FromSoft has really perfected the Soulsborne formula. These open-world RPGs are full to the brim with well-realized lore and picture-perfect art style. The gameplay is both intensive and engaging, with diverse potential playstyles.
But there’s no such thing as a perfect video game. Even a soulsborne game will have some quirks that you only really can understand after having played the game a couple of times. All of us, new and old, have a bad habit of making some common mistakes the first time we play a new soulsborne game.
1Making Up Your Stat Focus As You Go
A good build relies on a complete knowledge of the game. What weapons are strongest? What status effects are the most common? All of these determine what your stats should be.
But you don’t know any of that on a first playthrough, so with each level up, you’re just placing a point wherever you need it most in that given moment. It makes fora messy build later, but it helps you now.
2Committing To An Early-Game Weapon
A good soulsborne game will have a wide variety of weapons to choose from… if you can find them. Many of them are hidden away or locked behind random chance.
But that cool greatsword you found in an early area? It scales well enough, and you’ve already based your stats around it, so you just keep using it until the very end.
“I’ve already upgraded it the most” is just another way to fall into the sunken cost fallacy, folks.
3Dropping Everything For The Moonlight Greatsword
The opposite of the previous entry, completely abandoning your build or weapon for the cool new item can be just as dangerous. You work on a good strength build, up until you find a combination Faith and Strength weapon that weighs twice as much as your current one.
The Moonlight Greatsword is the called-out weapon since it’s so common and popular, but this can apply to any shiny new weapon with a cool effect. Now you have bad stats for the item and have to compromise to make it work.
4Spoiling Things By Summoning
Another stable mechanic of a soulsborne game is the multiplayer summon system. But whensummoning other players into your world, as friend OR foe, you run the risk of seeing things you shouldn’t.
Many weapons and armors are in reference to important characters or encounters. You might get your favorite NPC’s armor set by defeating them when they betray you later. But you didn’t know that until you summoned someone wearing it.
5Exploring A Little Further Than You Should Have
With the bonfire system, you respawn at set locations, having lost all your ‘money’ where you died. That means to reclaim it, you need to face all the dangers again or lose it for good.
But when faced with such fantastical and engaging atmospheres, it’s all too easy to go just a little further than was safe. The drive for exploration sometimes gets us into situations we can’t recover from.
6Choosing The Wrong Response To Confusing Dialogue
FromSoft loves havingeloquent dialogue befitting the era and regiontheir games are based on. The problem is, however, that we speak modern English. A lot of phrasing and terminology can be confusing to the unfamiliar.
So when an NPC rabbles some question we hardly understand, and we’re met with an even less clear yes or no response, we run the risk of choosing the wrong answer, potentially upsetting the NPC and locking us out of a questline.
7Forgetting Encumbrance
One of the worst-explained mechanics in soulsborne games, encumbrance dictates how much equipment you have on and how slow it makes you. Reaching certain thresholds reduces speed and changes the way you dodge roll.
So many things can influence your encumbrance, too, from stats to equipment to bonus effects and consumables. It can be all too easy to start wearing an encumbrance reduction ring, only to learn you’ve become dependent on it when you go to change it out for something better.
8Completely Changing Your Build Halfway Through
As mentioned earlier, folks have a tendency to just go with the flow on what stats to pick on level-up. But sometimes that is taken to an extreme. You’ve encountered a boss that you simply CANNOT beat.
Eventually, you decide to rework your entire build to focus on that boss’s weakness. You go from a spellsword to a poison archer, just to try and beat that boss. Except since you didn’t spend time refining your build for this focus, now you’re weaker than ever.
9Using That Random Consumable That Secretly Unlocks A New Ending
The one thing that a soulsborne game loves more than obscure dialogue is obscure items. The world is full of consumables, key items, and other pieces of kit that seem normal enough.
Unless you bring that specific item to some random location and give it to a bird in a tree, then it unlocks a new area and an alternate ending. But you had no way of knowing, so you sold/used it 20 hours ago.
10Being Over Reliant On The Wiki
Soulsborne games have some of the most intricate worlds and stories, with rich narratives being discreetly scattered among various items, settings, and interactions. Very little of it is directly served to you.
There’s a joy to discovering and piecing it together yourself. But that’s a time-consuming challenge that most folks won’t be able to achieve. So instead, they scour the internet, reading forum posts and wiki pages for all the sweet lore. While we don’t blame anyone for choosing this method, it does rob new players of the sense of discovery only possible by figuring it out themselves.
