[Discussion] What was your first experience with a Soulslike, and how did it go?
[Discussion] What was your first experience with a Soulslike, and how did it go?
I had given DS1 a try on PC back when I saw the game played by PewDiePie (jesus this was ages ago) and didn't really get the game at all; keyboard controls prior to PTD edition probably didn't help either lol
My first real venture into soulslikes was Bloodborne and it went horribly to say the least. I killed the Cleric Beast and Gascoigne the first evening I tried the game and put down the game afterwards but it was just too much for me. I was scared, didn't know what I was doing, and it was just waay to hard for me.
Took me a couple of years to get back to it and give it another shot. One of my all-time favourite games today.
How about you guys?
Played Dark Souls 1 after a friend recommended it, INT+DEX Magic Build.
Got to Blighttown, took me forever to beat the Capra Demon.
Load up the game next time, save corrupted.
Whatever, I think. Dark Souls is all about failing and trying again. I make a new character, and since I know the game a little better this time I level her more efficiently.
Get halfway through Blighttown, put the game down.
When I return, save file corrupted.
Now I'm pissed, and I'm not letting Dark Souls beat me in this low-down, dirty fashion.
I figure out that it's enabling online mode that may be causing the save corruption
So I start the game again, grind a little for souls. Book it to Darkroot Basin, whip that little fucking dickhead Black Knight's ass, firebomb the Hydra, spend 20 minutes rollsoulsing the Golem that contains Dusk and get my magic buff items.
Honestly, I felt satisfied. It was annoying to lose all my progress, but it really made me git gud.
That third run, I was at level 5 doing more damage than my level 20 the previous run. That build steamrolled Ornstein and Smough on the first try.
And now I'm unable to beat Four Kings, for some reason.
I feel like I've had a very unorthodox playthrough of DS1 so far.
Honestly this sounds amazing. It's your origin story and will lead you to many more adventures, I feel like
Yeah, as soon as my save corrupted I realized it was the ultimate "YOU DIED" and I didn't deserve to play Dark Souls if I couldn't git gud from there.
Tried DS1, immediately put it down. Years later tried Sekiro, immediately put it down.
Then I played Elden Ring until the Fire Giant and put it down.
Then I finished Elden Ring multiple times, finished Sekiro, finished Lies of P, and am now making my way through Black Myth: Wukong.
Took some time to really get invested, but now I love Soulslikes! I often find myself doing a couple of boss attempts, doing something else for 30 minutes, and then doing another bunch.
I feel like this is the experience most people getting into these games go through. It's just a very different kind of game compared to what's out there and usually played. It's funny if you think about too: soulslikes, at their core, are also just 3rd person action adventure games with combat, story, whatnot, but the way the combat is the focus of the games makes for a very different experience
I got Dark Souls for free on the Games with Gold on Xbox 360.
Was like "hey, this seems pretty nice, love the art style and music."
Only months later I heard this was supposed to be this notoriously hard and frustrating game for real pros.
I was then like "Well it did seem a little bit unforgiving, yes. Maybe I should leave this for later. You know, after I've 100%d Metroid Prime 2."
(Metroid Prime 2: Echoes on GameCube is balls hard. I beat the last major area boss. Then my Mad Catz memory card died. Did the whole game again. Beat it. Didn't get 100% because I missed one scan. I will do it again, probably soonish now that I've dumped the disc for Dolphin, but I'll wait a moment if there's a Switch rerelease.)
I have enjoyed some other Soulslikes - Elden Ring is great fun even though my tangible progress is quite slow.
Wow that's brutal. Hope you do get around to finish Metroid sometime!
I tried
PD1DS1 and really didn't like it. I hate being made to play the same content over and over so the typical soulslike loop of "die and repeat until you've learned how to deal with this one specific challenge" really doesn't resonate with me. The "drop all of your souls upon death" mechanic also didn't help. All in all I made it maybe 10% through the game at most and I'm not going to touch it again.Later I tried Remnant 1 and found it to be vastly more enjoyable. The focus on ranged combat and much more robust player character vastly improved playability. The fact that coop is possible without having to allow people to randomly pop in and engage you in PVP also helped greatly. I also found the setting and art style more interesting but that's fairly minor. I finished it with all DLCs although there are still a few events I haven't seen yet.
I haven't ever thought about all of the FromSoft titles not really allowing for good ranged builds. It kinda does go against their design philosophy, I feel like, and they do have magic and ranged combat in some ways, but both are not as fleshed out as melee combat and its plethora of weapons is. Would a good ranged weapon whose moveset you enjoy help you finish a traditional soulslike?
It's definitely matter of philosophy. The traditional soulslike approach is to impose a high skill floor and be unforgiving about certain mechanics, especially dodging. The player character is fragile and the player is expected to learn each enemy and situation so they know precisely how and when to attack, dodge, etc. This leads to players being fully expected to die over and over to the same situations until the proper approach has been learned.
It's a difficult, deliberate gameplay approach that rewards those who like to apply themselves to a situation until they've mastered it. This focus on repetition to achieve mastery is intentional and the enjoyers of classic soulslikes tend to want a game where completion is the kind of challenge you can brag about meeting.
This doesn't work for me. I have limited patience for being made to repeat sections too often; traditional soulslikes overstress it in the same way frustration platformers do. While I can deal with frequent loss and repetition in something like a roguelike (or roguelite), those have the benefit of short cycle times and self-contained runs. Meanwhile I get the feeling that Dark Souls just wastes my time if I spend five minutes making my way back to where I died, repeatedly.
Remnant deals with this by lowering the skill floor to be on par with most shooters. The emphasis on ranged combat and more capable player character mean that most encounters can be handled with a modest amount of learning; mistakes are far less deadly and death has a lower penalty. You learn your weapons and skills rather than the enemies' patterns. Even most bosses can be done without precisely learning their patterns. (That excludes you, Barbed Terror.) This makes the game a lot more pleasant for someone who doesn't appreciate FromSoft's strict approach.
In essence, it's like comparing classic Castlevania to Symphony of the Night: SoTN made the series more approachable by introducing stat growth, allowing players to overpower enemies with numbers if their skill wouldn't suffice. Traditional Castlevanias and Igavanias ultimately are different subgenres that cater to different audiences. Both are perfectly valid. And it's the same with FromSoft's games and Remnant.
And that's why I don't think that a good ranged weapon would help – the game would have to be designed to accommodate it and if it was to retain its character as a classical soulslike, ranged combat would still have to be deliberate, lethal, and built around precise timing. I wouldn't want to turn Dark Souls into Remnant; it's fine the way it it, it's just not for me.
(Oh, and one note: When I wrote "PD1" in my original post, I meant Dark Souls 1 but mistyped. I'm gonna go and correct that.)
I bounced off Bloodborne hard, about three times over the years. Same with Sekiro. I love these games conceptually, but there just isn't enough bandwidth for me to engage with them on their level, and my fighting style has always been so painfully conservative and generally lackluster. I've only been able to finish DS1 and DS3.
Yea you do have to adapt to the games' speed and play on their terms. Once you do, you're having a great time, but you need to get there first. Bloodborne is definitely the more approachable of the two in terms of difficulty and actually shouldn't be too far away from DS3 when it comes to speed and aggressiveness given that DS3 was inspired by BB's design