ive never run in any problems of having not enough food,
that said, i cleared the western area a lot and that brought me some fairly amount of items to cook with, so when heading for the east i had
4x20 soups, so i had no problem in that regard.
and when i try a boss, i just dont use all my stuff in the first atempts,
when theres only 20 percent health left of the boss, then i use healing stuff.
From my point of view, and from the hours of play I have on it, I get the impression that it’s more a poor approach to the game that many people have.
I’ve never had any worries about food or anything. I know I’m limited at the start of the game (because yes, afterwards you’ll never have food problems again) so I learn even if I have to die, and once I’ve grasped the patterns that’s it, I use the heal if I need to.
Don’t think of the game as a souls game when it comes to healing. It’s a different approach, you just have to adapt.
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Maybe a mecanic to restaure food in your inventory ONLY when beeing defeated by a boss ?
Or a more generous farming with a ratio like 15minutes farming for 4 or 5 try against a boss ?
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I think this is a great idea!
Would love for the devs to speak on their intentions here. Because if “the early game constantly risks essentially making the game unplayable for yourself, until your resources pile up sufficient to ignore half of the mechanics,” that’s certainly a design choice they’re allowed to make, but I’d like to hear them say that out loud.
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I’d also like them to be clear about their approach to the game on this point.
Regarding your point about early access, I think that EXCEPTIONALLY for early access, they should have made sure that we could have 100% access to a larger panel of weapons and the possibility of resetting stats from the start so that we could test the gameplay we like. If they had organized the early game better, I think there would have been far fewer complaints about healing.
And in my opinion, the heal approach should be closer to the BOTW system. Less access to healing, but healing consumed only on the death of a boss, and consequently healing consumed on trash mobs.
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Yeah, if death (even just boss death) reset your state to last whisper, I think a ton of these issues disappear. Unfortunately that’d probably be a big engineering challenge as it’s evident the game hasn’t been designed with that functionality in mind.
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i really hope the devs don’t force me to play this game on easy mode as you guys are asking.
i already made my builds and everything to get past it and doing it would remove any effort i made using my game knowledge.
i have zero food problems and never had to bother repairing me gear.
just make a seperate easy mode.
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Alright! This post was made prior to the 2 hotfix patches that the devs have introduced (Insane commitment by the devs btw).
I’m just writing this as my own closure to this topic.
I have 23h of playtime now.
Let me debunk this a bit, as I fear this post is slowly becoming a catalyst for misguided complacency. It stood its’ ground well before the fixes, but I feel like people are still clinging to this without really knowing that things have changed so here we go:
Gear repair:
Early game - it’s free.
Mid game - it’s cheap.
Late game (early-access) - it’s cheap.
Spawns are fixed, and the mob/resource respawns NOW are faster than you can handle killing or harvesting them all in the first place.
The map itself is fairly small, there’s such a thing as teleportation once you reach sacrament so no, there’s no such thing as needing to go “far” in this game to acutally farm, it’s not really a time consuming endeavour by no obejctive standard.
Food:
20 minutes of ACTIVELY farming for food ingerdients (if you’ve memorized the spawns AT LEAST partially, will get you going for 2 hours IF YOU’RE BAD.
Early game, if you’ve atleast made it past the shore, you have your well renowned “Mushroom soup”, it takes one artemisia herb and one mushroom to craft. These are sprawling everywhere, especially in the early game.
I’ve made very far into early-access even before the hotfixes, and I didn’t need to go out of my way to farm such thing as food, later down the line you get showered with different options to get access to resources such as food and other resources + there actually is a way to gain health very efficiently in this game by other means than just food, but I’m not going to spoil it.
After a soft “completion” of the early-access, I’ve gotten the impression that this game is… well, difficult.
Before, the hotfixes it was harsh, now, it’s just difficult, and that’s completely fine and should stay that way.
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Explain to me which parts of the systems we’re talking about add interesting challenge, and how altering them would invalidate your progress.
So what you’re saying is, it has no value. You’re saying the system can be completely ignored, except for the early mid game when it can effectively soft lock you. And you think this is a compelling defense of the system, not a condemnation of it. Uh huh.
So once again, the main defenders of these systems (or the workarounds to them) are saying “I never even had to interact with them. The systems were actually completely invisible to me.” Saying it didn’t affect your experience at all, but it’s ruining the game for other people, is once again not a compelling argument in favor of the systems.
If any of these arguments were about how these systems created compelling challenges or interesting decisions, that’d be a different story. But the defenses boil down to “um actually if you study the spawn frequency maps and optimize your farming route, it’s not even bad. I wouldn’t know because I haven’t actually had to engage with that at all, but I think it’s important it’s there anyways.”
For some people it evidently is actually important for a “challenging game” not to actually provide an interesting challenge, but simply for it to be making other people have a bad time.
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If they made it a lesser problem, does it even need to be a problem? I prefer to actually fight and gather resources for building something rather than just sustaining myself.
I do not want to remove all the friction, it is good to have some obstacles to overcome, finding the good balance is the tricky part.
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Yes and no.
Yes as in - the system has been dumbed down to the point where it becomes rather of symbolical nature for THOSE that may have more experience in the genre, and a challenge for THOSE, tha… well… find it as a challenge.
BEFORE it was definitely detrimental no matter the players prior skill or experience with such genres.
No, as in it challenges you to approach bigger fights in ways you aren’t used to, in the beginning there is no safety net, the way we were used to (example: estus flasks), so by design it tries to challenge your comfort zone. And as I’ve seen you personally have designed the stragety to counteract it very efficiently, by being conservative with your resources, actually learning the boss fight before commiting to the fight itself. Call me what you will, but I find that actually refreshing.
I feel like what is mostly overlooked is the fact that, by design, the system will shut down your progress if you fail to many times, sure. NOW, that has to be A LOT of dying by the way.
But the “farming” or the "going out of your way to farm " passively also rewards you. You get to notice that it rewards you with additional loot and experience for the time you’ve invested farming for resources and kiling mobs. And the higher your level, naturally, the higher the level of loot and resrouces.
EDIT: to add to this, it feels like they were very meticoulous when designing this system, farming routes themselves are very keen on change, I’ve scoured one part of the map, countless of times, yet very rarely felt repetitive, as the loot pool and the mob pool changes fairly quickly over the course of your personal progression (gaining levels)
IF you’re unable, inside the scope of your resources that you brought with you initially, to overcome the challenge. You go back, farm and grow, therefore naturally making the challenge smaller and smaller with each route. HOWEVER, if inside the scope of your initial resource pool, you succeed, you get to go further, until you’ve reached your bounds, either by way of nature (skill), or by way of the system (too low level, not optimized gear, bad stat organization, etc.)
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The positive aspects you’re describing would all still be there without the game hobbling your ability to continue playing if you lose against a boss too many times. And just trying to make the systems more generous as they have done so far doesn’t necessarily even solve that.
For example, making food too plentiful can actually make the game too easy. Someone above said they’re walking around with 4 20 stacks of good food. Having 80 full heals to use against a boss seems just as ridiculous as having 0 heals of any kind while trying to farm to get your gear repaired. Neither extreme is desirable, but as currently designed, one or the other extreme is effectively inevitable.
There’s no such thing anymore. Even for the worst player. You can’t get stuck anymore.
That’s just someone who went out of their way to stack and absurd amount of food. It’s not like one run is going to give you that generous of an amount of resources.
But you understand how the current system forces an unstable equilibrium with resources, yeah?
There may be some people whose playstyle and experience happens to put them directly on the middle of the teeter-totter, but even slightly off that center and you enter a positive feedback loop in either direction.
If you aren’t using many resources, you’re inevitably going to snowball into having more than you know what to do with. If you are using a lot of resources, you’re going to snowball into not having enough to be able to do anything without going to farm and grind constantly. Any system that only works as intended for a very narrow skill band, and completely unravels on either side of it, is probably in need of reconsideration.
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I understand but I don’t at the same time…
The system would force an uncontrollable imbalance, had it not be giving choice. But it does, it gives freedom based upon your skill level.
If you’re able to get by with the resrouces you have, good, no need for farming. (one would think)
If you’re unable to get by with the resrouces you have, no problem, you go farm.
But farming itself is made so, that either way, you’ll have to do it eventually. So the “lesser” party is actually in a timely advantage than the former. Because of factors like, uprading your hub, leveling your character, upgrading gear, all requiring farming, no matter the progression speed.
I’ve said it once before now, and I’ll say it again, farming is actually fun, because it’s diversified every few levels, you’ll always see or encounter something new along the way. And is not designed to be a tedium.
We’re debating in closed vacuums here…
You can’t have unlimited amounts of resources, there’s such a thing as space limitations. We’re only takling about food here, there’s resources you’ll have to gather no matter the “skill” of the player or the snowballing effect. Food in itself if just one aspect to a bigger picture here.
It feels like you’re advocating for the other minority, which is people who have never played games before and want to have the same stretch as those who put in the effort. Because the system is faulty by design.
It WAS, now it is NO MORE, it opened up facets about the system that we didn’t even know about before.
I invite you to re-experience it, and then give feedback upon what you’ve learned, once you’ve gotten through the whole of early-access.
EDIT: And if you find that nothing has changed for you, or the systems’ nature is still questionable, that is all good.
I never meant to say I was right in any aspect, those were just my experiences 
but I do aim to say that I’m gonna keep advocating what I think and have found to be a good experience
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I might be wrong about this, but to mr it does not seem that the intention is that you try a boss until you beat it as soon as you find it.
But rather try a couple of times (depending your reserve of healing items and how far you get it down) and if you do not succeed you go back and level your character and your gear and try again later.
And this is very well supported by exactly the way healing, other consumables and durability work.
The more you try a boss, the more you are encouraged to stop and come back later, because your resources are running low and maybe you are not up to it yet.
It is exactly the opposite of the forced boss trials in other Souls-like games, what I like about this.
You do not lose all your XP in the Boss arena and have to retry no matter how underleveled your are, with the only alternative abandoning all XP you earned the last two hours.
I really like the way the Devs are enforcing this loop of NOT trying again and again, but rather trying a couple of times and realizing you have to upgrade before you try again.
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The healing mechanic makes no sense atm. It’s horrible for new players and after the first boss it makes the game insanely easy.
You can stack infinite food and never die to the boss. People saying this game is about planning and prepping fail to see that this mechanic is destroying every challenge by giving you no consequence for taking damage in the fights other than waiting for the timer to go down while you run to the other side of the boss arena.
And I think the mechanic of having to go again with the boss at full hp is punishment enough, right?
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Yeah, I one-shot every boss in the “regular” game (not the crucible), simply because I had a bunch of food on hand. If I was getting hit, I could run around in circles and just wait for my heal to come off cooldown. That’s not the kind of challenge I was hoping for from bosses, personally.
This is the problem that needing to farm food and repair durability leads to, though. Bosses can’t be designed to be so difficult that they will take many attempts to learn and defeat, because of the extra punishment that food and durability impose on the player. I want harder bosses. I fought the first Tree Sentinel in Elden Ring on my wretch with my un-upgraded club until I beat him. I died so many times. If I had to farm flask heals and repair my gear in between attempts, I wouldn’t have bothered.
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