cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/57413346
I played Nine Sols recently and it had a transformative effect on my gaming experience. I’ve found myself no longer getting mad at fairly structured games and deeply enjoying the personal refinement of my skill set in pursuit of a goal. Suddenly this shift in perspective has allowed me to see difficulty in a new light and truly savor the victory that comes after significant effort. With this new perspective, I decided to try the game that had made me hesitate the most with its reputation for difficulty: Sekiro
Its been truly eye opening to realize that my nervousness has only kept me from a good time. Or maybe I just wasn’t ready for it…
Following that trend, I started Celeste for the first time even though I never play pure platformers, and it has blown my socks off. Do I suck? You bet your ass I do. But I know it’s from a lack of detailed platforming, and developing that skill has been very fun and satisfying.
Now, I’d love to hear from others. What games made you regret waiting so long to try them?
Dark souls. I tried it a few times and dismissed. I returned to DS2 when DS3, at the request of a fanboi friend.
Accepting defeat, dusting myself off and surpassing all odds changed my mentality and patience with gaming forever.
Fuck me big bad boss? No, fuck you
This happened to me. It was Sekiro that was the one that finally sank it’s teeth into me. Still my favorite video game of all time.
Pretty much the same, I went DS2, then DS1R, then DS2:SotFS and then DS3. I don’t normally enjoy replaying games but SotFS was fine because enough had changed.
Still can’t get into Sekiro or Elden Ring, but I did finish Nioh and I’m sure Nioh 3 will be nice in a year or so when all the expansions have dropped.
I highly recommend spending some time with Sekiro. It is arguably their best game. It learns most of the lessons from the Souls series, innovates on that, but also doesn’t lose anything, in my opinion.
Elden Ring is good, but I honestly think it’s a worse experience than the older games. Yeah, the combat has been perfected, but that’s a relatively minor part of the gameplay, all things considered. DS1 has the perfect world to explore, with corridors that are crafted to perfection. It’s open enough to feel like you’re choosing where to explore while being closed enough to have good encounters. Elden Ring is so open that it loses a lot of control, which essentially means the only encounters that matter are in the dungeons. Those are a small fraction of the game, so it feels like a lot of time and effort spent to make something that’s experientially worse than the simpler older style. It’s still a master class in open world design, but I feel the game would be stronger if they focused on the classic design.
I might go back to Sekiro but for some reason the first few bosses pissed me off so much more than anything I encountered in DS or Nioh, and I’m not good at parrying. It’s like trying to go back to Mega Man on NES, I just can’t, two bosses in and I’m twisting the controller unil it creaks :)
I did try Sekiro three times in total so far so it could still work. It took a while for DS to click, too. Demon’s Souls lost me at Flamelurker, though, not doing that again (tried a new playthrough from scratch at least five times over the years).
It was frustrating to start. I agree. It requires such a different skill set than the Souls games but it feels like you should be good at it already, but you won’t be.
One key to the game is in a quote a character says fairly early on: “Hesitation is defeat.” The way to play is to put constant pressure on the enemy. In the Souls games you’re encouraged to back off and take time to recover when you need to. In Sekiro, you need to keep the pressure up to break their posture. If you back off then they recover and progress is reset. It’s tough, but it’s one of the best combat games once it clicks. It’s why almost every game since has added a posture bar, but they don’t go all the way to the logical end that Sekiro did. Even ER took the posture mechanic, but watered it down.
Funny, I dropped Seiko 3/4 of the way through. Elden ring has been on the wishlist, never bought it.
I guess it’s hard to beat the best, all the co-op and troll-invade glory that was DS.
Elden Ring is like getting the gameplay of Dark Souls, but all encounters are on your own terms as the hard progression walls you get in linear dungeons don’t apply to most of the game. I wouldn’t call it easier, but I would describe it as more accessible.
They definitely turned up the dial on combat challenges for bosses, but I agree, it’s more accessible. There are so many ways to trivialize the combats, and you can even skip a lot of the bosses. It’s so much easier than ever before to come back later with a significant power increase and easily defeat any boss.
Probably the thing that helps accessibility the most though is making it clear there are other paths, and you can come back to a boss later. That was always the intention of the Souls games, but people often slam their head against a wall until it breaks, and they think the games are (too) hard. The tools were always there to make the game easier, but a lot of people didn’t take advantage of them in the older games. ER makes the alternatives so much more obvious.