not sure when that screenshot was taken, but I imagine the player numbers will be looking the same right now

can weapons actually break in Bloodborne? I've seen that pop-up from time to time, but I never bothered to try to break it - always switched weapons and repairer them

I feel like I'm going crazy. I love the nightfarers, their mechanics are absolute peak. The sekiro parry has never had more parry frames, the witch lady has a million spells she can combine and they all give me the wizard power fantasy I try to recreate in every game. The new bosses look amazing, it's the weirdest shit I could have ever asked for because I love Fromsoft weird shit. I should love this game.

But I'm tearing my hair out because it's just not fun. I remember feeling similar about Bloodborne when I first tried it but when somebody explained to me I was just interacting with the game's economy wrong it turned it around to be my favorite. So I was hoping this would be similar and I would just need to adjust my expectations and reframe how I move through the game.

But I literally can't with this time limit. I don't like sprinting through the world at lightspeed trying to gobble up items. The play area diminishes as time goes on, I get to see and explore less as I play the game. When I fail against a boss, it's not an opportunity to change and grow. it's the timer starting over again as I hit the slot machine for another roll at some items.

I watched people like letmesoloher and saint riot play and it doesn't seem like I'm doing it wrong, you're supposed to move at a breakneck pace with your friends and blender enemies like Elden Ring co-opers do. I don't know. Am I alone in this? Did anybody else sincerely try but fail to like it?

In Nioh 3, the protagonist is a young warrior poised to become the next Shogun. Why is he dedicated to battling against yokai? We’ll save those details for another day, but what we can tell you today is as the battles unfold, players will now be able to fight using two distinct combat styles: Samurai and Ninja.

The Samurai style provides a gameplay experience similar to previous Nioh titles. New actions such as Arts Proficiency, which enhances the power of martial arts, and Deflect, which allows players to block enemy attacks at the last moment have been added, helping create a series of intense and deadly face-to-face confrontations.

Meanwhile, the Ninja style excels in quick movements like dodging and aerial actions, giving ninjas the advantage of being able to attack from outside of the enemy’s range by utilizing a variety of “Ninjitsu” techniques according to the situation on the battlefield.

Edit: you can only download the demo if you have at least PS+ essential. what a rip-off

Whether it be a particularly annoying mechanic, bad design, poorly optimised... What are some of the worst soulslikes you've played? And what makes them so bad?

inb4 Jack Black as John Tarnished

I was watching a few videos on the difficulty in Khazan recently (https://youtu.be/iRn_4QtYFiM and a different one which I can't find any longer) where the creators argued that the difficulty, while very hard, is essential to the experience of the game. If the bosses were any less difficult, they would not pose enough of a challenge to players, thus diminishing the sense of accomplishment when beating the boss.

This made wonder if difficult bosses really are the most defining characteristic of soulslikes since that's what most people seem to focus on. Dark Souls was notoriously marketed as the difficult game franchise, with FromSoft even leaning into this reputation with their DS1 Prepare to Die edition. But is difficulty really that important to a good soulslike?

Demon's Souls, for example, mainly has gimmick bosses. Sure, Allan and Maneaters are quite difficult objectively speaking, but apart from Flamelurker (?) there was no boss in the game that gave me major trouble - it was primarily the brutal level design and lack of bonfires.

DS1, which had been heralded as this super hard game, doesn't pose too many super difficult boss fights, by modern standards, either - the level design and interconnectedness of the world is the primary focus.

I feel like Sekiro (and maybe Nioh? haven't played any of them) pushed the genre to include suuper difficult bosses, then Elden Ring did, now lower-budget studios with games like Lies of P or Khazan do, whilst the other pillars of what make up a "standard" soulslike take up a little bit of a background role.

With all that said, I was just wondering what your experience with difficult bosses has been recently and if you value difficult bosses over any other aspect of the games. Maybe you don't care about difficulty at all and rather want to explore and feel the atmosphere of the world you're in.

Have a nice weekend ✌🏻

Haven't watched anything on how good the game is but it seems to review fine so far? Any of you tried it yet? With randoms or friends?

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/65396784

People should've known these things going into it but hopefully the bad reviews should push fromsoftware to make the duo mode quicker.

FromSoftware’s co-op spin-off saw an incredible 313,593 peak concurrent users on Steam overnight, enough to make Elden Ring Nightreign one of the most-played games on Valve’s platform.

But it also came with a number of negative reviews (67% of the reviews are positive so far), most of which point out Elden Ring Nightreign’s lack of duos, or two-player co-op, and voice chat.

As explained in IGN's Elden Ring Nightreign review: "Let’s get the most important caveat out of the way first: if you are hoping to tackle Nightreign entirely solo, and are anything less than a hardcore Elden Ring player that actively seeks out ways to make that already difficult game even more challenging, Nightreign isn’t for you. Yes, there is technically a single-player option, but it is so poorly balanced that I would be shocked if it isn’t patched and adjusted within the first month of release. And this is coming from someone who lives and breathes these types of games."

When asked why there's no option for a pair of players to drop in together without a matchmade third player, Ishizaki said it was overlooked.

"The simple answer is that this is simply something that was overlooked during development as just a two-player option, so we're very sorry about that," said Ishizaki. "As we said before, we set out to make this a multiplayer co-op game for three players, balanced for three players, so that was the main focus and it's at the core of Nightreign.

lmao, overlooked