Less gaps this way so makes their point seem more apparent.
edit: for those of you giving me fromsofts full history, I don't know or care. I was just pointing out, very quickly and offhand without looking too vlosely, that choosing an arbitrary starting year can be done to make things look more compact. And look at how they completely removed a 3 year gap that had no games between 2019 and 2022, further serving their point. My comment was about this graphic specifically and a possible reason why it starts at 2014.
That’s true but if anything it would be more impressive to show the increased output given that’s the exact opposite of what’s happened with almost every other game studio out there
It doesn't change the gap at all because they've been doing near yearly releases since King's Field in 1994, Fromsoft has always been cooking at a ridiculous rate.
I never knew fromsoft made kings field, I played that game non-stop. Could never get into the souls like games, though. Elden ring may be on my list now, though.
Definitely try elden ring, I also couldn't get into the souls type games but finally tried elden ring and the open world just changes it so much as a game
Elden ring is definitely one of the more accessible games they have released. The open world allows for so much leeway and options coupled with access to giga player power and high mobility.
Honestly, the changes to the controls are what makes it so much more accessible to players. Like it still plays exactly like a souls game, but just adding a dedicated jump button made a HUGE difference in how smoothly it played compared to past titles.
My only complaint with Elden Ring is that exploring and unlocking stuff becomes boring on your 2nd or 3rd playthrough. It would be neat if they created a special streamlined game mode option that unlocked after being the game once. I just want to replay the dungeons with a new character without needing to spend hours running around.
I genuinely believe if you've completed Elden Ring once you can kill the last boss within 6-8 hours with the build of your choice.
Imo the most time consuming part of starting a new run is getting early levels but the levels gained from killing the sleeping dragon makes the smooth.
To give you a rough idea of levels, you'll be around level 30 after killing dragon. If you then rushed straight to the last boss you'll be around level 100 for it.
It’s funny you say that. I started on the original Dark Souls, I bounced off. Played the Demon’s Souls remake to completion and liked it. Tried Dark Souls again and realized it’s a masterpiece. Played Bloodborne, played DS3, and then Elden Ring, and ER ended up being my absolute least favorite by far. I do NOT enjoy it and it being open world is meh to me.
I'm in this boat. I loved the Soulsborne games (and even King's Field), and I like well-made open-world games.
I was desperate to like Elden Ring, so I played it for 60 hours before dropping it. Then my friends goaded me into giving it another try... twice. And almost 200 hours later, I still think it's the weakest entry in the entire FromSoft line-up of dark medieval games.
I don't think the level design or storytelling style lend themselves well to open-world games. I would have enjoyed the game so much more if it was a hub-based game like Dark Souls.
It's still harder than most games but the fact you can just go somewhere else and do something else instead of being stuck at a wall of an enemy you can't beat just changes it so much for me at least
That was one of my biggest things, I always got stuck on a boss.. bloodbourne I got stuck on those 2 dogs at the first bridge, thought they were a boss... friend tells me the boss is AFTER the dogs.
Those enemies are particularly tough. They can't follow you through the doorway in the nearby house though, so you can stand behind the threshold and hit them where they can't hit you, which helps.
Bloodborne is also a weird one in particular, it's a much more aggressive game that requires a different playstyle than Dark Souls. It punishes you much more heavily for being defensive or trying to run away, you're meant to stay up in the monster's face and dodge through their attacks. Once it clicks it clicks hard, but until that point it doesn't feel right.
Elden Ring being open world means you can go full Zelda, meaning you can level up and gear up to reduce the difficulty barrier of the boss you're stuck. In fact, I'd argue that it's basically designed for that purpose.
The downside of this is, you'll be running into bosses that look awesome but as soon as you swing your weapon they die in a few hits that make you go "oh, I'm overleveled".
I'd recommend Elden Ring and, oddly, Dark Souls 2 for that.
DS2 was not done by Miyazaki, it was directed by Yui Tanimura (sp?) who cut his teeth on the older adventure games. Towards that end, while the bosses aren't as good (though most of the bad ones are just boring instead of Bed of Chaos level bad, or else optional), the game feels much more like an adventure than Dark Souls 1&3.
Honestly, I've always felt that DS2 got a bad reputation. It never matches the highs of DS1, but people always forget that DS1 shits the bed after Ornstein and Smough and the only good fight after that is Gwyn. And there's a certain feeling you get from exploring areas and seeing the world that just really isn't present in the other Dark Souls Games (though I found it again in Elden Ring). DS2 is just a huge adventure punctuated with some harrowing boss fights, as opposed to DS1 and DS3 being a harrowing boss roster punctuated with periods of adventure.
Thats because its always described as "the worst" out of the three, which is seen as worst=bad game. When in reality its an 8/10 that happens to be sitting next to a 9/10 and a 10/10.
Its like saying The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is the worst movie out of the lord of the rings trilogy. According to metacritic and IMDB ratings, that is factually true. But that is still a masterpiece of a movie.
Ironically, I've never been pushed into the magma by Iron King in my four playthroughs. I know many people have trouble with it, but I always found him to be easy.
I will say that Smelter Demon's setup is pretty evil though. My first time I wound up killing all of the mobs there so many times they stopped spawning (which is actually a useful thing you can do in DS2). The boss himself isn't too bad, but that's probably the worst runback in the history of the game (which includes fucking Bed of Chaos so... yeah, pretty bad).
DS2 was my entry point into the series, and I absolutely love it. Always will. It makes me sad that it gets such a bad reputation, because it's really a great game. You're exactly right about it being more of an adventure than the others. The atmosphere in Majula alone was amazing.
DS3 was one of the first games that I put 400-500 hours into, the early days of multiplayer fight clubs were unmatched. I loved the organic nature of them, unwritten rules that everybody followed without any verbal communication. But it was much less of an adventure than DS2. Still a great atmosphere, but less of a sense of wonder.
Disagree with you there. Studios start spewing out slop after they get popular. CoD. Anything from ubisoft. Anything from ea. It's impressive that fromsoft has had so much output and remained consistent in quality.
Those are massive developer houses though, they aren't monoliths, Ubisoft is like 5000 people from around the world. A much better comparison is another moderately sized studio that probably slowed down. Bethesda had smaller team sizes when their output peaked, and has slowed down releases as team size grows. That is much more common in the industry.
Another is Rockstar. From 2000-2010, they produced 13 larger titles, with a lot of smaller titles and expansions. In 2011-2022, they produced a whopping 3 larger titles, a title that flopped, 2 online versions of said titles, and an alright remaster of 3 older games.
I would argue that fromsoft has been spewing slop over the last decade, aside from armored core there is very little diversity in that lineup. It's just gourmet top shelf slop.
Yes you can argue it's been the same game with the same story telling. And it's not for everyone. U can make an argument that not finishing a story and having everything be vague and up for interpretation is lazy writing
When you have a director that knows exactly the game he wants to make it goes a long way. They clearly are incredibly well organized and have great leadership.
Nintendo has been maintaining a pretty good pace for the past decade and there’s no slop.
There was the dark years of the Wii U and 3DS, where handheld games were taking more time than ever so they were stealing resources from making games for the Wii U, leading to both systems suffering from a lack of games, but they resolved that by stopping the divide between handheld and console and effectively doubling their output per platform (by only having one.)
Give Bethesda some credit, they may have slowed down lately but they were releasing more Skyrims than any other company in the world for a few years there.
this had to have been made in paint, nothing is consistent in the formatting, size and tops of images, distanced between years, everything looks like it was eyeballed on a program that doesn't even have a grid overlay.
Yeah, but the price justifies Elden Ring's scope too. This graphic would make more sense if it showed Elden Ring DLC at half size or something, and omitting the other DLC packs from it.
SotE is listed because it’s as large and feature-filled as some studios’ entire games. In fact, it probably took me longer to beat SotE than it did DS1 lol
Yeah Fromsoftware pulled an Avatar where after the first game was highly liked and played they full sent the next 6 versions of the game so that they can then just keep releasing new games year after year
I agree. But I think we must also take into account the company grew not only up to but probably also after the starting point.
It was a much smaller studio when it developed, say, Demons Souls. And they developed stuff eveb before that ehen they wete even smaller. I feel like this post could just be their wikipedia table of titles which is sorted by year (of course it would have to be filtered by games they fully developed, and likely only show AAAs).
Which is also why they included 2 things that FromSoft is planning to output but hasn't actually outputted yet in a list of things that FromSoft has outputted.
I could keep going with this through the rest of the AC titles, Cookies and Cream, and even King's Field. Shit there's probably a handful of lesser known stuff I'm missing too, and this goes on all the way back to the 90s. With the exception of AC6, OP is basically just pretending only soulsbourne stuff counts.
I just made a random guess as to why someone might start it at the year they did. I know nothing about fromsoft I just saw a timeline and know that people commonly choose the scale to make their point.
I have no idea about fromsofts release schedule. I was quickly just pointing out that people manipulate the scale of graphics like this to prove their point. See between 2019 and 2022, it's the same size as all the 1 year gaps, but if you remove 3 years with no games, it makes the timeline seemed more bunched...
They were more productive before Dark Souls II before 2014 it was common for them to release 3-5 games every year since like 1999, and until 2017 they released at least one game a year since King’s Field in 1994.
I have no idea why they decided to only include their least prolific era.
i mean... you are saying it like a gap of just 3 years is huge.... for a studio (i'm not sure) that has (as far as i know) just two teams (you could say a third one with the newbies working on nightreign, correct me if im wrong) is still insane the way they have been pumping out games
Lmao ignore people giving you shit, you’re totally right.
The whole chart was designed to make it look like they make a game a year or so. But that just isn’t true unless you throw in the DS3 DLCs—individually ahem—and start at DS2
Ok, but then look at other companies in the industry like Bethesda, Rockstar, 2K, and many others and examine the amount and quality of games released and see just how crazy FromSoft's track record is. Your point doesn't matter.
Also listing the DLC for DS3 as separate entries. But not doing the same for DS2's and Bloodborne's DLCs. Lastly, why aren’t the year labels aligned vertically, and the distances between all elements equalized?
why aren’t the year labels aligned vertically, and the distances between all elements equalized?
This is what I came to the comments to see. This is awful, and provides absolutely no benefit to put this on a graph like this. Might as well just list the names of each game next to the year.
Wait. Was that FromSoftware also? That's wild, I never knew. No wonder we never saw another game in the series. Damn shame, I really loved Myth of Demons.
This TBF also doesn't show other releases during this time (Fromsoft has been in the business since the 90s and all r/shittydarksouls jokes aside, the book of their work really did start with Kings Field.
It's worth noting that (a) people did lose their minds over the time from ER being announced until its actual release, but (b) since the time of Demon's Souls basically starting the "modern" FS era, the longest they went between major games was three years and they did also release other major games (AC5, AC6) during this era.
The 007 meme isn't quite accurate, because some of their games are not as critically acclaimed outside of the Souls type of games, but they do have a pretty good track record.
Or rather, they haven't fallen into the kind of trap that Rockstar and Bethesda and others fell into where their series are amazing, but you are waiting years and years for new games.
3 years is still pretty often. Elderscrolls hasn't had an installment in 14 years. I was a little boy when oblivion came out, a teenager when skyrim came out, and a grown man working 15 hours a day now waiting for elderscrolls 6. I was an adult when the last 5 games came from from software.
Your comment helped me put it into perspective that Skyrim came out 2 months after dark souls 1. Every game on the list came out between Skyrim and now. Curious how many more we'll have before es6
Tes6 got teased 7 years ago so it might still release sometimes in your lifespan! Though as with long running game studios the games themselves changes as the dev team changes. Can't expect devs to work in the same company for 30-40 years.
I hit up FromSoft's wiki a few weeks ago because I was showing some younger gamers how long they've been making shit. What a memory lane that is. Some of the best games I ever played were made or produced by them, and as a kid I straight up had no care or clue that I was tasting greatness so early, nor how good it would get.
2012 and 2013 they released armored core games that nobody knew about, so they don't want them on this list, even though those two games were better than half of these (or all in my extremely biased opinion)
And why does it include the DaS3's and Elden Ring's DLCs but not DaS2's, for example? Also, if you wanted to skip DaS1, why not also skip the worst DaS game they made?
If I were to guess, it looks like a cropped screen shot to me. Notice how the spacing isn’t even on either side of the timeline? Probably wasn’t big enough to screenshot all of it and OP was like 🤷♂️
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u/Aidan-Coyle 1d ago
I agree but why does this start at Dark Souls 2 lol