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

[Child of Malkav]

 

[Wunderbar]

Interesting to listen to. Let it run in the background or something.

the pretentious homo with a double-barreled surname strikes again! Five hours of drivel where it takes him ten sentences to explain a single thought that could've been expressed in just one.

clicked into some random spot and heard that he finished god of war without ever using a block button, and because of that he had to turn difficulty down. What a retard.

Don't watch this video.

 

[Wunderbar]

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?

I have the opposite opinion, they should go full Nioh and allow us to have multiple weapon arts equipped at the same time.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

So is it safe to say Elden Ring is getting the Doritos treatment now that From Software has made it?

All the casual or regular RPG players I know give up on it relatively quickly, since the bosses are just too hard. All the hardcore players who are used to From Software games, everywhere I see them criticize many of Elden Ring mechanics, which is also how I feel.

It seems like, as cvv was posting earlier, with Elden Ring, FS made most of the skill stuff way too hard for most people, and introduced cheesy borderline cheating stuff to compensate. Like summons, or guard counter.

Parry is wrecked, at least as bad as in DaS3. It has either some weird windup frames (seems to be the case as people tested against walls, and the parry visuals kick in way later than the animation would indicate), or because most enemies have weird delayed and unpredictable attacks. First they delay for 2 hours (looks really dumb too), then the attack comes out in 2 frames or whatever. Good luck parrying that consistently. Google is full of people complaining it's just not worth it.

Rolling is still king, but even there, there's some kind of weird input lag on PC at least, where a lot of times you roll way later after the key press. And with bosses spamming huge aoe attacks non-stop, even this is quite annoying.

And the fucking hitpoint bars on bosses and tougher non-boss enemies make combat an exercise in frustration, unless you cheese some OP weapon/ash of war/etc.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Parry is wrecked, at least as bad as in DaS3. It has either some weird windup frames (seems to be the case as people tested against walls, and the parry visuals kick in way later than the animation would indicate), or because most enemies have weird delayed and unpredictable attacks. First they delay for 2 hours (looks really dumb too), then the attack comes out in 2 frames or whatever. Good luck parrying that consistently. Google is full of people complaining it's just not worth it.

Imo parrying is worse off than in DS3. Someone (not on the Codex) had said that they were having consistent success with parrying by parrying the arm not the weapon, so basically waiting until the arm moved forward. Personally, I don't have that sort of timing or reflexes and couldn't do shit with that advice. The only way I was able to parry much of anything was to use the buckler parry weapon art for the better and more forgiving timing. Some people had said that using those magic ones helps too since it doesn't increase how forgiving the timing is, but it extends the range of it outward. YMMV

I agree that it's totally not worth it though, you really can't eat many/any attacks of damage trying to parry stuff and then not being sure if it just can't be parried or if you just suck.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

I tried that "parry the hand" approach, but I didn't find it to work for me consistently. Dark Souls 1 also had this, but there the attacks had more predictable animations, with more frames. Here, you can watch the hand all you want, but it basically wanders around for 2 hours, and then jumps forward in 2 frames. Unless you are a young person with excellent reflexes, that's not going to work for most people. Also, for larger enemies (e.g. bosses), their hand is often not even visible.

 

[Silva]

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?

I have the opposite opinion, they should go full Nioh and allow us to have multiple weapon arts equipped at the same time.

Fair, but then they should probably commit 100% to the animesque fantasy. This schizo halfway through is the worst of worlds.

 

[Artyoan]

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.

I'm a little surprised they didn't translate more of Sekiro's combat to Elden Ring. Something equivalent to Mikilri counter. A boss that suddenly glows some specific color and then the player needs to know to jump, perfect block, or mikiri counter depending on the move but rolling won't work. They might have been able to make boss combat more varied throughout the game by forcing the player to react to a major move but allowing the player a great opportunity for a counter attack should they be successful. Especially if they integrated the counter attack into being a significant component of poise breaking. I also think seeing an enemy poise bar would be good.

 

[Lutte]

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.

This is kinda wrong. I mean, you won't be able to wield the top end of stat req of other weapon categories, but most armament types have a few armaments that don't have high requirements in their core stat and can be attuned to have decent scaling to whatever other stat you're using - arcane, faith, or int.

For people who are STR only or DEX only, there tends to be a scant few weapons of the opposite kind that can scale. For example, most katanas are dex weapons, but one scales with strength. Most blunt weapons are a str affair, but flails lean dex.

Depending on the build you pick(Moonveil), ALL other Armaments lose ALL of their value.

Err, Moonveil is one of the more obvious of the powerful weapons, but if you look at my posting history you'll see there's many more over the top setups in this game, many of which are stronger than moonveil.

- very few gender specific variants

Plate armor looks the same on a man and a woman you know. Boobplates aren't a real thing, do you have any idea how much cloth padding you must wear underneath a set of plate? Besides protection you from abrasion while moving with plate, padding also adds (moderate) protection against hard hits, plate protects you from cuts, but not from the force of being hammered.
ER has a reasonable amount of gender specific things where it makes sense, like clothing.

- even though impractical for battle designs are aplenty, only 1 (one) singular set can be considered sexy(Goldmask)

Ah, you've revealed your true motivator!
Not sure if I missed the part where you talk about them, but talismans are among the sort of items I was very happy to find most of the time. They can be build defining with the right combinations of talismans.

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.

I think it was wrong to entirely cut the possibility of making tanky-ish builds the way you could in the older souls games, but you still feel the effect of levelling by how much more effective you are at destroying things imho.

Making me me question the inclusion of a leveling system at all into a game like this.

The levelling system defines the sort of things you can wield. If you want to be good at sorceries you won't be good at incantations (well, you could be good at both but it would require farming way too many levels). A dex arcane build will never be good at wielding a colossal sword. Etc.

In theory you're supposed to balance your Stamina usage [...] I don't think most people play FroSo titles for the sheer enjoyment of the combat.

That's a problem ER and DS3 suffer, but stamina usage is very important in other souls games.
Also, while combat mechanics are simple, they are effective and I find combat fun most of the time, though again, DS3 and ER have some pieces of content that are less palatable than others.

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 agree one hundred percent with this. This gets more noticeable and obnoxious with the nature of ER being an open world game which recycles and copy pastes too many enemies, you don't fight as many rats in previous souls games as you do in ER, and they tend to be mostly found in locations where they belong. Here you have the same enemies in every zones of the game, and you see them scale higher and higher in strength as you get into higher level zones.

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.

No. They don't have an actual stamina bar but they have a feature in which some (but very few) of their attacks are guaranteed to cause a "stop doing things" trigger. The game unfortunately relies on a lot of memorization of these patterns because there is no natural way of noticing which bit of a combo will truly be final.

Another way to deal with it is spacing - jump attacks, running attacks, weapon arts or just plain r1 from a distance when your own weapon has a higher reach than the enemy, like if you are using a spear and fight a regular sword guy.

-------------
I agree with all you've said about NPC stuff, UI and the shit music. Fromsoft has been declining in that respect with each game having less quality tracks. I also think it is a mistake to have constant music in the background, older souls games only had music during boss fights, which was appropriate to liven up the scene, while the game immersed you in its environmental audio. Bloodborne had one area in which music triggered in the background and because it was the exception rather than the rule, plus the track itself being a very, very good atmospheric fit, it made that area all the more memorable.

 

[JDR13]

So is it safe to say Elden Ring is getting the Doritos treatment now that From Software has made it?

I think it's safe to say the critics vastly overrated this game.

 

[Kruno]

where a lot of times you roll way later after the key press

This is by design. Roll events are generated on button up, not button down.

On certain controllers this poses a bigger problem, since I assign roll to L1 on my Dual Sense 5. Pressing and depressing takes more time that simply flicking L1. Sometimes when I flick L1 it doesn't register at all, and so I have to put more force on the button, which causes time between press and depress.

Rolling on my keyboard however feels perfect, I have blue switches, they are not Cherry, these are the better ones, but I forgot the name.

 

[Wunderbar]

I agree with all you've said about NPC stuff, UI and the shit music. Fromsoft has been declining in that respect with each game having less quality tracks.

I thought Sekiro's OST was a welcoming return to form. Wasn't a fan of exploratory ambient music, but some of the combat tracks were very good.

Spoiler

this track plays when you fight monks from Senpou temple. The creepy chanting in the background immediately sets the tone for this location - yeah, those monks are up for no good!


this track plays when you fight ghosts (headless dudes and Shichimen warriors).


despite what name suggests, this track doesn't play when you are fighting Snake eyes miniboss, it's a Gun Fort combat track.


fountainhead palace combat track.

I guess that's mostly because "generic asian music" is better than simply "generic music".

 

[DemonKing]

So is it safe to say Elden Ring is getting the Doritos treatment now that From Software has made it?

I think it's safe to say the critics vastly overrated this game.

Not sure about that - for an open world game I haven't once wanted to stop playing out of boredom even though there is a lot of cookie cutter stuff here in terms of enemies and region layouts. There's always something new to discover here and the way the world blends together seamlessly is awesome. Also the way you can approach the game in a ton of different ways that can all pretty much work is some incredible design work.

If nothing else Ubisoft and all those other open world developers are going to be looking at the sales and critical acclaim this got and if that changes their design approach to a decent degree that can't be a bad thing.

 

[JDR13]

Not sure about that - for an open world game I haven't once wanted to stop playing out of boredom even though there is a lot of cookie cutter stuff here in terms of enemies and region layouts. There's always something new to discover here and the way the world blends together seamlessly is awesome. Also the way you can approach the game in a ton of different ways that can all pretty much work is some incredible design work.

I didn't say it was bad, but it's definitely overrrated. It's not a 9.5/10, and anyone who claims it is is full of shit.

If nothing else Ubisoft and all those other open world developers are going to be looking at the sales and critical acclaim this got and if that changes their design approach to a decent degree that can't be a bad thing.

Depends on what their design approach is. I certainly don't think FromSoftware's take on open-world is the pinnacle of design. I wouldn't even say it's one of the better ones.

 

[cvv]

If nothing else Ubisoft and all those other open world developers are going to be looking at the sales and critical acclaim this got and if that changes their design approach to a decent degree that can't be a bad thing.

This is a very different open-world design, I doubt it'll influence more traditional open-world RPGs at all.

Remember, Souls-likes are still arcades in their heart, they're mostly about combat, action and puzzles while open-world is an key ingredience for immersion and larping. The point of having open world in games like TW3 or Kingdom Come is to give them a better sense of realism, which allows you to immerse yourself in the lore, story and geography.

None of that is important in Souls-likes. The kind of open-world you see in ER is far from realistic, it doesn't help you to immerse in anything, all it does is provide some cool vistas and makes you ask yourself "How the fuck am I gonna get to THAT place over there?" It's not gonna influence anything going forward.

 

[Wunderbar]

If nothing else Ubisoft and all those other open world developers are going to be looking at the sales and critical acclaim this got and if that changes their design approach to a decent degree that can't be a bad thing.

Ubisoft: the next Assassin's Creed game will feature George Martin's writing, more dungeons, 5-storey tall bosses with incoherent movesets, and a grind for upgrade materials!

 

[The Decline]

If nothing else Ubisoft and all those other open world developers are going to be looking at the sales and critical acclaim this got and if that changes their design approach to a decent degree that can't be a bad thing.

Ubisoft: the next Assassin's Creed game will feature George Martin's writing, more dungeons, 5-storey tall bosses with incoherent movesets, and a grind for upgrade materials!

That still sounds better than any of their previous games.

 

[Urthor]

I tried that "parry the hand" approach, but I didn't find it to work for me consistently. Dark Souls 1 also had this, but there the attacks had more predictable animations, with more frames. Here, you can watch the hand all you want, but it basically wanders around for 2 hours, and then jumps forward in 2 frames. Unless you are a young person with excellent reflexes, that's not going to work for most people. Also, for larger enemies (e.g. bosses), their hand is often not even visible.

https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls3/comments/5lt7md/parry_guide_for_noobs/

It's not particularly reflex based. It's mostly about *predicting the parryable attack*, then watching the hand/arm for point of inflection.

Old men can absolutely parry, but they need to read the attack. Once you put the practice in it's very easy.

Parrying is very effective as long as you use Storm Wall or Carian retaliation or a buckler parry.

You have to keep in mind that not that many of the attacks in Elden Ring are parryable, because there are so many goddamn huge enemies.

As long as you're able to recognize the 1 handed attacks that are parryable you can autowin against a good amount of the game's bosses and enemies.

 

[Lyric Suite]

One thing i was thinking about. People complain that there's too many spells in this game that pretty much are just different flavors of the same thing, but considering that if you want to be efficient with any of them you need to pick the right seal (10-15% bonus is not to sneeze at when every point counts when it come to spells):

https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Sacred+Seals

It feels like what they were going for is different "specializations" a la DnD so that no magic user build is the same as the other. Well, at least as far as incantations are concerned i haven't looked at sorceries yet.

Essentially if you decided to focus on one branch on this run you may decide to try a different set of spells on a different character, so that you don't have to make the same faith build over and over.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Rolling is still king, but even there, there's some kind of weird input lag on PC at least, where a lot of times you roll way later after the key press.

They all have it. Even past Souls game had it.

The obvious sign that is happening is when you press roll, you get smashed in the face by the boss, and then the roll happens.

 

[toro]

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?

I have the opposite opinion, they should go full Nioh and allow us to have multiple weapon arts equipped at the same time.

Nope. The impact of Weapon Arts is undeniable decline.

DaS1's pvp was a backstab clusterfuck but DaS2's pvp was quite good.

DaS3's pvp was all about R1 spamming but it is where the weapon arts faggotry started and now - in ER - pvp is all about weapon arts faggotry.

Nobody is thinking about positioning or other tactics, it's just weapon arts spamming. It's more flashy but it's the same shit as R1 spamming. It's even worse because some weapon arts are completely broken.

 

[Lyric Suite]

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?

I have the opposite opinion, they should go full Nioh and allow us to have multiple weapon arts equipped at the same time.

The pew pew shit i saw when i checked this series is the reason i haven't played it yet lmao.

I hate spazzy animu shit. Same reason i could never play the Devil May Cry games etc.

 

[Lutte]

LS: no, this doesn't change shit. 10 or 15% boost would be amazing if they had reasonable cast times, or reasonable FP costs (compared to using weapon arts), they don't.
Also incantations have a clear cut better damage dealer, the dragon cult stuff and lightning. Everything else is utility. Nobody cares to use a frenzy seal for frenzy spells, you don't use them for damage but stagger.

The dragon communion spells (not to be confused with dragon cult) are incredibly impractical and apart from the rot spell none are of any real use too. Rot one is very good if you can pull it off, the others are a waste of enemy downtime (you need the best downtime an enemy can give you to be able to cast any of these)

 

[toro]

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.

I'm a little surprised they didn't translate more of Sekiro's combat to Elden Ring. Something equivalent to Mikilri counter. A boss that suddenly glows some specific color and then the player needs to know to jump, perfect block, or mikiri counter depending on the move but rolling won't work. They might have been able to make boss combat more varied throughout the game by forcing the player to react to a major move but allowing the player a great opportunity for a counter attack should they be successful. Especially if they integrated the counter attack into being a significant component of poise breaking. I also think seeing an enemy poise bar would be good.

Nope. QTEs are shit and they break the fight flow.

 

[Lyric Suite]

LS: no, this doesn't change shit. 10 or 15% boost would be amazing if they had reasonable cast times, or reasonable FP costs (compared to using weapon arts), they don't.
Also incantations have a clear cut better damage dealer, the dragon cult stuff and lightning. Everything else is utility. Nobody cares to use a frenzy seal for frenzy spells, you don't use them for damage but stagger.

Well, what they were going for and what came out in practice may not be the same thing but i think the idea of "mage" specializations is not that bad.

Souls games are also not always about what's practical but the challenge. If you went with what's practical you could just cheese everything with summons and ashes etc.