The “dark souls” parry system is the dedicated parry button with awkward timing, which we have now. The modern parry system is what is used in games where people enjoy the parry system like sekiro, lies of p, nine sols, etc. where a parry is a well timed block so you’re not completely hosed if you miss the parry.
When you combine the facts that: you aren’t still blocking on an (early) miss, the intensely awkward timing, the massive damage of enemies, and the fact that we have to craft our healing, it is just a wildly imbalanced mechanic that would have to be wildly OP to justify using it (and then if you’re good at it the game is trivial).
Of course there’s merit in following your vision. If you don’t want people to parry, the current system is ideal as it copies other games that people also rarely parry in. But if you want people to engage with the parry system, there are already tried and tested options that are way more fun, that people love.
Reacting here because i’m sensing some passive-aggressivity in your last paragraph.
I love parrying in NRTFW, it takes time to learn however because it is much more depending on knowing what attacks enemies have and their own delay for each of those attacks.
I think you are quite new? I have that suspicion because you say “..the massive damage of enemies” “intensely awkward timing”. I can promise you in another 50 hours you willl be better at it. Some enemies and attacks will always be hard to parry but that’s the game we play in.
Your suggestion for another system would surely make learning to parry easier, I can see that. I don’t think there will be any deviation of it’s current state however, it is way to late for that. So far we have had a small increase in parry-window in a patch some time ago. Shields will also reportedly increase the parry window.
I hope you can find a way to still enjoy the game!
I have 41 hours in the game, my first full playthrough was entirely parry focused.
I do enjoy this game, I also want it to succeed. This is a simple change that makes a massive difference in enjoyability to players who don’t play every parry game on the market. As I said in my post, the question is whether they want people to use parry. Not going to restate the full argument because I described it well the first time.
And telling players “just play 50 hours and you’ll get it” isn’t a very good sales strategy.
The parry system should stay as it is, it’s completely optional and rewards players who develop a good sense of rhythm. If you don’t find instant staggering and gaining 100 focus worth the effort, that’s fine, you can still play effectively using only dodges.
I will say I prefer the parry systems in Sekiro, Ghost of Tsushima, Granblue Fantasy Relink, etc.
That is, a parry where the parry frame starts on button press, not tied to the windup animation.
There is also a lot of clarity missing from what can be parried. And outside countless players crowdsourcing and figuring out what can and cannot be parried, you truly can’t know if you can parry a bear bite or lunge, or if you’re just whiffing the timing, unless many other players have tried for hours with different timings and can confirm to you that XYZ cannot be parried.
A lot of the systems in the game are opaque, and could benefit from being more logically consistent with plainly intuitive and well communicated rules.
It is meant to be hard. There is nothing wrong with playing with dodge only, there are countless of people that play souls games without parrying and it’s ok. Not every game system have to be balanced around people that do not want to put an effort to learn it.
Not sure what your parallel analogy is supposed to mean. Are you suggesting that games should be designed and balanced primarily for casual players, just because hardcore players are a minority?
Last I checked, anti-casual genre — Soulslikes — has been thriving in recent years, with several releases achieving major financial success, despite constant complaints from casual players about their difficulty.
Similarly, Path of Exile 2 — an ARPG known for its extreme grind and insane learning curve — sold over a million copies in preorders alone. And that’s despite ongoing criticism from casuals about how overwhelming and complex it is. We wouldn’t even have a PoE2 if not for dedicated hardcore fanbase that supported PoE1 for years.
In the context of billion dollar mega corporations with never ending pockets, creating safe, tame games tailored for a broad casual audience can absolutely work. But for smaller studios with limited funding, trying to compete for casual attention in a market flooded with tens of thousands of similar titles is a much tougher gamble.
Your argument falls apart by bringing PoE2 as an example because the parry system in it is exceedingly easy to use. You just hold the shield button while equipping a buckler and the parry happens automatically on receiving a hit. It’s even easier than on souls likes. Most new souls likes are coming with difficulty options, like Lies of P. Elden Ring only got really popular because it’s one of the easiest games in the series.
There’s nothing wrong with rethinking how parrying works in this game. It’s not a perfect implementation. If I had to bet, and could see their telemetry numbers, I would see that most people are not parrying through their campaign. It’s not worth the effort to learn. Lol, someone came up with “it takes 50 hours” as if that was good design.
I suppose you are talking to me since i am only person in this thread that mentioned PoE2.
What has PoE2 parry system anything to do with what i wrote?
My response was to the OP’s post where he alluded that games should be designed for casuals. At least i believe that’s what he meant by posting this plane picture that references a certain story from WW2 often used in explaining survivorship bias. I brought PoE2 as one of the examples of anti-casual games that sold very well.
Difficulty of Elden Ring compared to DS is debatable and its success have nothing to do with it. It became huge, because it was heavily marketed game of a big corporation. I remember there were plenty of people and articles complaining about its difficulty.
There is no such thing as perfect implementation and there will never be. There are only options.
So what? To this day an estimated 37% of steam players have beaten Malenia, one of the hardest bosses in Elden Ring. Does this mean that FromSoftware should nerf her so more people can beat her?
For you it might not be worth the effort, for me it was. Estimates are very subjective, some players will learn it in 1 hour and some need 50 or even 100. And there is nothing wrong with a skill/mechanic requiring 50 hours to properly learn. Ever tried improving your skill in moba or fps games?
Wicked is not strictly a soulslike, nor is it an ARPG in the vein of PoE/Diablo.
It’s an amalgamation of soulslike features, ARPG features, action adventure and survival and life sim features. The game director himself has stated multiple times he wants it to be its own genre.
So it is not tied to the conventions of any single genre. It can be iterated to be its own thing. And player feedback serves that purpose, to steer it in a way the player prefers.
The developer sees the amount of opinions and then makes their own judgement on what to implement and iterate on.
The game’s design is not meant to be set in stone when still in early access and with less than 20% of the entire campaign, map content, and features out, much less when it’s about to undergo a combat and class overhaul in the future.
Yes that was me, thank you giving me feedback. It probably read very flat and cold to see me suggesting that, and it was not meant in the snappy way you just framed it.
To give context why it is I said that, I will give you a couple examples why this is my advice.
Learning parry is different and specific for most games. Yes you need to hit the button at the correct time, but that’s the only one universal thing I can agree on.
Parry in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is based on hitting keybind at the moment weapon hits you (block and parry have different keys), I mastered this only when reaching mid-game, about 60 hours in or so
Parry in Tainted Grail Fall of Avalan is very finnicky, animations have not much delay but hard to gauge when their weapon actually hits you. Some attacks had faints which really set you on edge. I learned to parry better in this game after going through a tough fight over and over. It was not easy.
I have played games where you need to parry once enemy animation begins, or you have time until mid-animation (not when it’s hitting you).
All these experiences taught me that it is a process for each game, and it is mostly fine. If OP would have suggestions to make parry better in the constraints of it’s own system I would very likely vote for that. I think it’s very important when new people come in to hear their very first impressions with any system.
But, if someone comes in and wants to overhaul an entire system because they have difficulty learning it, it is more likely said person has not put in enough hours yet to learn it. Or is working against that impulse to want to learn it by avoiding it all together (aka dodging only, you can see OP make a few remarks on that).
I don’t want to disparage a person saying they have difficulty, or have a hard time learning it. It is when you want to overthrow the entire system that I give advice based on my experiences, and that is why I suggested to put more hours in.
I hope this will clarify a bit more what I was thinking when commenting, be it you still disagree with me or not.
–May faith and silence lead your charge on the battlefield, Cerim!
If I understand correctly @wayward wants Perry to be, like in Sekiro and Lies of P (and calls it “modern Perry”).
“The modern perry” has a specific name it is called Deflection.
For those who don’t know deflection is a core mechanic in Sekiro and Lies of P and it works like this:
Your character assumes a defensive stance. Maintaining this defensive stance reduces the damage taken (like a shield). If this stance is activated just before being hit, a deflection occurs, protecting you from 100% of the damage and damaging the enemies’ posture. The deflection is activated at the same time as the enemy would be hit, making this system much more intuitive than Perry, but for this reason the benefit is much less than Perry’s, as it is a much simpler action to perform and less committed since if the window is missed, you are still in a defensive stance and take less damage.
The Perry, on the other hand, is a very committed action, It’s risky and should therefore only be used at opportune moments. It’s not a core combat mechanic but an option.
Proper use of Perry distinguishes the experienced player from the novice, but the player doesn’t need to use this mechanic to finish the game.
Technical details: Parries work like this: the character going from Start-up animation to Active Fremes to Wind-down animation when an attack’s parryable hit-box collides with the Active Fremes, the perry is performed
Perry, unlike Doge and Deflection, does not make the character invulnerable during the phase of Active Fremes, but during the Active Frames period a perry hit-box is generated that if it comes into contact with the parryable hit-box, activates the perry animaton which makes the character invulnerable and stuns the enemy.
So the developers have to place these parryable hit-boxes somewhere in the attack before the damage hitboxes themselves. If from the player’s point of view it is not clear when is the right time to use the perry or the right time does not seem to follow the same rules for all attacks it is due to the incorrect positioning of these hit-boxes.
Since the placement of these hitboxes is based on the player’s in-game perception of the correct window, they are very difficult to place, and simply placing them right before an attack could lead to a poor gameplay experience.
Many parryable hit-boxes in this game don’t have a shared rule that applies to all of them (which is probably why people are so concerned about the system’s inconsistency), but for the most part they work just fine and To make the semtem perfect it could take months of work for the combat team that deals with these aspects of the game (which would mean no new enemies and bosses for months).
But the game can’t adopt a deflection system, because deflections occupy the same role as dodges, and building the fight around both is unrealistic, in fact in Sekiro and Lies of P dodges only have the role of positioning.
I haven’t played either FromSoft games or these modern Souls-likes mentioned higher up in the thread by OP. In my experience, dodging is highly effective once you’ve had a few iterations of attack patterns. It’s almost to the point that a very experienced and coordinated player with a fast dodge build can basically go untouched.
I have 100+ hours in this game and I’ve only just now synchronized the timing of most of the attack patterns to parries. I think that’s a good thing. It has provided me another means of exploring challenging skillful gameplay as a late stage player. I’m sure going forward this mechanic will be trivialized until new content is released, but the trajectory for me in this game as a player I think is the proper design if its in any way common or average.
Thus, I think the suggestion here would make combat shallower much too early in the player’s lifecycle.
