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this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Soulslike - Discussion, News, Memes
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This is a community for discussion, news, and memes pertaining to the video game sub-genre "soulslike".
Given Lemmy's size, the definition of soulslike may be treated relatively loosely. While games like the numerous FromSoft titles, the recent Star Wars Jedi games, Lies of P, Nioh and similar games should be the focus, games that incorporate soulslike elements - like Hollow Knight and Blasphemous, for example - may also be discussed here.
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[BB] This enemy is so difficult!
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[DS1] Anyone struggling with the gargoyles?
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It's hard because I do like what Blood Vials help to add to the game, and generally what they were going for. I don't think just copying and pasting the Estus system exactly would have worked for Bloodborne's combat pace, I think having more fast to use but individually weaker healing items suites it well. They just kinda fumbled the availability, they went with something more like Lifegems from DS2 but without the nerfed Estus that helps to make them relevant.
replenishable estus that adds contested health instead of direct healing to force you to be aggressive.
Ooh, that's a really good idea.
Lies of P and The Surge (with a particular healing item, anyway since it has multiple types) allow you to just replenish your healing item itself by getting aggressive and landing hits or perfect blocks/parries.
People are notoriously bad at predicting what will make them happy. Many of the things that they predict will make them happy have been empirically found to make them less happy. For example, the trap of choice: we will go to great expense to preserve our ability to choose until later, but we end up happiest when we choose early (or the choice is taken away from us) and commit to that choice, even often when it was not the best one.
Farming isn't "fun". But neither is smashing your head into the same wall for 2 hours. Games need to punish the player. Doing so makes the fun parts more fun. If the game just jumped from climax to climax, it would lose all meaning.
There are mechanics that are better than others for the purpose of punishing the player and that can be debated, but the idea that something should be removed just because it isn't "fun" or that it makes it a bad mechanic is very shallow and does not necessarily lead to a better game.
Good analysis, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I can only speak from personal experience that I didn't vibe a lot with farming vials just to give a boss another try. It kind of makes sense to balance out the amount of vials you get, but I felt it didn't add to the challenge, personally, but rather made the game more tedious and annoying at times. If I want to keep bashing my head in against a boss because I'm stubborn and don't want to let up, that should be my perogative to decide and not the game's. It feels a little like an arcade machine gating me from further playing the game because I didn't throw in another quarter.
Don't get me wrong - Bloodborne sits in my top 3 favourite soulslikes. But I think they could have done without non-replenishing healing items and it wouldn't have made the game worse in the slightest. There are a lot of different mechanics in soulslikes that add to the challenge of the game without adding artificial scarcity to a required item that you use on the regular. For example, it makes sense that Beast Pellets are non-replenishing because they're not an integral part of the gameplay loop like healing items are unless you know what you're doing and/or are speed running the game. Same with the sugars in Sekiro.
Didn't like it a lot in Demon's Souls either where it was a lot more of a problem to me because the levels themselves were really difficult to navigate through vs. the bosses themselves.
In the end, the game is still fantastic. I just think a lot of players bounced off the game simply because healing needs to be farmed for.
It's the only one I know well. Isn't it also unique that you can heal yourself by doing damage? It stands to reason they'd look for a way to balance that mechanic with scarcer healing artifacts.
That's something I thought of too, yes. The rally(e?) mechanic allows you to regain the damage you have been dealt within a certain time frame. It's like the red portion of your health in Monster Hunter games which you regenerate when not taking damage for some time, but here you need to go in for damage.
Visceral attacks immediately heal that lost portion and with runes you can heal even more than the health you've lost.
It pushes you to be aggressive, and people who fail to adapt and over-rely on health potions are going to feel like they are being forced to grind. I liked the tension between wanting to heal, but wanting to conserve pots, and so trying to hang on for a free heal longer than I would otherwise. That gamble was important to the game, and there has to be a penalty that players don't like for that tension to exist. I feel like whatever mechanic they used would have drawn complaints, because not liking it is a feature of the mechanic, not a bug.
It's like wanting to have a novel with no antagonists, no people you don't like.
Different strokes for different folks in the end, I guess. Awesome that it worked out for you the way it did. I see where you're coming from. :)
I like the strat of always using your leftover echoes from level ups to buy vials. I always had a stockpile of like 200 vials in my first play through. Also if a boss was beating me a lot i went further in the chalice dungeons (not the cumgeon). Instead i often see people pop itemized blood echoes to get another level. Also harder bosses usually have some easy enemy that drops like 3-5 vials in the run back. I like Nioh's system a bit more as it always gives you enough elixirs to bring you back up to 3 even if you don't have any stockpiled.
I think Estus encourages non immersive play by making you rest at bonfires just to refill heals. I've had way more fun with demon's souls and bloodborne because i stayed in the world and didn't reset it every few metres. Elden Ring has a good combination with refilling flasks due to killing groups of stronger enemies but still suffers in legacy dungeons because there that for some reason doesn't happen
It's probably a hot take, but I never going going to the two brick boys under the bridge and taking their blood forcibly to be that arduous. Definitely personal preference though.