Does anyone else agree that the boss fights in this game are mostly bad?

[Iskandar]

Just to preface, I love fromsoft games, I've completed dark souls 3 fifteen times, and played every single souls/Bloodborne game multiple times. I even almost completed a no hit run on dark souls 3 a few months back (got hit against Twin Princes), so I am not a bad player by any means. I have also completed Elden Ring as well.

But honestly the boss fights in this game just seem really poorly designed, almost everys ingle boss outside of the story bosses are reskins (I must have fought Erdtree avatar over 10 times now lol) and they all just spam attack quickly like a BloodBorne boss giving you no opportunity to heal and do a full attack combo (in Bloodborne the HP regeneration attacks and the fast paced nature make this balanced), the bosses themselves just dont seem fun to fight for me. I cannot think of a single Elden Ring boss that even comes close to the fun of fighting Ludwig, Gael, Friede or Midir, hell even some DS2 bosses like Alonne and Fume Knight are way better than the bosses id describe as fun in this game.

Also there are no standout boss soundtracks, no boss track in this game comes close to Abyss Watchers or Ludwig.

Also can we talk about the amount of unfair gank bosses in this game? Seriously it's like Dark souls 2 all over again, FromSoft forgot what made O&S such a good and fair boss fight. 2 crucible knights and 2 GodSkins is just really awful boss design.

I love this game and I'd give it a 9/10, but honestly out of all of their games this is one of the worst Fromsoft games for boss fights, the worse being Dark Souls 2. BloodBorne and DS3 bosses top this games bosses in literally every single way. It feels like the game is trying to force you into using spirit summons to defeat certain bosses.

[Coin]

Цитата допису Naewyng:

Idk what you're on about, ds2 bosses are god tier compared to elden ring xD

You confused trash for god

[Grimm]

there is plenty of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bosses but I wouldn't go far to say they aren't diverse. so far I noticed tower bosses are special and some has it own soundtracks. dungeons some special and some reskins mostly reskins but def there are special. normal story bosses are hella unique with their out cutsences

[Zyrconia]

Цитата допису Bleezip:

Honestly, I'm kind of sick of every boss and every enemy having super poise, super long attack patterns with very, extremely limited openings that only give you a chance to attack one time and damage output that can two shot you.

It's extremely irritating.

Very true words. After 70 hours it is enough.

I'll play more to see the whole open world but I'm not sure I'll fight another boss ever again. These are bad bosses. I'll just play some other game with some good bosses, maybe crank the difficulty if needed.

[Trezoitao38]

Цитата допису ☠Dragnoros, der Wächter (GER):

I'm on the final boss now... I'm starting to wonder what Elden Ring has to do with his feet... 90% of the enemies just smash the ground around them. ♥♥♥♥ weapons most enemies' feet are stronger than any weapon.

We are used to counter after bosses do jump attacks. But now, they do a jump attack and them they smash the ground and do area of effect damage. So, you have to back up, wait and attack just after their longo combos

Fights dont have a good pace here, most of the time you have to wait the actions of the bosses.

[Zyrconia]

Цитата допису north:

Цитата допису Zyrconia:

This is a great game and I really like it, but the bosses are really bad by DS standards. I'm really starting to think that Miyazaki and From Soft do not understand the essence, the spark of what they originally created, it was not intentional, they just stumbled into it by chance and went with it. And once they tried to innovate and iterate upon it, since they didn't understand it, are missing the point.

The series has moved away from the concept of one-on-one honor duels against a formidable but utterly fair and readable bosses, who barely have any cheap attacks.

The series has moved away from booses and enemies where if you get hit it is your fault. Now it is often the game's fault, both by making timing too tight and by intentionally using juke moves and having combos where timings are intentionally selected in such a way that you can't read them, you need to memorize unnatural timings instead.

The co-director for Elden Ring is the same guy that took over the lead on DS2 (while Miyzaki did BB) and co-directed DS3.
He was not the lead on DS1, Bloodborne or Sekiro.

He is the driving force behind the style of combat the game has moved towards. Gone is the methodical, puzzle style boss fights and instead we have Bloodborne speed and size monsters with DS2 360 degree lock-on tracking, but the player character still mostly moves and acts like DS1 - slow methodical movement and attacking.

Well I won't argue with anyone that DS2 is the worst in the series, but it is still really good and quite fun IMHO. The ganks and the tracking, you get used to itand can compensate by skill and familiarity. The PvP was great, unfortunately you can't return to those times.

Now ER is the new "worst Dark Souls" game for me, for all the points I outlined in my original post (bad bosses, no fair duels, ash of war spam, summons, barely any legacy dungeons). but it has a 10/10 open world, so...

But after so many years of seeing some patterns, I think the director of DS2 is unfairly blamed and used and as a scapegoat. I'm genuinely starting to think that Miyazaki has no idea what he's doing and by sheer coincidence and luck landed in this position and has been successfully hiding this fact and will milk it as much as he can. He might even be to extend this to his entire career.

And now, thanks to the community their with "DS is hard, git gud", From Soft made a game with bad bosses and will use the "fact" that DS games are supposed to be hard to get away with it.

[Balm]

I agree. From intentionally made the boss fights annoying walls, instead of epic apexes of an adventure. I get that they had to do something to force average players to explore the world, and it worked on me, but I resented it.

As the other users said, I had no desire to see the bosses again, ever, after I beat them. Because they were a chore, not some epic experience.

There is this sense of rushdown hyperaggression focused ability spam that the bosses in this game gave me, that is lacking in many other titles. I did not like the way they stay target locked on you throughout performing their moveset. Perhaps it comes from playing too much monster hunter, but I wouldn't have spent so much time with that series if the monsters magically auto-faced you in the middle of leaping and lunging, either. It's uncanny, and I say its also bad game design to fail to reward situation awareness and positioning, in favor of timing dodge roll button press correctly.

There is a lot to like about Elden Ring, the sense of adventure and exploration are probably the best I have ever seen in a game ever, but the main story bosses and recycled side bosses are not one of the things I enjoyed.

I really did not like how useless the new guard counter ability felt vs. bosses, as well. I was stoke about sword and board being more than a coping mechanism for a change, but I couldn't believe how underwhelming it was vs the bosses that all seem to have arena clearing backhops or recovery movements from the combos they just laid down.

It's hilarious, and tiresome, watching a 15 foot tall behemoth creature perform ballet dance moves at warp speed, in half the time it takes my character to wind up and swing a sword after blocking. What's worse is that my character NEVER speeds up, no matter how strong or dextrous or whatever magical equipment he gets, the animation speed of his ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ guard counter stays static, forever. Why? It's such an easy way to create a sense of player character growth, or specialization into an ability moveset, by giving a method to increase the animation speed. I'm also taking that lesson from monster hunter, where improving animation speed of core mechanics is a game changing progression, but in this type of game it's somehow forbidden or simply ignored.

Like seriously, how hard would it have been to have the guard counter amulet cause your gc to come out 50% faster? Instead it just adds like 10 or 20% to the damage. So dumb, and a massive missed opportunity. So to with charge R2 attacks for large weapons. Why not have items or equipment that let you charge faster, and help big slow weapons be more viable for their intended use? Missed opportunity, that wouldn't even affect things like pvp where fully charged R2's are suicide anyways.

I was looking forward to some sort of combat overhaul compared to dark souls series, but they didn't really expand it at all. They just put in broken weapon arts and said have fun.

Amusingly enough, I felt like From had jumped the shark in terms of encounter design the very first time I fought the chained ogre in Sekiro and encountered its tracking grabs and leaps. I knew from that moment onward, all we were ever going to get was artificial difficulty through auto-tracking enemy movement, and that alternative defense and movement were NEVER going to be acceptable. The boss design in ER proves it.

[Corona Scurrae]

- reused optional bosses =/= bad boss design
- gank bosses =/= bad boss design
- mediocre soundtrack? subjective and I disagree.
- bosses not giving you enough time to recover =/= bad boss design

this game has been skillfully developed to the point of which they finally found a solution to deal with players having too many options to steamroll encounters.
you can't spam roll like in ds3 or their former games. you have to learn to be patient and learn their animations.
bosses not allowing you to heal up is not true at all. they do but you can't just run away and heal up, you have to wait for the right moment when they are done with a combo.
btw I fought most gank bosses alone because my summons sucked and I had too little fp to begin with. in other words a good game :)

[Orca]

Honestly, the amount of "reskins" and reused bosses for the world is very acceptable. My only complaint is that only the story bosses feel like the 1:1 souls experience. And then I forgot you can use spirits.

[Aeiku]

I still hail Demon's Souls for the PS3 the best Souls game they've ever created. The bosses were fairly designed around the player limitations. Dark Souls threw that out the window for the sake of challenge. Bloodborne gave you utility to counter the mistake Dark Souls created. Elden Ring catalyzes the mistake of Dark Souls slapped it with Bloodborne and Sekiro paint yet kept the player limitation of Demon's Souls with minor upgrades for improvement.

I love the main bosses only when I can use a summon to alleviate their bs attack chain to get in more than 1 or 2 hits and the side bosses are mostly cancer, fun but cancer. The enemies I mostly love with the exception of the HP bloated knights that rarely stagger and have stupid maneuverability. They're the Red Eyes Knights from Demon's Souls or the Black Knights from Dark Souls with Sekiro mobility and there's way too damn many in later parts of the game. Those are not fun. The Anor Londo enemy gimmick needed to die with the first Dark Souls.

Open world though, even though it's mostly bland flat lands or cliff edges. It's very joyous to explore. The art could be better but the exploration is well done.

[☠Dragnoros, der Wächter]

@Tarnished Knight of Dunghill

skillfully??? maybe i play a another Elden Role... but i could spam the rolebutton and it works perfect.
Running away and healing actually works for most bosses.
The spirit should only distract, this is mostly necessary when several opponents are at the same time. (they copied it extremely from Code Vein, which I don't think is bad)

"reused optional bosses =/= bad boss design"
i refuse indirectly. If it occurs too often, you can call it that. It looks good once you see it... sure, but if you see it over and over again it's bad design. We're not talking about 1 or 2 times here... the dragon appears more than 10 times

I would like to write again.
Soundtrack partially fits. Only in relation to the environment etc. does it actually have to fit together. And that's not the case with the small bosses for the time being.

[Bleezip]

Цитата допису Tarnished Knight of Dunghill:

- reused optional bosses =/= bad boss design
- gank bosses =/= bad boss design
- mediocre soundtrack? subjective and I disagree.
- bosses not giving you enough time to recover =/= bad boss design

this game has been skillfully developed to the point of which they finally found a solution to deal with players having too many options to steamroll encounters.
you can't spam roll like in ds3 or their former games. you have to learn to be patient and learn their animations.
bosses not allowing you to heal up is not true at all. they do but you can't just run away and heal up, you have to wait for the right moment when they are done with a combo.
btw I fought most gank bosses alone because my summons sucked and I had too little fp to begin with. in other words a good game :)

There's a difference though from being patient to every encounter both in the open world and a lot of the bosses being designed to wait forever, get one hit in and then repeat that process.

So many enemies have deceiving range, looooonnnnng combos and poise that makes it impossible to punish with the very tools the game teaches you about. The late game really devolves into just using regular hits every 30 seconds or so.

[☠Dragnoros, der Wächter]

Цитата допису Bleezip:

Цитата допису Tarnished Knight of Dunghill:

- reused optional bosses =/= bad boss design
- gank bosses =/= bad boss design
- mediocre soundtrack? subjective and I disagree.
- bosses not giving you enough time to recover =/= bad boss design

this game has been skillfully developed to the point of which they finally found a solution to deal with players having too many options to steamroll encounters.
you can't spam roll like in ds3 or their former games. you have to learn to be patient and learn their animations.
bosses not allowing you to heal up is not true at all. they do but you can't just run away and heal up, you have to wait for the right moment when they are done with a combo.
btw I fought most gank bosses alone because my summons sucked and I had too little fp to begin with. in other words a good game :)

There's a difference though from being patient to every encounter both in the open world and a lot of the bosses being designed to wait forever, get one hit in and then repeat that process.

So many enemies have deceiving range, looooonnnnng combos and poise that makes it impossible to punish with the very tools the game teaches you about. The late game really devolves into just using regular hits every 30 seconds or so.

In fact, the final main bosses are really what dark souls was all about back then. learn the opponent. Exploiting every little gap.

There are 2 difficulties.

1) The difficulty you have when the boss is relatively strong.
Strong combo attacks with small gaps that are big enough to use for attacks at all.

2) The 2nd difficulty is with pointless endless attacks and/or increased number of attacks.

[Pluto]

Too much of the same ♥♥♥♥ it's my main complain. You fight a new boss and you think "how cool", then you find it again and think "oh look who is there", then third time and "well, ok... another round" and then forth, fifth ecc. At the point you think this game it's a great copy and paste job.

[☠Dragnoros, der Wächter]

Цитата допису clotobee:

Too much of the same ♥♥♥♥ it's my main complain. You fight a new boss and you think "how cool", then you find it again and think "oh look who is there", then third time and "well, ok... another round" and then forth, fifth ecc. At the point you think this game it's a great copy and paste job.

Yes're right. but that was mentioned at least twice in the last 10 comments. I would ask you to at least skim the last entries.

[Sir Calen]

Oh yes, do I agree. So many bosses just spam attack near endlessly without giving you room to attack. And than you have those odd bosses like Radahn that are just garbage.

Once I beat this game, i'm going back and sticking with DS2