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Pontiff, Dancer, Lothric, Abyss Watchers, Dragonslayer Armor. Well, the really good stuff in DS3 can be summed up in dudes in armor, but I liked all these fights.
Unlike the person you quote though I wouldn't rank them above ER's bosses. ER does the dude in armor just as well, while also having better gimmick bosses. Rennala is a billion times more atmospheric and fun to engage than Crystal Sage. Starscourge Radahn has become one of my top 5 of all From games. Rykard is the best executed version of the storm ruler fight (Yhorm from DS3 on the other hand is yawn inducing).
The way I see it, ER hits higher highs than DS3, but also hits lower lows. When it's good, it excels far beyond DS3 could ever dream of, but when it's bad, it's worse than anything that was in DS3 too.
Y
Yep, agreed. Earlier Sous were about attrition and resource management. Basically D&D. That's why making players respawn far from bosses was important, as it meant the player would need to chug an estus or lose some HP before facing the boss again (or risk falling from some ledge if opting to run past enemies).
Agreed completely, Statues of Amerika were a mistake.
Altho some boss runs in earlier games could be too retarded (the one from Firelink to Capra still gives me nightmares - a two day run always cut short in two seconds) or totally pointless (the one to the twin bros duo in DS3 - it's long and there are no mobs to hinder you).
350+ pages just for all of you retards to realize that ER is massive decline. Another open world game where the biggest addition and innovation to the From formula is asking me to collect flowers where everything else is either dumbed down, rehashed or popamoled. WHO COULD'VE KNOWN????
Not really. If you went Dex, sure, but you have weapons that grant you hyper-armor, weapons whose switch mode had long reach, arcane items, powerful ranged parries among other things. Certain weapons actually rewarded you for using proper spacing and charged attacks, which often time also granted you hyperarmor. STR weapons are pretty much king of this style, and thanks to the health recovery mechanic it was pretty valid if you build your character around that (using the proper great runes, high STR to make charged attacks better). Also worth mentioning weapons like the Switch-axe, its reach allowing you to just stay out of the enemy's attack range and punish it. BB mechanics were pretty well tuned for the style of game they were going for, and big part of that was the excellent design when it came to the weapons and their move set.
Yes. Bloodborne weapons movesets actually mattered: reach, speed, area effect, poise break potential, parry potential, etc. The effects were subtle like serrated, blunt, bleeding, etc. Combat was based on a system of simple, fundamental options that worked from the lowly mook to the highest boss. Which was the DS1 and DS2 formula anyway, only in faster and more attack-oriented context.
Here? It went full KAMEHAMEHA. The basics don't matter much. What matters is how broken a weapon art is. Speaking of, can we agree "Weapon Arts" are pure decline and should be purged from the formula altogether for the next installments?
Speed, reach, area effect, and poise break absolutely matter. Parry potential, if you mean the chance of your attack being parried certainly matters in pvp.
Weapon arts aren't cancerous in general, the ability to customize them is actually a good thing, imo. The problem is they added too many goofy laser beam options (really, even 1 is more than enough) and didn't focus enough on things like the stamp swings, unsheathe, buttslam, roars, perseverance, etc.
I'm willing to cut DS3 a bit more slack as it is very much the end of a series and story, albeit cobbled together from the b-sides of its more illustrious forebears. I think I prefer DS3's bosses and concise length but I'd need to go back and play it again to confirm or refute that opinion.
What bosses you liked more in ds3? I had this discussion with someone today and I can't recall any cool bosses in ds III expect Gundyr and maybe NK (Base game, no dlc)
And this is why. The spear thrust spamming assholes in the High Wall level would've been trivial with BB's mechanics - lock on, quickstep to their side, stab in the kidneys. Don't want to do that? Blunderbuss to the face. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this. Even deciding between blunderbuss and pistol was a major tactical decision in BB.
Yeah, the biggest issue in DS3 is the normal enemies rather than the bosses. The same goes for ER, every time I meet large groups of imp input reading to dodge your r1, packs of bugged rot dogs, the flying pests that spit fire and have blades attached to their feet, those fucking crows and so on I die a little on the inside. But I guess that's what the weapon arts in ER are for, trivializing the dumb shit.
Gravity arts for example take down all the flying pests to the ground. The game even suggests you use this stuff somewhere (I don't remember if it was a vendor note or something else).
But I'm not sure it's the right direction to make stupid enemies and then giving you an I win button.
350+ pages just for all of you retards to realize that ER is massive decline. Another open world game where the biggest addition and innovation to the From formula is asking me to collect flowers where everything else is either dumbed down, rehashed or popamoled. WHO COULD'VE KNOWN????
Pontiff, Dancer, Lothric, Abyss Watchers, Dragonslayer Armor. Well, the really good stuff in DS3 can be summed up in dudes in armor, but I liked all these fights.
Unlike the person you quote though I wouldn't rank them above ER's bosses. ER does the dude in armor just as well, while also having better gimmick bosses. Rennala is a billion times more atmospheric and fun to engage than Crystal Sage. Starscourge Radahn has become one of my top 5 of all From games. Rykard is the best executed version of the storm ruler fight (Yhorm from DS3 on the other hand is yawn inducing).
The way I see it, ER hits higher highs than DS3, but also hits lower lows. When it's good, it excels far beyond DS3 could ever dream of, but when it's bad, it's worse than anything that was in DS3 too.
Funny enough the run of Stormveil -> Godrick -> Raya Lucaria -> Rennala -> Siofra River -> Radahn was the best bit of the game for me during the 1st playthrough with those 3 being my favorite ER bosses so far.
Cowboy my man, you usually speak sense but here you're wrong. By your logic, if an eventual Dark Souls 4 uses Sekiro rhythm fighting and makes a mess of it, then we should blame Sekiro for the failure of Dark Souls? Of course not. Same logic applies to BB. It has no fault if some "genius" misapplied its ideas somewhere else.
Speed, reach, area effect, and poise break absolutely matter. Parry potential, if you mean the chance of your attack being parried certainly matters in pvp.
In BB outspacing is part of the tactic. And don't play coy with me. You suggested in the original post that rollspam started with BB which is just fake news. It removed shields, true. But like I mentioned you have outspacing, rolling, quickstepping and parrying. Parrying which in none of the Souls games has been as important or easy to execute. You can finish all four Souls games without parrying anyone - and at least in DS1 you can't really parry any boss except Gwynn - while in BB Gascoigne is an exam on whether or not you know how to parry.
Rollspam did absolutely start in BB. There was comparatively little of it, but I'm pretty sure Ludwig phase 2 is the first point in the whole series where you *have to* rapidly dodge multiple times in a row. And it is absolutely true that the game expects you to dodge as the primary way of avoiding damage. You can talk about parrying all you want, but it's not necessary to finish the game, and it's not even much harder without it.
This is not some kind of slight against Bloodborne, it's simply how the series has progressed. A decent amount of the ideas that DS3 and ER took to negative extremes actually first appeared in the DS1 DLC, and that's also not a slight against that game.
And this is why. The spear thrust spamming assholes in the High Wall level would've been trivial with BB's mechanics - lock on, quickstep to their side, stab in the kidneys. Don't want to do that? Blunderbuss to the face. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention this. Even deciding between blunderbuss and pistol was a major tactical decision in BB.
You do understand that the only difference between BB's dash and DS3's fast roll is the animation length and some small amount of iframes, right? I also don't think that "You can parry them from range and ignore their bullshit moveset" makes DS3 enemies any better. I can guarantee you, for example, that Pus of Man would be unparriable in BB, and just as cancerous as it is in DS3.
It is fucking not. Even in BB enemies weren't playing by the rules, but this was since DeS. ER just took enemies from a whole different series against your guy who is playing by the same rules since DeS only now he can jump.
Same thing I can ask you. Why do people turn their brain off and blame everything on Bloodborne which was not fucking Dark Souls: Prepare to Werewolf Edition (and yes I've made this joke before, it's a good joke, I'll reuse it). BB was it's own thing and it worked fine. Again, blame the 200 IQ genius who ported this shit to DS3 because he had a contract with Sony and read Plebbit opinions of casuals who never played DeS.
Brother, you seem to be too emotionally invested in defending the honour of BB, and are reading a bit too much into my original comment. I don't really hold that game's mechanics in high regard, but it also isn't very relevant to ER, so if you want to continue this discussion, can we move it to the BB thread? I even have some tldr posts about it there from the time I played it, if you want to disagree with something more substantial than all these nitpicks.
All souls games, from Demon's to Dark souls 3 changed and balanced the player's character mobility and capabilities. It's not like they are throwing you at a pitt with crazy bosses. Enemies are fast and have extense movelists in Bloodborne and Dark souls 3, but your character is balanced around that (mid rolling has a lot of i-frames, it costs very little stamina, etc). In Elden ring your character still very strong, I would say that it has even more i-frames during the rolling animation. The thing is, they went apeshit designing the major bosses of the game. They always have some bullshit that feels unfair, unblockable, undodgeable. That never happened in previous games. I've just reached Malenia and man, what a way of spoiling a pottentialy great boss with that shitty flurry rush move (The health regen is an interesting mechanic by itself, there's no need for more).
I can't believe they went from Sekiro, which has extremely polished 1 vs 1 fights to this. They fucked up so much the balance in Elden ring. My main issue with the game right now.
All souls games, from Demon's to Dark souls 3 changed and balanced the player's character mobility and capabilities. It's not like they are throwing you at a pitt with crazy bosses. Enemies are fast and have extense movelists in Bloodborne and Dark souls 3, but your character is balanced around that (mid rolling has a lot of i-frames, it costs very little stamina, etc). In Elden ring your character still very strong, I would say that it has even more i-frames during the rolling animation. The thing is, they went apeshit designing the major bosses of the game. They always have some bullshit that feels unfair, unblockable, undodgeable. That never happened in previous games. I've just reached Malenia and man, what a way of spoiling a pottentialy great boss with that shitty flurry rush move (The health regen is an interesting mechanic by itself, there's no need for more).
I can't believe they went from Sekiro, which has extremely polished 1 vs 1 fights to this. They fucked up so much the balance in Elden ring. My main issue with the game right now.
Cowboy my man, you usually speak sense but here you're wrong. By your logic, if an eventual Dark Souls 4 uses Sekiro rhythm fighting and makes a mess of it, then we should blame Sekiro for the failure of Dark Souls? Of course not. Same logic applies to BB. It has no fault if some "genius" misapplied its ideas somewhere else.
Who's talking about blame? I blame Miyazaki for everything. You guys got weirdly defensive about a mostly throwaway comment about how mechanics in this series evolved in time. I could make a similar comment about the DS1 DLC, and that's one of my favorite pieces of souls content ever. I just really don't get what is so triggering about the factual observation that BB was the first souls game where you needed to rapidly dodge in succession.
Incidentally, if you want to be even more dismayed at my heretical opinions, Sekiro's combat is massively overrated, worse even than ER, and is a series of glorified memotrash QTEs. A very sad state of affairs, given how good the game is otherwise, but it is what it is.
Optional or not its still is a shit boss design. About 80% of the game is optional but that does not mean that suddenly it can be shit. Malenia is just like lady Maria but placed in a game where the player character operates at half the speed that the boss is built for.
Yes, there are ways to cheese her but somehow I doubt the intended method for beating her is to spam a weapon art that knocks her on her ass 100% of the time. In the same way that I doubt Radhan was supposed to be in the top 5 most difficult bosses when you are funneled to fight him as the second or third boss.
Optional or not its still is a shit boss design. About 80% of the game is optional but that does not mean that suddenly it can be shit. Malenia is just like lady Maria but placed in a game where the player character operates at half the speed that the boss is built for.
Yes, there are ways to cheese her but somehow I doubt the intended method for beating her is to spam a weapon art that knocks her on her ass 100% of the time. In the same way that I doubt Radhan was supposed to be in the top 5 most difficult bosses when you are funneled to fight him as the second or third boss.
Saw this floating around:
Don't agree with the guy's assessment of ER's overall quality but I'm sympathetic to the idea that the switch to an open world is a sign of creative exhaustion on From's part. ER can be very derivative of its predecessors. The open world is the biggest change. The use of a big name fantasy author to get more eyes on the product while telling a rather familiar story is potentially suggestive too.
Incidentally, if you want to be even more dismayed at my heretical opinions, Sekiro's combat is massively overrated, worse even than ER, and is a series of glorified memotrash QTEs. A very sad state of affairs, given how good the game is otherwise, but it is what it is.
But it simply worked for what Sekiro tried to do, as BB systems also worked for it's own design goals. Because context is everything. So, no matter what opinion you have of those elements, they form a cohesive whole that work for those contexts, and in a very elegant, less is more way, I must say.
Here? This is the most bloated and disjointed piece of mechanical design ever from From, and if not for legacy dungeons and production values I would swear this was some tryhard Soulsclone instead of the real thing.
210h of playtime. Beat one playthrough including Malenia. Explored about 80-90% of the entire game (86% of all Steam achievements, didn't fully explore Haligtree, Crumbling Farum Azula and Mohgwyn's Domain). Did Age of the Stars Ending, but completed the pre-reqs for the other endings up until their respective conflict point and watched them on youtube after I beat the game. This was my first ever FroSo title. I consider myself of average to slightly above-average skill.
Credit where credit is due:
When at it's best, the game reaches hights higher than most other contemporary titles in the same genre category can. These include:
- interesting to navigate, varied, vast and memorable environments. Easily Elden Ring's strongest feature.
- prolonged state of complete immersion during stretches of exploration
- a thicc, palpable Theme, distinctly different to most western and many japanese counterparts
- many breath-taking Vistas
- excellent Art Direction and a high quality Art Style
- mature monologue, devoid of any cringe
- excellent voice acting (Yura and the old Finger Maidens come to mind)
- no wooden Bioware faces to distract you from the spoken words
- no long cut-scenes or long stretches of pure dialogue, the action is always a mere moment away
- minimal HUD that doesn't obscure the game world or rob you of your sense of discovery
- absence of "tutorial island", constant hand-holding, micro-transactions, NFTs, concessions to casuals and identity politics which have become the norm in recent years
- message system provides a sense of community without the need to actually interact with people
- no romance system
- almost no weeb shit
- the feeling that people working on this actually gave a damn
- I will remember many moments of me playing this game
Unfortunately this game also reaches lows I haven't experienced in a while in a modern title. Lows I was not expecting given the apparent effort that went into this project. On far too many occasions during my playthrough I was taken out of the experience and frustrated by questionable design choices. Detailed thoughts on various topics below.
I am a primarily extrinsically motivated player. I love games where I can level and loot. Games like Path of Exile. PoE has arguably the best loot of any game to date and coming straight off a game like that it becomes very apparent that the extrinsic rewards in Elden Ring are weak.
This isn't helped by the poor nomenclature in this game which is blatantly of the place-holder variety. Smithing Stone[1]? Really? You're just gonna put the index of the array it is stored in as part of its name? Ok. You have +25 in your weapon's name. Literally. Why 25? Because that is the amount of zones you have in the game and that is how you balanced the HP pools of the inhabitants of those zones? Smooth.
Loot in Elden Ring consists mainly of Armaments(Weapons, Implements, Shields), Armour(4 slots of gear, in most cases found as an entire set), Consumables, Summons, Crafting Material, Upgrade Material and Key Items. Of these categories only the Upgrade Material consistently felt like a desireable reward throughout most of the game.
Armaments are very exciting during the first couple of hours of the game. Those precious hours of being a complete noob, not having figured out a build you want to specialize in yet. Not having looted any cool weapon yet. Not having found out what the truly OP weapons in this game are. As soon as you decide on your build and start upgrading the corresponding Armament, all other Armements types lose value, since you won't be meeting the stat requirements and won't be scaling their respective damage. If you have chosen a unique weapon, all grease type consumables lose all value as well. Depending on the build you pick(Moonveil), ALL other Armaments lose ALL of their value.
Armour sets have two primary functions in this game: cosmetics and granting you the maximum protection, while still meeting the requirements for Medium Rolling. I am not a god gamer(nor a masochist) and for most of the game I couldn't afford to use armour for its cosmetic properties. I used the heaviest Armour I could fit. I upgraded my set twice in 210 hours. Once when I beat Radahn and a second time after invading Targoth(rip). Only a select few sets have unique properties to them. While those were still useless to me, it still made them at least interesting to pick up(Black Assassin set). As far as cosmetics go, I find the various Armours are beautifully designed, but:
- are also just the re-used skins of the enemies and other NPCs
- are mainly variations of cloth, leather and plate
- most sets don't stand out and are grounded in medieval normie-ncy visually, which is a shame considering the absolutely bonkers setting this game is in
- you can't zoom in on your character to appreciate the intricacy of their design(ears and eyes on Ofnir's Set)
- very few gender specific variants
- even though impractical for battle designs are aplenty, only 1 (one) singular set can be considered sexy(Goldmask)
Consumables are only practical once you can start buying the ingredients (or once you discard all that is left of your humanity and start slaughtering turtles). If Consumables are made rare and valuable, you'll hoard them forever. If they are made practical to buy and use with abandon, they are devalued as a random drop/find in the world. More often than not I would hold off on using my Consumables on big bosses until I felt like I was close to defeating them only to then get lucky on one of my trial runs and defeat the boss. Equally as often I would sometimes get really close on one of my trial runs, start using Consumables only to get shafted by RNG(more on this later) for the next 5+ attempts. One solution could be to not make them available on the store, but also not remove the effect on death and prolong the duration to 10+ minutes. Consumables in Elden Ring also lead to the good old pre-buffing phase from WoW raiding. I really missed that.
I used a Grease once. It makes your weapon glow like a lightsaber. One of the very few ways of making your character look cool, but it also clashes with the rest of the overall Art Style. The effect didn't seem worth it to me to stop using my Moonveil, but I hear the dragonwound type is very strong.
I tried using a Cured Meat at the River of Rot and found its effect very lackluster. The Bloodhound's Step weapon art and the Fire, Cure Me! incantation are the solutions to these kinds of areas, not buffs or gear(you don't even get the mushroom set until after that area iirc).
Throwing Jars and Ritual Jars I used occasionally for some ranged damage against monsters that were weak to a specific type of damage. I found that pretty neat and it made certain types of Crafting Materials found throughout the world stand out to me that much more. It is by far the best Consumable and it made me light up whenever I would find another empty jar. They are still plagued by some issues I will talk about later, but in terms of rewarding loot they do it very well and are second only to Upgrade Materials.
Rune Arcs are a special type of consumable that will have varying effects depending on the Great Rune you decide to use. Great Runes are earned by defeating the major bosses in this game. Their effects are the most noticeable of all the Consumables, but still suffer from the same problem. I ended up using these only during exploration, when I felt more or less safe from death and not using them during bosses at all. Still, they do become sort of addicting and remain a valuable find throughout the game.
Upgrade Materials remain useful throughout most of the game and are thematically placed. Sacred Tears are always found in a Church, Golden Seeds are found at minor Erdtrees or dropped by Tree Spirits, Glove Wort is found in Catacombs and Smithing Stones are found in Mines. The exception to this are Crumbling Farum Azula and Haligtree which have a lot of the best Upgrade Materials just lying around. Why am I finding more Smithing Stones on a tree than in the highest level mine in this game? Crumbling Farum Azula in particular gave me the feeling of an old video game trope of a room full of supplies before a big boss battle.
Summons suffer from the same problem as Armaments. In the beginning you're experimenting with only a handful of them, trying to find the best match for each boss. It's great. A couple of the unique Summons outclass everything else and once you have found one, all subsequent rewards of this type become worthless. I have more to say on the topic of Summons later on.
Leveling in this game is a boring affair. First off the level cap is extremely high, which in turn dilutes the impact of any one level increase. When I first tried leveling up and saw the miniscule gain, I despaired. All you can do on level up is invest into one of the 7 stats your character has. There are no passive hp/mp increases that come with leveling up nor are there any talent points you can invest.
The stats themselves offer great value upon first glance, but in praxis you will end up stacking HP, Endurance and the stat you will be scaling your damage off of. If you are going to be casting spells or incantations for damage, you'll go for some FP as well, probably to the detriment of HP. In the beginning all engagements seem difficult and the xp rewards are low, so grinding for xp early seems like a painful proposition.
XP and levels will come to you naturally, if you simply explore the zones fully. Grinding for XP in this game boils down to clearing a camp near a grace and resting at that grace to respawn the enemies. The most exciting thing that can happen during that process is that one of the enemies will have glowing eyes, netting you quadruple the regular XP(for that killing that enemy). Overall a boring affair.
I grinded to lvl150 using the most degenerate of methods: the eponymous bird. However I never like my character truly grew in power. The game is designed such that most enemy configurations will dispatch with you in mere seconds still, regardless of your base stats. In other words, while the levels will help you, they don't provide the same feeling of progression one might be accustomed to from most other games.
Making me me question the inclusion of a leveling system at all into a game like this. It doesn't provide the usual benefits, it's boring to grind and at the same time it's a variable difficulty element that further dilutes the challenge for the intrinsically motivated crowd.
There are also consumable XP items which are interesting in the beginning but become equivalent to clutter past as soon as Caelid (lvl50+ zone).
This game has a lot to offer for masochists or very skilled individuals who enjoy a challenge. My issue with the challenge part is that it is IMO devalued by the variable difficulty in this game. You beat Ordovis at lvl1 with only a buckler and a club+25 after wiping for 10 hours? Great for you! I beat them on my 2nd try while jerking off, because my Tiche almost 1v1'd the add while I was dealing 20% of his HP bar in a single weapon art and stance breaking him on every 2nd weapon art. Oh, you put your naked lvl1 kill on YouTube? Impressive to watch! But it's now also an extrinsic reward, is it not?
I also watched Asmongold beat Malenia without any cheese. He didn't look like he was having fun. I highly doubt that the intrinsically motivated players are having a lot of fun with the challenge provided by Elden Ring.
There are many different toys to play with for the crowd that likes making their own builds. You have many Spells, which are further segmented into different Schools. The same goes for Incantations. In the melee department we have multiple weapon types with destinct animations for their combos, dual-wielding 2-hands, shields for parrying, greatshields + spears/rapiers for turtling. There are also Bows and Crossbows in the game, complete with a variety of arrow types. This is in theory. In praxis you're either ranged or melee. If you're ranged, you'll be shooting the same ability at the boss or running from the boss until your Summon takes the aggro again. If you're melee, you're dodging/parrying/blocking or running away until you see an opening for a jump + R2. If you're building around a powerful weapon art, you'll be using the weapon art instead of a jump + R2. There really isn't much more variety to actual combat
Combat in Elden Ring is very basic. Yes, you have 300+ skills to chose from, but you'll be using just 1 at any given time. The UI(more on that topic later) and enemy design is such, that any attempt to integrate more than one type of weapon art/spell/throwing item into your combat on the fly will be met with death. Your character's attack/stagger/recovery animations leave a lot of room for punishment, unless you actively dodge roll out, to cancel a portion of the animation.
There is no way to speed up these animation. You're encouraged to spam your roll button a lot. At the same time the game buffers your inputs to punish you. I spent a lot of time thinking "when do I get to move or act again?" during my combat engagements. Many of the weapon arts/spells/incantations - unique or not - feel clunky to use with long wind-up animations. Your character has no tracking, unless locked onto an enemy, but WILL fall to his death while performing some attacks or throwing items. It is definitely exciting, when you're fighting a new boss or trying to survive an ambush. But this excitement starts wearing thin with every copy-pasted boss or ambush.
It starts wearing thin on your attempt #20 on a difficult boss. It starts wearing thin while you character is being staggered, knocked around, standing up. In theory you're supposed to balance your Stamina usage, but the only time I found myself doing that was when I switched to the easiest mode in the game aka Greatshield + Spear. With that build you do want to eventually stop attacking and back away, so you can put your shield down and let your Stamina recover for a sec. Playing that build also removes all other aspects of combat from gameplay.
I don't think most people play FroSo titles for the sheer enjoyment of the combat. Unless they are masochists or very skilled.
The simple act of exploring a new territory and mapping it out in your head is very rewarding by nature for humans. This is Elden Ring's strongest suit and where I personally derived most of the pleasure from. Each zone has a unique visual style. Legacy Dungeons(the castles in this game) have intricate pathways, creating a sense of scale for the place. Enabling a shortcut in one of these can feel very satisfying(does it put this into the extrinsic category now?).
Unfortunately these excellent moments are too often interrupted by frustrating enemy placement. I may be the Elden Lord, but I'm not going back to those archers in Siofra River.
Summons felt like a big missed opportunity to me. Most of them will be found inside a Catacomb and have a paragraph of flavour text on them explaining their origin. Latenna is the big exception and I wish she wasn't. You obtain her as Summon by progressing her quest. Initially she is a regular NPC who "joins" you in the form of a Summon. This was very jarring to experience and made me question the world's internal rules, but it also made me wish for the rest of the Summons to be obtained like that. Or for the unique Summons to be removed entirely and instead have more of the gold NPC helper summoning signs placed for various bosses. It creates much more of an emotional attachment to the NPC without having to write compelling monologue or record expensive voice acting. You can even plot out a course wich the NPC takes through the game world this way in a typical obscure FroSo manner. I understand that Summons are a new feature to the game and as such are prone to being hit-and-miss, but the gold NPC summoning signs are already present in the game as well. This makes me suspect that FroSo intended to make use of the NPC summoning for their variable difficulty implementation, but couldn't be bothered to implement it on an open world scale. A compromise in the form of generic Summons was then implemented instead. What a shame.
What makes me even more angry at this implementation is that there is actually a gold NPC summon present for at least one open world boss and I missed it. If only the we had some sort of Guidance System for these. Like a ray of gold or something. Nah, that wouldn't fit into the world, amirite.
Far too often in this game I would defeat a big story boss only to then be obliterated by a configuration of regular enemies in some catacomb. Why are a couple of rats doing the same DPS as a dragon? I am wearing FULL PLATE, why is a dog bite staggering me? Sometimes I would think to myself "just put these guys on the Elden Throne, nobody will ever be able to take it".
Enemies in this game also cheese you back. They don't have a stamina bar that depletes and can chain their combos endlessly. This is why a lot of the time I don't feel any accomplishment from defeating enemies. Instead it feels like the game just let me win this time, because the RNG on the AI script didn't roll the very difficult attack too much. Difficulty in general is often achieved through cheap methods.
The input reading is so blatant, people make dance videos out of it. It doesn't create a sense that the enemy is intelligent. Instead it ruins the immersion completely.
While exploration is the strongest aspect of Elden Ring, the doors that open only from one side make me roll my eyes after the 3rd one. I can melt a dragon with Comet Azure in this game, but I can't break a wooden door? A few of the short-cuts were great, like that bridge you raise near Temple of Eiglay near Volcano Manor. But most are a one sided door or a half-broken lift.
There is a much more immersion-friendly system present in the game. It is even used at least once already! I'm talking about the magical barrier put up by Morgott that blocks you from entering the Forbidden Lands. Just put those instead of the doors and link them to minor bosses in the area.
How much of an RPG is Elden Ring?
lol.
The world of Elden Ring is very bleak. Everybody seems to be either suffering or a mindless enemy killer/monster. My motivation for saving it aproached zero the further I got into the story. You don't get a single glimpse into the past, where you could see the Golden Order in it's full beauty. This is exacerbated by the fact that friendly NPCs die at the end of their quest. There are no factions to join.
Nobody cares that you're doing quests for the Volcano Manor, because there is nobody there in the world anyway. What's the point of all these different "factions" vying for you to put their backdoor code into the One Ring, if everybody is dead anyway?
Crumbling Farum Azula goes for this somber theme of a once great civilization now in ruins. This would have evoked potent feelings, if the entire world wasn't like that already.
There is simply not enough time spent with the NPCs. Melina is the best example for this. The cutscene lingers on her while she is burning herself, glorifying her deed. All I'm thinking is "I've spoken to this chick like three times, why should I care?". Besides, it's her expressed wish anyway. Is my motivation for the Lord of Frenzy ending really supposed to be tied to saving Melina?
Ranni's ending is superior not because Ranni is the better waifu, but because her quest has had the most development and actually feels like you're doing a quest. Despite being the quest with the most meat on the bone, it still comes off as undercooked. Ranni bails from the scene around the mid-point of the game and only shows up again for one short cut-scene after you beat the final boss.
All other "quests" in this game feel like characters are just teleporting around while you are on errand duty.
The relative bleakness of the world also makes me question some of these NPCs. How does a blind Hyetta make it from Liurnia into the Capital(aren't the gates closed, lol?), past the Shunning Grounds and down that jumping puzzle? How can Zorayas remain this innocent, if she is sent out on scout duty regularly? Why does she even care about her origins, when the world around her is in such chaos?
My motivation to become the Elden Lord became mostly "just to get it over with" as the game progressed. I think obscurity is a nice tool for Lore, but it just doesn't work for the Main Quest or major NPCs. I wouldn't have issues with some obscure quests, if FroSo could show me that they can actually create a compelling conventional story thread.
As it stands, the obscure design seems like an attempt to obscure a low development budget.
The Sound Design in good for the most part. Most enemies have distinct audio queues which reward progressing at a careful pace. Some enemies even create diagetic harmony with the background music(bubble bois in the capital). Music is modular, which I am a big fan of in video games. However the implementation is sometimes very jarring, with sharp cuts during some bosses.
Music is a different story. On one hand it is good at enhancing the atmosphere the game is going for. The overworld tracks are underscore each zone very well. However many of the tracks don't have a proper melody to them. Most of the pieces are written as if there was a melody before, but it got broken up. Yes, truly masterful to intertwine the story theme of the broken ring into the music. It still makes most of the music unenjoyable as a stand-alone.
Boss music is even worse. Most of the tracks sound like generic Two Steps From Hell slop to me. The most I can say about them is that they are loud. Horror type music. Certainly fitting if your goal is to make people panic during the fight, but it all blends together at some point and is otherwise unenjoyable. The 1 (one) singular track that truly slaps is the Godskin Apostle theme. That one has a clear melody and progression throughout. I found myself listening to it outside of the game quite often.
This OST has nothing on the likes of Xenoblade Chronicles 2, PoE, Fire Emblem: SoV, most Final Fantasies or Bravely Default.
I hate to admit it, but the Ubisoft dev was right about the UI. It's atrocious. Windows style prompt during boss battle for horse summon. No customization. Icons take up a lot of space and have to be cancelled during tense moments. FOV is bad, no ultra-wide support, aiming sucks. I'm fighting the UI instead of the enemy. No improvements since the first installment, it seems?
PoE solved the camera issue long time ago. For big bosses they zoom out and give you more FOV. This has even an additional effect of "shit is getting real!". No reason not to adopt this, since they already implemented the flask recharge system on killing packs of mobs.
At one point in the game I had lost the ability to dodge and attack, but could still move around. I thought at first that something bugged out with my controller, but then I realized that I had a notification still open from a puzzle I had solved which prevents all face button inputs from working until you dismiss it with X. I can imagine a scenario where the UI designer at FroSo is being presented
with QoL requests from the community, but instead of actually putting in the work he counters with "It would ruin the immersion, guys. Nothing I can really do here, sowwy :3". Must be a cushy job.
If this was still Duck Souls, I would have said something like: This is not for everyone and I couldn't enjoy it fully, but I'm glad it exists for some people who might. But this game has sold 12 copies already and was touted as something great. Great my ass.
I would still people rather play this over some slop like AssCreed or Horizon Zero Soul. I wonder how the broader adoption will influence the design philosophy now. It seems to me that the degenerate masochist community pushed this series into a mould. Maybe normie gamers like me will tolerate just one series like Souls, because everything else is so hand-holdy nowadays. But if all games were like this? Elden Ring would be a B-Tier title.
It is memorable like a manipulative bitch girlfriend that rips your heart out is memorable. Like getting punched in the face is memorable. Great stuff for masochists for sure. I also feel like there are many people and gamers out there who are not explicitly masochistic, but still feel at home when the entire world is against them. Elden Ring provides that feeling in spades. Almost every enemy configuration feels like they are waiting just for you and have no other business to do.
If you really want an answer to the RPG question. Elden Ring is very good at roleplay if you like roleplaying as a rat. A monster, devoid of any dignity or humanity, scurrying about, scrounging up all it can find and defeating it's enemies with the only way it can: with unlimited amounts of cheese. I became the Elden Lord, because I know how a ledge works. My enemy's greatest strength? They sit in an arena that has no ledges. And they can block my progress with a magical barrier. This is what it came down to in the end.
I'm more than willing to admit that I would probably be sucking this game's dick, if I were 20 years younger and still had all of my reflexes and mental flexibility to learn how to read the delayed movements designed to catch you rolling. Would it make the game any better design-wise? No. I have a friend who is much younger than me, much more skilled and has played the previous titles. He quit around reaching Altus Plateau. His main criticism of the game was "the difficulty always feels like I'm either overleveled or underleveled, but never just right".
