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[Jopax]

It's not even the near-oneshots it was just that the bastard was so unpredictable, especially with NPC's around that a ton of times you'd go in to get a hit thinking you were safe when NOPE SUDDEN 180 AOE THAT FUCKS YOU UP

Anyways, been poking my way trough the zone he unlocks

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Run into the crucible motherfucker again. Except this time instead of a nice wide open arena where you can keep your distance and heal up it's a small cramped thing with ledges everywhere. And just as I was getting tired of his bullshit poise and stupid high damage combos I get him to his second phase. Dude flies up to do the swoopity-swoop, I roll, he flies off the edge of the platform and promptly dies. Serves him right, the bastard.

Also fought the double decker gargoyles, that was annoying, mostly because they once again take one big, nicely designed boss and completely ruin it by turning it into an utter shitfest of barely being able to keep track of one of the fuckers, let alone two. Oh and if you try the safe thing of hugging their feet and wailing away at the crotch the bastard vomits high strength poison which not only ticks up fast but it deals insane damage if you don't gtfo right away.

[Tawa]

Beat the game last night. Not as down on it as some people, but the endgame bosses are definitely a little overtuned, I basically had to summon mimic tear for [Godskin Duo] onward. I don't like that they seemingly balanced the game around needing to summon spirits, which kind of kills the pacing of boss fights for me; they go from elegant dances to MMO aggro-management tests. (Admittedly, I also mostly stopped doing the Skyrim dungeons around Mt Gelmir, so maybe I was just underleveled or something.)

That being said, I think the game as a whole was pretty strong. Exploring the world was the most fun I've had in an open world game since Breath of the Wild, the plot/lore/setting/whatever you want to call it was interesting, and I think some of the boss fights were very good (Godrick is an earlygame standout for me.)

[LuuBluum]

Yeah, I'll admit my motivation as I near the end has... definitely dwindled to nadda. Not much left, but not much of a will to deal with it, either.

[nenjin]

I think I have easily another 60 hours until full completion. Although I can't say all of my ~140 hours is strictly my own game, we've been doing a fair amount of coop as well.

[JoshuaFH]

I'm going strong at 60~ish hours in. I imagine if I had been binging the game enough to have 140 hours in I'd be kinda sick of it too. Though I imagine that with the replay value, a couple hundred, or maybe even 1000+ more hours of enjoyment is more than possible.

[nenjin]

I had like 800 hours in DS3 across 6 characters. Elden Ring will be no different. Yesterday was the first day since release that I didn't fire it up.

Every time I think I'm exhausted by it, I come back and do more. It'll be the only thing I play until I finish a complete playthrough.

[Cthulhu]

I have 400 hours in DS1, most of that is pvp, mainly going into forest while human and seeing how long I can go before I die or get a gap in the fog wall.  Usually a long-ass time, most forest invaders sucked.  I liked that chaotic gameplay from DS1, I guess Elden Ring is chaotic too but not in the fun sense, more in the "three people spamming moonveil and kamehameha at you" sense.  Which, whatever, you're trying to play the game a certain way and you don't want me in it, but why even have the feature anymore, since it's clearly lost its purpose.

I honestly don't see myself playing this one longer than it takes me to beat the last boss, maybe I won't even make it that far.  What else is there to do?  It doesn't have that staying power of DS1 to me, it's too long, too big, and too much of it won't be interesting the second time around. 

Spoiler: Current boss (click to show/hide)

Still on Malekith.  I have the special item that lets you parry his golden attacks, but I haven't gotten a chance to use it.  I've been going for probably 20 minutes and haven't even got a single hit on Malekith.  He just immediately starts doing infinite combos and his attacks have a gigantic dot so if you get hit once or twice you're dead.  Unlike a lot of big bosses all his combos are fifty feet off the ground so you can't hug him and hit him when his attacks overshoot you.

It feels like some of these later bosses just weren't designed for melee.  Godskin duo is another example, there is no fucking way to do that shit melee.  Astel is doable melee but it's clearly not what they playtested him for.  And I know from peeking ahead that the final challenge is two hard bosses in a row and you don't get a checkpoint after the first.

So I don't know.  I know for a fact I could beat all this shit in less than an hour if I used mimic tear and overpowered shit but I don't want to.  That's not fun.  I would rather not play the game than do that.  I've bounced off a few times and grudgingly come back but considering there's nothing left in the game except bosses I'll probably never beat without switching to a playstyle I don't like, why bother?

Overall this is a tough one.  Giving it a 5/10 doesn't feel right, cause it sounds like the game is middling or average.  It's not.  Half of the game is a masterpiece, half of the game is the worst game I've played in years.

[JoshuaFH]

The change from 'segmented and linear' to 'sprawling and open' does have some drawbacks, in that the game loses the touching points that remind you to take breaks. With how Elden Ring is designed, it is incredibly easy to get lost in ADHD Paradise: "Oooh what's this? and that! and that and that and that! Everywhere I go there's something new to seeeee!" whereas with the other Souls games, you were probably spending a lot of time in individual sections, and once you got done with those, you probably took a break. With Elden Ring I can see people binging on it so hard that they get sick of it, where that was hard with the other games because they incentivized you to take breaks just through their difficulty and design.

The invisible enemies glitch has been something of a hidden blessing, I think, because it had incentivized me to just soak in the game in bits and pieces, so I really appreciate the game aesthetically. Elden Ring really does just feel like FromSoft's love child.

If anything, I kinda wish they made the exploration a little harder. Even with the majority of enemies being invisible, it's piss easy avoiding them all and just exploring nearly the entire map willy nilly. I think they could have been in some harder barriers that require some combat savviness to progress through. Like with the scripted red phantoms, they force you to get off your horse, wherever that may be, and then they chase you down.

Right now I'm just frustrated with the same thing that I've been frustrated with in all FromSoft games: action queuing. I just wish it was more consistent. Sometimes I'll accidentally hit an input twice and do an action twice. Ok cool, my bad. Sometimes I'll anticipate the action I want to do, press the button in advance, and then it doesn't do it, it didn't queue it up. Now I'm in a shitty guessing game as to what gets queued and what doesn't, leading me to mashing where I don't have to mash, because I NEED to get an action out at the earliest possible frame; this results in me queuing up actions and boning myself further. Then I'll overcorrect in the other direction and trying to deliberately plan out my inputs, for the lauded grail "intentionality" that fighting game players seem to have achieved but remains out of my grasp, and then the game bones me by not queuing my actions and so I wind up dying stupidly as my character stands there when I was expecting him to roll or do a weapon art or something.

I also wish there was a bit more visibility to the stance mechanic. It's literally impossible to tell how close an enemy is to getting stance-broken. With Sekiro, it was a prominent mechanic and you got a gauge to keep track of for each enemy. With Elden Ring, it just shrugs its shoulders and goes "ehhh bigger enemy is harder to stance break. Just hit more harder and better til you do it!" it makes it very hard to be strategic when some enemies have seemingly endless poise and stance, even when I'm whacking them over and over with charged greatsword attacks and guard counters.

[nenjin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN2Y7Z3c_ro

All 91 Ashes of War, if you're so inclined to spoil yourself. Garden of Eyes didn't necessarily know all the variants to each attack (Flame Strike for example casts a wave of flame as the first part, but if you then heavy attack, you rip your weapon through the flames and buff the weapon with fire damage for about 80 AR. They didn't show case that) so this isn't totally representative of everything an Ash of War can do.

But watching this is giving me all sorts of ideas for combos. Honestly, the sheer variety of builds in Elden Ring has gotten me interested in PvP in a way no other Souls game has.

(Might also help that I have about a 90% win ratio in invasions and duels in ER so far. Although that's largely due to every invader having a glass cannon build and not understanding that being proficient in melee > weapon arts.)

[JoshuaFH]

I currently have a 100% failure rate in pvp, if only because I specced hard to be able to use the greatsword, which is not the best pvp weapon. Every pvp'er I've come across has also had a good build able to 1-2 shot me with ease, or using the ?spell? Which rapidly inflicts Death just through proximity, which is some real bullshit.

[nenjin]

That's an exploit/bug I mentioned a few posts above. If you go into PvP and see someone light themselves on fire and their HP starts draining, just run. Or Alt+F4. The only iteration of that I've seen so far that you can't avoid is the one where they can spam FP costing abilities. Not much you can do about that other than Alt+F4.

[Jopax]

Yeah, some of the builds are batshit insane and I'm loving it even tho I'm not much of a PvP-er myself.

By far my favorite one.

[nenjin]

Oh man that is nasty. The gravity affect is hard to avoid.

[SOLDIER First]

Been having an awesome time with this game. It's everything I love about Dark Souls but better, and I couldn't really ask for more.

However, since the most recent update a week or so ago I've been having this really irritating issue where my game will consistently crash within an hour of starting it up (usually much less, around half an hour). Anyone encounter similar problems or know any solutions?

[nenjin]

Everyone I know has the same problem. It doesn't manifest with an hour, but for sure when I'm doing a long play session, I'll get hard crashes. Game will be running fine, then it will halt and you'll be like "op, it's crashing." Then it will recover for a moment and you'll be like "nah just kidding." Then it will actually hard lock and need to be Alt+F4.

My assumption is that it has memory leaks or the GPU is getting overwhelmed, something. Right now the only performance related things people recommend is reducing settings and turning off whizbang stuff like Depth of Field and Bloom, etc...but I think it's probably just it talking to the GPU poorly or not performing garbage clean up correctly.