Why is this game so famous and hyped when it is so confusing and difficult to play? I don't get it

[Blazing Storm]

I am new to the Souls franchise and I don't get why this game is so hyped 13 hours in. The game is just so difficult its hard to enjoy and the story doesn't make any sense.

I came out into Limgrave and spent an hour trying to defeat the Tree Sentinel before referring a guide which let me know I am not supposed to face him until much later when I have levelled up. What is the point? It would be like in Assassins Creed, I am dropped off into a Level 50 territory at the beginning of the story where all enemies can kill me with 1 blow. This is bad game design because why are the devs showing me a boss whom I am very underlevelled to fight. If I have to refer a guide to get this, you have failed.

Moving on, I tried exploring the area as I usually do in open world games. Except this game does not seem to have any map markers for key areas so its like playing Assassins Creed in explorer mode which is frustrating IMO. Is there any guided mode available like i n Skyrim coz I cannot find it in options

Anyway, after giving up on the tree sentinel, I turned left and entered some catacombs which has some creatures looking like goblins leaping at me with insane speed and with just 4 hits they drain half of my health and when I am about halfway through the area and exhausted all my health potions, I am sent back to the last grace site and ALL of them respawn once again. Who thought its a good idea to have all enemies respawn after killing them? It removes al lsense of accomplishment within the game as when I quit and return all enemies have respawned. Am I supposed to kill enemies or just sneak past them if they are gonna respawn anyway?

I also tried fighting Patches unsuccessfully and barely managed to beat the Beastman of Farum Azula after an hour.

Even in the open world, the low level footsoldiers become difficult when the troll jumps from top of the mountain and I die multiple times.

And on top of that I have no idea what the story is, where am I supposed to go and whats going on. Why is this game so confusing and difficult to play? Is there any difficulty setting slider available which buffs up my character? I know through reddit threads that the easy mode is to use summons, but since I am using the ultrawide and DLSS mod along with FPS unlocker, I am no longer able to use online so am stuck. I am literally spending more times in referring guides than actually playing the game.

[nfinite.recursion]

1/10

Troll harder.

[opus132]

The difficulty is why i love this series so much.

I also like classical music and progressive rock because they are more difficult than normal popular music.

There's a rightful niche for those things.

[Mr. Nobody]

The entire concept of Souls games is to cater to the old school gamer who googles everything and looks up the wiki/guide for everything then goes into streams/forums and criticizes everyone who wants to be able to play the game without external guides for everything.

You have three choices to enjoy the game.
1.Play the game blind and accept the fact that outdated/poor game design means your likely going to miss half the content.
2. Give up and google everything and then come onto these forums and ♥♥♥♥ on everybody and pretend you didn't look everything up yourself.
3. If you have no job and a lot of patience, just wander around aimlessly for 1000 hours until you randomly stumble across everything.

That's just how it works. It's the same issue with every Souls game it's just Elden Ring has a way bigger world so the issue is more apparent. Just remember when you get flooded with hate comments that 98% of them are Option 2 people who think reading a wiki for hours on end is a skill and 2% are Option 3 people who actually spent the ridiculous amount of time to figure stuff out themselves.

[MOSLEY]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Mr. Nobody:

The entire concept of Souls games is to cater to the old school gamer who googles everything and looks up the wiki/guide for everything then goes into streams/forums and criticizes everyone who wants to be able to play the game without external guides for everything.

You have three choices to enjoy the game.
1.Play the game blind and accept the fact that outdated/poor game design means your likely going to miss half the content.
2. Give up and google everything and then come onto these forums and ♥♥♥♥ on everybody and pretend you didn't look everything up yourself.
3. If you have no job and a lot of patience, just wander around aimlessly for 1000 hours until you randomly stumble across everything.

That's just how it works. It's the same issue with every Souls game it's just Elden Ring has a way bigger world so the issue is more apparent. Just remember when you get flooded with hate comments that 98% of them are Option 2 people who think reading a wiki for hours on end is a skill and 2% are Option 3 people who actually spent the ridiculous amount of time to figure stuff out themselves.

The games aren't designed so you need to Google everything. The games are designed to allow you to keep discovering things through multiple playthroughs. That's why NG+ exists.

[opus132]

Indeed. Not only that, but some degree of community discovery effort is build in the game itself, through messaging. You may not discover every hidden wall on your own, but somebody else might and messages can help you with that.

Modern gamers are just too coddled and protest a bit too much for my tastes.

[TUPE_S]

Oprindeligt skrevet af opus132:

The difficulty is why i love this series so much.

I also like classical music and progressive rock because they are more difficult than normal popular music.

There's a rightful niche for those things.

[Kalameet]

Oprindeligt skrevet af MOSLEY:

The games aren't designed so you need to Google everything. The games are designed to allow you to keep discovering things through multiple playthroughs. That's why NG+ exists.

utter and complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ by fromdrones. Once you complete the game, you suddendly don't develop a sixth-sense that guides you on doing stuff differently.

On the contrary, it's very likely you'll do the same steps of your previous playthrough, just more lazily.

There are so many story events that gets triggered depending on how you traverse the game world and progress the story, in Human terms, it would require the user to do the cartesian product of all possible navigation choices to discover everything

Oprindeligt skrevet af Mr. Nobody:

3. If you have no job and a lot of patience, just wander around aimlessly for 1000 hours until you randomly stumble across everything.

[MOSLEY]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Kalameet:

Oprindeligt skrevet af MOSLEY:

The games aren't designed so you need to Google everything. The games are designed to allow you to keep discovering things through multiple playthroughs. That's why NG+ exists.

utter and complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ by fromdrones. Once you complete the game, you suddendly don't develop a sixth-sense that guides you on doing stuff differently.

On the contrary, it's very likely you'll do the same steps of your previous playthrough, just more lazily.

There are so many story events that gets triggered depending on how you traverse the game world and progress the story, in Human terms, it would require the user to do the cartesian product of all possible navigation choices to discover everything

Oprindeligt skrevet af Mr. Nobody:

3. If you have no job and a lot of patience, just wander around aimlessly for 1000 hours until you randomly stumble across everything.

You don't develop a sixth sense, no, you use your brain to process the information that you were able to gleam from NPCs during your previous playthroughs.

[HRHV87]

Oprindeligt skrevet af nfinite.recursion:

1/10

Troll harder.

Look at just played history. I think he legitimately is just not very gifted at playing games.

[Simbolic]

Imagine girls have also streamed there playthroughs. Girls..playing DS games..and doing decent. So hard for me to believe, every girl I have ever known never knew I was gaming. Since they all look down on that ♥♥♥♥. Yet now it's cool and there actual good at it. Like wtf?

[Kalameet]

Oprindeligt skrevet af MOSLEY:

You don't develop a sixth sense, no, you use your brain to process the information that you were able to gleam from NPCs during your previous playthroughs.

again, what NPC informations from previous playthroughs?
What superpower do you have to decipher a generic "i'm about to rest for a while", and then the said NPC disappears from the map and moves to a new fixed-but-seemingly-random location?

Don't fret to reply, i'm waiting for the same answer since DS1

[An Irate Walrus]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Simbolic:

Imagine girls have also streamed there playthroughs. Girls..playing DS games..and doing decent. So hard for me to believe, every girl I have ever known never knew I was gaming. Since they all look down on that ♥♥♥♥. Yet now it's cool and there actual good at it. Like wtf?

Using your individual experience as a brush with which to tar an entire sex is certainly a choice.

My wife's an active gamer, and plays a wide variety of titles. Women who are interested in men and also like games exist, but they don't tend to advertise that fact for a variety of heavy-breathing, unwashed, "akshully, you should do it this way--how dare you do it differently? Where's muh sammich?!" reasons.

Case in point, my wife was playing Reach a few years back. At the beginning of the game, the chat was full of requests for pics and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ pickup lines/horribly awkward attempts at flirting.

...as her kill count climbed, the flirting stopped, and the verbal abuse from boys playing at being men began.

Women who game are not unicorns. They're just painfully aware that a lot of guys who include "gamer" in their identity subscribe to a set of beliefs and behaviors that are--to put it kindly--not exactly "I'd like to get close to you" material.

[MOSLEY]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Kalameet:

Oprindeligt skrevet af MOSLEY:

You don't develop a sixth sense, no, you use your brain to process the information that you were able to gleam from NPCs during your previous playthroughs.

again, what NPC informations from previous playthroughs?
What superpower do you have to decipher a generic "i'm about to rest for a while", and then the said NPC disappears from the map and moves to a new fixed-but-seemingly-random location?

Don't fret to reply, i'm waiting for the same answer since DS1

They generally either tell you roughly where they're going next, show up later and tell you where they were, another NPC will give you information about them, or they show up dead somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_error

[s0d0]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Kalameet:

Oprindeligt skrevet af MOSLEY:

You don't develop a sixth sense, no, you use your brain to process the information that you were able to gleam from NPCs during your previous playthroughs.

again, what NPC informations from previous playthroughs?
What superpower do you have to decipher a generic "i'm about to rest for a while", and then the said NPC disappears from the map and moves to a new fixed-but-seemingly-random location?

Don't fret to reply, i'm waiting for the same answer since DS1

Why so mad? :D
Honestly I'm not that good at questing in these games either, but that doesn't really bother me. Few friends of mine also played through the game and they didn't use guides for most of the quests and they still kinda knew what to do.
So, I assume it has something to do with your approach to video games.
For some these things seem to come more naturally and for others not. Pretty sure this also has something to do with previous games you played. There are these games like AC or Witcher where it is mostly clear what to do, or you have a journal, quest markers etc etc,
but there are and always have been games that have a more cryptic quest design in general.

[Radex]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Blazing Storm:

I am new to the Souls franchise and I don't get why this game is so hyped 13 hours in. The game is just so difficult its hard to enjoy and the story doesn't make any sense.

I came out into Limgrave and spent an hour trying to defeat the Tree Sentinel before referring a guide which let me know I am not supposed to face him until much later when I have levelled up. What is the point? It would be like in Assassins Creed, I am dropped off into a Level 50 territory at the beginning of the story where all enemies can kill me with 1 blow. This is bad game design because why are the devs showing me a boss whom I am very underlevelled to fight. If I have to refer a guide to get this, you have failed.

Moving on, I tried exploring the area as I usually do in open world games. Except this game does not seem to have any map markers for key areas so its like playing Assassins Creed in explorer mode which is frustrating IMO. Is there any guided mode available like i n Skyrim coz I cannot find it in options

Anyway, after giving up on the tree sentinel, I turned left and entered some catacombs which has some creatures looking like goblins leaping at me with insane speed and with just 4 hits they drain half of my health and when I am about halfway through the area and exhausted all my health potions, I am sent back to the last grace site and ALL of them respawn once again. Who thought its a good idea to have all enemies respawn after killing them? It removes al lsense of accomplishment within the game as when I quit and return all enemies have respawned. Am I supposed to kill enemies or just sneak past them if they are gonna respawn anyway?

I also tried fighting Patches unsuccessfully and barely managed to beat the Beastman of Farum Azula after an hour.

Even in the open world, the low level footsoldiers become difficult when the troll jumps from top of the mountain and I die multiple times.

And on top of that I have no idea what the story is, where am I supposed to go and whats going on. Why is this game so confusing and difficult to play? Is there any difficulty setting slider available which buffs up my character? I know through reddit threads that the easy mode is to use summons, but since I am using the ultrawide and DLSS mod along with FPS unlocker, I am no longer able to use online so am stuck. I am literally spending more times in referring guides than actually playing the game.

then every souls like game is not for you.

You also think the Site of Grace is there for saving the game, they are not supposed to save the game, they restore your potions and hp/fp and make most enemies respawn that way (bosses and some others are a one time kill ).

This game is punishment and most souls players are masochists.

This game is simply about finding out which weapon can kill which enemy best or what tactics work and how the attack patterns of the bosses work in order to be able to find weak points.

without ever played a souls like and not having fun dying and having to try again and again, this game is torture for normal RPG players.

in the past there where some japan games that showed onscreen what buttons you can press in what situation, this type of game simple do not show you this information, you have to figure it out.