Elden Ring: YOU DIED on a horse

I read there was nothing in the room. Possibly was at one point going to be a secret but was nixed. Thank god.

I guess instead of putting a proper wall there they just gave it like a ton of hit points lol

I just got to Mountaintop of the Giants. Thank god, cuz I feel like over the past few weeks like 80% of the stuff I looked up that I wanted was listed as being there. First order of business was just to haul ass through the zone and grab some goods.

OK, a couple of hours in and this game rules. I've mostly been taking it easy, learning the mechanics, getting a maiden, getting a magic horse, getting killed several times by the Tree Sentinel before moving on, getting a few more levels, got my first Ash. Can't wait to spend more time with this! So, so, so much more time.

Alright, so I know I'm lagging way behind you all, but: not accidentally dismounting when I'm fighting on Torrent-back, that's just something I have to get used to, right? I already remapped the horse whistle to my pouch, but now I'm still constantly either hopping off the horse when fighting or, worse, waving a gesture when I'm trying to whistle.

I've always been impressed by the English translations of these games, which are so florid and full of personality. Do any of you speak Japanese? I wonder how some of this stuff works in Japanese. For example, "ye" is such a standard-bearer for olde medieval speak (and pirates and whatnot), so is there a Japanese equivalent of, like, "abandon all hope, ye who enter here"? Or is there something lost in translation? Or, I guess, possibly *gained* in translation?

i'm 100 and a bit hours in and i'll still accidentally dismount off torrent during an intense field fight.

and while it doesn't answer your exact question, there is an interesting article on the localization

You can turn off motion controls for gestures in the menu, that helps get rid of accidental gesturing (I don't know who want that on tbh).

xpost Interesting, thanks! So I guess it's not too far removed from translating literature.

Cave Cat ... down!
Beastmaster General ... down!
Tree Sentinel ... grr, all but a sliver down, then it squashed me.

FWIW, have had some disruptive frame issues running it on my PS4 Slim, not surprisingly when there are big pile-on brawls going on. Me vs. an entire village of soldiers, me and my wolf pack v. the Tree Sentinel, that sort of thing.

Maybe it's just because I've come off a couple of open world games, but this one really seems to reward my patient, accumulative play style. The other From games really channel you toward a few choke points, but this one, you know, or suspect, where the choke points (or big challenges) are, but can more or less avoid them as long as you want in favor of exploring, leveling, finding things, fighting things, and so on.

So Ive done all of Morne castle except the last boss, and then I went back to try Stormveil, and I can only get as far as just after all the bloody eagles with bombs (thank fuck for a glintstaff), then I have to get past a knight and he just clobbers me. And I look up the map and I am NOWHERE near done, jesus fuck. I'd kill for the save early/save often style of Elder Scrolls right now.

You can avoid them if you fancy a bit of roof jumping

Miyazaki: George RR Martin, it is a pleasure to meet you. I have read the first novel in your Song of Fire and Ice series and greatly appreciate your love of food description. Please, tell me what similar magic you have conjured for our new project.

Martin: It's about an all-powerful ancient ring that ...

Miyazaki: Stop right there. I love it. You can leave now. (Does whatever he was going to do anyway.)

Totally.

Trayce, just running past the knight is a valid tactic too (he is pretty beastly - I think you may get an ash of war or something from him?).

I'm now fighting the "Knights of the Great Jar" and it's a great pvp simulator. Each time it summons a randomly selected red sign npc (different if you die and come back), and they've really come a long way in terms of simulating player behavior and builds. Pretty fun.

Also the new jar girl in the jar town doesn't like me, and I think it's because I've been invading. :(

I'm having interesting moments where I'm thinking about "other games" and really feeling like wow this is the best game ever made, huh

Leyndell kind of sealed the deal, this game is such an achievement. I was trying to compare this game's geography to real life, like "is this the size of metro NYC? LA and the valley?" It's so huge. I can't imagine how much co-ordination it required of the team to get it all together. It's unbelievable.

My only actual complaint if I had any is that I'm starting to find certain repeating features repetitious but not in a "bad" degree, just in a "I guess this is a feature of a huge game" degree. Maybe one too many imps, one too many Somber (8)s as a reward, one too many Ulcerated Trees, idk. Petty complaints about an unbelievable game

Every time I talk to Patches tho I do find myself missing the exaggerated face-rendering of his speeches in Demon's Souls reboot

it is a great game. i’m obviously moving fairly slowly through it, but having completed Caria Manor, i was having a nose around the edges of the land and came out of a thicket to see an extraordinary entrance to a cliff side palace, with tremendous statues and a long road leading up to them, as the sun was setting. and, yeah it was great tbh. then about five minutes later i lost all my souls falling off a cliff but you know.

Today I unlocked my second map fragment, beat a pumpkinhead dungeon boss, beat a lil boss in a boat, helped out a few NPCs (guy in a jar, knight, some other dude), made my way to a burning church where, after I lost to an NPC invader a couple of times, was whisked away to the roundtable. I was attempting some platforming with my horse when I fell into a valley and died, but before I faded I saw what appeared to be a giant bear fighting a bunch of wolves down there. There is so, so much in this game, to find, to learn, to understand.

beat radahn today after ~10 tries, i have my wolverine claws doing cold damage on top of the bleed damage now, scaling with both int and dex, and once you get those meters full it goes bananas

I haven't even come close to progressing onto any of the real bosses or anything - Magit? - but I did do some more exploring into .. Caelid? The red area? I don't think I'm ready, it was pretty tough, especially all its feral dog beast things. And there was this one archer knight by a castle who kept raining down laser arrows on me.

i met that guy this morning, total jerk

I’ve been playing this regularly while assiduously avoiding battling any bosses or anything big. I’m level 30 and have my main weapon at +4 and haven’t even attempted Margit once lol. I skirted around Stormveil and made my way up north and even got into the magic academy. But I still haven’t beaten the Tree Sentinel (I got pretty close a couple of times but got frustrated and gave up). Wonder how far into the game I can make it continuing this trend.

I levelled up four levels with the Vulgar guys early on around lvl 20, and then did some help-a-friend work with Radahn for about four or five more levels, but otherwise haven't been actively farming, just uh "playing fastidiously", like remembering which ruins I need to loot and which catacombs I need to clear.

As a result, sticking to the beaten path a little longer, I think I might be horrendously overlevelled or something? I'm at 140 and touring the Mountaintop. I'm not finding myself dying that often, usually it's because I fall off something.

Here are some recent deaths I remember

- the perfumers in Leyndell are actually rather punishing when they want to be
- impaled by a very-strong lobster in a deep sewer
- bled to death a couple times by Vulgar losers on a landbridge
- one Erdtree Avatar became two Erdtree Avatars and that didn't work out well for me the first time

And many deaths-by-falling while popping from tree branch to tree branch or rafter to rafter

And many many deaths by instakill chariots

I did kill the Tree Sentinel, so there's that. A lot of early enemies are much easier on horseback so far, and it's tons of fun to just charge into groups like a lunatic. That's one way I knew that Caelid was not really for me just yet, since poor Torrent was either getting easily taken out or I was getting taken off by some strong enemies, like the nightmarish giant dogs.

So the weird thing about Caelid is that the southern part is much more suited to lower levels than the northern part. I don't know if they envisioned you taking a certain path in, or just wanted to scare you with the North, or were happy with both.

Apparently I'm 50 hours in, lvl 70, bopping around doing sidequests and invasions before I continue on. Just found a great big poisonous underground area, very much in character.

Tip on that area: use Flame Cleanse Me (and a talisman to boost your faith if you otherwise can’t). Comestible remedies are not gonna save you

Excellent, I respec'ed my faith down to the minimum for that spell and Heal, put the savings into arcane.

You'll be fine, you only need 15 I think? Use the soreseal and/or the other one that gives you +5. Trust you will need it

Luckily I also have an endless supply of Great Runes if I need a stat bump.

Adam, I'm curious how different Radahn is after the patch, the internet is abuzz saying he's much easier but it sounds like he's still got some fight in him, I'm sure it's still a challenge.

I'm quite a few hours in and still can't even quite kill the cat boss. I've had a go at Godrick but he's totally OP

xp I just beat Radahn last night after a few tries, going in hard with some NPC friends and then dodge rolling when he throws that huge fireball did the trick. After that he was so low on HP that I was able to re-summon a couple more friends then take him down. All in all not too stressful.

i could do without having to fight any more ulcerated tree spirits. i'm around lvl 110 currently wandering around the mountaintop, have fought i think 4 ulcerated tree spirits in total, and really hoping i don't have to face them again.

xp yeah radahn was all about riding around summoning dudes, avoiding attacks until they drew aggro, running in to get some hits, then run away and re-summon dudes, repeat.

the re-summoning made it feel a little less intense, could you do that pre-patch?

I tried my hand at Radahn a few times yesterday, and even got him down to around 1/3 of his health bar, but decided I'd have a better time if I go level up a bit, so I decided to trek back to the Ruin Strewn Precipice and see if I can finally make my way up to Leyndell/Altus. So now I'm stuck on Magma Wyrm Makar, but it seems doable with the right summons & tactics.

God, I feel so weird when people are like "I'm level 80 and I've been playing for 60 hours." I've been playing for almost 70 hours and I'm only level 60! But I die so much. And also I tend to obsessively go back over areas to make sure I haven't missed something cool.

One random thought while I'm thinking about this game: I know that "random isolated NPCs, and maybe a little hub zone" is the FromSoft house style, but I can't help but feel this game would benefit from a few honest-to-goodness RPG towns? They don't have to be huge or dense, just something that makes the world feel a bit more inhabited I guess. I really appreciated how, in BotW, there were still signs of people living ordinary lives despite living in the shadow of a catastrophe. I found Jarburg the other day, and thought, "yeah, more of this, please!"

Yeah you could re-summon in Radahn's phase 2, although I ended up not doing it because that gave him more of a chance to throw meteors at you, and they had insane tracking and one-shot me every time I got hit. Ended up being better to stay close, where he either wouldn't summon meteors or they wouldn't hit you.

Agreed about towns, that would have been nice. Also could have provided some spots to look for npcs when they move around that aren't totally random (I guess they do tend to post up at shacks and churches, but also just on the road, or sometime wherever).

Is this worth getting on the PS4 or is best waiting until I eventually get a PS5?

absolutely worth getting on the ps4. aside from quite rare frame rate issues noted above, especially involving bats or mobs, it’s fine.

xxp

idk i for one am grateful that these games forego towns and such. just get the ghosts of civilization in the long decimated ruins, it's fundamental to the whole vibe.

also i kinda hate going to towns in RPG's and having a zillion meaningless conversations with NPC's. it's like my least favorite part of the genre.

xxp
fizzles otm and I think the basic PS Store edition is PS4 + PS5 (or that's the impression I got when I bought it)

(I'll buy it again if I get a PS5 and it turns out I'm wrong. Maybe I'll buy it again anyway. This game is too much value for money. It's indecent)

idk i for one am grateful that these games forego towns and such. just get the ghosts of civilization in the long decimated ruins, it's fundamental to the whole vibe.

otm, the more grimdark the better for me, though the way FROM have integrated that side of things with some elements of the BoTW open world remains a marvel

Oh man this Melania fight….

90 hours in and level 136, she is destroying me every time. Had been going with an int build with Moonveil+10 have now rage-respecced to a dex/arcane build with rivers of blood+9, getting somewhat closer but it’s a real brick wall at the moment…

I think I'm far from reaching her, but I did watch a couple lvl1 fights on Youtube where people were parrying her every move. Makes it look so easy, lol.

Xp I managed Melania with a Dex/Arc build dual wielding Rivers of Blood and a blood Nagakiba with a Mimic Tear backing me up. I had a few levels on you and some talisman all aimed at raising bleed and attack power, but that path your on should be the way. Took me a handful of tries.

Also had the Seppuku ash on the offhand katana. Definitely the whole bag of the current patch 1.03 OP load out.

idk about Melania, I'm not there yet, but I'm similarly levelled. I did find Alecto (the assassin in the Liurnia plateau ever gaol) to be a remarkable challenge, and he seemed to anticipate Melania's moveset. "A remarkable challenge" I killed him second try, but I was definitely running low on flaskpower at the end

In typical dark souls fashion I got annihilated by Malenia several more times, before everything finally clicked and I breezed past her. I don’t think I took any damage at all in her first phase.

Have now respecced back to my previous build and will spend a wee while exploring some areas I didn’t linger in before (mainly consecrated snowfield and back around Volcano Manor which seems like it might be huge?) before starting what I presume is the endgame past the Beast Clergyman and all that…

Have had an absolute blast with this game, never bothered doing NG+ with any souls games or bloodborne but I’m really excited to jump back into this again right after I finish.

Man, I keep discovering stuff in places i thought I'd stepped over a million times

If I'm favoring a magic build over melee, whats the diff between levelling up FP, vs Intelligence? And should I have put some into faith? I figured the staff spells were enough but Ive seen some amazing looking high-level holy swords.

I am finding the heavy D&D stat wrangling HELLA confusing.