Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

I have always been quite good at gaming, both in terms of reflexes and strategy (played and completed various Nintendo Hard games in the 80s and early 90s, played at competitive league level in various FPS games, can win games such as Civilization at rather high difficulty levels, have completed various roguelikes such as the 1.1.1 and previous versions of ADOM which were widely regarded as very hard and I could win quite reliably, etc.) but for some reason I was really, really bad at Dark Souls. I gave the first boss (Taurus Demon) a few tries and quit. I didn't even try the sequels because time is a scarce resource and I supposed I would have the same problem.

Not sure if it is because the game doesn't suit my personality (it seems to appeal to highly methodical types of players, which I guess I'm not) or I was just missing something (I remember the game having a lot of "arcane difficulty" as mentioned in the article, in the sense that it had almost no instructions -or at least I read none- and I'm not too keen on looking at wikis or guides due to spoilers as I enjoy doing my own exploration and being surprised by things, so maybe there was something essential related to weapons, leveling, etc. that I missed).

This one looks really good but I fear my experience will be similar. Although I may still give it a try, given all the hype.

I hear what you say. I do think Elden Ring is different from other From Software games. It gives the player a lot of ways to mitigate difficulty. Giving the player more flexibility in what kind of challenge to be presented with.

It's also a bit hard to explain the part that this excels at. I'm trying to find the right words to explain it without too much hyperbole. I honestly think that the scale of this game, would have been broken up into at least 3 games, by many other companies. I'm 70 hours in, and I've roughly found as many "graces", which are spread out throughout the world. So, I'm still finding myself in new areas, new environments, in much awe of the world. And, I'm enjoying all of it.

Now, I have played other souls games. But, perhaps this is the experience that you might relate to. Those games where much, much, more "ok, this is the linear path. Beat hard boss 1.". Repeat for boss 2, etc. Elden Ring is to a much larger extent: "explore the world". Take it in, and wonder why it is the way it is. Most things actually make sense, and it tells a subtle story I'm so grateful for. From Software hasn't followed the regular trend of "we worked on this, and refuse to let the player miss it". It has huge areas that the game almost wants you to miss, because it genuinely rewards curiosity. It is the best open world I've played in, and I'm just... it's truly a masterpiece.

The games are terrible at difficulty curves. They could make a difficulty ramp with more simple bosses that teach one specific core mechanic at a time, but they don't want to do that. Elden Ring is no different in this regard.

The earlier games were also pretty janky and had unnatural hitboxes. Elden Ring is a stellar improvement in this case.

It also takes advantage of your lizard brain's reaction to hit the roll button as soon as you see an animation start, but that's often a bad idea in these games (definitely more so in Elden Ring).

There's big themes of precise timing and memorizing the moves over raw reflexes, although enemies can do mix-ups and combo options. They will stop the combo early if you're out of range, but if you try to go within range thinking the combo has ended, another attack comes out.

I suspect if you were doing competitive shooters that's where it doesn't match up well. You can't simply act faster to forgo learning the boss moveset. This is also why they say dying is part of the genre. Unless you sit and watch a boss video before-hand, the price of admission to see the boss moveset and know when you can attack safely is dying.

I guess you're good at games with good, unrestricted movement like mario, contra, megaman. Unlike them, afaik souls game (I only play monster hunter, which many says is similar mechanic wise) give some restriction with the movement and harsh penalty for being impatient.

It's a timing game, not a reaction / apm game, which IIRC isn't the same with what you usually play.

There's no animation cancelling at all and the animation queue can sometimes be obnoxiously long. But that's part of the point. Most Button presses you have to commit to, requiring you to be more aware of exactly what your enemies are doing.

I watched a video recently where someone explained that this difference is exactly what makes Dark Souls special, unusual, and interesting: mechanically it's not a hard game, the challenge is in practice/familiarity, patience, and timing.

Also there are plenty of guides without spoilers, the player community seems to value not giving up secrets.

It is mechanically a hard game. DS1 has some truly awful hitboxes, provided virtually no actual in-game explanation of rather important mechanics surrounding needing certain kinds of weapons in the tomb of the giants, entire stats that basically don't work so you can accidentally stick all of your souls into a wasted build, and more.

The primary system for making it easier (summoning phantoms) also encourages the community to send people to just gank you and waste your time.

"All you need is patience" is not true. There is no way in hell my dad would make it through DS1 even though he is retired and doesn't have anything to do all day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com