Let’s not forget how blatantly the bosses read your inputs. FROM bosses have always done this, but it’s never been so obvious; it kinda breaks the “tough but fair” illusion.

My take is that since players have gotten so powerful, bosses had to adapt…but the only ways to make them stronger have upset the balance between “tough” and “fair”. Hit boxes for attacks have gotten larger, which hurts readability; attacks that you used to be able to dodge now land, even though it didn’t look like it. Bosses hit harder, combo their attacks, and they can even cancel into different combos now.

All of this happened because bosses are balanced around Spirit Ashes and the new insane weapon arts. It’s harder than ever to SL1 the game, because if you don’t have a good Ash summon or a crazy weapon art or didn’t grind for upgrade materials, main quest bosses are stupidly hard. If you did do all of those things, they’re almost trivial.

It’s weird. The bosses used to be the highlight of Soulsborne games, and now they’re the worst part because they’re just not fun anymore. Dragonlord Placidusax is my favorite fight, and it’s not even close. I either trivialize my way through the rest, or just wanted them to be over. The satisfaction of fighting a worthy opponent is gone, because it’s almost always just unfair for the player, or unfair for the boss.

It looks to me like they’re reusing the Link’s Awakening map, like they did for BotW.

I’m gonna pick it up, if only to encourage Nintendo to give Zelda her own full-size, mainline game.

They’re far from perfect, I’d be the first person to tell you.

But they’re still light-years ahead of anyone else, because they’re perfectly happy just making tons of money instead of trying to squeeze every last cent out of the storefront at our expense.

Grimes was also in Cyberpunk, and it was abundantly clear that she’s not an actor.

In other words, things that are normal about game development, especially for games that are still getting updates. Of course an update will break mods, of course there’s going to be some miscommunication, of course there’s going to be bugs in a game this complex and fixing them takes time.

I’m just glad Larian recognizes that most of us knows how this sort of thing works and to call out that handful who have nothing better to do than to spew their hate on the internet.