Ok why does this guy doesn’t have more views? Great voice, well pace, with the subscribers made me think this is gonna be he playing and talking. This is a legit analysis. Keep it up man
Thank you! I'm glad you liked it! As for the subs it's definitely in part because I spend a lot of time talking about quite niche games that nobody is looking for on TH-cam haha I've only made three of these longer form analysis videos, but I'm definitely planning on making more because they're a lot of fun
The part about being a sorcerer was so true ugh,, i felt like I was missing out on so many cool weapons and such. I really wish they made good spells more accessible. Love ur review btw, everything you said I related to immensely
Yes! Especially with the need to put points in vigor I didn't get a better spell than Rock Sling until I'd pretty much finished the game.. Glad you liked the video!
You really nailed a few pieces of critique I had with Elden Ring. Regular enemies, more than ever, aren't worth fighting. Running past them was way too easy and there was zero effort put in to make me care about 3 copies of the same enemy. The crafting was my other gripe. It's so baffling, since it's CLEARLY a sign that Fromsoft didn't have any clue on why/how crafting works in certain games. Beyond the completionist side of me wanting all the recipes, the crafting is completely superfluous. If they had changed how the items work, like you kind of touched on, where you don't lose them if you die or something, sure. But you do, and since they're usually worthless, and the trial and error of testing every type of item on a boss to see if any are useful is tedious and wasteful, most players will likely not even give it a second thought. If From wasn't king, maybe Elden Ring would have received some backlash like Breath of the Wild did with its weapon break system. I'm personally OK with weapons breaking, but the crafting in Elden Ring seems like a much more obvious misstep.
I think what they've got lucky with in the crafting is that it's sort of so poorly implemented that it's incredibly easy to just ignore. You never need crafting for the main story, so it doesn't have much of a negative impact and instead just feels like a wasted feature! Regular enemies were far more disappointing, it was a shame seeing how less and less frequently I interacted with them as I played further through the game..
@@Table53 Happened to think of something you mentioned in the video that I didn't comment on. I know you said that the weapons/items you'd find were really only beneficial for melee players, but I remember Joseph Anderson said the same thing but in reverse. He was melee only, and loathed the amount of spells he'd find that he'd never even think of using. It's nuts that both of you had the exact same annoyance but opposite.
That is interesting, I guess because there are more than 2 possible ways to build a character most items won't be useful to you regardless of how you play. I found a lot of unusable spells too (that use Faith rather than intelligence). The Faith spells, Intelligence spells and maybe ashes and war if he counted them would be a lot of your rewards and on a melee build you might only use a couple of them
Heyo, a video on a game I've played! Love it dude! Hope this was fun to make, I was eyeing it up and the scale scared me. I still haven't finished the game lmao
Oh dang, you'd have thought this is what YT would have shown me on my phone rather than just your other comment. Thanks man! Yeah it was good fun to write this much again, though I can't say it was always so fun piecing together an hours worth of clips from ~60hr of footage haha..
Again you hit on a lot of the same praises and criticisms I have with a game. One notable thing about the Elden Ring criticisms is that many of them are simply endemic to From's Soulslike designs. The long walk backs to bosses or the contradiction between consumable weapons as simultaneously a quick tool but also a "precious" resource you never really want to use has been around since the start. These decisions aren't actually necessary in the genre as From themselves have come up with some solutions. While Demon Souls may genuinely have you run through a 5 minute gauntlet to try a boss again, Sekiro almost always puts a save point immediately before them. People have explained this to me as Souls games having a focus on the run back and the boss battle being a holistic challenge whereas Sekiro specifically makes the bosses a much larger focus and more demanding as a result. But it's clear in all of From's games that they've made bosses an increasingly difficult spectacle with each game culminating in some of Elden Ring's late game fights. As you point out, From seemingly recognized this and put Stakes of Marika, but them seem at odds with that design decision as they don't always use them (That said in your example video you did miss a significant shortcut that cuts out roughly half of the run back time though it's still a slog *shrug*). We see the same thing with consumables. We know it's an issue for many people on choosing when to use resources they can deplete, and things like the flasks are an excellent solution to this issue as you know that these are the flasks you'll have every life. They do not languish in your inventory for ever over a paralysis of using them non-optimally. Once again though we see Elden Ring make a half-measure improvement through the cracked pot consumables. These are permanent vessels you can imbue with different effects. Finding each cracked pot is like a little permanent upgrade, but they still make you spend a small number of resources to imbue them. I think it would've been more satisfying to spend a larger sum of resources to get a permanent equipable imbue so if you invested enough you could always have 5 fire pots and 2 blood pots on each life or whatever you set as your loadout. This would also act as a fun form of progression. But once again they're still a bit shackled to this consumable thing. All that said, the game is marvelous and truthfully, there is something to the opaque design decisions that had they not been implemented like that from the start, I wonder if we would've ever gotten this genre in the first place. Over time I believe the edges can be smoothed, but there probably is something integral about that rough seed that these games grew From.
Oh what? Where's the shortcut back to the boss in the academy? The only other route I could think of was up the stairs to the left but that has enemies which I assumed would make it take longer! Yeah the consumables just don't quite fit for me. I think it's a reasonable test that any game where you would be willing to die rather than use an item has failed to properly implement those items which is why the flasks have always been so good! I feel like there was a bit of "AAA open world games always have crafting" influencing the design in this regard..
Great video. Elden ring bosses are such bs compared to past games. They just aren’t fun to fight in this game. Past games had a nice back and forth balance to battle whereas this game it just lets the bosses be so aggressive, quick and attack repeatedly over and over and over without a punish window unless you wanna trade hits.
I'm not the biggest FromSoft expert, but even just from the start to the end of Elden Ring I agree with you. Morgott for example, sublime. A range of different attacks with quick releases, long delays, occasional use of range, attacks with some spectacle to them (the hammer) and while it's not the hardest fight you have to be on your toes and make the right dodges/jumps/blocks on the right attacks which makes it really satisfying. Especially because when you play your defence right you get windows to punish. When you just have to dodge and dodge and dodge for 15 seconds before getting in maybe one heavy attack it's just not as fun
Yeah that was a bit of a shame, I think with Elden Ring being a long game and having such strong opening areas where you'll want to spend even more time.. by the end I think I just wanted to get through a boss rush and be finished. So every other enemy felt like an obstacle
I don't disagree to be honest. I think the lack of balance is only an issue towards the end (where its a big issue). As for the size of the game I personally would want it to be a bit smaller, but I can understand other people loving how there's loads of things in the game
Leveling is a strong influence on the game. Rune farming removes some of the diabolical ‘neo-liberal’ economics of obtaining enough vigor and setting up your individual mode-calibration. Some skills are objectively switching the play through to ‘normal mode.’ I finally found a balance where I did not risk dying in open play and I can choose to fight or not along the way. I can level through accumulation of play and not farm except for upgrades (another terrible issue you failed to hammer hard enough) of weapons. Keeping a gold scarab talisman in a pouch seems to get in the way a little, but it is what I do to help out with buying stones for late game pickups. I mean, ONE 5? One 6, when you are traversing the tough areas of the game? Should be 8x5, or 6x6 stones so you can actually focus on the game besides the crafting economy.
I really, really don't like the concept that specific skills or playstyles are a "difficulty level" You should be able to pick a play style without it also independently affecting the difficulty. That's for both melee users wanting an easier experience, and magic users wanting more involved and trickier combat! In hindsight I agree, I should have mentioned upgrade materials more. I got stuck with a fairly weak weapon for a while because I had loads of level ~5 and 6 stones, but not enough level 3 stones! So I was stuck in a very weak weapon and didn't know where to go to get more! Although ultimately I also felt like the video spends more time on negatives than positive, a want to tilt that even further for a game that I did really like! Thanks for leaving a comment :)
So this was the big video you were working on! I am not into soulslike games myself, since I just do not have the patience to replay the same part of a game for 37 times and just want to see what's next... That being said, it's easy too see how Elden Ring is a masterpiece and might even be FromSoftware's best work til date. The only thing I am left wondering is... where do they go from now? How can you possibly top this? This might honestly be the peak of where soulslike games like these can go, but I'd love to be proven wrong
I understand that completely, Elden Ring is better for it than DS3 but there are still times when you just want a boss battle to be over with so you can move on! I don't really know enough about the Souls series to make a proper guess, but they could well go back to a more linear design again
Pretty sure they’re gonna go back to making another Armored Core game if I’ve heard correctly. It’s basically some sort of mech fighting game. But after that, I hope another linear and refined experience like Sekiro
Hey hey. I thought I’d check your channel out after watching your segment in Dorkaxe’s video. Great work! I found it easy to listen to you and found myself agreeing with a lot of the points you made. I’ll be checking out some of your other vids. All the best 😃
I can't really argue against that for the final third/quarter of the game. Boss fights became so tedious due to the strength of certain attacks, and because of that felt no desire to explore the world and just wanted to rush through them to get it over with!
@@Table53 honestly I struggle through the entire game. I just don't feel like an open world game meshes well with dark souls gameplay. The fact that I can continously stumble into higher level areas and lower level areas without any form of checks and balances baffles me. It's the ds1 graveyard/catacombs problem on steroids. I really REALLY want to like this game, but this issue strongly hampers my ability to do so :(
I’ve been wanting to get into the Souls franchise for a while, I saw a video on Elden Ring like a day after it came out and I was sold. Love this game, just finished my second playthrough of it last week
I don't think I'm going to finish my second playthrough (just because its such a time investment haha) but it is such a great game. It still catches me by surprise how stunning some areas are even though I've been through them before..
What did I do? I played the game on PC. Saved my game every time I was outside a boss fight and blacked it up. Every time I died I just loaded the backed up save. This was way better than just walking for hours.
By having an "objective difficulty" mode, there are more ideas about how you can have a completely subjective experience amongst each person. If there was an easy mode, it's magic. Or if you are better at melee, it'd magic. It's about how to do it, when to do it, rather than makimg numbers of the enemies and health values go up. Unfortunately those issues sometimes exist amongst enemies in the second half. But the difficulty is more based off of animations, timing. what you know, and what you don't know. This is why challenge runs are so amazing in these games because if you take out magic or certain barrier and put restrictions on yourself, the game gets harder and sometimes even easier depending on what you do. That is the merit and why Souls games are so vital, they are so open, and varied it's incredible. There are ways of mitigating the difficulty, but you have to find that out for yourself. That will always remain. The devs love to see exactly how players deal with specific challenges. That's why it works and why there is no easy mode.
This is one of the more common arguments against difficulty adjustments and it's one that I'm still not really on board with. I don't think the game's level of difficulty should be tied to denying yourself an entire chunk of the mechanics. I don't want to ignore all the really cool Summons in the game just to make a small adjustment to difficulty, and I wouldn't want to be forced into a mage build either just to tone down difficult bosses. Like if a player makes a melee build and likes using a hammer, I wouldn't want to say "well switch to glintstone pebble and its easier". I also don't think that health/damage numbers going up or down is the only approach to difficulty (although I agree, in the late game there are a couple of bosses where this sort of change would likely be an improvement), things like just adding a bit more of a delay between boss attacks or reducing the frequency of their deadliest moves would be another way of making adjustments. Essentially I don't think the addition of an easier mode would affect how I play the game at all, but it would open the genre up to more people!
@@Table53 Yeah. I get what you are saying, but I just think it's an example of everyone on the same playing field. It feels very rewarding amd refreshing to have games that decide they are going to tell you stuff and then you have to do it yourself. I think this series is the exception to difficulty modes. I think it should be left that way. Maybe in Armored Core as that is more of a traditional level-based, telling you the story kind of game. Really when the story is not told to me, and when a specific problem is thrown in, it feels like a journey in how you solve the problem.
The video is great and so is your content and opinions, but to claim that an easy mode wouldn't change the game feels out of place, and was pointlessly placed as a senseless hot take in the end of a farelly positive critique that I mostly agree with. It's surprising to see a game critic take the the controversial side in that discussion stating stuff in favor of such unnecessary triple A game design trends for the sake of accessibility alone when there is in fact a lot to lose from an artistic perspective. To understand why and how this could be bad we must first cast aside all the futile chit chat about disability and money spent in shit you can't play. The souls series has never been shy to throw it's absurd difficulty spikes right off the gate so it's soon enough for you to get a refund if you felt the game was showing a big middle finger to you, and disabled players are merely a shield to this argument and to mention such delicate topic completely misses the point and it's honestly disrespectful. In the case of most videogames, an easier difficulty mode acomplishes only one thing, it makes the game immensely accessible, letting anyone pick up and play is strongly marketable and convenient to add, but it does not equate to good game design. It's mostly an act of overprotection and can severely damage the whole experience. In the case of Dark Souls, it's lack of accessibility is one of its main idiosyncrasies. The quitters are treated as hollow corpses layed down across Lordran, you have a relentless, oppressing world where everything wants to kill you on sight, the world has been long lost and barelly has any life on it, feeling unworthy of saving, and players have the ability to help players or to put them into some more trouble by invading or writing lies with the message system. The developers intended for the game to not be finished by most players and wanted the world to feel daunting and unwelcoming, there's no easy way out, every player will approach it in the same way with multiple manners to choose from. Dark Souls is all about overcoming unsurmountable odds and the title makes its point not in spite of its fix difficulty but because of it, just like in real life you cannot choose an easier path and your success depends on your cleverness, experience, and knowledge and you don't have to go through it alone. The fact that the game allows for coop and messages is a whole new argument on it's favor, Dark Souls has not only it's lore strenghted up from it's challenging nature but there's also a meta to it. The reason why From is so well regarded is because their games are talked about for years after their release, they tend to choose the designs that best suit the experience instead of the ones that please players. It was never about gatekeeping, in fact one of the main draws of a high, fix difficulty is the collaboration between players. The games are intuitive enough to be figured out pretty rapidly but also a bit obtuse so players have to actually think about what they see and ask for help if they can't figure the next step. To have a game that is not easily beatable greatly enlarged it's sense of community, players are helping each other online and even in game, discussing strategies, telling you where to find stuff, making you laugh at their goofyness to spice things up or even soloing the hardest boss in the game for you if that's what you want. Elden Ring is a whole new IP but you can bet its community has been built since Dark Souls and veterans and newcomers treat each other pretty well as far as cooperation goes. Its the most accessible game Miyazaki has ever directed not because he wanted to make things easier but because it serves the open world design they fully committed to this time. And players are gathering along even more now since the odds have never been greater. So, in addition to all that, games can be much thighter balanced when there's a single way to play them, and I think it goes without saying. Letting players choose how hard the game is can be pretty lame and will add up a sense of control and forgiveness that Lordran and even The Lands Between would suffer from, their greatness come from the fact that they are hard to conquer and the games sold their harshness even in a meta level. For me personally, Dark Souls 2 was the game that brought me into the series and it was unforgettable and completely blew my mind, as a teen it was the first hard game I played and I've been enjoying every From Software game since that moment, where other titles were very easy to forget because I could just play them on easy and move on to the next, Dark Souls stayed with me as I grew up and every year or two I play a new FR game and it still captivates me, it captivates all of us. What Miyazaki excels at is not the combat, it's not the boss fights, it's not even the levels, but the worlds all of those things are packed on, because they feel real, they feel alive, and they don't give a shit about you.
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Elden Ring.
Ok why does this guy doesn’t have more views? Great voice, well pace, with the subscribers made me think this is gonna be he playing and talking. This is a legit analysis. Keep it up man
Thank you! I'm glad you liked it! As for the subs it's definitely in part because I spend a lot of time talking about quite niche games that nobody is looking for on TH-cam haha
I've only made three of these longer form analysis videos, but I'm definitely planning on making more because they're a lot of fun
The part about being a sorcerer was so true ugh,, i felt like I was missing out on so many cool weapons and such. I really wish they made good spells more accessible.
Love ur review btw, everything you said I related to immensely
Yes! Especially with the need to put points in vigor I didn't get a better spell than Rock Sling until I'd pretty much finished the game.. Glad you liked the video!
You really nailed a few pieces of critique I had with Elden Ring. Regular enemies, more than ever, aren't worth fighting. Running past them was way too easy and there was zero effort put in to make me care about 3 copies of the same enemy. The crafting was my other gripe. It's so baffling, since it's CLEARLY a sign that Fromsoft didn't have any clue on why/how crafting works in certain games. Beyond the completionist side of me wanting all the recipes, the crafting is completely superfluous. If they had changed how the items work, like you kind of touched on, where you don't lose them if you die or something, sure. But you do, and since they're usually worthless, and the trial and error of testing every type of item on a boss to see if any are useful is tedious and wasteful, most players will likely not even give it a second thought. If From wasn't king, maybe Elden Ring would have received some backlash like Breath of the Wild did with its weapon break system. I'm personally OK with weapons breaking, but the crafting in Elden Ring seems like a much more obvious misstep.
I think what they've got lucky with in the crafting is that it's sort of so poorly implemented that it's incredibly easy to just ignore. You never need crafting for the main story, so it doesn't have much of a negative impact and instead just feels like a wasted feature!
Regular enemies were far more disappointing, it was a shame seeing how less and less frequently I interacted with them as I played further through the game..
@@Table53 Happened to think of something you mentioned in the video that I didn't comment on. I know you said that the weapons/items you'd find were really only beneficial for melee players, but I remember Joseph Anderson said the same thing but in reverse. He was melee only, and loathed the amount of spells he'd find that he'd never even think of using. It's nuts that both of you had the exact same annoyance but opposite.
That is interesting, I guess because there are more than 2 possible ways to build a character most items won't be useful to you regardless of how you play. I found a lot of unusable spells too (that use Faith rather than intelligence). The Faith spells, Intelligence spells and maybe ashes and war if he counted them would be a lot of your rewards and on a melee build you might only use a couple of them
Seeing a video about elden ring from you really was the last thing I'd expect, haha.
Haha, I can fully understand that. I hardly expected it myself
Heyo, a video on a game I've played! Love it dude! Hope this was fun to make, I was eyeing it up and the scale scared me. I still haven't finished the game lmao
Oh dang, you'd have thought this is what YT would have shown me on my phone rather than just your other comment. Thanks man! Yeah it was good fun to write this much again, though I can't say it was always so fun piecing together an hours worth of clips from ~60hr of footage haha..
@@Table53 Weird right? It doesn't tell me when I get a super thanks comment either. Really weird. Yeah man, loved the vid, awesome work!
Again you hit on a lot of the same praises and criticisms I have with a game. One notable thing about the Elden Ring criticisms is that many of them are simply endemic to From's Soulslike designs. The long walk backs to bosses or the contradiction between consumable weapons as simultaneously a quick tool but also a "precious" resource you never really want to use has been around since the start.
These decisions aren't actually necessary in the genre as From themselves have come up with some solutions. While Demon Souls may genuinely have you run through a 5 minute gauntlet to try a boss again, Sekiro almost always puts a save point immediately before them. People have explained this to me as Souls games having a focus on the run back and the boss battle being a holistic challenge whereas Sekiro specifically makes the bosses a much larger focus and more demanding as a result. But it's clear in all of From's games that they've made bosses an increasingly difficult spectacle with each game culminating in some of Elden Ring's late game fights. As you point out, From seemingly recognized this and put Stakes of Marika, but them seem at odds with that design decision as they don't always use them (That said in your example video you did miss a significant shortcut that cuts out roughly half of the run back time though it's still a slog *shrug*).
We see the same thing with consumables. We know it's an issue for many people on choosing when to use resources they can deplete, and things like the flasks are an excellent solution to this issue as you know that these are the flasks you'll have every life. They do not languish in your inventory for ever over a paralysis of using them non-optimally. Once again though we see Elden Ring make a half-measure improvement through the cracked pot consumables. These are permanent vessels you can imbue with different effects. Finding each cracked pot is like a little permanent upgrade, but they still make you spend a small number of resources to imbue them. I think it would've been more satisfying to spend a larger sum of resources to get a permanent equipable imbue so if you invested enough you could always have 5 fire pots and 2 blood pots on each life or whatever you set as your loadout. This would also act as a fun form of progression. But once again they're still a bit shackled to this consumable thing.
All that said, the game is marvelous and truthfully, there is something to the opaque design decisions that had they not been implemented like that from the start, I wonder if we would've ever gotten this genre in the first place. Over time I believe the edges can be smoothed, but there probably is something integral about that rough seed that these games grew From.
Oh what? Where's the shortcut back to the boss in the academy? The only other route I could think of was up the stairs to the left but that has enemies which I assumed would make it take longer!
Yeah the consumables just don't quite fit for me. I think it's a reasonable test that any game where you would be willing to die rather than use an item has failed to properly implement those items which is why the flasks have always been so good! I feel like there was a bit of "AAA open world games always have crafting" influencing the design in this regard..
was looking for an in depth Elden Ring review, found your channel and your great content
subscribed!
Glad you liked the video!
Great video. Elden ring bosses are such bs compared to past games. They just aren’t fun to fight in this game. Past games had a nice back and forth balance to battle whereas this game it just lets the bosses be so aggressive, quick and attack repeatedly over and over and over without a punish window unless you wanna trade hits.
I'm not the biggest FromSoft expert, but even just from the start to the end of Elden Ring I agree with you. Morgott for example, sublime. A range of different attacks with quick releases, long delays, occasional use of range, attacks with some spectacle to them (the hammer) and while it's not the hardest fight you have to be on your toes and make the right dodges/jumps/blocks on the right attacks which makes it really satisfying. Especially because when you play your defence right you get windows to punish.
When you just have to dodge and dodge and dodge for 15 seconds before getting in maybe one heavy attack it's just not as fun
this is the best critique video of Elden Ring I have seen, and I have seen very many. pretty much nailed every point.
Thank you! I'm glad you liked it!
I completely agree with the normal enemy issue. I don’t even fight to em anymore if I don’t have to.
Yeah that was a bit of a shame, I think with Elden Ring being a long game and having such strong opening areas where you'll want to spend even more time.. by the end I think I just wanted to get through a boss rush and be finished. So every other enemy felt like an obstacle
bro convinced me 6 minutes in. thanks for the review!!!!
The games unbalanced and too big.
I don't disagree to be honest. I think the lack of balance is only an issue towards the end (where its a big issue). As for the size of the game I personally would want it to be a bit smaller, but I can understand other people loving how there's loads of things in the game
Its an awesome Review, congrats!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Leveling is a strong influence on the game. Rune farming removes some of the diabolical ‘neo-liberal’ economics of obtaining enough vigor and setting up your individual mode-calibration. Some skills are objectively switching the play through to ‘normal mode.’ I finally found a balance where I did not risk dying in open play and I can choose to fight or not along the way. I can level through accumulation of play and not farm except for upgrades (another terrible issue you failed to hammer hard enough) of weapons. Keeping a gold scarab talisman in a pouch seems to get in the way a little, but it is what I do to help out with buying stones for late game pickups. I mean, ONE 5? One 6, when you are traversing the tough areas of the game? Should be 8x5, or 6x6 stones so you can actually focus on the game besides the crafting economy.
I really, really don't like the concept that specific skills or playstyles are a "difficulty level"
You should be able to pick a play style without it also independently affecting the difficulty.
That's for both melee users wanting an easier experience, and magic users wanting more involved and trickier combat!
In hindsight I agree, I should have mentioned upgrade materials more. I got stuck with a fairly weak weapon for a while because I had loads of level ~5 and 6 stones, but not enough level 3 stones! So I was stuck in a very weak weapon and didn't know where to go to get more! Although ultimately I also felt like the video spends more time on negatives than positive, a want to tilt that even further for a game that I did really like!
Thanks for leaving a comment :)
So this was the big video you were working on! I am not into soulslike games myself, since I just do not have the patience to replay the same part of a game for 37 times and just want to see what's next... That being said, it's easy too see how Elden Ring is a masterpiece and might even be FromSoftware's best work til date. The only thing I am left wondering is... where do they go from now? How can you possibly top this? This might honestly be the peak of where soulslike games like these can go, but I'd love to be proven wrong
I understand that completely, Elden Ring is better for it than DS3 but there are still times when you just want a boss battle to be over with so you can move on! I don't really know enough about the Souls series to make a proper guess, but they could well go back to a more linear design again
Pretty sure they’re gonna go back to making another Armored Core game if I’ve heard correctly. It’s basically some sort of mech fighting game. But after that, I hope another linear and refined experience like Sekiro
A very comprehensive review. Thanks.
I'm glad you liked it!
Hey hey. I thought I’d check your channel out after watching your segment in Dorkaxe’s video. Great work! I found it easy to listen to you and found myself agreeing with a lot of the points you made. I’ll be checking out some of your other vids. All the best 😃
Thanks, I'm happy you like it! Glad that Dorkaxe decided to add other creators to that 2017 video, it worked out really well!
I dunno if it needs an easy mode. I think it just needed to be better designed. It's so unbalanced, I'm rarely ever having fun
I can't really argue against that for the final third/quarter of the game. Boss fights became so tedious due to the strength of certain attacks, and because of that felt no desire to explore the world and just wanted to rush through them to get it over with!
@@Table53 honestly I struggle through the entire game. I just don't feel like an open world game meshes well with dark souls gameplay. The fact that I can continously stumble into higher level areas and lower level areas without any form of checks and balances baffles me. It's the ds1 graveyard/catacombs problem on steroids. I really REALLY want to like this game, but this issue strongly hampers my ability to do so :(
thank you for your refreshing take
Any time!
I’ve been wanting to get into the Souls franchise for a while, I saw a video on Elden Ring like a day after it came out and I was sold. Love this game, just finished my second playthrough of it last week
I don't think I'm going to finish my second playthrough (just because its such a time investment haha) but it is such a great game. It still catches me by surprise how stunning some areas are even though I've been through them before..
What did I do? I played the game on PC. Saved my game every time I was outside a boss fight and blacked it up. Every time I died I just loaded the backed up save. This was way better than just walking for hours.
Wait... that's an option? How do you load the backup save? I assumed the game wouldn't let you "un-die" and I'd just have to run it back
By having an "objective difficulty" mode, there are more ideas about how you can have a completely subjective experience amongst each person. If there was an easy mode, it's magic. Or if you are better at melee, it'd magic. It's about how to do it, when to do it, rather than makimg numbers of the enemies and health values go up. Unfortunately those issues sometimes exist amongst enemies in the second half. But the difficulty is more based off of animations, timing. what you know, and what you don't know.
This is why challenge runs are so amazing in these games because if you take out magic or certain barrier and put restrictions on yourself, the game gets harder and sometimes even easier depending on what you do. That is the merit and why Souls games are so vital, they are so open, and varied it's incredible. There are ways of mitigating the difficulty, but you have to find that out for yourself. That will always remain. The devs love to see exactly how players deal with specific challenges. That's why it works and why there is no easy mode.
This is one of the more common arguments against difficulty adjustments and it's one that I'm still not really on board with. I don't think the game's level of difficulty should be tied to denying yourself an entire chunk of the mechanics. I don't want to ignore all the really cool Summons in the game just to make a small adjustment to difficulty, and I wouldn't want to be forced into a mage build either just to tone down difficult bosses. Like if a player makes a melee build and likes using a hammer, I wouldn't want to say "well switch to glintstone pebble and its easier".
I also don't think that health/damage numbers going up or down is the only approach to difficulty (although I agree, in the late game there are a couple of bosses where this sort of change would likely be an improvement), things like just adding a bit more of a delay between boss attacks or reducing the frequency of their deadliest moves would be another way of making adjustments.
Essentially I don't think the addition of an easier mode would affect how I play the game at all, but it would open the genre up to more people!
@@Table53 Yeah. I get what you are saying, but I just think it's an example of everyone on the same playing field. It feels very rewarding amd refreshing to have games that decide they are going to tell you stuff and then you have to do it yourself. I think this series is the exception to difficulty modes. I think it should be left that way. Maybe in Armored Core as that is more of a traditional level-based, telling you the story kind of game.
Really when the story is not told to me, and when a specific problem is thrown in, it feels like a journey in how you solve the problem.
The video is great and so is your content and opinions, but to claim that an easy mode wouldn't change the game feels out of place, and was pointlessly placed as a senseless hot take in the end of a farelly positive critique that I mostly agree with.
It's surprising to see a game critic take the the controversial side in that discussion stating stuff in favor of such unnecessary triple A game design trends for the sake of accessibility alone when there is in fact a lot to lose from an artistic perspective.
To understand why and how this could be bad we must first cast aside all the futile chit chat about disability and money spent in shit you can't play. The souls series has never been shy to throw it's absurd difficulty spikes right off the gate so it's soon enough for you to get a refund if you felt the game was showing a big middle finger to you, and disabled players are merely a shield to this argument and to mention such delicate topic completely misses the point and it's honestly disrespectful.
In the case of most videogames, an easier difficulty mode acomplishes only one thing, it makes the game immensely accessible, letting anyone pick up and play is strongly marketable and convenient to add, but it does not equate to good game design. It's mostly an act of overprotection and can severely damage the whole experience.
In the case of Dark Souls, it's lack of accessibility is one of its main idiosyncrasies. The quitters are treated as hollow corpses layed down across Lordran, you have a relentless, oppressing world where everything wants to kill you on sight, the world has been long lost and barelly has any life on it, feeling unworthy of saving, and players have the ability to help players or to put them into some more trouble by invading or writing lies with the message system.
The developers intended for the game to not be finished by most players and wanted the world to feel daunting and unwelcoming, there's no easy way out, every player will approach it in the same way with multiple manners to choose from. Dark Souls is all about overcoming unsurmountable odds and the title makes its point not in spite of its fix difficulty but because of it, just like in real life you cannot choose an easier path and your success depends on your cleverness, experience, and knowledge and you don't have to go through it alone.
The fact that the game allows for coop and messages is a whole new argument on it's favor, Dark Souls has not only it's lore strenghted up from it's challenging nature but there's also a meta to it. The reason why From is so well regarded is because their games are talked about for years after their release, they tend to choose the designs that best suit the experience instead of the ones that please players. It was never about gatekeeping, in fact one of the main draws of a high, fix difficulty is the collaboration between players.
The games are intuitive enough to be figured out pretty rapidly but also a bit obtuse so players have to actually think about what they see and ask for help if they can't figure the next step. To have a game that is not easily beatable greatly enlarged it's sense of community, players are helping each other online and even in game, discussing strategies, telling you where to find stuff, making you laugh at their goofyness to spice things up or even soloing the hardest boss in the game for you if that's what you want.
Elden Ring is a whole new IP but you can bet its community has been built since Dark Souls and veterans and newcomers treat each other pretty well as far as cooperation goes. Its the most accessible game Miyazaki has ever directed not because he wanted to make things easier but because it serves the open world design they fully committed to this time. And players are gathering along even more now since the odds have never been greater.
So, in addition to all that, games can be much thighter balanced when there's a single way to play them, and I think it goes without saying.
Letting players choose how hard the game is can be pretty lame and will add up a sense of control and forgiveness that Lordran and even The Lands Between would suffer from, their greatness come from the fact that they are hard to conquer and the games sold their harshness even in a meta level. For me personally, Dark Souls 2 was the game that brought me into the series and it was unforgettable and completely blew my mind, as a teen it was the first hard game I played and I've been enjoying every From Software game since that moment, where other titles were very easy to forget because I could just play them on easy and move on to the next, Dark Souls stayed with me as I grew up and every year or two I play a new FR game and it still captivates me, it captivates all of us.
What Miyazaki excels at is not the combat, it's not the boss fights, it's not even the levels, but the worlds all of those things are packed on, because they feel real, they feel alive, and they don't give a shit about you.