Elden Ring

[Ruin]

damn that's almost flash game numbers

Absolutely nuts for a Japanese RPG.

 

[BrunoMattei]

I finally started NG+ with my 2nd character and I have to say I'm disappointed. It's just the same game again but you take more damage and dish out less damage. That's it. I was hoping for some changes.

As much shit as autists give Dark Souls 2 that game had a very interesting NG+ where it would throw in some red phantoms to spice things up. Plus the early game had more enemies and a dragon in that one area. Plus the spider has a cameo but it seemed like the devs ran out of time/money to go further with NG+ changes and it kind of ends at the spider cameo and there just being more red phantoms.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I've only done two playthroughs, the second being done in a rush to see some things that I missed the first time, and it's apparent that NPCs are moved around to some extent so that you don't necessarily need to find every single scene with them to progress to their end. For example:

• Roderika will eventually appear at the Roundtable Hold even if you don't find her key item at Stormveil Castle, and she'll automatically become a spirit tuner once activate the Giants' Flame.
• Alexander will appear at the Radahn Festival and introduce himself there if you never meet him at his initial hole. I also found him at the volcano without ever see him stuck in his second hole.
• Blaidd will appear as a hostile at Ranni's Rise even if you never find him trapped in the evergaol. Iji will then remark in surprise of Blaidd having escaped his cell.

There are some NPCs who need to have steps fulfilled, though. For example, Hyetta won't get to the Three Fingers unless you give her all the grapes she asks for.

I can see how it can be confusing. I talked to Roderika, something-something chrysalid, walked around getting lost for a bit, when I returned there was just a blood stain and something to pick up. What just happened? Later on at Roundtable I talked to people again to see if they had anything to say and there she was thanking me for... ??? Problem was that my previous interaction with her was so brief that I didn't remember or recognize the character, had to go online and look up what this was all about.
It honestly made me a bit worried that the game had broken a bit.

Then there's the Weeping Peninsula. There's the lady there that wants you to give a letter to her father blah blah. A Quest! Fine. So I run 100m down the bend and got bitten by dogs and poked by knights, then did a quick 180 to go back to the site of grace to heal up, reset aggro and rethink my decisions. Now she was a bloodstain and a clever. I had been gone 60 seconds. Doing things like that doesn't feel right.
If she had stuck around for as long as I was bound to that particular site of grace, even if I died and respawned there, and gotten cleft only after I used the next one and had made progress into the area it would have felt less jank.

 

[Brain Problems]

I can see how it can be confusing. I talked to Roderika, something-something chrysalid, walked around getting lost for a bit, when I returned there was just a blood stain and something to pick up. What just happened? Later on at Roundtable I talked to people again to see if they had anything to say and there she was thanking me for... ??? Problem was that my previous interaction with her was so brief that I didn't remember or recognize the character, had to go online and look up what this was all about.
It honestly made me a bit worried that the game had broken a bit.

Then there's the Weeping Peninsula. There's the lady there that wants you to give a letter to her father blah blah. A Quest! Fine. So I run 100m down the bend and got bitten by dogs and poked by knights, then did a quick 180 to go back to the site of grace to heal up, reset aggro and rethink my decisions. Now she was a bloodstain and a clever. I had been gone 60 seconds. Doing things like that doesn't feel right.
If she had stuck around for as long as I was bound to that particular site of grace, even if I died and respawned there, and gotten cleft only after I used the next one and had made progress into the area it would have felt less jank.

Look, I know I may get chewed out for this but here I go:

There should have been a quest journal and/or obvious markers on the map. The NPC quest lines in this game are so obtuse and all over the place and borderline incoherent that the game is all but telling you, 'go look for some gamefaqs, dummy'. They already gave us a map with important things marked on it, you get markers for the Volcano Manor questline assassination gigs (unless I'm misremembering), so why not go a step further and let us know where to go to keep a quest going?

There is so much content behind these things that it feels like you're just missing out on large portions of the game if you don't have the fucking wiki open constantly.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Look, I know I may get chewed out for this but here I go:

There should have been a quest journal and/or obvious markers on the map. The NPC quest lines in this game are so obtuse and all over the place and borderline incoherent that the game is all but telling you, 'go look for some gamefaqs, dummy'. They already gave us a map with important things marked on it, you get markers for the Volcano Manor questline assassination gigs (unless I'm misremembering), so why not go a step further and let us know where to go to keep a quest going?

There is so much content behind these things that it feels like you're just missing out on large portions of the game if you don't have the fucking wiki open constantly.

Exactly. ER is an open world game and there are some expectations there to keep track of things. Imagine the uproar if Bethesda did the same thing(eh, couldn't figure it out, just kill the old location character and move the character to new location, bonus granted, move the story forward). I like the game but I can not understand why it's getting such monumental review scores.

 

[Gimmick Account]

you get markers for the Volcano Manor questline assassination gigs (unless I'm misremembering), so why not go a step further and let us know where to go to keep a quest going?

I think because the idea is that the NPC quest stuff is meant to be kind of superfluous and semi-hidden. Like you're almost meant to miss them most of the time so that when you don't, or there's something compelling enough for you to hunt it down, or you remember someone saying something when you stumble onto a related thing later, there's a sense of discovery. While there's that element of "remember when people used to talk about games in the schoolyard" (which people seem mad about Japanese games trying to perpetuate lately for some reason), I don't think you're really meant to do every ending questline in your first run necessarily like most of us did.
Ranni quests sorta suggest this because they're relatively harder to miss and mostly tell you where to go, so they aren't all equally obscure. But then they still have some stages and optional bits you might not notice or figure out, which makes me think that's intentional. Pretty much all the big hidden areas with actual content are easy to find, and the bits you might not get without looking em up are mostly kinda fucking nothing, even the endings.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the approach but I think that's what they were going for; potential for your story to be different hinging on tiny details. I dunno if the game really supports that too well though, not without multiplying the amount of NPC stuff tenfold at least.

Volcano Manor quests are an exception just because From is always begging you to participate in multiplayer even while punishing you for it, ie they're meant to give you a taste for being a red guy. But even that should probably have been fleshed out a lot more if they really wanted you to roleplay as a vaguely-defined villain preying on the vaguely-defined good guys. But they love vagueness, which I kinda love about the games tbh, and that means they're always in self-conflict with these kinds of design decisions.

 

[Evil Peter Griffin]

Exactly. ER is an open world game and there are some expectations there to keep track of things. Imagine the uproar if Bethesda did the same thing(eh, couldn't figure it out, just kill the old location character and move the character to new location, bonus granted, move the story forward). I like the game but I can not understand why it's getting such monumental review scores.

Not a good comparison. I played plenty of Bethesda games that had broken quests and dead NPCs. I played New Vegas on release and need to use console command every 10 mins.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Did Souls always have so much buffing? Every gameplay video of the game is basically this scene:

My biggest problem is with the buff where you impale yourself but it takes away a sliver of HP, while a guy brushing against you will take half your health.

 

[PuffyGroundCloud]

I didn't know that Radagon can parry spells

 

[Urbanmech]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-wYToJPH9K8I didn't know that Radagon can parry spells

Yea he was like the polar opposite of Malenia. Melania would dodge almost all spells except delayed spells like Rock Sling/Moon spells but Radagon would just parry everything if you were solo. Not sure if he can parry certain ashes of war like the Blasphemous Sword or if he can parry the backstab glint.

 

[Raging Capybara]

Am I the only one who felt the endgame was really really easy? Idk maybe I was just too fucking cranked but the last five or bosses I just roflstomped. Didn't die once on Fire Giant, Godskin duo, Malikath, or Elden beast. Malikath in particular was really really disappointing. He died in under 30 seconds.

How?

Maliketh is for me, by far, the toughest boss in the game.

As always, Mimic or other strong summon makes things trivial, but I don't think I will ever be able to solo this dude.

 

[Tom Myers]

Fun fan animation (spoilers):

So far I've beat the game twice and now I'm trying with a knight/vegabond strength boi. This game is the FromSoft title I've ever played were strength is this weak. Like fuck my mage was doing way better.

 

[Power Glove]

Look, I know I may get chewed out for this but here I go:

There should have been a quest journal and/or obvious markers on the map. The NPC quest lines in this game are so obtuse and all over the place and borderline incoherent that the game is all but telling you, 'go look for some gamefaqs, dummy'. They already gave us a map with important things marked on it, you get markers for the Volcano Manor questline assassination gigs (unless I'm misremembering), so why not go a step further and let us know where to go to keep a quest going?

There is so much content behind these things that it feels like you're just missing out on large portions of the game if you don't have the fucking wiki open constantly.

Or have the best of both worlds. The purists will obviously sperg, bitch and moan about the inclusion of such heresy. A journal in a Souls-like game? Purge the unclean, etc. How about have an option to buy a journal, like you do a crafting kit, or like the cookbooks, and as you progress while exploring, you get more knowledge about the world that fattens the journal up, and merchants sell quest journals. They travel the world of Elden Ring, know the lay of the lands so it would make perfect lore sense to have them sell you these things.

As they are completely optional, the purists can still go about it their own way, and people who want that extra help, and have a more standardized RPG experience with quest markers, quest stages and such, it is there.

That's just my take on it.

 

[The Doom Slayer]

 

[Dojima's Dragon]

How does the game look on ps4

 

[Pipi420]

How does the game look on ps4

I heard the PS4 version has better performance than the ps5 version kekmao
just look up some comparison vids on youtube, I think the console versions are solid?

Look, I know I may get chewed out for this but here I go:

There should have been a quest journal and/or obvious markers on the map. The NPC quest lines in this game are so obtuse and all over the place and borderline incoherent that the game is all but telling you, 'go look for some gamefaqs, dummy'. They already gave us a map with important things marked on it, you get markers for the Volcano Manor questline assassination gigs (unless I'm misremembering), so why not go a step further and let us know where to go to keep a quest going?

There is so much content behind these things that it feels like you're just missing out on large portions of the game if you don't have the fucking wiki open constantly.

brother i think you have the wrong idea, the only person who gets their rocks off to shitty vague broken side quests is Miyazaki noone else likes missing an entire quest line and titanite slab because you didnt backtrack to an empty area after you already beat the boss to open a door thus spawning in a character you already met into a well and then having to buy his armor from ANOTHER character with their own quest and then throw said armor down the well to continue their quest. That shit is poop poop pee pee

 

[Weeby Catto]

There is actually a certain "better" flow to play the game. In NG, i don't know how to read the map properly yet and wander around a lot, sometimes without map. So some sidequest happened in weird order.

In NG+, I knew how to read them and can see which areas i can explore etc. Irina, the blind maiden quest is one of the most obtuse quest and hard to chance upon.

You have to explore Limgrave, and progress to the right side of LG but not crossing to Caelid, then finish up Weeping Peninsula first. If you don't do weeping peninsula, then you will miss out on Irina questline, and you will have almost NO clue to where she is next.

But if you do WP, then progress to the left side of Limgrave into Stormveil, then a lot of things flow naturally. I manage to stumble and find Irina in all her position without wiki when playing this way. There is a certain ruins in Liurnia, where there seem to have a chest but there is nothing, and with a bit of curiosity, I found Irina there.

Whereas if you somehow play in different order, you might have passed her spawn location without her being there, and might not have clue that you need to explore those areas again.

I admit this is kinda bad design.

 

[Dumpster dived waifu]

I heard the PS4 version has better performance than the ps5 version kekmao
just look up some comparison vids on youtube, I think the console versions are solid?

I've been playing the PS5 version, games been running just fine outside of the server randomly shitting itself and booting me back to the title screen.

 

[DapperShark]

Has anyone been experiencing issues in multiplayer? My PC has been randomly freezing when summoned, my specs are well above the recommended and this was notably not an issue in previous patches

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Ok, this just happened and it's going to sound like absolute bullshit coming from a scrub gamer. I whiped the floor with Godfrick first try and unseen, was never in any danger. It feels like they don't plan for that because the middle-cutscene breaks the flow. I used Freya the Latexer summon[can't remember the name, she's his daughter and found in a room outside] and the ole' jelly, Freya died but Jelly was ultimately godfricks dimease. At the end he could not leave that sucker alone while I was free to procc bloodloss in his ass as fast as I could.
It gave me enough runes to level to 50.