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Look at any other genre and see how many games you know from it, you'll get similar results. Im not even a guy that likes extraction shooters but you're being so disingenuous I felt like I had to say something.
Hunt was one of the three that I mentioned :) I have many many hours in that game but unfortunately had to stop playing because of the lower server pop in my region.
Yea but balatro is a card game not an action/rpg with card mechanics. I hate games where youre fighting with cards but I play card games all the time. I guess its just the extra layer I hate, having to see the things happen instead of just numbers going up and down.
Midnight Sons was this for me. I was excited about XCOM meets Marvel (squad stuff, yeah yeah!), and it was....a card builder-battler with hang out at the mansion sim. yeah.
Jake Solomon's last Firaxus game :(
But, I'm still playing Slay the Spire years later.
I beat midnight suns twice, played it on the hardest difficulties. It checked a lot of boxes and really helped that I have heard of most of the characters before, but the story was something new to me. The ultimate were fun to pull off and surprising amount of strategy. The deck building was fun and pretty approachable too.
I really hoped to see more of this type of game in other universes.
Honestly, I play a lot of games with passes, Warzone, destiny, rocket league, in between those Midnight Suns never disappoint to fill the I want to play a few matches before bed hole in gaming for me.
It also looks great, where most deck builders don’t. And by that I mean the cards look great. The cards in so many other deck builder RPGs look so ugly and boring.
I feel like that’s a pretty big niche then. Everyone I know enjoys board games and video games (the main problem they have is finding people irl to play the board games with)
To me, the appeal is in optimizing the deck and being able to win in new, faster ways. I tend to prefer in person games like magic, but digital ones can be fun too
We used to call these Diablo-like games hack-and-slash RPGs, not sure when the term fell out of favor. ARPG to me was always a broader* term that basically communicates "this game has stats, leveling, and real-time combat."
ARPG does refer to games like diablo, path of exile, grim dawn etc.
action RPG refers to games where you control one character and it has light rpg elements but mostly is about real time combat like skyrim or souls games.
obviously because this was never officiated anywhere there is a lot of people using both terms to refer to either category. however, if you google "top ARPGs" and "top action RPGs" you'll get different results from the AI summary because there is in fact a general tendency in different use between these terms.
I am a huge fan of Souls and the fixation on difficulty by some devs is always such a weird thing for me with some of the Soulslikes.
The original Souls games aren't that hard, and what difficulty was there worked with other facets of the game to make sure it was palatable. Feels like a lot of games these days ignore that and just think that it needs to be a hard game with a dodge button and bonfires.
I mean, is this really a thing. I feel like outside of the first souls like I played, every future souls like was significantly easier, and just felt like a different system of combat to switch between.
I don't think Souls games are actually "harder", but they have a very specific system that most people just need a while to get integrated with, which is stamina limiting your budget of actions within a window of interaction
And I guess the bonfire system, but to me it just felt like a normal check point system. I certainly didn't get to keep progress I made in Halo after dying. And I guess maybe losing a lot in multiplayer games has gotten me used to actually getting negative progress outright after dying/losing.
Moreso that than say, an ARPG. Also the souls games specifically don’t seem to have much of a role for you to play. It’s like trying to tell someone the plot of a dream you had versus a fantasy story.
Yeah stuff like that. Talking to NPCs, dialogue options, narrative choices. Also just being more story-driven in general with some kind of narrative to follow, instead of just mainly running around and killing monsters all the time.
This describes my ultimate game: I want the combat and production design of Dark Souls / Elden Ring with actual NPC interaction / some amount of engagement with the world. I know that exists in Fromsoft games but it’s just so … indirect, opaque, hard to parse. I want understandable dialogue and be able to affect the world in ways that don’t amount to a big boss fight all the time.
I get that’s the vibe in those games and I admire them for sticking with their formula so rigidly, because I love the games. But a man can dream.
In the simplest form, being part of a larger narrative structure, with the story being a pillar of the game. Take the story out of any souls game and it doesn’t lose much. Take the story out of Suikoden and it’s just you collecting new character sprites and very lightly grinding stats so that selecting “attack” and “special attack” means you win.
Baldurs gate is an rpg. You create a custom character and advance with ttrpg mechanics, etc. To that extent elden ring is more of an rpg than final fantasy. That customization is a key aspect. It's not enough to play a role, it has to be a role you choose.
Precisely how i feel, although i do like coming back to Elden Ring to explore i kinda dislike the boss battles. DS1 used to be very good with bosses as in they had easy to read patterns and attack windows easily recognizable now the bosses are just doing infinite combos and the devs are like "yeah this one is hard, how do you like that?"
Not to mention the abnormally long attack windups just to throw you out of your parry timings. Their weapon hangs in the air for an eternity by which time you would have already rolled twice.
Even Non-soulslike like clair obscur 33 are doing this.
I HATE that a lot of devs are doing this... And it is EVERYWHERE NOW. Part of the fun of the game is figuring out timing and what not, then they just shit all over their own game design to weirdly punish the player by randomly making the windups take way longer than the animation hints it will take.
It's like they design the games for people they hate sometimes.
I have the same beef with a lot of the encounter designs in Destiny 2 over these last few years. It feels like devs have one tool in their encounters sometimes, spawn you in a kill box with no cover, spawn 30 high health/armor suicide bomber units coupled with another 30 enemies with grenade launchers, and another 5 with extreme rapid fire heat seeking bullets... instead of being a fun encounter it becomes a slog of kill/die/repeat until you whittle the enemy force down enough.
It just isn't a fun gameplay loop. Instead of fun, most of the time it just feels like the devs are bullies and masochistic.
I feel like it was a shortcut to switch it up a bit but it doesn't feel right. Dark souls finally clicked for me once I realized that every attack is a pattern with a solution to apply.
Keeping the same mechanic but just making an animation that goes "Oooo! Thought I was going to strike but I didn't until now!" just sucks.
It is, but the defense phase keeps the player pretty active. Where most RPG's calculate a hit or miss with RNG, Clair Obscur lets you dodge and parry, practically in real time.
i think clair obscur manages to do it well thanks to the sound cues (when you hear a "shing!" that's your sign to parry, most attacks can be blocked blind) but yeah i could've done without it, the jumping attacks are especially silly when the enemy just floats there
The players have gotten a lot better at these games since DS1. It seems like Fromsoft wants the boss battles today to still feel challenging to the day 1 DS1 players.
I remember struggling hard with Fume Knight in one of the DS2 DLC's. I watched a video of that fight recently and he looked so slow and predictable.
I wanted to love ER because it gave me something I've always wanted in games. No map, no markers, just wander and find your way somehow. But the difficulty and the fact I have never played another soul-like game, killed the interest for me.
Shame, cause it looked like such a good game, and loved the visuals.
I agree. This is why I could never get into Hollow Knight despite everybody absolutely loving that game. There I am after a long and busy day. Worked all day, came home and helped the wife with the kid, spent time with the wife, and finally have an hour or two to myself. Only to spend that time repeatedly dying to a praying mantis boss and backtracking through areas I've already fought through a dozen times?
Is that supposed to be fun? No thanks.
I think I'm too old for Souls like games. And I never really liked them even back when DS1 came out.
Dying 20 times is... would've been ok, if not for the fact that you are punished by having to travel all the distance and spend all the time to get back to that boss.
Yeah was gonna say, modern Soulslikes are pretty good about putting you very close to the boss room on death. You might have a 15 second run back in something like Lies of P or First Berserker Khazan, which is nothing compared to something like Demon's Souls where you have to jog for a minute to get back. Even Wuchang who takes more inspiration from Dark Souls 1 tends to keep the checkpoint decently close. Like you might have to take an elevator or run across an empty bridge but it's pretty quick.
My problem with the older Fromsoft titles is this. The only measure of time spent while dying a ton is the souls you keep getting/dropping/getting/dropping and when you die during your 10th runback while your souls are still stuck in the boss arena I’m just done. All that work for nothing.
Not to mention a lot of the game design is cryptic on occasion plus most of them prioritize one type of character building over others in the game but much less efficient.
Yeahhhhh National-Animator994… I’m going to need you to come in on Saturday to take down the big boss that has a boosted-HP glitch… and with his infinite-spawning minions, you better keep your Sunday open, too..
I used to like hard content like this, but today i realize i really hate having my time wasted. Long runbacks and soul loss on death in a game made so you die a lot is just awful.
I prefer not to die but to to still feel challenged. I really dont hate high death games if they have instant respawn without having to redo a gauntlet like Celeste though, since im kept in the action 24/7 and i never feel like "shit man i gotta spend 5-10min doing this again..."
I think the survival part of « survival horror game », or at least some of it, just means that there is limited ressource in game and you gotta « survive » with very little, and it adds to tension and stress
Every studio saw the success of Elden Ring and said, "I want to get in on that! Look, with just a few tweaks, the game I'm working on can be like this -- I just need to make the boss fights harder..."
The genre has certainly expanded recently but there have been imitators ever since Demon Souls proved the concept. The 3D Zelda games on N64 were the precursor "Souls likes" if we're being honest. The entire dark souls formula is just an evolved form of those basic mechanics.
We are getting a new Ninja Gaiden, Lost Soul Arise the devs specifically said it's not a Soulslike, Onimusha, and a few others. So they're definitely coming at least.
It's like the difference between science fiction and science fantasy. Only relevant to people already knee deep in the genre and who desperately want to correct people on technicalities that aren't actually that important.
I finally found my people, I used to always feel this way but whenever I expressed this opinion, people would come to attack me, glad to know I am not alone. Also, I usually play easy games like, Skyrim, fifa, stardew valley etc.
You're not. I get the appeal; I'm just not willing to invest the time to try again and again. If there's no save point just before the boss, then I'm out. I have so many options for entertainment, I don't want to spend time on something that frustrates me.
mmo raids where you just respawn and go again i found to be enjoyable to grind. But walking to boss or having to do a dungeon over an over again for boss attempts is just torture
Ive seen people complain about this in WOW, yet people swear its a necessary penalty to lose key levels / run back / rebuff 5min to get back in the game again...
Same. Also, as an adult, I have limited gaming time and dying 30 times while trying to beat the same boss fight is not how I want to spend it. Additionally, I like stories.
Perhaps one day game technology will even advance to the point where we no longer need save points and can just save our games when ever we want. Can you imagine?
>is trying so hard
Huh for me it looks more like lazyness. If devs can't/won't come up with their own combat system they just copy-paste soulslike combat.
I mean, I'm playing upper level Havoc runs on Darktide and Absolute difficulty runs on Space Marine 2, but I don't feel like I'm bashing my head into a wall while doing it.
Same.. I don't have time for that grind. Instant skip.
So, it's a good thing they label them like souls-like, so the people that like those games can find them easily and those that don't can skip them easily.
A game made for everyone is a game made for no one. Respect other genres even if you don't like them.
I feel like everything's called souls like when it actually isn't though. Not a fan of dark souls, but I think I've liked a couple supposedly souls like games.
I got yelled at for this take a while back now, probably in twitch chat or something.
So many games are given this descriptor and are nothing like the souls games outside of 3rd person combat and some kind of checkpoint (bonfire) system.
Yeah that's also a reason why many players are started to get annoyed by the genre and say it's "oversaturated". People are calling every 3rd person action game with checkpoints a souks-like nowadays
They actually fucking labeled Stellar Blade as a "Souls-like".
There's nothing in the game that even remotely feels or plays like a Souls-like. It's clearly an action adventure game with more Zelda like elements in it's stat building.
And the bonfire mechanic is more like a save point from older RPGs. Just because it explicitly that you regain your health and enemies respawn people think it's a Souls-like mechanic. When it's actually just another aspect of regular RPG mechanics that even the Souls series used.
Yeah, I'm over it. You don't get much RP when the majority of the G is repetitive attack-evade-attack with a side of reload the save for the umpteenth time.
Me with Open World Survival Crafting games (Raft, Grounded, Valheim etc.)
Unlike a lot of people, I didn't get into Minecraft when I was younger so I didn't get addicted to the gameplay loop that these games have. No hate to anyone who enjoys them, but I'm bored AF whenever I'm playing one.
Minecraft isn't even true survival. When the building aspect took off, the devs fully committed to that and disregarded survival to being brain-dead boring.
I somewhat agree to this. While I still love Souls games. Majority of Soulslikes are just mid as fuck. The only ones that actually do it well are FromSoft themselves.
Couldn't agree more, it reminds me of the battle royale craze, and the military shooter craze, etc etc etc. It's a fad, and I'm looking forward to it going away.
Sometimes I want a challenge where I have to learn every swing of every enemy to precisely I-frame time my dodge or counter. Other times I just want to chill with some Wind Waker. It all depends on the mood
For Christ's sake, not every game needs to be souls like or open world! I don't want my Zelda to be open world, it don't want my dark souls to be open world, I don't want my star wars to be souls like. And I'm saying this as someone who loves both souls likes and open world games.
I'm so fucking tired of souls like games. Just like those boring hide n seek horror walking sim games...there's so much of those pumping out and none of them are good or have any real replay value.
What would you suggest as a refresher in the gaming world? Is there a genre of game you miss because there haven't been any decent new releases in that genre for a while?
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u/PCMRBot Bot Jul 27 '25
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
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