I think the general progression for you at this point is Caelid->Volcano Manor->Leyndell. At least that's what I did and it felt normal to me.
The Shattered Elden Ring Thread: Tarnished Edition - (Shadow of the Erdtree p. 85)
- Thread starter hanselthecaretaker
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If you go by the questline, you can't actually finish the Volcano Manor til after Leyndell due to the final Recusant target being in the area after Leyndell. Though you can do it the other way,
Ah that's right. I think I did everything in Volcano Manor/Mt. Gelmir excluding Juno and then went back to finish it off after killing him.
That sounds off because the questline leads you into getting teleported into rhykaars boss fight. Unless you arent supposed to kill rhykaar until after Morgot? I dont remember the order anymore.
I think it's more because you don't actually need to do the quest if you don't want to. There is a way to reach him in Volcano Manor that can be found as the natural end of exploring the dungeon. The whole volcano manor quest just gives you some lore and loot, as well as progressing a couple non critical NPC quests, particularly one of the more perplexing quests I thought.
I actually just murdered him straight up and told the lady in the manor and she was like "well, shit." And didn't even do anything about it.
She should have become my maiden for killing her god. Like, "Woreship me now Maiden"! But alas, no Maidens.....never Maidens, unless you are fond of the color blue.
You do have to find the hidden wall(s?) to get into that dungeon though.
Tanith goes and starts eating his corpse. You can then kill her to get invaded by her Crucible Knight who will drop their fire breath incantation to round out the Crucible spells (sadly you never get the angel wing one).
Patches also randomly goes to the Shaded Castle (with no apparent indicator why), and will give you an item to give to Tanith. But that does nothing. Probably indicating another cut/incomplete questline.
The amphitheatres/ colosseums aren't accessible (yet) but there is something to interact with near the Great Jar. There are three red summon signs indicating dual challenges, and winning them will impress the Jarboi and get you a talisman.
I also missed the summon signs on my first visit.
To be fair, their entire world view is "Those with power take and become stronger". So she's basically just being consistent to her principles there. It's a very selfish worldview but there's the implicit "If you died, you weren't strong enough and thus undeserving of said power" thus no need to be mad.
Besides Now she can eat his face and get
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O you don't have any Maidens, O you don't have any maidens therefore You don't have any Maidens, O You don't have any maidens!
I'm sorry, I'm not sure where that came from.
By and large I'd say the "real" bosses are the ones you get Remembrances from (though that includes the Regal Ancestor Spirit, which was rather a forgettable whiff and a repeat). Which would be Godrick, Rennala, Radahn, Regal Ancestor Spirit, Fortissax, AStel, Rykard, Morgott, Fire Giant, Malenia, Mohg (real), Placidusax, Malekith, and Radagon/Elden Beast
The multi-enemies definitely seem poorly thought out. Catacomb dungeons in particular seem like a dumping ground for trash encounters shoved in a too small room (same with the couple of Ulcerated Tree spirits you fight in these rooms that the camera can't even handle them in)
With a bit more of solidly melee playthrough under my belt, yeah. I find I'm hitting an opening based on the AI RNGesusing up its mini-combo instead of its super mega chain. On both playthroughs I've noticed the AI with ranged moves will sit back and the second you touch a spell/bow/item that will plant you its fired its ranged move at you via input read. Or the hilarious rolliing based on input reads where you can be not even aimed at them or able to hit them.
And delayed attacks, well. Its been loitering in the series since DS2 at least. Along with the unnatural tracking (I've seen Leonine Misbegotten do a 170 degree turn in mid-leap during co-op). It does make the game look and often feel kind of garbage. Basically annihalating any sense of weight or momentum the games are usually lauded (though not by me) for.
The massive overtuning of boss hp is a weird one. Bleed basically becomes required as a percentage based output (with scarlet rot being the #2). With sorcery only keeping up because of the actual absurdity of that comet spell, and a weird tilt in the game to most things not resisting magic (conversely, something like 90% of the enemies resist holy damage, making the two spells that deal virtually ineffective. The final boss is even straight up healed by it). Which fits thematically in the lore oddly enough (though something like the red lightning or blackflame with lore implications should be equally hazardous) but makes for a total mismatch in the elemental outputs.
There is also the Melania specific issue. They gave the boss lifesteal. Even that channel that puts the bosses against each other using mods or whatever. Melania will always win because lifesteal, even eating 2 or 3 of Radahns comet tackles in the war of attrition. And its basically a doubled punishment on the player for any hit taken, as they both lose their health and restore hers. Which brings about to another problem across a large swathe of the enemies.... blocks and even parries still count as being hit and proc statuses. Which bleeds into PvP as well. Again giving a drastic overweighting to one style of build, even when contrasting monsters.
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I mean yeah, I think a lot of this game's majesty gets broken the moment you start to reflect on what's actually happening here.
I don't know if all these balancing issues were intentional (but i doubt it because of how poorly thought out they seem to be) as they do seem to claim to want a higher "completion" rate for this game versus previous titles. However if that was the case why would they nerf some of the "OP" items and not nerf others? Comet is still busted, everything that does bleed is insane, and hell even the nerf to mimic tear isn't much.
The "let me solo her" guy is getting attention, not because he is flawlessly kicking that bosses ass, but he does it without crazy ashes of war or spells. However he is using bleed. So even that is still playing with the damage system and it's required otherwise he'd take much much longer to fight her.
I'd get the impression that a large portion of things were not assembled by any singular unified team but piecemealed out to different sub-teams. And that lack of cohesive oversight is well.... how everyone decided on bosses that resist slashing weapons and are weak to magic. I'd also imagine most of the regular-enemies as bosses (Tree Sentinels, Watchdogs, Kindred of Rot, et al) sort of planted their feet as bosses initially then got randomly interspliced as elite enemies because of time or resource constraints (I mean, in DS1 the re-appearing bosses were literally left in placeholders to fill out an area)
Though you still get oddites. Elden Beast is the final boss, and you'd' assumably got a lions share of oversight. Absorbing and healing holy damage is a head scratcher. Unless Elden Beast was designed without the knowledge that there's 100% holy weapons in the game. So whoever built the Cipher Pata and Coded Sword is either a troll, or was unaware they might setup a character to have their selected weapon, carefully upgraded with one of those highly limited Ancient Dragon stones.... actively be worse then useless in the ultimate battle (other holy weapons also likely suffering a bit because those characters probably went higher in faith then the physical scaling... which may be why all the late game faith weapons use fire damage lol)
Yeah i mean the copyed enemies I can forgive because every game ever does that. But it's those design elements like the weapons, boss design, that kind of stuff seems unusually sloppy for FromSoft in general. There were some bad fights in previous games (bed of Choas) but for the most part From learns from the mistakes and doesn't usually repeat them. Every boss in Bloodborne is good, for example.
These fights in Elden Ring just don't have a lot of impact tbh. Godfrey, Margit, Giden, all these major players are just kind of whatever fights. Maybe because they all suffer from the same design issues. Most of the bosses in previous games fought you in different ways, like each boss had a thing such has the boss that delay's attacks, the boss that does grabs, the boss that aoe's a bunch, the boss that jumps around.
In ER every boss, does everything. Everybody does aoes, everyone has a strange delay attack, everyone has a crazy combo that sometimes has opening and sometimes leads into other shit instant and there's nothing you can do to tell the difference.
I said this in a previous post, but this is why i feel like the weapon arts and spells are so strong. I think the design idea was for the player to melt the boss down quickly before getting melted themselves. At least at the most basic of skill levels. Super Souls players can still play however they want and it's fine, but for the average player or even casual Souls fan, I don't think the bosses are really reasonable at a default skill level. So the solution is summons and crazy weapon arts, meaning that so long as a player builds into something, then they'll have a way to overpower the boss and stand a more reasonable chance against attack patterns that really push into unfair territory. EVen good souls players are starting to point out that some shit is unfair.
It is also entirely possible that the AI of the bosses being unfair sometimes could be a bug. That's possible too as ER is certainly the most broken a Souls game as I have ever seen in terms of bugs.
In spite of the game’s balance, copy/pasta shortcomings due to being far more expansive than anything FROM has done in the past while still being simultaneously developed early on with their last game, fortunately I so far haven’t had any game breaking glitches or gameplay hampering performance issues even on PS4. So unless the game takes a huge nosedive on the back end I’ve been as impressed so far as any past FROM title, and then some in some ways, all typical jank considered. Progression has been on the easier side more than usual thanks to not having to brute force a way through more limited path options forward, while the expanded mechanics have allowed for more breadth of viable melee tactics than simply spamming R1 and circle to win 99% of encounters. I’m also just as lost on the story as ever, so yeah there’s that.
However I do wonder if all these reviews from both professional and YouTubers heaping praise would benefit from revisiting the game a year from now and seeing how their opinions might change. I highly doubt it’s possible they were all bought off and/or higher than a kite on Miyazaki’s D for it to garner FROM’s highest rated game yet, but it is quite possible some hindsight would be beneficial in reevaluating a game of this size and scope. As it is though, in terms of initial balance or lack thereof it would seem out of all the reviews there’d have been more complaints about late game being too difficult for certain builds, with how readily that complaint has been leveraged for these games in the past.
In any case, it’s also pretty cool the thread made it over a thousand replies and stayed on topic vs devolving into toxic controversy like a certain Sony exclusive a couple years back.
However I do wonder if all these reviews from both professional and YouTubers heaping praise would benefit from revisiting the game a year from now and seeing how their opinions might change. I highly doubt it’s possible they were all bought off and/or higher than a kite on Miyazaki’s D for it to garner FROM’s highest rated game yet, but it is quite possible some hindsight would be beneficial in reevaluating a game of this size and scope. As it is though, in terms of initial balance or lack thereof it would seem out of all the reviews there’d have been more complaints about late game being too difficult for certain builds, with how readily that complaint has been leveraged for these games in the past.
In any case, it’s also pretty cool the thread made it over a thousand replies and stayed on topic vs devolving into toxic controversy like a certain Sony exclusive a couple years back.
I'm of two minds about this.
1. I think there is a huge hype bias to a lot of early reviews especially from fan reviewers, because OH BOY NEW DARK SOULS! At the same time I think the "professional" reviews inflated their scores because the pro-reviews have a reputation for being stupidly embarassingly bad at video games, so instead of talking shit about difficulty they just praise the game for clicks and move on.
2. I also think that, especially in the professional reviewer realm, the use of the summons dramatically made the game easier for them because Fromsoft's AI can't handle multiple targets, the games have never been good at spliting aggro. Plus the enemy design is meant specifically to target the singluar player and AoE abilities are meant to catch roll spammers, not actually hit multipler players or targets. These abuse of AI, intended or not, does make the game dramatically easier to the point where ER can be the easist Souls game ever at times. Even if you don't use a particularly powerful summon like Tiche or Mimic and are just using wolves or a jellyfish, splitting the bos aggro for a short time can make a HUGE difference in difficulty. Which I think directly led to a lot of journalists praising the game, and has even prevented most of the typical "ez mode plz" articles.
However in that design I wonder if things aren't working out as intended. As i mentioned above there are bugs in boss attacks that happen instantly that probably shouldn't. There are issues with the AI code that go beyond typical FromSoft issues. In NG+ I beat Ragadan while he stood there and did nothing. Godskin Noble's volcano manor boss fight break AI constantly as well, where after one of his attackshe just stopped moving for like 30 seconds and only hit me when his health got low again. And there is a lot more stuff going on.
Part of it is because it's an open-world game and these types of games are simply buggy most of the time. I can only think of a couple open world games that weren't buggy in places. Ghosts of Tsushima was one, The Witcher 3 on PC was fine but console was a fucking mess. But both of those games are fairly small in open world terms. Ghosts' island is not very large compared to most other open world games, and while The Witcher 3 is large in total, each area is zoned off so it's several smaller open world maps not one gigantic one which i think helps. Horizon's games aren't buggy either but again those games have much smaller maps that shit like Asssassin's Creed games and Ubisoft worlds in general.
Overall yeah, I wonder what the long term opinion on the game will be. Demodcracy, the youtuber whos video i shared above, is a huge souls fan and speedrunner to a limited degree. He normal does boss rankings and stuff like that and he generally praises these games. This balancing video is the first time I've seen him come down on Fromsoft's designs in any real way before, which is why I thought it was important enough to link.
Also if you guys having watched the Joseph Anderson video from a few pages ago, I really think it's worth a watch. He is very detailed and rational with his critique and makes a lot of valid points that you all should really see.
@CriticalGaming I did watch the J. Anderson video and can respect how the game can be so polarizing with critiquing it. Of course, I personally haven't touched much if any of the late game stuff that drives the worst complaints, so will reserve further comments until I've at least done all the main bosses and Malenia.
I thought this was kinda funny though, as a very abridged version of the full review -
I thought this was kinda funny though, as a very abridged version of the full review -
Its more the repeated playthroughs (and to a lesser extent the endgame points) where the cracks start showing. Like the "breaking point" for repeating bosses for most people will either be the evergaol where Godrick (a mainline Demigod shard bearer super important boss) gets recycled, or even moreso when you meet Astel #2 randomly in the snowfields.
Its those points when you get to Mountaintop of the Giants, or Dragonbarrow when you notice the thinnning out of content and the bits that are there are 100% recycled. The second playthrough or NG+ is when you're gonna scratch your head and say "do I really need to visit this dungeon and fight Erdtree Watchdog #11 or another Ulcerated Tree Spirit". When you get to the end of some quests that just sputter and end without any context.