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Bought and finished Elden Ring at launch, and never booted it again. Personally I found it to be a decent 30-40 hours long game, spread thin on a 120 hrs long piece of bread.

The story dungeons are very well designed and worth playing through, but in order to get to the meat you'll have to wade through dreadful open world sections. Well, the first open world area seems pretty nice at first - it has a lot of cool shit to find, lots of secrets and hidden locations, some difficult encounters that encourage you to explore and level-up. But then you enter your second big area, and it's basically the same shit but with a different coat of paint. Every open area follows the same predictable pattern of having a mine where you can find smithing resources, a cave with some miniboss that drops a talisman, a crypt where you fight skellies and stone statues, a walking mausoleum, a rune tower, a carriage with a weapon, a tree with the same copypasted miniboss, etc etc. The very first area instills a sense of wonder and discovery, and then the subsequent areas utterly crush and demoralize you with their sheer formulaicness.

Let's hope the expansion will focus on delivering typical Souls-dungeons instead of just dropping the player into another open world field with copypasted points of interest.

The game has a bunch of other problems.

The balancing is all over the place - the game world being too big and player's ability to visit areas in almost any order ruins the difficulty curve, making certain mid-game bosses into pushovers or unmovable roadblocks if you failed to "guess" the intended progression route.

The exploration works most of the times, but when it doesn't, you end up being rewarded with some shit crafting component after completing a difficult task or performing a difficult platforming stunt.

The bosses are messy and overdesigned, they suffer from the same problem every Fromsoft game has been suffering since Dark Souls 3 (or even Dark Souls Artorias of the Abyss DLC). The combat in general is designed specifically for Souls veterans, with lots of enemy types having gotcha-attacks that require rote learning instead of being predictable.

wndrbr wrote: ↑ February 28th, 2023, 10:03

The balancing is all over the place - the game world being too big and player's ability to visit areas in almost any order ruins the difficulty curve, making certain mid-game bosses into pushovers or unmovable roadblocks if you failed to "guess" the intended progression route.

Are there examples where this isn't the case?
Either the content gets beat with the level-scaling bat, or it's unscaled and there's a very obvious designer-intended path to progress on.

@rusty_shackleford it's more of a dig at Souls progression. The game uses the same type of character progression as dev's previous titles, despite having a huge open world where the player can fight bosses in any order.

They either had to resort to some kind of scaling (absolutely haram), or made an intented progression route more obvious.

Personally I don't mind boss difficulty being varied depending on in which order you tackle your challenges. In fact it's a good thing, because it increases replay value by incentivizing trying different routes and giving player different experience on each playthrough. On your first playthrough you immediately went to fight Fluent The Ominous and he provided a serious challenge, the next playthrough you beat other guys first and came to Fluent already leveled and now he's a pushover.

In ER the strength gap between bosses is way too big, so after wiping the floor with someone who looked threatening, you feel robbed of a potentially decent fight.

Fuck Fluent.

I never bothered to play the Dark Souls 3 DLC, and I doubt I'm gonna bother with the Elden Ring DLC. I got my fill of both games when they launched and never touched them again.

Elden Ring isn't a bad game, it's just not good enough to warrant a replay for me.

Holy shit, naked samurai is op.

viewtopic.php?t=274-elden-ring-and-shad ... -expansion

@wndrbr report it in the future so I notice and can merge them.

The secret to getting good was farming xp in the zone with all those vulgar militia, going naked, and studying the blade. As a naked edgelord, I can dodge everything. There's no lag in the controls, anymore. My katana doesn't hit like a claymore, but its not like I was killing anything before. Now at least I kill things. What a shame armor looks as cool as it is useless. Its also a shame that, behind merely appearing interesting, this game's another open world with nothing but ingredient collecting, generic dungeons, lore dumps, and ugly UI, dragons, and crafting. Total waste of my time.

maidenhaver wrote: ↑ May 23rd, 2023, 16:19

The secret to getting good was farming xp in the zone with all those vulgar militia, going naked, and studying the blade. As a naked edgelord, I can dodge everything. There's no lag in the controls, anymore. My katana doesn't hit like a claymore, but its not like I was killing anything before. Now at least I kill things. What a shame armor looks as cool as it is useless. Its also a shame that, behind merely appearing interesting, this game's another open world with nothing but ingredient collecting, generic dungeons, lore dumps, and ugly UI, dragons, and crafting. Total waste of my time.

legacy dungeons are still pretty good. I suggest you to check some guide to see which parts of the open world are safe to skip, and then just beeline through legacy dungeons.

I hate that everyone treats the open world genre as some logical point of progression for gaming. We have zoomers saying that From Software should never make a linear game again, because Elden Ring is just 'that' much better.

We often lose more than we gain from an open world experience, and there is just as much wrong with the genre as there is right.

I hope their Armored Core reboot is completely linear. Also, I hate goddam crafting.

Not even linear, but in missions format

There will be a hub world with ingredient and crafting porn.

Why isn't this in jrpg? @rusty_shackleford

Staggered attack timings are very dumb. Not hard, just dumb, unsatisfying and immersion breaking.

Dead wrote: ↑ May 25th, 2023, 14:51

Staggered attack timings are very dumb. Not hard, just dumb, unsatisfying and immersion breaking.

Your opinion sounds like a staggered attack timing.

still in the wrong forum.

maidenhaver wrote: ↑ May 30th, 2023, 03:48

still in the wrong forum.

You're in the wrong life. Find a cliff and jump into the next one.

This game is tranny propaganda.

By the time they release DLC for games like this I am already tired of hearing about the game. Especially when it feels like some of the content is leftover shit they could not finish in time.

Its got nothing going for it. I dropped it for Sekiro and Dark Souls 2.

Why do they think a massive open world game even needs DLC?. It's wasted effort and just adds more bloat to an already bloated experience. Maybe instead of making this crap they could've made a smaller, more unique game instead. Something like a Lost Kingdoms or a Shadow Tower.

From Software basically turned themselves into a meme with the Souls franchise.They now exist only to make the same game over and over again until the autists get tired of it.

KnightoftheWind wrote: ↑ May 30th, 2023, 05:31

Why do they think a massive open world game even needs DLC?. It's wasted effort and just adds more bloat to an already bloated experience. Maybe instead of making this crap they could've made a smaller, more unique game instead. Something like a Lost Kingdoms or a Shadow Tower.

From Software basically turned themselves into a meme with the Souls franchise.They now exist only to make the same game over and over again until the autists get tired of it.

I can't roll my eyes any harder. This is the Oblivion lover criticizing From Software of all things. Do you think they should be more like Bethesturd, who also made expansions for their massive open worlds?

SDG wrote: ↑ May 30th, 2023, 05:37

KnightoftheWind wrote: ↑ May 30th, 2023, 05:31

Why do they think a massive open world game even needs DLC?. It's wasted effort and just adds more bloat to an already bloated experience. Maybe instead of making this crap they could've made a smaller, more unique game instead. Something like a Lost Kingdoms or a Shadow Tower.

From Software basically turned themselves into a meme with the Souls franchise.They now exist only to make the same game over and over again until the autists get tired of it.

I can't roll my eyes any harder. This is the Oblivion lover criticizing From Software of all things.

Oblivion is fantastic, and you don't see Bethesda making Oblivion 2, Oblivion 3 and Oblivion 4 in the span of a decade. . From Software is milking this gameplay formula for all it's worth, churning out sequels and rehashes like it's a fire sale. It's to the point where "Souls" is basically a Japanese fantasy version of Call of Duty. You know, I know, everyone knows it. We just don't like to point it out because for some reason we think From Software is above such a comparison.

What a buttfucking retard.

SDG wrote: ↑ May 30th, 2023, 05:43

What a buttfucking retard.

Careful, if you kvetch any harder your nose will grow and you'll end up looking like your avatar.