A Case of Soulslike Fatigue | Semi-Ramblomatic

Can we appreciate the irony of a soulslike fatigue is sponsored by the second most oversaturated genre, roguelike deckbuilders.

As Frost said, all heat no flavor makes for a very spicy and unpleasant dish.

Kinda funny that when Dark Souls first came out, some people praised it for actually having the balls to BE hard and obscure and require patience and developing skill, in an era where it felt like publishers were hell-bent on dragging you to the end credits by any means necessary. Similar to how Breath of the Wild (and Elden Ring) was refreshing for being an open world game that was built around actually exploring, and not dragging you by the nose through every single setpiece terrified that you'd miss something that the graphic design budget went into. Lessons were learned, or at least they were ripped off a lot, but the novelty does wear off eventually.

Every trend was started by someone who had a specific reason they did it, and everyone else just copies what they understands what they see. It's the pattern.

There's definitely something to be said for a meaty challenge that takes you time and effort to overcome, leaving you feeling that haedy mix of catharsis, relief, and accomplishment, but it's worth remembering that you can only push things so far before your players start feeling less like Hercules and more like Sisyphus.

I really love Frost’s analogy for this - difficulty is like spiciness. Sure, it can be good, but spiciness is just one factor in making something taste good, and it seems like people are focusing just on making things spicy instead of taste good.

It's even more egregious now that soulslike combat is bleeding into every genre. Even if I am playing platformers and metroidvanias, I am still dodge rolling between the bosses. It's so tiring

It's not a soulslike specific phenomenon, genre fatigue is real for any genre, sometimes you just need something completely different for a while like a pallete cleanser before you dive back in :)

I think what adds to the feeling of fatigue is that a lot of Dark Souls 1 felt like a puzzle where if you're clever you can find an easy solution. The tutorial boss shows this because yeah you can brute force the asylum demon, but the game wants you to realize you can run away, which leads you to better gear and the ability to plunging attack it for a big head start. Compare that to Dark Souls 3, where the tutorial fight is just a fast and tough guy in a circular arena, no extra gimmicks at all. Or the Tauros demon, yeah you can fight it head on, but you can also abuse the fact that you can climb up a ladder and repeatedly plunging attack it. Or you can try to bait it into jumping off of the one broken part of the wall. Compare that to Margit at Stormveil, where the arena is a mostly straight path with empty parts at the edges. But Margot can't fall off, only you can. Dark Souls 1 was charming because it felt like generally everything adhered to following the same rules. Bosses can die from falling off of the arena just like you. But with the newer games the enemies get more exceptions but the player has to play by the same restrictions. Also your point about boss design is really true. A lot of bosses in DS1 felt like they had some puzzley aspect and we're closer to a Zelda like boss. There were plenty of straight up fights but there were some opportunities to be clever. In Elden Ring nearly every boss is just a straight up fight in a circular or square arena with very little extra things to make you stop, observe, and try to think outside the box. Rennala and Rykard being the only real 'puzzle bosses' I can think of

When I first played Dark Souls 1, my playstyle leaned hard into massive tower shields, the thickest armour I could wear and swinging the equivalent of a vending machine as my weapon. I knew I didn't have the reflexes or the willingness to learn a dodge build (and my dumb 12 year old brain just did not comprehend magic) so instead I adopted a way of play that I found incredible. It was slow paced, methodical, built around knowing when to block and when was safe to drop block to recharge stamina faster. The slow swing speed of my favourite weapons meant I had to perfectly place every swing but their high damage meant I didn't have to land many to win. It wasn't the quickest way to beat the game and I remember some bosses being painfully slow but I genuinely enjoyed playing the game like that, treating the game not as a reaction test but instead as a memory puzzle. Every Souls game since has tried desperately to prevent that from ever happening be it Dark Souls 2 leaving all half decent shields out of reach of the early game, Dark Souls 3 completely biffing how poise worked, Bloodborne demanding more active action from the player and Sekiro focussing purely on parry and punish. I didn't like that my preferred way of playing was being abandoned but at least I knew from the very start that my slow and methodical defensive play wasn't an option so I found new ways to play (using magic for DS2 and DS3) or just chose to skip certain titles (mostly Sekiro). What pisses me off is Elden Ring acting like every playstyle is viable, people praising it for just how amazing and diverse the sandbox is, and then finding out halfway through that Slow and Methodical Tanking Builds were, in fact, an objectively incorrect playstyle. I know Elden Ring isn't Dark Souls 1 (or even a DS game) so it's not fair to compare them 1:1 but when I found a Tower Shield, a Greatsword and Heavy Armour I thought I'd give my old build a go and it went great. I was having loads of fun, rolled over a few field bosses, beat Morgott, bullied Godrick, fought so many dragons (I adore ER's dragon fights). Then I beat Morgott's final fight and it all went down hill. Suddenly every boss either had extremely punishing grabs, flailed about like a rabid badger with a knife or had mechanics that just straight up ignored shields. It wasn't that the game got harder in the final half, I expect a game to do that, it was that the game just decided my build was no longer viable. I had beaten so many bosses up to that point with the power of greatshields and my trusty troll hammer or magma wyrm scalesword but then suddenly none of that worked anymore. My build still worked on some bosses but not in a fun way, more in the way that it felt like the devs didn't account for it (seriously using any high magic resist shield against Loretta in the Haligtree just neuters that fight). I got to Malenia knowing I was in for hell, I was ready for it. I landed a hit against her, she began an attack, I brought up my shield to block, her blade bounced off my might greatshield and her lifesteal procced through a block. That was the moment that killed Elden Ring for me. It was the point where a Boss finally dropped the pretense and just starkly admitted that my build wasn't viable. No matter how good I got at my tanking build, I couldn't use blocking against Malenia, I had to drop my build entirely and do something else. I hung around in the game for a few more hours purely because of just how good the Godfrey fight is (he's got a nice mix of blockable attacks, unblockable attacks and attacks you can block but really shouldn't risk it). Then I got to the Radagon/Elden Beast fight and immediately dropped the game. I've not beaten Malenia or the Radagon/Elden Beast fight, nor have I touched the DLC and I don't think I'll ever go back to change any of that.

For me, soul-like fatigue is the nihilistic nature of the games breaking me down( the fact that nothing I do has a positive outcome)

Also the internet in 2009-2012 was much different than it is today. As the internet continues to rot, a game series based on using the internet will only build resentment.

The secret to Dark Soul's difficulty was always about being hard enough to force the player to learn and try. I've never seen much point in the more recent soulslikes pushing further past that purely for the sake of being harder. At that point, it's just masochistic without necessarily giving me any more of that good feeling of overcoming a challenge.

So, in short: it doesn't matter if you're hard if you don't do anything WITH it.

I still enjoy their games. But completely agree with Yhatzee. Most of the weird uniqueness of DeS/DS1 got completely lost for the sake the difficulty. Many bosses nowadays are a mess with 200 attacks per minute, with a camera that spins and rolls non-stop. And the few bosses that aren't like that, are marked by the community as "gimmick/awful/not fun/disappointing" ones. I always recommend "The lost soul arts of Demon's Souls" by Matthewmatosis here on YT. A great example of the topic. In a video that is, by now, 7 years old.

Being proud of liking Dark Souls sounds like being a speedrunner for the 100% knob hammering competition

I am not necessarily tired of soulslikes, but I am definitely tired of the "enemy spins on a disc plate to track you to the very last frame and holds the attack just a little longer to catch you" nonsense that so many devs have now overused to a ridiculous extent. I recommend Mathewmatosis' "The Lost Art of Demon's Souls" video. It's from 2017, but very relevant today.

I think the big problem is that Soulslikes feel the need to copy everything FromSoft does; it's not just the core gameplay regarding stamina management, exploration, checkpoints that respawn enemies, and a refillable healing item. No, it's also the way that status effects work, some fog wall that you gotta cross before entering the fight, ladders to kick down, an oppressive atmosphere, an incomprehensible plot, etc. I think the difficulty arms race FromSoft has entered isn't necessarily helping, but I don't think that's the core problem.

"My name is Benjamin Yahtzee Wildebeest Croshaw." -Benjamin Yahtzee Sebastian Godzilla Croshaw

Older soulslike bosses are easier, yes, but the traversal, exploration, T R A P S, all of them are way more wicked. I don't think any area in a soulslike is still as widely dreaded like sen's, capable of felling a blind first playthrough. At least none that aren't a dev power trip, I don't think.