In Defense of Elden Ring's Boss Design...

i know it's become a meme for me to have like a five second intro and then just hop right into the meat of the video but i feel like this topic in particular needs to be done at least some justice i need to at least try you know when i had around 100 hours in the game i first made a statement in one of my earlier eldering videos that my favorite part of the game was the boss battles 1500 hours later most of which i've been spending in offline mode because i have way too many mods installed but that's beside the point that's a judgement i still stand by believe it or not elden ring makes it a point to give these bigger bosses an element of heroism to them and it's pretty easy to pick up on that when you're up against the demigod like radon or morgot it feels like you're fighting against someone who's just as determined as you are to win even the game's notoriously repetitive bosses like the knights cavalry or even worse the tree spirits still added to the game's world building in my opinion they didn't really make much sense as dungeon or cave bosses simply because you were already expecting a boss that would be waiting for you at the end and seeing something you already fought five times before can really take away from the surprise at the end of the dungeon but when you just saw a field boss out in the open somewhere just minding its own business it kind of felt like another discovery to me in the same way you discover a secret item or an illusory wall or something i'm not gonna sit here and pretend that elven ring is an experience without its blemishes and that it's perfectly balanced with no flaws at all nor am i trying to earn anyone's respect by acting like i'm taking some huge risk just because i'm giving the game some reasonable criticism i'm doing this video because i've watched the exact same videos on this topic that a lot of you probably have and i found myself having slight qualms and disagreements with just about all of them so i'm going to take a swing at this and see where it lands me howland rings bosses were designed to be special insofar as they follow a design philosophy that no other souls game has the bosses have this grand sense of godliness to them and this is all but confirmed with a quote that's been well in circulation stating that elden rings bosses are not just creatures and horrible monsters but have an element of heroism and mythology to them the major drawback to this is of course what a lot of people have experienced hand with the game by now most endgame bosses and even some in the early game are designed to be what a lot would argue as mechanically tedious in order for their in-game presence to accurately match their lore significance as demigods confrontations with even standard enemies feel much more impactful and cinematic than they ever have i don't think it's anything revolutionary by now to say that elden rings combat is very much unlike dark souls and if you head into it with a dark soul state of mind the game is likely to teach you an extremely harsh lesson you got jumps you got counter attacks you got dodges well you had dodges in the original dark so you you've never not had dodging and dark souls holy [ __ ] stop going off script rusty you're [ __ ] [ __ ] one of the largest discrepancies is elven rings introduction of summons the player's ability to call forth spirits in certain locations to help them out in battle some spirits don't differ too much from others but certain spirits have very unique talents and strengths as well as very glaring weaknesses that can be hard countered in certain fights this creates a phenomenon where the act of summoning spirits even weaker ones often will trivialize most bosses into being mere walks in the park yet playing through the game without them and trying to get by with a normal build is almost certainly setting yourself up for failure once you hit the late game difficulty spike so the tl dr of this is essentially elden ring seems to offer you the ultimate choice between journalism mode and gamer godhood with very very little room in between and a lot of the arguments that criticize the late games boss design i think stems from the fact that fromsoft really prioritized the cinematic heroism of these bosses without considering the in-game complications that decision would come with bosses like malekith and melania are about as formidable as they come in the game but you do risk some potentially unwanted side effects when you start looking at ways to communicate their strength in more ways than just lore having bosses brandish this strength in game prioritizes sentiments like oh my god look at how cool that attack was while actually balancing said attack falls to the wayside and can result in a very tedious fight that does nothing but discomfort the player instead of feel cool of course you can dodge melania's waterfowl attack there are hundreds of videos up on youtube that all have their own methods for doing so but think back to how excruciating this fight was on your first playthrough when no one yet had this knowledge and the few that did you didn't dare go searching for because you would be risking in-game spoilers obviously it's just not knowledge you had access to fast forward two weeks later and you found out that ashes of war like bloodhound step can all but trivialize this entire attack by giving you so much mobility that you can just l2 backwards a couple times and immediately not have to worry about being in range mog's blood ritual attack is an even more egregious example of this where his transition into phase 2 has absolutely zero practical counters and the only way you can seemingly bypass it is to simply bring out your estus and just hope you can get in heels faster than he chews up your health it's a completely inescapable attack with unlimited range and the only way to deal with it is to go and grab the purifying crystal tear and you can literally just walk right through it taking negligible damage at best the only counter the game gives you against blood ritual and it is a god damn tactical nuke so obviously we're running into some problems here more than a few have expressed disagreement on how or why exactly fromsoft chose this design philosophy but i have reason to believe this wasn't them falling into some game design trap door or something their decision to make the bosses like this was a hundred percent intentional elden ring is a cinematic game with cinematic bosses this much we've established i feel like it's also part of why half of sud bosses take their sweet god damn time revving up all their haymaker attacks and the other half can just activate blender mode and spam a 20-hit combo at you with no hope of escape as is agreed upon by i think most of us by now this game is teaching you one critical lesson which is you don't have to do this right now explore go and take things in doing this likely means you'll uncover some ruins or a dungeon and oh look a space katana three times more powerful than what i was using low stat requirements and the weapon art could be patented by craft for all these dogs i'm choosing oh what's this thing why am i invisible when i dash now and why do i move twice as fast and have like three times as many iframes now why the [ __ ] does this only cost seven fp i'm getting to the point point time here's the point here it is alden ring rewards players who explore in the same way dark souls rewards players who persevere it's really as simple as that the reason you're finding so much difficulty going after in-game bosses with a regular weapon and none of the game's sick moves is because sticking through it to the end with nothing but your trusty crusty broadsword is precisely what the game is discouraging sure waterfowl might be a tad busted as far as evasion goes sure mog's blood ritual only has one counter in the whole game and you have to jump through a bunch of weird hoops to get to it but looking at the variety of different tools at the disposal of the player most of which you can easily obtain without fighting a single demigod it's clear the game does its best to give you as many options as it can to level the playing field without ever necessitating the use of spirit summons or even bloodhound step for that matter in the same way older dark souls games rewarded you with the pride of finally knocking down that boss sized brick wall elden ring rewards you with the pride of finally figuring out that weird boss moveset and what abilities or ashes of war counter it alden ring is a game that prioritizes exploration more so than any other from soft game to date so what better incentive is there to go out and find all these weapons and tools than for you to discover this extremely practical use for it five or so hours later and i obviously understand the massive amount of players that don't particularly find this kind of design fun or rewarding but i think as discussions continue players will also find more uses for different skills and abilities that work well against certain bosses which will strengthen the argument that you don't have to answer every single late game boss with something as broken as bloodhound step or moonvale or rivers of blood or whatever the community hate anchor is this week against melania i always favored a strength faith build focused around blasphemous blade and a shield in my offhand with the barricade shield ash ready to go in case she was right on top of me and decided to pop waterfowl in my experience using magic seems to work against you because it locks you into this very passive playstyle and so whenever melania decides it's time to close distance you don't really have anything you can respond with vow of the indomitable i found to be downright excellent against estelle's grab attack during his second phase but it still requires a little bit of timing so it doesn't feel too broken or unfair in favor of the player if i'm using this ash of war vs estelle it's going to be specifically used against this very attack even malekith has a few tricks in his fight that you can take advantage of without surrendering completely to the easiest solution and just going for the blasphemous claw ashes of war like stormwall and stormcaller can block physical projectiles it tells you this in the description and it's pretty easy to make the connection that you can block arrows and bolts with these skills physical projectiles includes a bit more than just ammunition as stormwall can also deflect the bestial sling incantation used by the clergyman before his transformation into malekath it's little discoveries like this that give you these unique feelings of triumph whenever you pick up this obscure weapon or ability and then make the connection much later on that it can be used in this specific moment to your benefit let's take rikerd for instance reichard isn't nearly as late game as the others we've discussed but i think the way the game handles the fight is a perfect example of what i'm trying to explain it's no secret that reichard is essentially a show floor for how fromsoft has improved the yorm fight from dark souls 3. in ds3 the fight against yorm was extremely one-sided depending on whether or not you picked up the storm ruler if you fought him without the storm ruler you were looking at a 10-minute endurance run on your hands where any combo of attacks that caught you at a bad time would almost certainly kill you pick up the storm ruler and the entire fight is minimized down to hit him five times easy peasy here's a shitload of souls you win the serpent hunter spear feels less like a joker card that just scoffs at anything the boss can throw at you and more like a tool that levels the playing field against a boss that is in all cases and on all fronts written to be stronger than you even with the spear taking him down still requires good knowledge of how alden rings combat works the serpent hunter doesn't make rikerd an easy mode boss like the storm ruler did with yorm because it's not there to cheese him and win the fight and go home and call it a day it's there to allow you to challenge him as an equal do i think the late game spikes are a bit ridiculous yes absolutely i don't think most people would try and contest that but the game also seems aware of the problem it's created and does its best to counteract it with the solutions i've explained the purifying crystal tear doesn't beat mog for you his second phase is still no joke and you're more than likely fighting him with two-thirds of his hp because blood ritual can still heal him and of course it's no coincidence that margaret shackle works just as well on morgot yet in either fight you can only use it twice before the item gives out and when you inevitably find out that morgot's second phase negates the use of the shackle entirely it's a moment that's made all the more special blasphemous claw against malakath there you go enough said i don't think it's completely honest to say this is a fault in the game's design with the way they were making the game the game seems to guide the player in the direction of using items like this to force a level of fairness in fights against foes that are otherwise virtually unfuck-withable and i've gone this entire video without recommending dual frostbite weapons a single time regarding the game's repeating bosses i thought some of them were fine i guess i definitely thought some were less egregious than others i got used to seeing field bosses like the knights cavalries pop up and immediately thinking oh hey that guy has a new ash of war i can try out i got used to seeing the game's repeat bosses as the items they were potentially carrying and i know that's probably copium but that's the only justification i can think of as to why it didn't seem to bother me that badly if i hadn't ended up getting some sort of recompense for all the carbon copy field bosses i was taking down i probably would have focused more on the fact that i'm currently on my 10th erd tree avatar and i'm practically scraping crucible knights out of the grille of my honda at this point a lot of bosses being reused as remixed variants for later ones down the road didn't actually bother me that much i don't know seeing the draconic tree sentinel pull out a red lightning hammer and watching his horse shoot fireballs at me was a nice treat that i wasn't expecting i felt like i was going into battle kind of knowing what to expect only for those expectations to be subverted with an entirely new moveset in addition to the moveset on the regular sentinel boss other variants include the death birds and their distinct lack of that particular second phase that comes with facing the death right birds some iterations are less exciting like the archery avatars sometimes having a butt bounce maneuver that spreads scarlet rot everywhere and the night cavalries are so boring they don't even have a second phase you just kill them and sometimes they even do that themselves because they can just walk off cliffs and [ __ ] and to me this is essentially eldering's answer to the ultimate question of well we just made this giant open world game so now what the hell do we put in it i think it's been pretty clearly communicated for years that one of the most appreciated staples of the souls games are its boss fights you have characters like artorius ludwig ishin they're all so respected by the community that even years down the road the memories of these bosses are still going to be as clear as day fromsoft isn't tone deaf they know what we want to see and i feel like that's what led to their decision to ultimately triple perhaps even quadruple down on the amount of boss encounters but having over 150 completely unique boss fights is really straddling the line of being unrealistic in terms of asset usage and if they actually devoted the proper amount of time and resources to giving us that experience then i mean who's really to say that securo would have even seen the light of day so instead they decided it would be much easier to have a bunch of similar looking bosses with slight tweaks and varied movesets that demand slightly different tactics from the player and going out and finding these obscure weapons like death's poker or the gargoyle's blackblade is kinda what incentivizes us to actually go out and hunt them all down the best items in elden ring aren't hidden somewhere in a tomb that requires solving a puzzle they're guarded by these big 20 foot tall meat heads daring you to go through them well i mean i guess some of them are guarded by puzzles but usually not the good ones this is also a huge reason why alvin ring decided to do away with any sort of weapon durability system because it knew you were going to be doing a whole lot of fighting but putting players in this position of constantly wondering whether or not going after a boss is worth it when your weapon is about to break would obviously be unideal because you just found this cool dragon boss that probably has a really awesome weapon but instead of that discovery feeling rewarding or empowering all it would do is remind you that your weapon is in poor condition and if you think about the amount of items and treasures that are hidden behind so many boss fights i can only imagine how inconvenient it would have been had elden ring actually incorporated some sort of durability system like this if you have that system in place the incentive of going out and finding all these bosses and getting these items doesn't have nearly the same amount of gratification to it as for the duo fights i think most of it came down to the fact that a lot of the duo encounters had two variants of the same boss with their own weapons or tactics i'm willing to admit giving a crystallion a spear instead of a staff isn't exactly going the extra mile but i also feel like addressing them as the exact same boss is being a bit dishonest the whole idea of elden rings duo fights and and the whole idea of duo fights in souls in general is that one boss is typically more aggressive and melee focused while the other is privy to hanging back and poking you with magic and ranged attacks and whatnot most of the duo fights anyways don't don't you worry we'll get to those guys later the double pharah missoula beast encounter in dragon ball cave in caled is another example of this where one wields a giant cleaver and the second stays back and throws ring blades at you these examples are relatively simple and none of these fights are the most memorable in the game but the whole idea of it is there you can see it on paper the valiant gargoyles fight in nocron is probably one of the better examples seeing how one wields a halberd and sword and the other wields a twin blade and an axe not only do these two have completely different move sets but either of them at any moment can choose to switch to their sidearm introducing a whole bunch of additional layers to what is at its core just another repeat encounter what makes this so different from other duo fights however is that both of the gargoyles are in a constant go mode and will attack you aggressively sometimes regardless of what the other is even doing so when you see an opening being made when one of the gargoyles decides to go for the poison breath attack and breathe down on the floor it makes that combat opening all the more valuable so even though these are enemies you have fought before introducing variants of the same boss can sometimes make a huge difference in the tactics you employ as the player your strategy will also depend a lot on how you've built your character up to this point you can choose to go full attack mode on the ranged boss and get that one out of the way as soon as possible or you can play defense and let the more aggressive variant come to you so you can take that time studying your potential attack windows you can use your own ranged attacks and magic against an aggressive boss while kiting around its attacks so on so forth one creative decision that did really irk me was when i started seeing bosses that were special solely because of their uniqueness being copied into dungeons and ever jails and whatnot i don't know what the [ __ ] a goad freud is or what his significance is to the game's lore but i assure you it isn't significant enough to give him his own boss fight if all he is is just a shittier godric with no second face and i'm just gonna be honest with this one when i found a whole second estelle just hanging out somewhere in a random dungeon i got i got really close to just uninstalling the game like that that one struck a nerf that one pissed me off the point has been brought up quite a bit amongst players that elden ring doesn't handle 2v1 fights the same way that past souls iterations have done so in the past and whereas i would argue that the same duo fight design is still there it just isn't being implemented in ways that were as spectacular as other games before it as long as one is melee and the other is ranged then that fight's finished and we can move on to the next cave despite the less spectacular use of this design you can still see it at work which makes the godskin duo fight perhaps the game's most infamous boss even more egregious because it takes that tried and true blueprint and essentially wipes its ass with it both halves of the duo have the same black flame fireball attack that will almost definitely come out whenever you're further than three feet away from either of them the noble has a flame pillar attack that's basically just a shitty zoning spell they both attack at the same pace and intensity which means getting into a melee scuffle with one almost always leaves you vulnerable to the other in a way that's discomforting and awkward i find myself getting in my two tap and then instantly rolling out of the way anticipating a fireball from the other guy that doesn't even come half the time it's flawed in every way i can think of it shares the duo aggression of the valiant gargoyle fight but without any of the varied movesets that can make that fight even somewhat interesting yes one has a twin blade and the other has a thrusting sword that much is true but the fact that they both attack you at the same tempo makes the two different move sets seem even more similar and it just compresses them all into one big move set that you have to keep track of neither the apostle nor the noble specialize in any particular kind of combat that complements the other not even as simple as one is melee and the other is ranged but instead they're both just a little bit of melee and a little bit of range it's just too foreskin wearing [ __ ] coming after me with a toothpick and a bottle opener i find myself comparing this a lot to the ornstein and smo fight in dark souls 1 simply because how could you not and one massive thing that's missing from this fight that honestly could have redeemed it a little is that particular lack of a second phase when you kill one of them too early that's one of the most memorable moments of the entire ornstein and smo fight take out one of them and whoever's left standing absorbs the power of the other creating a whole new boss with a souped-up moveset that can engage the player in many different ways leaving very little room to attack but what happens here is you take out one of them the other guy just fumbles around like a [ __ ] for a few seconds not knowing what to do and then just summons his friend back like he has a goddamn spirit bell of his own a little cheese ball taking down both of them at once is an even more hilarious affair where the arena just stays empty for a few awkward seconds not even the game can be [ __ ] to stay awake for this fight and then one of them just miraculously returns from the ashes reborn only instead of a phoenix it's a walking paper mache sculpture with a kitchen utensil as a sword why did this idea not make it into the fight like that's not a rhetorical question i'm genuinely curious i am opening the floor for discussion because with all the similarities this fight shares with ornstein and smo they had to have at least considered it at some point wasn't this game designed under the philosophy of heroism and spectacle this is the one thing i would have expected them to keep in yeah i know what i titled this video i'm not even gonna try and defend this i think that's the largest gripe people have with most of elven rings duo fights not just the fact that there are 50 different variants you have to spend time discovering and fighting but the fact that there were so many creative avenues to make these fights fun and cool that i think just didn't or i guess maybe couldn't get explored none of the dual fights feel all that spectacular or original and that's honestly a major problem when you've structured your bosses around being heroic and grand and that's how you know i'm ending the video soon because i'm sighing and reflecting on everything i said at the end of the day the game has structured a lot of its bosses around the resources you find in the world and if you didn't personally find those encounters fun for the reasons i've explained then well i mean all i can really say is i did this game made some pretty uh questionable creative decisions regarding some duo fights and especially that duo fight i don't know maybe i just played skyrim too much when i was in high school and i just became this huge coomer for anything to do with open world titles i also don't have any ideas for an outro so i guess some things are just doomed to never change [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Rusty.

Views: 439,777

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Id: 3-THxzTHdB4

Length: 24min 37sec (1477 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 15 2022