The Reviews Are In

No, that mechanic is totally in there. It's linked to a Great Rune that will give you that ability in exchange for getting less healing from flasks.

@therealturk: Which one is it?

@rubberbabybuggybumpers: Malenia's

@av_gamer: Wow. I'm surprised you compare it to Demons Souls. Granted I didn't play it until the 2020 remake and had already beat Dark Souls 1&3, and platinumed Bloodborne and Sekiro by then. The only fight that took me more than 2 tries was the Maneater fight. I'll say at least Allant is not as big a chump as Gwyn in DS1. I think Margit and Godrick are harder than anything in Demons Souls. I would argue that DS3 has the hardest bosses, besides Sekiro, up until Elden Ring. But I won't really argue because its totally indicative of how these games have always gone for folks. We've all had conversations about which bosses gave us the most trouble. I remember everyone saying how brutal Midir was in the Ringed City. I beat him first try. Then proceeded to get my shit kicked in by Gael shortly after. Ya just never know lol.

@therealturk: Yeah, I'm not quite close enough to that one. I made it to the Grace point next to the ruins, which are also next to the first lift east of Leyndell.

Do a lot of you make use of Great Runes all that often?

I find that there's never a particularly useful time to actually use them. When I would WANT to use them is to help in learning a tough fight but by nature of learning a tough fight it means I'm dying a lot and thus wasting the consumable.

I found they really don't make much of a difference. The bosses still do high damage where they can kill my build in 2-4 hits, at least that was my experience. I spec'd a high dex character who couldn't equip heavy armor without becoming sluggish. So I had to depend on rolling a lot, until found a 100% block shield that didn't heavy load my character. Even then, I still had to master rolling with the later bosses.

My great curse with these games is that I never make use of anything and can barely tell if anything I am using is helping me. I've got talismans and armor that purportedly restore health over time but half the time it seems like that's not triggering so I gave up on it. And the talisman that "greatly" enhances HP adds, like, a quarter of how much HP proper level enemies seem to take off in a single hit?

So I just try to be big and strong and push through. And yet I still can't help collecting crafting materials, I'm damn near 1,000 Rowa Fruit at this point.

The best health talisman is only like.. 8% I think which is pretty negligible when there are much better options available.

The Royal Remains armor DOES regenerate your health.... when you are near death and then only to like a fifth or so of your total life. It is technically a way that one could interpret that item description but it's still mostly bullshit.

Agreed, they are pretty useless.

I use Rykard's, which heals on enemy kill, as a QoL thing while exploring the world. But it's no help at all for bosses and realistically I have more than enough healing to get through any given area. Just keeps me from reaching for the flasks as much.

Yeah seriously, the amount of rune arcs I have now would probably be wasted on a single boss fight. I realise they're not doing any good being left unused but I think it would just agitate me if I were to keep losing them on bosses. Kinda deflates the importance they try to give to the great runes.

@efesell: I just used Godrick's Great Rune for the first time and it took me from dying to Commander Niall to killing him. I had learned his patterns, but I just needed a little more cushion to actually take him out. It wasn't a huge bump, but dying to 1 hit or 2 hits is the single biggest difference you can make in this game. So it was the difference maker.

Latest patch adding NPCs to the map and more dialogue to better keep track of quest lines.

This is the sort of normal fix I would expect in games but From doing it seems Wild.

Added (previously met) NPC locations to the map…

Which validates a lot of what I’ve been saying about this game’s approach to an open world, IMO. Even From thinks players need more awareness of where The Stuff is.

Or more importantly, that it doesn’t matter if you know where The Stuff is. It’s The Stuff that matters.

Honestly the npcs and quests were so free wheeling in this compared to other from games that I didn’t have any trouble keeping track of quests. I met numerous people out of order and they were still like “well anyway…”.

But it’s a nice feature to add anyway.

I suppose I'm being a little reactive and Reply Guy about it because it still doesn't really address what I'm actually having a conversation about.

But if Open World Tropes are a thing this game was meant to upend, I did find one quest really, really weak in my last session: after solving the Town of Sorcery puzzle, there are two NPCs on opposite sides of a hill that need to trade items and information with each other, both anchored to fast travel points. So once you've got the primary item and solved the puzzle, you suddenly find yourself (at least if you're a dweeb like me) fast traveling from A to B and back again for about 15 minutes exchanging dialogue between two NPCs, and while it ends with the expected cliffhanger it lacks that edge that some of the Roundtable encounters have. In other words, it feels very artificial and poorly thought out.

But then, I suppose every open world game needs at least one of those. It just felt weird given the rest of my time with the game so far. But I could couple that with finally finding Ranni in her keep only to then be literally locked into that location until I'd traversed up and down a couple times to exhaust dialogue trees. Was an odd feeling back to back, especially since I'd spent so much time in Volcano Manor before, and even that quest line felt a lot like a regular ass Tsushima thread with me bopping between fast travel points to achieve small goals in the name of my new masters.

I was able to complete Blaidd's quest even though I didn't start it from the beginning. I jumped in the middle of his quest after I started Ranni's quest which he is a large part of. In past From Soft games, if you don't start their quest from the beginning, then the quest is broken and you missed your chance. Glad that wasn't the case this time. Then again, I did hear the howl and talked to the merchant at the church, so maybe that triggered it and I just missed some parts.

FWIW apparently smithing stones are a lot cheaper to buy now, particularly "standard" (as opposed to "somber") ones, which seems like a good thing to me. It was definitely a weird design decision that you only need 10 somber stones to fully upgrade a "special" weapon, while you need 97 stones to fully upgrade a "standard" weapon. It means the standard weapons are actually more expensive and difficult to fully upgrade. Makes no sense, really. Now it won't be so painful to upgrade a different weapon when you want to try something different.

Lol of course the latest patch nerfs that frost axe everyone wants to use after seeing that speed run. And the dang sword of night and flame which I was looking forward to checking out when I got that far. Maybe I'll just forgo the patch for now and make a run for the sword to test it out. At least they didn't screw over the bleed part of my build yet. Kept hearing bleed was OP, however its only my secondary weapon so no biggie.

EDIT: I hate when devs release patch notes, list a bunch of them, and then write "other weapon and balance changes." Sooo wtf are they?

EDIT2: Apparently Steam forces you to update your game before launching. Goddammit Steam, c'mon. Boourns I say. Guess I gotta go offline mode for now.

yeah this is much appreciated. i enjoy From games, but honestly their NPCs and quest mechanics have always appeared like a low-priority afterthought to me. great voice acting and backstory- but with looping animations and tedious hide and seek. at least they're making it easier to locate them on the map!

The map update stuff is a whole thing for sure, but I find it wild how upset these balance changes are making some people. Like, I get how you might be disappointed that your build just got upended, but there also seems to be an underlying anger over FromSoft directly responding to cheese strats. It's opening up the whole "easy mode" debate again in a way that also seems to inadvertently expose how a good chunk of people are actually playing Elden Ring.

I dunno, something about the fan response to this feels... significant.

@mindbullet: I blame the peak covid twitch revolution.

Maybe it was just me becoming more aware of it, but since 2020 it seems like video games have just turned into everyone having a dick measuring contest on who can do what the first for no other reason to weirdly flex on tiktok/social media.

I'm not going to tell people who just cheese and farm their way through the game they can't, but for me I don't see the point at all. Sure you're "playing" the game the way you want, more power to you, but is that really PLAYING the game?

I play games to experience a creation/vision of the developers, call me crazy but I don't think From necessary WANTS people to kill the same 10 enemies for 60 hours and then blast through the rest of the game in 40 minutes. Hence why they put out these nerfs.

People argue "I don't have time to waste on a boss for 2 hours". Okay, but you have time to just run back and forth for 40 pressing two buttons? *shrug* aight, not my free time.

If the same people who whine about easy mode are now whining about losing cheese strats then that’s just delightful. A beautiful self own and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If they did nerf the Icerind Hatchet, then it's a good thing I beat the game before that happened. I have it uninstalled now, so I don't know. But the funny thing is, they didn't have to nerf it, because the enemies actually adapt to players trying to spam the attack. They get better at dodging it and many enemies and bosses also rush the player during the stomp animation. It wasn't a complete game breaker. I still died plenty of times using it and had to learn how time the stomp properly. Heck, when I fought Astel, I couldn't use it at all because of the beast's design, and it's almost impossible to use it against very agile enemies like the red wolf boss in Laya Academy.

Annnnnnnnnnnd I'm finished with the game. I have no desire to go back and play with other characters as the endgame is absolute dog shit. The game completely falls apart after the fire giant.

@rubberbabybuggybumpers: The game should've ended in Leyndell imo. It's already built as a crecendo, and most of the areas after it are way less interesting. I already quit once before beating the game, and on my second character I've again hit the post-Leyndell fatigue.

I'm honestly starting to think this will be the first Souls game I'll never finish, just because it's too long.

I finished the game last night. The main story is maybe twice as long as it needed it to be. The momentum completely broke after the battle in the capitol. The second to last fight kicks ass, but other than that the back third of the game is a real chore. The big difficulty spike alongside several long dungeons just felt like the game asking way too much.

While I'm not sure that it really resolves it well either way nothing about Leyndall felt like the end of the game to me so I definitely wouldn't have liked it had the game ended there.

Plus I do really like the mountaintop, actually, even if by that point I was winding down on my Go Everywhere phase of the game.

I mentioned this in another thread, but Leyndell is probably my favorite area in a From Software game just in terms of the aesthetics, both the visual design and the music (and the fact that a lot of the enemies are playing their own instruments as an accompaniment). I just liked being in that area, it was so gorgeous. Which was maybe intended so that when the city gets covered in ash it hits you harder.

For me the game was not too long, and I didn't find the final third to be a slog. I was just happy to take as much game as they wanted to give me.

But I have to acknowledge that it is entirely possible that I'll feel differently on subsequent playthroughs, simply because of the way I played the game the first time. The first thing I did was ride all over the damned place finding all the map pieces I could and sequence breaking the hell out of the game, including fighting the intended third demi-god first (that took more than a few tries!) and then going back much later to wipe the floor with the intended first demi-god on the first try with OP equipment in literally about thirty seconds.

Now, though, since there is no incentive to visit late-game areas in order to gain powerful equipment and upgrade materials--meaning that I'll be playing the game more in the intended sequence for NG+--it may leave me with a very different impression! We'll just have to see.

I have to agree with the game starting to drag by the Fire Giant, especially because of how cheap he was. I used the hill exploit to get past him and I'm proud of it. That might have been patched now, so I'm glad I was able to do it when I could. And yeah, the boss fights after that point start to get kind of silly. And while the ending I got was okay, given what I've played through, there should have been more of it. But then, this how most From Software games usually end. One of the reasons I didn't give the game a perfect 10

I've only spent an hour and a half or so in the Forgotten Lands/Castle Sol and I can definitely see this area souring the game for a lot of people. I get why they did it, for whatever reason open worlds have become addicted to snow levels as a bid for prestige since GTA V's New York sections, but Elden Ring isn't trying to show off any kind of technical proficiency the way Horizon or Red Dead do so it's just...boring to look at, really. And sight lines are of course pretty terrible, something that had been a selling point for all the other zones in the game.

Likewise, encounters have suddenly become a crapshoot. Some enemies that look familiar go down familiarly, while others are suddenly hitting way harder or taking far more damage to kill. Likewise it suddenly feels like every area is designed with an ambush in mind, especially that castle. I met Niall but I'm not sure we'll get well acquainted, I hate that fucking slog of a boss run.

Then again, I'm the guy whose "hit a wall" in this very thread probably three times already so who knows? But I do get why some people have expressed a feeling of this area being a bit too much and that Leyndell and Morgott felt a lot like a climax.

I keep hearing about Niall having a fucked up boss run back and I wonder if y’all missed a shortcut because I remember just running to the left up one elevator with nothing in the way.

@efesell: Same. I had to fight literally no one to attempt him again, you just have to unlock the elevator right next to the boss door, then spawn from the Church of the Eclipse site of grace, head out the door and go to the elevator on your right. There's one guy patrolling right outside the church, but he's easily avoided.

Niall was definitely really hard, though. And you just sort of have to hope that your summon can draw aggro on two out of the three and then survive long enough for you to kill the two minions.

As a solo melee build this game is more frustrating than fun when reaching the endgame.

Most bosses are spent running away (Niall, Godskin Duo) or chasing them (Fire Giant, Elder Beast) while getting staggered and killed if hit once.

I just can't bring myself to summon or use abilities but it really feels like I'm playing Elden Ring the wrong way. Taking a break before I do the final optional bosses. It's a good game but below the Dark Souls series and Bloodborne if you're playing solo.

Probably great for co-op.

@mrbgone: Or use abilities…?

Man I think most games are frustrating if you don’t use the tools designed for them.

I haven't played Elden Ring at all this past week. I think I'm around 60ish hours in, I just beat Radahn, and I have no real urge to go back to it. I was feeling the Souls fatigue in the lead up to launch, but that went away once I got my hands on the game and really enjoyed it. But now I don't know man. I don't think I need a 100-hour Souls game. I feel like if I never see the rest of this game, I'd probably feel fine about it.

Meanwhile, I'm like 70 hours into Cyberpunk, where I feel like I'm playing a game where all the characters just can out of a version of Idiocracy, but if it wasn't a comedy, and feel compelled to finish that. So maybe my brain is just broken.

Maliketh the Black Blade was a cool looking boss when his second phase is triggered. He's the last boss I fought. When I spawned in the ashed ruins of the capital city, I walked around a bit, found another grace point, and quit the game. I have no desire to continue playing it. I doubt I'll give it another go when the DLCs come out. There is no incentive to go through NG+ and beyond.

The stuttering won't be fixed, I think. It might be something tied to the game's engine and that shitty anti-cheating software they've added. EAC is bypassed by playing the game offline. The stutters mostly go away but are still present in some zones.

I've been enjoying Sekiro more as of late. Hopefully FromSoft gets around to making a sequel to that or Bloodborne, makes them for the PC, and unlocks the fucking framerate. They need to use a better and more updated engine.

I'm up to Maliketh now, I feel like I'll finish the game but the last stretch is rough. It seems like From wanted to mitigate for players who would grind out the open world and get to the endgame overlevelled so they just made everything hit ridiculously hard. I'm not a fan of that sort of design at all, you can execute 99% perfectly on a boss but if you don't dodge at the correct time against some grab attack with a wild hitbox it's game over.

It's going to be interesting to see how (or if) fan perception of this game changes as more people reach the part of Elden Ring where it seemingly falls of a cliff. Even some of the true believers I've heard talk about it have straight up said it feels shockingly bad to play.

The question might end up being 'if you loved 60 hours of a game but the final 20 hours are absolutely dreadful, how much does-or should-that color your overall feelings on it?' Elden Ring is obviously going to be a big part of the 2022 GOTY talks, but it might be a bit more complicated than I thought at first.

@mindbullet: I’ve played untold RPGs where the game is great and the final dungeon is absolute horseshit. Personally I don’t feel Elden Ring really falls that hard but if it did there’s no level of bad that like the last few hours could be that hurt the previous 80 that I had a great time with.

It's definitely soured my overall view on the game. Up until finishing the capital I thought this game was a shoe in for my GOTY and was my favourite gaming experience in years.

Now picking it up again feels like a chore.

Interesting that so many people seem to dislike the final portions of the game. To me Lost Izalith in the first Dark Souls was so much worse than anything in Elden Ring. From eventually even admitted that it basically put a B-team of designers on that zone and didn't have time to fix the trash fire before release.

I don't think I would like a single Souls game if I judged them too harshly on their final zones.

Also I appear to be a very odd man out in that I hate the Capital. The sewers are a large part and maybe that's not fair but rest of it didn't do much for me at all.

I saw video of the sewers of Leyndell and noped out of the experience. Seeing that shit reminded me of those hero graves where those chariots are rolling nonstop. The worst hero grave, IMO, was that one at Mt. Gelmir. I straight up cheated in order to get to the boss fight, and it ended up being a rehash of the first boss in Raya Lucaria. I don't think there is any legitimate way to get to it without using some sort of cheat script. It's total horse shit. The payoff for defeating that boss wasn't worth the time.

@rubberbabybuggybumpers: I actually had a way easier time with that one then the one at the very start of the game cause you can just ride the chariot and skip the whole dungeon.

Skips any potential loot but eh fuck that I don't need 3 more Golden Rune(12s) or whatever.

If it's the one I'm thinking of, with the autonomous chariot and lava on the sides, you actually have to jump on top of the chariot from a spot directly above it and it will roll you to the boss, which I thought was a pretty clever puzzle (figured that one out myself without looking it up FWIW). But yeah, didn't mean those chariot things weren't annoying as hell... one for the whole game would've been plenty, there didn't need to be multiple. And I likewise didn't enjoy the sewers, too much crawling around in pipes that all looked the same and left you with no sense of direction.

Wellllllllll shit! I had no idea you could jump on them. I tried many times to jump over and got annihilated in the process.

finally rolled credits yesterday night- managed to snag the platinum (which really, really isn't so bad if you already play in a mildly completionist way- you're already most of the way there at credits, similar to a sony 1st party game). i think my total time was 190hrs- DON'T JUDGE ME. i'm very much of the vinny caravella school of game completion where my time in-game balloons waaay out beyond my peers. but i am confident i saw at least 90 to 95% of what that game has to offer. and this is the first game in years where i felt i needed to participate in The Realtime Discourse. so i figured fuck it! let's smoke the whole damn pack.

i have prepared a [TAKE], but i'll spare the forums another block of text and spoiler tag//give a one sentence summary.

tl;dr- very good, very iterative game. but i don't think the open world did anything to enhance my enjoyment (in some cases might have caused tedium), and i think i still prefer the construction of the previous FromSoft games.

@rubberbabybuggybumpers: I know you can't jump on all of them, like not the one in that first dungeon next to the tutorial area at all. But for the Mt Gelmir one there's a little platform on top especially for you to drop on.

FWIW even after I made the jump onto the thing I still died the first time I tried to dismount because it wasn't clear to me how I was supposed to do that! Derp. I think it turned out you were supposed to wait until it had turned around and drop off the back... directly into the lava. Which does much less damage in this game than in previous games for some reason.

@mellotronrules: I actually quite enjoyed the open world if only because it adds to my sense of discovery and makes me more likely to give it a second play through. I'mv very much like you in that I tend to be very, very slow when playing these games (I'm 80 hours in and up to the cold giant-mountain place, which I'm told is like 2/3 to 3/4 through the game). The difference is that in prior games, the linearity left me with a definite sense of "I've seen this" and gave me absolutely no reason to go back until DLC got released.

In Elden Ring, I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff I've missed despite being pretty thorough. For example, I found a dungeon with a second, hidden boss fight in it, so now I'm wondering how many of those types of encounters I missed in earlier dungeons.

The only knock I'd give the open world is that the obtuse quest design is a bigger problem than normal, just due to the sheer size of the world. In prior From games, the world was small enough that you could usually blunder into the encounter you needed just by backtracking a but. In Elden Ring, the world is so massive and the locations so spread out that unless you know exactly where to look, you probably aren't going to find what you're looking for. There are far too many times when a quest line will just dump you off without even a subtle hint as to where to go next.

For example, Sellen's quest, which, among other things, requires you to:

1. Find an NPC in a hidden dungeon in the Caelid wilds. The game offers up no indication, either in NPC dialogue or item descriptions, that you should look there, and you wouldn't immediately associate that region with the rest of what's going on in the quest. While one of the merchants does sell a note directing you the general area of the dungeon, the note doesn't associate the dungeon with the NPC in any way, so you wouldn't necessarily connect the two.

2. Find another hidden underground area, in which there is another hidden door you need to open to find the required NPC. The item you need for this step of the quest gives you no indication that this is where you should go.

3. Find a summon sign in the Academy of Raya Lucaria. Given the NPCs involved in the quest, it isn't necessarily a big leap to think you might look there, but the area itself is massive, and trying to find a tiny summon sign in it can be tedious.

To be clear, I am absolutely 1000% in the camp that these games should NOT have quest logs. But while I don't mind needing to be attentive and put together hints myself, the game does actually need to provide those hints, which I think Elden Ring frequently does not do at all.