Totally agree, i love the story and background. But the way it's presented - item descriptions, weird shit you find lying around - doesn't really track with what people expect from a traditional crpg.

: (

Maybe give Sekiro a try? It's not not ac6's frantic flying around combined with Tenchu's fun ninja toys. I

Yet baiting attacks is a core tactic in soulslikes. Curious...

:curious

Throw books about abolition of the family at him?

So like i dig a trench in the yard and do something with straw and then somehow avacados?

I am having intense deja vu and i would like you to know you were being reasonable and correct in all the weird maybe memories i am having of that conversation, too.

Tried to explain socialism to a smart but startlingly ignorant us military person today. They thought socialism was when the federal governments military procurement has an entrenched and inefficient bureaucracy. I tried, i really did, but they had some weird libertarian "i want freedom and meritocracy" thing going while also being shockingly politically ignorant. : p

I really think this is a key to it. There isn't much to the games beyond combat. There's almost no dialogue, the quests such as they are are extremely austere, the levels are generally very small and very linear if you were to simply walk through them without fighting for every inch. They're nothing like Skyrim or Mass Effect or Dragon Age or BG3 or Divine Divinity. They don't have Zelda style puzzles, they don't have branching questlines, there's little or no character development. It's mostly just the fighting. The environments are pretty but not pretty enough to justify going through them more than once or twice if you're not fighting for every inch. These are not deep, rich story games with hours of voiced dialogue and well developed characters. Most of the most talkative, beloved souls characters have at most, like, maybe 30-40 lines of dialogue? Ranni has more, but like Siegfried or Solaire? They don't say much, I doubt all of their voiced dialogue amounts to five minutes.

I think a lot of people think that a big deep complex character and story rpg is being gatekept from them by the difficult combat, but the difficult combat is all there is and if you don't enjoy the souls gameloop of fighting through the same area many times until you win then you probably just aren't going to find the genre enjoyable.

See, this is what I'm talking about; people who are still upset about "git gud" memes from 2011 don't actually want to play Elden ring or engage with the games on their own terms. They're arguing with teenagers from more than a decade ago about a genre manyf them have never played, with core game mechanics they seem to greatly dislike.

a grindy slog that always feels unfair.

I don't think soulslikes are a game type you will enjoy. Trying and failing to beat the same boss twenty times before you eek out a victory with 1hp left is the normal and expected course of gameplay. It is the core gameplay loop. If you don't find joy in that then this is not your genre in the same way that people who don't enjoy jumping on platforms should skip platformers and people who dislike shooting people should probably not invest time in fps games.

Buddy, I just wanna vibe with the atmosphere and the scenery sometimes instead of studying the blade or whatever the fuck. It's a video game, relax.

I think this might be the disconnect. If you just vibed with the scenary there isn't much to the games. You could run through the whole game in a few hours. I think Elden Ring only has four or five required boss fights and afaik every other fight is optional and you could run past all the enemies if you want to.

Much of the game - story, characters, and lore - only comes out if you spend a lot of time getting your ass kicked. Most of the game's background comes from random item drops you'd most likely miss if you got through every fight on the first try. There's a lot of information tied up in how enemies fight - similar enemies from different factions have subtly different equipment and weild different spells. Spell mechanics tie in to story stuff.

The other thing is - it's not easy to make the game easier. Most of the fighting relies on learning enemy movesets and timing. If you make the enemies deal %5 of their normal damage you're still not going to win if you can't figure out when you have openings to land hits. You'll end up being knocked down, staggered, afflicted with statuses, and all the rest of it. You could slow down the attack animations, but they'd look goofy af and become even harder to read.

As much as people scoff these games are carefully crafted works of art. There is wiggle room to make them "easier", but only so much due to the nature of the gameplay.

Additionally, the Elden Ring does have many mechanics - coop especially, to make it much more approachable to players who have struggled with previous entries in the series. I rarely seem people who complain about people who complain about the difficulty of the game discuss or engage with these systems.

Finally, i think there's a serious disconnect in the nature of the dark souls gameplay loop. You're supposed to die a whole lot. Every time you fight thrugh an area you have a chance for drops, you gain xp, and if you're paying attention you're figuring out the best path through the area in hopes of getting further next time. That process - advancing, learning, getting xp, dying, and repeating, is the core gameplay loop. If you don't enjoy that you likely won't have fun with the game.

I think a great deal of bad faith has accumulated - many people complaining about "git gud" don't seem to actually be interested in the game, only using it as a whipping boy for complaints about games gatekeeping difficulty. But dark souls and elden ring are generally the only games in the vast sea of available games discussed in this manner. It's these particular games that are essentially their own niche genre that peopke continue to be mad about over a decade after Dark Souls, despite each subsequent game having more features to make the games accessible to more people.

Accordingg to an interview i read he only provided some broad sketches early on in the game's development.