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On 2/24/2022 at 11:36 AM, Death From Above said:

I wouldn't call you out for it if you didn't make it your personal mission to let us know in every single conversation about FromSoft that you're not even involved in how much you dislike it because it was too hard

It's okay to stop posting

Like for fuck's sake the game is just launching today and this thread is already loaded with multiple paragraphs of you complaining about a game you have absolutely no genuine intention of even playing, go away

Fine by me and fair enough.  Enjoy the game and try not to piss yourself over the awesomeness.

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1 hour ago, A.M.B. said:

Well I just got my first crash, without saying too much, I somehow ended up at a far end of the map with red skies and the game freaked out apparently.

So far the only word I can use is overwhelming. I can’t say I’ve fully internalized the mechanics or have the confidence in my play style to be in a fun flow state yet. I am enjoying it, it’s just A LOT to take in. I am starting to regret picking the wretch a bit, the world is so huge it just feels like it might take forever to work a coherent build out. Plus I’m not upgrading my club yet since I’m hoping I’ll find a better weapon any minute, but that’s yet to happen. The tutorial section boss was incredibly easy, heavy R2’s are really useful apparently. Second boss I found made me really question how I’m approaching this game. Really can’t tell if I’m supposed to upgrade my equipment more, fight it now, or if the wretch was just a horrible choice. I’m also running past like 90% of enemies. The hordes are pretty frightening. This is definitely not Dark Souls 4, those games are looking ridiculously simple in comparison right now.

As a general Fromsoft rule, upgrading weapons is usually always better than levelling your stats. And they also have a history of having some prettty good weapons in the starter group (longsword has never been less than good, mace is good in every game, etc). Also by later on you'll probably be swimming in the basic upgrade material so trying to bump something early to +3 is almost certainly fine.

I started samurai and the uchigatana is dope in this game. They've replaced the R2 parry weapon art with a big overhead smash from Sekiro and it chunks stuff really well. I'm also pretty sure it can catch jump attacks.

I need to explore off the main quest path more and actually pick up some basic materials myself. I also know for sure I'm missing the early game PVP item which I'd like to find.

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Played for a couple more hours today and expored away from the main story path, finally found some upgrade material and I think also found my first optional boss that only spawns at a certain time of day? Also found the first dragon near the starter zone who just shit on me because he's a dragon and that's his job. Also stumbled on a couple sidequests. A snotty noble that wants me to get his fort for him and a sad girl that wants me to deliver a letter to her father who is totally alive.

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This game is quickly transitioning from overwhelming to absolutely incredible the more I internalize the mechanics and control changes and piece together the map. Hit a major roadblock with the first main gate keeping boss so I decided to mess around and grind up more in Limgrave and every area I’ve come across has been fantastic and perfectly rewarding. I ended up ditching the wretch and started a new game as an astrologer. It has made things a lot easier, though I sometimes feel a little guilty with how trivial magic can make certain battles. Only complaint is that my main worry is very much apparent in the first part of the game. That is, nothing but open, flat battle arenas. I’d love some boss arenas with more traps, holes, or bottlenecks. The first 3 bosses in DS all had vastly different arenas that were integral to how one had to approach combat.

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As someone with a ton of Fromsoft experience I'm constantly struck by how self-aware they are with the lessons from their own past games, and how this game really has treid to take the best of everything, with the result being "Dark Souls 3 combat, but more, in a good way". Also several really nice quality of life changes, starting with shooting weapon durability into the sun. 

I love the addition of summon magic. The 3 wolves you get relatively early in the game are great for tear-assing through groups of hollows.

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Bandai stealth-shipped my CE of the game and just now told me that its arriving today. I'm still too into Horizon (I can't play two similar games at the same time, my brain mixes up the controls) so I'm probably still at least a week away from playing it. Everything sounds great though.

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They put out a patch today that reduces the amount of loading on transitioning areas which is supposedly what is causing the stuttering problem some people are seeing. I've seen it but verrrrrrrry minimal, granted I have a pretty beefy rig. 

I haven't had a single crash, so that's awesome.

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So I was greedy and picked up that monstrosity of a monitor the Samsung Odyssey g9 a while back. Can't believe this doesn't natively support ultra wide screen but after messing around with a program dedicated to widescreen it now does. However when NPCs are not in the 16:9 part of the monitor their frame rate drops to comical levels, so it makes for an interesting visual. 

I can tell this is going to be similar to the Demon Souls remake for me, where I can only play it for an hour or two max at a time before getting frustrated and/or overwhelmed by the world (at least there is now sunshine!). I can't grind these games. 

I haven't gone back and read the thread too much yet. Did any of you take out the tree sentinel, that knight on horseback, at the start of the open world portion of the game? 

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I tried five times and realized that now ain't the time. I do love that element of Souls games that basically do not level enemies at all. I try to do that in D&D as a DM but in a way that won't kill my players instantly. Can you otherwise really be scared as a player if you know that any threat you're faced with is something you should be handle if you don't play/roll like shit?

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1 hour ago, Jiji said:

I tried five times and realized that now ain't the time. I do love that element of Souls games that basically do not level enemies at all. I try to do that in D&D as a DM but in a way that won't kill my players instantly. Can you otherwise really be scared as a player if you know that any threat you're faced with is something you should be handle if you don't play/roll like shit?

This used to be the common old school D&D approach where there would just be areas of the game that if you wandered into against DM advice, you died. The modern 5E tries hard to nudge people away from doing it, but nahhhhh I kinda like it too. It's one of the things I loved about Morrowind: some random caves were just shitty skeletons but once in a while you stumbed into the lair of DOOMUS THE IMMORTAL VAMPIRE GOD or whatever and whoopsie

The sheer scale of Elden Ring is just stupid. I played through DS2 (quickly for me, and none of the three DLC, also granted a game I know inside and out) in roughtly 10 hours as my Elden Ring prep and there's a legit chance I won't be out of Elden Ring's starting area in 10 hours.

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13 hours in as a bandit. So like, I've skipped most open world games since Breath of the Wild, so the sheer size of this is blowing me away. What's wilder is, every night I play (with one exception) I come away with some other thing I have found that makes me scream and laugh and curse. I will avoid mentioning direct things here but uh yeah this game nuts

also I think I'm like wildly underlevelled lol Maybe I'll just go kick it somewhere else and level up by doing other dungeons, because the boss I'm at now is A Lot To Deal With, and the first area I went in otherwise was Also A Lot To Deal With. This game is A Lot To Deal With.

I will say this: as someone who's never finished a souls game, this is the first time I've sat around thinking that this would be a cool game to try with other playstyles, as opposed to my default of "man I don't know how else you're supposed to do this and I'm not gonna learn."

I do feel sad for one of my friends because they've beaten all the other souls games and they're trying to rush headlong into this and getting frustrated. They rolled deprived, and I cannot get them to internalize "honestly most of the time the right answer is to run the fuck away". I hope it takes at some point.

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The game is transition back from fun into overwhelming as I seem to have run out of areas I feel appropriately leveled for. Mergit wrecked me at first so I went back and cleared out a lot of the Limgrave areas with little difficulty, slowly building myself up. It felt like I was playing the game how it's designed to be played. Now I keep dying at Stormveil Castle so I'm looking for other places I build my character up and am starting to feel a little defeated. I think I've given up on the last 5 or so bosses I've tried facing. Like, couldn't even take one hit, or get them below 80% health, so it's hard for me to imagine it's just a matter of skill. My DPS is absolute ass and I'm using a +7 Spear when I see +3 weapons are about what's normal for where I'm at. Morne Castle was awesome but I cannot make much of a dent in the boss, the weapon I'm looking to use is guarded by another boss I can barely even scratch, and Stormveil Castle is getting tiring to go though the same section over and over again, only to get stunlocked by some hordes.

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Alright now I’m back. This game is making me flip-flop in the best way possible. It’s getting a lot easier to see when I should and shouldn’t persist through a boss fight. Some bosses are obviously meant to be fought on your mount, which I should have realized earlier. Getting a 100% physical reduction shield has also illuminated how some bosses should be approached, instead of mindlessly spam rolling, which was viable in DS1-3, Elden Ring not so much. There was one boss in Gael Ruins who was wrecking me until I realized I could just stand directly in front of him with a shield and slowly work in shots as he pushed past me. Getting stance breaks is so addicting, especially with my recovery from critical attacks talisman.

 

Gael Ruins boss weapon is perfect for my Int/Dex build, plus I’ve got an uchigatana that’s amazing on its own, and an S scaling staff with some boosted gravity magic. Feeling a little OP since I found a couple easy enemies that can get you 120k runes, but that’s the point of an RPG, I don’t feel bad. Morne Castle and Stormveil Castle are everything I had hoped for with the classic, old school dungeon design, except they’re also huge, and downright intimidating to try and memorize. Part of my frustration was just getting too adventurous, I was neglecting Weeping Peninsula which definitely seems like the proper second area after Limgrave, then the area after Stormveil seems to be 3rd.

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Shields are definitely super good in single player for this game just because of that R2 guard counter move that insta staggers so many jabronis. I'm very curious to see how PVP plays out because shields have honestly been an afterthought for a lot of players there for a long time.

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I'm seeing so much controversy over the game. Most of the negative seems to be boiled down to "Too hard. Needs an easy mode."

Listen, I'm not a big FromSoftware player, but I think when major AAA games started really holding your hand through every little event they started becoming BS.  I greatly respect developers if they want to make their games harder and more challenging. If that's something they want, then I say go ahead do it. 

If the games are successful and doing well without easy mode, why is an easy mode necessary at all? Dumbing down and watering down franchises like Call of Duty is what killed the franchise IMO.

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26 hours in and here are some takeaways I've had

  • I feel lucky to be here for this. Things have been Hard and this has been a huge light in my life rn.
  • If I play too long I miss my dad, because when I was a kid dad played all sorts of weird RPGs (might and magic, shining force, fatal labyrinth (which is a genesis roguelike(which is probably the reason I hate roguelikes because I was done with them by the end of the genesis between that and Toejam & Earl)), and I can only imagine what his reaction to this would have been.
  • I've been compiling a list of things to scream about after 90 days, when people would be more ready to hear anything about what's in this game.
  • Every time I've sat down with this, without fail, I have seen something that's taken my breath away, or confused me about how it's even supposed to be possible to fight this, or made me feel like my imagination was never good enough because how do you come up with this.
  • Grinding via assisting people with the first main boss is hilarious.

I guess that's the biggest takeaway here: this game is So Much that it's caused me to rethink my ideas on whether art can be an endeavor undertaken by hundreds to create a single thing. I will not respond to additional questions on that take because it's one of those conversations no one likes having with me. Elden Ring is a scale of good that pushes my brain around every time I play it.

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5 hours ago, TheVileOne said:

I'm seeing so much controversy over the game. Most of the negative seems to be boiled down to "Too hard. Needs an easy mode."

Listen, I'm not a big FromSoftware player, but I think when major AAA games started really holding your hand through every little event they started becoming BS.  I greatly respect developers if they want to make their games harder and more challenging. If that's something they want, then I say go ahead do it. 

If the games are successful and doing well without easy mode, why is an easy mode necessary at all? Dumbing down and watering down franchises like Call of Duty is what killed the franchise IMO.

Because some of us have had rheumatoid arthritis for over 30 years and have no soft tissue left in our wrists and fingers, and would like to try this game without needing to preload on massive painkillers that I can't get prescribed.

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4 hours ago, JLSigman said:

Because some of us have had rheumatoid arthritis for over 30 years and have no soft tissue left in our wrists and fingers, and would like to try this game without needing to preload on massive painkillers that I can't get prescribed.

Add in "without gatekeeping assholes telling us to 'gut gud' when pointing that out".

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2 hours ago, Raziel said:

Add in "without gatekeeping assholes telling us to 'gut gud' when pointing that out".

Just seems overly generalized and reductive. I don't think the FromSoftware team is telling people "git gud, nerdz!" 

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There was a "get gud" literally in this thread.

The devs don't gatekeep,, but their players sure as hell do.

 

I get it, if you love super hard stuff and want to play everything on the hardest setting, fine.  But don't shit on us that don't have the time to sink into it  or physical capabilities to play shit like you do because we're open to spend money on the game but won't because we can't fucking play it.

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