The Soulsborne games and the Souls-like genre is touted as the golden standard of gaming skill - but are they actually hard, or just badly designed?
The PlayStation 3 is Sony’s most interesting home console ever, but what’s most interesting of all is trying to nail down the very best games on a console with hundreds of incredible games. Let’s give it a shot.
We desperately need Motorstorm back. Evolution is no more though and this makes me sad
Sly Thieves in Time
Stay the Party
Portal 2
Dj Hero
Demon’s Souls
God of war Ascension
2 of those games got railed through the “gaming media” during release.
Sly and god of war.
Both of which were fantastic games.
Yes it’s a decent list of popular games with a heavy hand on FPS and no Warhawk or Starhawk 2 of the best games (not sale wise) on ps3.
I would buy a Starhawk again even if it didn’t have a graphics upgrade hell I would even take a new one with micro transactions 😱🤯
I've noticed a recent nostalgia for the PS3 and I don't get it for me it's been my least favourite generation to date and I've been gaming since the NES I just feel like the ambition of the developers outweighed the capabilities of the consoles so I remember lots of games running in the lower end of 20fps range and I remember for the first time ever actually disliking the duelshock 3 and it's curved triggers
Sure there were some standouts and great games but that's the only gen I switched entirely to PC gaming
Maybe the recent nostalgia is because pretty much all of its games are trapped on that console. People want to play them on more modern hardware. hell... if XB can do it then so can Sony. there are competent emulators out there that can run on PS4/5 hardware but Sony just wont let them become official... why is that?
If we are talking least favorite generations (personally) then this one is certainly mine. i had more fun playing 8th, 7th and 6th gen stuff than 9th. And it isnt like i dont have access to do so... the heavy hitters just havent shown up anywhere close to those previous gens. The few here and there just doesnt cut it compared to the likes of constant good games that showed up in 6th, 7th and 8th gen. hell.... I'll even throw in 5th gen has been better than this one.
I tend to agree there's lots of amazing games locked to the PS3 like GTA IV or mgs 4 but then again my issue was never with the content the PS3 had but rather it's performance many other people have said the PS3 felt like it couldn't walk and chew bubblegum at the same time using PSN and downloading a game could take a few minutes to just start a download.
I typically don't worry all that much about performance I've never had a problem with games that run at 30 but games like crysis 2, Skyrim are good examples where the performance was so unstable you would never even touch the top of the frame cap and the hitching was worse than say Goldeneye on the n64
I think emulation is more than possible on the ps5 though it's just that Sony has no incentive to rush it's development it will likely be a ps6 feature if it ever happens at all.
But yeah the 9th gen has been so bad from a content perspective thats a given I see constant articles where people are frequently expressing their disappointment around the industry as a whole right now to much live service competition that sinks longstanding studios and consumes Devs time less ambition and games cost so much to make they have to play it safe.
The 5th gen was easily better than the 9th we had some all time greats crash, Spyro, Tony hawk, mgs, Mario,64, Goldeneye, Mario kart 64 the list goes on. The 5th gave us a new dimension and I remember being blown away by how much more open gaming had become the 4th gen with the mega drive and SNES was great and very easy to still revisit some of the greatest games of all time came out like earthbound, secret of mana, sonic , Mario world etc but saving our games was still not a standard function or a given so gaming was still evolving but it was very impressive to see some of the tricks Devs used like dithering to give us new experiences those earlier gens limitations bred innovation.
if XB can do it so can sony? I didn't know xbox had a cell processor in their older consoles, that's the reason why ps3 was so cool, but also the reason why games are hostage there and no, xbox did nothing similar even though their backward compatbility is good, they always had a similar architecture to their consoles.
Sorry Michael... I guess you missed the obvious part where i said there are already emulators out that do this. and that is what XB is doing... emulators for OG and 360 games. Its why the full slate is not BC on XBO/Series.
Former SIE president Yoshida explained that Sony wanted to work on the sequel to Demon’s Souls with FromSoftware, but the developer turned it down and instead decided to work with Bandai Namco on what would become Dark Souls.
Not sure what Sony was thinking. Wrong people testing the game. It was my favourite game from the PS3 days. Had to import it from Canada because it wasn't available in Europe at the time. Then I bought it again when a local version was available. It was fun to play online and get two separate platinum.
I understand, sony acting so cocky when it came out. But they quickly realized what they were missing on. I remember an interview of Yoshida saying clearly he hated the game.
"But they quickly realized what they were missing on."
So they've been sleeping on Bloodborne too
Sony didn't realize what they had with Demons Souls. It happens. Marvel approached Xbox to make Spider-Man before they went to Sony and Phil Spencer said "thanks but no thanks". You win some, you lose some. Personally I wasn't THAT bowled over by Demons Souls either when it launched on PS3. I thought it was slow and clunky. The remake on PS5, however, is fantastic! So I get why Sony was lukewarm on the franchise. I dont know if anybody could've foreseen what From Software would eventually become.
To be fair, not even From Software knew the huge success it would become. Their revenue target was tiny, as already confirmed by Miyazaki.
Exactly, these nipple head 'journalists' trying to spin this into a story to wield against Sony are ignoring the fact that hindsight is 20/20.
As you correctly point out, Demons Souls was incredibly niche at the time so it's not a surprise that Sony were cautious about investing huge amounts into advertising and support etc.
You can't just find the RIGHT people. This kind of thing didn't exist yet. FROMSOFTWARE started something huge and you could never see it unless you happen to get someone who not only gets a gut instinct but also the will and authority to act on it. You can't look back from 2025, you have to see it in a 2009 landscape. And Demon's Souls didn't even hit big, it wasn't until Dark Souls that it all started hitting, shortly after it's release in 2011.
Hey sometimes you just can’t see the potential.
It’s like the Chicago Bears moving up in the draft to take Trubisky over Pat Mahomes.
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I bought the Japanese version of Demons Souls before US release. Me and my friend heard about it from an online friend in Japan. It took a while for it to become popular in the US. It was a new IP with nothing like it at the time and it wasn’t easy to play obviously. Eventually word of mouth spread about it and sales picked up after launch. I don’t think anyone could have seen how big it would be at the time. It was considered very niche and hardcore games were minimal.
I do wonder if we'll ever see Demon's Souls 2. Sony clearly wanted it. FromSoftware's subsequent releases penetrated the mainstream in ways the developer likely never imagined. Any stigma or negative perception around the original game's release has long passed. Bluepoint's remake sold very well on PS5. I think the time has come to visit the IP that started it all.
With Sony now firmly in bed with Kadokawa now. I think a Demon's Souls 2 and/or Bloodborne 2 is fairly likely.
They also seem to not want to get on Fromsoft's bad side or undercut them in any way. I think it's completely up to FS. (which is kinda funny cause FS themselves makes weird moves with their games whenever it's not Miyazaki helming the project. ie DS2 and Nightreign)
The creator of the 60 fps patch for Bloodborne has been hit with a DMCA notice from publisher Sony after 3 years.
People will read this and assume "must be a bloodborne remake coming".
Unfortunately, more likely theyre just being d***s
Nintendo took down AM2R and the next year they announced their official Metroid: Samus Returns 3DS remake.
So... There's hope for 2026?
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“ People will read this and assume "must be a bloodborne remake coming".
Yep, that’s me! LOL
I disagree, within 6 months the remake will be announced, it’ll be out in 2026 or the end of this year.
I don't know why they'd do something 3 years after the fact unless it represented some new conflict of interest though.
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No they're not. I would argue that they're almost perfectly designed. It's hard to strike a good balance of "actual" difficulty (not artificial difficulty like most games) and fairness. Dark Souls is very fair, it just takes trial and error to figure things out. Which is a wonderful thing. Brings me back to the NES days of gaming, where difficulty kept you coming back to try and get over those hurdles. Most games just bump up enemy HP and the damage they deal for difficulty settings. With Dark Souls, it's all about formulating a plan. Taking in what you see from enemies, and how they behave. And in the end, becoming a better player than when you first attempted that difficult boss/enemy you just couldn't get past before.
I would strongly disagree. While I personally think Dark Souls 2 has many mediocre levels and bosses. The complex nature of Soulsborne game is something that takes careful crafting to create levels (better termed areas) and bosses that challenging, fair, and rewarding. Good soulsborne titles punish players for poorly approaching challenges whilst rewarding players that analyze challenges being presented.
As an aside:
As a long time player of FPS games. I have noticed that some of the poorest game design is in first person shooters that focus on loadouts and skill gap compression. Call of Duty, Battlefront, and Battlefield often have maps that are designed to be random and unpredictable to reduce the impacts of map control. Additionally, weapon, ability, hero and class balance seems to be intentionally poorly down.
of course sometimes games of these types has their own limitations, but you have to adapt, apart from that, they encourage you to learn and get better. these games has most fairness in gaming, because other games just artificial creates difficulties and they does not have any fairness, just screw players over without any reason.
thegamer is just troll site at this point.
They're actually quite the opposite, which is what made them blow up. In an industry where everyone has abandoned the core pillars of satisfying game design in exchange for "broad appeal" and hiding rewards behibd paywalls and microtransactions. The the Souls games brought them back with avengeance with string emphasisin risk vs reward, and wasn't afraid to make the rewardthat much sweeter by challenging players at a time when excessive hand holding was the norm. If the game was only hard because they were designed badly, they wouldn't be as popular as they are
As someone who has a bachelors degree in Game Development and Design i can tell you that this series is literally built on the core pillars of game design, probably the best and most consistent examples if it in the past deacde or so. I could sit here and tell you why but many others have already done so.
TLDR, you're wrong.
Is this site on a path to shitting out poorly written articles.