i assumed this was a deliberate throwback to games that required you to take notes so i’ve been keeping my own quest log? i have definitely forgotten to write a few down tho so i haven’t totally lost those “damn i don’t remember pissing off Edmund the Soiled but time to die i guess” experiences
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Spent all of last night in mt gelmir doing random shit because I realized I’d actually completely skipped all of mt gelmir by accident. I just teleported to volcano manor thanks to the prawn boil thief questline so I just had that core exit route down the mountain to the broken bridge and had not even realized there were other ways to get into the mountain.
THAT SAID, damn, the route through mt gelmir is really linear and weird and just snakes all around the outside edge of everything. Wild as hell. Dunno what I think of it as a region!
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Re: a lot of stuff said previously in the thread over the last day or so–I am also having a lot of structural issues with the game, though I am REALLY enjoying it. I’ve built a character who fits in well with a group of other players and occasionally like to take a role in a fight where I am doing CC, debuffs, heals, etc. Unfortunately, due to the multiplayer level banding system and the fact that I play late at night, I often find it extremely difficult to summon anyone at all.
Progression through this game is all over the place. Players can hit content at a surprisingly large range of levels. If you run past certain enemies, you can do zones much earlier than other players do-- the horse makes this so much easier than it was in any other souls game. As a result, it’s really easy to get out of sync with the bulk of the players in the matchmaking system. I find that being underleveled for content is not so much of a problem as being out of sync with other players and therefore unable to reliably summon anyone. It generally takes me 10 minutes to get a summon most of the time, even at crucial bosses which gate progress for everyone.
I did some research and realized that I may be as much as 20-30 levels below where most people are in a couple regions I’m progressing through. I don’t find my damage output to be a problem–I can easily handle the zone solo with all my tricks–but because nothing in this game controls player progression through the game particularly effectively, I’m unable to do the multiplayer the way I want to.
I also keep encountering assumptions that fromsoft seems to have made that I’m just not matching up to. Part of the reason the questlines are so stressful is that they all make huge assumptions about which tiny, lonely places in this huge overworld you’ll visit in which order. The Alexander and Millicent questlines in particular baffled me. I tend to complete entire questlines’ objectives before finding the beginning to them, which makes it impossible for me to continue them without looking up guides. I agree that just going with the flow in this game is a good idea, but if I hadn’t looked up any guides, I would not have completed a single sidequest in this entire game. A series of strange events related to my progression order just occurred where I absolutely under no circumstances would have begun a single quest properly.
I dunno! I think my solution to this would have been to bring the narrative content closer to the surface in this game by adding MANY duplicated startlines to each quest all over the map. Put Millicent in every church in Caelid, and just lock her to whichever one the player visits first. Put Alexander on a hundred hillsides and just lock him into whatever hole he’s stuck in the first time the player interacts with him. Just create more opportunities to make sure that players are encountering your stuff no matter what order you visit it in. Leave the rest up to the player.
Previous souls games were more comfortable with the player missing content, and it felt more appropriate there, as they were much more linear. This one just isn’t structured in a way that makes this stuff appropriate, imo.
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Kudos to the imaginatively named ‘John Elden Ring,’ the first invader to best me.
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i think i’ve played this game more than any other single player game ever and i’m still lovin’ it
the best sequel to Dark Souls 3: The Sequel to Dark Souls a feller could hope for
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Yeah re: NPCs I cleared the cave and got the needle before meeting Boc and once I did it was clear I had what he needed but…I couldn’t give it to him. It was only after a friend hinted I should go back to that cave that I found him worse for the wear having got his ass kicked looking for what I coulda given him right off the bat. Maybe his destiny was to suffer. Maybe my character’s just an asshole. But it seems like an oversight for a game this open-ended and makes me wonder how much I’m missing out on just because I’ve taken said open-endedness at face value.
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Yeah! This stuff is more or less what I’m talking about too. In Bloodborne if you don’t do the entire Eileen quest line you miss a cool character, some equipment and optional dialogue whereas in Elden Ring if you don’t cover a hundred times the ground in the same exact order with no prompting you miss one of the few entire large areas where you can meaningfully level up before the very end of the game. I just get the feeling that From’s tricks are not working as well.
And regarding things being broken or cheesable, honestly one of my problems with From is their inconsistent approach to this whole thing. ER follows the From tradition of having armour and items have sub-salient effects—i.e., if you have 100 life and enemies do 70 damage, then 8% damage reduction has no effect on the game. If poison takes 10s of exposure to tick up, then 10% poison resistance only affects the game for people playing with a stopwatch. It’s weird in a game where you’re allowed the choice of going toe-to-toe with a midgame boss, learning their combos and carefully taking them apart over 5 hours of practice OR melting them with a laser the moment you enter the room to get so precious about 90% of the equipment and items.
This is something a lot of games do to give the illusion of false choice for players while ensuring everyone has the same experience (and hence doesn’t need extra content, costing more money to make). From has always been pretty good about just letting some things be broken while sometimes they still seem to want to steer the player with an iron fist. Open world “find anything in any order” structure honestly just makes this more glaring than previous branching maps.
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I think this idea I had is pretty cool. Just thinking about how spirit summons could be weirder and less directly combat oriented… but some kind of mob that works like a damage reduction field, where if you stand it in you do and take less damage. You could kite bosses into it during their strong attacks and then lure them out of it for the rest of the fight; you could fight the whole time in it if you’re good at enduring long battles; you would NOT want to use this in some boss rooms, like ones that are small; you could cheese some fights by basically creating a boxing arena (and even use caestus) where you just tightly dodge all its attacks and stack bleed on it or something.
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yeah these subsalient effects are a big reason why you can do content out of sync with the rest of the playerbase, too. A lot of the stuff you get for doing all the content as laboriously as possible in “the right order” doesn’t really help you much. Doing what I did–dumping all runes into your weapons for half the game so that you remain sub-lv100 in zones where most players are lv120–makes you quite handily able to kill guys that other players can only handle because they’ve been dumping into VIT the whole time. Just exacerbates how random the whole thing feels.
I do not at all mind that the difficulty and exploration content feels random, because all of that is still fun even when you’re overleveled (you can still die to rats you can kill in one hit, etc). I do very much mind when I, say, accidentally cut off the entire volcano manor invasion questline before completing the very first step because I progressed the main quest too far.
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I’m at 70 hours or so, have completed most of the character stories, and I concur with everyone else that this game feels way overstuffed. I want like 30% less game.
That said I’m still really enjoying everything I’m doing, the moment to moment play is still very enjoyable even against hordes of copy-pasted enemies, it’s just taking a lot of willpower to start a session now. It’s the paradoxical feeling of running a marathon but also going nowhere, the horizon retreating every time I get closer. This was charming at 10 hours but it’s getting old at 70.
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precisely this also happened to me with Boc. Had to look up a guide to figure out what to do about it.
fromsoft should be aware that people are just gonna guide their way through this game. They should also be aware that doing so often ruins the vibe. It would have been impossible for playtesting to not reveal how poorly their normal way of doing things matches this particular exploration experience. I’m curious whether they just didn’t realize how hard it would be to find any content in this game until after they’d committed too strictly to the old style, and then just told themselves “well folks will use guides anyway.”
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Yeah to be honest I always felt that From’s cities like Anor Londo or Yharnam deserved a little bit more criticism along these lines. It gives you a big impressive overview when you enter, but more than half of the buildings you see are background fakes.
When Elden Ring does the same thing with the capital, those are all real buildings you can go inside or at least on the roof of
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a few counter-points regarding your reading of the armor system:
- the numbers being relatively meaningless on each piece of armor in isolation feels like a feature to me. the armor is not only for stats, but also for dress-up and player expression.
- if you switch EVERY piece of armor you have to try to maximize a certain stat (e.g. lightning resist) it DOES make a big difference. certain bosses i was having trouble with were suddenly doable if i chose my gear to minimize the effects of the attacks i was most having trouble with or choosing lighter armor so i could do more damage w/ a heavier weapon.
- i don’t see how this is inconsistent w/ their overall approach. items are another axis that the player can directly control to make the game harder or easier for themselves. it was also just satisfying to me to correctly identify what gear changes would help me most for a given boss or to experiment within that system.
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Maybe it’s my lack of complete sets or lower overall vigor or different build but I have not yet noticed a difference from armour even when gearing up strongly for one particular stat or another
Edit: and like fashion souls is fun, obviously—I just wish armour and items also seemed to matter more
I think their intention is probably similar to previous games, which is that you’re intended to use NG as your breadcrumbs to find the character stories, and NG+ to explore how to trigger/progress them.
Except this game is easily 3-4 times as long as any Souls game I’ve played, so I think maybe this was the wrong approach lol
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yeah i think vigor is pretty important to make the armor matter and wish that was communicated better within the game. i noticed i under-leveled vigor considerably when i unlocked the ability to respec, so i fixed it there and continued to adjust my leveling of it when enemy damage started to creep up again.
if you’re getting one-shot by things by a wide margin, the armor will never do enough to stop that from happening. you need a decent health pool to make the defensive stats matter.
1 Like
Every type of build is inherently a glass cannon in this game unless you go out of your way to level vigor, like, a lot. And after that it might be a good idea to also level Faith purely to cast elemental fortifications (30% negation at the 10-12 faith spells, and 70% negation at the 23-27 faith spells).
(Nominally the option still exists to level mixed-benefit stats: Endurance for equip load, Strength for better shields and Int for range. But none of that will fully prevent you from getting one-shot by certain attacks/combos.)
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Yeah I know some huge megafans will play this game forever but I can’t see most people finishing the game, much less playing it multiple times
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The problem is armour doesn’t matter until you’re almost not getting two-shot by things. Vigor is currently my second highest stat at 40, but 10 points ago standard enemies were 2-3 shotting me and bosses were 1-2 shotting me. When I put on heavier armour some of the enemies that 2 shot me were now taking 3 hits to kill me, while others still only took 2, and most bosses took 2 instead of 1, but sometimes 1 still did it. So like… VERY little functional improvement between light and heavy armour.
At vig 40 it does seem to matter, but it’s a weird artifact of the damage scaling where it’s like… unless you’re basically playing a “vig build” armour might as well just be paper
On the flip side of getting one-shot all the time, running out of flask is no longer a lose condition I needed to worry about very often.
It’s a return to Demon’s Souls balancing
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