Commander Niall isn't a group boss fight.
summons ads whatever gets your dick hard then
Sekiro was a lot tighter in terms of gameplay I think. Probably more tested as well
This always happens with these open-world games though. You can clearly see the detriment of the full open world in elden ring vs the semi-open in Sekiro
No it's just a single boss with a TimeWaste phase at the start.
that was my point about group, ads, nmagane fights in souls games to begin with
Nmagane?
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yes nmagane fights
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it's when the boss has backup or ads needling you on word choice
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I wasn't trying to needle on wordings, I just think there's a difference between multiple health bar bosses and a shitty trash mob at the start of the fight. I know it's not really that different - but it feels different to me.
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i enjoyed a lot of the exploration but some of the exploration encounter boss fights could be janked by environment. i remember magma wyrm being obnoxious on uneven terrain and some of the dragons landing in a rocky outcropping and being absurd to get to
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overall i enjoyed elden ring. the surplus of content is what sticks out compared to other souls games but idk if i'll go back and replay it multiple times like ds3 or ds1
Open world effect. It's just impossible to test all this stuff so they don't bother. The thinking is like - you can just go overlevel or get a better spell then come back and beat the jank. Result is a much less clean game
I don't think there are any open world games where this is not an issue. Bethesda is famous for celebrating their ridiculous bugs (shameful, obscene)
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yea open environments have their ups and downs. you always had a small amount of agency in exploring souls games up to a point but nothing like all 4 cardinal directions completely open. i didn't really enjoy running into something i thought might be intended for higher than my current level as you never really experience that in the old ones besides a few exceptions like dancer. the environments were at least super pretty and incredibly diverse
the open world at least let them put different aesthetics in, like the game getting increasingly alien and aberrant towards the end compared to dark souls being stuck mostly in gothic misery besides the mandatory poison swamp and lava river
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I think the best open-world games are actually designed to be open - in that you can start the game by immediately leaving the starting area, walk to the lategame area, and do most of the content if you're skilled enough.
Most open-world games use RPG elements to essentially lock you to the intended path. It's "open" in the sense that you can walk to another area, die to the first minor enemy you find, then go back to the starting area and fight the boss they wanted you to fight.
Funnily, some of the earlier Bethesda games did this properly just because they weren't fully tested/had tons of bugs. I remember in FONV there were ways (buggy and non-buggy) to sneak into New Vegas right from the start of the game. It always felt like a really creative way to play.
I try to recreate that sense of openness whenever I play an "open world" game these days, but more and more often you find that as game technology has advanced, it has empowered game developers to make bad decisions and lock you down to the "intended" path of the game. Sadly, most of these guys don't actually know how to make a good game, they just make something derivative of whatever has recently been on the market for these types of games, so we end up with a lot of "It's a massive open-world RPG where you are essentially on rails fighting the bosses in the same intended order as every other player." It's a very sad thing to invest thousands of hours into making something like this and still have no creative vision/nothing new to add to the lexicon of game design.
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i like the open world style you described but i can make concessions for a good narrative like the witcher 3. although that had some problems with overleveled areas/quests and gear progression i can imagine it would be impossible to make a good story and tell it with the characters if you can do any of the 'main quest' stuff at any time (which you sort of can in witcher 3).
fucking ubisoft games man. there isn't even a point to their open world because the characters are mostly forgettable and there are like 6 different exploration encounters or locations just repeated across the entire map
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assassins creed could have been such a great series it makes me sad. imagine visiting a different culture's assassins/saboteurs each game and having a fresh set of mechanics and weapons
See I disagree. The witcher was the perfect example of this. Each area's story (at least at first) is fairly self-contained. Take Skellige: You arrive in the area. You meet the important characters of the area in a fairly on-rails sequence and are introduced to the main conflict. You're then sent off to explore more of the open-world elements, play little side quests, chase Ciri (which notably was designed to be open-world - you can find different parts of Ciri's story out-of-sequence and then put them all together at the end of Act 1)
So the plot is actually well-designed to be played in any order. But - as soon as you face an enemy, you realize there is a leveling/RPG element designed to discourage you from playing this way. It's not simply skill/character progression - you're not missing moves or game understanding. There's literally a mechanic whereby if you are lower level than an enemy, you deal much less damage.
Vice-versa is also true. Once you outlevel enemies, they stop dealing damage to you and the gameplay becomes pretty pointless.
It's sad because this is exactly the opposite of what you'd want in an open-world game. It's designed to be explored in creative ways. If you want to bum rush up the river to Novigrad immediately (as I did), skipping all the swamp and early game content, sell all your clothes and swords to buy a boat to Skellige, and start the game as an impoverished resident of these distant barbaric isles, you should be able to. Somebody clearly intended it, as the plot is written to accommodate it. But when it came time to design the combat, the game's creators were too lazy or too stupid (or both) to figure out how to create a sense of progression and difficulty through movesets and combat mechanics - instead falling back on the shit game design of "Your level > my level. I lose"
To illustrate how this can be done properly you can actually look at Sekiro. In Sekiro, you can fight spearmen without the Mikiri Counter. Once you get the Mikiri Counter, you still have to learn all the timing and figure out how to utilize it properly. The progression around health/damage you deal is there (you upgrade your sword and stuff iirc) but it's minor compared to the power spike of actually learning and mastering the Mikiri Counter.
And if it was an open-world game, and you started with no hp/damage but knew where to get and how to use Mikiri Counter, you could run and get it and run around stomping on the late-game spearmen with great disrespect. The game's progression is 1) Does your character have a given skill, and 2) Do you as a player understand how to use the skill and understand the mechanics of the game -- with #2 being the dominating factor.
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The game design we laid out for NMAGane in his hit game For Jones by Jilsen also follows this pattern. The player can explore the world in any direction (for now, left and right - but maybe later we will add an up & down DLC) but the mechanics remain the same. A sword appears on the edge of the screen and flies toward the player; you have to dodge it. How far you can travel in the open world depends on your understanding of this core mechanic. (I have heard there is also a second mechanic - something about balls - but have not travelled far enough to see it myself due to very serious limitations on my personal time due to work and other unspecified obligations.) Player progression feels more real here because it is truly progression of the player, and not just the player character, that is driving the game. More game developers need to understand this.
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I dont care how 'cool' the gameplay in sekiro was. It was boring as fuck
Ashina Castle Cringe Castle Cringe cave
If i wanted gameplay i wouldnt be playing dumbass over the shoulder roleplayers, i would just play a real game like tetris or playing cards.
The only cool thing about Sekiro was Headless and genichiro. Everything else was so low effort