Oh btw, double post dunnot care. @robo you are absolutely right about the characters motivations feeling wrong in the plot.
The game very much fails to express till what extent these demi-gods got themselves into a stalemate.
I supposed it is implied, like Redahn is mad but Miquella can’t act on it cause she got problems of her own from that same fight.
Still having something like random fights of opposing factions spur around the land would probably give more justification to their causes and to the stalemate itself (they send soldiers into skirmishes cause there’s nothing they can do personally that would resolve the conflict). Or do their entire dungeon to get there and have someone say “no no, this character ain’t here, sorry, someplace else fighting, mind going there?”
In DS1 you invade the lord’s home to take their soul, but they were basically chilling and dealing with daily life till you got there. Same with DeS.
You were the one with the motivation there, the one disrupting everyone’s chill, and not them having the world plunge into chaos.
There is a little bit of this, especially between the forces of Liurnia and Limbgrave. There is also that huge pack of
Leyndell knights in waiting at the other side of the blown out bridge leading to Reya Lucaria. And the forces of Leyndell and Volcano Manor are still fighting at the entrances to that mountain.
Yeah very much…
Dunno still feels wrong for them to just be there. Morgot at least makes it look in his fight like he’s willing to clean the place up and does nothing… Not even a temporary aliance and a bit of backstabbing. Is this medieval themed or not?
Or maybe it’s just harder for western cultures to see this notion that a cursed world would end up in stagnation. Pretty much like DS3 where that stagnation is so strong they have to revive lords to burn them again, and not only 1 but 5.
All of their games had a bit of that notion so far to a level or another. But in here… Might be how much it is underlined that is not working for me?
I agree with you, but also wanted to point out these traces of continued fighting (and sometimes cooperation?) because I think they’re easy to miss. The only of these games which ever seemed to make a theme and literalize its gamey continuous present was Dark Souls 3, which they did by explaining that time has stretched on and brought all life with it into complete, absurd exhaustion. In Elden Ring there doesn’t really seem to be any treatment to time and how its passing would maybe change this land, it’s like the shattering just happened and has been happening forever. Because of that it’s not very interesting and it’s hard to make sense of, another place where my general disappointment about the story here lies.
If you killed the boss maybe no one is left to give you the hint, but one NPC talks about hearing slithering inside the walls at night. Check the rooms and all their walls for anything sus.
I was thinking this would’ve been an excellent game to bring back DkS2’s Bonfire Ascetics. It would be nice to have a way to spice up and improve the rewards for areas I’m overleveled for. Or rechallenge a boss I enjoyed without having to do a whole new game
I have no idea what kind of character build I should be making for this game. I originally started with Strength and minor Dex just to be able to use every gargantuan sword, but I didn’t enjoy that so I respec into a character than can wield the Sword of Ice and Fire or whatever + the Bloodedge Carver sword thing but in the end, I still just mainly use melee and crossbow because I don’t know what Magic is good.
So what Magic is totally broken and should I be abusing? I thought the Sword of Ice beam would be better but it doesn’t actually seem that good? Maybe my Int needs to be higher.
You probably just need some upgrades in it.
That’s been a problem for plenty of people in here.
The game seems to get to a point where weapons don’t pull much damage. Like… The game seems pretty free but specific upgrades materials are placed mostly in specific places which is kinda the path the devs were planing for you to follow.
Maybe explore some more dungeons or accessible areas?
About magic I have no idea, but people around the thread keep mentioning “The Laser”.
As for myself I just finished exploring all the areas to my content. Gonna wrap up the ongoing questlines and going for the final area.
Might do some serious wiking afterwards looking for talismans, weapons and armor I left behind.
All the magic in this game is crazy powerful, honestly. Here’s my rule of thumb:
Sorceries are raw power. You absolutely melt stuff, especially with all the int-buffing and sorcery-buffing stuff in this game. You get fifty different ways to make dudes explode with dangerous blue projectiles. Your goal is basically to just pump your damage numbers to crazy levels so you brute force everything.
Incantations are flexibility. There’s an incantation for every elemental weakness, even magic/ice. You get human-destroying spells (madness), cool dragon spells (dragon communion), holy, utility buffs like poison/bleed, and cleansing. You have to match the spells to the situation more to make use of incantations.
I’m a Strength/Faith build, so I went dragon spells. My favorite is Rot Breath, which spews heavily-damaging scarlet rot breath from a dragon head. I open every boss fight with it. I tend to shift my other spells around a lot depending on what I’m fighting.
If you read earlier in the thread you can see the Miffy build for sorceries, which is stacking damage debuffs, FP efficiency, and int, and then deleting everything in front of you with Comet Azur (basically a kamehameha)
If you’re going for “widest usability”, investing 30 points into int or faith will give you access to most of the important incantations/sorceries for that part of the game.
What’s really broken in this game, though? Ashes of War. Tons of them are super good and have really small FP costs. Greatswords + Bloodhound Step is so powerful I honestly think they might nerf it.
skipping a lot of this thread for fear of spoilers but the whole “encounter a quest NPC you forgot about from 80 hours earlier and now they want to kill you and you have no idea why” thing is verisimilitude at its finest. anyway From gave you little NPC quest markers and “note” items which imo is more than enough in lieu of a quest log. I’ve always hated quest logs! I don’t want to read about stuff that I’ve already done! that’s boring! if I forget something an NPC told me I simply do not care B)
anyway I’ve put like 100 hours into this now and I’m at level 91 and I just reached the capital. I did radahn in one try which makes me feel like I was already stupidly overleveled or overbuilt. playing dex/int with moonveil. also got to the third major underground area and it really blows my mind how much stuff is in this game. none of it sucks, either. it’s a little disappointing that some of the minor caves re-use layouts but I still haven’t gotten the cookie cutter feeling I get from literally any content I see in a bethesda game. every part still feels deliberately designed as its own thing. and now that I’m in what I’m assuming is mid-to-late game they are starting to blur the line between big sprawling open sections and tight focused level designed areas, which was the one thing I wanted most from this game that felt like a maybe unreasonable ask. I love it. I love how hard this game swings. I love how it never really misses. even if it as a whole it could be more coherent, it still puts every other open world game miserably to shame while also iteratively improving upon the core souls-like experience. we are spoiled to receive something this thorough.
so personally, even if the remainder of the game is a bit of a slog, I’m still extremely happy because this game has given me so much more than any other open world game and in some ways more than any other souls game. sure, I’d probably still rather play tight, focused experience but From also gave us sekiro right before this and idk if that can be topped for scratching that itch.
Godfrey is one hell of a boss. Absolutely refused to even remotely think about calling an ash and dilute that experience in anu way. Spent all this game practicing mu block counters at tiny openings and hell was it worth. Also refused to use a straight sword to make the block counters faster and more efficient… Absolutely went Darkmoon on his ass. Oh I was just talking about the first half of the boss fight so far cause second half?
YESSSSSSSSSSSSS
White over sexualized old dude with a pet animal thar doesn’t exist in his native continent. You have everything to make me want to defeat you so much and everything you represent. And he comes bare handed shouting like a berserker… Sweet.
A very technical fight, shield heavy at first, dodge heavy afterwards. Loved it. For me Godfrey is the final boss.
Radagon was more of a “boss after the final boss”. Like moon presence in bloodborne. To top it off it was a lesser version of the first half of Godfrey fight, consecutive attacks to throw you of my your game, but with lame holy spam chipping away at my health like a coward… Bleah. But not too bad, still did it solo, straight sword though cause I wanted to be done with it.
For the Elden Beast it was really starting to feel like “the boss after the boss after the final boss”. So much running did plenty of sense in sekiro… Fast and no stamina. Here? It’s more of a bother. Called mimic ash and went for the kill with the Darkmoon constantly in Moonlight mode and doing massive waves that break poise very easily. Probably could have learned to kill the boss solo, would be a mess to get away from the most spammy attacks, but felt like it would be exhausting.
Good game. Better than anything I tried around this time. Like toups I rather have a more concentrated experience and a path oriented open world, but this is fine.
Plenty of stuff like bosses and plot could have used a bit more work, going for more “down to earth” results, but this is doable so ok.
Ranking? Still not ready for it… Let me do 4 more runs and I might be able to do that =P.
But one thing I can say. The real last boss almost completely redeemed most of the game’s flaws for me. Even if being there makes no sense because he is dead with 2 cadavers around the world plus the one I just made… But didn’t cared.
I’ve been rather pleased with the variety of useful sorceries in this one, when the basic soul arrow spell has basically dominated every other souls game. The soul arrow equivalent (pebble) is still my all purpose default spell, but I rotate a lot. I’ve been using :
Glinstone Cometshard: Pebble for bosses
Carian slicer: When I want to play melee for a bit, as a treat. Will also ruin giants / bosses distracted by my skeleton pals
Glintstone arc: Good AoE
Great Oracular Bubble: Good AoE, maybe slightly worse than glintstone arc but slightly more neat
Loretta’s greatbow: Huge range to pick off / provoke enemies, or kill dangerous bosses from a distance
Magic Glintblade: will ruin human enemies who know how to dodge other spells
Carian Phalanx: Not great but a nice threatening spell to start off dangerous fights
Mists: Fun to use against immobile / very slow enemies, to feel even more like a coward than usual
Loretta’s full moon: I’m frankly not sure it’s that good but it requires 70 int and looks great so I’m using it. It takes like 10 seconds to cast but you get like 7 seconds of invincibility?
I’m not surprised incantations are not that great since I’ve tried using a Faith build in the first 3 Souls games and it blew in all 3 of them
