Now that the dust has well and truly settled, what did you think of it? I mean really, no bullshit or memes. I was extremely disappointed when I first saw gameplay, it felt so soulless and derivative especially after Sekiro had successfully gone in a different direction. I still played Elden Ring for 120 hours and somewhat enjoyed it, but I feel the hype and lack of any decent alternatives were largely responsible for its success, and I cannot respect it as a game. If anything it confirmed everything we suspected, that open world is a meme, that "build variety" is worthless, PvP is worthless, ambiguous storytelling is obnoxious and gay. It retroactively made me like the previous games less. Now I feel BB and Sekiro are the only truly great games From have made.
no replay value
Literally more replay value than any other open world game out there shahzamtroony
>huge elden ring fan excited to replay it for the first time
I bet you haven't replayed it yet, and when you do you'll quit after Stormveil Castle.
One of the only five games I ever replayed from start to finished.
I've been playing games for over twenty years.
What were the other 4?
Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2, Morrowind and Dark Souls.
I could probably add some strategy games, but just playing through different scenarios isn't really the same category for me as playing through a game with a crafted narrative arc.
There's a lot of replay value. You can decide which routes to take and in what order, you can do different runs with different builds or weapons or challenges, you can download mods that change the game
>You can decide which routes to take and in what order
Go outside if you want that
>games have to be linear
>this enhances the replayability
It absolutely does. Open world is a flawed ideology. You simply can't do balanced player progression when the player can go anywhere.
>ideology
u wut m8?
"muh freedom"
Progression will obviously not always work out in open world games I totally agree. But open world games do offer better replayability because of their open ended nature. "What if I went that way this time?"
Holding up on the stick for 90% more time than a more tightly built game takes away from that.
Oh so your issue wasn't with the open world aspect but instead the length of the game? Do you just prefer shorter games?
I took 120 hours in dark souls 3 so not the length, it's that the time is not engaging, going from point A to point B is better in linear games because the levels are interesting. Open World worked for shadow of the colossus because it was still under a linear progression and there was no meaningless content like the copy pasted dungeons so it was nice to look at the scenery for a little while. People praise elden ring for not being Ubisoft design but it really is ubisoft design the only difference is that they don't pre mark the stuff in the map.
Another open world I liked was RDR2, again a linear game where the world is more of a backdrop.
>I took 120 hours in dark souls 3 so not the length, it's that the time is not engaging, going from point A to point B is better in linear games because the levels are interesting.
While I agree with this point it only applies to linear games that are actually interesting. Frankly I cannot believe you're seriously using DS3 as a good example of an interesting linear game. That game has so many dull and boring areas, art direction is just grey colors on top of each other and there are so many fricking swamp areas that are just not fun to play and actively discourage anybody from replaying the game.
Elden Ring has prettier areas, but DS3 kept me engaged with the constant combat just like the other games. In ER you immediately meet Margit which is a higher level boss, so you are forced to engage with the rather banal content in the dungeons to level up which is way less interesting than anything in DS3. It works the first time around because you don't know what to expect but I can't do that shit again. I want to go stright to Stormveil then the academy but You wend up severely underleveled if you ignore the other content. In DS3 you just play and the levels from clearing the dungeons are enough to carry you all the game.
> but You wend up severely underleveled if you ignore the other content.
you need a +3 weapon for stormveil for it to be comfortable experience. Thats it. I can reasonably do stormveil within less than an hour of starting a new character. Most XP comes from main story bosses and the way stat scaling works its very hard to over level or be under leveled, as long as your weapon is upgraded appropriately. You can screw up by simply building your character wrong though. The most impactful damage increases you get come from weapon level upgrade, not raw stats. the biggest filter a new player experiences is dying in 1-2 hits from low vigor.
the worst part about replaying elden ring is finding regular smithing stones. you can skip pretty much all side content apart from the stuff where your weapon upgrades are.
I can agree the difficulty progression is better in DS3 than ER (as we agreed earlier open world games usually have worse designed progression than linear games) but part of the fun of replaying an open world game is that you can do things in an unconventional way. This means you don't have to go the 'intended' route, or you could go straight into more difficult areas. You can go get a specific weapon early on and build your character around it. I've seen fun challenge runs like shields only, or pacifist run (you're not allowed to deal damage) or the like. The open world aspect lets you approach these challenges in an open ended manner and think outside the box.
Of course, a well designed linear game can also offer lots of replayability by merit of the deepness of its mechanics or build variety or the like as well. DS3 isn't fun to replay in my opinion because I think it's the most shallow of all of the souls games, the levels are forgettable and a slog to go through (except Eleum Loyce and DLCs), most builds are not viable while straight sword R1 spam shred everything, and without the online features you don't even get to experience the cool invasions. DS2 used to be my favorite with the PvP but without that feature it too is something I don't want to replay again
I suppose this would matter if you are into builds but I play these games like character action games so I don't even try anything other than the basic swords of different sizes. And you can do things out of order in some of the souls games.
Yes you can do things in a very different order in DS1, that makes the game very replayable. There is less of that in DS2 and DS2's PvE is the weakest in the series so that game's not very replayable to me at least (unless if the servers were turned on and you can get invaded again). DS3 is a very linear game.
You absolutely can't.
Your only option is to ring gargoyle bell first, then quelaag, then sen's into anor londo. A straight fricking line because everywhere else is blocked off before you kill snorlax and pikachu.
Everything seems linear when you point out 3 individual points in time lol.
You can go to Nito earlier can't you? You get divine ember at Darkroot Garden. And the same goes for the Four Kings, you can go there any time after beating Sif.
Can't get to the Lord Souls areas before you get the Lordvessel, they're blocked off. You can do absolutely everything other than Lost Izalith, Duke's Archives, and Tomb of the Giants before O&S though. Need both Bells before Sen's Funhouse and consequently Anor Londo and the Painted World. Not 100% sure on New Londo, I know you can get the key to lower the water by killing the old dude that has it from way far away, and you can get thr Covenant of Artorias by killing Sif just by buying the key off of Andre or just killing him, so in theory I think you could fight the Four Kings from the get go if you know what you're doing.
Yeah you can kill the 4kings that early and that's what people who want the early red eye orb do to get it, also you can do most of Tomb of the Giants before the lord vessel, just not the white cave with the pinwheels at the end.
You can beat Quelaag before Gargoyles, get pretty far into later game stuff even before the lord vessel, beat like 7 different bosses as your first (non asylum) boss, skip several areas, and beat the final bosses in any order. Don't post cringe like this again, okay?
Might be just me but I always felt fhat FromSoft games (sans Sekiro and maaaaybe Bloodborne) are pretty dull if you take out the RPG aspexts and play them as pure action games. Functional, but boring -- the combat just isn't nearly as good as it's gassed up to be, on its own merits.
Yeah I have the opposite opinion, I would like them more without the RPG elements.
Do you just dislike having to make a build and you just want to get into the action no strings attached? Do you like the Kingdom Hearts or Metal Gear Rising approach where you just play it?
I like RPGs and action games, but I don't like the combination. I don't want numbers having anything to do with action games.
Most people aren't autistic and judge it in a vacuum. Its just part of the complete package of the games.
People don't understand what actual roleplaying is anymore so most stat talk devolves into min/max homosexualry.
I agree which is kinda why Sekrio felt so boring to me, the combat is only mildly more interesting and everything else was stripped down too far.
>have more freedom in a huge world that allows you to make builds without having to have killed 95% of the bosses already
>this is bad
Did you get slam dunked as a child, anon?
Bullshit, most of the good shit is locked to the end game. This reeks of PvP homosexualry.
Depends. If build variety is deep and actually changes how you approach fights rather than being a numerical/cosmetic difference, even a linear game can feel fresh. Oh hey, there's SoP again, who keeps letting it in?
Can you name a few linear games where you can make different builds? DMC?
Many action RPGs that aren't just action games with scaling stats (heyo, Kingdom Hearts). How linear are we talking, does Nioh count? There's also to which degree stat permanency is necessary compared to free respeccing -- casting a broad enough net, everything from Diablo-likes to Mass Effect or Borderlands to Transistor could qualify as "single-player action RPG with builds".
Mate, saying "ER is the best at something nobody else does" isn't the achievement you think it is. Neon White is easily the best card-based speedrunning platformer FPS, but that doesn't say much. Also what do trannies have to do with anything?
What I find annoying about replaying the game, is that while choosing your route in theory has the most freedom of any Souls game ever, this results in some obviously good starting paths that make replaying irritating. Like, there is not really any reason to NOT just go get every flask upgrade in Limgrave, Liurnia, Caelid, and Altus right at the start of the game. If I'm going to do multiplayer, I really want to do that, because whether I'm actively seeking out PvP or not, I'm going to find it. And the other players are going to have near-maxed Estus, so I'd better have it as well. Similarly, most caves are irrelevant on subsequent playthroughs, but there are a few you're going to visit every playthrough to get upgrade materials. And the process of following a route is 99% running from point A to point B on your horse.
There's just too much overlap in what I'm doing from one playthrough to the next, and too much of it is tedious IMO. I think playing through the game slower and doing more optional side stuff, even if it doesn't offer useful rewards, could make the game more fun to replay. I'm trying to find a good approach to replaying the game to enjoy it most, but I'm annoyed that I even have to bother trying to figure out how to enjoy the game, instead of it just being enjoyable by default.
>near-maxed Estus, so I'd better have it as well.
>healing in pvp
People who heal in pvp should be permanently banned from playing these games
I mean, if invaders didn't heal, I wouldn't mind not having as much estus. But every level 20 invader is going to have 7 flasks and each one is going to heal them to full health, and theyre gonna use every last fricking one of them if they need to. Which they probably won't, because the host has 400 hp and will die to a single bleed proc.
>people who use the mechanics should be permanently banned
what a b***hmade sissy
I play how I want homosexual.
I'm on my 4th playthrough. Still finding new things.
I've done strength, intelligence and faith characters and had a good time with all of them. I don't think build variety is an issue
It's a great looking and well built game, but they fricked up the bosses immensely, basically undid every lesson from the rest of the series and did the opposite
>that open world is a meme
True, they did as good as they could but you can't balance the game when the player could enter the dungeon at level 1 vs level 100, unless you implement some soft level-range system.
>that "build variety" is worthless
Enemies have way way too much HP, I can't have a weapon without bleed unless I want to waste my entire day chipping at an enemy with more health than Midir that can 2 shot me (even at 40 vigor and heavy armour)
>PvP is worthless
True, everyone uses meta, even the giant jar duelists I turned off my internet to get reasonable duelists that aren't meta-builds
>ambiguous storytelling is obnoxious and gay
From has always done this, people love it for the flavour text, but for quests and stuff it's like how Minecraft used to lack recipes so you had to constantly tab-out and look at the wiki, people will still defend this because they think difficulty = lack of QoL
Strength is probably the hardest build in the game that isn't a meme build, but INT and FAI are just castors and magic in these games are easy mode
You hit a lot of nails on the head there
Those don't mean anything, the game is too hyped up that no sane reviewer would dare tarnish the name of a game from From.
The thing is that I get covid happened and that's probably why we seem repeats and duos everywhere, but it's like their marketing team forced their hand to make the game stupidly difficult (more tedious and unfair) to fit the "prepare to die" motto
What does Melina actually do? I come out a grave, sit outside a gatefront, and this woman comes out of nowhere to groom me into killing God, if it wasn't for the game-sake I would have ignored her
Bosses have too much health unless you use meta/bleed, otherwise it's tedium
It's a great game; it's just exhausting to replay due to being too big.
Played almost 300 hours and enjoyed all of them.
This. It's so much harder to pick up and replay. I always did a second run right after the first with the other games but no way that's happening with this one. I'll probably have a great time doing it all again in a year or so though
i agree. got to the capitol and dropped it. by then i had a +9 somber weap and literally hadnt died once since like raya lucaria
i'm sure ill give it another go someday to finish it but right now seems impossible to fathom doing that. the game is basically 90% filler
So you stopped when the game actually gets to the parts that require +9 somber weapons and now you complain it's too easy.
He was complaining that it was boring, not that it was easy. I beat Returnal with 4 deaths total, that doesn't make it easy either but it wasn't overly difficult.
it has an amazing first playthrough, one of From's best, but if you're the type of person who likes going through the game over and over, the open world really just gets in the way. also the NG+ balancing makes no sense. 75% of the game never poses any challenge on any NG+ cycle up to the max difficulty, but the endgame bosses get quite brutal. im not exaggerating when i say they shouldve AT LEAST doubled those 75% bosses hp. godrick will never pose any challenge after NG, but then a boss like godfrey (who i thought had too little health in NG) goes super saiyan. im glad they made this game and ive put over 500 hours into it, but at this point i think they should be proud of the library of these games theyve created over the years and move onto something else.
>that "build variety" is worthless,
This is bullshit man. ER is the first game where you could actually make a build besides melee. But BB and Sekiro have more variety? Frick off.
>But BB and Sekiro have more variety? Frick off.
OP didnt say that, he said theyre the only truly great games FROM has made. i liked DaS1 and demons, but BB and Sekiro do stand head and shoulders above everything else. roll-roll-r1 gets old after awhile and even the most homosexual of fanboys has to see that eventually
>roll-roll-r1
More bullshit. ER bosses have large combos like they do in Sekiro, you can't just roll and cheese a lot of them like in other Souls games.
Seriously how do you say you liked DS1 more and then go on to say ER is the roll game?
You absolutely can roll through and sometimes away from most of them, they just made the patterns harder than ever to figure out
i'm not implying that DaS1 or ER have different playstyles. just that it gets old after awhile. in case you dont know, before ER there was both DS2 and DS3 and all of them used the same formula. hence how roll-roll-r1 "gets old". in regards to why i still prefer DaS1, its because ER is diluted but the shit open world and all of its filler. there's a bunch of great content in ER. most of the legacy dungeons are top notch. but sadly they cant make up for how much inane garbage there is in between.
I would say that FromSoft agrees that roll roll r1 got old, which is why so many ER enemies' movesets are stuffed full off roll catches and fakeout delays. The problem is that, in service of the build variety and customization that is a large part of the Souls appeal, they refused to design enemies around players having access to all mechanics at one time, as they did with Sekiro. Hence roll roll r1 still being possible but harder and less engaging than ever, and opting out of it entirely jn favor of range, ashes and status effects being more and more encouraged.
Ok go try rolling and landing Azure on Beast or any boss where you can't mount up.
You'll get ripped apart by combos or interrupted, anyone that actually played the game knows that.
>roll-roll-r1 gets old after awhile and even the most homosexual of fanboys has to see that eventually
Bloodborne/Sekiro is exactly that, except replacing roll with dash and parry, respectably. Dishonest non-argument.
BB/Sekiro gameplay is much more tight, much more engaging.
BB has great weapons, it encourages you to engage the boss, to parry him.
On the other hand in ER it's the other way around: you are the b***h of the boss and had to endure his combos. The gameplay just isn't fun. And I won't even mention the buffer.
blatently false post by summergay zoomer
>On the other hand in ER it's the other way around: you are the b***h of the boss and had to endure his combos. The gameplay just isn't fun. And I won't even mention the buffer.
not really, str builds can actually trade against many bosses and rely on posture breaks
>Any flaws Elden Ring has are worse in Bloodbore.
what flaws? for example, Bloodborne doesn't have the artificial difficulty of passive, input reading bosses
I would say Sekiro's biggest strength is in the variety of defensive options, actually. Sure the core is deflects, but you also have jumping for sweeps, mikiris for thrusts, dodges for grabs and semi-unblockables you're not confident in deflecting or just for positioning and posture conservation. It makes for a very engaging combat system because it's constant back and forth with multiple possible answers, as opposed to mainly needing to time rolls then picking whichever option has the highest DPS in between enemy attack patterns.
What kills Sekiro to me is that the parry and the mikiri counter are you true attacks and attacks are borderline worthless.
Played it twice and dropped it both times at the final boss because he can't be cheesed like the other bosses and you have to chain 40-80 parries to deplete his posture bar.
I wouldn't say attacks are worthless by any means, but they're definitely underbaked and not terribly satisfying to use compared to the orgasmic deflections. They paper over that flaw a little bit with combat arts, but then there's about two of them that you'll ever need and the rest are cool but inefficient window dressing. Can't say I agree on Isshin though, learning his patterns so you can bait out thrusts and sweeps to counter is very satisfying. His second phasebeing way harder than the first and third is an odd choice, but he remains one of the GOAT bosses.
Not him, I personally don't mind roll-roll-R1, my point is that DS3 exhausted the potential for this combat style completely. Slave Knight Gael was the logical conclusion of roll-R1 combat, there was nowhere to go from there. My primary issue with Elden Ring isn't that it's bad, its that it didn't need to exist in the first place. They should have made something new, not DS3.5.
This is not true of Isshin, he actually has quite low posture health and it does not take long to posture break him. You can make this criticism of both versions of Owl who I think are too tanky to the point of getting boring.
Also attacks are not worthless lol. Trying beating any mid-late game boss with defensive moves only and see how long it takes vs doing it normally.
>Trying beating any mid-late game boss with defensive moves only and see how long it takes vs doing it normally.
Got walled by Genichiro for eight hours because I tried to just deplete his health.
Decided to just parry and won after one hour.
Anon, you're supposed to use both. Posture recovery slows down as health gets lower, and attacking an enemy stops their posture recovery. So the ideal is for the first half of each health bar to be spent attacking and evading in order to whittle down their health and get used to their patterns, then around half health you start to proactively engage in deflect-attack-deflect patterns in order to quickly build up their posture and deliver a deathblow. Either approach is insufficient on its own, you gotta use every part of the buffalo.
This thread has actually had some pretty good discussion despite the inflammatory OP, believe it or not.
I didn't say that. My point is non-melee in these games is worthless because you are literally not playing the game. What are you doing with an INT build? You don't have to dodge attacks, you don't even have to aim your spells, you just lock on and spam magic from a safe distance until enemy is dead. I claim BB and Sekiro are the best for many reasons, one of which is that they don't give you the option of cheesing the entire game with magic. Sekiro in particular demands you play the game the way it was designed to be played.
You can easily make non-melee builds in Bloodborne.
Arcane and Bloodtinge can shit out damage if you do them right.
Multiple classes start with spells right out of the gate in ER. BB is good but there isn't really competition in which game has more build variety.
Oh shut up already with your "build variety" which bows down to "range vs melee". And range is insanely boring.
The gameplay barely evolved since DeS.
What? DS1 INT is easy mode.
two words
bland
samey
Terrible game unless you play it at RL1, than it's the best of the bunch.
Mediocre af
PvP is somewhat even worse than DS3
Connection issues make the PvP nigh unplayable
I kinda wasted my money/10
I played it once and I have no desire to go back anytime soon. It was okay, but just seems like another FOTM game
I enjoyed playing it through once, the little dungeons were kinda crap since they felt the same. Open world is only good for one playthrough and it's just tedious to do another run.
A mostly mediocre game. I played it for 70 hours and about half way I wanted to quit. The open world stops amusing after a few hours. Where this game went horrendously wrong is with the quantity over quality philosophy. They thought they could make it work, it never has and never does.
I found it too difficult.
I play Bloodborne and the Souls games to unwind at this point, but Elden Ring just makes my blood boil.
>damage scaling and enemy health pools are moronic,
>stupidly delayed attacks and variable boss combos that punish you for the accumulated game sense you've built up if you're a series veteran
>barren open world tied to a 90% junk crafting system
>the same mobs in each region, just reskinned with minor variations (seriously, even the armours they drop are just slightly changed for the models)
>bosses and minibosses reused so often that they have you rolling your eyes whenever they show up ("oh...yet another Ulcerated Tree Spirit...")
>only good Legacy Dungeons are Stormveil and maybe Farum Azula
>the entire motherfricking Haligtree
>the story/ lore is just kind of lame, doesn't have the same depth or charm as the other games
I did like some of the bosses, weapons and encounters, and it is fun to explore the first time around, until you realise how shallow the open field actually is, and see the same assets for buildings in every new area.
But my biggest issue with it is the PvP:
the second they decided you couldn't invade solo hosts, I knew it was over. I personally prefer invading 3/4 v 1 in DaS3, but in Elden Ring it's beyond obnoxious considering the sheer variety of bullshit spells and weapon arts that can be thrown around, not to mention how obscenely broken so many things are in PvP.
tl;dr - it was fun until it wasn't, then I started to hate it. No longevity because of dogshit PvP.
Contrarian thread #152 but the game has already lamented itself as legendary.
Nothing you can do or say about it will change this, plebs.
Ok, tell us what makes the game so good.
>unmatched art design, not a single other game comes close
>unmatched kino exploration
>unmatched Combat freedom system that allows you to create any build you want that can be used simultaneously for PvE and PvP at the same time
>God Tier OSTs only surpassed by Dark Souls 3
>Concept of Legacy Dungeons in a open world that connects seamlessly is genre defining
>Best game director in all of videogames
Cant wait to see you homosexuals seethe even more when he picks up his 2nd GOTY in 3 years
>unmatched art design, not a single other game comes close
Btfo art design destroys your DS3 with open world
>unmatched kino exploration
WoW vanilla open world shits on your open world.
>unmatched Combat freedom system that allows you to create any build you want that can be used simultaneously for PvE and PvP at the same time
It's the same fricking combat since DeS and every "build" plays the same
>God Tier OSTs only surpassed by Dark Souls 3
Ok, I'm done feeding you
same old 0 arguments just repeat the same things over and over again with nothing to back it up, what happened to the original shahzamtrannies who tried?
Why do gays pretend the OSTs isn't good in ER? Godskin, Mogh, Placidusax, Godfrey, Radagon frick even Godrick and the Old Warriors are fricking great, we get it you dislike popular things.
Because it's bad?
It's generic orchestra, I can't remember a single OST.
that's how people are, they hear orchestra and choirs and automatically think its epic.
>Old warriors
>Elden Beast
>Black Knives
>Regal Ancestor Spirit
>Orchestra
Try harder shahzam
Oh yeah? If they're so memorable then hum them right now.
Interesting idea, but I think it would necessitate shrinking down the world a whole lot, for starters. Can't really fill a world this big with just weapons with unique movesets. You're also tangentially describing something like skill trees, which a lot of people hate. I don't dislike them as a concept, but execution varies massively and being part of the cookie cutter AAA Ubisoft sandbox game has soured some people on them.
its what elden ring already is for half the game. your stat choices dont really matter for like 50-75% of the game as far as damage is concerned. agility/strength give such little damage increases for 50% of the game its not worth investing in them at all unless you are meeting specific weapon requirements. Snowfields is when your stat investment and weapon upgrade level start synergizing in a meaningful way, which coincidentally is when a lot of players felt that the games balance went to shit and complained that either the enemies became damage sponges or killed them too fast.
>which coincidentally is when a lot of players felt that the games balance went to shit and complained that either the enemies became damage sponges or killed them too fast.
That was more because memesters kept peddling bad info well past when everyone else realized the soreseals actually effect mid-late game.
The memesters didn't know because they didn't really play it or get that far.
The rpg stat stuff is too rigid overall though.
Lore videos are still using music from the old games, even from fricking king's field, that should tell you something. This game has like 2 decent tracks the rest is generic ambient.
>Concept of Legacy Dungeons in a open world that connects seamlessly is genre defining
I dont get this meme. You enter the dungeon from an entrance, and exit from an exit, and sometimes you can walk around the dungeon from the outside. Whats so mindblowing?
Raise your standards, play more videogames please.
>Best game director in all of videogames
I like Miyazaki and his *previous* games, but you sound like a fanboy
Combat freedom system that allows you to create any build you want that can be used simultaneously for PvE and PvP at the same time
You can argue the other ones if you really want, but no way you typed this with a straight face.
name a single other videogame the size of Elden Ring that has both PvE/PvP at the same time where you can make whatever build you want
you cant dumb frick it's the only thing out there
all MMOs?
Same category as ER troony, Action RPG, doesn't even have to be open world
name at least 3 of them that do it better I'm waiting.
How many action rpgs even have pve and pvp? You're setting up a race ER runs alone so you can celebrate it getting first.
That is true, but Owl Father was an order of magnitude more fun than GSO because he quit jerking you about and actually fought you man to man.
Could actually work. ER sometimes feels like it's too tied to Dark Souls for its own good.
>How many action rpgs even have pve and pvp?
5 In total my good sir
You do realize none of what you said has any implication of quality, right? Having a) an open world, b) PvE and PvP and c) different builds are all core parts of ER's design, yes. None of it requires it to be particularly well implemented, and indeed it isn't -- the balance is horrendous.
Can't name any huh, Souls combat has to be compared to MMOs because it BTFO's everything else in the action rpg category, kneel already troony.
Other devs are lucky a game can only get 1 GOTY per year because otherwise ER+DLC would easily get another 4-5 years worth of GOTYs.
>>Best game director in all of videogames
I only wish
art design
Delusional. Didn't read the rest.
Name games with better art design
>kino
Stopped reading
It was pretty kino, when you go down that big ass lift in the woods to Siofra River.. my goodness..
good rule of thumb
>>God Tier OSTs only surpassed by Dark Souls 3
The only good tracks in the game are the main menu, Radagon's boss theme, and the godskin ost. Every other OST is forgettable
you didnt like maliketh or godfrey?
>maliketh
It's okay. Not bad, but not amazing either.
>godfrey
It's a good song, objectively speaking. I just don't like the way it sounds. Just not my taste.
we could tell by your first reply you had shit taste no one asked for an explanation
opinions are subjective.
Hoarah Loux theme is much better than those 3, still like them though.
>piss off the Erdtree Sentinel
Ancestral Spirit? You're literally gay if you don't like that one.
That track made me wish we got more unconventional soundtracks instead of the usual choir and orchestral voice.
Oh yeah, same here. I like the grand orchestra stuff but ER was such a long game that would've been nice to hear other things like Ancestral Spirit's theme once in awhile. I find it kind of odd that it's really the one track like that, but that also makes it really stand out and make that part quite memorable.
I have unironically never seen so many people turn on a game. Literally EVERYONE that I knew who hyped this game up are kinda like "yeah...this game sucks lol".
It's super sad, because everyone thought they were taking extra time working on this game, and that's why it took ER so long. Nope, turns out covid legitimately just fricked this game up.
>The reddit spacer got gaslit by troons.
Shocking stuff.
Game would've been even better without the chalice tier dungeons. Just the legacy dungeons, castles and underground zones and a bunch of beautiful empty fields to ride your horse across SotC style
>Hardcore Soulsborne fans disliked or outright hated Elden Ring
>I'm not a hardcore Soulsborne fan, I like the Souls clones made by other developers, and I liked Elden Ring as much as the other Souls games.
It really makes you think.
I'm a hardcore souls fan and ER is probably my favorite From game.
No you aren't.
same here
seethe more homosexual, it's peak contrarian and nothing more, oh no they found our "le little niche gem!!" time to jump ship and play the next shitty unfinished game so we can stand out and look interesting
The funny thing is that Ganker loves literal shovelware and still has the gall to shit on Elden Ring
Neither of you are hardcore Souls fans. Now
is an example of a true hardcore fan, someone who dislikes Elden Ring due to losing the magic that made Dark Souls so special.
The reason you like Elden Ring is because you aren't true fans.
>Hardcore Soulsborne fans disliked or outright hated Elden Ring
No they didn't. This place is just terminally contrarian that hates everything. There isn't a single mainstream game released this decade or the last that this board didn't absolutely despise at launch. It's only when the next installment is released that they will admit having liked it
im a hardcore souls fan. I liked it. Hardcore souls fans who hated it either hate it because the pvp is unbalanced as frick or they got filtered by the combat.
Im not gonna lie, the big bosses kinda sucked as pure melee. Elden ring is the hardest souls like game if all you do is R1 and dodge. a lot of people cant handle it and a lot of the complaints i see about the combat are really a derivative of getting filtered by this.
I also see people who cant handle that so they pick an easy mode way of playing, but then the game is too easy and feels unrewarding. The game has so many options in how to play its easy to either have too frustrating of an experience or too easy and unrewarding of an experience. Thats a genuine ciriticism of the game. RPG systems dont work well in open world for a variety of reasons.
I think Fromsoft should have had health and stamina increase as you level no matter what and changed the stat system entirely to something else so players could still make choice but were punished less for making the wrong choice stat wise. Then balanced the combat more around that baseline so the games overall difficulty has less spikes and stat checks.
The problem with the bosses is that they do random attacks at the end of the combos, so they punish you only sometimes. It's horribly inconsistent and shits all over the dance feel of the older games.
They cancel animations, cancel out of staggers, perform high speed attacks designed to roll catch you immediately after they stop the previous combo. Or they stay still. The RNG is king in this game and it's a massive step back.
I gotta say, one pattern of one boss in Sekiro had that (Great Shinobi Owl onky sometimes follows up his shuriken -> dash wish a second sword attack so you have to gamble on it or risk missing the opening) and it was enough to sour me on the whole fight. Now imagine ER.
But you can cancel attacks and insta parry on Sekiro so it's okay there.
Yeah, but then it's a bit of a reflex test instead, which is fine but Sekiro is more about learning patterns and anticipating than raw reflexes, hence the generous parry window. For an example that was better executed, see Genichiro's jumping stab into perilous, first phase it's always a thrust but second phase it's around 75% sweep 25% thrust so you can gamble on it with a good chance of success by jumping and risking the thrust, rely on reflexes for the optimal punish, jump away and avoid either option but waste the punish, or preempt it by dodging the jumping stab and doing a dash attack for a lesser but guaranteed punish. Now that there is good fricking design.
It's also the entire gimmick of Owl, a crafty fricker who trained you himself, and one of the hardest bosses in the entire game. Via the game's own narrative logic, he knows how to frick with you.
Then in Elden RIng, you get killed because a brainless misbegotten apparently knows how to rollcatch you. It's loathsome.
Misbegotten don’t rollcatch, though. They have really banal attack animations
They still have tracking with delayed swings. That's enough to rollcatch
their combos have several sequences of attacks
For example say Combo 1 has attack sequence A, B, C
>attack sequence A has forward slash, horizontal slash,
>attack sequence B has downward slash, poke,
>attack sequence C has a jump attack.
correct way to deal with it is to roll through attack sequence A, then do a "low stance" attack to duck under the poke of attack sequence B, then roll out of the way of attack sequence C and start a charged attack to get a charged R2 off as the boss recovers.
Players who roll away of attack sequence A of the combo make the boss cancel attack sequence B because the player is out of range. thats why players say the moves are random, they arent, its just that the AI calculates if the player is in range and if not it does a different combo. so instead of doing combo 1 attack sequence B it does a gap closer or ranged instead.
Bosses also cancel attacks sequences if you run away, so they start a 3 hit comb but won't continue if you get out of range.
And even the cancelation has a telegraph animation as they switch to idle.
So it's not random at all, it's in fact the same concept as weapon arts that can be extended with another L2 or R2 press that the player does.
No they are random, I have stood on Margits face at the end of the combo and he only sometimes does the knife punish, sometimes he jumps away and throws 2 knifes, sometimes only one, sometimes its 2 consecutive knife swipes.
the
>he knife punish, sometimes he jumps away and throws 2 knifes, sometimes only one, sometimes its 2 consecutive knife swipes.
are different combos.
You dont understand combos and attack sequences which is why you think the game is totally random. yes the combos they do after different combos can be different.
I'm comparing all these after the end of the same downward swipe animation. It's the same thing with the input reading when chugging, at the same distance and while the boss its idle they will only sometimes punish you. There is a chance underlying everything on this game.
Even if you are correct, the feeling of randomness is more of an issue than if it's actually random or not.
Somebody at From is convinced that it should be difficult for players to learn boss movesets, and nobody seems to have told them that's a stupid fricking idea. What an absolutely worthless idea to spend time on when designing bosses.
Sekiro has much faster combat and your character has much better reactionary tools, and yet that game has more predicable boss attack patterns and it uses feint attacks sparingly and makes them very clear how they work. If Sekiro doesn't need that shit, Elden RIng absolutely does not either.
That's because it's the only semblance of challenge you can provide the player once you take a DS1 character, give it OP and spammable rolls/attacks and throw them against fast spammy enemies. All the challenge resides in how hard the moveset is to learn. If the movesets were fair and readable the game would be a cakewalk even without using cheese
It could be argued that an extreme variety of boss attack options with very limited differences in way for the player to respond is little better than true randomness. Good bosses can often be learned in one go just by paying attention to their tells and body language, rather than strict trial and error until you memorize the pattern. This is why extended move holds/feints are the fricking worst, incidentally.
if you have good reaction time you can dodge a lot of that stuff the first time you see it. I do it sometimes. The ironic thing is i actually understand this stuff very well but my reaction time isnt that good so i still sometimes panic roll in the wrong direction. But i watch people play and they often dont figure out what they are suppose to do unless its trial and error and they make the same mistake 50+ times in a row and blame the game but drink a red potion so they dont need to learn to play.
As far as I can tell, bosses have 'opener' combos, 'ender' combos', and a bunch of 'filler' stuff. For example, Godskin Apostle might open up by doing his poke into drag attack, and might finish by doing his big vertical chop. But in the middle is the filler stuff, and as far as I can tell, the way it works is that he can just pick any filler combos and do them in any order and will do a random number of filler combos before committing to his finisher combo. I've seen him do about a dozen attacks in a row in the most extreme cases, where normally he'll do like 5 to 7 attacks before he's done.
I do appreciate, in a sense, that finding openings in Elden Ring requires a bit more investigative work. Finding ways to duck under hitboxses like you mention here is cool. Needing to dodge in a specific direction, or with tighter timing in order to avoid getting roll-caught by a fast follow-up makes fights more interesting. What annoys me is ER has a similar problem that I thought DkS3 had, where bosses rarely have the stats to match their moveset complexity. A boss's moveset might be very difficult to learn how to properly play around, but the boss is still of middling difficulty or even outright easy, because they have no fricking health and hit like wet paper. The end result is that the fights feel really annoying, rather than engaging. You are being 'punished' by the game by eating hits, you know this is 'wrong' and you 'messed up' and yet you beat the boss anyways. This gives the impression that the boss is sloppy and irritating, rather than challenging and fun.
It's also probably why people get so mad at the end-game bosses, who suddenly actually have enough health and damage that you need to learn how to fight them for real (maybe, depending on your build). I think FROM needs to go back to giving most bosses simpler movesets, and save the really intricate stuff for the bosses that are actually meant to be hard.
Your idea of health and stamina scaling with RL (perhaps to a reduced degree compared to straight up investing in vigor/endurance, as a tradeoff) does have some merit, but I feel that it's a bit of a band aid. This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I honestly feel *some* degree of level scaling would've been a huge improvement. No Elder Scrolls-style "late game bandit has god tier loot and hits harder than a dragon", but maybe give each area a level range with a floor and ceiling that scales up with the player. So early areas will still be easy if you leave them for last and late game areas will still kick your ass if you go in underleveled, but there's some wiggle room for options other than get one-shot by mooks and shitstomp everything.
i dont like level scaling i would rather have less disparity between high and low level. I think the concept of baseline difficulty works particularly well in action oriented games where your skill is more important than stats. have level ups unlock more abilities and weapons, not be the difference between getting killed in 1 hit and surviving 8 hits and whether or not enemies die in 2 hits or 10.
i actually think elden ring isnt that bad for this. you can do the first 75% of the game pretty comfortably with mediocre stats and weapon upgrades. the big difficulty spike was snowfield/sewers which is when the player really starts to get punished for not making the correct decision. I personally didnt have a problem wit hit my first play through because i used a somber weapon and stacked vigor. But i know a lot of people wee complaining.
Soldiers in haligtree die about as fast as soldiers in limgrave if your weapons are up to date and your have decent stat investment. I think thats good balance in theory but why have such a complicated stat and damage system if thats the case? they could have simplified the stat investment and scaling and worked more on gameplay imo.
Yeah, I think the difference between high and low ends of each effective stat should be relatively narrow in order to deliver a consistent gameplay experience, but that's very hard to do in an open world game without scaling because of the variable order. Even if the mandatory areas follow a strict sequence, the player might have rushed straight to one from the previous one or have spent twenty hours fricking about and doing side content. For a scaled down version of this problem, consider DS1 -- whichever area you did immediately after O&S was likely to be the hardest for you, while the final one was a cakewalk (I recall three-shotting Demon Firesage after leaving Izalith for last). In a game such as ER that problem is hugely magnified -- open world begets exploration which (in a combat-focused RPG) begets experience/runes/levels and stronger gear, which throws off the balance.
On the flipside, overdo the scaling and it feels like a pointless rubberband where there's no difference at all between exploring and leveling up and bum-rushing the game at level 1. But even so, ER's approach could use a lot of work, or at the very least fine-tuning the numbers. Or hell, bare minimum -- it might be immersikn-breaking, but some way of indicating recommended RL of an area would go a ways towards mitigating this issue. Obfuscate the numbers a bit if you must (and boy does FromSoft love obfuscation), but do something about it.
>but that's very hard to do in an open world game without scaling because of the variable order
its easier to do in gameplay focused open world games. You want to find and use different weapons for the move sets, and you want the new move sets just for something fun, you worry more about how your weapon works rather than its raw damage, (unless it has ridiculous swings in one direction or another). However the basic longsword your character starts with is not only good enough to beat the game it actually does great damage at endgame too, if you build right. I think letting the player fail and having some leeway for bad builds or OP builds is a part of the reason people often find the gameplay imbalanced. A stat system based around unlocking various things and not raw damage health would allow for the devs to focus on mechanics and make a tighter gameplay experience.
The stat system doesnt even add much beyond build variety and customization. Im not saying a stat system shouldnt exist but it could be totally reworked into something with less impact on raw damage and health numbers and i think the gameplay overall would be easier to make enjoyable throughout the game.
Same as you OP, except I stopped playing it after 10 hours.
The main reason I was disappointed why :
1/The gameplay (especially the buffer which makes the game almost unplayable for me)
2/The lore (I'm just tired of having to endure the same exact setting for the 5th time and the openworld just makes the game feels even more empty).
7/10, first 2 zones are magic then downhill after Godrick, worst bosses in a FromSoft game, exploration is meaningless, weird damage calculation, can't tank or shield bosses so gameplay relies too much on i-frams, last boss sucks but could have been decent if you could ride horsey, worst story which is suspicious since George rr martin was involved, kinda gay
>can't tank or shield bosses so gameplay relies too much on i-frams
Actual skill issue.
I'm level 52 using a shield build and stomping things.
It's so easy.
probably the first time shields have been truly viable for bosses in the series. you have so much stamina and can stack buffs that you barely take damage or lose stamina when blocking bosses
It's actually insane going through NG+ with a fingerprint poke build with decent END. Bosses can't do shit to the fingerprint shield.
I haven't finished the game yet, just arrived to the Mountaintop of the Giants.
I was very disappointed at the beginning, for my first 70h or so I did Limgrave, Liurnia and Caelid. Besides both legacy dungeons (Stromveil and the Academy), I found the beginning pretty boring and uninspired (the legacy dungeons were cool as frick), and Caelid was utter garbage, it made me drop the game for a few weeks when I was done with this area.
But then I came back and I'd say the game really starts with Nokstella and the Ranni's quest. That's where you start getting lore and a grasp on the big story, that's where you get to amazing areas like Nokstella, the Altus Plateau, Leyndell, Mount Gelmir and the Volcano Manor. Now I have fun and I'm pretty hyped to see the end game, know all the lore and finally start talking about it with friends.
But goddamn it takes a long ass time for the game to really start and I understand the players who drop ER before it gets interesting.
I'm also tired of Miyazaki trash game design for his characters quests where you HAVE to follow a guide step by step for every fricking NPC if you want to see their questline. It's like this since his first game and it has NEVER been entertaining.
The lore/story is trash as well
I like it so far, still has the grandiose/mythical aspect of Soulsgames but with a refreshing touch of politics and dynastic shenanigans that I really like. Nothing mindblowing like Bloodborne's lore was but really cool.
Best lore out of all souls games but ok moron, didnt need no stink youtuber to explain it to you if you have more than 2 brain cells
(you)
but the plateau is literally the same fricking shit as limgrave, liurnia and caelid. more copy pasted soldiers milling around with random dungeons sprinkled around. then you get to the capitol and lo and behold...more fricking soldiers. i agree the volcano was pretty sweet. but the slog getting there made me tired of the game by then.
I personally like how all you do on the Elden Ring's world is killing things and there are no NPCs beyond a few story ones and trainers.
I don't like open world games because you spend most of your time being an errand boy transporting things between NPCs and reading their text vomit.
Those are some horrible points anon, maybe try to put a little more thought that "worthless" "obnoxious" and "gay" when describing something because that means absolutely nothing to people reading your shitpost
Open world dark souls 3.5, which is fine I guess. Would be a great intro to the series, but underwhelming for me. A ton of filler/recycled content. The open world didn't much, since exploring in this game isnt really that fun. Checking every nook and cranny for cave entrances is incredibly boring.
Fantastic environments and dungeons. The reveals to Lakes of Liurnia, Caelid, Altus Plateau, The Capital and Farum Azula were amazing. The actual dungeons were the best in the series, with Stormveil Castle and the Capital as standouts. Most caves/crypts were a waste of time.
Bosses and Enemies were very samey and didnt add much over DS3. I liked most of them and they were fun, but only standout for me was Radahn.
PvP is a step down from DS3. So much broken shit in duels that its barely worth it.
>The actual dungeons were the best in the series, with Stormveil Castle and the Capital as standouts.
On this point, I really don't see the hype for Stormveil. It's just Boletaria but worse. The point where you get into the courtyard and the exiles are standing there behind their crossbows and flamethrowers, completely ignoring you despite you being in their line of sight is so moronic. On repeat playthroughs I run straight to Godrick's boss fog with no desire to "do" Stormveil properly.
Leyndell is a great area but not without flaws. It feels kind of aimless, whereas the best areas IMO subtly guide you in the right direction while still having optional areas to explore.
The AI in the game is so fricking bad, I don't know why it's such a step backwards from sekiro which at least had the enemies aggro if they saw you.
I really liked the concept of having the 2 routes to the boss. I thought it was cool kind of sneaking around the back routes, but still seeing the main route and what you're avoiding, and knowing what you can come back to try to brute force later.
The level design was nice too, starting off fairly linear, but then opening up a lot at the Rampart Tower grace with lots of different branching paths and routes to approach the level. The roof jumping was great, the secret crucible knight was great, I loved the Banished Knights, the Grafted was a great miniboss.
I have not played Demon Souls so can't compare to Boletaria
>exiles are standing there behind their crossbows and flamethrowers, completely ignoring you despite you being in their line of sight is so moronic
Agreed this is pretty stupid
>On repeat playthroughs I run straight to Godrick's boss fog with no desire to "do" Stormveil properly.
Same, but I think the ability to do this is a plus for the level. Being able to be creative with an optimal fast route but still grabbing the gear you need is part of the fun for me
I played it for like 180 hours. Great game, well worth the cost. Few single player games get that kind of playtime anymore.
Melina is my wife.
The character with 2 lines?
she probably has more dialogue than anyone in the game besides maybe gideon
Do you want your wife to talk or something?
The main issue is that the exploration is shit. Most gear is in catacombs(which are extremely repetitive apart from the handful of clever gimmick ones) or the actual levels, so all you find is enemies you have no incentive to fight, bosses you're already sick of, useless crafting materials. As a bonus, makes replaying the game more tedious with extra busywork.
As for the rest, It's a pretty decent ds3 level pack. Level design has no innovation, bosses have more interesting movesets than the other souls games, but are lacking compared to Sekiro.
PvP sucks but it's better than the abomination of ds3 at least.
I think Elden Ring is one of the best games I've played in at least the last twenty years. I really took my time with it, explored everywhere. I finished my first run after around 285 hours. I am about 25 hours into my second playthrough. First run was as a Vagabond quality build using Bloodhound's Fang +10 and Great Stars. Second run is as an Astrologer intelligence+mind build. This is truly a great game, one of the alltime great games.
Best game ever made
ER is a very good game but whoever says it's the best game ever made must have played 5 games max in his entire life.
Played more games than you lol
You have school tomorrow, do not go to bed too late ok?
I played 20+ and still think so
For 60$ i got a good comfy 250 hours of it and it has yet to get DLC
Souls games should stay linear but fromsoftware's first attempt at open world shits on years of games from Ubisoft and Sony
played for 20 hours but the open world was too overwhelming with nothing interesting to find so i dropped it
didnt help that the combat got stale really fast
after 1k hours in ds2 and 600 in ds1 this combat does nothing to me
maybe if it was a full blown mmo i would give it a chance, singleplayer games are just boring to me
>Combat got stale
>Has literally more variety than any other Souls game.
>DS1 DS2
Oh I see the problem now. You have to time your attacks, you can't just fat roll behind every boss to smack off 20% of their life anymore.
game is utter shit. I want to play the updated version of ds1. all hope for modders.
Amazing game on the first playthrough but there is 0 replayability.
I fricking loved it. First game id ever 100% probably ever. Spent 160 hrs on it. Never played a FS game before. Played probably another hundred hours on alts and nuking bosses for folks with my Int build. Went out and bought BB and the DS trilogy. Really enjoying Dark Souls Remastered so far.
I think it's really good, not their best work though. The game showed me that I rather have FROM return to more focused experiences like the dense world of Souls 1 or the more polished gameplay of Sekiro.
PvP is somehow worse than Souls 3, so I didn't play much of it.
same thing i thought 1 week after release: it's awful in every single way
>Now that the dust has well and truly settled, what did you think of it?
Weirdly mixed feelings, it has the highest highs and lowest lows in the whole franchise, both inherent to open world design.
Initial discovery of the map, taking in all the non-linearity and grand scope of the world, all the early game surprises combined with release window collective hype after years of build-up, they successfully delivered above expectations and shattered doubts about open world, it was all so intoxicatingly mesmerizing at first.and the most engaging vidya experience in forever. It felt as magical as vidya could get.
Then the unexpected happens, You feel burned out, the world feels too big and empty with content spread too thin, you start seeing reused assets and recycled encounters all over the place, you remember why you initially had doubts about open world. Linear dungeons feel too small and like they also cut corners there. Game is absurdly front-loaded, all the mini-dungeons are repetitive filler, NPC quests are poorly designed for non linear open world exploration, by the time you reach the mountain it feels like an absolute chore, and even some of the bosses just feel lazily and artificially obnoxious with endless combos, input reading and cheap AOE spam. You stop having fun and the magic is gone, replaced only by tedium routine.
You have zero desire to ever replay it, unlike the previous games. You wonder if perhaps, you didn't simply get burned out on the formula as a whole, but afterwards you go play an older title, and remember why you loved DS so much and what ER lacked; the intricate design, the interconnectedness, the sense of journey and adventure with meticulously paced and hand-crafted encounters and environments all the way.
Exploring Limgrave, finding the elevator to Siofra, getting troll warped to Caelid, beating Margit and finding the Stormveil crypt... you sure had fun though. But it's tainted by all the bullshit.
This is the best summary of the game. The beginning really was magical
+1
Agree 100%
I wish I could agree but I thought Limgrave was garbage.
I thought it was shit, but played it 3 times. Realized it was one of the best games i've ever played. I bought dark souls and am on my first playthrough. Goddamn these games are so good. I'm going to go through them in order and even try out sekiro.
>I'm going to go through them in order
>starts with ds1
Anon, I…
Exploration was great on first run
I really like design of many weapons
Posture system with lots of crit oportunities is satisfying
Some of the NPCs are good
Artificial difficulty and unnecessary repetitions bring it down
I finished it around
But the open world *is* very weak in many aspects. If it was just open world, without legacy dungeons and DS3-tier bosses, it'd be an Ubisoft-tier game.
>I finished it around
*around 4 times and sometimes still feel the urge to replay it.
I dislike how you get "locked in" to using one type of weapon. For example, I am stuck with my +8 broadsword despite wanting to use other weapons. I wish there were a way to grind smithing stones to upgrade other weapons I want to use. I am sick of the broadsword.
but you can grind smithing stones
the merchant in the hub even starts selling them if you them the right item
Oh OK thanks, I'll look into this.
You can find the bell bearing that unlocks the 5 - 10+ smithing stones in Altus Plateau inside a mine, but I don't remember the exact location.
#Popular reception of FromSoftware games
If we were to rank Souls games by:
>Steam reviews
1. Dark Souls 3 & Sekiro (93%)
2. Elden Ring (90%)
3. Dark Souls 1 (87%)
4. Dark Souls 2 (85%)
[Bloodborne is unranked in Steam]
>Google reviews
1. Bloodborne (4.8 stars)
2. Dark Souls 1 (4.5 stars)
3. Elden Ring & Sekiro (4.3 stars)
4. Dark Souls 3 (4.0 stars)
5. Dark Souls 2 (3.8 stars)
>Metacritic user reviews
1. Bloodborne (8.9/10)
2. Dark Souls 3 (8.6/10)
3. Sekiro (8.5/10)
4. Dark Souls 1 (8.1/10)
5. Elden Ring (7.9/10)
6. Dark Souls 2 (7.7/10)
>Metacritic journalist reviews
1. Elden Ring (96/100)
2. Bloodborne (92/100)
3. Sekiro (90/100)
4. Dark Souls 2 (87/100)
5. Dark Souls 3 (89/100)
6. Dark Souls 1 (84/100)
>Confirmed sales
1. Elden Ring (~15 million so far)
2. Dark Souls 3 (10 million)
3. Dark Souls 1 (6 million)
4. Sekiro (5 million)
5. Dark Souls 2 (2,5 million)
6. Bloodborne (2 million)
>Completion rate [Proportion of players who actually played until the end, based on in-game achievements]
1. Dark Souls 3 (48%)
2. Elden Ring (46%)
3. Dark Souls 1 (45%)
4. Bloodborne (44%)
5. Dark Souls 2 (41%)
6. Sekiro (<30%)
>Ganker consensus
1. All games are shit except the single one I personally like and the old ones were better!!!111
>Combined score [Average placement in all rankings]
1. Dark Souls 3 & Elden Ring (2,3)
2. Bloodborne (2,8)
3. Dark Souls 1 (3,0)
4. Sekiro (3,3)
5. Dark Souls 2 (4,7)
=> Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring are most widely popular Soulslike games, with a combination of high sales, decent reviews and high completion rates.
=> Bloodborne is the best reviewed once sales numbers are ignored. Few played Bloodborne, but those who did loved it.
=> Dark Souls 2 is the least popular by a wide margin, across many factors.
=> Sekiro is amongst the three best reviewed games, but has a shockingly low completion rate and middling sales.
dark soul's rating dropped after the servers were shut down.
You wasted your time making this copypasta while I personally don't give a single frick about Metacritic, Steam scores or sales.
That's fine. Nobody gives a frick what you think either.
Contrarians BTFO
God journos are worthless
very fun. only beat the game once the rest of my time spent so far has been making unique and interesting invader builds. it's fun trying to make something work while not being a meta-slave.
BB and Sekiro are complete masterpieces, the best in their catalogue, but ER is definitely the best Dark Souls game.
Honestly?
I beat the grafted guy and played a little more, but by then it was feeling repetitive so I dropped it. I pirated it so had no monetary obligation to finish it if I wasn't have fun.
Low points:
>Big axe users get boned again
>nothing in the open world except some mobs
>no towns
>lifeless
>bloat
Good points though:
>Nice looking world even if it stretches on for too long
everything before the grand lift is neat
after that it really sucks
the open world feels great at first but then you realize that it was always supposed to be the medium in which the real content (legacy dungeons and various interesting handcrafted content) was supposed to exist in, but they put in too much shit in the open world so it's like a 80:20 proportion of open world to legacy dungeon when it should be 20:80. And the second problem is that the entire item system is flawed, and the metric frickload of loot in the world is actually useless, because you'll use like 5 different items for each slot throughout the entire game. If I got to decide, the next game they have they'll only have 10 or so weapon types, and then each weapon type has a moveset tree which you unlock through loot, so throughout the game you'll 1)
>be able to switch between weapons without having to overcome a barrier of 40k souls and 20 smithing stones to just try out if they're better than your current weapon
2)
>actually grow throughout the game instead of just using better stuff but in the same quantities
and possibly 3)
>be able to tango with the bosses doing insane ninja kickflips across the entire arena instead of just rolling and poking like you did in limgrave
Anyone who praises Bloodbore but claims Elden Ring is a mess has to be clinically moronic
Any flaws Elden Ring has are worse in Bloodbore.
>Any flaws Elden Ring has are worse in Bloodbore.
Like the weapons? Like the lore? Like the combat? Like the character's response ruined by the buffer? Like the OST?
Lore in BB is better, but mostly due to DLC clarifying the mess that came before. ER might still receive that.
The rest is worse imo. Except OST, can't judge because I always play without music
ER's gameplay is insanely boring and the buffer ruins the little bit of fun you may have.
I don't get how you can prefer ER over BB.
Combat is mostly the same in all games except Sekiro to me. Dashes might look cooler, but they're mechanically no different.
Dash are faster and don't throw you 5 meters away from your enemy.
They also make the fight looks more kino.
>They also make the fight looks more kino.
That's all it boils down to, lol.
BB combat is just Souls combat. Only the rally mechanic is completely unique.
This is a wrong, gay, and stupid post. Well done.
Consolewargay post
Finally made me come to the conclusion that dark souls 1 was good by accident.
Still on first playthrough. Problems I have with the game so far:
> Poise is still basically worthless
> Too many bullshit status effects
> Certain hitboxes are jank and certain bosses have bullshit hyperarmor
8.5/10 game, still like Dark Souls 1 more. Gonna go for a Rivers of Blood build next playthrough on a fresh character and see how much that actually breaks the game.
>Too many bullshit status effects
And there's only 1 (ONE) weapon in the entire game that inflicts sleep
It was fine. 5/10 at best. Could drop to a 4 on a replay.
I liked it more than DS2 and 3.
100%d it the day before the first patch. Thoroughly enjoyed it. One of the best games ever made.
troony Ring
It was good but I had less fun once I hit the stuff after the capital. Playing as a strength chad was the most fun build because you get to interupt all the gay 15 hit combos the game loves to throw at you.
It feels like as far as the combat goes, they had a rock-solid foundation with the Souls engine plus guard counters, jumping and jump attacks, charge heavies and vastly expanded weapon skills, but then they kinda wienered up the implementation with pretty unbalanced movesets that are rarely worth using in their entirety as opposed to just spamming jumping R2s with big weapons or overpowered WAs with unique weapons. That, and the enemy health and damage scaling is out of whack and the boss movesets just do not match up against the player's base toolkit, hence using OP ranged WAs, bleed and spirit ashes as crutches.
Mind you, the world, exploration, locales and lore are insane, some of the best ever. Customization is also pretty great. But at its core it's also a game where the vast majority of the systems -- the crafting, the exploration, the questlines -- ultimately exist around the combat. It's your main way of interacting with the world by far, this isn't Fallout. So any weakness in the combat cascades outwards into every gameplay system and I think that keeps the overall experience from being as good as it could be. It's great, but it could be one of the GOATs and it doesn't make it because of the aforementioned flaws with the combat, in my opinion.
>That, and the enemy health and damage scaling is out of whack and the boss movesets just do not match up against the player's base toolkit, hence using OP ranged WAs, bleed and spirit ashes as crutches.
Spirit ashes isn't a crutch, dummy, it's an intended gaming mechanic that the "git gud" crowd chooses to ignore.
The problem with spirit ashes isn't that they make the game too easy, but that they make you not interact with enemies. Magic has this issue too to a lesser degree. What makes Bloodborne and Sekiro combat so engaging is the fast-paced 1v1 of dodging, parrying and positioning, really coming to learn enemies' movesets and how to squeeze more and bigger openings out of them. Spirit ashes just... make the boss ignore you while you whale away at its backside. I'm not talking about git gud you didn't beat the game gatekeeping, but simple enjoyment -- they just make the game less fun. Sekiro would be a lesser game if there were consistent long-ranged DPS options and aggro-taking summons -- the places where that is implemented (shurikens and puppeteer) are of limited utility and application, making them a supporting tool instead of a main strategy.
>just don't use them lol
Sure, but many enemies are balanced around them being used. So your options are either boring and unsatisfying or frustrating and overtuned. I sincerely think ER would be a better game if they didn't exist at all -- that way they'd be forced to balance encounters around your base moveset, not around you being able to not engage with enemies at all. Sekiro made me buckle down and learn the game like it was meant to be played, ER sacrificed satisfying combat on the altar of shallow variety.
I agree that the grappling hook was oddly underutilized in Sekiro. For being the most 3 dimensional game by far, the world design (not the level design) was pretty underwhelming, and the actual implementation of the hook was one-dimensional.
Otherwise, good review and I mostly agree. But I'm glad they didn't introduce interactions beyond combat. I disliked the platforming in Sekiro, for the most part - FromSoft just isn't good at it.
What platforming? It was basically push button go here
It's easily the worst modern From game by a large margin
Best souls game by far.
I felt disappointed on how they removed all the stuff that was 100% completed, I don’t think this shit will make it in the dlcs
For me ER is a 7.9/10
Only the dlc can change me my mind
It was really fun but sometimes i felt a bit overwhelmed with the amount of stuff to do
I only played PVE.
The problem with Elden Ring is that the devs have failed to add depth to the game. The combat fundamentals are extremely simplistic and the devs "solved" this problem by making the bosses so unfair that you will have to, supposedly, use your head to develop strategies with the different gimmicks, i.e., the game wouldn't only be based on basic and repetitive combat mechanics, but on something broader and more strategic that involves analysis of items, skills, spells, character preparation, etc.
The devs failed, however.
The "gimmicks" on 99.9% of the occasions make the battles LESS complex, not more. With them you don't even need to learn the basic combat of the game. This killed the game for me. I stopped playing after Kalimeth, killed him just using a club and decided the game is not worth it.
Not at all, the bosses are far more fair then in previous games.
Even the 2v1 Crucible Knights and Godskin Duo fights are balanced for solo play. The AIs in both of these fights are linked and aren't allowed to start an attack if the other has started an attack 3-5 seconds before.
You can 100% tell this as they have tons of moments when the guy in back is passive and just hangs around compared to their 1v1 fights where they bumrush you 24/7. Then they occasionally itch roles and the guy in the back starts sprinting and the other starts doing the slow walking.
They changed the aggressiveness of the enemies, they were more offensive before. Anyway, this doesn't solve the problem I mentioned.
I decided not to use almost any of the "tools" the game offers because early on I summoned the three wolves for testing purposes and they basically made invading a castle that seemed impossible to me become totally trivial.
I then decided to play solo and dedicate myself to learning the enemy patterns and the game became a repetitive memorization exercise. The basic battle to my mind is not interesting enough for such a long game. At the same time, using the things that give the game "flavor" breaks it. There is no balance.
Spirits cannot be summoned in most areas, just vs minibosses and a few key areas.
Shit like 3 wolves even with a few upgrades get 4-5 shot by a few exile soldiers or 2 shot by a miniboss like the Burial Watchdog.
I had a +10 mimic vs the 2v1 Crucible Knights as a test on my 2nd char and it generally died in before one of the knights was killed.
And even vs single bosses, at best it took the boss to 60-70% HP before I had to do the rest.
your mimic being weak basically means that you are weak, dude
I had a very solid character DPS wise but I had a multiple weapons and spells equipped and the AI mimic probably derped out trying to use bad ones for that boss.
I did some tests here and I don't agree with you. Mogh for example I needed about 3 hours playing as honestly as possible with my weapons underpowered, it was quite a difficult fight for me. Maliketh more or less the same thing too.
With the same character, I killed the god duo that they say is a difficult boss on the first try, in about 3 or 4 minutes using everything I could. The same for that giant centipede that came from space, I didn't even know it was a difficult boss because I decided to see how the Mimic Tear worked on it and I killed it on the first try in about 5 or 6 minutes.
Don't tell me that this game is balanced. Difficult bosses took me an average of 3 hours when I played fair . Another difficult bosses with summons and other items took me an average of 4 minutes.
Summons were always an easymode, both COOP and now in spirit form.
The HP bosses gain for each player summon was 50% extra, not enough to balance a competent player with 5-7 chugs.
But stuff like minor spirits like wolves and soldiers that are easily available early game get fricking stomped in 3-4 boss hits, even from catacomb minibosses.
Those got nerfed, or should i say fixed, because those korean morons at fromshit forgot to code duo bosses differently.
They always had the AI leash mechanics for 2v1s when you're solo, it was just a bit too relaxed and sometimes their combos would intersect too much.
The patch only tweaked the numbers, it didn't add it as a new mechanic.
That behaviour was recently patched in and still doesn't always function properly.
>recent
That was 4 months ago.
Only people that rushed to the end even saw the unpatched 2v1 fights.
10/10
Elden Ring/souls is the ARPG combat system that gives freedom of expression with countless build and equipment options. People who complain about it or want it to be like Sekiro and Bloodborne misunderstand it. Yes it's a game about combat, and a combat that features countless of equipment options rather than being restricted into few weapon classes with shared moveset. It's a pure ARPG, and it always stayed true to its roots. You have maximum freedom of expression and choice for equipment, playstyle and character.
Countless equipment combinations and spells, Infusion system making equipment super versatile and adapted to several builds.
And consider that all 140+ bosses have to be able to handle all these builds without breaking, either being way too easy or way too hard.
It's the pure form ARPG, unapologetic. There's no other game like this, no other game gives you such freedom, is the DOOM of melee combat.
This would be more compelling if the actual takeaway weren't
>big two-handed/powerstanced colossal weapons
>ranged magic
>fast dps
>sword and board
That's still a fair bit of options, but every one of the dozens of weapons, WAs and combat approaches is, in the end, a variant of those four, at most mixing a couple. There's no actual difference in how you approach combat between a huge sword and a huge axe. Hell, the worthlessness of poise in PvE arguably removes one option from the main game.
Man, DS1 Havel's Ring/Wolf Ring/Zwei/GCS/Knight Set was peak. Can be gotten from near the start, scales with you through the game, and is strong enough to bulldoze through the game while actually making you interact with it.
>Man, DS1 Havel's Ring/Wolf Ring/Zwei/GCS/Knight Set was peak. Can be gotten from near the start, scales with you through the game, and is strong enough to bulldoze through the game while actually making you interact with it.
the only thing from that list that scales with you is the zweihander (same as any weapon), also poise in ds1 is comically broken for both pve and pvp
What I meant by that was that it's a playstyle, build and moveset that works just as well at the beginning of the game as at the end. You basically can ignore the entire RPG aspect outside of leveling uo your stats and weapons as you find souls and embers, no exploration or experimentation necessary. I wouldn't recommend it for a first playthrough for that very reason, but if you've already played the game before and want to just go through it kicking doors down and killing baddies, it's a build you'll never feel insufficient with.
>poise is broken
I feel that for bosses it works since you can't facetank everything, you have to pick and choose when to trade and when to dodge. Levels though, yeah they're largely trivialized. But then I'm of the opinion that FromSoft levels on their own are only super engaging the first time you play them, so that's not a negative in this context.
The dust hasn't settled yet, and it won't until after DLC gets released and we get 2-3 years of rest.
Ganker is contrarian and whiny by nature, so its first instinct is to shit on games, whether good or bad.
Figuring out posture mechanics and time limits and smashing bosses to their knees once you get a feel for their values is super satisfying.
>just spam jump r2 3 times in a row open critical attack to defeat every boss: the game
like
said
>The "gimmicks" on 99.9% of the occasions make the battles LESS complex, not more.
It's not a gimmick, it's the same mechanic from Sekiro, giving you incentive to attack (especially with weapon arts or charged R2s) and build up posture to get those sweet ripostes, forcing the player into the greedy attack/safe retreat dilemma constantly as they try to prevent posture from regenerating the player doesn't attack for 6 seconds.
The difference being that Sekiro a) makes it visible so you can consciously make those decisions instead of trial-and-erroring it and crucially b) inflicts posture damage on deflects (and also blocking stops very nearly all damage and you can't get guard broken when deflecting), giving you a big incentive to go for them and making it so defense is simultaneously offense, keeping you engaged with enemy patterns even when being attacked. Combining this with swift counter strikes, attack into block and being able to cancel atrack startul into block makes it so that in Sekiro you're heavily encouraged to stick in close with enemies and go toe-to-toe with them. Compare ER and playing mother may I as you wait for bosses to finish their 15-hit combo so you can maybe please get in a couple r1s or a jump r2, if they don't jump away and reset to neutral as soon as the combo is done.
1) There's no 15 hit combos in ER.
2) You can do a roll/jump attack between individual hits of many combos.
3) You can maintain the boss' current posture damage and don't let them regenerate by doing any form of damage to them, even a bone dart.
Your raid isn’t working
this is way better than Sekiro, the bosses are much cooler, there's a better number of them, and they have several approaches.
Sekiro can't compete.
Needs polishing for sure. From game always feel slightly half baked. I had fun with it though. I'm doing the coop mod with friends but honestly no thread of invasions does actually kill it a bit. It could stand to send bellbearing hunters at you or something.
It’s really good, build variety, environments, the level design in the big dungeons is incredible, the exploration is nice and feels meaningful, you get stronger the more you explore, the map has a good item placement and traversal, rushing things to get what you want reminds of the first areas of DS1
The bad are the small dungeons, too much recycling like enemy soldiers and some bosses, PvP is a meme, the snow areas should have not been made, game is definitely too long and hurts replaybility
Horrid shit. I played it throught once to have closture in my mind, not planning on touching it ever again. All previous entries were a blast, this one felt like Scary Movie 5.
I fricking love magic in ER.
Who needs gravity magic when you have gravity.
>Magic is more braindead than Skyrim's
How funny
skyrims magic isnt bad despite what haters say, though. only destruction magic is underwhelming, but if you combine all 6 schools, it's not that bad
Auto tracking and very fast casting on wide open arenas will do that to you. Wanna hear something funny? Stranger of Paradise, the funny meme chsos game made by the b-team of a b-tier studio on a budget of frick all, does magic better than ER.
id say pretty easily best game ever made
i like knights and swords and killing monsters and dueling. fromsoft games are basically exactly what i want from a video game and elden ring is their best game yet
6/10
>DS3: 72 hours including a brief restart
>sekiro: 55 h including replaying half the game because i accidentally chose shura (but the replay was fast since i gitted gud)
>elden ring:
90 fricking hours and I'm probably not even 2/3'rds of the game
It was pretty good for first 5 hours but the open world made me drop it. It's just not fun.
it's way better than previous souls games, no matter what nostalgia gays say
not sure whether it's better than sekiro or BB, those are too different.
>nostalgia
>for games from less than a decade ago
jesus christ, how zoomer are you?
>Now I feel BB and Sekiro are the only truly great games From have made.
I feel like a ton of the souls community must have started with BB
It has a host of tremendously awful bosses, including some of the worst that have ever befouled a souls game, like Rom, Micolash, The Hemwick Witches, Maneater Boar, Merciless Watchers etc.
A noticeably short 'main-game', that is somehow simultaneously arguably the most monotonous of any game they've produced
Rushed late game areas like many of From's other games, including the Upper Cathedral Ward - one room essentially with an awful boss, the strangely detached and inconsequential nightmare frontier, the levels beyond the mensis ritual site being connected via teleports etc. Post-Rom Yahar'gul generally being a disaster
A story and setting that doesn't tell an awfully compelling tale prior to the DLC, and in fact relies extremely heavily on post-launch content
A general dearth of majorly interesting characters and NPC's that can be palpably felt in game, especially compared to Elden Ring and Sekiro
Low weapon and build variety - which was even more dire prior to TOH
Sluggish performance, gameplay etc. numerous technical issues
No direct area-area warping/enemy refreshing at lanterns etc. - plus, you're forced to sit out the TWO seperate long ass loading screens
Chalice Dungeons in general, but most potently in the egregious lack of level variety
Maybe I've gone insane, but it feels like many of these flaws would be very vocally expressed by the fanbase if they were present in any other From game, and I'm left slightly confused at the sheer amount of 'perfect from start to finish' type posts I see from BB's fans
It peeves me as well that Bloodborne's gameplay gets treated as if it's equivalent to Sekiro's super smooth acrobatic fluidity, when it's generally far, far more in line with Dark Souls 3/ER, albeit with dashes and rallying.
Mostly agree with you, especially the fact BB gets FAR worse after Rom often gets overlooked.
But I also see why some worship Bloodborne:
- the core combat design is great, rally and dash >> rollspam
- the start is amazing, Yharnam and its bosses just rock
- it has the most fully realized lore imo
Also, Rom is a great boss, it has memorable and unique mechanics. A welcome break from "giant furry mutant that swings at you"
The bed of chaos is memorable with unique mechanics. Neither of those things make for a great boss unless they're executed well.
Rom's three-wave spider minion spawn, off-screen magic projectiles and AOE's, and the general stiltedness of the minefield-like combat makes for a fight that is tedious, unengaging, and frustrating.
The Duke's Dear Freja, while by no means a stellar fight, is a far better result of the 'mostly stationary spider minion boss' concept
Dunno dude, I agree with 85% of what you've said and still liked Rom. The meteor showers are always somewhat telegraphed. You have to kill the small spiders while avoiding them and then kill Rom before it kills you with increasingly powerful melee retaliations. It was one of the coolest fights for me, actually.
Since you mention tremendously awful bosses, why isn't Celestial Emissary worth a mention? Or One Reborn, that's a punching bag once you killed the mobs.
I have gone through the initial enamour for Bloodborne, to a phase of hating it for all its flaws and missteps, and now settling into a reasonable middle ground. I agree with some of your points but you post that graph repeatedly like its fact. BB's level to level quality is second only to Sekiro, the only area that drops below 6/10 is Yahar Gul. There are only 3-4 main game bosses that are genuine duds, and you can't include chalice dungeons since they are clearly ignorable. Weapon variety is one of BBs strengths, 2 greatswords with unique, fun versatile movesets are better than 20 with identical generic movesets. I have 200+ hours in BB and I know i'm not done with it, whereas it's quite likely I will never play ER again.
>BB's level to level quality is second only to Sekiro
Not true, dude.
Most areas after you leave Yharnam are a corridor with some shortcuts. Even the final dungeon, Nightmare of Mensis, is like that. Upper Cathedral, Lecture Hall, Byrgenwerth are just horrible and/or pointless.
And while the Gothic/Victorian design is beautiful, it does get old since all looks like that.
Sekiro levels outside of Ashina Castle were also pretty corridor-y, to be fair. Just usually had a few items to the side here and there. Central Yharnam blows pretty much all of Sekiro out of the water in terms of level design, but then again it's only one area. DS1 (up to O&S) remains unmatched.
My favorite part about shitposts like this is that they leave out the only two genuine critiques of Bloodborne. Absolute pottery
>shitposts
He's only of the few people ITT to offer arguments that go beyond adjectives.
Untrue. He just makes false claims and moves on.
>A story and setting that doesn't tell an awfully compelling tale prior to the DLC
>Low weapon variety
>Bad bosses
All untrue. When someone is just lying that's not "making an argument". It's shitposting. Plus you can tell, because if he was ACTUALLY critiquing the game, there is a zero chance he forgets to mention the two largest flaws:
>+Damage Bloodgems were so functionally superior to any other type that it fatally undermined the entire Blood Gem system.
>Chalice dungeons depths 1-3 were the entire source of that systems weakness and the game would have been massively improved if only depths 4-5 existed (including cursed and all those other modifiers)
It's an absolute give away
>>Low weapon variety
>>Bad bosses
but those are true imo, at least partially
Depends on what's meant with wrapon variety. BB has the lowest nunber of weapons, but each of them is unique and has a considerably broad moveset, more than practically any individual ER/DS weapon. By contrast, how many unique moves are there in ER/DS? More than BB I expdct, still, but the difference is a lot smaller than it looks at first glance.
>More than BB I expdct, still, but the difference is a lot smaller than it looks at first glance.
Yep, exactly. But it's still around 2 times.
Of BBs merely 26 weapons, many were uninteresting as well. If any weapon had the complexity of Ludwigs Holy Blade, I wouldnt complain, but many of them are throwaways never used by anyone but confused casuals as well.
>the two largest flaws
>picks two relatively obscure minor flaws, one of which is more or less another way of saying 'Chalice Dungeons bad'
0 replay value: the game
ER has the most replay value as you can skip most Limgrave catacombs (they only give low tier spirits) and just visit shit where you need to pick up stuff for your build like weapons, armor, spells and talismans.
I beat Godrick after 40 hours on my first run then did it in 4 on my 2nd.
Good to great game, but treads no new ground for From as a developer. The open world has too much repetition, some of the boss design combat wise is pretty bad and the game lacks meaningful decisions throughout the story. But the exploration is great(the first time), it controls amazingly well and the story/world design/enemy design are top notch.
I also didn't think the level design was any better than, say dark souls 3. Which is fine. Overall pretty good game, but I am less excited than ever for any more soulsborne games from Fromsoft.
>the game lacks meaningful decisions throughout the story
agreed about this - there were several times i was hesitant to make a decision because i thought it would have consequences (volcano manor, lighting the forge, etc) but they didnt actually affect anything.
No replay value due to the open world. Not enough levels due to the open world. No good progression due to the open world. Repeated bosses and dungeons due to the open world.
Open world is what killed it in the end.
ER's legacy dungeons + side dungeons are nearly 2 times more content than everything in DS3.
Too bad it's 70% shit and you have to get through the open world to get there.
Yeah, having to use your horse for 5 minutes between 3-4 hour long main dungeons, literally unplayable.
you're wrong dude, because much of the progression requiring
- upgrade materials
- flask updates
- levelling
is tied to open world areas. while you can ignore most of them, going from legacy dungeon to legacy dungeon will most likely leave you severely underequipped
Nope, all the legacy dungeons have enough smith stones to get your weapon to +3/+6/+9 as you go on, you just won't have enough for a second weapon unless you take a few small detours.
And souls aren't a problem get far more from legacy dungeon bosses than wasting time on Limgrave catacombs that give you 1500.
Eh, I'll try out what you've said if I ever replay the game again.
I don't hate all of the open world, by the way. I find the long line of defenders from Altus Plateau to Leyndell incredible, for example.
There's 3 stones on a body in a circle of chairs close to where you get that first seed on Stormhill.
There's a statue near Warmaster Shack that gives 5x #1 stones and 1x #2 stone, you need a troll to break it.
And another statue in Stormveil Castle that gives you 6x #1 and 2x #2, same as above.
Then there's around 8-10 #1 stones as fixed loot in Stormveil and 3-4 #2.
Nevermind the ones added to merchants and random drops from soldiers, with those you'd probably have 36 stones.
So you can get a +5 weapon even if you beeline to Godrick with just a 5 min detour for that first statue.
was meant to reply to
, not myself
Invalidated by Margit at SL1
>5 minutes lol dude. I took 160 hours to beat the game. Like 30 hours were spent in the main dungeons...
Yes, that's normal on a first exploration run.
On re-runs you have a general idea where shit is and you'll spend way less time acting like a Roomba in every corner of the map.
You literally just invalidated the open world concept.
When will you tard realize that quality matters more than quantity?
>Would you rather have 200kg pile of shit with some delicious pieces of corn to pick out, or would you rather have a single delicious ear of corn?
ER legacy dungeons are by far the best in terms of quality.
Stormveil alone is on the same tier as Grand Archives in DS3, and that's one of the biggest and most interconnected levels with 3-4 shortcuts, and that's just the first main dungeon.
And Elden Ring would have been better without the open world. Because it is the legacy dungeons which shine the brightest, not the shit surrounding the tasty corn.
I really liked the open world aspect.
Aside from it looking pretty, it offers nothing of value or substance. I supposed it gives the illusion of freedom, but there is nothing worth exploring for.
It was really fun.
It had most if not all of the crafting materials and legacy dungeons in it. The game finally felt like a place instead of levels.
You two desperately need to spend more time outside, doing so will fill what is missing in your life. Open world games will then become boring.
I work at a National Park I'm good anon, thanks though.
This is a weaker angle, you should find something less cloying.
So you hangout in the information kiosk all day? Just because you work at a national park doesn't automatically mean you spend time outside.
No, I hunt predators. You don't even know how a National Park operates lol.
Read William Blake's works, its a very simple story.
ER doesn't boil down to a single author, dude. Its influenced from anything from previous Souls games, Norse mythology (Erdtree), Game of Thrones (warring royal factions, incest, blood feuds), Lovecraft (outer gods), alchemy (Radagon/Marika/Rebis) and probably much more.
It does in this instance. The entirety of Marika's family line is laid out in detail in a single work of Blake's. Reading his entire canon would just add you in understanding more completely.
You seem like a smart guy, you'll either do it or you won't I don't care which.
I will, since I'm into poetry anyways. Albeit I'll be highly surprised if Romantic era poetry could explain much of a game that contains Astels, scarlet rot servants, two-headed lightning dragons and whatnot.
>Albeit I'll be highly surprised if Romantic era poetry could explain much of a game that contains Astels, scarlet rot servants, two-headed lightning dragons and whatnot.
You're in for a pleasant evening of surprises then.
>Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air;
>Hungry clouds swag on the deep
>Once meek, and in a perilous path,
>The just man kept his course along
>The vale of death.
>Roses are planted where thorns grow.
>And on the barren heath
>Sing the honey bees.
>Then the perilous path was planted:
>And a river, and a spring
>On every cliff and tomb;
>And on the bleached bones
>Red clay brought forth.
>Till the villain left the paths of ease,
>To walk in perilous paths, and drive
>The just man into barren climes.
>Now the sneaking serpent walks
>In mild humility.
>And the just man rages in the wilds
>Where lions roam.
>Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air;
>Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
>As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent: the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see Isaiah XXXIV & XXXV Chap:
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.
Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.
The establishment of multiple characters, locations, and elements of the game are present, along with the theme of the Golden Order religion. All in the opening stanzas of a single poetic tale.
Why William Blake in specific? Most poets of his eras wrote about similar themes, in imagery.
schizo moment
Put together with his second post it makes much more sense.
Sure you do, I bet you don't even know what a Game Warden is.
How devoid of real world experience are you that you'd compare a video game to real life interactions? Ever?
Grow up kid. A good video game is good, reality is still grander.
Elden Ring's open world is a simulator for picking up litter in real life. Just go to your local park and pick up the trash, it is no different than collecting crafting material.
>there is nothing worth exploring for.
this is wrong though. Its not even debatable. there are OP weapons armors and talismans all over tghe place that can define a build. If you see no value in exploring then you simply looked up a build and looked up where to get the items, in which case your opinion is invalid.
You're better off looking online for where these items are instead of combing the open world for them. It will save you a shit load of time because the exploring is not enjoyable.
circular logic, very tiring.
You dont find the exploring enjoyable because you look up a guide online to skip that feature. You arent suppose to look up a guide on how to make a build, you play a themed character you want and as you explore you find items that help you play your playstyle better.
Your argument would be like me playing chess online and saying its not very rewarding because
>bro i just like, use an engine, and like, bro i like, bro i like win 90% of my games, its too easy and not rewarding bro!
jesus christ anon.
>circular logic
KEK
>Exploration isnt fun because there is nothing worth exploring for because i already looked up where to find everything that is worth exploring for on my build
You don't get it, its a reference to some anon that uses that word religiously. Go check out an archive search of "circular logic" if you want a laugh.
>you play a themed character you want and as you explore you find items that help you play your playstyle better.
But the drive to find new loot is the only thing encouraging you to tackle side stuff past the first 10 hours. And if the rewards are consistently shit and pointless they sour everything, including exploration
Right on script.
>people can't have criticisms of my GOAT, it has to be a concerted raid!
Kinda sad.
You find yourself in a situation where you ~~*accidentally*~~ ended up having the same exact criticisms of a known discord raid.
Crossfire is bound to happen when morons think they are in good company.
You have autism.
holy shit my sides
Does bring the problem that a lot of the time you'll do a side dungeon or explore an out-of-reach area only for the reward at the end to be something you can't use at all. Maybe some form of unified non-rune currency would've helped soften that blow.
Unironically they should have just ditched weapon/spell requirements completely for Elden Ring if they wanted to be open world. Let scaling dictate build efficiency.
the open world makes everything seem better and grander on first playthrough, at least after mountaintop of giants
afterwards, its more of a chore and you start to miss the tighter designs of older souls games
I tried to do a second playthrough and I quit while rushing around weeping peen trying to remember where useful gear was. I truly do miss the tighter design of older souls games.
The games fun enough as is that I still haven't gotten bored on my 4th playthrough.
I'd have liked more random events in the open world, but it's still good.
Like having a smal % for certain rare enemies to spawn according to the time and date or maybe even "events" run by the server on log in.
Similar to that DS2 chest "events" in Majula that spawned weapons with unique skins every 2 weeks.
>no bullshit or memes
>it felt so soulless
stopped reading right there
1. Sekiro
2. Bloodborne
3. Dark Souls
4. Demon's Souls (PS3)
5 Dark Souls 3/Elden Ring
it's a good game, but doesn't really come close to the other From games mainly due to the lack of innovation. some elements of the game are breathtaking, others made me role my eyes. overall it was surprising to me to see so many bad design decisions like the copy/paste ruins/caves/catacombs. made me wonder if they outsourced this stuff to a different team full of pajeets
Radahn
Rennala
Rykard
Radagon
Mohg
Morgott
Malenia
Maliketh
Margit
Godfrey
Godrick
Dragonlord Placidusax
Astel
Fortissax
Fire Giant
Alecto
Death Rite Bird
Black Blade Kindred
Crucible Knight
Regal Ancestor Spirit
Fallen Star Beast
Commander Niall
Magma Wyrm Makar
Leonine Misbegotten
Loretta
Godskin Apostle
Godskin Noble
Apart from Sekiro, which itself occupies a sphere of gameplay excellence beyond the souls-standard, there is no Souls game with a better selection of bosses than Elden Ring.
Agreed, even minibosses like Leonine and Beast of Farum Azula have a more complex moveset than Artorias, and Beast is usually the first sideboss most people find when they find that first cave.
>Radahn
Literally the worst boss fight in video game history.
filtered. dont worry anon, they nerfed him.
>y-y-youre filtered!
>they nerfed the boss
ER fans just gonna go and make me hate the game even more than I already do with their moron FOTM bullshit. ER is shit and only DS2 is worse.
The only good bosses in Elden Ring are Loretta, Godskin Apostle, Godfrey phase 1, Rykard phase 1, Rennala phase 2, Astel and Death Rite Bird. Maybe Maliketh if he didn't die so quickly. The best ER boss doesn't even crack the top 20 bosses in the series in my opinion.
Let's be honest anons. You no longer like Dark Souls after playing the game for hundreds of hours and will accept nothing other than Sekiro 2 or Bloodborne 2. No point in beating around the bush.
i like the core gameplay of souls games far more than that of sekiro. i just think open world was a step in the wrong direction from where DS3 left us
I'm just glad they tried the open world so we don't have to hear the endless Dark Souls 4 bullshit.
There were ways to differentiate the game from DS3 beyond open world. For example, add more mechanics from Sekiro's playbook.
It's pretty interesting that a rough sequence of Sekiro - Bloodborne - DS1 - ER showcases a growing degree of ever less focused options. The less options you have, the more tightly the game can be designed around them. DS3 is a weird case in that it had a shitload of options but most of them suck in comparison to roll r1, allowing it to have the afotementioned tightly designed bosses at the expense of crap build variety.
Yep. To be quite honest the spell had already worn off after the first couple of Souls games I beat but I just kept playing them as they pumped out more and more in hopes that something would improve. It didn't. Even Bloodborne wasn't enough of an improvement despite how beautiful the world was. No amount of dark whimsy or inspired art direction can change the fact that the gameplay is fundamentally flawed. It just keeps getting worse with every game too because they're not just content to have enemies that wind up an attack and then hit you with it anymore. Everything boss has to be a flailing spasmodic tentacle monster with 73 penises and swords for arms reading your every input to make sure you can only attack them once in a blue moon and then it's their turn to start fricking you in the ass again.
Sekiro was the game that actually evolved the formula into something enjoyable to play. They never should have kept the janky combat system any longer than the first Dark Souls game. But not only did they do that, they fixed it with Sekiro and then went back to the same old shit but now it has an open world. And it's a nice open world, it's a wonderful, magical place, but it's like putting lipstick on a pig. The gameplay is ass and I regret the time I spent with Elden Ring. Sekiro 2 or frick off.
>Sekiro was the game that actually evolved the formula
Disagree. It's
a. very different from Souls and
b. worse, imo
First thing I did after dropping Elden Ring was another Dark Souls 1 playthrough. It was great as always.
I'd love a Sekiro 2, however. Bloodborne 2 is still more Dark Souls, it's not nearly as different as snoys like to pretend it is.
Top 3 best games ever made. Nothing has filled the void since i've beaten it 3 times. I've even resorted to playing FF14 to fill the hole but nothing works.
I just don't care about it anymore and keep forgetting it exists tbh. It doesn't do much new and I don't think it was particularly well executed either, it just feels like a nothing game to me. Maybe it's just me being burnt out of this kind of game, I wish From would make something new because they clearly have a lot of good talent but keep making the same thing with only mild changes.
>I don't feel like replaying it
>>200 hours clocked on first playthrough
>I replayed the other games multiple times
>>110 hours total in each game
Really makes you think.
Shazaam lost
Dark Souls 2-2. Unfocused, mostly shit content, a useless open world, and not-fun bosses. Game needs like 30% of its content cut, open world removed, and the summons removed entirely and bosses redesigned around summons being gone. Magic was 11/10 though.
Except DS2 was far better than DeS and DS1, it became the template for DS3 and ER with most mechanics it pioneered being carried over. That's why Tanimura was co-director for DS3 and ER and did combat and boss move-sets.
Bosses are already balanced around solo play, the summons are just there as an easy mode, just like COOP is.
>majority of bosses have AoE attacks
>they are balanced around solo play
Explain why a boss, much less every boss in the game, needs an AoE attack if they're only ever going to attack 1 target. Fricking idiot.
The ground AoE attacks are similar to sweep attacks in Sekiro, you're meant to jump them and plunge attack the boss while evading, like stomping on an enemies' head in Sekiro for a ton of posture damage.
That's why most cast on the ground only, unlike AoEs in previous games where they were sphere explosions.
>I mean really, no bullshit or memes
>Proceeds to meme
Is this what zoomies think shit posting is supposed to be?
What do anons think of the mushroom theory
redpill me
>interchangeable ashes of war letting you frick around with different weapon skills
>you can duplicate boss souls so you don't have to go to ng+ for every boss weapon/spell
>you can abuse status effects
>powerstance weapons
>all that really cool optional content
>end-game content that is actually hard if you don't have a good build
>cheese methods to beat the game at low level and do whatever you want
>item that lets you get invaded as a solo host if you feel like it
>optional, hard bosses dropping amazing weapons
My favorite from game so far.
Sure, pvp is aids, but there's so many ways to frick with gank squads in this game that it feels balanced if you know what you're doing.
>before capital
10/10
>after capital
8/10
>second playthrough
6/10
The open world was a meme in the end, literally just chalice dungeons in a vast field.
i dropped it during the mountaintops of giants
Elden Ring's a magnificent game, and the quality of the story and characters was a massive leap forward from the souls games. The consistently high quality of the bosses, especially the main shardbearers was very surprising as well, given how From's ambitions seemed elsewhere with this one.
It's formidable length tempers my desire to play it once more however, as two playthroughs amounting to almost 400 hours is basically the usual time I'd allocate to any new souls game at release. Which would have included several playthroughs and many different challenge runs etc. and of course extensive multiplayer. I didn't feel any of that was needed with ER.
Something about the richness of Elden Ring's world, from the deliberately structured locales and extensive environmental storytelling, made it feel like I was sort of spoiling the overall experience by running past everything.
From the prospects of Limgrave's opening shot and Liurnia's grand overhang, you can tell the developers had exploration in mind designing the game, and I feel it loses something special if you try and approach any of it like one of the more segmented levels of the other games.
I doubt I'll play it again for a good two or three years honestly. Hopefully by that time a DLC or expansion will be out. Maybe they'll have even nerfed Malenia.
i kind of agree but you still write like a paid journalist, lol
Played 30 hours, got to Leyndell and uninstalled
Snorefest where you ride around in an empty field on your goat horse for half the time
How many fricking “>le now that the dust has settled… “ threads are we going to fricking get!? Why can’t you trannies just shut the frick up and either play or don’t play the game!? Why the frick does the opinions of others matter that much to you homosexuals!?
schizo post
Disappointed at first but couldn’t bring myself to stop playing it and ended up loving it.
It feels like what DaS3 should have been in a lot of ways, but the open world is that bit too big to the point that Altus and the Snowfield drain the frick out of you.
Its biggest sin is re-using shit, sometimes pathetically. However even with this you can't help but see some charm put into it.
I think it's great and people just were expecting to be good at it because they are souls vets. They complain instead of getting good again and the OP combos bosses do they complain the most about can be countered and punished with a jump button they refuse to use.
Build variety is worthless in any souls game If level goes beyond 50.
Pvp is great if you get good at it, just like in every other from game, open world is not an issue if you know what you need, story telling is better than the previous games.
The only problem Elden ring has is seamless coop mod that kills invasions.
Bb is just lovecraftian dark souls btw.
>Build Variety is worthless beyond 50 in any souls game
I never understood this meme. The estimate tends be around the point you can hit the soft cap on all "essential stats" and hit the soft cap for your damage state. This varies from game to game.
I expected to be disappointed when it was announced to be open world but I was hoping that there would be increasingly unique and complex catacombs, mines, caves, bosses and legacy dungeons to counterbalance all the open world crap.
Didn't expect those to be mediocre/shit in the final game as well.
I really want the online servers for the rest of the games to come back. I'm sad that Elden Ring had no covenant equivalents, online was really lacking.
this
DS2 PvP was the shit, I want to go to fight clubs and invade or get invaded again
It's fricking shite m8.
Unironically feel that it is their worst game yet in the Demon's Souls-era of FROM.
And by a lot. Dark Souls 2 and 3 aren't even anywhere near as bad as Elden Ring. Very disappointing game.
I had fun. It was what I wanted & expected, even after it became obvious that they were reusing assets from older games. The problems I had with it were largely fixed and Fromsoft continues to rebalance and fix broken shit to this day.
The "fromsoft games storytelling" is better when the world is simple to understand.
GRRM wrote something too complex to be told like this. It sucks hard.
>GRRM wrote something too complex to be told like this
>too complex
theres a bunch of demigods and uhhhhhhhh they had sex with each other. the end
It's basically so circular and ambiguous that even some loregays gave up on the full picture.
Maybe the DLC will put everything in its right place, it was like that with Bloodborne.
> it was like that with Bloodborne.
it was like that with dark souls 1 as well but dark souls 1 did it a little better because you could at least be fooled into thinking you understood the story before the DLC
Case in point, that doesn't explain anything going on at all.
>tighter design of older souls games
Nostalgiagays are weird.
Souls games always had worse areas and filler areas even when they were linear. You didn't get 100% good content instead of a mixed bag. You got a mixed bag that just was smaller than Elden Rings huge ass mixed bag.
The filler didn’t start until ds1. Every stage in demon’s souls has a unique gimmick and is soulful
The early game is phenomenal. Wandering through Limgrave, stumbling upon Siofra River and then back up into the nightmare realm of Caelid is an absolute trip. That same feeling is then brought back later on when you get Ranni's quest and you just keep delving deeper and deeper into new areas. Ascending Mt Gelmir without a proper map is also really fun.
This is when the game most feels like the adventure it sells itself as. It unfortunately lets itself down abit with other areas being too disconnected from Limgrave and being big open areas you spend too long in before moving on - it would make more sense for all of them to smaller and accessible early. Art Direction is really sick and the sense of scale is achieved well, in any case.
Bosses are kinda cool, but many of them rely on AoE spam and feints instead of just being fair fights you learn and then get a good rhythm/flow going. Putting a bunch of effort into giving bosses +20 attacks is essentially wasted work since it just makes most of them less fun to fight - save it for an Inner version or something instead of recycling two overtuned bosses twice.
The music is really good with some of the best compositions in the series, but the instrumentation is often very noisy and mixed in an uninteresting way - there was an opportunity to have lots of experimental music or evoke the simple themes of Demon's Souls. From was too afraid to hold back on noisy chanting it seems, alot of themes would benefit massively from removing the Kitamura tropes and bringing out whatever unique instrument and melody you have in that song. If you're going to give Fortissax a theme with blaring organs, get rid of the fricking 7 layers of choir midis, please Kitamura, you need to stop.
PvP is trash but From clearly doesn't care, but they need to not nerf single player strategies to appeal to people who's main mission is to make Souls PvP the least fun thing possible.
>alot of themes would benefit massively from removing the Kitamura tropes and bringing out whatever unique instrument and melody you have in that song
But Kitamura isn't even the main composer
I liked it overall. Leaving stormveil castle for the first time and overlooking the cliffs was an amazing experience that I haven't felt in games for a looooong time. I did start to feel burned out once I got to the mountaintop of the giants though. I kept thinking "I must be close to the end" and then another map opened up and I had to keep on going.
I explored everything I could and took about 120 ish hours on my first save to beat the game. I did pvp/coop along the way too and had some fun doing both.
I 100% agree. Personally I think the game should've ended a little after the capital. Have a little segment when you go inside the tree and have to make it to the top, where you would fight Radagon
If I were the game director, I would've cut both snow areas entirely and placed their unique enemies and worthwhile loot into the previous areas.
ironically the open world feels small when you realise most of the amazing parts could be condensed into a 30-40 hour game and the rest is just fluff
>most of the amazing parts could be condensed into a 30-40 hour game and the rest is just fluff
You could describe any game like that, including previous Souls games.
eh the ratio may be the same across games, but it's much less exhausting when it's only 4-5 hours of filler fluff instead of 20-30
It's a far better version of DS3 with nevertheless some extremely glaring oversights. The souls formula of story telling is really starting to get old, DeS and DS1 made sense, Bloodborne's crypticness can get a pass because of the focus on Sanity, but how big of a coincidence is it going to be that all of these game worlds just happen to be equally cryptic and barren? It forces one to notice the weaknesses, like how is it that a piece of armor tells you it's history in explicit written terms instead of through context cues? Did Vyke's armor really need to mention the fact that it's melted in the shape of the three fingers?
I enjoyed the first half, forced myself to finish the second half. Uninstalled and never looked at it again.
I would rather replay DS2 than play elden ring again.
I learn about all the cut content and how much they rewrote/changed and im unironically mad.
This game easily needed at least 2 more years.
I liked it quite a bit. However after 20h I looked at the map. The games scale is too big for me, and I got overwhelmed. After that day I never turned it back on. More of a “me” problem but the game is simply too “epic” for its own good.
My general experience was 90% of the time feeling like I've been there, done that, and the other 10% being genuine moments of wonder. I mean this both from the perspective of the "series" as a whole (i.e. Souls/Bloodborne/Sekiro) and just the content of the game itself.
Name a more kino moment in gaming of the last 10-20 years.
One (1).
I am waiting.
unironically, both the final bosses of Demon's or DS1
Would be kino if Elden Beast was first, and then they save this to the very last.
Dragon's Dogma and Nier Automata have comparable kino though.
Humanoid final bosses after monstrous pre-final bosses is always kino, especially if they have similar movesets to the player.
This dude should've had multiple phases instead of that fat fish
I'm partial to DMCV's final boss, personally.
Did this moment make you feel better about your own gender dysphoria?
Even if you understood the lore, it isn't as memorable as: Isshin, SoC, Gael, Gehrman and Gwyn. It's cool because it's reminiscent from the first teaser.
No its cool because the architype of the builder is so iconic that it resonates well with almost anyone with a functioning mind.
Its so goofy to try and form a pecking order of a bunch of awesome boss fights.
This was a kino moment. When the main theme kicked in I was pleased. Shame this guy wasn't the final boss and they had to include Elden Beast
Literally a Demon's Souls throwback. The original was more kino.
All of It Takes Two
Open world is always a detriment. Aside from that it just felt like DS3: boring and repetitive.
A Song of Liberty.
1. The Eternal Female groan'd! it was heard over all the Earth:
2. Albion's coast is sick silent; the American meadows faint!
3 Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers and mutter across the ocean: France, rend down thy dungeon;
4. Golden Spain, burst the barriers of old Rome;
5. Cast thy keys, O Rome, into the deep down falling, even to eternity down falling,
6. And weep!
7. In her trembling hands she took the new born terror howling;
8. On those infinite mountains of light, now barr'd out by the atlantic sea, the new born fire stood before the starry king!
9. Flag'd with grey brow'd snows and thunderous visages, the jealous wings wav'd over the deep.
10. The speary hand burned aloft, unbuckled was the shield; forth went the hand of jealousy among the flaming hair, and hurl'd the new born wonder thro' the starry night.
11. The fire, the fire, is falling!
(cont.)
12. Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance: O israelite, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and wine. O African! black African! (go, winged thought widen his forehead.)
13. The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea.
14. Wak'd from his eternal sleep, the hoary element roaring fled away:
15. Down rush'd, beating his wings in vain, the jealous king; his grey brow'd councellors, thunderous warriors, curl'd veterans, among helms, and shields, and chariots horses, elephants: banners, castles, slings and rocks,
16. Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins, on Urthona's dens;
17. All night beneath the ruins, then, their sullen flames faded, emerge round the gloomy King.
18. With thunder and fire: leading his starry hosts thro' the waste wilderness, he promulgates his ten commands, glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay,
19. Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast,
20. Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying:
Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease.
Marika's war with the giants.
tbh I don't really get the william blake stuff people are talking about but if it just means ER's lore is very derivative from it then that just makes me less interested. even the lore and world history is a total rehash too?
Everything is derivative.
to some degree sure, but if ER's lore is really all laid out in a single section like that then what is the point
Because that work is one of the most profound works mankind has ever produced (Blake, not the game). Entire sections of it also read like something out of the 36 Sermons of Vivec.
Its the basis of inspiration for lots of good works of art on their own.
I get you are trying to sound aloof and cultured but you aren't doing a swell job of it by using ignorance as your argumentative groundwork.
I'm not trying to sound like anything (unlike you doing exactly what you're saying I am lmao), I'm just saying it makes it sound pointless and boring to me. even if I go and read all of blake's stuff won't that just make ER's version redundant? what is the point?
Because its a wonderful set of ideas put together brilliantly.
Everything ever told is a rendition of the Hero's Journey, does that mean you now find ALL media now meaningless?
You're being a sophist. I'm just being an ass.
no, you are a cringe reductionist that has literally nothing to say. I may read blake but you haven't inspired any interest in ER's lore for me, sorry
I don't care lol I already told you I don't care which you do.
well I care EVEN LESS that you don't care, so there
very cool
what did Miyazaki mean by this?
it's fun, just mega chunky
It has enough good game in it that I don't regret buying it.
>Limgrave has tons to explore, bunch of shit to encounter around every corner
>Stormveil Castle is a proper romp through a sizable castle, even giving you the choice of raiding through the main gate
>enter Liurnia of the Lakes
>the game fricking makes you run through vast expanses of absolute nothingness
>they even put portals to instantly teleport you to where you need to go for actual progress
That's when I knew this game was very special with its needs
Is it just me, or is Limgrave (and the Weeping Peninsula also) waaaay better themed than all the other areas as well. The colors, skyboxes, music and just general feeling of it is amazing and none of the other areas feel even close to as cool to be in. Liurnia is ok but feels more generic and a bit uglier, Altus is hideous because everything is yellow orange which is just too much, Caelid is ugly and boring, Mountaintop looks nice but has nothing interesting in it. I genuinely wish the whole open world was themed like Limgrave with smaller biome variations throughout.
>anon struggles with art direction
Not liking something an art direction is... struggling with it?? I'm trying very hard to parse this post but I just can't figure it out anon.
not my problem
>Is it just me, or is Limgrave (and the Weeping Peninsula also) waaaay better themed than all the other areas as well.
It's the zone most time will be spent in across all players therefore appealing to a broad majority of people. Putting hell next door was for shits and giggles.
I always like Altus. The perpetual autumn was kino
I thought I would like it from what I saw before the game came out, and if it was a smaller area I probably would have, but this giant area where everything is yellow gets old pretty fast for me. I'd be curious to see what it looked like with a different skybox color at least.
Elden Ring is the epitome of the “open world meme”. It’s literally just a Dark Souls rehash that’s worse than those games in almost every measurable respect, but because it’s open world people acted like it was an all-time legendary game (thankfully that sentiment seems to have worn off already). If you took the relevant levels and stitched them together while cutting out the open world filler, everyone would have shit on it for being so derivative and boring.
Near universal consensus except for contrarians who try too hard is the endgame is dogshit after or at the capital. There's some deviations but nobody celebrates the late game. It's all Caelid, Weeping Peninsula, Liurnia and limgrave.
I will say I liked the tree where malenia was except for malenia. I was probably overleveled for it so it was more tolerable.
Imagine if in DS1 everything after anal rodeo was dogshit Kinda was insofar at least as they were clearly half-baked and that's ER.
I liked it.
figet
Yeah the revenants were miserable, as was any of the enemies who amp up the spastic movements to 11. I liked the area traversing the cityscape along the walls. Enemies hit hard but fair.
Yeah if you want real despair imagine if the space, time and work put into the final mountains + the city in the tempest (which wasn't too bad at times) and put that into the underground city.
>Yeah if you want real despair imagine if the space, time and work put into the final mountains + the city in the tempest (which wasn't too bad at times) and put that into the underground city
unf
Imagine if the game just didn't have anything to the E-NE of Altus and instead had a full interconnected underground section the size of the whole land
>a full interconnected underground section the size of the whole land
Yeah, that's what FROM and journos were saying
source
I'm not gonna bother trying to find it, but I remember that sometime during Gamescom journos said that the underground was the size of the "overworld", and in some interviews with Kitao he said that the underground was massive and interconnected, but it's just some hallways except Siofra river.
Haligtree dungeon was cool yeah up until the small rot swamp. It felt like the dungeon was unfinished from that point onward which I thought was a shame. Great place otherwise. whoever decided to fill the bottom with fricking revenants should be hanged
Don't forget the underground parts. Those were great imho
Every time I thought it was the last underground section there was another. It was chef's kisses all the way through.
The first elevator ride down was a galaxy brain moment. I felt the scale increase and my mind exanded along with it. It just kept going down, down, down. Stunning moment
>The first elevator ride down was a galaxy brain moment. I felt the scale increase and my mind exanded along with it. It just kept going down, down, down. Stunning moment
agreed, discovering siofra and seeing how far it went was one of the highlights of the game for me. seeing the parthenon looking structure in the distance and wordering if i could go there, then midway through the game i think im going to reach it, then no its still cut off, then later on finally actually getting there fighting one of the best bosses in the game and not even realizing i was there until i beat him and walked to the balcony.
Thinking back on it the whole UG section was like a giant edging session that lasted the whole game, and every now and then you were rewarded with a little bit more orgasmic progression underground
ER made me realize that I don't really like Souls combat very much. It's not necessarily bad but it's so simple that it has gotten stale. They have added some new features like ashes of war but the fundamentals are still the same and they're not very interesting fundamentals. You have tons of different weapons but they all boil down to dodging enemy attacks and then getting a hit or two in. Using a big club wasn't really that different from using hookclaws. The defensive game allows even less creativity.
I still liked the game but I feel no reason to come back to it. After seeing the areas it doesn't seem to have much to offer. The gameplay is just too shallow.
It was fun, but Fromsoft should stay away from the open world meme from now on.
One of the GOATs. From and Miyazaki at their best in pretty much every aspect, and I say this as someone who has DaS, BB and Sekiro in his top 10. After three full playthroughs and ~400h, I'm giving it a rest until more patches or DLC.
Absolute gem, especially on PC with the co-op mod. The replay value for a 200-hour game is hard to compare with the replay value for a 40-hour game, such as the dark souls titles. I'm probably going to play NG+ next year and go through another massive playthrough. But they nailed it out of the park, this game is a fricking masterpiece. Top 20 games of all time, imho
I used to rabidly shitpost about the game because I was disappointed with how bad the later stages of the game were but ever since I saw Noah's video essay I've as of since warmed up to the game to a point I might consider re-playing it and maybe even buying the eventual GOTY Legendary Maximum Ultimate edition when the game is truly completed.
Like I never even found 1/3 of the shit I've seen in youtube videos, I didn't complete a single NPC quest outside of the one with the castle down south on the map.
Everything but "legacy" dungeons and dragon ambushes are soulless
Same thing I thought before it came out: it's just the next Souls game. Which is great, but it isn't something uniquely amazing. It's like if Super Mario Galaxy came out and broke all sorts of records and people were calling it generation-defining, and you're sitting there thinking, "It's just the new Super Mario game."
That did happen tho
No one cares about your Elden Ring opinion.
It was a good game.
8.5/10
Good
Not perfect, and I think those Black folk raving about how it's a "10/10 perfect best game ever" are sucking their own farts
My only real complaints are that the exploring is structured in a way that makes it not very repayable, and that the music is still generic "epic" orchestra, they really need to bring back the guy who did the DS1 music. You'll never forget the O&S theme song, but most tracks are forgettable, a lot of what made DS1 great was its music
The biggest issue I had with the game is that it really kills your momentum on a second playthrough or trying to formulate a plan for a new build for a new character. With every other game you could get what you need relatively quick with little fuss no muss. The fact that you have to slog through so much of the open world to get to a legacy dungeon, then do the same thing all over again gets tiring after awhile.
Speaking of that...this game really needed more legacy dungeons. Caelid has none. Mountaintops has none. Altus has two and almost every other zone has one. Farum Azula feels too much like Archdragon Peak to be connected to anything. Would it have killed them to make more or come up with more shardbearer identities? They don't all need some weird gimmick or backstory just make up something like Grimmel the Grisly or Tomas the Destroyer and say theyre Marika's sex slave gone rogue. Anything so I don't have to slave through the repeated marshes of Liurnia or Mountaintops.
Look at these tourists writing tl;dr novellas. What sissies.
Got bored halfway through Caelid. Only other games in the series I played were Demon’s souls and Ds1 and they were way better games. Elden ring just feels kinda crappy and empty, the open world gimmick is definitely the worst thing about the game. I thought stormveil was excellent and the rest of what I played was kind of crap for the most part. They should’ve just made stormveil the whole game instead of adding a stupid horse and shit. Also, the game is stupid easy, anybody who complains about the difficulty is shit at games. The only hard part of the entire game is killing the giant jar guy’s summons without cheesing them. There’s too much anime shit too, weapon arts are dumb as frick
does someone have that picture of Miquella looking all smug? I can't find it
Miquella has a face?
nah it's fanart
i want to see the smug trap
I got bored and stopped playing after ~30 hours
I enjoyed it at launch, but I like to 100% a game before finishing its story…I gave up and stopped playing it ngl
7.5/10, i'll wait for the DLC. the DLC is usually the best part of fromsoft games
I like from games but I’ll be honest the only one I actually beat was demons souls, I felt like finishing that one because it was their first souls games so it has more soul or something honestly idk why I just did
That being said I was getting into bb, just wish Sony weren’t gays and keeping that game forever in its current state
good, not as good as bloodborne. the side step is vastly superior to the dodge roll, all other souls games look bad compared to bb because of that
Aside from the repetitiveness of the dungeons the inability to be invaded without co op or being forced to use an item for it, I felt the game was fantastic. I can get nitpicky about some more things but overall the game still stands head and shoulders over any competition for the last few years. I hope that others take some pointers from what made elden ring successful and build upon it. That being said, I wouldnt mind if fromsoft return to their usual formula or continue to expand their arsenal of great games and create more unique experiences.
It's good but it's tiring. A lot of the areas are a slog to get through, and the shitty storytelling / NPC design of Miyazaki should have been dropped in favor of a more cohesive plot with characters that actually feel like they live in the world. You can say the game is sick cuz it's big but most of it has fricking nothing, except for "rare" drops that are actually just Arteria Leaves.