have no way to prove it fully.
Consider though: These “phantom” hits cause no damage as you say, but they do still cause status buildup and I’m pretty sure the hit sound is meant to be a glancing blow of sorts. You almost hit them, but didn’t quite. In actual laggy matches, the hits will not play this glancing blow sound on swing, but instead will randomly miss entirely or perhaps suddenly hit for damage sometimes several seconds after the swing appears to have taken place.
Low latency matches also afford the ability to frame perfect parry and attacks which are not dodged do connect instantly - hit detection is very clearly working properly when dodges are removed.
Why they would choose to do this is somewhat beyond me, but I find it hard to swallow that it wasn’t an intentional design choice, whatever their reasons were. The best guess I have is to make status apply pressure even to evasive opponents
I don’t think it’s working as intended, it’s been a problem since forever
This is a large factor in why I don’t think it’s broken, but intended.
Plenty of time to have fixed this as an oversight if that’s what it was. This mechanic is present even when latency isn’t a factor anywhere else in the equation.
If hits register instantly, 5-frame scimitar parries are working on point, dodges are appropriately avoiding hits but the status is still applying… well why didn’t the game register it as a full hit like it does in actually laggy matches?
The only answer to me is because it’s intended for status to apply on narrowly dodged attacks, and the indication for this occurring is that glancing blow sound effect.
1 Like
Either that or FromSoftware incomeptence. They don’t usually learn from their mistakes so
Balancing a game makes it less fun as dumb things is fun and interesting! Like bugs and weird mechanical interactions. Complexity can be kewl though.
2 Likes
I wouldn’t be using poison weapons if this mechanic didn’t exist in Elden Ring! It’s how I keep pressure up on especially evasive/passive opponents. Poison’s damage is fairly pitiful all things considered, but the fact I can still build and proc it on someone who’s playing extraordinarily defensively makes it worth using!
1 Like
DS2 also suffers from enemies having perfect tracking during their charge/grab attacks (looking at you, ogre) and having some of the worst areas in all of Souls(Black Gulch, Shrine of Amana, Cave of the Dead, Iron Passage and the worst of them all - Frigid Outskirts), not to mention Soul Memory.
Now, as for my hot take :
Supergiant Games were never good at making engaging gameplay. The art style, voice acting, music and story in their games are top notch, but the core gameplay loop starts to really show its cracks towards the end of all of their games.
This is especially true with Hades, which is a roguelike, so a majority of it’s focus is the gameplay. The enemy attacks are hard to see at times due to the visual noise, fighting often times boils down to mashing left click with the occasional dodge. Enemy health and armor scale rather poorly with difficulty modifiers, and so enemies end up feeling like bloated damage sponges especially when you don’t get lucky with your boons.
And overall I had a much better time with Dead Cells than with Hades, to the point where I beat all the bosses without taking damage.
God yeah, it’s like they just don’t know how to push the mechanics further
I remember playing transistor, banger game for the first buncha hours, then you get into the lategame and it’s just… tedious
Here’s a difficult to swallow pill:
The coders and contributors are no more able than many players to see the second and third order effects that a change will bring.
A culture of disregarding player input is bad for the game.
Another relevant difficult pill:
Not all change is good. Not all your ideas are good. Listening to the consensus is a good idea.
10 Likes
Servers interested in roleplay greatly benefit from whitelists, as they really help to weed out the gamer types.
5 Likes
Each order of change is harder to predict than the last and there’s a point where it’s going to be foggy no matter who it is, but “No more able” is simply not true. Someone who has been with the game and community through years of changes is going to be better able to predict this than a person who fell in love with the game a month or two ago. This is generally true regardless of status/title within the community.
100% agreed, serious community input should be considered and discussed openly whenever possible.
Also agreed, but not only is this not hard to swallow, it’s baked into policy. All coders have to follow a system of checks and balances on each other and nobody including maintainers can merge their own ideas unilaterally.
Fuck no it isn’t
The banning of slurs was quite unpopular at the time it was done. Do you think leadership at the time should have listened to the consensus and kept allowing them?
The removal of wallstuns was quite unpopular at the time it was done. After it was implemented anyway most players changed their minds because it did exactly what it was trying to.
Not every good change is going to be immediately popular, and I know damn well not every popular idea is actually a good idea.
With all of that I want to follow through with the second quote and challenge you:
Show me some already merged changes that had major unintended consequences or negative effect and compare them to controversial changes that turned out to better the community. Already merged, not currently being worked on and not yet merged
I can think of two off the top of my head to help your side out:
-
The botany dispenser made botany totally self-sufficient and enabled them to speed-run immensely overpowered plants at a rate that was never possible without chemist cooperation (or stealing a dispenser) before.
-
Bluespace miners (later reverted) enabled the station to easily have infinite materials across the board and invalidated the entire mining job because of their relatively early availability. This resulted in copious amounts of otherwise not easy to create items and had major power balance implications.
3 Likes
If the Ore Silo removal gets merged this response will age badly. Also, when the consensus is TOO strong you have to listen at some point. Isn’t that what happened when you tried to make backpacks hold 3 items and the thread was +200 responses of people majorly saying they didn’t like at all the change?
4 Likes
The server will keep crashing at the 1h mark
6 Likes