Healing is a staple of any soulslike. From the very beginning, Demon’s Souls introduced healing items to the genre to fight off the dangers of the world. The healing items were consumable, however, forcing the player to either get good enough to use fewer healing items or find spots to farm the various levels of healing items to have a stash.
Dark Souls ditched the types of consumable grass and instead introduced the Estus Flask - the healing item that comes with several healing charges which auto-refill when you rest at a bonfire or die.
Apart from Bloodborne, which had Blood Vials (controversial), Estus Flasks or similar have become a mainstay of the genre. But which of these are better for the game and which do you prefer?
Estus Flasks come with limited charges, but they refill automatically, so you don’t have to farm healing items and can just focus on the boss fight that’s giving you trouble. Consumable healing usually comes in larger quantities (20 Blood Vials plus a couple extra if you use specific runes), so you have more healing at your disposal in a boss fight, hence you can be more aggressive and reckless, but you run the risk of running out of healing at some point, so you might have to farm them at some point.
Thoughts?
I kinda like both? The real advantage of Bloodborne’s system is that you can find more Blood Vials in the world. This massively helps in area traversal, since you can just keep going. Out of heals? Just kill that troll or big werewolf and you can keep going. It creates a nice risk-reward strategy. The problem is just that in Bloodborne you can generally run out of Blood Vials. I wish it worked like in DS1, so that when you visit the Hunter’s Dream, your vials always refill to at least 10 (maybe upgradable with Insight?).
Still no Soulslikes for me this weekend… Lots of train travel. I play a bit of Pokémon Heartgold on my phone, now there is a game where healing is no problem for the player.
@v4ld1z@lemmy.zip also no Soulslikes for you this weekend? Are you still stuck on Slay the Spire 2? (That game does look quite fun.)
Now that you mention it, that does aid in exploration quite a bit.
Honestly, there’s a lot worse you can do than play Heartgold. Handsdown one of the best Pokemon games.
Nah, I don’t really have anything to play right now in terms of soulslikes. Everything I’m interested in I’ve either already played (several times sometimes) or it’s on PS5, and I’ve kinda given up on console gaming and moved over to PC gaming primarily. I did replay Sekiro and Lies of P there too, but I don’t feel like delving into any of the Dark Souls titles right now. Slay the Spire 2 and League of Legends are occupying my brain atm, yes :D