- Joined
- Aug 3, 2021
Alright, having beaten through it (word is that NG+ scaling isn't really that great, but who knows, it may change things up), it's time to pump a little autism into a completed Rich Evans Apologist blathers into the void post.
The tl;dr is that my personal ranking for the Souls series at current is: BB > Sekiro > First half of DS1 > DS3 > DS2 = ER > Second half of DS1. Haven't played Demon's, so I'm waiting on the remaster to get a PC port. The DLC also really elevated BB and DS2, so maybe ER will get some DLC that shifts my opinion around. Open World games fucking suck as a genre and drag anything they're attached to down.
Balance patch is actually a good sign on the whole, though. Leave less character lines just abruptly hanging, remove some of the stupid fucking cheese that completely drained all sense of challenge from the game. I don't really care that the game has an easy-mode in the form of summoning, but the number of people who genuinely insist that the game is easy because they summoned mimic then spammed hoarfrost/swordlaser on every single enemy and melted them is staggering. If you aren't playing these games to be challenged... what, are you playing to tell all your friends you beat a FROMSOFT game?
The tl;dr is that my personal ranking for the Souls series at current is: BB > Sekiro > First half of DS1 > DS3 > DS2 = ER > Second half of DS1. Haven't played Demon's, so I'm waiting on the remaster to get a PC port. The DLC also really elevated BB and DS2, so maybe ER will get some DLC that shifts my opinion around. Open World games fucking suck as a genre and drag anything they're attached to down.
I want to first start off with something that's a little hard to really see as just opinion - the game needs some major technical fine-tuning. I don't doubt that it'll get it, but random crashes, sudden and massive frame drops and stuttering, and so-on were really frustrating. There's a mandatory boss that's one of the crazy lightning dragons in the giant swirling sky vortex, and I had to fight him with my back turned the entire time by whittling him down with poison and rot because having the dragon do a super move and the vortex whirl about would crash my GPU, which is only a few years old. This with all the settings dropped to the lowest possible in order to keep as much steady as I could.
I've seen people say that the open world experience blends perfectly with the dark souls experience. I don't really know what the fuck that means, because everything I liked about souls is shit when the open world is involved. As best I can tell, as boring and shitty and repetitive as the open world is, it's apparently even worse in AAA open-world games, meaning that Elden Ring's open world is the best of the worst. And all it took to get there was to completely alter exploration, rewards structures, invasions, co-op, questing, and the sense of scale to do so.
-
I could ramble on for a long time, but realistically - exploration loses its charm after the first handful of zones. Exploration basically holds an appeal to the player on that promise of the unknown - but after the first few zones, well, you know what you're going to get. It's going to be the same two or three templates for a dungeon repeated over and over again with another repeat of a boss (maybe slapped together with another one and just thrown in there); or it's going to be the same world-boss with the same moves and same strategy that you already fought 20 times, except this one has more health and damage; or it's going to be some stupid item that doesn't really work with your build at all.
The chalice dungeons in BB wind up being more interesting than the majority of side-content in this game, which is insane. But those chalice dungeons at least promised unique bosses - which is something you can't say for the side-content here. Chalice dungeons certainly had a good number of repeats, yeah, but nowhere on this scale - and anyways, they were 100% completely optional, unless you wanted a very select few items. By contrast, the stuff the side-content gets you in ER is unique, and if you're going in totally blind, you've just kindof got to strap yourself in for another boring slog through a world boss, a copy-paste ruins location with a boss in the basement, or a dungeon. ...or you crack and look up what's actually in the dungeon, so you can save yourself the tedium.
Some of the side-content is cool - the hero graves are all interesting, there's a prison dungeon that's unique, there's these fun ones that fuck with your head by mirroring layouts, castles caria and redmane are cool; but on the whole, the shit is fucking boring, and you can't escape the realization that that promise of something-cool-to-find is getting fainter and fainter. Tons of systems and design was bent around the open world, and it's... just not interesting. There were tradeoffs to make the open world, meaning a lot of stuff I really liked got binned for content I find completely banal.
I remember distinctly parts of old souls games that I love going through again, get excited to explore with a new-build or just to re-explore and re-discover and re-suffer. There are some of those parts in Elden Ring, but not a single one is in the overworld. I don't look forward to ever replaying through any of the optional content in the game again. And I usually do do at least some of the chalice dungeons when I go through BB.
-
I liked how bloodborne for the most part cut back on pointless items and extreme redundancy. That's out the window - this is slightly modified dark souls, complete with all the equipment and spell and item bloat that plagued those games. You're gonna get a lot of shit that does essentially the same thing as 5 other items you've got stashed away.
-
Quests / character stories got ruined. There was always a chance of missing steps with them before, and some solutions to them were really stupid - who would think you had to take a very specific shortcut unlocked through a very specific covenant in order to save your sunbro from a bug? But the games having a linear structure at least always made sure that, so long as you explored thoroughly your next step, you were likely to find the character. You might get the bad ending - but at least it was an ending, some kind of closure.
Here, it's so easy to completely miss these guys, it's insane. It's part of the fundamental clash - exploration in the old souls games was tied into progressing the main story's content. Here, it's... its own optional thing, but unless you're scouring every tract of the map, you might miss something super important. Some phases of character quests are skipped if you progress too far, and they're inconsequential; some wind up just killing the character off entirely. There's no way to tell the difference, and often there's no indication on what obscure thing you should do next unless you go look it up. The abstract, obscure and disconnected means of storytelling is something I love, but it just doesn't work in this nonlinear setting. Some also just went... nowhere, although it seems like they're fixing that up.
It's in all a shame, as some of the lines are really interesting. Fia and Ranni are really, really good, interwoven arcs. The way the cast of the Roundtable is whittled down over time and all meet their ruin in various ways is good, and builds up to this encroaching sense of showdown and closure. Alexander is always a fun comedic aside. The way that so many of the lines essentially point to everything and everyone being scoured in preparation for a whole new slate adds a lot of badly needed texture to the game's overarching plot direction.
-
That storytelling is... I have no idea what I'm really even trying to do, exactly. The other souls games were vague in their explanations, but there was a bit of guidance - you're undead, undying, keep resurrecting. You've been herded off to this asylum where we'll keep you away from society, but now someone broke you out and there's this prophecy about someone ringing the bells so go ring the bells. Or you're cursed, and you came to this weird land to find a cure for the curse, and the only one that knows how to do that is the king - but to get to the king, you're gonna need to go get these other lordsouls. Or you're some ash of fallen heroes, and we need you to go get these lazy assholes to show up for work. Even bloodborne, which barely explains why you're doing anything, has the courtesy to shove a little guy in a window to explain "someone told you to find out what paleblood is and you have this weird memory? Oh, well, go talk to the blood church guys - if you can get there, guess tonight's a kindof fucked night for that, huh?"
By contrast, while Gideon is there to explain who the rune-bearers are and loosely how those runes are somehow tied into repairing the elden ring and becoming... essentially king, the question of who you are, what a tarnished is, how you came to be there, all of that shit... is left pretty vague. The opening cutscene suggests that something reanimated you, got it; and I'm fine with vague on the whole in these games. But like... why am I trying to become elden lord, exactly? Why was the elden ring breaking a bad thing? Why are the tarnished doing it? If the demigods can't do it, why are the tarnished thought to be able to? I don't need clear answers, but I need some sense of motivation; the game largely shits you out on the world and the only breadcrumb you have is that Melina wants to go to the big city. That's initially fine, since you're interfacing mostly with the exploration when you start up the game and wowed by all that; but eventually that lack of any sense of direction or inspiration makes it hard to interface with the world itself... which is made worse because the world feels way, way more video-gamey than any of the other entries.
-
Open world ruins the sense of scale. You can run from the bestial sanctum to the giant's kiln in like... 30 minutes on horse? Yeah, that's huge... for a video game. In the other games, you distinctly got a sense that you were seeing just a sliver of these massive, ancient kingdoms. Even Dark Souls 2, which was a really bad offender in terms of its world being jarring and not feeling cohesive, at least managed to properly convey a sense of scale - you were trawling about a handful of pathways in this otherwise massive kingdom that was sinking into ruin.
In Elden Ring, the lands between... are complete. You can see everywhere, mostly. Limgrave is what's in the game, nothing more can possibly exist. The skybox in dark souls 1 showed that there were countless other little cities and burgs strewn about all the massive rings that encircled anor londo, and your imagination could just wonder at how big the world was. Yeah, the ground you actually explored was video-gamey as all hell, but the way you were crawling over these massive ruins and monuments and things lended to this feeling of scale. Elden Ring's world feels like an MMO. Because it is the kind of world you'd see in an MMO. The enemies, the buildings, the trees, the geography - so much of it just repeats, over and over and over. You have to imagine "this is just a representation of something bigger, the real thing is actually way different in scale," rather than "this is just a part of something bigger."
I don't really know what I'm left to wonder at, either, because... what are the lands between? Is it a real place, or is this some purgatory? Is the entire world ruled by the various powers here, or were these 'empires' only ever centered on this dinky little landmass? Did a bunch of the landmass sink into the sea? How big is the broader world? I don't really have anything to go off of, and I feel like way too much information about the setting existed exclusively in the trailers. In Dark Souls, it was easy to imagine these massive, far-flung empires rising and falling and leaving things behind; or of how Yarnham was this odd, sprawling metropolis that the rest of the world was uneasy about... because I couldn't see everything myself, and there was at least some suggestion as to the nature of the wider world.
-
Add to this, one of the defining things for me about the souls series was that prevailing sense of lonesomeness and of overcoming challenge and difficulty. Elden Ring has really thrown that into the bin. First off, there was always a cost and a risk-reward associated in the past with getting help for a tough encounter - if you used humanity or an ember, you made yourself able to be invaded (I believe DS2 reversed this idea, and using an effigy made you less likely, but I forget). But you were also able to summon help - risk-reward. I think BB made you use insight to grab a friend.
You can now summon help... whenever, and if an invader kills you, it's just an inconvenience and who cares? You can just do it again. You're not leveraging any resource - the furlonged fingers are made from what, two erdleaf flowers And anyways, why should you need to? You can just summon something to trivialize almost every single encounter. You don't need to learn a boss's moveset, counters, whatever; just summon a spirit and whack on it with some cheese, summon some help for the fortieth time with no penalty. The world doesn't quite feel so forlorn and lonely when there's no cost associated with human contact at all, not to mention the overworld design's video-game sensation quashes that sensation of exploring a ruined world.
-
And to the last thing I'm really negative on - boss design. My favorite boss is the random deathbird in the snowy graveyard. I found that boss fun as fuck - clear telegraphs, very deadly and dangerous moves, big risk-reward plays, and great payout for doing something stupidly risky. Learn his patterns and you can style on him, but fuck up once and the momentum can totally change. There are a few bosses in the game that share that design, and I really like them - Melania without waterfowl dance is up there with (but distinctly below) Kos and Isshin.
But most of the bosses in the game do this thing that I like to call 'stancing.' That is, their attack is a stance. The stance doesn't really tend to have a clear tell for when the attack is actually coming out, just that an attack is coming out. The boss will run at you for a grapple, say. They will then stand there for a second or two, just standing there, doing nothing. If you roll, if you attack, if you anything much, the timing on the attack changes to punish you for it; you have to stand there doing nothing, not even reacting, and just learn the exact timing and the secondary tell (if there is one). I'm all for punishing people that just spam rolls, but DS3 and BB seemed to have a good idea of how to accomplish that; Elden Ring seems excessive.
Godfrey's second phase has a leaping grab, in which he proves that he can fly. He will stay there, suspended in air, for a good second and a half - if you dodge, he extends the time he's in the air to like two seconds in order to catch you. Attack swings will suddenly be slower than they were before, just to punish a dodge. Crucible Knight stands there doing absolutely nothing until you push a button, and then he drags his weapon or his shield on the ground for a period of time that's hard to guess at first because it will change depending on if you dodge it too early. So many bosses do this, and the instant you recognize they have the mechanic, you go, "oh, it's one of these again."
And then there's the bosses with 14-hit attack strings that only come out if you attack or dodge during an earlier swing. I don't hate this every now and then, as punishing greedy play is fine and good... but when it's every fucking boss, and it's impossible to learn their strings, it just encourages such passive play. Most of them have a 2 or 3-hit combo that enters into a waiting stance that will check to see if you're attacking, dodging, or healing; if you are, they go on into the next attack in the string, and if not, they go back to neutral. So what you do is you dodge the first 2-3 hits, then you stand there. You stand there, doing nothing, for like a second. Then you press an attack button once, because you learned the timing at which you can attack without triggering their next attack in the swing. Then they start up another combo, you avoid, and you stand there waiting again if it has extenders. Margit teaches you this with his stupid dagger - it's cool in that fight, but after the 17th boss that does it rolls around, it gets really fucking old. Regular enemies will do it, too. So I hope you like running bleed or frostbite if you've got medium-speed weapons that don't do a ton of stagger, because otherwise you're gonna be eating a lot of counterhits.
Oh, I should also say - boss variety is really, really bad. The number of repeats is -staggering-, especially if you include bosses that are just a singular phase of another boss (Mohg in the sewers, Godefroy in the Gael). There are so many fucking repeats. There were so many side dungeons I got to the end of, saw the boss's name spawn in, and I just summoned a mimic to kill them effortlessly as quickly as possible. I can kill the ulcerated tree spirits in my fucking sleep.
-
But I can't say the game's completely bad, as I'd have just given up on it early if there was nothing there. The legacy dungeons are the best they've ever made, prettymuch hands-down. Volcano Manor is a little short and Farum Azula isn't really that interesting, but the others are all bangers. Stormhill is a great, classic castle map with so many goddamn secrets and alternate routes and shortcuts that it's absolutely wonderful. Raya Lucaria is full to the brim with secret passageways and little platforming spots that hide a bunch of crap. Leyndell and the sewers are absolutely amazing and my main complaint is that there isn't more of them; and the Halligtree, especially the first two sections, is just absolutely gorgeous and fantastic in its design. Leyndell -feels- like a capital city of a sprawling, massive empire. Stormveil feels like a big, beefed up castle. The Halligtree is incredible in its scope and size, and absolutely feels like the center-seat of an enormous territory.
If the game was nothing but the legacy dungeons and traveling between them, it'd easily score way above DS3 and may even outrank that first half of DS1 for me. The overworld does fuckall for the world-building, for the atmosphere, for not making me feel like I'm playing a goddamn video game - but those legacy dungeons are a totally different story. It's all of the old charms of the souls games amped up to 11; so many little, immaculate details to breathe life into the world. So much environmental storytelling and things that make me wonder, "now why would that be there, of all places? Could this mean something?" For all of the boss strats that annoy me, I was also never really bored going through any of these dungeons' encounters - they're all fun, including the minibosses (imagine if you only ever fought the ulcerated tree spirit or avatar at the halligtree, oh what a world). For as annoying as Radahn and as unimpressive as Rykard were, they never quite made me fully dislike the game - no more offensive than crap that was in all of the other souls games.
As a result, Elden Ring is this weird mishmash of some of the most engaging souls content I've ever indulged in... and some of the most generic, boring, uninteresting shit. The fact that so many items and so much experience is tied to the overworld really kills my urge to make another character and replay, because it's so much of the game. The sacrifices to other shit were made for the sake of this element that I find to be completely unengaging, and the ludicrous success of this game gives me worry that they'll stray away from what I found truly unique and interesting about the previous titles.
I've seen people say that the open world experience blends perfectly with the dark souls experience. I don't really know what the fuck that means, because everything I liked about souls is shit when the open world is involved. As best I can tell, as boring and shitty and repetitive as the open world is, it's apparently even worse in AAA open-world games, meaning that Elden Ring's open world is the best of the worst. And all it took to get there was to completely alter exploration, rewards structures, invasions, co-op, questing, and the sense of scale to do so.
-
I could ramble on for a long time, but realistically - exploration loses its charm after the first handful of zones. Exploration basically holds an appeal to the player on that promise of the unknown - but after the first few zones, well, you know what you're going to get. It's going to be the same two or three templates for a dungeon repeated over and over again with another repeat of a boss (maybe slapped together with another one and just thrown in there); or it's going to be the same world-boss with the same moves and same strategy that you already fought 20 times, except this one has more health and damage; or it's going to be some stupid item that doesn't really work with your build at all.
The chalice dungeons in BB wind up being more interesting than the majority of side-content in this game, which is insane. But those chalice dungeons at least promised unique bosses - which is something you can't say for the side-content here. Chalice dungeons certainly had a good number of repeats, yeah, but nowhere on this scale - and anyways, they were 100% completely optional, unless you wanted a very select few items. By contrast, the stuff the side-content gets you in ER is unique, and if you're going in totally blind, you've just kindof got to strap yourself in for another boring slog through a world boss, a copy-paste ruins location with a boss in the basement, or a dungeon. ...or you crack and look up what's actually in the dungeon, so you can save yourself the tedium.
Some of the side-content is cool - the hero graves are all interesting, there's a prison dungeon that's unique, there's these fun ones that fuck with your head by mirroring layouts, castles caria and redmane are cool; but on the whole, the shit is fucking boring, and you can't escape the realization that that promise of something-cool-to-find is getting fainter and fainter. Tons of systems and design was bent around the open world, and it's... just not interesting. There were tradeoffs to make the open world, meaning a lot of stuff I really liked got binned for content I find completely banal.
I remember distinctly parts of old souls games that I love going through again, get excited to explore with a new-build or just to re-explore and re-discover and re-suffer. There are some of those parts in Elden Ring, but not a single one is in the overworld. I don't look forward to ever replaying through any of the optional content in the game again. And I usually do do at least some of the chalice dungeons when I go through BB.
-
I liked how bloodborne for the most part cut back on pointless items and extreme redundancy. That's out the window - this is slightly modified dark souls, complete with all the equipment and spell and item bloat that plagued those games. You're gonna get a lot of shit that does essentially the same thing as 5 other items you've got stashed away.
-
Quests / character stories got ruined. There was always a chance of missing steps with them before, and some solutions to them were really stupid - who would think you had to take a very specific shortcut unlocked through a very specific covenant in order to save your sunbro from a bug? But the games having a linear structure at least always made sure that, so long as you explored thoroughly your next step, you were likely to find the character. You might get the bad ending - but at least it was an ending, some kind of closure.
Here, it's so easy to completely miss these guys, it's insane. It's part of the fundamental clash - exploration in the old souls games was tied into progressing the main story's content. Here, it's... its own optional thing, but unless you're scouring every tract of the map, you might miss something super important. Some phases of character quests are skipped if you progress too far, and they're inconsequential; some wind up just killing the character off entirely. There's no way to tell the difference, and often there's no indication on what obscure thing you should do next unless you go look it up. The abstract, obscure and disconnected means of storytelling is something I love, but it just doesn't work in this nonlinear setting. Some also just went... nowhere, although it seems like they're fixing that up.
It's in all a shame, as some of the lines are really interesting. Fia and Ranni are really, really good, interwoven arcs. The way the cast of the Roundtable is whittled down over time and all meet their ruin in various ways is good, and builds up to this encroaching sense of showdown and closure. Alexander is always a fun comedic aside. The way that so many of the lines essentially point to everything and everyone being scoured in preparation for a whole new slate adds a lot of badly needed texture to the game's overarching plot direction.
-
That storytelling is... I have no idea what I'm really even trying to do, exactly. The other souls games were vague in their explanations, but there was a bit of guidance - you're undead, undying, keep resurrecting. You've been herded off to this asylum where we'll keep you away from society, but now someone broke you out and there's this prophecy about someone ringing the bells so go ring the bells. Or you're cursed, and you came to this weird land to find a cure for the curse, and the only one that knows how to do that is the king - but to get to the king, you're gonna need to go get these other lordsouls. Or you're some ash of fallen heroes, and we need you to go get these lazy assholes to show up for work. Even bloodborne, which barely explains why you're doing anything, has the courtesy to shove a little guy in a window to explain "someone told you to find out what paleblood is and you have this weird memory? Oh, well, go talk to the blood church guys - if you can get there, guess tonight's a kindof fucked night for that, huh?"
By contrast, while Gideon is there to explain who the rune-bearers are and loosely how those runes are somehow tied into repairing the elden ring and becoming... essentially king, the question of who you are, what a tarnished is, how you came to be there, all of that shit... is left pretty vague. The opening cutscene suggests that something reanimated you, got it; and I'm fine with vague on the whole in these games. But like... why am I trying to become elden lord, exactly? Why was the elden ring breaking a bad thing? Why are the tarnished doing it? If the demigods can't do it, why are the tarnished thought to be able to? I don't need clear answers, but I need some sense of motivation; the game largely shits you out on the world and the only breadcrumb you have is that Melina wants to go to the big city. That's initially fine, since you're interfacing mostly with the exploration when you start up the game and wowed by all that; but eventually that lack of any sense of direction or inspiration makes it hard to interface with the world itself... which is made worse because the world feels way, way more video-gamey than any of the other entries.
-
Open world ruins the sense of scale. You can run from the bestial sanctum to the giant's kiln in like... 30 minutes on horse? Yeah, that's huge... for a video game. In the other games, you distinctly got a sense that you were seeing just a sliver of these massive, ancient kingdoms. Even Dark Souls 2, which was a really bad offender in terms of its world being jarring and not feeling cohesive, at least managed to properly convey a sense of scale - you were trawling about a handful of pathways in this otherwise massive kingdom that was sinking into ruin.
In Elden Ring, the lands between... are complete. You can see everywhere, mostly. Limgrave is what's in the game, nothing more can possibly exist. The skybox in dark souls 1 showed that there were countless other little cities and burgs strewn about all the massive rings that encircled anor londo, and your imagination could just wonder at how big the world was. Yeah, the ground you actually explored was video-gamey as all hell, but the way you were crawling over these massive ruins and monuments and things lended to this feeling of scale. Elden Ring's world feels like an MMO. Because it is the kind of world you'd see in an MMO. The enemies, the buildings, the trees, the geography - so much of it just repeats, over and over and over. You have to imagine "this is just a representation of something bigger, the real thing is actually way different in scale," rather than "this is just a part of something bigger."
I don't really know what I'm left to wonder at, either, because... what are the lands between? Is it a real place, or is this some purgatory? Is the entire world ruled by the various powers here, or were these 'empires' only ever centered on this dinky little landmass? Did a bunch of the landmass sink into the sea? How big is the broader world? I don't really have anything to go off of, and I feel like way too much information about the setting existed exclusively in the trailers. In Dark Souls, it was easy to imagine these massive, far-flung empires rising and falling and leaving things behind; or of how Yarnham was this odd, sprawling metropolis that the rest of the world was uneasy about... because I couldn't see everything myself, and there was at least some suggestion as to the nature of the wider world.
-
Add to this, one of the defining things for me about the souls series was that prevailing sense of lonesomeness and of overcoming challenge and difficulty. Elden Ring has really thrown that into the bin. First off, there was always a cost and a risk-reward associated in the past with getting help for a tough encounter - if you used humanity or an ember, you made yourself able to be invaded (I believe DS2 reversed this idea, and using an effigy made you less likely, but I forget). But you were also able to summon help - risk-reward. I think BB made you use insight to grab a friend.
You can now summon help... whenever, and if an invader kills you, it's just an inconvenience and who cares? You can just do it again. You're not leveraging any resource - the furlonged fingers are made from what, two erdleaf flowers And anyways, why should you need to? You can just summon something to trivialize almost every single encounter. You don't need to learn a boss's moveset, counters, whatever; just summon a spirit and whack on it with some cheese, summon some help for the fortieth time with no penalty. The world doesn't quite feel so forlorn and lonely when there's no cost associated with human contact at all, not to mention the overworld design's video-game sensation quashes that sensation of exploring a ruined world.
-
And to the last thing I'm really negative on - boss design. My favorite boss is the random deathbird in the snowy graveyard. I found that boss fun as fuck - clear telegraphs, very deadly and dangerous moves, big risk-reward plays, and great payout for doing something stupidly risky. Learn his patterns and you can style on him, but fuck up once and the momentum can totally change. There are a few bosses in the game that share that design, and I really like them - Melania without waterfowl dance is up there with (but distinctly below) Kos and Isshin.
But most of the bosses in the game do this thing that I like to call 'stancing.' That is, their attack is a stance. The stance doesn't really tend to have a clear tell for when the attack is actually coming out, just that an attack is coming out. The boss will run at you for a grapple, say. They will then stand there for a second or two, just standing there, doing nothing. If you roll, if you attack, if you anything much, the timing on the attack changes to punish you for it; you have to stand there doing nothing, not even reacting, and just learn the exact timing and the secondary tell (if there is one). I'm all for punishing people that just spam rolls, but DS3 and BB seemed to have a good idea of how to accomplish that; Elden Ring seems excessive.
Godfrey's second phase has a leaping grab, in which he proves that he can fly. He will stay there, suspended in air, for a good second and a half - if you dodge, he extends the time he's in the air to like two seconds in order to catch you. Attack swings will suddenly be slower than they were before, just to punish a dodge. Crucible Knight stands there doing absolutely nothing until you push a button, and then he drags his weapon or his shield on the ground for a period of time that's hard to guess at first because it will change depending on if you dodge it too early. So many bosses do this, and the instant you recognize they have the mechanic, you go, "oh, it's one of these again."
And then there's the bosses with 14-hit attack strings that only come out if you attack or dodge during an earlier swing. I don't hate this every now and then, as punishing greedy play is fine and good... but when it's every fucking boss, and it's impossible to learn their strings, it just encourages such passive play. Most of them have a 2 or 3-hit combo that enters into a waiting stance that will check to see if you're attacking, dodging, or healing; if you are, they go on into the next attack in the string, and if not, they go back to neutral. So what you do is you dodge the first 2-3 hits, then you stand there. You stand there, doing nothing, for like a second. Then you press an attack button once, because you learned the timing at which you can attack without triggering their next attack in the swing. Then they start up another combo, you avoid, and you stand there waiting again if it has extenders. Margit teaches you this with his stupid dagger - it's cool in that fight, but after the 17th boss that does it rolls around, it gets really fucking old. Regular enemies will do it, too. So I hope you like running bleed or frostbite if you've got medium-speed weapons that don't do a ton of stagger, because otherwise you're gonna be eating a lot of counterhits.
Oh, I should also say - boss variety is really, really bad. The number of repeats is -staggering-, especially if you include bosses that are just a singular phase of another boss (Mohg in the sewers, Godefroy in the Gael). There are so many fucking repeats. There were so many side dungeons I got to the end of, saw the boss's name spawn in, and I just summoned a mimic to kill them effortlessly as quickly as possible. I can kill the ulcerated tree spirits in my fucking sleep.
-
But I can't say the game's completely bad, as I'd have just given up on it early if there was nothing there. The legacy dungeons are the best they've ever made, prettymuch hands-down. Volcano Manor is a little short and Farum Azula isn't really that interesting, but the others are all bangers. Stormhill is a great, classic castle map with so many goddamn secrets and alternate routes and shortcuts that it's absolutely wonderful. Raya Lucaria is full to the brim with secret passageways and little platforming spots that hide a bunch of crap. Leyndell and the sewers are absolutely amazing and my main complaint is that there isn't more of them; and the Halligtree, especially the first two sections, is just absolutely gorgeous and fantastic in its design. Leyndell -feels- like a capital city of a sprawling, massive empire. Stormveil feels like a big, beefed up castle. The Halligtree is incredible in its scope and size, and absolutely feels like the center-seat of an enormous territory.
If the game was nothing but the legacy dungeons and traveling between them, it'd easily score way above DS3 and may even outrank that first half of DS1 for me. The overworld does fuckall for the world-building, for the atmosphere, for not making me feel like I'm playing a goddamn video game - but those legacy dungeons are a totally different story. It's all of the old charms of the souls games amped up to 11; so many little, immaculate details to breathe life into the world. So much environmental storytelling and things that make me wonder, "now why would that be there, of all places? Could this mean something?" For all of the boss strats that annoy me, I was also never really bored going through any of these dungeons' encounters - they're all fun, including the minibosses (imagine if you only ever fought the ulcerated tree spirit or avatar at the halligtree, oh what a world). For as annoying as Radahn and as unimpressive as Rykard were, they never quite made me fully dislike the game - no more offensive than crap that was in all of the other souls games.
As a result, Elden Ring is this weird mishmash of some of the most engaging souls content I've ever indulged in... and some of the most generic, boring, uninteresting shit. The fact that so many items and so much experience is tied to the overworld really kills my urge to make another character and replay, because it's so much of the game. The sacrifices to other shit were made for the sake of this element that I find to be completely unengaging, and the ludicrous success of this game gives me worry that they'll stray away from what I found truly unique and interesting about the previous titles.
Balance patch is actually a good sign on the whole, though. Leave less character lines just abruptly hanging, remove some of the stupid fucking cheese that completely drained all sense of challenge from the game. I don't really care that the game has an easy-mode in the form of summoning, but the number of people who genuinely insist that the game is easy because they summoned mimic then spammed hoarfrost/swordlaser on every single enemy and melted them is staggering. If you aren't playing these games to be challenged... what, are you playing to tell all your friends you beat a FROMSOFT game?
