Elden Ring

[lazygecko]

Game's been out for a little more than a week now and I'm surprised there isn't already a thread about it. I didn't start playing it until a few days ago because I wanted to wait until some of the technical issues on PC had been patched out.

 

Having spent a few hours with the game now, I'm gonna say it's not really as good as I had hoped. At least not in the beginning. The shift to a more standardized open world format is definitely not doing the From Software formula many favors. Exploring the outdoors of Rimgrave has mostly just felt dull and unrewarding compared to exploring every nook and cranny in their previous games with the more tightly instanced areas giving them more fine control over the level design experience. Things got a lot better once I got into Stormveil Castle, but can't really tell what the open world to dungeon ratio is gonna be at this point. It's mainly this coupled with some other pet peeves like constantly foraging/farming items for a generic crafting system, alongside the game always having nondescript background music now constantly shifting between combat/non-combat that I think just greatly diminishes the unique mood and atmosphere present in the previous Dark Souls games. It's still a good game but the way they switched up the formula by having it lean closer to the now greatly homogenized Ubisoft/MMO templates really hurts its identity.

 

There's also the subject of visuals and it seems to be a common complaint that the game looks kind of outdated. Again I think this mostly comes down to the choice to make this an open world game and how that really compromises the way they have to handle tech in the engine. When you leave the tutorial and gaze on the wide open horizon in what I suppose was meant to be an impressive setpiece moment I just can't help but feel distracted by what a damn eyesore the LoD is even on max settings. That was not really a technical problem they had in previous games where they had much greater control over the presentation of distant elements and could afford to make it look at worst inoffensive.

[RagnarRandom]

it looks good but i have been burned on rpgs. i was told the witcher 3 and the dragon age games were masterpieces. meh. but i love the new assassin's creed games which are almost universally thumbed-down by "real gamers," so who the hell am i? i wishlisted this one though, maybe get it if/when it goes on summer sale.

[Murdoch]

It looks interesting but based on the gameplay videos the combat looks incredibly dickish, absolutely not my cup of tea. Supposedly it's not as dickish as their earlier games but that's not really a big selling point for me. Less of a pain in the ass is still a pain in the ass.

 

1 hour ago, RagnarRandom said:

 but i love the new assassin's creed games which are almost universally thumbed-down by "real gamers," so who the hell am i?

 

 

What's this? You like something other people do not like. This is bad. Really bad. You must be... a human being! With entirely subjective tastes like everyone else, who has every right to enjoy what you enjoy and tell anyone who gives you shit for that to fuck off and then fuck off again when they get there.

Edited March 7, 2022 by Murdoch

[BGreener]

Probably my favorite “Souls-styled” game of theirs since Dark Souls 1.

 

Sekiro and Bloodborne were very good but I wasn’t very fond of Dark Souls 2 or 3, I still had my fun with them but with plenty of reservations. That may have relaxed my expectations somewhat, but it’s still been fun having this much choice in how to progress in a Souls game with a lot of mechanic changes I agree with.

 

Demon’s Souls on PS5 is likely to be more technically impressive, but the warmer art direction has been nice and it’s still some of FromSoft’s best.

[snapshot]

im a level 37 vagabond tank and still can't kill margit even with spirits and a cooperator cuz too stubborn to learn his attack patterns, but at least i can now go elsewhere and loot stuff and farm runes before confronting him again, lost count of how many bosses i killed so far, the golden warrior on the horse back, that one warrior in the cave near the beach, the big tree guy near that orange tree, the lion lizard looking guy in the very bottom of the map, that witch looking thing on a boat, and that dragon in the swamp area in the north west of the map, whatever it was called, actually feel like im cheating cause some of them let me fight while still on horse back, barely taking any hits.

 

its freaking massive, opened a chest and was transported to a completely different area with a giant stone statue boss, used 2 keys near the starting area and died countless times to that giant  spinning saw/blades thing before finally reaching a stake of marika and dying a couple more times to a dragom-like creature there, some giant crawling hand attacked me while i was killing the small ones, found some sort of underground mages library and got killed soon after taking the stairs cause some mages decided to spawn in behind me, a portal below a cliff that took me to a deserted area full of small creatures that can insta kill me in 1 hit.

 

seen games that look worse, kinda has a stylized art style that makes it look like a painting sometimes, i don't mind it very much, wanted to go with samurai cause he looks so badass but everyone and their mothers kept shouting vagabond is best starter class so that's what i ended up choosing

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

Edited March 7, 2022 by snapshot

[7Mahonin]

I feel like from software games give you a lot of awesome customization of your character, getting cool armor and whatnot from the start, but you are more fragile to damage than the Silver Surfer on NES regardless of your skills it seems. In other similar games, you don’t get the cool stuff until halfway through and by then you’re usually overpowered from building up xp. I think I enjoy these games because of the challenge and the options for your character, though I do sometimes feel it can be a little over the top for no good reason other than to annoy people who aren’t as good at the game as those that have already beaten in 3 times already within a week. I haven’t even made a dent in progress so far and there’s people already completing the game multiple times! They must be really good players or they have mastered patience, or perhaps both. 

Edited March 7, 2022 by 7Mahonin

[Lippeth]

I've played and enjoyed virtually every FromSoft game since buying a used copy of Demon's Souls for PS3 a year after it came out, and Elden Ring is close to what I would've considered the perfect game ten years ago; Skyrim with Dark Souls combat. And for some reason now I'm struggling to get into it. There's nothing wrong with the game, and I've even had perfect performance so far on PC, but it's been a massive chore to try and play for more than twenty minutes and there are other things I'd rather be doing. I had planned to skip this one for now just because I'm into other things at the moment, but a friend of mine has been playing it nonstop and texting me all about it so I ended up getting it a few days ago to share the experience, and have only casually messed around with it for about three hours. So that's my review: It seems cool but I'm just not into it right now.

[Zaxxon]

8 hours ago, RagnarRandom said:

it looks good but i have been burned on rpgs. i was told the witcher 3 and the dragon age games were masterpieces.

 

I don't know if they qualify as video game masterpieces as a whole, but when it comes to immersion and the RPG aspect, they are not even close at being masterpieces. You want a masterclass RPG - you play the German classics Gothic and Gothic II: Night of the Raven! As a whole, they have some flaws and they require some patience, especially with getting used to their controls, but as RPGs, they are still the best there is. And i'm not even going to talk about the unbelievable atmosphere they provide, because it's best to be experienced on a blind playthrough.

 

Watch this if you want, but i recommend giving the games a blind shot:

 

Spoiler

 

 

Edited March 7, 2022 by Zaxxon

[vyruss]

I've put about 50 hours into my first character so far in this game.  I'm really enjoying it, but like all open-world games this one will be one of those that I might only play once a year since there is so much downtime just spent travelling and exploring.  At first it was amazing but like every open world game I've ever played, the tedium of travel -> explore -> boss -> loot is beginning to wear on my enthusiasm for it.  I'd hate to try to push for NG+10 like I did with Dark Soul 3 with how expansive this game's world is.

 

It's great, but will definitely only rarely come back to this one when I need to scratch the itch for mindlessly grinding areas to explore.

[PsychEyeball]

I'll want to get it eventually but I heard the PC port has been pretty horrendous so far. Hopefully they'll fix it up at some point. 

[Lippeth]

Finally set aside some time to really try and get into this thing, I've only put in about 15 hours but it seems like it was enough because I'm all in at this point. The only performance issues I've noticed while playing are the occasional texture pop-ins, and a fairly infrequent stuttering that doesn't seem to be linked with my framerate display, which stays consistently between 57 and 60 at maximum settings in borderless window mode. Honestly the performance is about on par with Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro on my rig and I've got no complaints with it.

[lazygecko]

The worst performance I get in the game is ironically within very small and cramped spaces like caves and catacombs. Regularly dips below 30 in those. You'd think places like that would instead perform much better than the outdoors with much less stuff rendered on the screen.

[amackert]

As a big fan of the Souls series, I'm absolutely loving Elden Ring. It's basically what you would get if Dark Souls had a baby with Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I guess I see why it might not be for some, but I've been hooked on it.

Edited March 9, 2022 by amackert

[lazygecko]

The game has sold at least 10 million copies on PC alone so far. Sales are apparently roughly equal between platforms, which would put it around 30 million total. By this point From Software have completed their ascent from the scrappy underdog with runaway hits to reaching the highest echelon of the industry.

 

And they have done so basically without compromising their creative vision by cynically chasing the focus-tested, "best practice" market trends that just about every other studio and publisher take for granted as necessary to reach this level of success. This has triggered some pretty interesting reactions and discussions prompted by some real salty tweets by developers behind competing AAA open world games, and the way they frame their critique of Elden Ring's UX and quest design principles basically comes across as they don't believe the game actually deserves its success compared to the games they worked on and their much more homogenized approach to those things which is supposedly innately superior.

 

This in turn prompted that meme image of Elden Ring with "good UX" which has since gone viral, and apart from just being hilarious and fairly spot on in what it's mocking, I think it taps into a pretty interesting sentiment and zeitgeist around how fed up people are starting to get with these design practices, and how being bombarded with explicit UI prompts and dialogue/monologue constantly telling you exactly where to go and what to do becomes exhausting to the point that the game experience feels more like checking off lists and doing chores.

I started thinking about this stuff years ago with how UX design can reframe the game experience and just abstract the game as a whole into purely feeding on the skinner box sensation the UI presentation provides, and everything else that happens in the actual game world just becomes incidental and a mere means to an end to serve the former, rather than being the point in itself. I first noticed how this was affecting me when healing in dungeons/raids in World of Warcraft, and what I was actually focusing on for my dopamine rushes was just this wack-a-mole aspect of filling the party health bars back up as fast as possible. Since then, this mindset has come to encompass more and more facets of gameplay, and it feels as though the industry has really jumped the shark over the past few years.

 

Quests in games especially just devolved into "follow the marker to the location, fulfill the objective (ie kill target, collect item or trigger some event), rinse and repeat. It becomes purely about checking the abstract boxes while paying minimal attention to the actual substance behind it. This kind of stuff is what makes modern open world games feel so interchangeable because they have conditioned people into only paying attention to the raw skinner box mechanics that are functionally the same in all of them.

Edited March 9, 2022 by lazygecko

[vyruss]

I have come back after some more time with this game and I am still very excited to open it up and go follow after a squirrel into a dungeon.  I rescind my prior statement about open-world burnout and am excited to get the minimum bosses route down and see if I can go all the way to NG+10.  This is explicitly because of the points brought up by lazygecko where other games will just point you where to go every single step of the way.  Here it is actually a challenge and you are well rewarded to find what exactly you're supposed to do when you finally complete your goal.  I don't think I'll be buying another game for quite some time.  Thank you Elden Ring.

[Doominator2]

It looks awesome, and it made me get back into the first Dark Souls after taking a break from it years ago. I'll definitely pick it up some time in the future.

[Old-Doomguy]

I might buy it when it's cheap. I've really only played Demons souls and Bloodborne. Ironically, the Soul-game I've actually only felt compelled to complete was a souls-copy known as Lords of the fallen.

[Taw Tu'lki]

My opinion about this game 

[xdarkmasterx]

Hopefully you appreciate the irony of needing to bump the thread to make your post :3

[Marisa the Magician]

It's a fairly solid game, and I enjoy playing it. My one major gripe with it, however, is how DENSE it is. The world map is immense, and there's just an obscene amount of little things and places here and there that could be easily missable unless you practically comb every corner of the world map. For example, many have already commented on how easy it is to break NPC questlines because there's no clear direction on what to do and where to go, and so many factors that affect progression without the player being exactly aware of it. Looks like applying the Souls formula to an open-world game comes with its consequences, in the end. About half of my play time before finally beating it was spent in confusion as to where to go next. But that's not to say it wasn't an enjoyable experience. All those hour sunk into "where the fuck do I go?" were full of interesting encounters as well.

 

The problem now would be the replay value. Just the thought that I might have to sink 80 more hours into it to beat it another time, with another character, was crushingly demoralizing. But that's my general sentiment with games of this scale. If this one were moddable to the level of other games of the style, then maybe I would be more interested in that, since it's what I usually do when I can't be arsed to re-do the whole main story all over again. Just pile up mods and screw around on my own.

[OniriA]

What @Taw Tu'lki said.

[Gibbon]

RPG's are a mixed bag for me.  Things like Skyrim and Oblivion I love, but then games like Witcher 3 and things like Blood Born just bore me.  Probably in recent years, the only game with a relatively mixed bag of elements that I really enjoyed was Horizon Zero Dawn.  If something doesn't have an interesting story, then I will just switch off.  Elden Ring doesn't look remotely interesting, at least to me.

 

Another thing that puts me off is the mindset that Japanese devs have towards optimisation.  On consoles, I pretty much expect a locked 60 or a locked 30..  too many eastern games I've bought that just fluctuate wildly all over the place.  To me, it isn't acceptable.

Edited April 27, 2022 by Gibbon

[SplinkWizard]

I think elden ring is a great game compared to the other "triple A" games

[BGreener]

My only reservation thus far is how little they do to bump up the difficulty during the second journey, i.e. New Game Plus. I felt this way during Dark Souls 3 as well, taking several NG+ runs before I started to feel a rise in difficulty.

 

For Elden Ring, the first journey is pretty well balanced with its difficulty for the most part, but it’s pretty snoozy on the second journey. Sekiro, Dark Souls 2, and even Demon’s Souls had means of upping the challenge that wasn’t just gimping yourself with worse gear so consider me spoiled.

 

Thanks to the lovely modding community, I figured out how to solve my concern. Simply put, the enemies now have their stats set to what they would be for “NG+2” despite me being on “NG+1”. I’m back to being a happy camper.

 

Now I’m watching the progress on that “persistent coop” mod.

Edited April 27, 2022 by BGrieber

[lazygecko]

Dark Souls 2 had by far the most intricate NG+ system by switching up enemies and items, and they even made it non-linear with the bonfire ascetic system allowing you to consume the item at a bonfire to instantly bump the area up one NG tier to increase both the challenge and rewards.

[BGreener]

It’s a great idea that sort of showed its face in Demon’s Souls: In addition to the buffs and debuffs, worlds with pure black tendency would have additional enemy placements. Using an aesetic is way less stupid than repeatedly killing yourself, though, and Ds2 is still the only one with NG+ level, item, and boss changes (DS1’s may be my least favorite, the ‘harder’ spawns are locked behind an abstract, online-only covenant).

 

I was disappointed to find out Elden Ring had no such features, but it’s making up for it with all the content and alternate routes I’m discovering on a second playthrough.

Edited April 28, 2022 by BGrieber

[Sotenga]

Loved it, loved it, loved it. I've been a Souls fan for several years now, so I knew I was going to like it, but I didn't expect that I would spend two full playthroughs and 250 hours on it over the past two months. This just might be my favorite game that FromSoft has ever made to now. It's so good. Soooooooooooo so good. Now mind, it's not perfect (I think they went overboard on Malenia, for example), but I just found a lot to love. This is probably going to be my game of the year unless God of War: Ragnarok doesn't get delayed, that's the only serious competition I can see!

[vyruss]

Just finished NG+4 (I have been going through about one playthrough every week or two... Margitt, Godrick, Rennala, Morgott, Giant, Godskin Duo, Maliketh, Gideon, Godfrey, Radabeast).  Can't wait to finish NG+7 and put this game down for a while.

[Doominator2]

Finally caved in and bought it. I've only played like 2 hours because I've been super tired from work and stuff recently, but I'm super hyped to really get into it!

[TenenteZashu]

Personally I haven't tried it yet because at the moment I don't have 70 euros to throw into a game I'm not even sure I enjoy but going off what some friends told me it's not serviceable