The Shattered Elden Ring Thread: Tarnished Edition - (Shadow of the Erdtree p. 85)
- Thread starter hanselthecaretaker
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Some good stuff, but I agree with a lot of the comments that basically say there were a lot missed opportunities. But it’s understandable though as everyone has their favorites.
So reached the Haligtree and managed to work my way down the branches past the giant ants and the rolly tooty boys to where the buildings start(and man, it looks fucking amazing from the top of the tree looking down). Of course, getting past the liturgical town was kind of annoying, mostly due the stupid arches with their rapid fire murder arrows ,though it was interesting how it's completely chill until you enter the evergoal and realize the real puzzle is in the alt version of the town.
Also, interestingly, if you look from the first haligtree grace towards the tree you can see look look like Mountains somewhere beyond, but checking the map reviews there's no land on the map corresponding to that. So whatever is over there is just off the edge of the map and somewhere else.
Also, interestingly, if you look from the first haligtree grace towards the tree you can see look look like Mountains somewhere beyond, but checking the map reviews there's no land on the map corresponding to that. So whatever is over there is just off the edge of the map and somewhere else.
I find myself doing this quite a bit too with the map. Like most recently up in Mt Gilmir there’s a spot where you can see one of the grace points inside the Shaded Castle. I though it was a shiny I’d missed until I zoomed in with the telescope.
Well... I'm done. Platinum trophy and everything.
Yesterday was just an all-day end-game marathon with Rivers of Blood and Scarlet Rot dragon breath thingy, and of course Mimic Tear +10 doing most of the work. I know, I know, the lamest copying-stuff-from-youtubes strategy but *shrugs*
Yes, even Melania fell to that set-up. I true Dark Souls experience is not complete for me when I look up a cheese strategy and find it more difficult to execute than doing it "normal." In this case, there is a cheese to run to the back of the room and spam spells from an elevated ledge. But I was not able to even run on that ledge! So... me and my mimic, wailing away with bleed and rot, just trying over and over to get lucky enough to prevent her from doing the impossible to dodge white slashies everywhere attack.
I am a little annoyed that Melania, the queen of rot, is vulnerable to rot. Whatevs.
Maliketh and Radagon.... just spamming attacks and flying around the screen and I don't know what's going on. Blech.
I did manage to take out the third(?) iteration of Godfrey on the first attempt, that was cool.
It's weird... I freaking love Bloodborne and in both that game and ER I feel like a lot of boss fights were just me throwing myself at enemies, wailing away and just praying I kill them before they kill me.
But of course the areas are cool, I enjoyed jumping around the crumbling farm and revisiting the capital I burned to the ground was pretty cool.
Since the last boss uses holy damage and it's two bosses, I followed a video guide to boost that immunity as much as possible so I spent all morning basically re-building my character, upgrading gear, etc, just for that last fight.
Save-scummed my way through all three endings to get the plat and deleted the game. I am retiring from From. As long as they insist on making enemies fly all over the place and make me nauseous, the appeal of the games is gone and it's more annoying then challenging or whatever, at least for me.
Certainly, Elden Ring has made switch sides on the "should FromSoftware games have difficulty settings" from con to pro. Getting killed in two his with 60 vigor really pisses off... like you're telling me I have to invest stats to maximize my choice in character, ok fine, but way up high health should make me a tank, I think.
As I was boring my non-gamer wife with my declaration that I'm done with these games, the saint who observers these self-inflicted travails of mine and justifiably mocks me asks "what if there is a Sekiro 2?" Hmm.....
Yesterday was just an all-day end-game marathon with Rivers of Blood and Scarlet Rot dragon breath thingy, and of course Mimic Tear +10 doing most of the work. I know, I know, the lamest copying-stuff-from-youtubes strategy but *shrugs*
Yes, even Melania fell to that set-up. I true Dark Souls experience is not complete for me when I look up a cheese strategy and find it more difficult to execute than doing it "normal." In this case, there is a cheese to run to the back of the room and spam spells from an elevated ledge. But I was not able to even run on that ledge! So... me and my mimic, wailing away with bleed and rot, just trying over and over to get lucky enough to prevent her from doing the impossible to dodge white slashies everywhere attack.
I am a little annoyed that Melania, the queen of rot, is vulnerable to rot. Whatevs.
Maliketh and Radagon.... just spamming attacks and flying around the screen and I don't know what's going on. Blech.
I did manage to take out the third(?) iteration of Godfrey on the first attempt, that was cool.
It's weird... I freaking love Bloodborne and in both that game and ER I feel like a lot of boss fights were just me throwing myself at enemies, wailing away and just praying I kill them before they kill me.
But of course the areas are cool, I enjoyed jumping around the crumbling farm and revisiting the capital I burned to the ground was pretty cool.
Since the last boss uses holy damage and it's two bosses, I followed a video guide to boost that immunity as much as possible so I spent all morning basically re-building my character, upgrading gear, etc, just for that last fight.
Save-scummed my way through all three endings to get the plat and deleted the game. I am retiring from From. As long as they insist on making enemies fly all over the place and make me nauseous, the appeal of the games is gone and it's more annoying then challenging or whatever, at least for me.
Certainly, Elden Ring has made switch sides on the "should FromSoftware games have difficulty settings" from con to pro. Getting killed in two his with 60 vigor really pisses off... like you're telling me I have to invest stats to maximize my choice in character, ok fine, but way up high health should make me a tank, I think.
As I was boring my non-gamer wife with my declaration that I'm done with these games, the saint who observers these self-inflicted travails of mine and justifiably mocks me asks "what if there is a Sekiro 2?" Hmm.....
"force" is a strong word.
The first playthrough is the only playthrough that took any time, I did all the exploring and whatnot during the first playthrough and got Rani's ending which is the most tedious and quest heavy ending to get.
The other endings didn't required anything except beating the game. So since I had a build from the first playthrough I just speedran the 2nd and 3rd playthroughs in about 90 minutes each (blood does % damage so no need to level up ever again) and boom platinum. Honestly the 2nd and 3rd playthrough were more fun because it was a boss rush basically with no tedious exploration required.
That I think is the biggest problem with Elden Ring over all the other Souls games. The exploration only works once, your first time through, when there is still wonder and discovery to the items you can find. Afterwards you will never care about it ever again.
When I replay a Souls game, I still did items out of every corner I can find or remember exists. I fight every boss, even optional ones, because fighting them is fun and it's core to those game's experiences. With Elden Ring that's not the case because the game doesn't have much use or emphasis on items outside how you build your character. And while you can respec, why would you want to in the same play through unless what you built absolutely does not work later on. Experimentation only goes so far imo, because ultimately people will play how they like and might only change for a challenge in a fresh playthrough.
All that said, if you told me I needed to play through the game 3 times from scratch in order to get the platinum, I absolutely would have not even bothered. Chances are likely that I will probably never play Elden Ring again, unless the DLC is amazing.
Was uploading a save at a strategic point and then redownloading it for the third ending not an option?
It was, I don't know how to do it on PS5, but it's possible. Wasn't really needed thought because I did the "hard" ending first, then just ran through the game the other times. No big deal.
I think people say that because it's the most open ended of these games, so it's quite hard to hit a wall.
Like, there's a really horrifying number of people who own DS3 but haven't made it past Iudex Gundyr (I don't have stats to hand, but I imagine it's the same for the Cleric Beast in bloodborne) and I feel bad for those people but I also can't blame them. They're missing out on a great game because they got frustrated having to fight the first boss over and over.
In ER, if you can't beat Margit you can just go do something else.
I am also absolutely convinced that the early game of ER is probably harder if you've played other souls games.
I don't think it's the worst one to start with by any stretch of the imagination. I would still recommend someone start with Bloodborne and just have a friend there to pep talk them through the first area and the cleric beast fight, but compared to any of the souls games it seems like it would be pretty smooth.
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But if you can't beat Margit you are gonna have a bad time later
I think what Elden Ring does over all other souls games is allow the player easy access to powering up. Through basic exploration, you'll get levels, items (including one that can stun Margit for a long time several times during the fight), trinkets, weapons, armors, etc etc. All these things power the player up without realizing it, and when you go back to MArgit you often will stomp him which I personally think sends the wrong message to the player.
By exploring and gathering items to beat a boss, it dramatically changes the focus of how these games usually work. If you can't beat Gundyr in DS3, you are not able to go overpower yourself to beat him. The only way to beat Gundyr is to embrace the game's combat mechanics and learn how to play the game, learn how to read enemy attacks and learn how to respond to those attacks. This is so that once you beat Gundyr, you beat him because you learned, the player got better not the character in game.
Elden Ring is the opposite. It doesn't care if you learn anything, it doesn't care if you have skill or not, because if you hit a wall you can just go find the "wallfuycker300" and get through it just the same.
Elden Ring doesn't require the player to learn anything other than "find more shit" or "Spam the special attacks". And while that's fine and it certainly opens the game up to a much lower threshold for completion. I don't think this is the right way to make a Souls game more accessible.
I don't like victory being rewarded because the player went and found more powerful stuff. I like the game rewarding the player for learning the skill of playing the game. Mostly because in order to bridge the game between these philosphies, I believe that Elden Ring has by far the worst bosses in Souls-game history. Every boss is a spam fest of bullshit and none of them have that exciting dance from previous games.
I mean, I'm in late game and my issue is I've got 3 dungeons I'm more or less taking turns on: Subterranean Shunning grounds, crumbling farum azula and the Haligtree. Normally if I hit a wall in one I'd work on one of the others but I'm able to make progress in all three so I'm not really making that much progress in any of them.
Actually that came out wrong but it feels like I'd probably benefit more from just finishing one, then the next and then pushing to the end. And part of it's my fault for leaving the shunning grounds till this late in the game because initially I didn't find how to get down there
Also the shunning grounds smells like piss and shit, so there's that.
Yeah that's exactly why I don't think my acquaintance would like it... it's not that I'm more skillful at it, it's that I have more patience (masochism) to look shit up on the internet or run around dark caves dodging the same f'n imps looking for stuff or going down obsessive wormholes of lore and mechanics. He's just a much more casual guy. I've been trying to encourage Bloodborne simply because I think all PS4 should at least try it and it's like basically free much of the time (that's how I first got into it, it was the "free" PS+ game when I got my PS4).
Yeah, but by then you probably will be able to beat Margit, either by having figured out ways to overcome the difficulty or by just having bent your brain into the correct shape through practice.But if you can't beat Margit you are gonna have a bad time later
I struggled with Margit. I'm pretty sure he's designed to fuck with people who played the previous games. Some of his moves have the kind of delay that you'd see on an endgame DS3 boss. He has a couple of combos with fast (but mercifully weak) follow up attacks that are extremely hard to dodge. I could not get my head around it so I ended up struggling through it with bloody slash.
Fighting Morgott however, with an almost identical moveset, I think I got hit once in total. I'm pretty sure that run was a fluke but it does illustrate my point. These games are really, really good at unconscious learning. If you keep playing, your brain will just figure it out on its own. The problem with Iudex Gundyr is that there are only two options. Beat Iudex Gundyr or quit the game. You can't even level up at that point so it's not going to get mechanically easier. You just have to do it until you learn.
A player who is new to the series won't necessarily have the kind of faith in the design to believe that dying over and over again will eventually make them better through the weird osmotic power of unconscious learning. They might well just think "okay, I suck at this game" and quit before they have the chance to develop any investment.
Elden Ring is a very hard video game. Even from my perspective in the early-to-mid endgame it is definitely up there with the rest of the Souls series. But I think in some ways it is better at introducing the player to how hard it is. The Elden Ring equivallent to Iudex Gundyr is really the tree sentinel you meet outside the first building, but it teaches a different and much more accessible lesson. If you're really stubborn and refuse to give up and you're willing to slam your head against a brick wall for a really long time, you absolutely can beat that tree sentinel at SL1 without Torrent, but most players will quickly realise that it's obnoxiously hard and that you can just walk away and find something easier to kill.
Those two types of players are both getting the introductory experience they need. The insane masochists who would have gotten into the series anyway learn that seemingly impossible challenges can be overcome if you're willing to persevere. Everyone else learns that if something seems too hard, you can go away, do something else, maybe level up and come back when you're ready.
I think that's a much better welcome to a video game than "die to this boss 20 times to prove you're worthy of playing this game".
Sure, but that happens anyway.
Again, that's what I think is really sad about all the people who quit because they couldn't beat Iudex Gundyr. Because they probably came away thinking this game wasn't for them and that they weren't going to enjoy it, and for the vast majority of them that won't have been true. It's all well and good for us, having already got past that point, to simply tell new players to git gud, but those players don't necessarily know if it's worth getting good, or even if it's possible for them.
Again, I literally play these games for the sense of reward that comes from overcoming difficulty. It's why I try to stick to these contrived rules about not using magic or spirit summons or spammable weapon arts, even though I know it sounds kind of insane. However, I am not remotely ashamed of spamming weapon arts to get past Margit, because doing that kept me playing to the point where I now don't need to do it any more. As brilliant as Fromsoft are at teaching you how to play their games, it still takes a long time and a lot of failure, and while it's all very well for your game to be hardcore and skill-focused, if players without those skills can't play and have fun a lot of them are going to quit before they ever develop the skills you want them to have.
Again, I am pretty sure those people who gave up fighting Iudex Gundyr were entirely capable of playing DS3. It doesn't actually require some rare or superhuman ability, it's just about practicing it and trying over and over until it all works out. But you can't just expect everyone to walk in and know that.
Not having patience is not a barrier to entry that any game can teach you. The people who bail on Gundyr, or any intro souls game boss, did not bail because it was too hard they bailed because they don't have enough patience to learn how to play the game. That's fine, not every game is going to "click" with you. Move on play something else and it's whatever.
I don't mean patience in the sense of tolerating dying over and over again. Souls games require patience to watch attacks, dodge, and only hit back when it's safe. I think everyone who's ever played through a Souls game knows the feels of seeing the boss at 1 or 2 hits from death only to die because you got greedy trying to finish the fight when it isn't safe to do so.
The Souls games in general are really not that hard. But they are unforgiving and will punish players who rush and players who refuse to "try". Actually I feel like the "get gud" moto that the community is know for is more akin to telling people to "try" than it is to mock them. Because really these games just need you to try. Don't button mash, don't rush, don't rage....just "try".
The thing is, any game that requires you to level up a character is to me too much to bother with more than once, mostly due to limited time and having so much else to play that I haven’t touched once yet. I actually just posted something about this in the hot takes thread. I wouldn’t even bother with something like GoW 2018 again outside of NG+.
In terms of sheer variety the earlier Souls games are also pretty limited next to ER. The larger world has a lot of filler space to be sure, but what if everything you could obtain was contained in a world say, the size of the earlier games? At that point you’d kinda be tripping over stuff in the playable space and diminishing the sense of discovery to where they might as well just relegate most of the gear to a handful of vendors.
No game is completely fresh on repeat play through’s but conveniences like respec’ing are still welcome in the design because it means less tedium in trying new things. I‘m only now at Volcano Manor and have been switching between bleed, strength, frost and fire tunings even without respec’ing, and so far have each weapon leveled as high as they can get without access to better stones or bell bearings yet.
Having said that, I probably won’t go too far out of my way to bother with platinum on this. After one playthrough I’ll be ready to finish something else in my backlog. DLC is likely a ways off enough that I’ll be ready for more then.
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Yeah, I'm curious what the DLC is going to bring to the table. Maybe time travel so we see some of these locations before they fell into Ruin? I'd be interested in Farum Azula as its own region before it was dropping pieces of itself all over the place, especially since it was implied to be much larger in the past or something (apparently time is wonky in Farum Azula). It feels like there should be a bunch of lore associated with it but there isn't for some reason.
I've read theories about time travel with Farum, and also one involving the cocoon of Miquella, possibly being able to enter a dream state. Then there's the mysterious cloud on the map at the center of all the rune towers. I mean, assuming there will be DLC any of these would be pretty neat to delve into.
One of the things I felt Nioh was able to do (which Souls didn't) was bringing that tense Soulsy combat into an active war-zone. Its for that reason the Sekigahara level in Nioh is so spectacular.
With that in mind I'd love a DLC set during The Shattering itself, though I know they'd never go for that.
Interestingly, both Sekiro and ER have bits where groups of mobs fight each other, so it's not like it's impossible for them to pull this off. They'd probably have to implement some special level design or blocking to avoid crashing the game or slowing it to a crawl but hypothetically they could make this work.