Post by WickedCrustacean on May 16, 2022 12:04:53 GMT -5
Elden Ring is a massive open world action RPG from the Japanese studio From Software, of Dark Souls fame, collaborating with Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin. To be quite honest, George Martin's involvement is hard to discern, as much of Elden Ring's story and setting is very similar to From Software's previous games. My guess is that they just cut him a check to get his name on the game, for marketing purposes. So in addition to not doing anything on A Song of Ice and Fire lately, and collecting massive checks from the books and tv show royalties, he will now also collect massive royalty checks on the game, while also doing nothing. George is living the life!
The game itself, on the other hand, is pretty much exactly about what every other From Software game is about. Instead of cursed undead, you now play as the Tarnished, which as far as I can understand, is some kind of undead anyway. The world of Elden Ring has something called the Greater Will (equivalent of God or Godhead perhaps?), and it is manifested in this ring, as well as the eternal Queen Marika, who takes on consorts from time to time, which are the Elden Lords. But previous to the game, the ring was destroyed and split up into fragments, and Marika's demigod children ran off with those fragments, and started waging war on each other. So by the time you come around, the entire world is split up into these ruins, each ruled by some demented corrupted demigod, or other monstrosities. Your job is to travel around, fight stuff to get more powerful, obtain better equipment and experience, level up, and then fight stronger stuff. Over time, the over-arching goal is to defeat the demigods and obtain Elden Ring shards from them, and then combine those into a new ring, allowing you to become the next Elden Lord and fix up the world.
The world of Elden Ring is one of the most beautiful settings ever brought to life in a video game. Credit where credit is due, From Software has really top notch artists, and they did an outstanding job creating a masterpiece of a fantasy world. Everything from the environment, the massive erdtrees which loom over the world and serve to provide light instead of the Sun, the outstanding creature and boss graphics and animations, and the prevalent castle ruins, all combine to create a first class setting to adventure in and explore. The music and sound effects are likewise top notch, and serve to immerse you into this gorgeous alternate reality.
When you start the game, you can select from one of various starting classes, such as the Vagabond (Knight), Warrior, Bandit, Samurai, Prisoner, Crusader, etc. These provide certain starting equipment and small stat boons, but mostly aren't very important, because you can obtain the same stats, equipment, skills from any starting class. The game immediately shows you how insignificant and weak you are, because you immediately face a boss that you probably have no realistic chance against, and after losing, are thrust into the next stage of the game. There's a short tutorial section, which you can skip, and then you are thrown out into the wide open world, where you face another boss that you have almost no chance against at that point. But you can run around it and begin your journey.
The game world consists of many different regions spread out over several continents. It is huge, with the game easily taking over 100 hours to complete, closer to 200 if you try to do most things and explore optional areas. You are encouraged to progress by following the trail of grace, which directs you to points where you can rest and recover your health and flasks. Much of the world contains various enemies that you can fight, some of them quite tough, but the key part of the game is fighting the numerous bosses, super tough enemies that will really test your mettle. Elden Ring has something like 130+ bosses spread throughout the world, some mandatory, many optional. While some are very unique, others tend to be re-used. For example, you might face a boss early on, and then run into another boss fight that contains 2 or 3 of that boss, or a more powerful version.
The combat, which is the centerpiece of this game, is similar to Dark Souls combat, but also changed quite a bit. There are some basic elements to it, for example to avoid enemy attacks, you can use a shield or weapon to block, or you can roll through the attack, which is a type of dodge, or you can try to parry certain attacks, which requires exact timing. You also have fast and power attacks, and various combos. There are things like poise, where certain attacks, like jump attacks or power attacks, especially with large, heavy weapons damage the enemy's poise, and if you damage enough of it, the enemy will be staggered, letting you do massive amounts of damage to it. So in theory, there is a lot of depth and hardcore mechanics in Elden Ring to provide for a fun combat system.
In practice, however, something has gone very wrong. To understand how, we will have to travel back in time to Demons' Souls and Dark Souls, From Software early games in their very successful formula. In those games, most of these mechanics and abilities have already been present, but since they were being used for the first time, they were all very straightforward. You saw the enemy attack, you parried at that moment, that was good enough. Or you dodged when it felt right to dodge. Or you used a shield to defend yourself. But of course as people played these games over and over, from Demons' Souls and Dark Souls through Dark Souls 2 and 3, Sekiro and Bloodbourne, From Software has developed a reputation as a developer of very difficult games. And the memes became the reality, and they felt more and more pressure to justify their reputation. So over the course of their games, you could see them constantly trying to make them harder and harder, to satisfy that segment of gaming audience that was craving more and more challenge. As a result of this, their games became twitchier and more demanding on the player's reflexes, and previously straightforward mechanics became really convoluted and next to impossible to use for the average gamer.
Let's take parrying and rolling/dodging for example. In Dark Souls, you had to have very crisp timing to execute those moves successfully, but the enemy attacks had reasonable animations and were fairly predictable, so anyone could pull these off with some practice. In Dark Soul 2 and 3, the studio introduced parry delay frames (forcing the player to predict the parry in advance rather than just react) and also introduced much faster bosses and other enemies, making these approaches much more challenging. In Elden Ring, this is dialed up to insane degrees. Not only are most bosses significantly faster than ever before, but they also attack non-stop, with nearly infinite combos, and have all sorts of feints and delays built into their patterns, to fool the player. So a boss might feint an attack, delay for several seconds to fool you into rolling/parrying too early, and then come out with an actual attack without any windup animation. Unless you are a world class e-athlete, I just don't see you being able to successfully deal with these kinds of shenanigans.
Of course From Software realized this, so they built in all kinds of "less skillful" ways to beat the game. You can use all kinds of summons for example, to help you with difficult fights. This ranges from Ashes, which are a type of summoning spell for different kinds of summons that you can discover throughout the world. You can then upgrade these ashes to make the summon more powerful. You can use this to summon anything from humanoids, monsters, copies of yourself, etc. While these helpers aren't exactly great with their AI or attack power, they can at least draw the bosses' ire for some time, allowing you to attack unchallenged. You can also summon in-game NPCs, if you complete their quests, or summon other players if you play in the online mode.
Another way to deal with tough enemies is to use the various powerful effects or weapon skills found throughout the world. Bleeding is one such overpowered effect in Elden Ring. Found naturally on most katanas, it can also be added to other weapons. With fast attacking weapons in dual wield mode (called power stancing in ER), it is very easy to apply multiple bleeding stacks to the enemy, which then do tremendous damage to the enemies. Weapons also come with unique weapon arts which in some cases can be tremendously powerful.
So while the game ensures that everyone has some way to get through it, I much preferred the earlier games approach, where through practice, anyone could get good enough at the basic combat (parrying, dodging, etc) to complete the game that way and then feel good about their skills, to the Elden Ring approach, where most people will have trouble beating the game in a "fair" way, and will instead have to resort to summons and overpowered effects/arts. The latter will work but leave the player feeling a little empty, kind of like they cheated.
While the main storyline of Elden Ring is fairly simplistic (go around the world, collect a few gizmos to put together, etc), there is actually a lot of mythological type stuff underneath that. The demigod children of Queen Marika had a lot of fun before you came along, waged all sorts of battles and engaged in various dramatic events. The problem is, all of this is presented to you in very sparse NPC dialogue lines, a few descriptions here and there, and other tiny tidbits of information. What's worse, there is no continuity to quests or storylines from the player's perspective: you meet some NPC, they tell you something vague, then you play for another 30 hours and meet another NPC who tells you something that happens to be the next step in that quest-line. But without a quest journal or anything like that, I have no idea how the player is supposed to keep track of this stuff. So the only quests I was able to complete were the few exceptions that were entirely in the same place/time, or the ones I looked up on the game wiki.
As far as exploration, it's a big of a mixed bag. On one hand, Elden Ring is full of out-of-the-way places to find, and can sometimes be a sheer joy to explore. But on the other, after a while, you start seeing a lot of asset reuse, with the same types of dungeons, bosses, enemies popping up again and again. And the game's emphasis on difficult combat and absence of significant dialogue also dampens the joys of exploration somewhat, at least for me.
So in the end, I feel like Elden Ring is a game that is neither completely bad, nor particularly good, stuck somewhere between the mainstream crap being regurgitated by AAA studios and the true open world gaming gems like Kingdom Come or Breath of the Wild. It might be worth playing in the age of so few quality titles being released, but will cause just as much frustration and disappointment as gaming joy.
The game itself, on the other hand, is pretty much exactly about what every other From Software game is about. Instead of cursed undead, you now play as the Tarnished, which as far as I can understand, is some kind of undead anyway. The world of Elden Ring has something called the Greater Will (equivalent of God or Godhead perhaps?), and it is manifested in this ring, as well as the eternal Queen Marika, who takes on consorts from time to time, which are the Elden Lords. But previous to the game, the ring was destroyed and split up into fragments, and Marika's demigod children ran off with those fragments, and started waging war on each other. So by the time you come around, the entire world is split up into these ruins, each ruled by some demented corrupted demigod, or other monstrosities. Your job is to travel around, fight stuff to get more powerful, obtain better equipment and experience, level up, and then fight stronger stuff. Over time, the over-arching goal is to defeat the demigods and obtain Elden Ring shards from them, and then combine those into a new ring, allowing you to become the next Elden Lord and fix up the world.
The world of Elden Ring is one of the most beautiful settings ever brought to life in a video game. Credit where credit is due, From Software has really top notch artists, and they did an outstanding job creating a masterpiece of a fantasy world. Everything from the environment, the massive erdtrees which loom over the world and serve to provide light instead of the Sun, the outstanding creature and boss graphics and animations, and the prevalent castle ruins, all combine to create a first class setting to adventure in and explore. The music and sound effects are likewise top notch, and serve to immerse you into this gorgeous alternate reality.
When you start the game, you can select from one of various starting classes, such as the Vagabond (Knight), Warrior, Bandit, Samurai, Prisoner, Crusader, etc. These provide certain starting equipment and small stat boons, but mostly aren't very important, because you can obtain the same stats, equipment, skills from any starting class. The game immediately shows you how insignificant and weak you are, because you immediately face a boss that you probably have no realistic chance against, and after losing, are thrust into the next stage of the game. There's a short tutorial section, which you can skip, and then you are thrown out into the wide open world, where you face another boss that you have almost no chance against at that point. But you can run around it and begin your journey.
The game world consists of many different regions spread out over several continents. It is huge, with the game easily taking over 100 hours to complete, closer to 200 if you try to do most things and explore optional areas. You are encouraged to progress by following the trail of grace, which directs you to points where you can rest and recover your health and flasks. Much of the world contains various enemies that you can fight, some of them quite tough, but the key part of the game is fighting the numerous bosses, super tough enemies that will really test your mettle. Elden Ring has something like 130+ bosses spread throughout the world, some mandatory, many optional. While some are very unique, others tend to be re-used. For example, you might face a boss early on, and then run into another boss fight that contains 2 or 3 of that boss, or a more powerful version.
The combat, which is the centerpiece of this game, is similar to Dark Souls combat, but also changed quite a bit. There are some basic elements to it, for example to avoid enemy attacks, you can use a shield or weapon to block, or you can roll through the attack, which is a type of dodge, or you can try to parry certain attacks, which requires exact timing. You also have fast and power attacks, and various combos. There are things like poise, where certain attacks, like jump attacks or power attacks, especially with large, heavy weapons damage the enemy's poise, and if you damage enough of it, the enemy will be staggered, letting you do massive amounts of damage to it. So in theory, there is a lot of depth and hardcore mechanics in Elden Ring to provide for a fun combat system.
In practice, however, something has gone very wrong. To understand how, we will have to travel back in time to Demons' Souls and Dark Souls, From Software early games in their very successful formula. In those games, most of these mechanics and abilities have already been present, but since they were being used for the first time, they were all very straightforward. You saw the enemy attack, you parried at that moment, that was good enough. Or you dodged when it felt right to dodge. Or you used a shield to defend yourself. But of course as people played these games over and over, from Demons' Souls and Dark Souls through Dark Souls 2 and 3, Sekiro and Bloodbourne, From Software has developed a reputation as a developer of very difficult games. And the memes became the reality, and they felt more and more pressure to justify their reputation. So over the course of their games, you could see them constantly trying to make them harder and harder, to satisfy that segment of gaming audience that was craving more and more challenge. As a result of this, their games became twitchier and more demanding on the player's reflexes, and previously straightforward mechanics became really convoluted and next to impossible to use for the average gamer.
Let's take parrying and rolling/dodging for example. In Dark Souls, you had to have very crisp timing to execute those moves successfully, but the enemy attacks had reasonable animations and were fairly predictable, so anyone could pull these off with some practice. In Dark Soul 2 and 3, the studio introduced parry delay frames (forcing the player to predict the parry in advance rather than just react) and also introduced much faster bosses and other enemies, making these approaches much more challenging. In Elden Ring, this is dialed up to insane degrees. Not only are most bosses significantly faster than ever before, but they also attack non-stop, with nearly infinite combos, and have all sorts of feints and delays built into their patterns, to fool the player. So a boss might feint an attack, delay for several seconds to fool you into rolling/parrying too early, and then come out with an actual attack without any windup animation. Unless you are a world class e-athlete, I just don't see you being able to successfully deal with these kinds of shenanigans.
Of course From Software realized this, so they built in all kinds of "less skillful" ways to beat the game. You can use all kinds of summons for example, to help you with difficult fights. This ranges from Ashes, which are a type of summoning spell for different kinds of summons that you can discover throughout the world. You can then upgrade these ashes to make the summon more powerful. You can use this to summon anything from humanoids, monsters, copies of yourself, etc. While these helpers aren't exactly great with their AI or attack power, they can at least draw the bosses' ire for some time, allowing you to attack unchallenged. You can also summon in-game NPCs, if you complete their quests, or summon other players if you play in the online mode.
Another way to deal with tough enemies is to use the various powerful effects or weapon skills found throughout the world. Bleeding is one such overpowered effect in Elden Ring. Found naturally on most katanas, it can also be added to other weapons. With fast attacking weapons in dual wield mode (called power stancing in ER), it is very easy to apply multiple bleeding stacks to the enemy, which then do tremendous damage to the enemies. Weapons also come with unique weapon arts which in some cases can be tremendously powerful.
So while the game ensures that everyone has some way to get through it, I much preferred the earlier games approach, where through practice, anyone could get good enough at the basic combat (parrying, dodging, etc) to complete the game that way and then feel good about their skills, to the Elden Ring approach, where most people will have trouble beating the game in a "fair" way, and will instead have to resort to summons and overpowered effects/arts. The latter will work but leave the player feeling a little empty, kind of like they cheated.
While the main storyline of Elden Ring is fairly simplistic (go around the world, collect a few gizmos to put together, etc), there is actually a lot of mythological type stuff underneath that. The demigod children of Queen Marika had a lot of fun before you came along, waged all sorts of battles and engaged in various dramatic events. The problem is, all of this is presented to you in very sparse NPC dialogue lines, a few descriptions here and there, and other tiny tidbits of information. What's worse, there is no continuity to quests or storylines from the player's perspective: you meet some NPC, they tell you something vague, then you play for another 30 hours and meet another NPC who tells you something that happens to be the next step in that quest-line. But without a quest journal or anything like that, I have no idea how the player is supposed to keep track of this stuff. So the only quests I was able to complete were the few exceptions that were entirely in the same place/time, or the ones I looked up on the game wiki.
As far as exploration, it's a big of a mixed bag. On one hand, Elden Ring is full of out-of-the-way places to find, and can sometimes be a sheer joy to explore. But on the other, after a while, you start seeing a lot of asset reuse, with the same types of dungeons, bosses, enemies popping up again and again. And the game's emphasis on difficult combat and absence of significant dialogue also dampens the joys of exploration somewhat, at least for me.
So in the end, I feel like Elden Ring is a game that is neither completely bad, nor particularly good, stuck somewhere between the mainstream crap being regurgitated by AAA studios and the true open world gaming gems like Kingdom Come or Breath of the Wild. It might be worth playing in the age of so few quality titles being released, but will cause just as much frustration and disappointment as gaming joy.
