From Software Elden Ring - From Software's new game with writing by GRRM

[Silva]

ITT: people complaining that they're burnt out after having played through 100 hours of content in a week. Can't make this shit up.

What burns people out is the fact that half of those 100h is padding.

 

[Lutte]

Yeah, when Dark Souls 2 came out I couldn't put it off my hands, kept going into NG+, making new characters, even did some PVP even though it's a feature I don't care much about because of how laggy P2P pvp can get at times, never felt "burnt out", 0 second of the game was spent traversing empty garbage on a horse, hunting for resources to upgrade new weapons to try out (bonfire ascetics are fking awesome), encoutering the 15th asylum demon (DS2 had some copypaste, and it's legit criticism, but this game takes it to the NEXT LEVEL) and I don't want to hear about how you can "skip" things like those copypasta when they drop such useful unique items, in the case of the asylum fucks, the physick potion stuff which is like one of the best addition of the game. ER's open world isn't an option, it's mandatory unless you want to miss out on a lot of cool weapons, gear, story (since everything about souls game setting is told through item descriptions and you'll miss on 2/3 of the stuff if you don't go through ER's garbage open world), NPC sidequests..

 

[Curratum]

The NPC quests are some next level bullshit. I wanted to get the set of Radahn's steward and discovered you get it in sorceress Sellen's questline.

Sorceress Sellen's questline involves finding TWO secret walls, one of which is a random cliff face in the open world with no hint or indication of where it is. The bullshit is off the fucking scale.

 

[Curratum]

I ended up deciding to stop playing. Making the Dark Souls “open world” was ultimately a mistake in my opinion. Quantity over quality isn’t a good modus operandi. One thing I always loved about Dark Souls was how everything was well designed. Shortcuts, connected areas and so on. Enemies were unique for the most part.

Seeing the same bosses being recycled was disheartening to me. I would’ve preferred a game 1/4 the size of Elden Ring than relying to copy/pasting of areas and enemies. Seeing those rats becoming stronger and stronger was disappointing.

I think non-linear is a clear positive for a game generally speaking (like Dark Souls to some extent). But non-linear shouldn’t default to “open world”. I’m wondering the pros of having an open world. The most boring part of Elden Ring for me was running across the fields to get somewhere until I got the horse to get somewhere. I don’t find that fun at all. With a tightly packed environment like the Dark Souls, exploration was limited to the essentials.

Mass producing content while remaining on budget will ultimately lead to low quality output. Was there a need for an “open world” this huge? What’s the point of having three different (A) places if their copied or very slightly modified? There’s this trend going on right now where games need to be longer and longer to possibly justify a higher price point but the final product ends up suffering for it.

I don’t think this deserves a 10/10.

I didn't mind the open world aspect for a good long while, but there's just too much empty space, especially later on.

The side dungeons are too many, it would have been fine if there were 10-15 of them and they had more attention and uniqueness to them. As it stands, items and upgrade mats / stones, etc are too spread out and gated behind exploration that becomes mandatory.

I don't even want to go through another mine to get the bell bearing that will make the Roundtable merchant sell the next tier of upgrade stones, I've already done it three times and one of the three battles was already absolutely terrible. I don't want to do it ever again.

Once you're deep enough in the game, you're not forced to do those areas, but in the first couple of areas, when you still need a ton of STUFF of all sorts, you're forced to do it and that becomes an issue.

There is way way too much dead space you just gallop through on your horse or simply run through, especially later on in the game, because the encounters are not worth the XP or drops and it's just tedium.

I am not against the concept of the open world as a whole, I just wish there were several more legacy dungeons and the entire open world was the size of maybe Limgrave and Liurnia and that was it, just have it more contained, not do away with it entirely.

The HP bloat and shit encounters in late areas, as well as the ABSOLUTELY RELENTLESS boss reuse really drag the game down big time. Some reviewers mentioned the boss reuse but made it sound like a minor problem, like it was in DS2 and 3, but here it's taken to absurdities. I've fought nearly 10 Ulcerated tree spirits at this point, I've fought I think 4 godskins without the duo and I don't have the achievement for the noble still, so there's at least two more godskin fights.

Margit, Margit in front of Leyndell, Margit with two new attacks as Morgott. It feels like I'm playing a low-budget DS knockoff at this point.

This is not a game to make new characters on, ever. NG+ might be ok if you just respec in a different build and already have all your items and spells so you can use sorcery or something.

7/10, be as thorough as you can first time round and get what you can because you will lose all your bonfires, markers and ingame knowledge of what is where. Game is just too fucking massive to go through all this all over again, in my opinion.

 

[Silva]

Between Lythium riffs, Lutte lore theories and Curratum whining, this thread is already more fun than the game. Keep up bros.




...well, at least until a patch fixes my arcane scaling so I can resume playing.

 

[cvv]

The NPC quests are some next level bullshit. I wanted to get the set of Radahn's steward and discovered you get it in sorceress Sellen's questline.

Sorceress Sellen's questline involves finding TWO secret walls, one of which is a random cliff face in the open world with no hint or indication of where it is. The bullshit is off the fucking scale.

Bro, seriously, you have been nothing but railing about this game for days now. Yeah, NPC questlines have always been BS, finding secret walls have always been retarded in Souls. Maybe take a breather, go for a walk, have a fap and a cup of coffee and then come back?

 

[Lyric Suite]

So i went in as a nun.

Just saw people walk by! I am no longer lonley.

 

[d1r]

Has anyone actually found a merchant that sells infinite special arrows?

 

[Curratum]

I think the thing that eventually brings the game down, like most open world games, is "asset fatigue".

You start recognizing the assets and configurations they're used in, after you encounter them several times. The world stops being a magical incredible place, you start seeing the mechanics and patterns and "assets" at work behind the magic on the screen, and this is what destroys every game for me, no matter if it's open world or not. It's not a mysterious unexplored cave anymore, it's "that cave which has the upgrade material merchant items in it" and you're now dealing with "mechanics", not with a good game's world. You can see how this applies to any type of mechanical thingamajig in the game, or asset prefab.

If you only saw a single walking mausoleum, the encounter would have been much more meaningful than having like seven of them all over the map. It doesn't just force you into doing the same "thing" again and again, it takes away from the magic and wonder of encountering that thing in the world.

And the more you play, the more this happens, obviously. The open world cannot help but be populated with those "assets" that you keep seeing in a recurring fashion and this wears you down and takes away from the experience.

 

[Belegarsson]

WHEN THE WINGED HUSSARS ARRIVED

 

[proxon]

Character and Godfrey fight spoilers

Spoiler

First off, i really like the Godfrey fight. I think it's the first time in From Soft games where the boss goes in second phase by tossing his weapon away and fights you bare handed. Problem is he deals too much damage in second phase, and his moves are harder to evade since he is bare handed at least for me. Keep in mind i was using hp rune and my health bar almost filled the screen. I even tried to respecc a couple of times, but went back to my Bloodhound blade quality build. I managed to get him to one percent once, and that was after hours of tries. I was like fuck it, and i upgraded Mimic ash to +8 and the fight was a complete joke. I think fully upgraded mimic would solo him, and he is second to last boss. I went to watch how some streamer deals with him, and he was only using heavy jumping attack which looked dumb as fuck. From Soft really fucked up by adding jumping, and ashes would be fine i guess if they we're a bit helpful and not trivialize entire fights.

In retrospect I regret using Mimic now, i guess the burnout was getting to me. Went to wiki to see what i have missed, i got Melenia and Mohg zones left, last boss as well. Im taking a break for a few weeks now.

https://ibb.co/7pFXx8p

 

[Curratum]

Character and Godfrey fight spoilers

Spoiler

First off, i really like the Godfrey fight. I think it's the first time in From Soft games where the boss goes in second phase by tossing his weapon away and fights you bare handed. Problem is he deals too much damage in second phase, and his moves are harder to evade since he is bare handed at least for me. Keep in mind i was using hp rune and my health bar almost filled the screen. I even tried to respecc a couple of times, but went back to my Bloodhound blade quality build. I managed to get him to one percent once, and that was after hours of tries. I was like fuck it, and i upgraded Mimic ash to +8 and the fight was a complete joke. I think fully upgraded mimic would solo him, and he is second to last boss. I went to watch how some streamer deals with him, and he was only using heavy jumping attack which looked dumb as fuck. From Soft really fucked up by adding jumping, and ashes would be fine i guess if they we're a bit helpful and not trivialize entire fights.

In retrospect I regret using Mimic now, i guess the burnout was getting to me. Went to wiki to see what i have missed, i got Melenia and Mohg zones left, last boss as well. Im taking a break for a few weeks now.

He has a second phase? :D

 

[Mortmal]

Found that , cannot guarantee 100% it's true but might help for your builds :

 

[proxon]

Character and Godfrey fight spoilers

Spoiler

First off, i really like the Godfrey fight. I think it's the first time in From Soft games where the boss goes in second phase by tossing his weapon away and fights you bare handed. Problem is he deals too much damage in second phase, and his moves are harder to evade since he is bare handed at least for me. Keep in mind i was using hp rune and my health bar almost filled the screen. I even tried to respecc a couple of times, but went back to my Bloodhound blade quality build. I managed to get him to one percent once, and that was after hours of tries. I was like fuck it, and i upgraded Mimic ash to +8 and the fight was a complete joke. I think fully upgraded mimic would solo him, and he is second to last boss. I went to watch how some streamer deals with him, and he was only using heavy jumping attack which looked dumb as fuck. From Soft really fucked up by adding jumping, and ashes would be fine i guess if they we're a bit helpful and not trivialize entire fights.

In retrospect I regret using Mimic now, i guess the burnout was getting to me. Went to wiki to see what i have missed, i got Melenia and Mohg zones left, last boss as well. Im taking a break for a few weeks now.

He has a second phase? :D

I was talking about this fight

Spoiler

https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Godfrey,+First+Elden+Lord

 

[deem]

Damn this game is hard to put down. I am currently playing a second character, after playing for about 15 hours before, and I'm catching up to where I was then. Exploring Redmane Castle at the moment.

 

[Shrimp]

On a serious note about NPC questlines, some of them do seem a bit fishy even by the usual From Software standards.
I felt like I sort of just stopped encountering a lot of them during the second half of the game so when I was close to finishing it I looked up how to resolve them or at least to see how they ended in case I already had passed a point of no return for their quests.
According to what I read online it seems like a lot of people suspect that the final parts of the questlines are either outright cut content or currently inaccessible - either due to bugs or simply some insane combination of triggers and event flags that no one has discovered yet. For instance dataminers have found loads of unused dialogue etc. that implies there is (or should have been) more to some of the NPC stories which currently end very abruptly. Some examples include:

Spoiler

• Nepheli Loux who, if you don't give her Seluvis' potion to turn her into one of his puppets, spends almost the entire game just hanging around in the Roundtable Holds while requesting some time to think. NPCs usually don't stick around like this solely for the sake of being decoration. Her last name implies she's related to Godfrey/Hoarah Loux, but to my knowledge this is not explored anywhere in the game. Apparently dataminers claim that she's also supposed to be involved with some other NPC named Kenneth's quest, but it doesn't seem like anyone has figured out how to initiate this.
  
• Diallos, the cowardly noble who starts out in the Roundtable Hold, sets out to avenge the murder of his servant but ends up joining the Volcano Manor instead. Here he realises he was deceived, laments his actions and... just disappears for the rest of the game? It feels like a very abrupt ending to his personal story since you'd expect him to want to redeem himself in some way. Dataminers say that apparently he's supposed to move to the jar warrior village where he ends up dying while defending them from a poacher or something. This sounds like a more classic *Souls NPC ending, but unfortunately he just doesn't show up in Jarburg at all. Is it bugged, cut content or just hidden behind some insanely obscure event flag? No one knows.
• On the topic of jars, Alexander does have a clear story (although it could've used 1 or 2 more optional points where you could encounter him if you ask me) that ultimately ends when you defeat him in a duel in the game's final area. This seems thorough enough, but one of the items he leaves behind is a key item named Alexander's Innards which no one has any clue what to do with. It disappears upon entering NG+ so the developers evidently want you to use it within your current playthrough even though there still is no known use for it. Dataminers once again reveal that some little jar warrior in Jarburg is supposed to be Alexander's nephew whom you can give the innards to - except that little jar warrior isn't there. Yet another key item with no known use.

Now, it's worth keeping in mind that the game only is like two weeks old so there's definitely still a chance that people simply haven't found out how to reach certain progression points in the quests. On the other hand I'd like to believe that if certain NPC questline related things were attainable, then people would've discovered them by now. A lot of these feel like oversights which leaves the players in a state of limbo where no one knows if the quests are bugged, cut content or if they still are working as intended but no one has discovered how to proceed with them. These issues might get resolved in a future patch, but I do hope they aren't just planning on sweeping them under the rug with the intention of eventually fixing them with the release of DLC or some definitive™ edition.

 

[hackncrazy]

Well, after a 24 hour break, I'm really eager to play the game again

I'll probably start a new character and make a Reduvia run, since it was a weapon that I liked a lot in the first one but had other plans.

I'll try to get all the bosses now, let's see if I can do it in less than 20 hours.

 

[hackncrazy]

On a serious note about NPC questlines, some of them do seem a bit fishy even by the usual From Software standards.
I felt like I sort of just stopped encountering a lot of them during the second half of the game so when I was close to finishing it I looked up how to resolve them or at least to see how they ended in case I already had passed a point of no return for their quests.
According to what I read online it seems like a lot of people suspect that the final parts of the questlines are either outright cut content or currently inaccessible - either due to bugs or simply some insane combination of triggers and event flags that no one has discovered yet. For instance dataminers have found loads of unused dialogue etc. that implies there is (or should have been) more to some of the NPC stories which currently end very abruptly. Some examples include:

Spoiler

• Nepheli Loux who, if you don't give her Seluvis' potion to turn her into one of his puppets, spends almost the entire game just hanging around in the Roundtable Holds while requesting some time to think. NPCs usually don't stick around like this solely for the sake of being decoration. Her last name implies she's related to Godfrey/Hoarah Loux, but to my knowledge this is not explored anywhere in the game. Apparently dataminers claim that she's also supposed to be involved with some other NPC named Kenneth's quest, but it doesn't seem like anyone has figured out how to initiate this.
  
• Diallos, the cowardly noble who starts out in the Roundtable Hold, sets out to avenge the murder of his servant but ends up joining the Volcano Manor instead. Here he realises he was deceived, laments his actions and... just disappears for the rest of the game? It feels like a very abrupt ending to his personal story since you'd expect him to want to redeem himself in some way. Dataminers say that apparently he's supposed to move to the jar warrior village where he ends up dying while defending them from a poacher or something. This sounds like a more classic *Souls NPC ending, but unfortunately he just doesn't show up in Jarburg at all. Is it bugged, cut content or just hidden behind some insanely obscure event flag? No one knows.
• On the topic of jars, Alexander does have a clear story (although it could've used 1 or 2 more optional points where you could encounter him if you ask me) that ultimately ends when you defeat him in a duel in the game's final area. This seems thorough enough, but one of the items he leaves behind is a key item named Alexander's Innards which no one has any clue what to do with. It disappears upon entering NG+ so the developers evidently want you to use it within your current playthrough even though there still is no known use for it. Dataminers once again reveal that some little jar warrior in Jarburg is supposed to be Alexander's nephew whom you can give the innards to - except that little jar warrior isn't there. Yet another key item with no known use.

Now, it's worth keeping in mind that the game only is like two weeks old so there's definitely still a chance that people simply haven't found out how to reach certain progression points in the quests. On the other hand I'd like to believe that if certain NPC questline related things were attainable, then people would've discovered them by now. A lot of these feel like oversights which leaves the players in a state of limbo where no one knows if the quests are bugged, cut content or if they still are working as intended but no one has discovered how to proceed with them. These issues might get resolved in a future patch, but I do hope they aren't just planning on sweeping them under the rug with the intention of eventually fixing them with the release of DLC or some definitive™ edition.

Nepheli's quest was the one that bothered me the most, because after I gave her the ashes, she spent the rest of the game at the same place just crying about how it reminds of her hawk. It made me really wish that I gave Seluvis's poison to her.


In general, my biggest gripe with NPCs is that they go to places that you already been and have no reason to return: An example is Millicent. I had passed Leyndell for hours and discovered that she went there out of nowhere. I'd never go back to that place if it wasn't for the wiki.

 

[deem]

I treat quests in From Soft games more like random encounters. At least for the first few play-throughs.

 

[toro]

Is GreenManGaming legit?

Game is 50 euros there. It was 46 euros at G2A but i'm not gonna trust that side for such a large puchage. I haven't paid full price for a game in ages but i think i'm gonna byte. Feels like i'm not actually enjoying the game as much as i would since i know this character is going to be deleted and that's making me care less about the experience.

I've paid €35.69 for the game. From cdkeys.com ... but now I see that the price has increased.

 

[Lutte]

Found that , cannot guarantee 100% it's true but might help for your builds :

I can confirm it's true. Going chart deep min maxing isn't that important though. The softcap on vigor is the most important knowledge, once you hit 40 vigor, the logical step is just to ensure that you have enough stamina to use multiple weapon arts or r2 without being unable to roll (which is going to be a different number for every person wielding different weapons), enough mind that you don't waste your FP recharging flasks, every other point you get in levelups can then be spent into your main damage dealing stat, it's not like you'd have anywhere else to put them, even if you hit beyond softcaps.

 

[toro]

ITT: people complaining that they're burnt out after having played through 100 hours of content in a week. Can't make this shit up.

What burns people out is the fact that half of those 100h is padding.

I would say more than half: more like 80% - padding, 20% - excellent content.

 

[toro]

Yeah, when Dark Souls 2 came out I couldn't put it off my hands, kept going into NG+, making new characters, even did some PVP even though it's a feature I don't care much about because of how laggy P2P pvp can get at times, never felt "burnt out", 0 second of the game was spent traversing empty garbage on a horse, hunting for resources to upgrade new weapons to try out (bonfire ascetics are fking awesome), encoutering the 15th asylum demon (DS2 had some copypaste, and it's legit criticism, but this game takes it to the NEXT LEVEL) and I don't want to hear about how you can "skip" things like those copypasta when they drop such useful unique items, in the case of the asylum fucks, the physick potion stuff which is like one of the best addition of the game. ER's open world isn't an option, it's mandatory unless you want to miss out on a lot of cool weapons, gear, story (since everything about souls game setting is told through item descriptions and you'll miss on 2/3 of the stuff if you don't go through ER's garbage open world), NPC sidequests..

How did you win the dumbfuck tag? I ask this because your ER posting are very good.

 

[Lutte]

How did you win the dumbfuck tag? I ask this because your ER posting are very good.

I once posted Infinitron's fanfiction about Ultima. The rest is history.

 

[toro]

So i went in as a nun.

Just saw people walk by! I am no longer lonley.

Are you talking about ER or real life?