Elden Ring: YOU DIED on a horse

also “i am extremely hungover” energy to the various lords after the shattering.

extremely pissed off at minor irritations like a lowly tarnished and going absolutely ham.

rocking back and forth in pain etc

Ha. I for one will not be missing the opportunity fight Radahn in his youthful prime. Especially when I've done everything else and the alternative is either starting over with a different character or not playing Elden Ring.

I think it's having finished everything else. I don't find myself thinking after work "great now I want to sweat a lot and test myself against an incredibly hard boss" even though I enjoy that a lot after two hours of wandering around to get there, or knowing more wandering is the reward. Tho with the Elden Beast I was very determined to beat it.

Fair enough, although maybe it's a good opportunity to really get to know a boss without feeling like it's getting in the way of more exploration & progression!

Bosses are maybe my least favourite bit of these games. Like, I appreciate them as set pieces and the whole sturm and drang of a cool boss like Rykard (y u break heart fgti? Magma Mansion is one of my favourite lore areas of the base game). But yeah, I have little interest in gitting gud enough to really work these guys out. I'm always happy to get them out the way so I can carry on exploring and finding new stuff

Honestly I wasn't always a huge boss fight fan. But since the pvp doesn't captivate me like Dark Souls 3 did, I've found myself really enjoying these dlc bosses and getting into fighting them without too many bells & whistles.

Playing Sekiro again probably helped too. In previous Souls games there were always a few bosses I got really into (Midir comes to mind as a memorable marathon, and Manus in DS1), but my appreciation for Elden Ring's boss fights has only grown with my second playthrough going into the dlc. They have a wide enough variety of moves that you're always on your toes, but it's not too many to learn. And what they do often depends on your position, so you have a degree of control and prediction. And they're obviously excellent at punishing heals, so you almost always have to dodge an attack and trade a counterattack opportunity in order to heal.

In general I also really like the boss fights. Think I'm just sad it's over besides the last one.

That said, I do not love fighting the dragons in this game, and now I find myself on Archdragon Peak.

It's a bit formulaic, tho I loved that area as a setting.

Apparently the only reward for slaying dragons is, you guessed it, more dragons.

Mm that ghost flame dragon fight in the village with all the Messmer soldiers helping (and then not helping at all) was really thrilling imo

lol it's such a funny fight, riding around, occasionally getting bored at their incompetence and horsing in, occasionally letting them at it, wondering why they don't think best to kill the dragon before killing you

I did like the first dragon mountain fight where the two of them were going at it...at first I figured I would just let them fight it out, but realized one was completely housing the other and taking no damage, so then I jumped in to try and keep the underdog alive and use it as a glorified spirit summon. They should have repeated the same thing but with Senessax and Bayle in the same arena, now that would have been sick.

I like fighting dragons in this game, generally. Crucible Knights and their variants the most. Giants and Titans least of all. Miranda flowers can fuck off entirely

i do not enjoy dragons. run in hit legs RUN AWAY run in hit legs RUN AWAY. none of the dancing you get with other bosses or strong foes (inc knights, which when you get their pattern are immense fun to fight - you get so brutally punished for mistiming a move. aaaaah, you say, i deserved that.

i had the same thought about the village dragon - why do they immediately start fighting *me* far more effectively than the MASSIVE FUCK OFF DRAGON terrorising the area. then i realised on reflection that i probably *was* the bigger threat all told.

though they wouldn’t think that if they’d seen me go down to messmer 5000 times.

If we give him the impression Radahn is somewhere nearby, maybe he’ll fuck off and play street fighter

lol.

yeah agree about the dragon fights, it really is just ride in and ride away again, over and over, slightly flailing for stamina with your sword for some reason moving more like a neolithic farming implement than at its usual speed.

also for some reason none of the dragons in the dlc are as hard or interesting as the later ones in the main game, not even close.

Radahn down. Not that bad in the end - just tried to soak up everything with absurd armour and defensive incantations and then poke and bleed and rot the bugger. Mimic throwing all sorts of hefty pots - cold! rot! flies!
We did him dirty, but for some reason, idk why, he needed killing.

I like the part where Bayle flies very high on his ghost wings, that gives dragon. Maybe I should be fighting these guys on horseback with a great lance for full immersion.

If I have some extra time this weekend I think I'll spend a while attempting to "learn Radahn". Considering that I "learned" every boss in the main game all the way up to (but not including) Malenia/Maliketh/Placidusax, it's the least I could do. It feels strange to think that I've just Fextra-strategied my way through all these late game guys on my first completion (Midra, Bayle, Gaius et al.)

Had a few attempts at Radahn tonight, just felt mostly random and too difficult. I do hate the way it makes you take a fucking age to do your summon and you get one shotted by many bosses trying to do it, but then every now and again they decide to tie their shoelace before one shotting you, leading you to attempt to summon again next time.

None of felt really learnable, not sure I will bother tbh.

I think I've got the (fextra check) opaline bubbletear in my flask, which lets you tank through summoning mimic + that first big Radahn hit if you neck it outside the fog wall

Took me about 20 runs over a few days - I ended up thinking 'I cannot learn and dodge the phase 2 bullshit - looks like a lot of holy, maybe magic, ok how do I push through that?'

Vengeance. Fextraed those Abyssal Woods things & found out you've got to parry them so I cranked my focus (mushroom armour), got out my carian retaliation shield and killed 5 or 6 of them last night. Enormously satisfying.

Knocked off Midra's manse after that and I think that's me done. Might look up minor dungeons I've missed, maybe try to take down a few more furnace golems but I can put it away for a while now.

I very much enjoyed Elden Ring's downloadable content.

What!!!! You can kill them?

I thought the “try parry” message was having a laugh

They were dying from one post-parry crit. I recommend everyone get out there and murder them

I'm finding Messmer really quite difficult! First phase is no real problem (although I can't seem to be able to fully dodge that first attack), but he just slaughters me in the second phase. Often there's so much going on on screen I can't figure out what's what.
Well, I've been at it for the best part of the afternoon. Hopefully I can best him before bedtime!

Beat him, finally. It really was going to be the last go of the night as I'd run out of buff materials, and I managed to just about get in there and wreck the last bit of his health.

I am finding it a bit tiresome that more often than not, beating a boss or a miniboss, or completing a dungeon usually leaves me with no choice than to turn back round because it's a dead end. I know this happened in the base game, but it feels more common here. You can go for miles and miles only to end up in a room with a bit of loot

Gg! Yeah I was kinda bummed that Messmer's chamber didn't lead elsewhere.

I'm doing the finger gardens and wishing there was more in them given the size and how imposing they are on the map, but it's also possible I'm missing stuff.

That was my experience of that area also, felt like they maybe didn't come up with anything for it.

Yeah those finger butthole places are a bit of a letdown. I didn't enjoy going to the second one because all it involved was dashing as fast as I could to the centre trying to avoid those lamprey homing tether spells (super annoying). Even if there had been new stuff to explore, I wouldn't have been able to. But the only thing I could find of note was a fairly easy c/p fallingstar beast

Yeah those things are horrible. I went back and explored again recently and couldn't really find anything else. Very large area for how few things it contains.

It's just... I'm sure the base game had some pretty open areas, but there always seemed to be "stuff" going on. Even Liurnia of the Lakes, which is a pretty wide and sparse space, still had lots of little hidden secrets, and seemed to be divided into micro-biomes. Compared to things like the Cerulean Coast, Hinterlands, Ruah Base, it's literally packed.

In the DLC, too often I find myself riding my horse in a sort-of zig zag tack up a long wide empty corridor of land with very little going on and only one direction to follow. The zig-zag is just land coverage in case I happen on something cool like a cave or even a hidden item. But usually there isn't anything. When I got to the Hinterland, for example, I saw a hill going off to the left which led to a large plateau. "Cool, there must be something up here", but no - just a bunch of bears and nothing else.

And then on the critical path you fight not one but two Tree Sentinels in a row. You can even summon an NPC to help you, even though you don't really need her. Then it's just a long long featureless ride to the finger gardens. The closest thing I've come to an obvious fetch quest in these games; not helped by the fact you can only access it by using a gesture to access the hidden path - I only worked this out through a guide.

OTOH, there are other areas, notably the legacy dungeons but also other areas of land, that are so layered and intricate I have a hard time mapping them out in my mind. Try remembering how to get to the (I think) Western Nameless Mausoleum by heart. Not simple!

Those two things together - tangled layered paths (+ verticality) combined with weirdly long empty or sparse stretches - seem to be the fundamental rhythm of the DLC. Don't know if that's intentional but I came to like it, tho more looking back on a session than when I was in - feeling like you're in this looping confusing not-quite-filled-in lonely dreamscape. It's a very different atmosphere from the main game - hard to articulate and it sometimes does just feel empty or under-realised but I love the moments where it works (for me, Cerulean Coast and then down into the fissure)

You've definitely got a point, but it's disconcerting sometimes. Like, I'll often find myself thinking "there must be a point to this whole bit, no? They wouldn't have just put this gigantic hard-to-reach plateau on the map for no reason at all?"

It would be fine in some cases (Cerulan Coast is very pretty), but there are at least a handful of these areas that are clearly undercooked or feel unfinished. What about that massive Suppression Tower? It's so big and prominent and takes a good bit of scurrying to get to; you ride a lift up there forever and there's just a chest up there with an item and a fairly nice view of the place (so long as the weather's clear).

Going to these areas and exploring all the little nooks and crannies only to find some butterflies or a mushroom (if I'm lucky) can feel like a cruel joke and a deliberate tax on my time for doing the thing FromSoft have been training me to do for all these years. I don't expect there to be rewards everywhere, but if you're going to have a long weird sidepath, make it lead to something!

No, I basically agree - there are quite long runs where I come out thinking something like 'honestly? smithing stone 7?'. Definitely different from those cruel but funny moments in base game when you carefully edge round some ledges and then it's mushroom.

xpost i like the suppression tower! It's pointless but has sinister meaning at the same time - it makes sense in terms of the landscape. However, completely agree that the finger ruins are undercooked (assuming we're talking about the same place). It's quite unnerving as you go down into them, and on the map, or when you see them from afar, and then they're just a bit empty and crap.

i'm either which way on it all. the most obvious thing, which woof has highlighted, is that it is so different form from the base game. Very different feel. I love the verticality, the tangled legacy dungeons and innocuous gaps that lead to completely new areas all around you. One problem with that though is a sense of being directionless, which leads to those boss dead ends that you mentioned, dl, as well as exhaustive exploration feeling a bit... well, exhausting really.

the emptiness i just didn't mind as I liked exploring the landscapes, and then suddenly you creep up on a busy lair or nest of things, and it produces a different vibe, wandering in benighted lands, rather than the teeming lands between of the base game.

oh yeah, co-sign on the boss dead ends and absolutely the finger ruins - they got a genuine 'get the fuck out miyazaki you sick fuck' out of me when I came to them cold but then they were just thin to go through

Yeah I agree with all this. It was kinda jarring in the main game to get to the Snowfield area where there just was... less content. The DLC feels like a bunch of Snowfields, dressed up in exceptionally pretty ways. The boss and enemy design is wonderful, though.

I'm at 49/50 and 24/25. It's soooooo annoying. Last night I went down the list to find my last Scadufragment, visited every location, got to the end and still hadn't found it.

Part of the thrill, for me, of DeS and DS1 was the way that repetition, exploration, and the density of the design meant that I literally knew every rock and cranny of the world. I could likely trace a convincing map on paper, right now, of Undead Burg. This density was lost in Elden Ring, with the exception of Stormveil Castle and Elphael. The fussier the design is, the better, imo

Finding the last scadus is definitely difficult. Have you got all of them in the specimen storehouse etc? There are loads there.

It is quite maddening when there's one or two left and you've no real idea if you got them or not.

I had this stretch of going through all the amazing parts (Shadow Keep, Ruah, Enir Ilim) without really knowing it was the main path, and now I'm feeling a little over-blessed (scadutree level 15 I think) and checking out all the outskirts of the map that feel more empty. I'm sure there will be some more good bits, but yeah it seems like it would have been so easy to add a few more bits in some of these places (or even to spread out some of the weapons and talismans).

Still looking forward to doing a playthrough with light greatswords, great katanas, and some of the claw weapons though!