The Soulsborne games and the Souls-like genre is touted as the golden standard of gaming skill - but are they actually hard, or just badly designed?
The Souls-like genre remains popular, along with FromSoftware's classics there are many contenders. But which are the best Souls-like games?
Hmm... In my opinion, the 7 best are the 6 made by FromSoftware (DeS, DS1, DS2, DS3, BB and ER), then Lies of P. But each to their own.
Still DS1? You don't feel it's been surpassed yet?
Demon's Souls has the remake of course, but DS1 has surely been outdated?
I think that the DS1 remake is better looking than DS2. The interior lighting matched with the low resolution textures in DS2 is very garish, IMO.
Besides graphics, what do you mean by DS1 being "outdated"? I'm someone who played through Elden Ring and just recently played through the DS series, and as far as gameplay went, there were all very similar.
I haven’t played many but Bloodborne and NIOH1 are on top of my list.. had a blast with these 2
For world design and interconnectedness (that's a word, right?) DS1 is yet to be beaten.
Saad from eXputer: "Almost a decade later, it's time to take the nostalgia goggles off and accept that Bloodborne has long been surpassed by its successors."
Yes, yes it does. It’s still a great game. Elden Ring isn’t better just different and a bit easier . I like that you have to be aggressive but smart in Bloodborne
I literally replayed it recently and it's better than I remember. I think it's like going back to a beloved book and noticing things I hadn't before.
Yo! I was getting ready to reply with the exact same four words you started with lol. Yes, I think Bloodborne has withstood the test of time and remains a great game. That’s why all the fans are hoping for a sequel someday. Hoping that we can catch that magic again with a new storyline.
Yes. Just replayed it a few days ago. My first Platinum. And yes. I rage quitted so many times and called it BS too when I started. It's tight. The combat is amazing and the lore is rich.
Elden Ring was easier? I don’t know about that at all. I remember leveling up in Bloodborne and breezing through it. In Elden Ring no matter how powerful I got I was still catching a beat down from every boss.
That's due to scaling enemies. I remember not doing Haligtree untill near the end and having enemies withstand almost a full blast from Azur's Glintstone Staff Comet Azure. My level was quite high.
Melee characters are not fun in that game, especially for the Elden Beast.
"Dark Souls: Archthrones is like playing a brand new FromSoftware game, and that speaks volumes about just how much good modding can do," says Hanzala from eXputer.
No they're not. I would argue that they're almost perfectly designed. It's hard to strike a good balance of "actual" difficulty (not artificial difficulty like most games) and fairness. Dark Souls is very fair, it just takes trial and error to figure things out. Which is a wonderful thing. Brings me back to the NES days of gaming, where difficulty kept you coming back to try and get over those hurdles. Most games just bump up enemy HP and the damage they deal for difficulty settings. With Dark Souls, it's all about formulating a plan. Taking in what you see from enemies, and how they behave. And in the end, becoming a better player than when you first attempted that difficult boss/enemy you just couldn't get past before.
I would strongly disagree. While I personally think Dark Souls 2 has many mediocre levels and bosses. The complex nature of Soulsborne game is something that takes careful crafting to create levels (better termed areas) and bosses that challenging, fair, and rewarding. Good soulsborne titles punish players for poorly approaching challenges whilst rewarding players that analyze challenges being presented.
As an aside:
As a long time player of FPS games. I have noticed that some of the poorest game design is in first person shooters that focus on loadouts and skill gap compression. Call of Duty, Battlefront, and Battlefield often have maps that are designed to be random and unpredictable to reduce the impacts of map control. Additionally, weapon, ability, hero and class balance seems to be intentionally poorly down.
of course sometimes games of these types has their own limitations, but you have to adapt, apart from that, they encourage you to learn and get better. these games has most fairness in gaming, because other games just artificial creates difficulties and they does not have any fairness, just screw players over without any reason.
thegamer is just troll site at this point.
They're actually quite the opposite, which is what made them blow up. In an industry where everyone has abandoned the core pillars of satisfying game design in exchange for "broad appeal" and hiding rewards behibd paywalls and microtransactions. The the Souls games brought them back with avengeance with string emphasisin risk vs reward, and wasn't afraid to make the rewardthat much sweeter by challenging players at a time when excessive hand holding was the norm. If the game was only hard because they were designed badly, they wouldn't be as popular as they are
As someone who has a bachelors degree in Game Development and Design i can tell you that this series is literally built on the core pillars of game design, probably the best and most consistent examples if it in the past deacde or so. I could sit here and tell you why but many others have already done so.
TLDR, you're wrong.
Is this site on a path to shitting out poorly written articles.