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

[Lyric Suite]

Also we are talking about Ongbank, he is not your run of the mill player

Sure, but it shows FromSoft crossed no threshold if he took him a few days to do his usual stuff (i assume he did it butt naked at SL1).

Also, what is the run of the mill player, exactly?

FromSoft games are intended to be difficult. They are NOT meant for the average normie. A lot of the games we cherish in the Codex aren't meant for the average normie either. There's nothing wrong about a game that "excludes" the run of the mill player as a matter of principle. The run of the mill player usually couldn't cope with games with difficult level design like Deus EX or Thief. They couldn't cope with all the stuff they would have to learn to play a complex 4X strategy game or RPG. Many of the concessions FromSoft makes (like summons) aren't there to cater to the run of the mill player. They are intended for the inexperieced player, the assumption being the player would eventually learn to cope with the game on his own. Sekiro doesn't even bother with that.

In my opinion, the "run of the mill" player when it comes to FromSoft game is already intended to be fairly advanced in ability. The baseline player of games like this should be someone who has no problem coping with challenging combat, or complex level design etc. You cannot think of games like this in terms of what the average normie would do. Just because normies flocked to Elden Ring for some strange reason doesn't mean a lot of them had any business playing a game like this.

 

[Hell Swarm]

Spoilers in the above post. I don't know how to spoiler quotes.

there's just a lot of shit going on (and it's really hard to see what's happening).

100% true. The final boss will light your screen up like a fireball for a good 3 seconds straight and there's no way to see where some of the attacks will land. You basically have to hope you're not standing in a pool of get fucked the moment the screen clears. And the best bit? Has zero recovery animation. Long start up but no recovery. He can immediately go into a full combo when he's done. And I know this because part of my strategy was to rush that attack down and hope I had room to survive after my 2 hits.

boss

Didn't like the ending. The idea of taking a character that was already built up, but not really seen, and letting you fight them at the peak of their power is good. Making that non-crazy Radahn is really strange. Godwyn would've made way more sense, especially considering there were already item descriptions in the base game that described how Miquella felt about Godwyn's death. I can't recall any prior indication of a dynamic between Miqeulla and Radahn. Very odd decision all around.

It's community fanservice for one but it also makes sense that he turned to the person who beat and survived his sister. I was disappointed we never got to fight him directly. It would have been an interesting fight.

GAY

For all the shitflinging that happened when the leaks came out, I didn't pick up much of a gay dynamic between Miquella and Radahn. Mohg's cutscene was more homo and now he's no longer a gay pedophile as we found out it was all due to Miquella's charm mind control.

How did no one figure this out before? Oh wait I did.. The mind controlling tranny was mind controlling people!? NEVER!

Never ceases to amaze me. Huge game hasn't even been out for a week yet and people are already finishing it. I'm in full support of hardcore gaming, but goddamn guys. Don't forget to slow down and savor the meal!

From always patch their games heavily to dumb down the difficulty. The DLC took me 30-40 hours with the last 10 dedicated to the final boss or finding upgrade items knowing I wasn't strong enough. So probably 5 hours of serious grinding with 1 of those being "This is doable, I'm tired as fuck but I want him dead NOW!" and playing heavily fatigued and refusing to back down. I did have a soft coop partner where we'd talk on voice chat as we were playing so we'd find stuff and say "oi, go that way next" but never summoned each other or told each other how to beat bosses. But 30-40 feels about right. It'll be closer to 30 when the patches start rolling in.

It's not an exaggeration, Mimic absolutely does trivialize almost everything. The only vanilla fight it didn't help with at all was Malenia, she ate all summons for lunch. Everything else ranged between kindda easy to trivial.

Mimic doesn't trivialize anything in the DLC unless you build it with the I win buttons (which I don't). Mimics biggest issue is it has the most health and if you put a blessing of Marika on the hot bar then he has double that health. Which makes him the only option to surviving the DLC bosses bullshit and even then he's often dead by the time a fight ends.

My PC runs ER at around 45 FPS.

PC ran base game at 60 fps. Erd drops to 45 due to bad optermization.

will probably pirate it sometime in the future and play with cheat engine just for the story.

Highly recommend playing this online without cheating. You really do need the player hunt messages for some stuff. There's things happen behind gestures you have no reason to try there.

Also, for what I gather reading here, on Steam and other websites, I think many people are arguing that adapting to issues like overload of effects and lack of visual clarity, incredible strong tracking, camera issues and strong input readings and gotcha attacks that you must memorize while, at the same time, having a character with very limited mobility, unable to cancel animations and forced to play defensively due to things like stamina constraints and slow attacking animations in such a fast paced game isn't that fun nor satisfying, with the difficulty not being the problem in on itself. Many of these complainings also come from people who actually beat the whole DLC, so is not even a matter of not being able to adapt to the bosses, as they did othewise they couldn't have beaten the game.

There are many attacks that fill your screen with effects and no clear visuals to dodge. You learn to dodge them but how you dodge doesn't make sense because you trial and error everything until it works. Some attacks I couldn't find a proper dodge for. There is strong tracking and it's designed for coop punishing where bosses will 180 and hit a guy running up behind them. It doesn't look dumb as the attacks are all big sweeps but it's clear. Again not Dark souls 2 bad but bad. All the other stuff you've described is fairly accurate. I can adapt, I can beat any boss using a melee only build and I have beaten the DLC and I've thought From needed to tone it way down for games now. From have lost the art of the puzzle boss and so you have 40-50 (or 200 in this case) bosses which all have to build upon their combat. Combat is buckling now and I play on instinct and muscle memory unlike the original Dark souls games where I learned bosses and felt like I was solving a puzzle to dodge their attacks not just rolling at the right time.

Yeah but in my own experience with the game, i didn't see those "flaws" at all (general shit like "camera issues" don't count because people have been bitching about that since Demon Souls).

"It's not a flaw because From don't fix it" this is why you're retarded.

Sure, but it shows FromSoft crossed no threshold if he took him a few days to do his usual stuff (i assume he did it butt naked at SL1).

No, From have always had broken stuff in their games you can exploit to 1 shot bosses or burst them down with a kame hame ha. Being able to do very specific things to beat a boss doesn't mean there isn't a problem with the boss. It's like saying a broken bridge is fine because Aeroplanes exist. I'm not going to fly over a broken bridge, I want to walk over the bridge and see what's on the other side by my own power.

 

[abija]

It's not an exaggeration, Mimic absolutely does trivialize almost everything. The only vanilla fight it didn't help with at all was Malenia, she ate all summons for lunch. Everything else ranged between kindda easy to trivial.

"Summons" doesn't imply "mimic with high dps character or breaking stagger/debuff application mechanics". That was the whole point.
Most summons are balanced and help just a bit, mostly in giving you some breathing room. Mimic isn't even obviously good, to imply everyone would auto chose it.

 

[cvv]

Mimic isn't even obviously good, to imply everyone would auto chose it.

The first time you try it you immediately understand using anything else would be nerfing yourself.

 

[abija]

Only if you kept trolling for imba tactics online. The lvl 1 mimic at the point you get it is collateral dmg (or at least it was in the intial game, no idea what they changed since then).

 

[Hell Swarm]

Mimic isn't even obviously good, to imply everyone would auto chose it.

The first time you try it you immediately understand using anything else would be nerfing yourself.

Even with the nerf he's still by far the best because he's the most survivable. Without equipping anything on your tool bar he will out tank basically every other enemy because he has invader (i.e. boss) AI and he can be adapted with a shield or suitable damage type. Him using HP to spawn is also a huge upside where you don't need to spec in extra FP to summon like you do Tiche or others.

 

[unseeingeye]

Never ceases to amaze me. Huge game hasn't even been out for a week yet and people are already finishing it. I'm in full support of hardcore gaming, but goddamn guys. Don't forget to slow down and savor the meal!

I feel the same way, though I understand people enjoy the games at different levels for their own reasons. My wife has a friend who finished it on her second day of playing, and another who was stuck on the final boss at the same time. Meanwhile I'd stupidly started new game plus after finishing the game not long after it released, so I had to go through a bunch of content to get to where I could start it. I just ran to grip the two medallions to hit the lift and start the festival to fight Radahn and rushed through Varre's quest to teleport to Mohg, which only took a few hours.

I made it to the expansion area sometime early Saturday morning, and so far I've only finished as much of the first area as I could find. I beat the Dancing Lion and then Rellana, and through exploration managed to reach a few new areas but immediately left for when I am ready to explore them with appropriate attention. I don't play more than 4 or 5 hours a day on average (if I even play at all) so I am certainly going to be behind most people who play more often. But I spend so much more time on exploration and considering the implications of the many artfully placed objects that evoke environmental narratives, pouring over the minutiae of item descriptions and the designs of the many strange denizens and weird environs they inhabit. Encountering the many figures depicted across the horizontal panels in stone relief adorning the massive double doors to Belurat Tower was a marvel I pondered while gazing on it for several minutes before progressing, only to find the interior further decorated in architectural splendor. I spend some time in every area once reasonably cleared of enemies in order to take in the details uninterrupted, where I assume many players consider the area only insofar as it is a means of reaching the next boss fight or new weapon.

 

[cvv]

Never ceases to amaze me. Huge game hasn't even been out for a week yet and people are already finishing it. I'm in full support of hardcore gaming, but goddamn guys. Don't forget to slow down and savor the meal!

My wife has a friend who finished it on her second day of playing

Huh, I guess girls can be no-lifer neckbeards too.

Btw the only way to finish a game like that in two days is to skip 70% of the content and just rush the bosses, ish.

 

[processdaemon]

I used Greatshield Soldiers as much or more than Mimic in the DLC. They have lower survivability so will only get you about 2/3 through most fights (although you can mitigate that with buffs) and don't do any damage really but they are far better at drawing aggro and give you a little breathing room around what I consider the hardest parts of each fight (usually the start and the phase transitions). They were excellent for the Metyr fight because she doesn't aggro immediately so you can buff them uninterrupted, but a bit useless for the final boss (although tbh Mimic wasn't great for that either, mine died about a third in on the run I won).

 

[Hell Swarm]

Never ceases to amaze me. Huge game hasn't even been out for a week yet and people are already finishing it. I'm in full support of hardcore gaming, but goddamn guys. Don't forget to slow down and savor the meal!

My wife has a friend who finished it on her second day of playing

Huh, I guess girls can be no-lifer neckbeards too.

Btw the only way to finish a game like that in two days is to skip 70% of the content and just rush the bosses, ish.

My wife is one of those no-lifer neckbeards just for Souls games. It's interesting as we have completely opposite fighting styles so I breeze through bosses she struggles and vice versa. It makes you appreciate the depth of boss fights when Katana man mauls a boss once try and Hammer man spends an hour trying to find any opening to get a single hit in.

I also don't skip 70% of the content. From games are one of the few games I will invest serious time into at release. I will dedicate every free moment (give or take) to beating a From game the first week it's out because I severely limit my online interactions until I have. By pure accident I got the last boss of the DLC spoiled for me a week or so ago. I like playing From games blind and going into them without knowing anything more than the title and the first reveal trailer. If I don't finish them first week then I will get spoiled and lose some of my enjoyment of the game. So my only option is to knuckle down and explore the game on my own terms. Then when I've finished the game or I'm at the final boss door I will check to see if I've missed any areas and get a hint like "X is accessed through Y" then go exploring to find it. I'm not just rushing to bosses because I don't know where the bosses are. But I'm also intentionally investing 10 or more hours a day into beating the game because I can't engage in my usual online discussions unless I do. I can't check a forum knowing I could be spoiled so 1 week before From release I stop reading video game content and don't pick it up until I finish the game. I unfortunately had to play some of it on Steam deck this time because I had to do some baby sitting and can't do that on my desktop obviously. So I would explore on Torrent on deck and if I encountered a serious boss I'd wait til I was at home on my desktop with a more comfortable controller to grind them out.

I am a no-lifer neckbeard but I'm okay with dedicating a few days of hard grind to beat the game before they patch the difficulty out and to do it as blind as possible. Then I get maximum pleasure out of the exploration and I feel it's -my- victory not the victory of reading the Elden ring thread or watching streams.

used Greatshield Soldiers as much or more than Mimic in the DLC.

They are my favourite summon but the amount of AOE spam made them seem useless for this. They're not tanking half the arena exploding.

 

[S.H.O.D.A.N.]

Why is Elden Ring in JRPG area when it was written by Martin?

Because Martin scribbling "incest" on an onigiri wrapper does not qualify as a writing credit.

 

[Ivan]

Just as with Lies of P, the smoothening of difficulty/scaling has begun:
https://en.bandainamcoent.eu/elden-ring/news/elden-ring-calibration-update-1122

Attack and damage negation curve scaling of the Shadow Realm Blessings have been revised.

• The attack and damage negation has been increased for the first half of the maximum amount of Blessing enhancements, and the second half will now be more gradual.
• The attack and damage negation granted by the final level of Blessing enhancements has been slightly increased.

The calibration update can be applied by logging into the multiplayer server.

TLDR: easier onboarding with more marked noticeability of the scadutree items

 

[Cryomancer]

Got into the final boss of the DLC and only managed to down him to 40% hp so far. This DLC is quite brutal. And I like it. This final boss is imo harder than Manus and Sir Alonne

 

[Ivan]

As always, someone is destroying every boss with ease

that is a smoooth frame rate. great player for sure. I could never.

 

[Hell Swarm]

Just as with Lies of P, the smoothening of difficulty/scaling has begun:
https://en.bandainamcoent.eu/elden-ring/news/elden-ring-calibration-update-1122

Attack and damage negation curve scaling of the Shadow Realm Blessings have been revised.

• The attack and damage negation has been increased for the first half of the maximum amount of Blessing enhancements, and the second half will now be more gradual.
• The attack and damage negation granted by the final level of Blessing enhancements has been slightly increased.

The calibration update can be applied by logging into the multiplayer server.

TLDR: easier onboarding with more marked noticeability of the scadutree items

~And this is exactly why it's worth putting in the effort to beat the game on release patch. I beat the game when it earned it's reputation. Not when it smoothed off the edges after a week.

 

[Stoned Ape]

Speaking of people who seem unreasonably good at this game, Quoppp has loads of no-damage boss run videos showcasing different builds for the base game and dropped this SotE major boss run video recently. He seems to spend as much time facing his character towards the camera as he does towards the bosses. There's timestamps to miss out the cutscenes if you don't want to watch them (I skipped them, personally).



He takes out the final boss' first form between 11:24 to 11:48 then the second form from 13:12 to 13:45, so less than minute for the fight in total.

 

[Ivan]

What have been people's favorite slices/bits of the DLC? Off the top of my head:
-the new traps in the dungeons

Spoiler

the huge flamemouth golem, the basilisk projectile, I do wish this did heavier damage as it closed in on you

-I loved the vertical design and encounter design of the Specimen Storehouse, all the way to the very top
-

Spoiler

I like that Radahn seems to be the only boss to really punish going for a summon ASAP. He can close the distance so fast and erase you if you try it without care.

-navigating the overworld, as in, reading the map and going, I wonder how I get there, is cool. Still not a fan of invisible walls or easy to miss ladders tho...fuck that got me
-the feeling of finding the Lv3 talismans is just chef's-kiss

 

[Raghar]

Parry is OP, thus it should be avoided in Dark Souls.

 

[Lyric Suite]

"It's not a flaw because From don't fix it" this is why you're retarded.

The argument is that Elden Ring has crossed a kind of threshold and that the combat now has many flaws that weren't there before. Bitching about old things that have been around Souls since the beginning makes me think people are just struggling to inflate what exactly it is supposed to be wrong about Elden Ring specifically. In fact, technical flaws shouldn't even be part of the conversation if the argument is that the mechanics FromSoft introduced to bump the difficutly are somehow bad. The argument isn't that those mechanics are broken or don't work properly, it's that they are bad in and of themselves while working as inteded, so old stuff like camera issues shouldn't count.

 

[Dobkeratops]

As always, someone is destroying every boss with ease

Rellana almost seems like a boss made solely to showcase the new OP deflect flask tear. But I imagine a lot of players were like me and ate 12 tons of unavoidable flaming debris on approach to the first flame golem and just decided to put them off indefinitely (turns out they're actually easier than trolls once you get underneath them.)

 

[Hell Swarm]

The argument is that Elden Ring has crossed a kind of threshold and that the combat now has many flaws that weren't there before.

When you get to the last boss or the super boss let me know. I'd love to know what other enemies in the franchise have multi hit explosions you need to dodge through while not changing the animation. My screen turns GOLD, I dodge the immediate explosion and then without any changing of the animations I have to dodge another explosion from the same attack animation. This is actually a new problem but you wouldn't know that because you haven't got there yet and likely won't. There's also a double boss that has unavoidable damage at times, which was a problem they patched out of Elden ring's double fights and reintroduced with a new mechanic/attack for late game boss.

Old problems are fixed and reintroduced and new problems make any sort of "tough but fair" argument invalid. But you for some reason have to defend From like your life depends on it. Which is just sad.

 

[Elttharion]

Mimic absolutely does trivialize almost everything.

if it's in the game it's to be used.

If Hidetaka Miyazaki din't wanted me to use Mimic, he would't have putted it into the game.

This applies to sorcery, incantations, to eastus, summons, shields, torrent, moonligh greatsword, scarlet rot weapons, scarlet rot weapons in your mimic while you use unlimited mana kahemahema when the boss is distracted, etc. The greatest problem of soulsborn community is that people like to dictate how other people should play their game that they brought.

I like to play this way >


If someone gets their fun picking a broken sword, going SL1 naked, no summons, no torrent, no shield, is their problem.

This "unlimited kamehameha" is not working in the DLC, in fact I'm using much more my Moonlight Greatsword against bosses and melee spells like Adula moonblade instead of using long range spells and even switching from medium to light loadout in some bosses.

Does your game actually look like this? Like 10fps stuttery slide show? It's like one of those old stop motion animations.

Turn based Elden Ring

 

[Tyranicon]

The first time you try it you immediately understand using anything else would be nerfing yourself.

Mimic at launch before patches was cheat-tier. It trivialized the game after you got it.

 

[Lyric Suite]

When you get to the last boss or the super boss let me know.

Will do, though i'm sure the boss will be nerfed by the time i get around playing this so it won't "count" lel.

 

[Crayll]

That's why you have to speed through the game on release now, the huge amount of new players that ER brought in that cry about difficulty has made From too nerf happy.