I tried playing blind and ended up in Caelid (~lvl 60 area) instead of Weeping Peninsula. That's when I noped out and spent the rest of the game with my head buried in the wiki. I couldn't imagine trying to play these games without a wiki.

Everything else I enjoyed for the most part. The controls and hitboxes are a little janky, the platforming sections are total garbage (shoehorned into an old engine that never had it), but the open world execution was by far the worst aspect for me. At some point FromSoftware has to start catering to players new to the genre instead of forcing people to struggle and calling it part of the experience. With 12 mil in early sales I guarantee a bunch of players struggled with these aspects of the early game and dropped it altogether.

In a more closed world like Dark Souls, I think the no-handholding of side quest can work. But in an open world, I would've liked a bit more hand holding.

I did get lost in the beginning because this is my first souls game and the only other game I've really played in the last 10 years is botw. But I've always have a good sense of where to go. The times I don't I explore and find something that leads me down a side quest. There's definitely lots of breadcrumbs imo. I mean if you're lost just look at the map and go towards a castle.

I think what could be better is to be able to revisit people and talk to them about quest lines. Or have a log. Other than that I'm having the complete opposite experience of you and I'm sure I've died 500+ times in my 50 hrs.

That's kind of my point though, because, at the beginning of the game, going straight to Stormveil Castle is not the optimal path. The optimal path is to go through East Limgrave and then Weeping Peninsula to get some levels and some gear. Guidance of Grace leads you away from that. Pretty unintuitive for the very first waypoints of the game.

I don’t think the game is unfair. It’s boss design is great. It’s the pacing that’s shit. Margit was an awesome fight.

I disagree. It is very intentionally unfair. Two against one bosses where one has long range attacks and one is melee? One shot kills? Losing all your level progress when you die and being unable to retrieve them? This breaks a lot of the common game formulas. It forces you to just "get good" and think about your gameplay differently. But that's exactly what I like about the game. When you're getting you ass handed to you you often can't just come back at a higher level, but need to actually take new strategies. You can for the main questline but outside that you need to "get good"

I’m not clear what you mean by outside the main quest line. The main quest line is the only noteworthy content. Everything can be done at a later level and probably will unless you’re using a guide to find everything in order. Malenia and mohg are outside the main quest line, technically I guess.

But elden ring’s design philosophy seemed to start with “what if we did dark souls but all doors and passages were open from the start?”

The answer is unsurprisingly that many players track awkward paths of hitting things too soon and too late.

If you’re going to have such significant character progression, linear games just make more sense. Breath of the wild gets away from it because link barely gets any stronger over the course of the game. Just a bit tankier.

Fighting bosses in elden ring and finding they’re drastically undertuned really ruins the point of playing a soulslike…

I prefer feeling confident that I’m at a good state to fight something and if I’m losing it’s just a skill issue to practice.

Farming in all souls games doesn’t actually net you that much, but it still feels like the easiest path forward at times. Elden ring is particularly weird with its scaling. Vigor gives much larger buffs to hp than people expect. Damage stats do much less.

There is a wide range of skill levels of players, and what is "appropriately leveled" for one player might be trivial or impossibly hard for others.

Players level to the point where they can beat the bosses that they get stuck on.

If you’re not good at the game, you can trivialize most encounters with the summons, or use multiplayer which adds a ton of luck to the outcome.

Actually farming runes is almost a trap for anything last stormveil.

I don't think the solution is just to rip them out and then proceed forward. And there are still other bad designs, of course; a sibling comment cites Oblivion. (Although I would call that an example of one of the "gyrations" I refer to; having a leveling system but then trying to remove it by somehow mathematically cancelling it is just weird. Quite distinct from not starting with one in the first place.)

I would cite something like Bayonetta as a good example of what I mean, though by no means the only possibility. Especially as "RPGs" continue to move more and more in the direction of straight-up-action-game combat anyhow. You open up some weapons. You can double your health and the other resource (forget what it's called), and I'm not even sure I love that, but you can. But fights are not about whether you're level 34 and they're level 63. Difficult fights are difficult because they are difficult.

In some sense the biggest mistake in my mind is that it gives designers such an easy answer; just slap a leveling system on it. More thought would be nice.

I could also cite something like Slay the Spire. No "levels" in sight, but your character certainly becomes more powerful over time, and your play gets better. Skill acquisition, clever combinations of abilities and features, etc. So much better than just a number that goes up.

Which certainly seems another step removed from logic.

The primary purpose of the leveling system in Borderlands, at least to my eyes, is to make it so you can't just pick up a gun on level one and use it the whole game, defeating the purpose of the main game loop to be forcing you to be constantly changing guns. OK, I get that purpose and in context it makes sense. But the leveling system is a really weird way to do it. I'd almost rather see guns decay instead. (Not do the whole "100% functional until they instantly and totally break"; we've got enough experiences with that to know how frustrating it is.) Decay is somewhat plausible though then you have to have the strength of will to reject repair mechanisms, which is still physically weird.

But I'm not really trying to propose all the solutions to all possible alternatives to leveling systems; I'm just saying "hey let's make the player and all the enemies 11% stronger every 30 minutes, except across a large set of dimensions impossible to ever keep scaled properly relative to each other in an exponential regime" is a silly thing.

Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. That leveling system meant you never ran into anything beyond your level. But it also mean that in the late game you were constantly hounded by insanely powerful creatures randomly out on the road.

Unfortunately, mods that de-leveled the open world were not very good. You had no idea if you were walking into an area you outleveled, or were outleveled by, and many early quests took you to incredibly high-level areas.

I don't even like soulsborne games that much but I recognize the beauty and purity of the experience they provide. I'd rather be playing quake 3, but it's the same thing in a certain conceptual way.

Farming souls is stupid.

The game is also just unintuitive when it comes to defensive stats. Putting lots of points into endurance to wear the biggest armor is nothing compared to boosting vigor. Armor mostly sucks tbh.

The map indicates the main path with glowy little directional markers all along it. Usually areas around the appropriate section of the main path are level appropriate, but there is much more to explore.

Imo it was really just the one time tax of getting your flasks and weapon upgrades. The initial scaling of things was just… really bad. Weapon upgrades are too good for something that’s so uncontrolled game progression wise. Flasks get way too powerful very quickly, filling up more than your entire health bar with just one of many many charges. Health starts too low but then scales up stupidly fast.