Elden Ring

btw elden ring got 100 trillion sales so fromsoft is firmly in AAA territory now, and as such if you defend them, you're no different from people who defend the poor multi billion dollar megacorps like nintendo and SNOY
 
btw elden ring got 100 trillion sales so fromsoft is firmly in AAA territory now, and as such if you defend them, you're no different from people who defend the poor multi billion dollar megacorps like nintendo and SNOY
Yeah call me a hipster if you want but Fromsoft will never make another Sekiro or Bloodborne or AC game anymore.

Once you get hugely popular and start puncuating the mainstream you start exclusively making slop for the brain dead masses.

How many times and how many devs have we seen this happen to?
 
Yeah call me a hipster if you want but Fromsoft will never make another Sekiro or Bloodborne or AC game anymore.

Once you get hugely popular and start puncuating the mainstream you start exclusively making slop for the brain dead masses.

How many times and how many devs have we seen this happen to?
Only pointing it out because I've seen people unironically defend no duos and shit solo balance by saying they'll patch it. It's as if people immediately turn their brains off when they give money to a company and play their game. This review is also spot on: https://steamcommunity.com/id/kalculated/recommended/2622380/
Let me preface: This game is great. The new bosses are fantastic, and if you're a die hard Souls fan, of course its worth the buy. The new music is beautiful, and I adore all the new characters. There is a lot of good here, with great foundations, but there is more work to be done for the average player.

-No new weaponry, very little new content
Nightreign is an 'asset flip' of Elden Ring, which was expected and FromSoft didn't try to hide that. However, you would expect at least some new gear and enemies. So far, only some starting weapons for characters are new-ish (IE a different looking greatsword, ect), meaning there are no new weapons, spells, incantations, or weapon arts to pick up in the world. There isn't even the new weapons or enemies from Elden Ring DLC, besides one minor demi-human mob.
The only new enemies are the day 3 Night Lord bosses, so the other 80% of the game can get repetitive.
Again, I don't think anyone was expecting everything to be 'new', its an asset flip. But some new stuff was expected.
Although the new Night Lord bosses are brilliant, beautiful, and function fantastically in multiplayer, the bulk of the rest of the game is pretty 'samey'.


-Extremely poor communication tools
Most PvE group games like this have pinging, voice lines, ect to facilitate communicating with randoms. Elden ring has almost nothing. You can put a marker down on the map, and that's about the limitation of your communication.
Even something as minor as seeing your party members in the hub is missing.

-Overly strong 'encouragement' for group play
You can queue solo or with 3 randoms. However, the game is pretty difficult and balanced towards 3 players, especially Night Lords. Going at it solo, you'll need to be experienced and pretty skilled to make any progress. Even with 3 legacy players, all of us playing for 5-10+ years of souls games, it was difficult to beat the first Night Lord.
Meaning without a dedicated group of friends, you're likely at the mercy of randoms to progress. People disconnecting, trolling, leaving at inopportune times, or just being new or less skilled is just what you're going to have to put up with. We had two randoms leave/disconnect before the second night finished and the game does not auto-adjust, making the final boss rush nigh impossible with inflated pinata healthpools.
There is no 2-player queuing, though they've said it'll be implemented at some point.

-Rough experience for new players
The lack of progression, and the game's difficulty - hard even for the first boss set - is going to be a serious barrier of entry to new players. We're all here for difficulty, but for a healthy multiplayer-only game to survive, it needs to be able to ease players in. The game very much expects you to already be familiar with enemies and weapons from Elden Ring, and the UI is struggles to properly show what spells, buffs, and weapon arts do.
If you're new to Souls games, I'm sorry, you're going to have a really rough time starting with Nightreign.

-Limited sense of progression
There is no real 'progression' without beating Night Lord bosses. Initially, you have access to very little until your first kill. Night Lords are difficult to kill, so if you're a new player and not able to reliably down them, or even if you're struggling as a veteran, you're going to be spinning your wheels without feeling any sense of progression for a while. To compare to Helldivers, you always at gain levels which shows time played to give some sense of progress, and currency to spend on permanent upgrades - even if you fail. Nightreign does not have anything equivalent.
There is a shop that lets you spend some currency at for small upgrades (+2 dex, start with a Lightning residue ect), but its easy to buy it all and the upgrades you can get are pretty minor - at least until you kill Night Lord bosses. All progression is tied to downing Night Lord bosses.

-Limited customization for runs
Runs are repetitive right off the bat being 99.9% recycled Elden Ring gear and enemies, but I expected to be able to select different starting weapons, spells, and/or abilities to give runs more variation and as progression. Maybe try out a greathammer on Wyld, or a crossbow on Ironeye ect.
At time of writing, there's only minor changes you can make with Relics. Start with this buff, start with fire damage on your weapon, or that consumable, and that's about it. I'd expect some options to swap out character skills or starting weapons.

-Paid characters
The language of the Deluxe Edition implies future characters with be cash. As they are the only real variations to runs in the game, this is gating replayability and content behind $$.

-Massively inflated healthpools mixed with weird pacing
Nightreign wants you to GO GO GO - enhanced movement and speed mixed with limited time makes you feel the need to constantly rush around and gear up.
Enemies healthpools are inflated to balance for 3 players. Night bosses can take annoyingly long to down, and some roaming bosses take most of a day to kill.
This makes you feel the need to go faster faster in the world, to stack as much damage as you can so bosses aren't taking annoyingly long to kill. It leads to a mixed pacing of feeling rushed, but things taking awkwardly long to kill.


To me, these are some glaring issues for a brand new Multiplayer game. But I think they're all pretty fixable, and reasonable to fix. DLC content can be imported, starting gear can be made adjustable, numbers can be tweaked.
If From Software is listening, I'd napkin-math guess 6-12 months to fix most of the issues I've listed here.

From Software has never done a game like this before, so it's unclear just how much content and support the game will get going forward. Maybe these are going to be permanent issues forever, or maybe they'll be good about patching and content and have plans down the road that'll erase these problems. Or maybe not. Unfortunately, From Software has a history of not communicating at all and making strange changes without explanation. The future is unclear for Nightreign.

As always, remember this is a Steam review. I'm just a player like you, and I'm writing a stream of consciousness and my own opinions. I'm not a professional being paid to review and manipulate you into agreeing with me. Just my own thoughts and some of what I think and have put here is probably just wrong or a bad take.
Nothing I've said here invalidates your own opinions of the game, and as you can see from my playtime, I'm still playing Nightreign - even if I think it has problems.
 
Only pointing it out because I've seen people unironically defend no duos and shit solo balance by saying they'll patch it.
Funny thing is before they announced a balance patch for single player people were saying that the early reviews saying the solo content wasn't balanced was just people being bad at the game.
There really isn't much difference between Fromsoft and Nintendo fans at this point, but at least Fromsoft hasn't actually did horrible shit as a company at least.
 
Funny thing is before they announced a balance patch for single player people were saying that the early reviews saying the solo content wasn't balanced was just people being bad at the game.
There really isn't much difference between Fromsoft and Nintendo fans at this point, but at least Fromsoft hasn't actually did horrible shit as a company at least.
Nightfarers,
Thank you for playing ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN.

Next week, Patch 1.02 will be released, and will include several bug fixes as well as improvements for solo expeditions.

The following improvements for solo expeditions will be added to the game:
- The effect "Automatic Revival Upon Defeat", which allows revival once per night boss battle, will be added to solo expeditions.
- The amount of runes gained will be increased.

Further details will be provided next week. Thank you for your support.


Seriously? Importing more Sekiro mechanics and boosting soul gain for singleplayer? That's it? There's like an entire mountain of fixes to make.
 
I don't like Elden Ring very much.

I've liked every other fromsoft game, even Demon's Souls despite how old it is. Elden Ring was the first one I just didn't bother finishing.

When you really get down to it Souls games are rather simple: you dodge, you attack, and when you mess up you heal. If you don't win, then you do that same thing but better. You can do things that might make the process a little easier, but that's really what the whole thing is built around. The gameplay itself is extremely simple at its core, and nothing you do will change that very much.
I appreciate the added jump attack and counter attack; they were at least something to shake up combat. Parrying is great, but it doesn't work on a lot of enemy types.

In the past, the more arcade-y set up of the games where you proceed down paths between well designed levels helped offset that simplicity, but now we've got some open world shit where that simple gameplay concept is stretched out to over 100 hours, and very little of it matters.
There's loads of stuff to collect, and almost none of it is worthwhile. I was using the bloodhound tooth for the last 80 hours of gameplay since I had no reason to change, and had no reason to bother with spells because it's just different ways of dressing up "Dodge and attack until the enemy dies".

Some of the dungeon-y areas in the game are well designed, but a lot of it is very empty and copy-paste, full of basic enemies and useless items.

-PvP-
In DS3 a big motivator to cap your level (and thus create different characters/builds), collect different armor (especially poise-heavy ones), and use different weapons, was actually PvP. PvE combat in souls may be very straightforward, but PvP isn't.
The pvp in Elden Ring is dead and gay. In DS3 even years after release you WOULD NOT make it through aldrich's keep embered without getting invaded; meanwhile the entire time I played Elden Ring I did not get invaded once.
I was so desperate that even when an NPC invaded I was overjoyed, simply because the combat would require a little finesse.

I considered "Maybe I should be the change I want to see in the world", but people only seem to care about arena (something Fromsoft was very against in past games, for good reason. You invaded or you didn't do pvp) so I didn't bother.

-Quests-
Whoever the fuck made the quests in Elden Ring should kill themselves. I would like to hear from even one god damned person who could possibly manage to figure out how to do 9/10 of quests without looking it up.

No journal of any kind, no guidance, if you're lucky you stumbled into a certain place and talked to some person, and you should psychically know to go some other arbitrary place on this enormous open world map and talk to someone else. Also you should correctly guess not to progress beyond a certain point in relation to this unmarked, unguided quest, given by a random, unmarked NPC sitting somewhere in the world because if you do you'll get locked out and NOT BE ABLE TO BUY FUCKING BOILED CRABS.

Yes, the quests were always a little like this, but they were contained within a more linear form where it was harder to miss NPCs. Not in an open world setting.

Genuinely unacceptable. Don't put this garbage into your game.

-Bosses-
The bosses are just serviceable. I barely remember the majority of them, unlike in other souls games or Sekiro where I still remember almost all of them.

Maybe it's because I'm more used to the games so I beat the majority pretty quickly and didn't spend much time with them, since I remember the few I struggled with. They were definitely better than playing the game otherwise. At least they were something other than wandering around, killing mobs, and collecting useless loot.


The more I write about it the more I realize how many things I really didn't like about Elden Ring. Of course the public has consistently awful tastes so this is the one that got really popular, which means this is probably the primary format we're getting going forward. Fantastic 👌

Lies of P was more fun than Elden Ring tbh.
 
People have already ported Elden Ring bosses to Sekiro, so if that’s what you’re looking for, it already exists.
Afaik they have just ported melania, but I what I want is to play elden ring with the sekiro moveset.
People have also already ported the deflect system into Elden Ring via mods anyways. Complete with posture bars.
Yeah but to my knowledge none of them are really complete/good, are they?
 
I just don't get what the point of this was. It's a rougelite without enough randomization, reusing enemies and bosses I am already sick of fighting and apparently not even including DLC bosses and enemies from Shadow of the Erdtree? Also still no Godwyn fight so SUCK MY COCK.

I'll just wait until modders import the new bosses to Elden Ring.
 
Random jerkoffs who have only played Elden Ring are making videos lecturing old players who don't like the new design.

Maybe if the mainstream culture fucks off we can get back on track to good fucking souls games.
Yeah personally I'm not holding my breath waiting for another souls game. Not to sound like That Guy but when From made the design decisions that they did with ER in order to reach the masses they did way too much to please too many people.
They reached out to the people with what I call Diablo Brain by jacking up the soft caps on most stats to 80. Aka all I gotta do is git bigger numbers.
They bent the knee to the Reddit crowd back in Dark Souls 3 with password summons. They were actually scaled down nicely and 90% of the time the level 800 summoned Bubba was actually worse off than the summoner in Hit Points, Damage etc. Yeah they had absurd armor but that was pretty well evened out by their HP being cut.
In Elden Ring that's the opposite of the case. They're bigger, badder, faster and stronger than the supposed hero (the summoner). So not only did they aim to please the Diablo Brained players they catered to an entire audience of new player tourist just looking to get through the game (by being carried by Bubba).
A few personal examples I can give out are this.
Back when WoW Shadowlands launched I hopped back on for around 6 months after not having played since Wrath. Just talking in random chat and with guildmates if I mentioned Dark Souls series/Bloodborn I got nothing but crickets and Huh what's that? Looks cool I guess.
My coworkers and friends knew that I had a deep love for the series. But none of them personally wanted to touch it due to "difficulty" and or invasions.
If I bring it up Elden Ring lets say at work.....pretty much the entire base there has played through it. The rest have dickeed around on it. If I bring it up online in a game it's the same thing. Hell even the Grogs over in Ultima Online have played it. My 12 year old nephew has played it.

Yeah call me a hipster if you want but Fromsoft will never make another Sekiro or Bloodborne or AC game anymore.
I've been holding out for another Kingsfield since 2003. I'd settle for another Shadow Tower game. I feel you brother.

The more I write about it the more I realize how many things I really didn't like about Elden Ring. Of course the public has consistently awful tastes so this is the one that got really popular, which means this is probably the primary format we're getting going forward. Fantastic 👌
The primary format going forward thing is honestly all I'm expecting from here on out. Your entire post is pretty much inline with my own opinions. Hell even my Animal Crossing playing ass girlfriend was cracking on NR and came into the room today with Hey I got something to show you! And starts fiddling with her phone. Nah babe I already know. I know about the promo video.
And on a side note one of my D&D buddies dubbed Elden Ring as Dark Souls 5th Edition after hanging out and watching me blow through a few areas and bosses with nothing but absolute L2 shenanigans.
He's ran through Demon Souls - DS2.
 
In the past, the more arcade-y set up of the games where you proceed down paths between well designed levels helped offset that simplicity, but now we've got some open world shit where that simple gameplay concept is stretched out to over 100 hours, and very little of it matters.
There's loads of stuff to collect, and almost none of it is worthwhile. I was using the bloodhound tooth for the last 80 hours of gameplay since I had no reason to change, and had no reason to bother with spells because it's just different ways of dressing up "Dodge and attack until the enemy dies".
Extreme truthnuke. The open world does nothing but dilute the core game design by increasing the amount of resources the player will have access to at any given time, which affects the balance significantly. This is not the same as a non linear metroidvania style design like in DS1, because it's still very tightly contained and generally progress gated. You can't just walk right into Sen's fortress. But you can just walk into Liurnia or Caelid and get stupid broken with just a bit of exploration. I am of the opinion that ER was extremely successful because it lowered the barrier of entry for so many casual players.
Lies of P was more fun than Elden Ring tbh.
Yes.
I just don't get what the point of this was.
They assigned the B team to make it in order to satisfy executives because of ER's success, while the rest of them worked on the real project (Duskbloods). This is exaclty what happened after DS1 with DS2 being the B team shitgame and Bloodborne being the real project that people actually cared about.
So basically it's a cashgrab.
 
First impression: the pace can be a deal breaker for some, but that shit is so fast it's honestly addictive. It's like being a bunch of hobos stripping copper out of buildings before the cops (in this instance, the night) comes. I adore it. Still haven't run into too many similar runs on melee characters and Recluse, but Iron Eye is pretty fucked due to how bad bow choice is both for weapons and ashes of war. They'll need to bring in more shit from past games for him specifically, like the Sanctum Crossbow. Bosses and map aren't nearly randomized enough. The lack of animation cancelling is so fucking annoying. There're moments where I know I could roll in ER to get out of recovery quickly that I can't in Nightreign. Not a huge fan of the special move sets Raider and Wylder have for great hammers/great axes/colossal weapons and great swords respectively. Guardian's halberd moves are fine because it's solid and he can shield poke with them. In general, he seems way more useful than Wylder or Raider because that revive is so damn clutch (heh, bird pun). No chance to try out Executor, Duchess, or Revenant yet, but Duchess seems like the best damage character out of the non-casters by a lot. Revenant struck me as really strange and oddly very involved for a summoner. Recluse is fairly strong and capable of a lot of damage and a little support. The game's performance is fine on my computer.
It's really trashy fun. I doubt it'll have much staying power, but this game's speed is just right in my opinion.

TL;DR: everything you've read before when it comes to reviews of this game, for the most part. I only disagree on the pace being too fast.
 
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Yeah call me a hipster if you want but Fromsoft will never make another Sekiro or Bloodborne or AC game anymore.

Once you get hugely popular and start puncuating the mainstream you start exclusively making slop for the brain dead masses.

How many times and how many devs have we seen this happen to?
The course can be corrected if Nightreign and Duskblood underperform or bomb. Well Nightreign maybe not so much, since its an asset flip catering to the Fortnite crowd and already has over a million players and Redditors defending it day 1.
 
They'll need to bring in more shit from past games for him specifically, like the Sanctum Crossbow.
I was gonna talk about how there's no dark damage so Sanctum Crossbows and Possessed Armor Greatbow and other dark weapons can't be ported but one reason they didn't in past games isn't a factor anymore. The menus don't show individual values for each damage type on the weapon screen and there's no armor so the space isn't a problem, the main problem is boss resistances, spell/ash rebalance and new Magic Cocktail mixtures but otherwise they could do it. But I agree, they need to let bows have generic ashes that whips can have like Hoarfrost Stomp at the very least. Or maybe give him Smithscript synergy as an excuse to port those.
Revenant struck me as really strange and oddly very involved for a summoner.
It's the fucking incants and summons man, Revenant doesn't have Recluse's sustain without Libra's relic or perk/relic RNG and the better spells are very FP hungry. Doesn't help that seals tend to have offensive incants and the pool of support incants are just horrible (fortifications only self buff unless they changed them (they're still random so 1 in 4 to be useful if they did), Law of Regression) and you can't guarantee sacred spawns for Shared Order or Golden Vow, so consistently buffing the spirits/teammates as a support like the class is described is inconsistent. It's also weak because summons are nice for most of the run but Nightlords tear through them in 2-4 hits except maybe Augur. To top it off the ultimate basically says "you, your summon, and/or (a) teammate(s) gets into an all out slugfest with the boss or at least get up from dying state", it's an AoE D&D Barbarian's Rage. The character's just downright peculiar. Edit: It's also made worse by Revenant's passive requiring her or the summons to kill enemies, meaning you have to do active mobbing to have it do anything.
 
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Sekiro still plays better, Elden Ring even Nightreign is still on that demons souls 2009-DS3 dogshit for combat. And still behind Bloodborne.
I always assumed that if you could just toss sekiro's responsive deflects into them it would instantly fix them, its why I had hopes for nightreign to finally fix the combat.
 
I always assumed that if you could just toss sekiro's responsive deflects into them it would instantly fix them, its why I had hopes for nightreign to finally fix the combat.
None of the Elden Ring enemies not even Malenia is designed for Sekiro style combat they are all pretty much ds2/ds3 bosses on cocaine rather than what sekiro bosses had going for them. These bosses are almost all animation-based and punish-based/rollcatch based.
The corrupted monk fight has more depth in boss design than any enemy in dark souls or elden ring.

If you're looking for Sekiro gameplay you won't find it in DS3.5 or DS4 which is Elden Ring. Even the shadow of the erdtree dlc flask that lets you sekiro block/parry feels more sluggish and has less of an ebon flow compared to Sekiro. Nightreign is just elden ring sped up with two cooldown abilities. Miyazaki himself seemed disappointed he couldn't integrate Sekiro gameplay the way he wanted to, so you'll need mods to even remotely capture the experience.
 
Even the shadow of the erdtree dlc flask that lets you sekiro block/parry feels more sluggish and has less of an ebon flow compared to Sekiro.
I also had high hopes for this one and was dissapointed with how shit it ended up being. I've seen mods integrate the parry better than the flask did.
Miyazaki himself seemed disappointed he couldn't integrate Sekiro gameplay the way he wanted to, so you'll need mods to even remotely capture the experience.
Huh, he did? Do you have the interview? It would be an intresting read.
 
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