Lies of P - It's like Dark Souls, but

lies of p is a new Souls like where youl as Chap's puppet and it could easily be mistaken for the latest thing made by from software instead this game is made by the most unlikely of developers Neo wiiz and round 8 they so perfectly capture the essence of the Dark Souls series that it feels like the from soft devs are ghost riding under Korean pseudonyms but here's the real twist the lies of pevs not only know from software's Playbook like the back of their hand but they're also able to remix it in ways that will remind you of why you came to love playing Dark Souls games in the first place this is Li of [Music] PE Dark Souls is most known and loved for how it can Captivate you with its amazing bosses combat and of course the world design and L of P delivers all of this and more from Surprise enemies to its darker themes and swamps L ofp masterfully uses all the same tropes and gimmicks of the Soul series while it's unabashedly derivative it's not in a bad way it's a bit of a reminder that these gimmicks and tropes are there and work for a reason but of course the game doesn't solely rely on copying Dark Souls to a te the game also brings a ton of improvements to many of the systems that comes with Souls games with most of these improvements in combat while flas bonfires Souls weapon upgrades and all the other systems is much of what makes up the flavor of a Souls game the combat and the bosses will keep you invested L of P may not hold up to something like Elden ring or dark souls in its map and World design but has some of the best combat and bosses that any Souls game has ever had for combat it's taken the best parts of its predecessors everything from Dark Souls 1 to Elden ring but somehow at the same time it feels distinct from all of them upcoming I'm going to talk about how Li ofp makes a fantastic combat system why it works and how it improves the souls formula but first it's important to be sure that we fully understand the foundational design of combat in a Souls game in order to see how it all comes together the most basic concept of combat in a Souls game is that you're allotted so many mistakes while fighting essentially you can think of your health pull plus your flash and their upgrades as a kind of mistake meter assuming you have enough HP to not get one shot that is the next step is giving players Windows of opportunity where they can attack the enemy while at the same time are safe from getting hit Veterans of fromsoft games know that finding these windows of opportunity and learning how to take advantage of them is a pretty large portion of the difficulty dodging every single attack that a boss throws at you isn't really too difficult but finding places to weave in attacks while also avoiding all the damage is what creates the challenge there also exist moments where you might consider taking damage in order to deal damage often referred to as trading and as a viable strategy in many situations like putting all your stats in HP and just slapping the boss until it dies in the original Dark Souls a good strategy for sure but but not exactly what the core of combat is designed around even in bloodborne where it can be far more beneficial to trade the game isn't built around it instead it's included to give more leeway for mistakes Souls games are truly designed around the idea that all enemy attacks must be avoidable in some way no guaranteed hits this is the entire Foundation of enemy attacks and souls games and enemies must adhere to these rules in order to feel Fair despite Elden ring beginning to deviate on this concept a little bit like MOG it's still mostly true for most of that game although Elden ring does present some serious issues by playing as close as they can on the border of this idea or even though many attacks on Elder ring are technically avoidable they're not all necessarily reasonably avoidable we'll come back to this idea in just a little bit anyways the core philosophy of combat in a Souls game can be easily compressed into the player should be able to find ways to deal damage while also being able to avoid all damage this concept is exactly why we have the insane community of souls players that will do challenge runs like no hit Level one boss fights with the understanding of the core design philosophy of combat in Souls games we can now learn about how each from soft game designs around this idea with their varying combat systems the original Dark Souls is all about using the roll to avoid attacks while blocking with The Shield or using the Parry or viable strategies using the rol as the intended core mechanic of the game ruling in Dark Souls gives you invincibility frames basically meaning you cannot be hit for so many frames during your roll allowing you to roll through enemy attacks such as sword swings and spells this is the main tool that allows players to avoid most of the damage in the game bloodborne imitates Dark Souls but instead of rolling you're given more of a fast Dodge that also has invincibility frames on it it's basically the same idea as the role but it makes the pace of the fights feel much faster sakiro is about parrying attacks the Parry was available in Dark Souls just in a slightly different form essentially you can toss your Shield out at an attack which then counters them and leaves them open for a post or critical hit sakiro Builds on this idea by making it the main tool to avoid damage in the game and and of course making it far easier to pull off pairing in the souls games is much trickier where you have to anticipate an attack with very precise timing These Foolish to while the parry and sakiro is still rather precise it's more about reacting to when exactly you will get hit instead of memorizing a timing it's personally one of my favorite Souls mechanics and it's super rewarding and fun to play around and of course in all of these games you can always just run away from attacks often being a good or even necessary strategy when all else fails this brings us to the ultimate Fusion of all these Concepts L of P which combines all of these ideas into a balanced stance let's take a look at exactly how Li ofp goes about this Li ofp has a Parry or block mechanic that works similarly to the system in sakiro depending on how soon you were able to press block before the attack hits you can either get a normal block or a perfect block one big change from sukir is that Li of P has a much tighter timing for getting a perfect block the window to get a perfect Block in LS of p is only around 8 frames or close to 18 of a second while sakiro is 12 frames the timing is also a bit different in sakiro you're able to Parry even on the same frame and enemy attack strikes but in Li of P you must be sure and press the block before the attack hits making it slightly more of an anticipation game then depending on whether or not your block was perfect it changes how the block will work in the instance of a perfect block you won't take any damage and you'll hardly lose any stamina but this is where things get a bit more interesting when a normal block occurs it will take quite a bit of your stamina and only BL a portion of the damage and instead of taking away HP it will make a part of your health grade out like when you get attacked in bloodborn you can recover this gr Health by Landing an attack or a perfect block meaning it's possible to fail a perfect block but potentially retain all your HP still which is exactly what allows this incredibly tight timing for the Parry to exist and feel fair at the same time while this blocking system is fairly complicated on paper it's really intuitive while playing it feels really good to play with because Li of P adds a great gray area to making mistakes which is a system directly inspired from bloodborne but designed in a much better way bloodborne's gry health system is more designed around giving leeway to making mistakes when looking for Windows of opportunity while L of P system is designed to give leeway to mistakes made when blocking and trying to avoid damage Li ofp masterfully designs gray Health around a different core concept of the game and it makes it even more directly tied to the inherent systems in the combat it makes not getting a perfect block a small Miss but not an unrecoverable one and bloodborne the gr Health would appear after getting hit directly and only last a really short period of time while in L of PE it lingers for quite a while consequently bosses also have this gry health system but it works a bit differently for them boss gry health will slowly recover over time after not being hit for a while forcing you to more frequently interact with the boss learning the perfect block attacks is really fun and really rewarding the gry hell system allows you to try it when not being completely punished for it and not doing well it makes learning to deal with fights by using perfect blocks far more incentivizing and fair despite its difficulty and of course instead of blocking you can simply roll or Dodge through attacks with invincibility frames like in Dark Souls or bloodborne the only stipulation with avoiding damage are Fury attacks enemies will sometimes begin to glow red meaning they will be able to hit you through your invincibility frames and your normal blocks so players must either perfect block the attack or be completely out of the way of it during the enemy's active hitbox window at least until late in the game where you can obtain an item that allows you to have invincibility frames again during these attemps also similar to sakiro and Elden ring all enemies can be staggered although it works a bit differently after landing enough attacks and perfect blocks their health bar will begin to flash white indicating they're now vulnerable to a Charged heavy attack when you land a charge attack while this state is active the enemy will become staggered giving you a window to do massive damage these are very much like the critical stagger attacks you can get on enemies and Elden ring except depending on the enemy it might create a red ring on the ground to stand on to get the attack off learning the system is really awkward at first and I definitely question whether or not it was good for a while but because Landing these attacks feel so satisfying and the window they give you to do damage is huge I think it works incredibly well it makes staggering enemy feel even more rewarding and like you earned it f ofp also includes a special attack system called fables it's a bit similar to the weapon arts in Elden ring you can use these attacks once you have enough energy built up in your Fable meter which can be gained by Landing perfect blocks and deal damage to enemies you can kind of think of this meter as your Mana bar these stable attacks can be anything as simple as much stronger versions of your regular attack to flying around in the air or putting the end of your weapon on a string some weapons even have unique abilities such as changing the weapon's form like a sword to a spear fables add a nice layer to the combat that are fun to think about like when and how to use them in fights like taking advantage of the super armor Fable attacks give to get a guaranteed charge attack to stagger an enemy or just doing a ton of damage all at once with all these Core Concepts in mind we can Now understand how the entire game is balanced around these ways to avoid and deal damage something I found interesting about how they implemented these systems is that you can get through the entire game using only blocks or only Dodges to avoid all damage which might lead you to wonder what's the point of Designing the game around both of the systems if you can get through the entire game using only one of them well there are times it's more beneficial to perfect block and sometimes it's better to roll allowing both systems to have strengths and weaknesses while both still being viable opens up the game to playing out boss fights and many different ways it gives you more opportunities to find what strategies work for you and your current build this is what makes up the foundation of combat in Li ofp in much of what makes it so fantastic to play Let's Take a look to see how this plays out to see it a little more clearly some enemy attacks will have a ton of push back when you block them which can drastically shorten your windows for attacking especially when you're using a big [ __ ] slow ass weapon it's necessary to take advantage of the entire window to get an attack off in these cases it's far more valuable to roll the attack and immediately get position position to be able to hit the enemy this can seem pretty obvious if you're someone who prefers to roll but may be very eye openening if you spent a lot of time in the game relying on guarding instead usually it's the very final attack in the combo that can push you far back so rolling that final attack it can often give you a ton of time to swing your enormous saw ax thing while this might make rolling seem Superior over roll you might not want to roll every attack rolling will take up a lot more stamina overall than getting off a couple perfect guards you might not be able to get a punish off if you wen't out of stamina rolling a huge flurry attack and of course you won't be generating nearly as much stagger by only attacking meaning you might not get as many big windows for huge damage but by incorporating blocking and rolling interchangeably at the right times you can get the Best of Both Worlds by getting massive damage off by finding Windows of opportunity and rolling into it and then also standing your ground and getting perfect blocks to generate stagger learning to take advantage of all the tools you have as well as the intricacies of each boss turns fights into a sort of synchronized dance and is what makes lives of PE feels so good to play while the combat system is amazing in l ofp a good system is nothing without well-designed fights I don't think I've ever felt so good on average when defeating bosses in a game The Challenge given to you is fairly high and really engaging I almost never finished a boss with more than one flask left to my name every single encounter felt like I was on my heels the entire time fighting for my life a big part of what makes the bosses design so well is not like their move sets or anything but they telegraphs nearly every Telegraph feels incredibly clear and feels more fair than any other Souls game I've ever played so even when the boss is rampaging madly towards you and doing a crazy flurry of attacks it somehow feels clear and I can understand what's happening after seeing it even just one time it feels Far and Away better than so many of the bosses of fromsoft has thrown into the ring with me even though these bosses have a lot of similarities Li of P actually gives you the tools to properly deal with what they've thrown at you going back to the idea of these windows of opportunity it's incredibly important to have somewhat clear points of when these are available not every window needs to be obvious but should almost always be clear when a boss is going into resting position resting position is what I like to call the boss's default State this is generally where the enemy can choose to do nearly any attack although the likelihood of some attacks will be based on your current distance most of an enemy's move set can be used out of resting position it also happens to be in general one of the best times to find a window of opportunity even more specifically this window of opportunity exists in the animation the enemy will use to get into resting position so the animation for getting into resting position is kind of your reward for rewarding whatever attacked enemy threw at you and your chance to get back the clarity of resting position in Li of P feels pretty drastic in contrast to Elden ring cographs in Elden ring if you attempt to take advantage of this window even a frame too soon before it starts bosses will either extend their combo or start a new one without fling basically Elden ring bosses are less on a track and respond to attempting to take advantage of them L of P pulls back from this philosophy a bit more while keeping the challenge very high in this section about bosses I'm going to be referencing Elden ring quite a bit more since it's the latest iteration of the Dark Souls formula and lysop succeeds on the aspects that Elder ring fails on Lia almost feels like a response to the many issues that Elder ring has in combat first of all let's recognize some of the major issues that Elder Ring's combat brings so we can more clearly see how liop deviates to diminish these issues bosses in Elden ring have an unfortunate problem where there is a consistent need to memorize their attack patterns which is in large part caused by their attack telegraphs to be fairly unclear as well as near impossible to react to at times it's something that's actually in complete opposition to Li of p in P nearly every attack is reactable meaning memorization is almost never required in order to avoid an attack so if you're nasty enough at the game it's totally possible you could kill these bosses the very first time you encounter them although it is fairly unlikely it is possible I feel like I've said this over and over but I really want to drive this idea home that boss fights even though they are challenging feel incredibly fair in Li of B unlike in in ring where attacks can feel incredibly unfair and cheap from the very first time you encounter them until the very last time let's take a look at a couple of examples of melenia to see what I mean while she is a bit of an extreme example in Elden ring she exhibits the new philosophy of difficulty from soft is bringing to the game very clearly in Phase 2 of Millennia she has an attack where she flies into the air and shoots mirror images of herself flying towards you this mechanic can feel incredibly unfair before you learn how to properly Dodge it and memorize it for one the telegraphs of each image are not clear and can be really difficult to see and some of their attacks happen instantly with little indication the worst lineup is the third and fourth image the third image is a bit of a change up in contrast to the first two and actually has a pretty clear Telegraph but the fourth image comes immediately after with an unreasonable amount of warning especially since it's tough to tell where it even comes from it comes at the same time that you have already chosen to roll the third one making it tough to tell it's even happening it's an incredibly unreasonable ask of the player to react to so you're instead forced to memorize the pattern which is you have to roll immediately after the third image and the fourth one and you're absolutely forced to do this because even more wildly unreasonable is the damage the attack does this is what I mean by attacks feeling unfair in the Elden ring this is not to say you can't take advantage of memorization in L ofp Romeo's flurry is quite valuable to memorize to consistently Dodge it correctly the difference is that it's not necessary to memorize it because it's reactable and you can even live through it if you get hit a few times damage is a huge problem that compounds the issues Elder ring has especially on loses like melenia getting hit by a single one of her attacks and already onshot you or just stagger you enough to guarantee you get hit by the next one essentially one-shotting you this makes learning to fight incredibly more difficult on an already incredibly tough move set to learn something similar Millenia kit that is somehow even worse is her Infamous water fou dance this is probably one of a million complaints about this attack but for those out of the know I'll explain one of the biggest problems with this attack is that it can instantly start from any position Millenia in like if you stagger her or bleed her she can instantly start to move which is horrible for melee players this is also compounded by the fact that the only reasonable way to dodge the attack is by being far enough away from melenia in order to have enough time to run away and not get hit by the first part of it which is incredibly deadly on its own I know there's probably a special few of you out there who are yelling at the screen no but you can totally Dodge it from melee let me solo her does it while there is a way to dodge to move while in melee range of her I don't find it a reasonable way to avoid the damage for one it requires abusing her AI mechanics in ways that is confusing two because it's incredibly difficult to pull off correctly and consistently and lastly it's not something that even some of the best players would be able to figure out on their own in a reasonable amount of time maybe I'm alone in this but if you have to look up a YouTube video to learn how to bug out a boss in order to dodge one of their attacks I think that's an unreasonable thing to ask of the average player anyways this means if you're an average melee player the best way to play around this move is by only staying in melee when you know for certain that she's not about to do the Dan dance if you are in melee range while this attack goes off you cannot safely get far enough away or Dodge through it without getting hit essentially you're not allowed to play in melee as a melee player for the majority of the fight there's nothing necessarily wrong with needing to be out of melee range every now and then for some mechanics but forcing players to do this awkward dance of constantly running away from the boss to make sure they don't get hit by some stupid move that can on-shot you is simply nothing but bad design the worst part of all is that there's a really easy way to make this attack feel Fair while hardly changing how it works the Small Change needed is just adding time to her windup while she's in the air charging the attack they just need to extend it long enough so you have a reasonable amount of time to react and run away from the first part of the dance or simply make the first part of the dance easier to dodge either way this would allow you to actually get to play the game and punish as you normally would without having to do the awkward dance Ive ripped this boss apart a lot and went on a long ran about something not lies of PE but I think this is really important to talk about if melenia didn't have the water fou dance move it would easily be one of my favorite soul Souls fights ever but it's unfortunately soiled by fr's deliberateness in creating difficulty for the sake of difficulty but this is where lies of pet delivers they don't add this ridiculous difficulty for the sake of difficulty in their design it's a huge part of why I came to love Li of PE so much they showed that it's entirely possible to make an incredibly difficult game that also feels Fair leasia swears to protect this Tower leasi is a boss with a lot of similarities in her move set to Millennia she has a lot of flying around and likes to smash her big sword into the ground you while she doesn't have anything similar to the waterf dance thank God she does have a move where she jumps into the sky and shoots things at you although what she shoots is far more reactable and far easier to deal with I actually wish they made this part just a little more challenging but anyway she's fast has a lot of Mix-Ups and was one of the hardest bosses for me to get through in the game and most of this boss feels really fair to do although she has one big issue she has a fury attack that is incredibly fast and not well telegraphed I found this attack really on the edge of the unreasonable and asking way too much of the player since it's a fury attack in the hitbox is huge I'm fairly certain you cannot roll out of the way in time unless you have the badge on so you're forced to perfect block it which is a nightmare I was able to pull off just a few times and if you can do it you get a huge window to fight back the only saving grace of this attack is that it won't on-shot you and she's staggered for long enough after the attack that you can heal up there are a few more moves like this to feel unfair in the game but none of them will do enough damage to kill you in one hit and they generally don't have a follow-up move afterwards it's way more forgiving than something like Elden ring where a boss with a move similar would have certainly had a follow-up move that would kill you in one hit out side of these few moves that are on the border of unreason ability every other move feels completely fair and easy to read to put everything in perspective there are three big reasons why boss fights and Li of P are designed so well one mistakes aren't so punishing that you're forced to restart the fight after getting hit once or twice two telegraphs are incredibly clear and making it so nearly all attacks are reactable and memorization is not necessary and three they are just awesome and fun to play in general they have these big epic moments just like any other from soft game and it feels like a big challenge to overcome with a big feeling of accomplishment after taking a boss down earlier we talked about telegraphs of going into resing position while taking advantage of this animation is useful even more useful can be learning how to take advantage of knowing when a boss is doing the last move of their combo and attacking them before they can even start wring position this becomes near impossible in Elden ring because the mixup are so vast and I think it's a part of why the game can feel extra punishing compared to its previous games and also why it can often feel like you're spending an exhausting amount of time just dodging attacks instead of actually getting to do any other kind of interaction in lies of P enemies don't have nearly the same length of crazy combos or input reading making it way easier to take advantage of this idea liip retains Mix-Ups in this area but have much more clear telegraphs on when the mixup is going to occur while in Elden ring there are no indicators or telegraphs you just have to feel it out leasia has a pretty obvious tell when she's going to do a fake out with one of her moves she has this attack where she slides her sword along the ground and eventually swings it at you but this move has two branches it can go one where she will swing her sword all the way around and go into resting position or one where she cuts it off and will continue her Onslaught I really like like this idea of attacks having these kinds of tells to give you HS on how to play out the fight and makes paying closer attention to what the boss is actually doing valuable information and I think that's cool while telegraphs are generally really well done in lives with Peter do exist some bosses to commit horrible cardinal sins with some unfair [ __ ] there are a few attacks that can also be Fury attacks that are incredibly difficult to react to and require memorization over reaction and even worse at the same time as this Fury attack they can exhibit a similar problem to some bosses in Elden ring where they fly off the screen in the air making it incredibly difficult to see what in the world they even doing with the horrible camera angle you're given some of the offenders of these Fury attacks are unfortunately also some of the best bosses like Saia Simon and nameless puppet all have this issue it's one of the few times Telegraph that attacks are not well done enough which is really strange considering that these are the attacks that should have the best and most clear telegraphs since you're forced to interact with them perfectly and these attacks are close to impossible to get out of the way of meaning if you want to avoid the damage consistently you're forced to perfect block the attacks the only saving graes of all these bad Fury attacks is they don't one shot you I had around 26 levels investing into HP and I could have still survived a ton of these Fury attacks even if I had 20 hp so there was never a time where I felt like I got hit by something and felt it was like way too much damage for the point I was at in the game and also deliberately made sure to not Farm souls and honestly just ran through most of the areas to be sure I didn't overlevel for fights this is a huge breath of fresh air from Elden ring where enemies do far too much damage and can often kill you in one or two hits within the same combo even when you have more than 40 plus points invest into HP and good armor the only reason this is probably the case is because you also do far more damage in other ring so boss fights are typically much shorter and are more about doing your best to never get hit more than once in a single sequence but this makes learning fights and boss move sets feel absolutely horrible it just leads the player to constantly reloading the game when they're trying to progress a fight for the first time lies of P mitigates this ruthlessness by making the player and the boss both do less damage allowing for players to make more mistakes within a shorter period of time and still able to recover from it this however often greatly increases the length of the boss encounter forcing players to be far more consistent over the course of a fight and truly knowing how to properly deal with that boss overall it's a change of pace I'm really fond of and it really forces you to focus and play well for longer stretches and you just spend more time fighting the boss than in a load screen while boss fights and L ofp are satisfying to do and are a ton of fun they have one really unfortunate problem except doing phase one of a boss over and over again gets incredibly boring which is a problem mostly to do in part to to increase the length of boss fights Dark Souls or Elden ring often puts phases of a boss all within a single HP bar but Li ofp essentially throws two entire bosses at you one after the other the swap monster Romeo leasia Simon and nameless puppet all suffer from this problem the difference in difficulty between phase one and two of these fights is a ridiculous Leap Forward I was able to finish phase one of all these bosses within my first three tries of fighting them but getting through Phase 2 alive took me at least an hour for every single one the worst of all being leasia while the first phase of our fight was fun for a while it started to get really boring really fast mostly because the fight was no longer challenging it became more of a 2 to three minute cut scene I had to endure every single single time I went through the boss door although I did have some interesting developments in my first bit of playing this phase over and over again my strategy began to change as I gain Mastery over to fight this boss has a shield on her back that she'll bring out for phase two but you can break it during phase one to make phase two much easier you can also instantly go to phase two if you just break her weapon meaning it's not even necessary for you to do damage on this part of the fight I found that even when I maximized my damage I would still end up just breaking her sword before I could even get enough damage in since I had gone so good at perfectly blocking her attacks I even and just ended up using my stagger attack to only slap her Shield as much as I could while that was cool to figure out I was dreading going back into phase one every single time I died normally I love finding bosses over and over again to get better at it and learn to fight but phase one became a routine instead of learning something and ultimately I was getting really bored of doing to fight just running around and waiting for the boss to attack you is pretty awful but it just made sense to do knowing that any damage I did during this phase was pointless kind of kills all the interesting interaction of boss fights when you aren't incentivized to fight back there is a far better solution to these bosses and separating them into two separate phases these easily could have just been two separate boss encounters with their own boss stories instead making the first phase of each boss just a little more challenging and in keeping the second phase of the boss its own thing as it was and the game would still have been just as challenging while being way more fun I'm having a tough time understanding why exactly they made these boss fights two boss fights one after the other I do have to say it is pretty fun playing through the game again and going through the same Gauntlet but while I was progressing it for the first time I found it horrible and annoying to deal with so I wonder if it would have just been better to keep the bosses separate and add some sort of Boss gaunlet into the game like in sakiro for players like me who have been in the game and want more of that kind of endurance challenge bosses are incredibly well done overall but the separate phases are personally my biggest issue with the game I was simply just not having fun fighting luxasia Phase 1 for the 40th time in a row and I think it really brought down the Vibes of that boss fight though I still think Phase 2 of luxasia is amazing while combat is the largest change that comes with Lop from Dark Souls games still does slightly iterate on some of the systems and creates Knights deviations to make it feel different such as the P organ system they added which is essentially a talent tree it works as a kind of replacement for the flask upgrades like esta shards or a fire keeper soul you can find quartz while running around in crot quartz can be used in a p organ system to gain new powerups and abilities like increasing the amount of flas getting little perks like damage in certain States or in my opinion the most important perk increasing the Stagger window for enemies the vanilla stagger window in this game is incredibly short and probably the largest issue with combat without upgrades if you don't increase it it can feel incredibly tough to find a window in a little time it gives you getting to any me stagger bar to fool and not being able to capitalize on it can feel really lame especially when using a slower weapon getting this perk is absolutely mandatory for making the game feel good and I don't think that's a good thing although if they go too far in the wrong direction such as making the window at full until you're able to get the Stagger off it would cause some serious issues such as making it far too easy to line up staggers to cancel tough mechanics that bosses will do this can feel satisfying to pull off but making it easy to do diminishes both the difficulty of the boss and how good it feels to line up correctly it's a tough balance to find the weapon system in Lys ofp is really interesting and comes with quite a few changes first of all weapons and Lys ofp can be split into a handle and a blade except for special weapons like the umbrella which do not come apart handles typically carry the animation and style the weapon will use to attack as well as the kind of stats it relies on while the blade determines the damage in the speed of the weapon swing and of course both will contribute to the length of the weapon it's a cool system that's fun to play with and creates a huge amount of variety and amount of weapons that exist one of the things that they carry over from Dark Souls that I absolutely loath is to upgrade system of weapons you can find things like tiny night chars but in this game they're called moonstones and dark Covenant moonstones L ofp at least does a much better job of showering you with these resources at more appropriate times but it still feels like I have to choose a specific weapon that I want upgraded and then I'm kind of forced to stick with it as someone who likes to play around with different builds and weapons this is an absolute horror of a system to play with while it's better than dark souls or Elden ring I think a much better system in these games could be implemented than this I have two really good design directions in mind that the system could take with one being designing the Locking of materials behind certain bosses a little better or or simply just having all weapons be on the same level when upgrading these games already lock certain upgrades behind specific resources that you need to progress to a certain point to get this is to lock you out of getting your weapon too strong for the boss you might be at they do this strangely by requiring many of the same material instead they could easily fix this by knowing what max level they would prefer your weapon to be at for a certain boss and then make it so you only need one of that material like a moonstone and keep the new upgrade material locked to the next area and so forth this would make it way easier for them to shower you with the mats you might need to upgrade a weapon without potenti giving you too many resources and have a super overpowered weapon for to place your at in the game all the system really requires is more different kinds of materials to upgrade weapons which might be slightly confusing but it makes it way easier to upgrade multiple weapons or a much simpler system would be instead of upgrading individual weapons all weapons are upgraded at the same time like a universal weapon power level kind of thing this way you can switch to using any weapon that you would prefer at any point as well as keep parts of the current upgrade system intact this can also fix a lot to issues with finding a new weapon lat in game that you might really enjoy or want to try in a real fight but may no longer have the resources available to you to upgrade that weapon without first needing to grind for materials this can also require you to do or find more specific things needed to upgrade your weapons with more intent things that would make it feel more rewarding and like you deserve the upgrade you got like killing a many boss that drops are required material or even an area boss I think either of these systems would be a huge improvement over the current situation allowing you to more easily swap between different weapons and try new things throughout the game instead of being kind of stuck with only one or two weapons round eight and Neo have some catching up to do in their map and World design but I think overall they've done a really fantastic job personally I think the combat and systems of these games overshadow everything else so if the combat of a Souls game isn't good then the game is likely to not be very good but lfp makes an incredible combat system by making incredible strid using all the good parts that PR soft has developed and more this is the kind of amazing games we can see when Innovation meets homage I can't praise this game enough for how fun it is to engage with its combat system and intricate boss fights as well as how they develop their own flavor of what makes a frof game so good I can't wait to see what round 8 has in store with their next installment and what seems to be in the world of Wizard of Oz it'll be interesting to see how they make an apocalyptic version of that as well as a Direction they take to improve on the combat and boss design we've seen so far I think this studio has a really promising future in developing the genre and I can't wait to see what they do [Music] next [Music] for [Music] you

Channel: Arthur Gunnerson

Views: 2,491

Keywords: Lies of P Review, Lies of P Critique, Lies of P, Lies of P and Dark souls, Lies of P and Elden ring, lies of p gameplay

Id: SpExyjTMbsE

Length: 31min 47sec (1907 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2023