Elden Ring Wants You to Play Differently

The invisible stagger bar in Elden Ring leads me to believe Elden Ring is trying to incentivize the player to play differently than they would in a normal souls game.

[ratatoskr]

The "you're playing it wrong" is a quote from a reddit post I cover in this video. I know you're not playing it at all. Neither am I.

[alexadelaide]

The “I was getting my ass kicked so bad I had to experiment with other strategies” is what I love about fromsoft games

[nullpo]

I'm glad that they finally make blocking, heavy attack, and jump attack useful. Plus the shield counter feels like a really good mechanic for someone that is more attuned to sekiro parry system than dark souls parry system.

[Discotechque]

I "accidentally" learned that R2 attacks staggered Margit because my R1 with a long sword dealt 32 DMG and a charged R2 dealt 105 so I chose to use RE attacks. Needless to say, I was staggering Margit every 3-4 R2's depending on the frequency. Though I died like 20+ times even with that knowledge, Rogier, and that jellyfish summon.

[walter]

So heavy attacks actually break bosses poise, opening up for a critical. Good.

[Entertainment-evob]

I’m usually against the “your doing it wrong and this is why your not having fun” thing but in this case I think it’s true. One example is thinking you can run through a souls game like any other game. Sometimes you need to take a step back and realize why specific stuff is done.

[NotSoMax]

I’ve never been big into guides or following anyone else’s builds so I’ve always just found a big ass heavy sword and find my opportunity to do my stupid strong but slow swings, playing Elden ring has been very rewarding in that sense because I can pretty quickly stagger bosses for a critical if I can find the right window. In past games my very dummy straightforward play style has worked, but it feels this time I’m actually rewarded for my glass canon play style. I think it’s cool that this game has broadened what they player can do and there are entire incredible well developed systems that the player can ignore (i.e. magic, shield mechanics, etc) if they so choose. Giving the players the option on how they play, and how hard the game is for them is super fulfilling as a player and it starts to feel like nearly every play style is catered to.

[josegoatkidd]

Ok, I've been thinking about this and after having finished Dark Souls 1 again after 2 years without playing it, now with this new "Elden Ring mentality" I'm starting to suspect that this approach to combat of mixing rolls and blocks might have been the intended way from the very beginning.
Something I realized playing Demon's Souls is that counter-attacks after a block were always a thing in these games, but it's a mechanic that has been completely overlooked. Or at least, I've never seen anyone talk about it. Let me explain: when you block an enemy's attack, his weapon will bounce off your shield (if you have enough stamina/stability for that, obviously), and if you attack inmediately after, you will do slightly more damage that if you attack him normally. You can test this very easily: go to Demon's Souls tutorial, and count how many hits you need to kill the first enemy; then go to the second one, block his first attack and counter. With the knight build (the one I usually choose) you will need 3 R1s to kill the first enemy, but only 2 if you block hist attack first. I've tested this and it is true for Dark Souls 1 as well.
And funny enough, this mechanic is put to test against Gwyn. I've seen quite some people complaining about how Gwyn has combos that are way too fast for Dark Souls 1 roll animation, that it is not balanced. Well, maybe what you need to do is to block those fast attacks. He also has some slower ones that you can roll through, thus making Gwyn a final test of everything the game's combat offers. Buuuut, we all have got used to parry him to death instead.
So, as I see it, FromSoft has always wanted us to weave all the combat mechanics in a dynamic way but have struggled to balance them all properly. In Dark Souls 1 tanking behind a shield was too OP so this became the meta for newcomers: hold the shield and search the backstab. Then BloodBorne came, and with it FromSoft tried to teach us how to properly dodge and be more agressive. This is cannon now, a lot of content creators have said it in their analysis of the game. But the problem is that this turned the table the other way around and created a generation of 2 handing dodge-spammers.
If you remember, there is even a couple shields in the game, and in their item description you can read "Shields are nice, but not if they engender passivity". This has no double meaning, no possible interpretation, it is literal: shields are OK but constantly hiding behind them is not the way. But most of us, when reading this, what we actually read was "shields are for scrubs, git gud lol".
So then Dark Souls 3 came, and I think this was another chance for FromSoft to test if we had finally learnt the lesson, putting shields back in the menu and giving more complex movesets to a lot of the enemies. But it was too late, we were accustomed to the dodge focused flow of BloodBorne; and that, mixed with the more generous i-frames for the rolls, turned us all into frenzied roll-spaming madmen.
BUT THEN Sekiro came, and with it, FromSoft put the focus on force-teach us how to properly use our blocks with the deflect mechanic (that is, tap blocking instead of just holding the L1 button); just as they force-taught us how to properly dodge in BloodBorne by removing shields all together.
Considering all of this, I see a really fascinating story of a company swinging back and forth, balancing different mechanics, in order to teach their fanbase how to play their games. All of this while releasing masterpiece after masterpiece. FromSoft is on a(whole)nother level when it comes to player conditioning, man.
Now, with Elden Ring, we'll have to see if we have finally learnt the lesson ;)

[yewtewbstew]

Quite a lot of the larger bosses in Bloodborne had something similar to this mechanic too, where if you hit them with heavy attacks (usually in a specific body part, but not always) they would stagger and become vulnerable to a visceral attack or at least be weakened in some other way (such as Darkbeast losing his lightning).

[TheSealMayor]

Margitt is absolutely supposed to be your first wall, your first test. Both mechanically, thematically, and narratively. Your waifu even says that she wanted to see if you can handle the journey

[batatinhacomics]

What's funny is that as someone who's not a Souls player, I've been playing like this from launch and it was super intuitive to play like this. I have no muscle memory from the other games or anything like that, so that might've helped.

[John-uwje]

From what I can see the "rules" for avoiding damage are as follows:
Counter slow attacks with dodging
Counter fast attacks with shield
Counter area of effect attacks (like a slam) with jumping

[chiajon]

Fun fact: You can charge many spells too. They do more damage (about 10% I believe) and can stagger more too I think.

[nhall]

If this remains a mechanic in the full game, im really excited for it. Its felt like heavy attacks have lacked much purpose outside of knocking down small enemies
If we now have incentive to use R2 attacks, we’ll have far more decisions to make in combat. Do i get the easy damage out, or do i risk the R2 for the chance at a posture break.
I love the potential of this change.

[manab]

I started with the warrior class and was dual wielding the scimitars for the entire first run of the demo. I played as if I was playing ds3 with the twin blades, primarily using L1 for attacking. Marget was very tough for me, he was relentless and had very few safe openings. It took me a while to beat him because I was playing as if it was ds3, I didn’t even jump the whole time, not because I didn’t want to, I just completely forgot I could.

[healersinbound]

Why after 200+ hours do I watch this..

[OmnibusEveryone]

To whom this may be useful:

A friend and I tested each weapon on the “”dragon”” and Margit specifically, as well as on each other in different circumstances through PvP.
As far as the Network Test was concerned, Jumping R2’s beat out all other moves in term of staggering (or whatever you wanna call it). Even more than the charged R2 attacks.

I’m generally just happy to have the posture bar back, albeit an abridged version, and options instead of just pressing circle and R1. The carian magic sword stab was also godly at staggering btw.
I do wish that blocking with a weapon only could negate damage if timed within a specific window, but we can’t have everything.

But yeah, the souls combat needed new options to account for the continuing changes in enemy design throughout the series. Elden Ring appears to do just that. Can’t wait to play the full game.

[franknfurterlover]

Margit really impressed me for the reasons you mentioned. He felt intentionally designed to be a wall to players stuck in the mindset of previous Souls titles. Designed to make you switch things up in a very clever way. He reminds me of Gascoigne and Genichiro in that he tried to force you to play the game you're playing, not Dark Souls.

[noahbuster]

Melee combat is brutal in Eldenring: delayed attacks, every mob/boss has aoes, hard to break poise. Mage was so much smoother

[bobdkdmeneme]

It’s also interesting that blocking the dragon with a straight sword in the gameplay trailer meant you rolled backward, instead of getting knocked to the ground. This seems to further emphasise the value of blocking regardless of the weapon.