So I just want to point out that this is more of a reversion to old From design than a whole new system. This might be a bit overlong, but I work in Combat Design so I find it very interesting: In every From Souls game post-Bloodborne, combat has been heavily centralized around a single timing-based defensive mechanic. For Bloodborne, DS3, and Elden Ring this was dodge. For Sekiro (which might not be a Souls-like, but regardless) it was parry. But if you go back further, to the original Demon Souls, or to Darksouls 1 and 2, you will notice that the landscape of defensive mechanics was a lot more broad. For one, in each of these games, Shields were far more powerful than they are now. Stamina costs per hit taken while blocking were lower and enemies tended to have good windows for lowering block to regen stamina. These games also prioritized positioning, either through large AoE attacks or through the use of level design (think the pillars for Ornstein and Smough). For many bosses in the early Souls games, even simply running away was a valid defensive strategy. If you stopped to heal or attack, that was slower than modern Souls, and therefore more vulnerable. But if you didn't want to attack the boss, generally the boss couldn't effectively attack you either. Poise was also a real stat. If you had Heavy Armor, you fat-rolled. But you also could armor through many attacks, and that was seen as valid play. Of course, dodging was and is still a viable strategy in old Souls games, but it wasn't conceived as the main defensive build. You can see this very obviously in the presence of the Adaptability stat from Dark Souls II, which had to be invested in to increase the i-frames of dodges. At that time, Fromsoft thought of dodging as something that *some* builds do (and thus invest into), and which other builds do not. This was enforced by the "janky" hitboxes of early Souls games. Hitboxes often lingered or hit too far or otherwise behaved unexpectedly, and that was seen as mostly okay given that many players would not even try to dodge them. Overlong durations or odd sizes don't effect a shield user who gets hit at the *beginning* of the hitbox duration and is thereafter immune. Dodging didn't take its place of prominence in Souls until Bloodborne. Bloodborne is a game designed from the ground up around speed, agression, and evasion. The only shield in the game is a literal joke, intended to teach veteran players that blocking is useless. The range of playstyles in the game is more narrow, since everyone is going to be a nimble, evasive hunter, but the depth is greater as every weapon has two complete move-sets that can be switched between. And Bloodborne was a massive success. It sold 7 million copies despite being a PS4 exclusive. For context, Darksouls 1 was seen as a massive success in 2012 with... 1.2 million copies sold. After Bloodborne, the rest of From's output has been molded in its image. Dark Souls 3, by far the biggest selling Dark Souls game, has far faster combat than previous entries in the series. In Dark Souls 3, Vigor is seen as a dump-stat, because defense is centralized around not getting hit with i-frames and many of the updated mechanics (weapon arts, power stance, etc.) are intended to flesh out the playstyle of non-shield-using builds. Elden Ring, which by itself has sold 25 million copies, more than two thirds of the entire Dark Souls series' sales, is faster still with more i-frame centralization. It features jump i-frames, emphasis of two-handed weapons through the stagger system, and has many bosses that use massive, un-blockable flurries of precisely tracking attacks. Of course, Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring are good games, but their success has caused two issues. First, on the level of discourse, their success has caused quite a bit of revisionist history about the older Souls games. To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and when compared on the level of "is this a good dodging game," Dark Souls 1 and 2 cannot hold up because they weren't designed to. Secondly, as you pointed out in this video, i-frames can be obtuse. That is especially true when they are slammed together with a bunch of long-time Souls mechanics, like diverse playstyles, magic, heavy armor, shields, etc. I am hopeful that in future From games, they will be a bit more free from the conventions of the Souls series. The best From combat since DS1 has been all of their non-Souls games like Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Armored Core 6, games where the team has had the freedom to make hard choices in what to cut and what to keep. Hopefully the success of Elden Ring will give them more of that freedom going forward.
@@MrWhygodwhy Thank you for saying that! I understand why people might not want to read an 8 page rant on the history of Fromsoft combat design, but I'm really glad at least some people do like it!
@@Dahras1 one thing I want to add about dark souls 1 as well that doesn't get talked about as much as it deserves I feel. The kick and the jump attack, both kinda weird inputs to pull off so a lot of people I know didn't really use them. But I felt like they fit really well into the combat of the time and helped break up the options moment to moment. Dodging wasn't the only response, if an enemy blocked you kicked, if they back stepped you jump attacked, etc. Always made the combat feel a little more "rock-paper-scissors" since you had to commit to an action more as well. That if you did the wrong action in the wrong moment the enemy would "win" that interaction and you'd take damage and vise versa. Almost a turn based feel in the form of real time combat if that makes sense. Obviously the game still has a lot of timing dodge based focus still. But I always felt that the pace shift to faster more fluid actions kind of removed this almost strategic component of the first game
Totally agree. I actually played Dark Souls 1 for the first time after my first go at Elden Ring, and I found when I returned to Elden Ring I was better equipped to read and adapt to various movements simply because, like Dark Souls, Elden Ring isn't solely designed around dodging. Figuring out how poise works has been huge for my own forward progress, and the fact that shield counters exist and are so strong feels indicative of FromSoft wanting to allow for the flexibility in their play styles again.
@@Dahras1 You put into words a lot of ideas I was thinking while watching the video and I agree with your line of reasoning. Looking back, it wasn't until after beating bloodborne that I started focusing more on evasion and shieldless play in DS1 and DS2, and of course the observation that the post-bloodborne titles were much more evade centric in their playstyle options just supports the thesis. Take your thumbs up, dude, definitely a comment that deserves visibility.
i think Fromsoft did in fact make this experiment. Sekiro. I spent over half of the game thinking it was the hardest game they ever made, because I was playing it like Dark Souls, conditioned to think that dodges should be prioritised over blocking, and even longer before i realised how *everything* that isn't perilous can be deflected. When I realised my mistake, the game became both a ton easier, and a ton more fun. I also suspect this error or expectation in understanding the gameplay loop is why it still has the reputation among some Soulsborne fans as the hardest game- which, honestly, yea, it is hard, but I do think it's one of the more easy-going overall
Sekiro feels completely impossible, until your brain rewrites itself during one of the first proper bosses like Lady Butterfly or Genichiro; and you realize it’s FromSoftware’s easiest game by a mile.
I gave up on sekiro like 2 hours in when i ran into random peasant with a wooden shield that you basically cannot fight without a ninja tool that breaks shields. Like no, F you game. tools like that should be optional to make a thing easier, not mandatory to even engage in gameplay. I didnt even bother going through the fog wall shortly after that enemy to see what their first "real" boss was like. I think that was the first real boss door anyways, its been years. I accept that sekiro is a niche experiment that is not for me so i cant say its "bad" but man it just never did a single thing to try to pull me in to like it.
@emwZEEK the shinobi tools are a core mechanic of the game. You can function without them, but you aren't supposed to, and complaining about it is *your* problem, not the game. No boss or enemy requires you use them. You sound like the games journalist that couldn't get past the tutorial in cuphead cause they couldn't jump dash
I still find Sekiro on average harder than the other FromSoft games, not because of the "deflect vs dodge" mentality, but because the way stance buildup works requires you to play with non-stop aggression to make progress on breaking the boss's stance. If you ever mess up somewhere in either your attack or deflect chains and need to back off and heal/reset, you lose so much time getting back to where you were because the boss is *also* recovering during that time. If you want to play patiently and methodically, you can do that, but it makes everything so much more difficult because it drags the fight out to an extent that it doesn't in the other games, where playing slower does obviously make the fight longer but you're not actively losing progress unless it happens to be against an opponent that can heal itself.
When I first started playing games like these I found the dodging extremely counterintuitive, because instead of avoiding an attack you needed to suicidally throw yourself into it in order to magically phase through it. It works and it plays well with tight timings, but it only makes sense once you're used to it. Dodging in a way that physically makes sense usually gets you killed.
I also think that positioning has become less and less viable as the games have gone on. In Dark Souls you could carefully stand out of range of an attack and then run in. Now it feels like you never have the time to do that and enemies leap at you from huge distances. I'm fine with i-frames but it sometimes feel like I'm playing a rhythm game instead of duelling with an enemy
@@theomegajuice8660 This is actually true because bosses have insane tracking with attacks now. And I mean to a ludicrous degree. Armored Core 6 is all about mobillity and positioning though if you're interested in that. Great game.
Opening a screen filled with words instead of looking into a bag full of items is also counterintuitive. All game mechanics that don't perfectly match reality are counterintuitive because your intuition is based on living in reality. This isn't an argument.
There is a diffrence between counter-intuitive and immersive. Intuitive means you can figure it out based on intuition. Up arrow makes the menu selector go up is intuitive. Suddenly not taking damage dispite the sword going through your body is less so,
My favorite additions to evasion in Elden ring are attacks that are clearly meant to be jumped over instead of dodged through, like Godfrey/Hoarah Loux’s stomps and massive ground pound attacks
In my casual play throughs of ER I never got the idea that those attacks could be dodged by jumping, because of all the flashy follow up animation showing the explosions and whatnot thrusting up into the air. :(
My problem with those is that it's quite unclear which attacks *can* be jumped over and which aren't. There are a lot of devious-looking hitboxes that don't always line up with the animation. Sekiro actually fixed this completely with Periless Attacks, which have a symbol that indicate that you should either jump or Mikiri Counter. It's of course still a threat because you need to read the attack and decide which of the 2 options to take. It's all really well done.
@@ManaBirb_0.1 to be fair youre still mostly right. you can only jump the AOE attacks that are like misty shockwaves or the rock cones that he combos into with his axe in phase 1. The HUGE earthquake attacks are just barely roll-able and most times youre better off just running away and attacking with spells or throwables
Kind of surprised that in the entire discussion he didn't take a sentence to define that "i-frame" == "invulnerability frames". I know the viewers are going to be gamer centric, but I'm guessing there's people interested in the discussion that aren't necessarily players of those particular games.
Should he also have defined the term "jank"? The video assumes its viewers know the terms or are motivated enough to look them up. Otherwise, the video would span hours.
@@gnerkus Fair, but it only takes a short sentence and is an often-used term in the videos. From of a lot of JM8's previous work, it is something I would have expected and was also a little surprised he didn't give a brief definition, even if most game-savvy viewers will already know it.
My only real problem with I-frames is that they're sort of a secret mechanic. Sure most players will figure out how they work quickly, but unlike games like Sonic that clearly indicate invincibility through flashing the sprite, souls-likes never address it directly or provide clear telegraphing for the timing. Elden Ring has a dedicated tutorial area and I don't see why there couldn't be a simple "hey you can't walk through these arrow traps unless you activate i-frames by dodging" section.
Fair point. Maybe more games should take a cue from when Hollow Knight added invincibility to its dash: Give a very clear visual indicator with some kind of in-universe reason for existing why you can schloop right through a sword thicker than you are tall.
@@AzhreiVep That and it helped it became a later mechanic. So alot of early enemies you have to physically dodge, but later enemies with the shade step you're more encouraged to dodge in
Action games are filled with secret mechanics like bounce cancelling, enemy juggling, dodge offsets etc. I-frames is just a more defensive example than most so many don’t consider it.
Im a Hades Sim and will always be. They straight up TOLD you in Hades that the dash makes you invincible and it works with both the narrative and the gameplay. I never got into Souls because it seemed unfair to me. I tried to dodge by rolling away from the attack and that killed me over and over again. I only figured out that you were supposed to roll INTO the attack after watching youtube clips of people playing it.
@@chazzergamerwhile that's true. the difference is that those are more advanced mechanics you can probably get through the game without, but most souls games are pretty much unplayable without some understanding of i-frames. The first 2-10 hours of most players' first souls game will be spent getting used to this unintuitive yet crucial mechanic which the games refuse to explain clearly for absolutely no fucking reason.
I think Armored Core 6 needs a mention here. That is another recent FS game that massivley toned down the dependence on i-frames. Dodging at the right time still matters, but if the attack makes contact with you, it hits. No magic phasing through projectiles as far as I know. Positioning matters.
And there wasn't a need to play flawlessly. I know it's players that popularized the no-hit run, but Soulsbourne mechanics games made it so easy to do compared to AC games. I like that there's these mosquito shots to not make me feel weirdly untouchable and it kept me on my toes because those little shots add up by the end. Also, not having to worry about poise was so nice to have.
Well yeah after all they added machine guns and armors that let you flyand jump over building in ER, that clearly shows they want you to fight at range like in AC6.
I think moving away from most combat ideas of older Souls games is a good idea and Elden Ring is getting players used to on that. The removal or iteration should allow for the combat to become even more dynamic in future FS games.
@@kenpachi1989 I see your point but I wouldn't be surprised if the next From game has more verticality like that. I could see them doing something like a flying mount, maybe
@@scrub_jay I mean the could, but it would feel more like AC than a soulslike. Also, I don't think flying mounts work well with the kind of exploration From goes for.
I feel like something that this video exclude is that roll spam has had significant updates in the Souls series. Not only that, but bosses are designed now to counter roll spam with variable delayed attacks. Imo FromSoft doesn't add I-frames due to players wanting and or expecting them, but because it is part of the combat system they are designing and use to using. Other commentors have pointed out that not all FromSoft games use I-frames, recently Armored Core 6.
I'm fascinated that you didn't mention Dark Souls 2, and what it did with I-frames. No i-frames while opening doors, very few i-frames at the start, requiring levelling a specific stat to increase them. From backpedalled pretty hard with those design choices, only to slowly re-introduce many of dark souls 2's ideas in Elden Ring
Dark Souls 2 actually does have s when you open doors, it just takes a bit for them to kick in. Most of the animations that players can be knocked out of have a very long startup where not much happens to avoid that janky door snapping shut issue he was talking about.
As someone who's been playing monster hunter for a long time, I disagree about the i-frames. They aren't integral to the game experience, but I constantly use them. There is even a skill to lengthen the i-frame window. Unless you're looking at speedruns where i-frames don't matter because the monster is permanently cc'd. That being said, tracking is a huge issue in souls games, and makes i-frame usage basically mandatory.
Monster Hunter is more of a mix. i-frames are absolutely used to avoid some attacks (at least by skilled players) because avoiding them outright can be impractical and leave you massively out of position. And of course there's the classic superman dive that has tons of i-frames (though it's more of a last resort because it also has a long recovery time). But there are other attacks that have long durations or lingering hit boxes that are impossible to dodge with i-frames. So you do have to understand the attack patterns and know how to react to different types of attacks, instead of just having one universal dodge button.
The superman dodge is a great way of handling s, it's designed to very effctive but also not very spammable, it doesn't create the constant exhuasting pressure of repeatably hitting the s on a 20 second combo of boss attacks, that's why i prefer it anyway.
I would say that I never felt like the i-frames were necessary. I went through a few games basically never trying to take advantage of them (but still getting the occasional save as a result of i-frames). As I became very advanced, I started to use them sometimes, but even now I pretty much only use them with very specific attacks, fights, or patterns.
It really depends on what weapon you use. Dual Blades use Iframes more than say a Greatsword or Hammer user. But GS/Hammer would rely more on weapon sheathing/unsheathing to get out of the way instead of rolling or using their weapon's s.
Not sure that many ER bosses have an effective coop ai as you say, if they do it isn't very apparent when a boss switches target mid combo and animation cancel teleports to the other combatant.
It's MASSIVELY apparent in the DLC. Though, for some bosses it can be frustrating. Because ER bosses track so well, it can really catch you out when a boss switches mid combo and you suddenly find yourself in the middle of the active frames of an attack that was being wound up 90 degrees from your direction. Rellana, Lion Dancer, and Messmer are notorious for it, so much so that it might sometimes feel better to fight solo just so you have a less complicated fight. I might fight the final boss solo just to make his attacks easier to read.
This is the reason why I hate using summons. In my experience it just turns fights into a chaotic mess that's not fun anymore. From needs to refine that mechanic much more for it to be good. I also don't think switching targets mid combo is a sufficient or even good adjustment for multiple opponents. It will mostly just come across like erratic behaviour. A boss that is actually adapted to those situations would use different movement patterns and attacks based on the number of opponents.
To make it clear, I like the idea of fighting as a group against the boss, kinda like a raid boss. But Fromsoft has still not figured out how to create an AI that can handle 2 players at the same time without bugging out or doing an instant 180 degree turn in the middle of an attack. If this were to ever be fixed, I could see the idea of summons feeling more natural.
I think er bosses are fascinating here. I’ve had fights where the boss will suddenly swap who it’s going for mid combo, meaning you have to stay on your toes. I have had some times where I just hard targets one player. It’s very silly
My problem with i-frames is that they tend to obfuscate what attacks are meant to be dodge-rolled and what aren't. One of the ER DLC bosses has an arena-wide multi-hit it uses at low health, and I thought it was unfair because I could never dodge it. It turns out it's actually really easy if you just jump, but I never figured that out because I assumed it just required stupidly precise dodge timing, and I only got the boss low enough to see & practice the attack every couple minutes. If you don't have i-frames or aren't taught you can rely on them, it's a lot easier to realize what attacks you should not be trying to roll away from. There's a similar issue with shielding, in that some attacks pierce shields and/or blow you off your feet anyway, and you are just left to figure that out on your own. I FAR prefer a precise but sightreadable boss to one that tests you with "gotcha" moments like when the boss moves without telegraphing or before you can react, or when there's only one possible defensive response to an attack but it's not well communicated ahead of time. Trial and error is not for me. Maybe that's just a matter of individual developer intent though.
This is exactly why I hate the final boss of the DLC's "purple ground slam" attack. It never alludes that you're meant to avoid the attack by continiously jumping. You expect to dodge it, it doesn't work, and you don't know why unless someone tells you what's happening. Of course, that's also not bringing up how akward it is to experiment with trial/error when one mistake costs you so much health.
To be fair, I think that particular attack uses the consistent 'flat shockwave' effect that generally indicates a jumpable attack Though I do vaguely recall a few attacks with that effect in the base game that hit you anyway- it could be inconsistently used, or the timing could be too strict, but it's hard to determine since you generally just die from it.
@@leithaziz2716 Yeah, if players had more survivability they'd be able to learn way faster, and trial-and-error wouldn't be so bad even with really complex multi-phase boss fights. In theory the open world should help with that, and until the late-game grind it does help in the base game. But in the DLC, because you can't upgrade your survivability without upgrading your damage, trying to get really tanky to manage the trial-and-error also makes you strong enough to steamroll most fights without even _needing_ to learn the boss moveset. I don't know if that criticism works for the final boss though because I haven't seen it.
@@AtelierMcMuttonArt That is fair. The effect looked like it went high enough up in the air that I didn't expect I could jump it. Maybe that's because I tried to jump over the boss's massive sword sweep and got punished, which made me less likely to want to jump during the fight. Or maybe it's just because shockwave moves are inconsistent about whether dodge rolls or jumps or both work, yeah.
@@melephs_cap Exactly, yeah- the implementation is *almost* good, but the lack of consistency really hurts it The exact same thing happened to me, too- the giant sweep definitely feels like it should be jumpable
As a Monster Hunter player, it is often interesting to see Souls players expect the gameplay to be the same (fight big monster), but get bodied because of that. The key to Monster Hunter, and IMO any engaging big monster fight, is positioning. Don't be where the attack will land, and be there where the boss stops so you can get in a few hits. It is, as the video said, a beautiful dance
tbf they've cleaned the games up a LOT by gen 5. There's very little jank left, the games are still very clunky but that's part of their identity at this point
I think a happy medium I've seen before is giving increased defenses when dodging instead of giving flat out invulnerability. You still take some damage but you get through the attack alive because you've been given something like a 75% damage reduction for the duration of the dodge animation
I've always seen I-frames as an abstraction for the complicated act of dodging. In reality, an attack could come from any angle, and in order to dodge it you would have to be able to move in any direction, or even pivot specific body parts out of the path of the weapon. The game simply doesn't have that level of detailed control over the player character's body, and it shouldn't. If it did, you'd be playing QWOP, not Elden Ring. So to bring dodging into the realm of something that can actually be modeled within the game's controls, we introduce I-frames: we say that as long as you press the dodge button with the right timing, the game will just assume that your character does whatever very specific motion is required to dodge that attack. And since we don't have the budget for an infinite number of dodge animations, we just have the dodge roll, which looks like it could plausibly evade most attacks. Could they make damage based 100% on whether the enemy weapon model physically intersects with the player's character model? Sure. But unless the player has full control over their character model (e.g. with some kind of full body VR system), that wouldn't feel fair, because it would mean the game is punishing you for something out of your direct control. This is presumably much less of a problem in MH because the monsters are huge and their attacks cover large areas, so it's not a question of whether that sword grazed your elbow but rather, was your body under that giant claw that slammed down. So whether your hitbox is your actual player model or a literal box shape around the model, the result is the same.
Well, there's games like Sifu, where you can duck, hop, or weave around attacks. I suppose that also uses I-frames though, just, never for the entire body. If an attack is defined as high, all ducks will dodge it, even if it clips through your character's head. Same for low attacks. You could have a giant overhead swing pass right through you and still dodge it because you happened to make your character leans slightly to the side. So, I guess it's still I-frames in a sense. Mainly for ZERO I-frames to work though, it would have to be a game where you can easily position yourself wherever the attack isn't. I played Wizard of Legend once, which had no i-frames. Most attacks from enemies were projectile-based though, so a dodge was basically a "move quickly" button, so you could rapidly reposition to wherever the attack wasn't going, and the dodge moves you so quickly, it was practically a teleport. It took a lot of practice though to learn not to wait until the last second to dodge everything.
@@sageoftruth I think your Sifu example demonstrates the matching of controls to hitboxes. Basically, you have two hitboxes, upper and lower, with separate dodge buttons for each. Since you have direct control over each of those hitboxes, it's fair for the game to target them individually.
Now I'm stuck imagining a dark souls parody game that bends the character around the enemy's weapon rubber-hose style whenever you dodge through an attack.
I appreciate a lot of the arguments made in the video, that said, it really feels like this video is only talking about DS3 and Elden ring. This massive tracking didn't really exist in ds1, ds2, or demon's souls, but they offer a real window into why it exists. Specifically, the boss AI was incredibly abusable in those games and while ds2 tried to use hoard fights to fix that but it didn't go over well. The heavy tracking was the solution they came up with so single enemy encounters couldn't just be trivialized. On the other hand, sekiro and bloodborne offer alternatives to Dodge roll centric combat that maintain fast paced combat. Sekiro centers on a different, far more readable and immersive timing based defense mechanic, namely perfect blocking. There's apparently only 1 in dodges so it's really only for repositioning. Meanwhile bloodborne has standard Iframes but much meatier hitboxes from enemies. That combined with how much earlier you can cancel the forward dash and how enemies tend to move forward when they attack creates a situation you're primarily using it as a timing based repositioning tool. Mostly to get behind the enemy but in a much more active and interesting way than the earlier games. I think the discussion of how we got there and discussion of fromsoft's other solutions to the issues give a lot of context. Finally, there is one more negative that I think should be covered. Reliance on delayed attacks and other intentional misignaling in boss fight designs, as well as ridiculously long attack strings as a means to punish careless rolling which unfortunately by extension trivialize all other defensive options. However, in Elden Ring's defense, adding jumping combined with attacks that are clearly ground targeted was a great addition.
It's... hard. As you said, the biggest hardship of any new experimentation will always be to have the players even try to understand what you're wanting them to do. But FromSoft games' formula works against it a lot, because it refuses to outright tell you most things, and the changes over the years have been slow. So habits are deeply ingrained in older players, and the game won't outright tell them they are wrong, it'll just make it tedious and unfun. But some players will prefer believing that's just what the game is (for better or for worse) and refuse to see it as an opportunity to try something else.
I-frames also require a large redesign of the game. I-frames are the trade of mobility vs negation. As you discussed i-frames keep you close to the fight. Everyone has really noticed from the DLC about how aggressive the DLC leaned into i-frames and it even showed how the increased number of i-frames of a jump vs a roll. So suddenly jump became meta. Overall it was a great dive into the concept.
Haven't played the dlc yet but the base game tried its best to lean away from relying too much on s and pushing players into other tactics. Margit is a pretty good example of that. His combos were designed to punish those who relied on abusing s on every attack
Reminder that the jump technically does NOT have I-frames as we understand them. What it does is turn only the lower half of you player model invulnerable for nearly the entire duration of the jump until you begin to fall.
@@SolitasRuisujump also has a longer recovery than rolling. That fall+landing takes nearly a metric hour (probably) to complete before you can move again. I will jump where it makes sense, but against anything that is my size (npc invader, etc) I won’t even bother with jumping to dodge.
DLC also leaned a lot on strafing and spacing, the second boss has long combo that are hard to doge with i-frame, but you can strafe many part of the combo and doing so you get longer openings. If you only rely on i-frames you make the game harder on yourself, I think the dev fully intend you to understand that sometime straffing around an attack is better than dodging
@@SolitasRuisuIt's also not really a 'new meta' so much as many of the bosses in the DLC have AoE ground attacks that cant be rolled through and need to be jumped over. It's a lot more common than it was for base game enemies.
Biggest con, IMO, of rolling i-frames in Souls games was the fact that it didn't seem to be advertised. If you're coming from games that don't have the concept of rolling i-frames, avoiding attacks by rolling into them is counter-intuitive, so you don't try it until someone explicitly tells you that you're invincible momentarily when you roll. Rolling/i-frames have made me want to go back to other action/rpg games like the OiF-era of Ys games where rolling wasn't a thing.
Weirdly, the lack of i-frames is part of why I prefer Armored Core to Souls. The quick boost to physically avoid missile salvos feels *more* than phasing through a sword twice my size. More consistent, more believable, more straightforward, all for the same result of avoiding damage. I also feel I've seen i-frames done better in other, smaller games. Code Vein (yeah remember that one?) has multiple dodge types, and two of them stand out: one kinda makes you float as you dodge, another turns you basically invisible; clear visuals of when you're untouchable, rather than just feeling out exactly which split-second of the roll animation.
I think part of the disillusion with dodging in Souls comes from how literal you're taking it. In the same vein, I dont think you'd want any and every injury you take ingame to do real life levels of damage, where every impale and grab attack instant kills. I tend to visualize it the same way you would... HP. We dont have health bars irl, ofc, and when you think about it physically, that dragon shouldn't have died just cus you poked its leg til its HP dropped to 0. It's more the idea of you whittling down it's vigor until you deliver a killing blow. Sekiro actually visualized it best, but it's the same idea with dodging I would say. For the sake of being a game you can play with an easy to understand "dodge", it's the idea that your character is maneuvering around the attack in any way possible that the dodge is meant to represent. Sure, that's a cop out in a sense, but so is having HP instead of demanding you only kill with killing blows and everything else only injuries or wounds. Which, in itself could be a cool game, but a very different one.
In terms of excitment, I think I might actually agree with you. Dodging the final boss' big laser right before it hits you is an exhillirating feeling, but I-framing through it would feel a little immersion-breaking. I think the difference is that the former feels like a natural reaction from the player while the latter is a reaction that's based on you knowing how to take advantage of how invul frames work.
It's funny, but I think a lot of my gripes with Elden Ring boss design might be solved if the character was sped up and side stepping around attacks rather than being a slug relying so heavily on I-framing everything. It never felt right that so many enemies and bosses seemed like they were designed for Sekiro while your character is just copy and pasted from DS1 basically. If anything, I feel it would work if the dance with bosses was similar to Rellana. Besides some wonky parry windows, she felt great for side stepping and parrying rather than being so reliant on rolling. Made me feel like I wanted to learn her moves and play more aggressively rather than running away the whole fight.
@@darugosuenyo I get what you're saying but I don't agree. Entirely subjectively, dodge rolling feels less "fair" than alternatives. I'm the kind of player who cares more about immersion than raw mechanics. Ghost of Tsushima strikes the balance for me. That combat system does a lot of what ER does--lock on, dodging, parrying, health consumables, frantically swapping the inventory item to turn the tide--but it doesn't feel as... idk, loose? Yes you're mostly fighting dudes in armor, but the paired animations and Kurosawa esque duels make up for it imo, and crucially, your dodge actually makes you dodge, instead of just turning invincible for a split second. It's easier to buy into the fantasy when I'm not being reminded "oh yeah, these are just polygons and hit boxes" every few seconds in a fight. fwiw I'm giving ER another chance with all the dlc hype online and things are clicking for me this time around. I don't dislike i-frames and the ol dark souls dodge roll. But I feel Souls is the vanilla option, the default; nothing interesting or new since DS1 (since we all collectively decided to memory-hole DS2's experiment), and other games approach the same problem with more interesting solutions.
I feel vindicated hearing someone who actually makes content finally saying that Monster Hunter is the most mechanically similar game to the FromSoft action RPG formula that isn't attempting to copy it. As a Monster Hunter player, I feel like moving away from hard tracking and obligatory i-frames into careful distancing and positioning without getting punished for it are good things. But oddly enough, I can actually cite one instance in an exist FromSoftware game that did this - Dark Souls 1. My current playthrough is currently at the point of fighting Ornstein and Smough and there were more than a few times where backstepping and sidestepping saved me better than trying to dodge roll through the attacks with i-frames.
Another counter example to i-frames is built right into FromSoft's library. Sekiro is basically, "What if I could parry everything?" The game. And it's truly amazing for it. I think people on the dev team were like me in wanting to play Dark Souls as a pure parry build, but knew that it wouldn't work mechanically with everything else.
In DeS and DS1 s were riskier to abuse. Would you rather risk jumping into an attack just to get an extra hit or simply back off and wait for a better opportunity? In recent games the boss fights are right by the bonfire, so you aren't losing anything if you die. In DS1 death meant going through hordes of mobs again. In general, those games favored a more tactical approach where the boss fights happened outside the fog gate as much as inside it, you really had to think about every risk you take.
The drawback for the “party everything” is that it turned Sekiro into a DDR machine. Parry parry clang clang parry parry clang clang Like I just sat there, not even really thinking and just mindlessly waiting for a counter to show up to break up the tedium.
@@pramitpratimdas8198I agree with your point about in fight tactics, but not forcing players to fight through hordes of mobs to take another crack at a boss was absolutely the right move. Nothing has made me put my controller down more often than the prospect of having to spend 45 second between each fight just running past enemies to try again.
@@Ceece20 it's the same as ds3/ER's design - hit dodge hit dodge etc. Also you cant beat Sekiro by parrying alone, you have to be the aggressor which copy cats like Lies of P seem to miss the point of
@@Ceece20 That's a really reductive way to look at any video game. I could say the same thing about Elden Ring and the souls games. "In Elden Ring you just wait for the attack, dodge, hit them a couple of times and repeat." See, it's not helpful for anything. I and a lot of people like that DDR/guitar hero element to the game. Having to learn the attack patterns and timings to deflect properly, how and when to use the various tools to the best effect, planning out stealth routes to take out groups of enemies, etc. I could go on. If you don't like the game, that's fine, not everything is for everyone, but don't dismiss it as being something it's not.
I honestly think Fromsoft's souls games are best experienced in order, and that the increase in people playing elden ring or dark souls 3 first is the biggest reason for most player's overeliance on rolls. Both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 have a much larger emphasis on positioning than the rest of the series, as in those games many attacks can simply be sidestepped, avoiding the stamina consumption from rolling. Unfortunately, the increase in tracking on attacks, combo attacks, and large sweeping attacks on enemies in dark souls 3 and elden ring seem to encourage constant rolling above all else, and I think it really hurts the experience of players when they play any other souls games.
4:08-As a fan of both series I have to disagree there. MH is very much prone to weird hit boxes that feel like an attack shouldn’t hit or having animations that don’t clarify a movement as an attack. Plus rolling is a big part of those games with evasion skills leaning into that play style. Obviously it’s not to the same extent but it is there. Ultimately it just comes down to types of enemies u fight and the way the games are organised, MH enemies are often large beasts that act as giant DPS checks with smaller monsters usually reserved for early game encounters, where as soulsborne has much a larger variety of enemies but that are much faster encounters, necessitating a more aggressive play style hence the greater reliance on rolling. An interesting avenue to this not discussed in the video is how Elden Ring bosses are designed to disincentivise you from rolling through every attack. Some require jumps others you have to run away from or around, attacks have ending hit boxes or come out faster than ur roll frames requiring positioning to avoid and punish. I know that play style isn’t for everyone, especially souls vets comfortable with the dodge and punish rhythm of dark souls etc but I think this design makes each ER boss a fun puzzle with multiple solutions, especially with the multitude of weapons and build variety
I certainly hope this prediction is right! Now that the "Souls" genre is evolving, it's clear to me that the i-frames in rolling make it too good of an option, and it ends up being totally centralizing. Any experienced Dark Souls/Elden Ring player completely ignores blocking. Parrying is used once in a while, but in general it's too risky to use all the time. So all players end up rolling around like Sonic to avoid every attack. Sekiro and Lies of P are improvements in that regard. Dodging, parrying, and blocking are all useful depending on the circumstances. Parrying is in theory optimal, but realistically too difficult to pull off all the time. So if you are not 100% sure you can pull it off you can just block. Dodging is good for positioning or when you're overwhelmed with status effects or your posture is ending.
I think one other facet of i-frames as FromSoft uses them is that it sort of simplifies decision-making in a lot of situations. Like if I have a weapon that either shoots me way up in the sky or swings around a wide arc on the ground, I need to decide which one is best suited to avoiding the big scary boss move coming my way, and the boss move may still hit one method of dodging but not the other. Whereas with i-frames, I know that if I just time my roll properly, I ought to dodge the move. Whether you think this is a good aspect of its design or not is sorta up to you, but I do think it's another thing to consider.
I would add that Elden Ring toned down tracking on boss attacks, and has emphasised positioning as an additional tactic against them. Hell, it's damn near mandatory to get those fully charged R2s for effective stance-breaking and some heavy commitment ashes of war. Margit's infamous staff slam, for example, has VERY weak tracking, and being easily side-stepped. I'm certain it was intended to teach the player that positioning is not only viable but outright vital for some builds, especially since trying to get away will result in the attack shifting into a charge that is even harder dodge and punish. Radahn, Maliketh, Elden Beast, and Hoarah Loux also put a fair bit of emphasis on it, too. It's not just about timing anymore.
Also, a big reason why bosses do such extreme amounts of damage is because you can negate them completely with i-frames. Maybe in a world where i-frames are more limited, you'd actually be able to take a few hits and battles would feel like attrition.
"Monster hunter is more about avoidance while souls is more about timing." This. All this. This is the line I need and will be using this everytime someone compares the two. Also in conjunction with the attack tracking of souls vs the cone attacks of monster hunter.
For a long time I've considered I-frames to be one of the biggest problems in these games. Precisely because it causes boss design to devolve into a graphically complex rhythm game. If I wanted to play Guitar Hero I'd be doing that. Positioning? Doesn't matter, just dodge. Distance? Barely relevant, just dodge. Often you will be actively punished for moving outside of melee range, because you're supposed to just eat the boss' undercarriage and time your dodges better. I'd been avoiding the dlc because there's a history of just making things move faster and die slower. Maybe it's worth a look, when it goes on sale.
I feel its very disingenous to say things like positioning and distance don't matter just because you have i-frames. Thinking like that is exactly how people get into the idea that the bosses just have 20 minute long combos with no end. Positioning and distance are how you convert your defence into an offence in these games. One example in the new DLC is the ancient dragon fight which has a 2 bite combo. If you roll away and to the left of the first bite you bait the second, but if you roll the second you don't have time to punish the attack in its second phase. However if you roll away and left of the first bite you can walk just out of range of the second bite allowing you to do a charge attack on the head of the dragon, doing several times more damage than if you just stuck to hitting its legs.
I have not played the dlc yet so I cannot speak for that, but for the base game I personally really enjoy the I-frame mechanics. There are some attacks where it’s better to run or jump to avoid, but to me the combat is at its best when you are frantically and frenetically dodging with the bosses’ attacks. It feels much more engaging when the boss actively responds to my own movements and chains the combo to try and hit me rather than go in the direction I was at the start of the chain. An example of a fight I find quite boring and annoying is Placidusax, almost entirely due to the number of attacks that force you to run away from the boss for up to half a minute to avoid without taking massive damage. Not to mention that I-frames are practically a necessity when AOE attacks have hit boxes you cannot clearly discern from their visual effects. When you compare the Dragonlord to something like Morgott, where his aggressive combos keep you on your toes I personally find it not very fun to simply run around. You also mention FromSoft potentially balancing the dlc around spirit ashes, which they did in the base game to a certain degree. This is my personal preference, but I dislike this design decision in the context of a single player game. There are multiplayer mechanics, but at their core it is a single player action rpg. I think the previous summon mechanics, where summoning a player or npc increases boss health, should apply to the spirit ashes (as a less intense increase than summoning a player) rather than being applied by default to incentivize their use. I love the idea of spirit ashes but the idea of balancing the game around the idea that they should be used or are a necessity dramatically damages the single player experience by designing the boss around the assumption of multiplayer. It is also detrimental to people that are using the multiplayer features because spirit ashes cannot be summoned in multiplayer, so the health bar scaled around two players (you and the summon) is then given the multiplayer health multiplier making it even tankier than it should be. I hope that this comes across as intended, but I really liked the thought experiment. You made me consider why I think I-frames are, if not a necessity, then very important in Elden Ring and games of its type. Having more ways to dodge attacks seems really cool, and your ideas are very well articulated. Even though they conflict with my own thoughts on the matter I can see your perspective and the benefits therein.
Fromsoft made Armored Core 6 which doesn't have i-frame and play similarly to third person action combat games contrarily to previous Armored Core. Basically they put emphasis on spacing, strafing and movement as method for not getting hit
To your discussion of I-frames at 9:09 blocking has been here since day 1 as well and Bloodborne did away with it. I don't think the convenience of I-frames was really expected from players until bloodborne and dark souls 3 implemented their wider I-frame windows. Prior we had other systems (ranged options, spacing, parrying, blocking and poise) we could rely on in a boss fight. However Bloodborne on we see bosses that hound the player, stricter stamina limits and weaker armor sets that force the game to focus on I-frame rolls.
Bloodborne doesn't have wider i-frames than Souls games. Its quick step dodge (11) has same amount of i-frames as Dark Souls 1 medium roll (11), less than Dark Souls 1 fast roll (13) and has less than any dodge in both DS3 and Elden Ring (Heavy 12, medium and light 13). Bloodborne has extremely fast quick step dodge which allows for physically moving away from attacks, i-frames are more of safety net.
I'm sure people have chimed in but.. Hitboxes and attack legibility. The more Fromsoft designed, the more they strayed away from understandable monster attacks that make sense with hitboxes that make sense (correct hitboxes too), to weird rubbery monsters that attack behind them for no real reason, and yeah, at that point, people just abuse s, as it's not a game where a Tarnished fights monsters anymore, it's a game where a player dodges and abuses hitboxes and the developer throwing delayed attacks and unreadable attacks any the kitchen sink at trying to stop the player. Iframes are a part of it, but there's more going on here that turns Elden Ring and its sequel into just.. a player's battle against the developer fighting with game mechanics. I'm playing through Returnal right now and i'm simultaenously both in awe of how many attacks i can dodge (with s) and just how much damage i can take from a single attack. The game is full with s but also attacks, but they're all extremely readable, but it feels much better to read and play and like i don't rely on them to survive per se. Also, a greater use of jumping and 3dimensional movement, especially when triple ring waves become a thing in biome 4.
@@AtelierMcMuttonArt Returnal is very much a bullet hell game, but there are enough melee enemies to read attacks on, and boss battles are 100% about moving rather than iframing through attacks.
They should definitely remove the dependency on i-frames for PvE but I doubt it'll be a good idea for PvP. Lack of i-frames will basically turn the PvP meta into pure AoE spell spam and it'll get old really quick. Its already a problem in ER but at least skilled players can dodge annoying stuff like waves of gold/moonveil spam with good i-frame timing.
As someone that hasn’t played many of these games or even many of the spectacle fighting games…..it has always annoyed me when giant swords or whatever weapon clearly clip through players or players roll straight through attacks. There’s often so much going on with great particle effects and graphics and whatnot, but apparently a core component of the game is stuff phasing through the player character? That has just always irked me. So I ask from a place of ignorance but not malice: why can’t these games be developed in a way where this doesn’t happen? Where physical objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time? Is it a hit box thing? Or is it a “years ago our games did this out of jank and now we do it on purpose these days because the players like it” thing?
It was always one of the more fascinating critiques of Horizon Forbidden Wests combat that Aloy didn't have i-frames when she rolled, jumped or slides. People have gotten so used to I-frames they've forgotten positional gameplay.
Just to add, it was so weird for me to play FF7 rebirth by trying to dodge. There is no I-frame, it's just positional. But i-frame are so ingrained in my mind that I was hit a lot before figuring out why. And because I frame are more of a "tried and test" than a flashing light to say "You succeded", you tends to think you just fucked up your timing. Btw: +1 for Monster hunter ! (And I frame are still great when the games is designed with it in mind. All hail bloodborne, Hades and lot of others!)
I feel like an issue that went unaddressed in this is that FromSoft's boss design in the Souls games has changed a lot overtime; in the first Dark Souls, the i-frames felt more like a safety net. There were really only a few bosses where you NEEDED to use i-frames to get through their attacks (Gwyn, Four Kings), and the rest of the time, getting out of the way of their attacks was an equally viable strategy because the pace of the bosses was slow enough to accommodate that. But as their games have only gotten faster, the controls and means of avoiding damage barely changed (except for Bloodborne and Sekiro, which both enable you to counter the hyper-aggression of enemies with your own aggression). I've increasingly felt like this has changed i-frames from a safety net into practically the only real means of survival you have in a fight, making it a crutch in Elden Ring to not have to evolve the player's means of defense while the bosses only get faster and more aggressive. It makes it feel less like I'm mastering the bosses, and more like I have to game the system in order to get good at it; it made late-game Elden Ring very unsatisfying for me to play, and it's all a major break in immersion for me.
I love any and all reliable and consistent ways to avoid damage, be that s, parries or blocking. When a game doesn't have any of these it's actively detrimental to my enjoyment. Moving out of the way of an attack does not do it for me, there are countless situations where that just isn't going to feel good and consistent (even in games that are designed for it).
Yeah, I don't think I've relied on MonHun's I-frames since Tri. It can be annoying tracking the monster's telegraphs when you can barely fit one thigh on your camera, but I like the emphasis on positioning and engaging with monsters as entities made of different parts instead of phasing through hits and blindly building stagger like Elden Ring
As a MH enjoyer since Tri and a DS player since 1 I'd like to interject that personally MH's "dance" has been actually been diluted as the games hit the 5th generation, Rise and Sunbreak especially as basically every weapon has a move of I-frames or guard that outdoes even the basic Fromsoft dodge-take for example the HH's R2 or the Hammer's Water Strike etc. But overall I still really enjoyed this video and eager to hear your thoughts on MH's issues as I could talk about them forever lmao
The shorter i-frame window makes more sense in Monster Hunter because you fight the same creature far more often than anything in the Souls series. As much as Elden Ring plays like to joke about fighting a dozen tree spirits over the course of a playthrough, that is nothing compared to farming the same creature 30+ times back to back to get that f*cking gem to finish your weapon. By that time, you have truly mastered the fight.
@@letstatement Agreed It's not my place to ask it to be different, but I always end up quitting MH once the grind sets in. ER and Souls works better for me because the boss is treated more like a test that is finished once you "pass" it. As much as I'd love to re-fight bosses, I want it to be because I enjoy it, not because I need to farm a material.
Actually, it's arguably more intuitive to dodge an unfamiliar enemy's attack by getting out of the way entirely than by nailing the timing of an i-frame dodge, so if ER gives you more unfamiliar enemies to face, a lack of i-frames in ER would actually make more sense - so long as the enemies' attacks were well telegraphed and if they didn't track you like a hawk like they do. In fact, I think attacks tracking the player in ER is the only reason i-frames are needed, because otherwise you literally can't avoid getting hit without blocking.
@@letstatement While there have been grinds in MH that are indefensible _(Sunbreak's anomaly levels, vanilla World's random decos made vital skills like guard up way too rare, and Iceborne had to reduce the postgame grind with updates)_ and the Desire Sensor can always screw you, I think 5th Gen has struck a very good balance at giving average players what they need in a reasonable timeframe, especially if you are willing to swap weapons/armor a lot instead of trying to finish specific sets, or if you abuse the Guardian armor/weapons. They've also implemented various mitigators for bad RNG on the game's rarest drops, like the Wyverian prints, anomaly coin trading, and sometimes even guarenteed drops. _(eg. both Iceborne's final boss and postgame final boss let you get their rarest material as a guarenteed partbreak reward, if you play well enough)_ If you are more interested in a regular game length rather than repeated hunts to master monsters, nobody is stopping you from playing MH like that and rolling credits with relatively few repeated fights. You will easily get the same ~60 hours you would expect from any other AAA purchase and stop there.
@@darthvaderreviews6926 Definitely agree. The grind is mostly optional unless you are trying to get a perfect build for something. You can get the skills you need from armor/set bonuses or from charms or from decos. I think they should let down the "crafting" element to get what final chips you need a bit sooner, but I never minded the grind until it's something that just isn't implemented well. Vaal Hazak fangs come to mind. You should get them if you break the jaw but it's still a 50/50 shot at best even if you do a double break. To get the 5 fangs needed results in a TON of hunts. Stuff like that is annoying at best and atrocious at worst. They should do bag-pull RNG so if you do x chances with y special things you can get what you are going for. More a bag of stones than true random. Investigations were a huge help to add chances, but still didn't guarantee a drop.
Even the base Elden Ring game gave players plenty of alternatives to rolling. Guard counters on blocks, jump attacks, better ranged options, weapon arts like that let you dodge attacks like BhS or RotM, or even moves like Lion's Claw or the Stances that let you tank the hit and land a large hit of your own. Some of these still have invincibility, where attacks phase through your character, so kind of a halfway point between i-frames and avoiding attacks entirely. On top of just giving players more options, I think this will help train Souls players to approach fights differently. They could go from rolling everything to jumping or blinking through attacks instead, and then eventually to considering other options like blocking + countering. Speaking of blinking, that could be another way to help immersion, turn the roll into a blink, or give the player a bubble shield while i-framing. Basically give some sort of visual indication that attacks won't count
As someone with too much hours on MHW and MHR, what I am about to say relates for me only to MHW because they halved I-frames and gave everyone a stupidly strong parry in MHR (I am not a fan of this). There comes a point in your monster hunter carrier where you start to use MHW I-frames like you do it in DS. The difference is that in DS I-frames are a core mechanic that you are expected to use and rely on out of the gate, where in MHW being able to I-frame is a reward for skill gained and something most casuals don't rely on.
That's why Sekiro is my favourite. The combat system invites you to play very aggressive and let defense and offense flow into one another. In DS I often felt like I dance around an enemy until I see a move I can punish. Then retreat and repeat.
I'm never a fan of arguing the solution to a problem in one game is to "become another game." There is a lot more going on in the Souls Formula that makes i-frame rolls just one of many pillars that gives the whole product a playstyle unique to it. Same for Monster Hunter. I don't think Monster Hunter is the best comparison. And the argument that it's a "player expectation" and not the game the devs just wanted to make is a bit reductive. Rolling and s are a mechanical abstraction of being evasive, so the "immersion" factor isn't really an issue. To me, the way my character constantly swings in the opposite direction of a Monster in Monster Hunter is far more immersion breaking and unintiutive then i-frames on a roll, all from it's "no lock on camera" origins. I also play fighting games where mechanics like s are expected.
@@SharpEdgeSoda tbf From do make another games. Sekiro and AC already move away from i-frames. They may go further but still have the game be "souls-like".
Is it not worth considering that some players really enjoy rolling to dodge? I like learning the timing for boss attacks. But then again thats why its not about removing them as an options, more so adding others.
You know I would like a follow up topic involving difficulty in general with Fromsoft games at the head but also Monster Hunter and of course other games. Especially where damage is concerned and most importantly why do people consider death, the ultimate fail state, to be the only sign of a games difficulty. Like why is the many ways a boss can kill you the only sign of how difficult an encounter is? Why don't we take resource management into account like how often you heal or use up certain items? Why do game devs keep using one-shot mechanics against players when in reality it is basically feels like the game is yanking the controller out of your hands and flipping you off? Sorry, got a lil ruffled at the end there.
With Souls games, I've always wondered why we have to learn via death specifically. Like there's apparently no other way to force us to learn boss patterns than throw us back to a loading screen every 5 seconds?
Armored Core 6 doesn't have I frames and it works pretty well, also monster hunter have the superman dive, of course you don't use it as much as rolling in dark souls. I love all of these 3 franchises, but in this discussion Armored core is the clear winner, you rely solely on your movement to escape attacks, not that I have a problem with I frames either, souls and even further Monhun are pretty slow compared to the frantic fever dream that is armored core lol, so I think that they need those.
Something worth mentioning is that Monster Hunter enemies are... well... giant monsters. This means they can have huge, sweeping, long-lasting hitboxes that are easily capable of threatening multiple players at once without tracking, and that they can tank multiple hunters beating on them at once for minutes on end without flinching, and they can act dumb sometimes, and this all feels reasonable. Monster Hunter's combat is designed around this fact. Meanwhile in Souls, you do fight giant monsters, but you also fight a lot of smaller humanoid enemies. MonHun's combat design doesn't work nearly as well for those encounters. They have small, short-duration hitboxes that need to track in order to consistently threaten the player. They need to react when someone hits them with a huge attack. They need to move with the sort of agility and intelligence you'd expect from such an enemy. It's a whole different set of expectations that can't really be met by cribbing MonHun design philosophy.
Weird to say FromSoft games rely on I-frames when SEKIRO exists. Souls games rely on I-frames. I played Sekiro without using I-frames even once. Recorded every boss fight and watched it back to make sure. Parry/Block, Jumping/Running out of the way, and using the shield make it so you don’t miss them at all. Made me really enjoy the game more. As someone who didn’t understand I-frames until Dark Souls 3, it feels more natural.
I play a lot of monster hunter, and am a very dedicated fan of the series, and while "be where the attack is not" and reading the behaviour telegraphs are an important part of it, utilising i-frames is absolutely a major factor as well, depending on your weapon of choice. You won't make reasonable time using sword and shield, for example, if you *don't* i-frame the majority of your target's attacks. In SotE, I play a pure caster build - so all the hype abut new weapon types and new arts is mostly not registering for me; I'll look at them later. What I'm finding, personally as a spell-caster, is that "otherwise avoiding" enemies is simply NOT an option in the majority of boss fights. I MUST dodge, and dodge very continuously, until I can steal a moment to cast something; I can't tank hits, and even quick cast spells take more time than a quick weapon poke - not to mention, very little chance of causing flinching or stance breaks, so I must account for being able to dodge after casting right away. Some attacks have other methods to avoid sure (twin moon is a jump wave, naturally), but most of the time, bosses will unflinchingly glue themselves to you and close in a flurry of continuous action that genuinely does leave dodging as the only safe option. If anything, my personal experience feels this has gotten much *Worse* in SotE, for my spell caster - enemy aggression and staying on you with on-going offence is more pressing than it's ever been, and as a caster I've not gained anything new to counter that, other than to keep dodging and looking for a window... though there also do seem to be, as part of that, more instances of situations where "if you dodge in *this* direction, at *this* attack in their combo, they won't be able to track as well, and you can steal a cast window", which is small foil to the increased pressure, but a boon all the same.
@@matthewmuir8884 The roll is absolutely an i-frame and you can and should use it to dodge through monster attacks to stay within attacking range at the part you want to be damaging more consistently and not have to move out too often. Blocking is an absolute last resort if the roll i-frame isn't long enough to pass through the attack from the position you're in (like, you can't roll through a monster that does a full body roll at/over you - it's not long enough; those kind of ones you certainly have to either get out of the way or take the block. That said, I'm not trying to say using the i-frames on your roll is essential, or that you can't function without doing this - of course you can... but the more comfortable you get doing it, the more efficient you'll be overall.
@@matthewmuir8884 I don't know what to tell you then; our experiences are clearly different. I definitely use the dodge roll with SnS to dodge through monster attacks in order to stay on the part I'm working on. I do it all the time, deliberately, and it works; the frame is very small, but it's enough to dodge the majority of close in physical attacks from most monsters. If your experience has been otherwise, I cannot tell you any more than that.
@@matthewmuir8884 I don't disagree - everything you mention is an important part of what makes SnS fun and engaging, and I've never implied otherwise. I main SnS, and I love it specifically because it's versatile, mobile and has an answer for everything in a neat, quick package (Though I admit, I was sad when they took away its ability to break out of your combo at any strike; having some of the combos become a multi-hit lock in, in later games reduces that flexibility a little). Most of what you say in your second paragraph is all valid and something I agree with; it doesn't take away from the fact that, along with that, you can roll under that urugaan tail sweep and come up swinging again on the other side of its ankle - which makes perfect in-universe sense, but which, if we were minding hit boxes rigorously, would not generally be possible because we only have one dodge roll animation, and we're going to clip through a bit of its body a little bit (and even a one pixel contact would otherwise register as a hit and send you flying). The frame covers that issue; it's what it was originally designed to do. It's not immersion-breaking and it's not an exploit (and I don't really appreciate you disparaging and back-handedly demeaning as brainless and simple players who are aware of the ideal timing for their dodges and have developed the skill to use it effectively); it's using a mechanic that is deliberately placed into the game, which is a very tight, narrow frame of invulnerability in your dodge roll that lets you more easily manoeuvre in and around a number of attacks with some small amount of leniency on their hit boxes. They're not like Souls i-frames, which are *huge* by comparison and can be used to do silly, nonsense things (like rolling into a massive hammer slam to 'avoid' it - I agree, that's immersively stupid). Mh i-frames are generally tighter and can only really be used to supplement quick evasions that make realistic sense because the attack has passed over so quickly. It doesn't 'devolves' the play - it's a natural part of it; you can't "just i-frame everything", like you're implying and that's not how they work in Mh games - but they *are* an important element of play and you *do* use them, whether you're aware of it or not. They don't negate the importance of everything else that makes Mh fun. If anything, I'd argue that Mh is a case of I-frames used subtly and well - the ideal way they should be used. The fact that a lot of people aren't aware that they exist and that they are benefitting from them in the course of play is a sign that they are unobtrusive and are doing their job without being overly visible, as it should be.
@@matthewmuir8884 No worries, tone is hard to convey on the internet, and it's easy to come across harsher than we intend; I likely did the same, and sorry on my part if I did ^.^
Honestly, I think a good comparison would have also been with Armored Core. AC6 have very little iFrames and it’s all about positioning, while at the same time there is still serious tracking done by bosses. Instead of using a button for dodging, it’s up to your lateral movement and vertical movement. It’s honestly very thrilling to just barely dodge an attack because you fly up, thrust to the side, and attack at the same time. One of my favorite builds in AC6 is using the laser dagger + max melee launch to leap into unsuspecting PVP players.
Honestly i-frames only make sense from a performance reason. Hit-box collision between a rolling player and the various spiky bits that enemies attack you with would be nightmare to compute accurately. So just make the player invincible during the roll, and problem solved. The problem is that it breaks not just immersion, but _intuition,_ which is a far bigger deal. Rolling into a swinging blade so you phase through it unharmed is not something that most players would guess on a first (or even tenth) attempt, because it requires you to switch off that part of your brain that thinks of the in-game combat as if it was a real, physical fight. But switching that off almost completely cuts connection between the player and the game.
Interestingly, a huge number of attacks that hit low in elden ring can just be jumped over. However, Elden ring doesn't intensely condition this but rather the previous game of Fromsoft's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice does. Learning to use this and adapting it to Elden Ring makes many difficult to dodge combos utterly trivial.
I've yet to play any Monster Hunter game myself, but the lack of i-frames had nothing to do with it. I didn't even know MH did dodging differently until I saw this video. I've simply avoided Monster Hunter games because as far as I can tell, the combat is basically all boss fights? Or at least is primarily focused on fighting single, tough, boss-style enemies rather than cutting through numerous weaker foes. And quite honestly, boss fights are generally my least favorite parts even in games I otherwise love. My happy place, and this totally goes for From's classics as well, is exploring new places and fighting numerous common enemies, not fighting single bosses. But I dunno, maybe I've totally misjudged Monster Hunter? Which is why I figured this might be a good time to see if I got the wrong idea from what little I've seen here and there.
I mean, they seem to have been experimenting with mitigating the I-frame issue for a while now with the systems they implemented for Bloodborne and in Sekiro. In Bloodborne, it was the system where the player regained lost health if they damaged an enemy a certain amount of time after being damaged. And in Sekiro, it was a combination of the “perfect guard” deflection system (which they kind of added with one of the new crystal tears in the Elden Ring DLC, just not with swords) and the visual attack symbols/cues that would signal to the player a deflectable attack vs an attack that should be avoided as well as attacks that should be dodged or jumped over. Both approaches contributed to less reliance on rolling I-frames. Personally, I hope their next game incorporates the Sekiro blade deflection and perfect guard system alongside the Bloodborne system. Those systems felt very rewarding to learn largely in part to the more active and aggressive play-style they encouraged. I could take or leave the warning symbols, though they were nice. Just wish there were more defensive options other than parrying, blocking, or rolling.
If they decide not to utilize an indicator to show how to deal with an attack, then they'll have to improve the readability of enemy attack animations- I feel like that facet has become worse and worse over time.
@@AtelierMcMuttonArt With non-humanoid enemies like the Revenants or Ulcerated Tree Spirits, it can be nearly impossible to tell which bit of their crazy thrashing around is the actual attack.
I think if there was something in the game that gave a visual or audible cue that shows off when the I-frames are active during a dodge. Like, the players shines blue or a chime rings out when they're invincible.
Great video. For anyone who doesn’t know, there’s a shield ash of war in Elden Ring called “Vow of the Indomitable” which provides a moderate amount of s contextualized as a momentary prayer which negates all harm. It looks awesome and I tend to use it when bosses perform massive explosion-like attacks that dodging clearly shouldn’t negate. With the dlc’s addition of thrusting shields and the deflecting hardtear, shield play feels like a more “immersive” alternative to FromSoft’s usual dodge-centric bouts and I couldn’t be happier for it!
I definitely feel Iframes are overutilized after playing Dark Souls 2, where I frames are KING and poise is worthless. The last few bosses of the game will 1hko you, or stunlock you until you die- there is no in between. As such, you're expected to dodge roll INTO the boss and its attacks, not away. As dodge rolling in this game is based not just on armor but on two stats, this was a terrible idea and goes against basic logic -these attacks are too big, the player can't dodge through them- and yet they do, and this is the "intended" solution to the bosses- the player just "phasing through" an enemy's giant blade or magic wave. Though my recent understanding of Netcode suggests another reason for I-frames: Netcode. In PVP, latency means player 1 may see them hit player 2 , while player 2 sees themselves not getting hit. When the game compensates, player 1 gets his hit, while player 2 is hit a good 3 feet away and rages a bit. But by adding i frames, if player 2 was dodging and thus invincible for that second, even if player 1 sees himself hit player 2, player 2 doesnt' take damage, and player 1 and 2 know the hit didn't register. The Iframes make it so player 2 has a chance and creates a sense of loose, general timing for combat- if you're about to be hit, you dodge, and thus even if the latency is way off, you're likely to successfully avoid the attack.
On the immersion breaking for the rolls ive always considered them to be just a limitation to their animations. Yes the animation is just a roll, but you could consider it like an action movie or character action game, limboing under a swing, quickly side stepping it or some other manner to dodge it. Not a literal statement of rolling makes you invincible. I would enjoy a more movement focused system, where you can dodge with attacks, they are moving that direction it seems and i am here for a shakeup in the formula, i love the souls formula but at some point it will become stale. I do hope they do not move to a multiplayer focused system, as someone who does not use summons at all, which i would say is the core of how the souls games are designed(ai janks out with targetting pretty easily with more than one person). I would like bosses to still be designed around a straight up duel. This straight up duel, where i just beat down a boss go toe to toe with monstrocities, no gimmicks no qte is what drew me to the souls franchise in the first place.
Thats pretty much it. I wonder why they havent fixed it and now it has pretty much become part of fromsoft games' identity. Lies of P doesnt have s iirc and it didnt break the game.
@@pramitpratimdas8198 i thought lies of P did have s on the dodge though not nearly as long a window, but I myself could be misremembering. Lies of p however also isn't super movement focused and is more sekiro like than souls like. On a side note, it seems most soulslikes these days are actually more like sekirolikes. There is the ever increasing trend of "parry based souls-likes" instead of traditional ones.
@@imALazyPanda Lies of P is extremely movement focused if you want to. I played it barely using block/parry at all and it was more than viable. People think it's parry only, but they actually made system that allows you to spec into improving any of the options and making them powerful.
@@Dorrovian maybe its time for a replay then. I do remember getting a few slick dodges with dancer sword special ability(forget what they were called) and feeling pretty cool when I pulled it off. Any build you can recommend or place you could point me to that is pretty movement focused.
I don't necessarily disagree (in every video game you have to accept SOME degree of abstraction) but I really wish they would at least replace the roll animation with something that looks more like a proper dodge. The animation is already in the game with the Quickstep skill, for example. Rolling was sorta cool in the early games when the stamina cost and the slower boss attacks made you use it sparingly and more deliberate. But the roll spam most boss fights in the newer games often degrade into looks really dumb and I'm tired of pretending it doesn't.
about AI designed for multiple foes: this can also makes bosses harder. hear me out: when a boss throws a combo at you and only you, at some point you will know how to deal with it. dodge left, walk back, dodge right, attack window. now, if you got a boss that can switch target mid combo suddenly you get these combos thrown at you with different timing and hitboxes, keeping the combo threatening.
I hear you, there are times where fights are easier solo then with a spirit summon. Some bosses have a higher reactive state, they react to your attacks instead of aggressively throwing combos at you. Those bosses are chaos with a spirit summon that attacks the whole time and I have caught the ass end of a combo a few times because the boss was countering my commons attacks.
This is why I don't like this design choice. I'm not a fan of how combat flows with multiple ally targets; it's pretty unsatisfying to have a victory or defeat happen due to some random switching of targets, or because a boss was designed to be borderline unfair to fight without them.
Something I like about Metroidvanias like Hollow Knight or...well...Metroid, is that the way enemy attacks are designed to encourage the player to utilize there full arsenal of weapons and/or abilities. You have to jump, you have to duck, you have to run towards a small window where the attack will miss, etc. Sometimes a boss will force you to use a specific ability in order to beat them. FromSoft's combat has been fairly simple, and therefore people become conditioned to that simplicity with only a few exceptions. Sekiro, in contrast, has a very dynamic combat and traversal systems, therefore you are faced with bosses that require more than just parrying.
I'd like to point out that From has made a game without i-frames recently and it's Armored Core 6, and it's fenomenal. Took some time to change the mindset but it's an amazing experience
I think "we could make this better, but the fanbase is expecting it" is a dangerous mindset for a developer. Players can be uppity and set in their ways, but as someone on the outside that doesn't give a shit about Souls games, I do think it might be cool if doors made more sense, or if there were more viable approaches to combat, ya know? If Fromsoft feels like they aren't allowed to change because people are expecting a specific format then their work will eventually feel stale. Maybe they really do need to make more, smaller games that present their fans with alternatives in order to get them used to new things.
How much more do you want? Despite how the video acts there are plenty of ways to fight minimally involving i-frames. There are plenty with ranged builds using distance, shield builds using blocks, parry based builds interupting the enemy, poise builds all about trading damage with the enemy, summon builds all around supporting the summons to fight for you. All that's ignoring that i-frames are not the end all be all even in builds that use it. Rolling is a costly action, it takes up stamina and locks you into an animation which prevent you from retaliating. Instead low-profiling, jumping, spacing or even positioning all allow you to attack an enemy safely during their attacks while letting you do much more damage than a roll would on account of having more stamina available. I-frames are a tool for safety but not what you should always be relying on otherwise it becomes notably more difficult to stagger enemies or inflict status effects on them, or even just damage them.
@@theresnothinghere1745 It's clear that they're capable of delivering new approaches to melee combat as they have with Sekiro. I'm not saying "this needs to stop!", I'm just saying that an overly reticent audience is detrimental to progress.
From is also pretty decent at introducing new mechanics naturally. If they were to put a clearly intentional door-opening trap in the opening hours of a Dark Souls IV, players would understand the game has no door invincibility. It's helpful to keep in mind what players expect, but that knowledge can (and ought to) be used in different ways.
Absolutely love MonHun. Started in Tri and have loved every new iteration. One of the interesting bits about iFrames and Dodging in MonHun are the Dodge related skills, one adds more iFrames, and one adds Distance, making for some interesting choices in Comfort Skills (Skills that don't let you kill faster but make the game more comfortable for you to play: Defense Up, Health Up, Guard, things like that)
I honestly would prefer going back to Bloodborne dodge. Faster, less i-frames. The current dodge is a bit methodical since its overall length means the player cannot i-frame through numerous multihit attacks and instead has to rely on positioning as well, but at Bloodborne dodge speed this is doable as well and the faster dodge speed would mean the game can expect more active gameplay from the player, thus giving possibility for more active and demanding enemy movesets. I'd love to see what sort of insane boss designs they would do if they went back to Bloodborne gameplay pacing. Things like Nioh have even faster dodge with even less i-frames, but that gameplay style is also way more dependent on fast movesets, cancels and other mechanics designed to cut down recoveries and pauses between moves, making it an entirely different gameplay style.
It doesn't help that blocking isn't consistently good either. Instead of making it a playstyle like in say, Ghost of Tsushima, it's treated more like a noob crutch.
The first soulslike game I played was Nioh rather than a From game. My instincts for fighting came from MMO tanking. So my tactics were about resource preservation, footwork, and aggressiveness. I would wear heavy armor and use fast, cheap attacks to keep up pressure. I would maintain my stamina (ki) reserve, but I would also do my best to keep it from capping out by poking at enemies. Sometimes dodging was necessary, but blocking, walking, and running were my main defenses. The game facilitated this play style with build/stat options, such as reduced blocking stamina cost. The net effect is that I was able to dominate through aggression and endurance bosses that gave more agile and evasive players a lot of trouble. Meanwhile, the Elden Ring players' main defensive tactic I've seen seems to be venting their stamina bar to do rapid somersaults. It doesn't look like a very effective way of fighting to me. It looks more like they're just rapidly mashing the Not Die button in a panic.
I hardly ever dodge in Elden Ring. I tend to use sword and board. Might be why I have such a hard time with the game. And I definitely want to check out Monster Hunter, now.
My second run i try to sword and board and it's much much easier than my first run to dual wield and roll. With all the confusing visuals and delayed attacks it's much better to wait for the attack to connect and then counter.
The majority of FromSoft's library actually lacks i-frames. King's Field,Armored Core,and Sekiro all lack i-frames entirely,or lacks them in any meaningful context. We already know what a FromSoft game looks like without i-frames,and Sekiro is widely beloved because of it. Hell,the Deflecting Hardtear is literally just Sekiro at home,and aggressive guarding has been encouraged since Elden Ring's launch with the addition of guard counters,resulting in shields being more powerful than they ever have been in the franchise,considering how simple it is to make your shields insanely good (Shield Grease + Greatshield Talisman) and guard counters having comparable offensive power to a charged heavy attack,with far less risk involved... Unless you're using a halberd. I-frames are a tool. Like any tool,they can be misused, and I will genuinely say this: People who refuse to use the myriad of Elden Ring's defensive options besides rolling are injuring themselves. In Elden Ring,as you pointed out,your defensive options are many. You can simply pick a direction and sprint,which is the actual solution to a huge number of the game's most infamously difficult to dodge attacks,such as Rykard's Rancor. You can just block it,since eating chip damage and a guard break is still preferable to eating full damage,and that's the worst case scenario. If it's low to the ground,or even a ground effect,nine times out of ten,you can bunnyhop it. If you've got the stones and eye for it,you can parry most weapon attacks from humanoids Omen sized or smaller,and the DLC release day patch buffed the Parry skill on daggers to Dark Souls 1 levels. And then there's just raw defensive power to take it to the chin when all else fails,or you decide to take a calculated risk and trade. There's even the Endure skill to facilitate this,and an entire raft of items and talismans,too. I-frames need to be designed around. Their existence alters the game on a profound and fundamental level,if the game's core gameplay loops heavily involve combat. This is why,in Sekiro,you have warnings for all attacks that simply cannot be deflected; You can't dodge them with i-frames,since i-frames don't exist in any meaningful way in Sekiro. So,you jump sweeps,and maybe get a cheeky footstool kick in for good measure. You either run the fuck away from thrusts,deflect them with perfect timing to bring the entire fight to a temporary screeching halt,or learn and use the Mikiri Counter to counter it with good timing. And if you try to deflect lightning in the normal way,you'll get paralyzed for your trouble,forcing you to use the Lightning Reversal technique to deal with it,which comes with some chip damage. In King's Field,you had to master spacing,as i-frames didn't exist at all. And in Armored Core,you have to rely on positioning,spacing,countermeasures (When the exist...) or just eating it,making the franchise extremely attritional. Yes,Dark Souls has trained us to dodge. But Elden Ring makes it plain that you're expected to do more,and people who refuse to learn that lesson are sleeping in the bed they've made themselves. I-frames are not holding the games back,I think. It's the people who try to roll through I Command Thee,Kneel. It's the people who try to roll through Rykard's Rancor. It's the people who never think to,or don't put in the time and effort to,learn the new tools the game drops in their lap,and then kicking up a stink over them trying to fit the huge square peg into the tiny round hole.
I agree with the sentiment here: people get stuck thinking the roll is the only "pure" tool and using anything else is cheese, then cry "bad design" when they encounter any friction. I will quibble about Sekiro not having meaningful s. You get 12 s on a forward dodge (holding forward or not holding the control stick at all), but only 6 on sideways or backward dodges. So it's often useful to forward dodge into a grab attack to through it. But the bad s on side dodges will quickly train you not to rely on them, yes.
The reason for the spirit buff items is the same as the buff for stats. They want a leveling system separate from the main game. If they didn't implement it, summons would be de facto nerfed for the DLC. If they just raised the level cap, the summons would be much stronger in the base game.
As a MH veteran first, souls game enjoyer second, this is so validating. I've been having the same through for years. Souls game have been relying on timing as the main depth of skill expression for years. Meanwhile MH have always traditionally put more emphasis in positioning/movement
"Monster Hunter i-frames are so miniscule that they might as well not be there." Ah, I see someone forgot about the superman dive. A move which gives you a whopping 1+ seconds worth of i-frames, and is borderline required to dodge some of the supernova screen wipe attacks endgame monsters have. Plus Monster Hunter is very lenient with the i-frames you get when knocked down, which makes staying on the ground longer a viable option to avoid more damage when you get hit. Not to mention how Monster Hunter gives you armor skills that both increase the number of i-frames in your actual dodge and massively extend the distance said dodges travel. And let's not forget skills like Divine Blessing which have a chance to reduce damage by up to 60%. And the copious amounts of healing options and the fact that you get 3 lives for every fight. The game might not give you dodge i-frames by default, but they offer a plethora of other options to help the player manage that added difficulty instead. I find it interesting that you brought up the wirebugs in Rise, because its the faster pace and more aggressive nature of Rise that necessitated giving the player so much added mobility that it started to feel like a DMC game. Just like how the faster paced and more aggressive FromSoft games give you more i-frame options to deal with it. "Door i-frames are due to technical limitations." No. Door i-frames are there because nothing sucks more than getting mauled from behind by all the enemies you ran past because you got stuck in a door animation. Dark Souls 2 had no door i-frames, and it blows.
DS2 dared to have you not just run past all the enemies and it blows? That's the biggest issue that souls games has never truly dealt with is that its deliberate pace means you can just run past everyone.
I think one of the games that did invincibility frames very well is Ittle Dew 2. It added a dodge roll mechanic, and telegraphs the s very clearly - when your outline is white instead of black, you cannot take damage from enemies. One of the "Super Secrets" even tells you that you can roll into projectile attacks to make them disappear. You don't need to use this mechanic for like 90% of the game, but there are 2-3 endgame enemies/bosses that either require or really need dodge rolling to beat. But this never feels like too much of an ask or filled with jank, because you spend all of the game getting used to the dodge and learning how to use it. And in practice, the roll lets you stay close to enemies to wail on them inbetween attacks, keeping the combat moving fast and rewarding studying enemy behavior. Now obviously Ittle Dew 2 is a much simpler game than any soulslike, but I think it's something worth looking into to see how well a combat system can be improved.
My problem with Monster Hunter isn't the lack of i-frames but the lack of proper lock on. The way MH handles the camera is simply beyond stupid. As for i-frames and rolling disease, it's one of the reasons the original Dark Souls is my favorite game in the series and why I still replay it to this day. Since armor, poise and shields are also viable options it means you can play in other ways too. Compared to the fashion souls of later games where it doesn't really matter what you wear, so rolling becomes the only real option.
My first playthrough was with shield and phat rolls. Its definitely viable but its nowhere near as easy as it was in ds1. Definitely agree rolling has become a crutch, they need to bring back tactical approach to combat like in DeS/DS1
Honestly one of my biggest peeves with Elden Ring's design is how armor is fundamentally just a weight:poise ratio. You're either playing mid-weight/poise, high weight for max poise, or you're effectively naked, and the rest is more or less cosmetics with some minor statistical bonuses you might never notice at all. It's the most Fashion Souls of any game probably. Considering how deep the weapon system is it's pretty disappointing how shallow the armor is, but in order to fix it they would have to adjust the way they design games, where they want an enemy to hit you and evaporate half your health pool and they dont want you to be able to mitigate that too much.
@@mediumvillain Ironic that equipment performance makes it extremely fashion souls, yet most of the outfits' visuals are so ugly they kill the fashion appeal anyway.
I think the other DS1 comparison is just... the speed of everything. DS1 EVERYTHING was ponderous and so you had the time to just... get out of the way of a lot of things. In every game since, things have gotten faster, to the point where unless you're playing *perfectly* you simply HAVE to roll through things.
Sekiro mostly did without them. Also I think you’re minimizing the role of s in Monster Hunter, especially Iceborne which had a few attacks that either you d through or you got hit.
one of the most fascinating souls-likes in recent years, "Bleak Faith: Forsaken" did not have i-frames when it came out. it is a janky game in many regards, but once you got used to not having i-frames but start paying more attention to positioning and movesets, it was a really great game. they actually have implemented i-frames after a few patches but I have not played enough to have a well founded opinion on them. they are certainly not on the levels that we are used to from fromsoft, but I find it very interesting that they added them. the devs (only 3 people I think) kept working on the game and improved them massively. it is a weird but curiously intriguing game that I recommend to anyone with enough patience :)
I don't know how better to disprove that MH doesn't use i-frames than simply gesturing at the superman dive. You get easily over a second of i-frames and for some builds and weapons it can be the only reliable way of dodging some big attacks. And it's not like the regular dodge isn't useful as well. In rise, there's not only skills made to make your i-frames better, but with bladescale hone or adrenailine rush, actively encourage you to do so aggressively and buff yourself with them. Also the light greatsword r1 moveset in ER is legit the EXACT same as a longsword combo in monster hunter so it is clear somebody is taking design cues
I agree that he was wrong that it doesn't *use* i-frames, but on the other hand, arguing that also doesn't refute his main point, that MH doesn't rely on i-frames as the main (or sometimes only viable) means of avoid damage as much/often as From Soft Souls games do.
What I find is that, once I got comfortable using the i-frames in DS2, DS3 and Elden Ring, I have never felt any drive to change my play-style to avoid or challenge it, it's become one of the most comfortable ways to play it, something which I am now inspired to try changing
While we’re talking about i-frames and dodging, can we get an episode on how ingenious Dodge Offset is in Bayonetta? That dodge system is what turns Bayonetta from a button-mash-fest at low level play into THE game I search on RUclips for combo montages at high level play. Putting a combo string on pause to do a Crow Feather attack, activate an Accessory ability, or run around in the Panther form, only to then resume the initial string where I left off like I never left, and finish it with a strong Weave attack! Most satisfying thing in the world to both pull off and watch others do.
I feel like with the dlc Fromsoft is starting to reach the breaking point of what is mechanically possible with their dodge/block/hit combat system, there is basically nothing mechanically new introduced in the dlc on the enemy side, just that combos last longer, there are even more AOE's (to account for summons since bosses still have awful AI that break when more than one thing attacks them so they give them attacks that hits both you AND your summon at the same time), and "punishing windows" after each combo is even shorter, to the point now there are 15-20 second 8+ hit combos you need to dodge perfectly in order to deal 1-2 hits in return (unless you have a weapon fast enough to deal a few hits in between the combos). If this is the direction the company keeps taking I might not pick up their next ARPG because it's getting tiring.
I agree, and if you are I'm assuming talking about the final boss, there is another bonus. Because this boss actively discourage jumping and distancing (phase 2) and some attacks need roll-spamming (also phase 2), which is weird because I thought that that was the opposite direction of the base game.
Once I finish SotE I will never buy another Fromsoft game. They've been trending this way for too long and they're getting a massive pass on shit thag no other dev would be allowed. I desperately wish the people handling their level design would get to work with a company that can actually make a mechanically coherent game.
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So I just want to point out that this is more of a reversion to old From design than a whole new system. This might be a bit overlong, but I work in Combat Design so I find it very interesting:
In every From Souls game post-Bloodborne, combat has been heavily centralized around a single timing-based defensive mechanic. For Bloodborne, DS3, and Elden Ring this was dodge. For Sekiro (which might not be a Souls-like, but regardless) it was parry.
But if you go back further, to the original Demon Souls, or to Darksouls 1 and 2, you will notice that the landscape of defensive mechanics was a lot more broad. For one, in each of these games, Shields were far more powerful than they are now. Stamina costs per hit taken while blocking were lower and enemies tended to have good windows for lowering block to regen stamina. These games also prioritized positioning, either through large AoE attacks or through the use of level design (think the pillars for Ornstein and Smough). For many bosses in the early Souls games, even simply running away was a valid defensive strategy. If you stopped to heal or attack, that was slower than modern Souls, and therefore more vulnerable. But if you didn't want to attack the boss, generally the boss couldn't effectively attack you either. Poise was also a real stat. If you had Heavy Armor, you fat-rolled. But you also could armor through many attacks, and that was seen as valid play.
Of course, dodging was and is still a viable strategy in old Souls games, but it wasn't conceived as the main defensive build. You can see this very obviously in the presence of the Adaptability stat from Dark Souls II, which had to be invested in to increase the i-frames of dodges. At that time, Fromsoft thought of dodging as something that *some* builds do (and thus invest into), and which other builds do not. This was enforced by the "janky" hitboxes of early Souls games. Hitboxes often lingered or hit too far or otherwise behaved unexpectedly, and that was seen as mostly okay given that many players would not even try to dodge them. Overlong durations or odd sizes don't effect a shield user who gets hit at the *beginning* of the hitbox duration and is thereafter immune.
Dodging didn't take its place of prominence in Souls until Bloodborne. Bloodborne is a game designed from the ground up around speed, agression, and evasion. The only shield in the game is a literal joke, intended to teach veteran players that blocking is useless. The range of playstyles in the game is more narrow, since everyone is going to be a nimble, evasive hunter, but the depth is greater as every weapon has two complete move-sets that can be switched between. And Bloodborne was a massive success. It sold 7 million copies despite being a PS4 exclusive. For context, Darksouls 1 was seen as a massive success in 2012 with... 1.2 million copies sold.
After Bloodborne, the rest of From's output has been molded in its image. Dark Souls 3, by far the biggest selling Dark Souls game, has far faster combat than previous entries in the series. In Dark Souls 3, Vigor is seen as a dump-stat, because defense is centralized around not getting hit with i-frames and many of the updated mechanics (weapon arts, power stance, etc.) are intended to flesh out the playstyle of non-shield-using builds. Elden Ring, which by itself has sold 25 million copies, more than two thirds of the entire Dark Souls series' sales, is faster still with more i-frame centralization. It features jump i-frames, emphasis of two-handed weapons through the stagger system, and has many bosses that use massive, un-blockable flurries of precisely tracking attacks.
Of course, Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring are good games, but their success has caused two issues. First, on the level of discourse, their success has caused quite a bit of revisionist history about the older Souls games. To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and when compared on the level of "is this a good dodging game," Dark Souls 1 and 2 cannot hold up because they weren't designed to. Secondly, as you pointed out in this video, i-frames can be obtuse. That is especially true when they are slammed together with a bunch of long-time Souls mechanics, like diverse playstyles, magic, heavy armor, shields, etc.
I am hopeful that in future From games, they will be a bit more free from the conventions of the Souls series. The best From combat since DS1 has been all of their non-Souls games like Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Armored Core 6, games where the team has had the freedom to make hard choices in what to cut and what to keep. Hopefully the success of Elden Ring will give them more of that freedom going forward.
I just wanna say, this is the best post under this video and it is criminal how few upvotes you have gotten.
@@MrWhygodwhy Thank you for saying that! I understand why people might not want to read an 8 page rant on the history of Fromsoft combat design, but I'm really glad at least some people do like it!
@@Dahras1 one thing I want to add about dark souls 1 as well that doesn't get talked about as much as it deserves I feel. The kick and the jump attack, both kinda weird inputs to pull off so a lot of people I know didn't really use them. But I felt like they fit really well into the combat of the time and helped break up the options moment to moment. Dodging wasn't the only response, if an enemy blocked you kicked, if they back stepped you jump attacked, etc.
Always made the combat feel a little more "rock-paper-scissors" since you had to commit to an action more as well. That if you did the wrong action in the wrong moment the enemy would "win" that interaction and you'd take damage and vise versa. Almost a turn based feel in the form of real time combat if that makes sense.
Obviously the game still has a lot of timing dodge based focus still. But I always felt that the pace shift to faster more fluid actions kind of removed this almost strategic component of the first game
Totally agree. I actually played Dark Souls 1 for the first time after my first go at Elden Ring, and I found when I returned to Elden Ring I was better equipped to read and adapt to various movements simply because, like Dark Souls, Elden Ring isn't solely designed around dodging. Figuring out how poise works has been huge for my own forward progress, and the fact that shield counters exist and are so strong feels indicative of FromSoft wanting to allow for the flexibility in their play styles again.
@@Dahras1 You put into words a lot of ideas I was thinking while watching the video and I agree with your line of reasoning. Looking back, it wasn't until after beating bloodborne that I started focusing more on evasion and shieldless play in DS1 and DS2, and of course the observation that the post-bloodborne titles were much more evade centric in their playstyle options just supports the thesis. Take your thumbs up, dude, definitely a comment that deserves visibility.
i think Fromsoft did in fact make this experiment. Sekiro. I spent over half of the game thinking it was the hardest game they ever made, because I was playing it like Dark Souls, conditioned to think that dodges should be prioritised over blocking, and even longer before i realised how *everything* that isn't perilous can be deflected. When I realised my mistake, the game became both a ton easier, and a ton more fun. I also suspect this error or expectation in understanding the gameplay loop is why it still has the reputation among some Soulsborne fans as the hardest game- which, honestly, yea, it is hard, but I do think it's one of the more easy-going overall
Sekiro feels completely impossible, until your brain rewrites itself during one of the first proper bosses like Lady Butterfly or Genichiro; and you realize it’s FromSoftware’s easiest game by a mile.
I gave up on sekiro like 2 hours in when i ran into random peasant with a wooden shield that you basically cannot fight without a ninja tool that breaks shields. Like no, F you game. tools like that should be optional to make a thing easier, not mandatory to even engage in gameplay. I didnt even bother going through the fog wall shortly after that enemy to see what their first "real" boss was like. I think that was the first real boss door anyways, its been years.
I accept that sekiro is a niche experiment that is not for me so i cant say its "bad" but man it just never did a single thing to try to pull me in to like it.
@@emwZEEK u can manuever around the shield and hit him from behind
@emwZEEK the shinobi tools are a core mechanic of the game. You can function without them, but you aren't supposed to, and complaining about it is *your* problem, not the game. No boss or enemy requires you use them. You sound like the games journalist that couldn't get past the tutorial in cuphead cause they couldn't jump dash
I still find Sekiro on average harder than the other FromSoft games, not because of the "deflect vs dodge" mentality, but because the way stance buildup works requires you to play with non-stop aggression to make progress on breaking the boss's stance. If you ever mess up somewhere in either your attack or deflect chains and need to back off and heal/reset, you lose so much time getting back to where you were because the boss is *also* recovering during that time. If you want to play patiently and methodically, you can do that, but it makes everything so much more difficult because it drags the fight out to an extent that it doesn't in the other games, where playing slower does obviously make the fight longer but you're not actively losing progress unless it happens to be against an opponent that can heal itself.
When I first started playing games like these I found the dodging extremely counterintuitive, because instead of avoiding an attack you needed to suicidally throw yourself into it in order to magically phase through it. It works and it plays well with tight timings, but it only makes sense once you're used to it. Dodging in a way that physically makes sense usually gets you killed.
Torrent combat though. No s. Only double jumps and physical movement and dashes.
I also think that positioning has become less and less viable as the games have gone on. In Dark Souls you could carefully stand out of range of an attack and then run in. Now it feels like you never have the time to do that and enemies leap at you from huge distances. I'm fine with i-frames but it sometimes feel like I'm playing a rhythm game instead of duelling with an enemy
@@theomegajuice8660 This is actually true because bosses have insane tracking with attacks now. And I mean to a ludicrous degree.
Armored Core 6 is all about mobillity and positioning though if you're interested in that. Great game.
Opening a screen filled with words instead of looking into a bag full of items is also counterintuitive. All game mechanics that don't perfectly match reality are counterintuitive because your intuition is based on living in reality. This isn't an argument.
There is a diffrence between counter-intuitive and immersive. Intuitive means you can figure it out based on intuition. Up arrow makes the menu selector go up is intuitive. Suddenly not taking damage dispite the sword going through your body is less so,
My favorite additions to evasion in Elden ring are attacks that are clearly meant to be jumped over instead of dodged through, like Godfrey/Hoarah Loux’s stomps and massive ground pound attacks
In addition, you'd be surprised how many things are best sprinted sideways.
In my casual play throughs of ER I never got the idea that those attacks could be dodged by jumping, because of all the flashy follow up animation showing the explosions and whatnot thrusting up into the air. :(
My problem with those is that it's quite unclear which attacks *can* be jumped over and which aren't. There are a lot of devious-looking hitboxes that don't always line up with the animation.
Sekiro actually fixed this completely with Periless Attacks, which have a symbol that indicate that you should either jump or Mikiri Counter. It's of course still a threat because you need to read the attack and decide which of the 2 options to take. It's all really well done.
I mean those are still just slightly different i-frames. When you jump the lower half of your body becomes invulnerable.
@@ManaBirb_0.1 to be fair youre still mostly right. you can only jump the AOE attacks that are like misty shockwaves or the rock cones that he combos into with his axe in phase 1. The HUGE earthquake attacks are just barely roll-able and most times youre better off just running away and attacking with spells or throwables
Kind of surprised that in the entire discussion he didn't take a sentence to define that "i-frame" == "invulnerability frames". I know the viewers are going to be gamer centric, but I'm guessing there's people interested in the discussion that aren't necessarily players of those particular games.
Should he also have defined the term "jank"?
The video assumes its viewers know the terms or are motivated enough to look them up. Otherwise, the video would span hours.
@@gnerkus Fair, but it only takes a short sentence and is an often-used term in the videos. From of a lot of JM8's previous work, it is something I would have expected and was also a little surprised he didn't give a brief definition, even if most game-savvy viewers will already know it.
Yeah. Never played souls games and felt confused for a while.
I figured the meaning in the context eventually, but not everyone will.
@Elesario doesn't help that an is an HTML element which is also problematic. I was wondering how Elden Ring was using html to code their UI
Very casual gamer here but like following these videos. Was a bit confused by the term as, like another said, it has another meaning outside gaming.
My only real problem with I-frames is that they're sort of a secret mechanic. Sure most players will figure out how they work quickly, but unlike games like Sonic that clearly indicate invincibility through flashing the sprite, souls-likes never address it directly or provide clear telegraphing for the timing. Elden Ring has a dedicated tutorial area and I don't see why there couldn't be a simple "hey you can't walk through these arrow traps unless you activate i-frames by dodging" section.
Fair point. Maybe more games should take a cue from when Hollow Knight added invincibility to its dash: Give a very clear visual indicator with some kind of in-universe reason for existing why you can schloop right through a sword thicker than you are tall.
@@AzhreiVep That and it helped it became a later mechanic. So alot of early enemies you have to physically dodge, but later enemies with the shade step you're more encouraged to dodge in
Action games are filled with secret mechanics like bounce cancelling, enemy juggling, dodge offsets etc.
I-frames is just a more defensive example than most so many don’t consider it.
Im a Hades Sim and will always be. They straight up TOLD you in Hades that the dash makes you invincible and it works with both the narrative and the gameplay. I never got into Souls because it seemed unfair to me. I tried to dodge by rolling away from the attack and that killed me over and over again. I only figured out that you were supposed to roll INTO the attack after watching youtube clips of people playing it.
@@chazzergamerwhile that's true. the difference is that those are more advanced mechanics you can probably get through the game without, but most souls games are pretty much unplayable without some understanding of i-frames. The first 2-10 hours of most players' first souls game will be spent getting used to this unintuitive yet crucial mechanic which the games refuse to explain clearly for absolutely no fucking reason.
I think Armored Core 6 needs a mention here. That is another recent FS game that massivley toned down the dependence on i-frames. Dodging at the right time still matters, but if the attack makes contact with you, it hits. No magic phasing through projectiles as far as I know. Positioning matters.
And there wasn't a need to play flawlessly. I know it's players that popularized the no-hit run, but Soulsbourne mechanics games made it so easy to do compared to AC games. I like that there's these mosquito shots to not make me feel weirdly untouchable and it kept me on my toes because those little shots add up by the end. Also, not having to worry about poise was so nice to have.
Bots with guns dont need it, and sekiro also doesnt use it as the main mechanic. I think the whole boss design is the trap that make the roll meta.
FromSoft doesn't have to rely on i-frames when Armored Core VI proved they can also do *not being near an attack*
Well yeah after all they added machine guns and armors that let you flyand jump over building in ER, that clearly shows they want you to fight at range like in AC6.
I think moving away from most combat ideas of older Souls games is a good idea and Elden Ring is getting players used to on that. The removal or iteration should allow for the combat to become even more dynamic in future FS games.
@@kenpachi1989 I see your point but I wouldn't be surprised if the next From game has more verticality like that. I could see them doing something like a flying mount, maybe
@@scrub_jay I mean the could, but it would feel more like AC than a soulslike. Also, I don't think flying mounts work well with the kind of exploration From goes for.
@@scrub_jay fuck now i want an Aladdin based From Soft with a flying carpet.
I feel like something that this video exclude is that roll spam has had significant updates in the Souls series. Not only that, but bosses are designed now to counter roll spam with variable delayed attacks. Imo FromSoft doesn't add I-frames due to players wanting and or expecting them, but because it is part of the combat system they are designing and use to using. Other commentors have pointed out that not all FromSoft games use I-frames, recently Armored Core 6.
I'm fascinated that you didn't mention Dark Souls 2, and what it did with I-frames. No i-frames while opening doors, very few i-frames at the start, requiring levelling a specific stat to increase them. From backpedalled pretty hard with those design choices, only to slowly re-introduce many of dark souls 2's ideas in Elden Ring
@@TorpedoBench Yeah I'm also surprised about the lack of a Dark Souls 2 mention. A major research oversight imo.
Elden ring's director is the same as DS2's. Miyazaki has pretty much retired to a supervisory role.
Dark Souls 2 actually does have s when you open doors, it just takes a bit for them to kick in. Most of the animations that players can be knocked out of have a very long startup where not much happens to avoid that janky door snapping shut issue he was talking about.
@@pramitpratimdas8198 Uh, Miyazaki literally spends more time directing than running the company.
@@BrickBuster2552 Not as much as he used to. Every game after Bloodborne featured staff members in the director role aside from Miyazaki
As someone who's been playing monster hunter for a long time, I disagree about the i-frames. They aren't integral to the game experience, but I constantly use them. There is even a skill to lengthen the i-frame window. Unless you're looking at speedruns where i-frames don't matter because the monster is permanently cc'd.
That being said, tracking is a huge issue in souls games, and makes i-frame usage basically mandatory.
Monster Hunter is more of a mix. i-frames are absolutely used to avoid some attacks (at least by skilled players) because avoiding them outright can be impractical and leave you massively out of position. And of course there's the classic superman dive that has tons of i-frames (though it's more of a last resort because it also has a long recovery time).
But there are other attacks that have long durations or lingering hit boxes that are impossible to dodge with i-frames. So you do have to understand the attack patterns and know how to react to different types of attacks, instead of just having one universal dodge button.
The superman dodge is a great way of handling s, it's designed to very effctive but also not very spammable, it doesn't create the constant exhuasting pressure of repeatably hitting the s on a 20 second combo of boss attacks, that's why i prefer it anyway.
I would say that I never felt like the i-frames were necessary. I went through a few games basically never trying to take advantage of them (but still getting the occasional save as a result of i-frames). As I became very advanced, I started to use them sometimes, but even now I pretty much only use them with very specific attacks, fights, or patterns.
The tracking has grown truly egregious. I hate watch a boss pirouette like a goddamn ballerina mid-attack.
It really depends on what weapon you use. Dual Blades use Iframes more than say a Greatsword or Hammer user. But GS/Hammer would rely more on weapon sheathing/unsheathing to get out of the way instead of rolling or using their weapon's s.
Not sure that many ER bosses have an effective coop ai as you say, if they do it isn't very apparent when a boss switches target mid combo and animation cancel teleports to the other combatant.
It's MASSIVELY apparent in the DLC. Though, for some bosses it can be frustrating. Because ER bosses track so well, it can really catch you out when a boss switches mid combo and you suddenly find yourself in the middle of the active frames of an attack that was being wound up 90 degrees from your direction. Rellana, Lion Dancer, and Messmer are notorious for it, so much so that it might sometimes feel better to fight solo just so you have a less complicated fight. I might fight the final boss solo just to make his attacks easier to read.
This is the reason why I hate using summons. In my experience it just turns fights into a chaotic mess that's not fun anymore. From needs to refine that mechanic much more for it to be good.
I also don't think switching targets mid combo is a sufficient or even good adjustment for multiple opponents. It will mostly just come across like erratic behaviour. A boss that is actually adapted to those situations would use different movement patterns and attacks based on the number of opponents.
To make it clear, I like the idea of fighting as a group against the boss, kinda like a raid boss. But Fromsoft has still not figured out how to create an AI that can handle 2 players at the same time without bugging out or doing an instant 180 degree turn in the middle of an attack.
If this were to ever be fixed, I could see the idea of summons feeling more natural.
I think er bosses are fascinating here. I’ve had fights where the boss will suddenly swap who it’s going for mid combo, meaning you have to stay on your toes. I have had some times where I just hard targets one player. It’s very silly
@@ksw8514 honestly, I LOVE a brawl. But, I'm a Monster Hunter player.
My problem with i-frames is that they tend to obfuscate what attacks are meant to be dodge-rolled and what aren't. One of the ER DLC bosses has an arena-wide multi-hit it uses at low health, and I thought it was unfair because I could never dodge it. It turns out it's actually really easy if you just jump, but I never figured that out because I assumed it just required stupidly precise dodge timing, and I only got the boss low enough to see & practice the attack every couple minutes. If you don't have i-frames or aren't taught you can rely on them, it's a lot easier to realize what attacks you should not be trying to roll away from.
There's a similar issue with shielding, in that some attacks pierce shields and/or blow you off your feet anyway, and you are just left to figure that out on your own. I FAR prefer a precise but sightreadable boss to one that tests you with "gotcha" moments like when the boss moves without telegraphing or before you can react, or when there's only one possible defensive response to an attack but it's not well communicated ahead of time. Trial and error is not for me. Maybe that's just a matter of individual developer intent though.
This is exactly why I hate the final boss of the DLC's "purple ground slam" attack. It never alludes that you're meant to avoid the attack by continiously jumping. You expect to dodge it, it doesn't work, and you don't know why unless someone tells you what's happening.
Of course, that's also not bringing up how akward it is to experiment with trial/error when one mistake costs you so much health.
To be fair, I think that particular attack uses the consistent 'flat shockwave' effect that generally indicates a jumpable attack
Though I do vaguely recall a few attacks with that effect in the base game that hit you anyway- it could be inconsistently used, or the timing could be too strict, but it's hard to determine since you generally just die from it.
@@leithaziz2716 Yeah, if players had more survivability they'd be able to learn way faster, and trial-and-error wouldn't be so bad even with really complex multi-phase boss fights. In theory the open world should help with that, and until the late-game grind it does help in the base game. But in the DLC, because you can't upgrade your survivability without upgrading your damage, trying to get really tanky to manage the trial-and-error also makes you strong enough to steamroll most fights without even _needing_ to learn the boss moveset. I don't know if that criticism works for the final boss though because I haven't seen it.
@@AtelierMcMuttonArt That is fair. The effect looked like it went high enough up in the air that I didn't expect I could jump it. Maybe that's because I tried to jump over the boss's massive sword sweep and got punished, which made me less likely to want to jump during the fight. Or maybe it's just because shockwave moves are inconsistent about whether dodge rolls or jumps or both work, yeah.
@@melephs_cap Exactly, yeah- the implementation is *almost* good, but the lack of consistency really hurts it
The exact same thing happened to me, too- the giant sweep definitely feels like it should be jumpable
As a Monster Hunter player, it is often interesting to see Souls players expect the gameplay to be the same (fight big monster), but get bodied because of that. The key to Monster Hunter, and IMO any engaging big monster fight, is positioning. Don't be where the attack will land, and be there where the boss stops so you can get in a few hits. It is, as the video said, a beautiful dance
4:05 Then you clearly have never been clipped by a Plesioth's hip check of the gods. It's the most cursed thing monster hunter has ever produced.
tbf they've cleaned the games up a LOT by gen 5. There's very little jank left, the games are still very clunky but that's part of their identity at this point
I think a happy medium I've seen before is giving increased defenses when dodging instead of giving flat out invulnerability. You still take some damage but you get through the attack alive because you've been given something like a 75% damage reduction for the duration of the dodge animation
I've always seen I-frames as an abstraction for the complicated act of dodging. In reality, an attack could come from any angle, and in order to dodge it you would have to be able to move in any direction, or even pivot specific body parts out of the path of the weapon. The game simply doesn't have that level of detailed control over the player character's body, and it shouldn't. If it did, you'd be playing QWOP, not Elden Ring. So to bring dodging into the realm of something that can actually be modeled within the game's controls, we introduce I-frames: we say that as long as you press the dodge button with the right timing, the game will just assume that your character does whatever very specific motion is required to dodge that attack. And since we don't have the budget for an infinite number of dodge animations, we just have the dodge roll, which looks like it could plausibly evade most attacks.
Could they make damage based 100% on whether the enemy weapon model physically intersects with the player's character model? Sure. But unless the player has full control over their character model (e.g. with some kind of full body VR system), that wouldn't feel fair, because it would mean the game is punishing you for something out of your direct control. This is presumably much less of a problem in MH because the monsters are huge and their attacks cover large areas, so it's not a question of whether that sword grazed your elbow but rather, was your body under that giant claw that slammed down. So whether your hitbox is your actual player model or a literal box shape around the model, the result is the same.
Well, there's games like Sifu, where you can duck, hop, or weave around attacks. I suppose that also uses I-frames though, just, never for the entire body. If an attack is defined as high, all ducks will dodge it, even if it clips through your character's head. Same for low attacks. You could have a giant overhead swing pass right through you and still dodge it because you happened to make your character leans slightly to the side. So, I guess it's still I-frames in a sense.
Mainly for ZERO I-frames to work though, it would have to be a game where you can easily position yourself wherever the attack isn't. I played Wizard of Legend once, which had no i-frames. Most attacks from enemies were projectile-based though, so a dodge was basically a "move quickly" button, so you could rapidly reposition to wherever the attack wasn't going, and the dodge moves you so quickly, it was practically a teleport. It took a lot of practice though to learn not to wait until the last second to dodge everything.
@@sageoftruth I think your Sifu example demonstrates the matching of controls to hitboxes. Basically, you have two hitboxes, upper and lower, with separate dodge buttons for each. Since you have direct control over each of those hitboxes, it's fair for the game to target them individually.
Now I'm stuck imagining a dark souls parody game that bends the character around the enemy's weapon rubber-hose style whenever you dodge through an attack.
I appreciate a lot of the arguments made in the video, that said, it really feels like this video is only talking about DS3 and Elden ring. This massive tracking didn't really exist in ds1, ds2, or demon's souls, but they offer a real window into why it exists.
Specifically, the boss AI was incredibly abusable in those games and while ds2 tried to use hoard fights to fix that but it didn't go over well. The heavy tracking was the solution they came up with so single enemy encounters couldn't just be trivialized.
On the other hand, sekiro and bloodborne offer alternatives to Dodge roll centric combat that maintain fast paced combat.
Sekiro centers on a different, far more readable and immersive timing based defense mechanic, namely perfect blocking. There's apparently only 1 in dodges so it's really only for repositioning.
Meanwhile bloodborne has standard Iframes but much meatier hitboxes from enemies. That combined with how much earlier you can cancel the forward dash and how enemies tend to move forward when they attack creates a situation you're primarily using it as a timing based repositioning tool. Mostly to get behind the enemy but in a much more active and interesting way than the earlier games.
I think the discussion of how we got there and discussion of fromsoft's other solutions to the issues give a lot of context.
Finally, there is one more negative that I think should be covered. Reliance on delayed attacks and other intentional misignaling in boss fight designs, as well as ridiculously long attack strings as a means to punish careless rolling which unfortunately by extension trivialize all other defensive options.
However, in Elden Ring's defense, adding jumping combined with attacks that are clearly ground targeted was a great addition.
It's... hard.
As you said, the biggest hardship of any new experimentation will always be to have the players even try to understand what you're wanting them to do.
But FromSoft games' formula works against it a lot, because it refuses to outright tell you most things, and the changes over the years have been slow. So habits are deeply ingrained in older players, and the game won't outright tell them they are wrong, it'll just make it tedious and unfun. But some players will prefer believing that's just what the game is (for better or for worse) and refuse to see it as an opportunity to try something else.
I-frames also require a large redesign of the game. I-frames are the trade of mobility vs negation. As you discussed i-frames keep you close to the fight. Everyone has really noticed from the DLC about how aggressive the DLC leaned into i-frames and it even showed how the increased number of i-frames of a jump vs a roll. So suddenly jump became meta. Overall it was a great dive into the concept.
Haven't played the dlc yet but the base game tried its best to lean away from relying too much on s and pushing players into other tactics. Margit is a pretty good example of that. His combos were designed to punish those who relied on abusing s on every attack
Reminder that the jump technically does NOT have I-frames as we understand them. What it does is turn only the lower half of you player model invulnerable for nearly the entire duration of the jump until you begin to fall.
@@SolitasRuisujump also has a longer recovery than rolling. That fall+landing takes nearly a metric hour (probably) to complete before you can move again. I will jump where it makes sense, but against anything that is my size (npc invader, etc) I won’t even bother with jumping to dodge.
DLC also leaned a lot on strafing and spacing, the second boss has long combo that are hard to doge with i-frame, but you can strafe many part of the combo and doing so you get longer openings. If you only rely on i-frames you make the game harder on yourself, I think the dev fully intend you to understand that sometime straffing around an attack is better than dodging
@@SolitasRuisuIt's also not really a 'new meta' so much as many of the bosses in the DLC have AoE ground attacks that cant be rolled through and need to be jumped over. It's a lot more common than it was for base game enemies.
Biggest con, IMO, of rolling i-frames in Souls games was the fact that it didn't seem to be advertised. If you're coming from games that don't have the concept of rolling i-frames, avoiding attacks by rolling into them is counter-intuitive, so you don't try it until someone explicitly tells you that you're invincible momentarily when you roll. Rolling/i-frames have made me want to go back to other action/rpg games like the OiF-era of Ys games where rolling wasn't a thing.
Weirdly, the lack of i-frames is part of why I prefer Armored Core to Souls. The quick boost to physically avoid missile salvos feels *more* than phasing through a sword twice my size. More consistent, more believable, more straightforward, all for the same result of avoiding damage.
I also feel I've seen i-frames done better in other, smaller games. Code Vein (yeah remember that one?) has multiple dodge types, and two of them stand out: one kinda makes you float as you dodge, another turns you basically invisible; clear visuals of when you're untouchable, rather than just feeling out exactly which split-second of the roll animation.
I think part of the disillusion with dodging in Souls comes from how literal you're taking it. In the same vein, I dont think you'd want any and every injury you take ingame to do real life levels of damage, where every impale and grab attack instant kills.
I tend to visualize it the same way you would... HP. We dont have health bars irl, ofc, and when you think about it physically, that dragon shouldn't have died just cus you poked its leg til its HP dropped to 0. It's more the idea of you whittling down it's vigor until you deliver a killing blow. Sekiro actually visualized it best, but it's the same idea with dodging I would say. For the sake of being a game you can play with an easy to understand "dodge", it's the idea that your character is maneuvering around the attack in any way possible that the dodge is meant to represent. Sure, that's a cop out in a sense, but so is having HP instead of demanding you only kill with killing blows and everything else only injuries or wounds. Which, in itself could be a cool game, but a very different one.
In terms of excitment, I think I might actually agree with you. Dodging the final boss' big laser right before it hits you is an exhillirating feeling, but I-framing through it would feel a little immersion-breaking. I think the difference is that the former feels like a natural reaction from the player while the latter is a reaction that's based on you knowing how to take advantage of how invul frames work.
It's funny, but I think a lot of my gripes with Elden Ring boss design might be solved if the character was sped up and side stepping around attacks rather than being a slug relying so heavily on I-framing everything. It never felt right that so many enemies and bosses seemed like they were designed for Sekiro while your character is just copy and pasted from DS1 basically. If anything, I feel it would work if the dance with bosses was similar to Rellana. Besides some wonky parry windows, she felt great for side stepping and parrying rather than being so reliant on rolling. Made me feel like I wanted to learn her moves and play more aggressively rather than running away the whole fight.
@@darugosuenyo I get what you're saying but I don't agree. Entirely subjectively, dodge rolling feels less "fair" than alternatives. I'm the kind of player who cares more about immersion than raw mechanics. Ghost of Tsushima strikes the balance for me. That combat system does a lot of what ER does--lock on, dodging, parrying, health consumables, frantically swapping the inventory item to turn the tide--but it doesn't feel as... idk, loose? Yes you're mostly fighting dudes in armor, but the paired animations and Kurosawa esque duels make up for it imo, and crucially, your dodge actually makes you dodge, instead of just turning invincible for a split second. It's easier to buy into the fantasy when I'm not being reminded "oh yeah, these are just polygons and hit boxes" every few seconds in a fight.
fwiw I'm giving ER another chance with all the dlc hype online and things are clicking for me this time around. I don't dislike i-frames and the ol dark souls dodge roll. But I feel Souls is the vanilla option, the default; nothing interesting or new since DS1 (since we all collectively decided to memory-hole DS2's experiment), and other games approach the same problem with more interesting solutions.
Code vein was a travesty of a souls like with a ton of backed in input delay and the dodges where either outright useless or extremely overpowered.
I feel vindicated hearing someone who actually makes content finally saying that Monster Hunter is the most mechanically similar game to the FromSoft action RPG formula that isn't attempting to copy it.
As a Monster Hunter player, I feel like moving away from hard tracking and obligatory i-frames into careful distancing and positioning without getting punished for it are good things. But oddly enough, I can actually cite one instance in an exist FromSoftware game that did this - Dark Souls 1. My current playthrough is currently at the point of fighting Ornstein and Smough and there were more than a few times where backstepping and sidestepping saved me better than trying to dodge roll through the attacks with i-frames.
Another counter example to i-frames is built right into FromSoft's library. Sekiro is basically, "What if I could parry everything?" The game. And it's truly amazing for it.
I think people on the dev team were like me in wanting to play Dark Souls as a pure parry build, but knew that it wouldn't work mechanically with everything else.
In DeS and DS1 s were riskier to abuse. Would you rather risk jumping into an attack just to get an extra hit or simply back off and wait for a better opportunity? In recent games the boss fights are right by the bonfire, so you aren't losing anything if you die. In DS1 death meant going through hordes of mobs again. In general, those games favored a more tactical approach where the boss fights happened outside the fog gate as much as inside it, you really had to think about every risk you take.
The drawback for the “party everything” is that it turned Sekiro into a DDR machine.
Parry parry clang clang parry parry clang clang
Like I just sat there, not even really thinking and just mindlessly waiting for a counter to show up to break up the tedium.
@@pramitpratimdas8198I agree with your point about in fight tactics, but not forcing players to fight through hordes of mobs to take another crack at a boss was absolutely the right move. Nothing has made me put my controller down more often than the prospect of having to spend 45 second between each fight just running past enemies to try again.
@@Ceece20 it's the same as ds3/ER's design - hit dodge hit dodge etc. Also you cant beat Sekiro by parrying alone, you have to be the aggressor which copy cats like Lies of P seem to miss the point of
@@Ceece20 That's a really reductive way to look at any video game. I could say the same thing about Elden Ring and the souls games. "In Elden Ring you just wait for the attack, dodge, hit them a couple of times and repeat." See, it's not helpful for anything.
I and a lot of people like that DDR/guitar hero element to the game. Having to learn the attack patterns and timings to deflect properly, how and when to use the various tools to the best effect, planning out stealth routes to take out groups of enemies, etc. I could go on.
If you don't like the game, that's fine, not everything is for everyone, but don't dismiss it as being something it's not.
I honestly think Fromsoft's souls games are best experienced in order, and that the increase in people playing elden ring or dark souls 3 first is the biggest reason for most player's overeliance on rolls. Both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 have a much larger emphasis on positioning than the rest of the series, as in those games many attacks can simply be sidestepped, avoiding the stamina consumption from rolling. Unfortunately, the increase in tracking on attacks, combo attacks, and large sweeping attacks on enemies in dark souls 3 and elden ring seem to encourage constant rolling above all else, and I think it really hurts the experience of players when they play any other souls games.
4:08-As a fan of both series I have to disagree there. MH is very much prone to weird hit boxes that feel like an attack shouldn’t hit or having animations that don’t clarify a movement as an attack. Plus rolling is a big part of those games with evasion skills leaning into that play style. Obviously it’s not to the same extent but it is there. Ultimately it just comes down to types of enemies u fight and the way the games are organised, MH enemies are often large beasts that act as giant DPS checks with smaller monsters usually reserved for early game encounters, where as soulsborne has much a larger variety of enemies but that are much faster encounters, necessitating a more aggressive play style hence the greater reliance on rolling.
An interesting avenue to this not discussed in the video is how Elden Ring bosses are designed to disincentivise you from rolling through every attack. Some require jumps others you have to run away from or around, attacks have ending hit boxes or come out faster than ur roll frames requiring positioning to avoid and punish. I know that play style isn’t for everyone, especially souls vets comfortable with the dodge and punish rhythm of dark souls etc but I think this design makes each ER boss a fun puzzle with multiple solutions, especially with the multitude of weapons and build variety
I certainly hope this prediction is right!
Now that the "Souls" genre is evolving, it's clear to me that the i-frames in rolling make it too good of an option, and it ends up being totally centralizing. Any experienced Dark Souls/Elden Ring player completely ignores blocking. Parrying is used once in a while, but in general it's too risky to use all the time. So all players end up rolling around like Sonic to avoid every attack.
Sekiro and Lies of P are improvements in that regard. Dodging, parrying, and blocking are all useful depending on the circumstances. Parrying is in theory optimal, but realistically too difficult to pull off all the time. So if you are not 100% sure you can pull it off you can just block. Dodging is good for positioning or when you're overwhelmed with status effects or your posture is ending.
I think one other facet of i-frames as FromSoft uses them is that it sort of simplifies decision-making in a lot of situations. Like if I have a weapon that either shoots me way up in the sky or swings around a wide arc on the ground, I need to decide which one is best suited to avoiding the big scary boss move coming my way, and the boss move may still hit one method of dodging but not the other. Whereas with i-frames, I know that if I just time my roll properly, I ought to dodge the move. Whether you think this is a good aspect of its design or not is sorta up to you, but I do think it's another thing to consider.
I would add that Elden Ring toned down tracking on boss attacks, and has emphasised positioning as an additional tactic against them. Hell, it's damn near mandatory to get those fully charged R2s for effective stance-breaking and some heavy commitment ashes of war. Margit's infamous staff slam, for example, has VERY weak tracking, and being easily side-stepped. I'm certain it was intended to teach the player that positioning is not only viable but outright vital for some builds, especially since trying to get away will result in the attack shifting into a charge that is even harder dodge and punish. Radahn, Maliketh, Elden Beast, and Hoarah Loux also put a fair bit of emphasis on it, too. It's not just about timing anymore.
Also, a big reason why bosses do such extreme amounts of damage is because you can negate them completely with i-frames. Maybe in a world where i-frames are more limited, you'd actually be able to take a few hits and battles would feel like attrition.
"Monster hunter is more about avoidance while souls is more about timing." This. All this. This is the line I need and will be using this everytime someone compares the two. Also in conjunction with the attack tracking of souls vs the cone attacks of monster hunter.
For a long time I've considered I-frames to be one of the biggest problems in these games. Precisely because it causes boss design to devolve into a graphically complex rhythm game. If I wanted to play Guitar Hero I'd be doing that. Positioning? Doesn't matter, just dodge. Distance? Barely relevant, just dodge. Often you will be actively punished for moving outside of melee range, because you're supposed to just eat the boss' undercarriage and time your dodges better.
I'd been avoiding the dlc because there's a history of just making things move faster and die slower. Maybe it's worth a look, when it goes on sale.
I feel its very disingenous to say things like positioning and distance don't matter just because you have i-frames.
Thinking like that is exactly how people get into the idea that the bosses just have 20 minute long combos with no end.
Positioning and distance are how you convert your defence into an offence in these games.
One example in the new DLC is the ancient dragon fight which has a 2 bite combo.
If you roll away and to the left of the first bite you bait the second, but if you roll the second you don't have time to punish the attack in its second phase.
However if you roll away and left of the first bite you can walk just out of range of the second bite allowing you to do a charge attack on the head of the dragon, doing several times more damage than if you just stuck to hitting its legs.
I have not played the dlc yet so I cannot speak for that, but for the base game I personally really enjoy the I-frame mechanics. There are some attacks where it’s better to run or jump to avoid, but to me the combat is at its best when you are frantically and frenetically dodging with the bosses’ attacks. It feels much more engaging when the boss actively responds to my own movements and chains the combo to try and hit me rather than go in the direction I was at the start of the chain.
An example of a fight I find quite boring and annoying is Placidusax, almost entirely due to the number of attacks that force you to run away from the boss for up to half a minute to avoid without taking massive damage. Not to mention that I-frames are practically a necessity when AOE attacks have hit boxes you cannot clearly discern from their visual effects. When you compare the Dragonlord to something like Morgott, where his aggressive combos keep you on your toes I personally find it not very fun to simply run around.
You also mention FromSoft potentially balancing the dlc around spirit ashes, which they did in the base game to a certain degree. This is my personal preference, but I dislike this design decision in the context of a single player game. There are multiplayer mechanics, but at their core it is a single player action rpg. I think the previous summon mechanics, where summoning a player or npc increases boss health, should apply to the spirit ashes (as a less intense increase than summoning a player) rather than being applied by default to incentivize their use. I love the idea of spirit ashes but the idea of balancing the game around the idea that they should be used or are a necessity dramatically damages the single player experience by designing the boss around the assumption of multiplayer. It is also detrimental to people that are using the multiplayer features because spirit ashes cannot be summoned in multiplayer, so the health bar scaled around two players (you and the summon) is then given the multiplayer health multiplier making it even tankier than it should be.
I hope that this comes across as intended, but I really liked the thought experiment. You made me consider why I think I-frames are, if not a necessity, then very important in Elden Ring and games of its type. Having more ways to dodge attacks seems really cool, and your ideas are very well articulated. Even though they conflict with my own thoughts on the matter I can see your perspective and the benefits therein.
Fromsoft made Armored Core 6 which doesn't have i-frame and play similarly to third person action combat games contrarily to previous Armored Core. Basically they put emphasis on spacing, strafing and movement as method for not getting hit
To your discussion of I-frames at 9:09 blocking has been here since day 1 as well and Bloodborne did away with it. I don't think the convenience of I-frames was really expected from players until bloodborne and dark souls 3 implemented their wider I-frame windows. Prior we had other systems (ranged options, spacing, parrying, blocking and poise) we could rely on in a boss fight. However Bloodborne on we see bosses that hound the player, stricter stamina limits and weaker armor sets that force the game to focus on I-frame rolls.
Bloodborne doesn't have wider i-frames than Souls games. Its quick step dodge (11) has same amount of i-frames as Dark Souls 1 medium roll (11), less than Dark Souls 1 fast roll (13) and has less than any dodge in both DS3 and Elden Ring (Heavy 12, medium and light 13).
Bloodborne has extremely fast quick step dodge which allows for physically moving away from attacks, i-frames are more of safety net.
I'm sure people have chimed in but.. Hitboxes and attack legibility. The more Fromsoft designed, the more they strayed away from understandable monster attacks that make sense with hitboxes that make sense (correct hitboxes too), to weird rubbery monsters that attack behind them for no real reason, and yeah, at that point, people just abuse s, as it's not a game where a Tarnished fights monsters anymore, it's a game where a player dodges and abuses hitboxes and the developer throwing delayed attacks and unreadable attacks any the kitchen sink at trying to stop the player. Iframes are a part of it, but there's more going on here that turns Elden Ring and its sequel into just.. a player's battle against the developer fighting with game mechanics.
I'm playing through Returnal right now and i'm simultaenously both in awe of how many attacks i can dodge (with s) and just how much damage i can take from a single attack. The game is full with s but also attacks, but they're all extremely readable, but it feels much better to read and play and like i don't rely on them to survive per se. Also, a greater use of jumping and 3dimensional movement, especially when triple ring waves become a thing in biome 4.
My thoughts exactly- the enemy design doesn't work with the tools that they seemingly want you to utilize.
Also, sounds like I should play Returnal.
@@AtelierMcMuttonArt Returnal is very much a bullet hell game, but there are enough melee enemies to read attacks on, and boss battles are 100% about moving rather than iframing through attacks.
Absolutely love a thoughtful dive into a specific element. 10/10
I know he's supposed to mini Yahtz but every topic being negative or "why X is actually not good for Y" is getting reeeaalllyyy old
They should definitely remove the dependency on i-frames for PvE but I doubt it'll be a good idea for PvP. Lack of i-frames will basically turn the PvP meta into pure AoE spell spam and it'll get old really quick. Its already a problem in ER but at least skilled players can dodge annoying stuff like waves of gold/moonveil spam with good i-frame timing.
Rolling out of the way of an attack has always felt way more satisfying to me than rolling through an attack.
As someone that hasn’t played many of these games or even many of the spectacle fighting games…..it has always annoyed me when giant swords or whatever weapon clearly clip through players or players roll straight through attacks. There’s often so much going on with great particle effects and graphics and whatnot, but apparently a core component of the game is stuff phasing through the player character? That has just always irked me.
So I ask from a place of ignorance but not malice: why can’t these games be developed in a way where this doesn’t happen? Where physical objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time? Is it a hit box thing? Or is it a “years ago our games did this out of jank and now we do it on purpose these days because the players like it” thing?
It was always one of the more fascinating critiques of Horizon Forbidden Wests combat that Aloy didn't have i-frames when she rolled, jumped or slides. People have gotten so used to I-frames they've forgotten positional gameplay.
Just to add, it was so weird for me to play FF7 rebirth by trying to dodge.
There is no I-frame, it's just positional. But i-frame are so ingrained in my mind that I was hit a lot before figuring out why.
And because I frame are more of a "tried and test" than a flashing light to say "You succeded", you tends to think you just fucked up your timing.
Btw: +1 for Monster hunter ! (And I frame are still great when the games is designed with it in mind. All hail bloodborne, Hades and lot of others!)
I feel like an issue that went unaddressed in this is that FromSoft's boss design in the Souls games has changed a lot overtime; in the first Dark Souls, the i-frames felt more like a safety net. There were really only a few bosses where you NEEDED to use i-frames to get through their attacks (Gwyn, Four Kings), and the rest of the time, getting out of the way of their attacks was an equally viable strategy because the pace of the bosses was slow enough to accommodate that. But as their games have only gotten faster, the controls and means of avoiding damage barely changed (except for Bloodborne and Sekiro, which both enable you to counter the hyper-aggression of enemies with your own aggression).
I've increasingly felt like this has changed i-frames from a safety net into practically the only real means of survival you have in a fight, making it a crutch in Elden Ring to not have to evolve the player's means of defense while the bosses only get faster and more aggressive. It makes it feel less like I'm mastering the bosses, and more like I have to game the system in order to get good at it; it made late-game Elden Ring very unsatisfying for me to play, and it's all a major break in immersion for me.
I love any and all reliable and consistent ways to avoid damage, be that s, parries or blocking. When a game doesn't have any of these it's actively detrimental to my enjoyment.
Moving out of the way of an attack does not do it for me, there are countless situations where that just isn't going to feel good and consistent (even in games that are designed for it).
Yeah, I don't think I've relied on MonHun's I-frames since Tri.
It can be annoying tracking the monster's telegraphs when you can barely fit one thigh on your camera, but I like the emphasis on positioning and engaging with monsters as entities made of different parts instead of phasing through hits and blindly building stagger like Elden Ring
As a MH enjoyer since Tri and a DS player since 1 I'd like to interject that personally MH's "dance" has been actually been diluted as the games hit the 5th generation, Rise and Sunbreak especially as basically every weapon has a move of I-frames or guard that outdoes even the basic Fromsoft dodge-take for example the HH's R2 or the Hammer's Water Strike etc.
But overall I still really enjoyed this video and eager to hear your thoughts on MH's issues as I could talk about them forever lmao
The shorter i-frame window makes more sense in Monster Hunter because you fight the same creature far more often than anything in the Souls series. As much as Elden Ring plays like to joke about fighting a dozen tree spirits over the course of a playthrough, that is nothing compared to farming the same creature 30+ times back to back to get that f*cking gem to finish your weapon. By that time, you have truly mastered the fight.
honestly, monster hunter could be so fun if it were more interested in being a game than a job.
@@letstatement Agreed
It's not my place to ask it to be different, but I always end up quitting MH once the grind sets in.
ER and Souls works better for me because the boss is treated more like a test that is finished once you "pass" it.
As much as I'd love to re-fight bosses, I want it to be because I enjoy it, not because I need to farm a material.
Actually, it's arguably more intuitive to dodge an unfamiliar enemy's attack by getting out of the way entirely than by nailing the timing of an i-frame dodge, so if ER gives you more unfamiliar enemies to face, a lack of i-frames in ER would actually make more sense - so long as the enemies' attacks were well telegraphed and if they didn't track you like a hawk like they do. In fact, I think attacks tracking the player in ER is the only reason i-frames are needed, because otherwise you literally can't avoid getting hit without blocking.
@@letstatement While there have been grinds in MH that are indefensible _(Sunbreak's anomaly levels, vanilla World's random decos made vital skills like guard up way too rare, and Iceborne had to reduce the postgame grind with updates)_ and the Desire Sensor can always screw you, I think 5th Gen has struck a very good balance at giving average players what they need in a reasonable timeframe, especially if you are willing to swap weapons/armor a lot instead of trying to finish specific sets, or if you abuse the Guardian armor/weapons.
They've also implemented various mitigators for bad RNG on the game's rarest drops, like the Wyverian prints, anomaly coin trading, and sometimes even guarenteed drops. _(eg. both Iceborne's final boss and postgame final boss let you get their rarest material as a guarenteed partbreak reward, if you play well enough)_
If you are more interested in a regular game length rather than repeated hunts to master monsters, nobody is stopping you from playing MH like that and rolling credits with relatively few repeated fights. You will easily get the same ~60 hours you would expect from any other AAA purchase and stop there.
@@darthvaderreviews6926 Definitely agree. The grind is mostly optional unless you are trying to get a perfect build for something. You can get the skills you need from armor/set bonuses or from charms or from decos. I think they should let down the "crafting" element to get what final chips you need a bit sooner, but I never minded the grind until it's something that just isn't implemented well. Vaal Hazak fangs come to mind. You should get them if you break the jaw but it's still a 50/50 shot at best even if you do a double break. To get the 5 fangs needed results in a TON of hunts. Stuff like that is annoying at best and atrocious at worst. They should do bag-pull RNG so if you do x chances with y special things you can get what you are going for. More a bag of stones than true random.
Investigations were a huge help to add chances, but still didn't guarantee a drop.
Even the base Elden Ring game gave players plenty of alternatives to rolling. Guard counters on blocks, jump attacks, better ranged options, weapon arts like that let you dodge attacks like BhS or RotM, or even moves like Lion's Claw or the Stances that let you tank the hit and land a large hit of your own. Some of these still have invincibility, where attacks phase through your character, so kind of a halfway point between i-frames and avoiding attacks entirely. On top of just giving players more options, I think this will help train Souls players to approach fights differently. They could go from rolling everything to jumping or blinking through attacks instead, and then eventually to considering other options like blocking + countering.
Speaking of blinking, that could be another way to help immersion, turn the roll into a blink, or give the player a bubble shield while i-framing. Basically give some sort of visual indication that attacks won't count
As someone with too much hours on MHW and MHR, what I am about to say relates for me only to MHW because they halved I-frames and gave everyone a stupidly strong parry in MHR (I am not a fan of this).
There comes a point in your monster hunter carrier where you start to use MHW I-frames like you do it in DS. The difference is that in DS I-frames are a core mechanic that you are expected to use and rely on out of the gate, where in MHW being able to I-frame is a reward for skill gained and something most casuals don't rely on.
That's why Sekiro is my favourite. The combat system invites you to play very aggressive and let defense and offense flow into one another.
In DS I often felt like I dance around an enemy until I see a move I can punish. Then retreat and repeat.
I'm never a fan of arguing the solution to a problem in one game is to "become another game." There is a lot more going on in the Souls Formula that makes i-frame rolls just one of many pillars that gives the whole product a playstyle unique to it.
Same for Monster Hunter.
I don't think Monster Hunter is the best comparison. And the argument that it's a "player expectation" and not the game the devs just wanted to make is a bit reductive. Rolling and s are a mechanical abstraction of being evasive, so the "immersion" factor isn't really an issue.
To me, the way my character constantly swings in the opposite direction of a Monster in Monster Hunter is far more immersion breaking and unintiutive then i-frames on a roll, all from it's "no lock on camera" origins.
I also play fighting games where mechanics like s are expected.
@@SharpEdgeSoda tbf From do make another games. Sekiro and AC already move away from i-frames. They may go further but still have the game be "souls-like".
Is it not worth considering that some players really enjoy rolling to dodge? I like learning the timing for boss attacks. But then again thats why its not about removing them as an options, more so adding others.
You know I would like a follow up topic involving difficulty in general with Fromsoft games at the head but also Monster Hunter and of course other games. Especially where damage is concerned and most importantly why do people consider death, the ultimate fail state, to be the only sign of a games difficulty. Like why is the many ways a boss can kill you the only sign of how difficult an encounter is? Why don't we take resource management into account like how often you heal or use up certain items? Why do game devs keep using one-shot mechanics against players when in reality it is basically feels like the game is yanking the controller out of your hands and flipping you off?
Sorry, got a lil ruffled at the end there.
With Souls games, I've always wondered why we have to learn via death specifically. Like there's apparently no other way to force us to learn boss patterns than throw us back to a loading screen every 5 seconds?
Armored Core 6 doesn't have I frames and it works pretty well, also monster hunter have the superman dive, of course you don't use it as much as rolling in dark souls.
I love all of these 3 franchises, but in this discussion Armored core is the clear winner, you rely solely on your movement to escape attacks, not that I have a problem with I frames either, souls and even further Monhun are pretty slow compared to the frantic fever dream that is armored core lol, so I think that they need those.
Something worth mentioning is that Monster Hunter enemies are... well... giant monsters. This means they can have huge, sweeping, long-lasting hitboxes that are easily capable of threatening multiple players at once without tracking, and that they can tank multiple hunters beating on them at once for minutes on end without flinching, and they can act dumb sometimes, and this all feels reasonable. Monster Hunter's combat is designed around this fact. Meanwhile in Souls, you do fight giant monsters, but you also fight a lot of smaller humanoid enemies. MonHun's combat design doesn't work nearly as well for those encounters. They have small, short-duration hitboxes that need to track in order to consistently threaten the player. They need to react when someone hits them with a huge attack. They need to move with the sort of agility and intelligence you'd expect from such an enemy. It's a whole different set of expectations that can't really be met by cribbing MonHun design philosophy.
Weird to say FromSoft games rely on I-frames when SEKIRO exists. Souls games rely on I-frames. I played Sekiro without using I-frames even once. Recorded every boss fight and watched it back to make sure. Parry/Block, Jumping/Running out of the way, and using the shield make it so you don’t miss them at all. Made me really enjoy the game more. As someone who didn’t understand I-frames until Dark Souls 3, it feels more natural.
Always a good day with a new Design Delve
I play a lot of monster hunter, and am a very dedicated fan of the series, and while "be where the attack is not" and reading the behaviour telegraphs are an important part of it, utilising i-frames is absolutely a major factor as well, depending on your weapon of choice. You won't make reasonable time using sword and shield, for example, if you *don't* i-frame the majority of your target's attacks.
In SotE, I play a pure caster build - so all the hype abut new weapon types and new arts is mostly not registering for me; I'll look at them later. What I'm finding, personally as a spell-caster, is that "otherwise avoiding" enemies is simply NOT an option in the majority of boss fights. I MUST dodge, and dodge very continuously, until I can steal a moment to cast something; I can't tank hits, and even quick cast spells take more time than a quick weapon poke - not to mention, very little chance of causing flinching or stance breaks, so I must account for being able to dodge after casting right away. Some attacks have other methods to avoid sure (twin moon is a jump wave, naturally), but most of the time, bosses will unflinchingly glue themselves to you and close in a flurry of continuous action that genuinely does leave dodging as the only safe option.
If anything, my personal experience feels this has gotten much *Worse* in SotE, for my spell caster - enemy aggression and staying on you with on-going offence is more pressing than it's ever been, and as a caster I've not gained anything new to counter that, other than to keep dodging and looking for a window... though there also do seem to be, as part of that, more instances of situations where "if you dodge in *this* direction, at *this* attack in their combo, they won't be able to track as well, and you can steal a cast window", which is small foil to the increased pressure, but a boon all the same.
@@matthewmuir8884 The roll is absolutely an i-frame and you can and should use it to dodge through monster attacks to stay within attacking range at the part you want to be damaging more consistently and not have to move out too often. Blocking is an absolute last resort if the roll i-frame isn't long enough to pass through the attack from the position you're in (like, you can't roll through a monster that does a full body roll at/over you - it's not long enough; those kind of ones you certainly have to either get out of the way or take the block. That said, I'm not trying to say using the i-frames on your roll is essential, or that you can't function without doing this - of course you can... but the more comfortable you get doing it, the more efficient you'll be overall.
@@matthewmuir8884 I don't know what to tell you then; our experiences are clearly different. I definitely use the dodge roll with SnS to dodge through monster attacks in order to stay on the part I'm working on. I do it all the time, deliberately, and it works; the frame is very small, but it's enough to dodge the majority of close in physical attacks from most monsters. If your experience has been otherwise, I cannot tell you any more than that.
@@matthewmuir8884 I don't disagree - everything you mention is an important part of what makes SnS fun and engaging, and I've never implied otherwise. I main SnS, and I love it specifically because it's versatile, mobile and has an answer for everything in a neat, quick package (Though I admit, I was sad when they took away its ability to break out of your combo at any strike; having some of the combos become a multi-hit lock in, in later games reduces that flexibility a little). Most of what you say in your second paragraph is all valid and something I agree with; it doesn't take away from the fact that, along with that, you can roll under that urugaan tail sweep and come up swinging again on the other side of its ankle - which makes perfect in-universe sense, but which, if we were minding hit boxes rigorously, would not generally be possible because we only have one dodge roll animation, and we're going to clip through a bit of its body a little bit (and even a one pixel contact would otherwise register as a hit and send you flying). The frame covers that issue; it's what it was originally designed to do.
It's not immersion-breaking and it's not an exploit (and I don't really appreciate you disparaging and back-handedly demeaning as brainless and simple players who are aware of the ideal timing for their dodges and have developed the skill to use it effectively); it's using a mechanic that is deliberately placed into the game, which is a very tight, narrow frame of invulnerability in your dodge roll that lets you more easily manoeuvre in and around a number of attacks with some small amount of leniency on their hit boxes. They're not like Souls i-frames, which are *huge* by comparison and can be used to do silly, nonsense things (like rolling into a massive hammer slam to 'avoid' it - I agree, that's immersively stupid). Mh i-frames are generally tighter and can only really be used to supplement quick evasions that make realistic sense because the attack has passed over so quickly.
It doesn't 'devolves' the play - it's a natural part of it; you can't "just i-frame everything", like you're implying and that's not how they work in Mh games - but they *are* an important element of play and you *do* use them, whether you're aware of it or not. They don't negate the importance of everything else that makes Mh fun.
If anything, I'd argue that Mh is a case of I-frames used subtly and well - the ideal way they should be used. The fact that a lot of people aren't aware that they exist and that they are benefitting from them in the course of play is a sign that they are unobtrusive and are doing their job without being overly visible, as it should be.
@@matthewmuir8884 No worries, tone is hard to convey on the internet, and it's easy to come across harsher than we intend; I likely did the same, and sorry on my part if I did ^.^
Honestly, I think a good comparison would have also been with Armored Core. AC6 have very little iFrames and it’s all about positioning, while at the same time there is still serious tracking done by bosses.
Instead of using a button for dodging, it’s up to your lateral movement and vertical movement. It’s honestly very thrilling to just barely dodge an attack because you fly up, thrust to the side, and attack at the same time. One of my favorite builds in AC6 is using the laser dagger + max melee launch to leap into unsuspecting PVP players.
Honestly i-frames only make sense from a performance reason. Hit-box collision between a rolling player and the various spiky bits that enemies attack you with would be nightmare to compute accurately. So just make the player invincible during the roll, and problem solved. The problem is that it breaks not just immersion, but _intuition,_ which is a far bigger deal. Rolling into a swinging blade so you phase through it unharmed is not something that most players would guess on a first (or even tenth) attempt, because it requires you to switch off that part of your brain that thinks of the in-game combat as if it was a real, physical fight. But switching that off almost completely cuts connection between the player and the game.
Monster Hunter mentioned. We are so back.
Hello math guys, I loved your vids! ❤
Interestingly, a huge number of attacks that hit low in elden ring can just be jumped over. However, Elden ring doesn't intensely condition this but rather the previous game of Fromsoft's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice does. Learning to use this and adapting it to Elden Ring makes many difficult to dodge combos utterly trivial.
To see a FromSoft game without I-Frames, take a look at armored core 6. A comparison follow up deep dive would be cool to see.
The issue is in how combat in Elden Ring copies more from Sekiro than Dark Souls 3… but doesn't give us the reflection mechanic.
I assume I-frames stands for invincibility frames? This should have been defined at the beginning of the video
I've yet to play any Monster Hunter game myself, but the lack of i-frames had nothing to do with it. I didn't even know MH did dodging differently until I saw this video. I've simply avoided Monster Hunter games because as far as I can tell, the combat is basically all boss fights? Or at least is primarily focused on fighting single, tough, boss-style enemies rather than cutting through numerous weaker foes. And quite honestly, boss fights are generally my least favorite parts even in games I otherwise love. My happy place, and this totally goes for From's classics as well, is exploring new places and fighting numerous common enemies, not fighting single bosses.
But I dunno, maybe I've totally misjudged Monster Hunter? Which is why I figured this might be a good time to see if I got the wrong idea from what little I've seen here and there.
I mean, they seem to have been experimenting with mitigating the I-frame issue for a while now with the systems they implemented for Bloodborne and in Sekiro. In Bloodborne, it was the system where the player regained lost health if they damaged an enemy a certain amount of time after being damaged. And in Sekiro, it was a combination of the “perfect guard” deflection system (which they kind of added with one of the new crystal tears in the Elden Ring DLC, just not with swords) and the visual attack symbols/cues that would signal to the player a deflectable attack vs an attack that should be avoided as well as attacks that should be dodged or jumped over. Both approaches contributed to less reliance on rolling I-frames.
Personally, I hope their next game incorporates the Sekiro blade deflection and perfect guard system alongside the Bloodborne system. Those systems felt very rewarding to learn largely in part to the more active and aggressive play-style they encouraged. I could take or leave the warning symbols, though they were nice. Just wish there were more defensive options other than parrying, blocking, or rolling.
If they decide not to utilize an indicator to show how to deal with an attack, then they'll have to improve the readability of enemy attack animations- I feel like that facet has become worse and worse over time.
@@AtelierMcMuttonArt With non-humanoid enemies like the Revenants or Ulcerated Tree Spirits, it can be nearly impossible to tell which bit of their crazy thrashing around is the actual attack.
4:05 "I never question why I got hit in Monster Hunter"
*Laughs in Plesioth*
I think if there was something in the game that gave a visual or audible cue that shows off when the I-frames are active during a dodge. Like, the players shines blue or a chime rings out when they're invincible.
Great video. For anyone who doesn’t know, there’s a shield ash of war in Elden Ring called “Vow of the Indomitable” which provides a moderate amount of s contextualized as a momentary prayer which negates all harm. It looks awesome and I tend to use it when bosses perform massive explosion-like attacks that dodging clearly shouldn’t negate.
With the dlc’s addition of thrusting shields and the deflecting hardtear, shield play feels like a more “immersive” alternative to FromSoft’s usual dodge-centric bouts and I couldn’t be happier for it!
> Insect Glaive's ADHD pole Vaulting
Oh, I guess we're just choosing to attack me today
I definitely feel Iframes are overutilized after playing Dark Souls 2, where I frames are KING and poise is worthless. The last few bosses of the game will 1hko you, or stunlock you until you die- there is no in between. As such, you're expected to dodge roll INTO the boss and its attacks, not away. As dodge rolling in this game is based not just on armor but on two stats, this was a terrible idea and goes against basic logic -these attacks are too big, the player can't dodge through them- and yet they do, and this is the "intended" solution to the bosses- the player just "phasing through" an enemy's giant blade or magic wave.
Though my recent understanding of Netcode suggests another reason for I-frames: Netcode. In PVP, latency means player 1 may see them hit player 2 , while player 2 sees themselves not getting hit. When the game compensates, player 1 gets his hit, while player 2 is hit a good 3 feet away and rages a bit. But by adding i frames, if player 2 was dodging and thus invincible for that second, even if player 1 sees himself hit player 2, player 2 doesnt' take damage, and player 1 and 2 know the hit didn't register. The Iframes make it so player 2 has a chance and creates a sense of loose, general timing for combat- if you're about to be hit, you dodge, and thus even if the latency is way off, you're likely to successfully avoid the attack.
On the immersion breaking for the rolls ive always considered them to be just a limitation to their animations. Yes the animation is just a roll, but you could consider it like an action movie or character action game, limboing under a swing, quickly side stepping it or some other manner to dodge it. Not a literal statement of rolling makes you invincible. I would enjoy a more movement focused system, where you can dodge with attacks, they are moving that direction it seems and i am here for a shakeup in the formula, i love the souls formula but at some point it will become stale.
I do hope they do not move to a multiplayer focused system, as someone who does not use summons at all, which i would say is the core of how the souls games are designed(ai janks out with targetting pretty easily with more than one person). I would like bosses to still be designed around a straight up duel. This straight up duel, where i just beat down a boss go toe to toe with monstrocities, no gimmicks no qte is what drew me to the souls franchise in the first place.
Thats pretty much it. I wonder why they havent fixed it and now it has pretty much become part of fromsoft games' identity. Lies of P doesnt have s iirc and it didnt break the game.
@@pramitpratimdas8198 i thought lies of P did have s on the dodge though not nearly as long a window, but I myself could be misremembering. Lies of p however also isn't super movement focused and is more sekiro like than souls like.
On a side note, it seems most soulslikes these days are actually more like sekirolikes. There is the ever increasing trend of "parry based souls-likes" instead of traditional ones.
@@imALazyPanda Lies of P is extremely movement focused if you want to. I played it barely using block/parry at all and it was more than viable. People think it's parry only, but they actually made system that allows you to spec into improving any of the options and making them powerful.
@@Dorrovian maybe its time for a replay then. I do remember getting a few slick dodges with dancer sword special ability(forget what they were called) and feeling pretty cool when I pulled it off. Any build you can recommend or place you could point me to that is pretty movement focused.
I don't necessarily disagree (in every video game you have to accept SOME degree of abstraction) but I really wish they would at least replace the roll animation with something that looks more like a proper dodge. The animation is already in the game with the Quickstep skill, for example. Rolling was sorta cool in the early games when the stamina cost and the slower boss attacks made you use it sparingly and more deliberate. But the roll spam most boss fights in the newer games often degrade into looks really dumb and I'm tired of pretending it doesn't.
about AI designed for multiple foes: this can also makes bosses harder. hear me out:
when a boss throws a combo at you and only you, at some point you will know how to deal with it. dodge left, walk back, dodge right, attack window.
now, if you got a boss that can switch target mid combo suddenly you get these combos thrown at you with different timing and hitboxes, keeping the combo threatening.
I hear you, there are times where fights are easier solo then with a spirit summon. Some bosses have a higher reactive state, they react to your attacks instead of aggressively throwing combos at you. Those bosses are chaos with a spirit summon that attacks the whole time and I have caught the ass end of a combo a few times because the boss was countering my commons attacks.
This is why I don't like this design choice. I'm not a fan of how combat flows with multiple ally targets; it's pretty unsatisfying to have a victory or defeat happen due to some random switching of targets, or because a boss was designed to be borderline unfair to fight without them.
Something I like about Metroidvanias like Hollow Knight or...well...Metroid, is that the way enemy attacks are designed to encourage the player to utilize there full arsenal of weapons and/or abilities. You have to jump, you have to duck, you have to run towards a small window where the attack will miss, etc. Sometimes a boss will force you to use a specific ability in order to beat them. FromSoft's combat has been fairly simple, and therefore people become conditioned to that simplicity with only a few exceptions. Sekiro, in contrast, has a very dynamic combat and traversal systems, therefore you are faced with bosses that require more than just parrying.
I'd like to point out that From has made a game without i-frames recently and it's Armored Core 6, and it's fenomenal. Took some time to change the mindset but it's an amazing experience
I think "we could make this better, but the fanbase is expecting it" is a dangerous mindset for a developer. Players can be uppity and set in their ways, but as someone on the outside that doesn't give a shit about Souls games, I do think it might be cool if doors made more sense, or if there were more viable approaches to combat, ya know? If Fromsoft feels like they aren't allowed to change because people are expecting a specific format then their work will eventually feel stale. Maybe they really do need to make more, smaller games that present their fans with alternatives in order to get them used to new things.
How much more do you want? Despite how the video acts there are plenty of ways to fight minimally involving i-frames.
There are plenty with ranged builds using distance, shield builds using blocks, parry based builds interupting the enemy, poise builds all about trading damage with the enemy, summon builds all around supporting the summons to fight for you.
All that's ignoring that i-frames are not the end all be all even in builds that use it.
Rolling is a costly action, it takes up stamina and locks you into an animation which prevent you from retaliating.
Instead low-profiling, jumping, spacing or even positioning all allow you to attack an enemy safely during their attacks while letting you do much more damage than a roll would on account of having more stamina available.
I-frames are a tool for safety but not what you should always be relying on otherwise it becomes notably more difficult to stagger enemies or inflict status effects on them, or even just damage them.
@@theresnothinghere1745 It's clear that they're capable of delivering new approaches to melee combat as they have with Sekiro. I'm not saying "this needs to stop!", I'm just saying that an overly reticent audience is detrimental to progress.
From is also pretty decent at introducing new mechanics naturally. If they were to put a clearly intentional door-opening trap in the opening hours of a Dark Souls IV, players would understand the game has no door invincibility. It's helpful to keep in mind what players expect, but that knowledge can (and ought to) be used in different ways.
Absolutely love MonHun. Started in Tri and have loved every new iteration. One of the interesting bits about iFrames and Dodging in MonHun are the Dodge related skills, one adds more iFrames, and one adds Distance, making for some interesting choices in Comfort Skills (Skills that don't let you kill faster but make the game more comfortable for you to play: Defense Up, Health Up, Guard, things like that)
Incomplete without a discussion about jumping, crouching, and low-profile.
Good point
I honestly would prefer going back to Bloodborne dodge. Faster, less i-frames. The current dodge is a bit methodical since its overall length means the player cannot i-frame through numerous multihit attacks and instead has to rely on positioning as well, but at Bloodborne dodge speed this is doable as well and the faster dodge speed would mean the game can expect more active gameplay from the player, thus giving possibility for more active and demanding enemy movesets. I'd love to see what sort of insane boss designs they would do if they went back to Bloodborne gameplay pacing. Things like Nioh have even faster dodge with even less i-frames, but that gameplay style is also way more dependent on fast movesets, cancels and other mechanics designed to cut down recoveries and pauses between moves, making it an entirely different gameplay style.
It doesn't help that blocking isn't consistently good either. Instead of making it a playstyle like in say, Ghost of Tsushima, it's treated more like a noob crutch.
The first soulslike game I played was Nioh rather than a From game. My instincts for fighting came from MMO tanking. So my tactics were about resource preservation, footwork, and aggressiveness. I would wear heavy armor and use fast, cheap attacks to keep up pressure. I would maintain my stamina (ki) reserve, but I would also do my best to keep it from capping out by poking at enemies. Sometimes dodging was necessary, but blocking, walking, and running were my main defenses. The game facilitated this play style with build/stat options, such as reduced blocking stamina cost. The net effect is that I was able to dominate through aggression and endurance bosses that gave more agile and evasive players a lot of trouble.
Meanwhile, the Elden Ring players' main defensive tactic I've seen seems to be venting their stamina bar to do rapid somersaults. It doesn't look like a very effective way of fighting to me. It looks more like they're just rapidly mashing the Not Die button in a panic.
"I-frames are pretty much at the core of every combat system From Software have ever made"
Entire Armored Core franchise: "Am I a joke to you?"
I hardly ever dodge in Elden Ring.
I tend to use sword and board.
Might be why I have such a hard time with the game.
And I definitely want to check out Monster Hunter, now.
My second run i try to sword and board and it's much much easier than my first run to dual wield and roll. With all the confusing visuals and delayed attacks it's much better to wait for the attack to connect and then counter.
The majority of FromSoft's library actually lacks i-frames. King's Field,Armored Core,and Sekiro all lack i-frames entirely,or lacks them in any meaningful context. We already know what a FromSoft game looks like without i-frames,and Sekiro is widely beloved because of it. Hell,the Deflecting Hardtear is literally just Sekiro at home,and aggressive guarding has been encouraged since Elden Ring's launch with the addition of guard counters,resulting in shields being more powerful than they ever have been in the franchise,considering how simple it is to make your shields insanely good (Shield Grease + Greatshield Talisman) and guard counters having comparable offensive power to a charged heavy attack,with far less risk involved... Unless you're using a halberd.
I-frames are a tool. Like any tool,they can be misused, and I will genuinely say this: People who refuse to use the myriad of Elden Ring's defensive options besides rolling are injuring themselves. In Elden Ring,as you pointed out,your defensive options are many. You can simply pick a direction and sprint,which is the actual solution to a huge number of the game's most infamously difficult to dodge attacks,such as Rykard's Rancor. You can just block it,since eating chip damage and a guard break is still preferable to eating full damage,and that's the worst case scenario. If it's low to the ground,or even a ground effect,nine times out of ten,you can bunnyhop it. If you've got the stones and eye for it,you can parry most weapon attacks from humanoids Omen sized or smaller,and the DLC release day patch buffed the Parry skill on daggers to Dark Souls 1 levels. And then there's just raw defensive power to take it to the chin when all else fails,or you decide to take a calculated risk and trade. There's even the Endure skill to facilitate this,and an entire raft of items and talismans,too.
I-frames need to be designed around. Their existence alters the game on a profound and fundamental level,if the game's core gameplay loops heavily involve combat. This is why,in Sekiro,you have warnings for all attacks that simply cannot be deflected; You can't dodge them with i-frames,since i-frames don't exist in any meaningful way in Sekiro. So,you jump sweeps,and maybe get a cheeky footstool kick in for good measure. You either run the fuck away from thrusts,deflect them with perfect timing to bring the entire fight to a temporary screeching halt,or learn and use the Mikiri Counter to counter it with good timing. And if you try to deflect lightning in the normal way,you'll get paralyzed for your trouble,forcing you to use the Lightning Reversal technique to deal with it,which comes with some chip damage. In King's Field,you had to master spacing,as i-frames didn't exist at all. And in Armored Core,you have to rely on positioning,spacing,countermeasures (When the exist...) or just eating it,making the franchise extremely attritional.
Yes,Dark Souls has trained us to dodge. But Elden Ring makes it plain that you're expected to do more,and people who refuse to learn that lesson are sleeping in the bed they've made themselves. I-frames are not holding the games back,I think. It's the people who try to roll through I Command Thee,Kneel. It's the people who try to roll through Rykard's Rancor. It's the people who never think to,or don't put in the time and effort to,learn the new tools the game drops in their lap,and then kicking up a stink over them trying to fit the huge square peg into the tiny round hole.
I agree with the sentiment here: people get stuck thinking the roll is the only "pure" tool and using anything else is cheese, then cry "bad design" when they encounter any friction.
I will quibble about Sekiro not having meaningful s. You get 12 s on a forward dodge (holding forward or not holding the control stick at all), but only 6 on sideways or backward dodges. So it's often useful to forward dodge into a grab attack to through it. But the bad s on side dodges will quickly train you not to rely on them, yes.
The reason for the spirit buff items is the same as the buff for stats. They want a leveling system separate from the main game. If they didn't implement it, summons would be de facto nerfed for the DLC. If they just raised the level cap, the summons would be much stronger in the base game.
funny thing about the spirit ashes. it felt like several bosses in the DLC were designed to do AOE attacks that are undodgable by spirit ashes.
As a MH veteran first, souls game enjoyer second, this is so validating. I've been having the same through for years.
Souls game have been relying on timing as the main depth of skill expression for years. Meanwhile MH have always traditionally put more emphasis in positioning/movement
"Monster Hunter i-frames are so miniscule that they might as well not be there." Ah, I see someone forgot about the superman dive. A move which gives you a whopping 1+ seconds worth of i-frames, and is borderline required to dodge some of the supernova screen wipe attacks endgame monsters have. Plus Monster Hunter is very lenient with the i-frames you get when knocked down, which makes staying on the ground longer a viable option to avoid more damage when you get hit. Not to mention how Monster Hunter gives you armor skills that both increase the number of i-frames in your actual dodge and massively extend the distance said dodges travel.
And let's not forget skills like Divine Blessing which have a chance to reduce damage by up to 60%. And the copious amounts of healing options and the fact that you get 3 lives for every fight. The game might not give you dodge i-frames by default, but they offer a plethora of other options to help the player manage that added difficulty instead. I find it interesting that you brought up the wirebugs in Rise, because its the faster pace and more aggressive nature of Rise that necessitated giving the player so much added mobility that it started to feel like a DMC game. Just like how the faster paced and more aggressive FromSoft games give you more i-frame options to deal with it.
"Door i-frames are due to technical limitations." No. Door i-frames are there because nothing sucks more than getting mauled from behind by all the enemies you ran past because you got stuck in a door animation. Dark Souls 2 had no door i-frames, and it blows.
DS2 dared to have you not just run past all the enemies and it blows? That's the biggest issue that souls games has never truly dealt with is that its deliberate pace means you can just run past everyone.
I think one of the games that did invincibility frames very well is Ittle Dew 2. It added a dodge roll mechanic, and telegraphs the s very clearly - when your outline is white instead of black, you cannot take damage from enemies. One of the "Super Secrets" even tells you that you can roll into projectile attacks to make them disappear. You don't need to use this mechanic for like 90% of the game, but there are 2-3 endgame enemies/bosses that either require or really need dodge rolling to beat. But this never feels like too much of an ask or filled with jank, because you spend all of the game getting used to the dodge and learning how to use it. And in practice, the roll lets you stay close to enemies to wail on them inbetween attacks, keeping the combat moving fast and rewarding studying enemy behavior.
Now obviously Ittle Dew 2 is a much simpler game than any soulslike, but I think it's something worth looking into to see how well a combat system can be improved.
My problem with Monster Hunter isn't the lack of i-frames but the lack of proper lock on. The way MH handles the camera is simply beyond stupid.
As for i-frames and rolling disease, it's one of the reasons the original Dark Souls is my favorite game in the series and why I still replay it to this day. Since armor, poise and shields are also viable options it means you can play in other ways too. Compared to the fashion souls of later games where it doesn't really matter what you wear, so rolling becomes the only real option.
My first playthrough was with shield and phat rolls. Its definitely viable but its nowhere near as easy as it was in ds1. Definitely agree rolling has become a crutch, they need to bring back tactical approach to combat like in DeS/DS1
Honestly one of my biggest peeves with Elden Ring's design is how armor is fundamentally just a weight:poise ratio. You're either playing mid-weight/poise, high weight for max poise, or you're effectively naked, and the rest is more or less cosmetics with some minor statistical bonuses you might never notice at all. It's the most Fashion Souls of any game probably. Considering how deep the weapon system is it's pretty disappointing how shallow the armor is, but in order to fix it they would have to adjust the way they design games, where they want an enemy to hit you and evaporate half your health pool and they dont want you to be able to mitigate that too much.
Shields are extremely viable in Eden Ring. If you have good heavy shield you can tank everything staying behind it.
@@mediumvillain Ironic that equipment performance makes it extremely fashion souls, yet most of the outfits' visuals are so ugly they kill the fashion appeal anyway.
I think the other DS1 comparison is just... the speed of everything.
DS1 EVERYTHING was ponderous and so you had the time to just... get out of the way of a lot of things. In every game since, things have gotten faster, to the point where unless you're playing *perfectly* you simply HAVE to roll through things.
Next week: Is a Lack of I-Frames Holding Monster Hunter Back? | Design Delve
It always feels weird to fight god with the power of doing a little rolly polly
Loved this one, I can tell J is getting more comfortable and having fun with it!
Sekiro mostly did without them. Also I think you’re minimizing the role of s in Monster Hunter, especially Iceborne which had a few attacks that either you d through or you got hit.
one of the most fascinating souls-likes in recent years, "Bleak Faith: Forsaken" did not have i-frames when it came out. it is a janky game in many regards, but once you got used to not having i-frames but start paying more attention to positioning and movesets, it was a really great game.
they actually have implemented i-frames after a few patches but I have not played enough to have a well founded opinion on them. they are certainly not on the levels that we are used to from fromsoft, but I find it very interesting that they added them.
the devs (only 3 people I think) kept working on the game and improved them massively. it is a weird but curiously intriguing game that I recommend to anyone with enough patience :)
I don't know how better to disprove that MH doesn't use i-frames than simply gesturing at the superman dive. You get easily over a second of i-frames and for some builds and weapons it can be the only reliable way of dodging some big attacks.
And it's not like the regular dodge isn't useful as well. In rise, there's not only skills made to make your i-frames better, but with bladescale hone or adrenailine rush, actively encourage you to do so aggressively and buff yourself with them.
Also the light greatsword r1 moveset in ER is legit the EXACT same as a longsword combo in monster hunter so it is clear somebody is taking design cues
I agree that he was wrong that it doesn't *use* i-frames, but on the other hand, arguing that also doesn't refute his main point, that MH doesn't rely on i-frames as the main (or sometimes only viable) means of avoid damage as much/often as From Soft Souls games do.
What I find is that, once I got comfortable using the i-frames in DS2, DS3 and Elden Ring, I have never felt any drive to change my play-style to avoid or challenge it, it's become one of the most comfortable ways to play it, something which I am now inspired to try changing
See, ACVI does not have Iframe on the quickboost, so we have a very recent case of what a Fromsoft game looks like without Iframe.
While we’re talking about i-frames and dodging, can we get an episode on how ingenious Dodge Offset is in Bayonetta? That dodge system is what turns Bayonetta from a button-mash-fest at low level play into THE game I search on RUclips for combo montages at high level play. Putting a combo string on pause to do a Crow Feather attack, activate an Accessory ability, or run around in the Panther form, only to then resume the initial string where I left off like I never left, and finish it with a strong Weave attack! Most satisfying thing in the world to both pull off and watch others do.
I feel like with the dlc Fromsoft is starting to reach the breaking point of what is mechanically possible with their dodge/block/hit combat system, there is basically nothing mechanically new introduced in the dlc on the enemy side, just that combos last longer, there are even more AOE's (to account for summons since bosses still have awful AI that break when more than one thing attacks them so they give them attacks that hits both you AND your summon at the same time), and "punishing windows" after each combo is even shorter, to the point now there are 15-20 second 8+ hit combos you need to dodge perfectly in order to deal 1-2 hits in return (unless you have a weapon fast enough to deal a few hits in between the combos).
If this is the direction the company keeps taking I might not pick up their next ARPG because it's getting tiring.
I agree, and if you are I'm assuming talking about the final boss, there is another bonus. Because this boss actively discourage jumping and distancing (phase 2) and some attacks need roll-spamming (also phase 2), which is weird because I thought that that was the opposite direction of the base game.
jumping and positioning is more important than ever
Once I finish SotE I will never buy another Fromsoft game. They've been trending this way for too long and they're getting a massive pass on shit thag no other dev would be allowed. I desperately wish the people handling their level design would get to work with a company that can actually make a mechanically coherent game.
@@Thanatology101 Armored Core is pretty nice, the soulslike genre just has so many sacred cows it's unreal.
They need to innovate more.