I made it all the way through Dark Souls 1 and 2 and about half of 3 before I even knew that was a thing. I was getting curbstomped by Dancer of the Boreal Valley and went online looking for discussions about her. Lo and behold:
Tl;dw - Dancer’s song is in 3/4 time instead of 4/4 and she dances with her music. This gives her a crazy pattern that people always get got by because what feels like an opening actually isn’t. In order to defeat her you have to listen to her song and learn to dance with her.
Once I learned that it opened up an entire new world of understanding across every soulslike game I played and immediately halved my average number of boss attempts. No joke. Not every boss can be beaten blindfolded by just listening to their OST but it’ll give you good timing cues for the fight more often than it doesn’t.
I’m sorry, I just can’t stop myself from launching into this spiel every time I hear a comment like your first one. There’s a huge swath of gamers that I feel like would actually love my favorite game if they weren’t scared away from it by gamer circlejerk. It’s not my mission in life to defend Dark Souls to people who don’t care about it, but I often assume that mantle despite myself.
At the end of the day though it’s just a game about self reflection and personal growth, and I like that.
Only the most braindead of gamers has a chance of bouncing off a single Souls fight more than maybe a dozen times. Two dozen if you’re especially thickheaded.
The thing about Soulslikes - and Fromsoft games in particular - is that they teach you new things primarily by killing you with them. Once you know whatever the thing is that this encounter is trying to teach you, you can blow through the entire thing at level 1 and people do it all the time. And I do mean “people” and not just professional streamers. SL1 is a popular challenge run for souls fans, specifically because once you know all the rules of the game it becomes very easy.
But there is no easing-in to learning new things in Dark Souls. You will get flattened into paste by some bullshit without warning, and it is up to the player to figure out a) why they died, and b) how to prevent that. Throwing yourself at the same brick wall 200 times with no change in strategy is a losing prospect no matter what game you’re playing, souls or otherwise.
The essence of “gitting gud” is literally just stopping for 10 seconds to think about why you failed last time. If you’re capable of that - and 99% of gamers definitely are, it’s a core component of game design - you’re capable of not only completing but excelling in Soulslikes.
People have been jerking off how difficult Souls games are for a decade and a half now and it’s never been true. Souls games are just rhythm games that don’t give you the rhythm onscreen. Find that rhythm (through observing patterns, and especially through listening to the boss fight music) and you’ll first-clear every single fight.
I find it offensive that the only effective way to combat this is to fight fire with fire and also make a big bitchy noise about this like the conservatives love to do. I have better things I would rather be doing with my life. But such are the times we live in I suppose.
"You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part.”
So no, it’s not misinformation, Nintendo is straight up telling you legally that they can and will do this. This is not a hypothetical. They may not have done it yet but there is no uncertain terminology around their ability and willingness to do so. The fact that they can even threaten this in their EULA is a huge warning flag that everyone in this thread is correct to be upset about.
I buy things in early access for just such a reason. If it looks like something I’ll like, I’ll buy it early to support development. If it’s great then great. If it falls through then I’m out a bad investment of like, $10.
I’ve got probably a hundred indie games in my library that I’ve supported in exactly such a fashion, from raw pre-alpha to 1.0 release to post-release content update or dlc. They aren’t all winners. But many of them were worth the cost of investment and then some.
From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s basically a sandbox. Imagine if F:NV had no main quest but allowed you to create your own faction. You’re just unleashed onto the wasteland to do whatever and let everyone else respond to it.
That is to say, much of the fun comes from building drug running bandit empires.
[…] because they don’t allow you to run older versions of games.
They do if the dev makes it available, I’m looking at four different versions of Terraria in the beta menu right now that stretch back four major versions. I’m pretty sure a couple games in my library somewhere have their entire update history in there, though I can’t think of one to name off the top of my head right now, that’s not a feature I use very often. [Edit: Rift Wizard is one that does precisely this, I knew I had at least one in here]
This is not true of all games, but it could be, either directly by game devs without Valve even having to care, or via pressure by Valve by just making older versions available whether the devs want it or not. I think the latter option is probably the better move, but there’s technically nothing stopping the former other than the game devs themselves.
There’s also a valid argument that making downpatching very easy would be a huge boon to piracy. This is a reasonable talking point no matter which side of that fence you sit on. It would also probably benefit modding as well, which I think is a more objective good but some game developers or more likely publishers would probably disagree.
It used to be that if anyone in the group was playing any game it would lock you out of playing anything else on the main account without kicking them off.
But they eased up on it now so you can both play at the same time as long as you aren’t playing the same game at the same time.
So just make a burner account for you or for your kids and family share the library to it and now you don’t even have to go offline unless everyone in the house wants to play BG3 simultaneously.
Big boss fights in particular (and some of those in particular, in particular, looking at you Maris and/or Gnoster) often have either a gigantic AoE attack that is very difficult to dodge when you’re the only source of aggro, or else charge across the entire arena after every attack and have you spend half an hour in the fight, 27 minutes of which was spent just chasing the guy across the map. Not impossible, but very annoying.
But 90% of what makes coop easier in my opinion is just having a spare body around that can pull aggro so you can heal. Elden Ring base bosses were designed around being able to be beaten solo so they usually have big wide windows where you can get a breather if you need it. Nightreign bosses have much less of that because they expect you to be running 3 deep. Nerfing their defenses helps with the solo DPS race but it doesn’t really solve the problem that these fights were designed from the ground up for a team who is able to rotate aggro. Nightreign bosses were designed with a sort of raid-boss mentality.
I think if this game were going to be appropriately balanced for single player they would need to go in and edit a lot of the main bosses’ movesets. But that was never part of Nightreign’s design philosophy and trying to shoehorn it in now isn’t doing them any favors in my opinion. This is the equivalent of a World of Warcraft player complaining that they can’t solo all the endgame raid bosses. Sure, you can’t. They weren’t designed to be fought solo. We could try to nerf them down to the point that you can fight them solo, but then it’s no longer a raid boss, you’ve lost the essence of why people wanted to come to this fight in the first place.
Also, are the enemies designed for multiplayer, except in scaling? Everything I’ve seen looks like standard Fromsoft stuff, no weird abilities that just fuck over solo players.
Compare base game Morgott and Nightreign Morgott and I think you’ll see what I mean here. Boss enemies are much more cracked out with longer combos and shorter downtime than in Elden Ring proper, because the developers expect you to be trading aggro with your teammates to give yourself a heal break.
In co-op you have fully infinite lives, your teammates can pick you up at any time and even if they fail to do so you’ll respawn back at a grace. If you fall over in a boss fight you have an unlimited timer to be picked back up and automatically rez at the end of the fight even if they don’t do it.
In solo you’re fighting a boss intended for 3 players and if you die twice the game is over completely.
Co-op, even with randoms, is much much easier by an order of magnitude. I’m usually a solo player in most games and thought this would be awful for me, it isn’t at all. Map pings are plenty of communication for most matches. It is, however, definitely better with friends on a voice call.