Absolutely agree with the ideas expressed in this video, which go to address a larger point many people have been noticing particularly within challenge running communities : the quality of bossfights in Elden Ring has lowered compared to previous titles. While most of the bosses in ER are still good to great (including some masterpieces of design such as Maliketh, Mohg, Godfrey, Radagon etc) a lot of them were given questionable moves that go from annoying to borderline unfair : Rykard's earthquake slam, Fortissax's static lightning, Elden Beast's Stars and other bullshit. Let's not forget Malenia and her Waterfowl dance. And so on. In a series of games that always put emphasis on overcoming obstacles via trial and error and being responsible for your own deaths that act as a stepping stone to help you learn, having unavoidable damage or scenarios where you can die due to factors outside your control is confusing. It seems FromSoft took a step back on trying to design mechanically fair bosses in favor of presenting memorable encounters, even if they can be unfun (Morgott, Malenia etc) or cinematic fights whose gameplay design is accessory to the visual spectacle they are meant to convey (Ancestor Spirits and Elden Beast for example). But all of that is secondary to a major problem this new trend of design has brought, indirectly or not : the multi-bosses fights. There is not a single good gank fight in Elden Ring. This is probably one of the biggest disappointments that were delivered by this game (and fortunately one of the very few). From the older Souls to Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro, the quality of gank bosses had been constantly improving and getting better with each title. Demon Prince and Sister Friede phase 2 are some of the best gank fights in the series, and the Dual apes bossfight of Sekiro being very scriptable and controllable by the player, making each death be the player's fault in all these fights. And then Elden Ring released and we got what we have now. There are many, many factors coming into play in designing a gank fight, but the three main factors I would consider are the following : readability, synergy and control. Three factors every major gank fight from other titles mastered, and three factors Elden Ring multi-boss fights fail to achieve. - Readability : First is visual readability : The player must be able to proceed and comprehend everything that's happening at any given time, in the context of a fair and well balanced fight. Being ABLE to doesn't mean this state should be spoonfed to the player without effort, of course : if the player laser focuses themselves on one boss and neglects to keep the other in check, it's on them if they get tag teamed by surprise. If they get stuck between a wall and have the boss' model fills the screen causing them to get hit, it's also on them for making positioning mistakes leading them into being cornered. But it should be achievable to keep both enemies in check for the entire fight. For instance unlocking and making smart use of the camera to attack Ariandel while keeping Friede in check in the corner of your vision, or positioning yourself against the melee Demon in order to see the ranged Demon during the Prince fight. Is this achievable during the Valiant Gargoyles fight ? Well no, but also no. Unlocking is not something you can do as easily because the Gargoyles have complex patterns of attacks that often need you to position yourself a certain way to not be blendered or a roll timed very carefully. As a result you need to maintain your focus on the Gargoyle you're fighting almost exclusively just to survive... And they are very mobile enemies that you cannot predict the movement of. Double Apes in Sekiro and Ariandel & Friede are slow, and the Demons are easily predictable since the active one always runs straight at the player to attack. Meanwhile the Gargoyles are able to jump across a third of the arena in one single jump or backhop, or running around your character at high speed to deliver some attacks. This makes splitting your attention between one Gargoyle and the other in the background next to impossible. Preemptive tells of attacks, particularly ranged attacks is also a major factor in balance. Friede's ice paths and Demons toxic trails have very clear, non-damaging indicators acting as warning to the player that ranged attacks are coming - but the poison from Gargoyles damages immediately and blends in with the arena making it very hard to estimate the reach of. Same goes for Godskins being able to perform long range attacks through one another's model (black fireballs or Apostle's spaghetti extendo attacks in phase 2 going through pillars for example). Valiant Gargoyles can also transition from active to passive state immediately without any clear indicator for the player... and the newly passive one can still perform proximity attacks (and overlapping timings with the other) or switch back to active state a few moments later. Second and just as important is the audio readability. The game also accounts for players staying locked-on to an enemy by providing them with audio cues and other sounds to help them know what the other boss is doing in the meantime. Ariandel's charges and Friede going for a heal miracle have distinct sounds. Every single of the three toxic attacks the ranged Demon uses has specific audio cues to let players differentiate which one is coming without looking directly at them. If a Demon is ending his ranged cycle and going back to melee mode, the player will be notified not by one, but two power-up screams that are extremely loud. Meanwhile Godskins black fireball sound is inaudible if they cast it from far away, but it can reach through 2/3rd of the arena and tracks very effectively. The poison spit from Gargoyles has basically no audio either. It's also completely unrealistic to know what one Gargoyle is doing while outside of your camera view, as its grunts and roars all sound the same across most attacks and it can decide to randomly jump at you while attacking, in which case the audio cue arrives at the same time as the attack, which is... a very useful warning, yep. - Synergy : You went over this in detail so here also I won't repeat what you pointed out, but there are a few points you didn't mention that I will go over for precisions, however : There were atleast SOME attempts at balancing these fights out made by FromSoft particularly with the patch 1.04 (?) and the tweaking of the "group bosses AI", however most of them failed miserably at their purpose. These AI tweaks mostly affected minor ganks such as Double Crucible knights and Crystalians Duo/Trio, but the fix went way overboard and essentially neutralizes whichever enemy into not attacking at all and standing there passively while the other attacks, seemingly turning into back to back duels instead of actual group fights. As for the behavior changes that were already present before that patch, they only work half the time. For instance the Godskin Noble rolling attack you mention at around 8:52. Whenever the Noble is rolling, the Godskin Apostle does receive a command to stay passive and not attack throughout the duration of the roll, which you can see in action between 9:00 and 9:22. This order is glitchy however and if the Apostle is already attacking while the Noble goes for his roll, this prompt to initiate passive behavior will be overwritten by the attack queue and Apostle will keep acting aggressive as if nothing happened. - Control The last key factor to tie it all together. This aspect goes back to what I started adressing before : the player must be the only one at fault if they die. Once the player have learnt everything they need to understand a boss, it becomes fully controllable and can consistently be beaten without taking hits even for extended periods of time. By positioning yourself a certain way, you can juke Friede into sending an ice path in a certain direction while being free to attack Ariandel. You can keep distance to make sure Friede will never catch up and start using melee attacks, or run away to bait Ariandel's charges and fire breaths. You can identically exploit the tracking of the Demons toxic trails, and kite one Demon away from the other to never have their attacks overlap with each other. You can stay close to the Headless Ape in order to bait his Terror scream attack then run away, which will always cause the brown ape to follow you and perform a 5 hits combo you can massively punish with 4 charged R1s. This is brillant multi-boss design, as it constantly rewards you for mastering the bosses behavior and outplaying them with clever actions. Now let's see Elden Ring. Trying to bait Godskin Noble away from Apostle to fight him while using pillars as cover from Apostle's black fireballs is possible... up to a certain point in the fight where all pillars are destroyed and the fireballs will go over them to hit you across the arena. Trying to 1v1 the Apostle and his moveset of varying swipes that cover a large area around him is hardly doable before receiving a fireball or surprise thrust attack from the Noble. And then you have Gargoyles, who render any attempt at kiting them around completely obsolete due to their ability to gap close across extreme distances in the blink of an eye. Distance doesn't matter as they can use their poison breath from range or melee quarters equally. I had a Gargoyles fight where I purposedly baited the first Gargoyle to one side of the arena so the second would need more time to catch up, only for the second Gargoyle to gap close in two jumps and hit me in the face within 4 seconds of its health bar appearing. For context, running from one side of the arena to another as a player would take around 20 seconds at full speed. Thank you, Elden Ring. Very cool gank fights.
Great analysis! I liked one 2 boss fight which was the farum beast duo, or whatever their name was, it wasn't en-par with previous titles for sure but those 2 at least complimented each other
Ayy I first saw one of your runs in the amazing chest ds3 most souls channel. You’re fuckin insane at the game man. Your vouch actually means a lot because of another point I wanted to express but didn’t want the video getting too long. These Elden Ring fights can absolutely be mastered, speedrunners prove as much. It is completely within the realm of possibility to devise consistent strategies for every single boss in the game. The argument is not that any boss is “too difficult” per se, but it is in how Elden Ring achieves that difficulty. I have fought Malenia more than any boss in any souls game. I know every one of her moves, I know how to respond to waterfowl, I know her windows of vulnerability. I have mastered the fight, but every criticism I had from back when I stuck on her still remains. I can dodge all of malenia’s scarlet clones, but is it fun getting her stance reset through no fault of my own? I can respect morgott’s holy dagger after an attack string, but is it fun being on the defensive simply because of a possibility that he *MIGHT* continue attacking? I can completely script godskin duo with sleep pots, but is it fun effectively removing the entire fight from the game because the alternative is so frustrating? Nothing annoys me more than the counter argument of “hey look, this one no-hit runner beat every single enemy in the game while blindfolded with his monitor off and upside down with both arms tied behind his back so your complaint is invalid.” Of course the fights can be mastered, but the challenge that they present can still be criticized. The problem with readability in Elden Ring is especially magnified during gank fights because of the need to now keep more than one enemy on the screen. I did mean to touch on sound cues but entirely forgot once I got to scripting tbh. While making this vid I also really came to further appreciate the Sister Friede and Demons fights more than anything. Everything I love about multi boss fights can be found in those two. They’re truly a masterclass in design. I wasn’t aware of the patch 1.04 changes to the godskin AI. I did notice the apostle would go passive sometimes but I thought this to be similar to how Malenia sometimes starts walking slowly and becomes purely reactionary rather than chasing. And of course, when bosses become reactionary and read your inputs, they react faster than is humanly possible. There is no reason why enemies as large as the valiant gargoyles should be able to cover than much ground so quickly, let alone have a sidestep upon input read. The player is playing dark souls, the bosses are not. Watching Maliketh, Morgott, or Malenia do acrobatics for 15 seconds is certainly cool. But there’s nothing enjoyable about getting my agency in the fight taken away for so long, and then having the boss backstep to the other side of the country immediately upon landing. It’s Devil May Cry, except you’re the mob and the bosses are Dante. Sekiro got it right. As the enemies capabilities increased so did yours. If Malenia doesn’t have to commit to her actions, neither should I. The brutally punishing roll buffer and inability to cancel animations worked in dark souls because the enemies moved at dark souls speeds. When dealing with Elden Ring enemies the limitations are crippling. I appreciate your input, and thanks for watching.
Whew...that's a long one. Dude it's really not that serious. Elden ring was my first souls game and I beat the godskin Duo fight on the first try. Summon. Parry. Fire Giant Incantations.
Same, the fight was ok in new game because you could trade hits and it was a fun dps race to keep it 1v1 (even if poorly designed) but from NG+3 I began to cheese it because they 2 shots you and it's not fun anymore because it was not designed to to be
I have a rule that if it’s a repeat boss then I can cheese it with summons or bs magic, after throwing myself at the duo for a good 2 hours, I thought “hmmm, technically I’ve fought these guys before (at the windmill village and volcano manor cathedral respectively) so screw it…” I used sleep pots and summoned, beat the boss first try that way.
ER explicitly lets you fight Godksin Apostle and Godskin Noble separately beforehand so you cam learn their attacks. They made them especially weak to sleep which allows you to even 1v1 the Duo if you are able to hit one sleep pot/arrow. The respawn delay on both of them Is quite long which makes this even easier. And on top of that there is always one NPC Summon sign (independent of whether you did a certain questline or not) PLUS you can use your spirit ashes, effectively making it a 3v2 without even using any online features and summoning another player. The game gives you so many tools, if you willingly ignore all of them then don‘t complain about getting shit on. The boss fight isn‘t badly designed, you just didn‘t learn what it wanted to teach you: to use your tools.
The problem isn't with the gank fights, the problem is that Fromsoft has changed the focus. With summoning being a key feature in the game and almost every boss allowing for summoning, if you don't summon, you're playing the game wrong. These fights weren't designed as gank fights, they were designed as all out brawls between you, your companions, and the bosses. But that's the problem, it now funnels you into a specific way of playing. This is the problem.
And when you use properly leveled summons, the game becomes actually easy. I had no trouble against godskin duo with my summon. Beat them first try and that surprised me, I was expecting a hard fight. This kind of multi-boss fight is either frustrating and hard, or lazy and easy.
So that's why they were sucking to me ooooooh. I really avoided and wanna avoid using summons but damn, some fights really felt unbalanced and made me want to change the way I played, but it was because it kinda is forcing you to play that way, yikes.
There were only two duo boss fights that I felt they were quite balanced. 1 - Perfumer Tricia + Leonine Misbigotten. Because the perfumer works as a support chapter giving lots of buffs to the Leonine. And the Leonine has a lot of attacks that you have time then change your focus on the perfumer to kill it easily. 2 - Beastman of Farum Azula duo. First of all because you can sneak and backstab one of them. One is a knife thrower and the other is a Fighter. The Knife thrower has lower HP and stance and works as a support character as well.
It's kinda annoying and frustrating when every boss is supposedly designed with spirit summons in mind but if you use any spirit that won't die in 2 Hits the boss is immensely trivialized, and if you don't use one it's incredibly annoying
Idk, it really depends on the summon in my opinion. I like using Ancient Dragon Knight Kristoff sometimes cus he doesn't do tons of damage but he's a good sponge for bosses with additional enemies or for multi-bosses. Mimic Tear though definitely trivializes the rest of the game after you get it
I honestly didnt knpw how to summon (i never bumped into ranni to get my bell) untill i explore killed margit, explored caelid fully and killed godrick. Only till i got to the weird castle with ranni and the 3 towers was I exposed to summoning and googled that shit
@@neounix6923 yeah, I beat Malenia in 17 attempts using Mimic Tear and Eleonoras Poleblade (Thinking about it, I was really bad lmao) Now I am in NG+7 suffering against her alone After 1 month, I no hit her solo
Not everyboss requires or encourages you to use ashes. In my opinion people are just being egotistical by not wanting to use Ash Summons then go on the internet and bitch about a DUO fight being a pain in the ass for them. BRO you're literally given so many tactics and mechanics to trivialize these DUO fights, stop bitching and use them.
I personally didn't find Godskin Duo all that hard, but then again I do use spirit ashes and I summoned Bernahl lmao; which unfortunately feels like the way you're supposed to handle the fight. It's stuff like this why I think Sekiro is the best fromsoftware game. In Elden Ring it feels like the best way to deal with bosses is to circumvent their movesets entirely, either by distracting them with spirit ashes, spamming bloodhound step, or nuking them with comet azur. In Sekiro, there's no bullshit. You MUST engage with every move, and doing so is far more satisfying anyway because every deflect, mikiri, and head bop contributes to your eventual victory. It just feels way more fun and involving. If you try to play solo in Elden Ring, it feels like the boss is the only one having fun lmao.
Sekiro is personally the one fromsoft game I would call a masterpiece. How far removed it is from all the other games definitely plays into that. It was a breath of fresh air that still maintained the heart of what I love about souls games
yeah all the duo fight are basically trivialized with ashes or summon. I mean you can do all of them solo just fine, its just as this video pointed out not fun because its not a dance that now involve 3 ppl but 2 crackhead rushing you down.
@@managarn8038 that's cause the bosses are ment to be fought with ashes. The bosses have higher aggression and smaller punish windows to tell players to use the ashes. That's why boss rooms are one of the few areas ashes can even be used besides large hordes of enemy's. The bosses were made based around the spirit ashes not a 1v1 with a player
@@gageunruh3574 exactly. If they had made the bosses like in the previous titles , ashes would have been useless or trivialized too much the fights. Also the Godskins are weak to sleep.
@@DRKLRD-kv4cm ashes would destroy all old dark souls bosses, that's why all the new bosses are hyper aggressive and they input read (many if not all bosses input read) and most bosses despite being hyper aggressive will also wait you out to see what you are gonna do before they do anything unless they are in melee range. In old souls games you could bait out margits jump attacks that are easy hits...yet in elden ring he wont do that cause he will just walk to you since you arnt doing anything and only do that attack once every so often. Yes soloing everybody is possible especially with a good build but the fact is the bosses were made with ashes in mind which is why the Godskin are like how they are it's not ment to be a 2v1 its ment to be a 2v2 or 2vmore so your summons can distract 1 of them and let you fight the other one. Alot of people cant seems to understand that's the design choice of the bosses, they arnt ment to be like the old games
You've done a perfect job of vocalizing exactly why Elden Ring duo fights just feel off. The "One Boss, Two Models" concept clicked very quickly, while Elden Ring does not share the practice. After 1.05 things are better, but not by a whole lot, if you ask me. The fights went from 1v2s to a 1v1 where another guy (or guys) is kinda hanging out in the background waiting for his turn to play the game. From definitely dropped the ball on the bosses in this game.
Think Fromsoft bailed on using this design philosophy for Elden Ring because the size of the game made it take too long to balance. So instead they add a bunch of OP combat options and just make enemies do insane damage and call it balanced. I really enjoyed Elden Ring my first playthru but I hardly play it now when I played games like Sekiro and Dark Souls 3 multiple times back to back.
Okay, first off: it's a large, open world game with 176 bosses. Not every one is gonna be a winner, and re-used assets is the expectation of this type of game. Also, there are plenty of bosses across the soulsborne series that don't stack up to the highest levels of game design. Second off: I find that the bosses are perfectly manageable in most every case, so long as you understand the game's mechanics and the limits of each boss. Third off: I assume that you're talking from a summonless run pov, since otherwise multiboss fights are not a big deal, since you have a summon to distract the second enemy. Fourth, and this is a big one: No they didn't "drop the ball." Just because you don't understand how to handle some bosses doesn't make them bad. That's like me complaining about Ornstain and Smaugh because they don't leave openings. Hell, the commonly agreed worst pair in Elden Ring(Godskin Duo) still gives you vastly more openings than those two. People just want to complain about everything new, it seems.
Who cares about how many bosses there are if about 19 of them are Ulcerated Tree Spirits and Erdtree Avatars? I can understand reusing them a few times, but not eight and eleven times apiece. They aren’t even close to interesting enough to make up for how much they’re copied over. Godfrey’s Shade does not need to exist. It’s a filler boss that spoils the penultimate boss for no good reason. The evergaol with Godrick has no purpose beyond refighting Godrick for some reason. I don’t care very much about all of the different caves and catacombs, they’re all completely optional and I don’t even bother with any of them most of the time because they’re not worth any of the hassle. That also being said, I can appreciate the spirit ash mentality on paper, but in practice it’s just such an annoyance. If I’m just trying to get through the game, I don’t want to take an hour or two to get through most of Ranni’s questline just to make getting glovewort easier. Good Spirit Ashes are slim pickings as well. Only Mimic, Tiche, and Dungeater have really been worth my time in my experience. With that in mind, I don’t think it’s all that unfair to say that the bosses, and even some of the areas, in late game are completely overtuned either. Elphael is a mess that I have no desire to ever return to now that you can’t skip the entire thing. Malenia is a fair fight that’s brought down dramatically by two mechanics, her waterfowl dance and her unpredictable poise usage. If one move is responsible for your boss being significantly harder, your boss isn’t hard, you’ve just designed a bad move. The unpredictable poise is just blatant cheating on Malenia’s part as well. I digress. Being a Godskin Duo apologist is completely inane to me. When people call it the worst boss in the game, they are 100% correct. It’s two separate enemies plunked down into an arena without much thought put into it. Comparing them to Ornstein and Smough (not Smaug, that’s lord of the rings) is also a laughable thing to do. When people call O&S the best boss in DS1, they have good reason. Both enemies have very creative and interesting visual designs, and have been very clearly designed around one another in the fight because they don’t exist anywhere else in the dark souls 1 world. The Godskin Duo absolutely do not deserve any praise or protection. They’re one of the worst bosses in the game, for good reason. Even if they aren’t that difficult, they’re still incredibly lazy and boring. Please don’t ever do that again, there’s better bosses to spend your time on. Suggesting that the boss design in Elden Ring hasn’t gone downhill isn’t an unreasonable statement to make, it’s ultimately a subjective topic. However, suggesting that they haven’t been overtuned is a silly thing to do. Most of the endgame bosses have absolutely monumental health pools that make fighting them without abusing bleed and/or frost and a spirit significantly more difficult without good reason. If that’s what Fromsoft wants it’s what they want, but it’s not something that they’ve done before, and if you ask me it’s the wrong direction to be going. I’ve always been a subscriber to the Quality > Quantity mantra, and if you ask me if you have to repeat two different bosses 19 times (or >10% of the game’s bosses in this scenario, which is absurd), you’re doing something wrong and should be taking another look at how many bosses you really want in your game. I hope that this isn’t the style of game From go with again. It was frustrating in Dark Souls 2, and it’s frustrating here.
@@mutilator97 Can you not automatically discredit anyone's critique as just "people complaining about new things"? It reads less like a debate and more like you just want to tell people why you think you're correct.
Beautiful video. I did always feel highly frustrated in Elden Ring gank fights in a way where it was like "i never want to do this again" which I never felt with older games. I couldn't exactly put my finger on why that was, but this video beautifully explains it.
A full on critique would be awesome. J9 already critiqued the broken ass state of PvP in this game, so maybe PvE could be the focus? idk, you do what you want
I think one of the biggest problems with the Elden ring community is the incessant bootlicking and double standards this community applies to this game. Fromsoft's fanbase has quickly turned into one of the most annoying fanbases out there. I see a lot of people coping and acting like this isnt a flaw yet when it comes to any other game they would be using these things such as poor duo bosses and massively recycled boss fights as flaws, dont even get me started on the fact Elden Ring barely innovates on the souls formula gameplay wise which Fromsoft has recycled for about a decade straight with their mlst "unique" title being Sekiro. Even Miayazaki him fucking self said that Elden Ring isnt his ideal game and that theres room for improvement.
The problem is that people quit playing the games and discussing them. Switching to listening to video essays about the games. People came to their own opinions back then. You also didn’t have people watching extreme challenge runs every week. All this piled up so that From fans have become the most carbon copy group half the time. Check the steam achievements for souls games, most players haven’t even beaten them but will call the game perfect.
Probably because duo bosses in Elden Ring just consist of two seperate enemies that weren't designed to be used exclusively in a gank fight. It's just two normal enemies... Not surprised it doesn't work very well. O and S were designed with the gank mind, that's why it's so perfect.
I think they nailed the normal multi boss fight with O&S and they took it a step further with Twin Princes and made probably the best non traditional double boss in the series Edit: coming back after 3 playthroughs of Elden Ring and damn this might be a hot take but most of the bosses even the single ones were kinda disappointing
The only elden ring duo boss that I felt worked and should've be implemented more was perfumer Tricia and the misbegotten warrior. Worked on a lore level and it was smart to have a aggressive boss bothering you while having to manage Tricia buffing him and throwing fire. That was a fun fight.
Sure, it "ruined" duos, but please let's forget how Bloodborne and Sekiro dropped the ball in this aspect too. Unless, for some reason, people think these are good bosses: Duo Apes (a reuse), Emissaries, Rom and the Thousand Spiders, some Commander fights, the duos and trios in Chalice Dungeons, and more. The less we talk about DS3's Gravetender and Halflight, and how they've been mawed by the community, the better. Make no mistake, Godskin and Gargoyle Duo sucks, but they aren't the worst in the series, we have tools (which yeah, isn't an excuse for these craps), and patch 1.04 literally tweaked ganks AI so they take turns, like Illusory Wall's video stated. EDIT: Yeah, there's some garbage duos and annoying enemies, don't get me wrong, and From thankfully patches them, but I feel attributing all of that to one game, when the previous ones also dropped hard in this regard, is a bit unfair.
I wholeheartedly agree. Minus the gank bosses though my main gripe with Elden Ring arent the bosses or even enemy designs, but exactly what you mentioned within the video - its overly ambitious and therefore loses a lot of Fromsofts magic because they tried to do too much at once without the proper time. Most people could play through Limgrave and give Elden Ring easily a 10/10, I mean I sure did my first playthrough. As you begin to near the end of the game though, you realize that nothing.. grows and the game feels almost stale. What do I mean by this? Let me use dark souls 2 as an example not in regards to enemy design but in terms of world building because I found it similar to ER, only I actually feel dark souls 2 did it better. When you first enter ds2 much like when you first enter Limgrave, the atmosphere is rich and the world is very much dead but it feels... alive. You are vaguely told of the war with the giants later in the game but when you first enter the world you can only imagine. This contrats directly with say Mt. Gelmir, where not only are the enemies copy pasted and the things to do in the zone actively hinder immersion as I will elaborate upon later but we know from Gideon exactly what happens before we go there and so there is little to no mystery due to Elden Rings very straightforward way of giving exposition. Now sure some zones such as the underground areas are very atmospheric and arent extremely elaborated upon giving us mystery, but they arent really connected well to the rest of the world which goes on to my second point - Elden Ring is so large but also so small because since its open world, our imaginations are limited as the entire world is relatively accessible. Consider Vendrick from ds2, some could argue that Godfrey could be the King Vendrick of Elden Ring in spirit, much like how Gideon is the Gehrman, but something is very much lacking. Throughout the entirety of ds2, Vendrick is a presence you are constantly reminded of and when you finally meet him through this linear adventure, its awe inspiring due to that build up. Godfrey sure is epic, but he isnt something that is grown. He's mentioned a few times, but nothing about him festers. When I first met him I was like "oh, Godfrey appears out of no where. Cool?" The analogy between Vendrick and Godfrey may be a bit weak but my main point is this - Elden Ring doesnt evolve. Gameplay wise Every zone of Elden Ring feels like its the same as the last with a new coat of paint without much in terms of making the world feel alive. Every zone has the same ruins, catacombs and caves and if you're lucky a legacy dungeon. Minus a few lackluster ones such as Carian Manor, Redmane Castle/Castle sol etc. most of the classic fromsoft levels are great. The open world though fundamentally doesnt do more than it did within the first zone and hinders creativity of the player which takes away the magic of fromsofts worldbuilding. Although some zones like Caelid do somewhat accomplish this as we can imagine what it used to look like and it does do visual storytelling, the buildup is stunted by the open world. By the time I reach Radhan, i've either done all of these copy paste catacombs, caves etc. which ruin immersion and decimate build up OR I did none at all and simply ran through the area which has a similar effect. If each aspect of the open world was intricately designed and kept the immersion which it sometimes does in Elden Ring only sparsely then great, but the game wouldve taken decades to create. One last issue ill mention regarding the open world is that Level design is just as important in terms of Fromsoft as enemy design. Since the open world removes the level design, enemies are just splattered throughout the lands between at seemingly random which makes no sense from a story standpoint and feels at times like clutter. Sure some soldiers walking about makes sense, but where are the villages, the farms, the living spaces? The open world lacks well... world. Its a lovely painting and looks gorgeous but everything feels so fake from my perspective. I know this is a lot to read but if anyone did i'd love to hear thoughts, maybe the whole "open world formula degrades worldbuilding" is simply a personal gripe of mine. In previous games though you could actively imagine the world which really assisted with atmosphere and immersion whilst within Elden Ring, especially after your first playthrough, you cant because you've actually seen all the world has to offer which is both too much at once and not enough at the same time.
Great comment! I never thought about it that way. It really seems that the world only consists of castles and catacombs and tunnels, but why do they need so many catacombs? I also personally hoped Elden Ring to be more like Ocarina of Time. A few villages with NPCs, many legacy dungeons and an open world that links all together. What we got is a world full of filler content (same looking catacombs with boring bosses) and a lot of castles.
On the "village/farms etc." and lack of life I think this is a limitation comming from the way FromSoft make their games. Almost everything in your screen is hostile or can be triggered by attacking/being too close. So they can't put some life in the world I a way like we see in other open worlds (ie : having civillians going around, small settelments etc.) A good exemple is Leyndell, it's supposed to be the capital of all the Lands Between... yet there's no one here, no civilian, only a few soldiers. "What the fuck is Morgott protecting ? There's nothing in this city." was what I thought after I completed that area.
@@robertspeedwagon982 Right I agree, but it works in other games due to the linear design of the levels. Bloodborne for example again has enemies that clearly live in yharnam and talk to you when they attack. When I say life, I wouldve just liked a town with hostile villagers that arent strong per se but the area would have atmosphere. Maybe a wheat field with hostile scythe wielding scarecrows yk?
@@zacoliver5547 EXACTLY. Even if the open world wherent filled with that much if it had enough atmosphere and connected a bunch of really cool legacy dungeons together i would've been happy. Less is certainly more regarding the open world in that aspect.
Fair critique and worthwhile observations. I think a lot of the difficulty with Elden Ring’s duo boss fights can be helped with spirit summons, but I see how that’s not the best design
You could argue that the bosses behaive like they do PRECISELY because of the spirit summon mechanic. I.E., they aren't actually meant to be done solo.
@@sophiaperennis2360 pretty much. My favorite summons include multiple allies, and it’s great for distracting the bosses. Normally this allows me to land several heavy attacks before having to dodge or block, but it would also work to distract the second boss while I can focus on the first
@@sophiaperennis2360 exactly. Otherwise Spirit ashes would be useless. You aren't forced to use them, but you Can't complain that a boss fight Is bullshit or too hard when you can make It "Fair" by using a game mechanics that was intended for it
@@NasuPrime I don’t understand your question or point, but I don’t think it’s fair to complain about a bossfight when you are given the tools you need to win. I’m new to Fromsoft games, but I’m having a great time. Even with summons and co-op, these bosses are not easy. Spirit summons allow us to play by the same rules as these aggressive duo bosses, so why not take advantage of it?
The way double boss fights work makes me think they made them for spirit summons only. The issue is the behavior of double bosses doesn't alter if you don't use the summon. I'm not even trying to go for the clout. If I see a double boss I'm summoning a spirit. I'm not wasting any time getting destroyed by a double team. I have already beat these bosses individually, and I definitely could beat them as a duo with me fighting alone after many tries. But to be honest I don't care about the clout that much, and summoning spirits can be fun as well. I'll do solo fights on bosses that appear alone.
This is something I grew increasingly frustrated with each installment, especiallu in Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring. The Dark Souls 1 mantra was tough but fair, but by the time we reach Elden Ring the kantra has become "OMG GUYS ISNT THIS SO HARD?????" Look at DS3 Iudex Gundyr compared to the DS1 Asylum Demon. Asylum Demon is quite easy, but he can still punish you hard if you dont have it down - which none of us did back in 2012. He teaches you that not all enemies can readonably be blocked, he teaches you that theres more than one way to tackle a boss, and he comes after one of the BEST tutorials in gaming history that actually teaches you to use your tools without hplding your hand. Youre MADE to learn how to move and attack and block because there are enemies and traps that will stop you if you cant do it. What do we get with Iudex Gundyr? A "tutorial" that doesnt test you at any point. Nothing to teach the player the mechanics organically. A wide open area that is quite short with frankly some really silly enemy spam (made not so bad since you can stunlock them with rolls, its not a big deal). Then you get to this boss who starts off AMAZING. Nothing to add about the first phase. Then you get to the second phase and its this really hard to read, bubbling monstrosity that tends to get way too close to the camera. Hes relentless and will barely let you heal. Its chaotic and messy. But you can still parry him, which what youre looking at would tell you its not going to work, and thats if you even understood parrying properly from the tutorial, which is unlikely. Is he really that hard? No. But hes the first boss and the player isnt given any time to actually learn anything, even if its just the mechanical differences coming off the heels of 1 and 2. Am I saying Iudex is a bad boss? Hell no, I think Champion Gundyr being top tied S rank across the whole franchise is propf enough that Iudex is at minimum decent. But hes **the first boss.** If he was the second, third, fourth boss he would make so much more sense as the player wouldve dealt with unothodox enemies - especially since hed be foreshadowed properly by the worm hollows before Vordt. It reallt feels like hes there to say "Welcome to Dark Souls 3 BITCH, hope you played all the others! ISNT THIS SO HARD???" I gave up my first playthrough of ER at the Dragontree Sentinel, not because he was challenging, but because I would do evwrything near perfect but fuck up ONCE and get 100-0d by its hard-to-read lightning. Weve reached this point where bosses arent there to present you with a challenge to learn from and apply throughout, but rather a case by case check of "have you learned how to deal with every single attack this boss/enemy/area can throw out? Oh, but what about the one that oneshots you? 🙂" Theyre all still amazing games but theyve strayed far from difficulty being part of the lore, narrative, and meta and bmrather become all-encompassing to the point I dread a lot of bosses and breath a sigh of relief on defeating then rather than feeling victorious and accomplished.
Demon's Souls and DS1 were about using your head to think of how to win, everything since DS3 has been "trial and error until you know when to press roll".
@@daboos6353Ds2 was the perfect middle ground. You didn’t have any pure gimmick fights like the bed of chaos or dragon god. But you also had a side mechanic for almost every fight except maybe alonne, velstadt and old dragonslayer. Who were all honerable and thus wanted a fair duel. Even when ds2 would reuse assets, they at least changed the arena or context to keep it fresh.
The thing about things like "cheesing" these fights is that unless you're actually using glitches (out of bounds stuff, etc.) what you're really doing is using tactics and gameplay mechanics to win. The game isnt at fault if people playing Elden Ring are still trying to play Dark Souls. You can use sleep pots/arrows/ashes to keep one boss locked down. You can use a summon to keep one of their aggro off of you half the time. If you refuse to use any of these tactics to win a fight while complaining about a fight not being balanced, the problem isnt that the fight isnt balanced, its that youre trying to play Dark Souls while playing Elden Ring and getting mad that the game is not designed to be Dark Souls.
The Crucible Knight due fight was amazing, one of them is always defensive as you fight the other, and the gatekeeper boss to Radhan, the red wolf with Crucible knight, the Knight spawned each time just as im about to kill the wolf and in the fight he doesn't attack with the wolf, in the Godskin due fight, the fat one is always attacking whilst the skinny one is casting fire balls, the only bosses that attacked together were the Crystal tall bosses, and uhhh FUCK ELDEN BEAST
"The game has over 160 bosses, they can afford to reuse some smh" My brother in Christ this game has like 20 bosses, a bunch of glorified common enemies (or mini-bosses at best), and some random combinations of the latter
8:30 killing them both at the same time is the funniest shit in the game. It sits there for a good 20seconds before they respawn actual clown boss fight
@@hitthegoat It got extra cringe with Elden Ring though, never seen anything like it before. With DS2 a select few people defended it but the vast majority of the community instantly realized that DS2 is not of the same quality as its predecessors. I believe that is because back then the community liked what's actually good about the games but since then it's been infested by knuckle dragging idiots that don't care how badly something is designed, as long as it's hard it's good and you can never criticize it cause that obviously just means you're bad.
@@FunkiMonki69because ER is played a lot of people, therefore there are a lot more idiots, and also usually the first Fromsoft game you play is your most liked so ER being so mainstream. Its probably gonna be their first experience of a Fromsoft game and defend it heavily
What I hate about the bosses is that every single one of them has a AoE attack, range attack and reads your input to roll catch. Also, they have infinite stamina and FP
@@zaxmaxlax So what, roughly 50% of the content is shit according to you but its still the best souls game? I guess you just dont like the souls-genre hehe.
The thing that annoys me the most about the foreskin duo is that if you manage to kill both of them before they can summon, they still get summoned back anyway even though neither of them are alive to be able to summon. You think the game would reward players for thinking outside the box. But no. The game breaks the established rules because fromsoft has a hard on for pissing their players off.
Yup, I actually killed them both and realized that amounted to half the total boss health bar. Then they respawned, so I had to kill 4 godskins. A really wtf moment.
I get that they wanted to prevent mages from just comet azuring the boss. But even without that, the combat in the game is weak. Doesn't compare with the masterpiece called Sekiro
my biggest gripe with the twin gargoyles in elden ring was the fact that the poison spit not only fills poison gauge but it also deal flat damage when you're in it. Don't have it hurt my health bar before the ailment bar is all the way full
lol i completely agree. what's the point in even having a poison bar if it damages your health without even having to fill up. it makes sense for it do that with the scarlet rot, seeing as that's basically super aids, but shitty weak poison? cmon.
This. It would be totally managable if it didn't also do massive damage over time. Also, y'all are crazy; that was easily the *worst* multi-boss fight in the game. I honestly didn't even struggle much on the godskin duo, but those damn gargoyles, man.
I think FromSoft completely intended for players to use spirits to split enemy aggression, and simply didn't anticipate how difficult they would be to fight alone
They literally designed a game mechanic to work off these boss fights and players get mad when they decide to not use them and have a hard time. I get wanting to make it harder on yourself but don't complain when you are not playing the game as intended and get upset about it not working 100% perfectly.
@@Dabeast1911Que nah fr though, i picked up on the fact many of these bosses were meant to be fought with ashes very quickly, and even though i didnt want to have to, i did it anyway maybe in another playthrough or so ill challenge myself to fight alone, but the game clearly wants you to use the ashes, thats why there are *so* _many_ of them
@@Dabeast1911Que Honestly multi-enemy boss fights are really fun to solo though, if they're properly balanced. If you use spirit ashes (or player/NPC summons) they become too easy and not very fun.
@@Dabeast1911Que That's what I'm saying: they're not. They're way too easy and boring with a spirit summon, but overly luck-dependent and patience-demanding without.
The most annoying duo boss to me (aside from crucible knights) is this one random one in a perfumers grotto Its a flower and an omen killer Its not annoying to me because its hard, its annoying because the omen killer breathes a flame attack that coats the ground in front of it and you would think “oh cool the flower is weak to fire! Ill trick it into killing the flower” But no, it just ignores the flame damage, and its such a missed opportunity
I miss when bosses in these games were actually things you outsmarted and had to get creative with, not just something where you press the roll button at the right time
Fights like the mimic tear where you go in naked to trick it into spawning with no armor or weapons are funner than the thousand "hey this guy has several attacks that are nothing but spam combos you have to run away from to survive." @@xolotltolox7626
I hate when people automatically thinks that when you have a critique for the game you’re instantly frame as “not good” or just “get better” when in reality you can be good at the game but still have criticism, being good doesn’t give the game a criticism invulnerability, after almost 600 hours I can say the game has flaws and it needs some balance because some bosses are either to easy or unnecessarily hard.
True I have lost countless hours of progress due to glitches and I complain about it, the game has bad traits, and yet is still my favorite game of all time (rn at least)
I think the reused bosses like the Godskins and the Misbegottens are one of the biggest problems in the game. I would rather have less bosses than more of the same bosses
Quality over quantity, 100%. Which hurts even more because that's how every single one of the soulsbourne/sekiro games was before Elden Ring. Hopefully they return to that with whatever they do next
Godskin doesn't seem like it's reused too much, just the perfect amount you fight the first one, and it's weak, then you fight the much stronger one at a very divine location. After that struggle, you don't see one for a long time, then bam, now you're suddenly hit with TWO of the boss that was hard enough to fight at the divine tower
You've probably heard of this already, but FromSoft has shown that they are listening to the community feedback and that is a wonderful thing, I don't remember which update it was, but a while back they somewhat remedied the issue of multi bosses by making one of the bosses more passive. Of course this doesn't fix the problem outright since these fights weren't designed with multiple bosses in mind in the first place, but it's reassuring to think that FromSoft is still the passionate developer we have come to know them to be.
Too passive. Killed lots of multi bosses on release (3 crystalians was the hardest, and I also didnt knew you can crush their poise to deal more dmg...) and it was hell of a satisfaction. I still think they were too disbalanced at release but man now? You come in and one of the dudes is eating popcorn in the corner waiting for its turn. Too easy and boring.
@@bartekkajewski8385 You can use mods to make them aggressive again. Or you could just do a challenge run to return the balance towards higher difficulty.
“Passionate developer” who left the original 3 games’ PC multiplayer offline for an entire year from a hack that someone gave the solution to from the very beginning. 🙄
Good, I'm playing it for first time (first souls game btw) and I'm trying to go without cheesing, which I thought would be difficult against the duo of death but I guess I'll be fine
One of my favorite bosses in DarkSouls 3 is the Abyss Watchers. It is so unique due to how the watchers behave with one another: 1:The main Abyss Watcher rushes in, but will back away and be less aggressive once the second one comes in. 2: The secondary abyss watcher will rush you, and will be very aggressive. 3: The third abyss watcher is corrupted, and will attack the other two watchers. Once this happens the other two WILL focus on him, because it is their priority. It is such a memorable experience.
yo WHAT, that never happened to me... and ive fought them so many times! I must have always died whenever a second showed up or DPS'd them down enough to never have 3 at one time
I wish more people knew it was okay to critique that which you love. I consider it being a better fan than unbounded lauding. I feel like they were trying to encourage the player to use new options, but with this being their first huge game, it's not entirely balanced. I feel guilty about Mimic Tear+10 outside of Malenia; it feels like I'm cheating, or using an exploit. I still think this is the best FromSoft game I've played behind Sekiro, but it's behind Sekiro: a tighter, more focused game in some ways, at least in the boss design.
You mean I *DON'T* hate the game that I've spent well over 200 hours of my limited time on this earth playing?? Please tell me, how do I communicate this to all the people telling me "if you don't like it don't play it." They clearly know my thought process better than me
@@65firered to be fair those are fans in total denial of companies whose talent has left and have stripped down core mechanics to make their jobs easier and make more money.
@@NasuPrime easy dont see them as normal humans with normal opinions, they're literally IRL NPCS that have no unique thoughts in their heads and cannot formulate a rational thought to save their lives
Arenas make a huge difference. Ornstein and smough’s pillars are incredibly important in making the fight work, and if they weren’t there (or could be destroyed) like basically every duo fight in elden ring it would just be annoying. Even simpler duo boss arenas have something you can do to separate the enemies, like the slopes in the bell gargoyle arena
Crucible knight duo and Godskin duo both have pillars in the arena. This is all just people whining because they’re bad at the game and want it to be easier.
@@itsawoodchuck4330 The pillars in the godskin arena are small and destructible, unlike the pillars in ornstein and smoughs arena, which after breaking still block them off. It makes you seem like an insecure pompous ass when you assume that anyone criticizing the game design is bad. I want the game to be hard, I’m actually a bit masochistic, but not all forms of difficulty are fun and engaging, some are stupid and pointless.
@@hhhcontent3930 but the pillars in the godskin duo arena also still block them off after being broken. the main strat for the rolling phase of the noble is to stand on the pillar and heal/buff/do weapon arts. meanwhile in o&s ornstein gets stuck on the pillars in his sliding attack then insta-zooms into a free hit behind you.
@orionfell they stop the rolling attack but that's it. Projectiles pass right over. The apostle especially likes to pass over them with jump and stretch attacks. I don't mean to dismiss the obvious jank in ornstein and sought, though, that shit does happen way too often
@@hhhcontent3930they are breakable, but are still useable to seperate the 2 bosses from each other even after being broken (although not with the same effectiveness of the ornstien and smough fight). Even though it’s still a pretty mid fight I find it to be the most tolerable of the duo fights in the game
Good critique. Yeah, I love Elden Ring, but From really fucked up with those duo fights. They weren’t so much challenging as they were cheap. You either struggle against the Godskin Duo, or trivialize it with Mimic Tear (Doppelgänger). I hope From will listen to the feedback and won’t make the same mistakes in an inevitable DLC.
Exactly my man. There wasn’t a single duo fight that was conceived *as a duo fight* . Just two previously fought enemies shoved together in a room. Sure there are a metric fuck-ton of bosses but how many are really enjoyable. Sometimes less really is more
Not to mention the amount of damage every single hit is. In the O&S fight the ONLY time you had to fear getting one-shot at full health was Smough's slam attack. In Elden Ring, EVERY attack can nearly one-shot :D Or, they attack with such succession that it's basically a one shot regardless.
@@Sucellusification some late game areas do too much damage, I remember having 2500-3000 hp when fighting Malenia (my health was beyond the compass) and I think she killed me in 3 hits? (And I was wearing armor)
Very accurate opinion. Most of the multi boss fights in Elden ring make me feel like fighting two Ornstein in an inappropriate arena at the same time, it's really unfair and chaotic.I hope FS can improve it in the DLC or in the next game.
@@NasuPrime Probably Miquella stuff, its the most mysterious and with more potential Character in the game since we only know its in a shell waiting to awake some day
"The Crucible Knight's moveset wasn't designed around having a Misbegotten Warrior in the same room." This statement alone summarizes the entire Multi-Boss fight experience in Elden Ring. Beautiful video.
So? What’s wrong with that? I feel like it’s more realistic/enjoyable that way I don’t think that monsters that are trying to kill you will take turns hitting you lmao. That fight in specific was very annoying I feel like it’s more rewarding that way when you beat them.
Hey man, great points. The devs are actually actively trying to fix this issue, illusionary wall made a video on it. They're making some changes duo bosses so that the boss taking the back seat is more docile.
@@eneveasi well a realistic fight would be one guy in the front and then one guy supporting from the back. you don’t want two guys fighting one guy because then the duo might hit each other with attacks but if there’s a guy in back he can take his time to line up a shot. That’s just what I think.
I'd love to see a full review of Elden Ring from you. While I thoroughly enjoyed it I got some problems with it too, and it would be nice to get your perspective on the game in a format that's (hopefully) not 12 hours long.
Aye aye captain. Working on another vid atm, and don’t see myself ever making anything over 30 mins long. I love long form content but idk if the 2 hour plus style is me. Most of those can be played in the background without much being lost, but I like incorporating a lot of visual gags and such into videos
Joseph Anderson has a really good review (it is a little on the longer side, like 2hrs if I remember right) that perfectly outlines a lot of what people have been criticizing the game for.
It seems that's also why everyone uses magic, moonvail, or bleed besides them being OP. For many bosses in the game you have to take the cheap way out and have fast attacks with high dmg so you can have time to run away before you get ass blasted by 2 things attacking at the same time up close to you. If you use any great or collosal weapon in a duo fight ( like I tried to do) your animation takes so long that by the time you get a single hit on one of them the other one is right beside the one you're attacking already hitting you. You're essentially trading for dmg on one enemy without the health to do so.
It’s like they actually wanted us to spam the weapon art while we summon and at that point it isn’t even fun anymore im not even doing anything but sitting there spamming shit
Meanwhile, I just found a fun combo of ashes of war which pair well for me. I use Shield Crash on my shield to knock down bosses(weirdly high poise damage, and guaranteed knockdown on smaller enemies), then quickly switch to two-handing my broadsword so I can charge up a Carian Grandeur. By the time the enemy is standing again, I've gotten at least to stage 2 of the charge, so I do pretty good damage(1000 for stage 2, 1600 for stage 3). For me personally, the only bosses I've cheesed are the ones I was underleveled for at the time. These would be the first Tree Sentinel, the Erdtree Avatar near the Great Jar, and the gargoyle outside the beast sanctum. In order, the cheese methods were: hit and run, repeat until death; abuse cliff position over the enemy; and abuse the doors of the sanctum. Oh, and by the way, no. I have a current run going using the watchdog staff, and it's perfectly manageable. Hell, the weapon art on the thing really makes things interesting.
@@mutilator97 You say you aren't cheesing but you literally just admitted you used a cheese method to constantly stagger bosses -_-. You basically found an alternate Flame of The Redmanes method. I'm not saying your build isn't interesting but you still cheesed it either way.
@@FastestRunnerInNoMansLand I can only use my shield crash/Grandeur combo twice before I run out of FP, so no. It's not cheesing. Even by your own definition. Also, Cheesing is using unintended methods to kill an enemy safely. Using ANY combo of weapons/ashes of war is not cheesing, by definition. Synergy is not cheese.
Even in DS2 most of the gank bosses were fair. Ruin Sentinels? You can defeat one before the other 2 aggro, and then make one of them loose almost all health. Skeleton Lords? Yes, there are many, but small damage and columns for getting covered And IMO the best gank boss in the series is the Demon Prince. It's just so good and brutal
Ds2 also borrowed a lot of DeS boss philosophy. Meaning that the arena played a part in the fight. Sentinels had to climb up to you one at a time. Twin Riders had you knock down the pillar. The twin Tiger fight was specifically designed in one of the 3 co-op zones. Twin Pursuers was the only time it was kind of unfair, but it was designed as a special optional challenge for NG+. Ds2 is my favorite souls game because it really took advantage of the formula. You had some “honorable” bosses where the arena was neutral. And you had gimmick fights. But the gimmicks didn’t override the fight itself. They towed the line between a dragon god/bed of chaos situation. And real fights. ER’s repeat fights don’t excite me in the way DS2’s did because there was no spin in ER. It’s just “Oh boy, another magma wyrm”. The arenas are all disinfected of any fun level geometry (except for making it hard for the player to traverse and hit crits). Also, ER creating invis walls for the enemies so they’ll only fall if you push them is really lame. Seeing a crucible knight fly forward only to abruptly stop at the ledge is such a buzzkill.
@@DarkFayWhy does that matter. There are lots of amazing bosses in elden ring but compared to how many are in the game it is very frustrating, and not in a satisfying to beat kind of way. I love this game and there are some great bosses, but there’s no reason to assume that just because someone’s bad at the game, that their criticisms are invalid. Besides, only idiots think that the difficult = good. Same with the opposite
I think this is because FromSoft wants to force you to use spirit summons and/or player summons. That's probably why the multi-boss design seems to disregard the soloing player.
I agree but why did they want to put such an emphasis on summons? They just trivialise the fights and make it so that you never have to actually learn the movesets and engage with the fight, you just distract them with the summons and melt their health bar. Do people find that fun?
It's really a shame, cause I feel like it's entirely possible to build a summoning system that acts as another build option rather than something that must be built around. Even something as simple as a time limit on summons would help mitigate its power.
I honestly think that the godskin duo was a major missed opportunity on From’s part. The duo was there in the first place to take back the rune of death from maliketh. Was thinking up a concept where when you kill both of them just once then they appear back weakened, then like the godskin noble would kill his own partner in a hurry to transform himself into a giant boss. That would have been so cool
Even just something like Throne Watcher and Defender, where you need to kill both at around the same time or they revive each other. It increasingly feels like FromSoft learned the wrong lessons from DS2.
I ABSOLUTELY AGREE! I'm honestly disappointed by the Godskin Duo. I mean, we see them so often throughout the game. But you know what would've been cool? Combo Moves. Apostle jumps on the Noble, then suddenly gets launched by the poomph towards you. Apostle creates a giant wall of black flame for half the arena, and then suddenly the Noble comes rolling out of it towards you. But not only are there no combo moves, but they are quite literally just separate enemies smacked together. I noticed that after playing Sekiro that there's a similar style with a duo boss near the end of the game. It's not fun, it's just artificial difficulty. As far as I can remember, I think that the only boss fights where Duos/Trios were accounted for were the Crystallians... and even then, they don't work super well together. It's just a constant onslaught of attacks with no consideration for one another. Feel free to ignore, just an idea for a Duo Fight. Demi-Human Queen + Troll. Obtusely shaped triangle room with various pillars. The Demi-Human Queen can jump from pillar to pillar, attacking with magic while the Troll tries to slam you. However, the Troll's Attacks can destroy these pillars, causing her to fall and allowing you to deal quite a bit of damage. It would be an early game Duo Fight that would probably be quite fun.
"With the immense scale of Elden Ring, it's absolutely necessary" aaand there's the root of the problem in my opinion. Elden Ring is just too big. Much like DS2, they went for quantity over quality and it shows.
What was an awesome discovery for me for the ornstein and smough fight (after trying forever to get the super ornstein kill for his ring) was that you can actually use smough to block ornstein from attacking you; his spear won’t be able to reach the player so your focus shifts to dodging smough’s heavily telegraphed attacks while making sure he’s between you and ornstein. I absolutely love this boss battle, it’s practically a game of chess in its design
godskin duo is so bad, not 1 good duo boss in this game, even the "good" ones where mid at best, putting 2 health bars doesn't translate to a good duo, ffs the devs made Ornstein and Smough in 2011 and in 2022 we get this mess, this isnt even hard, either trivial with sleep pots or bs if you do it solo. fatty and lanky dont complement each other (which is realistic but makes for an annoying fight). ive beat them several times solo playing sword and board and after you learn them the fight isnt even satisfying its just boring
When I kill a boss in Elden ring I don't feel good at all but when I play any of the other souls games and beat a boss I have a feeling of success. I just have to say in my opinion Elden ring is the worst souls game so far
9:42 THIS 👏 RIGHT👏 HERE 👏 I am so sick of hearing easy cheese tactics being used to excuse bad boss design. The ability to poison micolash from the balcony did not make his boss fight any better The ability to throw fire bombs at the Bed of Chaos weak points did make it any less GARBAGE And using items sleep arrows or ash summons does not make any of these fights good either.
@@leonardo9259 It's the fact that Fromsoftware was dumb enough to make a boss so broken that it incentivises the NEED for those summons. Most of the bosses in Elden ring are garbage gimmicks like Fallingstar Beast which literally is literally a filter for melee builds and becomes stupid easy when you find out you can just kill him from across the room. Example of incredibly bad boss design.
@@mattroush7364 Oh so Yhorm is bad bc its gimmicky? is aldrich bad bc its a filter for megic builds? is Vordt bad bc you can spam him with magic? Nameless king? Iron Golem? literally half the bosses of ds1? ER doesnt NEED summons except for the duo, which i agree it sucks. Literally every other boss is completely managable with melee builds, just bc you cant stunlock the hell out of a boss with you STR build doesnt mean the boss it bad
I think Crystallians work now after their AI was patched, before all 3 were super aggressive, but after the patch the one that’s mainly attacking you will be aggressive while the other two will be more passive Spear one will be the most aggressive and be on top of you while the Staff will do heavily telegraphed range attacks and the Chakram one is usually really passive if you aren’t close to it. I think this particular gank fight works but the others straight up doesn’t. Godskin Duo being easily the worst offender.
Honestly- the Godskin Duo was actually my favourite fight in the entire game. It felt fun, and to me, it didn't really feel unfair or unfun at all. Granted, everyone has different perceptions of fun- but I really enjoyed their fight. Although it's probably ER being my first soulslike game that makes me think this.
@@cherrysoda4462 You don't know actual quality made by the same dudes, maybe it's better than what you had before but it's a step down from before, for bad and concerning reasons
@@thegk-verse4216 I've been meaning to go through all the Dark Souls games sometime soon, just to make sure I have the entire experience. Unfortunately Bloodborne isn't on PC, so I'll need to skip it, but the others I believe are. I've heard a lot of comparisons to Ornstein and Smough- so I'll have to see it for myself. That being said- I don't think seeing the point will make Godskin any less fun for me, since I very much enjoyed the fight on my first playthrough. Maybe playing the other games'll give me sight on why people don't like it, but I don't *think* it'll shift my opinion.
@@thegk-verse4216 having played all Souls games in order (except Demon's Souls) I'd hazard a guess that your first playthrough used a quick-swinging melee weapon, and Cherry Soda 's did not. Either you were dex or sword and shield. Am I right? Because Godskin Duo is to a dex build what Morgott is to a strength build, and Renalla is to a magic build. Godskin duo is neither hard, bullshit, nor badly balanced. Well, it is badly balanced specifically for dex builds. But for any other build it's just an ordinary, reasonable boss. If you have range, it's much easier. And if you have a collosal weapon, they're easy to stagger to death. And like every ER boss, they have one bullshit move (Noble's roll). That's how I'd summarize Elden Ring bosses. Every player build has a hard counter boss which is just completely unfair against them, and the way to win is to summon mimic tear (which trivializes the fight) or switch to a hybrid build. It's why I still prefer Dark Souls 2 overall. Because the variety of Dark Souls 2 is "every build is equally viable" while the variety in Elden Ring is "the only build that's completely viable is a hybrid of some kind". Different design philosophy-not necessarily worse or better-but I personally prefer the variety of Dark Souls 2. It also helps that in DS2, a bad boss is still a very easy boss, so it's over quickly and forgotten even quicker, while an Elden Ring bad boss is unreasonably difficult and has a ridiculous easy-mode switch (summon mimic) which is hard to resist, and whose existence makes the difficulty less fun to push through. Still, Elden Ring had a very magical first playthrough that I won't forget. It constantly fulfilled a boyish fantasy of slaying a big lizard and a want for adventure that I didn't know I had.
The only time I really questioned from softwares decision about the godskin duo is when EVERY TIME you HEALED they’d BOTH throw fire at you, literally wasted 4 flasks for 1 heal yet I still hadn’t gotten half my hp back, same goes for other bosses aggression and rng unpredictable moves some bosses can do from time which annoys me. (red wolf radagon) Plus those moves that they don’t stop spamming until they hit, for example, the draconic tree sentinels lighting, I literally dodged it 6 times and still got hit and died to it, I’m not angry over the attack patterns because those can be predicted and timed correctly, I’m just disappointed that some boss designs can has such bs moves that throw you off even when you’re perfectly dodging or parrying and they cancel or do some unthinkable moves. Like when Morgott/Margit cancels their combo and you question whether you should punish or not because you don’t know if they will pull this undodgeable move if they decide not to jump away (the holy knife attack)
Nah I had this same opinion a year ago but now affter replaying the game it really isn't that bad. I beat almost all of the bosses without summons except for the Godsking Duo because I refuse to belive someone looked at that boss and actualy thaugt it was a good idea.
Elden Ring is my first Souls game, and I also put in a ton of hours. Its a great game, but after going back and playing Dark Souls (still pretty early into it) I can see a lot of what people in the Souls community are griping about. Your video is spot on in describing the problems with the Duo bosses not being synergistic at all, and the quality definitely suffers. It seems like in ER they decided to replace all of that strategy with the ability for the player to summon spirit ashes to distract, or in some cases solo (Mimic Tear w/ strong build, Tiche, etc) bosses. It just seems like a lazy way to solve a problem, as the player has to choose between making fights borderline trivial by summoning or borderline impossible by going it alone. Its not a "git gud" thing, its bad design thing IMHO. And that's not even touching the glitch abusing that people are doing to make PvP untenable. I really hope that the DLC fixes a lot of these issues, otherwise I think that the replay value of ER will suffer greatly. Also, this video has made me more terrified and excited of my eventual Smough/Ornstein encounter in DS1. Great video
I've played every souls game multiple times (except 2), but with Elden Ring I have zero desire to do NG+ or create a new character, just the thought of having to suffer through this or that boss again discourages me, while for the rest of the games getting to fight most bosses again was a joy.
@@certainlysignificant7721 Honestly no one cares at this point. The horse you’re beating has been dead since Bloodborne, even if you’re objectively right.
You'll probably steamroll Ornstein & Smough after playing through Elden Ring. Word of the caution though - from what I remember, I don't think there's a good area to farm souls if you're under-leveled before that fight. It's been a long time since I played DS1, but I kind of remember being stuck on that fight at an extremely low level and not being able to leave the area.
Very few types of people i would look and listen about their reviews and analysis: 1. Newcomers 2. Veterans that understand their beloved games down to a T 3. That one guy in the reddit/RUclips comment section that perfectly sums everything up (A.K.A Jordien) You're the 2. Loved the video :)
What annoys me most is the attitude of the community. I always have to preface by saying I liked Manus and other hard bosses I’ve killed, but even then, I get the “gir gud” type responses… about bosses I’ve already soloed. I’m also mad about Malenia, because without her obligatory force-you-to-be-overly-cautious-on-the-off-chance-they-cast-it-and-you’re-within-the-same-zip-code attack, she would be one of my favorite bosses in the entire series
I have a strong suspicion that many of these "git gud" types are trollish kids who use summon themselves but like to pose as souls pros. Make a game every idiot can now play (with summons, ashes and Torrent), and its community will be full of idiots.
My time online has tuaght me that gaming communities tend to have two types of people in their majorities: People who go out of their way to help new players, give random gifts when they are spawned into your world, act honorably when dueling and are just generally there to have fun and make the community a great place to be. And the other side are the folks who say "git gud" to anyone who complains/criticizes the game or wants help. The ones who have no respect for anyone else and only exist to troll and make the community toxic and gate-keep. There is no inbetween really. And if there is, then it's likely the silent people who just stick to themselves.
I'm so late but Elden Ring is doing the same dumb thing Monster Hunter has recently. They make the bosses fly or retreat while spamming AoE projectiles when 90% of the weapons are melee weapons
This video is phenomenal, it explains the difference in boss design from older titles to Elden Ring so well. I have a devil's advocate position I'm curious about your take on, if you see it. I think Elden Ring bosses are successfully designed to make more interactive, aggressive fights and to complement the player's access to options like spirit summoning, spellcasting and overpowered ashes of war. I'll start with the second point. Bosses in Elden Ring definitely have... different design than previous FromSoft titles, and not just the gank bosses. One-shot moves, moves that can't be dodge rolled or blocked, and hyperspeed are all much more common now. However, I also feel like the power level of the player character has gone up a lot. We're faster, our stamina regenerates more quickly, we have more buffs, we have more status effects, spells are more varied and powerful, incantations are a LOT more varied and powerful, and there are tons of absolutely ludicrous weapons and ashes of war. This isn't Dark Souls where I feel less powerful than even the rats and dogs. You can still easily die to a pack of dogs in Elden Ring, but I can also aerially carpet bomb the entire pack with dragon breath from outside their aggro range. Imagine the infamous entrance to Undead Settlement in DS3, but you have Hama's Cannon. We also have brand new tools in our tool belt: guard counters, jump dodges, jump attacks, stance-break(not entirely new I know) and spirit summons. It's those last two things that I think From chose to incorporate into their design practices the most. Stance-break obviously encourages aggressive play. It actually can encourage very risky play, since you get the most reward from charge attacks, jump attacks and guard counters. Bosses don't have very long windows for punishment after their attacks in this game and are generally more aggressive. They make you work for your stance-breaks, getting in every little hit you can and experimenting with things like getting a jump attack or charge attack instead of something safer. Spirit summons role in the fights is also pretty obvious. We have tons of setpiece battles scattered around the map that you can take on with your loyal companion(s), and gank fights are a blast when you and your summon are locking down different opponents and you're trying kill your mark before your summon loses their battle of attrition. Then suddenly it's a gank fight for the boss and it feels awesome. They also help with the increased aggression and input-reading heal punishes, giving you opportunities to buff and heal that were there naturally in past boss fights. I mostly played without summons my first playthough, but I invited Tiche to setpiece battles and gank fights(except the gargoyles) and I felt like I was hitting a difficulty level sweet spot that was perfect for me(except the gargoyles). Crucially, it's still possible to play the game without these tools. I mean, people have done it even without dodge rolls. But is it still fun to be a purist, or is it just harder? I think gank bosses suffered the worst, for the reasons you've listed in your video. I'm pretty sure that's why they ended up nerfing them into the ground so it's more like successive back-to-back duels than a gank. The gargoyles are the saddest example by far, getting the fight wrong almost as badly as DS2 did, maybe even worse. They are my least favorite enemy and it's not even close. But other bosses have changed as well. Traditionally, the trial and error process we love in boss fights has been about learning the boss's moveset and then reacting appropriately. You learn the timing on a delayed attack and then dodge it correctly, you learn there's an unreactable followup after a particular move and you dodge preemptively, etc. It's a game where knowledge is the deciding factor in overcoming an obstacle and the moment-to-moment decisions are mainly just correctly identifying visual and auditory tells. Elden Ring mixes it up though; there are boss moves that you don't just add to your knowledge library as things to react to, but which you keep in mind more actively because the boss _might_ use them. Margit sometimes throwing a retreat dagger after a combo is a prime example, and so are Waterfowl Dance and Godskin heal-punish fireballs. These tend to be the things I see people complain about the most in the new boss design, after gank bosses. Personally though, I was overjoyed when I realized that's what was happening. I now had to think about not just what the "correct" answer is to any particular stimulus, but what the "best" answer could be. A couple examples: for Godskin fights, I can't just run away and heal, I have to decide whether it's necessary to bait out a fireball first. I also learned more opportunities for healing without running away. For Malenia, the learning process included experimenting with which of my attacks were safe in different scenarios; if I use my tools correctly I can be really aggressive, but if I over-commit then I could get punished. I think this alone makes fights more strategic and interactive. When paired with the stance-break system you have a really fun element of risk and reward in your fights that used to go away as you became familiar with the fight. Margit _might_ juke me with a dagger after this combo, but it won't kill me if he does and I know he's _so_ close to a stance-break. Those kind of moments make for very exciting fights, even long after you know his moveset like the back of your hand. I remember people complaining about more bosses having roll-catching attacks in DS3. They're even more prevalent in Elden Ring now, but I haven't seen very many complaints. They add another step to your learning, sure. You can't just dodge the first part of the attack on reaction, you have to dodge a certain direction or position yourself ahead of time so you have an escape route. But if Dark Souls was a game where the only skill you need to win is dodging with the correct timing, it would be a very boring game. It's the strategic parts that keep the game interesting. Questions of giving up damage for stamina management or better positioning add nuance to the combat. Once people got used to it, I think people realized those roll-catching attacks were a good addition. I see the new changes much the same way. I don't think they gave bosses more powerful movesets just to balance around spirit summons and other "easy mode" options, I think they did it to create more interesting challenges for the purists too. It's different from the direction of the previous games, but I don't think it's worse. The easy mode is easier, the hard mode is harder, and both ways of playing are more fun and full of spectacle than ever before. I can get behind that. I know that challenge runners probably benefit the least from this. No-hit players don't benefit at all from risk/reward decisions and spectacle, they need sound, repeatable strategies. I understand the frustration, and I agree that Elden Stars and Waterfowl really aren't justifiable. However, for me the appeal of challenge runs has always been the learning process, putting together an otherwise uncommon strategy that will get me through an obstacle even under strict limitations. I don't expect challenge runs to inherently be the most fun way to play the game, I expect them to force me to learn again, which is fun on its own. The fights themselves might be drastically slower than normal, but that's okay. I don't think Elden Ring deviates from that formula at all: you absolutely can play the game with strict limitations, but you'll probably have to play differently than normal. I think that's the point, but I know there are people who disagree. I would absolutely watch a full-length critique of Elden Ring from you, no matter how long it is. Especially if it's long. Cheers!
I actually think ER has one of the least number of actual one shot moves. While Bloodborne has the most. And there are almost none attacks that are actually undodgeable, contrary to what some say. Elden Stars kinda sucks.
@@arcanefire7511 I could see that, there are only a couple moves that actually one shot that I can think of. However how many combos are you guaranteed to get hit by if you get a dodge buffer? If you're not super over leveled I think a lot of people experienced getting, for all intents and purposes, one shot a lot. In general boss fights are over more quickly either way, but they're especially over for you really fast. They tried to make up for it with short runs and stakes of Marika, but I still think it's a frustrating design in a game with loading screens between deaths, especially since in most past boss fights I felt like I had a chance to learn the fight a bit even on my very first runs. Now when I die it's usually because I got wombo comboed, not because I ran out of heals.
@@Wintercat1 To be fair I think a difficult enough boss should be able to kill you the moment you act careless, but you also need to be at fault for that to work, which isn't guaranteed in Elden Ring. (I also feel like it's been a problem since Bloodborne, but not to this extent
I feel like the Godskin Duo was originally designed to be a "real" duo boss fight where they compliment each other. Kind of like the one with the snail. You first fight them individually and then in the last phase, you have to use what you learned about them when fighting individually in a fight against both at once. Would explain this really strange health bar imo. But when the game grew more and more in scope, they needed bosses and therefore redesigned them both to be usable encounters in a 1v1 fight. But didn't really change much about the duo fight except that you fight them both directly (because you can fight them individually in the world).
I managed to force my way through those fights with summons and unreasonably tanky builds without much issue but the problem stands, you can't just throw enemies that were DESIGNED to be fought alone together and say that's JuSt A dUo bOsS like that makes a lick of sense, not even touching on the overall stupid balaning in the game like Malenia breaking most of the game's rules and get guaranteed punishes ON THE PLAYER or shit like Astael waves of darkness which is guaranteed damage since you quite literally cannot dodge it, the game is still good and has many more good points than bad but holy fuck there's so much dumb stuff that i cannot belive they actually let it into the game.
Precisely. Nothing in the game is unbeatable. You can force your way through them. Malenia is not impossible. Waterfowl is not *literally* undodgable, even at point bank range. But what is required of the player is far from reasonable. I find it hard to believe that the devs planned for the player to dodge waterfowl by unlocking their camera, circling around malenia, rolling twice, turning back around, rolling once more, and then strafing the final flurry. All of these things have to be done perfectly in succession if she does this move close to you. It can be done, I know how to do it, but it’s still an awful move
@@NasuPrime yeah the camera work is another thing i was hugely let down in elden ring. Like you say, any boss fight that requires you do unlock camera to do a complex maneuver is just bad design. Theres also camera lock on bigger enemy being a huge mess. Like i spent a good amount of time fighting dragon trying to land blows to their head to eventually just say fuck it and keep hacking at their legs because the camerawork is just so bad.
@@managarn8038 Eh I don’t think that necessarily needing the player to unlock is bad in itself, but it when it’s to the degree of what you have to do with waterfowl or when your attacks literally miss point blank like with Mohg or Fortissax, that kinda sucks… a lot
it's a gag how often you find videos basically proving that Elden ring isn't the best souls game, and for numerous reasons, yet "game journalists" all gave it the highest rating ever. never trust game reviews, especially reviews of AAA games
I have no beef with all the 10/10 reviews, just take issue with how early they came out. Basically all of them threw out their reviews upon reaching Raya Lucaria. The first two areas really aren’t an accurate representation of the entire game considering the late game is where the cracks really start to show. I understand that journalists HAVE TO BE on top of the newest games as soon as possible, it’s just the nature of the profession. But I really wish that wasn’t the case. Even though reviews aren’t something I give much credence to, I’d rather people not throw out the word “masterpiece” after just 30 hours with a 100+ hour game.
I adore Elden Ring but it definitely has some issues, just like any other souls game. It's new and still requires work. Personally my favorite is Bloodborne, then ER, then DS3. I wasn't a major fan of DS1 & DS2, perhaps because they're older and clunkier than they used to be when they were newer. Regardless, ER is still very high on my list of best games and easily takes #2 or #3 in terms of Souls games.
I mean "best" is very subjective. And I think its fine to call Elden Ring one of the best games made, in the sense that it does so many things so much better than most, if not any, games. But there are things that it doesn't do well... Rating games through points, especially when it is a % based system, is overall very flawed.
I would have preferred a third of the bosses that are in the game currently than have so many awful duo bosses. From my calculations, I count 20 duo bosses, going off the definition that they must have two health bars. Including bosses with a shared health bar, like Godskin Duo and that one Erdtree Avatar, we have 22 bosses. If we're including bosses with other enemies added into the fight, even when it's their whole point like Tibia Mariner and Spirit-Calling Snail, we have about 37 "duo" bosses in the game. This isn't even getting into all the re-used bosses with no worthwhile changes, but I digress. Crucible Knights are an actual joke, and should only ever be fought 1v1 because of their superarmour, defence and fast pace. The only enjoyment you could get out of it is by flexing your parrying skill, something I as a Strength user am too illiterate to comprehend. Leonine was cool at first and I wouldn't mind fighting him two more times for the legendary armaments if 1) they made it like Draconic Tree Sentinel where they're similar but have new moves up their sleeves thanks to their unique swords, and 2) if they didn't put them next to random enemies that don't compliment them in any form whatsoever. Mini-bosses becoming enemies? That's the Soulsborne way. Regular enemies becoming mini-bosses? Oh no. Abductor Virgins? Cool on their own, together they hurtin'. Fell Twins? The void looks nice, but it's not a win. Kindred Pests? Put those foolish ambitions to rest. Nox Priests? No, please. Thank God most of the twin bosses like the Burial Watchdog's and Crystalarian's have little health so you can just trade damage instead of having to put up with them, but that still doesn't mean they're good. In fact, it just makes them even more boring. Valiant Gargoyles was the closest they got to something good and when I first fought them I was excited, but as shown by the overworld encounters they clearly weren't intended to be fought at the same time. The big arena is nice but the dreadful poison attack throws everything we've learnt from Friede and Demon Princes out the window. The Apostle and Noble fights are some of my favourite non-Remembrance bosses in the game because of how freaky and nimble they are and how they encourage both aggression and zoning. Too bad Godskin Duo is one of the worst fights in the series. When they appeared for the first time together my heart sank and after one attempt I knew I wouldn't be able to stand it. The only time in my entire 120-hour playthrough where I used spirit summons since I had forsaken them after testing them on Margit. Horrible boss. In summation: This ain't it chief.
I actually have beaten Nox monk and Swordtress first time by using Mad Pumpkin bro ashes..tbh I think using Spirit Ashes on duo bosses help in some cases (offcourse if you are the kind of guy that don't want to use spirit ashes in bosses then alright, I know people say that they trivialise boss fights but tbh they helped me alot against pretty powerful opponets) and I'm still on my first run
@@hollowed1110 play however you want man. Summons ashes are literally a part of the game to be used. If you feel they cheapen your experience but still think you require them , there's plenty of other support summon that are there to mostly back you up with buff or debuff.
With the Nox Duo I soloed on my second try. Using a curved great sword with endure on it. The arena is large enough where you can single one out a safe distance away from the other. Use Endure for poise to move in and hit. Since its a great sword and they have low to mid poise they stagger with every hit. Move away as soon as the partner comes in and repeat. That duo fight with misbegotten and Crucible knight is ass. Misbegotten is fine, if using great or colossal weapons he staggers easy. You just have to keep on him, cus if slips away the crack addict will not stop moving. Unless i endured to bait him to hit me. Crucibles knights are a pain in the ass if you don't use parry. Like you i am also illiterate in that shield witchery, so it was pain. Trading even with endure, hurts like hell. Not to mention only 2handing colossal weapons seem to be the most consistent way to stagger them. They are just chores to fight if not cheesed, which is why when i fought the boss crucible knight in deep root depths i shot the bitch to shit with the cannon. (Cannon doesn't work on shield knights) Ended up using mimic tear on misbegottenand crucible, cus i couldn't be assed anymore. The way that misbegotten got jumped by me and my clone, the Crucible knight became the unwilling witness to a hate crime. FUCK THE KINDRED OF ROT duo boss. Goddamn seeking multi missile spamming shrimp bastards. Was forced to bring wolves into that fight to even it out.
They did give Leonine a unique sword in the secret snowfield area in a cave next to the giant wrym boss. Weird they didn’t do that for the other Leonine fights in the game.
guys i wanna remind you that input reading is fine if done CORRECTLY and USED correctly (note: no this shit will almost never work on 2+v1 situations) taking genichiro's 1st fight as an example here, he tries to use his bow to interrupt your heal and punish you, but he gives enough of a window to dodge as long as you time it, making his input reading a fun little challenge addon for the game to see if you're panicking from low health or still focused and calm enough to get out of the way with the proper maneuver now to see a few problems with the input reading of the godskin duo this shit does not work at all because: 1. they cast at the speed of light 2. they both fucking do it, WHY. 😁 with the fact that this punishment is buffed tenfold in tandem with the already stressful walmart copy paste of the smough and ornstein fight that is the duo, anyone would feel shit and automatically hover toward the decision of not healing for less risk, which is not good as a mechanic if you are actively pushing your player away from engaging in what should supposedly be a fun extra quirk to the boss, you are doing something wrong
Great point! Agree, thanks for bringing this up. I don't actually mind Genichiro, Owl, and a couple of other bosses, to interrupt me when I'm healing. All that means is *I've* got to play smarter, I've got to time my heals better, I've got to utilize better positioning. But fighting Margit and him hitting me after his 5 hit combo, when it was in fact *MY* turn to strike, is so god damn aggravating.
@@FoggyFogzmeister i absolutely agree , i really think the aggression here was better built for bloodborne's system (also isn't cool how they can whip out another combo after a long string bruh)
The worst part of Godskin Duo's input read is that it's almost good. In the 1v1 fights, there's either enough room to let you dodge after healing (e.g. Caelid Tower Apostle) or enough cover to heal safely (e.g. Volcano Manor Godskin Noble). In putting both bosses in the same arena with no alterations to their AI, it's that much harder to get the spacing or cover needed to heal safely; the solution might be to only let one of them (probably Apostle) use the ranged attack.
I actually didn't have too much trouble with the Godskin Duo, but I understand why a lot of people do. They are actually, quite literally unfair. Heal? Both of them throw a fireball that drains your health. You killed one? Nah it comes back. You got both of them to half health? Now they both do more damage and one has an attack that lasts a whole minute that you cannot dodge. It is a pretty ridiculous fight, and that's saying something when O&S is my favorite Souls boss.
I keep seeing people repeat the idea of "the game was designed with ashes / summons in mind", and that really misses the reason of why so many are dissapointed by ER's boss design. It is this very reason that bosses just feel so awful to fight. It's not that we don't understand it was designed that way-- it's that the design is awful.
Unfortunately the bosses suck to fight solo. I don’t like summoning in DS3, I find it saps my enjoyment of the fight by a lot because it makes it easy, but summoning feels like a necessity in ER. Why? Why should I be forced to click the help me button every time? I don’t want to. Sure, theoretically it’s possible not to use summons in any capacity, but it’s not fun, or reasonable to expect. The quality of boss design in this game makes every single boss in DS3 feel like a masterpiece. I’d rather fight Crystal Sage again 30 times than fight any Elden Ring boss, with the exception of maybe 3 of them. My complaint with DS3 bosses was never that they were bullshit, it’s that they were hard, and I got better and beat them, but playing ER feels like an insurmountable chore. I’ve also experienced more glitches in ER than any other game that I’ve played. I lost 20 hours of progress, mid boss crashes, shit online multiplayer, and many more. ER is a beautiful game. Most of the enemies are fun to fight and it’s very artistically and visually appealing, but some aspects of the game are so shit that it makes me regret buying it.
@@mikal9904 Exactly. They really dropped the ball on this one, having summoning be a necessity. It's a huge dissapointment considering how well designed their last game was.
@@mikal9904 maybe you're just not as good as you thought you were, you don't need summons to beat ED bosses, i've done all of them without it and never really struggled. I've played a little of DS1 in the past and that's it, i don't have a lot of experience in souls game and yet, i've done it without summons and never thought the bosses were unfair to fight. You don't have to be a superhuman in order to beat this game w/ summons. I feel like ya'll are just frustrated for nothing. And i have to say that i like ED more than DS1, it was that enjoyable of an experience to me.
@@clouddinasty912 I mean that’s fine for you but I’ve got the experience. I’ve NG+ Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring both. I didn’t even know about the mimic tear until the second playthrough, and didn’t level mind. I used summons only for Malekith and the duo on my first play through. I’ve no hit most of the dark souls 3 bosses. I can tell you right now, it’s a step down in quality. Also what? of course you enjoyed Elden Ring more than Dark Souls 1! Dark Souls 1 is fucking trash mechanically lmao, the game is old. What are you on about?
I think the watchdog duo fight in the tomb by the minor Erdtree in Caelid (the one by the giant pot) was a pretty good double boss fight, one usually stayed back and did fire attacks in a relatively passive way while the other came towards you in a *much* less passive way
Being overly ambitious is really the best shortcoming we could have hoped for Elden Ring. The Godskin Duo isn't some pair of comrades who've fought long and tirelessly alongside one another for many years, refining their abilities to better work in tandem with their partner- they're just two very powerful enemies in their own right doing everything in their own power to kill you. I can certainly recognize that the careful forethought and planning which was present in battles like Ornstein and Smough is absent in the multi-boss battles of Elden Ring, but at the same time, I'm not sure it's entirely necessary. The game isn't balanced well, and for good reason: how do you balance a game like this? Where the player can traverse to any region of the map they wish and collect any number of powerful weapons, abilities, summons, etc. all while levelling to a degree which can't be estimated? How do you make the game live up to the acclaim of the Soulsborne difficulty, when you can collect Moonveil from a random cave troll, a mimic tear summon, and anything else the player could ask for? I don't think it's unreasonable to wager that if the developers had stuck to their roots with the passive secondary boss mechanics, these duo battles would be just as forgettable as fighting these repeated enemies by themselves, since the prospect of annihilating the aggressive boss with Rivers of Blood while the passive boss just watches is all too likely. There's no such thing as a perfect anything, and Elden Ring is certainly not a perfect game. But I'll be damned if it's not FromSoftware's masterwork. They've taken elements from all of their games and combined them into this new, unique experience that stands apart from its predecessors. As a souls veteran, not an elitist, my humble indie game dev opinion is that this is the definitive Soulsborne experience. There's still hope for a DLC which could expand on missed opportunity for multi-bosses, but I don't like leaving faults up to the potential promise of future updates. This was a great video, but I think we'll have to agree to disagree on the matter of this being a masterpiece. I understand some folks are eager to throw the title of masterpiece out to a shiny new game, but this is in all sense of the word.
Ds1: passive, aggressive, very aggressive Elden ring: extreme aggression, hyper aggression The one thing I always hated in souls games was the hyper aggressive bosses. those fights that require you to roll 30 times before getting one attack in
@@LumpyBumpyAcidFish Pontiff was an annoying asshole and personally made me take a several day long break on my first play through, but never because I felt like he was unfair, it was because he was simply difficult. Pontiff is decently designed, maybe not great and definitely not perfectly, but he’s just hard. I enjoy coming back to crush him on NG+
You could have just said "fuck elden beast" as the whole video and I'd have wanted to hear more. But yeah FromSoft actually patching in lower aggression on these sorts of bosses shows that your criticism rings true. The rest made a lot of sense, too. I think they could had their cake and eaten it too if they started from, for example Godskin Duo. Make that duo work together when one is passive as well as duo bosses from the Dark Souls series, and then split them apart into different bosses to be placed earlier in the game. Another advantage is that the environment is going to matter a lot more on a duo boss, so it's better to design it as part of the full boss fight instead of building the arena after the fact for two independent enemies slapped together. Odds are a fight against an enemy designed as half of a boss fight that never enters passive mode would still be plenty solid. Edit: In fact, I think the Ornstein fight in Dark Souls 2 shows that last point to be the case.
I think the reason why bosses are so aggressive is because fromsoft expects players to use spirit ashes. At least that is what it feels like. I have 500hrs in this game and I almost always would finish my pkaythroughs solo. Out of curiosity I decided to spawn a decent spirit ash. Nothing like luthel/mimic/tiche etc. And these bosses felt very easy. Not to mention godskin duo and twin gargoyles have NPC summons as well. (As long as you don't kill hunter D or get him killed by fia before you reach them). So normally it can be a 3v2 against these bosses unless you go spirit ashes that spawn even more AI. I do agree with uneven terrain tho, that is very annoying. Idk like i want them to be balanced for solo play but given how much damage a player can deal to these bosses and also giving them access to multiple summons I understand why they want to keep these bosses aggressive.
Good critique and I good points made, dual bosses in Elden Ring are defiantly just 2 solo bosses put together and not designed to be with one another. That being said the Player in Elden Ring has a lot more access to power (ashes, incantations, spells) etc in Elden ring there is way more power scaling in the players favor, so its very relative as to what build / level you encounter some of these bosses with
For sure. Comet azur, redmanes, Astel’s meteors all exist. Just a shame that when bosses start being on their bullshit the game demands that you hop on your bullshit too. Having all those options are nice, and some will definitely be stronger. But it’d be nice if they were all equally viable
I agree with practically every point in this video as it is very well put together and I actually share the same level of contempt for the reuse of seemingly random bosses and jamming them in the same fight. However, the bosses are designed to fight “one player each” which was done for the sole intent of accommodating for the spirit summons and multiplayer. While yes, if you were to play Elden Ring like it were Dark Souls 2 it’d be a shitty experience with the duo bosses, they improve in terms of fun when you have someone there to account for the other overtly aggressive boss. Even still though, the duo bosses can be tedious and random at times, feeling less like a fun challenge and more like a chore. 8/10 video 👍🏾
I find it odd that you didn't touch on the abyss watchers(unless of course you don't consider them a multi boss). I think they're really interesting due to the fact that they take the reverse approach of the gargoyles, with multiple in the first phase and only one in the second. While they aren't really built around each other, the addition of the third watcher helps you divide the other two's attention to help focus on the main watcher.
The Godskin Duo makes me think that Fromsoft combined the worst aspects of Ornstein and Smough and Throne Watcher and Throne Defender into them. Edit: I wonder if someone at From felt nostalgic for the Burnt Ivory King, because bringing what amounts to a troop formation to fight a boss seems to be the name of the game in Elden Ring.
I love Elden Ring so very much but I do wish it had better designed 1v2 boss fights. I hope in the DLC we get redemption with a multi boss fight where both bosses are designed specifically for that boss fight and their movesets compliment each other
Devil may cry did it better than dark souls. Agni and Rudra are the perfect duo boss fight, more balanced than smough and ornstein, but also harder. Hell dmc5 did a triple boss fight with shadow, griffon and nightmare and that fight was incredibly difficult but not in the least bit unfair, even on dmd and hell and hell difficulties. If you compare godskin duo to that triple boss fight then you can immediately see that godskin duo is a complete fucking mess.
I just got to the gargoyles in elden ring today, I gotta say, yes it's a god awful bad fight. I could beat Radahn entirely solo in half the attempts this would take with my knight spirit summon.
What blows me away is how they fixed the camera for the most part in Sekiro, but then completely threw it away for Elden Ring. The Camera has ALWAYS been utter dogshit. However, Elden Ring's bosses are almost freakin' custom designed to bring out it's worst aspects. It's not funny FromSoft, fix that shit, PLEASE. Literally just pull out, and up a LITTLE bit. Then, make it so it won't brush up against walls and/or the ground; it's not great when you have a face full of character model and a metric fuck-ton of particle effects preventing me from seeing a damn thing.
Absolutely agree with the ideas expressed in this video, which go to address a larger point many people have been noticing particularly within challenge running communities : the quality of bossfights in Elden Ring has lowered compared to previous titles. While most of the bosses in ER are still good to great (including some masterpieces of design such as Maliketh, Mohg, Godfrey, Radagon etc) a lot of them were given questionable moves that go from annoying to borderline unfair : Rykard's earthquake slam, Fortissax's static lightning, Elden Beast's Stars and other bullshit. Let's not forget Malenia and her Waterfowl dance. And so on.
In a series of games that always put emphasis on overcoming obstacles via trial and error and being responsible for your own deaths that act as a stepping stone to help you learn, having unavoidable damage or scenarios where you can die due to factors outside your control is confusing. It seems FromSoft took a step back on trying to design mechanically fair bosses in favor of presenting memorable encounters, even if they can be unfun (Morgott, Malenia etc) or cinematic fights whose gameplay design is accessory to the visual spectacle they are meant to convey (Ancestor Spirits and Elden Beast for example). But all of that is secondary to a major problem this new trend of design has brought, indirectly or not : the multi-bosses fights. There is not a single good gank fight in Elden Ring.
This is probably one of the biggest disappointments that were delivered by this game (and fortunately one of the very few). From the older Souls to Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro, the quality of gank bosses had been constantly improving and getting better with each title. Demon Prince and Sister Friede phase 2 are some of the best gank fights in the series, and the Dual apes bossfight of Sekiro being very scriptable and controllable by the player, making each death be the player's fault in all these fights. And then Elden Ring released and we got what we have now.
There are many, many factors coming into play in designing a gank fight, but the three main factors I would consider are the following : readability, synergy and control. Three factors every major gank fight from other titles mastered, and three factors Elden Ring multi-boss fights fail to achieve.
- Readability :
First is visual readability : The player must be able to proceed and comprehend everything that's happening at any given time, in the context of a fair and well balanced fight. Being ABLE to doesn't mean this state should be spoonfed to the player without effort, of course : if the player laser focuses themselves on one boss and neglects to keep the other in check, it's on them if they get tag teamed by surprise. If they get stuck between a wall and have the boss' model fills the screen causing them to get hit, it's also on them for making positioning mistakes leading them into being cornered. But it should be achievable to keep both enemies in check for the entire fight. For instance unlocking and making smart use of the camera to attack Ariandel while keeping Friede in check in the corner of your vision, or positioning yourself against the melee Demon in order to see the ranged Demon during the Prince fight. Is this achievable during the Valiant Gargoyles fight ? Well no, but also no. Unlocking is not something you can do as easily because the Gargoyles have complex patterns of attacks that often need you to position yourself a certain way to not be blendered or a roll timed very carefully. As a result you need to maintain your focus on the Gargoyle you're fighting almost exclusively just to survive... And they are very mobile enemies that you cannot predict the movement of. Double Apes in Sekiro and Ariandel & Friede are slow, and the Demons are easily predictable since the active one always runs straight at the player to attack. Meanwhile the Gargoyles are able to jump across a third of the arena in one single jump or backhop, or running around your character at high speed to deliver some attacks. This makes splitting your attention between one Gargoyle and the other in the background next to impossible. Preemptive tells of attacks, particularly ranged attacks is also a major factor in balance. Friede's ice paths and Demons toxic trails have very clear, non-damaging indicators acting as warning to the player that ranged attacks are coming - but the poison from Gargoyles damages immediately and blends in with the arena making it very hard to estimate the reach of. Same goes for Godskins being able to perform long range attacks through one another's model (black fireballs or Apostle's spaghetti extendo attacks in phase 2 going through pillars for example). Valiant Gargoyles can also transition from active to passive state immediately without any clear indicator for the player... and the newly passive one can still perform proximity attacks (and overlapping timings with the other) or switch back to active state a few moments later.
Second and just as important is the audio readability. The game also accounts for players staying locked-on to an enemy by providing them with audio cues and other sounds to help them know what the other boss is doing in the meantime. Ariandel's charges and Friede going for a heal miracle have distinct sounds. Every single of the three toxic attacks the ranged Demon uses has specific audio cues to let players differentiate which one is coming without looking directly at them. If a Demon is ending his ranged cycle and going back to melee mode, the player will be notified not by one, but two power-up screams that are extremely loud. Meanwhile Godskins black fireball sound is inaudible if they cast it from far away, but it can reach through 2/3rd of the arena and tracks very effectively. The poison spit from Gargoyles has basically no audio either. It's also completely unrealistic to know what one Gargoyle is doing while outside of your camera view, as its grunts and roars all sound the same across most attacks and it can decide to randomly jump at you while attacking, in which case the audio cue arrives at the same time as the attack, which is... a very useful warning, yep.
- Synergy :
You went over this in detail so here also I won't repeat what you pointed out, but there are a few points you didn't mention that I will go over for precisions, however : There were atleast SOME attempts at balancing these fights out made by FromSoft particularly with the patch 1.04 (?) and the tweaking of the "group bosses AI", however most of them failed miserably at their purpose. These AI tweaks mostly affected minor ganks such as Double Crucible knights and Crystalians Duo/Trio, but the fix went way overboard and essentially neutralizes whichever enemy into not attacking at all and standing there passively while the other attacks, seemingly turning into back to back duels instead of actual group fights. As for the behavior changes that were already present before that patch, they only work half the time. For instance the Godskin Noble rolling attack you mention at around 8:52. Whenever the Noble is rolling, the Godskin Apostle does receive a command to stay passive and not attack throughout the duration of the roll, which you can see in action between 9:00 and 9:22. This order is glitchy however and if the Apostle is already attacking while the Noble goes for his roll, this prompt to initiate passive behavior will be overwritten by the attack queue and Apostle will keep acting aggressive as if nothing happened.
- Control
The last key factor to tie it all together. This aspect goes back to what I started adressing before : the player must be the only one at fault if they die. Once the player have learnt everything they need to understand a boss, it becomes fully controllable and can consistently be beaten without taking hits even for extended periods of time.
By positioning yourself a certain way, you can juke Friede into sending an ice path in a certain direction while being free to attack Ariandel. You can keep distance to make sure Friede will never catch up and start using melee attacks, or run away to bait Ariandel's charges and fire breaths. You can identically exploit the tracking of the Demons toxic trails, and kite one Demon away from the other to never have their attacks overlap with each other. You can stay close to the Headless Ape in order to bait his Terror scream attack then run away, which will always cause the brown ape to follow you and perform a 5 hits combo you can massively punish with 4 charged R1s. This is brillant multi-boss design, as it constantly rewards you for mastering the bosses behavior and outplaying them with clever actions.
Now let's see Elden Ring. Trying to bait Godskin Noble away from Apostle to fight him while using pillars as cover from Apostle's black fireballs is possible... up to a certain point in the fight where all pillars are destroyed and the fireballs will go over them to hit you across the arena. Trying to 1v1 the Apostle and his moveset of varying swipes that cover a large area around him is hardly doable before receiving a fireball or surprise thrust attack from the Noble. And then you have Gargoyles, who render any attempt at kiting them around completely obsolete due to their ability to gap close across extreme distances in the blink of an eye. Distance doesn't matter as they can use their poison breath from range or melee quarters equally. I had a Gargoyles fight where I purposedly baited the first Gargoyle to one side of the arena so the second would need more time to catch up, only for the second Gargoyle to gap close in two jumps and hit me in the face within 4 seconds of its health bar appearing. For context, running from one side of the arena to another as a player would take around 20 seconds at full speed.
Thank you, Elden Ring. Very cool gank fights.
Great analysis! I liked one 2 boss fight which was the farum beast duo, or whatever their name was, it wasn't en-par with previous titles for sure but those 2 at least complimented each other
Ayy I first saw one of your runs in the amazing chest ds3 most souls channel. You’re fuckin insane at the game man. Your vouch actually means a lot because of another point I wanted to express but didn’t want the video getting too long. These Elden Ring fights can absolutely be mastered, speedrunners prove as much. It is completely within the realm of possibility to devise consistent strategies for every single boss in the game. The argument is not that any boss is “too difficult” per se, but it is in how Elden Ring achieves that difficulty. I have fought Malenia more than any boss in any souls game. I know every one of her moves, I know how to respond to waterfowl, I know her windows of vulnerability. I have mastered the fight, but every criticism I had from back when I stuck on her still remains. I can dodge all of malenia’s scarlet clones, but is it fun getting her stance reset through no fault of my own? I can respect morgott’s holy dagger after an attack string, but is it fun being on the defensive simply because of a possibility that he *MIGHT* continue attacking? I can completely script godskin duo with sleep pots, but is it fun effectively removing the entire fight from the game because the alternative is so frustrating? Nothing annoys me more than the counter argument of “hey look, this one no-hit runner beat every single enemy in the game while blindfolded with his monitor off and upside down with both arms tied behind his back so your complaint is invalid.” Of course the fights can be mastered, but the challenge that they present can still be criticized. The problem with readability in Elden Ring is especially magnified during gank fights because of the need to now keep more than one enemy on the screen. I did mean to touch on sound cues but entirely forgot once I got to scripting tbh. While making this vid I also really came to further appreciate the Sister Friede and Demons fights more than anything. Everything I love about multi boss fights can be found in those two. They’re truly a masterclass in design. I wasn’t aware of the patch 1.04 changes to the godskin AI. I did notice the apostle would go passive sometimes but I thought this to be similar to how Malenia sometimes starts walking slowly and becomes purely reactionary rather than chasing. And of course, when bosses become reactionary and read your inputs, they react faster than is humanly possible. There is no reason why enemies as large as the valiant gargoyles should be able to cover than much ground so quickly, let alone have a sidestep upon input read. The player is playing dark souls, the bosses are not. Watching Maliketh, Morgott, or Malenia do acrobatics for 15 seconds is certainly cool. But there’s nothing enjoyable about getting my agency in the fight taken away for so long, and then having the boss backstep to the other side of the country immediately upon landing. It’s Devil May Cry, except you’re the mob and the bosses are Dante. Sekiro got it right. As the enemies capabilities increased so did yours. If Malenia doesn’t have to commit to her actions, neither should I. The brutally punishing roll buffer and inability to cancel animations worked in dark souls because the enemies moved at dark souls speeds. When dealing with Elden Ring enemies the limitations are crippling. I appreciate your input, and thanks for watching.
Whew...that's a long one. Dude it's really not that serious. Elden ring was my first souls game and I beat the godskin Duo fight on the first try.
Summon. Parry. Fire Giant Incantations.
@@benlooy547 thx for the tips Ben :)
This was a very good read, great analysis boss
The godskin duo is one of the bosses that I absolutely don't feel shame to cheese it.
bernahl and mimic tear got that achievment for me
I've soloed every boss in the series except for these pieces of shit.
Same, the fight was ok in new game because you could trade hits and it was a fun dps race to keep it 1v1 (even if poorly designed) but from NG+3 I began to cheese it because they 2 shots you and it's not fun anymore because it was not designed to to be
I have a rule that if it’s a repeat boss then I can cheese it with summons or bs magic, after throwing myself at the duo for a good 2 hours, I thought “hmmm, technically I’ve fought these guys before (at the windmill village and volcano manor cathedral respectively) so screw it…” I used sleep pots and summoned, beat the boss first try that way.
ER explicitly lets you fight Godksin Apostle and Godskin Noble separately beforehand so you cam learn their attacks.
They made them especially weak to sleep which allows you to even 1v1 the Duo if you are able to hit one sleep pot/arrow. The respawn delay on both of them Is quite long which makes this even easier.
And on top of that there is always one NPC Summon sign (independent of whether you did a certain questline or not) PLUS you can use your spirit ashes, effectively making it a 3v2 without even using any online features and summoning another player.
The game gives you so many tools, if you willingly ignore all of them then don‘t complain about getting shit on. The boss fight isn‘t badly designed, you just didn‘t learn what it wanted to teach you: to use your tools.
The problem isn't with the gank fights, the problem is that Fromsoft has changed the focus.
With summoning being a key feature in the game and almost every boss allowing for summoning, if you don't summon, you're playing the game wrong. These fights weren't designed as gank fights, they were designed as all out brawls between you, your companions, and the bosses. But that's the problem, it now funnels you into a specific way of playing. This is the problem.
It forces you to be a pokemon trainer.
And when you use properly leveled summons, the game becomes actually easy. I had no trouble against godskin duo with my summon. Beat them first try and that surprised me, I was expecting a hard fight. This kind of multi-boss fight is either frustrating and hard, or lazy and easy.
@@epruno3583 i had no problem with godskin duo without any summons. It doesn’t mean they aren’t poorly designed at all.
@@Mega2chan I really need to unveil the mystery of the one dude that never have any problems with anything. Would very much like if you developped.
So that's why they were sucking to me ooooooh. I really avoided and wanna avoid using summons but damn, some fights really felt unbalanced and made me want to change the way I played, but it was because it kinda is forcing you to play that way, yikes.
There were only two duo boss fights that I felt they were quite balanced.
1 - Perfumer Tricia + Leonine Misbigotten. Because the perfumer works as a support chapter giving lots of buffs to the Leonine. And the Leonine has a lot of attacks that you have time then change your focus on the perfumer to kill it easily.
2 - Beastman of Farum Azula duo. First of all because you can sneak and backstab one of them. One is a knife thrower and the other is a Fighter. The Knife thrower has lower HP and stance and works as a support character as well.
Personally, I hated the Perfumer + Misbegotten gank because those damned room pillars kept messing with the lock-on.
The beastman duo is in a cave in Caelid right?
@@makara204 Yes.
@@LiloDemon That GPS tracking boomerang is annoying tho. 😂
oh yeah those are good too. the flower and omenkiller was decent too
It's kinda annoying and frustrating when every boss is supposedly designed with spirit summons in mind but if you use any spirit that won't die in 2 Hits the boss is immensely trivialized, and if you don't use one it's incredibly annoying
Idk, it really depends on the summon in my opinion. I like using Ancient Dragon Knight Kristoff sometimes cus he doesn't do tons of damage but he's a good sponge for bosses with additional enemies or for multi-bosses. Mimic Tear though definitely trivializes the rest of the game after you get it
I honestly didnt knpw how to summon (i never bumped into ranni to get my bell) untill i explore killed margit, explored caelid fully and killed godrick. Only till i got to the weird castle with ranni and the 3 towers was I exposed to summoning and googled that shit
@@neounix6923 yeah, I beat Malenia in 17 attempts using Mimic Tear and Eleonoras Poleblade
(Thinking about it, I was really bad lmao)
Now I am in NG+7 suffering against her alone
After 1 month, I no hit her solo
Not everyboss requires or encourages you to use ashes. In my opinion people are just being egotistical by not wanting to use Ash Summons then go on the internet and bitch about a DUO fight being a pain in the ass for them. BRO you're literally given so many tactics and mechanics to trivialize these DUO fights, stop bitching and use them.
@@592Johno Facts. Imagine refusing to use game mechanics and then complaining 😂
I personally didn't find Godskin Duo all that hard, but then again I do use spirit ashes and I summoned Bernahl lmao; which unfortunately feels like the way you're supposed to handle the fight. It's stuff like this why I think Sekiro is the best fromsoftware game. In Elden Ring it feels like the best way to deal with bosses is to circumvent their movesets entirely, either by distracting them with spirit ashes, spamming bloodhound step, or nuking them with comet azur. In Sekiro, there's no bullshit. You MUST engage with every move, and doing so is far more satisfying anyway because every deflect, mikiri, and head bop contributes to your eventual victory. It just feels way more fun and involving. If you try to play solo in Elden Ring, it feels like the boss is the only one having fun lmao.
Sekiro is personally the one fromsoft game I would call a masterpiece. How far removed it is from all the other games definitely plays into that. It was a breath of fresh air that still maintained the heart of what I love about souls games
yeah all the duo fight are basically trivialized with ashes or summon. I mean you can do all of them solo just fine, its just as this video pointed out not fun because its not a dance that now involve 3 ppl but 2 crackhead rushing you down.
@@managarn8038 that's cause the bosses are ment to be fought with ashes. The bosses have higher aggression and smaller punish windows to tell players to use the ashes. That's why boss rooms are one of the few areas ashes can even be used besides large hordes of enemy's.
The bosses were made based around the spirit ashes not a 1v1 with a player
@@gageunruh3574 exactly. If they had made the bosses like in the previous titles , ashes would have been useless or trivialized too much the fights. Also the Godskins are weak to sleep.
@@DRKLRD-kv4cm ashes would destroy all old dark souls bosses, that's why all the new bosses are hyper aggressive and they input read (many if not all bosses input read) and most bosses despite being hyper aggressive will also wait you out to see what you are gonna do before they do anything unless they are in melee range. In old souls games you could bait out margits jump attacks that are easy hits...yet in elden ring he wont do that cause he will just walk to you since you arnt doing anything and only do that attack once every so often.
Yes soloing everybody is possible especially with a good build but the fact is the bosses were made with ashes in mind which is why the Godskin are like how they are it's not ment to be a 2v1 its ment to be a 2v2 or 2vmore so your summons can distract 1 of them and let you fight the other one.
Alot of people cant seems to understand that's the design choice of the bosses, they arnt ment to be like the old games
You've done a perfect job of vocalizing exactly why Elden Ring duo fights just feel off. The "One Boss, Two Models" concept clicked very quickly, while Elden Ring does not share the practice. After 1.05 things are better, but not by a whole lot, if you ask me. The fights went from 1v2s to a 1v1 where another guy (or guys) is kinda hanging out in the background waiting for his turn to play the game. From definitely dropped the ball on the bosses in this game.
did they change the ai in 1.05? if not what is it that they changed?
Think Fromsoft bailed on using this design philosophy for Elden Ring because the size of the game made it take too long to balance. So instead they add a bunch of OP combat options and just make enemies do insane damage and call it balanced.
I really enjoyed Elden Ring my first playthru but I hardly play it now when I played games like Sekiro and Dark Souls 3 multiple times back to back.
Okay, first off: it's a large, open world game with 176 bosses. Not every one is gonna be a winner, and re-used assets is the expectation of this type of game. Also, there are plenty of bosses across the soulsborne series that don't stack up to the highest levels of game design. Second off: I find that the bosses are perfectly manageable in most every case, so long as you understand the game's mechanics and the limits of each boss. Third off: I assume that you're talking from a summonless run pov, since otherwise multiboss fights are not a big deal, since you have a summon to distract the second enemy. Fourth, and this is a big one: No they didn't "drop the ball." Just because you don't understand how to handle some bosses doesn't make them bad. That's like me complaining about Ornstain and Smaugh because they don't leave openings. Hell, the commonly agreed worst pair in Elden Ring(Godskin Duo) still gives you vastly more openings than those two.
People just want to complain about everything new, it seems.
Who cares about how many bosses there are if about 19 of them are Ulcerated Tree Spirits and Erdtree Avatars? I can understand reusing them a few times, but not eight and eleven times apiece. They aren’t even close to interesting enough to make up for how much they’re copied over. Godfrey’s Shade does not need to exist. It’s a filler boss that spoils the penultimate boss for no good reason. The evergaol with Godrick has no purpose beyond refighting Godrick for some reason. I don’t care very much about all of the different caves and catacombs, they’re all completely optional and I don’t even bother with any of them most of the time because they’re not worth any of the hassle.
That also being said, I can appreciate the spirit ash mentality on paper, but in practice it’s just such an annoyance. If I’m just trying to get through the game, I don’t want to take an hour or two to get through most of Ranni’s questline just to make getting glovewort easier. Good Spirit Ashes are slim pickings as well. Only Mimic, Tiche, and Dungeater have really been worth my time in my experience. With that in mind, I don’t think it’s all that unfair to say that the bosses, and even some of the areas, in late game are completely overtuned either. Elphael is a mess that I have no desire to ever return to now that you can’t skip the entire thing. Malenia is a fair fight that’s brought down dramatically by two mechanics, her waterfowl dance and her unpredictable poise usage. If one move is responsible for your boss being significantly harder, your boss isn’t hard, you’ve just designed a bad move. The unpredictable poise is just blatant cheating on Malenia’s part as well. I digress.
Being a Godskin Duo apologist is completely inane to me. When people call it the worst boss in the game, they are 100% correct. It’s two separate enemies plunked down into an arena without much thought put into it. Comparing them to Ornstein and Smough (not Smaug, that’s lord of the rings) is also a laughable thing to do. When people call O&S the best boss in DS1, they have good reason. Both enemies have very creative and interesting visual designs, and have been very clearly designed around one another in the fight because they don’t exist anywhere else in the dark souls 1 world. The Godskin Duo absolutely do not deserve any praise or protection. They’re one of the worst bosses in the game, for good reason. Even if they aren’t that difficult, they’re still incredibly lazy and boring. Please don’t ever do that again, there’s better bosses to spend your time on.
Suggesting that the boss design in Elden Ring hasn’t gone downhill isn’t an unreasonable statement to make, it’s ultimately a subjective topic. However, suggesting that they haven’t been overtuned is a silly thing to do. Most of the endgame bosses have absolutely monumental health pools that make fighting them without abusing bleed and/or frost and a spirit significantly more difficult without good reason. If that’s what Fromsoft wants it’s what they want, but it’s not something that they’ve done before, and if you ask me it’s the wrong direction to be going. I’ve always been a subscriber to the Quality > Quantity mantra, and if you ask me if you have to repeat two different bosses 19 times (or >10% of the game’s bosses in this scenario, which is absurd), you’re doing something wrong and should be taking another look at how many bosses you really want in your game. I hope that this isn’t the style of game From go with again. It was frustrating in Dark Souls 2, and it’s frustrating here.
@@mutilator97 Can you not automatically discredit anyone's critique as just "people complaining about new things"? It reads less like a debate and more like you just want to tell people why you think you're correct.
Beautiful video. I did always feel highly frustrated in Elden Ring gank fights in a way where it was like "i never want to do this again" which I never felt with older games. I couldn't exactly put my finger on why that was, but this video beautifully explains it.
these videos go kinda hard bro keep at it
Gotchu, thanks for watching
this dude a gabriel
A full on critique would be awesome. J9 already critiqued the broken ass state of PvP in this game, so maybe PvE could be the focus? idk, you do what you want
I think one of the biggest problems with the Elden ring community is the incessant bootlicking and double standards this community applies to this game. Fromsoft's fanbase has quickly turned into one of the most annoying fanbases out there.
I see a lot of people coping and acting like this isnt a flaw yet when it comes to any other game they would be using these things such as poor duo bosses and massively recycled boss fights as flaws, dont even get me started on the fact Elden Ring barely innovates on the souls formula gameplay wise which Fromsoft has recycled for about a decade straight with their mlst "unique" title being Sekiro.
Even Miayazaki him fucking self said that Elden Ring isnt his ideal game and that theres room for improvement.
The problem is that people quit playing the games and discussing them. Switching to listening to video essays about the games. People came to their own opinions back then.
You also didn’t have people watching extreme challenge runs every week. All this piled up so that From fans have become the most carbon copy group half the time.
Check the steam achievements for souls games, most players haven’t even beaten them but will call the game perfect.
Probably because duo bosses in Elden Ring just consist of two seperate enemies that weren't designed to be used exclusively in a gank fight. It's just two normal enemies... Not surprised it doesn't work very well. O and S were designed with the gank mind, that's why it's so perfect.
Yessir. That was the thesis of the vid
I think they nailed the normal multi boss fight with O&S and they took it a step further with Twin Princes and made probably the best non traditional double boss in the series
Edit: coming back after 3 playthroughs of Elden Ring and damn this might be a hot take but most of the bosses even the single ones were kinda disappointing
True, that's a very nice fight
The only elden ring duo boss that I felt worked and should've be implemented more was perfumer Tricia and the misbegotten warrior. Worked on a lore level and it was smart to have a aggressive boss bothering you while having to manage Tricia buffing him and throwing fire. That was a fun fight.
Sure, it "ruined" duos, but please let's forget how Bloodborne and Sekiro dropped the ball in this aspect too. Unless, for some reason, people think these are good bosses: Duo Apes (a reuse), Emissaries, Rom and the Thousand Spiders, some Commander fights, the duos and trios in Chalice Dungeons, and more. The less we talk about DS3's Gravetender and Halflight, and how they've been mawed by the community, the better.
Make no mistake, Godskin and Gargoyle Duo sucks, but they aren't the worst in the series, we have tools (which yeah, isn't an excuse for these craps), and patch 1.04 literally tweaked ganks AI so they take turns, like Illusory Wall's video stated.
EDIT: Yeah, there's some garbage duos and annoying enemies, don't get me wrong, and From thankfully patches them, but I feel attributing all of that to one game, when the previous ones also dropped hard in this regard, is a bit unfair.
I wholeheartedly agree. Minus the gank bosses though my main gripe with Elden Ring arent the bosses or even enemy designs, but exactly what you mentioned within the video - its overly ambitious and therefore loses a lot of Fromsofts magic because they tried to do too much at once without the proper time. Most people could play through Limgrave and give Elden Ring easily a 10/10, I mean I sure did my first playthrough. As you begin to near the end of the game though, you realize that nothing.. grows and the game feels almost stale. What do I mean by this? Let me use dark souls 2 as an example not in regards to enemy design but in terms of world building because I found it similar to ER, only I actually feel dark souls 2 did it better. When you first enter ds2 much like when you first enter Limgrave, the atmosphere is rich and the world is very much dead but it feels... alive. You are vaguely told of the war with the giants later in the game but when you first enter the world you can only imagine. This contrats directly with say Mt. Gelmir, where not only are the enemies copy pasted and the things to do in the zone actively hinder immersion as I will elaborate upon later but we know from Gideon exactly what happens before we go there and so there is little to no mystery due to Elden Rings very straightforward way of giving exposition.
Now sure some zones such as the underground areas are very atmospheric and arent extremely elaborated upon giving us mystery, but they arent really connected well to the rest of the world which goes on to my second point - Elden Ring is so large but also so small because since its open world, our imaginations are limited as the entire world is relatively accessible. Consider Vendrick from ds2, some could argue that Godfrey could be the King Vendrick of Elden Ring in spirit, much like how Gideon is the Gehrman, but something is very much lacking. Throughout the entirety of ds2, Vendrick is a presence you are constantly reminded of and when you finally meet him through this linear adventure, its awe inspiring due to that build up. Godfrey sure is epic, but he isnt something that is grown. He's mentioned a few times, but nothing about him festers. When I first met him I was like "oh, Godfrey appears out of no where. Cool?"
The analogy between Vendrick and Godfrey may be a bit weak but my main point is this - Elden Ring doesnt evolve. Gameplay wise Every zone of Elden Ring feels like its the same as the last with a new coat of paint without much in terms of making the world feel alive. Every zone has the same ruins, catacombs and caves and if you're lucky a legacy dungeon. Minus a few lackluster ones such as Carian Manor, Redmane Castle/Castle sol etc. most of the classic fromsoft levels are great. The open world though fundamentally doesnt do more than it did within the first zone and hinders creativity of the player which takes away the magic of fromsofts worldbuilding. Although some zones like Caelid do somewhat accomplish this as we can imagine what it used to look like and it does do visual storytelling, the buildup is stunted by the open world. By the time I reach Radhan, i've either done all of these copy paste catacombs, caves etc. which ruin immersion and decimate build up OR I did none at all and simply ran through the area which has a similar effect. If each aspect of the open world was intricately designed and kept the immersion which it sometimes does in Elden Ring only sparsely then great, but the game wouldve taken decades to create.
One last issue ill mention regarding the open world is that Level design is just as important in terms of Fromsoft as enemy design. Since the open world removes the level design, enemies are just splattered throughout the lands between at seemingly random which makes no sense from a story standpoint and feels at times like clutter. Sure some soldiers walking about makes sense, but where are the villages, the farms, the living spaces? The open world lacks well... world. Its a lovely painting and looks gorgeous but everything feels so fake from my perspective. I know this is a lot to read but if anyone did i'd love to hear thoughts, maybe the whole "open world formula degrades worldbuilding" is simply a personal gripe of mine. In previous games though you could actively imagine the world which really assisted with atmosphere and immersion whilst within Elden Ring, especially after your first playthrough, you cant because you've actually seen all the world has to offer which is both too much at once and not enough at the same time.
Great comment! I never thought about it that way. It really seems that the world only consists of castles and catacombs and tunnels, but why do they need so many catacombs? I also personally hoped Elden Ring to be more like Ocarina of Time. A few villages with NPCs, many legacy dungeons and an open world that links all together. What we got is a world full of filler content (same looking catacombs with boring bosses) and a lot of castles.
On the "village/farms etc." and lack of life I think this is a limitation comming from the way FromSoft make their games. Almost everything in your screen is hostile or can be triggered by attacking/being too close. So they can't put some life in the world I a way like we see in other open worlds (ie : having civillians going around, small settelments etc.)
A good exemple is Leyndell, it's supposed to be the capital of all the Lands Between... yet there's no one here, no civilian, only a few soldiers. "What the fuck is Morgott protecting ? There's nothing in this city." was what I thought after I completed that area.
@@robertspeedwagon982 Right I agree, but it works in other games due to the linear design of the levels. Bloodborne for example again has enemies that clearly live in yharnam and talk to you when they attack. When I say life, I wouldve just liked a town with hostile villagers that arent strong per se but the area would have atmosphere. Maybe a wheat field with hostile scythe wielding scarecrows yk?
@@zacoliver5547 EXACTLY. Even if the open world wherent filled with that much if it had enough atmosphere and connected a bunch of really cool legacy dungeons together i would've been happy. Less is certainly more regarding the open world in that aspect.
@@dylanschmeichel2008 yeah, they did it very well in Yharnam but failed miserably in ER 😔
Fair critique and worthwhile observations. I think a lot of the difficulty with Elden Ring’s duo boss fights can be helped with spirit summons, but I see how that’s not the best design
You could argue that the bosses behaive like they do PRECISELY because of the spirit summon mechanic. I.E., they aren't actually meant to be done solo.
@@sophiaperennis2360 pretty much. My favorite summons include multiple allies, and it’s great for distracting the bosses. Normally this allows me to land several heavy attacks before having to dodge or block, but it would also work to distract the second boss while I can focus on the first
@@sophiaperennis2360 exactly. Otherwise Spirit ashes would be useless. You aren't forced to use them, but you Can't complain that a boss fight Is bullshit or too hard when you can make It "Fair" by using a game mechanics that was intended for it
@@NasuPrime I don’t understand your question or point, but I don’t think it’s fair to complain about a bossfight when you are given the tools you need to win. I’m new to Fromsoft games, but I’m having a great time. Even with summons and co-op, these bosses are not easy. Spirit summons allow us to play by the same rules as these aggressive duo bosses, so why not take advantage of it?
@@TheWickedSir yeah🤔
Found this channel in recommended, watched everything, and I can't wait for more. Good shit here bro, keep at it.
Thanks for the support man, hope you enjoy what’s to come. Got a few video ideas still cooking
The way double boss fights work makes me think they made them for spirit summons only. The issue is the behavior of double bosses doesn't alter if you don't use the summon. I'm not even trying to go for the clout. If I see a double boss I'm summoning a spirit. I'm not wasting any time getting destroyed by a double team. I have already beat these bosses individually, and I definitely could beat them as a duo with me fighting alone after many tries. But to be honest I don't care about the clout that much, and summoning spirits can be fun as well. I'll do solo fights on bosses that appear alone.
This is something I grew increasingly frustrated with each installment, especiallu in Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring. The Dark Souls 1 mantra was tough but fair, but by the time we reach Elden Ring the kantra has become "OMG GUYS ISNT THIS SO HARD?????"
Look at DS3 Iudex Gundyr compared to the DS1 Asylum Demon. Asylum Demon is quite easy, but he can still punish you hard if you dont have it down - which none of us did back in 2012. He teaches you that not all enemies can readonably be blocked, he teaches you that theres more than one way to tackle a boss, and he comes after one of the BEST tutorials in gaming history that actually teaches you to use your tools without hplding your hand. Youre MADE to learn how to move and attack and block because there are enemies and traps that will stop you if you cant do it.
What do we get with Iudex Gundyr? A "tutorial" that doesnt test you at any point. Nothing to teach the player the mechanics organically. A wide open area that is quite short with frankly some really silly enemy spam (made not so bad since you can stunlock them with rolls, its not a big deal). Then you get to this boss who starts off AMAZING. Nothing to add about the first phase. Then you get to the second phase and its this really hard to read, bubbling monstrosity that tends to get way too close to the camera. Hes relentless and will barely let you heal. Its chaotic and messy. But you can still parry him, which what youre looking at would tell you its not going to work, and thats if you even understood parrying properly from the tutorial, which is unlikely. Is he really that hard? No. But hes the first boss and the player isnt given any time to actually learn anything, even if its just the mechanical differences coming off the heels of 1 and 2.
Am I saying Iudex is a bad boss? Hell no, I think Champion Gundyr being top tied S rank across the whole franchise is propf enough that Iudex is at minimum decent. But hes **the first boss.** If he was the second, third, fourth boss he would make so much more sense as the player wouldve dealt with unothodox enemies - especially since hed be foreshadowed properly by the worm hollows before Vordt. It reallt feels like hes there to say "Welcome to Dark Souls 3 BITCH, hope you played all the others! ISNT THIS SO HARD???"
I gave up my first playthrough of ER at the Dragontree Sentinel, not because he was challenging, but because I would do evwrything near perfect but fuck up ONCE and get 100-0d by its hard-to-read lightning. Weve reached this point where bosses arent there to present you with a challenge to learn from and apply throughout, but rather a case by case check of "have you learned how to deal with every single attack this boss/enemy/area can throw out? Oh, but what about the one that oneshots you? 🙂"
Theyre all still amazing games but theyve strayed far from difficulty being part of the lore, narrative, and meta and bmrather become all-encompassing to the point I dread a lot of bosses and breath a sigh of relief on defeating then rather than feeling victorious and accomplished.
Demon's Souls and DS1 were about using your head to think of how to win, everything since DS3 has been "trial and error until you know when to press roll".
@@daboos6353Ds2 was the perfect middle ground. You didn’t have any pure gimmick fights like the bed of chaos or dragon god. But you also had a side mechanic for almost every fight except maybe alonne, velstadt and old dragonslayer. Who were all honerable and thus wanted a fair duel.
Even when ds2 would reuse assets, they at least changed the arena or context to keep it fresh.
@@elijahfyffe5176 I don't really like DS2 honestly but I definitely prefer the boss fights to Elden Ring.
The thing about things like "cheesing" these fights is that unless you're actually using glitches (out of bounds stuff, etc.) what you're really doing is using tactics and gameplay mechanics to win. The game isnt at fault if people playing Elden Ring are still trying to play Dark Souls. You can use sleep pots/arrows/ashes to keep one boss locked down. You can use a summon to keep one of their aggro off of you half the time. If you refuse to use any of these tactics to win a fight while complaining about a fight not being balanced, the problem isnt that the fight isnt balanced, its that youre trying to play Dark Souls while playing Elden Ring and getting mad that the game is not designed to be Dark Souls.
Agreed with everything you said except at the End when you said elden ring wasn’t a masterpiece
Underrated video
Ty ty, appreciate you watching!
The Crucible Knight due fight was amazing, one of them is always defensive as you fight the other, and the gatekeeper boss to Radhan, the red wolf with Crucible knight, the Knight spawned each time just as im about to kill the wolf and in the fight he doesn't attack with the wolf, in the Godskin due fight, the fat one is always attacking whilst the skinny one is casting fire balls, the only bosses that attacked together were the Crystal tall bosses, and uhhh FUCK ELDEN BEAST
skill issue
i think those boss fights were design around the spirit ashes and summon mechanics.
Fromsoftware used to make good rpg games, that ended with dark souls, now they just make rhythm games.
"Elden Ring has dozens and dozens of bosses!"
Me, fighting the same cat statue for the third time: "oh, cool."
And the have the nerve to call them "WatchDOGS"
yes, in this game are btw 6 "Watch dogs"
@@eorlundgraumahne37 technically FUCKING UNLIMITED because in a late game dungeon they become normal enemies that respawn….
@@pseudzy and they still have boss health
"The game has over 160 bosses, they can afford to reuse some smh"
My brother in Christ this game has like 20 bosses, a bunch of glorified common enemies (or mini-bosses at best), and some random combinations of the latter
I see a duo fight, I summon my mimic. No shame in it.
I see a boss, I summon a mimic
@@unionjakass6589if nobody got my back I know mimic got my back
I see a mimic.
Aaaaarrgggrrrsg h jjkhjkolln
The problem is, THE MIMIC IS LIKE GIVING A HYDROGEN BOMB TO A FUCKING GAME JOURNALIST
@@maninhu9837 so use a different ash
8:30 killing them both at the same time is the funniest shit in the game.
It sits there for a good 20seconds before they respawn actual clown boss fight
Makes you really wonder why they even have a summoning ability.
@@Kasunex Free hits whilst they summon
Dickriders will literally look you in the face and say that is good boss design
@@jjnix95 It's nothing to hit because they are both getting summoned
I killed the boss, and got credit but a godskin apostle got summoned right after.
It was acting as a boss still even though I killed it. 😂
I hate how if you criticize one point about the game the fanbase dog piles you and say your bad
Isn’t that literally every fanbase for every piece of media tho?
@@hitthegoatid say the fanbase of all souls games
@@hitthegoat It got extra cringe with Elden Ring though, never seen anything like it before. With DS2 a select few people defended it but the vast majority of the community instantly realized that DS2 is not of the same quality as its predecessors. I believe that is because back then the community liked what's actually good about the games but since then it's been infested by knuckle dragging idiots that don't care how badly something is designed, as long as it's hard it's good and you can never criticize it cause that obviously just means you're bad.
@@FunkiMonki69because ER is played a lot of people, therefore there are a lot more idiots, and also usually the first Fromsoft game you play is your most liked so ER being so mainstream. Its probably gonna be their first experience of a Fromsoft game and defend it heavily
@@FunkiMonki69 mad cuz bad lmfao
What I hate about the bosses is that every single one of them has a AoE attack, range attack and reads your input to roll catch. Also, they have infinite stamina and FP
Why are you playing the game bro, lol, you just described essentially every boss of every souls game haha.
@@SebboTheFro The bosses are shit and the PVP is worst but it is the best souls game overall IMO.
@@zaxmaxlax So what, roughly 50% of the content is shit according to you but its still the best souls game? I guess you just dont like the souls-genre hehe.
@@SebboTheFro I don't like the boss fights in general, the thing that hooked me into the series is the level design.
All their nonsense wouldn't be nearly as broken and annoying if they had actual limits to what they could do, but they just do what they want.
The thing that annoys me the most about the foreskin duo is that if you manage to kill both of them before they can summon, they still get summoned back anyway even though neither of them are alive to be able to summon. You think the game would reward players for thinking outside the box. But no. The game breaks the established rules because fromsoft has a hard on for pissing their players off.
Yup, I actually killed them both and realized that amounted to half the total boss health bar. Then they respawned, so I had to kill 4 godskins. A really wtf moment.
Yup this is 100% facts
I get that they wanted to prevent mages from just comet azuring the boss. But even without that, the combat in the game is weak. Doesn't compare with the masterpiece called Sekiro
@Juan Spotted the guy who never beat the game. Good one.
@Juan "Bruh like I beat all bosses first try, like i have no maidens."
4:23 bro really said "Get down mister president!"
my biggest gripe with the twin gargoyles in elden ring was the fact that the poison spit not only fills poison gauge but it also deal flat damage when you're in it. Don't have it hurt my health bar before the ailment bar is all the way full
Tbh that was like the only duo boss fight that I enjoyed
the only thing that needs fixing in that fight is how visible the poison is.
lol i completely agree. what's the point in even having a poison bar if it damages your health without even having to fill up. it makes sense for it do that with the scarlet rot, seeing as that's basically super aids, but shitty weak poison? cmon.
This. It would be totally managable if it didn't also do massive damage over time. Also, y'all are crazy; that was easily the *worst* multi-boss fight in the game. I honestly didn't even struggle much on the godskin duo, but those damn gargoyles, man.
Don't forget that it staggers you too, I just spent 20 minutes getting bullshit from those guys when it should've been just a clean kill instead.
I think FromSoft completely intended for players to use spirits to split enemy aggression, and simply didn't anticipate how difficult they would be to fight alone
They literally designed a game mechanic to work off these boss fights and players get mad when they decide to not use them and have a hard time.
I get wanting to make it harder on yourself but don't complain when you are not playing the game as intended and get upset about it not working 100% perfectly.
@@Dabeast1911Que nah fr though, i picked up on the fact many of these bosses were meant to be fought with ashes very quickly, and even though i didnt want to have to, i did it anyway
maybe in another playthrough or so ill challenge myself to fight alone, but the game clearly wants you to use the ashes, thats why there are *so* _many_ of them
@@Dabeast1911Que Honestly multi-enemy boss fights are really fun to solo though, if they're properly balanced. If you use spirit ashes (or player/NPC summons) they become too easy and not very fun.
@@VVayVVard that's the point, they are balanced properly, to be taken on with a spirit summon.
@@Dabeast1911Que That's what I'm saying: they're not. They're way too easy and boring with a spirit summon, but overly luck-dependent and patience-demanding without.
Smegma, forever my favorite boss of any game. Such an iconic character with a deep meaning to its name
"one boss with two hit boxes" or whatever you said, nailed it. I've never thought of it like that, but it's 100% accurate.
The most annoying duo boss to me (aside from crucible knights) is this one random one in a perfumers grotto
Its a flower and an omen killer
Its not annoying to me because its hard, its annoying because the omen killer breathes a flame attack that coats the ground in front of it and you would think “oh cool the flower is weak to fire! Ill trick it into killing the flower”
But no, it just ignores the flame damage, and its such a missed opportunity
I had no idea this boss even existed and I just wanna Thankyou for spreading awareness of this absolutely egregious game design sin
I miss when bosses in these games were actually things you outsmarted and had to get creative with, not just something where you press the roll button at the right time
@@xolotltolox7626 Isn't that an exact quote from matthew matosis
@@Lastninjaxoxoxoxox not exact, but quite close
Matt makes good points, what can I say
Fights like the mimic tear where you go in naked to trick it into spawning with no armor or weapons are funner than the thousand "hey this guy has several attacks that are nothing but spam combos you have to run away from to survive." @@xolotltolox7626
I hate when people automatically thinks that when you have a critique for the game you’re instantly frame as “not good” or just “get better” when in reality you can be good at the game but still have criticism, being good doesn’t give the game a criticism invulnerability, after almost 600 hours I can say the game has flaws and it needs some balance because some bosses are either to easy or unnecessarily hard.
True I have lost countless hours of progress due to glitches and I complain about it, the game has bad traits, and yet is still my favorite game of all time (rn at least)
Get good
@@SkorgeBloodfist haha so funny
@@SkorgeBloodfist get good at adding to conversations
600hrs? How do you mfs have so much time to play?
I think the reused bosses like the Godskins and the Misbegottens are one of the biggest problems in the game. I would rather have less bosses than more of the same bosses
Quality over quantity, 100%. Which hurts even more because that's how every single one of the soulsbourne/sekiro games was before Elden Ring. Hopefully they return to that with whatever they do next
Godskin doesn't seem like it's reused too much, just the perfect amount
you fight the first one, and it's weak, then you fight the much stronger one at a very divine location. After that struggle, you don't see one for a long time, then bam, now you're suddenly hit with TWO of the boss that was hard enough to fight at the divine tower
@mattc9598 Then a random snail summons both of them back to back 💀
You've probably heard of this already, but FromSoft has shown that they are listening to the community feedback and that is a wonderful thing, I don't remember which update it was, but a while back they somewhat remedied the issue of multi bosses by making one of the bosses more passive. Of course this doesn't fix the problem outright since these fights weren't designed with multiple bosses in mind in the first place, but it's reassuring to think that FromSoft is still the passionate developer we have come to know them to be.
Too passive. Killed lots of multi bosses on release (3 crystalians was the hardest, and I also didnt knew you can crush their poise to deal more dmg...) and it was hell of a satisfaction. I still think they were too disbalanced at release but man now? You come in and one of the dudes is eating popcorn in the corner waiting for its turn. Too easy and boring.
@@bartekkajewski8385 Oh yeah, I thought the crystalians were bugged for being so passive haha
@@bartekkajewski8385 You can use mods to make them aggressive again. Or you could just do a challenge run to return the balance towards higher difficulty.
“Passionate developer” who left the original 3 games’ PC multiplayer offline for an entire year from a hack that someone gave the solution to from the very beginning. 🙄
Good, I'm playing it for first time (first souls game btw) and I'm trying to go without cheesing, which I thought would be difficult against the duo of death but I guess I'll be fine
One of my favorite bosses in DarkSouls 3 is the Abyss Watchers. It is so unique due to how the watchers behave with one another:
1:The main Abyss Watcher rushes in, but will back away and be less aggressive once the second one comes in.
2: The secondary abyss watcher will rush you, and will be very aggressive.
3: The third abyss watcher is corrupted, and will attack the other two watchers. Once this happens the other two WILL focus on him, because it is their priority.
It is such a memorable experience.
yo WHAT, that never happened to me... and ive fought them so many times! I must have always died whenever a second showed up or DPS'd them down enough to never have 3 at one time
@@zegtronic damn u must have been killed or killed them rly fukin quickly then, do u just ignore vigor completely perhaps?
@@slayer4592 omg im rereading the original comment and i thought he was talking about DS1 Abyss 4 kings... im so dumb
@@zegtronic xd that makes more sense 4 kings fukin suck ass xd
@@zegtronic LMAOOO
I wish more people knew it was okay to critique that which you love. I consider it being a better fan than unbounded lauding.
I feel like they were trying to encourage the player to use new options, but with this being their first huge game, it's not entirely balanced. I feel guilty about Mimic Tear+10 outside of Malenia; it feels like I'm cheating, or using an exploit.
I still think this is the best FromSoft game I've played behind Sekiro, but it's behind Sekiro: a tighter, more focused game in some ways, at least in the boss design.
You mean I *DON'T* hate the game that I've spent well over 200 hours of my limited time on this earth playing?? Please tell me, how do I communicate this to all the people telling me "if you don't like it don't play it." They clearly know my thought process better than me
@@NasuPrime I wish I knew because I hear this all... the... god... damn... time but more from Ubisoft and Bethesda fans than anyone else.
@@65firered to be fair those are fans in total denial of companies whose talent has left and have stripped down core mechanics to make their jobs easier and make more money.
@@geordiejones5618 I don't just mean fans I also mean the insane fanboys who blindly defend ANYTHING.
@@NasuPrime easy dont see them as normal humans with normal opinions, they're literally IRL NPCS that have no unique thoughts in their heads and cannot formulate a rational thought to save their lives
Arenas make a huge difference. Ornstein and smough’s pillars are incredibly important in making the fight work, and if they weren’t there (or could be destroyed) like basically every duo fight in elden ring it would just be annoying. Even simpler duo boss arenas have something you can do to separate the enemies, like the slopes in the bell gargoyle arena
Crucible knight duo and Godskin duo both have pillars in the arena. This is all just people whining because they’re bad at the game and want it to be easier.
@@itsawoodchuck4330 The pillars in the godskin arena are small and destructible, unlike the pillars in ornstein and smoughs arena, which after breaking still block them off. It makes you seem like an insecure pompous ass when you assume that anyone criticizing the game design is bad. I want the game to be hard, I’m actually a bit masochistic, but not all forms of difficulty are fun and engaging, some are stupid and pointless.
@@hhhcontent3930 but the pillars in the godskin duo arena also still block them off after being broken. the main strat for the rolling phase of the noble is to stand on the pillar and heal/buff/do weapon arts. meanwhile in o&s ornstein gets stuck on the pillars in his sliding attack then insta-zooms into a free hit behind you.
@orionfell they stop the rolling attack but that's it. Projectiles pass right over. The apostle especially likes to pass over them with jump and stretch attacks. I don't mean to dismiss the obvious jank in ornstein and sought, though, that shit does happen way too often
@@hhhcontent3930they are breakable, but are still useable to seperate the 2 bosses from each other even after being broken (although not with the same effectiveness of the ornstien and smough fight). Even though it’s still a pretty mid fight I find it to be the most tolerable of the duo fights in the game
Good critique. Yeah, I love Elden Ring, but From really fucked up with those duo fights. They weren’t so much challenging as they were cheap. You either struggle against the Godskin Duo, or trivialize it with Mimic Tear (Doppelgänger). I hope From will listen to the feedback and won’t make the same mistakes in an inevitable DLC.
Exactly my man. There wasn’t a single duo fight that was conceived *as a duo fight* . Just two previously fought enemies shoved together in a room. Sure there are a metric fuck-ton of bosses but how many are really enjoyable. Sometimes less really is more
@@NasuPrime honestly disagree. The only multi-enemy fight i found unjust were the putrid crystallian trio
Every boss was cheap, I don't get why they made it this way instead of buffing the boss like it was co-op or something.
@@DRKLRD-kv4cm What he says is true. They are solo ennemies copy pasted into a room.
@@thegk-verse4216 still disagree, especially with the later patches
Not to mention the amount of damage every single hit is. In the O&S fight the ONLY time you had to fear getting one-shot at full health was Smough's slam attack. In Elden Ring, EVERY attack can nearly one-shot :D Or, they attack with such succession that it's basically a one shot regardless.
lvl up vigor bro
@@Sucellusification some late game areas do too much damage, I remember having 2500-3000 hp when fighting Malenia (my health was beyond the compass) and I think she killed me in 3 hits? (And I was wearing armor)
@@lycanthoss three normal hits or waterfoul dance? Was it NG or NG+?
@@lycanthoss anyway, I was joking of course
@@Sucellusification ng, it wasn't from waterfowl.
the "but everything changed... when the second gargoyle attacked" with the faint opening to avatar the last airbender in the background was GOLD!
ATLA is a top 10 tv show. Any chance to reference it, imma take 👌
@@NasuPrime "Your taste...extraordinary...the mark of a true Lord."
Made even better by the fact the 2nd gargoyle shows up to mainly throw fire at you XD
Bro, same thought exactly...
That was extremely beautiful to say the least.
12:39
The boss design is shifting from being tough but fair, to tough and if you don’t summon, tougher
And if you do summon, so easy there’s no point in playing the game
Not being able to hit a Gargoyle with a critical hit because of uneven terrain. That hurt on a physucal level
Bruh wtf is that rarity there
@@MILDMONSTER1234 creation of my deranged mind :^)
Very accurate opinion. Most of the multi boss fights in Elden ring make me feel like fighting two Ornstein in an inappropriate arena at the same time, it's really unfair and chaotic.I hope FS can improve it in the DLC or in the next game.
Hella curious what they do for DLC
Nah fam for me godskin felt like fighting two super ornstiens
@@NasuPrime Probably Miquella stuff, its the most mysterious and with more potential Character in the game since we only know its in a shell waiting to awake some day
the only ER duo fight thats actually fun for me is crucible duo. i figured out u can chain parry them and get infinite s
Malenia duo incoming?
"The Crucible Knight's moveset wasn't designed around having a Misbegotten Warrior in the same room."
This statement alone summarizes the entire Multi-Boss fight experience in Elden Ring. Beautiful video.
So? What’s wrong with that? I feel like it’s more realistic/enjoyable that way I don’t think that monsters that are trying to kill you will take turns hitting you lmao. That fight in specific was very annoying I feel like it’s more rewarding that way when you beat them.
@@x0rynka502that shit is not fun, and I don’t think
Most people are playing this game for a realistic experience
@@x0rynka502 fatherless comment
@@x0rynka502 Instantly regenerating stamina and being able to infinitely jogs while wearing heavy armor isn't realistic either.
@@excalibro8365 Being able to use so many spells and incantation while having extremely limited stamina is already so awkward if you ask me.
Hey man, great points. The devs are actually actively trying to fix this issue, illusionary wall made a video on it. They're making some changes duo bosses so that the boss taking the back seat is more docile.
Wish they didn’t. I like dealing with the cluster of attacks and still making it work.. makes it more realistic tbh
@@eneveasi well a realistic fight would be one guy in the front and then one guy supporting from the back. you don’t want two guys fighting one guy because then the duo might hit each other with attacks but if there’s a guy in back he can take his time to line up a shot. That’s just what I think.
@@justinvincent8998 nah realistically youd want to guys swinging and going ham. Having one be passive just give the 1 guy more leeway
@@justinvincent8998 Yea they could be synced a little better
@@eneveasi It would be realistic if the bosses could hit eachother, allowing you to exploit the fact they both attack you at once.
I'd love to see a full review of Elden Ring from you. While I thoroughly enjoyed it I got some problems with it too, and it would be nice to get your perspective on the game in a format that's (hopefully) not 12 hours long.
Aye aye captain. Working on another vid atm, and don’t see myself ever making anything over 30 mins long. I love long form content but idk if the 2 hour plus style is me. Most of those can be played in the background without much being lost, but I like incorporating a lot of visual gags and such into videos
Dude ik. Why is every video essay these days 4 hours long? Just SPIT IT OUT
Joseph Anderson has a really good review (it is a little on the longer side, like 2hrs if I remember right) that perfectly outlines a lot of what people have been criticizing the game for.
0:07 Did I hear "smegma"????
I must heard that wrong I think he meant smore
It seems that's also why everyone uses magic, moonvail, or bleed besides them being OP. For many bosses in the game you have to take the cheap way out and have fast attacks with high dmg so you can have time to run away before you get ass blasted by 2 things attacking at the same time up close to you. If you use any great or collosal weapon in a duo fight ( like I tried to do) your animation takes so long that by the time you get a single hit on one of them the other one is right beside the one you're attacking already hitting you. You're essentially trading for dmg on one enemy without the health to do so.
True. I've never cheesed more bosses in a game.
It’s like they actually wanted us to spam the weapon art while we summon and at that point it isn’t even fun anymore im not even doing anything but sitting there spamming shit
Meanwhile, I just found a fun combo of ashes of war which pair well for me. I use Shield Crash on my shield to knock down bosses(weirdly high poise damage, and guaranteed knockdown on smaller enemies), then quickly switch to two-handing my broadsword so I can charge up a Carian Grandeur. By the time the enemy is standing again, I've gotten at least to stage 2 of the charge, so I do pretty good damage(1000 for stage 2, 1600 for stage 3).
For me personally, the only bosses I've cheesed are the ones I was underleveled for at the time. These would be the first Tree Sentinel, the Erdtree Avatar near the Great Jar, and the gargoyle outside the beast sanctum. In order, the cheese methods were: hit and run, repeat until death; abuse cliff position over the enemy; and abuse the doors of the sanctum.
Oh, and by the way, no. I have a current run going using the watchdog staff, and it's perfectly manageable. Hell, the weapon art on the thing really makes things interesting.
@@mutilator97 You say you aren't cheesing but you literally just admitted you used a cheese method to constantly stagger bosses -_-. You basically found an alternate Flame of The Redmanes method. I'm not saying your build isn't interesting but you still cheesed it either way.
@@FastestRunnerInNoMansLand I can only use my shield crash/Grandeur combo twice before I run out of FP, so no. It's not cheesing. Even by your own definition. Also, Cheesing is using unintended methods to kill an enemy safely. Using ANY combo of weapons/ashes of war is not cheesing, by definition. Synergy is not cheese.
"not by bashing your head in the wall until you did" as a strength build this is exactly what i do
respect
Even in DS2 most of the gank bosses were fair. Ruin Sentinels? You can defeat one before the other 2 aggro, and then make one of them loose almost all health. Skeleton Lords? Yes, there are many, but small damage and columns for getting covered
And IMO the best gank boss in the series is the Demon Prince. It's just so good and brutal
Ds2 also borrowed a lot of DeS boss philosophy. Meaning that the arena played a part in the fight. Sentinels had to climb up to you one at a time. Twin Riders had you knock down the pillar.
The twin Tiger fight was specifically designed in one of the 3 co-op zones.
Twin Pursuers was the only time it was kind of unfair, but it was designed as a special optional challenge for NG+.
Ds2 is my favorite souls game because it really took advantage of the formula. You had some “honorable” bosses where the arena was neutral. And you had gimmick fights. But the gimmicks didn’t override the fight itself. They towed the line between a dragon god/bed of chaos situation. And real fights.
ER’s repeat fights don’t excite me in the way DS2’s did because there was no spin in ER. It’s just “Oh boy, another magma wyrm”. The arenas are all disinfected of any fun level geometry (except for making it hard for the player to traverse and hit crits).
Also, ER creating invis walls for the enemies so they’ll only fall if you push them is really lame. Seeing a crucible knight fly forward only to abruptly stop at the ledge is such a buzzkill.
These bosses feel like they weren't playtested
They're terrible
Maybe you are. Ever thought of that
@@DarkFayWhy does that matter. There are lots of amazing bosses in elden ring but compared to how many are in the game it is very frustrating, and not in a satisfying to beat kind of way. I love this game and there are some great bosses, but there’s no reason to assume that just because someone’s bad at the game, that their criticisms are invalid. Besides, only idiots think that the difficult = good. Same with the opposite
I think this is because FromSoft wants to force you to use spirit summons and/or player summons. That's probably why the multi-boss design seems to disregard the soloing player.
I agree but why did they want to put such an emphasis on summons? They just trivialise the fights and make it so that you never have to actually learn the movesets and engage with the fight, you just distract them with the summons and melt their health bar. Do people find that fun?
@@Nihil975 Not sure but for the demi human chiefs they literally placed a summon before the fog door. TBH it felt more fun with a summon for me.
@@Nihil975 THIS.
It's really a shame, cause I feel like it's entirely possible to build a summoning system that acts as another build option rather than something that must be built around. Even something as simple as a time limit on summons would help mitigate its power.
@@Nihil975 The casuals did. Trust me. And also the apologists.
I honestly think that the godskin duo was a major missed opportunity on From’s part. The duo was there in the first place to take back the rune of death from maliketh. Was thinking up a concept where when you kill both of them just once then they appear back weakened, then like the godskin noble would kill his own partner in a hurry to transform himself into a giant boss. That would have been so cool
Ornstein and Smough 2: Smough's revenge. Again.
That would just be foreskin and dough again, although I would much rather fight that than what we got.
@@LowIntSpecimen I'd rather fight the twin dragonriders again
Even just something like Throne Watcher and Defender, where you need to kill both at around the same time or they revive each other. It increasingly feels like FromSoft learned the wrong lessons from DS2.
I ABSOLUTELY AGREE!
I'm honestly disappointed by the Godskin Duo. I mean, we see them so often throughout the game. But you know what would've been cool? Combo Moves. Apostle jumps on the Noble, then suddenly gets launched by the poomph towards you. Apostle creates a giant wall of black flame for half the arena, and then suddenly the Noble comes rolling out of it towards you.
But not only are there no combo moves, but they are quite literally just separate enemies smacked together. I noticed that after playing Sekiro that there's a similar style with a duo boss near the end of the game. It's not fun, it's just artificial difficulty.
As far as I can remember, I think that the only boss fights where Duos/Trios were accounted for were the Crystallians... and even then, they don't work super well together. It's just a constant onslaught of attacks with no consideration for one another.
Feel free to ignore, just an idea for a Duo Fight.
Demi-Human Queen + Troll. Obtusely shaped triangle room with various pillars. The Demi-Human Queen can jump from pillar to pillar, attacking with magic while the Troll tries to slam you. However, the Troll's Attacks can destroy these pillars, causing her to fall and allowing you to deal quite a bit of damage.
It would be an early game Duo Fight that would probably be quite fun.
Ornstein & Smough and its consequences have been a disaster to the souls race.
"With the immense scale of Elden Ring, it's absolutely necessary" aaand there's the root of the problem in my opinion. Elden Ring is just too big. Much like DS2, they went for quantity over quality and it shows.
This tbh
@@SteambieGrimbley9110 My first playthrough took me 110 hours and I didn't even find everything. That's pretty freaking huge.
What was an awesome discovery for me for the ornstein and smough fight (after trying forever to get the super ornstein kill for his ring) was that you can actually use smough to block ornstein from attacking you; his spear won’t be able to reach the player so your focus shifts to dodging smough’s heavily telegraphed attacks while making sure he’s between you and ornstein. I absolutely love this boss battle, it’s practically a game of chess in its design
godskin duo is so bad, not 1 good duo boss in this game, even the "good" ones where mid at best, putting 2 health bars doesn't translate to a good duo, ffs the devs made Ornstein and Smough in 2011 and in 2022 we get this mess, this isnt even hard, either trivial with sleep pots or bs if you do it solo. fatty and lanky dont complement each other (which is realistic but makes for an annoying fight). ive beat them several times solo playing sword and board and after you learn them the fight isnt even satisfying its just boring
When I kill a boss in Elden ring I don't feel good at all but when I play any of the other souls games and beat a boss I have a feeling of success. I just have to say in my opinion Elden ring is the worst souls game so far
I think so too
9:42
THIS 👏 RIGHT👏 HERE 👏
I am so sick of hearing easy cheese tactics being used to excuse bad boss design.
The ability to poison micolash from the balcony did not make his boss fight any better
The ability to throw fire bombs at the Bed of Chaos weak points did make it any less GARBAGE
And using items sleep arrows or ash summons does not make any of these fights good either.
What’s wrong with sleep and summons?
@Leonardo Nothing is wrong with them, inherently. What's wrong is using the fact those items can be abused as an excuse for poor boss design.
Not to mention they patched out the sleeping spam you can use on the noble. So that don't work anymore.
@@leonardo9259 It's the fact that Fromsoftware was dumb enough to make a boss so broken that it incentivises the NEED for those summons. Most of the bosses in Elden ring are garbage gimmicks like Fallingstar Beast which literally is literally a filter for melee builds and becomes stupid easy when you find out you can just kill him from across the room. Example of incredibly bad boss design.
@@mattroush7364 Oh so Yhorm is bad bc its gimmicky? is aldrich bad bc its a filter for megic builds? is Vordt bad bc you can spam him with magic? Nameless king? Iron Golem? literally half the bosses of ds1?
ER doesnt NEED summons except for the duo, which i agree it sucks. Literally every other boss is completely managable with melee builds, just bc you cant stunlock the hell out of a boss with you STR build doesnt mean the boss it bad
I think Crystallians work now after their AI was patched, before all 3 were super aggressive, but after the patch the one that’s mainly attacking you will be aggressive while the other two will be more passive
Spear one will be the most aggressive and be on top of you while the Staff will do heavily telegraphed range attacks and the Chakram one is usually really passive if you aren’t close to it.
I think this particular gank fight works but the others straight up doesn’t.
Godskin Duo being easily the worst offender.
Honestly- the Godskin Duo was actually my favourite fight in the entire game. It felt fun, and to me, it didn't really feel unfair or unfun at all. Granted, everyone has different perceptions of fun- but I really enjoyed their fight. Although it's probably ER being my first soulslike game that makes me think this.
@@cherrysoda4462 You don't know actual quality made by the same dudes, maybe it's better than what you had before but it's a step down from before, for bad and concerning reasons
@@thegk-verse4216 I've been meaning to go through all the Dark Souls games sometime soon, just to make sure I have the entire experience. Unfortunately Bloodborne isn't on PC, so I'll need to skip it, but the others I believe are. I've heard a lot of comparisons to Ornstein and Smough- so I'll have to see it for myself.
That being said- I don't think seeing the point will make Godskin any less fun for me, since I very much enjoyed the fight on my first playthrough. Maybe playing the other games'll give me sight on why people don't like it, but I don't *think* it'll shift my opinion.
@@thegk-verse4216 having played all Souls games in order (except Demon's Souls) I'd hazard a guess that your first playthrough used a quick-swinging melee weapon, and Cherry Soda 's did not. Either you were dex or sword and shield. Am I right?
Because Godskin Duo is to a dex build what Morgott is to a strength build, and Renalla is to a magic build. Godskin duo is neither hard, bullshit, nor badly balanced. Well, it is badly balanced specifically for dex builds. But for any other build it's just an ordinary, reasonable boss. If you have range, it's much easier. And if you have a collosal weapon, they're easy to stagger to death. And like every ER boss, they have one bullshit move (Noble's roll).
That's how I'd summarize Elden Ring bosses. Every player build has a hard counter boss which is just completely unfair against them, and the way to win is to summon mimic tear (which trivializes the fight) or switch to a hybrid build.
It's why I still prefer Dark Souls 2 overall. Because the variety of Dark Souls 2 is "every build is equally viable" while the variety in Elden Ring is "the only build that's completely viable is a hybrid of some kind". Different design philosophy-not necessarily worse or better-but I personally prefer the variety of Dark Souls 2.
It also helps that in DS2, a bad boss is still a very easy boss, so it's over quickly and forgotten even quicker, while an Elden Ring bad boss is unreasonably difficult and has a ridiculous easy-mode switch (summon mimic) which is hard to resist, and whose existence makes the difficulty less fun to push through.
Still, Elden Ring had a very magical first playthrough that I won't forget. It constantly fulfilled a boyish fantasy of slaying a big lizard and a want for adventure that I didn't know I had.
The only time I really questioned from softwares decision about the godskin duo is when EVERY TIME you HEALED they’d BOTH throw fire at you, literally wasted 4 flasks for 1 heal yet I still hadn’t gotten half my hp back, same goes for other bosses aggression and rng unpredictable moves some bosses can do from time which annoys me. (red wolf radagon) Plus those moves that they don’t stop spamming until they hit, for example, the draconic tree sentinels lighting, I literally dodged it 6 times and still got hit and died to it, I’m not angry over the attack patterns because those can be predicted and timed correctly, I’m just disappointed that some boss designs can has such bs moves that throw you off even when you’re perfectly dodging or parrying and they cancel or do some unthinkable moves. Like when Morgott/Margit cancels their combo and you question whether you should punish or not because you don’t know if they will pull this undodgeable move if they decide not to jump away (the holy knife attack)
Elden ring tried to make the game harder in a cheap and an unfun way
Nah I had this same opinion a year ago but now affter replaying the game it really isn't that bad. I beat almost all of the bosses without summons except for the Godsking Duo because I refuse to belive someone looked at that boss and actualy thaugt it was a good idea.
@@li81520 coming from dark souls my first playthrough was just a basic knight no summons nothing so you can expect how it went for me
Elden Ring is my first Souls game, and I also put in a ton of hours. Its a great game, but after going back and playing Dark Souls (still pretty early into it) I can see a lot of what people in the Souls community are griping about. Your video is spot on in describing the problems with the Duo bosses not being synergistic at all, and the quality definitely suffers. It seems like in ER they decided to replace all of that strategy with the ability for the player to summon spirit ashes to distract, or in some cases solo (Mimic Tear w/ strong build, Tiche, etc) bosses. It just seems like a lazy way to solve a problem, as the player has to choose between making fights borderline trivial by summoning or borderline impossible by going it alone. Its not a "git gud" thing, its bad design thing IMHO. And that's not even touching the glitch abusing that people are doing to make PvP untenable. I really hope that the DLC fixes a lot of these issues, otherwise I think that the replay value of ER will suffer greatly. Also, this video has made me more terrified and excited of my eventual Smough/Ornstein encounter in DS1. Great video
Isn't a souls game tho 😐
@@certainlysignificant7721 Yeah yeah whatever. A fromsoft game, happy now? Doesn't matter anyway, it'll have the same discussion
I've played every souls game multiple times (except 2), but with Elden Ring I have zero desire to do NG+ or create a new character, just the thought of having to suffer through this or that boss again discourages me, while for the rest of the games getting to fight most bosses again was a joy.
@@certainlysignificant7721 Honestly no one cares at this point. The horse you’re beating has been dead since Bloodborne, even if you’re objectively right.
You'll probably steamroll Ornstein & Smough after playing through Elden Ring. Word of the caution though - from what I remember, I don't think there's a good area to farm souls if you're under-leveled before that fight. It's been a long time since I played DS1, but I kind of remember being stuck on that fight at an extremely low level and not being able to leave the area.
Very few types of people i would look and listen about their reviews and analysis:
1. Newcomers
2. Veterans that understand their beloved games down to a T
3. That one guy in the reddit/RUclips comment section that perfectly sums everything up (A.K.A Jordien)
You're the 2. Loved the video :)
Preciate you
What annoys me most is the attitude of the community. I always have to preface by saying I liked Manus and other hard bosses I’ve killed, but even then, I get the “gir gud” type responses… about bosses I’ve already soloed.
I’m also mad about Malenia, because without her obligatory force-you-to-be-overly-cautious-on-the-off-chance-they-cast-it-and-you’re-within-the-same-zip-code attack, she would be one of my favorite bosses in the entire series
I have a strong suspicion that many of these "git gud" types are trollish kids who use summon themselves but like to pose as souls pros.
Make a game every idiot can now play (with summons, ashes and Torrent), and its community will be full of idiots.
git gud bro
My time online has tuaght me that gaming communities tend to have two types of people in their majorities:
People who go out of their way to help new players, give random gifts when they are spawned into your world, act honorably when dueling and are just generally there to have fun and make the community a great place to be.
And the other side are the folks who say "git gud" to anyone who complains/criticizes the game or wants help. The ones who have no respect for anyone else and only exist to troll and make the community toxic and gate-keep.
There is no inbetween really. And if there is, then it's likely the silent people who just stick to themselves.
Git gud bro
Git gud bro
Jk
I'm so late but Elden Ring is doing the same dumb thing Monster Hunter has recently. They make the bosses fly or retreat while spamming AoE projectiles when 90% of the weapons are melee weapons
Tell me you know nothing about the fight without telling me
This video is phenomenal, it explains the difference in boss design from older titles to Elden Ring so well. I have a devil's advocate position I'm curious about your take on, if you see it. I think Elden Ring bosses are successfully designed to make more interactive, aggressive fights and to complement the player's access to options like spirit summoning, spellcasting and overpowered ashes of war.
I'll start with the second point. Bosses in Elden Ring definitely have... different design than previous FromSoft titles, and not just the gank bosses. One-shot moves, moves that can't be dodge rolled or blocked, and hyperspeed are all much more common now. However, I also feel like the power level of the player character has gone up a lot. We're faster, our stamina regenerates more quickly, we have more buffs, we have more status effects, spells are more varied and powerful, incantations are a LOT more varied and powerful, and there are tons of absolutely ludicrous weapons and ashes of war. This isn't Dark Souls where I feel less powerful than even the rats and dogs. You can still easily die to a pack of dogs in Elden Ring, but I can also aerially carpet bomb the entire pack with dragon breath from outside their aggro range. Imagine the infamous entrance to Undead Settlement in DS3, but you have Hama's Cannon.
We also have brand new tools in our tool belt: guard counters, jump dodges, jump attacks, stance-break(not entirely new I know) and spirit summons. It's those last two things that I think From chose to incorporate into their design practices the most. Stance-break obviously encourages aggressive play. It actually can encourage very risky play, since you get the most reward from charge attacks, jump attacks and guard counters. Bosses don't have very long windows for punishment after their attacks in this game and are generally more aggressive. They make you work for your stance-breaks, getting in every little hit you can and experimenting with things like getting a jump attack or charge attack instead of something safer. Spirit summons role in the fights is also pretty obvious. We have tons of setpiece battles scattered around the map that you can take on with your loyal companion(s), and gank fights are a blast when you and your summon are locking down different opponents and you're trying kill your mark before your summon loses their battle of attrition. Then suddenly it's a gank fight for the boss and it feels awesome. They also help with the increased aggression and input-reading heal punishes, giving you opportunities to buff and heal that were there naturally in past boss fights. I mostly played without summons my first playthough, but I invited Tiche to setpiece battles and gank fights(except the gargoyles) and I felt like I was hitting a difficulty level sweet spot that was perfect for me(except the gargoyles). Crucially, it's still possible to play the game without these tools. I mean, people have done it even without dodge rolls. But is it still fun to be a purist, or is it just harder?
I think gank bosses suffered the worst, for the reasons you've listed in your video. I'm pretty sure that's why they ended up nerfing them into the ground so it's more like successive back-to-back duels than a gank. The gargoyles are the saddest example by far, getting the fight wrong almost as badly as DS2 did, maybe even worse. They are my least favorite enemy and it's not even close. But other bosses have changed as well. Traditionally, the trial and error process we love in boss fights has been about learning the boss's moveset and then reacting appropriately. You learn the timing on a delayed attack and then dodge it correctly, you learn there's an unreactable followup after a particular move and you dodge preemptively, etc. It's a game where knowledge is the deciding factor in overcoming an obstacle and the moment-to-moment decisions are mainly just correctly identifying visual and auditory tells. Elden Ring mixes it up though; there are boss moves that you don't just add to your knowledge library as things to react to, but which you keep in mind more actively because the boss _might_ use them. Margit sometimes throwing a retreat dagger after a combo is a prime example, and so are Waterfowl Dance and Godskin heal-punish fireballs. These tend to be the things I see people complain about the most in the new boss design, after gank bosses. Personally though, I was overjoyed when I realized that's what was happening. I now had to think about not just what the "correct" answer is to any particular stimulus, but what the "best" answer could be. A couple examples: for Godskin fights, I can't just run away and heal, I have to decide whether it's necessary to bait out a fireball first. I also learned more opportunities for healing without running away. For Malenia, the learning process included experimenting with which of my attacks were safe in different scenarios; if I use my tools correctly I can be really aggressive, but if I over-commit then I could get punished. I think this alone makes fights more strategic and interactive. When paired with the stance-break system you have a really fun element of risk and reward in your fights that used to go away as you became familiar with the fight. Margit _might_ juke me with a dagger after this combo, but it won't kill me if he does and I know he's _so_ close to a stance-break. Those kind of moments make for very exciting fights, even long after you know his moveset like the back of your hand.
I remember people complaining about more bosses having roll-catching attacks in DS3. They're even more prevalent in Elden Ring now, but I haven't seen very many complaints. They add another step to your learning, sure. You can't just dodge the first part of the attack on reaction, you have to dodge a certain direction or position yourself ahead of time so you have an escape route. But if Dark Souls was a game where the only skill you need to win is dodging with the correct timing, it would be a very boring game. It's the strategic parts that keep the game interesting. Questions of giving up damage for stamina management or better positioning add nuance to the combat. Once people got used to it, I think people realized those roll-catching attacks were a good addition. I see the new changes much the same way. I don't think they gave bosses more powerful movesets just to balance around spirit summons and other "easy mode" options, I think they did it to create more interesting challenges for the purists too. It's different from the direction of the previous games, but I don't think it's worse. The easy mode is easier, the hard mode is harder, and both ways of playing are more fun and full of spectacle than ever before. I can get behind that.
I know that challenge runners probably benefit the least from this. No-hit players don't benefit at all from risk/reward decisions and spectacle, they need sound, repeatable strategies. I understand the frustration, and I agree that Elden Stars and Waterfowl really aren't justifiable. However, for me the appeal of challenge runs has always been the learning process, putting together an otherwise uncommon strategy that will get me through an obstacle even under strict limitations. I don't expect challenge runs to inherently be the most fun way to play the game, I expect them to force me to learn again, which is fun on its own. The fights themselves might be drastically slower than normal, but that's okay. I don't think Elden Ring deviates from that formula at all: you absolutely can play the game with strict limitations, but you'll probably have to play differently than normal. I think that's the point, but I know there are people who disagree.
I would absolutely watch a full-length critique of Elden Ring from you, no matter how long it is. Especially if it's long. Cheers!
I actually think ER has one of the least number of actual one shot moves. While Bloodborne has the most. And there are almost none attacks that are actually undodgeable, contrary to what some say. Elden Stars kinda sucks.
@@arcanefire7511 I could see that, there are only a couple moves that actually one shot that I can think of. However how many combos are you guaranteed to get hit by if you get a dodge buffer? If you're not super over leveled I think a lot of people experienced getting, for all intents and purposes, one shot a lot. In general boss fights are over more quickly either way, but they're especially over for you really fast. They tried to make up for it with short runs and stakes of Marika, but I still think it's a frustrating design in a game with loading screens between deaths, especially since in most past boss fights I felt like I had a chance to learn the fight a bit even on my very first runs. Now when I die it's usually because I got wombo comboed, not because I ran out of heals.
@@Wintercat1 To be fair I think a difficult enough boss should be able to kill you the moment you act careless, but you also need to be at fault for that to work, which isn't guaranteed in Elden Ring. (I also feel like it's been a problem since Bloodborne, but not to this extent
God Damm this is such a banger
Only 100 views?? Definetly deserves more, the duo gargoyles gave me a headache and probably the worst boss in the game
Channel steadily growing, just gotta keep grinding. Yeah honestly that’s the first fight that really killed my stiffy after hours of peak gaming
now its at 14,202 4 days later ,
good stuff
I wasted more time fighting the gargoyles than malenia. It's totaly unfair if you have a mid upgraded weapon and low HP.
@@sh-theel 129k after 3 weeks
Game is peak but the sheer amount of unbalanced parts in it is what makes it annoying sometimes,good video btw
So which game Ds 1-2-3, Bloodborne, Elden Ring???? Lol.
@@spacewizardpip1111 im referring to elden ring here lol
@@sypher3492 Lol
Sounds like as bad as Sekiro double apes. Seems they take Sekiro instead of DS3 as ER multi boss fight
I feel like the Godskin Duo was originally designed to be a "real" duo boss fight where they compliment each other. Kind of like the one with the snail. You first fight them individually and then in the last phase, you have to use what you learned about them when fighting individually in a fight against both at once. Would explain this really strange health bar imo. But when the game grew more and more in scope, they needed bosses and therefore redesigned them both to be usable encounters in a 1v1 fight. But didn't really change much about the duo fight except that you fight them both directly (because you can fight them individually in the world).
I managed to force my way through those fights with summons and unreasonably tanky builds without much issue but the problem stands, you can't just throw enemies that were DESIGNED to be fought alone together and say that's JuSt A dUo bOsS like that makes a lick of sense, not even touching on the overall stupid balaning in the game like Malenia breaking most of the game's rules and get guaranteed punishes ON THE PLAYER or shit like Astael waves of darkness which is guaranteed damage since you quite literally cannot dodge it, the game is still good and has many more good points than bad but holy fuck there's so much dumb stuff that i cannot belive they actually let it into the game.
Precisely. Nothing in the game is unbeatable. You can force your way through them. Malenia is not impossible. Waterfowl is not *literally* undodgable, even at point bank range. But what is required of the player is far from reasonable. I find it hard to believe that the devs planned for the player to dodge waterfowl by unlocking their camera, circling around malenia, rolling twice, turning back around, rolling once more, and then strafing the final flurry. All of these things have to be done perfectly in succession if she does this move close to you. It can be done, I know how to do it, but it’s still an awful move
@@NasuPrime yeah the camera work is another thing i was hugely let down in elden ring. Like you say, any boss fight that requires you do unlock camera to do a complex maneuver is just bad design. Theres also camera lock on bigger enemy being a huge mess. Like i spent a good amount of time fighting dragon trying to land blows to their head to eventually just say fuck it and keep hacking at their legs because the camerawork is just so bad.
@@managarn8038 Eh I don’t think that necessarily needing the player to unlock is bad in itself, but it when it’s to the degree of what you have to do with waterfowl or when your attacks literally miss point blank like with Mohg or Fortissax, that kinda sucks… a lot
it's a gag how often you find videos basically proving that Elden ring isn't the best souls game, and for numerous reasons, yet "game journalists" all gave it the highest rating ever. never trust game reviews, especially reviews of AAA games
I have no beef with all the 10/10 reviews, just take issue with how early they came out. Basically all of them threw out their reviews upon reaching Raya Lucaria. The first two areas really aren’t an accurate representation of the entire game considering the late game is where the cracks really start to show. I understand that journalists HAVE TO BE on top of the newest games as soon as possible, it’s just the nature of the profession. But I really wish that wasn’t the case. Even though reviews aren’t something I give much credence to, I’d rather people not throw out the word “masterpiece” after just 30 hours with a 100+ hour game.
I adore Elden Ring but it definitely has some issues, just like any other souls game. It's new and still requires work. Personally my favorite is Bloodborne, then ER, then DS3. I wasn't a major fan of DS1 & DS2, perhaps because they're older and clunkier than they used to be when they were newer. Regardless, ER is still very high on my list of best games and easily takes #2 or #3 in terms of Souls games.
I mean "best" is very subjective. And I think its fine to call Elden Ring one of the best games made, in the sense that it does so many things so much better than most, if not any, games. But there are things that it doesn't do well... Rating games through points, especially when it is a % based system, is overall very flawed.
@@emptyptr9401 Bro straight up peeked into my journal of ideas. Number ratings is actually a topic for a future video
@@NasuPrime Well then I HAVE to subscribe no I guess xd
First fromsoft game for me. Sure some of the boss’s are complete bullshit but you’re always able to learn and adapt. Elden ring isn’t for the weak.
I would have preferred a third of the bosses that are in the game currently than have so many awful duo bosses. From my calculations, I count 20 duo bosses, going off the definition that they must have two health bars. Including bosses with a shared health bar, like Godskin Duo and that one Erdtree Avatar, we have 22 bosses. If we're including bosses with other enemies added into the fight, even when it's their whole point like Tibia Mariner and Spirit-Calling Snail, we have about 37 "duo" bosses in the game. This isn't even getting into all the re-used bosses with no worthwhile changes, but I digress.
Crucible Knights are an actual joke, and should only ever be fought 1v1 because of their superarmour, defence and fast pace. The only enjoyment you could get out of it is by flexing your parrying skill, something I as a Strength user am too illiterate to comprehend.
Leonine was cool at first and I wouldn't mind fighting him two more times for the legendary armaments if 1) they made it like Draconic Tree Sentinel where they're similar but have new moves up their sleeves thanks to their unique swords, and 2) if they didn't put them next to random enemies that don't compliment them in any form whatsoever.
Mini-bosses becoming enemies? That's the Soulsborne way. Regular enemies becoming mini-bosses? Oh no. Abductor Virgins? Cool on their own, together they hurtin'. Fell Twins? The void looks nice, but it's not a win. Kindred Pests? Put those foolish ambitions to rest. Nox Priests? No, please.
Thank God most of the twin bosses like the Burial Watchdog's and Crystalarian's have little health so you can just trade damage instead of having to put up with them, but that still doesn't mean they're good. In fact, it just makes them even more boring.
Valiant Gargoyles was the closest they got to something good and when I first fought them I was excited, but as shown by the overworld encounters they clearly weren't intended to be fought at the same time. The big arena is nice but the dreadful poison attack throws everything we've learnt from Friede and Demon Princes out the window.
The Apostle and Noble fights are some of my favourite non-Remembrance bosses in the game because of how freaky and nimble they are and how they encourage both aggression and zoning. Too bad Godskin Duo is one of the worst fights in the series. When they appeared for the first time together my heart sank and after one attempt I knew I wouldn't be able to stand it. The only time in my entire 120-hour playthrough where I used spirit summons since I had forsaken them after testing them on Margit. Horrible boss.
In summation: This ain't it chief.
I actually have beaten Nox monk and Swordtress first time by using Mad Pumpkin bro ashes..tbh I think using Spirit Ashes on duo bosses help in some cases (offcourse if you are the kind of guy that don't want to use spirit ashes in bosses then alright, I know people say that they trivialise boss fights but tbh they helped me alot against pretty powerful opponets) and I'm still on my first run
@@hollowed1110 play however you want man. Summons ashes are literally a part of the game to be used. If you feel they cheapen your experience but still think you require them , there's plenty of other support summon that are there to mostly back you up with buff or debuff.
With the Nox Duo I soloed on my second try. Using a curved great sword with endure on it. The arena is large enough where you can single one out a safe distance away from the other. Use Endure for poise to move in and hit. Since its a great sword and they have low to mid poise they stagger with every hit. Move away as soon as the partner comes in and repeat.
That duo fight with misbegotten and Crucible knight is ass. Misbegotten is fine, if using great or colossal weapons he staggers easy. You just have to keep on him, cus if slips away the crack addict will not stop moving. Unless i endured to bait him to hit me.
Crucibles knights are a pain in the ass if you don't use parry. Like you i am also illiterate in that shield witchery, so it was pain. Trading even with endure, hurts like hell. Not to mention only 2handing colossal weapons seem to be the most consistent way to stagger them. They are just chores to fight if not cheesed, which is why when i fought the boss crucible knight in deep root depths i shot the bitch to shit with the cannon. (Cannon doesn't work on shield knights)
Ended up using mimic tear on misbegottenand crucible, cus i couldn't be assed anymore. The way that misbegotten got jumped by me and my clone, the Crucible knight became the unwilling witness to a hate crime.
FUCK THE KINDRED OF ROT duo boss. Goddamn seeking multi missile spamming shrimp bastards. Was forced to bring wolves into that fight to even it out.
They did give Leonine a unique sword in the secret snowfield area in a cave next to the giant wrym boss. Weird they didn’t do that for the other Leonine fights in the game.
guys i wanna remind you that input reading is fine if done CORRECTLY and USED correctly
(note: no this shit will almost never work on 2+v1 situations)
taking genichiro's 1st fight as an example here, he tries to use his bow to interrupt your heal and punish you, but he gives enough of a window to dodge as long as you time it, making his input reading a fun little challenge addon for the game to see if you're panicking from low health or still focused and calm enough to get out of the way with the proper maneuver
now to see a few problems with the input reading of the godskin duo
this shit does not work at all because:
1. they cast at the speed of light
2. they both fucking do it, WHY. 😁
with the fact that this punishment is buffed tenfold in tandem with the already stressful walmart copy paste of the smough and ornstein fight that is the duo, anyone would feel shit and automatically hover toward the decision of not healing for less risk, which is not good as a mechanic
if you are actively pushing your player away from engaging in what should supposedly be a fun extra quirk to the boss, you are doing something wrong
Great point! Agree, thanks for bringing this up. I don't actually mind Genichiro, Owl, and a couple of other bosses, to interrupt me when I'm healing. All that means is *I've* got to play smarter, I've got to time my heals better, I've got to utilize better positioning. But fighting Margit and him hitting me after his 5 hit combo, when it was in fact *MY* turn to strike, is so god damn aggravating.
@@FoggyFogzmeister i absolutely agree , i really think the aggression here was better built for bloodborne's system
(also isn't cool how they can whip out another combo after a long string bruh)
I never found the duo difficult. Just bait them and heal rather than just healing
The worst part of Godskin Duo's input read is that it's almost good. In the 1v1 fights, there's either enough room to let you dodge after healing (e.g. Caelid Tower Apostle) or enough cover to heal safely (e.g. Volcano Manor Godskin Noble). In putting both bosses in the same arena with no alterations to their AI, it's that much harder to get the spacing or cover needed to heal safely; the solution might be to only let one of them (probably Apostle) use the ranged attack.
This game doesn't have input reading
I actually didn't have too much trouble with the Godskin Duo, but I understand why a lot of people do. They are actually, quite literally unfair. Heal? Both of them throw a fireball that drains your health. You killed one? Nah it comes back. You got both of them to half health? Now they both do more damage and one has an attack that lasts a whole minute that you cannot dodge. It is a pretty ridiculous fight, and that's saying something when O&S is my favorite Souls boss.
Kill both of them?
Fight just continues.
Kill one?
Just reapears without the other one resummoning.
Both of these happened in the same fight.
Well, not allowing them to drop below 50% at the same time is a part of a tactic..
@A B wouldnt even call this mess a designed fight
I keep seeing people repeat the idea of "the game was designed with ashes / summons in mind", and that really misses the reason of why so many are dissapointed by ER's boss design. It is this very reason that bosses just feel so awful to fight. It's not that we don't understand it was designed that way-- it's that the design is awful.
Unfortunately the bosses suck to fight solo. I don’t like summoning in DS3, I find it saps my enjoyment of the fight by a lot because it makes it easy, but summoning feels like a necessity in ER. Why? Why should I be forced to click the help me button every time? I don’t want to. Sure, theoretically it’s possible not to use summons in any capacity, but it’s not fun, or reasonable to expect. The quality of boss design in this game makes every single boss in DS3 feel like a masterpiece. I’d rather fight Crystal Sage again 30 times than fight any Elden Ring boss, with the exception of maybe 3 of them. My complaint with DS3 bosses was never that they were bullshit, it’s that they were hard, and I got better and beat them, but playing ER feels like an insurmountable chore. I’ve also experienced more glitches in ER than any other game that I’ve played. I lost 20 hours of progress, mid boss crashes, shit online multiplayer, and many more. ER is a beautiful game. Most of the enemies are fun to fight and it’s very artistically and visually appealing, but some aspects of the game are so shit that it makes me regret buying it.
@@mikal9904 Exactly. They really dropped the ball on this one, having summoning be a necessity. It's a huge dissapointment considering how well designed their last game was.
@@mikal9904 maybe you're just not as good as you thought you were, you don't need summons to beat ED bosses, i've done all of them without it and never really struggled. I've played a little of DS1 in the past and that's it, i don't have a lot of experience in souls game and yet, i've done it without summons and never thought the bosses were unfair to fight. You don't have to be a superhuman in order to beat this game w/ summons. I feel like ya'll are just frustrated for nothing. And i have to say that i like ED more than DS1, it was that enjoyable of an experience to me.
@@clouddinasty912 I mean that’s fine for you but I’ve got the experience. I’ve NG+ Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring both. I didn’t even know about the mimic tear until the second playthrough, and didn’t level mind. I used summons only for Malekith and the duo on my first play through. I’ve no hit most of the dark souls 3 bosses. I can tell you right now, it’s a step down in quality. Also what? of course you enjoyed Elden Ring more than Dark Souls 1! Dark Souls 1 is fucking trash mechanically lmao, the game is old. What are you on about?
@@mikal9904 ds1 is trash mechanically? Braindead take
I think the watchdog duo fight in the tomb by the minor Erdtree in Caelid (the one by the giant pot) was a pretty good double boss fight, one usually stayed back and did fire attacks in a relatively passive way while the other came towards you in a *much* less passive way
yeah i thought it was unfair then came back after being like level 50 and had a more fun time
Being overly ambitious is really the best shortcoming we could have hoped for Elden Ring. The Godskin Duo isn't some pair of comrades who've fought long and tirelessly alongside one another for many years, refining their abilities to better work in tandem with their partner- they're just two very powerful enemies in their own right doing everything in their own power to kill you. I can certainly recognize that the careful forethought and planning which was present in battles like Ornstein and Smough is absent in the multi-boss battles of Elden Ring, but at the same time, I'm not sure it's entirely necessary. The game isn't balanced well, and for good reason: how do you balance a game like this? Where the player can traverse to any region of the map they wish and collect any number of powerful weapons, abilities, summons, etc. all while levelling to a degree which can't be estimated? How do you make the game live up to the acclaim of the Soulsborne difficulty, when you can collect Moonveil from a random cave troll, a mimic tear summon, and anything else the player could ask for? I don't think it's unreasonable to wager that if the developers had stuck to their roots with the passive secondary boss mechanics, these duo battles would be just as forgettable as fighting these repeated enemies by themselves, since the prospect of annihilating the aggressive boss with Rivers of Blood while the passive boss just watches is all too likely. There's no such thing as a perfect anything, and Elden Ring is certainly not a perfect game. But I'll be damned if it's not FromSoftware's masterwork. They've taken elements from all of their games and combined them into this new, unique experience that stands apart from its predecessors. As a souls veteran, not an elitist, my humble indie game dev opinion is that this is the definitive Soulsborne experience. There's still hope for a DLC which could expand on missed opportunity for multi-bosses, but I don't like leaving faults up to the potential promise of future updates. This was a great video, but I think we'll have to agree to disagree on the matter of this being a masterpiece. I understand some folks are eager to throw the title of masterpiece out to a shiny new game, but this is in all sense of the word.
I agree with this comment so much
Yeah thats funny.
As a game, there is a requirement for it to be fair to the player, keyword "fair" not kind, not easy, and not forgiving.
if u r an indie dev dont make ur games as unfair as elden ring
@@mellomoose_ I'm not quite so ambitious lol
Ds1: passive, aggressive, very aggressive
Elden ring: extreme aggression, hyper aggression
The one thing I always hated in souls games was the hyper aggressive bosses. those fights that require you to roll 30 times before getting one attack in
is that really all of elden ring? I hate pontiff more than every boss in ds3
@@LumpyBumpyAcidFish not all...
But some bosses and enemies "yes royal revenant" make the magic feeling go to waste
@@mark0183 Royal revenant is a disgusting excuse for an enemy and the people who designed it need to be fired (and then hanged) lmao
@@LumpyBumpyAcidFish Pontiff was an annoying asshole and personally made me take a several day long break on my first play through, but never because I felt like he was unfair, it was because he was simply difficult. Pontiff is decently designed, maybe not great and definitely not perfectly, but he’s just hard. I enjoy coming back to crush him on NG+
@@mikal9904 fuck bosses in general actually
You could have just said "fuck elden beast" as the whole video and I'd have wanted to hear more. But yeah FromSoft actually patching in lower aggression on these sorts of bosses shows that your criticism rings true. The rest made a lot of sense, too.
I think they could had their cake and eaten it too if they started from, for example Godskin Duo. Make that duo work together when one is passive as well as duo bosses from the Dark Souls series, and then split them apart into different bosses to be placed earlier in the game. Another advantage is that the environment is going to matter a lot more on a duo boss, so it's better to design it as part of the full boss fight instead of building the arena after the fact for two independent enemies slapped together. Odds are a fight against an enemy designed as half of a boss fight that never enters passive mode would still be plenty solid.
Edit: In fact, I think the Ornstein fight in Dark Souls 2 shows that last point to be the case.
Whenever they fucked up the balance, I would just pull out my laser beam.
I don't blame you.
I think the reason why bosses are so aggressive is because fromsoft expects players to use spirit ashes. At least that is what it feels like. I have 500hrs in this game and I almost always would finish my pkaythroughs solo. Out of curiosity I decided to spawn a decent spirit ash. Nothing like luthel/mimic/tiche etc. And these bosses felt very easy. Not to mention godskin duo and twin gargoyles have NPC summons as well. (As long as you don't kill hunter D or get him killed by fia before you reach them). So normally it can be a 3v2 against these bosses unless you go spirit ashes that spawn even more AI.
I do agree with uneven terrain tho, that is very annoying. Idk like i want them to be balanced for solo play but given how much damage a player can deal to these bosses and also giving them access to multiple summons I understand why they want to keep these bosses aggressive.
Good critique and I good points made, dual bosses in Elden Ring are defiantly just 2 solo bosses put together and not designed to be with one another. That being said the Player in Elden Ring has a lot more access to power (ashes, incantations, spells) etc in Elden ring there is way more power scaling in the players favor, so its very relative as to what build / level you encounter some of these bosses with
For sure. Comet azur, redmanes, Astel’s meteors all exist. Just a shame that when bosses start being on their bullshit the game demands that you hop on your bullshit too. Having all those options are nice, and some will definitely be stronger. But it’d be nice if they were all equally viable
I agree with practically every point in this video as it is very well put together and I actually share the same level of contempt for the reuse of seemingly random bosses and jamming them in the same fight. However, the bosses are designed to fight “one player each” which was done for the sole intent of accommodating for the spirit summons and multiplayer. While yes, if you were to play Elden Ring like it were Dark Souls 2 it’d be a shitty experience with the duo bosses, they improve in terms of fun when you have someone there to account for the other overtly aggressive boss. Even still though, the duo bosses can be tedious and random at times, feeling less like a fun challenge and more like a chore. 8/10 video 👍🏾
I find it odd that you didn't touch on the abyss watchers(unless of course you don't consider them a multi boss). I think they're really interesting due to the fact that they take the reverse approach of the gargoyles, with multiple in the first phase and only one in the second. While they aren't really built around each other, the addition of the third watcher helps you divide the other two's attention to help focus on the main watcher.
Love the Abyss Watchers, but they’re a bit unique in how they gank the player. I just wanted to still to the basics.
The Godskin Duo makes me think that Fromsoft combined the worst aspects of Ornstein and Smough and Throne Watcher and Throne Defender into them.
Edit: I wonder if someone at From felt nostalgic for the Burnt Ivory King, because bringing what amounts to a troop formation to fight a boss seems to be the name of the game in Elden Ring.
Burnt Ivory King was fun though, so even that didn't work out.
I love Elden Ring so very much but I do wish it had better designed 1v2 boss fights. I hope in the DLC we get redemption with a multi boss fight where both bosses are designed specifically for that boss fight and their movesets compliment each other
Devil may cry did it better than dark souls. Agni and Rudra are the perfect duo boss fight, more balanced than smough and ornstein, but also harder. Hell dmc5 did a triple boss fight with shadow, griffon and nightmare and that fight was incredibly difficult but not in the least bit unfair, even on dmd and hell and hell difficulties. If you compare godskin duo to that triple boss fight then you can immediately see that godskin duo is a complete fucking mess.
DMC games at higher difficulties really exhibit how thoughtfully designed the gameplay really is
@@NasuPrime very true
I just got to the gargoyles in elden ring today, I gotta say, yes it's a god awful bad fight. I could beat Radahn entirely solo in half the attempts this would take with my knight spirit summon.
What blows me away is how they fixed the camera for the most part in Sekiro, but then completely threw it away for Elden Ring. The Camera has ALWAYS been utter dogshit. However, Elden Ring's bosses are almost freakin' custom designed to bring out it's worst aspects. It's not funny FromSoft, fix that shit, PLEASE. Literally just pull out, and up a LITTLE bit. Then, make it so it won't brush up against walls and/or the ground; it's not great when you have a face full of character model and a metric fuck-ton of particle effects preventing me from seeing a damn thing.