General Gaming Elden Ring - Information Thread, update (02/21): Shadow of the Erdtree DLC "Collector's Edition Messmer the Impaler Statue" trailer

[Bacon]

All it has to be is not Dark Souls 2. This is a 100% combination of DS3 and Sekiro. That's good enough for me. I would prefer it if it was more like DS1, which it won't be. DS1 is just too easy for anyone who has played DS3, BB, or Sekiro. I wouldn't mind it being easier as long as a flat difficulty remains. Watching the boss fight, it is ever so slightly disappointing that they have just ramped up boss speed once again.  Maybe it is just that boss, but boss movement as a whole has seemed to get faster with every non-DS installment. 

[skillzdadirecta]

1 hour ago, XxEvil AshxX said:

So I'm not a Souls person (though I have played a few) so my opinion is probably moot anyway

 

 

 

[gamer.tv]

It looks interesting, but realistically if it’s nails like the rest I just don’t have the time to invest (much less, in a huge, open works).

[Greatoneshere]

4 hours ago, Bloodporne said:

@Greatoneshere I'm curious to see what you think of this gameplay trailer knowing you also thought Dark Souls 3 was a recycle fest. It obviously has the open world spaces and verticality added but aside from that, I think based on what they've shown here, this game makes Dark Souls 3's level of recycling look amateurish. I actually laughed out loud at my screen for a second when I noticed that they wholesale reused the Souls sound effects library again. 

 

I have a number of issues with DS3, and I do feel HIdetaka Miyazaki's more producer role on that game while his main focus was on Bloodborne and then Sekiro is felt. The level design isn't imaginative or clever, the levels feel a bit bloated, things like that. I don't hate DS3, but it doesn't stick out in my mind (similar to DS2, which also doesn't) like the other Soulsborne games do.

 

As for this game, definitely feels like a Dark Souls/Sekiro hybrid. I definitely saw a lot of recycled assets, the same inventory screen, etc. and was like: "okay, so definitely in line with Dark Souls rather than Bloodborne or Sekiro". However, I was fairly impressed with the map, the contiguous open world while maintaining difficult Dark Souls-style gameplay. The graphics and controls still seems a little jank but that's FromSoftware for you. I'm hype for the game, but we'll see.

[Biggie]

I’ll pass

[Paperclyp]

Jesus I thought it looked incredible. Surprised at the lackluster response in this thread. 

[Mr.Vic20]

Just now, Paperclyp said:

Jesus I thought it looked incredible. Surprised at the lackluster response in this thread. 

Oh too be clear, I pre-ordered today, and it’s one of my most anticipated games of 2022!

[Bacon]

I want to pre-order, but, not even kidding, just spent too much on onaholes. 

[Biggie]

18 minutes ago, Paperclyp said:

Jesus I thought it looked incredible. Surprised at the lackluster response in this thread. 

It literally was Sekiro with a different skin. 🤷‍♀️

[Paperclyp]

31 minutes ago, Biggie said:

It literally was Sekiro with a different skin. 🤷‍♀️

 

I'd question if you've played any of their games if that was your takeaway. 

 

If you want to be reductive it was open world Dark Souls, to which I would say, hell fucking yeah it was. 

[Keyser_Soze]

I am now an Elden Ring richer thanks to @Mr.Vic20 who apparently has a better memory than I do!

[skillzdadirecta]

1 hour ago, Biggie said:

It literally was Sekiro with a different skin. 🤷‍♀️

You never played Sekiro if you think that's Sekiro like. 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

The Sekiro DNA is pretty evident in certain aspects such as movement and animation.

[Paperclyp]

1 minute ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

The Sekiro DNA is pretty evident in certain aspects such as movement and animation.

I don’t disagree, but calling it sekiro with a different skin is quite a misrepresentation. 

[Chris-]

I loved movement in Sekiro but just could never get into the combat due to the way damage worked, so open world Dark Souls with Sekiro movement? Game of the fucking century. 

[skillzdadirecta]

I'm sure this game shares some animations from all of From's previous games, it just doesn't seem like it plays as fast as Sekiro to me. Won't know until I get a controller in my hands.

[Keyser_Soze]

 

[CitizenVectron]

It looks incredible, and I've certainly wanted a new open-world action RPG for a while...but the comparison to Dark Souls is likely going to scare me away. I get why people like the DS series...but for me, it's just too punishing for the little time I have to play. If this game is easier and lets me have fun while exploring and fighting, then I'll likely pick it up. If it's too difficult and I need to re-do the same area over 5 or 6 times to figure out some mechanic to beat just that area, then it's not for me.

[Keyser_Soze]

4 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

It looks incredible, and I've certainly wanted a new open-world action RPG for a while...but the comparison to Dark Souls is likely going to scare me away. I get why people like the DS series...but for me, it's just too punishing for the little time I have to play. If this game is easier and lets me have fun while exploring and fighting, then I'll likely pick it up. If it's too difficult and I need to re-do the same area over 5 or 6 times to figure out some mechanic to beat just that area, then it's not for me.

 

It's already easier than a DS game since it has a map!

[Paperclyp]

1 hour ago, CitizenVectron said:

It looks incredible, and I've certainly wanted a new open-world action RPG for a while...but the comparison to Dark Souls is likely going to scare me away. I get why people like the DS series...but for me, it's just too punishing for the little time I have to play. If this game is easier and lets me have fun while exploring and fighting, then I'll likely pick it up. If it's too difficult and I need to re-do the same area over 5 or 6 times to figure out some mechanic to beat just that area, then it's not for me.

 

It'll be interesting to see how difficult some of the open world encounters are, since at least some of the difficulty of the boss encounters in the series comes from the limited space you have to work with. However, it seems likely that they will funnel you into more enclosed spaces for a lot of the big bads. 

[best3444]

2 hours ago, CitizenVectron said:

It looks incredible, and I've certainly wanted a new open-world action RPG for a while...but the comparison to Dark Souls is likely going to scare me away. I get why people like the DS series...but for me, it's just too punishing for the little time I have to play. If this game is easier and lets me have fun while exploring and fighting, then I'll likely pick it up. If it's too difficult and I need to re-do the same area over 5 or 6 times to figure out some mechanic to beat just that area, then it's not for me.

 

These are my thoughts too.

[CitizenVectron]

Just now, best3444 said:

 

These are my thoughts too.

 

It's annoying to express this opinion in some places online, because it's common to get pushback about people wanting "easier" games that remove the challenge/reward of beating them. As if giving people the option of a less-stressful playthrough somehow diminishes someone else beating it on a harder setting. There's a huge element of gatekeeping in the gaming fandom that tries to keep hard games hard, and really looks down on people wanting an easier experience, even if it's because a person has a disability, etc. It's really embarrassing. In my case I just don't have a lot of free time for games, so I don't want to waste a bunch of it retrying the same thing over and over! Honestly, I play the "story mode" difficulty setting on more and more games, just so I can at least end up finishing them.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

3 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

It's annoying to express this opinion in some places online, because it's common to get pushback about people wanting "easier" games that remove the challenge/reward of beating them. As if giving people the option of a less-stressful playthrough somehow diminishes someone else beating it on a harder setting. There's a huge element of gatekeeping in the gaming fandom that tries to keep hard games hard, and really looks down on people wanting an easier experience, even if it's because a person has a disability, etc. It's really embarrassing. In my case I just don't have a lot of free time for games, so I don't want to waste a bunch of it retrying the same thing over and over! Honestly, I play the "story mode" difficulty setting on more and more games, just so I can at least end up finishing them.

 

Fortunately, you'll be playing the PC version and there are always mods that can give you that "story mode" experience.

[Keyser_Soze]

35 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

It's annoying to express this opinion in some places online, because it's common to get pushback about people wanting "easier" games that remove the challenge/reward of beating them. As if giving people the option of a less-stressful playthrough somehow diminishes someone else beating it on a harder setting. There's a huge element of gatekeeping in the gaming fandom that tries to keep hard games hard, and really looks down on people wanting an easier experience, even if it's because a person has a disability, etc. It's really embarrassing. In my case I just don't have a lot of free time for games, so I don't want to waste a bunch of it retrying the same thing over and over! Honestly, I play the "story mode" difficulty setting on more and more games, just so I can at least end up finishing them.

 

These Souls games have a reputation for being hard and that is also part of the appeal. The story is actually quite minimal and enigmatic. Beating the game isn't really the point of playing it and if you flew through it and got to the end you'd be scratching your head to why people like the game. It's not really gatekeeping but saying it's less of a game if it was super easy.

 

That being said, as this topic always comes up, the game is easier by what your class is. Like if you use magic, it's pretty easy. It's just not spelled out at the beginning of the game so people pick some melee character and get frustrated.

 

The games aren't necessarily hard either. They are about as hard as Super Mario Brothers. Souls games require patience and pattern recognition and observation. If the hammer brothers are throwing hammers at you, you don't run into them and die, you dodge or figure out a way to get by them or jump on their head. Same thing with these games but the bosses are bigger and more intimidating looking. Watch Bourne to Run on Giant Bomb. Danny is just a scared little boy going though Demon's Souls

 but he made the series so you have nothing to fear

 

Spoiler

 

 

And on the subject of Elden Ring it looks super easy. Did you see how he summons spirits to fight for him and hangs back with big ass magic spells? That seems so easy even you could do it!

[skillzdadirecta]

55 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

These Souls games have a reputation for being hard and that is also part of the appeal. The story is actually quite minimal and enigmatic. Beating the game isn't really the point of playing it and if you flew through it and got to the end you'd be scratching your head to why people like the game. It's not really gatekeeping but saying it's less of a game if it was super easy.

 

That being said, as this topic always comes up, the game is easier by what your class is. Like if you use magic, it's pretty easy. It's just not spelled out at the beginning of the game so people pick some melee character and get frustrated.

 

The games aren't necessarily hard either. They are about as hard as Super Mario Brothers. Souls games require patience and pattern recognition and observation. If the hammer brothers are throwing hammers at you, you don't run into them and die, you dodge or figure out a way to get by them or jump on their head. Same thing with these games but the bosses are bigger and more intimidating looking. Watch Bourne to Run on Giant Bomb. Danny is just a scared little boy going though Demon's Souls

 but he made the series so you have nothing to fear

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

And on the subject of Elden Ring it looks super easy. Did you see how he summons spirits to fight for him and hangs back with big ass magic spells? That seems so easy even you could do it!

Damn you beat me to it... my thoughts exactly. 

[Bloodporne]

I don't care how other people play their games obviously, nor do I care if they add options to any of these games, but I will say that Dark Souls made me really appreciate the feeling of danger and the heightened levels of excitement difficulty can add to the experience. I mean I grew up with arcade games, SNES and so on and yeah, shit was hard back then, but I just never finished games really. Dark Souls was the first time where I actively noticed how much its total disinterest in your player character in the context of its world adds to the atmosphere and isolation in the world. I fucking hated how hard it was at first, I even returned it to the store, and I ended up subjecting myself to its difficulty because the game was so goddamn compelling actually. I think I hit Blighttown or something when I thought about just how exciting and engaging this game felt compared to anything else I had played in years exactly because it felt dangerous just to explore that next room. 

 

Again, I don't care if they add the options for other people's sake at all of course, but I'm actually glad the game didn't give me any other option out of its uncaring feeling world. One of my favorite things about the first Dark Souls is still how much it pushed me and made me commit to what I was doing in-game like a real adventure. Sorry probably reiterated the same shit five times in a row, listening to an album on the side 

[CitizenVectron]

I'm definitely not advocating for dumbing down games, or removing high difficulty levels—I just think it's nice when they include story modes (or general more-easy modes) to accommodate people who either don't want to play hard games, or can't play hard games (due to various disabilities, etc).

[Brian]

These type of games aren’t for me. It’s similar to rouge-lites. These games require time and attention that I don’t have.  
 

 

[skillzdadirecta]

45 minutes ago, ManUtdRedDevils said:

These type of games aren’t for me. It’s similar to rouge-lites. These games require time and attention that I don’t have.  
 

 

Wise man... Not everything is for everybody and that's ok.

[nublood]

Didn’t watch. Just waiting on release. Naysayers be dammed.

[stepee]

1 hour ago, ManUtdRedDevils said:

These type of games aren’t for me. It’s similar to rouge-lites. These games require time and attention that I don’t have.  
 

 

 

Yep, the attention required is what gets me on Souls stuff. It’s not necessarily the difficulty, but the constant amount of attention that sorta thing and rogue-lite’s also require, I simply can’t do that.

 

It’s why I never liked bosses, at some point during 5 minutes or whatever my mind is going to wander off to thinking about something and I’m going to die and have to start over because of it. And I can repeat that over and over again because I don’t WANT to have to constantly focus on a game and nothing else, that’s tiring to me. Even in vr, I can always think of other things while playing.

 

These games are basically so’s that require all of your attention 100% all of the time and I just need my space man.

[Brian]

40 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

Yep, the attention required is what gets me on Souls stuff. It’s not necessarily the difficulty, but the constant amount of attention that sorta thing and rogue-lite’s also require, I simply can’t do that.

 

It’s why I never liked bosses, at some point during 5 minutes or whatever my mind is going to wander off to thinking about something and I’m going to die and have to start over because of it. And I can repeat that over and over again because I don’t WANT to have to constantly focus on a game and nothing else, that’s tiring to me. Even in vr, I can always think of other things while playing.

 

These games are basically so’s that require all of your attention 100% all of the time and I just need my space man.

It’s like dating super needy person. It’s exhausting. 
 

The other problem for me is I like to play multiple games at once. Nothing is harder in life than taking a break from a DS/BB game and then coming back to it. Trying to figure out what you were doing and where you are suppose to go is impossible. The game needs to add some bread crumbs. I am happy to see a map and markers being added to it. 
 

I will play this at launch with the cool kids knowing I ain’t cool enough to beat it. 

[Moa]

I really hope this is the FromSoft game that I finally enjoy. I've tried them all except Bloodborne and always bounced off.

 

I think what I've always struggled with is believing the myth that the souls games are "tough but fair." From the outset each game asks you to commit to a class decision without providing the knowledge to make an informed decision. This pattern continues as the games pressure you to make consequential stat decisions early, again without providing the context necessary to know what you're getting. You could pool your souls so that when you find an item you want to use you can get the prerequisite stats, but this isn't a realistic option for a new or blind player since you're probably just going to lose your souls to a trap that you had know way of knowing was there. So instead you probably dump your points in stats that you have know way of understanding, and when you finally find an item you want to use the upgrade cost to do so is now exorbitantly high. The game constantly punishes the unprepared in this manner. It pressures you to make blind decisions and then later shows you how you fucked up. From the top down the games are unfair openly hostile to the player, and I think that is one of the major draws for fans of the series. There are many games that are harder mechanically than the souls games, but no other major games revel in being as abjectly unfair as them.

 

I think I just need to reframe how I think about these games. Instead of believing my many already souls-literate friends who have said something along the lines of "tough but fair," I need to prepare for and embrace the hostility that the games have to a newcomer, because there is some allure to confronting a hostile and mysterious world that refuses to play fair.

[skillzdadirecta]

4 hours ago, Moa said:

I really hope this is the FromSoft game that I finally enjoy. I've tried them all except Bloodborne and always bounced off.

 

I think what I've always struggled with is believing the myth that the souls games are "tough but fair." From the outset each game asks you to commit to a class decision without providing the knowledge to make an informed decision. This pattern continues as the games pressure you to make consequential stat decisions early, again without providing the context necessary to know what you're getting. You could pool your souls so that when you find an item you want to use you can get the prerequisite stats, but this isn't a realistic option for a new or blind player since you're probably just going to lose your souls to a trap that you had know way of knowing was there. So instead you probably dump your points in stats that you have know way of understanding, and when you finally find an item you want to use the upgrade cost to do so is now exorbitantly high. The game constantly punishes the unprepared in this manner. It pressures you to make blind decisions and then later shows you how you fucked up. From the top down the games are unfair openly hostile to the player, and I think that is one of the major draws for fans of the series. There are many games that are harder mechanically than the souls games, but no other major games revel in being as abjectly unfair as them.

 

I think I just need to reframe how I think about these games. Instead of believing my many already souls-literate friends who have said something along the lines of "tough but fair," I need to prepare for and embrace the hostility that the games have to a newcomer, because there is some allure to confronting a hostile and mysterious world that refuses to play fair.

You can literally avoid most of the "traps you have no way of knowing about" by being patient and observing your surroundings. The thing with the souls games is that they require PATIENCE. If you take your time, especially the first time you're in an area or encountering a new enemy, you can get pretty far. The games just require you to actually learn how to play them unlike 90% of the games that have been made since the 16bit era. If you cut your gaming teeth in arcades and on the Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis, this type of diffilculty is a throwback.

 

But the better question I always have for folks is why do you keep playing these games if you don't like them? I really don't understand that. There are plenty of games and series that aren't for me for one reason or another but I don't actively resent them because of that. It seems like a lot of Souls non-fans are upset because the games aren't what they think they should be because they just can't experience them the way the gamers who put the time into them can. Sekiro became quite easy and challenging for me once it clicked with me on how to play it. Someone in this thread said that they relaized these games just aren't for them and they accepted that. I think a lot of gamers will save themselves a lot of unnecesary frustration (and money) if they just do the same 

[SimpleG]

7 hours ago, Moa said:

I think what I've always struggled with is believing the myth that the souls games are "tough but fair." From the outset each game asks you to commit to a class decision without providing the knowledge to make an informed decision. This pattern continues as the games pressure you to make consequential stat decisions early, again without providing the context necessary to know what you're getting.

From breaks the general gaming rules and in doing so it shows how greedy players are.

Players feel this need to maximize and it really doesnt matter  

Class doesnt mean shit in this game, it can help to know all the ins and outs if you are wanting to optimize but it doesnt matter.

Stats dont matter ,weapons dont matter, armor doesnt matter.

7 hours ago, Moa said:

You could pool your souls so that when you find an item you want to use you can get the prerequisite stats, but this isn't a realistic option for a new or blind player since you're probably just going to lose your souls to a trap that you had know way of knowing was there.

Another rules they break

Death doesnt matter. Souls will be there when you go back, did you die again ?, Oh well cause it doesnt matter

7 hours ago, Moa said:

So instead you probably dump your points in stats that you have know way of understanding, and when you finally find an item you want to use the upgrade cost to do so is now exorbitantly high.

Broken rule

You dont need to use every weapon or item or cant use it "this run". 

7 hours ago, Moa said:

The game constantly punishes the unprepared in this manner. It pressures you to make blind decisions and then later shows you how you fucked up. From the top down the games are unfair openly hostile to the player, and I think that is one of the major draws for fans of the series. There are many games that are harder mechanically than the souls games, but no other major games revel in being as abjectly unfair as them.

 

 Everyone complains about this game being punishing but the entire game is really about rewarding players. Souls character at the start are the default and the game can be beaten with this character. Ever thing after that is a reward.