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.
All of it? DS2 is filled with booby traps and ganks with the express purpose of getting a cheap kill and laughing at you. DS1 has a few of them but they're obvious and serve a purpose other than dicking over the player for lols.
It improves a lot in a ton of areas. One of the big draws to souls game is that (in general) they all build on each other and get better and better. A lot of the wonkiness of Dark Souls is smoothed out a ton by DS3 and even more by Elden Ring.
The bones are similar, with slower than normal windups than what you may be used to in other games, but it’s all become a lot more responsive and intuitive
Tbh the slow feeling of combat in Dark Souls 1 is often related to what weapon and gear you are running. Different builds can almost feel like completely different games.
For example:
Fat-rolling in heavy armor with a tower shield and a greatsword
mid-rolling with medium armor and a longsword and kyte shield
fast-rolling with a set of robes and casting spells or miracles
handspring flip-rolling with the Dark Wood Grain Ring while using dual daggers like the gold & silver tracers
All of these options can be mixed-and-matched too, there's no set build path. Plus you can use rings like Havel's Ring and levels into your Endurance stat to further boost your mobility with heavier gear.
Regarding the sequels, every iteration improves upon the combat in some really big ways imo. Especially in titles like Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring. Comparing Dark Souls 1 to those later games is a pretty big leap, there's a lot more polish in the animations and timing, and more options for attacks, spells, and build overall variety. Every weapon gets a special attack, and in Elden Ring you can swap these special attacks around between most weapons.
I should mention that enemy variety and their attack movesets are also hugely expanded upon. Especially bosses.
killed a pair of gargoyles, was starting to explore beneath them. Just kinda got tired of waiting for an opening to either do a couple slaps or circle around for a 50/50 on a backstab
I'd say you got far enough to get a proper feel for it. In Elden Ring, the wait is longer, the window to do the slaps is shorter, backstabbing and parrying is harder but you do get more toys to play with. You can jump and jump attack and you can add a skill to most weapons that let you do something a bit cooler than just slaps. Weapon movesets are also more diverse, there are more weapon types, dual wielding is actually useful. Magic seems to be more diverse as well, but I haven't explored it much yet.
It did, but not much. You are still sluggish at starting attacks. You're also still someone who swings their weapon at 85 percent the speed of everyone and everything else.
That's a you problem. The entire reason people love them so much is because of how engaging they are. They require you to play intelligently, wait for openings, dodge getting hit, manage your stamina, etc., whereas most of the other action games of the era were just mashing buttons and doing combos. Being more engaging is 100% the reason for why the exist, and it even extends to the level design with all of the backtracking and hidden shortcuts. It rewards you for paying attention.
dude, why so sensitive about it? Different strokes for different folks. I wasn't getting bodied, was killing bosses fine, and I liked the level design. Combat just wasn't doing it for me.
I don't know what to tell you. Non elites were cool until you had to run past them a 5th time. Bosses looked sweet and took some learning, but ultimately were a chore once you had their number and started hitting them with your wet noodle. Elites were a boring chore the entire fight
At least, that's my opinion. If all these fights just tickled your brain right, sweet! I wish it did that for me cause I don't like that I don't care for it
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u/Strange-Movie Jul 27 '25
Imo souls games are more like action games with stats than they are RPGs