168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dark Souls has a complicated history with PvP arenas. FromSoftware hit the ground running with the first game, adding an arena in the DLC that you can find after the Artorias fight. Once you find a match, you’re thrown into a separate space that you can’t run from, meaning you have to stand your ground and fight. Duel etiquette, which is otherwise 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a fan-made creed for fights, is ingrained into the mechanics, meaning you can’t dash around and wait for your summoned friends to show up. Given its success, Dark Souls 2 added it as part of the base game, meaning everyone could now enjoy it together, rather than splitting players into camps of DLC owners or ot𓆏herwise.
It’s no surprise that the sequel’s arena was a hit. YouTubers would make entire series dedicated to mucking ꦗabout in PvP arena fights, trying out new (often gimmicky) builds, sneaking up on enemies with spells, and aiming for the number one spot. People would cosplay Heide Knights and Havel, while others would try to win duels with nothing but their fists. Challenge runs against bosses are one thing, but when you’re against an actual player, a broken straight sword is much harder to cinch a victory with. To this day, they’re a big part of why 2’s PvP is the series’ peak, and many even celebrated their retur🌸n after a year-long server shutdown, but 3 tends to fall out of the conversation altogether.
It had all the ingredients for the perfect return. Not having an arena at launch meant the mode was, like with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elden Ring, highly anticipated. People were itching for a return to that Dark Souls 2 experience, albeit with the smoother, more fluid combat of its sequel. Datamines, rumours, and all the history that would repeat itself with Elden Ring kept chugging until Dark Souls 3’s first DLC was finally unveiled, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ashes of Ariandel. In this Painted World, you could find an optional, tucked away boss, and once beaten, you’d gain access to an arena, much like with Dark Souls 2. But the hype came and went. Those who couldn’t or didn’t want to ♔buy the DLC were left out, meaning that while many flocked to try out arenas, many were also stuck to the base game, splitting up the PvP scene. And so, fight 🉐clubs prevailed, with the usual base game spots continuing to dominate as it’s easier to find players there.
Elden Ring 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:needed a PvP arena more than any other Souls or Souls-like game. Its vast open world means it's much easier for players to run away and hide, rather than engaging in duels. This means they have more time to summon friends, get the advantage, or find a boss to boot you out - it’s a lot harder to make invasions fun when it’s two people duking it out in a football field that keeps on growing. Shrink that football field down to a small colosseum and stick six people in it and you’ve got yourself some good old fashioned PvP.
And, like Dark Souls 3, it let the hype build. Once Elden Ring launched, people found these abandoned, closed-off colosseums, and that sparked 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:datamining, leaks, and rumours, building up anticipation for nearly a year. And then bam, FromSoft dropped a free update that let us go into these colosseums at long last. They come with pre-set rules, like being able to toggle Spirit Ashes and healing, which burns in the etiquette🎀 that so many argue over. And, like 3, you can access this from the hub, rather than having to travel there as with Dark Souls 2. The only prerequisite is finding the colosseums in the world itself, all of which are already present in the base game. There’s no splitting of the community, it’s easy to access, it brings back a classic, nostalgic Souls-like PvP experience, and it was hyped-up simply from its absence.
Dark Souls 3 nearly managed to pull off the same, b𒆙ut it failed to stick the landing. All that waiting for a PvP arena, something that was part of the base game in 💙its predecessor, just for it to be paid, ultimately soured a lot of the community. Elden Ring repeating that past would’ve likely ended up the same - a messy online scene that’s split between fight clubs and arenas, unevenly skewed to the former. Now, I get to try out my terrible knife-only Ghostface build in the colosseums, constantly dying to much better players, all without having to worry about some random kid watching from the sidelines jumping in to kill me.