What can you do to avoid dying?
Active Protection
- You can improve your reflexes and understanding of enemy attack patterns (always valid
Thanks to good game design)
- You can heal yourself and try to always have high health (this does not count for falls)
- You can play passively (The Devs want to push the player to be more active and in fact it is the way of playing that is rewarded the most, but falls are one of the few things in the game that encourage you to play passively)
Preventive Protection
- You can improve the defense of your build (this does not count for falls) (I will talk about poise later)
- You can use buffs before a fight (this does not count for falls) (I will talk about poise later)
- You can stock up on consumable items (this does not count towards falls) (I will talk about poise later)
- You can improve the damage of your build (if the enemies are alive for less time you are in danger for less time)
- You can make a build designed specifically to solve the problem you are facing (in the case of drops a build with a spear and a large shield that focuses on having as much range and poise as possible), this option however even if it is interesting to have as a part of the game is not a “normal” answer but the exception, in this goes against one of the main fantasies of the Game: If I want to be an agile assassin, I will not change my build to become an immovable tank.
Even though the poise counteracts the pushes it doesn’t work well as a preventative mechanism for two reasons: The poise only works against knockbacks when you have big quantity of it so: if I have a light armor and I take a poise flask I won’t be protected from the knockbacks anyway, and obviously if I fall because of miss input or I miss a jump I won’t be able to survive the fall anyway.
Other
- In the crucible there are buffs that allow you to come back to life once, these work against falls and bring you back to the edge from which you fell, but they are quite rare and completely random, I always take them, not because I’m afraid of dying against the hardest boss in the game, but because of falls (even if fall rarely, obviously since I have more than 400h on this game, with 400h hours on any game you fall much less and it is valid for games with the dead fall like NRFTW and Elder Ring and also games where you only take damage like Sekiro and Hollow Knight)
So there is a need to nerf falling into pit or through directly nerfing them or via new ways to prepare for them (without ruining the game fantasy)
Other good reasons from a game design point of view
Different deaths can punish you differently In NRFTW you have
Exploration, Boss and Crucible, with different punishments
- The bosses are right before the respawn Thanks to level design
- In Exploration you just have to retrace the path, and it often takes very little time
- In the case of the Crucible we are talking about even more than 10 min because you have to face the enemies again and obviously it is impossible reduce the time required given the promises of the mode
Why did the developers put the respawn right in front of the bosses?
The reason is simple, to make us learn the bosses faster, a shorter road means more attempts, and therefore more chances to learn, more time spent playing the game in the way the player wants to play the game, less frustration, more fun.
How much does it take away from the difficulty of the game?
In dark souls one, the player had to go a long way to get back to the boss, often the road was full of enemies, this practically made the road to the boss part of the boss fight, only that the path was much easier than the boss and so the players were very frustrated, the experience was sometimes so terrible that after a certain number of attempts, many began to get condensed and do worse both the boss and the runback.
It was hard, but was it fair? If the game is a game about facing obstacles and difficulties, so why is it not good for the game here?
The reason it was bad for the game is that the player is not engaged with that kind of challenge, but just wants to face the boss, the path full of enemies was a punishment for the death not a challenge to overcome, and this punishment was not counterbalanced by the mistake of dying against the boss.
Why is there frustration? It is not a lack of determination but a communication problem between the game and the player, there is no problem in having a challenging path inside a boss fight but it must be communicated correctly to the player, as for example (Ori 2 does this).
FromSoftware then decided to remove this challenge, partially in DS 3 through level design, and in Elder Ring with the “Marika statues”, It may seem like this has made the overall gameplay experience easier, but it has also given room for bosses to become more difficult and interesting, as the players focus resources were no longer reduced by the runback.
Knowing all this, there are some reasonings that I can make as to why adopt a fall damage system like Sekiro.
The first is that the same as the bosses being right before the respawn, if we have more attempts we learn not to fall better and in a more satisfying way.
The second is that the game with fall damage system like Sekiro is allowed to be more complex and interesting as to how the use falls and platforming (and in fact Sekiro has much more interesting platforming than souls)
Punishment for death and falls in different genres
This paragraph helps me explain why it would be good to neerf falls in the context of the crucible and also where do i get ideas for possible systems to nerf fall damage indirectly
It is important to specify that in different genres dying and falling have different punishments, I will illustrate the cases similar to NRFTW:
Souls-light (Sekiro): In Sekiro if you fall in a pit you take damage, and you return to the edge from which you fell or if you already have low health and you fall in a pit you die this is the same system that I would like to implement in NRFTW, or at least in the crucible and hardcore (with the addition of realms this should be the default option, but you can adjust it to make it easier or more difficult).
When you die in sekiro, if you have a charge of dragon blood you can be reborn, if you don’t have the charge or you decide not to use it or you die by falling into a pit you really die and you lose half of your money and your xp, and you risk the npc getting the dragon blood sickness, and all enemies that are not bosses or mini bosses respawn, xp and money are not too valuable in Sekrio (and enemies can be skipped) and you still lose time, this punishments can be prevented, by spending xp and money before a battle (or in other ways that I’m not going to explain) definitely bigger punishment than NRFTW but it is preventable by thinking ahead and not only by having good mechanical skill a point that i will cover later.
(Unimportant trivia: Even if NRFTW is not too similar to Sekiro it actually also falls into the category of Souls-light and not into the Souls-like from a definitional point of view)
Souls-like: In all Dark Souls 1&2&3 (but not in Elder Ring) even a small fall can kill you, falling into the void always kills, in my opinion even here it wouldn’t be bad if the games adopted the method of Sekiro, but the situation is not as problematic as with NRFTW because the combat is less frenetic and more “heavy” you are rarely pushed very far from the enemies and often when it happens you are not near a cliff, the platforming souls is very similar to that of NRFTW but the beams are wider and it is more difficult to fall (except for DS1 where all the spaces are narrow) also the platforming souls is more a way to access secret areas than a real challenge, and in this sense NRFTW is similar with the difference that in NRFTW we often find ourselves re-exploring the areas, the exceptions are Elder Ring and Another crab’s treasure, where there are real platforming sections, even if they are few, (another crab’s treasure adopts the falling system of Sekiro).
when you die in a Souls-like you leave all your souls (xp + money) at the spot where you died, If you fail to recover them, you lose them forever, and all enemies that are not bosses or mini bosses respawn, souls are really valuable in all soul-like much more than xp and money are in Sekrio, and to get them back you have to go through the whole process (sometimes you can skip enemies) that led you to your death the last time, this punishments can be prevented, by spending souls before a battle or in other ways like the “ring of sacrifice” (or its equivalent counterpart in the corresponding game) the ring destroys itself and prevents you from losing souls at death, the ring destroys itself instead of your souls when you have already lost them and die a second time.
Similarly there could be a ring that self-destructs when you fall and saves you from a fall
Roguelike: In Enter the gungeon (Similarly to all the games with health points instead of the health bar) the fall is punished with one health point, and therefore the falls are traps like others, in Risk of rain 2 the fall does damage to you based on the distance from which you fall but it can never kill you, at most it leaves you at 1hp (in this game there is a modifier that doubles the damage suffered from falls and falls can be fatal). It is clear that the Roguelike adopt this systems because the punishment for death is greater as you have to start over the run, it is fair to say that a run of the crucible is short compared to a real Roguelike, the crucible is 10min-15min run won 100% exploration (necessary xD) while Enter the gungeon winning run by 50min-1h30min 100% each floor (depending on what you try to do and which floors you explore and which no) while Risk of Rain lasts between 3min-12min per floor depending on how many chests you want to open and they are a minimum of 6 floors up to infinity.
The crucible is short but it is because it’s incomplete the goal of the mode is not to have short runs with only one boss. More things will be implementedand the longer it will get. It should do like the other Rougelikes, and not have lethal falls since punishment increases.
Sorry, I rushed the last part of the post, I hope everything is clear, if not tell me where and I’ll correct it. If you prefer you can ask me more specific questions so I can answer them or you can make a post about why you think the the fall damage should stay as it is and I’ll answer your post, I think there are other reasons according to which I can justify the changes.
same as LOL which means laughing out loud
. The second one is not dead yet but I haven’t played it much, and I noticed that the approach to the game is different, and that, if there is an area with moral drops and little loot it is not even worth going (that’s why I mentioned it).
Almost all bosses in the soulsborne series are exclusively on locations you cannot fall off from, even though the rest of the game will let you fall to your death all over the place. (yes, a few exceptions). I think there is a reason for that. The end boss in a crucible run isn’t just a boss fight, it’s the end of the run. So falling of the edge on that boss, feels super sucky. Reform!