am I interpreting it properly
Souls-like is defined by the need to decide between attacking, blocking, dodging or parrying. With the additional factor of attacks having a fixed commitment to the attack animation that leaves you vulnerable and likely to get hit if you press it at the wrong time.
It’s mostly just 2D fighting game combat translated into 3D with a lock on targeting system.
This is spot on. I like fighting games and I after playing a bunch of fighting games I will be better at the spacing and timing in a souls game.
It’s mostly just 2D fighting game combat translated into 3D with a lock on targeting system.
fighting games are fast tho. if a fighting game had souls combat it would be boring af
fighting games are fast tho
Not Soul Calibur (the WORST soulslike)
Transcending history and the world, a tale of souls and swords, eternally retold
I am incredibly upset that this emoji requires a user to misspell “Worf”
Super Smash Bros - the original Souls-like game
smash bros is intentionally designed to be the least like fighting games it can be, i think sakurai has some youtube videos about the design concepts.
Yeah, it’s not a fighter, it’s a Souls-like
But there are slow fighting games like Samurai Shodown, Two-strikes, Divekick and Footsies. Two-strikes looks sick even.
dive kick isn’t especially slow. souls bosses makes samshow look zippy.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Maybe this explains it, I neither enjoy 2D fighting games nor ‘Souls-like’ combat.
According to the Skyrim modding community, Souls-like combat means:
-You have a camera lock on function
-You have a dodge or roll button
-You have ‘attack commitments’ that hold the player and enemies in place during attacks to make the attacks feel more weighty
You have slightly more optional aspects like having weapons with somewhat varied movesets or the punishing difficulty but as far as changing Skyrim’s combat into a Souls-like, those seem to be the defining traits
According to this definition, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is souls like
I suppose the jump attack is pretty committal but the attacks in OoT are pretty quick
Try playing with only three hearts and only using the Biggoron sword. It is absolutely a Soulslike.
Sure fine ok
Well more like Souls games are Zelda likes but yeah
need more hya!! hup! hyaah!!! in souls likes tbh
At least we get ouuuughghhh to make up for it
I’m playing Demon’s Souls now and it really feels like a Zelda game, but edgier, more RPG and with a Stamina bar. In particular because of the many gimmick bosses.
Then Dark Souls 1 and onwards started being more and more of just an Action game, until DS3 (or Bloodborne had I played it) where it’s an action game first. Which is also good. Just different.
I actually think Zelda and Dark Souls are almost the same game so unironically yes. Dark Souls 2 is basically just one giant Zelda dungeon
I want to see the “I’m a gaming badass souls-like hard game master” types try Zelda 2 for the NES on original hardware, within a single weekend like a proper rental experience. No emulation save states. No internet guides. Original controller. No Game Genie. They play it the way we elder millennials played it. Let’s see how good they really are.
I love Souls games and think Zelda II is awesome. I think I liked Zelda II more than Elden Ring tbh
No cheese-crouch-stabbing Shadow Link.
Nah cheesing the bosses is a key part of the Dark Souls experience, you can’t take that away from them for Zelda. Are you even a true Souls fan if you haven’t tricked Iron Golem into falling off the side?
Back when Demon/Dark Souls were new I remember people making this comparison explicitly. The only thing they don’t have compared to Z-targeting Zelda is the gadgets, but they add in a lot of depth to the sword stuff that Zelda doesn’t.
You have ‘attack commitments’ that hold the player and enemies in place during attacks to make the attacks feel more weighty
Imo the point of this isn’t how the game feels, feel is just a byproduct. The point is to have what some might describe as more consequential positioning and decision making with attacks, because you can’t just swivel mid-animation to hit someone who got around the initial path of your attack.
you can’t do that in a fighting game either but fighting games manage to feel fast. slow in souls combat is slow like if everything was the 35 frame charge unblockables in soul calibur
Fighting games aren’t that functional a comparison because mobility works completely differently in them.
it’s probably closest to arena fighters. i’m sure there’s some no-budget indie arena fighter i’ve never heard of that plays like whatever souls game the devs liked the most.
Ah yeah you’re right, the better explanation is that adding attack commitment allows the Souls-like dodge rolling to function at all. In base game Skyrim enemies will swivel 180 degrees to track you during an attack, and your intended way of dodging them is fully backing away and then rushing back in again while you’re playing the game in first person.
Combat is mostly rolling.
I appropriated your gag. Sorry, comrade.
but also that if you’re bad at it you’re dead immediately, right
And die and die and die and die and-
If you put a moderate amount of stats into HP most attacks do not kill you in one shot. Smaller enemies hardly ever have ridiculous damage attacks if you’re not taken by surprise.
There are bosses and enemies that ARE very punishing but no, I’m not that great at them and I’m not always dead.
everytime i tune into a stream where someone is playing one of these games they are just rolling around on the ground like wtf are you doing just play sanic the gofer or whatever if you want to roll into a ball and move around on the floor
lol that’s me, i’m the one who rolls :^)
enjoy your grimdark sanic-like i guess
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No, and even superficial scrutiny demonstrates that that’s not the case.
I’m so unfathomably sick of listening to people moan and moan about soulslikes.
Yes, the fanbase is rancid. Yes, the subgenre is wildly overrepresented and trend-chasing games are often designed in a very formulaic way and are liable to suck, as always. These complaints are fair game.
But very often people go several steps further because they have so much resentment over these facts that they extend this to attacking a serviceable genre on absurd grounds and always interjecting how much they hate it and how superior they are to it in every discussion about it. I don’t really care for shoot-em-ups. Do you know what I do? Move on with my fucking life instead of writing dissertations about how they are fake and evil games and dropping into every shmup conversation to tell them how much it sucks.
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I didn’t deride shmups, I merely said I don’t like them. I think it’s ridiculous to try to make up rules about why this or that video game isn’t actually a video game short of there literally not being such a thing as player choice.
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When minecraft first came out there was a big discussion online and offline about whether it was technically a game. There was no ender dragon or netherworld or ‘bosses’ to speak of. There were no objectives, quests, storylines… All you do is mine and craft. There’s no way to win or lose or any ingame reason to play beyond mine and craft.
I mention this to say that trying to define a videogame is a fool’s errand
Diogenes, holding up a floppy disk containing the 1993 “Interference” scene demo (by Sanity) for the Amiga:
“Behold, a video game!”
Ninja edit: holy shit, someone captured it for YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWYRIV8YVdk
This is the same machine whose platform died off because its absurd network-of-coprocessors-driven-by-an-MC68000 (or 68EC020) meant that it couldn’t run Wolfenstein 3D for shit, let alone Doom
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I think it’s a game
early minecraft or the uninteractive music video?
Everything
i don’t understand how you hope to ever have a productive discussion on or think nontrivial thoughts about a category with no boundaries.
just be anti-noun at that point.
I’m just not interested in deciding what a game is or isn’t.
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I was always on the team of ‘everything is a game who cares’ so yeah for sure.
Is lego a game, though? More of a craft
I mention this to say that trying to define a videogame is a fool’s errand
i would say instead that there’s room for other kinds of art that might use the same interfaces that aren’t games but they’re still valid pursuits. A virtual tour of a museum where you move the point of view around in 3D space like an FPS probably isn’t a game but it draws on game literacy for the interface and you could sell it on game consoles.
a box of lego isn’t a game but you can play a game with it if you invent objectives and constraints etc.
A virtual tour of a museum where you move the point of view around in 3D space like an FPS probably isn’t a game
There’s a whole genre of game called "walking simulator " where this is exactly the gameplay maybe interacting with a button or something
i’m aware, you can simplify even more though and have all the points of interest available from the beginning and no tracking of what you looked at and then it’s much more clear that the thing i’m talking about isn’t a game at all and isn’t presented as a game.
a slideshow isn’t a motion picture, but nobody is weird about it. nobody would try to claim 50 still images you click through is a movie and nobody would smear a presentation by saying it isn’t one.
Don’t bring arcade games into this. You’re playing a dangerous game and you’re not guaranteed to win if you besmirch the elegance of the arcade.
That said, it fucking sucks as people saw the elegant design of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls with the cool ways they tied the in-game story and the game mechanics together, the extremely good world design and level design, the open-ended ‘solve the problem however you can’ RPG design, the innovative way to incorporate and rejuvenate once-boring multiplayer and story-telling techniques, and instead of being inspired to do anything cool with those or being inspired to change their thoughts on games they just went “I fucking love i-frame dodge rolls and big bosses and +12% stagger damage amulet equips”.
I only played Elden Ring but in that game, if you use spears you can see enough of the enemies that you can read their intent = you don’t need to memorize stuff.
Also if you watch the very proficient (not me) in those games, they don’t roll much. They sprint and revolve around the enemies until they are in recovery poses and then go in.
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you can choose to describe any genre of game in such a reductive way as to make it sound objectively unfun
not my beloved DotA 2
You’re just describing any action game. Or even turn based games. Or even real life games. Just say you hate games.
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But… Souls enemies don’t do the same thing every time, at least FromSoft’s. There’s fairly few instances where you can manipulate the RNG into one predictable attack. I WISH I could see when the boss is going to use that one stupid attack, but I can’t. I for one think Souls has one of the more* complex RPG systems (for an action game first - obviously, JRPGs like E33 beat it, but have extremely basic action) when you factor in the different weapon speeds and range, armor/roll/weight ranges, changing which attacks you can counter and how, a TON of varied magic (that vets hate because it’s fun I guess), shields (and shield pokes, my beloved), stat distribution and multiple damage types if your build allows it. Even in melee focused runs, I upgrade different weapons to change between depending on situation.
If you just take your straight sword or ultra sword and use nothing else, like the stereotypical Souls player does, then the games are pretty basic for action games. Which is probably why a lot of players think Sekiro is much better, because they focused on action only. But most From games aren’t just action, they are RPGs too.
Having a high damage to health ratio is common but not remotely essential, while people would consider having stamina much more important for the character of the genre because it introduces resource management. Another common example of resource management is having a heal with a limited number of uses that is restored at checkpoints. There’s also usually a mechanic where when certain conditions are met, you can go to the enemy and do a much stronger attack with a canned joint animation between attacker and recipient (backstabbing and whatever the other one is called in DS are like this).
There are also other structural aspects of the game outside of the immediate combat, like the existence of those checkpoints that restore health and certain resources, certain elements of the world design (centered on shortcuts and unlocking doors, usually), the bloodstained mechanic, the soapstone mechanics for letting players leave each other messages, and a few other things.
These days souls like combat means basically anything. Action RPG? Souls like. Dodging and parrying mechanics? Soulslike. Drop your items on death? Soulslike. I recall a review of Expedition 33 that called the combat soulslike which is absolutely ridiculous.
The word has become like the word rogue like in that it is so overloaded it’s essentially meaningless
to me there is nothing quite like dark souls 1. even later iterations are “souls like” (while still being their own thing)
to me its a game where the stakes are relatively low; you can die a lot and it doesn’t really matter. You just have to learn the movesets of the bosses / enemies, and however long it takes you to execute damage within the windows given. It requires a lot of patience, memorization, and some motor skill effort depending on what you’re trying to do. It’s difficulty means that any hardship you overcome feels well deserved and rewarding. You can grind and get levels / gear that helps, or go bare bones. While the game is punishing, and does have some “gotcha!” moments (such as saying “no” to a cat) you can always work to overcome it. I don’t think the developers intended to be cruel or to punish one too much.
And then there is ds1 pvp which I hear is like starting all over again and overcoming a wall, but is unique in it’s delivery.
really, when other games say “soulslike” I think they just mean their game is difficult and requires memorizing the movesets of bosses. Hades 1-2 has some aspects of this but it’s not exactly the same. But dying has different consequences, starting over from the very beginning.
to me its a game where the stakes are relatively low; you can die a lot and it doesn’t really matter.
That’s the big key part, right alongside combat loops that are built around getting to iframe/quickly reposition out of attacks or otherwise mitigate them on reaction/prediction. People always incorrectly focus on the difficulty aspect when the important parts are the QoL features like “dying literally does not matter just try again” and the tools it provides for players to overcome challenges in more reactive and streamlined ways than more traditional “just face tank it lmao” or “play cover” or “just run around until the boss sits down and exposes its weakpoint” styles of combat.
I remember losing a bunch of souls in DS3 once and never playing again lol. The dying felt too punishing. Maybe one day I’ll play again, though. It just took so much time to collect all those 😭
For some reason, it really seems like no matter how people try to sell these games to me, I still can’t get over the fact that I’m going to die over and over again. I play games to be rewarded, not punished repeatedly before finally obtaining the small satisfaction of overcoming the thing that killed me 30 times. That just doesn’t feel like a win to me.
I think that is what it is for me, too. I wish I could get what other people get from these games because it really does sound so rewarding. But I have short spurts of playtime available to me.
But, DS games felt like the kind where you really have to be in the zone or rhythm of it, and by the time I warmed up to that point, I had to put the controller down and I had either none or barely any progress in the actual game.
There’s a lot about the souls games I like, but eventually I reach a boss I can’t beat and the rest of the game gets locked behind that one boss; in dark souls 3 that would be the sword dancer boss, a literal gate behind which the rest of the content exists. Her moveset is extremely confusing because it looks very samey and it gets hard to learn what to dodge through.
Also you say ‘dodge and block’, but really it’s just dodge; one thing that’s really awful about these games (maybe just the later ones in the series? I can’t remember how the older ones were in this regard) is that there’s primarily only one way to play it and that’s dodging and maybe parrying; you rarely are able to build your character to be super tanky (so heavy armor + high health); it may be an RPG, but you can’t truly play it the way you want.
I recall back in demons’ souls and dark souls 1, heavy armor and armoring up was entirely viable. In dark souls 1 they even added a steel (iron? stone?) skin pyromancy to add on top of the heavy armor you already had on. I can’t recall if dark souls 2 allowed for that style, and dark souls 3 definitely didn’t. The Havel set USED to be great for boss fights.
Turning into metal is in all the subsequent games too, I’m pretty sure.
There are fundamental aspects of a game where if you don’t like it, you won’t like the game, and you can’t really avoid needing to roll, block, or parry attacks some of the time (though you virtually never need to do any one of them and can often just walk out of harm’s way). If you don’t want to do any single one of those then yeah, playing the game is silly and you’ll have a bad time. That said, there are still lots of other elements to builds, like different types of casting and such, that give it more diversity.
I’ve beaten DS1 without rolling or parrying a single time, just blocking and repositioning, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for everyone, but I thought it was fun.
With those hard-stop bosses I either look up the cheese strategy. Or I just turn on an infinite health cheat. That way I can try and learn the boss without the wasted time of reloading again and again, and then I try doing it for real… and if it’s still too annoying for whatever reason I just kill it with cheats. Promised Consort can go fuck himself, a lame plot twist boss deserves no respect.
I also cheat drop rates up, because I don’t do grinding, and usually infinite materials, because I don’t give a fuck about crafting systems any more. I like that they’re there, but I have better things to do than collect hog butts. If a game starts wasting my time so overtly then I start thinking I should probably just read a book…
Incidentally, the Convergence mod made major changes to items in Elden Ring, by removing drop rates for equipment and just placing them in appropriate locations or as guaranteed drops from appropriate miniboss enemies. I really dig that.
that’s a lot of systems to not engage with
Soulslikes are all about dodging things you don’t want to be hit by, after all.
I beat 2 and 3 as a tank armor slow roll shield build because my buddy was telling me the only way to play is light load rolling
soulslike is when animation priority and when you have a whole lot of animation priority, you get QTE
High stakes and punishing and satisfying to beat
Souls-like just means m “rhythm games with swords and magic instead of dancing and neon shapes”
Fighting is infact a form of dancing
maybe that’s why people have used dance pads to play the game 😁
Now that I have read everyone’s responses I have a few things to add that others haven’t mentioned yet:
I actually very rarely roll in this game, it’s reserved for certain quick manuvering which is not always required, because most of the time I am actually positioning myself to be in the “blind spot” of the enemy.
Parrying and backstabbing is really important. Granted I have skipped parrying and mostly backstab when needed, but if I was patient enough I could easily just one shot many enemies and parry bosses.
The community is actually not very toxic, although it may have that reputation, honestly there are people like that in every popular fandom 😔 griefers, g*mers… but people who cherish this game for it’s anti-fascist sentiments get it. They’re cool people.
The plot of the first game is very vauge and not really explained that much. To me this makes it much more endearing. There is a lot which is implied but not outright said, perhaps leaving it to interpretation. What one might consider the “good” path is a trick, supported by liars (in my view) There are characters who turn out to be shitty. And there are characters who feel like they care about your well being.
Everything in this game that is a boon to you feels precious. There is something about the spirit of resilience in here, and the shared resilience of those who take the journey with you.
Above all: Don’t give up, Skeleton!
Agree
%From what I have seen of the souls community it’s mostly fine too. I only have 2 issues with it.
The Dark Souls 2 fandom is easily the most annoying one. I get that DS2 has been smeared pretty hard and that they feel the need to correct that, but they keep saying it is the greatest thing ever made and every single other souls game is inferior by comparison. Then you go to the other game’s communities and they are almost never talking shit about the other games, but rather talking and enjoying the ones they are a part of. I don’t like to use the term “eternal victim complex” because chuds love using that against actual victims, but it feels appropriate here.
The other issue I have is with the Elden Ring fandom, since they just collectively decided to believe that Miquella is the second coming of Hitler or something of the sort, and I genuinely do not get that. Like I didn’t really dive into the lore, but that is definitely not what I got from that character at all. Also there’s this video essay that I haven’t watched yet, that someone posted here before and I’m sure will make me dislike them even more.
Everything in this game that is a boon to you feels precious. There is something about the spirit of resilience in here, and the shared resilience of those who take the journey with you.
YES!!! There’s an incredible sense of fellowship and comradery these games can provide from those that you only interact once or twice, be it from direct jolly cooperation or from messages left by other players. It’s pretty cool.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Souls-like as a genre implies a certain kind of difficulty design, but games that are not souls-likes can have souls like combat. for example, the newer Assassin’s Creed games have souls like combat, and they aren’t really unforgiving like that. It has more to do with attacks that have slower animations so you can’t just button mash.
This would describe expedition 33: Claire obscura pretty well.
fr lol
