Elden Ring: YOU DIED on a horse

Just started poking around the flaming madness tower which I'd somehow missed before. I think because I ignored Varre's request, because why should I have to invade 3 ppl to finish a quest? :/ Anyway Ive put out the tower flame (handy tip: use beast repellent torch and you dont even have to deal with the rats), ran up to the church, but havent fought the invader yet because I've skipped the "do 3 invasions and let Varee cut yr finger off" bit.

I guess I dont have to do EVERYthing. I've got Skyrim syndrome here - loads of side quests and wandering about, no getting on with it.

I've been listening to the Bonfireside Chat podcast (very good btw) and they're at Weeping Peninsula right now, mentioning there is a whole lot of stuff to do with the Frenzied Flame over there which I must have missed. I feel like Madness is an underused mechanic in this game really, and the Frenzied Flame (considering how important the lore around it is) doesn't really get much airspace. Or maybe I'm wrong? I think the only time I've really come across it is at that tower Trayce mentioned (and of course below Leyndell sewers)

I still don't understand what Madness even does tbh

Bleed builds up quickly and does significant damage once the status bar is filled
Frostbite builds up less quickly and does significant damage once filled, then leaves you extra vulnerable to damage afterward
Madness builds up even less quickly but does enormous huge damage once filled, usually enough to kill you if you're not super-highly invigorated
And death blight builds up and just kills you instantly if it maxes out

The first time I played through Weeping Peninsula, I stumbled into the Ailing Town, noticed a new status bar that I didn't recognize, saw a bunch of scary people, murdered looted and left

The second time I was like "oh damn I know what's going on here" and I noticed the flame logo wooden great shield lying somewhere and thought "aha"

There does seem to be a connection between the merchants and the Frenzied Flame. They use madness spells when attacked, they say things like "burn away like the rest of them" when murdered. I think the wide assumption is that once the merchants were shut away to the Shunning Ground to effectively be genocided, they made contact with the Three Fingers there and came to accept the Frenzied Flame both as saviours and as a logical response to how they'd been treated

In all my hours of playing I don't think I ever encountered the sleep mechanic, not once, didn't fool around with any sleepy stuff either

I think I must have missed the Ailing Town somehow because that's what they were talking about in the podcast.

I assumed the Merchants were shut down there by the Golden Order because they worshipped the Frenzied Flame but you could be right

Been very much enjoying the lore videos by Smoughtown by the way

Yeah the Ailing Town (and the Demi-God Queen) are kinda easy to overlook, I just was fastidious about that particular area.

I had to jump up a rock a bunch of times to get there like the roof in ds3 lol

I stumbled on the demigod queen early on, which was very lucky as her staff has been excellent for my battlemage build.Still the only one I use, even though Ive got the meteor staff, lusat staff, etc.

there's a sleep sword laying around in a cellar in one of the caelid ruins. apparently sleep works on some bosses though i haven't played around with it much.

it's very funny to have mooks fall asleep in front of you then get skewered on the ground, vulgar militia-style. the sound effects are on point, too (as usual)

also, st trina is the biggest mystery to me right now, who the fuck were they

Sleep works on the godskin guys from videos ive seen. Ive only tried it once and it did work but I got hammered anyway.

I've got the sleep sword, but I'm too dumb to use it. I've used sleep arrows in the past and they seemed effective. I may make up some of the grease to play with it.

Currently: underground doing a job for tiny little ranni doll; meeting Mogh, but thinking I might explore the whole dirty bloody area before I head back and beat him up; touring the beautiful capital city of Leyndell.

Turns out Mogh did not want to be beaten up by me and continues to put up a stiff fight. Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy, went down quickly though (lol mimic tear and +4ing the serpent hunter), so now I have a blasphemous blade. Enjoyed a test run with that.

The size of Leyndell is slightly doing my head in. I can't accidentally panic-roll off a roof without finding a whole new area.

ST TRINA IS MIQUELLA

At an early point my bf asked “what’s this game about” and I said “I don’t actually know.. yet”

Three weeks later I gave him the full explanation of all the gods and their lore and everything, feeling quite pleased with myself

Yesterday morning he put on Hairspray (the reboot movie) and it was 9am and he was watching on his laptop and the small speakers made it even more shrill and awful as ambient sound

And I said “ok maybe we need to have a permission slip situation when it comes to ‘musical theatre at 9am’ in this residence” and he bristled and said “I have listened to you go on for HOURS about fucking Marika and Radagon so suck it up” and he turned the volume up

Oh god, that is harsh but oh so very fair!

> ST TRINA IS MIQUELLA

why? what have i missed?

Oh no I was riffing off a particularly ham-fisted revelatory plot point in the game

I'm still theoretically working on my level 40 sleep build but haven't felt like playing through the early game again (yet). Also haven't been able to coordinate with anyone to drop a second St. Trina sword from my first character the second -- if anyone plays on Playstation around 6 - 7pm CST, let me know!

xp lol ok then, you got me because iirc the text is ambigous re miquella's gender, if im not mistaken some item descriptions call them malenia's brother and others sister so i wouldn't be shocked if they pulled that one a second time

Reddit ppl have said that re St Trina too fwiw

So not only did I miss the Ailing Village, but I've only just happened upon the Frenzied Flame Village in Liurnia. Seriously, that whole area with the Mausoleum Compound and the Minor Erdtree etc is so hard to navigate - so many cliffs and dead ends. But no wonder I'd been thinking the Frenzied Flame was undermentioned in the game

Yeah you kinda have to go up and around. I'd tried to get to it via the path up thru the aboveground bit of Urd Ruins and kept running into dead ends, looking at the map and scratching my head. There *is* one spot you can squeeze up in thru o Torrent that gets you to a lake with a jumping (!) mausoleum. But otherwise I guess you were meant to come down from above.

Uhl Palace ruins I meant. Blargh. Too many placemnames.

I very much dislike that whole area. There's still one mausoleum I can hear but have never seen

Theres one in the lake, and one just above it. The lake one I only got to jumping up a tiny gap in the rocks from where all the Viking guys are shooting arrows at you.

fuck those guys

Oh god... I let Boc die I AM A MONSTER. I had the prattling pate, I knew about using it, but somehow I clicked unthinkingly on a set of dialog and happily handed him a larval tear and... argh! :(

I never got the larval tear dialogue for some reason... The prattling pate thing was quite underwhelming really I must say

People are NOT kidding about Malenia are they? I'm using like eight buffs and a +10 mimic tear and she's still whooping me

Is Malenia someone you have to fight to finish the game?

Nope, extremely optional.

Now that I've seen videos like this, I kinda want to fight her again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnfe-vYRjOc

I really thought I was done with this game, but now I'm 10 hours in to a new Faith-oriented build and I'm still having a blast. I would have gladly paid $80 for this game given how much quality time I've gotten out of it.

It took me til about ~250 hours of play for me to be actually "done with this game", and done with gaming in general lol

https://images-ext-1.discordapp.net/external/Eg2Ji0ck-QtK2JEPkuGb9k38JPD7w6W6rKaKymCnthU/https/media.discordapp.net/attachments/881920856501157948/951507372478726244/or4tklntkfm81.png

I finally best Malenia with the help of two players. Very very tough. Shame the quest just ends in the arena though. Bit of an anticlimax after that whole journey only to be rewarded with a rune and some loot

As in most of these games, the journey is 99% of the thing. :)

After being briefly burned out on ER (and not being able to get into Salt & Sacrifice like I was hoping to), I've started to have fun again on a new character (magic & sleep-themed). I found some things I missed in the early game and I'm almost ready to start some low-level invasions, which will hopefully a welcome change from lvl 150.

Some of the build ideas & positivity here helped:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uMJsCLhU9Y

I am still what feels like far too underlevelled even though I'm partway into Leyndell/tryin to finish Rannis quest (just need to do Astel). "Oh just farm the albinauracs" is useless to me as I have no access to the mountain area yet. Frustraing.

I've managed to swim through a whole load of the last part of the game fairly easily - the last few bosses you meet in succession weren't too tough. However apparently I need to find Placidusax or else I'll get the bad ending and I'm not sure where he is

It's so interesting how different people have more trouble with some bosses than others. I'm sure it's down to the various builds. My friend running a DEX build destroyed Malenia in just a couple of goes. I had to buff, rune, and eventually concede to summoning other players for the first time, and it still took well over 15 goes. On the other hand, she had terrible trouble with Maliketh who I beat first time round.

DL - assuming you've explored Farum Azula, you know that dark room with water on the floor, where the beastman cleric tries to electrocute you? If you turn around from that around and run straight out to the cliff and look down, you'll see a spot you can jump down to.

Here's my first invasion on my low-level Saint Trina character, I'm already having sooo much more fun than at level 150. I didn't play very well, but was able to learn from my mistakes because I wasn't getting one-shot by every ash of war! Amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkb7jPmqRp8

wow, nice job! i would have panicked and lost so, so many times if that were me.

how come the giant didn't attack you? amazing using it to your advantage, but did it ever take a swing at you?

Finished this today. I have a ton of thoughts, if anyone cared, but in the meantime, my rankings of From games:

1. Bloodborne
2. Dark Souls
3. Dark Souls 3
4. Sekiro*
5. Elden Ring
6. Dark Souls 2
*(this was my least favorite/fun to play, so I never finished it, but I love a lot of what it did to reinvent the formula)

DS2 is the only "bad" game in the bunch, imo, and it's not even that bad, but it's clearly the worst. So placing Elden Ring second to last is less a statement of quality and more that I feel it's a missed opportunity.

If you're an invader, the enemies don't attack you. :) Most can't even do damage to you, but the big ones can if you get in their way (I'm guessing that troll can hit me, though I guess not with the roar?).

Josh, I'm curious what think it missed!

I don't think I could rank these games, they've all been such different experiences for me.

Dark Souls - best world
Dark Souls 3 - best pvp
Dark Souls 2 - idk I didn't like it either
Sekiro - best boss fights, and cool to see what they can do with a single-player offline game
Bloodborne - idk if it's specifically the best at anything aside from goth vibes and art direction, but it's an incredible game
Elden Ring - incredible scope, love how it combined mechanics from all the games and added a heap of new stuff too. It's not perfect, but it sure makes it hard to go back to the other games.

I agree they're all pretty different experiences, to degrees. OK, here goes.

A disclaimer: I played offline and don't plan to play this again (I haven't replayed any of the others, either), which I concede affects my takes. And again, to stress, this is not a bad game by any stretch, and I highly recommend people play it!

1. I loved the open world, but it's no "Breath of the Wild." In particular, crafting, hunting and item discovery in general is almost an afterthought, and barely necessary for the game. Heck, I didn't even use any Rune Arcs, at least not until the final boss, and even then I'm not sure I used one to beat it (once I figured out what was wrong; see below).

2. Torrent is a nice way to fast travel across these vast lands, and useful in some combat situations, but the goat-horse nonetheless lacks personality. It would have been nice were it upgradable, for example, and for that matter, it more or less disappears/becomes superfluous/unusable for huge hunks of the game, especially the endgame, so could have at least gotten a send off (RIP, my RDR2 horse, My Horse). Or maybe become a combat summons?

3. In terms of exploration, I kept getting rogue-like vibes from this game. I know so much of From is very well designed and intentional, but after a while the rewards for exploration started to feel pretty random and worthless. You'd make a tricky run and get a mushroom. You'd explore a dungeon and get yet another minor weapon/spell/whatever. By the end, sure, I was swimming in runes, and got to level up enough to try some different weapons/incantations, but this was only when there wasn't much game left. Which brings me to:

4. Upgrading. The game gives you tons of weapons and ashes, but it more or less limits how many you can upgrade until very late game, and even then there's an absolute limit on the top tier smithing stones. Which is fine and familiar from From, but I found only a couple of the ashes were truly and repeatedly useful, anyway, and the weapon that took me through most of the game was one I got pretty early. I did use a second weapon for some specific stuff/abilities and battles, but not really more than those two weapons. As for shields, this is I think the first From game that really required or at least benefited from some shield use, and I admit, I did more shield swapping than weapon swapping, for various purposes. And some of the incantations I explored late game were so OP I wish I had learned them earlier. Looking at you, Rotten Breath.
 
5. Second disclaimer, I did follow a guide, because stuff like the NPC quests and certain other features I maintain are next to impossible without a guide. But even then I started skipping some stuff late game (like dungeons, catacombs, enemies, quests), not because it was too hard (imo, this is perhaps the easiest From game, since its size and scope more or less naturally allows you to level up pretty quickly, and the spirit ashes are a big helping hand) but because it was a pain in the ass with very few worthwhile rewards. Like the gimmick maze dungeons? Nah. A lot of the Knights toward the end of the game? Screw them. Those giant dogs and birds? Why bother? The secret two-headed dragon boss? Looked cool but by then I was done with dragons. And the rune rewards seemed almost totally random as well. For example, there would be a stationary fire breathing creature-thing that nets you almost 4000 runes for literally no effort, so why would you want to fight yet another crucible knight? As for the fabled difficulty spike, I never really struggled with any of the bosses. But the Tree Sentinel before Maliketh? What a pain in the ass that fight was. 

6. These games are generally pretty well tuned, but this is the first one that sort of got on my nerves. Again, didn't love Sekiro, but its visible stagger meter would have been nice motivation here for some fights. And the shitty camera and platforming, at this point that's clearly a From feature, not a bug, but Sekiro again showed how it could be done better, so the return to default here struck me as lazy. (Likewise some of the rando enemy placement; why was there a giant octopus in a couple of the catacombs?). Last, there were some serious QOL glitches I encountered. On the minor end, there were at least two graces where the flame (or whatever it was) wouldn't light because the actual activation spot was glitched and located somewhere else in the area (which was annoying). On the major end, the final Elden Beast boss for a time was seemingly impervious to any of my damage, forcing me (after several beatdowns) to restart the system. There was some other rando stuff in between those extremes, too. And afaict this might be the first From game I've played where there was an NPC quest I literally couldn't do without online access, as it required doing invasions. That was kinda annoying. 

7) Last, the plot/narrative/lore or whatever. I get that From doesn't hold hands and hides the story details in odd places, and that oblique approach is novel, but ... I would have for once liked a bit more here to make it feel worth my while, emotionally. One reason I gave up on Sekiro, besides the relentlessness of its bosses, was that I just didn't really care about the story, whatever it was. One reason I like Bloodborne best amongst these games is that I actually kind of *did* care about what was going on, at least a little. The mystery seemed more worth figuring out, even if I fell short on that front, and when big things happened they completely changed my conception of the game a little. Here, it just felt like another Souls game, albeit one with a lot more space/levels/enemies. I wish it had distinguished itself a tad more, like Sekiro and Bloodborne did.

This is long, and a lot of nitpicking, but the game itself is super long, and having lived with it for all those hours these were the things that kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Still, I'll happily play whatever DLC is introduced!

I think those are all very valid criticisms. I think you're OTM about the rogue-like-ness of the rewards; it was kind of frustrating to repeatedly be rewarded with weapons or spells that were worthless for my spellsword build. Rewards pose an interesting design challenge in a game that allows for a diversity of playstyles, but which, by virtue of the stinginess of the leveling & upgrade systems, really ask players to commit to a certain build.

The most practical solution might be to only reward the player with souls/runes/etc and make everything accessible via a shop, but then that takes away the fun and world-building mystique of finding unique items out in the world.