IIRC there are vague hints of where to go for the lift pieces in the item descriptions, but most people would still need to wiki it unless they get lucky and stumble upon one or the other.
The Shattered Elden Ring Thread: Tarnished Edition - (Shadow of the Erdtree p. 85)
- Thread starter hanselthecaretaker
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IIRC there are vague hints of where to go for the lift pieces in the item descriptions, but most people would still need to wiki it unless they get lucky and stumble upon one or the other.
I was out exploring and found one of those gaels and in it was Godrick the Grafted, except the renamed him Godefroy the Grafted. And the laziness was just intense. And I wouldn't even call it a fair challenge - just take a boss known for sweeping AoE attacks and hard to dodge magic, and put him in a smaller arena with no cover. Brilliant!
And its like no, From, bad! You made Godrick as an experience. A moveset designed with the environment in mind and you brainstormed and workshopped it to death to make it work. And now you're just reskinning him as a filler boss in as generic an arena as you can imagine?
Also the number of times the tombs have had the giant cat statue boss is starting to get real annoying. 'Cause they don't scale with the player. They just keep getting easier and easier as I progress.
Also also the number of times the dragon boss just flies away to fight you again is really annoying. Like its even more lazy than reskinning a boss, its just using the same boss twice because it called do-overs. I have like 3 or 4 dragon bosses I need to track down again because at the 50% mark they just leave.
People definitely didn't like the lack of direction especially with quests, that's why FROM patched things to make tracking shit easier.
See it's one thing for there to be a huge world. But one of the reasons why FROM's typical no hint vaguery works in Souls games is because the souls games are linear and the exploration is minor so stumbling across npc's and shit is very likely for the player as they progress through the game. However in a big fucking go-anywhere world, it doesn't work and ends up being very player unfriendly. When you're world gets huge you need guidance to get through the world or at least guidance to make sure you find interesting shit.
Even BoTW provides several nagivation tools to allow the player to find shit. Towers for the player to simply look and mark the landscape for places that look interesting. And you have a radar that literally beeps when you are closing in on a shrine so that you can find them. ER has nothing to help the player find things, like the cave behind a hidden wall in Caelid that nobody would find without stumbling into hitting that one particular cliff. And consider that one hidden cave is the ONLY one in the game, meaning that the game has trained players who would have thought to hit walls (aka previous souls players) to not bother because for dozens of hours there has been nothing. Until this one fucking time. It's not good design it's not good forethought.
All the more reason why they should have guided the player in some way to "side content" EVen if they only had a few direction things in Lymgrave and gradually take away those tools later on, it could be used as a teaching tool in telling the player "Hey don't just b-line to the big bosses, you should look for caves and shit". Again ER does none of this.
Top that off with ER being really hostile to new players right out of the gate. Think about ER as if you have never played a FROM game before. Okay you make a character, and pick a class, that's cool. You walk around an empty zone trying to get your barings, then the first enemy you fight kills you, seemingly unfairly and unbeatably. But it's cool right? You jump down and have a really easy tutorial, (or maybe you miss it because it's not super clear). Either way you are led up to Lymgrave where the FIRST thing you see is a Golden Knight on a horse. Maybe you engage him because it's the only enemy you can see from the starting position and the rest of the world looks empty. Tree Sentinenal of course kicks your fucking face in. So now the first two real combat engagements are designed to destroy you in your starting moments of the game. Now if you have never played a souls game and only know them for difficulty, you'd probably think this is insane and quit because the game offers no advice on anything from here on out.
Hopefully they learn from this. I worry because the game has gone unrelenting praise as the greatest fucking shit ever, and I fear that FROM will run with it without learning from the big mistakes that are littered throughout this game.
I wouldn't mind them doing another open world, so long as they temper their ambitions and learn from what doesn't work here.
I think a new player would have an easier time with ER than Dark Souls or Bloodborne, or especially Sekiro. There are few options forward in those games so you have to brute force your way through. In ER unless you’re being stubborn it’s pretty clear the sentinel (and even the kinda joke easy Soldier of Godrick in the tutorial) are optional, and you can go wherever you want out of the gate. Basically it’s open enough that you can let the game’s difficulty guide you by doing whatever’s easiest first until you gain levels or find better shit.
It’s a lazy rehash for sure, but a lot of users still upvoted the following comment about that particular Evergaol -
Anonymous
I actually love that this is included, because it's a clear instance of the game showing the player "look how much you've grown". I struggled with the version in Stormveil so much, but by the time I got to this fight I found all his attacks painfully easy to dodge and super telegraphed. Plus I was doing ridiculous amounts of damage with every hit. Souls style games make you grow both as a player and a character to get through them, and I really appreciate that.
I actually love that this is included, because it's a clear instance of the game showing the player "look how much you've grown". I struggled with the version in Stormveil so much, but by the time I got to this fight I found all his attacks painfully easy to dodge and super telegraphed. Plus I was doing ridiculous amounts of damage with every hit. Souls style games make you grow both as a player and a character to get through them, and I really appreciate that.
Which also ties into why I personally love that these games don’t scale difficulty with player level, since if I’m going to be spending so much time leveling up my shit I’m gonna sure as hell want to destroy fuckers with it eventually. If that’s not appealing then people can always just not level so much.
I don’t recall dragon fights resetting when they fly off. I think it might’ve happened to me once with the first one in Limgrave, but every other time they relocate a bit they’ve retained damage taken so far.
There are a few dragons. The white lighting dragon near the capital bounces at 50% and returns in Farum Azula, Then there is the dragon that is outside of the four arms lady's house that also bounces at 50% and I think appears in the Lake somewhere later, but im not 100%.
Other dragons will reset if they move outside their open world "arena" but those come right back.
See I think saying that there are options is a false positive. Because again you have context with previous games and even context of having played through ER quite a bit now. But a brand new player wouldn't have any of that. The only knowledge a brand new player would have coming into this game would be that it's supposed to be really hard. So by that logic, fighting Tree Sentinel immediately makes sense as being hard because that's all you know about the games. Some players might quit the game entire, or might eventually just run off somewhere to fight something "easier", and some players might even get a crash course in Souls and figure out how to "get gud" right off the back.
Personally I look at the game and really do not enjoy it. Especially when I look at the other souls games. To me this is the WORST Souls game FROM has ever made below DS2 even.
However ER sold like a billion fucking copies and everyone thinks it's the best shit ever so maybe I'm just taking crazy pills.
To me it just sounds like you’re letting those few issues spoil whatever it does well, which is of course going to depend completely upon any given player. To me it has the best melee combat and traversal mechanics of their games (barring Sekiro), best upgrade system, best progression system, freedom of builds and upgrading, paths forward, menu system, and it’s even the first time a FROM game doesn’t require at least one NG+ Run to Platinum (if save scumming endings). It’s actually proving to be the most accessible yet, with more people beating the first major boss than with Sekiro.
70% of Elden Ring players have conquered the first tough boss
The majority have beaten Margit the Fell, but only 17% have made it all the way to the end.
www.pcgamer.com
It also more recently includes one of the highest Platinum rates of any recent AAA game, let alone FROM game.
Which falls in line with what Miyazaki predicted.
Everyone’s personal experiences will vary.
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Do you think they translated that wrong? "Go at a leisurely pace?" That's not why ER is easier than Souls games, A souls games will fuck you up if you rush it. ER is easier because it's balancing is dumb, and it provides so many tools to just blitz bosses.
I mean it's good in a way right? More people have bought ER so you KNOW From is making more games.
The platinum itself also isn't very hard as it requires no grinding to deal with. The other Souls games had a big problem with spells and items that you had to jump through a lot of grind to actually get and therefore getting those achievements was just a pain in the ass and not worth it over just playing the game and enjoying yourself.
Bloodborne is the only other FROM game I've platinumed strictly because it does not have any bullshit grind to get anything. Nothing requires anything to unlock other than the skill to beat the bosses blocking your way which you would need anyway.
However If people go from ER to Bloodborne or Souls, I wonder how much skill carries over. New players I mean. Because there will be no spirits, or OP weapon arts to carry them through the challenges.
I'm glad people are enjoying the game, and frankly I'm sad that I don't think it's as cool as everyone else does. Hell I hated BotW too for similiar reasons. ER has far too many annoyances and flaws of frustration for me to think highly of it. No shame in disagreeing with me or loving it despite it's problems.
So this game just became very weird in an awesome way for me. I discovered my new favorite weapon art, and it's no other than the utsusemi ninjutsu from Sekiro! (that thing where you parry with it and you teleport to the sky while leaving raven wings behind you, both looks awesome and is super strong)
Only in this game it's OP because it doesn't consume any FP if it doesn't proc so you can do it over and over, and it actually reduces your hurtbox so much that sometimes you just duck things entirely, like arrows shot at you from an even plane or horizontal swings, and you just have so much more MP here than those little magatama in Sekiro as well, so you can just rely on that for entire boss fights with ease.
So due to that, I basically abandoned my shield which was something I'd use for scary fights (like those giant bears)...which brings us to dualwielding greatswords. I found these headless soldiers guarding a walking building and one of them had this cool greatsword which I wanted to try out so I farmed him, but I liked the one I already had too, so I ended up just using em both and going with a jumping attack talisman to take advantage of the weapon art putting you in the sky. Giving each of them a different art and being able to switch between em on the fly with twohanding the left hand one is so nice too, very flexible. And the L1 strike where you hit with both of em is like a middle ground attack, slower than a 1hand swing but faster than a charged attack, so all in all it's just super flexible and the DPS on it is insane.
So yeah, I basically tore through the mage academy dungeon with this sword art online shit and beat the moon queen lady in like 3 tries and Red XIII in 2, I was doing like 20% of theirl life with a single jump dual wielding attack lol. It seems to be tailor-made for this playstyle. I still have yet to find an ultra greatsword but I'm making do just fine so far.
Also I found a second dragon and took him down (this one had eaten a lot of glintstone so his fire was blue) and learned that dragon claw spell which looks insanely awesome, I kinda expected it to be closer to DS3's dragon spells which were kinda meh but no this is incredible.
Though yeah I assume a lot of people will quit before doing that too, which is also cool in a way, if you are one of those who didn't quit.
Only in this game it's OP because it doesn't consume any FP if it doesn't proc so you can do it over and over, and it actually reduces your hurtbox so much that sometimes you just duck things entirely, like arrows shot at you from an even plane or horizontal swings, and you just have so much more MP here than those little magatama in Sekiro as well, so you can just rely on that for entire boss fights with ease.
So due to that, I basically abandoned my shield which was something I'd use for scary fights (like those giant bears)...which brings us to dualwielding greatswords. I found these headless soldiers guarding a walking building and one of them had this cool greatsword which I wanted to try out so I farmed him, but I liked the one I already had too, so I ended up just using em both and going with a jumping attack talisman to take advantage of the weapon art putting you in the sky. Giving each of them a different art and being able to switch between em on the fly with twohanding the left hand one is so nice too, very flexible. And the L1 strike where you hit with both of em is like a middle ground attack, slower than a 1hand swing but faster than a charged attack, so all in all it's just super flexible and the DPS on it is insane.
So yeah, I basically tore through the mage academy dungeon with this sword art online shit and beat the moon queen lady in like 3 tries and Red XIII in 2, I was doing like 20% of theirl life with a single jump dual wielding attack lol. It seems to be tailor-made for this playstyle. I still have yet to find an ultra greatsword but I'm making do just fine so far.
Also I found a second dragon and took him down (this one had eaten a lot of glintstone so his fire was blue) and learned that dragon claw spell which looks insanely awesome, I kinda expected it to be closer to DS3's dragon spells which were kinda meh but no this is incredible.
The grace guidance for me is more of a "where to go last" indicator as opposed to "where to go next" lol. I see it point one way so I explore everywhere else around first and leave that direction for last once I feel I've moved on. Also I feel the game shows you too much, mainly due to the map, cause you can clearly see landmarks and caves and big buildings, the map is super detailed, so I don't think you really need anything more.
I think Tree Sentinel is a great tutorial boss actually. If you can beat him with your starting getup before finding good gear or even leveling up at all I think you'll be prepared for everything the game has to throw at you.
Though yeah I assume a lot of people will quit before doing that too, which is also cool in a way, if you are one of those who didn't quit.
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On that last part, it kinda depends. I’m about to respec for the final boss duo because fuck those two. They make Malenia seem like a pushover. At least she has some weaknesses like low poise, cold, bleed, fire, even fucking rot somehow lol. The other two? They don’t give a fuck and let you know it really quickly. Plus Elden Beast is more like Elden Bitchboy,
I know you're joking and just giving shit, but I never understood the complexities behind that phrase. Specifically how it interacts with the idea of a From easy mode and critiquing a game as too difficult.Sounds like you should "get gud".
From my point of view, if a game shouldn't have an easy mode, and should be played difficult and players need to "get gud", then it should be a perfectly acceptable criticism that a game is too difficult to enjoy.
If its meant to be played this way, then its fair to say its not good game design/not fun to play.
Personally I think the phrase came from the fact that people who played the game didn't like the fact that people wanted a big fat "easy" label on the start page. Mostly because people knew that these games already have an "easy" mode to begin with. In Demon's Souls the Royal class was broken because magic makes most things trivial, seriously trivial.
By "get gud" I think the original sentiment was actually, "If your approach is too hard, try something else." It only became a meme because people got enraged by it. The same way people who get fucked in Moba's are told to "learn 2 play" as a mocking insult, because really are people supposed to just let you win the game or what?
None of the From games are really difficult when you put your mind too them. However if you aren't willing to be a bit persistant than you are probably going to cry about it being too hard.
ER has absolutely no excuse, because the fucking game hands you easy-mode shit from damn near the start. Here fucker, use these spirits, use these weapon arts, summon friends who gives a shit, just stop bitching about it being too hard.
That being said, the balance and difficulty tuning of the end game boss is absolutely too high. And even veteran players will tell you that these bosses border on unfair if you try to fight them like traditional Souls bosses. Someone did an analysis of Malaketh, the Black Blade and actually found out that he is brokenly unfair in phase 1 as a melee player. He strikes too often and too fast for a melee player to reactl, meaning that the only strategy as a pure melee player to face him is to be tanky enough to trade damage with him as he does not have enough start up frames or opening windows for "safe" melee attacks. This is further broken if a player is using heavy weapons because the fastest 2-handed weapon is slower to swing than EVERY bit of downtime the boss has in phase 1.
Elden Beast is just a bad boss period. It's not unfair really, it's just badly designed from concept. I think maybe if you were supposed to have the big final battle on torrent then it might make sense, but to fight him on foot is just fucking awful. It's not even hard really, it's just an exercise in bullshit running around this massive fucking room while he shoots garbage at you. It's not fun, it's not good, it's just stupid.
There are a fair amount of rumblings on the Elden Beast wiki page that it’s the worst designed boss FROM has made, and I can see why. I’d rather fight Bed of Chaos, no joke. Even Maliketh was pretty trivial. The Lombax Lion dude guarding the throne took me two tries with my Godskin Peeler/poleblade combo. But what follows is just ridonkulous, at least for melee.
See the one boss I think is bullshit, and Im about 1/5th of the way through the game, is the Fallingstar Beast. Because its fucking immune to physical damage. So if you aren't spec'd for magic, you're fucked.
I had a +11 Katana and even a fully charged R2 attack did some 75 damage. Out of some 7,000 health. I had to call in a friend to use his magician and he was able to practically solo the bastard because black fire was just tearing through him.
And it doesn't feel like a challenge of a boss, it feels like a way to punish players who play one way. And Im sure there are bosses out there all but immune to magic who punish magic users.
I dunno if I would go that far. Elden Beast is unfun to fight. But it's not unfair and it's not broken the way Bed of Chaos is. So that's a tricky thing to say. It's not a good boss at all for sure, and highly exploitable to the point where you can break it's AI completely, as you can with Radahan. In fact there are a lot of bosses you can just turn their AI off completely and win for free. I wonder what that's about.
Did they patch Godskin Noble yet?
Idk anything about breaking any of these bastards’ AI; they all fought back for me. I never ran into the fog gate glitch or whatever if that’s what it stems from. One of the putrid trees in a hero’s grave stopped fighting about half way through once, and the bigger deer ancestor fell through the ground on me so there’s that.
I also don’t know about whatever the EB exploits might be, but it’s probably on YouTube so maybe I’ll check it out. Basically, BoC took far less of my time with its bullshit, so that’s how I rank ‘em.
Shhhh…any more of that and PhoenixMGS will be showing up in here to say that phrase doesn’t apply to Souls games.Or you could just "get Gud"
How do you respec? Is it that thing the moon lady says about being reborn or something after you beat her?
To me the fun comes from getting good and going back to stuff that gave you trouble and trouncing it and seeing how much you improved so that's how I take it. I have fun bashing my head against a boss for hours on end only to barely win after having a perfect run.
Oh and it's totally fair criticism to say you can't get good so to you the game is too hard and not fun, but it's less a criticism of the game itself per se and more of the game's concept. The game is still fine being how it is, it's just not a style of game you enjoy, it's still a great specimen of that type of game though.