Board 8 > Elden Ring discussion 5 - Try finger, but hole

(+) Yeah! (+)

Finished and platinum'd but lets keep the discussion alive.

To the person in the last topic saying I could have used a USB drive for the backup save, I played on PS5 and as far as I'm aware that wasn't an option.

Do you think it's still possible to go back and enjoy the other Souls games after Elden Ring? Not that I'm going to do that anytime, soon after 150+ hours of Elden Ring, but...

It seems like if someone tried and didn't enjoy a Souls game before, Elden Ring won't change that. This game is much more accessible.

But if you've never tried any of their games before I would absolutely encourage you to try Bloodborne or Sekiro.

Any suggestions on good early game incantations? I have crazy eyes, fireball, and spark flame.

Hot predix- no DLC announced before this topic finishes

Peace___Frog posted...

Any suggestions on good early game incantations? I have crazy eyes, fireball, and spark flame.

Lightning Spear is great, and you can get it in Liurnia.

CassandraCain posted...

It seems like if someone tried and didn't enjoy a Souls game before, Elden Ring won't change that. This game is much more accessible.

But if you've never tried any of their games before I would absolutely encourage you to try Bloodborne or Sekiro.

I actually own Dark Souls and Bloodborne but never got around to playing them.

Try Bloodborne at the very least. It's almost unanimously agreed that it's the best one. Even considering Elden Ring.

CassandraCain posted...

Try Bloodborne at the very least. It's almost unanimously agreed that it's the best one. Even considering Elden Ring.

With the big caveat that you like gothic horror. I bounced off bloodbourne twice because I just hated the setting. Im much more of a fantasy guy.

I also bounced off Sekiro but that was because I realized I never played pure melee characters in souls games for a reason

UltimaterializerX posted...

The final two manor letters - I cant reach them, but if I kill Rykard Im sure all the NPCs leave (the side quest guides Ive looked at say so). How do I actually finish the assassin quest stuff? Do they go somewhere else?

From what I remember, you can still finish the letters and get their rewards after killing Rykard. The rewards will just be on the table.

Not sure about the ones related to Patches though.

It's not that fun of a strategy, but what you can do is just continually run away until she does a jump attack, and then punish

there's also a certain rock in the arena that you can stand on and it screws with her pathfinding. She can still jump attack to reach it though, so be careful

Again, Guard Counter helps against half of her attacks

I think the trick is to let Alecto do a lot of the attacking and punish her, since that way you dont risk being too close when she unleashes that attack.

For what its worth here is my struggle with her (and yes some counters are too slow, but not all)

https://youtu.be/2k4WZBUIJu4?list=PL74UX9QKZ9tvY_XgcUPTP0aOVjPlafsds

edit: also just noticed you can dodge through that one attack

You are gonna love later fights then

Alecto is super easy if you just run away the whole time. Not even dodging (unless strictly necessary); just running. She'll perform attacks well out of your range, you bonk her in the face once or twice, and then you go back to holding circle and tilting the control stick away.

Yeah Alecto isn't that bad at all once you realize that just sprinting away dodges the worst attack 95% of the time.

Not a bad fight at all.

Being a total dodge character build, I actually had a fun back and forth with Alecto dancing and dodging around

Whoa it's possible to fling Malenia up like a ragdoll.

https://youtu.be/TgEfK0zbZ98

This guy always makes the game look easy.

Mohg was an absolutely brutal fight for me. Malenia was honestly half as difficult. I don't use summons or Bleed though which probably factored into it.

UltimaterializerX posted...

Currently leveling Mind so I can actually try out Tiche.

There's a physick option that gives you free FP for a few seconds. You can use that to call any summon without needing the FP/Mind for it.

That's what I ended up doing since Mind was othewise useless for my melee build.

Its worse if you wanna save Tiche for the 2nd phases

By beating my head against a wall for six hours.

Oh and the Moonlight Greatsword is fun because you can fire a projectile with the poise-breaking properties of a charged greatsword R2. It's not inherently better than anything else though. Weapons in Elden Ring are pretty balanced if you remove Rivers of Blood.

KamikazePotato posted...

Weapons in Elden Ring are pretty balanced if you remove Rivers of Blood.

I would add Moonveil to that list. Haven't tried PvPing, but it is absolutely busted in PvE.

The L2R2 in particular just erases anything during the first half of the game, and out-damages almost everything else in the 2nd half while almost guaranteeing a stagger AND attacking quickly from a distance.

UltimaterializerX posted...

I dont know what Rivers of Blood is.

Rykard beated. I didnt honestly think they would do a Stormcaller callback in this game but here we are.

So now what? I only have half the elevator medallion and I kind of thought killing this dude would drop it. Isnt it impossible to get to the capital otherwise?

Rivers of Blood is a katana that procs Bleed and has some sort of great Ash of War. You need a bunch of arcane or something to be able to use it though. Don't remember who I killed to get it.

Not sure which medallion you're talking about. If you're talking about Dectus, no, you don't need it to get up to Altus Plateau. I'm assuming when you say capital you mean Leyndell?

You have to have beaten 2 shardbearers to get access to the city. That's the only prerequisite.

I'm not certain if there's multiple ways into the city. Maybe some backdoor approach via Deeproot Depths? For me, the entrance I found was above ground to the north east side and I had to beat a more advanced Tree Sentinel first.

Turns out the secret to winning in Malenia co-op is to equip Shabriri's Woe. She can't kill the host with Waterfowl if she's using it on you instead!

Yup, you gotta activate it from the bottom.

Does anyone else find certain armor sets to look way cooler in YouTube videos than they do in-game once you finally find and equip them yourself?

This can't be just me being weird

Been a few weeks since I've beaten the game, and have had some time for my thoughts to crystallize.

This is the first FromSoft game I've played all the way through. The only other game by them I've played was Dark Souls, but I played <10 hours of that.

-The combat is great, and the game does a great job of making you feel like you have options in terms of build. Kinda wish I'd played around with respecing, since I stuck with Faith/Strength all the way through. Even still, I went Sword + Shield -> Cipher Pata -> Coded Sword + Finger Seal -> Blasphemous Blade and it felt like I was getting some cool variety and progression there.

-The game is too long, or the world is too big. I haven't really decided. The game clearly wants you to explore and level up by doing that, but I was pretty tired of exploring by the time I reached Leyndell. It's also super easy to over-level by exploring too much. I think I was 140 by the time I reached Malenia and 155 or 165 by the time I finished the game, and I definitely felt overleveled and like I was brute forcing my way through all the content in the endgame.

-Exploring felt amazing early on, but really started to feel pointless quickly. Usually any rewards I got out of exploring were not useful or appealing to me in the least, so I was exploring for the sake of exploring. But I didn't feel like I got much satisfaction out of that after the first third of the game, as the game really does not change things up in any significant way. The only content you discover is usually more combat (because that's what the game excels at), and anything else like puzzles or quests are underdeveloped and barely worth noting. And that might have been fine if the combat itself was varied enough, but instead you get sent into catacombs and caves over and over with the same enemies and same bosses.

-Specifically on caves and catacombs, I feel like they had maybe 10 good ideas for interesting caves/catacombs, and yet there's over 50 in the game.

-The UI/UX is bad, and I feel a little bad for the people who were on the receiving end of an angry internet mob for saying so (regardless of the games they had worked on).

-The first dragon fight felt amazing and honestly they should've left it at that or had maybe two more. Not counting Magma Wyrms who feel like their own thing...but there's also too many of those.

-The upgrade/weapon system is really weird to me. You need way more regular smithing stones than somber smithing stones to upgrade normal weapons, so it feels harder to upgrade those. And yet...it's going to be for a less flashy weapon than the named weapons generally. Which lead me to using named weapons most of the game, but because of that I feel like I missed out on customizing ashes of war, which feels like a fun/interesting component of the game that I just sidestepped entirely.

-I think the upgrading also discouraged experimentation-- is this weapon good? Well hard to compare against my +7 weapon, so let me upgrade to match...and nope, I actually prefer the weapon I had. Well, there go my smithing stones!

-Already touched upon by many, but the quest design and general interaction with NPCs was not very good. Somehow the open world made it feel especially flat/gamey.

Despite all my complaints, the game did take over my life for a bit and I think it's great overall. But probably not an all-time great for me personally. I'm very interested to see what FromSoftware does next.

Oh, also horse combat sucks and horse platforming sucks. Torrent was nice for getting around, but doing any sort of precision jumping or fighting anything other than trash mobs on him was not fun.

The open world absolutely made the game worse. They did a ton of things way better than other open worlds but the strengths are still in the legacy dungeons.

Open world would have been fine if it was smaller. One of the biggest problems with souls games is difficulty bottle necks. Elden ring was amazing at giving you random things you could do instead of dying at the same boss 15 times in a row. I probably would have played more sekiro if I didnt have that happen to me. I was already a little iffy on the game so when I got frustrated by a boss I just quit.

Even some of the legacy dungeons I thought were too big. I would have cut the game in half and made it two different games.

Yeah something that almost every developer fails to understand when making an open world game: Traversal needs to be fun too. This is why I dislike open world games, because most of it is just galloping from point A to point B in order to get to the fun part.

BotW is the only open world game that gets it right. Moving around in that world IS the fun part.

Elden Ring should have gone with their original style of semi-open world. Where everything is connected but with much less emphasis on empty space. You could still have a lot of options for places to go to make it more accessible.

Also I hate the horse combat too. I know what I'm doing and it's still just annoying, I much prefer to fight while on foot. However I will say that using magic on horseback is at least enjoyable.

I loved the open world

Yeah, the world in Elden Ring is amazing. Probably the best realized open world Ive ever seen. I never got tired exploring, and I loved that I found new things every time I played

yea I personally would take Elden Ring's open world over BotW's any day but I also rate BotW a solid 7/10

Boom, Malenia beated. Took about two hours and I had to get a little bit cheesier than I would have liked, but she's dead, that's the important thing.

And I agree about the length. I love the open world, but I'm also bored of it now and just want the game to end. Doesn't help that the snowfields at the end are all kinda dull too.

Elden Ring's open world is probably the best I've ever seen. Pretty much every single inch of the map is packed with surprises and wonder. Actually moving through the world is better in BotW but its map is incredibly uninteresting by contrast.