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

[Strange Fellow]

You did it. You got gud. It's all over now

Nah, I don't mean that. I still need 10 - 30 runs at bosses, getting my stupid fat ass kicked like a fucking normie. It's just everything in between bosses is vast, empty and boring. Except the visual design.

I'm surprised to hear that. For me the DLC has been great fun to explore, and figuring out how to get to different places on the map or that can be spotted in the distance has been plenty engaging, to the point that I'll find enemies in the open world annoying when they get in the way of travel.

I've also been challenged by enemies in dungeons (the proper ones, not mines and catacombs). There are a lot of trashmobs, true, but I've died a fair bit to enemies like the bird knights, the red dudes in the shadow keep or the spin2win horned guys, as well as ambushes and gangbangs assisted by ranged enemies placed at vantage points. What is true, is that the discrepancy between the difficulty of bosses and regular enemies is probably the highest it's ever been, but I have that down to the bosses being a bit ridiculous.

 

[Silverfish]

More likely, they spent their upgrade materials on the first 4 weapons that seemed kinda cool, found out 3 of them are shit for some reason, and are now stuck with 1 unless they go grind to upgrade a new weapon that seemingly has a 75% chance of being shit.

One of the biggest catches in ER's design. Removing Demon's Souls' weapon upgrade system would make sense for an open world game and would encourage experimentation and reward exploring (fewer instances of "Oh, that's a cool weapon, too bad I'll never use it"). On the other hand, no upgrade system means no smithing stones, which in turn cuts way down on loot and ends up giving you less reason to explore after finding a few weapons you like.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

By what happens to my char from bleed attacks I'd say each hit ads that number to a hidden bar and when it reaches a treshold based on enemy resistance it triggers a blood loss. Is it close?

Kind of, except the threshold can channge during the fight, the bloodloss doesn't do the same thing every time, and the number added to the hidden bar is also varied based on which weapon and attack you use. The number is really only useful in context of comparing it to that number on the exact same weapon. If you want to compare say, scythes to daggers for speed of bleed buildup, or the damage inflicted, you need empirical tests or excel tables taken from the game code. Most of FS stats are like this; they give you enough info to know if raising a stat influences something, but leave out all the details required to actually optimize anything.

What you're describing here though is called "playing an rpg." No system is 100% predictable from stats alone, and if it was it would be boring. Every single RPG I have ever played required some mix of theory and practice. You do your best to come up with a build and then you see how it performs in real gameplay. No engineer ships a car without a test drive.

I can't imagine any rpg fan would be so adverse to experimentation; you're laying a bizzarely unreasonable standard on this one game. Monster Hunter for example hides so much from the player that the fan base reverse engineered all the damage and motion values from pure gameplay alone, to the point that MHW showing actual damage numbers was seen as sacrilegious. The damage stats on the weapons in those games are flat out lies with hidden modifiers out the wazoo.

I agree that the upgrade mechanics in ER are a hassle though (but again, nothing even close to MH in aggravation.) At by the late game you can buy all the smithing stones you want.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Just because a game is transparent about it's rules doesn't mean the optimal setup is trivial to find. We can't even solve chess after all. There's no reason to hide things like how much damage status ailments cause or the way stats scale weapon damage. It's just adding needless busywork of having to check a wiki. I don't give Monster Hunter a pass either; it's opaqueness was never an asset and letting me see my damage incentivized trying out more types of weapons and attacks to see what was actually doing well instead of settling for one thing because I can't be assed to spend hours taking notes to see which spear does more damage. Seeing more stats makes it easier to experiment so you have time to test more things.

I've played many games that are completely transparent about their rules that offer way more incentive to experiment and theorycraft things. It's a result of having more than one way to skin a cat and some complexity, not keeping the player in the dark.

 

[Vic]

elden gay

 

[ERYFKRAD]

elden gay

Starfailed

 

[Vic]

elden gay

Starfield

I have played starfield 15x more than elden gay, so that's a win

 

[Silverfish]

Starfailed

The final boss of Starfield isn't getting buttfucked by a femboy.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

elden gay

Starfield

I have played starfield 15x more than elden gay, so that's a win

Not the boast you think it is.

 

[Reinhardt]

Starfailed

The final boss of Starfield isn't getting buttfucked by a femboy.

yeah, it's so bad no one even bothered to mod it.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Starfailed

The final boss of Starfield isn't getting buttfucked by a femboy.

that's why it's a shit game

 

[Hell Swarm]

Pata is a really cool weapon.

 

[Vic]

what body type did you guys select for your character

 

[Hell Swarm]

Great, Lyric finally fucks off to his own thread and Vic replaces him. Guess he finally figured out Starfield is unplayable garbage and now he wants attention.

I'm starting to think the scabbu fragments are padding. The same way the smithing stones are. From figured they needed to put -something- in the DLC to pick up in the empty fields. If they had left fragments out and kept base damage in mind when designing bosses instead of NUMBER GOES UP the DLC wouldn't have suffered in the slightest. If anything it would be an improvement on the snore fest the 2nd replay is. Now instead of 1 long drawn out hunt for flask shards you have 2 of them! Hurrah!

 

[Vic]

Great, Lyric finally fucks off to his own thread and Vic replaces him. Guess he finally figured out Starfield is unplayable garbage and now he wants attention.

I just want to know what body type you selected for your elden gay character.

speaking of unplayable garbage, how do you manage to explore an absolutely boring and empty world for 100+ hours while being dragged along by the promise of some souls or item for a build you can't use? this has got the be the worst AAA open world I have yet seen.

 

[Hell Swarm]

how do you manage to explore an absolutely boring and empty world for 100+ hours while being dragged along by the promise of some souls or item for a build you can't use?

I don't know. I didn't play Starfield.

Now fuck off and go derail another thread because you're jealous we're enjoying a game unlike the trash you play.

 

[Sunri]

hard game booo

 

[Vic]

how do you manage to explore an absolutely boring and empty world for 100+ hours while being dragged along by the promise of some souls or item for a build you can't use?

I don't know. I didn't play Starfield.

Now fuck off and go derail another thread because you're jealous we're enjoying a game unlike the trash you play.

you seem upset

 

[Silverfish]

I just want to know what body type you selected for your elden gay character.

A. All the default B's are painfully, offensively ugly.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Didn't want to pollute the main thread with personal blog shit, but i figure since this is the first major boss i'm going to copy paste what i wrote in my thread:

Alright, i guess i was the real savage lion after all:



First off, from a design point of view i gotta say this is one of the coolest bosses FromSoft ever did. I just love the aesthetic and concept of it. The whole fight is a great spectacle and the music is pretty good too.

That said, smacking him with the winged syche didn't do a whole lot of damage, so i decided to go medieval on his ass. I cycled through couple of damage types and it seems fire did the most damage, which in hindsight isn't surprising. Notice that i still haven't used any Scadutree Blessings yet and i already outpaced the boss in damage. Didn't even give him a chance to go to the ice or wind phases. The lighting phase is definitely the worst and took me a while to figure it out. If you want to press damage (as in, to stagger him or get a bleed proc like i did), there is indeed an element of RNG as you can't always time to roll away from the static charge or his attacks at the same time (but then that's what perfume bottles are for). If you play it safe and have no need to put pressure on him, it's not that bad honestly just don't engage when you see the static in the ground. He'll default to that spinning move where you can just pelt him away from a distance with spells if you are so inclined. The ice and wind phases were easer for me than the lighting one, but milage may vary.

I can see why people raged but for me it felt like any other FromSoft boss. Seemingly impossible at first, but then not a huge deal after all.

Opinion from the usual suspects?

 

[Child of Malkav]

Lyric Suite
The divine lion and Midra were the only 2 bosses I liked. Also did them without shield or other cheese. They're pretty fun and the bullshit kept to a relative minimum.
Anyway, no one (at least I didn't) contested your ability to adapt to bullshit. If you have high tolerance for it then yeah sure whatever, have fun I guess.
IDK what's this supposed to prove. There will be challenge runs and speedruns done at level 1 and all the others but that only shows someone's ability and patience to tolerate the cheap stuff shown on screen.

 

[Hell Swarm]

The divine lion and Midra were the only 2 bosses I liked. Also did them without shield or other cheese. They're pretty fun and the bullshit kept to a relative minimum.

The Lion is one getting a lot of complaints from it's phase changes and weird animations.

There will be challenge runs and speedruns done at level 1 and all the others but that only shows someone's ability and patience to tolerate the cheap stuff shown on screen.

He didn't do any of that though. He stacked a bunch of buffs and killed it with a meta weapon to the point where it never even entered 2 of it's phases. The storm phase and the ice phase come after lightning (orders random). So he didn't have patience or tolerance, he looked up all the buffs on a wiki, stacked them with a meta weapon and went "I'm so good at this game!" when he's doing so much damage the bosses barely react.

 

[Suicidal]

Commander Gaius is such a terrible boss.

His charge is very very hard to dodge and deals 50% of my health in damage. But it also has a lingering hitbox meaning if I dodge wrong I can get hit twice in 1 passthrough, killing me instantly.

He can also randomly decide to use it from point blank range and it has a very fast windup leaving you no time to dodge properly.

Just died from full health to that when he was at 15% because he decided to charge right after another attack while I was standing in melee.

Fuck this guy. What where they thinking? It's basically an RNG fight.

 

[Child of Malkav]

Hell Swarm Well I liked this boss and Midra.
The music, especially. The other two phases, ice and wind I found them to be way easier than lightning.
Yeah, I was referring to speedrunners. The thing is, with bosses in ER you kinda gravitate naturally to high damage instruments. If the bosses are so good I wonder why people do that.

 

[Child of Malkav]

Commander Gaius is such a terrible boss.

His charge is very very hard to dodge and deals 50% of my health in damage. But it also has a lingering hitbox meaning if I dodge wrong I can get hit twice in 1 passthrough, killing me instantly.

He can also randomly decide to use it from point blank range and it has a very fast windup leaving you no time to dodge properly.

Just died from full health to that when he was at 15% because he decided to charge right after another attack while I was standing in melee.

Fuck this guy. What where they thinking? It's basically an RNG fight.

I fought him right next to the gate where you enter and he got stuck on the opposite side of a wall there. I used blood boon ritual from Mohg's trident to bleed him through the wall. He also got a few hits in also through the wall. No regrets. Cheese bosses deserve cheese builds.