nfreak

Pretty much sums it up perfectly.

Also worth mentioning that machine learning has been a thing for ages and only recently has fallen under the same umbrella as generative dogshit like LLMs. Obviously there are some similarities under the covers but for all intents and purposes they're hardly the same thing.

It's a huge part of why I quit Destiny 2 entirely. A game that doesn't respect the player's time and pads it with RNG on top of RNG to extend playtime feels awful.

If it were more linear akin to their older games and dramatically reduced the visual clutter of most bosses, it would've been perfect, but those two things brought it way down imo. These sorts of games excel in smaller, more linear but interconnected environments.

Nine Sols. Played it right after finishing Silksong to keep the metroidvania kick going.

The parrying was some of the worst feeling parrying I've ever felt in any game, the world felt tiny and extremely linear, the narrative was predictable and felt extremely flat, and the final boss is the only time I've ever switched to a story mode difficulty in any game just to get it over with, I love difficult games but that difficulty spike is absurd and the game never remotely prepares you for that.

They advertise this game as a Sekiro-like metroidvania, while it feels like they completely miss what made Sekiro work or what a metroidvania is.

I quit Desiny 2 a few months before I made the switch, and it really helped ensure I'll never go back to that dogshit.

God I actually somehow forgot how common this used to be. So fucking gross.

This one's wild to me lmao. Like yeah I get how it's not everyone's taste but the game was getting 10/10's across the board, and of course discussions are gonna die down 2 months after it launches when most people who picked it up at launch finished it by October.

This is something that gets completely lost in the translation to an open world game. The DS trilogy, Bloodborne, and even the original Demon's Souls feel hand-crafted and carefully structured without being completely linear. ER loses a lot by leaving that formula behind.

On top of that, the boss/enemy design is imo some of the worst they've ever done. The past games (with DS2 being the one with the most exceptions) typically give you very fair but challenging fights. Telegraphs are clear without being slow and obvious. Particle effects and such are generally kept to a minimum to prevent visual clutter from taking over the screen. Bosses hit hard, but very few hits or combos, if any, would one-shot most builds outside of challenge runs. ER throws all of that out the window - bosses tend to hit like trucks, are visual clusterfucks (either enormous models with a terrible camera, tons of particle effects blasting out the ass, or both). I feel like the final boss of the DLC as an example is the most egregious example of this sort of design philosophy. Hell, Nightreign works so much better with the exact same designs because it's such a faster-paced game where getting knocked down once or twice isn't usually the end of a run.

I echoed this in another thread. I honestly feel like ER is the weakest "Soulsborne" game they've put out. It feels like a lot of conflicting design philosophies at once.

The lore and worldbuilding are phenomenal but gameplay-wise it falls short of what made their past games shine.

I bought it ages ago but finally decided go give it a go. From the first day I could tell it wasn't gonna be a game for me. Note-taking is basically mandatory, and it seems so easy just to get fucked out of a run by RNG.

Narrative seemed interesting but I feel like the whole "ability to decide what room you're going into" thing should be weaved into the story off the bat.

Neat concept but not for me, but I think since I've owned it for so long I'm outside of the refund window.

I legitimately feel like ER is one of FromSoft's weakest titles. It doesn't come close to the DS trilogy for me, and unironically I feel like Nightreign is a better game in the same vein, as the faster paced sandbox works far better for the fast, clusterfuck bosses ER is known for.

I'm in the camp of Soulsborne vets whose first AC game was AC6. Took me like 3 tries for it to click but it finally did, then I binged the hell out of it and platinumed it in a week. Phenomenal game and really got me interested in picking up the rest.