>>13310
This; however, it isn't the Souls formula that does it for me, it's their design philosophy. FromSoft is one of the only developers in the industry that, despite their success, still respects players' intelligence and refuses to hold their hands, no matter the cost. And there is a cost: players getting filtered. Getting filtered is different from critiquing, criticizing, or even complaining about something. Getting filtered is complaining about something that you don't even understand.
Even Elden Ring, their most accessible game, still filters players. I'm not even talking about the most difficult bosses, I'm talking about the beginning of the fucking game. I've seen so many self-styled YouTube critics say shit like
>The game doesn't teach you to stance break
for example. Well, okay:
1.) The game has a tutorial that explicitly tells you how to stance break.
2.) There are three natural paths to progress from at the beginning of the game: the right leads the grace where you meet Melina, the center branches off from the right and leads to a dead end with a catacomb, and the left leads down to the beach. On the way down to the beach is a troll, an enemy with a lot of HP that is weak to stance breaks. On the beach itself are two big land-octopi, another enemy with a lot of HP that is only worthwhile to kill with stance breaks. Basically the only way to fight the land-octopi is to cut off their tentacles and then break their stance.
3.) When you stance break a land-octopi or another enemy for the first time, you hear the
>THOOM
noise. When you can break and / or critical an enemy, it makes the one of only two non-diegetic sounds in combat. Everything other than the stance and shield break noises are produced by something within the game world, even the exaggerated sound of your flask healing you. The THOOM sound, the critical damage, and the okizeme you get on a stance-broken enemy is a big, fat dopamine hit that tells the player that this is the way to play the game.
The game teaches you to stance break, immediately but subtly guides you to a situation where you need to stance break two enemies that need to be stance broken twice each to be killed, and gives you feedback for doing so. What these players are upset about isn't the game not teaching them to stance break, it's that they didn't fucking learn how and got filtered.
All these motherfuckers saying shit like the game needs a visible stance bar, or the game needs to explicitly tell you that stance starts regenerating after X seconds without damage, or the game doesn't sufficiently encourage you to stance break, etc. don't even understand the fucking game. Worse, a lot of them reach hundreds of thousands of people who will blindly repeat the same shit. The reason I played Demon's Souls to begin with was to get away from these retards who want their hands held. It's the same type of person who plays Monster Hunter with HunterPie so they can see stun, status, stagger, and part break thresholds.