3 Ways Lies of P Outclassed From Software 

The point about quests is so true. I love souls-likes but I absolutely hate how needlessly obtuse the quest structure is

Elden's questing was just irritating as hell. It's a very long game and I don't know if I'm gonna replay it, so of course I don't wanna miss some of the biggest questlines (which can easily happen). Lies of P was the most refreshing pleasant surprise of a game. I'm really anxious for its DLC.

The reason Lies of P combat is so good is because it follows one core philosophy, if you want to deal the most amount of damage you need to be close to the enemy. Elden ring encourages to move away from it. If you want to deal the most amount of damage in Lies of P you need to parry every attack forcing you to be in the most danger, you can choose what attacks to parry, evade or block allowing you to dinamycally change the difficulty through combat while rewarding risky aggressive behaviour. In Elden ring if you want to deal the most amount of damage you should summon mimic tear and stay as far as possible casting spells. The risk/reward makes no sense. How is an aggressive strategy dealing less damage than a defensive one.

FromSoft and Elden Ring are so loved in the gaming community that it can feel like blasphemy to criticize them, but i think it's good that we do so that more games like Lies of P can come out and improve on their formula. As much as I loved Elden Ring, always in the back of my mind it felt like it was held back by its predecessors rather than helped; I even wondered if maybe this game would have been better if it wasn't a souls-like game, because a lot of the souls mechanics really don't fit the open world design. The quest design did not translate well in the slightest in my opinion, mainly due to the sheer size of the game. Nobody can keep track of ten different NPC quests while exploring, trying not to die, and progressing the main story all at once. The only way to do the quests is to use the wiki, every one of them has some random step that you would never predict based on the information given. The magic system is also super outdated and feels awful, nobody should ever have to scroll through a list of spells mid-combat. Upgrading weapons feels like shit, they added hundreds of weapons to the game but it was basically pointless because switching to a new one requires that you give your character the right levels, find a bunch of special rocks, and then finally upgrade it, only to eventually need to do it all over again when a boss resists that weapon type. Every single person I've watched play the game (also me) used 2-3 weapons max in their entire first playthrough, which is ridiculous for a game that takes 100+ hours to complete. They should have just made your damage scale with character level or something. I've always thought the worst-designed areas in FromSoft games were the ones where you could just run past the enemies without penalty, but Elden Ring gives you Torrent which allows you to skip probably 90% of the enemies in the game--and many areas they can just be sprinted past because of the more open area design. Which begs the question, why even bother having them if you don't need to fight them? Most wandering enemies feel more like annoyances than actual fights. Enemies in the Dark Souls series always felt like active obstacles to my progress rather than set dressing for reviewers to point at as proof of how "big" the game is. Avoiding damage in fights is still 90% how good you are at rolling, sure there are shields, parries, ashes of war, jumps, etc. which all allow you to avoid damage in other ways, but they all have pretty significant downsides while rolling is effective against every attack and has zero downside aside from locking you in an animation (which everything else in the game already does). Lies of P fixed this issue by borrowing the parry mechanic from Sekiro and the health-regain from Bloodborne when you're blocking, making all three of them into viable options and I found myself needing to master all three to beat the game. The pulse cell regain that you mentioned is such an obvious and amazing quality of life change that I can't believe From never added it in any of their games. I can think of so many times I got to a boss's arena after fighting all the enemies on the way there and then just died instantly because I couldn't heal. Overall I thought Elden Ring was a pretty good game that could have been so much better if they fixed the issues with the original souls formula before making a giant behemoth of a game out of it. Lies of P did a great job of fixing these issues, I absolutely loved the game and I'm absolutely buying the sequel when it comes out.

Lies of p really came out of nowhere and took the "souls like" genre to the next level. Every souls like should take a leaf out of its book and bring in it's own unique mechanics rather than completely copying the souls formula

One thing I haven't heard anyone mention is the upgrades, in Lies of P you get a renewable tier of upgrade material at the same time the next tier is getting introduced. This encourages experimenting with weapons as no matter what, they wont feel underpowered.

These are actually good points

I enjoyed most of Lies of P's boss fights more than Elden ring fights tbh, felt less spammy and more tactical

After playing the Shadow of the Erdtree I have to say... I enjoyed playing Lies of P last year more. I'm sick of huge open worlds. Give me linear on foot exploration...