Elden Ring

 


Once again From Software releases another game in the 'souls' form.  
This time around, its got a new differenciating brand, Elden Ring
But really what it is, is a continuation of Dark Souls, except now with the twist that its a massive sprawling open world.
The immediate comparisons to games like The Elder Rings are obvious, as it sort of seems like its trying to appeal to the Skyrim audience, which by itsself isn't a problem.
It's interesting for them to mix up the concept from the first few souls games from being a very finely tuned, linear corridor crawling, small arena, interconnected tunnels and rooms - to this new seemingly endless gigantic open world.
 
Some people found themselves getting lost, and not knowing what to do in the original Souls games, but here in Elden Ring, well now its even more of a head scratcher, but thats OK.
 Elden Ring explicity encourages you to go off the beaten path and just explore as much as possible.
Because right off the bat the game introduces a fundamnetal concept to you:
 If its too hard, if you do too little damage, if you just keep dying to this one boss or section, maybe you need to just walk away and do something else first.

This is taught instanteiously as soon as you enter the open world, in the form of the boss Tree Sentinel, which new players have only a tiny percent chance to actually defeat, because they do 0.1% damage per attack, and the boss is on a horse and can two hit you .

After the initial struggle , and then realizing that the developers are trying to taunt, and teach you a hard lesson, you ignore the boss and just explore the world.  
The world is divided into multiple different terrain types/biomes/areas.
At first, your map will not be filled in (of course) and you'll have to find the Area Map to be able to get a decent idea of whats in the area. Luckily, I learned quickly, that the area maps are almost always next to the main road, so they arent that hard to find.

You soon unlock the horse, which becomes a major mechanic and big shift from regular Soulslike gameplay. Atleast half, if not more of the time spent in Elden Ring will be spent on this horse.
The controls are good, and the horseback combat can be quite satisfying, with animations where you can hold the trigger to drag your sword on the ground and release it at the right time, double jumping to get to places you cant just by walking, and plenty of boss fights where you can use the horse.    
Your horse has a health bar of its own (that you cant unfortunately see all the time)   and when it depletes, it knocks you off and stuns yoMillicent u on the ground for a moment.
Unfortunately, a pretty frustrating decisgn choice is that when you try to get back on the horse, a prompt will show up asking "Are you sure? [No] / Yes"  , and the default is No, so you have to painstakingly scroll over to Yes, in the heat of battle, which isn't challenging or anything its just awkward and clunky.

So you find yourself wandering around on the horse, not quite sure whats optional and whats the main story.  
At first its all overwhelming and the content seems endless, and it kind of is.
My playthrough clocked in at just around 90 hours, I tried to do as much content as I possibly could, checking every nook and cranny.
I found myself actually wanting to search every last corner of the map, looking for any potential secrets or hide away locations.
This is because the loot is very entertaining and satisfying, and theres a gigantic selection of weapons and armors, and talismans which significantly boost stats.

This is as much an RPG as it is a skill based action game.  
A lot of people struggle, and complain the game can be extremely hard, personally I didn't have too much issues, because I could tune the RPG mechanics in such a way that it really became forgiving.
The difficulty curve was a little odd, in the first quarter of the game, I found it quite difficult.
I got to the first real challenging boss, Margit, and for about 2 hours i died over and over, getting 2 hit, not being able to complete it.

It seemed like the game wanted me to beat this boss right there and then so I could progress the main story, but I realized again at that moment that I had to just walk away and do some other things first, upgrade my character and gear, and come back later.
Because it's a RPG game, its like all of the monsters , bosses, and zones, technically have an invisible monster level, like in other RPG's or MMO's, so if you just cant do enough damage or take too much damage, the boss/area is probably just way higher 'level' than you.
Once I went and explored the map, did some of the numerous side areas and caves, and finally upgraded my weapon, I came back to that boss and beat it within the first or second try.
After this point, the game clicked, and I found myself wanting to explore as much as possible in order to mitigate how hard I knew the game would be in the future.

You can build different characters, like Strength, Dexterity, and a plethora of magic types that I didn't engage with. I just did the most cut and dry Strength character imaginable, massive 2 hand greatsword, huge bulky armor, and massive health and stamina.

So early on I found myself the Claymore, and started to upgrade it into a Strength weapon
This is because in Elden Ring, the weapon system is such where you can find 'Whetstones' which permanently give you the ability to alter the 'Scaling' on your weapon.
Weapons scale from E to S on stats, the better the letter, the more damage it will benefit from how high the stat is.
You can customize scaling for any weapon at any time, so I could apply the 'Heavy' scaling on the Claymore, to make it go from D scaling to B scaling, which massively buffs the damage for a Strength based character.

From there, you find Smithing Stones to upgrade the base level of the weapon.
At first, you hold onto all of these stones dearly as you dont want to waste them on a weapon that sucks, but you quickly realize these things are in abundence, and they are even farmable and relible to find, in that they mostly spawn in Mines which are actually visible on the map by little red cavern boulder looking areas.
So I wanted to explore even more, to find these Stones, to find better weapons, and better armor.
Armor is especially important as a Strength character, because it grants Poise.
Poise is a stat that determines how hard it is for enemies to stagger you.
This is very important because giant strength weapons have slow animations, and if an enemy keeps cancelling and interrupting this animation, then you'll never hit them
If you stack a bunch of poise through armor, then a lot of smaller enemies can rarely stagger you, and you start to just steamroll them.

More motivations for exploring was that you start to find huge , incredibly complex and amazing side areas, that are tucked secretly behind invisible walls or seemingly insignificant corridors. Its insane to think these developers spent so much time , effort, and money, to develop huges slews of content that maybe only 20% of players will actually find, because some of them are so obscure
Some of these optional areas can take hours to finish, and have multiple bosses, and are just mindblowing when you find them behind a hidden wall or something.
The lure of being able to suddenly find this new incredible secret location behind every random corner, or drop off a cliff onto some platforms, makes exploring even more rewarding.

Everyone knows of these games primarily for the boss fights and brutal difficulty
Well this game probably has the most bosses of any Souls game in the franchise.
There must be atleast 50 bosses in this game, if not more.
Admittedly, a lot of these are in these optional catacomb areas
There are these cave/catacomb areas which always have a similar layout and tileset, where you navigate a small labryinth to push a lever and unlock the boss room.
The boss room in these catacombs is always the same square grey room, it can start to feel sort of copy-paste, but its fine if it allows the game to cram in even more optional things to do.
The bosses in these areas are a great addition, it allows you to find these caves to do bosses and more content when you get stuck anywhere else in the game.
They're never all that hard, and most of these catacombs are fun to do and feel very 'dungeons and dragons' inspired.
Except for those stupid levels with the spiked wheel chariots, fuck those.

On that note, a considerable portion of this game is actually spent platforming, not engaging in combat or bosses actually.
More than any other Souls game they have so many areas and locations where you either have to climb down a cliffside, figure out how to climb up to this place, climb these tree branches, hop across these platforms to get an item, use the horse to double jump to this spot, find these lifts that make your horse jump 500 feet into the air and land safely etc.
It's  almost a complaint, but it does give even more variety to the gameplay so I don't actually know what I feel about it, except for the obvious fact that maybe these games aren't exactly Mario when it comes to platforming controls. This one area in particular in the sewer location has you trying to carefully jump down onto tiny platforms to go to the bottom of the dungeon, you can see Bloodstains, which are images of other characters previous deaths, littered all around the starter position. I knew this part would be a pain in the ass and awkward to complete, and yeah it took about 100 tries.

Another note on something I'm unsure of, is I didn't expect myself to spend almost half of the combat in the game on horseback.
It's actually really very significant portion of the game and boss fights where you fight them from your horse, not doing the traditional soulslike combat.
This has a very different feel and combat cycle to it. It starts to seem a little mechnically limited than just regular combat, as in the bosses on horse back really just have one major style. You wait for a opportunity to charge your weapon up, sweep in on the horse to get off a hit, then either hug around the giant bosses legs to avoid most of his attacks, or sprint away on your horse and wait for the next chance.
The horseback combat doesn't have as complex movesets or controls as regular foot combat, and a lot of these bosses it seems that if you stopped using the horse it would be much harder, so you are kind of forced to use it.   
 It's not something I really explicity wanted out of a Souls game, to spend most of it fighting bosses from horseback, but I can't really say its a bad thing either. It does mix it up, and can be pretty fun, but maybe its just a little too much.


The enviormental designs and locations have a very ethereal/dreamlike and otherworldly feeling but still has plenty of the typical European medevial inspired locations too, its pretty great and some very memorable locations like Caelid, which if you stumble upon too early you'll have your ass handed to you wondering why its so hard (which happened to me)
Most of the enviorments are very well done, aesthetically, and the draw distance is huge so you can really feel overwhelmed and it seems like the world goes on forever, it probably is impossible to see everything in one playthrough, as there are so many side areas and secrets that can lead you down a path of an entirely new set of content thats very easy to miss.
So all of this helps to make exploration feel very rewarding and purposeful.

Theres a 'main hub' place called the Roundtable where you can interact with some NPCs to sort of get more of a general idea and direction what you should be doing, it also has merchants and a place where you can buy armors after every main boss you kill.
All the NPC dialogue and characters are in the classic extremely obscure mysterious style, where what they say is interesting enough, but more often than not leaves you wondering what they were even talking about or what they want you to do.

 Theres a lot of different npc 'quests'  where they ask you to do things, or go to this location, but theres no quest log so you can easily just forget about it totally, or just not know what you have to do next.
And unfortunately, a lot of these quests come to an  awkward abrupt 'endings' where they keep saying the same line over and over, and actually what you have to apparently do is just kill them, which is just counter intuitive because you dont even know if the quest is over or not.

I know all Souls games has NPC quests like this, but in a massive open world like this, its particularly jarring because to progress their quest they could be ANYWHERE and how the hell are you suppose to do them without a guide? I guess its the kind of thing where you are suppose to not really care that much about it, and if you happen to unlock/progress one of the npc quests its more of like a "huh, that was neat" kind of thing, that something you actually are suppose to go out of your way trying to 'figure out'

If you try to do them youself without looking up any guides it quickly becomes frustrating and really, really stupid. Like that episode of AVGN Simons Quest where you have to somehow know to stand in a corner of the map and crouch a specific amount of times and do random BS and then a tornado comes by and takes you away. Its similarly that bad. Frequently for these NPC quests you'll have to somehow know to constantly reset very specific instances, exaust dialogues, then Somehow know that you have to then travel across the entire map to this one tiny specific location and find the NPC again,  or the NPC just keeps saying the same thing, and it seems like the end of the quest, but actually you have to travel to some random obscure part of the game world and find an invisible wall on the ground and jump on it to then find the NPC again etc, etc. It's really stupid and convuluted and next to impossible to figure out some of these questlines by yourself without a guide, so it becomes the kind of thing where you just have to miss out on most of them if you dont want to spend all day looking at a wiki or watching youtube video guides, then its like whats the point of even playing?

It might have worked in a smaller, more linear game like the previous Souls titles, but in a massive open world filled with endless side areas and easily missable locations, it quickly just seems insane to even try to attempt to progress most of these side quests.

Luckily its just a bonus piece of content, very optional, and they never really give you anything crucial to progress or anything.

One NPC in particular was very intruguing , the Dung Eater, hes a guy who talks about explicitly wanting to kill you and consume your corpse and curse you or something, if you keep interacting with him he has a quest where you eventually have to keep returning to him tn the sewer to give him 5 seeds to complete his quest. Unfortunately since the game is so obscure, it never actually told me I had to give him exactly 5 seeds. So I pressed the prompt to give him the seed, then he just kept saying the same line of dialogue over and over until I googled what to do, and turns out I had to find the rest of the seeds to complete his quest.

These were placed totally randomly around the map, so I searched long and far and eventually found them all and gave them to him to complete his quest, this unlocks an alternate ending , but unfortunately by the time I was at the end of the  game, there was a typical summon sign on the ground, I figured I wanted to press it before the game ends to see what happens, and it turns out THAT too was a different ending, so I unlocked the ending that wasn't the Dung Eater one which I spent many hours finding the items for, which was pretty damn disappointing.

The actual combat is very much the same as previous Souls games.
When you're in the overworld, and you can ride the horse, theres a lot of just riding past enemies for the first half of the game, because they dont drop much anything useful and only small amounts of 'runes' which are just souls for levelling up.
You have the familliar mechanic where some certain enemies are unique, and wont respawn when you rest, so I always tried to defeat these ones, usually drop some interesting loot.
The enemy designs are as usual very cool and diverse.

One thing I found bizarre was the difficulty in the game.
Since its so easy to explore, in return its very easy to level up and aquire powerful upgrades and armor.
So either I extremely overlevelled, or the game isn't THAT hard.
For example, in the last half of the game, I beat almost every single boss in under 5 attempts. Usually only one or two.
Even bosses which I've seen people say are near imposible, or very hard, I beat first try... how could this be?
Well, I didn't really go out of my way to specifically grind for levels or anything, I just had a good time exploring all the content and finding upgrades.
I eventually finished the game at;
Level 170
80 strength (2h sword damage)
60 endurance (stamina)
60 vigor (health)
And the other stats at default, as I didn't mess with anything magic related.

A new unique controversial feature added in Elden Ring is the ability to summon 'ashes' at almost every boss or hard encounter.
A gate icon appears on the side of your screen, then that means you can summon your selected ally from a bell item you can equip.
You can only use them once per rest, but some of them can be so tanky that they dont even die during difficult bosses.
Theres a giant roster of different allies you can summon, and Its kind of like pokemon or something.
You pick one and can level them up to +10 with items you find mostly from the side dungeons

These ash summons can seriously make the game A LOT easier, and I used them every chance I could. The developers put it in and very much incentivized the player towards using them, evidenced by the fact that they keep throwing new ones at you frequently.
Theres one in particular, the Mimic Tear, which summons an exact clone of your character.
This summon basically trivializes most bosses, as they start to ignore you and instead attack your summon.
Even without this though, I probably would have found much of the game relatively easy, because I guess i built my character right, and was sufficiently higher level than the content I was doing.
On the one hand it feels like I sort of gimped my playthrough, but on the other I was just doing what came naturally, this is what the developer intended
Either way, I was never really bored, always curious what came next, and at least I wasn't extremely frustrated and pissed off from difficulty like in other Souls games.

Other things that can seriously reduce the difficulty is the inclusion of Talismans
These are amulets you can equip up to 4 slots that give all sorts of special buffs, from reducing incoming damage, making you heal more, making you do more damage on horseback, increasing stamina regen ,etc  
The right combination of these at the right time can significantly boost your character.
I was constantly swapping these depending on context, which probably helped a lot to reduce the games difficulty
This also aided in making exploration even more satisfying, as I wanted to find as many of these things as possible and was always hyped when I found a new one.

The story admittedly is very obtuse and hard to follow, I dont really know all that much about it still. But the mystery is part of what makes it appealing, I like a world where I'm not really sure whats going on, and where it would take multiple playthroughs to start to get an idea of whats happening, through enviormental storytelling ,and the various NPC's trying to explain the weird world around you.
I can't really say its good or bad, but it is interesting and adds a certain air of mystery around the whole experience.

Some critiques I have of the game are;

- There can be a large amount of downtime in between the action. Unlike other Souls games, where the linear action never stops, and around every corner is some new intense interaction and obsticule , In Elden Ring you can spend huge amounts of time just riding around aimlessly on your horse, looking off into the distance, going around in circles, rechecking areas over and over again, running along the cliffsides trying to figure out how to get down to the next terrain, ETC.  A significant amount of time can be spent doing nothing at all but just roaming the open world, which can start to make you sleepy and bored because of the lullaby soothing music that tends to play all the time.  It can be relaxing and visually pleasing and immersive, but im not sure thats what I play these games for, I want viseral nonstop combat and challenge, not some ASMR simulator. This is usually a problem and negative of the nature of Open World games in general, I think.  
It can be espeically bad in Elden Ring because there is basically nothing in the way of direction or helping you figure out what to do next.
Sure, you have this beam of light from bonfires which kind of point in some general direction of what to do next,
but I never found it all that helpful, and didn't even notice it until halfway through the game.

- Lack of direction can be frustrating and boring
This is a pro and a con.
Sometimes you can find yourself hitting a dead end, or literal brick wall, and the door will be locked and say you need an item. Without telling you any idea of where that item is. So you could literally spend 50 hours traversing the entire gigantic map and not even find the item.
I think a few times this happened I got lucky, or atleast one of the times I happened to notice the bonfire light point in the direction of where I had to go, but I can see for some players how they will seriously just not be able to progress for hours at a time and feel like what theyre doing is pointless and without progress.
This starts to become less of an issue when you get towards the halfway - end game point, there tends to be a bit more direction from the help of the commander at the Roundtable, but for the first half there were times where I had no idea if I was making progress or just walking arond in circles and wasting time.

- Some of the graphics/artstyle can seem a little odd/outdated
Atleast for me, especially in the Orange autumny area, it kind of looks like a ps2 enviorment at times. It seems like a deliberate design decision, but the visuals can sometimes be hit and miss.

- Not much variety in the heaviest and best armors. Theres only really 2-3 armor sets I found that are actually good for what I want, high poise, tanky armor.  So for most of the game I'd be wearing the same armor with the most defense, and be finding all of these dozens of other cool armors, even if they were from really hard end game bosses, they were always crappy and worse than what I had found 50 hours before.
I understand theyre good for players that dont have as much equipment weight, but they could have really buffed some of the other armors or add more armors that give more variety of the tankiest and heaviest armor. Maybe (probably) there are more in the game that I missed, but that was my experience on my first playthrough. Also, for the first quarter or so of the game, I was using the starting armor and couldn't find anything at all , really. Then suddenly I started finding all sorts of cool stuff.

- Sometimes navigating can be frustrating and annoying, like the map doesn't show what is above or below, so you can spend a lot of time just hugging the cliff edges trying to figure out how to get up/down from this area, only to find out later that you had to go through a cave or some random teleporter to actually get to that place.

- Questionable amounts of platforming

- The UI and inventory can be clunky or annoying. Like when you pickup new items , you have to scroll through endless pages in your inventory to try to find or remember what you just picked up. When you pickup items, it should also have an option to press a button to immediately view what it is.

- Sometimes, certain mechanics can be way too vauge, so you just skip or avoid them entirely. For one example, you can find Paintings, which in the description say something like there is a treasure somewhere about this painting, but it doesnt mean to go to the area depicted in the painting, it means to find some arbitrary random spot where it was PAINTED to find the reward. I still dont understand how im suppose to even figure out where those locations are.
And many other similar things such as this giant red door in subterranian area, where the only way to enter it, is to somehow know that you have to first take off all of your clothing and only THEN the prompt shows up to enter the door.

- Its questionable if the game would actually be better as a linear game, or as the current open world. It's unclear if the open world really actually adds all that much to the game or if it just consists of meandering padding to lengthen out the games duration. It goes both ways.

- I completely trivialized the difficulty about halfway through the game and become super powerful and im not sure why it was so easy , i didnt even look anything up really.

There isn't really that many complaints besides these, and the biggest one is probably that you can have a lot of downtime in between the action. The core gameplay loop and finding loot and bosses and upgrading your character is seriously addicting.

But anyway,
The amount of bosses really is quite impressive, youll never go too long without encountering one, optional or not. Though it is sort of hard to tell which ones are the optional ones and which ones are the main ones, there are these side 'evergrol' areas where you warp down into a small circle arena and fight bosses, these are pretty fun and challenging and usually give cool rewards.

The usual grueling annoying run back to the boss room is mitigated compared to prevoious games, because in Elden Ring theres a new sort of checkpoint mechanic, called Stake of Marika, where frequently around dangerous areas or boss areas, you will have these checkpoint icons that let you know when you die, you can respawn nearby. This helps tremendiously from making the game feel annoying and frustrating when you keep dying to that same boss. It puts you right back into the action, which is appreciated, and it never made the penalty for dying meaningless or anything.

Commonly you will walk into a tucked away corner or new area and suddenly find yourself in a boss fight, without even entering a fog wall. So the element of surprise is there and it keeps everything exciting , that you cant be sure what to expect.
And the variety of locations is quite great too, you have lots of mystical otherworldly sprawling endless labrinyth landscapes that go from lava cities , to medevial castles, then to weird areas that seem like another dimension in space, this crazy area in the sky inside of a tornado, and Caelid in particular is this scary red landscape full of dragons and hard enemies, I went here too early and got my ass handed to me and promply left until I was higher level.

The game has an immense amount of content, so much that youre never quite sure what is the main quest and what is optional. towards what I thought was the end of the game I was really trying to explore and cling on to the playthrough to avoid accidentally suddenly beating it. It seems like theres a bunch of different endings you can unlock, and around the final area you basically get to choose what ending you want, I didn't realize any of this, and just saw a typical generic summon sign on the ground, so I figured I would press it to see what it does before the game ends - well THAT was one of the options that  ended the game. Which was pretty disappointing because I spent half of the game going out of my way to try to find these items to give to the Dung Eater character to unlock his ending, but I didn't press the right button for his ending and missed it...

But the mystique of being able to so easily miss most of the NPC quests and special endings, just means that it adds that much replayability, even if the game is 100 hours long. Maybe the second time around it would be only 50, but actually since the game takes so long to beat, its kind of a double edged sword in that maybe I won't ever want to replay it since its so long.  

But overall its a welcome return to the Souls forumla, with a few twists and turns and a different open world approach, for what it is, its a pretty fun and addicting game albeit with some downtime in between that can be a bit snoozy. I'm probably gonna play through it multiple times, and I havnt even touched the co-op yet, which im definitely gonna play through again with, so it has a ton of content , and im not sick of it yet.

7/10