After spending more than 100hrs of the game. i realised there's pretty much nothing to make me want to keep me going because everything feels more of the same, even the character progression has hit a snail pace where I need 80k to get a single tik on my attributes.

I'm a guy who have beaten Demon's Souls 8 times and Bloodborne 4 times because they didn't have so much fillers and time sinks during the progress of the game. They were great from start to finish, Bloodborne in fact had side dungeons that are pretty similar to elden ring's but they weren't built into the main game but put on the side for people who want to experience them.

I hope that I'm only one here who feels this way about it but is just me?

I have beaten four of the mainline bosses, a ton of smaller ones, have uncovered pretty much the entire map. Prob about 50-ish hours altogether?

I know there's so much game left, but I have completely fallen off. Every encounter / dungeon / castle now just feels like the same process. The same stumbling around until you figure out what order and direction you need to approach from. Every boss feels weirdly the same too, even tho they totally are not. The sense of discovery has gone and all that is left to keep me going forward are the visuals and the whole vibe of the game, which is top tier, but not enough to keep me mechanically interested.

I have definitely gotten my moneys worth out of the game, and maybe there is a time in the future where I decide to go through it again and finish with a different class or something, but as it stands I have gotten bored with it. Its really strange how something so unique looking, and fun to play, has become repetitive for me and now every encounter just feels exactly the same.

I think if the story / plot was a bit more direct it might have kept me engaged longer.

Clearly these are all splodge problems though. I have a buddy who has put like 400+ hours in on multiple playthroughs and it's his favourite game of all time, and I am very happy for him.

Yeah, there's too much filler. I got to the snowy area before Malenia and got bored and quit. That was 150 hours in. I keep thinking of going back to it but end up finding a new game to play instead.

I'm worried the success of this game will make them think all of their games need to be this big or bigger. I'll miss their better paced 60-80 hour games. On the plus side, Elden Ring helped me realize 80 hours is the point where I start to resent a game for being too long. If I'm not really into the grind or story at 80 hours then I find myself frustrated and trying to rush to the end just so I can feel like I'm finished with the game and can move on.

I've gotten all the way to the last boss, beaten all the main optional bosses (skipped or two world bosses because they're repeats of fights I've no interest in repeating AGAIN) and just stopped playing. Nothing is driving me to try and beat the final boss who is one of my least favourite types of bosses to have to fight in these games - particularly in a melee build.

I definitely got my monies worth but over all I think this is my least favourite From game and like some others I'm sort of worried that the success of this will is going to lead to more of their games being like this than not.

Even all the major bosses I found to feel samey as others have said. Everyone seems to have the same 4 core design rules. Lots of big chain combos, lots of AoE centred around the boss, lots of big wind up attacks, lots of tracking attacks and some really, really noticeable input reading.

The bosses have Sekiro style combat but you don't have a Sekiro style moveset to deal with it.

Sadly I found myself in a similar place though a lot earlier having given up about 30-40 hours in.

I generally dont like open world games for a lot of reasons and Elden Ring didnt do anything to change that. I still found the world to have a lot of filler and repeated content, I still found it up to chance as to whether I stumbled into something interesting or dull and it made "Ive not done enough side quests to level up" a realistic idea in my mind when facing new challenges.

It was all a negative effect for me where I was missing the tight nature of the earlier games level design and the bespoke challenges you face in certain ways since it was all now seperated by an variable amount of side content with an incredibly useful horse. It made it substantially harder for me to figure out if I was just bad at a certain boss fight or I had stumbled into it too early without having done enough side content grinding. Even just having the horse in the open world I found took away from what I liked about Souls, I wanted to face that specific challenge with everything I could muster versus the designers specific. I remember a particular moment where I was hunting for a key and it looked like I was going to face a crystal dragon but I was able to ride up, get the key and go away before the dragon had a chance to start attacking. I could have elected to fight it but the fight was already over, I had my reward and the game didnt feel like making me fight it which is a lot of what I liked about previous games.

I also just didnt find any of the bosses particularly interesting or unique so far, it felt like a lot of things I have already seen in previous games so I never found myself that excited to continue on and see what new things might be around. They really liked their chain combos, AoE around themselves and wind ups for most of the bosses.

Im guessing this general design will continue for future FROM Souls games which is understandable and probably the correct choice given the reaction and sales but I think Im out at this point. Its not for me anymore and thats fine.

Elden Ring would be Froms best game if Sekiro didn't exist.

So give me that Sekiro sequel that takes place in an Elden Ring sized render of China.

I probably would've beat the game if the multiplayer actually let me play with my friends. I had very few problems connecting to randoms but when I try to play with my friends, we get a lot of lag and get disconnected after a few minutes. It was so bad we gave up on trying to play together after the first month. PC version btw.

I'm a little ticked the multiplayer in Elden Ring is garbage and ALSO they shutdown the multiplayer servers for all of their other games because they can't figure out how to get hackers to not be able to run code on other people's PCs. Kind of a shit year for Fromsoft PC games tbh.

I beat it. It took me 94 hours to do so and I don't regret doing so. I saw a lot of awesome areas and did a lot of cool things and fumbled through a lot of difficult areas and still came out on top. I did beat pretty much every major boss and visited every major area, even ones that are pretty out of the way.

Whatever you think of this game, though, it's doubtlessly From Software's least refined Souls game (I have no idea about From's games before Demon's Souls). It's poorly paced and all over the place in terms of difficulty, and that's even accounting for the fact that it's an open world game. There were plenty of bosses I had zero issues with, a fair few that nearly made me quit altogether because they felt like bullshit, and some open world areas that were more difficult than most bosses. I think this game might have been one of my all time favorites if I had played it ten years ago, but as of right now I don't really need nearly one hundred hours of Dark Souls 3. I guess what I really wanted was basically just more Dark Souls 3, please, thanks, I don't need a massive open world separating all the good big dungeons that I'm here for.

There are a lot of things to dislike about this game, but one thing that left me feeling disappointed was the reliance on spirit ashes. Some of you may be absolutely incredible gaming gods, with perfectly formed thumbs and absurd reaction times, but most of us aren't. By the end of the game, it didn't feel like soloing most bosses with colossal weapons was truly viable for me. Instead, I wound up using a lot of spirit ashes... which made the game stupidly easy. I went and respec'd into a dexterity focused dual-wielding katana build and that made it even easier. Did you know that you can stunlock Malenia and beat her in a little over a minute? Because I did that. And I'm not bragging, I just dived into the game's most broken build and cheesed the fuck out of it.

That's certainly satisfying on some level, but it's not the same kind of satisfaction as mastering and perfecting a boss that feels fair and square. Maybe Let Me Solo Her did that, but I don't have the patience for trying a boss three hundred times. I never felt like that was necessary to solo anything in the Souls games. Fighting bosses wasn't as satisfying for me here and more than once I stepped back from the game feeling pretty soured on it.

On the flip side, when I finished the game I was dead set on not playing it again, and I was pretty adamant about not buying the next From Software game if it's basically this game, again. But now it's been a couple months and I've been thinking about the game a lot more and I might play it again and just totally embrace the cheese. Just toss all sense of going after balanced, fair fights and steamroll everything because fuck you, you bastard boss designers and your input reading and other shit.

Whatever the case, I hope From Software's next game is at least smaller in nature so that we can have less repeated content, and gives me a fucking quest log. Please, God, give me a fucking quest log if you're going to give me this big ass open world.

Yes a lot of the bosses and dungeons and dragons begin to repeat as you explore more of the world. It's like the developers created this huge world, but ran out of stuff to put in it. With that said, the variety of enemies, especially when exploring a new area is pretty huge, which makes the repeat enemies all the more noticeable. Overall, Elden Ring is a great game in a lot of ways, but its far from perfect. All the From Software cheap stuff is still in the game, and the bosses become frustrating from the Fire Giant onward. I've beaten it, but I did so before the first patch and was able to take advantage of a lot of stuff speed runners were doing at the time, like using the Icerink Hatchet's power stomp attack. I don't see myself going back to play it until the predicable DLC expansion is added in the future.

Already talked about it a fair bit here when the game first launched, but yeah, Elden Ring is the game that proves that for Souls games less is more.

Every day I wake up and wonder if I'm going to get another chance to feel the high of Sekiro's combat again. Until then, I sleep...

I finished it but I definitely reached the point of "I'm over it" way before the credits rolled. It doesn't help that I was influenced by a few Twitch guys I watch to "soak in" the experience and comb through every area, do every cave, every dungeon, every optional boss. Playing a typical Souls games and being thorough is alright but playing Elden Ring this way can really be exhausting. For some people of course. I saw plenty of folks out there play through this game as thoroughly as me and not wanting it to end. Thank the lord for some of the quality of life improvements Elden Ring has over past From Soft entries but it still felt like a long journey and I think the Consecrated Snowfield is one area that really drags the experience out - for what it's worth at least it's optional.

I was pretty vocal about being out on this game at various sticking points, only to eventually soldier on and push through and that was always satisfying. I was also pretty vocal about much of the quest design betraying that "this is unlike any other open world game!" mantra superfans like to parade around. Most of the quest that unlikes the frenzied flame ending, for example, is best enjoyed by warping between two different sites of grace four or five times trading items and conversation. Sure, you could ride through Sellia, up the cliff and back again those four or five times...but why?

That being said, I also don't play these games necessarily for the rush of accomplishing something the best I can accomplish it - I didn't feel like I lost anything from the Radahn fight when the player I summoned happened to be capable of killing him in less than 30 seconds, nor did I feel cheated when I brought in two players on just my second attempt at the Elden Beast because I had absolutely no interest in chasing that thing around its huge arena with my melee build and no horse. I've always enjoyed kicking a game's ass - hell, Contra 3 was one of my most played games as a kid solely because of how much I loved plugging that thing into a Game Genie and going to town - so a big part of Elden Ring's appeal for me was finding an overpowered weapon, ash of war or spirit ash. Mimic Tear was a game changer in the best way.

That all being said, I agree with everyone that after Godfrey the game feels excessive, just a trio of areas that buff familiar enemies beyond reason and cram oppressive bosses down your throat. What saved the game for me at this point was stumbling on the route to pursue Mohg, as I would have never discovered that on my own since it involves engaging with the PVP repeatedly. I really enjoyed all that stuff, though, and it led to a lot of self-discovery of other things I'd thought I'd found but clearly just sprinted past...the density of Limgrave and its two major dungeons, Stormveil and Leyndell, is pretty immaculate and with some greater focus I think there's some kind of perfect game hidden there.

But more than anything, learning how to follow Mohg's quest was vital because it led me to the hill of Albinauracs, one of the most explicit XP farms I've seen in decades, since the SNES/PS1 heyday of JRPGs. I level boosted from mid-80s to nearly 150 just hanging out in that area for a few hours, listening to podcasts and getting more and more blood drunk fantasizing over how much revenge I was about to enact on the Fire Giant and his cronies. And revenge I did enact, quite heftily. After beating Fire Giant, I drunkenly (both metaphorically and literally) pranced through the rest of that game in a six hour late night marathon and took great satisfaction in choosing the Frenzied Flame as my one true God. And got a really sick image out of it.

...Anyway, after a month or so away I realized that I'd always been curious about all that magic I was stumbling into and started an Astrologer play leaning into INT and ARC rather than trying to turn this game into Bloodborne and it's been a ton of fun sniping enemies from afar and trivializing so much that gave me trouble in a melee build. Beat Godrick in 9 hours rather than 40. Having a real good time, and seeing even more of the game's appeal. I was pretty sure Forbidden West was squarely my preferred gaming experience so far this year, but now that I know there's that XP farm out there if and when I need it I've actually found that I enjoy exploring this world with the confidence that it can never truly defeat me even without the sense of discovery - turns out, the sense of nostalgia can be pretty powerful, too. Especially when you get to stare down bad memories like the mad pumpkin that killed me over and over and over outside Fort Haight knowing, for example, that that little icon in the lower left means you can summon (and having gained access summons just ten minutes into the game, rather than nearly 10 hours in) so you just march right up to the guy with an army of diseased dogs and wreck him. Feels great.

No love for Metal Wolf Chaos, huh?

I love the game tbh, it's better than any of the other ones I've played so far. But, I also get open world fatigue and this game is giving it to me after the second boss (80 hours in). My issue is just too much choice in exploration, I kind of just want a slight nudge as to where to go next.

But I've taken about 3 weeks off the game and am starting to want to get back to it again. The sheer amount of fun just finding cool shit and popping up into wierd areas I shouldn't be in brings back memories of when I first played skyrim. I loved that game too, and also never beat it even with 100's of hours into it lol.

Well, it's no Lost Kingdoms, but OK.

As for Elden Ring, it's the first and only From Soulslike game that I've ever gotten the Platinum trophy in. It grabbed me and didn't want to let go.

I don't know if this is part of why I loved it so much or not, but I didn't have a problem with the "filler," because I didn't see it that way. To me, Elden Ring presents a gigantic world in which I can just point in a direction and go, knowing I'll find something that way eventually. I never felt like I had to do it all, even though I did end up doing everything there was a trophy for.

But to each his own. While I'm excited to play another Elden Ring-style adventure from From, I hope they also make more of the "traditional" style Souls games in the future, too.

I mean to be fair we all know that it's Actually Enchanted Arms.

Sekiro would be From’s third best game if The Adventures of Cookie & Cream didn’t exist.

Sekiro would be From's best game if Ghost of Tsushima with its superior and more fun combat didn't exist. Sucker Punch does it again. Oh, who am I kidding, it still wouldn't be From's best game.

I almost stopped a couple times. Feels like the game loses steam after a climax halfway through, and then you have a whole new area to work through. That's when the bosses get a little ridiculous with damage, leading to so many one hit or stun locked deaths. I had an amazing 40 hours and a sloggy 20 hours. Early on I could go somewhere else, but once it became apparent that one level for vitality didn't really matter anymore, the urge to explore went away.

Bloodborne and Sekiro took me between 30 and 40 hours, which seems like a sweet spot for their games. Honestly, after finishing this one I was done with this style of game (for now, anyway).

I put it down to play something else about halfway through Raya Lucaria. I did most if not all of the optional side stuff up through that point, unlocked pretty much the whole map up to that point, etc.

I had fun with it but it started to feel like the same old tricks at that point and I just don’t think these games are fun enough to justify going through the motions over and over. To me.

Guy down the hall shooting instant kill fireballs at me. Where have I seen this before? Solution is the same as it’s always been. I know 25 hours down the road there’s a boss who’s “unlike anything ever seen in a Souls game” or whatever. Then again it’s apparently just a yucky version of Valstrax from Monster Hunter.

I’m being facetious. Kind of. I mean, I’m happy for the Souls superfans who seem like they got their favorite game this year. Them overstating how revolutionary various parts of it is doesn’t harm anything really.

Actually I really enjoyed my time with Elden Ring and I felt at that point that I’d had my fill. I didn’t put it down disliking it. I killed some dragons. I beat up dudes with a lot of arms. I put it down feeling that I’d enjoyed what I played and that I didn’t need another 30+ hours of it.

@av_gamer said:

From could have made Anthem and Battlefield 2042 and Sekiro would still be their worst game.

I'm not gonna repeat everything I've already said but I will say I have yet to finish it. Haven't touched it in around a month at this point. The last thing I did was beat the Godskin Duo. Still think Malenia is a terrible fight and I've yet to cheese it and get it over with.

I think this is my 2nd least favorite of their games. I like it more than DS2 but I don't see myself replaying it at all whenever I do inevitably finish it. While I've happily replayed all their other games multiple times. Albeit those playthrough's took significantly less time.

I find it amusing how many folks here do not like Sekiro, my fav Fromsoft title. Gawwd I love that game. Its where Malenia belongs....bitch lol.

@therealturk: Let’s not overdo it..

@humanity: Eh that seems to be going easy on it. I don't know that I've seen a bigger enemy of Sekiro anywhere.

Sekiro is a very specific thing that does feel good to nail. Elden Ring is a very broad thing that runs right out of steam once you get to the endgame. And that endgame is 15 hours. If you're quick about it.

They're both kind of exhausting but in different ways.

Sekiro is FromSoft's best game and one of the best action games all around. I like Elden Ring a lot but I don't know when I'll find the time/inclination to actually finish it, I had a great 50ish hours with it and now I reckon that's about as long as I can maintain interest in a Souls game.

I really liked what I played when I played it, but I was very, very done with it by the time I got to the final boss. I almost wish I hadn't tried to beat Malenia, because it just required me to completely respec (which I'm glad they FINALLY included an easy way to do!) and would've felt like unfinished business ,but I honestly feel about this like I did about Dark Souls 3: by the end, they replaced a real challenge with overwhelming bullshit. And you can overcome it, that's not the issue.

The issue is: it doesn't feel like you have to get better at the game, it feels like you have to get better at fighting THIS SPECIFIC BOSS/ENEMY.

I just want Bloodborne 2. Is that so much to ask?