[Discussion] Have you stopped playing a soulslike mid-playthrough? What was the reason?

Right now, DS1. With the fucking Four Kings of all things. My save corrupted at Blighttown twice, and I kept going. I ran through Ornstein and Smough first try. My patience and my build are pretty good, I'd say. But I just cannot beat these fucking guys. To the point where I've just had to focus on other games for a little bit.

That fucking runback is so atrocious it deals psychic damage irl.
- Praise Marika and her stakes.
- Did you find the short route? You don't have to fight anything.
  Down the stairs, over the bridge, run past the ghosts. Jump off the ledge. Run forward a bit and drop down, and you're outside the boss room. There might be a ladder you have to kick down first. It's been a while.
- Was thinking about it backwards and at first I was like "eh, not that bad after the ghost room elevator." Then I remembered you had to run all the fuck way from the very first bonfire in the game! Get lucky one of the ghost drops a couple transient curses too otherwise you only got like 4 tries unless you wanted to try the four kings with half HP.
- That's really what's been getting me. And now the Undead Merchant has stopped carrying Transient Curse so idk what I'm going to do lol
The lazy way to beat them is to pile on the armor until you can barely roll, stack any stat buffs you can, buff your weapons, tank most of the damage, and heal when you need to.
Havel's armor has heavy poise and you can take some good hits without staggering.
If you have pyromancy, Power Within is a good attack and stamina buff.
The four kings are, unintuitively, a DPS check. Make sure your weapon is upgraded as much as possible, and play aggressively and you'll have more success. The real problems come when you can't kill them fast enough before a new one spawns in. Either way, good luck! It's a tough fight but if you beat O&S you can take these guys too.

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I could not stand Sekiro. I'm not saying it's a bad game at all, but it's not for me. On just about every level it felt like a game that was designed to not appeal to what I enjoy, even though I've played all of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring enough to complete 100% runs at lvl 1.

Imo the samurai/ninja tropes and aesthetics have been done to death and beaten into the ground, especially by anime culture, so it holds zero appeal for me. I still tried to get over this and give the game an honest go, but couldn't.
I like having different weapon options to play around with to change up how I approach different situations, but Sekiro sticks me with a single weapon that can't be changed. What's worse is that katana and other dex swords have been the least interesting weapons to me in other games. Heavy strength builds with stagger are my favorite by far, but int, faith, and just about any other dex weapon is more interesting to me than katana builds, so I'm stuck without alternative play styles to enjoy.
Unless you do backstabs or guard breaks, your katana does laughably pitiful damage. I don't want to deal chip damage like I'm killing my opponent with paper cuts, I want the option to deal some chunky hits with a standard attack.
The secondary tools are annoyingly weak, and also require you to constantly keep a high stock of the ribbon things. It's like how in Bloodborne if you get stuck on a tough fight and use up all your blood vials, having to take a detour to go back and grind to restock is tedious and breaks the flow of the game.
I've never enjoyed block or parry mechanics in any game, so I just ignored them in all other FS games and had fun with the dodge roll. In Sekiro, the dodge is still included but doesn't give any i-frames, which is a frustrating bait-and-switch. The fun mechanic I like was turned into a trap to make me eat hits, and the mechanic I don't have fun with is basically 100% required.
I really hate the sickness mechanic that stops npc quest progression when you die too much. Npc quests in FS games are already pretty nebulous and poorly implemented in the games I love. Having them get stalled out from dying because you are trying to practice getting better at the game is just making me want to stop playing. It really doesn't feel thought out and is actively anti-fun.

Overall, my impression of Sekiro strikes me as the devs saying "you play by my specific rules, or you don't play at all." I tried to like it, gave it over 15 hours of my time, and didn't enjoy anything other than some pretty environments. Probably never picking the game up again, even though I'm currently tempted to go back to Dark Souls 1 again for my annual playthrough.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Dang.
I'd give just about anything to play this game again for the first time.
Yeah, I also bounced of hard of Sekiro.
Build variety is one of my greatest joys in Souls Games and while I occasionally enjoy parrying, to be forced to always parry and deflect didn’t jive with me.
Straight after beating DS3, I planned to go in release order and play Sekiro after two (?) days of playing I instead bought Eldne Ring. Now I have beaten ER so many times, even once all Bosses at RL1.
I will probably return to Sekiro and give it another go … eventually.
I loved sekiro tbh and I'm sorry to hear your experience with it. It's definitely not a game for everyone.
Like another commentor said I wish I could play it for the first time again. It broke my dodge only habit and when I returned to other fs games I can now parry like no one's business and it's breathed new life into my play styles. It also made for a fun time through expedition 33 for the parry mechanic.
- I just said almost the same. But expedition 33 kinda lost me with option paralysis on the skills and the punishment for missing a parry. And that was on normal. The first optional boss you come across literally one hit KOs you. It took me three or four tries, but I powered through. But that lantern boss fucking broke me! Turned it to easy and it was way too easy. And it was like I was playing with cheat codes and I lost interest. Wish it had something in between 1hitKOs and immortality.
I personally found the chip-chip-EXECUTION pretty satisfying. Posture is a neat mechanic, in my opinion. I've done the first phase of the final boss that went like deflect-deflect-deflect-mikiri_counter-slash-jump-DEATHBLOW, and that was really satisfying.
It's not for everyone, of course, and that's fine.
It's probably my second favorite fromsoft after bloodborne and it's a shame, but I totally see how some people can experience the game this way. In the end the game is just pattern recognition of bosses and how well you can parry, once you learn that the game is practically "solved" but I like that style.
Totally understand your perspective, because it is def the only souls game where you are forced to play a certain way, if you don't it will be suffering.

Yes, all those I tried. I mean isn't it the whole concept of this type of games?

Waaaa it's too hard

-- me

Same. I have a bunch of them, have tried most of what I have, and really want to play through them cuz they sound really rewarding. Instead I find them rage-inducingly, frustratingly difficult and I’m just not that into being frustrated and mad for hours at a time. If I was, there’s some humans I could talk to for similar effect..

I stopped playing DS3 because Silksong came out... I resumed last weekend -- after recently beating Silksong -- and while it took me a bit to remember what the hell I was doing and how to control my character, I managed to defeat a demon and stumble my way through most of Smouldering Lake (to the point that I found the boss, at least) so I guess I haven't forgotten everything in the interim.

Does stopping skong at the end of act 2 count as putting it down halfway? Cause that's what I've done
- That's like getting only the first ending in Hollow Knight and never awakening the Dream Nail. There's some pretty significant stuff left...
  Also, I don't really blame you. I found Act 2 challenging, and it just got harder from there. Act 3 was brutal.
  Some things you missed out on:
  three gauntlets back to back with no bench
  at least 8 boss fights, including...
  possibly the hardest boss fight in the game
  the other hardest boss fight in the game
  possibly several optional areas plus at least three[1] definitely missed areas -- and the bosses/quests/challenges associated with them
  at least one crest
  at least one movement ability
  ...among other things.
  [1]: Not sure on the exact count on further reflection; may be more depending on how you count areas.

Sekiro: I guess it's unfair to say that I started, it wouldn't run on my video card beyond the intro.
DS3: I beat it but I had just run through DS1 and 2 and was too burnt out by the time I got to the DLC.
Elden Ring: multiple save file corruptions. Probably would have pushed through anyway but my video card took the whole rig down and now it feels too daunting to start over from scratch.
Bloodborne: Rom, the Vacuous Spider. Enough said.

Oh, there's another:
Ashen: stopped being able to schedule game times with my co-op partner.

Sekiro. Between the insane difficulty and me not knowing where to go or what to do next I just kinda stopped bothering

I so recommend you give it another shake. Everyone said it, but until like 2 years ago I didn't understand what everyone was saying. It truly is a rhythm game. Even the big gate keeper genechiro (? Dunno how to spell it) really only boils down to like 5-6 easily recognizable patterns. It took me 3 days of hours after work grinding, with YouTube's help. But I'm kinda into the banging of head against brick wall until it cracks.
But once it clicked, it really clicked.
After you beat him, you get a memory you can use to re fight him. I didn't even use one gourd. After that the game became so much easier!
The "parry" window is so much more forgiving than you're used to, you just got tap it kinda quick. Shit, you could probably spam it fast enough for most fights. But it's such a beautiful game!
Like I know all souls games are pretty in a dark way, but sekiro hits different with the actual foliage, wilting cherry blossom trees, non human skeleton like mountain sides. I beg everyone to try your best to get through at least to that boss, cause he really is a teacher more than a roadblock. You've surmounted seemingly impossible challenges before and came out victorious. You can do it again, it's so rewarding!
- Your post makes me want to revisit it. I have platinum in From’s other souls games, but Sekiro had me tapping out not long after the giant drunk guy. It is beautiful, but I am terrible at playing with rhythm.
- Genichiro Ashina I think the bastard's name is.
  I think I'm going at him too soon, like I think the game expects me to go do other stuff first, but I can't resist the temptation to try anyways.
  I've gotten to his lightning phase a few times but I can never stay alive more than a few seconds at that point.
  I may go back to it yet. I do generally enjoy the challenge. But between him and the butterfly person boss, honestly more frustration with unfair bullshit than genuine enjoyment.

I had to take a break the first time I got to O&S in ds1. I hadn't yet accepted that being defeated is okay, so I just got really frustrated.

I barely started Nioh and I was struggling, I got preoccupied with other things, next thing I know, its been years

I loved Nioh. When Nioh 2 went on sale, I picked it up cheap, and played about an hour.
Ni-oh I totally gave up on. The discrete levels just don’t hit the same as a connected world, and I hate being forced to manage randomly generated loot.

I think I tried Dark Souls 2 for half an hour before I realised I'm too dopamine-deprived and not patient enough by far for this type of game. I admire anyone who makes it through even one souls-like.

It's an unpopular opinion in the community, but I like ds2. I dunno what order I put in it with the all the others from fromsoft, they all got their own charm to me. DS2 's main one is it's the only one that's optimized to any degree! That souls is as about as resource intensive as portal 2! The igpus I've seen it getting 60 fps on are fucking crazy!
- I think DS2 has been getting more appreciation in recent years, it got slandered hard by a content hate train back in the 2010s with people like Mauler and in the early 2020s by FeebleKing. I think most people now acknowledge that its a good game, just not most people's favorite.
  It is my personal favorite tho. Way more chill than 3 or Elden Ring imo.

DS1: Really enjoyed it until the pitch-black area. People convinced me to go back to it, and I eventually made it to the bottom of the pit... but I hadn't rung the second bell, so the path was closed. (There's no fast travel in DS1, so I would have to climb all the way back out).

Sekiro: Grapling hook is fun, stealth is fun, thought the combat was dumb and too clunky. Gave up at the first fire troll or whatever it was. Absoluetly loved Nine Sols though.

In general I have no tolerance for "just git gud" as an excuse for bad game design. If it's not fun, then I don't play it.

Oof there IS fast travel in DS1 after you reach Anor Londo 😅 you really aren't meant to be in the tomb for the giants until you've unlocked it
- I think the whole area should have been scrapped from the game tbh... but why don't they just close the entrace??
Flaming giant guy being so early in Sekiro is actually a totally fair reason to drop it. I STILL cheese him years later because his grab hitboxes are so shit, he is one of the only enemies in the game I feel are indefensible garbage.

Dark Souls 2,3, and Bloodborne.

I'm just not good enough.

I had 20-30 hours into each one, and just wasn't making progress. Even if you're enjoying the story, not being able to progress just kinda sucks.

Would difficulty options help you give it another try? It's a very divicive (?) topic, and I feel like it'd bring more good than bad to the genre
- I honestly don't know. I don't know if I would try them again, but a new game that was similar concepts and story, but had difficulty levels that allowed me to progress--despite generally sucking--might keep me playing it.

I have played only demon souls which I did stop after the second world because I could not understand how to approach a soulslike. But I completed it later after reading a few guides. Also I don't have experience of playing a 2nd soulslike so I cant say why would one stop playing but my best guess would be that when one understands the flow of the game he may choose to not continue with it.

Demon's Souls is one of the more tedious games of the genre. Healing items being consumable means that if you struggle with the game, you'll oftem have to go grinding for items.
The World Tendency stuff was so opaque that I had to go look up how it worked and how it affected the game, and once I understood it, I didn't want to have to deal with it. Fortunately it doesn't matter much for most players and can safely be ignored unless you already know what you're trying to do.

Twice, actually. First time was the Ringed City DLC for DS3. I was already kind of burnt out after the first DLC, Sister Friede was really challenging for me and I hated how long phase 1 and 2 was, only to get one shot instantly at the start of phase three. Took me a really long time to beat her. Then in the Ringed City for some reason I struggled with the Demon Prince even more. And it had all the same things I hated: a gank fight (I struggle with tracking multiple objects so any gank fight feels almost impossible) and a super long phase 1 that just feels boring and like it deliberately wastes your time. And I don't know. Eventually I just realised I wasn't having any fun. Didn't keep going past Demon Prince, and then Elden Ring came out and I just never went back to the DS3 DLC after, and after ER I kinda moved on to other things.

And then recently it was GRIME. I was already kind of feeling Soulslike fatigue I think, and I think the game was just a bit more difficult than I was expecting. Got to the first major boss and it was a 2v1 gank fight. Eventually got through it - only to find out it had a second healthbar and then get instantly one-shot. And I just kinda realised maybe I just need a break from feeling like I suck at everything for a while. Or maybe I've finally gotten too old for Soulslikes and really difficult games. I didn't really feel that fire or that need to overcome the challenge that I used to feel that would lead me to spend days working on a boss until I beat it. I just felt tired.

GRIME looks interesting. I’m book marking it.
- It's a really good game, don't let my experience with it scare you off. The world building is awesome, the graphics are beautiful and the art style is gorgeous and very unique. It also has a very interesting character customisation system where you absorb aspects of enemies.
  I still half-plan (or at least hope) to return some day, I think I just need a long break.
The Friede fight was also my first biggest souls like fatigue moment. Such a long boss fight and I didn't really enjoy...any of it. I know she is probably a good boss by from soft standards but damn if I don't find her 3-phases exhausting. She made me take a month break til I came back and beat her.
I feel like Gael, the final boss of The Ringed City, is absolutely NOT exhausting because he isn't visually phased into 3 healthbars. He just has 1 fucking huge one and awesome in combat phase changes and settings. They are a good comparison cause I still hate Friede to this day, but like Gael.

I stopped playing 3. I forgot what i was doing or i got lost. Idk.

I cannot beat Roland in Another Crabs Treasure and I'm tired of trying to grind / learn new builds to beat him. I tried even cheesing him with a wall clip bug that's probably patched now. I am just tired of it.

I haven't finished ER, I am savoring it, not done, just pausing for a bit

I never finished Sekiro for the same reason as ACT, I keep getting to the drunken house fire boss and getting my ass whooped. I want to try it again sometime, give it another go. I'm pretty sure this will be my 4th attempt to start over.

If by drunken house fire boss you mean ishin, that's an optional early endgame and not advised for a first play through.
If you mean big ol heavy dude with the big ass sword and vomit, go to the temple and practice jumping counters
Do it... use the gun...

Elden ring... I got to the big gold guy and sat in it for months then I hopped back in, beat him then stopped playing again... This is my playthrough I started when it released.

Orphan Of Kos, because I knew it was going to take a few attempts and then Silksong came out.

Lady Maria about six years ago because I was just chewing through my vials and needed a more chill game for a while. I started from scratch when I came back this year and beat her fairly easily.

Dark Souls when I got my ass handed to me repeatedly in Blightown. Came back a couple of months later and started over.

Original Lord's of the Fallen because it was so bland, I made it about an hour in.

The Surge like 75% of the way through - I slogged my way through most of the game, but the level design towards the end was lacking and I wasn't interested in continuing, it was too difficult.

I have not... Yet. But I have an addictive/ hyper focus type of personality and the gameplay loop of soulslikes has me all fucked up. Even when I'm being shit I keep coming back for more, I can't help it.

My tolerance for the more character and story driven rpgs has decreased significantly because of this. So I'm currently on a quest to play other types of games again and ENJOY them. Sometimes it feels like a chore tbh.

I haven't played through all the FS catalog so maybe my nemesis is out there still, (sekiro still scares me a bit) but we'll see.

Dark Souls 2. The level design felt so much worse than DS1 and every area felt like a joyless slog. I have no desire to return.

Elden Ring. Open worlds make me tired, because I try to explore every nook and cranny. I have returned to this one, dealing with the open world as just a place between major points of interest. I only explore if I see something interesting. I’ve made it further than I had before and still want to keep going.

Nioh 2. Nothing bad to say, just put in 60 hours and still wasn’t done so I went to play something else for a change of pace. I will definitely be back at some point. It’s a lot of fun. “Too much content”, as if that’s a bad thing. I hear higher difficulty levels are new experiences with new gear and enemy types and placements, too.

Yes. But it’s my own fault. ADHD when it comes to games and a lack of time.

Bloodborne :(

motion sickness... really need a proper 60fps remaster some day

Now that's a QoL change then. Never heard of people getting motion sick from a lack of FPS. Fortunately, I've not experienced that ever even though I'm prone to getting motion sick quite easily... Brains are weird

Dark Souls 3. I have all these huge build plans and want to revisit it, but I always lose interest super quickly after thinking about all the mediocre areas i gotta get through and frustrastion of the enemies that almost encourage you to just run past all of them. Really sucks too, cuz the endgame stuff is great, I just cant be bothered with the tedium of everything between Undead Settlement and Irythil or whats its name.

New lords of the fallen as well. The lantern mechanic was really cool at first, but became tedious after a few hours considering you're really only using it for hidden ramps.

I stopped playing Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty.

The combat gameplay was too repetitive. Boss fights were mostly the same: dodge/parry and hit em with my bamboo stick. Even the sounds were repetitive.

I used to play every souls like, I started with dark souls in my teens and played every single one, even went back for demon souls. My favorites (and the only from soft I still play) are bloodborne and Sekiro.

I got to Elden Ring and I was honestly already burnt out on the style. I managed to force myself through 99% of the game, got probably 90% of the way through the final boss's health bar (terrible boss IMO) after a couple fights and my desire to play souls games just..died. I don't think I ever went back and beat it.

Seems like eventually the "excitement" on beating bosses just....went away for me in souls games. It is still there for games more actiony, where it feels like there is more to learn on the player side than the boss side. Nioh has never gotten old to me, because the weapons are complex and the game is begging you to break it. Games like DMC5 and Ninja Gaiden 4 (which I beat last night, so much fun) have so much more for the player to learn of their own skillset than a souls game and they remain infinitely more interesting to me.

Acutally the first Lords of the fallen. Hated the mechanic of slowly losing my souls but being forced into slow clunky combat.

Darksouls 2, because I didn't stop smashing my head against the chariot boss. Just didn't do that on my second play through a while later and had a great time