Very simply, no other game series does the "mastery" thing so well. The game is both wide and deep, and even though there's superficially a leveling system, it won't save you if you can't actually play.
This raises some accessability issues, definitely. I'd love to see Fromsoft games take that challenge on next. (Or another studio, there are plenty of great Souls-like games out there.) Especially as I'm getting older, I definitely feel like I have a lot more "knocking the rust off" to do when I start up each new Soulslike game before I'm competent enough to play well.
But once I'm in the zone, once I've achieved that mastery, enemies that I had previously been decrying as "absolute bullshit, what the hell am I even supposed to DO about them?", I'm just carving through casually, while theorizing in my head what stats I'm going to raise at the next level up or where I should head next.
At least for me, there's no other game series that does that quite so well.
> This raises some accessability issues, definitely. I'd love to see Fromsoft games take that challenge on next.
> Especially as I'm getting older, I definitely feel like I have a lot more "knocking the rust off" to do...
I would definitely appreciate novel takes on accessible mastery. I likely [1] have visual memory (immediate + delayed), subtle but measurable visual motor difficulties, and ADHD:I. Having zeitgeist games feel so thoroughly inaccessible is alienating.
One thing that feels like it helps (no concrete data, placebos and all that...) is high refresh rates. My guess is that it frees my visual memory from being used for interpolation. Ironically, From Software seem almost antagonistic to providing this.
[1] Measured definitively ~15 years ago; who knows what's happened since then.
Why that sounds very familiar. I'll have to see what I can do about increasing refresh rates, seeing if that helps.
Weirdly, what I've found helps is restarting games. Like, play 2-3 hours, go offline for a day, then come back and replay those 2-3 hours. I find I have a lot less "newness" fighting for attention, and my subconscious has had time to assimilate a lot of it subconsciously, and then I have a much better "second play" experience, and then I can continue on happily after that.
Also, same tactic for boss fights. Sometimes I'll be stuck on a boss for an hour or so, and all I really need to do is go to sleep and try again tomorrow. I actually spent like 1.5h on a miniboss in the first major castle, then the next day, came back and beat him first try. Feels bad to set it down, feels great to smash through that barrier later.
Couldn't have said it better myself. I got into Dark Souls 3 last year and have only fallen in love more and more with the genre. Like many, I absolutely hated it at first, but as time went on I started to "get" it. Now I don't really have any interest in playing anything else, including previous favorites like Breath of the Wild and Skyrim.
At this point the only (Souls-like) From game I haven't played is Sekiro.
This raises some accessability issues, definitely. I'd love to see Fromsoft games take that challenge on next. (Or another studio, there are plenty of great Souls-like games out there.) Especially as I'm getting older, I definitely feel like I have a lot more "knocking the rust off" to do when I start up each new Soulslike game before I'm competent enough to play well.
But once I'm in the zone, once I've achieved that mastery, enemies that I had previously been decrying as "absolute bullshit, what the hell am I even supposed to DO about them?", I'm just carving through casually, while theorizing in my head what stats I'm going to raise at the next level up or where I should head next.
At least for me, there's no other game series that does that quite so well.