Elden Ring: YOU DIED on a horse

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.

I disagree with most of those criticisms!

Not to negate them or anything I just didn’t feel the same way— I found the lore engrossing, the upgrading balanced, the Tree Sentinel before Maliketh an appropriate challenge, and I got kinda emotional about the challenge presented by (specifically) the Farum Azula Crucible Knight, like it was a curtain call

My issues were with the comparative underdeveloped multiplayer, the copy-paste feeling about the catacombs, the oft-repeated Ulcerated and Putrids; the Astel rerun in particular felt kinda insulting

Aside from that, the game reached such dizzying heights for me that I feel disinclined to game again and more inclined to remind my body about push-ups and chin-ups

i really kinda love what is being described as random, "worthless" item drops, but it maybe requires you be the type of person who finds intrinsic value in the lore bits. i enjoy getting whatever weapon or incantation or whatever that's totally useless to my build because no matter what (with the exception of some ashes of war), there's going to be a new bit of lore attached in the description, and i love that shit. if you're focused on uncovering the world you're exploring, that part becomes the reward in itself.

and as a part of that, nothing is actually placed randomly. it can feel like that, but there's almost always a connection between the item and the circumstances that brought you to it.

and the ease with which the game allows you to change builds means that no drop is ever truly useless, you can always look at whatever massive greatsword or whatever and plan to try it out after a respec.

i do agree about weapon upgrades though, i think it's balanced badly and it makes experimenting with new weapons a great big hassle. i sort of wish that instead of making stones infinitely available to purchase if you have the right bell bearing, you can just transfer your upgrades between weapons. i don't want to have to stumble upon 3 random bell bearings all located in standard caves and then spend a ton of runes just to see how this new weapon compares to my +14 standard.

The one thing I wish they'd done was put the Bell Bearing Husk Maidens a little closer to Hewg. Running back and forward through those rooms for AGES, in the meantime forgetting whether it was a 4 x Smithing Stone (8)s or 8 x Sombre Smithing Stones (4) to upgrade this particular weapon.
And like you say x, it's never fully obvious whether a particular weapon is worth upgrading.

I think the story is fine, but the lore is insane. If I had the time, I could spend HOURS watching YouTube lore videos; it's just beyond belief. The story of the game; i.e. your character's journey isn't the story at all - it's a means to discovering what is actually happening.

I played Bloodborne not really realising that these games have so much lore; I played it like an arcade game really. "Oh there's another fucked up dude!" *SMASH*

The game does make me feel quite stupid and unobservant though. There'll be cut scenes (most recently Placidusax) where, to me, "fucked up shit" is going on. How am I supposed to really understand that lying down in a pit is actually making time go backwards, hence why the original Elden lord is still alive and Farum Azula is no longer crumbling, therefore allowing me to reverse something that happened much earlier in the game using one specific object I picked up but needed to "unalloy" in another specific place? Yes, yes, I know this is just the way of From Soft, but if other people are figuring this all out just from watching the cutscenes and reading item descriptions, hats off to them

Yeah, that's all why I stressed I don't think the game is bad at all. Just that for what is essentially the ultimate Dark Souls game, which happened to follow the From game that deviated most from formula, it was a missed opportunity to merge the two approaches, offer something new and expand the game play while keeping all the From quirks and character, like the obscure story/lore (which as said Youtube videos show, always, somehow, ties together, if you put in the work; and yeah, hats off to those doing the work!).

Having played a few open world games by now (albeit games driven more by narrative), I do feel that the open world here is something of a shell game, as fun and surprising as it can be. And it is fun and surprising! Those teleportation traps and other portals were great additions, for example. No idea what lore purpose they serve, but they're an example of a way to shake things up a little. You can use it to your advantage, or you can panic.

I do love that people are into the lore, btw, and I actually do appreciate it as a From facet, I just don't find it compelling (in any of these games, honestly). Especially this far along in the series, it's kind of a Mad Lib of magic and blood and rebirth and world in ash and flames and supplanting a god on the throne or whatever. The fact that George Martin has his name on this but there is no significant difference imo from the From formula underscores this. I think that's another reason I liked Bloodborne. There are other characters in that game experiencing the same thing as you, kind of. Some of them are on the loose. Some of them are locked away in fear. But you kind of feel like you have more of an explicit role to play in navigating this horrifying world. At least I did, but it's been a while.

I agree that going back and forth between the Maidens and the blacksmith was another example of busy work. The number of times I went to the wrong room, ugh.

There might be a method to the madness in terms of item placement, but if it's totally obscure then it's kind of a wash, imo. I'm not even sure what (for example) Astel even was, but yeah, its first placement made some sort of sense, but the second one, in whichever catacomb it was, felt totally rote. Like, here we go again.

Oh, and my full list of enemies Just Not Worth Fighting:

giant octopus
giant lobster
giant dogs
giant birds
bears (though I liked having them around to keep you on your toes)
crucible knights
most things in the consecrated snowfield
those spidery spazz things with swords that suddenly appear and go aggro
those gross things that vomit maggots and death
giant hands
those centipede dudes with homing missiles
death birds (though I liked fighting black bridge knights)
trolls/giants/whatever they are (which are easy, but easier to avoid)
bell bearing hunters (though the first time I encountered one was a memorable event)

I may be forgetting a few.

The real joy in the game imo is fighting the basic knights— Godrick, Cuckoo, whatever the Caelid ones were, Gelmir, Leyndell, Mausoleum, Haligtree, Cleanrot.

The longer I played and experimented, the more I realized that the upgrade system was made balanced by the fact that the vast majority of the weapons are totally viable, there isn’t really a ‘wrong’ one to upgrade (except some shields and bows).

i've been using the twinblade like 90% of the time, it just feels so much faster than any of the other swords and i can't deal with how slow the bigger swords feel after using the twinblade. are there other weapons that have that similarly zippy feel that i should keep any eye out for? the claws are the only ones that feel close so far

Lots of great posts! I agree that the item placement is thoughtful, even if you inevitably end up finding lots of things that aren't applicable for your build or playstyle.

Also agree that running back and forth between Hewg and the twin maidens drove me crazy, and that it would have been nice if they let you swap upgrades between weapons as easily as they did affinities and ashes of war this time around. Also multi-player covenants were a huge missed opportunity, although I get that they were trying to make the online elements more streamlined and understandable (which the furled fingers did not help).

NA, I found dual straight swords to be nearly as fast as the claws, with more range. Also dual curved swords, and one-handed katanas. Knives and rapiers are very fast too obviously, but with more drawbacks (not a lot of range for knives, and no horizontal attacks for thrusting swords).

Regarding the lore-as-storytelling thing, I genuinely feel as if this is From's greatest eureka in this series. Every other narrative medium requires that the level of plot exposition be evident enough to be parsed by the audience, things that are "obvious" to the creators aren't obvious at all to an audience (to the detriment of the work). From (perhaps accidentally) have discovered that obscurantism actually works in game storytelling, provided that a game is compelling enough without traditional exposition. That "a plot" in a game can rely upon online community discussion to be fully parsed, and the gradual discovery of "what the hell is going on" is its own unique method of receiving a story.

Lore-based storytelling is so much more compelling to me than the decades-old-now method of "cutscenes" that I find myself bored and distracted at cutscene-based exposition (in Elden Ring and elsewhere), like, just give me some hints as to what's going on as I go, it makes uncovering the plot feel like its own subquest

Before starting Elden Ring I was playing the first Horizon game, with its "picking up data logs and reading them at your leisure" storytelling base (my first encounter with this method-of-exposition I can recall was System Shock in the 90s). The story to Horizon was more interesting ultimately than Elden Ring's story, but its mode of transmission (data logs, cut scenes, option-based dialogue that you have to exhaust) took up so much in-game time in comparison; I've been being told stories in this fashion for decades. Horizon's plot was worth it in the end for the couple of "big reveals", but I do hope more games recognize what From has been going for here and try and develop lore as a viable storytelling mechanism, I guess. It's really nice when a plot is optional, and highly rewarding when engaged with, and reveals itself with a coy subtlety

fgti, I know how much you dig and dug into the lore, but did you think that the lore of this particular From game was better or more interesting than the lore of any of the others? I find most of it pretty interchangeable. And what is your opinion of the maddeningly specific multi-step NPC quests? That's an example of being actively required to invest in an almost impossibly unfathomable series of tasks to progress an obscure narrative with no clear guarantee of a satisfying payoff, imo. Which is a big ask!

I was thousands of times more invested in the lore of Elden Ring than I was in previous From games, including Bloodborne. Bloodborne I found perplexing, and was interested in certain character arcs (Ioselka i.e.) but wasn't invested at all in the main story. Dark Souls had a wonderful mood but I didn't give a shit about any of the characters or anything, really, in the end, aside from (I suppose) the Astorias stuff.

Elden Ring on the other hand was fascinating. It's interesting that people didn't feel it was particularly informed by GRRM's style, because I felt a definite analog between the houses of the Seven Kingdoms and the various demigods and their armies. I literally had no clue about anything on my first playthrough, had zero idea who Miquella was or what this egg was in Mohg's underworld. The Radagon Is Marika moment had me scratching my head because I literally was confusing Radahn and Radagon, there was no difference between these individuals in my mind. I smirked at the Hoarah Loux reveal because his name sounds like Horton Hears A Who, and this big revelation was meaningless to me, on my first play through. I was just titillated with the world design and parsing out my build. I was definitely invested in certain characters. Hyetta and Ranni in particular. I didn't fully understand what Ranni was up to or why I was doing it and still felt a cleansing moment of resolution when I completed her quest line. I didn't even put together that she was dead and I'd located her corpse on top of that tower until much later.

But then, reading shit online, playing through some more, it all started to come together. I became invested in the diverse personalities of the main characters. I felt moved by Vyke's quest line and how it seemed (to me) as if he'd been successfully swayed by Shabriri into getting fingered, with the same rhetoric Shabriri was attempting on me. Patches became a sympathetic character and I felt much more interested in his stuff than I had in previous From games. Fia's whole deal was genuinely moving to me. The plight of the merchants was moving, Morgott's seeming "I'm gonna be dutiful even if people are prejudiced toward my omenism" was moving, the pervert stuff with Seluvius and Dung-Eater and Mohg was sufficiently gross in an SVU kinda way. Loved Blaidd, obviously. Loved Millicent, was creeped out by Gowry, appropriately. Playing through a second time and understanding the significance of the full extent that the Frenzied Flame had on certain pockets of the world, or the devastation of the Melania-Radahn conflict in Caelid, it left me feeling very elevated and transported like the best fantasy immersions of my teenage years reading idk David Eddings or whatever. I can profess at this point to being able to draw out family tree of the Elden Ring world, which I cannot do (any more) for Greek or Norse mythology. I got really invested.

Certain plots fell flat. Couldn't care less about snake lady or anything relating to Volcano Manor, I thought Rykard was uninteresting. Felt that Renalla's imprisonment felt odd and arbitrary and I didn't really understand what was going on there, and how/why Ranni felt it necessary, or why she permitted you to battle Renalla. Wish that Beardy Wizard dude in Caelid (the guy who wants you to fight Sellen) had more screen time. Didn't really think much of the Beast guy in Dragonbarrow. I wish there had been a touch more exposition regarding Godwyn/Placidusax, I feel like they missed a trick on one of the most interesting bits of the world's history. Most of the rest of the game really worked for me.

Funny, the snake lady was one of my favorites. I loved reading that though! I will readily admit that I'm not a huge lore person, which is why I love that it's optional. I like the item descriptions but generally just let it wash over me, although I'm liking it more and more after the fact now that I see people making the connections.

A big reason that I love the co-op and invasion mechanics is that it's true "emergent narrative", ie the kind of little stories you only get from running into people in their own worlds and having these elaborate non-verbal interactions. It's why I especially like low-level invasions in ER, because they're longer and there's more time for memorable things to occur. And tbh that stuff sticks with me more than most of the actual story. Which is why it bums me out that the newer, larger audience for ER is so vehemently anti-invasion, instead of looking at it as maybe a fun & unique part of the game (even if they die to it sometimes).

the lore just slides off my brain but i'm not really a fan of any fantasy worldbuilding so it's probably mostly just me

i just spent like an hour trying (and failing) to kill the draconic tree sentinel, circling around and around him on torrent, and now my brain is circling circling circling

Which, the one at the back door to Leyndell? Truly an ignobly difficult mini-boss.

Oh and a cool thing that I liked about the structure of the bosses/mini-bosses was how, as the game progresses, you get limited in your options. The random Farum Azula dragon can be co-op'd, but not Torrented. Later, Placidusax can neither be co-op'd or Torrented. I like this, that you have crutches on dragonfights and they gently make things more and more difficult. I love that the evergaols disallow Spirit Summons. Stuff like that. I really do wish there hadn't been a re-run of Astel. That would be something I'd hope they'd fix in an update. Not only was it a disappointing fight the second time, but it rendered the previous fight less memorable

Thanks for your posts on the lore! As I've confessed, I'm a total sap, an easy mark, and narrative games like RDR2, Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, et al., I sometimes just don't want them to end. I love the worlds, the characters, *their* journeys. But the From games, I readily admit I play them *to* finish them. That is, I look forward to them being done, complete, where reaching the end is the achievement, not where the story ends but where my relationship with the game ends, if that makes any sense. So in this way the "lore" as I engage with it is the mechanics and personalities of the games themselves, their quirks, how they work and don't work, the hurdles they put up and how to get around them. If I described any of these games to anyone I would talk about how they were played, but if they asked me what the objective was I would probably just shrug and admit I don't really know! And that's part of the game's personality. Which of course is not totally accurate, since of course a story can be sewn together from bits and pieces of found narrative fabric. It's just not how I approach them.

Last week I mentioned an anecdote about Eldensplaining that I thought was humorous

I don't care about the lore of this game at all but that's just me and I can def understand why someone would. Due to some minor miracle I accidentally completed all of the steps of fia's questline without a guide and without breaking it and really thought it was done in a way that made me care about her character (without really understanding the story behind it). Just the vibe of finding her in the depths, fighting a boss in her dream, etc was cool

Watched a bit of one of the VaatiVidya lore videos. There's got to be a metaphor in there somewhere about why From would bother to create such a rich, detailed mythology and then purposefully scatter it and bury it and make it almost impossible for most to parse, the same way From also develops massive hidden levels in these games that many if not also most might outright miss, too. Sekiro may have had the most - and most missed/skipped by me - secret stuff of them all.

Same, re: Sekiro, in that I missed/skipped the entire game

lol, you should give it a shot!

I've twice given it a shot and been unable to beat the very first mini-boss general. For whatever reason my skill set is void in that game

Every other narrative medium requires that the level of plot exposition be evident enough to be parsed by the audience, things that are "obvious" to the creators aren't obvious at all to an audience (to the detriment of the work). From (perhaps accidentally) have discovered that obscurantism actually works in game storytelling, provided that a game is compelling enough without traditional exposition.

i can gush about the lore itself for basically the same reason... from has a level of confidence and commitment to it that i just haven't found anywhere else. most other modern AAA games have a certain self-aware awkwardness in their lore/worldbuilding which is a barrier for me to really get engrossed. i know it's weird and possibly silly to say it about a game where you can spend an entire playthrough with no idea what's going on, but from makes it feel like every aspect of the game springs out of the world/story itself and not the other way around (of course that's not true, but they're really good at making it feel that way)

admittedly i think the lore could be a lot worse in itself and i'd still gush over it because of how well integrated it is/how enjoyable the sense of discovery is

I was dead pleased with myself when I beat Astel quite easily today (only took a few tries). But that was quickly erased when I came up against the bloody glinstone dragon. Apparently spamming him with rotten breath is the go and now - at levvel almost 100- I find out I could have just bought that spell ages a fucking go?!

Some fantastic posts itt. Funny, I thought the Rykard/Tanith story was one of the most interesting, accessible and disturbing ones, and that Gelmir / Volcano Manor was among my favourite sections of the game

And it is peculiar how differently I have come to think of this game to Bloodborne. I had no interest in builds or lore with that game whereas for me with ER that literally is the game. I couldn't imagine playing this as a straight battle romper, no way

One of the many aspects of Bloodborne I liked was the ability to get some of your health back by attacking. I also liked having to find the enemy with the glowing eyes to get your souls back. I feel like that and the faster play in general was Miyazaki actively pushing people *into* combat, forcing them to get more aggressive. Iirc there were no shields in the game, either, save one, which is literally a joke. He took that to its apotheosis with Sekiro, which essentially gives you one weapon that can't be upgraded, but lots of different ways to engage in battle, which itself demands your hyper engagement with the enemy to get ahead. No more winning by attrition and cheese opportunities iirc were pretty infrequent. There was real stealth, though, which was new, and there was the grappling hook, which provided a verticality and speed its relatively methodical/plodding predecessors lacked. With ER, it's back to more weapons, back to more shields, back to more familiar fantasy. There is some degree of stealth, but I honestly forgot it was even a factor. There is some verticality, a little jumping, but that's not really a factor, either. Those are a few reasons why I consider ER a step back closer to the status quo. Again, not criticisms, per se - it's a good game - just some reasons I maybe expected more than just ... more. Lore aside, I guess.

I think reducing Elden Ring to just “more of the same” really sells it short. Yes, it’s more but it’s also a refinement and a significant expansion. Building an open world like this is a massive undertaking that they have never done before. The amount of balancing and design considerations that go into something like this is boggling.

It’s the best, most ambitious game they’ve made by a considerable margin imo. I personally don’t need (or want) entirely new, novel combat systems every time out when the basic template they’ve been refining for years is this good.

I replayed most of Sekiro after ER and while I love the idea of the active combat/parry system, I found it really only shines when you’re dueling. Like that Genichiro rooftop battle is still probably the best From boss fight of all time. Unfortunately, a not insignificant portion of the game is spent fighting monsters or humanoids in a non-sparring sorta way and that stuff can be a chore.

I’d like to revisit Bloodborne but tbh despite it being a more consistent game than its predecessors, I didn’t think it was more fun or memorable (Dark Souls 2 excluded). Hoping for like a 60 fps patch for PS5.

I like their bread and butter best, generally. I thought it was getting a little stale with Dark Souls 3, but they completely re-captured the magic this go around.

I don’t pay for online access but suddenly today i seem to have access to the online functions? I can see messages and bloodstains but haven’t figured out how to summon anyone. I’m guessing they’re giving free access for a limited time to try and entice people to paying for it

dunno about any free trials but to summon another player you need to spend a furlcalling remedy to make non-NPC summon signs appear in your game and then activate the sign of your choice

signs can deliberately be put down anywhere the game allows, but if players use the summoning pool item instead of the "place sign here" item then their signs will cluster around the marika statues

Beat the game last night, to my own surprise!

Congrats, DL! Which ending did you get?

my PS5 is on the way and i'm looking forward to immediately getting this game

Accidentally kill Boc last week, had to kill Blaidd yesterday ;_; I knew it was coming but that Good Boi did not deserve it.

Felt even worse when I told Iji and then came back and found HIM dead too. This game!

i know i'm pretty overleveled because i just beat godrick and morgott within an hour of each other, second try on each (almost first try on each)

level 98, 160 hours in, lol