Elden Ring – Parry Everything

Video Games Vs. Horse

Ahh, horse. Strong, graceful, the picture of elegance. Truly one of nature’s most majestic creatures, and a favorite mainstay of the that one medium I like a whole lot. Welcome to ‘Video Games Vs.’ where I analyze the dumbest stuff in video games I can think of which inexplicably follows a pattern of being almost consistently jank and bizarre. And there is no creature in the interactive medium’s menagerie more jank and bizarre than the horse, and riding animals in general. Let’s get right into it.

Simulating a Living Creature

When adding a feature to your game, you always have to ask yourself what it is you’re spending your resources on and why. What’s the goal of having a horse in your game? Does it enable combat? Is it merely for making the player go faster? Are horses just cool? Or, does it need to be immersive, and make the player feel like they really own a companion animal? The goal of the later comes up a lot in small ways, such that it separates the concept of riding animals from, say, a dune buggy. One is a tool, the other is a living thing. In a lot of games, horses are not meant to be mere vehicles.

With this consideration, it makes a lot of sense that often, in games, the movement of horses is not nearly so smooth or precision as the movement of your main playable character. Many games are concerned with just this sort of behavior. For example, the recent Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom, and it’s predecessor Breath of The Wild features horses that do not map perfectly to the player’s control stick, the way link does. The horse does not go slow on a slight tilt of the control, nor does it gallop at a full tilt. Rather, Link must gently heel the sides of the horse, much like a rider does to a real horse, to encourage it to pick up speed. In Tears of The Kingdom, there are several ‘levels’ of speed which the player accesses through a set of states that the ‘kick’ button rotates to, and holding back on the control stick encourages the horse to slow down.

Besides that, these horses do not start out friendly to Link. They’re wild, and must be tamed. They may back and panic before they are tamed. The method to calm them is to simply press a button, yet still the player must be attentive to, and respond to the horse’s needs. These things do not facilitate the gameplay of movement, combat, or puzzle-solving which otherwise dominates Zelda‘s play space. Their purpose to give the illusion of life to these horses – temperamental, disobedient, and willful life. On the flip side, the illusion of life can also be a boon to movement gameplay. The Zelda horses, if set on their course, can follow paths and avoid obstacles automatically, as though the horse has a will of its own, allowing the player to occupy themselves with other activity. In this way, the horse is not an extension of the player, but rather a partner.

Link from Ocarina of Time rides his horse, Epona, over the grasslands of Hyrule field. A meter represented by six carrots slowly drains as Link encourages Epona to speed up.

Zelda has long toyed with this sort of behavior.

However, as I alluded, these considerations can also be obstacles to gameplay. Particularly in early Zelda games, the horse Epona would often get stuck on strange geometry. She’d whinny and complain, and at times refuse to move if one attempted to guide her over large tree routes, cliffs, or rough terrain. Zelda horses can never be commanded to jump, for another instances. Epona and her descendants will only jump if approaching certain obstacles like fences. With such loose rules, divorced from player controls, they are prone to errors and discrepancies, like Epona getting stuck on a gate, because she did not approach it at quite the precise angle.

These sorts of bizarre terrain interactions are terribly common for video game mounts. Agro from Shadow of The Colossus is a lovable and friendly free-thinking horse. However, his AI is sensitive to shifts in terrain, and sometimes can get a little mixed up. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is infamous for the ‘Skyrim Horse’. These otherwordly creatures are capable of scaling near-vertical inclines, and if you were around in Skyrim’s heyday you were no doubt subject to one or two horse-terrain interactions that were so bizarre as to totally shatter the fiction and immersion of the game, at least once or twice. It is, admittedly, rather funny.

A knight on a black and white horse stand on a cliffside in the mountains. The horse is standing nearly vertically on a cliff face.

Charming.

When The Horse Is Only Decorative

There is an inverse to this, where horses are not considered as companions in gameplay, or even as vehicles. It is customary in MMORPGS to collect lots of mounts, and usually, the mount is merely a visual flare. It increases your move speed, and nothing else. No new mechanics are imparted, nor does the mount behave in any way like a living thing outside of its animations. Perhaps the mount even allows you to ‘fly’, but generally the ‘flight’ is just a repurposed swimming mechanic, again with the animations switched out. The horse in this instance appears with a button press, and disappears just as easily. In Final Fantasy XIV, presumably to counteract this sense of one’s chocobo riding bird feeling like a prop, among other reasons, you are able to summon it as a companion in combat, aside from its utility in increasing moving speed. World of Warcraft, in its latest expansion as of August 2023 added in new draconic flying mounts whose motion is governed by a more interactive flight and movement system, to better characterized them as living things, and make travel more interesting.

A woman in blue with a white braid whistles, and a giant ostrich-like yellow bird appears suddenly, her now riding it.

I’m faster, and riding it, but I’m not really riding it, you know?

A Peek Behind The Curtain

In MMOs and games like them, mounts usually appear and disappear out of nowhere as needed. However, wherever a mount is introduced, you have to decide how it’s going to be conveyed to the player. The Horse Delivery System, if you will. For Zelda, traditionally Epona is called on some sort of instrument, but what then? The player can potentially leave Epona wherever they want, travel a few miles, and then… what? Do they have to wait for Epona to make their way all the way across the land? Well no, and in fact the game will sometimes not even bother to remember where Epona was. Rather, she will spawn in off-screen, somewhere nearby. The camera will dramatically swing around to give the impression that Epona did travel across the land at the sound of your call, but this is indeed just an illusion – a visual trick.

There is a danger to this, though. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, due to how free the camera is at all times, it is very very trivial to swing your camera around fast, just as your horse appears and see what’s really going on; your horse jarringly winks into existence just where the game thinks it’ll be off-camera. I think many a curious or intuitive player might do this, it may even happen by accident, and it is extremely jarring. It underscores the artificiality of Inquisition‘s horses so much that I never saw them as representations of living creatures again. Besides that, while I’m on the subject, the Inquisition horses are so slow, relatively speaking, so as to not even be worth the enormous amount of screen estate that they demand with their huge bodies. If including a mount in your game, consider the trade offs – especially if implementing life-like features that may hamper control.

A woodland ranger kneels down to pick a lock on a wooden door. Their nearby horse rears up, and slides along the front of the door, in glitchy fashion.

Procedural interaction with terrain is prone to uh… a lot of problems

Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom utilizes stables, which always, magically, are able to summon forth horses registered to the stable system, regardless of where in the world they are left. Otherwise, horses can only be called from a fairly short range, not universally, like the Eponas of old. This is more ‘realistic’ in a way, I suppose, but really just feels like a way to further justify the common use of the stables, and the previous solution was a lot smoother in my opinion. So what other ways are there to get a large quadruped into the play space as the player needs it that isn’t disruptive? Stables are a common solution, such as how chocobo traditionally work in the Final Fantasy games- visit a stable or chocobo farm or chocobo forest, and go off with your mount, which is returned to the stable when left behind. I think the most elegant version of a video game horse, would have a very inventive and elegant way to get the horse into the player’s hands, so to speak.

Gaming’s Most Powerful Horse

So I’ve discussed my love of the strongest apex predator of the mounting animal world before, so I won’t labor the point too much. Torrent from Elden Ring is a very satisfying and reliable game mechanic to use, which allows you to traverse vast distances, engage in mounted combat from the safety of a riding saddle, and engage in combat in entirely new and interesting paradigms as compared to Elden Ring‘s on-foot combat.

A woman with a spear rides a horned steed through shallow waters and over large castle ruins to avoid the breath of a fire-breathing dragon.

Mighty is He.

One interesting thing to note, is that Torrent approaches a lot of the problems I’ve talked about so far by just… not engaging with them at all. For example, many games struggle with how and where the player can call upon their mount. Each game’s individual Horse Delivery System, so to speak. Several games, like Dragon Quest, and certain Zelda games, try to brute force this problem by simply teleporting the horse in on command, trying valiantly to hide the seams of this unnatural action, and mostly failing. Some games, like Zelda: Breath of The Wild and Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom try to smooth over this dissonance by having at least the required use of an in-game stable to summon your horse from anywhere. Torrent does not brute force this particular problem so much as he double-jumps over it. Torrent doesn’t have to appear from anywhere besides just under the player, immediately, whenever they want him, so long as they are outdoors. There’s no need for any transition from off-screen. Our only explanation needed, is that he is a magic horse.

This is reflective of FromSoft’s design philosophy as a whole, which favors gameplay usability over simulation. Which isn’t to say they don’t value immersiveness, but rather that they tend toward verisimilitude over realism. Thus why Torrent has the barest minimum of startup acceleration. The lightest touch of clearance needed for him to turn. Torrent has just the hint of a suggestion of more rigid movement, which creates the convincing illusion of riding a horse, which in this specific case is all that’s needed to sell the fantasy. That leaves a lot of leeway to make Torrent feel really satisfying to use, and create very exciting mounted-combat scenarios with a lot of precision movement. However, there are of course drawbacks – if you’re looking for a game that truly simulates the feel of riding an animal, you’ll not find it here.

A woman with a spear rides a horned steed through shallow water, staring down a fire breathing dragon. Just as it starts to spew flames, the woman and steed hop up a nearby stone, and jump up to run her weapon through the dragon's head, vanquishing it.

And yet, how many video game horses can do THAT!?

Plessie

Okay she’s not a horse, but she is a riding animal – it counts, and the lessons we can take from her implementation will be invaluable to our line of interrogation here. As we’ve been over, video game animals often struggle with the Horse Delivery System. Where and how does the horse appear? What space does the horse take up when not in use? For Torrent it’s ‘he doesn’t’ and ‘none’. Usually, it involves spawning the horse in just off-screen to hide them popping it, with the implication that the horse was totally nearby the whole time and just needed to hear the sound of your voice to come scampering in. Personally, I find this all kind of tedious and momentum-killing. Especially in exciting adventure-time games, which is where you’ll usually see horses, the need to drop everything to navigate a menu or perform some special action feels disruptive to me, which is probably why Torrent is my favorite on this list so far, despite his ‘avoiding the problem’ approach to ‘solving’ this problem. It makes Torrent feel less substantial, and more like a game mechanic than an animal, which is probably why they made him a ‘spirit steed’ in the story.

Mario, in a cat costume, standing on an ice pillar. The camera pans over to the nearby water, and a small, orange plesiosaur emerges from under the waves.

Plessie has no such issues.

Nintendo has proven this problem solvable, as far as I’m concerned. The 2021 re-released of Super Mario 3D World is actually Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury. The latter of which is a bundled open-concept mini-adventure in which Mario explores a vast lake or sea type area to stop the titular Bowser and his Fury from rampaging. The game is separated into a number of islands and shores that require navigating not insignificant portions of water. That’s where Plessie, your erstwhile amphibious companion comes in. Plessie’s movement is good, but pretty standard. She’s not as agile or high-jumping as mario, she can’t turn as hard as him, but she is faster, especially in water. What I find so fascinating about Plessie is how she slots into a Horse Delivery System.

The HDS in Bowser’s Fury has the goal of being as frictionless as possible to Mario’s adventuring. While playing this game, if you notice it, it is almost uncanny. Plessie is consistently, always, just where you need her to be. How does she always know? I suspect there is a number of robust processes happening under the hood, invisibly, to ensure that Plessie is constantly ‘aware’ of Mario and what he’s doing.

Having her be an amphibious aquatic creature is a good hack to start with. She can reposition herself by submerging, and popping up in a new location without the player seeing an discontinuity between the two actions. Secondly, the game is very veeery careful to never allow you to see Plessie pop up out of nowhere. She always emerges from the water, giving the illusion of a plausible physicality to her. Sure, she may literally be teleporting, but it never seems that way – merely that she swims very fast underwater without a mountee. Frequently however, the transition is simply hidden, and Plessie is already in her designated location when the player gets there. There? How does Plessie always know where to be, seemingly in the perfect spot for whenever the player would want to make use of her?

Mario, in a cat costume, checks his map near a shoreline. The map obscures the screen. When the map fades, an orange plesiosaur is waiting at the shoreline to pick up Mario for a ride.

Planning to travel to a new island? Plessie is way ahead of you.

I have a couple of theories on this. Firstly, Nintendo is extremely good at crafting specific player experiences. They will playtest a game into the ground until they know every iteration of every kind of action a player may want to do. Based on the large datasets I’m sure they have, alongside decades of sharpened design instincts, I think they were able to narrow down the likely places players would want to use Plessie. The game will detect when Mario is in proximity to one of these, and have Plessie spawn there, always ready to go. This system is very robust, too! Once, while escaping the very scary Fury Bowser’s fire breath, I jumped Mario over a waterfall – woah! What I didn’t expect was that, in perfect action-movie style, Plessie would appear at the foot of the waterfall, just beneath me, and catch Mario in the nick of time for us to make our daring escape from Bowser. Wild! All without any input from me.

The result of having Plessie out and about on her own in the world, showing up only when needed, gives the impression of an intelligent, loyal animal. Plessie feels so much more like a character with agency because she is making ‘decisions’ alongside you, ‘deciding’ where and when to pop up, as though she is protective of Mario. I think the game may even take Mario’s currently situation into account. Plessie could theoretically emerge anywhere from the water, but during some challenges will not, soas to not be disruptive to the flow of gameplay. I would not be surprised if things like active nearby collectibles, whether Fury Bowser is active, what direction Mario is running, are all tracked and fed into Plessie’s spawn system to determine the most ideal time and place to appear. The result is that you don’t have to think about Plessie until she’s needed, but she still feels like a real animal and not just a game mechanic.

A cat-shaped medallion appears atop a waterfall lined with large block-platforms. Mario, in a cat costume, scampers up the blocks. Suddenly, an orange plesiosaur is at the top of the waterfall waiting, as Mario arrives.

HOW DOES SHE ALWAYS KNOW!?

Horse

I don’t think my ideal land horse has yet appeared in a game. Torrent is my favorite video game horse to play with – his mechanics and movement are the most refined, in my opinion. Plessie is also pretty close, and she can run on land. She will not frequently, however, traverse land without Mario. I do think some of the methods employed to make Plessie feel so loyal and convenient could work on a regular old horse. Given the challenges of placing a horse on land-based geometry though, it would requires some finagling, and perhaps some compromises. A combination of methods could be used. Some horses like Agro from Shadow of The Colossus spawn in from off-screen and appear when called, which is less seamless. I think a combination of the approaches could make something that feel extremely smooth to play, but also reinforces the fantasy of having a living animal companion. If a horse were to appear automatically as the situation demands though, it would require a lot of considerations to avoid having its appearance be disruptive or inappropriate to the flow of gameplay, without Plessie’s advantage of being aquatic.

A creature of contradictions, the video game horse is. An animal companion, but also a gameplay vehicle. Made for ease of traversal over vast distances, but also temperamental, and prone to disruptive interactions with the environment. Often controlled by artificial intelligence, but rarely intelligent. I think my ideal land horse is possible in games. A creature as loyal seamless, and frictionless as plessie, but as strong and fun to use as Torrent, yet also with its own personality and sense of presence like Agro. I’m of the opinion that getting to greater heights such as this, in any area of design, requires learning not just from the best, but also from valiant attempts that didn’t quite succeed – It’s a bit of an ongoing struggle in that sense, a conflict, or a versus, if you will. One day, if we should all be so lucky, we will master the concept of Horse. See you next time.

Link from Zelda: Breath of The Wild plummets to his death, comically tumbling over the side of a cliff with a horse.

How did you tame that wild horse right under my nose?!

Difficulty as Narrative Design – The Emotions That Might Happen When You Fight Sans

I’ve had some stuff on the brain lately, in regards to difficulty’s place in design, which is what tends to happen when you play Elden Ring for so many hours straight. I’ve also been replaying Toby Fox’s Deltarune with a friend, another game that uses difficulty in interesting ways. I’ve had this thought for a while, to do a write up about how difficulty can be, and is, deployed in design to affect the greater experience. This article contains major spoilers for Undertale and mild spoilers for FromSoftware’s Elden Ring.

To be unambiguous here – difficulty is a very nuanced and at times personal subject in design that touches on a host of other things such as game balance, technical depth, general play enjoyment, and of course accessibility. These are very complex subjects that deserve their own discussions. What I’m specifically focusing on in this article is how difficulty can be deployed with purpose, and often has more relevance to the overall design than is often attributed to it, as a simple measure of player competence for the purposes of challenge. I wanted to look at an example of a game where difficulty is an intimate part of its narrative design, where the reactions it illicit is very much a product of how difficulty is utilized.

The idea that difficulty in gameplay can be a narrative tool should be fairly straightforward to grasp when looking at a couple of examples. In Elden Ring, all of your primary boss characters are demigods, children of gods, who once fought over the shards of the titular ring. The demigod Radahn fought his half-sister Malenia to a standstill. Radahn is oft touted as the strongest of all demigods – he holds the stars in stasis by his own power – he takes an entire platoon of elite soldiers in gameplay just to take down! This assertion that Radahn is the strongest remains more or less unchallenged for some time. There are harder bosses, but none that require so much backup to defeat, nor any nearly as hobbled with injury as poor Radahn.

There is a secret and hidden boss, however, another demigod called Malenia, who is still alive. When Radahn is found, Malenia’s power, the same power that has scarred the landscape around Radahn has left him ‘divested of his wits’, and fighting like a wild animal. Malenia, however, is more or less totally lucid, angrily awaiting the return of her missing twin brother and liege lord, Miquella. Malenia has never been in better form – there was nothing stopping her from taking Radahn’s shard of the Elden Ring and yet she did not, so clearly she has no interest in ruling. Indeed her dialogue reinforces the notion that she fought only for loyalty to her brother’s ambitions.

Two warrior women face each other in a lush cavern filled with white flowers. One has red hair and is in golden Valkyrie garb, with a sword. One is in a blue hood, with a spear. The Valkyrie ascends into the air and swings her sword with such ferocity it creates white-hot slashes of air in a blurring flurry around her. The blood-hooded woman runs and rolls around the attacks. — I can practically feel the hairs being shaved off the back of my neck.

Any who’ve fought Malenia will tell you, the idea that Radahn could stand a chance against Malenia in combat, is laughable. They could tell you entirely because of how demanding of a boss she is, how difficult she is tells you the entire story. There’s no possible way she left her encounter with Radahn in defeat, or even in a draw. Her swordsmanship is deadly and near insurmountable, and she hides an even greater power beyond that. She defeated him, and he was left without his senses. She must have left because her brother, the real aspirant to the Elden Ring, went missing. The player will know this intuitively, through experience. They lived it. They will feel it in their bones. Radahn could not have defeated Malenia, and the rest of the story follows. Without Miquella, there would be no reason to collect Radahn’s shard. If you’ve explored the world of Elden Ring thoroughly, this line of thinking is vindicated, as you’ll know Miquella underwent a sudden and shocking disappearance, followed by an extended and secretive absence.

A woman in a blue hood runs her spear through the chest of a taller woman with red hair and golden Valkyrie garb, the stabbed Valkyrie falls onto her back in a pool of blood as the spear is removed. — Difficulty is a marker of power in games, and examining power is essential in stories of conflict

If you’ll indulge me to invoke the first of two quotes from Bennett Foddy, designer of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, a notoriously difficult game.

“The act of climbing, in the digital world or in real life, has certain essential properties that give the game its flavor. No amount of forward progress is guaranteed; some cliffs are too sheer or too slippery. And the player is constantly, unremittingly in danger of falling and losing everything.” – Bennett Foddy

All that said, difficulty is not just a mechanical gameplay consideration. Like all aspects of a game, it is an essential part of the cumulative experience. I am of the opinion that if an obstacle within your narrative is meant to be threatening, formidable, out to kill our dear player character, then the player should get the sense that this force is threatening and formidable. To trivialize it, or deny the sensation that there is an opposing force trying to halt the player’s forward motion, is to render the narrative dishonest, and rob it of its power. If conflict is about power, than difficulty is one of the most genuine ways power can be communicated in an interactive system. This isn’t to say that every game needs extreme challenge, or even that every game with conflict is necessarily trying to create the aforementioned sense of opposing force. This is but one type of experience you might seek to create, a goal your art may aspire to. In fact, this is just one way to deploy difficulty as a mode of narrative design. That brings us to Undertale.

The skeleton Sans stands in a black void, above a battle UI overlay. He says "ready?" then suddenly unleashes a barrage of bones and laser beams to attack the player, represented by a red heart-shaped cursor. — “No.”

In Undertale, the story is persistent – and any runs of the game, even when reset, are remembered and color the experience of playing Undertale going forward in little ways. Death and resetting is diegetic, meaning the player character is literally dying and coming back to life at a previous point in time, within the game’s fiction. In this way failure is kind of inherently tied to the narrative. Undertale comes packaged with a few predefined paths to play that present themselves based on how the player tackles obstacles. Killing monsters casually as they come to confront you will result in one of several ‘neutral’ endings, in which the player’s human character escapes the world of monsters, which is left in varying states of disarray as a result. The ‘pacifist’ run will see the player avoiding lethal violence, and reaching out the hand of friendship to major characters to achieve the best world for everyone. The ‘no mercy’ run is the third and most obscure path, in which not only is lethal force deployed against all obstacles, lethal force is deployed against every potential obstacle, wiping out all monsters in the underground.

To do this, the player has to spend an inordinate amount of time trawling around for enemies to fight. Every single one needs to be killed for the No Mercy ending to hold true. This process is long, repetitive, somewhat dull, and even grueling at times. And yet, it remains an immensely popular way to play this already immensely popular game. There is a purpose to all this consternation, though. I think it pretty noncontroversial to say Undertale‘s ultimate message is one of nonviolence – that the best way to solve conflict is through open communication and a curious, empathic heart. The No Mercy run exists as a counterpoint to this message, to prove its efficacy. Killing everything in Undertale is a pain, frankly. It takes a lot of effort but not necessarily the kind of effort a player seeking challenge might be after. More of that exists along the less violent story routes. No, Undertale is instilling through the avenue of frustration that ‘the easy way out’ isn’t always easy, and while ‘the high road’ isn’t always easy either, it’s a heck of a lot more fun than willful cruelty, which is a continuous and conscious effort on the part of the abuser.

And yet, most playing through will persist. They have buy in, and as Undertale expects, most will be curious enough to want to know what happens next, not in spite of the frustration, but perhaps even because of it. One of Undertale‘s most infamous features is the normally comedic, friendly, and jovial character Sans, who is a bit of an internet meme. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but I think one of them has to be his sudden transformation into the game’s greatest and most stubborn challenge. The boss battle against Sans, with one other exception, is the only real challenge in the No Mercy run, with all other opposition crumpling like paper before the player. The player has not had a ramp up in difficulty in this point, and Sans comes out of the gate swinging with one of the most demanding gameplay experiences in modern popular interactive media. No punches pulled here, Sans is meant to be a brick wall of a boss, one that will have to be worn down with patience if it’s to be cleared at all.

Sans the skeleton stares you down from a black void with a battle UI overlay, as the player's heart-cursor, now blue, jumps across platforms littered with bones. — I have SO MUCH patience right now, you wouldn’t believe. Oh god the patience I have.

Fans of Undertale have such a personal relationship with it, and given its immense popularity that is quite impressive. The player at this point, is acting as an agent within the narrative, separate and apart from their controlled character, Frisk, who ambiguously is either mind-controlled by the player, or influenced by the player subtly to act or fight. Sans tries everything he can to appeal to the player to start over, to do anything but follow through on the path they’re on. He pleads, he appeals to humanity, he threatens, and he even cheats. After each failure, Sans comes up with some new unique dialogue with which to taunt and belittle you for trying. The player can come back as many times as they want to try again, so words and his ability to act as an immovable object are Sans’s only real forms of power over you. The ironclad stubbornness of this encounter, the unerring, unflinching confidence in its unreasonableness makes it feel real, like Sans is a thinking actor specifically trying to get under your skin, and make your goal unreachable, and that is what makes it feel personal.

Sans the skeleton says, "sounds strange, but before all this i was secretly hoping we could be friends. i always thought the anomaly was doing this cause they were unhappy. and when they got what they wanted, they would stop."

He then fires a bevy of skull-shaped laser cannons at the player's red cursor. — Oh. Kind of makes me feel bad I’m trying so hard to kil- OH GOD LASERS

Sans isn’t trying to kill you – he knows that is beyond his power. He’s trying to wear you down, to frustrate you, to bore you, whatever it takes to make you give up on your killing spree, and maybe start over, or even give up. The story was very carefully set up to make this a legitimate way to cap off the narrative. In Undertale, the story is persistent – and any runs of the game, even when reset, are remembered and color the experience of playing Undertale going forward in little ways. In Undertale, giving up and starting over is a legitimate and designed-for chapter of the narrative.

The skeleton Sans sends an onslaught of bones and laser beams at the player's heart-shaped cursor, turned blue now. After a moment he sends the blue heart careening into a deadly maze of bones as it flies against its will to the right side of the screen. — What a reasonable amount of garbage that can instantly kill me, on the screen, all at once

Giving up can mean a new beginning, a world where the player is not a force for destruction and misery, but a force for change and friendship. Whenever I play Undertale, I love to play the part of the sinister player destroying the world and its inhabitants for callous entertainment (and in a way, I truly am that), but then our protagonist, Frisk, overtaken by sorrow after killing Sans, is able to wrestle back control and ease me into a more peaceful, and ultimately more fulfilling world. I’ll play a No Mercy run just up until I’ve killed Sans, and no further. I’ll then roleplay the regretful monster, the powerful demon whose lost everything, and has no more mountains to conquer. From there I return, back to the beginning of the game, anew with a desire to learn and try again. Undertale makes failure an avenue for learning and improving at the game yes, but also a potential narrative moment of fulfillment.

I love this scenario. It creates a full arc for me, as the will and intention of the player character Frisk, to go through. It’s a rich narrative that unfolds entirely through gameplay that I get to be a part of. That’s the real magic of difficulty in games for me, it’s something entirely unique to the medium, a level of interactivity other forms of art simply cannot achieve. Sans is blisteringly difficult, to the point that he may even feel antagonistic to the human behind the screen. But the game isn’t trying to punish you, nor look down on you, it’s trying to play with you. It is a game, after all. It is interactive theater, a stage show where you are the star. And maybe just maybe you’ll get something valuable out of the experience.

“Death and rebirth, trying and overcoming—we want that cycle to be enjoyable. In life, death is a horrible thing. In play, it can be something else.“-Hidetaka Miyazaki

You are meant to be along for this emotional ride through joy, through sorrow, through fear, through love, through distress, and yes, through frustration. It’s a frustrating thing to be denied passage, to face an opposing force that’ll do everything in it’s power to stop you. If the art is to be evocative, it may be necessary to instill that sense of frustration. I will deploy the second of two Bennett Foddy quotes, as I admire the way he puts it;

“What’s the feeling like? Are you stressed? I guess you don’t hate it if you got this far, feeling frustrated. It’s underrated. An orange, a sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel. That’s not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness. It’s coffee, it’s grapefruit, it’s licorice.” – Bennett Foddy

Sans the skeleton sleeps, standing up, in the center of a screen with a battle UI. A red heart-shaped cursor moves over to the UI button labeled "FIGHT". A slashing effect moves toward Sans, but he slides out of the way and begins to speak, but is cut off by a second attack, which leaves a violent gash across his chest. — Frustration and loss isn’t just a roadblock to joy and catharsis, it’s an essential part of the whole.

Frustration is not the opposite of fun. I think the runaway success of games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Undertale, games that very much use frustration as feature of their storytelling, are strong evidence of this. There are hosts of games that follow similar patterns. When you play and watch people play difficult games as much as I do, you begin to notice that not only is frustration not a deterrent to the fun for most, it often accompanies the highest highs of player’s positive emotional reactions. Art is not a vehicle for merely delivering joy and nothing else. Life is a rich tapestry of a variety of emotions, and if art is to speak truth, then I think it’s worth considering how best to accurately reflect that. I’ve been talking a lot about feelings and emotional reaction, and I can’t overstate how subjective such things can be. You’re walking a fine line when utilizing traditionally negative emotions such as frustration to tell a story. As I said before, difficulty is a very nuanced and complex topic and this is just one aspect of it, one feature of difficulty to consider when configuring the shape of the experience you want to create. Difficulty can be used to tell and legitimize interactive narrative in a very profound way. That said, not all games need to, and by no means should they, take the same shape. Knowing how best to achieve the goals of your design starts with understanding your goals, and understanding the tools at your disposal.

Sans the skeleton sleeps soundly, standing up, in the center of a screen with a battle UI overlay.

You have something called ‘determination.’ So as long as you hold on… so as long as you do what’s in your heart… I believe you can do the right thing…

The Evolving Boss Design of Elden Ring: Godrick The Grafted

Yes, yet another FromSoft post. In my defense, Elden Ring, 2022’s action RPG release, and FromSoftware’s foremost foray into the open world game format is impossibly large, and has proven just as impossible to keep out of my head. Boss battles, with their big climactic set pieces and heightened sense of challenge have always been FromSoft’s bread and butter when it comes to their contemporary era of action games. It seems these games are constantly pushing the envelope of how grotesquely deadly these big baddies can be. The opening boss battles of Elden Ring are a strong showing, coming in with all the bombast, shock, and awe that I’ve come to expect, but I did notice something – a subtle shift in the design for the likes of Margit The Fell Omen and the first major ‘chapter boss’, so to speak, Godrick The Grafted. This new design direction seems to carry forward with the rest of the bosses of the game, so I really wanted to talk about it.

In a castle courtyard, a huge man made of many limbs grotesquely frankenstein'd together swings his axe above his head, summoning gusts of wind upon which he rings up into the air, then slams his axe down on a thief, who dodges out of the way.

For those unfamiliar, combat in FromSoft RPGs generally can be broken down like this; The boss has a pool of attacks and moves from which they will select their action, reactive to the player character’s position relative to themselves. A dragon may swing its tail if the player is behind them, or breath fire if the player is standing at a distance, and such. In response, the player has a number of options including blocking with their shield, moving out of the way of the attack, or avoiding damage with the dodge roll maneuver, which gives the player a brief window of invincibility. The dodge roll is very very powerful, and potentially frees up a hand that would otherwise be occupied with a shield, so the player can two-hand a more powerful weapon, or offhand a second weapon. As such, the dodge roll is traditionally the player’s greatest tool of avoiding harm while they look for punishes, brief windows in which a boss cannot counterattack. These punishes happen when the end of a boss’s action animation precludes them from taking another action for a brief moment. The recoil of swinging a huge axe, for example.

Traditionally, FromSoft RPGs like Dark Souls and the like have a very powerful strategy when it comes to fighting bosses – getting behind them. Though even as far back as Demon’s Souls, many enemies were equipped with back-facing attacks meant to dissuade players from becoming too comfortable back there, the caveat was generally that these back-facing attacks were a lot more manageable than many of the front-facing ones, so circle strafing enemies remained a pretty dominant strategy in most situations, all the way up to Dark Souls 3, with some exceptions, but we’ll get to that.

When I first fought the major boss Godrick The Grafted I found myself failing and dying. A lot. To be expected of the infamously difficult FromSoft RPGs, right? Well sure, but Godrick is a very early game boss, so I had to rethink my approach. Surely the first major boss couldn’t be that difficult. Godrick’s fight is split into two phases, though both operate generally the same. He has a large pool of attack options, but I’ll mention some of the most common ones. First he has what I’ll call his basic attack combo, which he prefers to use on players that are standing medium-close to him, in front of him. It starts with a very slow axe swing to teach players to rely on their eyes for dodge cues, not just prediction, as aggressive predictions tend to result in early dodge rolls that are punished by such slow attacks. He’ll then follow up this axe swing with a series of swipes of his arms and axe, using a combo of variable length. If the player disengages, the combo stops at two attacks, but continues for up to four attacks if the player stays close.

In a castle courtyard, a huge man made of many limbs grotesquely frankenstein'd together brings his axe down on a thief, who ducks and dodges toward the arc of the axe swing, avoiding harm, but getting hit by the grotesque man's swinging arm, just as the thief is standing up. — The hitbox of this move is designed very specifically to catch players getting too close.

This attack presented a bit of a problem for my muscle memory. The dominant strategy of old in Dark Souls was to ‘dodge through’ enemy attacks. If you got the timing right, the invincibility of the dodge roll could carry you through the hitbox of an enemy sword swing, and the best way to do this would be to dodge into the arc of the swing, toward the direction it’s coming from. This minimizes the time your player character and the enemy hitbox intersect, making a successful dodge more likely. This results in a lot of getting behind enemies and proverbially hugging them up close. Try this on many of Godrick’s moves, however, and he’ll have a hasty response.

The better maneuver is to out-range Godrick, and dodge away from him as he attacks, dodging or moving toward him only to punish his openings, although these can be difficult to judge at first because he has so many followups. Remember how I said his basic attack has a variable length? Many many of Elden Ring‘s baddies have followups like that, contingencies to account for the different places the player might be standing to avoid harm, so sometimes what you think is a punishable opening on a boss is simply not.

In a castle courtyard, a huge man made of many limbs grotesquely frankenstein'd together wildly swings his axe at a thief, as the thief sprints away, out of his reach. — Dodging this attack with rolls is theoretically possible, but so high-risk as to be ill-advised

Godrick’s ‘big swing’ attack, as I like to call it, happens when he rears up his axe with both hands slowly, giving the player ample time to reposition themselves in response. This attack has five very large swings, some of which hit in nearly 360 degrees. They’re also very deadly, making standing up close to him equally as deadly. This attack is very punishable, but only at the end of its run. Godrick has a lot of attacks like this, such has his whirlwind, which not only nudges players away in a circle around him with a bit of damage, but is immediately followed by one of two attacks that very difficult to distinguish without the full picture, and dodging the wrong one could mean taking a big hit. A lot of Godrick’s and many Elden Ring enemies’ moves are like this. They are of variable length, and potentially can sweep the player up in a very long combo. It’s not that getting behind a boss is impossible, it’s just not very safe.

Another feature worth mentioning, is the stagger system, somewhat borrowed from Sekiro. All enemies have an invisible value that is diminished when they take a hit, but constantly regenerates over time. If this value hits a certain minimum, the enemy will stagger, and become open to a critical attack. Due to its nature, and the many variables that go into it, this value can be somewhat unpredictable, especially as it is not displayed anywhere, unlike in Sekiro. Previous FromSoft RPGs had systems like this, though they were less powerful, only allowing an extra hit or two when enemies stagger, rather than a chance for big damage. Since the exact moment a boss will stagger is so unpredictable, the best thing to do is to just keep up the pressure, to increase your likelihood of getting a stagger, which naturally makes Elden Ring combat more aggressive and high-tension.

In a castle courtyard, a huge man made of many limbs grotesquely frankenstein'd together leaps into the air riding on a whirlwind and slams his axe down, but his target, a thief, dodges out of the way, then stabs his exposed body several times, causing the hulking man to gush blood, and fall onto his knees. — Whenever a stagger does occur, it creates a rewarding moment of catharsis

Frequently, if you do manage to get behind Godrick he’ll roll out of the way, and quickly prepare another attack. This often results in taking a hit, and disrupts your ability to consistently damage Godrick, meaning you’re less likely to stagger him with this route.

In a castle courtyard, a huge man made of many limbs grotesquely frankenstein'd together rolls away from a thief as the thief positions himself behind the hulking man. As he finishes rolling, the man swings his arms at the thief. — Godrick is quick to respond to unfavorable positioning.

So what’s going on here? Why do the bosses in Elden Ring feel so different? I think I know. It seems to me that a major design goal for the bosses of Elden Ring ties into that verisimilitude I talked about when discussing Sekiro. FromSoft wanted fights in this game to feel more genuine, to reduce the friction between the gameplay and narrative of a life-and-death fight. In a real fight, you’d expect there to be a lot less dancing around opponents and a lot more squaring up, staring them down face-to-face, standing opposite one another as you trade blows. As such, everything about Godrick’s boss design makes him equipped to enforce that scenario. Getting behind him is dangerous, standing too close is dangerous, all defined by Godrick’s particularly designed behavior.

In a castle courtyard, a huge man made of many limbs grotesquely frankenstein'd together takes his own battle axe and slams it into his other arm, screaming all the while, before succeeding in cutting it off, the end of his arm landing bloodily in the foreground. — Extremely normal behavior.

Between a much broader repertoire of tools at his disposal for hitting players at any angle, the ability to quickly reposition himself, and a much more unpredictable, variable moveset that adapts in length and reach to player positions in real-time, fighting Godrick the old way is much less viable. When players have to rethink their approach, they’ll likely come to a similar conclusion I did; the safest place to fight Godrick is in front of him, at a decent distance, where they can see his attacks clearly, and where dodging is less likely to be a death sentence. Compare Godrick to an early boss from the first Dark Souls game.

A rotund demon in a crumbling ruin swings a mighty hammer at a thief, he dodges the swing and rolls behind the demon with ease. The demons stands there for a moment, then swings his hammer feebly in front of him, unable to reach the thief. — Godrick would have killed me three times by now.

Notice how completely unable the asylum demon is to respond to my parking behind his rump. The Asylum demon does have an attack that can reach behind him, but it is exceptionally easy to dodge, with a huge slow windup. Also, it’s only just the one. Outside of trying to butt-stomp the player, the asylum demon really has no options. He can’t reposition himself either. Godrick, on the other hand, can… slam the ground to create a large earthquake in a circle around him, quickly whip up a whirlwing that knocks nearby players way, jump into the air to reposition himself and attack simultaneously, roll away to a more advantageous position, initiate his 5-hit super combo, etc.

Sped-up footage of a thief continuously circling around a large demon, standing behind him as the demon fumbles to try and attack the thief, in an old dimly lit ruin. — Yep, it pretty much just goes like this.

The old way of fighting bosses in Dark Souls was, and still is, fun. Some of the most fun I’ve had in a video game, but FromSoft isn’t a developer to rest on their laurels. The evolution of their boss design seems to be working more and more to create a believable experience with a strong sense of weight and presence. Verisimilitude is a major priority, but not only that, there are a lot of important advantages to designing bosses this way. For one, the player will be able to admire and appreciate the art of the boss they are fighting a lot more from a nice, framed, middle-distance shot, than from standing between their legs (depending on the boss, and the player, I guess..). The clearer framing also makes reading enemy telegraphs a lot clearer and easier. If a player is rightfully standing behind a boss because it’s the safest approach, camera zoomed up way close, they might understandably become frustrated by attacks they cannot see, and won’t determine the reason, succeeding by their strategy in the end, but having less fun in the process. Since so many of a boss’s attacks are triggered by the player position, having the player spend so much time in an awkward position may result in them not even seeing the boss’s coolest most impressive attacks, diminishing the entire set piece.

It seems FromSoft has been working toward this goal of the ‘squared off, face-to-face’ boss battle as a default for a long time. As far back as Dark Souls 2, we saw evidence of this. It is very popular to complain about the enemies’ ability in that game to track the player’s position with their attacks, meaning the enemy’s entire model actively rotates to align itself with player position, making circle strafing a weaker strategy. This worked to an extent, but also was pretty transparently artificial. People really just don’t move that way, spinning on their heel to align the swinging of their arms in a way that defied physics, so much so that my friends and I had taken to calling the process the ‘ballerina twirl’. Bloodborne reduced the ballerina twirling quite a bit, making up for it by giving the player a tool which made squaring up with bosses a lot safer – an extremely powerful frontal parry. Since the player needed their enemies to attack them from the front to succeed in a parry, it became a much more desirable spot to stand. The backstab of Bloodborne, being so slow, also meant circling around was suitable for stealth, but less suitable for active combat. Dark Souls 3 introduced a lot of the standard for how attacks are shaped in these games; big sweeping things that sometimes make as much as 360 degrees around the boss a danger zone. That game also introduced a lot of the adaptability and variability of enemy move-sets that made them more equipped to react to players constantly trying to get behind them.

This new design direction seems to have culminated in Sekiro, which was developed alongside Elden Ring. In Sekiro, parrying is everything, so enemies had to constantly be positioning themselves and the player into a squared off position. A lot of strategies employed to accomplish this seem to have carried over to Elden Ring, adapted to account for the lack of a strong parry, of course. The behavior of Sekiro‘s largest bosses is rather reminiscent of Elden Ring bosses. I can’t say I dislike this new direction FromSoft is taking its boss design. Godrick is a fun and exciting challenge, and one I actually got to see visually in its full glory! Just while recording footage for this post, I was struck by how consistently beautiful and exciting the action looked in motion, so by my estimation the efforts to make fights in Elden Ring feel more genuine, worked.

A hunched, cloaked figure gently caresses the face of a skewered dragon carcass in a castle courtyard. A close up of the figure reveals a six fingered hand.

…And one day, we’ll return together …to our home, bathed in rays of gold…

Torrent of Elden Ring: Gaming’s Most Powerful Horse

My god, so that Elden Ring huh? Certainly has given me a lot to chew on. There are any number of topics I want to write about on that game eventually, from the new approach to boss design, to the integration of more summoned NPCs, the nuances of the tweaked melee combat, the expanded magic toolset, to how the open world has changed the way enemy encounters are designed. So I had to narrow it down, and I want to talk about one of the game’s most prominent new features and a major marketing point of the game – the presence of a horse and mounted combat.

I’ve wanted to, for a while now, do a write up on game design’s strange and somewhat hilarious history with mounted riding animals in a broader sense, but Elden Ring‘s local speedy boy Torrent has given me cause to talk about the ways Fromsoft has distinguished mounted combat and movement specifically. There are a lot of really cool design choices I’ve noticed that went into making Torrent a beast on the battlefield, with combat that feels as good as any of Fromsoft’s previous unmounted offerings. Here are just a few.

Don’t Forget, We’re Playing a Video Game

When I say ‘we’re playing a video game’ I don’t mean to say that player immersion and realism needs to go out the window. Kind of the opposite, actually. I feel like the tendency in some games is to put a lot of physics and terrain based restrictions on how player characters move. Maybe in the name of realism, maybe in the name of feeling cinematic, but often this approach leads to characters that control like tanks, ultimately creating more friction between the player and the experience, not less. My preference is to make the character controlling process as smooth as possible.

Torrent is a horse, and the design makes considerations to make his control feel more like a horse. He doesn’t stop on a dime. He’s got some acceleration and deceleration to him. He can’t turn on a dime, he needs space to swivel his rear around when you about face. Thing is, he doesn’t need that much space, and he doesn’t take that long to reach full speed or come to a stop. Torrent has movement limitations, but only barely enough to convince you he’s moving a like a horse. Fromsoft put the utmost priority into making sure he just moves smoothly, minimizing friction. Even given the very minor limitations placed on mounted movement to give the impression of riding a horse, enough to reinforce verisimilitude, these are somewhat circumvented by the presence of a double jump!

A warrior astride a horned horse leaps over brush and rocks as they ride across a field. To jump over a tree, the horse gains additional height with a spectral magic circle in midair. — Imagine animals actually being able to navigate their environment. Incredible.

Yes, the horse can double-jump, completely redirecting his momentum in midair, enhancing the length and height of his jump in the process. Torrent doesn’t turn as hard as the player can on foot, but he can totally reorient himself by jumping. This mechanic is in place for several very important reasons. First, Torrent is an exploration tool and Elden Ring is filled with very precarious drops and complex terrain geometry. Something a lot of other games featuring horses have stumbled on is how damn incompatible the mounts are with their own game world. Lots of video game horses can move fast, but can’t go anywhere. A glut of limitations on mounted movement can make it too specialized and niche, not versatile enough to be used often.

Torrent doesn’t feel like a second entity your player is fighting to control, but rather an extension of themselves. In that way Torrent is treated more like a vehicle. It’s a compromise, in that this perhaps distances the design from the realism of riding a horse, but for the design goals they were trying to meet, it makes a lot of sense. Those design goals being, that riding Torrent needs to serve as a distinct combat style that feels as seamless and satisfying as grounded combat, an extension of Elden Ring‘s primary gameplay mode.

A Horse Is Much Faster Than You

This is a weird one to see not fulfilled so many times. Part of what makes Torrent so successful as a mount is that he is just a lot more maneuverable than you, the human player. He’s a horse; he can move at like double your top speed. I’ve played an astounding number of games with mounts that don’t feel all that much faster than just walking. The double jump plays into this too. Torrent has horns as well, kind of giving him the impression of a mountain goat, which communicates his exquisite climbing ability. Mountains, cliffs, and ravines are common obstacles in Elden Ring‘s world of the Lands Between. Distinguishing Torrent with his much more robust set of movements for dealing with such obstacles proves his worth to the player, and was very important in cementing his place in the game.

Torrent Isn’t Made of Paper

For a number of reasons, video game horses are often not equipped for combat. Perhaps the game simply does not have a design for mounted combat. Perhaps the design does not account for a constant companion that would throw off the game’s design. Maybe they just thought it’d be awkward if you constantly had a horse following you, biting and kicking goblins. Whatever the reason, horses in games often wind up very weak. Ride them off a two-foot-high outcropping and they crumple like they’re made of paper mache. Get jumped by a dragon, and you’re never seeing that horse again.

First of all, Torrent can fall very very far without issue. He needs to navigate complex environments with a lot of versatility and if he was constantly dying from underneath the player, it just would not be workable. Torrent has knees of steel, and can bound off of cliffs with ease.

A warrior astride a horned horse jump off of a cliff from grassland into a shallow lake. The horse lands gracefully and harmlessly. — Oh no no NO NOT OFF THE CLIFF oh- oh never mind, we’re fine.

What’s more, Torrent is meant to be used in combat, and thus can take a hit or two. In fact, he’s quite a bit more sturdy than even the player. Riding Torrent is a very safe place to be, gameplay wise. He can even take hits for you, depending on the angle of attack. To counteract this big advantage, riding Torrent is given a specific risk. You can take a lot of hits, but if you are knocked off of Torrent, either by losing your balance, or if Torrent dies, you are sprawled onto the ground and left very vulnerable. Re-summoning Torrent will require taking a moment and possibly sacrificing some healing resources.

A warrior astride a horned horse pass in front of a gray dragon, which angrily bites at the duo, drawing blood. The horse stumbles, but quickly composes itself and rides on, warrior still in tow. — Good God this horse is built different.

We’re Just Not Bothering With The Idle Problem

This one is funny to me, but I respect it. If you’ve played a video game with a horse you’ve seen it. The world’s jankiest implementation of entity spawning known to man. I’ve legitimately played a AAA game where I’ve seen a horse pop into existence upon use of the ‘horse summon’ button. The problem is, what do you do with mounted animals when they’re idling, not being ridden? Do they just run off somewhere? What’s the visual of that? How is the horse summoned and where does it come from? Does the horse exist in real-time, meaning it stays where you leave it until you come to pick it up? Torrent kind of just… double-jumps over this problem entirely. When summoned, he appears underneath your player in an instant, and disappears just as instantly when dismissed. Sometimes, the realism of a thing isn’t worth the headache. Torrent works better if his presence is never in question, so it just isn’t.

The side-benefit of this is that Elden Ring can switch between its two combat modes, mounted and on-foot on the fly and seamlessly. Torrent is always available outdoors if you need him. You can even ride Torrent into battle and jump off for a cool dismounting attack.

In a shallow lake dotted with dead trees, a lone warrior whistles on her fingers, summoning a horse that phases out of spectral energy beneath her as she mounts up, and rides toward a large gray dragon in the distance. — Man, I love not even having to think about what stupid stuff Torrent’s Horse AI would get up to.

As Above So Below

This is a straightforward idea, but one that implies a lot of extra work in creating game assets. While mounted, the player is allowed to use basically any attack they can use while unmounted. Making the mounted combat feel seamless and parallel to unmounted combat was very important for Elden Ring, so a lot of extra animation and frame data was created to ensure the player’s preferred weapon and spells were available to them while mounted on Torrent as well.

Combat As a Spatial Problem

As I’ve said before, action combat is mostly all about relative spatial relationships between player and hazard. Where a player is standing when an enemy attacks determines if damage is dealt, etc. A friend of mine pointed out that video games are and have always been, very very good at mapping spatial problems, and with this in mind, real-time combat can often be boiled down to very elaborate spatial problem. Elden Ring‘s mounted combat leans hard into this concept. Normally, combat in Elden Ring and other action RPGs from Fromsoft centers majorly around the dodge roll mechanic, in which well timed button pressed can impart a moment of invincibility that can be used to circumvent damage regardless of positioning, although positioning remains important due to the invincibility window’s briefness.

Torrent does not have a dodge with invincibility frames, this seems to have been the main thrust of distinguishing mounted combat in Eldren Ring from its on-foot counterpart. There are other key differences, of course, but they all seem to revolve around this one major change. Having no iframes on Torrent changes the way one approaches combat immensely. ‘Rolling into’ attacks, so to speak, such that when a dodge roll ends, the enemy’s attack has already moved past the player’s position, is a fundamental strategy normally. But now, keeping your distance is a player’s best method for not getting hit. Since Torrent can’t dodge in the way the player can unmounted, dodging attacks becomes entirely a matter of positioning. In place of a dodge, Torrent has a dash which gives him a quick burst of speed, useful for getting player-seeking projectiles off your tail or outmaneuvering other mounted combatants. So you’re encouraged to always disengage after riding up to an enemy to hit them.

Dead serious, fighting this dragon is an all time great achievement of experiential design

The result of this simple change is that combat much more resembles a series of ride-bys where the player rides up to their foe, hits them quickly, then circles behind or gets out of their reach in some way. There’s a lot of two horses riding past each other in a sort of joust… kind of like how mounted combat actually works, or at least how one might imagine it works! There’s that verisimilitude again! Dang. By removing this seemingly essential tool, Fromsoft has reinforced a method of gameplay that resembles what they are trying to simulate, brilliant! When you can’t dodge with invincibility, you have to outmaneuver danger, and that means riding around and past enemies like you’re an actual mounted cavalry, you can’t just stand squared up to your foe and hit them without expecting to get hit back, and thus you are encourage to be constantly on the move, kind of like you’re on a riding animal. Dang. It just keeps fitting together, doesn’t it?

A warrior astride a horned horse gallop in the foreground as brush and trees rush by, a dragon in the background flies across the sky raining down fire narrowly outpaced by the mounted warrior and his companion. — No amount of rigid unresponsive tank controls would have made this moment feel more cinematic

So this is all well and good, but Elden Ring is an extremely three-dimensional game with a lot of danger happening, left, right, center, up, and down all the time. Torrent needed another tool to avoid damage. Dang, he already has one we’ve talked about, doesn’t he? The damn horse can double-jump. Torrent’s extreme level of vertical maneuverability makes awareness of enemy attacks even more essential, and some can be completely circumvented with well placed and timed jumps. Very little in this, or any video game feels as instantly exhilarating as jumping over a dragon’s flaming gullet, the camera pulled way out to capture the action. Forget harshly limited controls that make characters feel more ‘realistic’ or ‘cinematic’. No, good gameplay can do that just as well.

A warrior astride a horned horse runs up on a large gray dragon in a shallow lake as it begins to breath fire, the horse runs up a large rock and bounds into the air, over the dragon's head. The warrior skewers it with a spear, cutting off the fire breathe and felling the beast. The two ride out, then come to a stop as the words "GREAT ENEMY FELLED" appear. — WOW! Someone get this horse an apple and some sugar cubes.

So yeah. Elden Ring impresses on a number of fronts, but it’s easily got the best mounted combat I’ve ever played. Not that I’ve played a huge number of mounted combat games, but riding Torrent is just as engaging as fighting enemies on foot, which is kind of impressive. The riding in and out to swipe enemies in the side as I pass, jumping over dragons, and covering great distances as I bound over cliffs, it’s all very exciting. Rarely have I had just a smooth experience with mounted animals in games. Fighting that dragon? Almost indescribable how elated I was, to fight a dragon that felt like it had an appropriate sense of danger, scale, and gravitas. Couldn’t have done it without you Torrent, here’s to many more adventures in the Lands Between.

Torrent has chosen you. Treat him with respect…

Boss Breakdown: Bloodborne’s Blood-Starved Beast

You step into a large chapel overgrown with sickly vines and eerily empty, save for one hunch-over figure at the back, nearest the chapel shrine. It stalks toward you like an animal as its boss music kicks in, and you’re introduced to its name: Blood-Starved Beast. The Blood-Starved beast is a mid-game boss in FromSoft’s action RPG Bloodborne. Though technically optional to complete the game, Blood-Starved is centrally located, and gatekeeps one of the game’s major features; the chalice dungeons. It is thus likely to be a boss that most players encounter toward the start of Bloodborne‘s mid-game. This malnourished and emaciated figure fights with the ferocity of a starved predator, and its design backs up this idea while also serving appropriate functions within the overall experience of Bloodborne.

A hunter in a long black coat and tricorn hat pushes through a wall of fog into a run down stone chapel, lined with columns and torches. A lone figure, on all fours, slowly trudges toward the hunter from the distant shrine of the chapel. — FromSoft really knows how to set the scene

My philosophy when it comes to design, and especially in regards to big set-piece combat encounters like this is to reinforce the overall feel and experience of the game. It’s one of the reasons I so admire FromSoft’s design ethos overal.. Bloodborne, at this point in its story, is a visceral gothic horror about hunting horrible, bloody beasts. It’s gritty, it’s guttural, and it’s dangerous. The blood-starved beast begins to reinforce Bloodborne‘s overall aesthetics and feel from the moment you see its visual design. It’s a hunched-over, somewhat skeletal, feral humanoid figure with large portions of its skin bloodily peeled from its back, and draped over its head like a shawl. It’s a gruesome sight that reflects the environments and tone of Bloodborne. It fights with a hunter’s aggression, homing in on the player with a ravenous intent, keeping the fight high-intensity. The Blood-Starved beast is a quintessential representation of Bloodborne‘s hunt. It’s bloody, it’s animalistic, brutal, and imminently deadly.

A hunter in a long black coat and tricorn hat runs at a semi-humanoid skeletal beast, who charges at him on all fours, before wildly swiping at the air with large claws. — This thing’s animations and attacking pacing create a frantic sense of danger

Blood-Starved’s sense of danger is essential to making its fight come together. It needs to feel as though this thing could rip out your throat at any moment, a violent, unstable, rabid animal. This is most embodied in its grab attack, which does a huge amount of damage and can potentially kill a player outright. Highly lethal attacks like this are a favorite of FromSoft’s design to establish the threat of their enemies, and keep them oppressive. The ever-present looming promise of an attack that can potentially outright end the fight in a game over keeps the player on their guard, and shores up the tension. That said, such attacks can feel cheap and unfair if not handled carefully. If an attack is extremely deadly, best practice is keep it predictable and telegraphed, so if the player does fail to avoid it, they don’t feel as though they were blindsided, and the mechanic remains one of skill in the player’s mind, not a random vector of bad luck. The Blood-Starved Beast assumes a very particular posture, it’s normally gyrating and animated movements become still, and focused, it’s arms almost exactly shoulder-width apart in an even stance. This stance really stands out once you know to look for it, rewarding close observation of the boss, which is a standard for FromSoft enemy encounter design, something they are very much always looking to reinforce.

A hunter in a long black coat and tricorn hat strikes a vaguely humanoid skeletal beast with an overhead swing of a large battleaxe. The beast reels, but then assumes a steady, wide stance, before leaping at the hunter, who barely dodges out of the way. — After the first axe strike, you can see the beast assume this very still, square stance, a clear telegraph for its deadly grab attack, seen here missing the player.

On the more usual and rote side of things, the Blood-Starved Beasts’s primary attacks almost exclusively are aimed in front of it, and they have very little player tracking, meaning just a bit of movement will move the player out of danger. If the player moves too far away, however, the beats will initiate a Dashing attack that covers a lot of ground, to reset the neutral positions of the fight. These patterns, while predictable and simplistic, create the very strong spacial dynamics of the fight.

Blood-Starved’s quick attacks and short response time make it dangerous to approach, and risky to engage in close combat. As an early-to-mid-game boss, Blood-Starved functions to help really cement the player’s skillset and prepare them for the steeper challenges that are to come, and it does so by emphasizing Bloodborne‘s parry mechanic, in which players shoot an oncoming attacker with a firearm just before being hit, stunning the enemy and preparing them for a visceral counter-attack. It’s a powerful option that can carve through enemy health bars quickly, and will remain useful throughout the rest of the game, so Blood-Starved really pushes the player to master this. Its attacks are fast but reactable, wide-reaching but mostly short-ranged, perfect for being parried by the player’s firearm. If the player utilizes the parry and visceral attack, the difficulty of the Blood-Starved Beast can be curbed to a great degree, rewarding mastery of the skill.

A hunter in a long black coat and tricorn hat is attacked by a vaguely humanoid skeletal beast who swings with its immense claws horizontally, striking the hunter just as he blasts the beast with a flintlock pistol. The beast reals from the gunshot, so the hunter grabs it by the neck, and violently rips out a gush of fluid, sending the beast flying onto its back. — Even though the player takes damage here, he is able to rally all of his health back thanks to a well-timed, aggressive parry, while grievously harming the boss to boot.

Later on in the fight, The Blood-Starved Beast will start to string a long series of attacks together. With a maneuver like this, the beast is more likely to get some licks in, to give players more opportunity to leverage the health-restoring rally system, which rewards reprising attackers. It also punishes a lack of attention paid. Once the attack begins to hit a player, it is not difficult to disjoint with a dodge so the remaining hits miss, but being caught unaware could mean quickly and drastically losing health. There is one more feature to this attack though, which is that, since it’s a rapid series of strikes it makes parrying it very easy. A lot of times FromSoft will employ rapid attacks like this that seem very intimidating, but realizing how parrying works – that it requires player input to intersect with a certain part of an enemy’s attack animation, means knowing that if you try to parry one of these rapid attacks you are very likely to succeed, as the enemy’s ‘vulnerable’ animation is flashing past over and over again, and it only needs to be snagged by your parry attempt once. As I supposed this boss is meant to greatly reinforce the use of Bloodborne‘s parry, I suspect this is one of the primary reasons for the presence of this attack, a reliable parry opportunity. It’s a powerful attack, but it can be turned against the beast, with an equal and opposite counter.

At the same time, Blood-Starved maintains the standard formula of FromSoft’s boss design through a moveset that reinforces spacing and timing. If the player is unable to master the parry mechanic, Blood-Starved is surmountable through diligent use of spacing. Fast yet telegraphed melee attacks make engaging with it directly from the front infeasible without parrying, so circling around behind can be effective. The boss’s preferred response to this is to create distance between itself and the player, which effectively sets up for it’s leaping grab attack or dashing slash attack, both of which require precise timing to avoid. This makes the boss feel proactive and responsive to the player’s actions, while ensuring player’s are unlikely to escape the battle without seeing their enemy’s most deadly attacks. Circle strafing it is an effective tactic, but not one that carries no risk. In a game that relies so much on its atmosphere, this illusion of a thinking and responsive agent behind enemy AI is essential.

A hunter in a long black coat and tricorn hat steps to the side as a vaguely humanoid skeletal beast tries to bite him. He responds with a strong vertical swing of his battle axe. — The best mainly will attack forward and in front of itself, making circle-strafing very effective

Once The Blood-Starved beast has taken significant enough damage, it will begin the first of two phase transitions, marked by a screeching roar it lets loose. Starting in phase 2, its attacks will now apply poison to the player. The addition of poison to the fight accomplishes two things. One, it ramps up the tension and danger of the encounter. If you’re hit by the beast too many times, even if you’ve got enough healing to recover from the damage, you’ll be poisoned and a constant ticking clock will hang over you. This punishment effectively sets the standard of how often the player should expect to successfully dodge boss attacks without incurring major disadvantages in the future, establishing their expectations accordingly. Secondly, the building of a slow poison encourages a more aggressive playstyle, which is one of Bloodborne‘s chief design goals and hallmarks, which sets it apart from its more slow and calculating predecessors, Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls. Players in high-intensity situations will often try to ‘turtle-up’, so to speak, avoiding direct encounters so-as to preserve their resources and maximize safety. This is somewhat the opposite of Bloodborne‘s strengths as an action game, so FromSoft went to great lengths to reward proactive behavior.

A hunter in a long black coat and tricorn hat fires his pistol repeatedly at a vaguely humanoid skeletal beast as it mills about on the floor. After a moment, it screams and rears up, a cloud of toxic mist emanating from its body and its wounds. — The poison is mechanically functional in gameplay, but also very stylish and intimidating

The presence of the poison’s ticking clock communicates that your resources will be depleted if you don’t return a good amount of strikes that the Blood-Starved Beast can dish out to you, complemented by Bloodborne‘s rally system, which restores health if player damage is followed quickly by successful attacks against enemies. Blood-Starved serves as an excellent tool for engendering a more aggressive playstyle that matches the frantic and gritty nature of Bloodborne’s encounters. Phase three sees this pushed further, with clouds of poison now spewing from the beast’s wounds in all directions as it attacks. Spacial awareness becomes even more pivotal, and reliance on just one strategy becomes dicey. Players who can utilize a variety of approaches based on the situation, and do so proactively and aggressively, will find the final phase of the Blood-Starved Beast much smoother.

If a player is too risk-averse or simply not yet up to playing very aggressively, there are alternative solutions to besting the beast for the more strategically-minded. ‘Antidotes’ are plentiful from the carrion crow enemies that dot the level leading up to Blood-Starved Beast, and keeping them handy can put off the pressure from poison, if you find a moment to take one in-between dodging attacks. The pungent blood cocktail, a common item meant to distract the bloodthirsty minor beasts players can encounter, appropriately, works on the Blood-Starved Beast. It will become distracted if one is thrown, and clamor after the small traces of blood within. It’s really refreshing to see that kind of flavorful ingenuity that relies on knowledge of the game’s fiction be rewarded that way. Purely from a gameplay perspective, it might not be obvious that an item like that would work, but from a narrative standpoint it makes perfect sense. Anyway, I always appreciate these little alternate routes to victory in difficult games. Thinking around a problem is as impressive a show of skill as tackling it head on, and players should be encouraged to do so. Reward experimentation.

Blood-Starved is an extremely effective mid-level fight, I think. It’s rather straightforward with its only real gimmick coming in the form of the poison, which as I explained, fits rather well in what the beast’s design utility is. That is, the beast is at home in Bloodborne‘s oppressive atmosphere, with its oppressive combat style, and helps to reinforce a lot of Bloodborne‘s combat fundamentals leading up to the more advanced challenges that await afterward. Players who find themselves able to fight aggressively, and reliably perform parries, counters, and sidesteps, will find themselves well equipped for what comes after. You might say the Blood-Starved Beast is a ‘skill check’ in that way. Designs that focus on both teaching the player abstract technical concepts while engrossing them in the atmosphere of the world is what FromSoft does best in its boss design, and I think the Blood-Starved Beast is pretty emblematic of that.

A hunter in a long black coat and tricorn hat is struck multiple times by a vaguely humanoid skeletal beast, then backs away. He injects himself in the outer thigh with something, then dodges out of the way as the beast tries to bite him.

Hunters are killers, nothing less…

Rethinking ‘Health’ as Game Mechanic: Sekiro’s Verisimilitude

Talking about Sekiro again. Sekiro is a ninja action game by FromSoftware, that involves a lot of sneaking around and backstabbing, but nearly as much sword-to-sword clashing and front-stabbing as well!

A ninja in a red coat and scarf attacks a spearman in an old-japanese-style interior. The ninja is stabbed, but blocks the followup attack, breaking his opponent's guard before stabbing him through. — That beautiful yellow bar there, that’s the posture bar. Love that thing. We’ll get to that.

Verisimilitude! A big word, and one of my favorite ‘game-designerisms’. What exactly does it mean? So if realism is invocation of the real, of reality upon your fiction, verisimilitude in the context of game design is the invocation of what seems real, or rather feels right to give the impression of reality. That distinction might seem fuzzy, but it’s very important. What makes a game realistic is an adherence to the facts of the subject you are simulating, from an objective standpoint. What gives a game strong verisimilitude is a respect for the experience of what you’re trying to depict. In the latter case, it is more important that the gameplay feels right than it is for the game to be objectively close to reality. A horse’s hooves are expected to make a certain sound in television and movies, but this sound is often expected to be the sound of clapping coconut shells, instilled in audiences after many years of the sound effect’s prominence in television and movies. As you can see, creating a fulfilling sense of verisimilitude involves a complex balance of player expectations and affordances. This becomes even more complex, as these things tend to be, when you involve the dimension of interactivity. In Sekiro, I want to talk specifically about the verisimilitude of the game’s sword fighting.

I think one of the things I respect most about Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the design’s willingness to reevaluate even the most fundamental assumptions of action games. The health bar, for one, is ubiquitous in such games. But, if you think about it, ‘health’ as a gameplay mechanic is a little weird, right? There is an arbitrary number representing your opponent’s closeness to death. Maybe the enemy will pull out some stronger ‘desperation moves’ when their health gets low, but so long as it isn’t zero, they can fight as well as they ever have. When that last HP or ‘hit point’ is depleted though, POOF! Their body’s ability to sustain its own weight goes up in smoke and they crumple like their bones have suddenly turned to sawdust. The HP mechanic exists for a reason, it works well. The suspension of disbelief needed to accept this abstraction of how fighting capability works is easy enough to achieve such that most players will not question it, in return for the fun gameplay that HP pools provide. Sekiro wants to go a step further though, and bring the abstraction of their combat closer to a cinematic realization of an idealized sword fight.

A ninja slashes a flurry of blows at a spearman in a old-japanese-style interior. The ninja steps on an oncoming spear attack, knocking it out of the way, then breaks the spearman's guard with a final blow, before stabbing him to death. — The enemy’s posture indicated by a yellow bar above them (the red bar is HP). As the posture bar fills, the enemy is closer to loses their stance.

In reality, a sword fight does not involve two guys hitting each other back and forth until one guy runs out of hit points and collapses. Really, it’s closer to the first guy to land a clean hit… has probably just killed his opponent. So Sekiro has created a system that abstracts this reality – Sekiro is not generally a game about cutting opponents over and over again until you’ve punched out all of their blood, but rather, you strike at opponents as they deflect your blows until you can land a clean hit, killing them instantly. This makes a lot of sense. In a real fight, wearing down your opponents’ defenses, finding ways around their guard, is paramount. Most opponents are not going to just stand there and let you stab them with a sword. The idea Sekiro proposes is that ‘hit points’ are secondary to ‘posture’, or the strength of one’s defenses.

Two ninja duel in a Japanese manor courtyard, one garbed in grey and a mask, one garbed in a red coat and scarf. The masked ninja strikes at the other several times, each time deflected in a flurry of sparks, after the fourth strike, the masked ninja loses his stance, and the red-coat ninja quickly stabs him to death. — clang, clang clang, CLANG. And its over. The nature of the posture system creates a ‘correct’ sense of lethality and back-and-forth in combat.

Posture in Sekiro can be reduced by striking an opponent’s guard to rattle their stance, deflecting their attacks with a well-timed parry, or participating in a number of other contextual maneuvers such as the mikiri counter, a special counter against thrusting attacks, or jumping over enemy sweeping attacks. Posture naturally regenerates over time, and the player or enemy combatants can quickly restore it by holding their position and guard. When posture is completely gone, enemies become vulnerable to a deathblow, which will kill them instantly, while the player becomes stunned if their posture is gone, forcing them to dodge or take a hit. The idea of becoming too tired or psyched-out to defend myself in a tense situation due to relentless pressure from my opponent is much more relatable to me than suddenly exploding into red mist and collectible coins because I was punched one too many times. I am able to, through this system, put a bit of myself in the battle. Feeling my defenses wear down is something I have really experienced, in real life, so that feeling of the real draws me further into the game through Sekiro‘s clever abstraction of the concept.

Deathblows becomes the real hinging point of combat in Sekiro. As I said, whenever an enemy’s posture is depleted, they become vulnerable to the instant-killing deathblow. I say instant-killing, but some enemies can endure two or even three deathblows before really dying. Sekiro takes places in a fictionalized and fantasy-tinged realization of 16th century japan, with inhuman warriors, monsters, and demons, so the idea that a giant ogre-man can survive two ‘clean hits’ before he goes down for good does nothing to hurt the verisimilitude in my estimation. It’s not realistic, but it still feels right. The thought that even the strongest demigod opponents you face can be brought down by just two or three true strikes really grounds the world in a sense of grit and lethality. The illusion is given that life in Sekiro is nearly as fragile as it is in reality, even with divine powers. These ‘deathblow counters’ work brilliantly with Sekiro‘s stealth mechanics as well, as one needs only sneak up on an opponent to get a free deathblow, no risky one-on-one fighting required. The two systems work so well together that I feel I could write an entire article just about that, so I’ll move on for now.

A giant white, headless gorilla charges a ninja in a red coat and scarf in a knee-high spring in a valley. The gorilla, wielding a giant sword and its own severed head, swipes at the ninja. The ninja manages to block, being pushed back by meters with each p;arry. — The verisimilitude of the combat mechanics highlights and heightens the impact of the supernatural elements. So it still works when a beast keeps fighting after decapitation.

Now hit points still exist in Sekiro, but their role has been shifted somewhat. Enemies will still die if their HP reaches zero, though this is much less likely to occur than their posture reaching zero. That’s not to say wearing down your opponent’s HP is pointless. The lower a combatant’s HP is, the slower their posture can regenerate. Now if HP is still meant to represent ‘health’, then this makes a lot of sense. A clean hit is likely to just kill someone in a sword fight, but a series of glancing blows are very likely to make someone less able to defend themselves. Cuts, bruises, a broken finger or two, such things would definitely add up to a poorer and poorer defense, and so this adds to the overall sense of internal consistency in Sekiro‘s combat. No matter the true reality, fighting in Sekiro creates an experience that meets the player’s imagination of how being a sword-fighting ninja would actually work. This level of gradient to the effects of losing HP, where the more injured a combatant, the worse they can defend themselves, addresses much of the inherent weirdness of HP I mentioned earlier, and it does it in such a simple, smart fashion.

Verisimilitude is all well and good, but I wanted to quickly go over some other practical advantages of this system. Since posture is an ever-shifting and renewable resource, it creates a very dynamic tension that can shift back and forth freely as the situation demands. Empowering reversals of fortune on the part of the player are common, as posture greatly rewards consistent performance, making a win when you’re on the ropes a lot more feasible than you might expect. Posture also allows many little tweaks and knobs for the designers to create a great variety of enemy fighting styles based on their posture stats alone. Maybe one boss restores their posture absurdly quickly, but doesn’t have huge stores of it, meaning this boss must only be parried a few times, but they cannot be given the downtime to recover. Maybe another boss has huge stores of posture, but recovers it very slowly. Some enemies might recover posture quickly, but lose this advantage if they’re even a little injured. Etc. There are a huge number of possible variations of these, and Sekiro implements pretty much all of them.

A twelve-foot-tall woman in a skull mask and large monk robes swings a naginata polearm in wide arcs at a ninja in a red coat and scarf, atop a bridge in the mountains, covered in snow and autumn leaves. The ninja is able to deflect several strikes, then steps on the naginata to block it, The ninja cuts the monk twice, then blocks two more strikes, before leaping over a sweeping attack and stomping her shin, breaking her stance, and stabbing her. — The versatility of the posture system can create endurance battles of attrition, or deadly quick-draw duels, depending on context.

Obviously glowing praise is my default position for much of Sekiro‘s systems, but it’s worth mentioning some drawbacks. Sekiro‘s posture system works specifically because of how intense a game it is. It demands constant, focused attention of players in a way that may not be appropriate for every game experience. It’s very much ‘Sekiro‘ but every action game may not benefit from such high levels of gameplay intensity so consistently, and so the posture system isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution that can be injected into every action game without adaptation considerations or consequences. I would like to see more systems like the posture system see popularity, but it is a very delicately balanced system that would demand a lot of care in the implementation. Just plain old HP is much simpler, and it’s been the de facto way to represent combat in so many games for so long for a reason. As I’ve said before, the level of abstraction it creates can be an acceptable tradeoff if it’s supported by a strong combat system, and the simplicity of it fits your game. Another aspect of Sekiro‘s posture system is not only the gameplay intensity, but the intensity on the player’s hand in controlling the thing. The system demands a lot of very rapid and often repetitive inputs that may not be suited for all players. It’s an obvious drawback, perhaps not inherent to a posture system, but correlated to how it’s implemented, and so the system would likely need some fundamental changes and re-tuning to map to a more inclusive suite of control options.

I think the posture system is a great look at how we can rethink the traditionally established rules of how games need to be. Creating new and exciting interactive experiences means being willing to accept that no one game mechanic can be sacred, even if it is ubiquitous. HP bars are so universally standard that any deviation from that mold feels almost alien. The posture system picks apart what HP is meant to represent and repackages it in a way that is extremely conducive to the kind of ninja-action experience Sekiro aims to create, in a way that is evocative of the real, even if it is still very abstract. Sekiro‘s posture system isn’t purely realistic, it’s not what sword combat actually looks like, but it feels very real to experience. It feels like pitched life-or-death battle with high stakes, and real tension.

A ninja man in a red coat and scarf clashes swords with an old woman ninja dual wielding kunai. She jumps from a hidden wire connected to the walls of a crypt-like cellar. Her attacks are deflected repeatedly by the red-coat ninja before losing her stance and being stabbed.

My Lord, I Have Come For You. This… Will Only Take A Moment…

Dark Souls 3’s Brigand Twindaggers or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love Status Effects

It is February 2022, my dudes, and you know what that means. Elden Ring is around the corner and there was absolutely no way I wasn’t going to just talk about Fromsoft games all month. I want to share an interesting experience I found while playing Dark Souls 3 as it pertains to a specific weapon found in the game, the brigand twindaggers. This is less a breakdown of this weapon’s moveset or particular attributes and more a little anecdote about how the daggers won me over once Dark Souls 3 had sold me on using status effects on my weapons, and the subsequent analysis that followed.

In RPGs with character customization I love to bring in my own stock of characters to populate the world, and there are some old standbys I revisit frequently, such as a thief who wields a pair of daggers, whom is often my player character in Fromsoft games. If at all possible, I will deck out my characters in their appropriate gear. I kind of like the RP side of RPG that way.

In Fromsoft’s Bloodborne, an action RPG that preceded Dark Souls 3, there is a weapon called the blades of mercy, a sword that can transform into a pair of daggers. I often refer to this weapon as a lawnmower – it absolutely shreds enemies to pieces with a massive amount of damage output. It scales incredibly well with Bloodborne‘s equivalent of the dexterity attribute, and its moveset is a flowing, seamless series of rapid strikes. Its the most satisfying to use pair of daggers in any of Fromsoft’s games to that point, so I had high hopes and expectations when it was revealed that Dark Souls 3 would have, as a new feature, paired weapons – weapons that come in a set, made specifically for dual wielding. I went over the game with a fine-toothed comb when I got it, clamoring to find a pair of daggers. Surely if paired weapons were a thing, I’d find dual wield knives.

And so I found them, and it quickly became difficult to contain my disappointment. Compared to Fromsoft’s previous outing with dual wielded daggers, these brigand twindaggers had a slower moveset with a much longer startup, and tremendously pathetic damage by comparison. They didn’t even scale that well with dexterity. I tried to like them, and tried to use them throughout my first play-through, I really did. In the end, there were just so many better speedy weapons, whose damage scaled so much better, that I could really not justify using the daggers any longer. I ended up embracing my inner edgelord and used a paired katana and wakizashi, two japanese style swords, as their damage output was insane compared to the daggers.

I had a blast on my first playthrough of Dark Souls 3, but I always regret not making a player build I was satisfied with involving the daggers. It didn’t feel true to my player character to not have him using knives, and I wished the knives were better. They didn’t really need to be though, after some experimentation, I would discover I just needed to change my approach. It started when I saw a player versus player showcase of the brigand twindaggers. The very skilled video author was destroying human opponents, seemingly with ease, utilizing the weapon I had condemned as largely useless. His secret? The daggers were enhanced with a bleeding effect. The Dark Souls series has always had weapon status effects, special attributes that can be applied to weapons to make them debilitate enemies in specific ways, applied if enemies are hit enough times rapidly. Primarily, this takes the form of bleed weapons and poison weapons.

On two pedestals, side-by-side, sits a jagged stone covered in a shiny oozing red liquid, dribbling onto one pedestal. On the other, a pair of curved knives crossed over each other. — Like peanut butter and jelly.

Enhancing a weapon in Dark Souls always modifies its base damage and damage scaling in some way. Status effect weapons on the whole tend to deal a lot less base damage as a tradeoff, and so I’d often shy away from them not just in Fromsoft games but in RPGs in general. It just felt like it was an unnecessary extra step, compared to simply dealing more damage directly. But I wanted those daggers to work, so I gave it a try. In Dark Souls bleed is a status effect that builds up by hitting your target repeatedly, and when it’s built up completely, the victim loses a large chunk of their health to a hemorrhage, all at once. It’s a rather cool mechanic that gives the player a smaller micro-goal to achieve while fighting enemies, that is, quickly building up bleed, in addition to just fighting. It makes for an interesting playstyle and when I tried it out, I found I was having a ton more fun than before. Even when modified, the daggers still deal similar damage to their sharpened variant, and yet now acted as a powerful poison or open wound delivery system.

An undead wrapped in tattered garb thrashes two daggers at a frostbitten undead ghoul, in a snowy medieval city. The ghoul gushes blood as they are struck. After several hits, the ghoul's health indicator suddenly takes a large amount of damage. — See how quickly enemies vulnerable to bleed pop like balloons? It’s a great time, all round.

Status effects in Dark Souls 3 just work. Astounding. But why is this such a pain point for me in so many other RPGs? What is it about Dark Souls 3 in particular that makes it work? I think I’ve identified a few factors that majorly contributed to my enjoyment of using bleed and poison variants of the brigand twindaggers. First off…

It Works

Yeah okay so this one is a little self explanatory. Players aren’t likely to use a game mechanic that doesn’t work, obviously. It goes deeper than that though, players aren’t likely to use a game mechanic that isn’t effective. Every enemy in the game could be vulnerable to bleed, but if it only did a piddly pathetic amount of damage nobody would care enough to go that route. Thankfully bleed is very effective, and can often kill enemies even faster than raw damage. It was also seen fit to make nearly every enemy in the game vulnerable to bleed, a very wise decision. Some are resistant to it, some weak to it, but only a handful are completely invulnerable to bleed. Was this point even worth mentioning? Yeah I think so. Each of these points is something I’ve seen failed in many many games before. There are tons of games where status effects are simply unreliable to the point of near-uselessness. What good is a poison effect if it takes a dozen tries before it actually sticks? What’s more, what is the point if the poison is super hard to apply, but it barely does anything as a result? By then I could have just beaten by opponent to death with a stick. Floundering around with weak status effects feels terrible, and they need to be at least as viable as the more straightforward option.

It Works On Bosses

I cannot stress this one enough. Nothing will make me drop a combat mechanic which requires a time investment more definitively than seeing it is ineffective against boss encounters. Often in combat centric games bosses are the height of the combat system, pushing it to its limit where the most fun to be had is, or even the central axis about which the rest of the gameplay turns. If a combat mechanic breaks down in a boss fight, as a player I often feel as though it’s not worth my time. Status effects work on bosses in Dark Souls 3, generally, or at least frequently enough that I never find myself despairing at the futility of using them.

It is so strange to me that so many RPGs see fit to make bosses immune to status effects. On the one hand I can see the perspective – status effects tend to be very powerful in certain contexts, especially when they are not direct damage dealers, like disables or other utility effects, and one does not want to trivialize combat encounters. And yet. If one has been relying on a certain game mechanic, they begin to take ownership of it as a playstyle. They feel clever or powerful for utilizing it. Taking it away at the most crucial encounter feels awful. There are ways to design around the brute force method of just making bosses immune. Perhaps bosses are merely resistant, and incur a diminished form of status effects applied to them. Perhaps bosses have the ability to remove their own status effects under the right circumstances, or perhaps they last less time. Perhaps status effects are balanced as such to simply be generally useful, but not overly powerful against bosses. I think it’s rarely ever wrong to let players think around a problem, and removing a strategic tool such as status effects from their arsenal, when they can be employed elsewhere feels like player punishment.

In Dark Souls 3, applying a bleed effect deals a flat chunk of damage to enemies, usually enough to kill lesser foes. On bosses, it’s merely a nice step toward their defeat, but not an utter showstopper by any stretch. For bosses that may be felled too quickly if they are bled out repeatedly, it was decided they would be resistant to bleed effects. You can still get that extra damage, and it’s not that hard to do, it just takes a little longer, and the balance is kept that way. There are some enemies and bosses which are immune to bleeding, but not nearly enough to make me question the status effect’s efficacy, and what’s more it contributes to the overall fiction of the game, which has to do with my next point.

Strong Feedback

Dark Souls 3 has very strong audio-visual feedback for when you’re wailing on an enemy. Blood shoots out in exaggerated sprays along with a crunchy *squelch*ing sound with each strike of your weapon. Against armor, you can hear the rattling clang of steel on steel. This is obviously good design from a gamefeel standpoint, but it also provides the very useful advantage of illustrating what can and cannot be inflicted with a status effect. Hitting stuff that can be bled tends to use that exaggerated blood graphic I mentioned, but things that are resistant or immune will show less blood when struck, or none at all.

A well-armored women swings a wrist-mounted blade at a cage full of reanimated corpses. Blood shoots out when it is struck, and after several hits, an explosion of blood gushes from it. — A cage full of reanimated corpses? Can the cage bleed? Kind of ambiguous, except that it shoots blood off when hit. Okay so it can be inflicted with bleed!

I’ve mentioned that some enemies are immune to status effects and how that enhances the fiction of Dark Souls 3. What I mean by that is, it is effectively intuitive what enemies can and cannot bleed. Bulbous fleshy beasts, dripping and shambling undead, living creatures. Things that obviously have blood, are all vulnerable to the bleed effect. Things like enchanted empty suits of armor, a giant tree, skeletons. These things obviously do not have blood, and thus do not bleed. It seems like a simple trick not to miss, but yet again I’ve seen this very concept done poorly too often. Consistency is key. The player shouldn’t have to guess, or at least not guess blindly whether or not their combat tools will even work. Obviously you can’t bleed a skeleton, but obviously you can bleed a giant rat. Design the game so players can trust their own eyes and ears, and the play experience will feel much more seamless. Immunities and resistances should have logical reasoning grounded in the rules of the real world, even if the game takes place in a fantastic one, so your player has a hint of familiarity with which they can decipher the rules of your game.

An undead wrapped in tattered garb thrashes two daggers at a giant rat with exposed wounds. The rat gushes blood as it is hit, and quickly keels over dead. — Giant fleshy rat with exposed red meat? Blood pinata. Spooky skeleton? Not so much. Notice the understated hit effect on the skeleton vs. the huge amount of blood on the rat.

An undead wrapped in tattered garb thrashes two daggers at a cloaked skeleton in an dank catacomb. The skeleton takes damage. but the hit effects against it are dull and understated. — Giant fleshy rat with exposed red meat? Blood pinata. Spooky skeleton? Not so much. Notice the understated hit effect on the skeleton vs. the huge amount of blood on the rat.

We’ll have to come up with some **other** clever solution to deal with the skeletons

Conclusion

So I guess my takeaways from this experience are twofold: certain weapons can be satisfying to use in how they fulfill certain gameplay niches. The brigand twindaggers are an excellent status effect tool in how they apply effects quickly through rapid hits. My other takeaway is that a lot of games could do status effects in a much more satisfying way that makes them feel powerful and useful, something a lot of the designs I’ve seen are often too bashful about. They can be a viable alternative gameplay style all their own, you just need to put in the legwork to make sure this gameplay style feels strong and effective. Locking it out of boss fights makes it feel like a lesser, illegitimate gameplay style, an afterthought. Players should be able to discern the applicability of status effects with audio and visuals alone, without having to consult a wiki. Overall, I think status effects can be underappreciated in games mostly because they so often could be implemented better. When games get it right, I think it’s worth giving a closer look to see exactly what went right. Status effects in Dark Souls 3 were fun enough to use, and strong enough to completely reverse my opinion of an entire weapon’s implementation.

An undead wrapped in tattered garb thrashes two daggers at a giant armored mage wielding a flaming staff. in a snowy medieval city. The mage gushes blood as they are struck. After several hits, the mage's health indicator suddenly takes a large amount of damage.

Such weapons inflict lacerating damage. Most effective with sharp or spiked weapons…

FromSoft and The Taxonomy of a Parry

I love parrying things in video games. You might have already guessed that. I’m always looking for how and why things work or don’t work in games, so I have a particular interest in one of my favorite gameplay mechanics, the parry. So what is a parry? In the context of an action game, I’d define it as a maneuver the player can execute on the fly to nullify incoming damage and disarm enemy defenses, which requires an acute execution of timing to succeed. Commonly, it’s a button press that initiates a short window of animation during which, if an enemy attack connects with the player character, the parry activates. After considering how to approach the design of this gameplay mechanic, I’ve decided there are three pillars of a good parry mechanic: usability, versatility, and impact.

Usability describes the practicality, from the player’s perspective, of actually using the parry at all. How restrictively difficult is the timing necessary to succeed in using one? Is the risk of using the parry worth the reward? How necessary is the use of this parry to succeeding within the game? Are there other specific considerations like spacing that make the parry more or less practical?

Versatility describes the frequency of general use cases for the parry. Can the parry be used to deflect any attack encountered in the game, or is it limited in some way? Can even large and powerful enemies be parried? Do you need a specific weapon or in-game skill to use the parry? Is the parry’s reward worth forgoing a more straightforwardly offensive approach?

Impact is at the center of what makes me want to use a parry. A parry can be powerful, but ultimately I am motivated to use it by how fun it is. What’s the audio-visual feedback of a successful parry like? Do I get a rush from disarming my opponent, or is the reward for parrying barely noticeable? Does it make me feel powerful? Does it make me feel skilled?

FromSoftware or FromSoft is a Japanese game developer well known for their popular action games, all of which in recent memory include a parry of some kind. I want to run through three of their flagship titles, the original Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and analyze their respective parry mechanics through this lens I’ve come up with to see how it can be applied to specific cases.

The parry mechanic in Dark Souls is an interesting beast. A favorite of the game’s more hardcore fans but, in my experience, one that new and even many veteran players ignore completely. It’s powerful, and it’s fun to use once you get the hang of it, but that’s kind of the problem, it’s not very fun to learn to use, and many players will not bother with it, as it is far from essential to completing the game. I’ve found most friends I’ve introduced to the game simply ignore the utility of parrying, or try it once and discard it in favor of the game’s more developed mechanics.

Though powerful, the parry in *Dark Souls* is stiff, restrictive, and difficult to master

The parry in Dark Souls suffers severely from a lack of usability and versatility. Usability, as I explained, is my concept of how practical it is for a player to actually execute your parry maneuver consistently and successfully. Firstly, this parry is not universally available – the player must be wielding a small or medium sized shield in their off-hand. Given the wide and varied options of character customization in this game, it’s possible a player won’t be using a shield at all. I think the greatest source of dissuasion for using this mechanic, though, is how difficult it is to succeed with it. Dark Souls has a very specific and narrow window of time at which a parry will succeed. An enemy’s attack must connect with the player character during this 6 frame window – that’s one fifth of a second. Needless to say, it is a difficult mark to hit. Now, with practice one can hone in on Dark Souls‘ very consistent and reproducible rhythm. Not every enemy attacks with the same timing, but they all share a fairly general pattern of wind-up, swing, and follow-through. Once you get it, you’ll find parrying a pretty consistent tool.

Failing to parry can result in incurring massive damage, and its timing is excessively strict

However, the skill floor to reaching this point of consistency is restrictive, even by this game’s standards. Given how great the risk is of failing a parry in this game, and how the game itself trains players to be extremely risk-averse with enemies that deal massive amounts of damage when interrupting player actions, players are naturally disinclined to even take those risks. Thus, they’ll not learn the parry timing. What’s more, most enemies can be thoroughly dispatched, with far lesser risk, by simply striking them down with your favorite weapon or spell when the foe’s defenses are down, between their attacks. I conclude that the parry in Dark Souls is not entirely practical, or usable without a great deal of personal investment, time, and effort most players will find better spent in learning the nuances of movement, dodging, and attacking. These options are far more practical, realistically, even if the parry becomes very powerful once one masters it.

The impact of this parry is intense, and intensely reward, so it’s a shame it’s so hard to use

This would be enough turn off most players from the mechanic on its own, but the move also struggles in the versatility department, meaning the frequency of its general use cases. Dark Souls is filled with enemies that can be parried – essentially any enemy that can suffer a backstab. I’d always say that any enemy with an obvious spine that your player character can reach can probably be backstabbed and parried, as a general rule of thumb. Not every enemy matches this criteria though, and nearly none of the game’s 25 boss encounters do either. Boss encounters are a major part of this game, and something players will be spending a lot of time on. They’re also notoriously among the game’s most difficult and high-intensity segments. Since parrying is useless in those encounters, it further disincentivizes paying the mechanic any time or energy. If you can’t use a move for a game’s greatest challenges, what worth is it? Any real world skill building towards parry mastery is, objectively, better spent on other things, if finishing the game is your goal.

I like using the Dark Souls parry – it’s got excellent impact. A harrowing low boom sound effect accompanies its successful use. Parried enemies reel in a wide, exaggerated swooping animation, soon to be followed by a riposte that drives a weapon straight through them, gushing comical amounts of blood (if the foe has blood). It all really accentuates the player’s power and superior skill over the opponent. The totality of the audio-visual feedback here is excellent, it’s just a shame so few will ever get to actually see it. The move is simply not useful to a significant portion of the player base.

When a mechanic like this goes so underutilized by your players, the designer might ask themselves what’s causing this discrepancy, and what can be done to address it.

In Bloodborne, FromSoft wanted to shift to a more action-oriented system, less about patient and considered movements, more about reaction and aggression, as compared to Dark Souls‘ more traditional RPG inspired roots. As part of this shift, the parry in Bloodborne was made to be more of a central mechanic than in Dark Souls, something to be expected of the player regularly throughout combat encounters. So that means getting players to actually use it. First, FromSoft needed to address usability. Bloodborne‘s parry is unique in that it takes the form of a projectile. This accomplishes two things. One, it makes accounting for space exceedingly easy for players. Dark Souls was fairly strict about where player and opponent were standing for a parry to successfully work. In Bloodborne, if an enemy is shot during the tail end of its attack animation, it will be parried, no matter its distance from the player. Two, this means the player does not have to put themselves in direct danger to parry, as an enemy can be parried even if their attack is very unlikely to actually hit the player. The risk to parrying now feels much more proportional to the benefit, making it a valid alternative to just wildly attacking.

Even when incurring damage, it’s possible to parry in *Bloodborne*, the mechanic is forgiving

As the timing for Bloodborne‘s parry is now timed to the enemy‘s attack, and a moving projectile, rather than lining up the player’s parry animation with the enemy’s animation, the player really only has to track one movement, the enemy’s. Together, these elements remove a ton of cognitive blocks on actually using Bloodborne‘s parry system, so its usability is extremely effective by comparison. Bloodborne‘s parry is also extremely versatile. When looking at the 30 or so bosses in the game, about 15 of them can be parried, roughly half, making mastery of the parry a far more effective tool in way more situations than it was in Dark Souls. Bloodborne doesn’t shirk in the impact department either. The same familiar boom sound effect accompanies a success, and can be followed up with a violent and beastly visceral attack that grabs the enemy’s insides, twists them, and rips out a huge gush of blood, knocking the foe to the ground and stumbling nearby enemies. The player hunter’s sense of superiority over their prey is the focus.

Even the biggest and burliest can be parried, and at a distance too!

The Dark Souls parry had another issue I didn’t mention; if you did master it, and made it a consistent tool in your arsenal, many enemies outside of boss encounters become exceedingly easy to deal with, even if they are still fun to beat. Nevertheless, this runs the risk of the move becoming too powerful, especially if it’s easier to use. FromSoft’s solution to this was to make parry attempts a limited resources. This elegantly maintains the risk of attempting a parry, while assuaging the frustration of losing one’s own progress as a result of said risk. There’s still some risk of injury to a failed parry, but it’s much less likely than in previous games, most of the risk is the parry-centric resource of quicksilver bullets.

If Bloodborne made parrying a more central mechanic, then Sekiro made parrying a core mechanic, one of the primary action verbs of the game. Parrying is most of what you do in combat. Formally, the Sekiro move is called ‘deflection’.

To accomplish its design goals, Sekiro‘s parry is made to be even more accessible and low-risk than Bloodborne‘s. A deflection can be directly transitioned into from a block (which itself nullifies incoming damage), and a block can be transitioned to directly from a deflection. Both ‘block’ and ‘deflect’ are activated with the same button, block is simply the result of holding it. Deflections are initiated when the button is compressed, not when it is lifted, so erring on early deflections makes the maneuver even safer – deflections that fail for being used too soon simply result in a block. No damage is taken either way. The limiting resources of Bloodborne are gone here, at least for parries, so player’s will often find themselves using the deflection move even more than they attack, but this was the goal. Sekiro aims to evoke the back-and-forth clanging of cinematic sword fights, and the game is built around the interest of deflecting a series of attacks in quick succession. Any one given deflection is easy, but the difficulty can be smoothly ramped up by stringing a sequence of them together.

Sekiro conditions the player to use a series of parries as a defensive, and offensive tool

We’ve come a long way since Dark Souls, with a skill floor that is extremely approachable, without sacrificing the skill ceiling. Where the parry window of Dark Souls was only 6 frames, one fifth of a second, Sekiro‘s deflection window starts at the extremely generous, by comparison, half-second. This deflection window decays in size if the player abuses the deflect button. Deflecting rapidly and repeatedly causes the window to shrink down to only a small fraction of a second. The goal is to make any given deflection easy, but the player is encouraged to use their own powers of reaction and prediction, rather than relying on spamming the button. Even still, this window decay is also generous, as the deflection’s full capability is restored after only a half second of not using it.

All this to say, Sekiro has extremely generous usability for its deflection mechanic. It has to, as deflection is the primary tool for defeating enemies in this game. Were it as restrictive as the parry in Dark Souls or even Bloodborne, it would be an exercise in frustration. To counterbalance this, the individual reward for one Sekiro deflection is much lesser, and you need to do a lot of deflections to add up to a bigger reward.

Sekiro is a masterclass in parry versatility. The deflection maneuver is applicable to nearly every encounter in the game. It’s extremely generally useful, so much so that exceptions, attacks which cannot be deflected, are unlikely to be deflected, or require other special maneuvers to deflect, are given their own glowing red UI graphic to further make them stand out. Outside of that, if it deals damage, it can be deflected by the player’s sword, near-universally. Formalizing what can and can’t be parried in this way is also helpful for usability, as it removes guesswork on the part of the player.

When deflecting successfully, right orange sparks fly like a firework cracker was set off as a cacophony of metal sounds clang in satisfying unison. The audio-visual feedback for a successful deflection is actually kind of subtle, compared to simply blocking. It is merely a heightened, more intense version of the block visuals, just distinct enough to unambiguously be its own separate function to ensure players know when they’re succeeding, but similar enough to not be distracting. This makes sense, as players are expected to deflect a lot of attacks in any given encounter. A series of successful deflections looks and sounds like a larger-than-life battle of master swordsmen, with sparks showering about amidst the metal clanging. When an enemy has finally been deflected past the limits of their endurance, Sekiro will delight players with some of the most lavishly animated executions in video games, anything from the tried and true gut-stab, to decapitating a gorilla with a hatchet the size of a refrigerator, to gingerly extracting tears from a dragon’s occular injury. The impact of Sekiro‘s parry system is not only good, but usually proportional to each situation, even though the overall impact of any one given deflection is not super intense.

It’s clear somebody at FromSoftware loves parrying things almost as much as I do. It’s a common mechanic for a reason, giving players an area of skill to strive for mastery over, which reinforces a sense of power. Few things can make a player feel more powerful than successfully turning enemy attacks against them. Over the course of these three games, FromSoft has made parrying more and more central to the experience, to the point of it becoming the main point of focus for Sekiro. It’s clear there was an awareness of how neglected parrying was in Dark Souls among casual players, and even some veterans. They needed to find ways to make using it more attractive, without sacrificing the sense of power it imparted, the thing that makes it fun in the first place. While the Dark Souls parry has its flaws, I’m glade they persisted in iterating on it. I think Sekiro and bloodborne have two of the most consistently fun combat systems out there, and the excellence of their respective parry mechanics are a huge part of that, in Sekiro especially, which deserves its own write-up, eventually. The metrics I’ve come up with here to assess parry mechanics are just the way I look at things, though. It’s useful to look at design through a variety of lenses. So the next time you stab some zombie in the face after battering its arm away like you’re in a kung-fu movie, think about why and how that maneuver works the way it does.

Hesitation is Defeat…