The game is good, but it has glaring problems.

[Mistr James]

(As a disclaimer, I do not hate this game, I just want to point out a few glaring problems that I have noticed.)
While the gameplay has good bones, there's a good number of underlying problems with it. To start, I want the obvious. Whether it was intentional or not, this game is very obviously like Bloodborne with a bit of Sekiro sprinkled in. I point this out because while they do bring over the basic mechanics of both games, that's all they bring over; the basics. To me, it makes the gameplay feel very shallow and has no real flow. It feels stiff. Like you're dancing to an off beat song. In this wall of text, I wanted to point out few examples.

There have have been a lot of people saying that this game plays much more like Sekrio than it does Bloodborne. What the games main combat has in common with Sekiro is that is has a perfect parry mechanic. That's it. But it doesn't even have that. When you pull off a perfect parry, all it does is prevent you from taking damage. The enemy's attack will still keep going. In Sekiro, there was the added benefit of when an enemy attack connected, it would deflect with the possibility of it completely cancelling an enemy's combo. Since dodging is damn near useless, I feel like that is something that is missing from this game. It also should add to when putting an enemy into a groggy state. Another thing that this game is missing is that attacks need to be easier to telegraph. Some of the wind up animations take so long that you can't tell when an attack is coming, and when it does happen, you usually miss the window for a perfect parry. This no more apparent when an enemy is going for a critical attack which, as the game describes, cannot be dodged or simply blocked.

When it comes to the Bloodborne side of things, it tells a similar story. With how fast the attacks are in this game, it would seem that the game is encouraging to play more aggressively. But again, it only goes surface level. You can wail on an enemy all you want, but there is no real reward for it except putting the enemy into a groggy state, which in my experience with the demo, only works sometimes. In Bloodborne however, aggressive play isn't just encouraged, it actively rewarded. When you go hard on an enemy, including large ones and bosses, it doesn't really cancel there attacks, but it does prevent them from starting one for a bit. This is another thing this game feels like it missing. The able to be aggressive.

A third thing I wanted to touch on is something that I have seen many people talk about and I agree with: you can't animation cancel. If you've played good amount of Souls games, you know that making split second moves is important. You'll go for a block or a dodge while in the middle of an attack. In this game however, that isn't possible. When you attack, you are stuck that attack until it is done. Only then can you do anything else. With how fast most of the boss attacks are, it makes it a bit of a problem.

I want to close this out by saying this: I want this game to succeed. I want this to be a game that I can come back to and be able to enjoy it. Lies of P doesn't have to an exact copy of Bloodborne or Sekiro, but I do think it needs to incorporate the deeper mechanics of it. Like how Half Life set a standard for single player fps games, the From Software Souls games set the standard in it's own genre, so much so that the genre itself was named after them. A good example of this would Jedi: Fallen Order. That game could be classified as basically "Sekiro in Space", but while it does have many of the core mechanics of Sekiro (not just the surface level ones), it incorporate it's own unique mechanics to be able to be it's own thing. This is just my opinion though, so I want to know what you guys think.

[tewi]

i agree with much of these, although i have to say, sekiro enemies most definitely keep attacking even while deflected. it depends on the enemy and even then, it depends on the attack they're doing. wolf and genichiro for example will get into a hit-hit-deflect cycle very often where your deflect will reset him back to neutral (and it feels amazing for the pacing of the fight), but once genichiro decides to do a real preset combo he ignores your deflects for the most part, although obviously they continue building posture damage. the game follows the same logic for basically everything above a trash mob. ninjas, minibosses, bosses, etc.. what makes it work so well isn't that deflect always has an immediate reward, but that sekiro's deflect doesn't feel like glorified parry fishing like it does in lies of p, instead it feels like it's intuitively, inseparably woven into the entire philosophy of the game. that's why lies of p deflects feel so disjointed, because it's just kinda a halfassed mechanic that doesn't meaningfully dictate the pace of any fight. it's just kinda...there, use it or run away or dodge or whatever, it probably won't meaningfully change how the boss reacts to what you're doing. because he pretty much won't ever. all that said, i agree this game is absolutely nothing like sekiro and it baffles me that people keep making this idiotic comparison. it's far more like bloodborne

[Mistr James]

tewi původně napsal:

i agree with much of these, although i have to say, sekiro enemies most definitely keep attacking even while deflected. it depends on the enemy and even then, it depends on the attack they're doing. wolf and genichiro for example will get into a hit-hit-deflect cycle very often where your deflect will reset him back to neutral (and it feels amazing for the pacing of the fight), but once genichiro decides to do a real preset combo he ignores your deflects for the most part, although obviously they continue building posture damage. the game follows the same logic for basically everything above a trash mob. ninjas, minibosses, bosses, etc.. what makes it work so well isn't that deflect always has an immediate reward, but that sekiro's deflect doesn't feel like glorified parry fishing like it does in lies of p, instead it feels like it's intuitively, inseparably woven into the entire philosophy of the game. that's why lies of p deflects feel so disjointed, because it's just kinda a halfassed mechanic that doesn't meaningfully dictate the pace of any fight. it's just kinda...there, use it or run away or dodge or whatever, it probably won't meaningfully change how the boss reacts to what you're doing. because he pretty much won't ever. all that said, i agree this game is absolutely nothing like sekiro and it baffles me that people keep making this idiotic comparison. it's far more like bloodborne

This is exactly what I was trying to get across. parrying and dodging have no real impact in combat. If your going to have these mechanics, they need to have a real purpose.