I had to take care of my kid when fighting the Liurnia boss second phase once, and that was annoying! If you quit and reload during a boss battle, you get sent outside the boss room and have to go back to a site of grace, defeated, to recharge the flasks
Also when there’s a real baby emergency, I only have time to press one button, Souls quitting is out of the question
I only play videogames when the baby’s either sleeping or absent from the house and have still been annoyed by this a couple times already
That was one of my favourite dungeons exactly because of the aesthetic (not the pretty, the feelings it provokes that you describe much better than I could).
I guess I’m still much more of a sucker for the impact than I wish to believe.
But I completely missed that point you made. For me it never was, or ever is, about paths to an end with this games. It’s all paths to explore… All of it (preferably killing everything so I can explore again freely).
But to be fair only that third of the dungeon is like that. The rest is pretty much play DS3 linearity, with the path dividing sometimes to come together eventually, a few dead ends.
@vincenttoups and @Tuxedo dying is the only viable option. At least you know it will respaw at a safe place.
My method for “pausing” Souls games has always been to rest at a bonfire and just leave it that way. But I learned the other day that this isn’t entirely safe. A slow, shambling poison husk guy eventually reached me at the Shaded Castle and that disabled the bonfire temporarily even though my character was already sitting at it.
This game seems to have an abundance of stonesword keys. I use them whenever I get a chance but I always have 8-9 in reserve. Maybe there are more frequent spots in the later areas I haven’t seen yet. Or maybe I just explore too much.
I think this is the first time in this game that I’m not aware of anywhere new to go that’s not blocked by bosses I haven’t been able to beat yet. My current avenues are Fire Giant and Mohg, though I think I can beat the former at least if I try a few more times.
Edit: A few minutes after writing that I remembered at least one other place I left unfinished that probably ends in a boss, Castle Sol. But I seem to remember NPCs telling me that if I go there Melina will be sacrificed and I should find a way to sacrifice myself instead (and I think I have already found the place to trigger that but I haven’t done it).
That’s been my experience with stonesword keys and the promise of more caves or whatever that may or may not exist to have been opened by them kinda got me pining for more procedurally generated dungeons or something so this thing doesn’t have to end. Though I guess that’s the niche Bloodborne’s chalice dungeons filled?
Yes, I felt fatigue near the end, but now I’m scanning the map looking for little graves and catacombs to run through. I don’t need an open world game anymore thanks, just want to fight some skeletons.
I killed Malenia for someone. St. Peter take notice.
yeah the chalices are also where they hid all the “fight story boss again but in a room its way too big for” optional hell encounters, seems like they just folded that into the game world this time around
I got to the final boss fight last night. I’ve done most of the dungeons in the game. I’m ready to be done! Sad that I missed so many side quests but it is what it is.
Got to the final fight and immediately got my ass kicked. Got it kicked again. Decided to go to sleep, haha. I love how weird and eerie and different the visual design for many parts of the final fight is, haha. It feels almost like it doesn’t belong in this game, but a lot of the rune related stuff feels that way, so it works.
I’ve heard a lot of stories about people sneaking through the lava in other ways because they didn’t realize the “intended” solution for this puzzle. I love how many ways people handle these chariot sequences in general because they’re SO fucking annoying, you can really tell everyone is going wild with thier cheese/exploit brains to get around them, haha.
Less and less I see good reasons to use +25 weapons. In NG+ I have a few of them and for every weapon I try with most kind of affinity I get a +10 somewhere that puts it to shame. On top of that they are easier to upgrade…
I’m really starting to fail to see the point in +25 weapons.
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After I wrote this post, turn on the game… And get a 1.05 update… Yeeeeeeeeah
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L2+R2 of moonveil is carrying me through so much rn. comes out quick, does huge damage, interrupts attacks of very high poise enemies, has enough range to use safely. eminently spammable. doesn’t seem quite as OP as the death’s poker but still feels pretty broken. very easy to stagger big enemies and bosses with repeated uses.
also idk if this has been posted yet but it is possible to pause elden ring using this one weird trick:
I had some trouble with Fire Giant and decided to check whether there were any exploits. One guide said that if you make him climb up on that tallest rock in the area and fall off, he’ll take a lot of damage. I did that and he took no damage. It turns out that was fixed in a patch.
But there’s a new method, said another guide. With your horse you can double-jump back outside the door you entered and then safely hit him with arrows from outside the area. I tried that but I couldn’t even come close to making it back to the platform. That must have been fixed in the latest patch.
So I decided to just try him head on again, this time with an ash skill I used a lot early in the game but hadn’t in a while (Wild Strikes). With that, I was able to beat him without much trouble.
I think I know what’s going to happen with the forge, so I decided to try to advance a quest line or two before doing anything there. Just when I was thinking I should stop for the night, I found a portal that led to several new areas (the other half of Ainsel River, the other eternal city, and Lake of Rot).
