So I tend to hate souls games, the reason is the horrible mechanics of the game design, horrible checkpoints, respawning enemies, having to backtrack when you die to get your stuff killing the same guys over and over again.
Basically the so called “difficulty” of Souls games tends to revolve around doing the same damn thing over and over again, dying surprise deaths, back tracking to get your stuff etc.
I REALLY hate that crap and find it a waste of time
Now I’m pretty familiar with From Soft as I was a huge fan of the Kings Field series and Armored Core back in the day.
So Eternal Ring might be back to form for what I like but I have some questions that may or may not have been revealed yet.
1.Can you save anywhere?
2.If not can you save your game without spending 30 mins looking for a campfire?
3.When you die do you have to backtrack to get your stuff back?
4.Do enemies respawn? If so do they do it slower then other souls games?
I like the mood, settings, enemies, and weighty combat of Souls games but hate everything else about them. I hope this game is just the stuff I like and not the lame repetitive crap they pass off as hard difficulty.
I’m someone in the same boat as you. I just don’t have the capacity for a Souls game anymore. But I have one thing to say: If you play on PC, you can download difficulty modifiers mods.
I’m not sure how these things will work in Elden Ring, but here’s how they go in the rest of the Souls games,
You can save almost anywhere outside of a boss fight arena. Just quit the game, it auto-saves.
See answer 1.
When you die you have to backtrack if you want to retrieve the blood echoes or souls you were carrying, as they’re the only thing you drop on death.
Enemies respawn when the player returns to the Nexus in Demon’s Souls, rests at a bonfire in Dark Souls & at a lantern in Bloodborne, so the speed of the respawning is controlled by the player.
Edit: Have to say, I don’t think Elden Ring will be for people who don’t like Souls gameplay. It very much looks like another iteration of the formula.
There seems to be some misconceptions on how difficult souls games actually are. You don’t lose “all your stuff” on death, just the souls you use to level up. By endgame this becomes a non-issue due to the levelling system eventually giving you diminishing returns. The games are also constantly autosaving. Defeating even a single enemy or picking up an item saves the game. As for enemies respawning, I think it’s a balancing issue if they never respawned. You could just kill 1 enemy, run back to bonfire for full heal and item refills, and repeat. And what happens if you die? The enemies you defeat are still dead? This plus adding a “button mashing easy mode” will create players who finish the game and say the game was “meh” because at that point you’ve stripped away core game mechanics and have created a generic action game. Also it would fragment the pvp community, which isn’t supposed to be an optional thing if you are using the embers/humanities for their bonuses (at the risk of being placed in the pvp pool)
Just for the record, I’m in favour of an easy mode in Souls games. As long as it’s optional & offline only, I can’t think of any reason why it would be a bad thing. I say that as someone who absolutely loved Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 1 & Bloodborne.
Open gaming up for more people, I say. Accessibility options for all.
I watched the 20 minute gameplay trailer for Elden Ring twice yesterday. Would love to explore the world and whatnot but you can see it, it’s an open world Souls game. It even starts with saving at a campfire. lol.
So I think the main keys that will allow me to enjoy this game VS most Souls games is:
Ample ability to save nearly everyhwere. I got a busy life and can’t be playing for an extra hour just to find a place to save my game.
When I die in the game I do not want to have to backtrack and kill the same respawning enemies again and again just to get my stuff back.
A REAL story and narrative would be nice, I don’t like having to learn about a games main story through little codex finds and written scrolls.
Boss encounters should allow me to save right before so I don’t have to replay the game for an hour just to get back to the point where I can take on the boss that just killed me.
Basically in gaming I HATE repetition and stupid game mechanics that force you to repeat area’s, kill the same enemies over and over again and just go out of it’s way to make the game annoying instead of legimately difficult
I hate Souls like games, mainly because of the artificial repetition they force you in which people confuse with being difficult when its really just bad mechanics that make you do the same thing over and over again…
I like Kings Field and Armored core which were also made by From Soft. I hope Elden ring is more like the Kings Field games and also more normal open world RPG’s
The games autosave very regularly, even while you quit the game and come back. Just that you don’t get to start from that save again if you die, cuz bonfires exist. Again a very normal checkpoint system that’s common in a lot more games than just Fromsoft’s.
You don’t have to kill anyone again to get the stuff back, it’ll literally just be on the ground, you can run to it and grab and get out, what you want is less of a hindrance while getting to that dropped stuff and back. Backtracking and respawning enemies is built into Metroidvania as a genre yet that point gets zero mentions when talking about games like Ori, Hollow Knight, Momodora, etc. Why I say that is that’s not a design failing inherently, it’s a deliberate choice, perhaps one you don’t like, which is perfectly fine. The respawning makes sure you don’t rail through entire swathes of levels, also because learning combat in these games is fundamentally iterative.
Elden Ring will have less of an issue here due to it being more open, having more options to engage in combat and traversal. Sekiro had sprint and jump and you could just speedrun the entire game without needing to face one non-essential enemy/miniboss.
I agree, and again, Fromsoft did a better job with this in Sekiro which had the bonfires very close to boss fights showing that they’re not averse to doing that, hoping Elden Ring has that too, even if not, the existence of a mount shall probably make it a lot faster to get back to places you died at.
Can there be a Souls game for people who don’t like Souls games? The core aspects of the game that people love about them are the very things that are despised by those of us who hate them.
This brings me back to the Dead Rising series. I enjoyed the earlier games where you only had a set amount of time to complete your objectives. It added to the tension and actually made it kinda feel like you were just another guy in the outbreak who can’t save everyone (until you master the game and know the best routes and have a high level lol). I enjoyed the gameplay loop of going out and rounding up survivors and bringing them back. People have sometimes referred to early dead rising games as “crazy taxi but with zombies” and I think that made a fun game. Come DR3 and DR4, they decided to cater to the part of the audience that said they hate the timers and the survivors (with DR4 also even removing boss fights because there was a group that hated those too). So what we got were IMO mediocre zombie games that felt like the musou genre (Dynasty Warriors) that are just about killing zombies with wacky weapons. These games are not nearly as fondly remembered as the original which most people say is a 360 classic. This is kinda why I have the opinion that not every game has to “work” for everyone. Souls games provide a certain audience what they are looking for in very good quality.
I wouldn’t even call it softening, just take out the annoying repetitive BS from Souls games and it would be much better to me.
I think those repetitive mechanics in souls games are just bad designs that artificially bump up the difficulty, because you have to backtrack and repeat yourself so often. It’s basically a lame short cut for devs to spike the difficulty and pad the game play times.
