Hiya,

To barge right in. Which of the 2 would you recommend to someone who's been fed with open world rpg designs for multiple years now?
Games such as Control and Tom Raider (2013).. Jedi Fallen Order(more or less) fit perfectly, though.

Elden Ring is difficult to pass out on with such general acceptance of its quality as a game but the dev's established name + the fact that it seems to come with an enormous area to explore have thus far managed to withheld me from a purchase.

A comment made by me earlier today in this forum post explains this maybe better
- https://www.gog.com/forum/general/levels_in_video_games_good_or_bad/post40

I wouldn't dare to imply that open world games in general are bad. It is just me. I seem to hit some kind of wall, for several years now, when I do any attempt at an open world game. Maybe it is because of the similarity in concept. Your quest icons, the time you have to spend. Lost story integrity due to the open world format etc etc etc.

Right after posting, i found myself interested in a boldly titled youtube vid
"Why Western Developers Are So Angry About Elden Ring's Success"
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Br32rNMpf-s

Basically, the earlier mentioned 'problems' were swept away by the commentator of the vid. This spiked my interest in Elden Ring once again.
Now, I also have a backlog problem. And really feel a bit encumbered by the thought of adding yet another behemoth to the party.
Sekiro happens to be already there so, and is yet another pretty high praised title so i did wonder about if adding Elden Ring and start game as soon as i have time is most recommended or is actually considered to be similar to Sekiro? Therefore, removing the need for Elden Ring for at least another 2 years or so.

I didnt much like Sekiro. I loved Elden Ring. But I've played "Souls" games since Demon's Souls on PS3. I've loved most of them. Elden Ring is open world in the best way. There is a ton to explore, with some rewards in nearly every nook and cave. There are no quest markers or busy work to distract you, no towers to take to unlock missions. Just you, your blade, your yak-horse, and a world that wants you dead.

If you're familiar with the Dark Souls formula, and like it, ER is a game for you. Sekiro is more focused, with tight controls and a different formula. I personally didn't like it, but it's just not for me. It's still a good game.

Despite being both from From Software and both being "souls-like" I would say they are rather different games.

Sekiro, is a standard Dark Soul style game with a shinobi paint on it. It's large interconnected levels, in which you unlock shortcuts, usually you need to progress the main story to unlock a new zone (most of the time by killing a boss).

It's a lot more focused that Dark Souls, and Elden Ring obviously, you are shinobi, you have two Katanas and some gadgets in your prosthetic arm that you unlock during the story and that's it. No armor, no weapon upgrade, you just have a skill tree giving some new moves.

The main gimmick of the game is the "rhythmic" combat, in the game you have two "health" bars, the real health bar and the posture bar, the health bar lower when you hurt your opponent and the posture bar lower when you parry its attack, when the posture bar is depleted you can do a critical attack, most boss can be killed with 2-3 critical attack so 99% of the time lowering their posture is the only way to kill them reliably.

That can be a downside, if you don't like the whole parry thing then there is no real other option, even if you grind like crazy it won't really help you a lot.


Elden Ring is kind of the opposite of Sekiro.

Once you finish the tutorial (or ignore it and go straight to the exit) you are left in a vast open world with vague instruction of where to go next. Unlike a lot of open world games there is very little hand holding, you won't have a map with 2 billion Ubisoft style markers telling you where to find all the "activities". Here the map is mostly empty until you explore and even after you will only have the teleport points, merchants and some basic landmark, no quest marker, no quest log. The core of the game is really the exploration, you see a mountain, there is probably some caves at its base, see something that looks like ruins, probably there is some chest or catacomb to explore, a road, maybe there is a merchant somewhere next to it, etc...

But on the other side, if you concentrate on the main quest, you can easily skip 90% of the game content.

Gameplay wise it's also very "open", you can use all sort of weapons and shield, you can parry like in Sekiro, or you can use a bigger shield and block attack then counter attack, you can dual wield, specialized in slow but powerful colossal weapons, or just use magic and nuke your opponents from behind. You can also summon "ghost-like" creature/warriors to help you. So you are not forced into a gameplay style like in Sekiro, if you suck at parry, just use something else that you are more comfortable with and if a boss is too strong for you, you can most of the time just ignore it and explore some other part of the world and come back later (or skip it completely if it's one of the numerous optional one). That make the game a lot more accessible (you could even say "easy") than the other Souls or event Sekiro.

The down side is that it requires a lot more "investment" than Sekiro, you can finish Sekiro in 20-40, but on the other side ER requires ~100 hours. Personally it took me 200+ hours but I took my time.

My only computer is a laptop that is completely "potato" in the GPU department (Intel UHD 620), and I've heard that Sekiro works well with onboard GPUs, so I'd say Sekiro.

Moreover, Sekiro is cheaper, and if you have a backlog, it's not wise to pay now $$$ for a game that for which you could pay a lot less in a year or two.

I love Sekiro so much, haven't play Elden Ring yet, but it looks like the other souls games, it's not bad at all.
Sekiro is much more fast paced, with a combat that requires skill, some people say it's hard but for me was the easiest of From Software games.

My CPU is not good enough to run Elden Ring so I haven't played it yet, and I never played Sekiro either.

However, I did recently watch a criticism video of a guy who compared Elden Ring to the Dark Souls games, and he said Elden Ring was a lot worse than Dark Souls, because in Elden Ring, you can just run past most of the content without actually having to fight your way through it, which he thought was bad because it makes Elden Ring easier than the Dark Souls games, and since it hurts Elden Ring's replayability since there is no reason not to skip most of Elden Ring's content after the first playthrough of it.

Those are some great responses. Now whot to do?! ;-)
I will postpone. That seems to be the more logic choice.... Let's start the new year with logic!

Thanks for the great explanations. I've not been very intrigued by what little I know about Sekiro, but what you people write about Elden Ring sounds promising. I've never tried a Souls game, so Elden Ring will probably be the first. Just need to get that PS5 first :-)

Free exploration without quest markers sounds excellent, at least on paper. Sounds more like the games of... many years ago.

The one that's Dark Souls II 2 ;)
Elden Ring.

So now these two games and the Dark Souls series only need to become DRM-free for me to spend some money on them...

Nonononono, don't go me suggestion even more!
I postpone.

Only from Fromsoft, i have the first DS and Sekiro.
In the souls like genre
-Nioh
-CodeVein
-Mortal Shell
-Lords of the Fallen
-Jedi:Fallen Order

In Nioh, i made progress until the first real boss, the demon found on the ship. The demon felt so out of bounds with the start of the game. Such a generic bullet hell like enemy i could not endure.
In Lords of the Fallen i managed 2 bosses before i had something like, nah i'm quitting.
Codevein in general just felt like this indie adventure gone wrong.
Mortal Shell was like ok, ok, nah, to tedious
in Jedi fallen order i'm at about 40 or maybe 50% completion rate. Casually playing for an hour now and then. This one I probably will eventually finish.

The first Dark Souls game, seems to expect an extraordinaire amount of investment. That is something i'm certainly not able,willing to provide for.
Never gave Sekiro a try.

Therefore it would only seem less than logical to try DS II

To be fair, you've only experienced the lesser souls clones.

The only "souls like" games out there are the ones made by From themselves. The rest are broken copies which leave a lot to be desired.

Nioh isn't a true "soulslike". More like a fast paced action game. If anything, I think Platinum games are closer to it, and even then, Nioh is just a bad copy. While Souls offers more thoughtful combat, Nioh is just void of strategy. It's not "harder", it simply expects you to grind (which isn't mandatory in souls games, btw).

Code Vein is already a lesser clone of another series, God Eater. Those games are strictly for anime fans, I'd say. I like some anime but it was too much for me. The game design and gameplay are third rate at best and it seems like a fan game. It's sad.

Lords of the Fallen is probably the worst souls like out there tbh. It's slow, void of any strategy, linear and boring. The Surge was better though, and the devs heard all the criticism and are working on fixing their flaws for Lord of the Fallen 2.

Haven't played the Star Wars one, but I've heard lots of people claiming that the soulslike tag was added kind of as a marketing ploy and that it belongs in the "x is the soulslike of y" trend.

Dark Souls 2 is a whole different thing. At release it was heavily criticized because it deviated from the first game, when it came to look, design and feel. The development cycle for it was very problematic and it was salvaged by its director, who isn't Miyazaki. It has received some reconsideration over the years but it has stayed as the black sheep of the series. I think you can find a decent comparison in Bioshock 2's place in the franchise.

Dark Souls 3 is everyone's favorite, but I don't like it. Outside of boss fights, and not even all of them, it's a really so-so game and mostly a compromise for people who wanted familiar things instead of new mechanics. Think of it this way, it's a Bloodborne total conversion mod.

DS1 is in a weird place for me. I often revisit it but never go full playthrough. I find it's a decline in comparison to several things found in Demons Souls (the og, the remaster isn't good). But it also has several things that make it good. I see that you find the game asks for commitment from your part, and I think I know what you mean. Perhaps you feel you have to build an adequate character for the game, but it's not that complicated, really. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons can figure out what does what and how to level up (except Resistance, don't do it). In theory, you can beat Dark Souls 1 with any character of any level with any equipment. More critical than stats and even equipment are the rolls and poise. You either want fast rolls (low equipment load) or high poise (heavy equipment load). With light rolls you can evade anything (which is preferable in Souls combat) but with high poise you can withstand a nuclear blast directly to your face (which can be fun in on itself). Poise works differently in future games, and if you ask me, it works properly in the other games (which is a controversial statement, don't mind me hehe). And it's also a rhythm game of sorts. Enemies telegraph their attacks with weeks of anticipation and you should be able to read them quite easily. In ds3 they started adding extra fast swings at the end of every combo chain so they catch players unaware.

Also, builds only really matter in PVP multiplayer. Unless you have a Black Knight Halberd. Black Knight Halberd is the be all and all weapon in DS1, when you get it you'll never use any other weapon ever again.

Well there are dodges,rolls, and bonfires, to start :D

It is Star Wars though and meant for a huge crowd. Some of the fights gave me a lot of trouble, but nowhere near the amount of a 'feeling of lost' that Dark Souls manages to imprint.

Played around with Sekiro for a bit. The setting is actually quite enjoyable. The first thing that surprised me was the speed with which your ninja character moves around. Made it about 5 miles in and then came across, after your first death, this Samurai General San thing. Ridiculous! Spend about 20 minutes trying. After those 20 minutes his health bar was more reduced than, at the start but damn. This fight though, is actually pretty similar to what Jedi:Fallen Order offers and their second sister encounters. Jedi:Fallen Order also offers difficulty settings with which you can refine the reaction window parameters.

Now Dark Souls, yes the game once again is installed. Started with this fair pyromancing maiden. But what happens pretty soon is way over the top. Face off against this humongous sized demon that smashes buildings for fun is seemingly opposite as the challenges you are face off against in Sekiro or Fallen Order. Most other games would present something like this as an end boss while providing you at the same time with some trick. Some nuclear device, for instance, you would need to trigger a couple of times to get it down.

You should try Nioh again. In my opinion the Nioh games are even better than the original Dark Souls games.

Naturally, like in every Soulslike you need to learn the attack patterns and tells of the bosses and practice hard how to evade or block their attacks. You also need to master your weapons. Nioh has a wide variety of weapons and they are all very different. So look for a weapon that fits your style of play best and learn how to use it well. You also unlock lots of new moves during the game for every weapon.

And last but not least: In Nioh most tougher enemies (including bosses) have a weak point. For most demons (like the one on the ship) this is their horns. Cut them off and they will be stunned for a while with no defense. And I think that even after they recover their defense will not completely restore. That will make them much less spongy. Don't forget you not only carry two close combat weapons but you also have a bow and a rifle. And you can change to a half-demon for a certain amount of time. All of that should give you enough of an edge to kill even bosses easily once you've figured them out.

It's a pity the Nioh games aren't on GOG...