Elden Ring is pretty much my favourite game of all time. I feel like it’s the “culmination of Dark Souls design”, and just happens to be exactly what I was personally looking for in DS games
I’d probably feel the same way if I hadn’t played a few other similar games while waiting for ER. Nioh and especially Nioh 2 showed me how much more Dark Souls could do. Their combat system is much richer and deeper, and I find it baffling that From Soft hasn’t tried copying even a few of their ideas. I hadn’t realized anything was missing from the Souls formula until I played them, but now I can’t unsee it. Maybe my expectations are excessive. From Soft seems incapable of copying even its own good ideas. Dark Souls 2 made quite a few good (if relatively minor) changes to the formula, all of which were erased the moment Miyazaki took back control of the series.
I also recently replayed Blade of Darkness, which I consider the forgotten true originator of the souls-like genre. Being more than twenty years old, it’s much simpler than its spiritual successors, but it showed me that Dark Souls also does a bunch of things it really doesn’t need to do, such as bullshit artificial difficulty. I used to think BoD was really hard back when I played it for the first time more than two decades ago, but after several thousand hours in Souls and Nioh, it feels easy. And you know what? That makes it great fun. Enemy attack patterns are quite basic and easily readable and predictable, there are no surprise ganks and no spoiler enemies (which is what I like to call annoying enemies specifically added in order to spoil what would otherwise be a fun combat encounter). Hell, there’s even friendly fire among enemies, so it’s much harder for them to gang up on you, and you get none of that toxic and abusive encounter design based around ranged enemies shooting you through melee ones that From Soft seems so very fond of. Nioh showed me what the Souls series is missing, and BoD reminded me that sometimes less really is more.
Seeing that ER is just more of the same has really sapped my motivation to play, and I haven’t gotten very far in it as a result. I’ll probably finish it someday, but I’m definitely not going into the NG+ cycle and PvP for hundreds of hours like I used to do with previous Souls games.
as for Fromsoft just doing the same thing over and over - Armored Core VI coming out next week, and that’s quite different. :D
Ah yes, the sixth game in a series. More than halfway to double digits. Such innovation. ;D