FromSoftware’s Next Soulslike Can Afford to Ease Up on Gank Fights

Highlights

• Boss fights reign supreme in Soulslike games, often the highlight of challenging gameplay with unique lore and appearances.
• Gank fights in FromSoftware titles can be frustrating and unbalanced, requiring strategic positioning or additional help to survive.
• Future games should balance gank fights, ensuring each boss has a distinct move set for engaging gameplay without unfairly or tediously overwhelming players.

The actual combat in FromSoftware’s Souls games and Soulslikes has never been its true star. If intricate world-building, atmosphere, and level design aren’t, either, it’s surely boss fights. Indeed, boss fights have become one of the most popular features of Soulslikes in terms of how challenging they are, let alone how neat a boss’ appearance and lore are. FromSoftware has excelled with bosses time and time again, though gank fights could debatably be toned down in future games. They aren’t all egregious or irritating, but having multiple bosses to contend with in a single encounter is typically more trouble than it’s worth.

FromSoftware’s Gank Fights Rarely Hit a Sweet Spot Between Terrific or Horrendous

Some players may absolutely adore this boss design, but there’s an argument to be made about how effective they all are and how frustrating many can be.

Of course, players can turn the tide of nearly every duo/trio fight and bring in NPCs or other players to ensure they’re no longer outnumbered. But when that seems more viable or preferable to fighting alone, it isn’t because the boss fight itself is necessarily designed well. Players can certainly take on Dark Souls’ Ornstein and Smough on their own, for instance, but doing so effectively and reliably now usually involves awkward strategies where players position themselves in a way where Smough’s model is stuck behind a pillar base.

It isn’t as if players are genuinely combatting both bosses at once is all, at least with an optimal tactic at hand. Cheese strats like instantly sending Dragonrider lunging off the tiny boss arena platform in Dark Souls 2 aren’t necessary even though they save time and effort, but racing up the staircase and keeping distance atop a platform in the claustrophobic Capra Demon boss arena while dogs leap at the player in Dark Souls is almost a mandatory route if players don’t want to be swarmed and slain within seconds.

Again, many circumstances can ensure players are at a higher level or have a greater advantage when they finally do come across otherwise aggravating bosses. It’s seemingly small details such as these that compound and make boss fights against more than one enemy troublesome if not tedious.

Future FromSoftware Games Need to Distill and Barrel-Age Gank Fights

A FromSoftware Soulslike with no duo/trio bosses could get stale unless each boss has a vastly different move set to telegraph. On the other hand, if gank fights are perpetuated, which they most surely will be—especially if FromSoftware needs to fill another open world—they should at least take after what makes most duo/trio bosses fantastic in Dark Souls 3. Gank fights arguably hadn’t been refined well until Dark Souls 3, where boss fights against multiple foes actually became engaging chess matches rather than mad, uncoordinated scrambles.

This is usually due to some variable in the fight that regulates the overwhelming effect they commonly have; for Abyss Watchers it’s the fact that, despite two Watchers eventually attacking the player in the first phase, a third one spawns and attacks them, basically behaving like an unsolicited NPC aid. The Ringed City’s Halflight, Spear of the Church has the potential to be an infuriating boss fight with a handful of summons and can be intriguingly substituted for a PvP invasion if online, but almost all of these summons or phases can be dealt with individually if players are able to cut them down quickly.

Likewise, Demon in Pain and Demon from Below both fight players at once but there’s often enough space between them that players only need to worry about kiting them individually anyway, same as in Sister Friede’s second phase when a bowl-wielding Father Ariandel uproots his chair. These gank fights circumvent an otherwise grueling and disproportionate confrontation, and more like them would be welcome if FromSoftware is hellbent on pitting players against more bosses where they’re outnumbered.