Elden Ring (FromSoftware)

[Jeff Kelly]

Im now at Maliketh and this is a prime example of what happens when From has run out of boss ideas and relies on bullshit mechanics to up the difficulty.

The first phase is an absolute joke and basically just there so they can lore dump during the phase 2 cut scene. Phase 2 is only difficult because Maliketh is in infinite combo mode. If I could have healed just once it would have been a first try win. I had him at 10% before he murdered me through a column.

Compared to the Alecto fight in the evergaol or even the Dragon Lord Plasidusax fight also in Farum Azula it’s just bad and arbitrarily difficult without being any good

[Trippy]

Getting him stuck on a pillar should let you heal and he's very easy to stagger -- i.e. he's essentially a glass cannon -- so you can't be afraid to get up in his face and whack him. If phase 1 is easy for you maybe use your summon(s) on phase 2, after hiding behind a pillar, to give you enough opportunities to stagger if you are having issues with the dodge timing.

[Jeff Kelly]

I’m not venting because the boss is hard. I was more pointing out that the boss feels arbitrary like it’s more designed to counter certain player actions than being an engaging boss fight.

I almost killed him first try and if his moveset didn’t completely prevent healing I would have stomped him if I had managed to drink just once. Compared to e.g. Alecto from Ringleaders Evergaol or Margit or Godrick etc. this doesn’t feel like a boss which has to make sense or be engaging as a boss. It feels more like a boss whose moveset is designed to prevent specific player actions to mask that it’s not really difficult. If that makes sense.

For me it feels like a boss that is not designed as a meaningful encounter with an inherent difficulty and more as a set of moves whose only coherent design philosophy it is to remove certain tools from the players arsenal. Almost like a troll boss.

I also feel that removing just one of those troll mechanics would trivialise the encounter completely.

It’s also a contrast because the first phase is just so pointless. Almost like it’s just there so they can show you the transformation cut scene leading into phase 2 of the boss.

It’s grating because I did this directly after the Plasidusax fight which is also hard but feels like a real boss encounter that you can actually learn and get better at but where you can still use flasks and ashes of war and the fight is still challenging.even with those.

Another example for what I mean is the Tree Sentinel which spawns on the staircase outside the boss arena.

It’s still a tree sentinel but now it has a dragon great claw infused with lightning and the horse spews fire and you can’t use Torrent and have to fight it on foot instead of on horse back.

It feels like they needed a field boss there but didn’t have any idea what would be cool or what made thematic sense and so they re used a tree sentinel so they had to “upgrade” it to make it even remotely challenging. So someone said “let’s just take away the horse and give it two elemental attacks”

I hope any of this makes sense

[Zetor]

If obnoxious two-phase boss fights annoy you, you're going to love a certain upcoming mandatory boss.  

I also think Placidusax is one of the better ER bosses btw (and not just because he literally drops the bass a few times)... and since I was a mage, I just straight up cheesed all the outdoor minibosses in that area (including that crucible knight you gotta get past at some point). Loretta's Greatbow and/or Rock Sling solves everything!

I'm generally in the "gamepads are overrated" camp, but I tried kb+m for like 30 seconds and found the mouselook bizarrely jerky in exactly the way I remember from Dark Souls 1 (the last From game I played). Maybe I just need to mess with the settings or get used to it though.

I missed this post, but this mod is all but mandatory for kb+m IMO.

[Jeff Kelly]

The only thing that annoyed me about the Placidusax fight was the awkward boss run

[Khaldun]

The arbitrary character of when attacks can kill you behind something and how close you can be really annoys me a lot.

This game is fun but the devs definitely have some persistent habits that are unnecessary and aggravating--that interrupt the wonder and strangeness of their games, the mood they create. I hate being pushed out into the "what's the mechanic here" thing where I have to reckon with the question of what I'm supposed to do in terms of exploiting the environment and changing up my equipment and learning the pattern. So much of the game play feels organic with patterns that pulse through the game like genetic trees, but in some boss fights, you can really feel the intent to make something hard via fucking bullshit.

[Velorath]

They've gotten more ambitious over time since Demon's Souls but that means they've had to compromise quite a bit with balance. Since the old days, they've allowed for a wider variety of viable builds (magic and faith getting built out a lot more since Demons), added a jump button, more save sites, a lot more content, and now summoning spirits (which  themselves have widely varying AI and power levels) and a mount. Speed-runners aside, I could see probably being anywhere from lv. 80 - 160+ by the time they get to the late game stuff on their first playthrough. I can kinda see why they might have felt they needed to add some bullshit move sets in there for the bosses to artificially inflate difficulty a little bit. I understand the sacrifice they made in order to achieve the scope of Elden Ring, but Demon's Souls is always going to remain the high water mark for me.

I've said in Discord a few times (and might have said it earlier in this thread) that pretty much 99.99% of my deaths in Demon's Souls felt like they were my fault, and Elden Ring is... well it's not that anyway.

[Khaldun]

I'm hitting that Souls point where I lose patience with it and it stops being fun to figure out. I hated the Godskin boss moveset--that felt incredibly timed to my inputs at the ostensible end of the fight. But also just the tedium involved in moving through some places.

I don't quite get the mythos sometimes too. Like, I want to be Elden Lord, but I'm also murdering the fuck out of basically normal human guards and soldiers who give me no chance at all to be cool with them? I know, I know, I'm Tarnished and all that, but the NPCs mostly don't care much about that if they're questgivers except for Gideon who is clearly squaring off against me from the outset. It's kind of the basic Souls thing but maybe with this game opening up the world it needed to open up the mythos/world-building a bit more. I love the weirdness and the feeling of alienation, so I don't want companions or pals or dudes who are like "whoa, Dragonborn, fus ro dah, man" but I do wonder why my only choice on Mt. Gelmir on finding a bunch of soldiers grieving is to murder them before they notice me.

[schild]

Demons Souls was a tight restricted experience that changed dungeon crawling for me forever.

This is the best open world game ever made, and nothing else even comes close. While a lot has changed since demons souls, none of it feels like it was without point. If the balance was a smooth gradient it wouldn't even feel like a souls game. Also, the swinginess of it makes you explore the world so much more. And sure, some fights are hard for some builds. I'm level 120 and can't kill Alecto, but any main branch content is a walk atm.

Everything they made between the two feels like experimentation.

[01101010]

This game definitely has its flaws, but overall I can't say I have played something better in the genre. I focus on the parts I like such as the exploring and minor dungeons rather than the ball busting bosses that I plan to outlevel in order to give me at least a chance. Outleveling the content affords me my sloppy, ham-fisted play but even then it is not a gimme where I am playing god. I got to the godskin duo in farum and even though I was high enough level to assume I could run thru it with little problem, just fighting the banished knights was still a challenge, since timing dodges is not my strong suite. I might get a few but still get nailed by stuff I really shouldn't at this point. But I have accepted my fate and this game at least allows me to go commit genocide in the other areas of the map to work off the frustration and get back to it when I clear my head.

[Khaldun]

Can't decide whether to do the Volcano lady's bidding.

Also sort of stuck on the latest part of Ranni's quest--that Baneful Shadow after the murder frogs is pretty fucking tough for me. I might try cheesing it with some giant arrows, I guess.

[Jeff Kelly]

Only Marika/Elden Beast and Malenia left. 140 hours and Level 165.

They really want me to do two additional play throughs of a 100+ hour game to get the remaining two achievements if I wanted to platinum the game. So I guess there’ll be a lot of save game backup strats by people looking to plat the game.

I don’t really get why From still keeps doing this. In Sekiro you’d have to play and complete until NG+4 to get all achievements. Which is an insane requirement.

[Velorath]

Only Marika/Elden Beast and Malenia left. 140 hours and Level 165.

They really want me to do two additional play throughs of a 100+ hour game to get the remaining two achievements if I wanted to platinum the game. So I guess there’ll be a lot of save game backup strats by people looking to plat the game.

I don’t really get why From still keeps doing this. In Sekiro you’d have to play and complete until NG+4 to get all achievements. Which is an insane requirement.

Save backup on PS5 was fairly painless at least (although it requires a PS+ sub).

[Jeff Kelly]

I can already tell that the Elden Beast part of the final fight will manage to royally piss me off to no end.

Biggest enemy in this fight is the camera and that stupid magic glob Dolphin is always fucking off to an area two post codes over after attacking. Which means that I spend most of the fight either dodging attacks and spells I struggle to see because of the camera or I have to go on a twenty mile hike to get back to where the boss is.

Oh, I almost forgot that jumping is now required to evade certain attacks.

At least the music is calming

[Typhon]

Am I the only one having troubles with the way they present storyline options?  Haight straight-away asks you to be his knight... ahhh, no dude, imma be Elden Lord.  You'll work for me, eventually.  Or, much much worse, the Queen of Volcano Manor: help me burn everything down (which, at this point, is what I think she means by, 'work against the Erd Tree).  Well, no, actually, I don't want to burn everything down.

Couldn't From have a step prior to that to open up this areas (to get you in the front door/open the area), and after you done a bit in their realm, THEN have the NPC give the, "No, THEY are the evil ones! Fight for us!", speech?

[Khaldun]

The storytelling is both bad and kind of good in the same way. Everything is sort of mysterious and oblique in part because nobody really explains anything and you can't really interact or ask questions; everybody treats you both as if you are a stranger who knows almost nothing and as a known quantity who knows everything. You're a mythic figure in a world of mythic figures. But that makes weirdly prosaic figures like Haight even more strange--this slightly bumbling, kind of naive but also arrogant aristocrat calling out for help, who then goes back to retake his castle after you clean it out only he doesn't have any soldiers or anything, and he's about as helpless as a newborn, so? None of it really makes any sense. It feels like hunting down other Tarnished for the Volcano people is a momentous choice, but you have no idea what it really means, and if you just say "oh ok burning the Erdtree is a sin" after you talk to the Finger before going up to the Land of Giants, that's pretty much the end of the adventure and you do what at that point instead? Hang around the Table schmoozing with D?

From's games always put you in the position of someone doomed to continue even while people around you tell you that you shouldn't or that you're something degraded, bad or forsaken. Since everyone is equally hopeless, lost or confused, it hardly matters. It almost feels like Moorcock's Eternal Champion only with less personality and warmth--no choice but to struggle, no choice but to murder, no choice but to burn things or betray people.

[Typhon]

It throws me out of the world and into a, "for the game to continue you need to do this, regardless of the character journey you might have been attempting".  Which strikes me as extremely at odds with the effort they put into creating multiple endings.

But what I think/hope they are trying to do is something like, "life is ambiguous, and even more so in this world that is horribly dark, where you WILL have to do things that you probably don't want your character to do".  Showing up to a new NPC and having to choose without any background (because that is gated behind accepting service) might be something they decided was necessary... I guess?

It vexes me.  I CAN get to the lower levels via the 'trick' in the lower levels of Raya Lucria (and have), and I'm sure many would argue that is the whole point of that trick, but I don't actually like putting FROM's dick in my mouth (to say a nicer way, I think their story telling is kind of ass, but their atmosphere building it top notch so I, mostly, give them a pass on the story telling/character progression).

Edit: to be clear I don't think I'm right, I suspect I'm obsessing over something I shouldn't, which is entirely why I'm posting here.

[Khaldun]

Yeah, it interrupts me too at times, and throws me out of the mood.

I think maybe it's because in many RPGs, we either have a really specific model of who the character is that's built into the gameplay or we develop a specific model of what kind of person we think our character is because the gameplay is open to different kinds of character ideas.

E.g., I know who Geralt is in The Witcher, who Joker is in Persona 5 (though there's a teeny bit of room to play Joker as an asshole, just like Geralt can either go Triss or Yennefer).

I know what MY version of a Fallout character or a Bioware character is.

Whereas it doesn't really matter WHAT my idea about my Tarnished is in Elden Ring. The game doesn't care what you think you are, even though it seems once or twice to regard your choice as meaningful. But it also doesn't have a fixed idea about what you are either--you're not a well-defined character who is going to do somethings regardless. It doesn't even create a space for your character to register any feelings about, curiosity about, reaction to choices or events. Some of the NPCs act as if what you've done is meaningful or as if they appreciate you in some way or as if they hate and resent you, but it sometimes--maybe because of translation, but I don't think so--feels like they've got the wrong guy or you can't even tell what the fuck they actually mean.

One small thing that's interesting too is how different this feels if your character design is heavily based around incantations/spells. Then you've got a whole bunch of interactions that at least have that aspect of tangible significance (you're trying to get someone to teach you spells).

[Jeff Kelly]

Elden Beast is such a let down of a boss for this game. It’s mostly running around, either to whatever area of the level the beast ran to after attacking or away from it to escape one of its many long ass spells or attacks. If you’re not quite literally jumping through golden hoops.

It feels less like a fight and more like a Takeshi‘s castle challenge

It also has really bad hit boxes and half of the time I’m not hitting anything even though I’m right next to it.

edit: also everything in this game instantly breaks your poise regardless of the items you wear. Bad RNG on Radagon and mistimed the dodge and the first attack knocks you on your ass and by the time the game lets you even attempt to stand up he already followed up with two other attacks and you’re dead

You also have to skip two cut scenes every time you attempt it

This is a really unfun slog of a fight

[Khaldun]

Yeah, I seriously dislike:

a) hitboxes that are 100% violated by the actual animation on screen
b) most items that invite you to maximize this or that being worthless, especially poise
c) in fact, the general degree to which itemization seems so important and yet often isn't beyond really raw categories of "I am using a greatsword" vs. "I'm using something else" etc. in relationship to builds. Or at least that's how it often seems.

[Rasix]

NG+ Malenia did not have a fun time. REVENGE.

Mimic tear and a weapon that does a lot of stagger will turn that fight into a beatdown (as long as I don't fail the dodge at the start of phase 2  )

Not looking forward to Mohg. I could spec back into something that one shots him from across the room, but I'd rather see if I can manage it melee. I didn't really fight him per se the first time around, so it's time to learn some patterns.

[Phildo]

Has anyone come across this guy yet?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqN2phpMWno

[Trippy]

Not even close to her yet (just finished Raya and doing Caria now) but hopefully he’ll still be around if I get stuck on her.

[Khaldun]

Well, that's pretty amazing to watch.

[Falconeer]

After about 16 hours of trying Malenia, I can do everything that player does.... except avoid the Waterfowl Dance. As a result, I still can't kill her. Easily the hardest boss ever in a Souls game in my opinion. The only difference compared to some other very hard bosses is that Elden Ring gives you plenty of tools to make her a bit easier if you want, but I still think she is the hardest ever.

[Job601]

I played the entire game with a shield using lots of guard counters, then had to switch to dual wielding and use mimic tear so I could stunlock Malenia to get past the second phase. The rest of the game felt like a cake walk after her (Guard counters are extremely good against Radagon, btw.)


I don't understand why people say they like the "story" in these games. They have a great sense of mood, but the characters are paper thin and the environments never feel like real places people could do anything but kill each-other in. It's not that the castles aren't built like castles, but that there's not even an attempt to imagine or portray what daily life might be like in this universe if the player wasn't there. Sir Gideon just stands there on that desk all the time waiting for me to talk to him. I can't bring myself to care about these people.

[Falconeer]

I don't use summons, and that's why Malenia is pretty much unkillable so far for me. But I'll get there.

And I adore these games, everything about them. But there is no story. It's all about mood as you say, suggestions, hints. The whole point I believe is to be as vague as a nightmare. To me, this is fantastic and pretty much PERFECT. But there really is no story to be liked (or disliked). Just beautiful fading mirages from a dying world.

[Trippy]

People like the lore / worldbuilding not the stories.

[Khaldun]

That exactly. I love the mood, not the narrative. The narrative is paper-thin and shitty when it isn't. The mood is great.

[satael]

I kind of like that a lot of the story is more or less hidden in descriptions whether for spells or items (though it would be a pain if more games did it). Now it's just something quaint.

[Zetor]

I don't know what y'all are smoking, From has god-tier narrative skillz as documented in their best game ever (2004). 

[amiable]

I think my favorite part about elden ring so far is going on youtube and reddit channels mad about "teh gayz" in gaming and pointing out that Elden ring is super LGBTQ friendly (you don't actually choose a gender in the beginning, anyone can romance Ranni and the deathbed maiden, one of the main characters is clearly trans) and watching them angrily deny it, which I find weird and sad.

[schild]

I think my favorite part about elden ring so far is going on youtube and reddit channels mad about "teh gayz" in gaming and pointing out that Elden ring is super LGBTQ friendly (you don't actually choose a gender in the beginning, anyone can romance Ranni and the deathbed maiden, one of the main characters is clearly trans) and watching them angrily deny it, which I find weird and sad.

That's a weird thing to be your favorite thing about arguably one of the best games ever made.

[amiable]

I think my favorite part about elden ring so far is going on youtube and reddit channels mad about "teh gayz" in gaming and pointing out that Elden ring is super LGBTQ friendly (you don't actually choose a gender in the beginning, anyone can romance Ranni and the deathbed maiden, one of the main characters is clearly trans) and watching them angrily deny it, which I find weird and sad.

That's a weird thing to be your favorite thing about arguably one of the best games ever made.

I'm a small petty man.  Also the game itself is amazing!

Edit: It is just a pet peeve of mine that for some demographic reason my youtube feed is chock a block full of game/movie reviews by people who are apparently mad all the time about LGBTQ representation in games and movies (critical drinker, clownfish, etc..)  I block them but new ones keep popping up.  Not that I am some great crusader for gay rights but I just find the whole discourse around it tiresome.  There have been a bunch of reviews hailing Elden Ring as "the Great White Savior" of games that promote a "traditional narrative" when, at least in my opinion, it is anything but.  Anyway I have derailed this thread enough.

[Rasix]

Journey 2 done. Let's just say level 200 makes some of these fights a bit trivial.  

Next run is either Faith based or some sort of giga-tank. I don't think I have it in my to do a pure str, colossal weapon run. Just too slow.