Soulslike - Discussion, News, Memes

Good analysis, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I can only speak from personal experience that I didn't vibe a lot with farming vials just to give a boss another try. It kind of makes sense to balance out the amount of vials you get, but I felt it didn't add to the challenge, personally, but rather made the game more tedious and annoying at times. If I want to keep bashing my head in against a boss because I'm stubborn and don't want to let up, that should be my perogative to decide and not the game's. It feels a little like an arcade machine gating me from further playing the game because I didn't throw in another quarter.

Don't get me wrong - Bloodborne sits in my top 3 favourite soulslikes. But I think they could have done without non-replenishing healing items and it wouldn't have made the game worse in the slightest. There are a lot of different mechanics in soulslikes that add to the challenge of the game without adding artificial scarcity to a required item that you use on the regular. For example, it makes sense that Beast Pellets are non-replenishing because they're not an integral part of the gameplay loop like healing items are unless you know what you're doing and/or are speed running the game. Same with the sugars in Sekiro.

Didn't like it a lot in Demon's Souls either where it was a lot more of a problem to me because the levels themselves were really difficult to navigate through vs. the bosses themselves.

In the end, the game is still fantastic. I just think a lot of players bounced off the game simply because healing needs to be farmed for.