Thanks, will skip and continue to play Starfield on gamepass.
When are we going to get the Elden Ring DLC?
Uhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmm if we're operating on the Cyberpunk 2077 model, it will be 2026.
J/K!! Supposedly sooner than that but who TF knows nowadays [fun sidenote, Google is totally fine with the spelling of "nowadays" but not at all with "nowdays" christ google you fascists].
Anyway, I managed to spend another, I dunno, 6 or 8 hours on LoP, as I do NOT have the ability to quit a souls-like any sooner than it takes to watch
Too Old to Die Young. The Fallen Archbishop is where I draw the line at a bad game.
There are some major problems with this game:
-the game ends up being built around perfect parries. This is the big one. And there are, well, almost zero indicators for what's different between a perfect parry and a normal block on the bosses, which will kill you. The Fallen Archbishop (fuck this guy) has like three attacks in total but then two completely separate phases, and, yeah, he can stagger any of the three attacks, with a delay, into a combo of up to six hits with the others. Good luck parrying or dodging that.
-enemy stagger doesn't work well. Normal enemies take a parry, you think you have a chance to heal, but they've got zero delay on their next hit so you're both taking damage and not healing. Bosses are worse.
-similarly, there's bad feedback on hits in general. Guy will be closing on you, you throw out R1, maybe it hits? Guy glances right through it but looks like he took damage but also has zero delay on his next attack? It's irritating how inconsistent the mechanic is.
-there's little to no feedback on perfect parries. Sekiro and Wo Long both knew that this had to be exactly right since it was the key to playing the game well, and they both make it very clear when you managed a perfect parry and the enemy was stunned/staggered/whatever.
-the importance of throwable items is too high. This was also a big problem in
Steel Rising, but that was pretty easy overall and I didn't constantly run out of items. In LoP, electric and/or fire bombs do disproportionately large damage to bosses so much so that normal tactics feel useless.
-only level up at the main hub: this is the Dark Souls 2 problem that various other games in the genre fixed afterward. Lazy, maybe, or just ignorant, I'm not sure.
-goddamn two-stage bosses. Maybe a bit of a pet peeve here, but really, it's a pain. I can think of a handful of two-stage (or more, like, I dunno, Bed of Chaos I guess that one had checkpoints at all phases) bosses that make things fair, heck, even General of Man in Wo Long is very reasonable once you learn it, but jeez, there are a handful of multi-stage bosses in the genre that I just hate, and that trend continues in LoP. Fallen Archbishop in Lies...., ugh. It's just such a pain to learn one phase, use your consumables learning one phase, knowing full-well that there's another more difficult phase next. Reminds me of Orphan in Bloodborne, and at least he had obvious punishers and was the last optional boss instead of a required one.
-the XP gain for killing enemies isn't tuned correctly. You get 85-115 Ergo (souls) for killing mobs at the very beginning, and you get the same amount for killing mobs 1/3 of the way through the game, at which point levels cost 5000 Ergo instead of 500. Elites and bosses award more and the unique Ergo fragments tend to be more valuable, but all of those are limited. Thus grinding becomes nearly impossible. I think the devs honestly made a design mistake here that will be patched sooner than later. Another very similar issue is that all boss ergos (that can be traded for unique weapons just like in From games) are worth the same amount so far, 5,000 each. So the incentive to consider burning the ergo becomes much less and getting the weapon or amulet is a no-brainer, which, again, can't actually be intended.
-and the camera is often really bad, even for this genre.
So.... after, I dunno, 15 hours on it, I'm out. It's just not polished enough and too much of it feels cheap, which is saying a lot for this genre. I mean dang I finished Hellpoint and I put 15 hours into that goddamn space/sci-fi souls-like [fucknutwhatthefuckwasitcalledthewholeinternetapparentlyforgot] and I just can't on this one.
Not recommended. Try it on Gamepass but don't pay extra for it.
Edit: It made me fire up Wo Long in anticipation of the DLC at the end of the month. I tried to help a guy beat the silliest OP mission in the main game and we lost on Blindfolded Boy gauntlet but it's still my favorite game of the year by a considerable margin.
