I probably won't be playing any soulslikes this weekend, but my partner and I are deep in the trenches of Warframe, having traded one free2play addiction for another :D we're currently still clearing the star chart and doing all the main missions.
I've recently built Volt and Wukong and am currently getting Volt to 30 (might use him as a base once I can subsume Warframes). After that, I'll switch to Wukong for some leveling. That's the Warframe I've been saving up materials for for a while, so I'm looking forward to dipping my toes in there. Also earned my first platinum yesterday, so we might end up doing more Void Fissures for some more easy platinum. My partner apparently got a super rare mod on one of our missions that's only got like a 1% drop chance and sells for around 100 plat on the market which is crazy.
So for me, it took several attempts to get into soulslikes. Bloodborne was my first and my first attempt went ok I think. I got to Papa G and then called it a day because I thought I knew where I had to go - a corridor were I'd get ambushed by enemies jumpscare style, which was more or less fabricated lol - but then just stopped playing lol. Same goes for Sekiro which I ended up sticking with after three separate new playthroughs as well as several years between each. Bloodborne got quite hard by the end, but I managed somehow, and yet, Sekiro was a whole different beast. It challenged me in ways I could not have imagined prior. Hence, I'd say that Sekiro definitely was the one game that pushed me to my limits and had me "git gud" somewhat and prepared me for soulslikes to come. Not so much in terms of level design, finding my way around a complicated map, or using a specific build, since all of these are either nonexistent or not huge focuses of the game, but definitely in terms of hard mechanics and micro.
Which one was it for you? How did it make you a better player?
As a follow up to this, we played about 11 hours of this mod and it's not very good. We had some tech issues, which is to be expected, especially combining seamless coop with other mods. But the experience we had on other large mods such as Covergence for example was much better, Reforged had a lot of crashes, weird bugs or simple oversights by the devs.
I love a lot of the concepts in the mod, the ideas behind them are creative and sound fun. The execution however leaves a lot to be desired. They introduce a whole bunch of new mechanics, most of which only kinda sorta work and some just fall flat.
For example there is a ducking mechanic as a dodge option, which in principle is very fun. It's cool to have an extra option in the toolbox and it looks cool. However it is very situational, where I've seen very few occasions outside the tutorial where it was useful at all. On top of that for one of us it kinda worked, for the other it would just simply not work at all, the input failed to register. This made the mechanic frustrating to use and we ended up not using it at all, which is a shame.
They also messed with stuff they should have better left alone. The balancing is all over the place and in many places attempts at (I presume) making stuff harder just made things frustrating, tedious and outright unfun. Balancing is very hard and at the moment at least it's not there yet. One example is cool down timers on bosses and enemies. They've reduced or outright removed them, this made them all very chaotic and spammy. Those cool downs are there for a reason, it's to make the game feel fun to play. Having a boss spam their biggest attack over and over again isn't adding difficulty, it's just poor game design.
There's also stuff I really liked, but wasn't really a big factor in gameplay. For example they have a kind of subclass specialization system and that's awesome. The benefits and downsides are cool and would really add value. In reality however it felt like it was a small detail that overall didn't really impact gameplay at all. Perhaps further into the game it would become more relevant, but we played a good chunk of the game and I would have like to have it way more prominent.
They also tried to "fix" crafting and they made a good attempt at it. It is in fact an improvement over the vanilla system. But I find the lack of QoL like auto crafting of parts annoying. And in the end the stuff you can craft is close to vanilla, in other words very situational, annoying to use and not really worth it. So the stuff they fixed doesn't matter much if the whole crafting thing simply isn't relevant.
Another thing I disliked was the speed boost they gave Torrent. I think Torrent was plenty fast in vanilla and having fast travel made it never really an issue in the first place. The increased speed made handling him annoying and horse combat (already an iffy thing in Elden Ring) basically impossible. Perhaps if you're the kind of player who goes on a gathering quest quickly before starting the game it might be useful. But I just like to play in a natural way, picking up stuff as I get there with natural progression, rather than zooming across the map to get the specific items.
All in all we had fun, despite the tech issues and the issues we had with the gameplay of the mod. I admire what the devs did, it's a lot. But I feel like the changes were maybe more than what was realistic. A smaller scope could have perhaps lead to better execution of the excellent ideas. I wouldn't recommend the mod at this time, but that's my personal opinion in a single day of coop gameplay. I've heard people playing in single player who had a great time and different people like different things. 5/10 for me, not terrible, but not great.