Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
Rules
Souls-like is defined by the need to decide between attacking, blocking, dodging or parrying. With the additional factor of attacks having a fixed commitment to the attack animation that leaves you vulnerable and likely to get hit if you press it at the wrong time.
It's mostly just 2D fighting game combat translated into 3D with a lock on targeting system.
This is spot on. I like fighting games and I after playing a bunch of fighting games I will be better at the spacing and timing in a souls game.
It's mostly just 2D fighting game combat translated into 3D with a lock on targeting system.
fighting games are fast tho. if a fighting game had souls combat it would be boring af
fighting games are fast tho
Not Soul Calibur (the WORST soulslike)
Transcending history and the world, a tale of souls and swords, eternally retold
everytime i tune into a stream where someone is playing one of these games they are just rolling around on the ground like wtf are you doing just play sanic the gofer or whatever if you want to roll into a ball and move around on the floor
According to the Skyrim modding community, Souls-like combat means:
-You have a camera lock on function
-You have a dodge or roll button
-You have 'attack commitments' that hold the player and enemies in place during attacks to make the attacks feel more weighty
You have slightly more optional aspects like having weapons with somewhat varied movesets or the punishing difficulty but as far as changing Skyrim's combat into a Souls-like, those seem to be the defining traits
According to this definition, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is souls like
I suppose the jump attack is pretty committal but the attacks in OoT are pretty quick
I actually think Zelda and Dark Souls are almost the same game so unironically yes. Dark Souls 2 is basically just one giant Zelda dungeon
I want to see the "I'm a gaming badass souls-like hard game master" types try Zelda 2 for the NES on original hardware, within a single weekend like a proper rental experience. No emulation save states. No internet guides. Original controller. No Game Genie. They play it the way we elder millennials played it. Let's see how good they really are.
You have 'attack commitments' that hold the player and enemies in place during attacks to make the attacks feel more weighty
Imo the point of this isn't how the game feels, feel is just a byproduct. The point is to have what some might describe as more consequential positioning and decision making with attacks, because you can't just swivel mid-animation to hit someone who got around the initial path of your attack.
you can't do that in a fighting game either but fighting games manage to feel fast. slow in souls combat is slow like if everything was the 35 frame charge unblockables in soul calibur
Fighting games aren't that functional a comparison because mobility works completely differently in them.
There's a lot about the souls games I like, but eventually I reach a boss I can't beat and the rest of the game gets locked behind that one boss; in dark souls 3 that would be the sword dancer boss, a literal gate behind which the rest of the content exists. Her moveset is extremely confusing because it looks very samey and it gets hard to learn what to dodge through.
Also you say 'dodge and block', but really it's just dodge; one thing that's really awful about these games (maybe just the later ones in the series? I can't remember how the older ones were in this regard) is that there's primarily only one way to play it and that's dodging and maybe parrying; you rarely are able to build your character to be super tanky (so heavy armor + high health); it may be an RPG, but you can't truly play it the way you want.
I recall back in demons' souls and dark souls 1, heavy armor and armoring up was entirely viable. In dark souls 1 they even added a steel (iron? stone?) skin pyromancy to add on top of the heavy armor you already had on. I can't recall if dark souls 2 allowed for that style, and dark souls 3 definitely didn't. The Havel set USED to be great for boss fights.
Turning into metal is in all the subsequent games too, I'm pretty sure.
There are fundamental aspects of a game where if you don't like it, you won't like the game, and you can't really avoid needing to roll, block, or parry attacks some of the time (though you virtually never need to do any one of them and can often just walk out of harm's way). That said, there are still lots of other elements to builds, like different types of casting and such.
I've beaten DS1 without rolling or partying a single time, just blocking and repositioning, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for everyone, but I thought it was fun.
With those hard-stop bosses I either look up the cheese strategy. Or I just turn on an infinite health cheat. That way I can try and learn the boss without the wasted time of reloading again and again, and then I try doing it for real... and if it's still too annoying for whatever reason I just kill it with cheats. Promised Consort can go fuck himself, a lame plot twist boss deserves no respect.
I also cheat drop rates up, because I don't do grinding, and usually infinite materials, because I don't give a fuck about crafting systems any more. I like that they're there, but I have better things to do than collect hog butts. If a game starts wasting my time so overtly then I start thinking I should probably just read a book...
Incidentally, the Convergence mod made major changes to items in Elden Ring, by removing drop rates for equipment and just placing them in appropriate locations or as guaranteed drops from appropriate miniboss enemies. I really dig that.
This would describe expedition 33: Claire obscura pretty well.
fr lol
Combat is mostly rolling.
I appropriated your gag. Sorry, comrade.
but also that if you're bad at it you're dead immediately, right
If you put a moderate amount of stats into HP most attacks do not kill you in one shot. Smaller enemies hardly ever have ridiculous damage attacks if you're not taken by surprise.
There are bosses and enemies that ARE very punishing but no, I'm not that great at them and I'm not always dead.
soulslike is when animation priority and when you have a whole lot of animation priority, you get QTE
Souls-like just means m "rhythm games with swords and magic instead of dancing and neon shapes"
Fighting is infact a form of dancing
maybe that's why people have used dance pads to play the game 😁
to me there is nothing quite like dark souls 1. even later iterations are "souls like" (while still being their own thing)
to me its a game where the stakes are relatively low; you can die a lot and it doesn't really matter. You just have to learn the movesets of the bosses / enemies, and however long it takes you to execute damage within the windows given. It requires a lot of patience, memorization, and some motor skill effort depending on what you're trying to do. It's difficulty means that any hardship you overcome feels well deserved and rewarding. You can grind and get levels / gear that helps, or go bare bones. While the game is punishing, and does have some "gotcha!" moments (such as saying "no" to a cat) you can always work to overcome it. I don't think the developers intended to be cruel or to punish one too much.
And then there is ds1 pvp which I hear is like starting all over again and overcoming a wall, but is unique in it's delivery.
really, when other games say "soulslike" I think they just mean their game is difficult and requires memorizing the movesets of bosses. Hades 1-2 has some aspects of this but it's not exactly the same. But dying has different consequences, starting over from the very beginning.
to me its a game where the stakes are relatively low; you can die a lot and it doesn't really matter.
That's the big key part, right alongside combat loops that are built around getting to iframe/quickly reposition out of attacks or otherwise mitigate them on reaction/prediction. People always incorrectly focus on the difficulty aspect when the important parts are the QoL features like "dying literally does not matter just try again" and the tools it provides for players to overcome challenges in more reactive and streamlined ways than more traditional "just face tank it lmao" or "play cover" or "just run around until the boss sits down and exposes its weakpoint" styles of combat.
"souls like" is when your character is doing a slow "return to idle" animation so you press a button to stop that and do the next thing, but they have no visible reaction, then the situation changes so you press a different button, then five years later they finish their animation and act like you pressed the first button
Souls like games are barely even games, they remind of me of arcade machines where it's all just about memorising vs the machine
Never actually feels like playing a proper game, it's got more in common with a dance mat than anything else. When X does Y, press B. When Y does X, press A. Dodge the thing. Hit the thing twice. Dodge the thing again. It's like a feature length quicktime event.
When minecraft first came out there was a big discussion online and offline about whether it was technically a game. There was no ender dragon or netherworld or 'bosses' to speak of. There were no objectives, quests, storylines... All you do is mine and craft. There's no way to win or lose or any ingame reason to play beyond mine and craft.
I mention this to say that trying to define a videogame is a fool's errand
Diogenes, holding up a floppy disk containing the 1993 "Interference" scene demo (by Sanity) for the Amiga:
"Behold, a video game!"
Ninja edit: holy shit, someone captured it for YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWYRIV8YVdk
This is the same machine whose platform died off because its absurd network-of-coprocessors-driven-by-an-MC68000 (or 68EC020) meant that it couldn't run Wolfenstein 3D for shit, let alone Doom
No, and even superficial scrutiny demonstrates that that's not the case.
I'm so unfathomably sick of listening to people moan and moan about soulslikes.
Yes, the fanbase is rancid. Yes, the subgenre is wildly overrepresented and often treated in a very formulaic way and are liable to suck, like most trend-chasing games do. These complaints are fair game.
But very often people go several steps further because they have so much resentment over these facts that they extend this to attacking a serviceable genre and always interjecting how much they hate it and how superior they are to it in every discussion about it. I don't really care for shoot-em-ups. Do you know what I do? Move on with my fucking life instead of writing dissertations about how they are fake and evil games and dropping into every shmup conversation to tell them how much it sucks.
I wrote two short paragraphs about why I don't enjoy souls like combat on a post showcasing an opinion on souls-like combat
You are the one who has written a dissertation and derided shoot em ups on an unrelated post
you can choose to describe any genre of game in such a reductive way as to make it sound objectively unfun
I only played Elden Ring but in that game, if you use spears you can see enough of the enemies that you can read their intent = you don't need to memorize stuff.
Also if you watch the very proficient (not me) in those games, they don't roll much. They sprint and revolve around the enemies until they are in recovery poses and then go in.
These days souls like combat means basically anything. Action RPG? Souls like. Dodging and parrying mechanics? Soulslike. Drop your items on death? Soulslike. I recall a review of Expedition 33 that called the combat soulslike which is absolutely ridiculous.
The word has become like the word rogue like in that it is so overloaded it's essentially meaningless
Having a high damage to health ratio is common but not remotely essential, while people would consider having stamina much more important for the character of the genre because it introduces resource management. Another common example of resource management is having a heal with a limited number of uses that is restored at checkpoints. There's also usually a mechanic where when certain conditions are met, you can go to the enemy and do a much stronger attack with a canned joint animation between attacker and recipient (backstabbing and whatever the other one is called in DS are like this).
There are also other structural aspects of the game outside of the immediate combat, like the existence of those checkpoints that restore health and certain resources, certain elements of the world design (centered on shortcuts and unlocking doors, usually), the bloodstained mechanic, the soapstone mechanics for letting players leave each other messages, and a few other things.
Now that I have read everyone's responses I have a few things to add that others haven't mentioned yet:
I actually very rarely roll in this game, it's reserved for certain quick manuvering which is not always required, because most of the time I am actually positioning myself to be in the "blind spot" of the enemy.
Parrying and backstabbing is really important. Granted I have skipped parrying and mostly backstab when needed, but if I was patient enough I could easily just one shot many enemies and parry bosses.
The community is actually not very toxic, although it may have that reputation, honestly there are people like that in every popular fandom 😔 griefers, g*mers... but people who cherish this game for it's anti-fascist sentiments get it. They're cool people.
The plot of the first game is very vauge and not really explained that much. To me this makes it much more endearing. There is a lot which is implied but not outright said, perhaps leaving it to interpretation. What one might consider the "good" path is a trick, supported by liars (in my view) There are characters who turn out to be shitty. And there are characters who feel like they care about your well being.
Everything in this game that is a boon to you feels precious. There is something about the spirit of resilience in here, and the shared resilience of those who take the journey with you.
Above all: Don't give up, Skeleton!