this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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I feel like you just unwittingly hit on the problem many series veterans have been having.
People are approaching bosses in Elden Ring like they're Dark Souls bosses, and in my thousands of hours across the series, the only bosses I summon help for is Sister Friede and the Demon Twins. Everyone else I was eventually able to defeat on my own, because that's how they were balanced.
But in Elden Ring, you have the open world to grind in and Spirit Ashes and crazy weapon arts that are far beyond any that were in Dark Souls 3, and the bosses are balanced around these things. It's harder to make a good guess at how powerful a player is at any given time in Elden Ring, so in order to counter the player's bullshit, the bosses need bullshit of their own.
This, naturally, throws a wrench into the plans of veterans who are used to bosses that are tough but fair and approaching them in that manner. They then promptly get their shit pushed in because they aren't using the things the encounters are balanced around having simply because they didn't used to need them.
It makes the bosses binary. Either you get your ass kicked, or you summon help, use a Mimic Tear, and run a train on them. They're either frustrating or boring, and fights that are frustrating or boring just aren't fun. I'm not having fun getting comboed to death or just pelting the boss with spells while my goons beat them up.
The magic is gone. Bosses used to be the highlight of Souls games, and now I just want them to be over.
I am just about to start the DLC, but I think the quality of the major bosses in the base game is pretty good. I would actually say that my main complaint is that they aren't balanced around using all the new bullshit, so it ends up being more fun to fight them without it. Like, I'd love to mess around with spirit summons, but most of the bosses have terrible decision making when there's more than one target available, so you just get a bunch of free hits. For my replay I just used a bastard sword and restricted myself to "fair" Ashes of War that feel like normal parts of a weapon moveset, like Stamp (Sweep) and Impaling Thrust, and only used a shield on fights where I couldn't figure out how to do the fight without one, like Radahn, and it was a lot of fun! I also tried out perfumes for the first time and I think they might have to be relegated to the "overpowered" section in future playthroughs: Uplifting Aromatic in particular giving on-demand Opaline Bubbletear effect is extremely powerful and let me win some fights that I wasn't actually proficient in. (Also it's not especially fun to farm snow trolls for Arteria Leaf once you run out.)
My secondary complaint is that a lot of minor bosses, especially in the overworld, have a lot of terrain jank and camera issues, like Lansseax going down the nearby cliff and then having weird geometry issues with the tiny raised section down there, or the tree spirit "miniboss" in the rotten pond in the Haligtree that is encircled by raised roots that make the proper part of the boss arena too small, and which it regularly clips through during its animations, making it even harder to see what it's doing than usual.