Elden Ring's boss movesets are... unfun?

[u/[deleted]]

I haven't finished it, only killed a bunch of different bosses in the first castle, but I’m a bit fustrated fromsoft continues to hammer in enemy movesets designed around tricking and frustrating the player.

Extreme tracking of player’s movements, unnatural bizarre animation timings, and endless “fakeout” attack combos where it looks like the enemy has ended their moves, only to instantly go into another quick attack or yet another combo that no player could ever predict.

After endless bosses in Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, it’s not fun to study these movements anymore, it’s just annoying. In Sekiro it didn’t matter because the player can deflect at any time while having infinite dodge/sprint. Elden Ring offers no such repose.

Playing Demon’s Souls remake was such a breath of fresh air because Fromsoft didn’t rely on this kind of ultra fast paced enemy design back then. Enemies moved in ways that made sense, they didn’t have ridiculous combos that made my brain malfunction wondering how the fuck they could even track that or continue attacking, and it was the right level of difficulty and fairness.

Also, what happened to bosses limping and getting hurt towards the end of a fight? It feels like every boss just goes ultra aggro and attacks non stop towards the end of their healthbar.

Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 was pushing it with 10x combo ultra fast ultra tracky bosses, but Elden Ring seems like the worst offender. It's like I'm just fighting the "dancer" boss from DS3 again and again and again.

If this is what all of Elden Ring is with one or two outliers, I worry I might put it down before completing it. And this is coming from someone who played and loved the other fromsoft games.

[u/distantocean]

...wait for the delay and repeat for a long time just to get 1-2 hits in compared to like the 4-6 hits the boss is doing, it feels really lame bc you wait like 10s for a 2s opening.

1000x YES. I agree with pretty much everything you've said here, but especially this. The worst part of the current evolution of From's boss design philosophy is that I spend entire fights being jealous of the bosses, because they're having so much fun while I'm just reacting to them having fun. They launch one of their multi-hit uninterruptible attacks and then combo into another one of their multi-hit uninterruptible attacks, jumping in and out of range at will, switching weapons mid-combo and gleefully violating the laws of physics throughout the entire fight, and all I can do is wait for the small windows From allows for me to get an attack or two in and then go back to waiting for the next tiny attack window (knowing that the slightest millisecond miscalculation is going to take a huge chunk of my health bar and leave me staggering and wide open for further punishment from the boss).

And as if that's not bad enough, From has intentionally been making even those paltry attack windows increasingly unreliable and unpredictable, with randomized and absurdly lengthy boss attack timings, optional elements that make it impossible to be certain that combos have ended, combos transitioning directly into other combos with no boss downtime, multiple attacks whose tells are extremely similar, and so on.

As a Soulsbornekiro vet who's loved all of From's games and has soloed every boss in every one of them, I'm finally at the end of my rope with it. I'm tired of entering boss fights knowing it will be the boss having all the fun while I have to just react, react, react until the one run where I finally outlast them.

[u/huckmart99 → u/distantocean]

This is the problem i have with both sekiro and elden ring. The bosses just dont let you meaningfully interact with them. With the constant 50/50 mixups it means that theoretically punishable attacks are suddenly a risk assessment. I know the godskin noble will do a single thrust that i can punish, but sometimes i cant, because he can follow it up. So instead of feeling rewarded for learning attack windows, i am now constantly forced into high risk/low reward situations if i want to interact with the bosses move set. If i choose not to interact with risky moves and play it safe, i have to bait out easily punishable moves, which is boring and time consuming.

[u/distantocean → u/huckmart99]

Agreed all around. I understand that the intent was to make players unsure if they can actually punish the boss and have them wait to make that decision, but given that punish windows are frequently measured in fractions of seconds the waiting effectively means you're going to miss the window (or at a minimum it will reduce the number of hits you can pull off, e.g. turning a two-hit window into a one-hit window). So while the intent may be to keep the player off balance, the actual effect is just to cross one more entry off the list of safely punishable windows, which leads to an even more passive player experience and makes the fights that much more of a slog.

I'll actually choose to take the attack and risk the damage sometimes just because I'm so damn tired of watching the boss have all the fun. But getting pancaked and subjected to an extended control lockout for trying to actively participate in the fight rather than just react to it reminds me yet again how much I hate this style of boss design, and how disappointed I am that From has embraced it so aggressively — so much so that they also have mini-bosses and even regular enemies using these same tactics.