I don’t know if we’ll ever get another Sekiro game, but FromSoftware‘s 2019 ninja sim lives on in everybody cribbing off its notes. We’ve already seen fellow soulslikes Wo Long and Lies of P borrow its signature moves, and the Resident Evil 4 Remake used a Sekiro-style parry system to great effect. But it feels like a whole new frontier altogether to see RPG old guards BioWare and Obsidian spice up their upcoming games with some of Sekiro’s signature moves.
For a quick rundown of what I’m talking about, I’d say Sekiro’s big innovations over Dark Souls were its emphasis on parrying over dodging, and its stagger meter in parallel to player and enemy HP. The former lent this wonderfully crisp, satisfying cadence to the combat (and was critically more forgiving than Dark Souls’ parries), while the latter rewarded aggression and precise timing, with a stagger break letting you wipe out one of your enemy’s health bars.
Let’s start with the Veilguard, which got an 11 minute-long combat showcase at Gamescom. We’ve known since Veilguard’s first gameplay reveal that it would have a parry system, but this extended cut from later in the game gives us a better idea of how it works in practice. In addition to parries opening up enemies to “high-damage counterattacks,” the warrior in the gameplay video chose an upgrade to her build that grants a powerful fire damage buff to her attacks after each successful parry.
It’ll all depend on how things feel in the hand, but a union of one of my favorite action game mechanics with BioWare’s demonstrated affinity for buildcrafting has me even more excited for Veilguard. According to a preview from WccfTech, Warriors will have a less forgiving parry window in exchange for the ability to block attacks with a shield, while Rogues will get the opposite: No shield, but a more generous parry window.
While it doesn’t look like Avowed will have timed blocks going off its 31 minute Gamescom demo, both of these games are embracing a stagger mechanic. Your attacks will fill up a meter to send enemies into a weakened state where they’re more susceptible to damage, similar to Armored Core 6’s take on the mechanic, while the Veilguard will also let you perform takedown moves on staggered foes, which reminds me of Dragon Age: Origins’ cinematic finishers.
More than anything, it makes me excited to see BioWare and Obsidian slather their action RPGs with the secret sauce of one of the best action games around. There was a time when these studios’ ARPGs were sluggish, clumsy things—awkward middle children like Jade Empire or Alpha Protocol made by people used to tactical, turn-based, or real time with pause games.
BioWare hasn’t been a tactical RPG studio in years, and Obsidian still seems skittish after the initially disappointing sales of Pillars of Eternity 2: Neither one seems inclined to follow Larian’s lead anytime soon, so I want them making the best action RPGs they can, and that requires borrowing from the best pure action games out there.
Too many action games water themselves down with bad RPG mechanics—looking at you, Ubisoft and Sony first party studios, with your +15% poison damage while airborne nonsense—but I think coming from the opposite direction, RPG-focused studios injecting their games with action, has borne fruit and will continue to do so.
