What factors do Souls like clones fail at, none ever seem to be able to hit the 10/10 mark and the best Soulsekiro games we have are Black Myth WuKong and Stellar Blade both of which are so easy sometimes you don't need to learn a bosses moveset nor do either try to follow the genre. Why is it that WuKong makes a better Souls game that any Souls clones while being piss easy 90% of the time?
Level design is always an issue even the Nioh series doesn't land it but it can't just be that can it?
I have pinned down another issue with difficulty also, they always try to throw to much at the player, they can never seem to make the games difficult without it feeling cheap and very importantly your game needs to be flawless if you want to do high difficulty and the difficulty and punishment should never exceed the fun factor. Khazan as the most recent example has every boss tuned with a health bar three times that of end game Souls bosses so it's battles of attrition most often, they almost always have elemental status and they do chip damage through your block in a game where your primary defence is parrying and guarding, self healing bosses, summons are useless and to gain them you need to fight a mini boss, just all they can think of the makes things harder without relying solely on great design. Lies of P's latter third suffered the same. Mortal Shell the same. I hear the Lord of The Fallen reboot, the same. But still with Level design and this approach to difficulty it doesn't explain why these games fall so short of the mark or why Black Myth Wukong comes so close compared to these.
Khazan is not reaching greatness despite better combat and QoL features and more refined builds, for some other reason I can't put my finger on.
Last edited by LegitHyperbole - on 22 April 2025
