How Fromsoft challenges common player strats with each new release.
I touched upon this commenting in another thread, but thought it might make for a fun conversation in itself.
One of my favorite things about From is how in tune they are with how people are playing their games, and how they look for ways to counter that in subsequent titles, encouraging more active/dynamic play as the series goes on.
Examples: In DS1, you can pretty reliably take down most bosses by just getting behind them and hitting them in the back over and over. More often than not, it's a blind spot, and the boss needs to fully turn around before they can hit you, giving you plenty of time to reposition. Then, the very first thing they put in the DLC was a fight where standing behind the boss is the most dangerous place to be. This incentivized players to get comfortable fighting bosses head on and really dialing in their dodge timings/being more dynamic with their positioning in general.
Also in DS1, it was very easy to draw enemies one at a time, so they upped the ante gank-wise in DS2, which, while not always fun, did force me to learn how to manage my camera/lock-on more effectively, further hone in on positioning, and just generally treat crowd control like its own skill.
Bloodborne, of course, not only (mostly) removes shields, but even flat out tells us this is to de-incentivize passivity in combat. This, plus rallying and faster movement, encourages us to keep up the pace in combat.
DS3 they started really extending enemy combos and reducing downtime between attacks, again encouraging a more active playstyle; not just waiting out an attack, but looking for opportunities to punish before the animation ends.
Sekiro, I'd say it's a bit more broad: the entire approach to combat is so different. I remember really struggling on release until it clicked that I was trying to hard to play it like Bloodborne. This one teaches us to not rest on our prior experience and embrace new mechanics/playstyles while still roughly in a soulslike format.
Elden Ring it's a bit harder to pin down. For me, it was kind of an expansion of the lesson learned from Sekiro: what works on one boss isn't necessarily going to work on the next, and all the skills I'd been incentivized to learn in the previous games pay off in different scenarios: realizing that big enemies (especially) dragons are way better to fight with minimal lock-on, that hyper-aggressive enemies aren't going to give me enough time between attacks so I need to engage with them mid-combo, etc. Guard counters also allow for a much more active playstyle when using shields. And, of course, jumping makes for some excellent new opportunities in combat, both offensive/defensive.
What are some other examples? I know my list gets a lot more broad as it goes on, but I'm sure there's a lot of great little nuances I'm glossing over. What are some fun "not gonna work this time" details you've noticed from game-to-game?