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One thing I haven't heard anyone mention is the upgrades, in Lies of P you get a renewable tier of upgrade material at the same time the next tier is getting introduced. This encourages experimenting with weapons as no matter what, they wont feel underpowered.

After playing the Shadow of the Erdtree I have to say... I enjoyed playing Lies of P last year more. I'm sick of huge open worlds. Give me linear on foot exploration...

FromSoft and Elden Ring are so loved in the gaming community that it can feel like blasphemy to criticize them, but i think it's good that we do so that more games like Lies of P can come out and improve on their formula. As much as I loved Elden Ring, always in the back of my mind it felt like it was held back by its predecessors rather than helped; I even wondered if maybe this game would have been better if it wasn't a souls-like game, because a lot of the souls mechanics really don't fit the open world design. The quest design did not translate well in the slightest in my opinion, mainly due to the sheer size of the game. Nobody can keep track of ten different NPC quests while exploring, trying not to die, and progressing the main story all at once. The only way to do the quests is to use the wiki, every one of them has some random step that you would never predict based on the information given. The magic system is also super outdated and feels awful, nobody should ever have to scroll through a list of spells mid-combat. Upgrading weapons feels like shit, they added hundreds of weapons to the game but it was basically pointless because switching to a new one requires that you give your character the right levels, find a bunch of special rocks, and then finally upgrade it, only to eventually need to do it all over again when a boss resists that weapon type. Every single person I've watched play the game (also me) used 2-3 weapons max in their entire first playthrough, which is ridiculous for a game that takes 100+ hours to complete. They should have just made your damage scale with character level or something. I've always thought the worst-designed areas in FromSoft games were the ones where you could just run past the enemies without penalty, but Elden Ring gives you Torrent which allows you to skip probably 90% of the enemies in the game--and many areas they can just be sprinted past because of the more open area design. Which begs the question, why even bother having them if you don't need to fight them? Most wandering enemies feel more like annoyances than actual fights. Enemies in the Dark Souls series always felt like active obstacles to my progress rather than set dressing for reviewers to point at as proof of how "big" the game is. Avoiding damage in fights is still 90% how good you are at rolling, sure there are shields, parries, ashes of war, jumps, etc. which all allow you to avoid damage in other ways, but they all have pretty significant downsides while rolling is effective against every attack and has zero downside aside from locking you in an animation (which everything else in the game already does). Lies of P fixed this issue by borrowing the parry mechanic from Sekiro and the health-regain from Bloodborne when you're blocking, making all three of them into viable options and I found myself needing to master all three to beat the game. The pulse cell regain that you mentioned is such an obvious and amazing quality of life change that I can't believe From never added it in any of their games. I can think of so many times I got to a boss's arena after fighting all the enemies on the way there and then just died instantly because I couldn't heal. Overall I thought Elden Ring was a pretty good game that could have been so much better if they fixed the issues with the original souls formula before making a giant behemoth of a game out of it. Lies of P did a great job of fixing these issues, I absolutely loved the game and I'm absolutely buying the sequel when it comes out.

These are actually good points

Elden's questing was just irritating as hell. It's a very long game and I don't know if I'm gonna replay it, so of course I don't wanna miss some of the biggest questlines (which can easily happen). Lies of P was the most refreshing pleasant surprise of a game. I'm really anxious for its DLC.

The reason Lies of P combat is so good is because it follows one core philosophy, if you want to deal the most amount of damage you need to be close to the enemy. Elden ring encourages to move away from it. If you want to deal the most amount of damage in Lies of P you need to parry every attack forcing you to be in the most danger, you can choose what attacks to parry, evade or block allowing you to dinamycally change the difficulty through combat while rewarding risky aggressive behaviour. In Elden ring if you want to deal the most amount of damage you should summon mimic tear and stay as far as possible casting spells. The risk/reward makes no sense. How is an aggressive strategy dealing less damage than a defensive one.

The point about quests is so true. I love souls-likes but I absolutely hate how needlessly obtuse the quest structure is

I enjoyed most of Lies of P's boss fights more than Elden ring fights tbh, felt less spammy and more tactical

Lies of p really came out of nowhere and took the "souls like" genre to the next level. Every souls like should take a leaf out of its book and bring in it's own unique mechanics rather than completely copying the souls formula

wow cool bro

this deserves more views

amazing video

Although I found myself disagreeing with many of your points made against Elden Ring, I still enjoyed watching this. Solid video overall

the risk of losing runes is pretty much zero which encourages mindless gameplay This is also why runbacks are actually good. Even though they are tedious they build tension and force you to pay attention. Without them you can just run in the room and never worry about losing souls/runes/whatever, which encourages a sort of "mindless grind". This is a problem because its the core part of the gameplay loop. If you wanted to remove runbacks on bosses, you could give the player their souls back only after they've dealt the same amount of damage to the boss as the previous attempt, for example.

Gotta keep in mind that Elden Ring is considered one of the easier souls games which can explain the amount of graces and torrent (possibly). The feeling of being over leveled goes away once you reach NG+ 8, everything hurts even when I was level 267 or so and had a lot of vigor. But it’s all subjective, I love this game so much

You can only ever explore something once. On your first playthrough every dungeon can conceivably reward you with something major for your build, but when you know the overwhelming majority don't, you have no incentive to engage with them again.. And at that point you may as well just play a linear action RPG with expertly crafted levels, instead of one where those expertly crafted levels are relegated to legacy dungeons.

It's normal. Games don't have to be made to be forever replayed. Elden Ring to me is just like a book. I've read it one time and got through all that excitement so there's no reason for me to replay it. And that's just fine and I believe miazaky was well aware of it. It was and still is a 10/10 game and the fact that replaying it would be a chore does not take that away from it - for me, at least. I don't think comparing it to soulsborne games is necessary, as the it being an open world game completely changes the way the gameplay goes. I mean, if we're comparing, we could also say that Elden Ring has the best combat system out of all of them, as it took the best elements from them and polished it in to a complete one. Soulsborne games would not work in an open world setting, as would Elden Ring not work in a closed up world.

I just got done beating it for the second time after 2 years. And I had more fun the second time because I refused to use summons. So it was a new experience and beating Melania was brutal

quality videos man

Replaying it Right now after beating it the first time a week ago with about 140 hours and playing a new class is dope on a new file that being said its tedious having to remember to go to certain areas for a talisman i never used on my old file as it was a different build , so while im having a fun ...doing the open world thing feels time wasting, compared to my like New game plus file on Bloodborne that i would run back to back for hours at a time when on my days off, just felt less annoying dealing with the open world aspect and some of the damn cheese level bosses that take 100 hits but deal out 2 hit kills even on my first time around with a high health and strength build so i totally feel you

I replayed bloodborne with my dad and I forgot how crazy it was just making it up two blocks and elden ring you can just jump around everything

Definitely a great game that has its flaws. The first playthrough was something special but the replayability just isnt the same as the other games. Bloodborne sits at the top of the list of soulsborne hames

Cant help but agree with all of this, I'd persaonally rank the games as: 1. Bloodborne 2. Dark Souls 3 3. Dark Souls 4. Elden Ring 5. Sekiro 6. Dark Souls 2

For the past two years I've been having a crisis over deciding which game I like more. Elden Ring or DS3. It's just such a hard choice.

Hot takes 🤔