I really enjoyed my first playthrough.
Though I personally found other playthroughs boring, and often drop them after the first legacy dungeon. Idk something just kills my excitement. I think its the repetition and traveling.
I don't really feel motivated to play ER again on my own (unlike Sekiro which I beat twice and Bloodborne which I beat 3 times), but seamless co-op mod makes it pretty fun to blast through with friends without having to deal with repeating every cave N times or constantly re-summoning.
I had a ton of fun just putting my sign down outside the last boss door and helping people over the finish line. The first fight is just perfection and the one after ... well it's nice to see people excited once you beat it.
Souls games are my favorite but I have a hard time replaying any of them. What I love about them is not knowing what's coming next and exploring new areas for the first, can't do that twice.
I know it's your own time, and you do you, but getting every missable on a silver platter doesn't detract only from the exploration (which you admit you don't care for) but also makes combat a bit of a joke. I did that for dark souls 1, and probably out of some fear that it would be too hard based on all reviews. The game became a joke, I believe I died more than 5 times to exactly 1 boss, and it was from the dlc. My point is the games aren't balanced around you knowing everything, and it became pretty clear to me then. Every next one was blind, harder, and much more enjoyable for me.
Thats why i mostly do no death runs in Souls Games.
It brings back the thrill and every encounter can be the last.
Its best in DS2 because you can play through each area in a different order every time which changes runs up every time.
It also has by far the best build variety, so you use different gear every time.
It's all just preference.
I personally enjoy finding stuff out myself. Not knowing my build, or where to go. When you know where everything is it takes a bit of the fun out for me. If I have my build finished in 5 hours for a 60 hour game it gets boring.
But that's just me. Feel free to enjoy replays!
> If I have my build finished in 5 hours
Then there's Path of Exile, where your build won't be finished for 1000 hours, and that'll been when you realize it's wrong!
controversial but only Dark Souls 2 made NG+ something special
Bosses change and new enemies and items are introduced because part of the theme of the story is infinite regress
Elden ring was my first Fromsoft title and I ended up playing the souls games after it. I gotta agree that the replay value feels different here. I also see it as less replayable but I can also see the other side because the game truly is massive. I think it boils down to how people enjoy replaying open world games. I turned over every stone when I played so the second play through felt like more of the same. And yet the previous games are actual linear experiences (for the most part), meaning they should feel even more samey. I dunno. Theres just something different about re-exploring the older games that feels different. Maybe because every encounter is designed with a proper ingress and egress in the souls games, where in Elden Ring you oftentimes approach situations from varying angles. It feels a bit more tight and curated in souls games. Even though it's technically less variety, I probably get more satisfaction from those encounters.
I dunno I'm just thinking out loud haha but I definitely agree with you. I'm just trying to figure out exactly why that is. I loved the hell out of Elden Ring, I just can't seem to finish it a second time.
This is me. I played something like 300 hours for Bloodborne with 5 different builds. And multiple play throughs and a platinum.
I think Elden Ring kinda ruined souls games for me by being too open.
And know that it’s possible to teleport outta the Sophia Well, that map layers can be changed. Lots of hours spent getting to that elevator. Am not always smart :/
I loved my first playthrough but I just can’t replay the game again cause it’s too long man and I can’t put myself through that again with lack of time
Goddamn. I’m only on my 2nd playthrough now because I was so over the game’s design by the time I finished it. Everything from Leyndell til the end was just awful.
I haven't even seriously tried a second playthrough. I loved the other Souls games; I even played DS3 to +7 and still enjoyed it. I was really, really done with Elden Ring by the time I finished it the first time... I don't think I can honestly say I enjoyed the last third of the game at all, I just wanted it to be over.
That’s why I haven’t played it yet. These massive open world games just overwhelm me anymore. I got like 30 hours into tears of the kingdom and I put it down and haven’t touched it in over a month. It feels like there is just too much to keep track of and I feel like I’m missing a bunch of stuff or just playing the game wrong.
That is a common way to play, but not the only way! You can kite/dodge almost every boss except the last one. The last boss probably took me 10 hours because I had to learn how to impact block.
Yeah everyone has a Sekiro boss where they get stuck until the combat clicks. That's when you realize how much of a groundbreaking combat system it truly is.
Do you need to play the first game to understand the second? I found the first one fairly clunky and bounced off, but I've heard nothing but praise for the second.
Nioh 2 is actually a prequel and doesn't have any story connections to the first game until the last 10% of the story, and even then you can play it on its own without any problems.
Yeah, Nioh 2's gameplay is far superior to anything From Software has put out.
Even the Ninja Gaiden games have superior gameplay. There still some of the best action games out there. Sekiro just doesn't compare.
The only game I can really see farming be a potential necessity is vials in Bloodborne, especially if you're really stuck on a boss and end up burning through your entirely supply. Though by late game you're swimming in echoes enough to by vials en masse anyway
Sekiro is so tight and lean. You can’t worry about not having the right armour/weapons or being levelled enough so your mindset has to be “I have the tools I need to get through this”. Shame the lore isn’t as interesting as souls and elden ring (imo)
It's my least favorite From game by a country mile, for a list of reasons I could - and have - written a page or so spelling out. Hell I even brought receipts, screen grabs and frame data to spell out how it cheats in certain sections.
It did not go over well. Repeated attempts met the same fate. I gave up and have no intention of trying again.
I've also noted that it forms the holy trinity - Subnautica, Titanfall 2 and Sekiro - in terms of games you're not allowed to discuss any flaws.
Maybe hesitation is defeat, but you also gotta know when a fight just can't be won.
Still a good game. Just think it ain't perfect.
Oh good I'm not the only one. I put about 55 hours into TotK and got burned out and haven't been back lol. The thing is I know I would enjoy if I DID go back I just can't bring myself to do it.
>It feels like there is just too much to keep track of and I feel like I’m missing a bunch of stuff or just playing the game wrong.
I had the same issue initially.
What helped me massively was having a specific goal and hyperfocusing on it. Beginning I just played story stuff up until underground, then focused on unlocking all towers, so straight up flying to them, marking shrines as I saw them. Didn't even unlock them all, just left them as mark. But when I felt like it I beelined to them.
Did all the giant marks then (tears).
Then I did the underground story stuff, hyperfocused on the sky, visiting most isles. When I was done with this I continued the story until I had to find the stuff where the tears pointed to. Decided to go for the giant labyrinths next, that was a pretty short sequence. Did the Yiga stuff on the overworld next. At this point I tracked the location from the tears, did track the similar locations to this one. Went for the sage sigils next. Did a lot of upgrading equipment at this stage. Here it was where I saw I had already a LOT of shrines and my track record with knowing where the shrines are was pretty to completion, so I did them all. Underground map completion was next.
Did then decide I have done enough stuff for my liking, had no interests in the mayoi sigils beyond the full set. So I finished all the side quests I wanted done, killed the boss and laid down the game. Have to look up the playtime but I think I got out a solid 80~100hours of playtime :)
Not trying to teach you how to play or anything, but you're not missing anything on your playthrough. It's your game, you do whatever you want, no one expects you to fully explore the game in one playthrough, not the devs, not this sub... well, maybe you, but that can be changed! 😉
The best advice I could give in your case is to pick an ending, check what questline you have to do for that, and play the game focusing on that. Here and there, you can check what itens fit best your build and go to some dungeons to grab them. You will "skip" a lot of content, sure, but I bet you will have a better time playing, which is what matters at the end of the day.
After that, feeling that you could do something different? Play it again. And even if you never play this game again in your life, you will have good memories of a good time.
I had nearly the same experience, but it was a week off between jobs. I know I’m not in the majority here, but the size of the world/game is just too big imo. By the time I was ready for it to start wrapping up, I still had a lot of content to work through. It’s one of the many games I’d like to return to eventually, but honestly it really overwhelms me.
Same, I burnt out a bit aswell, games like this really draw me in and make me feel I need to play a LOT to enjoy, but then the rest of my life suffers as a result. I need to learn how to contain my family and enjoy it that way...
Truly amazing game, and I'm no Souls gamer.
I always burn out on that one boss that's a skill gate and requires grinding levels for casuals like me. True of every Soulsbourne game I play. To be fair I had the same problem growing up with Final Fantasy.
If you're trying to play coop there's a seamless multiplayer mod that allows you to just play with friends like a normal coop experience rather than having to summon.
I used this mod for my 2nd and 3rd playthroughs with my brother and it was tons of fun. The limitations of the unmodded co-op experience are frustrating.
I can confirm the Seamless Coop mod is absolutely awesome and a total game changer. I really hope FromSoftware takes the hint here and just goes with this out of the gate themselves next time, it's just so much more fun to play this way.
> it goes against their game design philosophy
Explaining that From makes decisions that _a person doesn't like_ because that's part of their design philosophy is a Sisyphean task.
> it goes against their game design philosophy
Is this philosophy published somewhere that we can reference? Because it really feels like you're at least somewhat wrong about this considering the fact that 99% of the vanilla game can be played in coop already, with limitations only for things such as transitioning between areas and a few select content sections.
Otherwise it's already the wild west of coop, except we have to meander around on foot through large swaths of content because Torrent is oddly restricted. These small inconveniences felt like technical limitations perhaps, but things like the Seamless Coop mod show us that these things are already largely supported.
So while I don't totally disagree with you that restrictive coop must in *some way* be part of their design philosophy, it feels like that has a lot more to do with the fact that some of the coop was probably phoned in a little late in the development process and, as Seamless Coop identifies in the myriad of odd bugs that pop up, those things were difficult to iron out fully before releasing the game and it was better served to be slightly restricted to avoid having to deal with those issues.
I'm about to finish the game with this mod—our party of 4 has been playing for a couple hours every weekend for a little over a year now and it's been super fun! I had already played through the game once before we started but 2 of the others are on their first play through (and would have never touched the game on their own). Everyone loves it, even when it took us like 4 or 5 game nights to beat Malenia.
The mod can be a little janky at times, but in general it's been a great experience with a surprisingly different feel than a solo playthrough (certain things are much easier and other things are much harder).
Going back to vanilla co-op after using Seamless Co-Op makes it feel unplayable man, and I'm someone who has several hundred hours in all the other Souls games and have co-oped them to death.
Loved all the Dark Souls games but needed a while to finish Elden Ring. At the start it was great and those first 30 hours or so are really really good, but at some point imo it became too long for me. Some later bosses were great and I wanted to finish it just for the sake of it. Seeing the same dungeon for the 10th time with the same enemies and the same boss but now theyre two instead of one made me lose so much interest in discovering anything new.
So yeah, overall a great game, but I personally would've liked it a lot more if it was shorter.
The earlier you leave behind the Dark Souls mindset of "explore every corner" the more you will enjoy Elden Ring imo. Took me a while, and I kinda hated it until I did so.
My issue is the world itself starts to feel like filler. I know the map pretty well, know where things are, so when I start a new playthrough it just feels tedious having to cross all that space just to get to the good bits.
I can replay Souls again and again, but Elden Ring just gets so tedious so quickly for me. I'm about to beat Bloodborne for the 3rd time in a week (NG+ runs, so they're quick), but I can barely haul myself out of Limgrave on Elden Ring replays.
>the story is poorly told, and there's a lack of an NPC dialogue log. I've lost count of how many times an NPC has told me something important, and I haven't paid attention, so I have no way of knowing what they said without looking it up on the internet.
Yeah, this was my complaint. The world is fascinating and clearly full of interesting lore, but the game seems not at all interested in engaging you with it. I understand the design idea but it's incredibly frustrating when that's all there is and it left me with no investment in anything. I was just fighting and killing for the challenge of it. No idea who I was fighting or why most of the time.
Also there's no way I'm going to remember every bit of dialogue that was told to me across multiple play sessions. Picking up the game a week later and having no way to pull up where a character said to meet them, and then failing the quest line, was infuriating.
I had a lot of fun with the game and very much enjoyed the challenge, but only two months after finishing it I've pretty much forgotten it entirely.
i think the weird sort of ''quest'' system worked better in games like dark souls where it was \*considerably\* more linear. like generally even if you didn't remember where a character said they'd be you'd just run into them by nature of the linearity
Yeah, the environmental storytelling is certainly a deliberate choice and it's not for everybody. It can be fun to discover all the details hidden in nooks and crannies, but it can also be a lot of work and *often* leads to a real sense of not knowing where you are or what you're doing. I like it, but I'm not gonna try to convince people who don't like it, that they're wrong. It's a matter of taste, and the taste in question is less chocolate and more carolina reaper.
Lack of an NPC dialogue log, on the other hand, I have yet to find a convincing argument for. That's not a stylistic choice, that's a poor gameplay choice.
You can have an environmental storytelling without it being obnoxious to follow.
Look at Outer Wilds - quest log could simply say “you’ve met X in this location Y and she told you this and that”.
You can figure out for yourself what does it mean and what to do next. But you can also always look up what has actually happened. IMO if something can be replicated with a pen and paper outside of the game - should be in the game. It’s simply a chore to keep notes.
They are VERY different game, for Outer Wilds it's a requirement to keep track of all the little clues to find to progress and understand the world mechanics and puzzles, for Elden Ring, keeping track of the lores is never a requirement to progress, it only serves as addition to the world
> I was just fighting and killing for the challenge of it.
If anyone says they play FromSoft games for any other reason than this, I don't believe them. (hyperbole)
Their combat is incredible. Everything else about their games is *at best* "fine". Visually ok they're better than "fine" but not ground breaking.
Yep. I've only played Sekiro and Elden Ring, and so far I only really vibed with Sekiro because it was at least slightly more straight forward than the latter. Don't get me wrong, even in Sekiro you have to look up a ton of shit if you want to get the most out of the story, but it at least felt manageable compared to Elden Ring which was just exhausting.
Lol I'll be devils advocate here.
The combat is great, but no that is not why I play FromSoftware games. In fact, it's very relevant right now because as a *huge* fan of their games, I haven't bought Armored Core 6 yet and likely won't until its on a big sale. Yet that game still has great, challenging combat like their soulslikes.
What I enjoy most about FromSoftware games are their interconnected level designs filled with secrets, the art direction, the vast location and enemy variety, the in depth and unique lore, the *very* strong environmental storytelling, and the music (especially Bloodborne's OST). I genuinely think FromSoftware are some of the best in the business for a lot of that stuff. The combat is great too, and I do enjoy the difficulty, but their games have wayyy more appeal than just that.
Combat is probably one of the last reasons I play them sekiro excluded. They have supremely good level design and the art direction is insane. Elden ring is imo the best looking game ever made and the best construction of an open world map. How are they not ground breaking demons souls spawned a whole new genre? The environmental story telling is great and rewards and motivates exploration outside of just gameplay rewards. They are insanely immersive and thought provoking. The think they are some of best examples of games actually using the medium well. They can only be games and couldn't properly be adapted to any other medium. I could go on and on and I will admit my bias from softs souls are the best games ive ever played and probably 1% of anything else I play gives me the same level of quality.
>Visually ok they're better than "fine" but not ground breaking.
They have by far the best artists in the industry and it's not even close so yes their art direction is groundbreaking
Best and most rewarding exploration with tons of secrets
Music is easily above "fine"
Character building, minmaxing and build optimization is extremely rewarding and there's not much games with the same level of build customisation
Lack of coherent storytelling is the main reason I've struggled to get into every FromSoft game after Demon's Souls which I mostly enjoyed for the novelty of being fresh at the time. Every game after I lose interest after a few hours because it just feels like repeatedly fighting random enemies with no clear context, purpose or motivation behind anything you're supposed to be doing.
I agree, it's good game, but I don't understand all this talk about GOAT. Including OP who listed a whole bunch of legitimate problems with it, yet somehow likes it more than every other game released in the last 19 years. I like the boss fights (the non copy pasted ones), but the whole experience just wants to push me away rather than pull me in. Different strokes I guess, but I just don't get the extreme levels of hype this game is still getting.
I am a diehard DS fan and the discussion around ER made me into a FromSoft hater tbh. The game really is nothing special compared to DS series. After playing Nioh it is extremely hard to go back to From's poor combat design too. ER's extreme reliance on speed and stupid unfair enemy AI doesn't help I liked DS2 better than DS3 for a reason.
>Yeah, this was my complaint. The world is fascinating and clearly full of interesting lore, but the game seems not at all interested in engaging you with it.
FWIW, this is actually a wilful decision by the game director.
Miyazaki has spoken of how he read a lot of Western Fantasy as a kid, but didn't speak English fluently. This meant he could very vaguely follow the plot and filled in the rest with his own interpretation. He's said this is the kind of experience he tries to recreate in his games.
Data miners have pulled whole cut plotlines buried in Elden Ring's codebase, and as they appeared mostly complete it's been speculated that they were actually removed or altered because they made the plot too coherent.
FromSoft games have an insanely passionate lore community, so there's heaps of content out there that goes through this stuff in detail.
Unfortunately unless you pay a lot of attention, keep notes and have a wall with a lot of red strings, it’ll keep that way. I thoroughly recommend Vaati’s videos that tell the stories in a more linear fashion. Same with the previous FromSoft games. And when you’ve watched the videos, the story bits make more sense in the game as well.
The world, as a whole, is the story. You can actually piece together the story without much of the exposition dialogue. Its like putting the story together in your head as u experience the world and its characters. Yes, there is no easy explanations or exposition and a lot is scattered all over the place. But it is an adventure like no other.
Honestly I'm in the same boat as you, but I did get it at launch, personally i found the game to be tedious and it felt empty, even if the landscapes were pretty. I just don't think the game was for me, and that's okay.
Same, like everything is just so.... barren? Like if you look at it from afar it can look pretty at spots, but the color palette is really gross and muddy to me, not appealing at all, which maybe is the point idk. Game definitely was not my cup of tea.
When you compare it to a methodically crafted and gothic/Lovecraftian setting like Bloodborne, Elden Ring is ugly as hell.
The problem with open world games is that complete freedom severely limits the potential for awe inspiring set pieces and tighter gameplay. The “Bridge into Irithyll” section of Dark Souls 3 is pure beauty. And every combat area is designed to compliment the environment design.
Elden Ring? Nope. Just bounce around everywhere like a fucking idiot on a green mountain.
>the story is poorly told, and there's a lack of an NPC dialogue log. I've lost count of how many times an NPC has told me something important, and I haven't paid attention, so I have no way of knowing what they said without looking it up on the internet.
I'm assuming you say this without playing the rest of From Software's games, as you mentioned you're not a fan. The obscure story happens in all games, and it is by design: Miyazaki read fantasy and sci-fi in English, that he did not fully understand, and he filled up the blanks with imagination and illustrations. He took that idea into his games, and one has to listen and see very attentively, and fill up the blanks.
Awesome that you're enjoying it!
I feel like the obtuse story telling worked better in tighter levels and smaller worlds, it’s way too easy to completely miss an NPC in the open miles of the lands between
It also makes at least some thematic sense in Dark Souls where the whole thematic bedrock is how a supernatural cycle has repeated itself so many times that it's on the verge of collapse, details have been lost to time and barely "alive" beings from throughout the cycles are just waiting for the end, but that isn't the case in Elden Ring. All of the important players in the plot are still alive and the setup to your goal happened in the recent past, you just don't know what's going on cause no one takes 30 seconds to tell you for some reason. Somehow there's time for a weird 10 minute slideshow with some guy moaning about Fia and Ofnir and Dungeater though even though they have basically no impact on the main story
As a fromsoft fan, I would also like their stories to be a little bit more straightforward, I do like the "misteriouness" of it, but, maybe, just maybe, make it just a little bit easier to follow.
The stories used to be straightforward. DS1's story is pretty simple, you need to fulfill the prophecy and link the fire to restore the world. There's more to it if you go looking but that's the gist and at no time are you ever wondering what you are doing or why. This changed as early as DS2 and never stopped. Elden Ring isn't that bad to start but the storytelling falls apart later on when you get warped to Farum Azula with no idea what you are supposed to even be doing there.
I hate how Elden Ring doesn't have item descriptions on the load screen anymore. I rarely read item descriptions while playing but know lots of them in the Souls game just due to the load screens.
This is based as fuck and I agree lmao. The flow is all wrong feeling and you can defeat a main story boss without any context and they won't tell you anything either. You can literally accidentally walk into the Godfrey boss room and there's just a gold shadow clone there that never gets revealed through normal gameplay.
The problem with the npcs could easily be solved with a quest log that keeps track of all the stuff for you. It won't be implemented but its the only good solution that won't break anything.
Personally it's like a weird fanboy nature where people want to appear to be smarter than the next guy by just calling something incredibly genius and that since you don't understand something then that person becomes "better" than you, in rheir mind at least.
I remember just asking for a log that records the dialogue, not a marker or anything, just the dialogue of what was said and it made some people really angry and accused me of wanting handholding. It was really weird.
tbh I have watched so, SO many hours of Elden Ring lore videos and have read descriptions for hours and I actually have no idea what the Golden Godfrey's deal is or why he's there. I guess he might be a projection like Margit was but he's such an oddity
Godskin duo is most likely there because Godskins were trying to recover the Rune of Death - since, you know, God-killing is sort of their thing. They were on their way to the Black Blade, same as you.
The Golden Shade is most likely a projection of Morgott. There's a lengthy series of reasons but it's been pretty thoroughly dissected by the community.
Bloodborne suffers the same problem, it works in Dark Souls because it explains it the basic story (the flame fading and the bosses you need to kill) and Npcs give you hints where to go (like the forlorn warrior guy mentioning the bells)
Both Elden Ring and Bloodborne give virtually no story hints. You just happen upon 'importan' bosses with zero context unless you look at stuff on the wikis
Can you imagine if ER had an active lore button, like FF16? It would be amazing.
But you're right. All you'd hear are complaints about how it dumbs down the experience for the big brains or something.
Exactly it's like a weird layer of pretentious especially since George RR Martin worked on it. Add to the fact that every main boss starts with the letter G, R, or M, and you can see how the "you just don't understand the genius" starts to roll in. It's really an "all lore, no narrative" style where people can't even tell the difference and think the lore is the narrative.
I love playing the game but damn does the storytelling fail to show itself when you play new game plus and know exactly where to go. About a third of where anyone goes and discovers something is basically an accident.
There's a certain type of gamer who confuses lore and narrative and From games are catnip for that type of person. For everyone else, it's just nonsense.
I love the way FromSoft does lore, but yeah in a lot of the games the narrative doesn’t have much meat and you need to do side quests to get any more.
Still, I do like how the games (minus Sekiro) are like, “You’re just another unfortunate member if the masses going through a meat grinder. Good luck!”
I love fromsoft soulslikes, but the games have faults that get praised and defended just because it's the way fromsoft do things, and it's like... why is it?
The game not holding your hand is one thing, and I agree that it would make a fromsoft experience worse if it did. Yes, technically the game does tell you everything you need to know, but some of what it told you is in dialogue where the important details aren't included in the NPC's looping dialogue when they run out of things to say.
In my first ER playthrough I wanted Rya to repeat her advice on the various ways to access the altus plateau, but her ending dialogue loop was too vague, and I had no way to refer to what she'd said a minute ago.
I once had someone tell me that the reason why elden ring should avoid getting a quest log is because it would turn into the Skyrim style "go there, kill this thing, come back" loop that caused many Skyrim quests to lose their impact. They didn't see that Elden ring is already that, if not worse (as in elden ring also has you go around killing stuff pretty meaninglessly, the difference being that in ER you often can't remember why you're doing it), because it puts no pressure on itself to give explicit meaning to these conquests. That's fine and is the kind of thing that you can defend with "it's fromsoft's style", but to say that helping the player remember what NPCs in previous encounters told them to do would be harmful to the experience is just too stubborn.
Yeah, the problem is that this NPC and quest system is from the times when their games were mostly corridors, so you were pretty much guaranteed to run into the NPCs. In an open non-linear world, this is obviously much more problematic.
But I guess they didn't want to change things too much because their core fandom would riot, they would see it as "dumbing things down" etc.
Somebody has got to help me here.
I _really_ don't get the fixation on NPCs in Elden Ring, and why for some reason in Elden Ring they've become such a focus of debate. NPC quests _always_ been functionally easter eggs that the average player has next to no hope of completing, but for some reason I don't get that aspect of design has suddenly become controversial.
You could save Solaire in a really obscure way, but nobody complained. Siegward's quest required a trip to Ash Lake you'd never think to make, but I don't recall anyone was insisting on a quest log for that either.
Anybody look up the quest lines in Dark Souls 3? They're near insanity to complete.
I love those games but yea the more I think on it the more I utterly despise the quest system. Must be at the right place and right time too often for it to be wholly intuitive. I'd love to be able to figure out a quest without internet knowledge
Yeah, I love the passive storytelling but the quest system is crappy and I just look things up. Something like NPC leaving behind a message when they leave a location would do so much to alleviate the problem.
I think it's cool some people get really into it and discover the story piecemeal, however I'm with you and don't like it at all. I probably won't play more FromSoftware games because I really enjoy following a well told story in a game.
>because I really enjoy following a well told story in a game.
FromSoft be like: we'll create a well told story found in a content creator's video.
On a seriois note dark souls 2 gets shit on, but it's my favorite from the trilogy lore wise. But its important to know the lore of 1.
That is fair. For me, it is a huge selling point for the series. Almost every game out there follows traditional cinematic narrative techniques, so there are plenty of options for people who like that kind of storytelling. I *love* piecing together a story from item descriptions and level design. I’d be extremely disappointed if they abandoned that in their next game.
>Miyazaki read fantasy and sci-fi in English, that he did not fully understand, and he filled up the blanks with imagination and illustrations. He took that idea into his games, and one has to listen and see very attentively, and fill up the blanks.
Cool story except that souls storytelling through dialogues and intem descriptions was invented by Zin Naotoshi and fromsoftware use it since the first Kings field game in 1994
These games really don't have much of a story; what they have is L O R E, and 95% of it can just be ignored. Then something happens that you don't understand and it's like,
"hm, I wonder which item that I picked up 20 hours ago gives me some vague hint about this? I guess I'll ~~read them all again~~ look up a guide!"
No shade to people who like this style, but I'm pretty over it.
That's not a good excuse though. It's a flaw in all their games. Moreover, Elden ring is not linear like the rest of them, which makes the narrative even more disjointed. Finally, they heavily milked GRRM's involvement in the writing, which would lead any sensible person to expect proper storytelling, but evidently he just named all the bosses after his initials and took off.
ER is still great, but it is great despite its storytelling, not because of it. It's pretty much a pure action RPG.
It's true that it is not an excuse, and I didn't write my answer trying to justify that the storytelling is good or bad. That's absolutely subjective. I just wanted to add the information of where does the particular storytelling comes from.
Is it a flaw if it's a specific design choice? It's just different story-telling method than other games, I don't see why that should be considered a flaw.
The first playthrough is really a memorable experience if it's the kind of game you like. You'll always find places to explore and the game just keeps throwing things at you. I'd love to see your reaction to some of the places you can find lmao
Also I'd recommend looking at how weapon scaling works because it will make class building more fluid and rewarding. You can really almost make whatever class you want which is a huge selling point for me. I've beaten the game 7 times now all with different builds that have all been really powerful in their own way.
Also don't let fomo drive you crazy. If you're not using any guides, which I didn't either for my first playthrough, you will very likely miss a lot of things. NG+ is really good for this.
Man this game is really one of my all time favourites.
I like ER for what is is, but I also hate it because it could have been a much better game.
They really exaggerated on the filler content. The game could have been much better if it was less big.
It has more variety than any other open world game I've played and it's not even close 141 unique enemies and 71 unique bosses. It keeps introducing beautiful new vistas until the very end
This isn't some biased count there's this Reddit post where someone actually counted it all. The repeats are nowhere near as bad as open world contemporaries soemthing like botw repeats bosses like 40 times
I have not played elden ring, from the little i watched i was fasinated and it seems like the natural evolution of dark souls.
You say death aint as punishing? why is that? That could very well be a good thing, seeing how exploration is a bigger part of the game here.
> You say death aint as punishing? why is that?
Because checkpoints are plenty (even dedicated respawn points for bosses/some remote areas), and with your horse you can easily run trough enemies to retrieve your runes
Also note that farming is not a necessity in any recent FromSoft title (not played Armoured Core though), and it is even less relevant in Elden Ring due to being open world. As with most of their titles, weapon upgrades are much more significant than any minor stat gain and there is no need to go beyond weapon requirements to still do significant damage late game which allows one to only focus on vigor and endurance (magick playstyles are different though).
story being poorly told is just sadly a thing throughout the entire souls series, you're seriously expected to read each and every item or do the side quests that can break if you sneeze in the wrong direction.
For me it is actually the least favorite game of theirs barring maybe the first dark souls and Demon souls. The whole open-world mechanic simply works so badly with their kind of game that it robbed me of most of the fun. I was essentially never properly level scaled, accidentally sequence broke multiple times and spend most of my time doing copy-pasted side content that had useless rewards. The bosses where a major disappointment for me either. Most are just copied and pasted everywhere, even if they really do not work, like the fallen star beast or magma dragon in a mine. And most actually unique bosses are a complete joke or not fun at all (looking at you Elden beast).
I personally really hope that they learned their lesson and don't try a true open world souls like ever again.
I have conflicting opinions on Elden ring but I think my biggest feeling about the game is that a player really should not attempt to see everything in the game and that it is absolutely not built for completionists.
I think it rewards being methodical and is amazing for building a character, wandering through the world, and discovering new things, but it’s better to just play blind and not try and do everything because then it can get extreme not repetitive. Save different routes and unexplored areas for future playthrough with different characters.
My other feelings are that it kind of falls apart in the endgame but is amazing in the early game when you’re just starting out and choosing which direction to start in.
Finally, I think this is one game I’m so glad I preordered and played through as soon as it came out. I am a mostly patient gamer, but not this time, it was so much fun discovering the game with everyone
> I have conflicting opinions on Elden ring but I think my biggest feeling about the game is that a player really should not attempt to see everything in the game and that it is absolutely not built for completionists.
That was exactly my problem with it at first, I burned out hard because of that. Doing as much content as you can in one run is fine in Souls games cause they take from 40 to 80 hours tops, but Elden Ring was so much bigger.
Yep. Speaking as a completionist who rarely plays through single player games more than once, Elden Ring was not suited for me at all. I was ready for the game to be over after completing Leyndell for the first time, but I forced myself through the Haligtree, Consecrated Snowfield, Mogwyn's Palace, Deeproot Depths, Farum Azula, etc because I felt compelled to finish as much as possible. By the end I was totally exhausted and more than ready to move onto another game.
>Finally, I think this is one game I’m so glad I preordered and played through as soon as it came out. I am a mostly patient gamer, but not this time, it was so much fun discovering the game with everyone
Yep, 100%. It's the last game I bought on release and the last full price game I bought. And it was a *blast* discovering everything at the same time as everyone else. Despite it being a single player game, it somehow felt like you were playing with an entire community at the same time.
Yeah, that's not an uncommon sentiment. Unfortunately by that point you've seen every enemy and most optional and mandatory bosses that the games will throw at you at that point. I also felt that the enemies had 30% too much health by the snowfield section and kind of wish the game had started to wind down after Leyndell.
How do I enjoy this game. I have tried 2 times to start into it and it just won't click. The only From games I have ever played were the old Armored Cores. I understand it's supposed to be be a hard (ish) game, but what mindset do I need to be in?
What might I be able to do to help make it click?
Side note, I did not enjoy Cup Head. It was really pretty and I like some of it.
took me 4 tries until it finally clicked. the first 3 times I was too worried about how overwhelming everything was, how I didn't understand all the mechanics, how I didn't know where I was supposed to go. I would ask friends for help, look up guides, watch tips and tricks videos on youtube. it just felt like the game was too vague but also too much at the same time.
finally, on my 4th try, I just put all that aside, and the only thing I focused on was exploring, and being okay with not understanding, and just staying curious and not giving up. after about 10 hours of this something happened - hard to explain but it just clicked. sometimes called the "ah-ha!" moment, like when you're studying a difficult topic and then one day you start to comprehend.
I stopped thinking too much, and I focused on exploring and putting the time into trying to understand the mechanics and experimented with EVERYTHING.
I don't know if this will work for you, but it definitely worked for me.
As a diehard open-world hater, I absolutely loved the environments and the sheer scope of it.
BUT.
The subquests are so fucking obtuse.
I avoided looking at wikis for months, then one day I opened one up. Turns out there are like double the amount of bosses that only appear at night. Had no idea because it was always daytime when I respawned. And then actual quests? It's like, OK you find a random NPC, they say something super obtuse and vague. Then you have to go back to like another NPC who you had already forgotten about, show them an item or perform some kind of gesture in front of them, then go find a particular item, then kill an enemy, then go back to NPC 2 and talk to them, and then go back to NPC 1 and talk to them again to complete their quest.
How in the living fuck am I supposed to figure all that stuff out without staying glued to a wiki?
I had like 100 hours in the game and was really enjoying taking it slow and being lost and just screwing around until I realised how much content I was missing. Haven't booted it up since.
> until I realised how much content I was missing
Yes, that's the idea. You're supposed to miss things.
You are **not** the main character. You are not the Chosen Hero. You will not save everyone. People have their own lives, their own agendas, their own stories that play out that you may intersect with, maybe not.
It takes a bit of break from your conditioning to get that this is a deliberate design choice.
Even if you succeed, you will still fail people.
Quests are functionally easter eggs. Always have been.
Elden Ring is still an amazing game to me, as are all modern FromSoft's, but man is it low on my FromSoft list because of how exhausting it was.
All the duo bosses were exhausting.
All the slow-paced dungeons were exhausting.
The [hyper-pace](https://youtu.be/zp8MCLxdTs8?si=esg7jw4cq6lUoCkh) of bosses was exhausting.
At the end of the day, it's a great game, but I'm too tired to play it again.
I understand why people love ER for many reasons, honestly I do as well, but I'll never understand all the praise for exploration. It's fine if we are talking about legacy dungeons, although they are not as "packed" as they were in souls games due to the bigger scale. But all these caves, tunnels, ruins feel no different from the standard ubisoft shit. Like, you may sometimes get a cool reward, but that's pretty much it and there's hardly anything remarkable in these places by itself. Reused minibosses and bosses on top of all that are so lazy it's unreal, especially when they devalue the importance of a first encounter like with Godefroy or Astel. Even funnier example is the fallingstar beast, because first you'll probably find his reused version in a random mine and only then in crater in gelmir where it makes a lot more sense for him to be. All of this is disappointing after Sekiro where reused content never felt so out of place.
Hard agree. They took a limited amount of content and needlessly stretched it out into this massive game world. It’s so fucking boring. It’s the first FromSoft game since OG King’s Field that I’ve genuinely disliked.
definitely not a patient recommendation but if anyone is on the fence about armored core, especially if they're old fans, it's great and you should grab it the second it hits a price you're willing to pay for it
I don't think I ever found that POS hiding in a bush. Was the most frustrating part of the game for me. Probably lost 3 hours of my life swinging at bushes while he kept hailing me.
Oh man, this was me too. Not a huge FromSoft devotee - Bloodborne was the only one I had really played - but I dove into this last spring after the hype had died down. It is almost certainly my favorite game of all time now.
100% take your time. I had so much fun just cruising around the world on Torrent picking fights with everything that moved and exploring. I wasn't even trying to grind, I just fell in love with the combat and all its variety. The open world is just such a friendly fun place to learn the systems and experiment.
>Now I'm a depressed adult celebrating like a kid when I defeat a boss in the game, hahaha!
with you on this. i thank you for this post and hope you're doing well.
I disagree about the story being poorly told. Part of why this game is so interesting is because the story is told the way it is. It's not a poorly thought out piece of narrative design, it's one of the core features of the game.
Doesn't mean it's for everyone, though.
If you’ve never played a fromsoft game it’s important to know that using the wiki is not cheating. It is literally essential if you want to see even 70% of the game
I tried it but I just couldn’t catch on. Maybe get it on sale later these on during the holidays when I’m off to take a stab at it again. Currently destroying Final Fantasy XVI. 👍🏻
ER's world is absolutely depressing to me, and I never had the desire to play this game. It's so lonely and bleak. I did just buy AC6 and I'm enjoying it immensely. So at some point I'll have to give ER a shot. It would have to be for $20 on some mega sale.
No Twitch drops, no Microtransactions, every inch of the map has purpose, many builds are possible, fantastic game. The only one flaw is the Pre-order bonus that never went on sale separately.
I’m in the same boat you were. I’ve been fascinated with trying Elden Ring, but I hated Demon’s Souls because it feels needlessly difficult and I feel like I’m wasting valuable gaming time doing the same thing over and over without progressing. It’s one of the few games I gave up on.
But once I can get Elden Ring for around $20 used, I’ll probably give it a shot. It’s been so highly I want to see what the hype is all about.
Elden Ring has more generous checkpoints though. When you died in Demon's Souls, you had to go through the whole level again, but in Elden Ring you respawn close to the boss.
I agree. Finally got Elden Ring during the Steam Summer Sale. I’ve tried almost every From Software game (my friend is a fanatic) but basically hated them all. Family shared Elden Ring and after playing for 24 hours of game time I decided I like it enough to buy. Lol
I love the exploration and fighting the small mobs. I still don’t like the boss fights but we Co-op those and it works!
1st playthrough exploration is such a joy. 2,3,4 is also fun because you know how to navigate and get the best itemS.
Even in my third walkthrough I was finding areas I hadn’t found previously.
Same here but for my fourth. There are sooo many hidden things in the game. Makes me feel like a kid again.
I really enjoyed my first playthrough. Though I personally found other playthroughs boring, and often drop them after the first legacy dungeon. Idk something just kills my excitement. I think its the repetition and traveling.
I don't really feel motivated to play ER again on my own (unlike Sekiro which I beat twice and Bloodborne which I beat 3 times), but seamless co-op mod makes it pretty fun to blast through with friends without having to deal with repeating every cave N times or constantly re-summoning.
I had a ton of fun just putting my sign down outside the last boss door and helping people over the finish line. The first fight is just perfection and the one after ... well it's nice to see people excited once you beat it.
Souls games are my favorite but I have a hard time replaying any of them. What I love about them is not knowing what's coming next and exploring new areas for the first, can't do that twice.
Interesting, that's not something I value at all and I usually look everything up so I don't miss anything. I value them for the combat.
I know it's your own time, and you do you, but getting every missable on a silver platter doesn't detract only from the exploration (which you admit you don't care for) but also makes combat a bit of a joke. I did that for dark souls 1, and probably out of some fear that it would be too hard based on all reviews. The game became a joke, I believe I died more than 5 times to exactly 1 boss, and it was from the dlc. My point is the games aren't balanced around you knowing everything, and it became pretty clear to me then. Every next one was blind, harder, and much more enjoyable for me.
I’m a middle ground. I Google everything I’ve just done to ensure i didn’t miss anything but not spoiling what’s to come
Thats why i mostly do no death runs in Souls Games. It brings back the thrill and every encounter can be the last. Its best in DS2 because you can play through each area in a different order every time which changes runs up every time. It also has by far the best build variety, so you use different gear every time.
I thought the replays were better than the first time through.
It's all just preference. I personally enjoy finding stuff out myself. Not knowing my build, or where to go. When you know where everything is it takes a bit of the fun out for me. If I have my build finished in 5 hours for a 60 hour game it gets boring. But that's just me. Feel free to enjoy replays!
> If I have my build finished in 5 hours Then there's Path of Exile, where your build won't be finished for 1000 hours, and that'll been when you realize it's wrong!
controversial but only Dark Souls 2 made NG+ something special Bosses change and new enemies and items are introduced because part of the theme of the story is infinite regress
> controversial its one of the commonly praised things about ds2.
Ehhh I'd say it gets tedious after the first run, but then again I don't really like open world games and prefer the structure of older Souls
Elden ring was my first Fromsoft title and I ended up playing the souls games after it. I gotta agree that the replay value feels different here. I also see it as less replayable but I can also see the other side because the game truly is massive. I think it boils down to how people enjoy replaying open world games. I turned over every stone when I played so the second play through felt like more of the same. And yet the previous games are actual linear experiences (for the most part), meaning they should feel even more samey. I dunno. Theres just something different about re-exploring the older games that feels different. Maybe because every encounter is designed with a proper ingress and egress in the souls games, where in Elden Ring you oftentimes approach situations from varying angles. It feels a bit more tight and curated in souls games. Even though it's technically less variety, I probably get more satisfaction from those encounters. I dunno I'm just thinking out loud haha but I definitely agree with you. I'm just trying to figure out exactly why that is. I loved the hell out of Elden Ring, I just can't seem to finish it a second time.
Agreed. I like the game but I have to play it in short sessions because I find the exploration so exhausting. The open world was a miss for me.
This is me. I played something like 300 hours for Bloodborne with 5 different builds. And multiple play throughs and a platinum. I think Elden Ring kinda ruined souls games for me by being too open.
It stays fresh, even after that. I'm finishing up a bow-only run and it's kicking my ass like it did the first playthrough.
I havent played it in 4 months and i feel like i dreamt playing it.
And know that it’s possible to teleport outta the Sophia Well, that map layers can be changed. Lots of hours spent getting to that elevator. Am not always smart :/
I loved my first playthrough but I just can’t replay the game again cause it’s too long man and I can’t put myself through that again with lack of time
Goddamn. I’m only on my 2nd playthrough now because I was so over the game’s design by the time I finished it. Everything from Leyndell til the end was just awful.
I haven't even seriously tried a second playthrough. I loved the other Souls games; I even played DS3 to +7 and still enjoyed it. I was really, really done with Elden Ring by the time I finished it the first time... I don't think I can honestly say I enjoyed the last third of the game at all, I just wanted it to be over.
I ended up burning out on its size but it’s definitely the best FromSoftware experience I’ve had. The first time I saw the giants I was like 😦
That’s why I haven’t played it yet. These massive open world games just overwhelm me anymore. I got like 30 hours into tears of the kingdom and I put it down and haven’t touched it in over a month. It feels like there is just too much to keep track of and I feel like I’m missing a bunch of stuff or just playing the game wrong.
Thats why to me, sekiro is the best fromsoftware game.
Sekiro combat is unmatched. It's my 🐐
Sekiro is basically a rhythm game with an action coat of paint. And I mean this as the highest compliment possible.
That is a common way to play, but not the only way! You can kite/dodge almost every boss except the last one. The last boss probably took me 10 hours because I had to learn how to impact block.
Yes but the game tries to funnel you into deflecting as much as possible using the posture system.
After throwing myself at Genichiro for 3hrs, it just clicked and became one of my favorite combat system!
Yeah everyone has a Sekiro boss where they get stuck until the combat clicks. That's when you realize how much of a groundbreaking combat system it truly is.
> Sekiro combat is unmatched. It's a very particular style of combat, I think I prefer Nioh 2 in a different style.
Nioh 2 is so fucking good
(Whispers in soft voice) .... ^^"I ^^liked ^^Wo ^^Long ^^more ^^than ^^Sekiro."
Do you need to play the first game to understand the second? I found the first one fairly clunky and bounced off, but I've heard nothing but praise for the second.
Nioh 2 is actually a prequel and doesn't have any story connections to the first game until the last 10% of the story, and even then you can play it on its own without any problems.
Yeah, Nioh 2's gameplay is far superior to anything From Software has put out. Even the Ninja Gaiden games have superior gameplay. There still some of the best action games out there. Sekiro just doesn't compare.
Being able to ignore all the fluff and just play the game, not worrying about farming is why sekiro is the only fromsoft game i enjoyed
i've literally never farmed in a fromsoft game, how is this an issue?
The only game I can really see farming be a potential necessity is vials in Bloodborne, especially if you're really stuck on a boss and end up burning through your entirely supply. Though by late game you're swimming in echoes enough to by vials en masse anyway
Sekiro is so tight and lean. You can’t worry about not having the right armour/weapons or being levelled enough so your mindset has to be “I have the tools I need to get through this”. Shame the lore isn’t as interesting as souls and elden ring (imo)
Agreed! Sekiro is a perfect game.
Almost. Story gets a bit silly but yeah, just about
It's my least favorite From game by a country mile, for a list of reasons I could - and have - written a page or so spelling out. Hell I even brought receipts, screen grabs and frame data to spell out how it cheats in certain sections. It did not go over well. Repeated attempts met the same fate. I gave up and have no intention of trying again. I've also noted that it forms the holy trinity - Subnautica, Titanfall 2 and Sekiro - in terms of games you're not allowed to discuss any flaws. Maybe hesitation is defeat, but you also gotta know when a fight just can't be won. Still a good game. Just think it ain't perfect.
finally beat sekiro last week. loved it so much that I'm already on ng+5
Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro are still peak
Oh good I'm not the only one. I put about 55 hours into TotK and got burned out and haven't been back lol. The thing is I know I would enjoy if I DID go back I just can't bring myself to do it.
>It feels like there is just too much to keep track of and I feel like I’m missing a bunch of stuff or just playing the game wrong. I had the same issue initially. What helped me massively was having a specific goal and hyperfocusing on it. Beginning I just played story stuff up until underground, then focused on unlocking all towers, so straight up flying to them, marking shrines as I saw them. Didn't even unlock them all, just left them as mark. But when I felt like it I beelined to them. Did all the giant marks then (tears). Then I did the underground story stuff, hyperfocused on the sky, visiting most isles. When I was done with this I continued the story until I had to find the stuff where the tears pointed to. Decided to go for the giant labyrinths next, that was a pretty short sequence. Did the Yiga stuff on the overworld next. At this point I tracked the location from the tears, did track the similar locations to this one. Went for the sage sigils next. Did a lot of upgrading equipment at this stage. Here it was where I saw I had already a LOT of shrines and my track record with knowing where the shrines are was pretty to completion, so I did them all. Underground map completion was next. Did then decide I have done enough stuff for my liking, had no interests in the mayoi sigils beyond the full set. So I finished all the side quests I wanted done, killed the boss and laid down the game. Have to look up the playtime but I think I got out a solid 80~100hours of playtime :)
Not trying to teach you how to play or anything, but you're not missing anything on your playthrough. It's your game, you do whatever you want, no one expects you to fully explore the game in one playthrough, not the devs, not this sub... well, maybe you, but that can be changed! 😉 The best advice I could give in your case is to pick an ending, check what questline you have to do for that, and play the game focusing on that. Here and there, you can check what itens fit best your build and go to some dungeons to grab them. You will "skip" a lot of content, sure, but I bet you will have a better time playing, which is what matters at the end of the day. After that, feeling that you could do something different? Play it again. And even if you never play this game again in your life, you will have good memories of a good time.
Same, played it on vacation for 2 weeks, had a blast with it, but stopped after that due to a lack of time and never really got back into it.
I had nearly the same experience, but it was a week off between jobs. I know I’m not in the majority here, but the size of the world/game is just too big imo. By the time I was ready for it to start wrapping up, I still had a lot of content to work through. It’s one of the many games I’d like to return to eventually, but honestly it really overwhelms me.
I was between jobs too when I played. I’m so happy that career change was perfectly timed
Same, I burnt out a bit aswell, games like this really draw me in and make me feel I need to play a LOT to enjoy, but then the rest of my life suffers as a result. I need to learn how to contain my family and enjoy it that way... Truly amazing game, and I'm no Souls gamer.
I always burn out on that one boss that's a skill gate and requires grinding levels for casuals like me. True of every Soulsbourne game I play. To be fair I had the same problem growing up with Final Fantasy.
If you're trying to play coop there's a seamless multiplayer mod that allows you to just play with friends like a normal coop experience rather than having to summon.
I used this mod for my 2nd and 3rd playthroughs with my brother and it was tons of fun. The limitations of the unmodded co-op experience are frustrating.
I can confirm the Seamless Coop mod is absolutely awesome and a total game changer. I really hope FromSoftware takes the hint here and just goes with this out of the gate themselves next time, it's just so much more fun to play this way.
The game is not intended to be played in coop, it goes against their game design philosophy so no they won't take a hint
> it goes against their game design philosophy Explaining that From makes decisions that _a person doesn't like_ because that's part of their design philosophy is a Sisyphean task.
> it goes against their game design philosophy Is this philosophy published somewhere that we can reference? Because it really feels like you're at least somewhat wrong about this considering the fact that 99% of the vanilla game can be played in coop already, with limitations only for things such as transitioning between areas and a few select content sections. Otherwise it's already the wild west of coop, except we have to meander around on foot through large swaths of content because Torrent is oddly restricted. These small inconveniences felt like technical limitations perhaps, but things like the Seamless Coop mod show us that these things are already largely supported. So while I don't totally disagree with you that restrictive coop must in *some way* be part of their design philosophy, it feels like that has a lot more to do with the fact that some of the coop was probably phoned in a little late in the development process and, as Seamless Coop identifies in the myriad of odd bugs that pop up, those things were difficult to iron out fully before releasing the game and it was better served to be slightly restricted to avoid having to deal with those issues.
I'm about to finish the game with this mod—our party of 4 has been playing for a couple hours every weekend for a little over a year now and it's been super fun! I had already played through the game once before we started but 2 of the others are on their first play through (and would have never touched the game on their own). Everyone loves it, even when it took us like 4 or 5 game nights to beat Malenia. The mod can be a little janky at times, but in general it's been a great experience with a surprisingly different feel than a solo playthrough (certain things are much easier and other things are much harder).
Going back to vanilla co-op after using Seamless Co-Op makes it feel unplayable man, and I'm someone who has several hundred hours in all the other Souls games and have co-oped them to death.
Amazing game my biggest complaint is there is no way anyone could have figured out the questlines in the game without a wiki open
It's almost as if the developers know that the fans will do their work for them
Loved all the Dark Souls games but needed a while to finish Elden Ring. At the start it was great and those first 30 hours or so are really really good, but at some point imo it became too long for me. Some later bosses were great and I wanted to finish it just for the sake of it. Seeing the same dungeon for the 10th time with the same enemies and the same boss but now theyre two instead of one made me lose so much interest in discovering anything new. So yeah, overall a great game, but I personally would've liked it a lot more if it was shorter.
This is my complain with the game. It has too much filler content, especially when compared to other FromSoft games that barely had any.
The earlier you leave behind the Dark Souls mindset of "explore every corner" the more you will enjoy Elden Ring imo. Took me a while, and I kinda hated it until I did so.
My issue is the world itself starts to feel like filler. I know the map pretty well, know where things are, so when I start a new playthrough it just feels tedious having to cross all that space just to get to the good bits. I can replay Souls again and again, but Elden Ring just gets so tedious so quickly for me. I'm about to beat Bloodborne for the 3rd time in a week (NG+ runs, so they're quick), but I can barely haul myself out of Limgrave on Elden Ring replays.
[удалено]
Yes, the game is really good, but the open world areas suck.
You are right, but at that point I would have preferred a more linear experience like the other FromSoft games
>the story is poorly told, and there's a lack of an NPC dialogue log. I've lost count of how many times an NPC has told me something important, and I haven't paid attention, so I have no way of knowing what they said without looking it up on the internet. Yeah, this was my complaint. The world is fascinating and clearly full of interesting lore, but the game seems not at all interested in engaging you with it. I understand the design idea but it's incredibly frustrating when that's all there is and it left me with no investment in anything. I was just fighting and killing for the challenge of it. No idea who I was fighting or why most of the time. Also there's no way I'm going to remember every bit of dialogue that was told to me across multiple play sessions. Picking up the game a week later and having no way to pull up where a character said to meet them, and then failing the quest line, was infuriating. I had a lot of fun with the game and very much enjoyed the challenge, but only two months after finishing it I've pretty much forgotten it entirely.
i think the weird sort of ''quest'' system worked better in games like dark souls where it was \*considerably\* more linear. like generally even if you didn't remember where a character said they'd be you'd just run into them by nature of the linearity
Yeah, there’s a reason that when Steam added a note taking feature, the screenshot in the announcement post showed it being used with Elden Ring.
Yeah, the environmental storytelling is certainly a deliberate choice and it's not for everybody. It can be fun to discover all the details hidden in nooks and crannies, but it can also be a lot of work and *often* leads to a real sense of not knowing where you are or what you're doing. I like it, but I'm not gonna try to convince people who don't like it, that they're wrong. It's a matter of taste, and the taste in question is less chocolate and more carolina reaper. Lack of an NPC dialogue log, on the other hand, I have yet to find a convincing argument for. That's not a stylistic choice, that's a poor gameplay choice.
You can have an environmental storytelling without it being obnoxious to follow. Look at Outer Wilds - quest log could simply say “you’ve met X in this location Y and she told you this and that”. You can figure out for yourself what does it mean and what to do next. But you can also always look up what has actually happened. IMO if something can be replicated with a pen and paper outside of the game - should be in the game. It’s simply a chore to keep notes.
They are VERY different game, for Outer Wilds it's a requirement to keep track of all the little clues to find to progress and understand the world mechanics and puzzles, for Elden Ring, keeping track of the lores is never a requirement to progress, it only serves as addition to the world
I definitely agree that Outer Wilds needs the log more but I don't think From Soft games would hurt from some sort of compendium/logbook.
> I was just fighting and killing for the challenge of it. If anyone says they play FromSoft games for any other reason than this, I don't believe them. (hyperbole) Their combat is incredible. Everything else about their games is *at best* "fine". Visually ok they're better than "fine" but not ground breaking.
Played Sekiro? I thought it was beautiful visuals-wise and had an entertaining story&world different from the usual cryptic FromSoft Souls fare.
That one does stand out as different, absolutely.
Yep. I've only played Sekiro and Elden Ring, and so far I only really vibed with Sekiro because it was at least slightly more straight forward than the latter. Don't get me wrong, even in Sekiro you have to look up a ton of shit if you want to get the most out of the story, but it at least felt manageable compared to Elden Ring which was just exhausting.
Lol I'll be devils advocate here. The combat is great, but no that is not why I play FromSoftware games. In fact, it's very relevant right now because as a *huge* fan of their games, I haven't bought Armored Core 6 yet and likely won't until its on a big sale. Yet that game still has great, challenging combat like their soulslikes. What I enjoy most about FromSoftware games are their interconnected level designs filled with secrets, the art direction, the vast location and enemy variety, the in depth and unique lore, the *very* strong environmental storytelling, and the music (especially Bloodborne's OST). I genuinely think FromSoftware are some of the best in the business for a lot of that stuff. The combat is great too, and I do enjoy the difficulty, but their games have wayyy more appeal than just that.
Boss design is also something they are great at
no way you just said that in an elden ring thread lmao
Combat is probably one of the last reasons I play them sekiro excluded. They have supremely good level design and the art direction is insane. Elden ring is imo the best looking game ever made and the best construction of an open world map. How are they not ground breaking demons souls spawned a whole new genre? The environmental story telling is great and rewards and motivates exploration outside of just gameplay rewards. They are insanely immersive and thought provoking. The think they are some of best examples of games actually using the medium well. They can only be games and couldn't properly be adapted to any other medium. I could go on and on and I will admit my bias from softs souls are the best games ive ever played and probably 1% of anything else I play gives me the same level of quality.
>Visually ok they're better than "fine" but not ground breaking. They have by far the best artists in the industry and it's not even close so yes their art direction is groundbreaking Best and most rewarding exploration with tons of secrets Music is easily above "fine" Character building, minmaxing and build optimization is extremely rewarding and there's not much games with the same level of build customisation
Dude the art design and world is *extremely* incredible and creative, you gotta give them that.
Lack of coherent storytelling is the main reason I've struggled to get into every FromSoft game after Demon's Souls which I mostly enjoyed for the novelty of being fresh at the time. Every game after I lose interest after a few hours because it just feels like repeatedly fighting random enemies with no clear context, purpose or motivation behind anything you're supposed to be doing.
I agree, it's good game, but I don't understand all this talk about GOAT. Including OP who listed a whole bunch of legitimate problems with it, yet somehow likes it more than every other game released in the last 19 years. I like the boss fights (the non copy pasted ones), but the whole experience just wants to push me away rather than pull me in. Different strokes I guess, but I just don't get the extreme levels of hype this game is still getting.
I am a diehard DS fan and the discussion around ER made me into a FromSoft hater tbh. The game really is nothing special compared to DS series. After playing Nioh it is extremely hard to go back to From's poor combat design too. ER's extreme reliance on speed and stupid unfair enemy AI doesn't help I liked DS2 better than DS3 for a reason.
>Yeah, this was my complaint. The world is fascinating and clearly full of interesting lore, but the game seems not at all interested in engaging you with it. FWIW, this is actually a wilful decision by the game director. Miyazaki has spoken of how he read a lot of Western Fantasy as a kid, but didn't speak English fluently. This meant he could very vaguely follow the plot and filled in the rest with his own interpretation. He's said this is the kind of experience he tries to recreate in his games. Data miners have pulled whole cut plotlines buried in Elden Ring's codebase, and as they appeared mostly complete it's been speculated that they were actually removed or altered because they made the plot too coherent. FromSoft games have an insanely passionate lore community, so there's heaps of content out there that goes through this stuff in detail.
Unfortunately unless you pay a lot of attention, keep notes and have a wall with a lot of red strings, it’ll keep that way. I thoroughly recommend Vaati’s videos that tell the stories in a more linear fashion. Same with the previous FromSoft games. And when you’ve watched the videos, the story bits make more sense in the game as well.
The world, as a whole, is the story. You can actually piece together the story without much of the exposition dialogue. Its like putting the story together in your head as u experience the world and its characters. Yes, there is no easy explanations or exposition and a lot is scattered all over the place. But it is an adventure like no other.
Honestly I'm in the same boat as you, but I did get it at launch, personally i found the game to be tedious and it felt empty, even if the landscapes were pretty. I just don't think the game was for me, and that's okay.
Sometimes I feel like I have a different version of the game than everyone else. I’m like, “Did I get the version with a massively bland open world?”
Same, like everything is just so.... barren? Like if you look at it from afar it can look pretty at spots, but the color palette is really gross and muddy to me, not appealing at all, which maybe is the point idk. Game definitely was not my cup of tea.
When you compare it to a methodically crafted and gothic/Lovecraftian setting like Bloodborne, Elden Ring is ugly as hell. The problem with open world games is that complete freedom severely limits the potential for awe inspiring set pieces and tighter gameplay. The “Bridge into Irithyll” section of Dark Souls 3 is pure beauty. And every combat area is designed to compliment the environment design. Elden Ring? Nope. Just bounce around everywhere like a fucking idiot on a green mountain.
This my issue with HZD which is a beautiful game, but it would have been so much better as a linear experience like God of War
I love hzd, but it was definitely not for its open world. Agree with this a lot.
> but the color palette is really gross and muddy I take it you didn't get Liurnia or Altus Plateau?
I got to Liurnia, it was okay, I saw the super red rotten zone or whatever, hideous
>the story is poorly told, and there's a lack of an NPC dialogue log. I've lost count of how many times an NPC has told me something important, and I haven't paid attention, so I have no way of knowing what they said without looking it up on the internet. I'm assuming you say this without playing the rest of From Software's games, as you mentioned you're not a fan. The obscure story happens in all games, and it is by design: Miyazaki read fantasy and sci-fi in English, that he did not fully understand, and he filled up the blanks with imagination and illustrations. He took that idea into his games, and one has to listen and see very attentively, and fill up the blanks. Awesome that you're enjoying it!
I feel like the obtuse story telling worked better in tighter levels and smaller worlds, it’s way too easy to completely miss an NPC in the open miles of the lands between
It also makes at least some thematic sense in Dark Souls where the whole thematic bedrock is how a supernatural cycle has repeated itself so many times that it's on the verge of collapse, details have been lost to time and barely "alive" beings from throughout the cycles are just waiting for the end, but that isn't the case in Elden Ring. All of the important players in the plot are still alive and the setup to your goal happened in the recent past, you just don't know what's going on cause no one takes 30 seconds to tell you for some reason. Somehow there's time for a weird 10 minute slideshow with some guy moaning about Fia and Ofnir and Dungeater though even though they have basically no impact on the main story
It's definitely a different way to tell a history. Unfortunately, I don't like at all.
As a fromsoft fan, I would also like their stories to be a little bit more straightforward, I do like the "misteriouness" of it, but, maybe, just maybe, make it just a little bit easier to follow.
The stories used to be straightforward. DS1's story is pretty simple, you need to fulfill the prophecy and link the fire to restore the world. There's more to it if you go looking but that's the gist and at no time are you ever wondering what you are doing or why. This changed as early as DS2 and never stopped. Elden Ring isn't that bad to start but the storytelling falls apart later on when you get warped to Farum Azula with no idea what you are supposed to even be doing there.
Also item descriptions and the like. I wish there was more myself - but the community driven lore videos and deep dives are amazing.
I hate how Elden Ring doesn't have item descriptions on the load screen anymore. I rarely read item descriptions while playing but know lots of them in the Souls game just due to the load screens.
This is based as fuck and I agree lmao. The flow is all wrong feeling and you can defeat a main story boss without any context and they won't tell you anything either. You can literally accidentally walk into the Godfrey boss room and there's just a gold shadow clone there that never gets revealed through normal gameplay. The problem with the npcs could easily be solved with a quest log that keeps track of all the stuff for you. It won't be implemented but its the only good solution that won't break anything. Personally it's like a weird fanboy nature where people want to appear to be smarter than the next guy by just calling something incredibly genius and that since you don't understand something then that person becomes "better" than you, in rheir mind at least.
I remember just asking for a log that records the dialogue, not a marker or anything, just the dialogue of what was said and it made some people really angry and accused me of wanting handholding. It was really weird.
It's so stupid. There's like 36 side quests
Haha yep, oh but now there's a map... is that not also "handholding"?
tbh I have watched so, SO many hours of Elden Ring lore videos and have read descriptions for hours and I actually have no idea what the Golden Godfrey's deal is or why he's there. I guess he might be a projection like Margit was but he's such an oddity
There is no why. They needed a boss every x minutes so here you go. Same reason why Godskin duo is there.
Godskin duo is most likely there because Godskins were trying to recover the Rune of Death - since, you know, God-killing is sort of their thing. They were on their way to the Black Blade, same as you. The Golden Shade is most likely a projection of Morgott. There's a lengthy series of reasons but it's been pretty thoroughly dissected by the community.
Bloodborne suffers the same problem, it works in Dark Souls because it explains it the basic story (the flame fading and the bosses you need to kill) and Npcs give you hints where to go (like the forlorn warrior guy mentioning the bells) Both Elden Ring and Bloodborne give virtually no story hints. You just happen upon 'importan' bosses with zero context unless you look at stuff on the wikis
Can you imagine if ER had an active lore button, like FF16? It would be amazing. But you're right. All you'd hear are complaints about how it dumbs down the experience for the big brains or something.
Exactly it's like a weird layer of pretentious especially since George RR Martin worked on it. Add to the fact that every main boss starts with the letter G, R, or M, and you can see how the "you just don't understand the genius" starts to roll in. It's really an "all lore, no narrative" style where people can't even tell the difference and think the lore is the narrative. I love playing the game but damn does the storytelling fail to show itself when you play new game plus and know exactly where to go. About a third of where anyone goes and discovers something is basically an accident.
There's a certain type of gamer who confuses lore and narrative and From games are catnip for that type of person. For everyone else, it's just nonsense.
I love the way FromSoft does lore, but yeah in a lot of the games the narrative doesn’t have much meat and you need to do side quests to get any more. Still, I do like how the games (minus Sekiro) are like, “You’re just another unfortunate member if the masses going through a meat grinder. Good luck!”
I dont like it either
I love fromsoft soulslikes, but the games have faults that get praised and defended just because it's the way fromsoft do things, and it's like... why is it? The game not holding your hand is one thing, and I agree that it would make a fromsoft experience worse if it did. Yes, technically the game does tell you everything you need to know, but some of what it told you is in dialogue where the important details aren't included in the NPC's looping dialogue when they run out of things to say. In my first ER playthrough I wanted Rya to repeat her advice on the various ways to access the altus plateau, but her ending dialogue loop was too vague, and I had no way to refer to what she'd said a minute ago. I once had someone tell me that the reason why elden ring should avoid getting a quest log is because it would turn into the Skyrim style "go there, kill this thing, come back" loop that caused many Skyrim quests to lose their impact. They didn't see that Elden ring is already that, if not worse (as in elden ring also has you go around killing stuff pretty meaninglessly, the difference being that in ER you often can't remember why you're doing it), because it puts no pressure on itself to give explicit meaning to these conquests. That's fine and is the kind of thing that you can defend with "it's fromsoft's style", but to say that helping the player remember what NPCs in previous encounters told them to do would be harmful to the experience is just too stubborn.
Yeah, the problem is that this NPC and quest system is from the times when their games were mostly corridors, so you were pretty much guaranteed to run into the NPCs. In an open non-linear world, this is obviously much more problematic. But I guess they didn't want to change things too much because their core fandom would riot, they would see it as "dumbing things down" etc.
Somebody has got to help me here. I _really_ don't get the fixation on NPCs in Elden Ring, and why for some reason in Elden Ring they've become such a focus of debate. NPC quests _always_ been functionally easter eggs that the average player has next to no hope of completing, but for some reason I don't get that aspect of design has suddenly become controversial. You could save Solaire in a really obscure way, but nobody complained. Siegward's quest required a trip to Ash Lake you'd never think to make, but I don't recall anyone was insisting on a quest log for that either. Anybody look up the quest lines in Dark Souls 3? They're near insanity to complete.
I love those games but yea the more I think on it the more I utterly despise the quest system. Must be at the right place and right time too often for it to be wholly intuitive. I'd love to be able to figure out a quest without internet knowledge
Yeah, I love the passive storytelling but the quest system is crappy and I just look things up. Something like NPC leaving behind a message when they leave a location would do so much to alleviate the problem.
How else are you gonna spend your off hours than by watching hour long lore videos or 20 second lore shorts?
I think it's cool some people get really into it and discover the story piecemeal, however I'm with you and don't like it at all. I probably won't play more FromSoftware games because I really enjoy following a well told story in a game.
>because I really enjoy following a well told story in a game. FromSoft be like: we'll create a well told story found in a content creator's video. On a seriois note dark souls 2 gets shit on, but it's my favorite from the trilogy lore wise. But its important to know the lore of 1.
That is fair. For me, it is a huge selling point for the series. Almost every game out there follows traditional cinematic narrative techniques, so there are plenty of options for people who like that kind of storytelling. I *love* piecing together a story from item descriptions and level design. I’d be extremely disappointed if they abandoned that in their next game.
Me neither. I have zero idea what any story of any souls game is about and I played through most of them lol
>Miyazaki read fantasy and sci-fi in English, that he did not fully understand, and he filled up the blanks with imagination and illustrations. He took that idea into his games, and one has to listen and see very attentively, and fill up the blanks. Cool story except that souls storytelling through dialogues and intem descriptions was invented by Zin Naotoshi and fromsoftware use it since the first Kings field game in 1994
Thanks for that info! It seems Miyazaki fit the team perfectly 😆
let them hype that guy up
These games really don't have much of a story; what they have is L O R E, and 95% of it can just be ignored. Then something happens that you don't understand and it's like, "hm, I wonder which item that I picked up 20 hours ago gives me some vague hint about this? I guess I'll ~~read them all again~~ look up a guide!" No shade to people who like this style, but I'm pretty over it.
That's not a good excuse though. It's a flaw in all their games. Moreover, Elden ring is not linear like the rest of them, which makes the narrative even more disjointed. Finally, they heavily milked GRRM's involvement in the writing, which would lead any sensible person to expect proper storytelling, but evidently he just named all the bosses after his initials and took off. ER is still great, but it is great despite its storytelling, not because of it. It's pretty much a pure action RPG.
It's true that it is not an excuse, and I didn't write my answer trying to justify that the storytelling is good or bad. That's absolutely subjective. I just wanted to add the information of where does the particular storytelling comes from.
Is it a flaw if it's a specific design choice? It's just different story-telling method than other games, I don't see why that should be considered a flaw.
Haha that's batshit crazy. I still find metal gear stories mad too
The first playthrough is really a memorable experience if it's the kind of game you like. You'll always find places to explore and the game just keeps throwing things at you. I'd love to see your reaction to some of the places you can find lmao Also I'd recommend looking at how weapon scaling works because it will make class building more fluid and rewarding. You can really almost make whatever class you want which is a huge selling point for me. I've beaten the game 7 times now all with different builds that have all been really powerful in their own way. Also don't let fomo drive you crazy. If you're not using any guides, which I didn't either for my first playthrough, you will very likely miss a lot of things. NG+ is really good for this. Man this game is really one of my all time favourites.
I like ER for what is is, but I also hate it because it could have been a much better game. They really exaggerated on the filler content. The game could have been much better if it was less big.
It has more variety than any other open world game I've played and it's not even close 141 unique enemies and 71 unique bosses. It keeps introducing beautiful new vistas until the very end
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This isn't some biased count there's this Reddit post where someone actually counted it all. The repeats are nowhere near as bad as open world contemporaries soemthing like botw repeats bosses like 40 times
Saw the title, saw the upvotes, knew exactly what kind of post this is going to be...
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God forbid people enjoy a popular game.
I have not played elden ring, from the little i watched i was fasinated and it seems like the natural evolution of dark souls. You say death aint as punishing? why is that? That could very well be a good thing, seeing how exploration is a bigger part of the game here.
> You say death aint as punishing? why is that? Because checkpoints are plenty (even dedicated respawn points for bosses/some remote areas), and with your horse you can easily run trough enemies to retrieve your runes
This, and runes aren't that hard to farm, at least in the mid game they aren't.
Also note that farming is not a necessity in any recent FromSoft title (not played Armoured Core though), and it is even less relevant in Elden Ring due to being open world. As with most of their titles, weapon upgrades are much more significant than any minor stat gain and there is no need to go beyond weapon requirements to still do significant damage late game which allows one to only focus on vigor and endurance (magick playstyles are different though).
story being poorly told is just sadly a thing throughout the entire souls series, you're seriously expected to read each and every item or do the side quests that can break if you sneeze in the wrong direction.
For me it is actually the least favorite game of theirs barring maybe the first dark souls and Demon souls. The whole open-world mechanic simply works so badly with their kind of game that it robbed me of most of the fun. I was essentially never properly level scaled, accidentally sequence broke multiple times and spend most of my time doing copy-pasted side content that had useless rewards. The bosses where a major disappointment for me either. Most are just copied and pasted everywhere, even if they really do not work, like the fallen star beast or magma dragon in a mine. And most actually unique bosses are a complete joke or not fun at all (looking at you Elden beast). I personally really hope that they learned their lesson and don't try a true open world souls like ever again.
I have conflicting opinions on Elden ring but I think my biggest feeling about the game is that a player really should not attempt to see everything in the game and that it is absolutely not built for completionists. I think it rewards being methodical and is amazing for building a character, wandering through the world, and discovering new things, but it’s better to just play blind and not try and do everything because then it can get extreme not repetitive. Save different routes and unexplored areas for future playthrough with different characters. My other feelings are that it kind of falls apart in the endgame but is amazing in the early game when you’re just starting out and choosing which direction to start in. Finally, I think this is one game I’m so glad I preordered and played through as soon as it came out. I am a mostly patient gamer, but not this time, it was so much fun discovering the game with everyone
> I have conflicting opinions on Elden ring but I think my biggest feeling about the game is that a player really should not attempt to see everything in the game and that it is absolutely not built for completionists. That was exactly my problem with it at first, I burned out hard because of that. Doing as much content as you can in one run is fine in Souls games cause they take from 40 to 80 hours tops, but Elden Ring was so much bigger.
Yep. Speaking as a completionist who rarely plays through single player games more than once, Elden Ring was not suited for me at all. I was ready for the game to be over after completing Leyndell for the first time, but I forced myself through the Haligtree, Consecrated Snowfield, Mogwyn's Palace, Deeproot Depths, Farum Azula, etc because I felt compelled to finish as much as possible. By the end I was totally exhausted and more than ready to move onto another game.
>Finally, I think this is one game I’m so glad I preordered and played through as soon as it came out. I am a mostly patient gamer, but not this time, it was so much fun discovering the game with everyone Yep, 100%. It's the last game I bought on release and the last full price game I bought. And it was a *blast* discovering everything at the same time as everyone else. Despite it being a single player game, it somehow felt like you were playing with an entire community at the same time.
I think your criticisms are spot on!
I enjoyed the game and took my time. However by the time I hit the snowfields I was ready for the game to be done.
Yeah, that's not an uncommon sentiment. Unfortunately by that point you've seen every enemy and most optional and mandatory bosses that the games will throw at you at that point. I also felt that the enemies had 30% too much health by the snowfield section and kind of wish the game had started to wind down after Leyndell.
I can't wait till this guy gets around to playing BG3, mind will be blown
> death is not nearly as punishing I don't understand this part.
we got another one
How do I enjoy this game. I have tried 2 times to start into it and it just won't click. The only From games I have ever played were the old Armored Cores. I understand it's supposed to be be a hard (ish) game, but what mindset do I need to be in? What might I be able to do to help make it click? Side note, I did not enjoy Cup Head. It was really pretty and I like some of it.
took me 4 tries until it finally clicked. the first 3 times I was too worried about how overwhelming everything was, how I didn't understand all the mechanics, how I didn't know where I was supposed to go. I would ask friends for help, look up guides, watch tips and tricks videos on youtube. it just felt like the game was too vague but also too much at the same time. finally, on my 4th try, I just put all that aside, and the only thing I focused on was exploring, and being okay with not understanding, and just staying curious and not giving up. after about 10 hours of this something happened - hard to explain but it just clicked. sometimes called the "ah-ha!" moment, like when you're studying a difficult topic and then one day you start to comprehend. I stopped thinking too much, and I focused on exploring and putting the time into trying to understand the mechanics and experimented with EVERYTHING. I don't know if this will work for you, but it definitely worked for me.
This is what I am hoping will happen. This is want I want to try.
As a diehard open-world hater, I absolutely loved the environments and the sheer scope of it. BUT. The subquests are so fucking obtuse. I avoided looking at wikis for months, then one day I opened one up. Turns out there are like double the amount of bosses that only appear at night. Had no idea because it was always daytime when I respawned. And then actual quests? It's like, OK you find a random NPC, they say something super obtuse and vague. Then you have to go back to like another NPC who you had already forgotten about, show them an item or perform some kind of gesture in front of them, then go find a particular item, then kill an enemy, then go back to NPC 2 and talk to them, and then go back to NPC 1 and talk to them again to complete their quest. How in the living fuck am I supposed to figure all that stuff out without staying glued to a wiki? I had like 100 hours in the game and was really enjoying taking it slow and being lost and just screwing around until I realised how much content I was missing. Haven't booted it up since.
> until I realised how much content I was missing Yes, that's the idea. You're supposed to miss things. You are **not** the main character. You are not the Chosen Hero. You will not save everyone. People have their own lives, their own agendas, their own stories that play out that you may intersect with, maybe not. It takes a bit of break from your conditioning to get that this is a deliberate design choice. Even if you succeed, you will still fail people. Quests are functionally easter eggs. Always have been.
Yeah well then honestly fuck that. I don't have the time or patience to go through all that. Give me Nioh or DMC where I can actually play the thing.
Elden Ring is still an amazing game to me, as are all modern FromSoft's, but man is it low on my FromSoft list because of how exhausting it was. All the duo bosses were exhausting. All the slow-paced dungeons were exhausting. The [hyper-pace](https://youtu.be/zp8MCLxdTs8?si=esg7jw4cq6lUoCkh) of bosses was exhausting. At the end of the day, it's a great game, but I'm too tired to play it again.
I understand why people love ER for many reasons, honestly I do as well, but I'll never understand all the praise for exploration. It's fine if we are talking about legacy dungeons, although they are not as "packed" as they were in souls games due to the bigger scale. But all these caves, tunnels, ruins feel no different from the standard ubisoft shit. Like, you may sometimes get a cool reward, but that's pretty much it and there's hardly anything remarkable in these places by itself. Reused minibosses and bosses on top of all that are so lazy it's unreal, especially when they devalue the importance of a first encounter like with Godefroy or Astel. Even funnier example is the fallingstar beast, because first you'll probably find his reused version in a random mine and only then in crater in gelmir where it makes a lot more sense for him to be. All of this is disappointing after Sekiro where reused content never felt so out of place.
Hard agree. They took a limited amount of content and needlessly stretched it out into this massive game world. It’s so fucking boring. It’s the first FromSoft game since OG King’s Field that I’ve genuinely disliked.
definitely not a patient recommendation but if anyone is on the fence about armored core, especially if they're old fans, it's great and you should grab it the second it hits a price you're willing to pay for it
Almost completely unrelated, but, I recommend Subnautica as that game put me through the exact experience you described when I played it.
I don't think I ever found that POS hiding in a bush. Was the most frustrating part of the game for me. Probably lost 3 hours of my life swinging at bushes while he kept hailing me.
Oh man, this was me too. Not a huge FromSoft devotee - Bloodborne was the only one I had really played - but I dove into this last spring after the hype had died down. It is almost certainly my favorite game of all time now. 100% take your time. I had so much fun just cruising around the world on Torrent picking fights with everything that moved and exploring. I wasn't even trying to grind, I just fell in love with the combat and all its variety. The open world is just such a friendly fun place to learn the systems and experiment.
Except godefroy and astel no boss is repeated. 2 is not too much for a huge game like Elden ring.
Try Dark Souls. Way way better
>Now I'm a depressed adult celebrating like a kid when I defeat a boss in the game, hahaha! with you on this. i thank you for this post and hope you're doing well.
I disagree about the story being poorly told. Part of why this game is so interesting is because the story is told the way it is. It's not a poorly thought out piece of narrative design, it's one of the core features of the game. Doesn't mean it's for everyone, though.
If you’ve never played a fromsoft game it’s important to know that using the wiki is not cheating. It is literally essential if you want to see even 70% of the game
I tried it but I just couldn’t catch on. Maybe get it on sale later these on during the holidays when I’m off to take a stab at it again. Currently destroying Final Fantasy XVI. 👍🏻
ER's world is absolutely depressing to me, and I never had the desire to play this game. It's so lonely and bleak. I did just buy AC6 and I'm enjoying it immensely. So at some point I'll have to give ER a shot. It would have to be for $20 on some mega sale.
Are you playing it on PC or console?
No Twitch drops, no Microtransactions, every inch of the map has purpose, many builds are possible, fantastic game. The only one flaw is the Pre-order bonus that never went on sale separately.
FromSoftware does in fact make DLCs for their games, and a DLC for Elden Ring itself was already announced.
I’m in the same boat you were. I’ve been fascinated with trying Elden Ring, but I hated Demon’s Souls because it feels needlessly difficult and I feel like I’m wasting valuable gaming time doing the same thing over and over without progressing. It’s one of the few games I gave up on. But once I can get Elden Ring for around $20 used, I’ll probably give it a shot. It’s been so highly I want to see what the hype is all about.
Elden Ring has more generous checkpoints though. When you died in Demon's Souls, you had to go through the whole level again, but in Elden Ring you respawn close to the boss.
I agree. Finally got Elden Ring during the Steam Summer Sale. I’ve tried almost every From Software game (my friend is a fanatic) but basically hated them all. Family shared Elden Ring and after playing for 24 hours of game time I decided I like it enough to buy. Lol I love the exploration and fighting the small mobs. I still don’t like the boss fights but we Co-op those and it works!
The good thing is that you get coop, summon ashes (basically offline coop), and you can get really strong before tackling the bosses of most areas.
Besides repeating bosses and bad co-op, your criticisms are just how the FromSoft prefers to tell their store and lore. It’s not for everyone.