I finally watched the "Bloodborne is Genius, and Here's Why" video

[hanselthecaretaker]

Interesting video, but I somewhat disagree with the general premise of dodging automatically being objectively more fun. I really like Bloodborne, but it feels less tactical overall by relying on dodging around like a rabbit (Happy Easter) or gun parrying for defense, which is easier and less risky than Souls because you can attempt it outside of your opponents' range. Dodging and hacking/slashing especially just makes the combat feel like nearly every other action game (which is probably why Bloodborne instantly resonated with people that didn't "get" Souls) by removing the tension that guy felt against Allant around 16:25 and forcing you to rely on i-frames, which I personally consider somewhat of a bane of modern game design and one of the worst aspects of SoulsBorne combat. They are basically like a QTE without the actual prompt. Bloodborne remedies a lot of Souls' bloat and imbalance by a quality over quantity approach and buffered by practicality in upgrading and summoning, but it still carries over the biggest combat design flaws and limitations.

It also gives the player far more options and play styles than Bloodborne, which is why although many people "got" and enjoyed Bloodborne more than they did with Souls, many more Souls fans still consider Dark Souls a better Souls game, regardless of it having a subjectively labeled "boring" way to play. Shields can still be fun if done right.

I do think most people do find faster paced gameplay more fun, not that that's better. The Matthewmatosis face-cam reactions do a really good job of demonstrating that as well. I also think that Souls other playstyles aren't as well executed as the standard dodging playstyle either making that style more "fun" as well. Playing a shield playstyle is just holding a button and being invulnerable to getting hit, dodging requires more from the player. Of course, the riposte mechanic is pretty half-assed as far as when you can actually use it as he showed in the video so there's no point in even getting good at it. And the range stuff is pretty weak whether magic or bows. Sure, dodging in a game or even real life is basically a QTE, lots of things are basically QTEs when you break them down; the riposte is a QTE as well and it's the most "fun" mechanic of the shield.

As it stands now, I think i-frames are a necessary evil in action combat systems. Games that have very low i-frames or none at all never "feel" right. I've been playing Monster Hunter World a lot and the game has very low i-frames on the standard dodge and so many times after I get hit, I'll say to myself "I wasn't there" or "that didn't hit me". I've never played a game where I ever thought the hitboxes were done great and unless you have pinpoint hitboxes along with properly tracking those hitboxes as the characters move, you need i-frames. So until games get really good hitboxes, i-frames are required and it'll probably stay that way because adding in i-frames is like 100x easier and less time consuming for developers than making perfect hitboxes.

Also, Monster Hunter does a lot of combat things Souls does but far better like you actually have to manage your stamina in MH. In a Souls game, you can just attack until you run out of stamina and dodge away in a split second after recovering a sliver of stamina. Whereas in MH, if your dodge needs a 5th of your stamina, you can't dodge until you get that much stamina. Each move in MH also requires more deliberation for every attack because you are committing to longer animations than you are in a Souls game. MH really punishes you for mashing buttons and makes the player press each attack in your combos at the very tail-end of each attack so you don't get stuck in animations. I've come across as pretty hard on the Souls games not because I hate them or "they suck" but because they really don't do that many things good when it comes to their gameplay mechanics and they could be so much better. Souls wants to be this slow and deliberate action game where stuff like positioning and stamina management is crucial but it really is just masquerading as that IMO. From Super Bunnyhop's video on For Honor, the game really seems to have a great skill-based sword and shield gameplay far above a Souls game so you can do defensive/shield gameplay better.

The thing is, Dark Souls can have excellent hitboxes.

Spoiler

https://i.imgur.com/ovtKeC3.mp4
https://i.imgur.com/emObPti.gif
https://i.imgur.com/ISc3wRb.mp4
https://i.imgur.com/dKcRUhb.gif
https://i.imgur.com/xQ20FQV.mp4

It would be better if games could be designed around more of a logical hit register format instead of taking shortcuts to look cool or simplify various encounters.

I'd also rather play Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I tried For Honor and it seemed ok, but Ubisoft would've forced me to abandon it sooner than I would have liked based on principle alone.

 

[sXeth]

I agree with a lot of this. One thing though is that I never found how the Souls games are considered hard because it's really just getting into a different mindset vs gaining actual skills or getting better. If you play the games with just the mindset of surviving first and foremost, you should rarely die regardless of playstyle. I played Dark Souls (my 1st Souls game) and made it through several dungeons without dying once because I just constantly choose the action that was best for not dying. I played through Sen's Fortress not dying once because I merely paid attention to the environment. Then, if you play the Bloodborne way, you should be doing just fine if you played any action combat games before because Souls' enemies are rather slow and far less aggressive compared to a games like DMC, Bayo, or Ninja Gaiden.

That's been my general experience with Souls. My initial experience with Dark Souls was not one of frustrating difficulty, but actual tedium. Presumably I was supposed to be dying and forced to go find a wiki (because DS1's interface and any sense of tooltips was utter garbage) about upgrading my gear or whatever. I wasn't though, since the light attack-light attack-dodge used in prettymuch any given action game works perfectly fine in Souls too, so long as you've got an aptitude for pattern recognition. So my initial Dark Souls experience was just dropping it out of tedium after the sewer dragon thing took 45 minutes to kill while just repeating the same cycle of actions.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

I first rage-quit Bloodborne at the Blood-Starved Beast. Not because I couldn't kill him, although it took me about a week's worth of attempts to do that, but because after he died, I found out he was guarding...

!!!

...a dead end and a chalice that I didn't know what it did. I assumed this guy was just the next step in the game, but it turns out he was just a bonus boss. That made me angrier than the boss did.

My big problem with all the Souls games has been how determined they are to not tell you what the fuck is going on or what it is you're supposed to do. I can't get through these games without a walkthrough that tells me that I need to go to the top of this bell tower to find a note that has a password that I give to a corpse who's guarding a gate that leads to a snake-infested forest that goes to a creepy haunted university where I have to suicide-jump off the balcony and into the lake to fight a big ass-spider (as in a spider that is both a big-ass spider and a spider made mostly out of ass) so that I can usher in the Apocalypse Moon or whatever, and then JESUS CHRIST AMYGDALA WHAT THE FUCK DUDE [https://bloodborne.wiki.fextralife.com/file/Bloodborne/Lesser%20Amygdala%20Eyes.png]

I gave up when I got killed by a window. Not by being thrown out of a window or eaten by an animated window monster or anything. The window just killed me.

Some of these bosses are garbage, honestly. I was fighting the one at the end of Yahar'gul and got his HP almost fully depleted and then he one-shot me when I had almost full health. This area is a chore. It's not even hard getting back down there. I just run past everything in typical Dark Souls fashion. But It's still so tedious. He's a mess of a boss with huge sweeping attacks, shitty gigantic acid pools and deformities that make it hard to tell what you're even supposed to dodge, if the attacks are even on camera, and the attacks are overpowered. I just died again and I don't even know why. Trash. One of the trashiest bosses I've fought in the Souls games. Yeah, I'm upset.

If you're talking about the big monster made out of corpses, he's pretty easy.

Like, I don't want to say "get better," but I'm surprised you had trouble with him if you were able to kill all the bosses before him. The One Reborn remains the one and only Bloodborne boss that I've killed on my first try.

 

[Azure-Supernova]

See, this sounds boring to me. I know that seems weird, but pretty much every game focuses on nothing but offense. Shield use is under-utilized in Souls, but at least it's one of the few games that even attempts it. Odd to put so much effort into items that are ultimately just regarded as a waste of time. Shouldn't have to be the case. It could add so much in the way of tactical push and pull gameplay.

I think what separated my experience from a lot of other offense focused action games is that in DS2 I knew that a mistake could cost me my life, not just a tiny chunk of health bar. In The Pursuer boss fight for example, my spellsword build had limited stamina to use for dodging and attacking and I didn't have the stats to wear the armour for damage mitigation. So I often found myself in a position where a mis-timed roll or overextending my attacks would pretty much guarantee my demise.

In the Paladin build I ran for about two hours before I rolled the spellsword, I could afford to tank a few hits in a fight. But because I could afford to make those mistakes, I just did. I went for that extra attack and played more aggressively and what I would usually dodge, I just absorbed with the shield and healed up for the tiny damage.

I suppose in the end, like many things, it just comes down to what you want out of the game and its encounters. But this is why I enjoy them, because it seems no two people play them the same way. Some impose extra difficulty on themselves, some min-max their builds, some play blind and others use guides to miss nothing. But I do think that ultimately, Bloodborne showed a lot of players that sword and board wasn't the only way to play.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

I first rage-quit Bloodborne at the Blood-Starved Beast. Not because I couldn't kill him, although it took me about a week's worth of attempts to do that, but because after he died, I found out he was guarding...

!!!

...a dead end and a chalice that I didn't know what it did. I assumed this guy was just the next step in the game, but it turns out he was just a bonus boss. That made me angrier than the boss did.

My big problem with all the Souls games has been how determined they are to not tell you what the fuck is going on or what it is you're supposed to do. I can't get through these games without a walkthrough that tells me that I need to go to the top of this bell tower to find a note that has a password that I give to a corpse who's guarding a gate that leads to a snake-infested forest that goes to a creepy haunted university where I have to suicide-jump off the balcony and into the lake to fight a big ass-spider (as in a spider that is both a big-ass spider and a spider made mostly out of ass) so that I can usher in the Apocalypse Moon or whatever, and then JESUS CHRIST AMYGDALA WHAT THE FUCK DUDE [https://bloodborne.wiki.fextralife.com/file/Bloodborne/Lesser%20Amygdala%20Eyes.png]

I gave up when I got killed by a window. Not by being thrown out of a window or eaten by an animated window monster or anything. The window just killed me.

Some of these bosses are garbage, honestly. I was fighting the one at the end of Yahar'gul and got his HP almost fully depleted and then he one-shot me when I had almost full health. This area is a chore. It's not even hard getting back down there. I just run past everything in typical Dark Souls fashion. But It's still so tedious. He's a mess of a boss with huge sweeping attacks, shitty gigantic acid pools and deformities that make it hard to tell what you're even supposed to dodge, if the attacks are even on camera, and the attacks are overpowered. I just died again and I don't even know why. Trash. One of the trashiest bosses I've fought in the Souls games. Yeah, I'm upset.

If you're talking about the big monster made out of corpses, he's pretty easy.

Like, I don't want to say "get better," but I'm surprised you had trouble with him if you were able to kill all the bosses before him. The One Reborn remains the one and only Bloodborne boss that I've killed on my first try.

I think he took me three or four tries. However *slowly stretches out arms* first try on Blood Starved Beast. I had an offline summon following me though around though. That?s the thing about SoulsBorne bosses; everyone seems to have a different take away. I will agree that ROM was one of the more frustrating encounters, and it?s even worse in the chalice dungeon.

Curious if FROM?s next game will be as cryptic as all these have been.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

See, this sounds boring to me. I know that seems weird, but pretty much every game focuses on nothing but offense. Shield use is under-utilized in Souls, but at least it's one of the few games that even attempts it. Odd to put so much effort into items that are ultimately just regarded as a waste of time. Shouldn't have to be the case. It could add so much in the way of tactical push and pull gameplay.

I think what separated my experience from a lot of other offense focused action games is that in DS2 I knew that a mistake could cost me my life, not just a tiny chunk of health bar. In The Pursuer boss fight for example, my spellsword build had limited stamina to use for dodging and attacking and I didn't have the stats to wear the armour for damage mitigation. So I often found myself in a position where a mis-timed roll or overextending my attacks would pretty much guarantee my demise.

In the Paladin build I ran for about two hours before I rolled the spellsword, I could afford to tank a few hits in a fight. But because I could afford to make those mistakes, I just did. I went for that extra attack and played more aggressively and what I would usually dodge, I just absorbed with the shield and healed up for the tiny damage.

I suppose in the end, like many things, it just comes down to what you want out of the game and its encounters. But this is why I enjoy them, because it seems no two people play them the same way. Some impose extra difficulty on themselves, some min-max their builds, some play blind and others use guides to miss nothing. But I do think that ultimately, Bloodborne showed a lot of players that sword and board wasn't the only way to play.

Yeah, that?s primarily why I like them as well. I?d rather play a flawed game that offers more variety than a perfectly made one that offers little to none. I?m getting anxious to start DS3 to see how the influences of Bloodborne fit into it. I?ve read it?s the best of both worlds, at least by some longtime fans of each.

 

[CaitSeith]

Meh, if Bloodborne was that good it would come to pc.

Unless From Software was legally tied up by an exclusivity contract with Sony.

 

[CaitSeith]

I know PhoenixMGS has been posting it as a reference [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC3OuLU5XCw] for the last year or so.

Spoiler: Here were my comments in full

hanselthecaretaker
4 hours ago (edited)
Interesting video, but I somewhat disagree with the general premise of dodging automatically being objectively more fun. I really like Bloodborne, but it feels less tactical overall by relying on dodging around like a rabbit (Happy Easter) or gun parrying for defense, which is easier and less risky than Souls because you can attempt it outside of your opponents' range. Dodging and hacking/slashing especially just makes the combat feel like nearly every other action game (which is probably why Bloodborne instantly resonated with people that didn't "get" Souls) by removing the tension that guy felt against Allant around 16:25 and forcing you to rely on i-frames, which I personally consider somewhat of a bane of modern game design and one of the worst aspects of SoulsBorne combat. They are basically like a QTE without the actual prompt. Bloodborne remedies a lot of Souls' bloat and imbalance by a quality over quantity approach and buffered by practicality in upgrading and summoning, but it still carries over the biggest combat design flaws and limitations.

This is also why Kingdom Come: Deliverance's combat is a breath of fresh air, because every action feels tangible and logical vs gamey for the sake of looking cool if nothing else. I don't think Bloodborne "solved" any of Dark Souls' issues, because all it did was side step them literally. It took a series lacking technical depth (too often playing ring-around-the-rosie for backstabs for example) and doubled down on its shortcomings instead of actively attempting to correct them. It also is telling if it's true that Miyazaki thought it was a mistake giving players a shield right away; in other words, "why give them one at all" seems to be the take away. In that case, maybe he should have skipped right to Bloodborne? I think the over-reliance on dodging and i-frames trivializes what Souls could have or should have been about. Why should I be able to invincibly roll right through a physical attack just because QTer, I timed it right? If anything it should at least have a different damage model, but every attack you're in range of should always connect. I-frames throw out game logic for the sake of what, looking cool, or keeping combat design conveniently shallow?

But as it is stands with Souls, a general perception is that the player conditioning was done intentionally to make players aware of the "fool me once" mantra. You'll know to look behind you for that ambush enemy in the future if the game introduces them early, as you also perfectly understood in Bloodborne at 1:15:32 and onward. You'll know that picking up a shield first doesn't mean it should always be a first resort. The game throws these things at you to teach the importance of becoming aware of your surroundings and to never get too over-confident or careless. In that way it definitely succeeds, but again the actual combat could have been balanced better between offensive and defensive strategy to make each feel equally important in a typical encounter. There are far too many games that go all-in on offense but never consider defense, which makes them too predictable and boring. I don't consider a gun parry that involves both near-perfect timing and near vacancy of risk the best example of defensive strategy by any means either.

Having said that, perhaps third person has its limits as to how precise and situational the combat move set can be...

As an aside, while I enjoy Yahtzee's commentary I don't consider his opinions gospel by any stretch. Supporting arguments may be helpful to present, but in one case you use one of his at 25:00 to help contradict one of your own established originally at 6:07. It makes the final takeaway point you're trying to make unclear. Also, while it might have been for you and I and quite a few others, Demon's Souls wasn't everyone's first Souls game, especially considering it was a PS3 exclusive. So the "weird and new thing" comment would translate well for them. The reason the Souls games have gained such a following is because of the "weird and new" anyways. It also gives the player far more options and play styles than Bloodborne, which is why although many people "got" and enjoyed Bloodborne more than they did with Souls, many more Souls fans still consider Dark Souls a better Souls game, regardless of it having a subjectively labeled "boring" way to play. Shields can still be fun if done right.

In short I'd say Bloodborne is a better action game than Souls overall, and definitely more refined in key ways (I still like the estus system more than blood vials though; DS2 balanced it well imo), but it also limits itself sometimes too much in the process despite still retaining key mechanical flaws; a big one you also get into around 1:01:56 and also 1:07:33. I also still haven't gotten around to playing DS3 after all this time, which many Souls and Bloodborne fans say is the best balance between the two. I hope so.

ps, while I also think the chalice dungeons were the worst part of the game from a level design perspective, I think their main purpose was to provide an elaborate playground for farming and upgrading. In that respect they exceed anything offered in the Souls games. But again, that reveals another couple considerable design flaws; or at least how they're implemented imo.

pss, I've always been kind of curious about Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, but haven't actually gotten around to playing it yet either.

That video has the classic "only what I find fun is not crap" bad attitude that he rationalizes by bringing personal experiences and examples from people who share his same tastes. For a series that is liked by different people for very different reasons, the opinions in the video are too shallow for proper discussion.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

The thing is, Dark Souls can have excellent hitboxes.

Spoiler

https://i.imgur.com/ovtKeC3.mp4
https://i.imgur.com/emObPti.gif
https://i.imgur.com/ISc3wRb.mp4
https://i.imgur.com/dKcRUhb.gif
https://i.imgur.com/xQ20FQV.mp4

It would be better if games could be designed around more of a logical hit register format instead of taking shortcuts to look cool or simplify various encounters.

I'd also rather play Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I tried For Honor and it seemed ok, but Ubisoft would've forced me to abandon it sooner than I would have liked based on principle alone.

It seems like really accurate hitboxes are just very time consuming to implement. There's some good examples like those videos/gifs but that might not be due to hitboxes technically as the game can be doing something under-the-hood that has those attacks miss just because (basically i-frames or something similar) but the animations end up just looking so good making it seem like amazingly good hitboxes. You'd need access to like a debug mode to truly see the hitboxes and where they are and everything; it's really only when you get hit when you shouldn't that you can tell the hitboxes are wrong. A simple google search of 'dark souls hit boxes' will bring up examples of really poor hitboxes. Ideally, I'd love for every game to have perfect hitboxes and tracking instead of i-frames but the time and resources to actually accomplish that is probably better spent elsewhere honestly. You'd be spending a lot of time doing that for really not that great of an increase in gameplay quality because i-frames do fix the hitbox problem pretty well already IMO while requiring barely any time and resources.

There is some pretty funky stuff that goes on under-the-hood of games. For example, in MGS4 when you roll across a gap, the game actually has Snake fall to the ground for a split second and thus Snake can be interacted with at a spot he's not supposed to be in. If it wasn't for the online component, no one outside of the devs would probably know; here's less than a minute video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktcv5lwiAnM] example of it.

That's been my general experience with Souls. My initial experience with Dark Souls was not one of frustrating difficulty, but actual tedium. Presumably I was supposed to be dying and forced to go find a wiki (because DS1's interface and any sense of tooltips was utter garbage) about upgrading my gear or whatever. I wasn't though, since the light attack-light attack-dodge used in prettymuch any given action game works perfectly fine in Souls too, so long as you've got an aptitude for pattern recognition. So my initial Dark Souls experience was just dropping it out of tedium after the sewer dragon thing took 45 minutes to kill while just repeating the same cycle of actions.

That was one of the dungeons I did without dying and I arrow cheesed the gaping dragon boss. I think the 'play conditioning' part of the video has a lot of merit to it because I went into Dark Souls thinking this is a game about just basically surviving/winning at all costs due to hearing from the community, the memes, the marketing that Dark Souls was super hard. So I went into the game with that mindset and the game itself shows you that it will do anything kill you so you sorta think to yourself that 'two can play that game' and when you focus on just finding ways to basically win each encounter or scenario, you find that there's just so much to exploit and how easy it is to do it. Stuff like literally just holding a shield and circle strafing for backstabs breaks the game, bow and arrow breaks the game, and more. I think Bloodborne does in fact "fix" the player mindset of playing the game in a more "fun" / less tedious way and makes for a better experience while basically removing everything that could be exploited in a really cheesy manner vs actually fixing said exploits.

That video has the classic "only what I find fun is not crap" bad attitude that he rationalizes by bringing personal experiences and examples from people who share his same tastes. For a series that is liked by different people for very different reasons, the opinions in the video are too shallow for proper discussion.

I think there are some really great nuggets of theory and criticism in the video (maybe like a third of it) but there is a lot of stretching arguments extremely thin. For example, that 1st 10-15 minutes is basically incoherent rambling from what I recall when I watched it. I especially think the Play Conditioning section is really good because I experienced that myself first-hand basically as my reply to Seth Carter just above this demonstrated.

 

[stroopwafel]

I?m getting anxious to start DS3 to see how the influences of Bloodborne fit into it. I?ve read it?s the best of both worlds, at least by some longtime fans of each.

Definitely. It's me fave Souls. It's in the same engine as Bloodborne and as such feels more like Bloodborne with knights. The visual presentation is out of this world. From's artists are the cream of the crop and their designs are so full of imagination it makes pretty much every other game pale in comparison. There isn't any other game I ever enjoyed as much as Bloodborne and DkS3. I'm pretty much always itching to replay them. If From's next game is going to be even better I think I'm probably gonna faint.