I'm starting to get the sense that Elden Ring is going for maximum accessibility, and there's some specific choices they've made that kinda strike me as gamey.
-You can put down summons signs ala the old way, or add yourself to a "summon pot", which players can walk up to and just pick an available summon partner from a list. These pots are found generally where you'd expect you want coop partners. Near PoIs with enemy, near the mini-dungeons. You can also seamlessly move between a lot of stuff in the open world, it does not appear many things except boss fights are fog-walled off. So that's a nice QoL feature for multiplayer. But I'd kinda miss the raw and dynamic nature of placing signs. It sorta reminds me when WoW made dungeon finder groups, and getting a group went from a struggle to easy and rather impersonal. You kinda got to know the people you were grouping up with because you had to. Dungeon finders just made it into a McGroup.
-The Spirit Summons can only be summoned within a certain range of a certain statue or specifically in some boss fights. I'm a little disappointed by that, in that I thought they would be very dynamic in how they could be used. And it sorta implies things are balanced against them getting used. Now, the areas you can summon them could be fairly large and that'd be alright. But from what I've seen of gameplay it's more "Ok, here's this camp full of guys, have fun with your summons." Feels a little contrived.
-Bosses (how many is unclear) seem to put a bleed effect on you when you block an attack, called Hemorrhage. It's like Bleed from Dark Souls 3. When the bar fills up you take a bunch of damage. I get why they did it, because shields and blocking seem hella effective in ER. But it's kinda gamey. When you add in Poise and Posture...there's a lot going on now.
-The gameplay I'm seeing now reminds me a lot of what I've seen from Demon Souls Remastered. Combat seems pretty fast, and damage gets handed out in pretty large chunks. I know that sounds weird to say about a Soulsborne game, because they all kinda fit that description in some way. But there's something about Demon Soul's Remastered combat and stuff that just looks....a little too slick, is the only way I can put it. Dark Souls 3 looks and feels meaty, the movement is somewhat more ponderous. Sekiro by comparison you were pretty agile and didn't plod around as much. ER looks closer to Sekiro and DSR than Dark Souls. It has that same slickness to everything.
-They've overhauled weapon enchanting from previous games in an interesting but kind of gamey way. They've combined Weapons Arts and Enchantments. Stay with me. Weapons Arts are now called Ashes of War. There are all different kinds and are earned in all sorts of different ways. Ashes of War are slotted on to weapons. Some are restricted, like, can only go on a Slashing Weapon. Some Ashes of War are bound to a specific weapon only. An Ash of War does two things. One it provides a special attack to your weapon, i.e a weapon art. But two...it lets you set what scaling you want your weapon to use. So let's say you have an Ash of War called "Super Duper Lightning Strike." The weapon art makes your weapon glow with lightning and you slam it down and it makes a lightning explosion. In your equipment menu, Super Duper Lightning Strike also has two scalings: Strength and Faith. You can change the scaling in your menu at any time. You can also swap Ashes of War around any time as well, like you're equipping gear. So what used to take farming materials, and going to the blacksmith, and really planning out how you want to craft your weapon, in Elden Ring you just have to find the Ash of War that works for you and equip it. But there's some considerations too. Maybe you love your weapon type, but the Ash of War you want doesn't jive with it. Maybe you love the Weapon Art it grants, but don't like the scaling. Or maybe you really need the scaling but you find the Weapon Art to be subpar compared to others you've seen. It definitely simplifies getting your build to where you want to be and not locking you into it, because the resources and weapons to modify gear in Soulsbournes are often limited. And that's pretty nice. But player choices you've made feel less binding when you can just equip/unequip some things and change up your character. I think this is a combination of a thematic choice by From Soft to go along with the IP and a rethink of a core system they've used for many games. Remains to be seen if it works out well.
-Weapon Arts seem crazy strong in ER. In DS3 and Sekrio, Weapon Arts just weren't that strong compared to your normal attacks. They were novel and cool, some provided good buffs rather than attacks. But by and large they were just anemic in damage and inefficient compared to just normal light and heavy attacks. And if you were going to spend FP on something, magic was generally a much better use of it. Only late in DS3's life did Weapon Arts come to be appreciated for their usefulness in specific situations or combos. So if you want someone to use a feature or thing, it has to be worth their time. ER seems to have taken that to heart. Weapon Arts seem to do really good damage, have AoE, do multi-hit combos and look badass. It really helps that From Soft has upped their visual effects game, stuff looks beautiful and awesome. It already feels like you've reached anime levels of action within the first few minutes of the game. And that's pretty cool. But it contributed to my sense of things seeming a little easy. When one use of a Weapon Art takes like a 1/3rd of a mini-bosses' health, it leaves it feeling a little anti-climatic despite how cool it looks. I'm really hoping what we've seen so far isn't the exact early game experience. There is a shit load of whizbang stuff that's put into your hands from very early on. I think they did this for a couple reasons. #1: The theme of ER is that you're exiled not-gods coming home to beat up demi-gods and take their power. That kind of necessitates cooler looking stuff coming to the player earlier on. #2: Dark Souls often was a slow process of finding cooler looking and better weapons. It took time to level, find the right thing, infuse it, temp buff it with consumables, unlock the sexier and more grandiose spells. The Souls games could be a pretty drab affair until you, hostage like, came to appreciate how subdued everything was. It made the special things stick out more when you found them. ER is looking to impress early. Like, immediately. I'm increasingly thinking that the tutorial level, if there is one, will at least give you some space to absorb all the new stuff coming at you. And assuming there won't be one, then the minute you enter the first area, you're shooting lasers and doing fruity animoo melee weapon arts. It lacks subtlety compared to Dark Souls, and to me that signals a desire to not bore people out of playing the game by giving them candy right away. I'm not opposed to it, and it's never a good idea to judge everything based on something like a network test but it kinda aligns with my other feelings.
-People are making a big deal about sleep arrows. Considering you can just craft them and they work even on large intimidating foes, they feel like another nod toward accessibility and options for getting through the game besides just mastering the combat.
-You have unlimited stamina when sprinting in the open world and you're not in combat. You have a mount you can summon anywhere in the open world as long as you're not invaded, that double jumps, can be launched up tall cliffs using jump pads and has its own fast mode sprint. You can fast travel from any place to specific place while in the open world. It's like From Soft has taken every modern convenience from every open world game design and put them all in ER, and made most of it available right from the start of the game. Part of me is like "good." But another kinda feels like it's reached overkill proportions. Why have unlimited sprinting stamina in the open world when you have a magical goat to ride around on? Why not have stamina just be stamina so it's consistent. You can get a mount in the first, like 5 to 10 minutes of the game.
-Also notable is that so far that we've seen, there is no trial by fire boss that kicks your ass. There IS a big armored dude on a steed right outside where the game starts, but he's optional. You're only engaging him if you choose to because he's hard to miss. Dark Souls and BB etc... always had that first moment when it lets you know what kind of game it's going to be by throwing you into a challenging fight. Asylum Demon. Gundryr. Gyobu Masataka Oniwa. The Beast in the Clinic (optional too but he's literally in your way.) There are probably more. They were always the first hurdle to overcome before the "real game" started. In ER, it seems like you just get to dive into the open world seemingly from the very start. Again, hard to say if the network test omits part of it. But if they skip that it would be telling. I remember some people getting royally stressed out by the Gundryr fight in Dark Souls 3 because they couldn't get to the rest of the game without beating him. Maybe they want the game to not scare people away early. Or maybe you can say the first Legacy Dungeon is the first real boss of the game.
-Again with the network test it is hard to say what balance is or where it's at. But what's being shown, a lot of things look really strong. Magic looked hella strong. Weapon Arts look hella strong. Guard Counters look hella strong (although it kinda appears they don't work on bosses?). Jumping attacks look hella strong because they deal a lot of posture damage. Now if you turned some mid level Dark Souls characters loose in the early game, they'd look pretty strong too. And maybe that's what's going on here. But it's contributing to my mounting sense that things look sort of easy.
-I think it's starting to come home to me how Elden Ring is reshaping itself around being an open world game. Everything has a very structured feel to it. You have bonfires evenly spaced across the open world as paths through the content. Each content bit has a little shrine you can rez at instead of respawning at the last bonfire. Each piece of content has a little summoning box for collecting coop players, and another little statue that says whether or not you can summon spirits. The mini-dungeons live up to the mini-moniker, on the order of a cutdown Chalice Dungeon from BB. They even have the same mechanics of finding a lever to open a door to get to the boss. There's content and collectibles and crafting materials and huntable animals and enemies and mini dungeons and bonfires and mini-bosses....like every 20 feet. Watching VaatiVidya do this 25 minute run he just bounced from thing to thing to thing. It is an odd experience to see this now combined with the Dark Souls formula. I've played plenty of open world games and it's hard not to maybe feel slightly jaded about it. Because that's what open world games tend to do eventually: make you jaded to their content through overexposure and grind.
-This really does feel like a new IP, despite being the culmination of everything From Soft has done since Demon Souls and being so close to Dark Souls in terms of design and asset/idea re-use that it's hard not to think of it as Dark Souls 4. It's got a very different vibe and theme than Dark Souls though. Dark Souls and Bloodborne and to some degree Sekiro all share the same vibe. The world is shitty and falling apart and you're either going to keep the cycle going or break it. There's a grimness and a darkness to everything about the games. Sekiro less than the other two but it's there to some degree. Elden Ring is feeling like something different, tonally. It's triumphant. It's a return from exile and a retaking of what's yours. Kicking out all the spoiled, debauched demigods and becoming the next king. It's still plenty edgy and dark and weird the way From Soft games always are. But there isn't the weary hopelessness draped over ER like there is the other games. There's this energy and heroic nobility that is being played up. Like From Soft's take on God of War, almost. While I like the change, it's a new IP and it feels a little hard to connect to some of it. NPCs are saying stuff that should sound edgy and meaningful but, ya know, it's new and you're not sure if you buy it. "Finger" Maidens? Hrmmm. Some of the mini-dungeons felt, for lack of a better term, hella generic. One was a cave with some wolves and in the back was "The Beastman of <some place>." It wouldn't have been out of place in Skyrim or something like that. The enemies are great but some of the environments look a bit like generic fantasy. There's camps with tents and a palisade and crates and soldiers. Some of the mini dungeons look like small catacombs out in the middle of the open world, usually underground in a cave. I could tell we'll be seeing those a lot. It all was very pretty, but seemed a little pedestrian without that theme of undeath laid over it. Maybe when I'm playing it I'll start feeling connected to this stuff but from a distance some of it has not drawn me in. The Legacy Dungeon looks way more like I expect. It's the side content that has looked a little bland so far.
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Topic: Oooohhhhhhh, Elden Ring. Bay12 Group Password: MAGMA. It's DLC time! (Read 46409 times)