what jumped out at me was radahn mastering gravity magic just so he wouldn’t have to give up his beloved horse
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Starscourge Taft
the only good lore
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frenzied flame proscription is pretty eerie
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You are all like 20 more hours into this game than I am and I’m glad it all gets weirder
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I burnt out at about the halfway point so I’m taking a break until I binge it to completion
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Yesterday I got properly mad and confused at this game.
I was exploring eastern Limgrave, got to the rot part within the map, helped the gracious pot gentleman warrior, and got a bunch of smithing stone 4.
I didn’t even had a weapon +6, and I have to level 3 (each hand dual wieldng + bow).
Decided I won’t do Stormveil Castle because… I don’t want to. So bypassed it and when to the lakes. Got my ass kicked like in the rot area.
So… Not really a lot of smithing stones 2 around here as well. So as much as the game claims free choice, if you want to keep melee and the weapon in fighting conditions to deal with how feeble your defence is… You gotta follow a path.
Had to go all the way north to the cave with the first chrystalid so I could buy stones… Pittyful.
However on my way there, found this interesting ambush at some ruins that you kill a guy at the centre and 6 mages and a horrible multiarmed hysterical enemy teleports in.
That’s when it hit me… And kinda think it segways into this:
So I think this game base principle is… The inverse of Bloodborne. In Bloodborne the more aggressive you are the better, in fact it plays well to be more aggressive than enemies. Some bosses I can run circles around them while giving hits.
In Elden Ring you are unable to be more aggressive than most enemies. They are ALWAYS more aggressive than you.
The principle us interesting but how FromSoft got there… Well… They made this error in previous games and now they kinda made it systematic here. Enemies have no stamina
Enemies just don’t stop attacking as long as you get into their zone. They don’t stop to rest, a following attack that is not a combo come right after the previous without a pause.
Even Huge bears do it, your chance is that they are slow and old 4 legged enemies trick of going under the belly.
Compare reactions between crabs that still have DS3 AI, and lobsters. Fucking lobsters don’t stop hitting you. Had one giving me 12 stabs one after the other and with little room to dodge sideways, before it immediately changes to a grab attack. No interruption… No rest… No “opening” to exploit.
I either go full shield, or caster so I can zone enemies enough to have space to react.
Best part is turning speed. You could at least in the past go behind enemies. Now most of the enemies have a “swing to the back” attack as if they were a ducking DS3 Silver Knight.
I’m feeling a bit of DS2 enemy unbalance here.
Going through DS2 NG+7 while killing every enemy once was a nightmare. I kinda see the same happening here.
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I think Elden Ring definitely goes too far with bosses who act like perpetual motion engines with blades and magic aura, but I think this point as I’ve seen it mentioned online these past few days is pretty overblown. The bosses in particular always have attacks which cause them to “invest” in long animations, which is classic Souls gameplay. The absolute removal of the ability to spin behind an enemy, which has basically been absent since DS1, is absolutely a good thing. Playing DS1 these days is totally trivial for melee classes unless you are forbidding yourself from doing this. Really, that enemy which you were ambushed by in the lakes is probably the worst offender in this game, bar none. They are horrible creatures with basically only one strategy you can cast a heal in their area and it does huge damage and stuns them and at all other times it’s just panicked flailing and rolling. All these enemies, except for them definitely have cool down moments. So it’s not really a good example to draw this conclusion from, really. I get that it’s frustrating being tossed around (it was in DS3) but this is not an Elden Ring thing really imo.
Switching from a fast bleed weapon like the hookblades to a dex/str greatsword has taught me a lot of patience in the late game.
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Doing a terrible job of keeping track of NPCs, was there a person enquiring about Latenna/needs to be talked to after finding Latenna or did I just imagine that?
The aubernaic woman? I met her a loooong time ago now and haven’t found the thing she tips you off about yet, and haven’t had any other NPC mention her either. I think she wants to reach a really endgame place.
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the capital sure is dense as fuck. I always have like four paths available and now somehow I fell down like fifteen levels and I’m in a bloodborne catacomb again
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I can certainly garante that going around bosses is not gone since DS1.
That actually works worst in DS1 because you don’t have diagonal dodge while locking on the enemy. In DS2 going behind was the bread&butter of the game for me. Bloodborne I can give a few examples from the top of my head that “follow the butt” was the best strat: Amelia, Laurence, Lady Maria, not to mention that the Orphan of Kos has a backstab weakness.
DS3 you have Vordt, Dancer, Pontiff, Aldrich you literally have to hit the tail without locking to be safe, and even Gael at NG+7 that is a brickwall and your biggest weapon is a twig and you have to do a marvelous coordinated dance of dodges and stabs to get little by little damage in, you get him from the sides or back.
But that is not the biggest problem.
Fine, going around now is not a big choice for everything, works with Wyrms and plenty of them.
My real problem is the lack of openings.
Like you said “perpetual machines” which is much nicer than what I call them: spamming hysterical bitches.
Just did a small dungeon with this big fellows with an axe and a body full of bumps. They do not stop attacking if you are in their zone. Ever.
You talk abou slow attacks… And that is… Kinda true? I know perfectly well about attacking an enemy on the recover part of the animation.
It has bren like that since DeS.
But that recovery is hardly non existent from elite enemies and above. And without a “rest” time after a combo or a bigger attack you get no openings
In the end this game is much more prone to stats battles than to be patient and wait for the enemy to tire or do an attack with a big recover at the end. In bosses I’m killing them mostly with roll-attacks.
Another thing that is kinda of a twist is that attacks have big windup animations, you can attack before their hitboxes enter the animation.
But still you can only get those by memorizing attacks and waiting for the right cue. I know that was a big part of these fight for ever, but you always had the opening which always kept you on edge to pay attention to when the enemy “rested” and gave you that feeling of progress through learning. Even without you having memorized one specific enemy patterns, you still had practice from searching for those moments with others, and you would snap to action at the correct “feeling”.
Another way? Use shield.
Anyways my hunger for smithing stones made me get curious about a black spot at the northest part of the Liurnia of the Lakes, I suspected it was a mine.
Went east of the lake first to arrive at a minor Erdtree without an exit. Found a good place to go down a cliff west from the tree, discovered I bypassed Raya Lucaria to find blocked by the Grand Lift of Dectus that doesn’t work. But from up there I saw scafolding that indicated the mine at the bottom of a waterfall that actually created the huge lake.
Back to the lake and followed it all the way north, found my cace and bypassed the lift. Fought a Wyrm that decided midfight it wanted to stand in 2 legs and give me a “come at me bro” moment with its huge curved scaled greatsword.
Arrived at the Altus Plateau bypassing every major location… I’m way over my head.
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wha-I say-what in the dog gone halibut is going on heah
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I guess I misunderstood you, because what I meant re: getting behind enemies was that From has given humanoid boss and elite enemies a lot of moves and greater speed to make sure you can’t just run behind them with total reliability like you could with basically every single enemy in Dark Souls 1. For anything with four legs or that is gigantic, the strategy remains getting behind or sticking to the side of one. This was definitely the pattern for DS3 and Bloodborne, otherwise I think I would find Elden Ring a lot more surprising.
I see where you are coming from, but I also suspect you are off balance because you are so early on and haven’t done much content yet. It’s not really any more a tight stats matching game when you keep up in gear upgrades and leveling, which you can’t be doing by skipping the earliest big dungeon. Which sort of confirms what you said about there being an intended path.
You really have to keep growing in strenght and you can’t really rely on “git gud” much. More like “git grindin” with a “free exploration” mantle to cover it’s subtle forceful path.
Still it really gets me because this harder path on stats math contest means that bosses either overpower, or get overpowered. Or cheesed (I’ll always happy with that btw unless every boss is a cheese puzzle boss).
Like I might have made it sound worst than I think it is because of the long text but I always try to hit the right point with many words and miss it by a meter.
Just bumps me a bit that I really think DS3 had awesome boss quality, specially for action play, and triple specially for Sekiro.
I’ll get used to this, and it’s fine.
I still do DS1 runs and I always use a shield.
But having easy dual wielding for the first time and not being given much chance to be aggressive… Is a bit aggravating.
But on a more technical point it kinda breaks the FromSoft base principles. Not having bosses have a rest time as plays must have because of the stamina… Well… That was the base for their entire battle system balance.
Orphan of Kos can be backstabbed like silly.
Bloodborne has a very particular design feature for bosses that I find it charming. Bosses scare you. Size doesn’t do much for scare but aggressive movements, very disturbing imagery and shouts that give you a certain primal fear simply makes doing some stuff not making sense to do due to unconscious fear. Like I.E. doing Orphan of Kos backstabs, or being aggressive with Ludwig because he’s so scary and attacks from everywhere.
Anyways backstabs. Orphan of Kos has a few attacks you don’t even need to dodge, just side step on the right direction and you’ll be standing right behind the sucker. Saw Cleaver/Spear work very well to charge attack, but untransformed Blades of Mercy work even better because it has the fastest charging attack.
If you really want to cheese it the use Augur of Ebrietas which does backstabs with it’s attack (as well as parries to other enemies). The backstab is instant as soon as you activate it, but you have to be fast after the long recovery to get the visceral.
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i think the aggression in this game is good – it + the weird varied timings are how the game throws off veteran players. they give you a ton of stamina from the start to compensate for it.
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Fume Knight and Ivory King in DS2 DLCs had actually randomized triggers to when a combo’s follow up attack was triggered, as if expecting you to make that same motion you did before to get you are the end of the dodge.
From there onward FromSoft has been fighting player timings all along and every game hits you were it most hurts. Logarius weird timings and sudden attack motions, Lorian long windups, Corrupted Monk’s smooth movements so hard to tell when the attack is actually connecting.
I think Ishin, in both forms, also had those randomized mid combo mini pauses.
world size spoilers
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