Jeff, Jeff, and Jan Talk About Elden Ring!

I'm with Jeff G on this.

The game ain't open ended, it just won't tell you what you need to do. You wind up doing what the game wants anyway. It's obtuse design.

The game case could hold a turd and it'd be an improvement over Sekiro.

People always complain aing about the difficulty. BUT you can litterly summon other players to kill every boss in every game.

More elden ring videos! This is great.

The fact that this video is all "early game" and my experience since starting hasn't sent me anywhere covered in here is why I'm loving Elden Ring - I just picked a direction and hoped for the best.

It is only me or Jeff and Jan keep referring to the lore being in the item descriptions, and I know it's a Souls thing but in my experience... it's not in Elden Ring? Most item descriptions seems more functional than anything else. The lore is more in conversations with NPCs and visual storytelling in the world design.

I feel like people are doing a disservice to this game by saying "oh, it's one of THESE", be it as a disparaging comment or as praise from FromSoft fans. In my experience, this is only true at surface level. Sure, the combat system is very much the Souls system with extra features, and you still have ballbusting boss fights, but the open world design changes so much about how you play it vs. a Souls game. It makes exploration core to the gameplay, and as a viable (it'd even say better) alternative to just try, try, and retry to go through a difficult encounter. Instead of just being against a difficulty wall, you can either just completely go around an encounter, or if it's essential, just... leave, explore, and come back with better equipment, skills, higher level, etc. There's not one encounter yet where I felt I HAD to repeat it over and over again.

The best example of the choice and those two approaches is for Margit, the first true boss in the game.

• I did it solo, and my approach was : I tried and died a few times, and I didn't have the mental energy to learn his patterns and try again. So I just left, explored for a good 5 hours, got some cool new summons, leveled up, etc. I died like maybe... 3 times in that 5 hours because you can always avoid dangerous situations in the open world, and normal enemies aren't very hard to beat. Then I came back to the boss, used my new summon and beat him first try.
• I did it multiplayer with 2 other people that were a bit underleveled. We just decided to try, try, and retry until we've got it. It took about 20 tries, and 1-2 hours, it was very draining, but at the end, we felt like it was a massive accomplishment.

To me, the fact that they managed to make the game more accessible, supporting less experienced players better, without diluting the essence of the series for hardcore FromSoft fans, and actually IMPROVED the game for both by doing so is an achievement. That's why, while I didn't finish the game yet, I think it's the best game FromSoft has released, and is shaping up to me one of, if not my favorite game of all time.

Finished the video, it was cool seeing Jeff G. changing opinion in the middle of it and being 100% ready to give it another go.

Also, sorry if my last message/rant seemed like it was against the crew, it was not. Just a general observation :)