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[JoshuaFH]

The only crash I've had recently was when I was being summoned in as a cooperator, but then I got grabbed by an imp before the fade-to-black, and I guess the game didn't know how to handle these things happening simultaneously and so that crashed the game.

[Cthulhu]

It's official, I have uninstalled.  I'm done with this shit.  I pulled out the mimic tear and started making progress again but it's not fun anymore.  I might take my PS4 out of the graveyard and replay bloodborne or something, I still have a fromsoft itch.  Maybe replay sekiro and try to beat the final boss, but really stranger of paradise comes out in three days and it looks fucking amazing so I may just not get bogged down in any large games in the meantime.

I'll still buy the next fromgame because I'm stupid, but they're on thin ice.  I'm hoping it's an isolated problem because they put too many overpowered tools in the game, akin to monster hunter world's archtempered monsters, where they designed the fights around the most busted strategies and made them borderline unplayable for normal people.  This one really feels like they forgot how to make good fights, just throwing everything and the kitchen sink into the boss design because it's cool, or because they "make hard games" or something, but this shit is just plain bad.  I feel bad cause I enjoyed every minute of my first hundred or so hours, but the time I've spent after that was just so agonizingly unfun it burnt through all of the goodwill they built up in the early game.  To the point I think I actually just straight up don't like the game as a whole.  I hate to say it but I think Elden Ring kind of sucks.

GRRM's influence is the way the game falls apart near the end

[nenjin]

To date I haven't fought anything so frustratingly unwinnable I'm ready to quit. I can still point back to most bosses as me not getting something or not executing. But I'm going to finish and step back and think about the whole thing afterward, probably write a stupidly long thing just for my own edification.

[JoshuaFH]

I haven't come up against anything very frustrating either, but then again I haven't progressed very far into the game despite being like 75 hours in now. My qualm would be that some of the optional dungeons are uncreative. Like, the bosses will be "Here's that boss you fought before, but now there's two of them." Which can certainly be a new challenge,  but it's not very novel.

I was much more contemptuous of Sekiro for having mean and unforgiving bosses. You couldn't grind levels or do stupid cheese strats or call for help in Sekiro, your options were to git gud or give up; and I gave up on Sekiro.

[Cthulhu]

To date I haven't fought anything so frustratingly unwinnable I'm ready to quit. I can still point back to most bosses as me not getting something or not executing. But I'm going to finish and step back and think about the whole thing afterward, probably write a stupidly long thing just for my own edification.

How far are you?  My red line was

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Malekith, who spends most of the fight way up in the air where you can't hit him and then when he's on the ground he's constantly doing massive aoe combos.  His hits do probably a third again their damage in a dot, and also significantly lower your max HP.  Maybe not the worst fight, but at that point I was out of patience.

I loved Sekiro.  There were some punishing bosses and I never beat Isshin but I didn't ragequit either.  Stuff like Malenia and Malekith make corrupted monk look like taurus demon.

[nenjin]

Haven't made it that far.

I also beat all of Sekiro and I can't say Corrupted Monk was a problem for me. Sword Saint though.....that was a good 10 to 12 attempt boss, even on my 2nd playthrough. I'm bracing for the worst....but I think I've also run out of pride. Like, while I've beaten a lot of Souls games and bosses completely solo, somewhere around the 120 hour mark of Elden Ring I started asking if it was worth the pain just to beat it solo. OTOH, your summon results in a lot of fights feeling anti-climatic. So I dunno. There's always another playthrough for cock and ball torture. At this point I just want to beat it in totality so I can say I've seen it all.

I haven't come up against anything very frustrating either, but then again I haven't progressed very far into the game despite being like 75 hours in now. My qualm would be that some of the optional dungeons are uncreative. Like, the bosses will be "Here's that boss you fought before, but now there's two of them." Which can certainly be a new challenge,  but it's not very novel.

If I have to give a rating and a justification for why it's not "10/10" it's this. Even From Soft gave into the need to fill space. When there are two identical boss fights, and gimmicks, literally within sight of each other (looking at you

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Ancestor Elk Spirit fight

) one has to ask if it was even really necessary for anything other than making "The Biggest Game We've Ever Made."

Now, I enjoyed the first fight and was happy to do it again.....but it doesn't go without notice. There are about 20% of bosses you're going to fight at least three times over the course of the game BEFORE they get downgraded to "normal enemies." What saves ER in this regard is that there are SO MANY unique boss fights with great visuals and action to counterbalance that. It's like having a gourmet meal surrounded by plates of cheaper veggies and dip. You should just focus on the main course but since you're at the table anyways.......

But yeah. The whole "cave/mine/catacomb" framework of mini-dungeons was a mistake. More variety there would have been better. Yeah the layouts are different but it makes the game feel exactly like Skyrim when you keep seeing places with the exact same textures, usually the same kinds of enemies and then sometimes the same bosses you've fought before. Like there's a builders association of catacomb construction where every single catacomb in the Lands Between was built by the same people with the same material and the same intention.

I think there should have been about half as many side dungeons. Most of the crap you get in there exists everywhere else in the game, so they could have easily taken the unique loot drops and redistributed them across the rest of the game.

That said, it's not as lazy as a game like Skyrim and there is some good adventuring within some of those mini-dungeons. Especially the ones with a lot of vertical depth. (Skyrim had some good ones like that too.) It's just not the From Soft style of everything being unique and having little unique details to flesh it out that I kinda miss.

I dunno. I'll have to have a real think on it at the end.

[Jopax]

I think it's several factors at play here, some of it may be wildly off since I think I'm at maybe the halfway point myself but there's a definite trend I'm seeing.

First off, the game is quite possibly too big for its own good. FS is known for recycling shit and reusing assets whenever they can get away with it (hi same dog in how many games now?) but they might have been a bit too ambitious in this case and were forced to reuse way more than might've been planned initially. Of course being strapped for resources meant that they probably didn't do much testing or changing of certain fights after they just went "Yes, but what if we just double the amount of bosses the play fights" . And it should be obvious that a fight doesn't get just twice as difficult if you simply double up on a boss without any changes to its AI.

Secondly, the truly open world nature of the game, as brilliant as it is, works against the power progression. In previous games you powered up and got better gradually as the game ramped up the difficulty. Here you can use so many intentional sequence breaks to skip to and obtain really powerful shit that trivializes the game that you can't really design a progression curve around it. Couple this with them introducing shit they never did before like summons and balance is naturally going to suffer. Especially if they do the lazy approach of not trying to make the AI of the summon good but instead just inflate the stats to high heaven (mimic tear says hi). All of this can still be fixed down the line, tuning of bosses and weapons/ashes/arts as well as outright replacing certain bossfights with something else. But how much of that we'll actually see is very uncertain considering FS's previous approaches to DLC/updates.

Additionally I think there's a disconnect going on between how they thought the game should be played and how a lot of people seem to be playing it. As massive as it is I don't think 100% runs were meant to be the norm, or anything approaching that figure, considering the sheer amount of various quests and NPC's you can miss/fuck up without knowing what you did at all. And this is part of why there's so much repeated and recycled stuff is in there, you're not meant to see it all in a single run, so of course the various ruin/tomb bosses start to get repetitive and the obvious flaws in the design start to grate when you're doing them well past the point they were meant to be done. 

Anyways, I'm still kinda hooked, partly because I wanna see where this stuff goes and partly because big smashy sword is still fun/broken enough to keep me going :V

Is it going to be GOTY for me? Probably, but that's mostly because there's been fuck all to excite and hook me this much in the past several years and not much of note (to me at least) is coming out this year.  So far all the shortcomings it's still one hell of a game to me and well worth the asking price, even if you don't wait for a sale.

[Frumple]

Wait, how have they not done summons before? I know for a fact there's npc summons in earlier fromsoft games -- not as free form or nearly as varied (for all everything except a handful aren't that impressive) as in elden ring, but they absolutely were there.

[Trapezohedron]

To be perfectly fair, Summons occupy their own slot, so if you can chance on AI sunbro summons, that's basically 2 dogpiling against an enemy now.

Not to mention that the variety gives you between 1-5 summoned entities to play with, and that just breaks the boss AI... which they naturally address with mid-late game bullshit AoE.

So far, it's a fun game and I'm enjoying every minute of my time, but I also have to acknowledge all the same that linear map design, or at least scaling the map down to DaS1 levels would greatly benefit this game's progression.

Part of enjoying Elden Ring is just to learn how to enjoy the hilariously overpowered effects that you can get, e.g. cold ash bleed weapons, etc.

Honestly, this feels as much a megamix as Etrian Odyssey Nexus did. Unfortunately, it may have set a bar FromSoft may not be able to overcome in their next game.

[JoshuaFH]

As far as balance goes, I think it's supposed to be unbalanced.  There's never been explicit difficulty options in FS games, but there's also never been any stigma against using the most overpowered or broken strats available to you. And as far as viable strats go, ER seems to have the widest variety of strats and builds I've seen in any FromSoft game. I think Pat and Woolie said it best that the game feels like the Marvel Vs Capcom of FS games. Pick what OP build you like and go to town.

[nenjin]

Wait, how have they not done summons before? I know for a fact there's npc summons in earlier fromsoft games -- not as free form or nearly as varied (for all everything except a handful aren't that impressive) as in elden ring, but they absolutely were there.

Summons in From Soft games have always been human/player models. They've always had a significant amount of damage reduction to survive boss fights, to compensate for the fact they're not going to avoid most boss attacks the way the player will. But their damage has always been additive to the fight rather than multiplicative.

In Elden Ring, you have summons that are multiple units, fly, crawl, teleport...up until the Mimic Tear I would have called summons "useful but not necessary and certainly not OP." Even a +8 Special Class Birb summon I was using would get downed in the first 30 seconds, get posture broken while flapping around in the air and squashed.

I forget what dual boss fight I was doing last night....but my Mimic Tear killed the boss they were fighting while I still had 30% of the life bar left on mine. Because I had to avoid and dodge while the Mimic Tear will just face tank a god-tier attack and keep swinging.

So what's not new is AI summons to distract the boss....what's different is how many of them there can be, how durable they can be and how much damage they can add to the fight for you. A Mimic Tear has the same loadout as your character, so if you're facing a boss already weak to bleed....now you have 2x as much bleed and bleed is already hella strong. So the boss just liquefies.

First off, the game is quite possibly too big for its own good.

Agreed. I came to this a while ago. Yeah, it's great running around in a From Soft "World." But because of how From Soft does itemization, as a player you feel compelled to check every nook and cranny to make sure you didn't miss something really note worthy, because From does that all the time. Except in Elden Ring, about 50% of what you'll find isn't unique or note worthy. Opening a chest to find Mushroom x8 really makes you question if it's worth your time to check everything. "Oh, Smithing Stone 4 x3? Nice....except I've been able to buy those from the vendor for the last 20 hours."

And if you're not getting an interesting or unique item, at least there's the setting and lore to make it worth it....right? Except many of the PoIs are duplicated (that shack model gets used I don't know how many times, 20?), and there aren't those interesting and subtle details to make it stand out. The only thing that makes "The Artist's Shack" different from every other shack is the name and the fact there's a painting there, nothing else. The only thing that makes the Stormfoot Catacombs different from the Murkwater Catacombs is the actual layout, mobs and bosses. There's nothing else contextual to differentiate them the way, say, the Undead Settlement is thematically and contextually different than Anor Londo. You get "enough" of that in the bigger areas like the Carian Manor and the Legacy dungeons, but you'll spend far, far less time dealing with those than the rest of the open world unless you skip the majority of it.

Likewise.....fuck Treasure Scarabs without any actual treasure. They should just get rid of the Red and Blue Scarabs. Because you hear that noise and you go "Oh I have to go make sure that isn't an item I'm missing." So you spend 20 minutes figuring out how to get down that cliff, or to the other side of that wall...and find out it's a Scarab that refills your Estus which you don't need. BOO. Give them a different sound or just get rid of them. It makes me, again, think there's something worth looking for out there when it 100% is not.

I also agree the game wasn't intended to be a 100% complete playthrough.....but that's like putting cocaine in front of an addict and saying "you're only intended to do a couple bumps." But then at least 1/3rd of that cocaine turns out to be baking powder. I don't know if quantity is a good defense for a lack of balance and meaningfulness but different gamers are going to see that differently.

Elden Ring will be my GoTY barring something truly amazing happening. I'm leaning toward a 9/10. No "thing" is truly flawless. In the world of marketing though, it's the closest to a 10/10 of any game I've played in recent years. But I can't really give it a 10/10 because yeah, there are short comings that you only feel after about 100 hours. Is it even reasonable to dock points when it takes you that long to see the forest for the trees? Different folks are going to have different opinions on that.

[Cthulhu]

It's weird, maybe something broke in my brain in the years since I played DS1, I was an absolute cheater in there, doing whatever busted strat for every boss, I beat Gwyn by just standing there with golem armor and ironskin and hitting parry button as fast as I could, but in this one it just felt so painful to do any of that that I'd rather not play than do it.

Also Corrupted Monk I meant True Monk.  Which still wasn't a bad fight, it was one of my favorites, just very flashy and mobile and complex.  But in Sekiro the character was built to handle that.  This one you're a dark souls guy fighting bosses that would be over the top in Sekiro, is what I meant. 

Right now I'm mad at it, but just by hours played and hours enjoyed it'll probably end up being my favorite game of the year.  I just got so mad at it over the last few days that it's overshadowed my good memories.

[nenjin]

That's when it's time to take a break. That's how DS1 went for me when I hit S&O. I never recovered, until Dark Souls 2 came out.

It's weird. When I got to Rhadan and wiped the first few times, I could feel the rage building. But I just kinda went numb and kept going back into the fight. When I was one hit from killing him and died on like attempt #8, and had to do the fight another 6 times or so to beat him, I should have LIVID. But for some reason it rolled off my back.

Now Putrid Avatar of the Erd Tree, Ulcerated Tree Spirit and Bell Bearing Hunter.....those guys had me absolutely seeing red. But now, I've managed to beat them on my first flask, no Mimic. Maybe my jimmy's will get twisted by another late stage boss, we'll see. But I'm feeling pretty Zen about Elden Ring's difficulty at the moment.

[Cthulhu]

Yeah, it's weird.  Putrid avatar and putrid tree spirit really put me through hell and I was pissed, but I was never tempted to give up or use cheese or anything, I always knew what I did wrong and could at least try to fix it on the next run. Same with stuff like gascoigne, seven ashina spears, guardian monke, true monk.  They were ballbusters but they were honest. The endgame mandatory bosses feel unfair.

But maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe I'm just salty and I need to step away from the game and the thread and come back later.  Trouble is by then my skills will have rusted and I've only got one mimic tear left (maybe two more in the world?  That I know of) so I'll have to be real careful about how I want to play it.

[Trapezohedron]

Wait, how have they not done summons before? I know for a fact there's npc summons in earlier fromsoft games -- not as free form or nearly as varied (for all everything except a handful aren't that impressive) as in elden ring, but they absolutely were there.

Summons in From Soft games have always been human/player models. They've always had a significant amount of damage reduction to survive boss fights, to compensate for the fact they're not going to avoid most boss attacks the way the player will. But their damage has always been additive to the fight rather than multiplicative.

In Elden Ring, you have summons that are multiple units, fly, crawl, teleport...up until the Mimic Tear I would have called summons "useful but not necessary and certainly not OP." Even a +8 Special Class Birb summon I was using would get downed in the first 30 seconds, get posture broken while flapping around in the air and squashed.

I forget what dual boss fight I was doing last night....but my Mimic Tear killed the boss they were fighting while I still had 30% of the life bar left on mine. Because I had to avoid and dodge while the Mimic Tear will just face tank a god-tier attack and keep swinging.

So what's not new is AI summons to distract the boss....what's different is how many of them there can be, how durable they can be and how much damage they can add to the fight for you. A Mimic Tear has the same loadout as your character, so if you're facing a boss already weak to bleed....now you have 2x as much bleed and bleed is already hella strong. So the boss just liquefies.

First off, the game is quite possibly too big for its own good.

Agreed. I came to this a while ago. Yeah, it's great running around in a From Soft "World." But because of how From Soft does itemization, as a player you feel compelled to check every nook and cranny to make sure you didn't miss something really note worthy, because From does that all the time. Except in Elden Ring, about 50% of what you'll find isn't unique or note worthy. Opening a chest to find Mushroom x8 really makes you question if it's worth your time to check everything. "Oh, Smithing Stone 4 x3? Nice....except I've been able to buy those from the vendor for the last 20 hours."

And if you're not getting an interesting or unique item, at least there's the setting and lore to make it worth it....right? Except many of the PoIs are duplicated (that shack model gets used I don't know how many times, 20?), and there aren't those interesting and subtle details to make it stand out. The only thing that makes "The Artist's Shack" different from every other shack is the name and the fact there's a painting there, nothing else. The only thing that makes the Stormfoot Catacombs different from the Murkwater Catacombs is the actual layout, mobs and bosses. There's nothing else contextual to differentiate them the way, say, the Undead Settlement is thematically and contextually different than Anor Londo. You get "enough" of that in the bigger areas like the Carian Manor and the Legacy dungeons, but you'll spend far, far less time dealing with those than the rest of the open world unless you skip the majority of it.

Likewise.....fuck Treasure Scarabs without any actual treasure. They should just get rid of the Red and Blue Scarabs. Because you hear that noise and you go "Oh I have to go make sure that isn't an item I'm missing." So you spend 20 minutes figuring out how to get down that cliff, or to the other side of that wall...and find out it's a Scarab that refills your Estus which you don't need. BOO. Give them a different sound or just get rid of them. It makes me, again, think there's something worth looking for out there when it 100% is not.

I also agree the game wasn't intended to be a 100% complete playthrough.....but that's like putting cocaine in front of an addict and saying "you're only intended to do a couple bumps." But then at least 1/3rd of that cocaine turns out to be baking powder. I don't know if quantity is a good defense for a lack of balance and meaningfulness but different gamers are going to see that differently.

Elden Ring will be my GoTY barring something truly amazing happening. I'm leaning toward a 9/10. No "thing" is truly flawless. In the world of marketing though, it's the closest to a 10/10 of any game I've played in recent years. But I can't really give it a 10/10 because yeah, there are short comings that you only feel after about 100 hours. Is it even reasonable to dock points when it takes you that long to see the forest for the trees? Different folks are going to have different opinions on that.

I arrived at the same conclusions honestly. It's a great game, close to a masterpiece, but the new features (esp. open world) they added also serve to detract to it.

I do worry if people start complaining that the next fromsoft game is not as open world as this, but those games were enjoyable experiences on their own with proper pacing.