When the high fantasy game about warring demigods and gods has more flashy visuals than the dark fantasy game about the entropic decline of gods and humanity.

I love also the /v/ contrarian with a big titty anime girl profile pic saying that AotA sold out with its anime sensibilities, like Artorias doing a couple front flips.

With an extremely loud bass boosted backstab sound effect.

Dude is mad depressed, when you come to fight him he’s probably laying in bed in his dim room, staring at the ceiling and annoyed that some mongrel intruder is coming to make him fight.

In a fight like Demon Princes the AI is specifically programmed to have one boss take an aggressive role, attacking you in melee, while the other is more passive and mostly throws long-range attacks at you. Even in the ER twin gargoyles fight that's kind of the case, but the aggression is dialed way up.

In O&S the bosses don't have different behaviors that work off each other, they are both walking towards you trying to kill you, but their different speeds separate them. It's not as sophisticated as the later games but works pretty well regardless.

Lies of P drove me up the fuckin wall with delayed, unreactable red attacks that you will eat every time until you learn the perfect parry timing. I side-eye anyone who says "now Lies of P, that's a fair soulslike unlike newer From games".

Prime Radahn was a fanfiction speculation for the final boss, and From’s implementation of the idea is arguably a retcon. But then people’s replacement idea is the #1 fanfiction speculation before the DLC, that is also arguably a retcon.

Personally, neither of these ideas were good and they should have brought back Solaire for the DLC in his sandworm form.

I hear you and wish unusual arenas would come back, but people would throw an actual shitfit if you could fall to your death during a bossfight. It would be cool to have an intentionally easier bossfight that has that risk though.

For bosses in the DLC, if they have a combo that has a possible followup, you should pretty much always be able to punish both variations so long as you know that's the case. If they don't followup, you can punish after confirming that they didn't, and if they do followup, that almost always gives a big punish window. I also didn't notice any instances of doing a follow-up based on me trying to punish a combo - not saying it doesn't happen, but that kind of thing is pretty ripe for confirmation bias.

YMMV based on weapon speed and reaction time of course - but for an example, on the last boss, he can do either a single flip and slam move, or a two flip and slam moves in sequence. Both cases are 100% safe to punish with a UGS.

I don't know, the fight gets pretty insane when he summons those lightning bolts that land nowhere near you, have an indicator on the ground and give you 5 seconds to react.

Also Old Hunters is such a good prequel that contextualizes the story of Bloodborne with some great reveals and actually makes it more comprehensible.

It hurts honestly, I'm not a huge lore guy but the DLCs have always been a highlight in terms of story. I would say that for DS3 and BB the stories are completed by the DLC. The Marika village, Igon, the NPC arcs and the finale with Leda, were great. And then they just absolutely fumble the ball for the final boss.

Respectfully, if you are doing 300 damage a hit with a light greatsword and 20 blessings your something about your build must be cooked. I just changed my milady to heavy and with 80 strength/18 blessings I'm doing at least double that with R1s to elite enemies in the zone right after Rauh.

It shows when the DLC has like twice the content of Old Hunters, but people complain that it feels empty, and they're not wrong. Like literally shrink down the Abyssal Forest into a few pathways and make it a little outdoor legacy dungeon like Hemwick Charnel Lane, and then it would be the perfect side area.

Open world games have a fundamental issue IMO, because even the best developers like From and Nintendo cannot create enough unique content to fill a space that is supposed to be a fully accessible real world. It's much better to create the facsimile of a huge world and treat the player to a beautifully designed slice of it.

I don't think I got hit just rolling backwards into R1, maybe you need to early roll. A rolling R1 is definitely safe. The move recovers unusually fast compared to other command grabs but I considered it a free punish whenever he used it.

I'm 99% sure that Rellana punishes estus with the ranged wave slash. Other than that, no obvious input reading. The bosses are just mostly very aggressive, so healing in neutral rarely goes well.

Malenia has 33k and Rellana has 30k, but you also can't neglect Scadutree fragments in comparing base game bosses to DLC. With just Scadu level 3, you're doing 1.25x damage which means Rellana has an effective HP of 24k (plus she doesn't heal like Malenia).

My personal experience was that Lion and Rellana felt overtuned because I did them at a low blessing level (pre-buff, NG+, so it was a bit much). Then bosses started feeling progressively easier as I kept leveling my blessing, with Messmer feeling downright undertuned at level 15. And then the final boss is a wall at any blessing level.

This only really applied to Radahn most pathetic thing is after the grab attack in the second phase if you dodge it you can't even punish it with anything bigger than a longsword or he'll have retaliated again

Huh? I punished that consistently with a colossal greatsword R1 and sometimes got away with R2, here's ongbal punishing it with a thrusting sword R2. https://youtu.be/JeBOIYnVq54?t=202

In Sekiro, knowing when your turn is is simple, you attack the boss until they deflect you, then it's the bosses turn and you deflect. Punishing in Sekiro is pretty easy, instead of having to know whether you can fit an r1 or an r2 after a boss's string, you just hit r1 until that deflect happens.

It makes the combat "flow" better because the player's turns are longer and easier to define than ER, where you have to be very methodical about your punish based on your weapon speed and range. Which I think is a good thing overall, but it shifts the combat to relying on different skills than ER.

I stand corrected, though it seems too hard/inconsistent to be intentionally designed that way.

He's got some omen horns but yeah pretty much the same. If he was some fucked up Mohg-Radahn hybrid it would be actually pretty cool. Like having glowing Miquella riding the monstrosity he created.

For me it's more like the lore is so convoluted, malleable and weird that From could have done any crazy bullshit they wanted and I would at least respect it (see: squid fetus throwing its placenta around, old cannibal 10000 years in the future). Miquella could fuse himself into a giant jar like a mecha and I'm enough of a From glazer that I would at least give it a chance.

But it's just the cool warrior demigod again except he's got a holy orbital cannon on his back. It makes sense enough, I guess, but it's just boring.

It might be if you roll very early, you can dodge the second hit, but it's not reasonable to be able to react fast enough to early roll such a fast attack. If ongbal has to find "cheese" for it I'm inclined to say it's not possible.

Yeah I want to say that in DeS, DS1 and DS2 sword and board was almost the default build, or at least very common, and the cover art for DS1 and DeS shows a shield. Bloodborne kind of made fun of you for using the shitty shield, and DS3 IIRC had pretty nerfed shields. By then people were also getting pretty good at dodging everything, plus the BB and DS3 dodges were better than ever before, so the default playstyle shifted to dodging only.

The difference is mostly cosmetic since the AI is never really going to "react" to your drinking animation, just the fact that you used the drinking move. But it becomes very obvious that the input reading is happening when the enemy begins their heal punish move without fail on the exact millisecond you press the button.

Like if Godskin bosses waited .2 seconds after you press the heal to throw their fireball, people would probably complain less because it more closely resembles an actual human with reaction times.

Your point about the "real-time problem solving dungeon crawler" was very good and I agree. The games are less punishing, but are more difficult. Your build is easier to change, but you're expected to optimize more. I don't think it's necessarily an erosion of the fundamentals but a shift to something more combat-focused and having less friction in order to make greater difficulty palatable. If you had to do the Blighttown runback through a rot swamp every time you died to Malenia, it would absolutely suck ass.

I think that the DLC is great but absolutely want something new instead of Elden Ring 2. I loved most of the boss fights, but this is the wall - there is nothing more From can do to push the mechanics of the Souls combat system to provide a greater challenge, or even something interesting. I think they can go 1 of 2 ways to evolve their design - create a combat-focused game that has a tighter, more complex combat system (a la Sekiro or AC) or lean more into RPG elements, resource management, or even survival-horror type gameplay.

I think the former is way more likely considering From's direction and what people want from them, but the second would be very interesting.

Delayed attacks started becoming noticeable in Bloodborne (think Orphan) as a way to counter the power of spam dodging. Heal punishing via input reading was very noticeable in Sekiro, though it goes back as far as DS2. Combos have just generally gotten longer as the series progressed, and Sekiro has tons of variable combo extensions.

The biggest design difference in Elden Ring is the proliferation of AoEs, which were also in previous games, but are obviously here to counter spirit summons. Everything else about the enemy design is just continuations of previous mechanics that made enemies harder to dodge, plus overall high aggression.