recent: tears of the kingdom, or as i like to call it botw 1.2, its the same thing all over again just with one or two added gimicks, the open world is dead, npcs are boring and nintendo just got away with it like that
not so recent: i cant stand persona 5, joker and his entourage are annoying teenagers, the time management is a horrible gameplay addition and the artstyle is just a visual overstimulation
with that being said,~~ plz dont kill me~~
Elden ring. It looks like an amazing game but it just doesn’t work for me. I feel like it’s the combat? Somehow it feels “clunky” to me. It’s odd I can’t put my finger on it, but I don’t like the movement which obviously affects combat.
I just tried out Lies of P. Turns out, yup, Souls combat still feels clunky and terrible; entirely reliant on the iframes of the same roll animation used everywhere.
I completely burned myself out on Elden Ring.
I played until I reached the plateau-area and completely lost motivation. In the previous Dark Souls-games I’d stay in one area until I was sure I’d discovered everything, and I definitely should not have done that in the open world of Elden Ring.
I really enjoyed some of the dungeons and closed-off castles, but the big open world filled with junk craftables and copy/paste bosses really turned me off.
I’ll probably get back to it when I feel like finishing it, but I haven’t felt the need to yet after playing for a few weeks after release.
I was also gonna say Elden Ring, have you played other souls games?. The combat in elden ring felt pretty decent compared to other souls games, very fast paced and actually alot smoother than any other because of the jumping mechanics. I love the dark souls games but elden ring killed itself for me with its open world, just didn’t feel fun exploring, and the only places that i enjoyed going through were the few legacy dungeons that were designed like the older games. Repeated bosses, useless gathering and crafting skills, the regular dungeons had the same 4 designs and were too short to be fun and too repetitive in design. Oh and i forgot the quests, screw elden rings questlines tbh they suck, too cryptic in an open world with no guidance
Alot of people really like this game and i dont get it.
Yep! Played 2 of the dark souls games. I kinda enjoyed them but I didn’t finish either. Still felt better than Elden Ring somehow.
Also when I played elden ring the mapping was all controller based and I was playing on pc. That was weird. Had to dig through the Internet to find how to change it to KB/Mouse mapping.
For a game of that price I’d expect it to:
No wonder you don’t like the feel of the combat. It’s just not something that really works without a controller, nothing you can really do about it, besides using a controller.
That could be it. I do have a controller I could give that a go… I usually prefer to play these harder games with kb/m though.
There are some games I can’t imagine trying to play with kb/m and getting anything like as good an experience - Psychonauts comes to mind, in particular, because there is that arrowhead collecting progress gate that is WAY easier if you have the controller vibration for your dosing rod, and the worst parts of the meat level are way easier with controller too.
But at the same time… I’ve had the apparently weird experience of finding platformers that “must” be played with a controller to, often, be way easier on keyboard, just because that’s how I grew up playing platformers, I guess. No amount of practice has changed that for me.
Tl;dr: I support your unexpected souls game controller preference.
Sometimes specific input method simply work better, there’s a reason most shooters on consoles have heaps of aim assist, those are inherently easier to play with a mouse, and those souls games with a controller.
I wish we could get a successor to the steam controller, but with better build quality and more user-friendliness (both for using it, and for the process of sharing your custom per game mappings, and preferably a better way of having loaded mappings be visible in game so that you don’t just have to memorize them) so it might catch on more.
I still love mine for certain use cases - like wanting to play shooters on a controller, or, more often, wanting to play point-and-clicks or strategy games on a controller, or setting up old games to control in a way that feels more intuitive, or the game Outer Wilds specifically - and I dread its breaking one day.
Edit: one thing I love about it is its middle-ground between mouse-like aiming and controller-like control over your movement speed.
Exactly my thoughts!
I hate souls “fuck up even a little bit once and DIE into a slow death screen” fight mechanics to begin with, but also with Eldin Ring in particular the art style (the color palette, the lighting, everything) and the way the world is constructed and over-stuffed with big enemies that are just… there to be there, not doing anything but patrolling or something, is really offputting.
I want to like it, because when other people talk about it, it sounds pretty great, but so far eeehhhhh not for me.
Souls games always feel pretty clunky to me. I haven’t thought about that specifically much before, but, yeah. I guess the movements are very stiff and slow a lot of the time? It feels video-gamey, in a way somehow even more video gamey than arguably much more video gamey systems that are nonetheless more invisible to me (like, spam this attack button and maybe try for a combo).