You didn't mention it but DS2 was the game that brought Respec-ing to the series, bringing Soul Vessels to the old fire keepers at the start allows you to reallocate your stats. It's even easier since you don't have to defeat a boss to unlock it, you just need the item. You also get more attempts than in Dark Souls 3, you get 7 Soul Vessels with base DS2 no DLC and 11 with the DLC and more become available with bonfire aesthetics.
@@chadofastora To add to things DS2 did right was bonfire ascetics which push an area into NG+ but also infinitely re-spawn bosses and non metal chest items. Also lot of bosses in DS2 have New drops from NG+. This includes a new boss soul set from the great souls or exclusive upgrades to equipment skeleton lords dropping +2 spell casting speed ring in NG+. Thus making there be a good incentive for replaying said bosses.
@@chadofastora You mentioned dark souls 3 and 1 weapon arts a lot, but you ignored that dark souls 2 had a varied amount of weapons with special and even bizarre powers that some could even be combined thanks to power stance, in addition to shields and armor with abilities. Before Elden Ring existed, many considered that Dark Souls 2 had more replayability because there was so much to use and combine
@@alexfoudraine5886 I’m sorry if it felt like I was neglecting ds2 in terms of build variety, it is great, and I’m giving it a bit of credit in my next video.
the ability to reroll your stats makes this fun because you get new weapons to try out. You're a collector type, but my enjoyment of the mini dungeons come from the bosses not the rewards personally
@@ender8166 yeah man, you didn't find the end because you really wanted some endstone, you fought him because it's cool to fight a big ass dragon that's how i feel with elden ring too
Honestly, I’d find it interesting if they would add a boss colosseum mode, which could have a wave mode, or a progressively difficult boss attempt mode that you can fight with friends and get certain rewards for doing so that are irrelevant to the actual base game, like collectibles and stats.
The open world game meant that my first play through was extremely long. The reason I played dark souls and blood borne etc so many times is because there were so many builds I wanted to try, and the games themselves weren’t terribly long. Elden Ring is just too massive for me to get excited about starting over
Exactly my feelings too. My first playthrough took me 100 hours, though I did try to 100% the game. The NG+ run took about 4 hours since I just skipped everything to get the Frenzied Flame ending. Now I still need the Age of Stars ending, but I'm honestly not feeling like going for a whole new playthrough to finish Rani's Questline and get the ending. I'm burnt out a bit. Guess it's time for me to try Sekiro.
Elden ring is very short when you're only doing main bosses Godrick, rennala, dragon tree sentinel, morgott, fire giant, maliketh, Godfrey, radagon, and elden beast are the main bosses
I feel like I'm in a weird camp where I oddly enjoy the long delays between big bosses. To me, it makes those those boss fights much more well deserved and savory. I can understand how people do not like it, for me though, all the more enjoyable though, like leveling up for a big J-Rpg turn based boss fight.
I found myself purposely "wasting my time" because I didn't want to speedrun my way through the game and enjoy myself and try some new builds out. (First fromsoft game I've played) but I feel like I could've beaten the game and be done with it with 50+ less hours than I originally did. I used a mix of hardcore and "broken" builds so I'm definitely thinking about trying Sekiro
Mhm, I'm honestly still in camp "fuck the delays" but I won't deny that as of late I've felt satisfaction in dodging delayed attacks consistently. Personally though, one thing that I liked about previous souls games was how intuitively combat flowed. You didn't need to memorise attack patterns, as long as you had a good sense of resource management and reflexes, you could beat a boss on your first try without ever memorising any of their patterns. Elden Ring's abundance of weird timings combined with both drawn out and lightning fast wind ups means a lot more memorising is required to win fights now. That's not really objectively good or bad. It just means it plays differently to other souls games, and it's in a way I don't like
I've got 500 hours in this game, there's not one single player game I've played ever that has even come close to that. Every so often I'll see a new build from Fextralife on TH-cam and I'll be like whelp.....guess I'm booting up Elden Ring again. The crazy thing is I'm still discovering little things I've never seen about the world at 500 hours in. The game is just a masterpiece. One of the few single player games to justify a $60 price tag. Plus, even though it's not the focus, the PvP is fun also.
I'm at 630 hours. I did the 3 endings to get my platinum with my rl 315 character. And I have a rl 30, 80, and 120 for pvp. First 2 playthroughs I explored every little nook and cranny. It was surprising how many things I missed in playthrough 1. Playthrough 3 and 4(I messed up Ranni's ending and did ths default in playthrough 3...so I had to do an entire playthrough again!) I zipped through the game pretty fast skipping Mohg, Melania, ect. After being able to use every weapon, spell, armor, incantation...it does get a little stale. Found myself helping out players with every main boss as a phantom before I beat them just for fun.
What makes the game replayable, to me, are the build variants. Even if you're running a strength/faith build again, it's likely gonna be different if you're using a different weapon. Sadly the catacombs and caves aren't replayable at all, but the main content and quests are. I just finished my 6th full playthrough, and for the first time, I used strictly non-somber weapons. And lemme tell you, there's a reason people prefer somber: they're stronger and easier to upgrade. I was stuck at a +16 weapon up until Mountaintop, while I'd have a +10 somber at this point usually. So that was interesting to experience.
How little build diversity there is given how much stronger some are then others SEVERELY drops replayability. Even more so when you can test every build before your 1st playthrough even ends. It's a very lacking game
@@Digger-Nick Build diversity. Here we go: - Melee: fuckton to choose from, focused on block counters/heavy attacks/poise breaking/dual wielding - magic builds (including melee options from different schools) int+fth/int+arc/fth+arc - hybrids: quality/str+int/str+fth/str+arc/dex+int/dex+fth/dex+arc/int+fth (for sword of night and flame) - ranged possibilities - massive arcenal of practical and powerful consumables Should i say more? Go play your call of dumpass and league of farts
Someone out there gets it! Thank you for this explanation video, it really does sum up how I've felt about Elden Ring: + It's got great variety for builds and concepts + It has wonderful quality of life changes - The travel between the bosses ruins the experience of the fights (no matter how hard or easy they are) - The travel around the areas is only fun on the first gameplay (after that, the excitement is lost) ER is a great game and deserves no true hate (at least, for right now), but DS3 and BB really hit that "balanced Souls-like" itch when it comes to the limitations they had. They won't have the quality-of-life that Elden Ring has, but they're still more fun to loop around into NG+ more than what ER can do. PLEASE DO NOT misunderstand that I'm dissing or "hating" people who can find the fun in ER's NG+ or replay ability! If there are people out there who can love ER no matter it's differences, that's awesome! I Just can't like it as much as everyone else can, which is fine too. To each their own, and cheers for the dedication to the games you all like. But equally, cheers to you Chad of Astora for explaining it in a way I couldn't for my friends. 👍
My first playthrough was mind blowing and thoroughly engaging throughout. After beating the game I began a 100% playthrough and while beating every boss and finishing every quest I’ve been blown away at just how much I missed. While I likely won’t ever beat Elden Ring 100% again, I do think the replay ability factor is still there if you go into the game with a build in mind, and focus on completing the side content only required for that build. In a similar vein, I am more excited for Ng+ in this game than I normally am as there are TONS of late game armor, spells and weapons that I think will be extremely enjoyable to run with into the next Ng+ cycle
I agree 100%. My favorite part of another play through is the builds, bosses, & fashion, for all of these games. That’s why I like elden ring so much, so it’s wild to me when I see people complaining about replay value. I understand not wanting to go through every part again, but this game gives the opportunity to skip a lot of extra content. I even see people complain about the existence of ashes of war, which is my favorite but I guess some ppl think it ruins PvP. I’ve never been into PvP, & have always been more of solo rpg type, which goes to show that this game is so good. All different kinds of people that want different things love this game, & I think everyone can find at least 1 thing they think this game excels at. Great video!
I agree with this 100%…first souls game but not in this realm of pvp gaming. I now have 10 different chars all at various pvp breakpoints and i have a fucking blast re beating the game each time. I just 100% the game with my lvl 50 +12/+5 char and it was still challenging and fun
I kind of disagree because if you are paying for a game. you shouldn't feel like especially for the first playthrough of it that you need to skip things because its too repetitive. But I felt like (on my first playthrough) it was wayyy too repetitive. That is a problem that I can't say I've ever had with another game before on the first playthrough. I think what it comes down too is calling it how it is. and its bad game design. I think they are only 9 unique bosses in this game which means every other boss you have fought more than once in the game assuming you have explored everywhere. And im pretty sure Dark Souls 3 has at least double that. This hurts the game a lot because one of the first things you see in the game is a Tree Sentinel and its really cool... until you realise that you have to fight it multiple times.
@@edad170 I mean it depends how you are counting it. I found what you looked up about 103 unique bosses but the way they counted it includes variants of those bosses. In my opinion that doesn't count as they have a very similar move set and they have the same model. Tree sentinel and Draconic Tree Sentinel or all of the minor erdtree's (some have different moves). Or even Margit and Morgott are not unique as they share basically the same model. So basically what I'm saying is it entirely depends on what you think unique is. If you look it up some say 8 unique bosses, some say 32 and so on.
How does this guy only have 3 subscribers? With such streamlined quality content, I expected subscribers in the thausands. I hope that more people will find this channel! :)
This just happens with games (even big ones) that grab your interest, everything about elden ring is so memorable and beautiful that you play through once or twice at a combined 160 hours or so and it’s imprinted in your brain. Nobody reads a book t they love and go “man that was so good, I’m gonna read it again” at least not immediately. This lack of replay ability has effected me all my life with every game I’ve finished that I’ve played, you just need to wait a while before diving back into it again so you maybe forget a couple details and it seems new again
@@ryanhopkins5239 yeah I’m a huge souls series fan and I’ve never understood everybody’s fascination with multiple ng+ runs, I’ve only ever done so to get an item or weapon I missed out on and it was a quick run
The only game I've played through again immediately after beating it is Persona 5 strikers, I absolutely love that game and its definitely in my top 10 favorite games if not top 5.
This is my first fromsoft game and I did NG +4 or so before I moved on and recently just really wanted to start a new run and been having a blast. Honestly a top 3 video game all time.
Even though I LOVE Elden Ring, something about it being open world loses some of the Souls charm. I liked coming to intimately know every environment in the past, seeing vistas in the distance and letting your imagination run wild. Also, nice to hear Secunda in the video!
I think with ease to share info and get info thru social media, forums, and youtube perpetuates the feeling that you "need that info" or have a fully optimized OP build to melt bosses or play elden ring "properly". I try avoid strategy info on a first playthrough and just learn and test a little on my own, but I have a lot experience with these types of games. As the player base expands you will always get more individuals that just want to beat the game as fast and easy as possible and move on to the next thing. I enjoyed the vid and the view points. I like monster hunter as much as like FromSoftware games, because of the similar kind of combat with more focus on just boss fights. They really need some type of boss arena or boss replay mode. The amount of build variety is awesome and the pace of the game is great. I always felt at the appropriate level just paying thru naturally on my first playthrough (not rushing to high level area to get endgame mats or weapons). I enjoy starting new playthroughs for the most part vs new game plus, but I understand why some like it and is needed, if you want more play time with some endgame weapons. Good vid, thanks for taking the time to make it!
Ive put abt 180 hrs in the game and im still playing it rn. I have an acc on ng+4, one on ng+2, and several other accs with the story completed. The build variety and the bosses make this game for me. Im currently doing a mage build and i just beat dragonic tree sentinal. This game is a masterpiece to me
There is literally 0 reason to replay the game, especially when only 5% of the builds completely overshadow the other 95%. The world is also completely barren and lifeless lol. Not even close to a "masterpiece" like Sekiro was.
@@Digger-Nick u can literally make anything work almost it doesn’t matter and the only reason people replay it is because it’s fun u just don’t get the same feeling from playing the game i thought sekiro was very boring but that’s just my opinion
My first playthrough took 120 hours + but all my subsequent play throughs on a new character is 40 hours and 5 hours on NG+. So to me this game has massive replay value. All other Fromsoft games only played NG+ and done.
i agree.. I have 1k hrs in Elden Ring. Almost as much hours as I have both Dark Souls 1&3.. Which is around 1k hours each. I personally just love these games and always have since first playing Demon Souls.. The Replay value of elden ring is honestly higher imo because of how easy it is to make good builds compared to Dark Souls 3. This games more forgiving imo
Even on my first playthrough the length of time required to travel places annoyed me. I enjoyed the spectacles but for me combat is where it's at. I tried to start another playthrough recently and how long it took to get to Margit alone was enough to deter me from continuing. The tutorial pop ups where annoying af after a while too (yes i figured out how to turn them off too late) and the cutscenes with the fire keeper sheesh IDC!
Good point with the Boss replay mechnic. With that it will keep the feeling of momentum and excitement longer or at least maintained since you don't need to take more time traveling to the boss' location. Maybe it will be updated with that feature.
Honestly, I took a big break from elden ring. But recently I came back and I have to say, I love this game, I like helping others, collecting new stuff, and discovering secrets I previously skipped and learning about new npc’s and quests. Overall I give Elden Ring a 10/10, I love it Edit: I do wish they would make a DLC tho, and no I dont count the new PvP stuff as DLC.
As my first souls game, I am very much looking forward to replay Elden Ring. In my case, I began my playthrough in a laptop (which detrimented the experience) and now I'm finishing it on the Steam Deck, so I can't wait to properly experience limgrave. I really hope your content gets soon recognised as it deserves!
Im also playing it on steamdeck...absolutely in love with the game and i HATED the darksouls games tbh.not cuz of the difficulty but bcuz u were forced to move in a linear way,i only ever enjoy open world games so elden ring is just great.many awesome bossfights,secrets and weapons to find even after hundreds off hours into it im still finding new stuff
I’m on my 3rd play through . I started with ds2 beat it once then ds3 just came out . I did every build imaginable. If you love dark souls you’ll love it all
The boss replay mechanic is absolutely needed. Mostly by your first play-through you will collect all the cool shit there is and will have a good inventory. Since respecing is kinda easy i want to be able to try different builds on different bosses without having to start a whole new playthrough.
I’m an avid new game plusser over here, and you summarized my feelings COMPLETELY, and some points I never even knew I felt. Your amazing! Loved the video man
Couldn't have put it better myself. Every playthrough I do I imagine 50% of the hours put into it are either travelling on Torrent or being AFK while looking up stuff on the wiki. Having to go out of your way to get basically necessary items and questlines (like the Sacred Tears and Ranni's Questline) is such an annoyance compared to the previous games where an upgrade material or quest line would literally be in the next room, not the other end of the map. That being said, the build variety, world and bosses are still bringing me back to this game. Even on my 6th playthrough, I'm still finding new caves, items, hidden paths and lore. It's a masterpiece with it's biggest flaw being it's biggest selling point.
of the two camps i actually think i sit in both of them. it is the best game by far mechanically and is more interesting than even my favorite, ds1, but i do find myself usually needing a long while to want to replay the game. that being said, i got the beta for the first person mod and now i can't stop replaying the game. something about playing it from a new perspective has me feeling even more engaged by absolutely everything, and i'm now creating multiple playthroughs all at once for different friends i'm playing with. entirely of two minds on the subject.
I honestly thought you were a channel with at least 100k subs or at least 50k cause of how good the vídeo quality is, hope your channel grows a lot more and keep the great content coming 👌
Good video. I began to find Elden Ring fatiguing in subsequent playthroughs, such that I would often reach a boss and feel like I didn't have enough energy and patience to approach the fight in a sensible manner. I would have liked the ability to replay boss encounters too, and not simply so I can skip to the good stuff, but because I'm often not satisfied with my victory. It might have been a messy fight, I might have just gotten lucky, or I cheesed it etc. I wanna fight the boss again sometimes so as to snag a cleaner, more dominant win.
That is a GREAT point, I remember when I first beat Maliketh it was so unclean, and I just felt annoyed rather than satisfied with my first W against him
There’s a mod that lets you resurrect bosses if I’m not mistaken. I’m not undermining your criticism of course. I’m simply giving you a suggestion to enjoy the game more. Personally speaking, mods increased this game’s replayability tenfold for me.
Congratulations, you’ve earned yourself a new subscriber. Not only are your points concise and well argued, you don’t fall into the trap of filling the entire video with criticisms while forgetting the positives. Many people here on TH-cam do this, they spend hours raving about what the game could’ve done better, without ever highlighting how incredible it already is. Elden Ring is as close to as I’ve seen a game get to having a perfect open world. There are things that could be better, but nothing will erase what this game already accomplishes .
Bloody slash definitely helped me immensely in my first play thru. Didn’t even look up anything about bloody slash just found it after the Kenneth Haight quest and figured I’d use it since I was a dex / arcane bleed build. That move literally demolishes lol- and you can use it the entire game
The same goes for me with incantations and sorceries for me. Discus of Light, and Rock Sling. It's reduced so many fights that COULD have been fun and challenging, to mere spectating.
I'm currently playing Elden Ring, just bought it at Christmas, now I'm at Rykard, already killed morgott radahn and rennala, currently level 67, I'm feeling like the game is way too big and diluted, there's too much empty space between locations, and sometimes this space is full of crap, like the lake of rot. I've done every dungeon, and explored very much, but the dungeons feel very much the same, repeating the same minibosses, like those stone cat/dogs with delayed swoosh. It seems to me that in 35 hours I haven't achieved anything important yet, because I kept completing every dungeon and getting all the items. Personally the best From Software's game is Sekiro, that I love because of the perfect combat sistem, the ninja stuff parkour, and the boss fights, that are really testing the player's skill. Inner Father>>>>>>>>>>>>Every boss fight in From's games
As someone who falls under the “elden ring isn’t that replayable compared to the rest of the series camp” I’d like to add one point. You’ll always start every playthrough needing to collect the items in the peninsula. Specifically the huge amount of Sacred Tears and on your way there be sure to stop by the first mine to grab all the upgrade stones. Then I just immediately go and steamroll rennala, go up to plateau, come back down and fight Radhan. When I’m replaying I often know the armor and weapons I need ahead of time. So at least in the old games the upgrade stones and healing upgrades were less clumped in an area like the sacred tears at the peninsula, or the having a specific area like the mine you go every time. M
Very true, getting bell bearings, golden seeds, sacred tears, after playthrough 2 it gets very repetitive, every souls game has an area that's a slog to play through like shrine of amana, for elden ring it's the egregious amount of set up
Yesnt, if you complete the story going straight up to the end instead of exploring every inch of it then yeah, if you explore about everything in the game the first time then it is very likely you already had enough.
We should make a request to FROMSOFTWARE to add a Boss Rush Mode.. They added the one in Sekiro after more than a year and a half from release. And more Elden Ring content is anyway expected as they said.
@@chadofastora Yeah, I just beat Maliketh and this is literally the first boss in ANY game where I said, "Dang I beat him, I kinda want to do that again". 🤣
We must consider that this game was made in tandem with Sekiro, so not all of the lessons they have learned are present. This would include the boss rush feature and such, I suppose. Personally, it is thrilling to know that even if Elden Ring does feel like the culmination of everything they have learned with their own games, it is truly not, not yet.
I feel like elden ring has great replayability with terrible execution. For example I feel people get bored because they want to do something but the motivation leaves all of a sudden after remembering everything that leads there. I think that a good way for people to not get bored is to allow people in ng+ to go to any grace point that they had unlocked before with exceptions of bosses.
Hot damn, I was shocked when I looked at the subscriber count during this video. Clear points, examples to help illustrate them, easy to understand language without being too simple, and more. As a souls veteran, I find myself agreeing to most of the video, possibly all of it. Generally speaking, Elden Ring has all that I want out of a souls-like, with two exceptions, both of which are brought up in the video: no way to fight unique bosses more than once per playthrough (hail DS2, haven't really played Sekiro), and I find the world of Elden Ring to simply be a bit too large. I think FromSoftware would have had a chance to greatly improve the quality of the game if the world was like 20% smaller. This would have helped with the issue of down time when replaying the game as well.
i think if From makes another open world game will be more condensed and smaller , anyway good video i think challenges run in ER are great to replay it, 0+ only, consumable only bow only now that they feel stronger
I'm a pretty solid "Elden Ring is my least favorite FromSoft game" guy. I haven't finished Sekiro, DS1 or DS2, but everything about Elden Ring minus the build variety and the legacy dungeons makes me mad. The best parts of Elden Ring are the legacy dungeons, and that's because you have a set destination, and can't just blitz past everything with Torrent. You're not rewarded enough for interacting with the open world. You can usually just run past everything, assassinate the miniboss that drops an item, and leave without giving the regular enemies any time to react. It feels like it isn't worth your time to even fight most regular enemies in the open world, since they just drop runes, and don't reward you with anything. Sure, you can run past enemies in Stormveil or Volcano Manor, but they'll eventually catch up to you. Your reward for defeating THEM is progress. Definitely don't like the regular dungeons either, they're mostly filled with recycled gimmicks and bosses. There's only two that I can say I enjoyed, both of which being in the sewer of Leyndell. I don't think Elden Ring is bad overall, but I don't like it nearly as much as everyone else seems to.
Yeah exactly man The open world isn't good enough for it to be justifiable, because ERs greatest feats are still its classic areas from past Souls games They should've ditched the open world and just make another metroidvania and it probably would've been better than Bloodborne
I come back to play it frequently, it feels really fun to try things out combat wise, I have so many characters to play different builds and for the most part, they have a large impact on how I interact with the game. I have no issue with the travel in Elden Ring, I really enjoy the landscape and the way it’s built, where many landmarks can be seen no matter where you are, so with a few play throughs, I feel like I know the lay of the lands between, it often feels like a nice bit of breathing room between combat. 100% agree with the looking stuff up thing, I didn’t that a lot on my first play through for quest lines and how I can build a character that would be like guts from berserk. It feels like that it took a while to feel like I was getting the hang of kt, but it also feels nice to see so much of the community coming together to accumulate knowledge
I know every area by heart by now, what bothers me most is not the long ways but the knowledge of where the enemies will be. It kinda makes me feel like a inhabitant of the lands between, guiding friends thru it which is nice...but stale for solo runs. For Elden Ring, it may have been bold, yet good to have, might be an enemy randomizer in higher new game rounds, not exchanging enemies changing their spawning and patrol locations, to at least keep the encounters fresh when traversing the wide relatively unimportant areas. Tho maybe it would be too alien even for Fromsoft.
Great take on the end game flaw that's really not a big flaw really, I agree that some of replay through can be rough especially npc quest that require extra time, but then again if I want to duel wield a powerful weapon then doing a npc quest twice isn't so bad lol
I’ve spent around 1200 hours in the game, I’m in my 17th playthrough and still occasionally discover new things. I love experimenting with different builds, so the replay value for me is clearly an 10/10.
I love just hanging out in The Lands Between. I boot it up on my ng4 save and just do a couple dungeons, fight a couple camps, conjure up a new build with some new fashion and just relax that way.
im also somewhere in the middle when it comes to how replayable elden ring really is. im a bit of a newcomer to the series after starting in mid 2020, but even then after finishing every souls game and demons souls, i instantly jumped into ng+ or flat out created a new character, but for elden ring i just satisfied with finishing it and i didnt pick it back up until recently when it went on sale on steam.
I'll never understand how it doesn't have replay value. This is the only game I've done a million playthroughs of in this short amount of time having the game
It's very simple - it took me so long to finish the game for the first time that when I started NG+, I immediately felt tired and didn’t want to play anymore. It also seemed to me that PvP and co-op are worse implemented here than in DS3. It was just harder for me to find players because of the separation by levels / upgrades (it's much easier now after the patch).
A lot of people don't like the open ended nature of the game, even if you tackle anything you want at any order, which succeeded were the DS sequels struggled. Personally, I just do the content I want with different characters exploring different places. This works because there's not a "bad area" like Lost Izalith or Farron Keep. Even the reuses felt fun for how complex and varied enemies are.
Do you not understand or do you just not feel that way? cause it doesn't seem that strange to me that people don't like traversing such a huge world multiple times. What made dark souls replayable was the fact that its a 30 hour game, elden ring is not. Yes you can skip areas etc but you still need to farm to beat main area bosses if you just skip everything else since youll be underleveled, not to mention you have to travel so fucking much by horse. Many more points but thats the gist. There is build variety but in order to make a build viable without being ng+ you have to try very hard for it, and usually you need to respec to make it work, since most of them become viable in the late game and by then you need to farm somehow.
@@mikechartofilis not only you can finish ER between 40 to 50 hours, you can skip most content or do certain things out of order; helps to know that there's also no bad areas in this game like Lost Izalith or Farron Keep. By the first 10 hours I can have a pure melee mostly done, but if I want a hybrid, I can do certain things out of order and have a decent to good character in-between 10-15 hours, you could imagine how strong it could be at 40 hrs. So no, after 6 playthroughs (which is a lot for a complex ARPG and an open world game of all things), there's still plenty of optional but interesting content to do while you finish the game. Of course, if you don't like horses in OW games, then you wouldn't enjoy ER, nor other games like TW3, RDR2 or, even worse, BoTW. Coda: I say BoTW is worse 'cause if you're far from the horse s, they won't come to you.
If I can make a suggestion for everyone. Grab 1 to 3 friends, and play the "Seemless Coop" mod for ER, using the "Hard Mode" or "Harder Mode" as you see fit. It transforms the game into a full fledge coop action rpg, but with the hard modes, enemies are far less forgiving, and have massive pools of health. Giving the option to play tank, support, and other less efficient builds when soloing. My buddies and I got to Godskin Duo just last night, and after a 30 mins stuggle, we managed to pull off a kill. 10/10 would do it again, it basically a whole new game.
Shouldn’t have to depend on mods for an experience that deserved to be in the game day 1. Elden Ring could’ve been the ultimate Co-op experience but nah, they just haaaad to please the FromSoft fanboys with invasions and waste another Co-op slot with Blue Hunters
I think the reason there’s become more discourse on Elden ring is because it was a lot of people’s (including mine) first souls game. That made this game seem so fantastic to me ands for the first few months I can only say good things about it. Then I, and as I’m assuming other players introduced to the sites did, tried the other souls games. Now that I’ve played the other games, it’s affected my view of Elden ring and I feel more comfortable joining into souls like discussions. So to summarize,I think there’s more criticism of Elden ring now because there’s been enough time for a new audience to formalize a point of reference that existing souls players had. Making our views of Elden ring more in line with longer tenured players instead of just blind praise
A few points worth mentioning: -Nier Automata's open world suffers, a lot, for lack of visual and enemy variety, a lot of filler fetch quest and many areas that aren't that well design for exploration. On fact, that's one of the biggest criticism people had on the game. -Yeah, playing any open world will take a lot of time. Not every TW3, RDR2 or BoTW fan will immediately replay those games, specially as much as people replayed ER. -ER has received a lot, and I mean, a lot of balances for PVP and PVE. The "OP tools" were extremely nerfed, and every other weapon, along with poise, received buffs. In fact, that community has being very positive the last couple of updates. But every Souls game has received many patches before. DS3 received 14, and that game still suffered from weak magic, pointless weapon arts and pretty bad weapons. -From Reddit to YT is has been stated that, with the right amount of vigor, you shouldn't be oneshotted. In fact, a lot of people didn't even realized that scarseals/sorseal diminish damage resistance, or how there's many damage resistance talismans. So no, even with 50-55 vig, nothing will be near kill you. -After three pure melee playthrough, I can say: no, you don't need summons nor OP tools (which are in every Souls game). In fact, you can watch many videos of just pure melee bossfights, and even challenge runs. Is very dishonest of many in the community saying that you need to use summons or OP weapons, while ignoring that you can craft plenty of projectile items, and how useful perfumes are. -At the end, it depends on what you search in these games. If you only want to rush to fight the boss, good, but that's not what made DeS, DS1 and BB so successful. DS3 heavily suffers from very weak levels and very narrow progression. It doesn't help that if there's a fight you don't like, you have to do it to finish the game, with no tools to avoid it. Overall this comes down to personal preference. Pretty good video overall!
Ds3 has weak levels? High wall of lothric, undead settlement, cathedral of the deep, Irithyll, lothric castle, ariandel, ringed city, you think all these are weak?
@@anonymous01201 No, areas like Farron Keep, Road to Sacrifice, Profane Capital (such a wasted area), Catacombs, Earthen Peak, the lower parts of Ariandel (when breaking the bridge) and, without a doubt, Smouldering Lake, among other areas, are pretty lackluster. Dragon Peak looks cool (except for some enemy placement), but a fraction of that level is in the Great Wyvern fight, which is an underdeveloped gimmick and one of the worst dragon fight in the series. Couple that with ganks in most of that section and you dragged down a good level by some points.
@@enman009 Lower part of ariandel is tiny and optional, and not all that bad apart from the boss. Earthen peak is a DS2 area, if you meant the Dreg Heap that area’s awesome in my opinion and is only let down somewhat because the angels can get annoying, but it’s a cool gimmick nonetheless. I think Archdragon Peak is good but not amazing because some of the enemies there are poorly designed and the wyvern encounter is a bit underdeveloped although I think it would have been good if it didn’t have the boss healthbar. The catacombs is an overall fine area, there’s nothing wrong with it, it just isn’t anything unique. The Profaned Capitol is a huge disappointment with how small it is, but while it is a waste of potential I wouldn’t call it weak since it’s so small that it’s basically just a run up to Yhorm and nothing about it is bad apart from how small it is. Road of sacrifices, Farron keep and the Smouldering Lake are the only ones I would call ‘weak’; even then, just like Bloodborne’s weakest levels (Nightmare Frontier, Nightmare of Mensis) none of them are actually bad. Not to mention that the entire second half of DS1 (Demon Ruins, Lost Izalith, Tomb of Giants, New Londo, Crystal Cave, Chasm of the Abyss) as well as half the areas in the main game of DS2 (Huntsman’s Corpse, Harvest Valley, Iron Keep, Doors of Pharros, Brightstone Cove, Shrine of Amana, Giant’s Memories) are far, far worse, which is why I’m confused as to why you’re singling out DS3 for having ‘very weak’ levels, when the majority of them range from good to great. P.S. Don’t think this has to be said but this is all my opinion.
@@anonymous01201 Yeah, I know is Dreg Heap, but I say Earthen since that was the original name of the game. I'm referring to that hole area since the moment you enter, before the 1st angel. One, of many, of my problems aren't even the angels, is the ganks: many projectile enemies close to a melee one, two very agile enemies in an enclosed area, and then there's the reuse of an old DS2 enemy paired with a reused DS3 enemy. As the last piece of DS content, having this amount of reuses, coupled with Argo appearing three times in Ringed City, and part of that area being another swamp, in a game shock full of swamps, was very disappointing. As for the rest, yeah I know this is all subjective. I just provide enough information about my thoughts so it doesn't feel like complaining because I just don't like a thing or two (which is very popular in this community since the release DS2 or BB I believe). Do you love those areas? All power to you. Is fair to criticize these games, but it is equally valid to defend them, and that's not being a fanboy. So, huge respect Sunbro.
@@enman009 Damn you sound like you really hate ganks. Ganks are all over the souls games, it’s not just DS3, just look at all of DS2 or the several places in Bloodborne where they just decided to increase the challenge by adding 2 joint-aggro strong enemies right next to each other. And despite the fact that they don’t play to the series strengths, ganks aren’t an inherently bad thing in an area, they’re only bad when they’re poorly designed, nothing in Dreg Heap stood out to me as being that way. The swamp in ringed city feels unique enough to where I’m not really bothered by it. And it doesn’t give you any sort of status effect, that’s a plus. It isn’t like Royal Woods from DS1 where it’s literally the exact same aesthetic as an area in the base game. Respect to you too. I was honestly surprised you 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯’𝘵 call me a fanboy with how I’ve been coming across.
Till the day I die, I will always hate the Godskin Noble, Elden Beast, and Beast Clergyman. The Beast Clergyman is a mess and I wish we could get to Malikath sooner, everything about the Godskin Noble make me shoot black flames, and Elden Beast just has too many moves.
Very fair, I'm not a fan of the noble or elden beast either. But I disagree on beast clergyman, I find it a lot of fun, though I do with it was shorter in favor of phase 2
ER has by far the most replay value in any of the Soulsborne games IMO, the thing I like most about replaying it isn’t only just the build variety (which is absolutely crazy), it’s the bosses’ rhythmic complexity, combo branches & the dynamic nature of them that separates it from the older Soulsborne games, it’s why I liken them to Bloodborne’s bosses, they have some similarities in the way they attack & how you have to approach them but ER takes it to a whole another level, From Software has mastered the bosses encounters with this game, all of the remembrance bosses have some trick up their sleeves, I just LOVE how aggressive these bosses can get & how many punishing windows you can CREATE in-between their onslaught, I didn’t know that you could jump Margit’s tail swipe, I didn’t know that you could dodge & immediately jump-attack Maliketh’s “wall-jump to ground pound” attack instead of just dodging away from him, I didn’t know about all that until way further in my subsequent playthroughs, it’s like every time you fight against them (with different builds too) you find new punishing windows within them, Mohg, Radagon & Malenia are absolute great examples of this, it’s this complexity these bosses have that feels so satisfying the further you master them with every subsequent playthrough, then you have a whole another can of worms, a lovely can of worms in fact, and it’s the overwhelming amounts of Ashes of War that you can experiment with in your playthrough that fundamentally change your play style, and almost all of them feel very satisfying to land upon your enemies (Troll's Roar on a Colossal Sword anyone?) Also about going through the areas beating them in another playthrough, I get that the moment-to-moment playthrough isn't as immediate in ER as DS3 & BB due to it's sheer scale of its open-world, BUT at the same time, ER can be pretty short too, you can skip like 95% of the open-world & go in a straight line from Limgrave to Radagon real fast if you ask me. By the way, since patch 1.06, the game's weaker Ashes of War & weapons have gotten a huge buff & the broken OP ones got a huge nerf, game got heavily re-balanced, and they keep improving too.
It literally has worse combat than Sekiro... Not even mentioning how little build variety there is given how useless 95% of the builds are compared to that other 5%. It's a downgrade from Sekiro in every way possible...
Me who has 3 lvl 120 characters in Bloodborne compared to Me who has 1 lvl 150 character in Elden Ring because I don't feel like refinding all the various talismans and weapons
Honestly I'm way more eager to return to eitheir Sekiro or Dark Souls 3, the Game may have Replay value, but what kills it to me is all of the bullshit You have to collect just to start playing, and honestly, the Open world was fun the fisrt time, but after that it just losses it's Magic.
@@chadofastora I was thinking about hopping into Elden Ring with a new character after beating it. I mean I really like ER and I missed a lot and messed up a lot too, like my builds. My only fear is that it could get boring or exhausting.
@@spencer5372 I would say if you haven’t replayed ER yet, go for it. When I first beat the game I immediately started new playthroughs, but that’s also because I had already played the other games a fair share and ER was new and interesting. So honestly, it’s your call, the issues I mentioned in this video didn’t become very present until 3 playthroughs in, for me at least
One of my friends keeps playing going from playthrough to playthrough, and I noticed that I really do not have that urge to immediately jump back in again. And this video perfectly describes where that feeling is coming from. So thanks for making that clear!
game too long. that's really it for me. even setting replayability aside - by the time i was told i had to go to the giants' mountaintops i was about ready to finish the game, but i went damn alright i guess, and found myself enjoying the mountaintops to a decent extent. THEN the game sent me to bloody farum azula and i was like "Wtf am i doing here i just opened the path to the erdtree i wanna fight the final boss". It's a great game, but I think it overstays its welcome by juuuuuuust a little bit, and then on replay a lot of it feels like a chore or a pushover buffer between you and your goal. Between that, and the fact that the open world structure makes it so much more easy to accidentally overlevel or fuck up NPC storylines, then as much as I like Elden Ring (which I do, a lot, don't get me wrong..) I will always prefer the previous games in the series.
Still on my first playthrough here, but a lot of this goes through my head constantly. The more I progress and discover another giant area after area, the more terrifying the prospect of a replay becomes. Dark Souls is fun to replay because it’s shorter and you can speed run it in a couple hours if you want, but this game is unbelievably massive. Probably going to finish it once and leave it at that.
@@ddmacc well, in fairness to the game, I don't believe the devs intend for us to experience everything in one playthrough - we're probably meant to simply skip a lot of the side dungeons and ignore or not even find many npc storylines, especially depending on our chosen build and what stuff we're actually interested in finding/doing(for our buid, from a gameplay prespective, and/or for our character, from a roleplay perspective, and/or for ourselves as players, from a meta perspective). And that's definitely an argument that could be made for my original point as well, if i wanted to play devil's advocate. That said, coming back to our side of the conversation, the same argument could be made for the previous soulsborne games and those are not usually considered bloated, so i think my complaints and your experience do show the sheer difference in scale - a completionist run of any of the previous games is vastly shorter, better paced, and better structured, than a non-completionist run of this one, and I think there's valid criticism in that
I put around 250 hours within the first few months and haven't touched it since. I intend to come back with a deep dive but one of two things has to happen, I want new single player content OR the Raytracing update as I plan to do my first magic build when I can see the pretty lights they make reflect off everything.
The fact that the game is so open and vast makes it definitely less replay able, yet all the more magical you're first playthrough. When it comes to balancing it is almost impossible due to the sheer amount of different weapons, spells, miracles, ashes of war etc.
This game as a different kind of replayability for me. While I’m not constantly beating it back to back, I find myself coming back to certain parts of it that I absolutely adore. For example, sometimes I get the urge to explore Stormveil as a low level runt, or discover Leyndell again, or thread through Volcano Manor. Sometimes I want to fight against Margit and Godrick, or the Draconic Tree Sentinel, or the Godskins Apostle in Windmill Village. What I mean by this is that while I haven’t beaten the game more than twice, I have beaten most of its main bosses dozens of times, and some of the open world bosses too. I have about eight characters, all in different parts of the game, and I regularly cycle through them, progressing steadily. Elden Ring IS replayable, just not in its entirety at once.
The biggest reason I don't care to replay elden ring compared to the other games is the fact that it's the easiest game in the series. I believe my first playthrough I had maybe 10 deaths total, even after well over 100 playthroughs of every other souls game I still die all the time.
Yup, it's comically easy, only thing that kills it for me tbh If the whole game was challenging, it'd at least make exploring the boring world more interesting
I think these are some fair points. Something that upset me personally was the summoning pools deactivating when you go into new game+. It meant I couldn't restart the game with the same character and gear, without giving up the ability to help other players with late game areas and bosses, and that sucks.
I have that same feeling, but I uploaded my save after Elden beast and have a few million runes to go for level 50 to 150. I have all the main bosses killed so I can kinda do whatever build I want at whatever upgrade level. I'll bounce back and forth. I can host and do a ngplus run or I can invade and coop in the first playthrough.
Fromsoft went all in on Spectacle and forgot the purpose of a game. Gameplay. Open world is a terrible genre and even From couldn't make it work. The pacing in this game is terrible.
LOL, no. Open world is fantastic, but you have to flesh it out. They did that for about the first 2/3 of the game. I agree with your first sentence. i get the impression from their creative director that they're more than ready to move on from the whole Dark Souls / Bloodborne / Elden Ring series. That's sad for me.
And sadly we're only going to get more open world from From Software because Elden Ring sold so insanely well. That's why the Erdtree DLC is an unnecessarily massive and empty world. They had to check that box because that's what casual gamers want, or think they want. "Linear" is still something of a dirty word despite everybody having open world burnout. It's weird.
for me it was the bosses that that usually kept me coming back for a second playthrough and sadly i think the bosses were a little bad in some areas, DLC usually adds the best of the best though so i'm very much looking forward to that
I'm hopeful, since Sekiro's boss rush mode wasn't in the game at launch I can imagine they recognize the desire for a mode and just have other priorities they wanted to add first like the arenas.
I completely agree on the boss mode. It would be great if we could fight any boss once we have finished the game,building on the character we have (free respect, and select a difficulty appropriate to the level of the character)
2:23 I can agree with you on that, currently I'm now doing the Prophet class (Fifth playthrough btw, doing a multi class playthrough on separate saves.) and I can safely say after 100% percent weapons and achievement on Vagabond, you've already did mostly everything there is to do.
I'm still playing almost everyday and I don't even do PVP. I just make new builds and challenge runs. I'm 43, been playing video games since Atari. This was my first Fromsoft game. I just can't put it down. It's so much fun to just explore and experiment.
About 1/2 way thru a NG+ run now and still loving it. (I'll probably do an essential bosses NG++ to get the platinum.) A boss replay option would be nice, though.
Build variety is 100% Elden Ring’s biggest strength, and it’s the main thing that kept me replaying the game (making new characters with different builds) when otherwise I would’ve (personally) had good reason to lose interest.
The other thing to add to NG+ is with ER in addition to build variety there is also a lot more freedom with how you tackle progression, and since so much of it is optional it’s ultimately up to the player how much and what content to re-engage with. In past Souls game, Bloodborne and Sekiro, you’re primarily always playing through the same way as before.
Fun & engaging gameplay makes it replayable. I can replay BB and Sekiro endlessly but I cant replay Dark Souls & Elden Ring. Don’t get me wrong about DS and ER, but they’re just good as 1 and done games for me. Build variety doesnt equal replayability to me cause Im not interested. Its cool watching what other people can do with their builds but I was content with my Flail and Whip I loved the Fire Giant btw
The first play through playing this game blind was the most fun I’ve had in a whole. Making a new build is just tedious. I’m glad they have tears to change your build
You didn't mention it but DS2 was the game that brought Respec-ing to the series, bringing Soul Vessels to the old fire keepers at the start allows you to reallocate your stats. It's even easier since you don't have to defeat a boss to unlock it, you just need the item. You also get more attempts than in Dark Souls 3, you get 7 Soul Vessels with base DS2 no DLC and 11 with the DLC and more become available with bonfire aesthetics.
Oh damn, I didn’t know that, my bad
@@chadofastora To add to things DS2 did right was bonfire ascetics which push an area into NG+ but also infinitely re-spawn bosses and non metal chest items.
Also lot of bosses in DS2 have New drops from NG+. This includes a new boss soul set from the great souls or exclusive upgrades to equipment skeleton lords dropping +2 spell casting speed ring in NG+.
Thus making there be a good incentive for replaying said bosses.
Respecing has technically been a thing since demons souls because of the King Allant fight (DS1 skipped this).
@@chadofastora You mentioned dark souls 3 and 1 weapon arts a lot, but you ignored that dark souls 2 had a varied amount of weapons with special and even bizarre powers that some could even be combined thanks to power stance, in addition to shields and armor with abilities. Before Elden Ring existed, many considered that Dark Souls 2 had more replayability because there was so much to use and combine
@@alexfoudraine5886 I’m sorry if it felt like I was neglecting ds2 in terms of build variety, it is great, and I’m giving it a bit of credit in my next video.
Boss replay mechanic is a NEED I forgot Sekiro had that. I can't believe they wouldn't keep that concept going into the development of a new game.
Best thing ds2 did was the bonfire aesthetic
@@gaythugsmatter7029 ascetic*
@@TheBrokenOrder1 true true I agree with your statement
@@TheBrokenOrder1 no aesthetic is correct
They had the perfect opportunity too with the colosseums we could have spawned it bosses and fought them with my friends
You forgot to mention how 80% of mini dungeons become pointless once you know what they have (which is useless to your build).
That’s if you don’t change your build a dozen or so times like me.
the ability to reroll your stats makes this fun because you get new weapons to try out. You're a collector type, but my enjoyment of the mini dungeons come from the bosses not the rewards personally
@@caseydia3957 Never played the game but I do agree with you. Boss fights are cool.
@@ender8166 yeah man, you didn't find the end because you really wanted some endstone, you fought him because it's cool to fight a big ass dragon that's how i feel with elden ring too
just hit your head really hard and youll forget then its like finding it for the first time again
Honestly, I’d find it interesting if they would add a boss colosseum mode, which could have a wave mode, or a progressively difficult boss attempt mode that you can fight with friends and get certain rewards for doing so that are irrelevant to the actual base game, like collectibles and stats.
oh its definitely coming, just gotta wait for the modders to work their magic
Awesome idea
They did this with the nioh 2 DLC, it was insane, but what a rush when you do finally complete it.
I think it it cut content
the dark moon mod creator did it
The open world game meant that my first play through was extremely long. The reason I played dark souls and blood borne etc so many times is because there were so many builds I wanted to try, and the games themselves weren’t terribly long. Elden Ring is just too massive for me to get excited about starting over
Exactly my feelings too. My first playthrough took me 100 hours, though I did try to 100% the game. The NG+ run took about 4 hours since I just skipped everything to get the Frenzied Flame ending. Now I still need the Age of Stars ending, but I'm honestly not feeling like going for a whole new playthrough to finish Rani's Questline and get the ending. I'm burnt out a bit.
Guess it's time for me to try Sekiro.
Elden ring is very short when you're only doing main bosses
Godrick, rennala, dragon tree sentinel, morgott, fire giant, maliketh, Godfrey, radagon, and elden beast are the main bosses
@@haldir255 same
Play ng+ and use a different build. Stay at 150 for pvp.
Same. My first play though took me 200+ hours.
I feel like I'm in a weird camp where I oddly enjoy the long delays between big bosses. To me, it makes those those boss fights much more well deserved and savory. I can understand how people do not like it, for me though, all the more enjoyable though, like leveling up for a big J-Rpg turn based boss fight.
That’s fair, it does make them seem more special
I found myself purposely "wasting my time" because I didn't want to speedrun my way through the game and enjoy myself and try some new builds out. (First fromsoft game I've played) but I feel like I could've beaten the game and be done with it with 50+ less hours than I originally did. I used a mix of hardcore and "broken" builds so I'm definitely thinking about trying Sekiro
@Grant Todd now that was so uncalled for
@Grant Todd bro, people can also take there time playing a game. Wtf is you're problem with that then.
Mhm, I'm honestly still in camp "fuck the delays" but I won't deny that as of late I've felt satisfaction in dodging delayed attacks consistently.
Personally though, one thing that I liked about previous souls games was how intuitively combat flowed. You didn't need to memorise attack patterns, as long as you had a good sense of resource management and reflexes, you could beat a boss on your first try without ever memorising any of their patterns.
Elden Ring's abundance of weird timings combined with both drawn out and lightning fast wind ups means a lot more memorising is required to win fights now.
That's not really objectively good or bad. It just means it plays differently to other souls games, and it's in a way I don't like
I've got 500 hours in this game, there's not one single player game I've played ever that has even come close to that. Every so often I'll see a new build from Fextralife on TH-cam and I'll be like whelp.....guess I'm booting up Elden Ring again. The crazy thing is I'm still discovering little things I've never seen about the world at 500 hours in. The game is just a masterpiece. One of the few single player games to justify a $60 price tag. Plus, even though it's not the focus, the PvP is fun also.
Same here
I have 300 hours on it and with every playthrough I still find new things xD
I'm at 630 hours. I did the 3 endings to get my platinum with my rl 315 character. And I have a rl 30, 80, and 120 for pvp. First 2 playthroughs I explored every little nook and cranny. It was surprising how many things I missed in playthrough 1. Playthrough 3 and 4(I messed up Ranni's ending and did ths default in playthrough 3...so I had to do an entire playthrough again!) I zipped through the game pretty fast skipping Mohg, Melania, ect. After being able to use every weapon, spell, armor, incantation...it does get a little stale. Found myself helping out players with every main boss as a phantom before I beat them just for fun.
I have 1100 hours of pure pvp chaos. Game is a drug.
yall should try bloodborne
@@newyork9923 i have it platinumed, amazing game
What makes the game replayable, to me, are the build variants. Even if you're running a strength/faith build again, it's likely gonna be different if you're using a different weapon. Sadly the catacombs and caves aren't replayable at all, but the main content and quests are. I just finished my 6th full playthrough, and for the first time, I used strictly non-somber weapons. And lemme tell you, there's a reason people prefer somber: they're stronger and easier to upgrade. I was stuck at a +16 weapon up until Mountaintop, while I'd have a +10 somber at this point usually. So that was interesting to experience.
Yeah, using somber weapons is a LOT easier, as you probably noticed from most of my gameplay.
@@chadofastora Yeah, you can literally get a +10 weapon in the 1st hour of the game if you can kill Volcano Manor Godskin and finish Varre's quest.
I go through every single side dungeons on each playthrough, but even on replays, I love clearing everything with my build for that playthrough
How little build diversity there is given how much stronger some are then others SEVERELY drops replayability. Even more so when you can test every build before your 1st playthrough even ends.
It's a very lacking game
@@Digger-Nick
Build diversity. Here we go:
- Melee: fuckton to choose from, focused on block counters/heavy attacks/poise breaking/dual wielding
- magic builds (including melee options from different schools) int+fth/int+arc/fth+arc
- hybrids: quality/str+int/str+fth/str+arc/dex+int/dex+fth/dex+arc/int+fth (for sword of night and flame)
- ranged possibilities
- massive arcenal of practical and powerful consumables
Should i say more? Go play your call of dumpass and league of farts
Someone out there gets it! Thank you for this explanation video, it really does sum up how I've felt about Elden Ring:
+ It's got great variety for builds and concepts
+ It has wonderful quality of life changes
- The travel between the bosses ruins the experience of the fights (no matter how hard or easy they are)
- The travel around the areas is only fun on the first gameplay (after that, the excitement is lost)
ER is a great game and deserves no true hate (at least, for right now), but DS3 and BB really hit that "balanced Souls-like" itch when it comes to the limitations they had. They won't have the quality-of-life that Elden Ring has, but they're still more fun to loop around into NG+ more than what ER can do.
PLEASE DO NOT misunderstand that I'm dissing or "hating" people who can find the fun in ER's NG+ or replay ability! If there are people out there who can love ER no matter it's differences, that's awesome!
I Just can't like it as much as everyone else can, which is fine too.
To each their own, and cheers for the dedication to the games you all like. But equally, cheers to you Chad of Astora for explaining it in a way I couldn't for my friends. 👍
My first playthrough was mind blowing and thoroughly engaging throughout. After beating the game I began a 100% playthrough and while beating every boss and finishing every quest I’ve been blown away at just how much I missed. While I likely won’t ever beat Elden Ring 100% again, I do think the replay ability factor is still there if you go into the game with a build in mind, and focus on completing the side content only required for that build. In a similar vein, I am more excited for Ng+ in this game than I normally am as there are TONS of late game armor, spells and weapons that I think will be extremely enjoyable to run with into the next Ng+ cycle
I agree 100%. My favorite part of another play through is the builds, bosses, & fashion, for all of these games. That’s why I like elden ring so much, so it’s wild to me when I see people complaining about replay value. I understand not wanting to go through every part again, but this game gives the opportunity to skip a lot of extra content. I even see people complain about the existence of ashes of war, which is my favorite but I guess some ppl think it ruins PvP. I’ve never been into PvP, & have always been more of solo rpg type, which goes to show that this game is so good. All different kinds of people that want different things love this game, & I think everyone can find at least 1 thing they think this game excels at. Great video!
Thanks, also I forgot to mention the fashion it’s actually so good
I agree with this 100%…first souls game but not in this realm of pvp gaming. I now have 10 different chars all at various pvp breakpoints and i have a fucking blast re beating the game each time. I just 100% the game with my lvl 50 +12/+5 char and it was still challenging and fun
I kind of disagree because if you are paying for a game. you shouldn't feel like especially for the first playthrough of it that you need to skip things because its too repetitive. But I felt like (on my first playthrough) it was wayyy too repetitive. That is a problem that I can't say I've ever had with another game before on the first playthrough. I think what it comes down too is calling it how it is. and its bad game design. I think they are only 9 unique bosses in this game which means every other boss you have fought more than once in the game assuming you have explored everywhere. And im pretty sure Dark Souls 3 has at least double that. This hurts the game a lot because one of the first things you see in the game is a Tree Sentinel and its really cool... until you realise that you have to fight it multiple times.
@@CaZuaLDeMoN just googled how many unique bosses eldenrind has and is said to be around 103 unique bosses lol didnt feel like it was that many lmao
@@edad170 I mean it depends how you are counting it. I found what you looked up about 103 unique bosses but the way they counted it includes variants of those bosses. In my opinion that doesn't count as they have a very similar move set and they have the same model. Tree sentinel and Draconic Tree Sentinel or all of the minor erdtree's (some have different moves). Or even Margit and Morgott are not unique as they share basically the same model. So basically what I'm saying is it entirely depends on what you think unique is. If you look it up some say 8 unique bosses, some say 32 and so on.
How does this guy only have 3 subscribers? With such streamlined quality content, I expected subscribers in the thausands. I hope that more people will find this channel! :)
Keep up the good work! :D
Because he only has three videos within a ten month window
He's better than farty fiddler ey
He has 109 subscribers not 3. He has 3 videos
Considering he's up to 220 subs now, I'm hoping it's a sign of growth for him. I genuinely like these videos.
This just happens with games (even big ones) that grab your interest, everything about elden ring is so memorable and beautiful that you play through once or twice at a combined 160 hours or so and it’s imprinted in your brain. Nobody reads a book t they love and go “man that was so good, I’m gonna read it again” at least not immediately. This lack of replay ability has effected me all my life with every game I’ve finished that I’ve played, you just need to wait a while before diving back into it again so you maybe forget a couple details and it seems new again
Exactly. Ive never had a game that made want to replay it immediately after
@@ryanhopkins5239 yeah I’m a huge souls series fan and I’ve never understood everybody’s fascination with multiple ng+ runs, I’ve only ever done so to get an item or weapon I missed out on and it was a quick run
The only game I've played through again immediately after beating it is Persona 5 strikers, I absolutely love that game and its definitely in my top 10 favorite games if not top 5.
This is my first fromsoft game and I did NG +4 or so before I moved on and recently just really wanted to start a new run and been having a blast. Honestly a top 3 video game all time.
@@ryanhopkins5239 same except maybe shadow of the colossus but only because it was so short and I needed more.
Even though I LOVE Elden Ring, something about it being open world loses some of the Souls charm. I liked coming to intimately know every environment in the past, seeing vistas in the distance and letting your imagination run wild. Also, nice to hear Secunda in the video!
Yeah, I really like being able to know every inch of the other games, also thanks, fellow Dragonborn
Dark Souls 1-3 was one big legacy dungeon and I love it.
I think with ease to share info and get info thru social media, forums, and youtube perpetuates the feeling that you "need that info" or have a fully optimized OP build to melt bosses or play elden ring "properly". I try avoid strategy info on a first playthrough and just learn and test a little on my own, but I have a lot experience with these types of games. As the player base expands you will always get more individuals that just want to beat the game as fast and easy as possible and move on to the next thing.
I enjoyed the vid and the view points. I like monster hunter as much as like FromSoftware games, because of the similar kind of combat with more focus on just boss fights. They really need some type of boss arena or boss replay mode. The amount of build variety is awesome and the pace of the game is great. I always felt at the appropriate level just paying thru naturally on my first playthrough (not rushing to high level area to get endgame mats or weapons). I enjoy starting new playthroughs for the most part vs new game plus, but I understand why some like it and is needed, if you want more play time with some endgame weapons.
Good vid, thanks for taking the time to make it!
Ive put abt 180 hrs in the game and im still playing it rn. I have an acc on ng+4, one on ng+2, and several other accs with the story completed. The build variety and the bosses make this game for me. Im currently doing a mage build and i just beat dragonic tree sentinal. This game is a masterpiece to me
There is literally 0 reason to replay the game, especially when only 5% of the builds completely overshadow the other 95%.
The world is also completely barren and lifeless lol. Not even close to a "masterpiece" like Sekiro was.
@@Digger-Nick u can literally make anything work almost it doesn’t matter and the only reason people replay it is because it’s fun u just don’t get the same feeling from playing the game i thought sekiro was very boring but that’s just my opinion
@@fishnetcorn0493 If Sekiro is boring then what the fk is Elden ring lmao.
@@Digger-Nick you can make anything work with the right stat tuning, maxing out the weapon, and using the correct talismans to boost your weapon set
@@Digger-Nick definitely not boring it sounds like u never played it or u just didn’t get far enough you’re hating on it for no reason
when the wow effect goes away it become a pain to day everything again and again
Love the subtle Halo Reach music in the background
My first playthrough took 120 hours + but all my subsequent play throughs on a new character is 40 hours and 5 hours on NG+. So to me this game has massive replay value. All other Fromsoft games only played NG+ and done.
i agree.. I have 1k hrs in Elden Ring. Almost as much hours as I have both Dark Souls 1&3.. Which is around 1k hours each. I personally just love these games and always have since first playing Demon Souls.. The Replay value of elden ring is honestly higher imo because of how easy it is to make good builds compared to Dark Souls 3. This games more forgiving imo
Even on my first playthrough the length of time required to travel places annoyed me. I enjoyed the spectacles but for me combat is where it's at. I tried to start another playthrough recently and how long it took to get to Margit alone was enough to deter me from continuing. The tutorial pop ups where annoying af after a while too (yes i figured out how to turn them off too late) and the cutscenes with the fire keeper sheesh IDC!
Good point with the Boss replay mechnic. With that it will keep the feeling of momentum and excitement longer or at least maintained since you don't need to take more time traveling to the boss' location. Maybe it will be updated with that feature.
Honestly, I took a big break from elden ring. But recently I came back and I have to say, I love this game, I like helping others, collecting new stuff, and discovering secrets I previously skipped and learning about new npc’s and quests. Overall I give Elden Ring a 10/10, I love it
Edit: I do wish they would make a DLC tho, and no I dont count the new PvP stuff as DLC.
As my first souls game, I am very much looking forward to replay Elden Ring. In my case, I began my playthrough in a laptop (which detrimented the experience) and now I'm finishing it on the Steam Deck, so I can't wait to properly experience limgrave.
I really hope your content gets soon recognised as it deserves!
You would LOVE ds3!
Im also playing it on steamdeck...absolutely in love with the game and i HATED the darksouls games tbh.not cuz of the difficulty but bcuz u were forced to move in a linear way,i only ever enjoy open world games so elden ring is just great.many awesome bossfights,secrets and weapons to find even after hundreds off hours into it im still finding new stuff
I’m on my 3rd play through . I started with ds2 beat it once then ds3 just came out . I did every build imaginable. If you love dark souls you’ll love it all
Wow, I did the same as well
Did u like it
The boss replay mechanic is absolutely needed. Mostly by your first play-through you will collect all the cool shit there is and will have a good inventory. Since respecing is kinda easy i want to be able to try different builds on different bosses without having to start a whole new playthrough.
This was in my recommended. You're going places on TH-cam. Keep up the great content!
It seems I was blessed by the algorithm
I’m an avid new game plusser over here, and you summarized my feelings COMPLETELY, and some points I never even knew I felt. Your amazing! Loved the video man
Lol!!! I'm on my 7th full play through, this game has immense replay value. The amount of builds you can do in this game are insane.
Couldn't have put it better myself. Every playthrough I do I imagine 50% of the hours put into it are either travelling on Torrent or being AFK while looking up stuff on the wiki. Having to go out of your way to get basically necessary items and questlines (like the Sacred Tears and Ranni's Questline) is such an annoyance compared to the previous games where an upgrade material or quest line would literally be in the next room, not the other end of the map.
That being said, the build variety, world and bosses are still bringing me back to this game. Even on my 6th playthrough, I'm still finding new caves, items, hidden paths and lore. It's a masterpiece with it's biggest flaw being it's biggest selling point.
of the two camps i actually think i sit in both of them. it is the best game by far mechanically and is more interesting than even my favorite, ds1, but i do find myself usually needing a long while to want to replay the game. that being said, i got the beta for the first person mod and now i can't stop replaying the game. something about playing it from a new perspective has me feeling even more engaged by absolutely everything, and i'm now creating multiple playthroughs all at once for different friends i'm playing with. entirely of two minds on the subject.
It’s still blows me away from software were able to accomplish their greatest work yet
I honestly thought you were a channel with at least 100k subs or at least 50k cause of how good the vídeo quality is, hope your channel grows a lot more and keep the great content coming 👌
Good video. I began to find Elden Ring fatiguing in subsequent playthroughs, such that I would often reach a boss and feel like I didn't have enough energy and patience to approach the fight in a sensible manner.
I would have liked the ability to replay boss encounters too, and not simply so I can skip to the good stuff, but because I'm often not satisfied with my victory. It might have been a messy fight, I might have just gotten lucky, or I cheesed it etc. I wanna fight the boss again sometimes so as to snag a cleaner, more dominant win.
That is a GREAT point, I remember when I first beat Maliketh it was so unclean, and I just felt annoyed rather than satisfied with my first W against him
There’s a mod that lets you resurrect bosses if I’m not mistaken.
I’m not undermining your criticism of course. I’m simply giving you a suggestion to enjoy the game more. Personally speaking, mods increased this game’s replayability tenfold for me.
Congratulations, you’ve earned yourself a new subscriber. Not only are your points concise and well argued, you don’t fall into the trap of filling the entire video with criticisms while forgetting the positives. Many people here on TH-cam do this, they spend hours raving about what the game could’ve done better, without ever highlighting how incredible it already is. Elden Ring is as close to as I’ve seen a game get to having a perfect open world. There are things that could be better, but nothing will erase what this game already accomplishes .
Bloody slash definitely helped me immensely in my first play thru. Didn’t even look up anything about bloody slash just found it after the Kenneth Haight quest and figured I’d use it since I was a dex / arcane bleed build. That move literally demolishes lol- and you can use it the entire game
The same goes for me with incantations and sorceries for me. Discus of Light, and Rock Sling. It's reduced so many fights that COULD have been fun and challenging, to mere spectating.
I'm currently playing Elden Ring, just bought it at Christmas, now I'm at Rykard, already killed morgott radahn and rennala, currently level 67, I'm feeling like the game is way too big and diluted, there's too much empty space between locations, and sometimes this space is full of crap, like the lake of rot. I've done every dungeon, and explored very much, but the dungeons feel very much the same, repeating the same minibosses, like those stone cat/dogs with delayed swoosh. It seems to me that in 35 hours I haven't achieved anything important yet, because I kept completing every dungeon and getting all the items. Personally the best From Software's game is Sekiro, that I love because of the perfect combat sistem, the ninja stuff parkour, and the boss fights, that are really testing the player's skill.
Inner Father>>>>>>>>>>>>Every boss fight in From's games
Btw, I played Dark Souls 1 and 3, Bloodborne and Sekiro, I'm not a newbie I hope 😁😁😁
You have a brain, I respect that
@@Sohelanthropus man detected opinion accepted 🔱🔱🔱🔱
Brother, your work is top-tier. From one creator to another, I salute you.
Interesting, im on my second playthrough and i am feeling that it is sometimes pretty pointless for me to explore like i did on my first playthrough.
I think that once you know where everything is then you can plan narrative runs for different builds and create our own stories within the game
wtf i clicked on this vid and im stunned you only have 11 subs with a quality vid like this. keep up the quality, good job :)
As someone who falls under the “elden ring isn’t that replayable compared to the rest of the series camp” I’d like to add one point.
You’ll always start every playthrough needing to collect the items in the peninsula. Specifically the huge amount of Sacred Tears and on your way there be sure to stop by the first mine to grab all the upgrade stones. Then I just immediately go and steamroll rennala, go up to plateau, come back down and fight Radhan.
When I’m replaying I often know the armor and weapons I need ahead of time. So at least in the old games the upgrade stones and healing upgrades were less clumped in an area like the sacred tears at the peninsula, or the having a specific area like the mine you go every time.
M
Very true, getting bell bearings, golden seeds, sacred tears, after playthrough 2 it gets very repetitive, every souls game has an area that's a slog to play through like shrine of amana, for elden ring it's the egregious amount of set up
@@poliorice3600 Bell bearings, golden seeds and tears all carry over into NG+ though
@Strong Young Chimp Creations I play heavy amounts of pvp and co-op so I never use ng+
Damn this channels gunna pop off, earned your 100th sub here dude
Yesnt, if you complete the story going straight up to the end instead of exploring every inch of it then yeah, if you explore about everything in the game the first time then it is very likely you already had enough.
We should make a request to FROMSOFTWARE to add a Boss Rush Mode.. They added the one in Sekiro after more than a year and a half from release. And more Elden Ring content is anyway expected as they said.
That’s true, and I bet a lot of players would come back if they added it
@@chadofastora Yeah, I just beat Maliketh and this is literally the first boss in ANY game where I said, "Dang I beat him, I kinda want to do that again". 🤣
We must consider that this game was made in tandem with Sekiro, so not all of the lessons they have learned are present. This would include the boss rush feature and such, I suppose.
Personally, it is thrilling to know that even if Elden Ring does feel like the culmination of everything they have learned with their own games, it is truly not, not yet.
Love the Halo Reach music in the background
I feel like elden ring has great replayability with terrible execution. For example I feel people get bored because they want to do something but the motivation leaves all of a sudden after remembering everything that leads there.
I think that a good way for people to not get bored is to allow people in ng+ to go to any grace point that they had unlocked before with exceptions of bosses.
Agreed. I hate having to rediscover graces. There's just so many.
Liked and subbed for the sick Elden Ring x zombies music montage that I didn’t know I needed!
Hot damn, I was shocked when I looked at the subscriber count during this video. Clear points, examples to help illustrate them, easy to understand language without being too simple, and more.
As a souls veteran, I find myself agreeing to most of the video, possibly all of it. Generally speaking, Elden Ring has all that I want out of a souls-like, with two exceptions, both of which are brought up in the video: no way to fight unique bosses more than once per playthrough (hail DS2, haven't really played Sekiro), and I find the world of Elden Ring to simply be a bit too large. I think FromSoftware would have had a chance to greatly improve the quality of the game if the world was like 20% smaller. This would have helped with the issue of down time when replaying the game as well.
my first fromsoftware game and i love it almost 700hours into it and beaten it twice, i mostly just spend my time helping others with bosses now.
i think if From makes another open world game will be more condensed and smaller , anyway good video i think challenges run in ER are great to replay it, 0+ only, consumable only bow only now that they feel stronger
This is truly a criminally underrated video. You have so many well explained points that some people might be "mad" about
I'm a pretty solid "Elden Ring is my least favorite FromSoft game" guy. I haven't finished Sekiro, DS1 or DS2, but everything about Elden Ring minus the build variety and the legacy dungeons makes me mad. The best parts of Elden Ring are the legacy dungeons, and that's because you have a set destination, and can't just blitz past everything with Torrent. You're not rewarded enough for interacting with the open world. You can usually just run past everything, assassinate the miniboss that drops an item, and leave without giving the regular enemies any time to react. It feels like it isn't worth your time to even fight most regular enemies in the open world, since they just drop runes, and don't reward you with anything. Sure, you can run past enemies in Stormveil or Volcano Manor, but they'll eventually catch up to you. Your reward for defeating THEM is progress. Definitely don't like the regular dungeons either, they're mostly filled with recycled gimmicks and bosses. There's only two that I can say I enjoyed, both of which being in the sewer of Leyndell. I don't think Elden Ring is bad overall, but I don't like it nearly as much as everyone else seems to.
Yeah exactly man
The open world isn't good enough for it to be justifiable, because ERs greatest feats are still its classic areas from past Souls games
They should've ditched the open world and just make another metroidvania and it probably would've been better than Bloodborne
I come back to play it frequently, it feels really fun to try things out combat wise, I have so many characters to play different builds and for the most part, they have a large impact on how I interact with the game.
I have no issue with the travel in Elden Ring, I really enjoy the landscape and the way it’s built, where many landmarks can be seen no matter where you are, so with a few play throughs, I feel like I know the lay of the lands between, it often feels like a nice bit of breathing room between combat.
100% agree with the looking stuff up thing, I didn’t that a lot on my first play through for quest lines and how I can build a character that would be like guts from berserk. It feels like that it took a while to feel like I was getting the hang of kt, but it also feels nice to see so much of the community coming together to accumulate knowledge
I know every area by heart by now, what bothers me most is not the long ways but the knowledge of where the enemies will be. It kinda makes me feel like a inhabitant of the lands between, guiding friends thru it which is nice...but stale for solo runs.
For Elden Ring, it may have been bold, yet good to have, might be an enemy randomizer in higher new game rounds, not exchanging enemies changing their spawning and patrol locations, to at least keep the encounters fresh when traversing the wide relatively unimportant areas. Tho maybe it would be too alien even for Fromsoft.
Bro I wish you the very best you are a really good youtuber !
Great take on the end game flaw that's really not a big flaw really, I agree that some of replay through can be rough especially npc quest that require extra time, but then again if I want to duel wield a powerful weapon then doing a npc quest twice isn't so bad lol
Halo music in the background was nice touch
Unbelievable quality for someone with only 9 subs.
It was 2 before this vid dropped lmao
Agree , After you die or lose on some bosses such a pain to travel back to boss room.
I’ve spent around 1200 hours in the game, I’m in my 17th playthrough and still occasionally discover new things. I love experimenting with different builds, so the replay value for me is clearly an 10/10.
Not to call you out but how do you put 1200 hours into a game that hasn’t even been out for a full year yet?
@@dathunderman4 Play it a lot
@@dathunderman4that’s almost 2 months of the 10 1/2 months it’s been out. That’s scary.
So no offense but you must be like 16 right?
@@brightnight8831 you’d rather triple that
you make great points very early. new sub instantly here man keep up this content and u will blow up.
I love just hanging out in The Lands Between. I boot it up on my ng4 save and just do a couple dungeons, fight a couple camps, conjure up a new build with some new fashion and just relax that way.
im also somewhere in the middle when it comes to how replayable elden ring really is. im a bit of a newcomer to the series after starting in mid 2020, but even then after finishing every souls game and demons souls, i instantly jumped into ng+ or flat out created a new character, but for elden ring i just satisfied with finishing it and i didnt pick it back up until recently when it went on sale on steam.
I'll never understand how it doesn't have replay value. This is the only game I've done a million playthroughs of in this short amount of time having the game
It's very simple - it took me so long to finish the game for the first time that when I started NG+, I immediately felt tired and didn’t want to play anymore. It also seemed to me that PvP and co-op are worse implemented here than in DS3. It was just harder for me to find players because of the separation by levels / upgrades (it's much easier now after the patch).
A lot of people don't like the open ended nature of the game, even if you tackle anything you want at any order, which succeeded were the DS sequels struggled.
Personally, I just do the content I want with different characters exploring different places. This works because there's not a "bad area" like Lost Izalith or Farron Keep. Even the reuses felt fun for how complex and varied enemies are.
Do you not understand or do you just not feel that way? cause it doesn't seem that strange to me that people don't like traversing such a huge world multiple times. What made dark souls replayable was the fact that its a 30 hour game, elden ring is not. Yes you can skip areas etc but you still need to farm to beat main area bosses if you just skip everything else since youll be underleveled, not to mention you have to travel so fucking much by horse. Many more points but thats the gist. There is build variety but in order to make a build viable without being ng+ you have to try very hard for it, and usually you need to respec to make it work, since most of them become viable in the late game and by then you need to farm somehow.
@mikechartofilis9144 I 100 percent disagree with every point you made but you have your opinion and I have mine
@@mikechartofilis not only you can finish ER between 40 to 50 hours, you can skip most content or do certain things out of order; helps to know that there's also no bad areas in this game like Lost Izalith or Farron Keep. By the first 10 hours I can have a pure melee mostly done, but if I want a hybrid, I can do certain things out of order and have a decent to good character in-between 10-15 hours, you could imagine how strong it could be at 40 hrs. So no, after 6 playthroughs (which is a lot for a complex ARPG and an open world game of all things), there's still plenty of optional but interesting content to do while you finish the game. Of course, if you don't like horses in OW games, then you wouldn't enjoy ER, nor other games like TW3, RDR2 or, even worse, BoTW.
Coda: I say BoTW is worse 'cause if you're far from the horse s, they won't come to you.
If I can make a suggestion for everyone.
Grab 1 to 3 friends, and play the "Seemless Coop" mod for ER, using the "Hard Mode" or "Harder Mode" as you see fit.
It transforms the game into a full fledge coop action rpg, but with the hard modes, enemies are far less forgiving, and have massive pools of health. Giving the option to play tank, support, and other less efficient builds when soloing. My buddies and I got to Godskin Duo just last night, and after a 30 mins stuggle, we managed to pull off a kill.
10/10 would do it again, it basically a whole new game.
Shouldn’t have to depend on mods for an experience that deserved to be in the game day 1. Elden Ring could’ve been the ultimate Co-op experience but nah, they just haaaad to please the FromSoft fanboys with invasions and waste another Co-op slot with Blue Hunters
I think the reason there’s become more discourse on Elden ring is because it was a lot of people’s (including mine) first souls game. That made this game seem so fantastic to me ands for the first few months I can only say good things about it. Then I, and as I’m assuming other players introduced to the sites did, tried the other souls games. Now that I’ve played the other games, it’s affected my view of Elden ring and I feel more comfortable joining into souls like discussions.
So to summarize,I think there’s more criticism of Elden ring now because there’s been enough time for a new audience to formalize a point of reference that existing souls players had. Making our views of Elden ring more in line with longer tenured players instead of just blind praise
A few points worth mentioning:
-Nier Automata's open world suffers, a lot, for lack of visual and enemy variety, a lot of filler fetch quest and many areas that aren't that well design for exploration. On fact, that's one of the biggest criticism people had on the game.
-Yeah, playing any open world will take a lot of time. Not every TW3, RDR2 or BoTW fan will immediately replay those games, specially as much as people replayed ER.
-ER has received a lot, and I mean, a lot of balances for PVP and PVE. The "OP tools" were extremely nerfed, and every other weapon, along with poise, received buffs. In fact, that community has being very positive the last couple of updates. But every Souls game has received many patches before. DS3 received 14, and that game still suffered from weak magic, pointless weapon arts and pretty bad weapons.
-From Reddit to YT is has been stated that, with the right amount of vigor, you shouldn't be oneshotted. In fact, a lot of people didn't even realized that scarseals/sorseal diminish damage resistance, or how there's many damage resistance talismans. So no, even with 50-55 vig, nothing will be near kill you.
-After three pure melee playthrough, I can say: no, you don't need summons nor OP tools (which are in every Souls game). In fact, you can watch many videos of just pure melee bossfights, and even challenge runs. Is very dishonest of many in the community saying that you need to use summons or OP weapons, while ignoring that you can craft plenty of projectile items, and how useful perfumes are.
-At the end, it depends on what you search in these games. If you only want to rush to fight the boss, good, but that's not what made DeS, DS1 and BB so successful. DS3 heavily suffers from very weak levels and very narrow progression. It doesn't help that if there's a fight you don't like, you have to do it to finish the game, with no tools to avoid it.
Overall this comes down to personal preference. Pretty good video overall!
Ds3 has weak levels? High wall of lothric, undead settlement, cathedral of the deep, Irithyll, lothric castle, ariandel, ringed city, you think all these are weak?
@@anonymous01201 No, areas like Farron Keep, Road to Sacrifice, Profane Capital (such a wasted area), Catacombs, Earthen Peak, the lower parts of Ariandel (when breaking the bridge) and, without a doubt, Smouldering Lake, among other areas, are pretty lackluster.
Dragon Peak looks cool (except for some enemy placement), but a fraction of that level is in the Great Wyvern fight, which is an underdeveloped gimmick and one of the worst dragon fight in the series. Couple that with ganks in most of that section and you dragged down a good level by some points.
@@enman009 Lower part of ariandel is tiny and optional, and not all that bad apart from the boss. Earthen peak is a DS2 area, if you meant the Dreg Heap that area’s awesome in my opinion and is only let down somewhat because the angels can get annoying, but it’s a cool gimmick nonetheless. I think Archdragon Peak is good but not amazing because some of the enemies there are poorly designed and the wyvern encounter is a bit underdeveloped although I think it would have been good if it didn’t have the boss healthbar. The catacombs is an overall fine area, there’s nothing wrong with it, it just isn’t anything unique. The Profaned Capitol is a huge disappointment with how small it is, but while it is a waste of potential I wouldn’t call it weak since it’s so small that it’s basically just a run up to Yhorm and nothing about it is bad apart from how small it is.
Road of sacrifices, Farron keep and the Smouldering Lake are the only ones I would call ‘weak’; even then, just like Bloodborne’s weakest levels (Nightmare Frontier, Nightmare of Mensis) none of them are actually bad. Not to mention that the entire second half of DS1 (Demon Ruins, Lost Izalith, Tomb of Giants, New Londo, Crystal Cave, Chasm of the Abyss) as well as half the areas in the main game of DS2 (Huntsman’s Corpse, Harvest Valley, Iron Keep, Doors of Pharros, Brightstone Cove, Shrine of Amana, Giant’s Memories) are far, far worse, which is why I’m confused as to why you’re singling out DS3 for having ‘very weak’ levels, when the majority of them range from good to great.
P.S. Don’t think this has to be said but this is all my opinion.
@@anonymous01201 Yeah, I know is Dreg Heap, but I say Earthen since that was the original name of the game. I'm referring to that hole area since the moment you enter, before the 1st angel. One, of many, of my problems aren't even the angels, is the ganks: many projectile enemies close to a melee one, two very agile enemies in an enclosed area, and then there's the reuse of an old DS2 enemy paired with a reused DS3 enemy. As the last piece of DS content, having this amount of reuses, coupled with Argo appearing three times in Ringed City, and part of that area being another swamp, in a game shock full of swamps, was very disappointing.
As for the rest, yeah I know this is all subjective. I just provide enough information about my thoughts so it doesn't feel like complaining because I just don't like a thing or two (which is very popular in this community since the release DS2 or BB I believe). Do you love those areas? All power to you. Is fair to criticize these games, but it is equally valid to defend them, and that's not being a fanboy. So, huge respect Sunbro.
@@enman009 Damn you sound like you really hate ganks. Ganks are all over the souls games, it’s not just DS3, just look at all of DS2 or the several places in Bloodborne where they just decided to increase the challenge by adding 2 joint-aggro strong enemies right next to each other. And despite the fact that they don’t play to the series strengths, ganks aren’t an inherently bad thing in an area, they’re only bad when they’re poorly designed, nothing in Dreg Heap stood out to me as being that way.
The swamp in ringed city feels unique enough to where I’m not really bothered by it. And it doesn’t give you any sort of status effect, that’s a plus. It isn’t like Royal Woods from DS1 where it’s literally the exact same aesthetic as an area in the base game.
Respect to you too. I was honestly surprised you 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯’𝘵 call me a fanboy with how I’ve been coming across.
As everyone else has said.. amazing vid, why don't you have 100k subs?
Till the day I die, I will always hate the Godskin Noble, Elden Beast, and Beast Clergyman. The Beast Clergyman is a mess and I wish we could get to Malikath sooner, everything about the Godskin Noble make me shoot black flames, and Elden Beast just has too many moves.
Very fair, I'm not a fan of the noble or elden beast either. But I disagree on beast clergyman, I find it a lot of fun, though I do with it was shorter in favor of phase 2
ER has by far the most replay value in any of the Soulsborne games IMO, the thing I like most about replaying it isn’t only just the build variety (which is absolutely crazy), it’s the bosses’ rhythmic complexity, combo branches & the dynamic nature of them that separates it from the older Soulsborne games, it’s why I liken them to Bloodborne’s bosses, they have some similarities in the way they attack & how you have to approach them but ER takes it to a whole another level, From Software has mastered the bosses encounters with this game, all of the remembrance bosses have some trick up their sleeves, I just LOVE how aggressive these bosses can get & how many punishing windows you can CREATE in-between their onslaught, I didn’t know that you could jump Margit’s tail swipe, I didn’t know that you could dodge & immediately jump-attack Maliketh’s “wall-jump to ground pound” attack instead of just dodging away from him, I didn’t know about all that until way further in my subsequent playthroughs, it’s like every time you fight against them (with different builds too) you find new punishing windows within them, Mohg, Radagon & Malenia are absolute great examples of this, it’s this complexity these bosses have that feels so satisfying the further you master them with every subsequent playthrough, then you have a whole another can of worms, a lovely can of worms in fact, and it’s the overwhelming amounts of Ashes of War that you can experiment with in your playthrough that fundamentally change your play style, and almost all of them feel very satisfying to land upon your enemies (Troll's Roar on a Colossal Sword anyone?)
Also about going through the areas beating them in another playthrough, I get that the moment-to-moment playthrough isn't as immediate in ER as DS3 & BB due to it's sheer scale of its open-world, BUT at the same time, ER can be pretty short too, you can skip like 95% of the open-world & go in a straight line from Limgrave to Radagon real fast if you ask me.
By the way, since patch 1.06, the game's weaker Ashes of War & weapons have gotten a huge buff & the broken OP ones got a huge nerf, game got heavily re-balanced, and they keep improving too.
It literally has worse combat than Sekiro...
Not even mentioning how little build variety there is given how useless 95% of the builds are compared to that other 5%.
It's a downgrade from Sekiro in every way possible...
@@Digger-Nick...
Me who has 3 lvl 120 characters in Bloodborne compared to
Me who has 1 lvl 150 character in Elden Ring because I don't feel like refinding all the various talismans and weapons
Honestly I'm way more eager to return to eitheir Sekiro or Dark Souls 3, the Game may have Replay value, but what kills it to me is all of the bullshit You have to collect just to start playing, and honestly, the Open world was fun the fisrt time, but after that it just losses it's Magic.
Sekiro and dark souls 3 are very fun and easy to replay compared to ER, whichever you choose should be a lot of fun
@@chadofastora I was thinking about hopping into Elden Ring with a new character after beating it. I mean I really like ER and I missed a lot and messed up a lot too, like my builds. My only fear is that it could get boring or exhausting.
@@spencer5372 I would say if you haven’t replayed ER yet, go for it. When I first beat the game I immediately started new playthroughs, but that’s also because I had already played the other games a fair share and ER was new and interesting. So honestly, it’s your call, the issues I mentioned in this video didn’t become very present until 3 playthroughs in, for me at least
One of my friends keeps playing going from playthrough to playthrough, and I noticed that I really do not have that urge to immediately jump back in again. And this video perfectly describes where that feeling is coming from. So thanks for making that clear!
game too long. that's really it for me. even setting replayability aside - by the time i was told i had to go to the giants' mountaintops i was about ready to finish the game, but i went damn alright i guess, and found myself enjoying the mountaintops to a decent extent. THEN the game sent me to bloody farum azula and i was like "Wtf am i doing here i just opened the path to the erdtree i wanna fight the final boss". It's a great game, but I think it overstays its welcome by juuuuuuust a little bit, and then on replay a lot of it feels like a chore or a pushover buffer between you and your goal. Between that, and the fact that the open world structure makes it so much more easy to accidentally overlevel or fuck up NPC storylines, then as much as I like Elden Ring (which I do, a lot, don't get me wrong..) I will always prefer the previous games in the series.
Still on my first playthrough here, but a lot of this goes through my head constantly. The more I progress and discover another giant area after area, the more terrifying the prospect of a replay becomes. Dark Souls is fun to replay because it’s shorter and you can speed run it in a couple hours if you want, but this game is unbelievably massive. Probably going to finish it once and leave it at that.
Good to see more people who have a brain, I'm there with ya man
Yeah i wanted to do a run where i do all npc quests and looked up a guide and the guide is literaly 30 minutes long for each area
@@ddmacc well, in fairness to the game, I don't believe the devs intend for us to experience everything in one playthrough - we're probably meant to simply skip a lot of the side dungeons and ignore or not even find many npc storylines, especially depending on our chosen build and what stuff we're actually interested in finding/doing(for our buid, from a gameplay prespective, and/or for our character, from a roleplay perspective, and/or for ourselves as players, from a meta perspective). And that's definitely an argument that could be made for my original point as well, if i wanted to play devil's advocate.
That said, coming back to our side of the conversation, the same argument could be made for the previous soulsborne games and those are not usually considered bloated, so i think my complaints and your experience do show the sheer difference in scale - a completionist run of any of the previous games is vastly shorter, better paced, and better structured, than a non-completionist run of this one, and I think there's valid criticism in that
@@marcog.verbruggen674
Theres also the fact that i have no idea how you would experience even half of these quests organically without guides lol
I put around 250 hours within the first few months and haven't touched it since. I intend to come back with a deep dive but one of two things has to happen, I want new single player content OR the Raytracing update as I plan to do my first magic build when I can see the pretty lights they make reflect off everything.
The fact that the game is so open and vast makes it definitely less replay able, yet all the more magical you're first playthrough. When it comes to balancing it is almost impossible due to the sheer amount of different weapons, spells, miracles, ashes of war etc.
This game as a different kind of replayability for me. While I’m not constantly beating it back to back, I find myself coming back to certain parts of it that I absolutely adore. For example, sometimes I get the urge to explore Stormveil as a low level runt, or discover Leyndell again, or thread through Volcano Manor. Sometimes I want to fight against Margit and Godrick, or the Draconic Tree Sentinel, or the Godskins Apostle in Windmill Village.
What I mean by this is that while I haven’t beaten the game more than twice, I have beaten most of its main bosses dozens of times, and some of the open world bosses too. I have about eight characters, all in different parts of the game, and I regularly cycle through them, progressing steadily. Elden Ring IS replayable, just not in its entirety at once.
Why do you have so few subs? Great quality video both in terms of content, delivery and visual. You got a new sub today
The biggest reason I don't care to replay elden ring compared to the other games is the fact that it's the easiest game in the series. I believe my first playthrough I had maybe 10 deaths total, even after well over 100 playthroughs of every other souls game I still die all the time.
Yup, it's comically easy, only thing that kills it for me tbh
If the whole game was challenging, it'd at least make exploring the boring world more interesting
Bro, it would be fucking awesome if you could replay boss fights whenever you want, hope they add it in an update.
As someone who has beat the game 10 times, it has good replay value
I think these are some fair points.
Something that upset me personally was the summoning pools deactivating when you go into new game+. It meant I couldn't restart the game with the same character and gear, without giving up the ability to help other players with late game areas and bosses, and that sucks.
I have that same feeling, but I uploaded my save after Elden beast and have a few million runes to go for level 50 to 150. I have all the main bosses killed so I can kinda do whatever build I want at whatever upgrade level. I'll bounce back and forth. I can host and do a ngplus run or I can invade and coop in the first playthrough.
Fromsoft went all in on Spectacle and forgot the purpose of a game. Gameplay. Open world is a terrible genre and even From couldn't make it work. The pacing in this game is terrible.
LOL, no. Open world is fantastic, but you have to flesh it out. They did that for about the first 2/3 of the game. I agree with your first sentence. i get the impression from their creative director that they're more than ready to move on from the whole Dark Souls / Bloodborne / Elden Ring series. That's sad for me.
And sadly we're only going to get more open world from From Software because Elden Ring sold so insanely well. That's why the Erdtree DLC is an unnecessarily massive and empty world. They had to check that box because that's what casual gamers want, or think they want. "Linear" is still something of a dirty word despite everybody having open world burnout. It's weird.
@@CaptJackAubreyOfTheRoyalNavy 1000%!
for me it was the bosses that that usually kept me coming back for a second playthrough and sadly i think the bosses were a little bad in some areas, DLC usually adds the best of the best though so i'm very much looking forward to that
You’ve just convinced me to replay Elden Ring. Thanks!
👍
I'm hopeful, since Sekiro's boss rush mode wasn't in the game at launch I can imagine they recognize the desire for a mode and just have other priorities they wanted to add first like the arenas.
I completely agree on the boss mode. It would be great if we could fight any boss once we have finished the game,building on the character we have (free respect, and select a difficulty appropriate to the level of the character)
They definitely should of added a boss rush in the coliseum
Great video! I know I liked this video as soon as the Halo Reach score started playing
2:23
I can agree with you on that, currently I'm now doing the Prophet class (Fifth playthrough btw, doing a multi class playthrough on separate saves.) and I can safely say after 100% percent weapons and achievement on Vagabond, you've already did mostly everything there is to do.
I'm still playing almost everyday and I don't even do PVP. I just make new builds and challenge runs. I'm 43, been playing video games since Atari. This was my first Fromsoft game. I just can't put it down. It's so much fun to just explore and experiment.
About 1/2 way thru a NG+ run now and still loving it. (I'll probably do an essential bosses NG++ to get the platinum.) A boss replay option would be nice, though.
Build variety is 100% Elden Ring’s biggest strength, and it’s the main thing that kept me replaying the game (making new characters with different builds) when otherwise I would’ve (personally) had good reason to lose interest.
I couldn't figure out why I was having trouble replaying elden ring compared to ds1 and ds3. Great vid!
I think what harmed my opinion of replay value was that bosses were reused. I beat the ulcerated tree spirit like 10 times.
The other thing to add to NG+ is with ER in addition to build variety there is also a lot more freedom with how you tackle progression, and since so much of it is optional it’s ultimately up to the player how much and what content to re-engage with. In past Souls game, Bloodborne and Sekiro, you’re primarily always playing through the same way as before.
Fun & engaging gameplay makes it replayable. I can replay BB and Sekiro endlessly but I cant replay Dark Souls & Elden Ring. Don’t get me wrong about DS and ER, but they’re just good as 1 and done games for me. Build variety doesnt equal replayability to me cause Im not interested. Its cool watching what other people can do with their builds but I was content with my Flail and Whip
I loved the Fire Giant btw
My biggest issue is re collecting bell bearings for smithing stones to fully level weapons
They patched that a few months ago they now carry over
Only 313 subs with this kinda content? Talk about underrated
Great video and extra props for using a goated OST (halo reach)
The great jar battles are crazy lol. I was pissed off for sure, I died like 50 times, but I finally beat all of those random guys eventually.
The first play through playing this game blind was the most fun I’ve had in a whole. Making a new build is just tedious. I’m glad they have tears to change your build