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

[Bohrain]

Yeah I dislike Ulcerated Tree Spirits in particular. Throws the camera off whack and it feels like their hitboxes have very little to do what I'm seeing on screen.

Cheesed through Black Knife Ringleader Alecto with fully upgraded Misericorde + Carrian Phalanx ash of war. The special stance breaks everything on 3 strikes and Misericorde has the highest crit stat on the whole game. I tried to do it legit for a while, but the jump attack where it throws black flame just isn't avoidable if you can't start running the millisecond it initiates the animation.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Land bosses in general are a chore, after a while I just didn't bother to keep track of them anymore.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The first time you meet an Ulcerated Tree Spirit in the open world is when you finally get to see wtf it does. After that, they are not so troublesome anymore.

 

[fork]

I still don't get how anyone can defend this game's open-world design. It's Ubisoft without the map-markers. Well, actually with the map markers...
And the legacy-dungeons aren't worth all that crap.

I'm wondering whether I'll get off my lazy ass and finally replay DS2, which plays two leagues, an order of magnitude higher, than Elden Ring. I hope I can.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

The first time you meet an Ulcerated Tree Spirit in the open world is when you finally get to see wtf it does. After that, they are not so troublesome anymore.

I think you find one of them at the Tree in Mt Gelmir, right? That's still a long way after Stormveil, which is probably the first time people might find one. But to be fair, there aren't as many of them in the game. They are a bother still lol.
I remember that after fucking up a jump in Stormveil I fell and ended up dying in that part where one of Godwyn's faces is. This was back when the game was still brand new and it was quite the sight. Tried to google wtf that was and nobody knew yet... Good times.

 

[ferratilis]

What's up with all the open world bitching? I don't remember any game in the last five years that gave me the same satisfaction of exploration and combat (outside of cRPGs of course). Whether it's better than previous From titles is questionable, but it being better than anything open world out there is undeniable. And comparing it to Ubisoft titles is not just disingenuous, but stupid. There are enough landmarks in the world that you'll never need a map marker, as long as you're observant. Which is what their games have always been about. If anything, this game will have a positive influence on the rest of the industry imo.

What I'm more upset about is the nerfing of bosses. I couldn't play the game for the first few months after release due to heavy stutter on AMD GPUs, so I never got to experience Radahn pre-nerf. Some of the satisfaction of soloing him is gone. I'm not sure about other bosses like Niall or Maliketh, but I didn't struggle with them in my latest playthrough as much. But then they made the dumbest boss in the game, Elden Beast, stronger lol. Miyazaki seems to be going the Josh Sawyer route of game balancing, and I'm not happy about it.

 

[Lyric Suite]

They just become routine after a while:



My biggest pet peeve about the reused enemies is that there doesn't seem to be any logic as to why some of them get recycled over and over and some don't. Like the lion in Stormveil, which you only meet a few times, including a double encounter later on. The ctrol v / ctrl c bat seems to have been applied heavily on some enemies but not others.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Enemy copypasting and boss demoting to normal enemy is a trademark of FS design at this point.

 

[fork]

What's up with all the open world bitching? I don't remember any game in the last five years that gave me the same satisfaction of exploration and combat (outside of cRPGs of course). Whether it's better than previous From titles is questionable, but it being better than anything open world out there is undeniable. And comparing it to Ubisoft titles is not just disingenuous, but stupid. There are enough landmarks in the world that you'll never need a map marker, as long as you're observant. Which is what their games have always been about. If anything, this game will have a positive influence on the rest of the industry imo.

I compare to previous From titles, because the rest of the industry is pretty much in the gutter (no pun intended). And it compares beyond unfavourably. While it's still better than the industry standard, it is so much worse than peak Fromsoft (Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2), that calling it shit and throwing it together with your typical AAA crap is more reasonable than to treat is as a Fromsoft title. There's just too much of a steep decline here.

If you don't notice that, you've become part of the problem.

 

[NJClaw]

peak Fromsoft (Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Darlk Souls 2)

Imagine thinking that Bloodborne and Sekiro aren't peak Fromsoft

 

[Child of Malkav]

Dark Souls 2 and Sekiro are the peak. It is what it is.

 

[fork]

Sekiro is good for a playthrough or two, but hardly peak.
And neither is Bloodborne. Bloodborne is worse than DS3 imo. The only reason it got so hyped are Sony fanboys and the envy of people who still haven't played it. It's quite weak for a "Souls"-title. Sekiro is better.

But they're all better than Elden Ring (and worse than Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2).

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

peak Fromsoft (Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Darlk Souls 2)

Imagine thinking that Bloodborne and Sekiro aren't peak Fromsoft

Imagine thinking that games even more action-oriented than Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are peak Fromsoft.

 

[mediocrepoet]

And neither is Bloodborne. Bloodborne is worse than DS3 imo.

Que?

 

[MajorMace]

Oh my ! Even more action-oriented than Demon's Souls ? You mean that absolutely action-focused game ? What have the Soulsborne become !?

How can you write such stupid shit ? I know it's the rpgcodex and we complain about games/franchises getting dumbed down all the time but the point is to denounce the lazy dumbing down, not the change of game design itself. If anyone here claims that Bloodborne has gone the high-adrenaline route for the sake of it, or to make the experience more appealing to casuals, is a complete and utter fucking moron.
Special mention for the stupid take I keep reading about "playstation fanboys hyping it by console bias" or whatever. Bloodborne is peak FromSoft. They never made a better game, and probably never will. It's the least bloated, least artificially extended game they made. It provides a short amount of movesets, focuses on a few key elements both in art direction and gameplay while DS or ER aim to fill their armory and bestiary with as much shit as possible, and you gotta be a complete fucking idiot to pretend otherwise.
It's specifically faster-paced and incentivises attacks and mobility because you're not a fucking elite knight anymore. It's supposed to fit the fucking roman noir / Brotherhood of the Wolf vibe. How can anyone not understand this ?

The excruciating pain of reading these dumb fucking takes over and over again I swear.

 

[fork]

And neither is Bloodborne. Bloodborne is worse than DS3 imo.

Que?

Yeah, Bloodborne is an action game that got rid of many of the rpg-elements and introduced the spastic combat first. It was the beginning of the end of what I loved about Fromsoft titles. The environments were samey, the story was shit, the chalice dungeons were shit, the setting was shit, the input lag is worse than in any other of he From-titles. It's fucking overrated hipster-trash, almost as bad as Elden Ring tbh.

 

[MajorMace]

A well deserved tag.

 

[Ivan]

Haven't touched this since I first rolled credits (a month or so after release). Did they address the performance a tall? I remember this frequently stuttering, but too good to put down.
1080GTX

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

I've a 2060rtx and it still stutters but it has decidedly gotten better than what it was at release. It's just your average FS port job.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I've a 2060rtx and it still stutters but it has decidedly gotten better than what it was at release. It's just your average FS port job.

What's your CPU?

I have a 5700xt i never experienced stutters. Either it's some random shit that happens to some people due to some bad coding in the game or the weak link is the CPU.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

I've a 2060rtx and it still stutters but it has decidedly gotten better than what it was at release. It's just your average FS port job.

What's your CPU?

I have a 5700xt i never experienced stutters. Either it's some random shit that happens to some people due to some bad coding in the game or the weak link is the CPU.

i5 10400

 

[Bohrain]

I have it on stable 60fps with 3060TI. Although at one point I got massive FPS drops when for some reason Discord stopped defaulting to my external sound card and my mic input went through something else that throttled the hell out of my system.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Yeah to be fair the drops are very minor, and only happen in somewhat intensive areas. The game runs fine otherwise.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I've a 2060rtx and it still stutters but it has decidedly gotten better than what it was at release. It's just your average FS port job.

What's your CPU?

I have a 5700xt i never experienced stutters. Either it's some random shit that happens to some people due to some bad coding in the game or the weak link is the CPU.

i5 10400

Mmmh, i have a 5600x, which is not THAT much better, but maybe it's good enough to push it over the required edge.

 

[NJClaw]

I've a 2060rtx and it still stutters but it has decidedly gotten better than what it was at release. It's just your average FS port job.

What's your CPU?

I have a 5700xt i never experienced stutters. Either it's some random shit that happens to some people due to some bad coding in the game or the weak link is the CPU.

ER runs better on my 2060 than on my 3080, so there's definitely something weird going on with this game. It's not like there are huge frame drops or anything like that, but on the 3080 when I charge a Carian Grandeur and there's some shit going on on the screen I drop to 50-55 frames.

Imagine thinking that games even more action-oriented than Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are peak Fromsoft.

Yeah, Bloodborne is an action game that got rid of many of the rpg-elements and introduced the spastic combat first.

Sekiro and (to a lesser extent) BB both did without the RPG elements, but they focused more on other aspects of what makes these games great. Of course, how you view each installment will depend on what drives you to play this series, but BB and Sekiro are EASILY the two most polished games FS has released since DeS.

The environments were samey, the story was shit, the chalice dungeons were shit, the setting was shit, the input lag is worse than in any other of he From-titles. It's fucking overrated hipster-trash, almost as bad as Elden Ring tbh.

Chalice dungeons were indeed shit and the environments were samey, but I can't take seriously the rest of your critique. It's just as blind as what the "DS2 bad" brigade has spewed online in the past. BB peaks with regard to action-oriented combat, bossfights, atmosphere, weapons, and design of its sprawling interconnected areas. Just to make an example, Father Gascoigne is the single best "first roadblock" boss in the series (with DS1 gargoyles slightly behind, but I guess that gets very subjective).