It's ridiculously funny how careful and timid most people are about criticizing this game. Every middly negative review I've seen starts with some type of disclaimer basically saying "sorry for not liking this masterpiece".
in my defense, my disclaimer doesnt say sorry for not liking it but that i did still like the game lol. i really hated starting out with that for the exact reason youre talking about though. everything feels so black and white with this game so i felt like it was a necessary evil to lead off with. too much of the elden ring content gets immediately grouped into "it sucks" or "its perfect" and most people are looking to judge based off of only those two opinions. that was my poor attempt at not creating a dividing line 4 seconds into an hour long video.
@@SwoopGoose well I may have worded it wrong, you sure didn't say that but it was more like a "forgive me for having these blasphemous opinions about this masterpiece, pls don kill me!" kind of disclaimer. Which I find hilarious and kinda sad because I've seen the same thing in a lot reviews that dare to criticize it, almost like people are afraid of the fandom (which is very toxic tbh) or afraid of going against the popular opinion. Anyways, good review! I pretty much feel the same way about the game. It sure is "good" but in the end I had so many issues with it that almost dropped it by the time I reached the mountain top of the giants.
This game definitely had a honeymoon phase for me where I thought it could do no wrong, a literal perfect game. As you start to really sink your teeth into this game the flaws unravel: 1. Boss variety is sorely lacking 2. Every side quest except volcano manor is ridiculously cryptic like you basically have to google everything 3. The difficulty is either too easy or too hard based on how you go through the game. 4. The end of the game feels empty and a bit rushed This game to me is still an 8.75 or 9 out of 10, it does a lot of things right but I think the boss variety really hurts the experience. Why am I exploring this area to fight a boss I’ve fought 5 times for an item I probably won’t use?
100%. If they had got the boss combat right I think it could've been a 10, but the triple cristallian boss alone automatically takes off a point and a half for being such BS
@@ModernHonour you have summons my friend, the tools to make it easier are there. If you decide not to use them for the challenge, then you get what you ask for haha
@@hellion1193 Yeah but given that summons are a reasonably new addition and the template always used to work without them, they’re not really offering dark souls players a way of having a similar experience. Instead I have to let the computer do some of the fighting for me?
@@hellion1193 I know, but it wasn’t the dark souls experience if you didn’t use them because ds3 didn’t have these stupid fights I’m talking about except for curse rotted greatwood
Fall Damage is based on height, but it's really weird. It's a scale from 1-20. If you fall up to 15 units, you take no damage. 16-19 is a percentage of damage, and 20 or more is death. That's why it feels so janky, the safe zone is so much bigger than the hurt zone.
@@hellion1193 Having a fall damage be by percentage than by linear function makes sense, but ER completely disregard another crucial factor: momentum. Literally every other open world game implements both height and momentum to calculate their fall damage. The height itself doesn't kill you, it's the sudden stop that does. ER's fall damage is extremely consistent in a non-consistent map.
The issue with *input queuing* is that the system cannot tell the difference between "button mashing" and simply adapting to the enemy's pattern changes. Especially in this entry where every other mob is on crack and (past Morgott) does ludicrous amounts of burst damage while being sponges themselves.
Best example of input queues screwing me over is when I mistime a dodge roll and press the button moments after I get hit, then the input is read after my stun lock is done and I end up dodging too early and getting hit, resulting in me getting punished twice when I made one mistake.
I have had no trouble with it for the most part. I don't see why they don't add the ability to cancel an attack before it's finished though, like Chivalry, Mordhau, or Sekiro... Let alone cancel a cue.
I had problems with the input queuing and healing for some reasons. Sometimes it just woudlnt queue a heal and I was so focused on watching the bosses next more I didn’t make sure it went off. Doubly so for say bigger lads like Radhan who you have to be watching the VERY top of the screen so I’m not looking if my gal chugged some tears
@@cosmiclikesminecraft what size monitor are you playing on Jesus are you at the movie theatres ive never once not seen my character use a flask because I was looking up at a boss
by the time i got to the mountain tops of the giants i was mentally and physically exhausted. The game didnt need to be this big, especially if they're just going to recycle every enemy you've fought 100 times by the time you got to the snow area. That's when i started abusing summons to rush to finish the game.
Yeah the open world while nice had a lot of dead air and not enough value in the open area itself. While I guess it felt more “real” I don’t really come to games for “real” I’m a massive hater of photorealistic graphics and mechanics. Since 99% of the most interesting items are gonna be in villages or more commonly dungeons which can easily be spotted on the map Also Stakes of Marika are great. Except when they’re not sometime they jsut aren’t in front of a boss so you Gotta do a stupid run back. Equally disappointing is there’s still a lack of shortcuts, the last time levels really had shortcuts commonly was DS2 and even then they were far fewer then in DeS and DS1. I like shortcuts less graces more shortcuts please. It was rare for me to feel tense exploring because I was so sure the next grace was always gonna be around the corner when I started to run low on flasks
@@joeblunt6126 if i needed to take a break before finishing my first playthrough then that is exactly the proof that the game is too big for no good reason. Im not against big games with huge maps, but at least make them interesting. Elden Ring's map stopped being interesting after Lyndell. The mountains are generally empty, but also filled with recycled enemies with bloated numbers, not to mention the damn fog where you cant even see where you're going, which kills the fun of exploring.
@@AysarAburrub that's not proof at all. No matter how big or interesting you think a map is... it will reach a point in size where you will get burned out. That's a You problem Not a game problem
As a Souls fan I was hyped for ER like never before. I played through 3 times now and my feeling is that it’s a great game but it’d have been better if Leyndel was the last level. Make the game shorter and use the saved resources for more unique bosses and it’s a best game in the series. As it stands I still think Bloodborne and Sekiro are better
It really felt like they were running out of ideas after Leyndell with how many bosses just had massive AOE spam. Not all of them and some major story fights were still pretty solid but the story could've easily been altered to fit them into Leyndell. Something like Fire Giant would've made for an excellent optional challenge even if it didn't fit there, keep his area as a lead in to the Haligtree as a purely optional challenge area. Make the snowfield and mountain significantly smaller, make reaching the Haligtree much simpler. Keep Farum Azula as an interlude between Morgott and the final series of bosses but make everything else between the two optional. Being a proper legacy dungeon it is one of the more fleshed out areas and having boss level dragons as normal enemies for one endgame dungeon rather than scattered through the open world, is enemy reuse I can appreciate as a means of highlighting just how ridiculously powerful we are and by extension everything at that point is.
@@zeroattentiongaming820 I mean Haligtree is optional, but for Souls vets there’s no such thing as optional lol we always want more souls, I just think it got pretty tiresome with all the reused assets.
Yeah, ER has the same problem as ds1, in my opinion: the game is a masterpiece until you beat "the city of the gods" then the problems start showing it's ugly face. Ds1 had a lack of time resulting in lower quality areas. (And the worst boss fromsoftware has ever designed) ER has an overtuning problem, and recycling enemies we've already fought earlier in the game
I think most reviewers genuinely loved the game. The thing is very few of them played long enough or explored enough to see the repetition; most reviews were less than 60hrs of play.
Agreed. It took me a second playthrough as well until I started to really see some flaws. It's my third favorite game they ever made and i'm glad it was received so well. I just hope that FROM doesn't think they've peaked with Elden Ring and continues to evolve.
@@camdenwyeth316 Don’t wanna spoil it, but when I was 130hrs in I was still having a great time finding new things too. It’s more obvious to those who’ve had the chance to explore most/all of the game. I personally don’t fault the game for repetition though since there’s soooo much content it’d be impossible to constantly introduce new things.
@@seananih7609 yeah that's fair enough then, I can see even what I've done getting stale to some people too. For a game this scale though I'm impressed it's managed to feel relatively immersive/fresh this long at least, even if it goes downhill going forwards
@@camdenwyeth316 Same. Right now I have 241 hrs clocked and about 130 of them are the most fun hours I’ve had with a game in my adult life. It’s amazing.
With the Godskin Duo, there's actually a grace if you turn from the grace you came from, and drop down! (fully down to the last level, itll take 2 jumps, 1 to the stairs, 1 to the bottom) and progressing through that area, you'll find a different entrance to the Godskin duo. I don't know why they were so misleading entrance wise for that boss that's frustrating enough. The grace I'm talking about though is literally just right next to the entrance, with no enemies in the way.
This grace irked me when I found it after the fact. Spent like an hour running around that place trying to figure out how the fuck I was supposed to get to it before fighting the boss. When I did find it I just sighed and moved on.
On performance issues, if you are having them, they are enough to ruin the experience, especially during boss fights. I was one of the unlucky ones, but most of my friends seemed to get by okay. It wasn't enough to stop me from playing, but when you're dealing with the fine margins you so often have to in these games it becomes very frustrating, very quickly.
Game crashes are still way to frequent. Usually occurs when attempting to connect with multiplayer. Tho occasionally when fast traveling. With how big the game is sales wise I'd hope they'd put more attention into multiplayer, but fromsoft has always cared more about the single player experience, despite every game sans sekiro having invasions.
Yeah, the narrator lives among a blessed group. When I got the game I had the bug that made human size NPC and dogs invisible. I kept trying to play anyways. Eventually, a mod was released on Nexus that fixed the issue and then beyond that From finally patched it out but that was after like a month of owning the game. The suck part about the bug was that while people who didn't have it were so eager to tell everyone that our computers suck even though that was fa from the truth given the range of devices that had the issue, once the mod was made it was revealed that it was a load order issue in the Regulation.bin. I say all that to say, while I still love Elden Ring I still get annoyed at folks who dismiss people who have bugs as "looking for excuses to complain" I played the game for 12 hours unable to see most enemies before I had to stop and wait for a fix.
@@jasonphillips9281 that’s just a shit excuse. It doesn’t have to be ‘the best’, the game isn’t technically groundbreaking. The game runs poorly on hardware more powerful than a PS5. If they didn’t want people to buy it on PC they wouldn’t have released it on the platform, they just did a bad job of it but go on posting bullshit.
I remember when I first loaded up the game there were weird see through black bars all over my screen that would rarely vanish and I had to get into a discord call and show my friends. I did find some fixes but that first day of Elden Ring was full of weird performance issues.
i feel like a lot of reviewers did not even come close to finishing the game prior to reviewing it. I love Elden Ring, but IMO after Leyndell there is a massive drop is quality and enjoyment and the last 25% or so of the game is a full on slog where it stops being fun and all the game's flaws are apparent. Ridiculously overtuned enemies that don't reward you with anything, no more rewarding exploration, constant re use of enemies and bosses, repetitive caves that don't offer rewards, and overly obtuse quests and storytelling that basically require you to look up a guide if you want to experience at all.
I hate the reusing of enemies and low rewards. Elden Ring made me crave Dark Souls though and I’m half way through the remastered for the first time. Incredible experience!!
Mountaintop of gaints is what crossed the line for me. Every area kept ramping up where enemies became brick walls or 95% untouchab...Maliketh. When I'm double fisting giant hammers leaping off my horse and slamming those bad bois directly into the bonk zone I wanna see some stagger and some damage not hear a squeaky oh no my own organs why. Didn't really become more difficult so much as more tedious. Longer wait times for an opening, longer volleys to get a poise break or other critical shot, longer hp bars. It didn't get harder for me it got harder for my patience.
I'd add two things you didn't mention... and I heard even some of the die hard dark souls fans with thousands of hours say these things about this game. 1) The input queue in this game is far worse than in any previous DS games 2) The input reading the enemies do is just unfair. And in the end if nothing else, you gained a new sub with this video. Keep up the good work.
As a big souls fan I agree. I think it's possible the input queue is "this same" but the change in controls and ashes of war system plus all the extra stuff going on makes it considerably worse. The older games were far more focused so it didn't really feel as bad but as someone who can basically breeze through the older games I HATE the input buffering in this game with a passion
"feeble king" and "unleashed bread" both youtuber are souls vet oldfan and made some solid videos criticizing Elden ring. especially feeble king, check out his vids i case u are interested
Input queue is absolutely ridiculous but the input read is not as bad but i played close range while learning dodge timing to create gaps to heal myself
Being a big From Software fan, I think it's good that people have started criticizing the game. This game really made me feel burnt out on souls formula. But to be very honest with you, some criticisms did felt like you can easily find a workaround for them. For example the enemies attacking you through fog door, just roll once and you are good to go my dude!
You brought up some really good points man, thank you for this analysis! I really enjoyed it. And I feel frustrated towards people who bash others for criticizing a popular game... If you love something, you have to speak your mind so that the creators can improve on their shortcomings. It's sad that the "mob mentality" makes criticizing look like just mere hate, to me it's a sign of caring about the game and the creators behind it. This video to me reflects that, and I agree (as a souls fan btw) with many of your criticisms.
Once you've seen it all once, the mystery and wonder is gone. Once you've fought every boss, you know how they work and the challenge disappears. I started NG+ a few weeks ago and I've only done a few hours of it, because I honestly just don't want to crawl through all the early-game stuff again, which is laughably easy now at level 201. Margit got absolutely SMOKED, and I was barely trying. It was fun to get revenge on him like that, and Tree Sentinel, who also got destroyed, but I just don't feel the same urge to get in and do it that I did on the first playthrough.
I get this all the time on all games tho, not just FromSoft games. Good games gives you a decent sense of finality once it's over, which actually makes your brain think there's nothing more to experience. It makes your brain associate continued playing with past memories, instead of being open to experiencing things in the moment. Ergo, little/no motivation. It sucks but it's actually the sign of a good game that it got you rly into it. Best thing to do imo is take some time off from the game, then go back to it and play NG+ some other time; clear your mind from the atmosphere the game gives you. I took about a month or so off after finishing it, and did other things (Subnautica, a very different game). Now I find I can go back already (sometimes I need longer off). I have to do this with books and movies too, especially if I read/watch too many similar feeling ones in a row. It's just how the brain works.
To be fair, NG+ being very easy has always been the case, that's why I personally never used the feature that much, making a new character just feels a lot better because you can see how much you've improved. I agree with the sense of mystery and wonder being gone tho. Exploration is one of it's biggest strongsuits when playing it the first time, but it also turns into it's biggest flaw on repeat playthroughs imo. There's just too much content that doesn't warrant being replayed. Too many dungeons with a copypaste boss and loot I can't find a use for, or am literally unable to use. When replaying DS3 or Bloodborne, there isn't a boss or area i'm not looking forward to (except 1 or 2 per game maybe), when replaying Elden Ring, at least a third of all bosses and dungeons feel like a chore.
That’s just false, after the first time is when you truly start exploring, when you take advantage of everything you thought you knew to make even more discoveries, open up new build potential, even start planning routes in your head.
@@glohan2122 Not to mention that in Dark Souls 3 we proved that the early game ng+ genuinely was easier but the difficulty did ramp up a towards mid to late game. Ng+3 and up is still where the real challenge comes in.
About your camera segment, it's actually really funny that sekiro has the current best camera in the series, especially in fights like demon of hatred, who is an enormous enemy where u can clearly see the moves he's doing, I don't understand how they downgraded from it, maybe it's the ds3 engine but idk
I think my biggest concern going into Elden Ring was the NPCs. The cryptic, non-linear questlines worked very well for DS1, DS2, DS3, and Bloodborne. But in a completely open world game... it does NOT translate well. I was hoping they'd be a little more straightforward and more like regular side quests, but... it wasn't. It was confusing and hard to find one specific NPC without looking it up. What are the odds you would go hear Blaidd's howl and then go talk to Kale and happen to see the dialogue option about said howl without looking that up? You might hear the howl and think it's just a background part of the game, or a random wolf. And, to be honest, that is one of the EASIER NPCs to figure out. There's even harder ones than that! How the hell are people supposed to logically follow these without guides?
I genuinely dont see why this is a problem though. This has always been how it is in most souls game except sekiro, most questline get left out until you started googling and elden ring is no different. Plus most encounters with these npcs are not compulsory and the compulsory ones are made very obvious. I didn’t meet blaidd in mistwood nor did i met alexander in stormhill or gael tunnel i just met both of them in redmane and continue their quest from there. I agree that theres a lot of problems with elden ring but I genuinely dont think npc quest being cryptic is a problem, its the same way it was in dark souls.
@@dudeiii2069 I'm not reading all that. To address the first point, it works in other games because they are relatively linear. You can literally go anywhere in Elden Ring right from the start. It's impossible to keep track of NPCs without looking things up. Also, it's incredible easy to miss almost all of them (again, because the map is way too big). Hell, I missed Ranni for SO long because I didn't visit her spot for ages.
@@TheTongueTwisler also a good chunk of quests just become incompletable because you killed that area's shardbearer which is genuinely retarded because they have nothing to do with the npc's quest in the first place.
@@TheTongueTwisler You couldn't bother to read "all that", despite the fact that it's less text than your comment? It's not even much text at all, neither were your comment to begin with. Talk about giving courtesy enough. Furthermore, some of the questlines in Dark Souls were almost equally as difficult to follow, why would you spontaneously traverse all of Blighttown again after Anor Londo for Siegmeyer's quest? I didn't buy the key from the Undead Merchant, forgot about it and Griggs got left behind. My friend had to tell me about Greirat's location, and to progress Sirris' line I had to look up her soapstone placement. Although for all of Fromsoft's games the obscurity may work in their favour. It's supposed to add replay value, you didn't find them/complete the questlines on your first time but maybe you do on a second playthrough. Even if the player didn't find either of Alexander and Blaidd both appear at the festival, which you're pointed to by the Guidance of Grace. The non-linearity of Elden Ring is what mostly impacts the questlines negatively, if you've already explored an area you're unlikely to return there, but that also goes for Dark Souls questlines; there's not much fundamentally different between the two.
Stop trying to downplay legitimate performance concerns by saying "Oh I didn't have any problems". They're not trying to hate the game, they want it to perform better to enhance enjoyment 🙄
Second playthrough and I love it. The game was made for people like me apparently. I like grinding, I like build variety, I like freedom, and I like role playing or arcade action
It was made for tons of different people. That's why it is so popular. It's good that you can enjoy grinding, but this video kinda assumes grinding is needed, when it really isn't anyway.
@@lucascarracedo7421 I think it is. Eventually, you either have enough levels to learn a spell or have upgraded a good weapon enough to be able to do enough damage to take down a story boss’s health bar.
@@dr17719 but that doesn't meant you have to grind specifically. Just exploring a bit and killing a few optional bosses gives you enough resources to be able to beat bosses (depends on skill of course). In fact, just upgrading weapons and getting a bit more survivability is usually enough for subsequent playthroughs though. By that point you tend to know what you are doing anyway. The reason the first run tends to take so long is that we want to see as much as possible, collect as much as we can.
As someone who loves this game and has played through this game multiple times, i have to say this review is spot on in most of its points. I can disagree with spots in this review and still understand why it was thought or experienced. Im looking forward to more!
I spent 2 months and a half to beat my first playthrough and it was a blast. Now I'm on NG+, took a break for a week, went back to play... and I turned off the game 5 minutes after, not knowing what the fuck else to do. I could do another character by starting a fun build you see on youtube, but that feels like too much effort to set everything up. I love this game so much, but I think I'm burnt out and bored now. Will try some months later, especially for DLC.
Couldn’t have said it better. Probably my favorite video game ever but the replay ability just isn’t there for me. I did like 130 hours my first play through and couldn’t pick it back up for a new build or NG+. Will probably play again down the road
New game + is not as fun as starting fresh as a new build. I deliverately didn't complete the game 100% on my first play through so I would still have some new content on my second playthrough. Also, I did hardly any of the quests on my first playthrough so I am focusing more on them during my second. If you complete everything 100% on your first playthrough, though, then I can understand why starting again isn't so appealing.
The weird part with ER and most fromsoft games is that you usually do it once completely blind and then on other playthrough just look where the stuff for your new build is (because you mostly forgot) and then just do that. It usually cut down playtime by half at least. In ER this is exacerbated even more. My first playthrough almost reached 100hours but my next fresh was 20ish and NG+ around 4 or 5. Once you have beaten it once you know what part of the game really matters. Also after Leyndell content quality just drops.
I’m like that with almost every game I play. It’s very rare that I play any game again after I beat it once. Elden Ring is definitely one of the best games I’ve ever played but for now I won’t return to it. I did just about everything on my 1st play through and got 200 hours out of it. So I feel I got more than my money’s worth.
I just finished my second playthrough lately. It gets more fun when you don't explore everything and focus on your build rather than exploring every side dungeon and fighting every miniboss imo.
Elden Ring is one of my favorite games, but there’s a lot wrong with it. For one, doing side quests is basically impossible without guides. I wanted to play this game blind, but it’s ridiculous how in order to do some, you need to talk to an NPC, do one thing, and then for the next step you have to go across the entire map down a very specific path and you’ll find them again. And then you do this again multiple times. And then the one questline where you need to climb inside a coffin and fall off a waterfall to continue it? Theres no way I’d ever figure that out by myself. And it sucks how most of the time the only hint youll get in game can only be found by buying a note from a random merchant who’s also probably located across the map in some out of the way place. Its just unreasonably difficult for players who want to go in blind. One suggestion I’ve seen that would definitely improve this would be if your character had a little journal, and whenever you complete one step of a quest it would give you a little one or two sentence long hint on where to go next. You’d still have to figure it out yourself, but its much simpler than being completely blind on a map as big as this one And the boss scaling (specifically for double bosses) just isn’t there at all. Its clear that this game was built around summons, and if you dont want to use any you’re gonna have a much harder time with double bosses. Both the bosses are always full aggression and give you no space to breathe. Even in low level areas. The double boss in Boc’s quest line is just constantly on you with both bosses being fast and overly aggressive. If you don’t have summons to help you distract one, youll just constantly get waffle stomped by double bosses. The game tries forcing you to play a certain way, and if you use summons then fights become much easier and lose a lot of the charm, and the sense of accomplishment you get from beating the bosses is just gone.
It really does feel like the game wants you to rely on summons and magic instead of fighting. I started a Confessor and the game difficulty about halved when I got my first offensive incantation.
I hate the misleading boss design in Elden Ring. Almost every boss was designed to repeatedly bait the player into bad decisions, to a point where it's just annoying. For example: Margit and some other bosses can literally ignore gravity and float in the air for 1-2 seconds during a jump, just to bait you into a mistimed roll. Margit also has an overhead staff attack that he can delay for about 5 seconds if you stay out of range. Many combos can only be successfully evaded if you memorize the precise timing of the attack, because the delay of attacks within just one combo can vary between half a second and 5+ seconds. Not to mention that a couple bosses can read your input and react instantly, making things like healing inbetween their combos a very frustrating experience - Crucible Knights are insufferable in this regard. I'm at my third playthrough now, and it's just tiring to fight bosses. Except for Malenia, she's not perfect but the 20 hours I spent practicing that fight were more enjoyable than dealing with the dumb gotcha combos of some other bosses. Oh, and camera lock. Camera lock has always been broken and by now FromSoft has no excuse to continue copy-pasting that feature without change.
I wouldn’t say that it is misleading, it is simply a mechanic. It has been a mechanic in pretty much all other souls games where enemies will hold an attack to punish people who spam roll. Makes you have to focus and time your rolls.
@@kencer8320 Please name one Souls boss that can hold an attack for ~5 seconds and then cancel it if you stayed out of range. What makes it actually bad is the way Elden Ring combines this with attacks that are too fast to react to, meaning you either memorize the precise timing of the attack delay or you get hit. I think the only Souls boss that really had this kind of sudden attack animation was Nameless King but his delays were much more consistent and predictable. Now of course this doesn't apply to all Elden Ring bosses, but enough to make it an annoyance throughout the whole game. And if you care about people not spamming rolls, DS1 already solved that perfectly by making it cost a lot of stamina.
I don’t get these complaints on delayed boss attacks. It all comes down to learning there movesets & when to roll on those delays. There’s no gotcha moments
@@pigskin94pvp82 Almost every boss and a ton of regular enemies have these attacks. Super delayed wind-up+perfectly tracking instant strike that somehow always covers way more area than it should. In other Soulsborne games only very few enemies and bosses have these and they use them sparingly and for a good reason because these attacks are meant to punish muscle memory which is hilariously stupid for games that actually want you to have good reflexes. ER makes the issue even worse by having variable wind up on so many attacks, so you can't even learn the timing and are instead forced to back away which means you're punished for actually trying to interact with the boss in melee.
a lot of the game feels like it's designed for you to run through without paying attention. The carian manor with all the crawling hands, for example. you're already reasonably far into Liurnia at that point, already presumably gotten at least one great rune, and yet those giant hands, which take a lot of time to kill and can wreck you, drop basically no runes and nothing else worth getting at that point in the game.
I don’t like elden not because it’s bad I just want a dark souls game a game set in small world with amazing level design,bosses,enemies,Builds. I don’t wanna fight 170 bosses that half the same
Yeah I never do ng+ but just start completely fresh and currently I'm on my third playthrough and I'm loving every second, there is so much roleplaying potential with build variety and multiple endings.
I’m on NG+2 now… I’ll definitely say the “exploration” appeal goes away, with the exception of maybe certain tunnels or quest lines for certain materials… but basically I treat these runs as legacy dungeon runs.. I rarely fight optional dungeon bosses now. But I still enjoy going thru all the main areas including Volcano Manor and Mohgwyn Palace
Agreed, I actually recently finally went through my first NG+ run after 300 hours, to make it more interesting and less of a pain on my part I decided to go in completely naked not using any ash summons for the major boss fights, and just focused on killing the major bosses, was it fun? Yea, but imo I found that allot of the exploration kinda just gets put on the back burner, and it just kinda felt like I was going through the motions to just be finished with the run through.
Idk man, I'm a good way into my first NG+ now and I'm having a shitload of fun. I love the Souls revenge playthrough where you just disrespect every bastard that gave you trouble the first time. I'll probably be playing this game over and over for ever.
@@brandonmclain2933 yeah I haven’t done ng+ but like 8 ng playthroughs for challenge run purposes and the abs section I can use my horse is a lot more boring than any dark souls pr el for the 8th time Also haven’t finished the vid yet so idk if he says it but after doing rune level 1 a few bosses are a bit too hard usually only because of a couple specific moves and I don’t like the philosophy of making it harder for veterans and adding cheese for new players cuz it makes more play styles unviable like in ds3 I was able to do no roll no armor and most attacks could be avoided consistently just by running but in elden ring every attack required a specific combinations of timings and movement patterns
I’ve unashamedly cheesed several bosses, and destroyed others by being vastly over levelled in this game, because it cheeses you. Getting hit through solid objects is my personal favourite. Besides, if it stops me exploring then it’s just annoying because that’s what I enjoyed most about this game
The fall distance for death is consistent, but the distance from taking damage to death is very small, which makes it harder to intuitively judge height. It is usually best to use rainbow stones to judge if a drop could kill you.
I've played DS3 to completion at least 10 times, and I've played ER to completion 1.5 times. My playtime for both games is about the same at 250-300 hours, so I got my moneys worth out of it. However I think more fondly of my time spent with DS3. In DS3 I played the same content 10 times, while with ER I played lots of recycled content. You'd think the recycled content would be superior as it offers more variation, but it is restrictive in how you can interact with that content. With DS3 each playthrough was done with a different class, playstyle or handicap, while with ER I was locked into playing one thing for the duration. The repeated content combined with the length really harms the replayability in a way that DS3 doesn't suffer from.
The title is exactly what I know is going to happen to me when me and my buddy get done beating it. I know for a fact that no matter how much I'm having fun with this game I won't play it again for at least years to come.
Is it a great game? Yes. Is it perfect? A 10/10? No. Did I have a lot of fun with my first playthrough? Yes. Do I want to play through it again right now? No. Is it my favorite game in the series? No.
Same here man: I was exhausted after Castle Sol. Little to no motivation to plow through the last areas. Finished the game yesterday and was relieved I do not have to touch it again. Took me 7 months.
Exactly my thoughts. The Souls Series in general for me personally feels something like "oh you got so far? Let's make it more unnecessarily difficult to piss you off as much as possible" and that's the point of no return where i just think nah fuck it, it ain't worth it.
I disagree. Yes it gets harder but it only does so in ways that build upon the skill you've gained over your play through, with endgame bosses being the most fun and engaging fights despite their difficulty. Elden Ring chucks an endgame boss at you at the very start and the only way they figure to up the ante is make them one shot you unless your vigor is 60 and give them attack patterns that take ages to learn because they're in the second phase.
@@Kaiwala Yeah, maybe. I´m that rage-subsceptible type of person so i usually avoid games like this and stick instead to Skyrim, Witcher, Pillars of Eternity...and the list goes on. I tried Dark Souls 1, 2, 3, Demon Souls, Nioh 1, bloodborn and i was able only to complete Dark Souls 1 & 3 and Bloodborn as well. The others games i couldn´t stand it anymore to come home from work and rage till night becuse of dying 10 times at one single boss. It´s just frustrating. That´s the reason why I am passing Elden Ring no matter how good it looks.
Personally, I think one thing about Fromsoftware and their approach to games is, they appreciate their audience. None of their games is without faults..DS tails off, DS2… DS3 (my first) not as integrated. ER does have a lot of repetition. I got bored with a few of the catacombs and caves etc. But after playing to get the 100%, for me I think it’s their most consistent, approachable and complete creation from start to finish. I am looking forward to the dlc. Regarding ‘community’ …ignore it. Most communities can be gate keepers or toxic. There are helpful folk out there but most gangs are…gangs. Finally, bird area is designed as a farming spot. They often do that sort of thing
I had the opposite happen, dark souls progressively had me more addicted ,I spent so many hours in 2 and 3 ,finished every possible part of them without hesitation ,I barely turn elden ring on now after beating the first 2 bosses
Agree. Elden Ring with all its splendor is soulless. I still haven't finished ER and I bought it on release day. I am on the final straight but I couldn't care what the outcome of the final story/ending is. That is something I have never experienced playing these games since Demon Souls.
@@Insp.CountMortisWinshipKlaw I still need to finish demons souls ,that's the only one I haven't ,but I have the original PS3 version as I don't own a PS5
If you're at level 10 in Limgrave, and you're level 50(5 times your starting level) when you get to Mountaintops of the giants, you did something wrong. Probably multiple somethings. Edit: Yes, the different weapons once levelled up, are very different from each other. And the reason you should at least carry one of each type and affinity? All enemies are weak to something. Main bosses are mostly very weak to Bleed, so if you're having trouble, try using a Katana or imbue your weapon with Bloodflame. Erdtree Avatar giving you hell? Use a fire affinity weapon. That sort of thing.
I mean, he’s obviously new to souls games just by how he plays. He also ran the ultimate “new to soul’s games build”. Bull Goat armor, katana, ect. This game was probably terrifyingly difficult for him so he probably didn’t do a lot of exploring or fighting bosses in the open world so he just didn’t have to deal with it. Bosses in caves and catacombs don’t allow you to summon mimic tear and probably wasn’t taking on anything if he couldn’t summon. He has some valid points for sure but a lot of his critiques reflects a lack of understanding of souls games.
I hate how 95% of the bosses you kill are basically just a waste of your time. In Sekiro, every miniboss and boss dropped something that would power your character up. Beads, memories, or special items. In Elden Ring, I spend 45 minutes on some boss and get some stupid piece of crap my character can't use, and a pittance of souls. It's horrible feeling
Your comments on game performance were genuinely stupid. This game has mediocre to decent performance on PC, with it having been nearly unplayable for some on day one. Of course people will be upset that the game they had been waiting so long for (and paid money for) isn't even playable for them. If you had a good experience, great. Though even I am still having stutters considerably often on a high end PC.
I find your performance comments very disingenuous. You didn’t have the performance issues, good for you. I did however and so did so many other PC players and while it wasn’t enough to ruin the experience for, I did find it laughable that Fromsoft fanboys were still trotting out the “Fromsoft isn’t bad like other AAA developers” nonsense when they released a game with glaring performance issues for PC.
Really good video! I appreciate that for a smaller channel you’ve got a good audio setup which makes listening so much better. Also nice to hear thoughts from a person who didn’t really vibe with the other souls games. Very engaging video!
Friendly tip for future videos: Don't do comparisons on a false and/or skewed premise. I just found your channel, and I really like the content you're providing. However, I couldn't help but notice that you're building a lot of you comparisons and analyses with a heavy dose of bias and skewed perspectives. I'm fully aware that they're hard to overcome, but neutral positions are the best. I wrote 2 easy examples below, but the video was quite full of them. In any case, good video! Looking forward to seeing more from you. :) -- WEAPON COMPARISONS ---------------- "Elden Rings weapon choice is dominated by its war ash and the only difference other than that, is faster attack and less damage, or slower attack and heavier damage. Metal gear 5 gives you the wide array of different interchangeable guns that any third person shooter does. Along with different ways and items to mess around and have fun with its enemies in the process." Here you are just wrong. The way you described Elden Rings weapon choices is like if I were to say that MGS5 only has 2 weapon types. Tranq and Kill, something both of us know is wrong. This faulty premise destroys your own point, since it's based on false information. Weapons have: Attack speed, range and width. Health damage + stagger damage. Blocking mitigation. Combo/attack pattern. Weapon type. And lastly, applicable Ash of War. For example, my last playthrough was with a halberd, which I chose for their attack range+speed compared to other heavy weapons. There are quite a few in the game, but I knew I wanted to have as many opening wide sweep attacks as possible + ability to enchant + a specific Ash of War. There was only one Halberd, out of probably 15, that lived up to my requirements. Opposite argument for clarity: MGS5 weapons are very basic. Either you have low damage with a high fire rate, or high damage with a low firerate. AKA, snipers or machineguns. The only thing that differentiates MGS5 from any other shooter are the tranquilizer bullets. And they're so OP you don't need anything else. Elden Ring on the other hand has almost every kind of melee weapon type in existance. They even have 8 different kinds of swords, all of which have their own strengths and weaknesses. It doesn't even stop there either, you can apply various spells and items to them, plus even choose from a wide array of unique Ashes of War. All of this creates a very in-depth combat sandbox that is a blast to play around with. Especially when you learn that the hundreds of different enemy types have their own stats. Compared to MGS5 outdated AAA-standard of 3 different types. -- PLAYSTYLE COMPARISONS ------------ "I can go in with a tranquilizer gun or a rocket launcher and both are viable choices that has positives and negatives. You also have to decide whether you want to airlift out soldiers and materials but risk setting off an alarm for all the other soldiers in the area. In Elden Ring you pretty much have 2 choices in every scenario. Either fight what's in front of you or run past." Again, you're building the critique on a false premise. You speak about MGS5 in experience-terms, but Elden Ring in overview-terms. Opposite argument for clarity: I can attack a castle head on with a hammer, or I can use spells to thin their numbers from afar. Both of these are viable choices that has positives and negatives. You also have to decide whether to use your flasks and items now, or save them for tougher areas ahead. Because you have no idea what might be around the next corner, and a single misstep can be fatal. In MGS5 you only really have 2 choices, either deal with the enemies in front of you, or sneak past them. And even if you somehow manage to fail, there will be a checkpoint from 1 minute ago. Ruining any sense of challenge or difficulty that otherwise might have existed. See what I did there? Neither your, nor my, gameplay description is wrong. But - the comparison isn't fair. Because they're described using skewed terms with a heavy bias. ----------------------------------------------------------
Not only that but weapons also have a specific movesets for both 1 hand and 2 hand and with Elden Ring there's also powerstancing. Plenty ways to change up your playstyle, not only that but there are also sorcery and incantations way of playing for even more diverse gameplay. There are also items you can use for attacks where people have found ways to actually use to build their own "parry" magic hack. At this point it's really up to the user's imagination on how you play the game. I'm not gonna lie, I saw him literally using a shield the entire video. No wonder he got bored AF. Sword and board is literally the most boring way to play the game >.>
Yeah I was gonna come down here to say that weapon variety and build variety point was idiotic. It’s especially comical considering this guy used the most op build in the game, and obviously didn’t try much else considering his opinion. I for one tried multiple builds and respeced many times during my playthrough
All his criticisms boil down to him clearly just not being a fan of the franchise, or enjoying the combat system enough to invest time in it to fully experience its depth/purpose. He also doesnt seem to understand how From designs these games in a very precise, deliberate manner. He needs to stop approaching them from a "Ok game, give me fun" place, and more from a "I want to fully engage with the experience this game provides" position. He isnt accepting the game on its own terms, hes trying to find a way to avoid what he doesnt like about it, rather than understanding it as a piece of media.
Playing it for the first time a few years after the hype. It’s not my first fromsoft experience, I’m finding myself very overwhelmed by the immense size of it in a way I never felt w the previous games. I’m constantly discovering new branches while I’m already committed to a certain path, and the primary feeling I get is anxiety that this is another point of interest I’m going to forget to come back to and explore. I guess there are worse problems to have in a game, but I feel like I’m leaving so much behind as I play through it. And I simply don’t have the time and patience now to explore every square inch like I did when I was a teenager with much smaller games. Always afraid I’m missing out.
This is my first FS game honestly. And I’m not buying another fs game. Not because I dislike it but it’s not for me. I’m glad I played this game ngl but this is the one experience I definitely do not want to try again. Because now I’m just beating the game because I spent 60$ lol. Definitely love the game it’s just too big for me and way to frustrating. Everyone have a good day ❤️
I'd highly suggest you at least try Dark Souls 1. It's far less punishing while still being challenging. I've played every Souls game, and ER by far felt the most unfair. Bosses on my first playthrough in ER towards the end were doing as much damage as a boss in Dark Souls 3 in NG+5 with comparable health (every NG+ raises enemy stats). If I can survive an entire boss combo in NG+5 in DS3 but not 2 hits from a dude with a sword in ER, that's a problem.
I have to disagree around the 7m mark because (I'm a games dev btw so professional opinion) the games pacing is atrocious, too much is too obsecure, and there's a lot of imbalance in there. I could talk about a lot of different things if you've played it you'll know that for the first couple of dozen hours you don't get much loot, you cant exploit the stats system, you don't get clues about where to go and what to do, and overall there's very little to hook the player and keep them there. Its not easy to play but hard to master - a cliche for a good reason - it's just hard because of the lack of information and incredibly slow burn. A lot of you don't want to hear that, I get it, but I think it's more than "Didn't know what they were getting into" and "Not for them". The game is flawed, yall just love it anyway.
Just to clarify on the fall damage, the reason it feels so inconsistent is because the maximum fall damage you can take is only something like half of your healthbar. In most games you take a linear amount of fall damage until it kills you. In this game, it jumps from taking roughly half of your health to killing you if you fall 1 meter further. That's why the difference between a jump that will and won't kill you can be so hard to gauge. You might think "I've fallen about that far before and only lost half my health" which leads you to believe you might just take 60-70% damage this time, however you pass the kill threshold (I believe it's 20 meters) and die instantly. It also doesn't help that fall damage doesn't even start until 15 meters if I recall correctly. So there's only a 5 meter window between where fall damage starts and where you die. I think there are some inconsistencies regarding falling while on Torrent, but otherwise it really is very consistent, it just doesn't feel like it at all due to the way it's set up.
And since it based on meters if you jump before falling even on torrent. That jump can be the difference between life and death so you always want to just walk off instead of jumping off when on torrent but it feels natural to jump and Im sure many people havent realized this.
@@BaxBoogey22 Jumping on torrent is honestly one of the worse mistakes you can do. Double jumping is probably the worst. Because if you jump on torrent the 20 meter threshold is reached earlier and if you double jump then let's just say that you're most probably dying even if the height of the cliff is 15 meters (btw there is no fall damage until you pass the 15 meter threshold, just like OP pointed)
I feel like Elden Ring is just going to be a game that I need some time to pass before I do another playthrough. I enjoyed it a lot, but after sinking over 100 hours into completing the world, it's a big commitment for me to play it through again. I'm a bit if a completionist so I'll probably end up doing the majority of the content The second time through too. The prospect of playing with a different build sounds pretty fun though.
Yeah, if anything, it requires a clearer replaying mindset that previous games didn't require being so linear. My second run wasn't even close in length to the first one. But now I can finish an actual casual in a few hours. As in, not trying to speedrun it, but knowing where to go and having a somewhat clear route in my head. Of course it depends on how much you need to level up and upgrade weapons to beat the hardest bosses. I don't really agree when some reviewers see it's length as an issue when the length is easily controlled by just avoiding optional stuff, which is like 95% of the game. I mean, following that approach you could go as far as "you'll never 100% an rpg until you've collected every single flower". Following the tradicional souls approach of killing everything in sight doesn't work here for subsequent playthroughs.
@@lucascarracedo7421 complaining about length in an open world RPG just seems silly to me. It's like saying Skyrim has too many dungeons. I'd never complain about a game having too much content (unless it's a repetitive grindfest like many MMOs or Ubisoft titles). The fact of the matter is, Elden Ring can be completed in a similar amount of time to DS3 if you ignore the optional content. It's just dependent on what type of gamer you are. For me, I like to defeat all the bosses and complete all dungeons, so it's a bigger time commitment for me as opposed to someone who selectively goes through content. At the end of the day, anyone purchasing an open world RPG should go in with the expectation that its going to be a large world with a lot to do, and that will require a certain amount of time dedicated to the game.
@@lordthruxawe504 I am not exactly sure if you agree with me or not. What I basically said is the same, it's silly since you can either do everything, or skip as much as you want. So I don't know what the point of the video complaining about it's length really is. But then, what you say after about not being able to skip stuff more or less goes against that. I mean, I get that you would want to visit literally every dungeon and part of the map the first time, I did the same clearly. But if that is what's preventing you from replaying the game, I doubt there's much to gain from doing literally all that again when it's not even new anymore. Although of course I respect that you might not like skipping things, that's personal preference. And that's the point, having too much to do is not an issue, it just covers more gamer's preferences. It was wasn't that much of a decision on previous games since they didn't have as much optional content, and just by going through the maps you more or less visited the whole thing to some degree in every run. What I mean is that, yeah I agree the first time is usually a massive time commitment. But it doesn't have to be in subsequent runs. In fact the long term replayability of Elden Ring depends on accepting that you can't spend over 100+ hours for each run, unless time isn't a problem, which it is for most people.
I would like to add a few points that I think are forgotten, some of the problems you have listed here would be issues in all the older souls games except with the older souls games, you don't need to sit at bonfires to talk to certain people. Dark Souls II honestly has this problem a lot more than Dark Souls I, doing NPC questlines in DS1 is a lot easier since the world feels a lot more complete and running around in most places with NPC quests is not annoying at all since most of the time, the early game is where a lot of the NPC's are and the best interconnected level design is in the early game of Dark Souls I. Elden Ring is too big to have reasonable NPC questlines that don't feel like a chore to complete. Also honestly I think crafting doesn't need to be more fleshed out for a souls game because you really want the weapons you pick up to have more oomph and impact in a souls game. Because what happens in Skyrim is you eventually just keep your smithed weapon for the whole game and all other loot basically becomes worthless. Souls games are about the loot scattered around the area so that when you reach a hard area and a reward for getting somewhere is given and that reward could be a really good weapon.
I think this is one of the most level headed opinions on this game I've seen. I absolutely LOVE this game, it might be my favorite game ever, but I can see its flaws, and I understand the problems it has. I also see many reviewers sort of equating their idea of finding sth fun or not fun to a sort of objective measurement on the game. You don't do this, you recognize that you just don't like it that much, and that's perfectly fine. If anything, it's very similar to my own opinion on God of war 2018: I liked it, I can see why people loved it, but I just didn't like it nearly as much as most folks. That doesn't mean it's not a masterpiece of its genre, it means it didn't meet my personal tastes as much as other ppl, and that is.. fine.
I've watched the entire GoW 2018 story back when it released and was eager to play it when i heard about releasing on PC. Let me tell you, i played like 10-20% of it and got bored with it, the gameplay is just boring and their cinematic camera makes me puke.
Well, most people can't detach their preferences and taste from their opinion on something. That's why you get so many bad arguments following some comments. I don't get where that idea that if you like something it means it's good comes from. Of course nobody can really be objective, but loving something while seeing it for what it is has a lot more value than blindly defending it for no actual reason.
So in summary, you are judging games with your own brain, which comes with its own set of tastes, dislikes, obsessions, flaws and upsides different from even the next person over. A rare occurrence to see in this modern landscape of game critique
The problem is that a lot of Elden ring problem are things most reviewers and commentators have claimed are bad design. By their own claims Elden ring is not as incredible as they claim.
I don’t know why but the righteously indignant “You’re god damned right I shot that bird for an hour and my mashed potatoes and meatloaf was delicious!” Was incredibly amusing for me
i love elden ring, but after beating it i don’t feel the urge to play again. i’ve tried to do a second playthrough around 5 times and ended up deleting my character after a few hours. every dark souls game i always feel good about replaying. i dont know why i like dark souls more.
I'm glad someone else felt the same way about the end. The last third or so was a frustrating, mostly unfun slog. Some of the most frustrating bosses in the series and felt like it had lost the wow factor of the first part of the game.
While I disagree with a lot of what was said in this video, I appreciate getting such a comprehensive and well expressed window into such a different experience.
Some points are factual you just can't disagree but some points don't make much sense like comparing this game to an FPS or saying the combat feels the same throughout the game. If you stick to a boring melee only build and chose to not engage with all the other options it is your fault, not the game's fault. Also saying all there is to do is go somewhere and kill the boss really is a dishonnest simplification, you even mention that yourself just like you mention that you can't compare this game to an FPS yet you still do it i don't understand.
For me its just the pure frustration of dying over and over again at every boss especially bosses like Mogh and sometimes even Margit where you spend all this time learning their attacks and then just when you think you have an opening they use a bs attack move like margits knives or moghs close up swipe attack that leaves you zero time to react. Boss attacks have too long of a time winding up their attacks where normally you reaction would be to dodge immediately but have to wait not knowing when they're going to strike more often than not. Another complaint from the boss side of things comes from moghs undodgeable attack where he speaks in latin that nothing can be done about. You just have to sit there and outheal massive amounts of damage or get the item you need to avoid the shit ton of damage he does from it. Even when I've finally beat the boss I've been struggling with the sense of accomplisment was just not there for me and add to the fact that most of the items you get from defeating them are subpar at best, it leaves much to be desired. In conclusion: Elden Ring is a fantastic game but one with many flaws and a lot of patience is needed.
love the video! personally i don’t agree with the idea they should have had less ashes of war or that a lot of them are pointless. i think it allows for soooo much potential for many many different kinds of builds which we have seen hella unique cool builds going around n what not. i feel like even weak or bad ones create for also unique or cool challenges you’ll see the community do with them. i absolutely love this game. personally, dark souls was too much for me and i was too impatient with it. but elden ring was exactly what i’ve been looking for in a game and it makes me so happy to see such a dope ass community behind it. BUT if you are above LVL 150 BE CAREFUL WITH PVP those higher LVL mfs are the snakiest bitches out there ong. i think 150 or below is a good cap for your lvling if u still tryna pvp in the game
SL120 and I can barely get an invasion. Every other souls game never had this problem. The PVP is dying because its not balanced, in fact its an absolute mess. PVE it is a superb game but it will die if the PVP is not fixed
My biggest issue was the lack of any relevant narrative throughout the game. I lost interest after about 85 hours since I still had no real feel for why the world is how it is, why the characters had the motivations they had, and what I was supposed to do to advance various quests. Interesting lore and art style IS NOT a story. I need character development and cohesion. A log of some sort was desperately needed just to keep track of what the fuck I was doing. I would meet an NPC and start a quest then go hours upon hours of play time without seeing that NPC. So I inevitably forget what that quest line was about or how to progress it. The amount of times I had to literally Google "what to do for xyz quest in Elden Ring" was ridiculous. That issue applies to the game on general.
Hey man, I just wanted to clear up the point of reused assets, as someone who's been playing since Demon's Souls. The reused assets/bosses were always a point of criticism. In Dark Souls 1 especially, an entire area was widely known to have suffered from being unfinished, and it reused 2 bosses as enemies and just threw the tutorial boss in but on fire. The problem is that in the other games, there weren't many reused bosses. Dark Souls 1 only had the aforementioned bosses (the tutorial boss was uses 3 times), but at least in that case it was only those, and they had the excuse of just being nameless demons. In Souls 2, there were only a handful of reused bosses as well (mostly in the DLC, from the main game). Dark Souls 3 had maybe 2? Bloodborne only reused a couple in the optional randomized dungeons (and even these had unique bosses and enemies only found here). Sekiro reused quite a few minibosses, but again, this made sense: you were fighting an actual army and organizations. It was always seen as underwhelming or lazy at worst, but at least it either made sense or you could stomach it easier because they were so few. But basically, 99% of the time it was only minibosses or non-named, important bosses that were reused In ER there are less than 10 unique bosses, out of about a 100. It's the opposite problem as before, where the ujique bosses vastly outnumbered the reused ones, but now people are suddenly defending it because it's ER. Even a few supposed major story bosses end up reused in ER, it's like if in Dark Souls 1 you fought Artorias of the Abyss then 5 hours later you fought Artorius of the Deep. This is also actually the only game where reused enemies are a problem, because it used to be if an area didn't have 100% unique enemies, it would hover around 80-90% being unique to that area. Here the enemy variety per area is abysmal, but is again only defended because it's ER. I do agree with pretty much everything you said though. Good game overall but far from a 10/10 game of the century.
Dude what are you smoking lol. "Less tham 10 unique bosses in the game?" 1. Margit. 2. Godrick. 3. Radahn. 4. Malenia. 5. Rennala 6. Wolf of Radagon (gets re used as a mini boss in a hidden area later but the first one still counts). 7. Tree Sentinel 8. Rykard. 9. Godskin Apostle 10. Godskin Noble 11. Death rite Bird 12. Night Cavalry 14. Magma Wyrms 15. Dragons (agheel, adula, smarag, etc.. ount as at least one unique fight. 16. Ancient dragons (Fortissax and Lansseax) waaaay different than the other dragons. 17. Crystalians. 18. Astel 19. Crucible Knight 20. Mimic Tear 21. Dragonkin Soldiers 22. Gargoyles 23. Fire Giant 24. Mohg 25. Radagon 26. Elden Beast 27. Commander Oneil 28. Maliketh I can literally go on and on and on after this amd STILL not repeat anything. Are some bosses used more than once? Sure. Are there darn near 50 specific unique boss encounters despite that? Damn straight.
@@scleless1342 unique means you only fight them once in the game.. if you only fought crucible knight for example just once, you didn't do very good exploration because you fight him multiple time through the game, margit also twice, night cavalry muktiple times etc etc.. your list is just plain wrong mate..
I also hate the ash summons mechanic. If you use them every encounter becomes a joke but it sure feels like a lot of bosses, especially dual fights and late game bosses were designed with the summon in mind
Tbh I don't like em because I don't want to trek through the game or do questioned just to find a summon that'll make it possible to beat Radagon + EB. It seems to break the Souls formula where bosses were designed to be beaten solo
@@slamislife74 this game is more casual than any other Souls game. That's why they give the player so many options. Trust me, if it wasn't open world, didn't have op gear or didn't have summons, a lot of people would've quit half way through. But to be fair, it was the easiest way to make a Souls game main stream.
@@thelgpain6529 idk man I think making the game open world and giving OP weapons is where they should’ve stopped as it still gives newbies options but doesn’t take away from the souls formula. In a way both of these options are in pretty much every from game
I think this game is just too long and too big for its own good. The first few regions like Limgrave, Weeping Peninsula, Stormveil Castle and Liurnia of the Lakes are absolutely magnificent when you play for the first time. You keep coming across brand new enemy types, finding unique places, admiring the stunning views and the game feels like the best thing in the world. But around the time you reach Caelid most of the game's flaws that you haven't noticed yet start to show all at once. By the time I reached Altus Plateau and then Mountaintops of the Giants, Farum Azula and Consecrates Snowfield, I was tired of the game and completely burned out. At the time I'm writing this comment, I still haven't finished the game. I gave up at the moment I reached this annoying liturgical town with invisible assassins that leads to the Malenia's tree. I just couldn't be bothered. The game became too boring, repetitive and frustrating to me and I no longer was having fun. I think Elden Ring would be 5 times better if some content was cut and devs instead focused on refining what's left. I would much rather play a 60-hour-long game that constantly introduces new and exciting things rather than a 100-hour-long game that drags on unnecessarily and starts throwing recycled, uninteresting and poorly designed content at me halfway through. Personally, I would cut at least Mountaintops of the Giants and Consecrated Snowfield. They are the most boring locations in the game and they don't even offer any unique enemies, bosses or cool vistas for that matter. A frozen wasteland filled with trolls is just pathetic compared to the creative and and dense areas the game starts with. I could write a whole essay about game's faults here but let me just summarize the most important points: 1. The game recycles enemies and bosses way too much. I could understand a few instances of recycling like fighting Morgot who is hellbent on avenging Margit. This is a cool concept that would work perfectly if it was used sparingly. But the content is recycled all over the place! Caelid's unique dinodogs and giant birds are all over snowy Mountaintops for some reason! Stormveil Castle's weird stormhawks suddenly appear in other locations later on. There are way too many copy-pasted dragons that diminish the initial fight in Limgrave's lake. I think the game should have maximum of 5 dragons, where each one has a unique moveset and different elemental breath. Every dragon encounter should be a special and memorable event, not a chore. It's even worse with bosses. I fought about 10 identical Erdtree Avatars, 5 giant Erdtree monsters, 3 Fallingstar Beasts, 5 Magma Wyrms, multiple Tibia Mariners, 5 separate Gargoyles etc. The game just keeps reusing the same bosses with identical movesets. The only difference is a slight reskin sometimes but even that isn't guaranteed. It diminishes the experience because the game stops surprising me with unique designs and cool encounters. Halfway through the game I saw everything it had to offer. 2. Side quests are too vague and the game doesn't have any quest log so it's virtually impossible to keep track of everything. If you want to complete questlines, you basically have to google everything. It should not be a case in a game that aspires to be so unique and immersive. I should be able to play on my own and discover everything organically, not rely on guides to find a specific character the game never told me where to look for. 3. The camera and movement are extremely clunky. I hate how the camera keeps automatically recentering every goddamn second. I fought it harder than some of the bosses. It was distracting, annoying and I couldn't even admire the views properly because every time I wanted to look to the side, the game would pull my camera back. I don't know if you guys noticed but the game doesn't really respond to controller input smoothly. You can test this by riding your horse diagonally relative to the camera. It seems like the game was designed with 8 main directions you can achieve with a keyboard and when you try to be more precise with your controller, the character or your horse start to twitch between 2 different directions. Apart from that, some animations are too detached from the world and they feel weightless. I didn't expect fully realistic and grounded animations like in RDR2 but the game would definitely feel better if Torrent felt more like a real horse and there was some momentum attached to your movement. Ghost of Tsushima's feel would be perfect here. 4. The loot is not rewarding because most of it is useless for your character build. There should be more universal upgrades like parts to upgrade armor, ways to level up Torrent and items that permanently buff your stats like health, stamina or FP. Most gear you find also becomes useless the longer you play. At some point I found weapons that made everything else obsolete. Once I got the Golden Halberd and the Golden Greatshield, this became the only gear I used. The halberd was too OP compared to everything else I had so there was no point in trying to upgrade other weapons. I used the Brass shield for like half of the game and then switched to Golden Greatshield to beat the other half. Never felt the need to experiment with other shields. 5. The combat system is weirdly designed. Sometimes the game feels like a slow-paced Demon Soul's clone where you have to dodge at the right moment to avoid damage and other times enemies and bosses do ridiculous 50-hit anime combos, jump every 5 seconds or spam area attacks which makes the player feel too slow and to clunky to deal with them properly. I feel like many encounters were designed with either Bloodhound Step or great shields in mind. But if this is the case, then why not just make bloodhound step your default dodge? If devs wanted to have those hyperaggressive and lightning-fast enemies, they should have made players faster and more agile as well. Imagine how much better the game would be if the roll dodge was replaced with bloodhound step at some point in the story. I felt like a Dark Souls character being forced to deal with Bloodborne enemies. Instead of getting more aggressive and confident with my attacks, I became more and more defensive. The game very quickly taught me that turtling behind a big shield is the best approach. I would just hide behind a Golden Shield with Barricade ability and wait for enemies to attack me so I can do a quick counter with my OP halberd. It works like a charm because I can just tank ridiculous combos enemies throw my way and easily stagger them for a critical hit. I competely removed the need to dodge from the game. Every fight devolved into this and it made the game extremely boring for me. 6. And finally, I want to point out one flaw that everyone seems to be ignoring. LOSING RUNES MAKES NO SENSE IN THIS GAME! I get that many people are used to this mechanic. I also understand the idea behind it. Devs wanted to introduce some risk so that players are more careful and they think about what they are about to do. If you can lose the runes you have at any point, it makes the game more tense. However, it completely ruined the flow of the game for me. Especially in the caves and dungeons. Elden Ring has an annoying tendency of putting hard bosses in low-level areas. And because the boss rooms are hidden behind the fog wall, you can't really tell what's waiting for you on the other side. I had multiple moments in my playthrough where I cleared the whole dungeon, got a bunch of runes and then entered the boss room just to discover that my character is way too weak to defeat it. The lost runes respawn INSIDE the boss room which you can't leave unless you kill the boss. This means that sometimes you can enter a boss room and effectively LOSE all of the runes you just acquired in the dungeon because you're forced to leave them inside the boss room. This became so annoying to me that I stopped completing boss rooms at the end of a dungeon! Instead, I would always leave the dungeon with all of my runes and quickly farm some enemies in the open world so I can level up. I would just stop doing the dungeon, farm runes for a moment, level up and then come back to face the boss when I don't have any runes to lose. This was the only way for me to ensure that I'm not wasting my time by losing runes to some random boss who's too OP for my character. At a later stage, I just started cheating to solve this issue. I installed a trainer and ticked the option "never lose runes". That way I could progress through the game in an organic way and not teleport away before every boss fight. Losing runes doesn't even make sense in Elden Ring because it's an open world game with respawnable enemies! This means you can farm as many runes as you want. If you lose runes, it only means the game wasted your time because you can always go to a farming spot and regain them.
43:30 When I started playing, I told myself that I would not use any summons and it was so fun to me to overcome certain bosses. But later, it started to be tedious so I started summoning random players and it was so much fun again too. Especially if the players are not too overpowered and we can beat the boss together.
The input queue system worked really well in Demon's and DS1, and less well since then. They've dialled it down a bit, I think, to deal with the fact that the games keep getting faster and less 'clunky' which means you're more likely to either button mash or just queue up inputs which you then change your mind about because something new happened. Also the range of possible inputs has got bigger with jumping, weapon arts etc. But the net result is that I never quite know if the game is going to queue my inputs correctly or not. That exquisite feeling of queueing up a roll and a combo 2-3 presses in advance that you get duelling silver knights in DS1 just doesn't quite happen in ER. The old games felt like clockwork, yes, but clockwork that YOU were building in real time. That doesn't make ER bad I just don't think they've quite figured things out. Sekiro did new things but worked because the combat system was so drastically streamlined, aggressively balanced and prescriptive.
I wasn't convinced by the announcement, trailer or reviews of Elden Ring 2 years later I forced myself to try again and beat the game solo I did I dislike Elden Ring. My gut reaction was correct People really overhyped this game
I get the "boss reuse" criticism, but I don't think "you aren't going to use 2/3rds of the spells/items/weapons etc" goes very far. Everything in the game is there as options for you to explore. SOMEONE out there is using that weapon your build can't, and if you did want to experiment, it's ridiculously easy to re-spec in this game. In fact, experimenting with builds and equipment is the main reason I would replay the previous titles. ER is the exception, because like I said in my last comment, it's just too damn long.
I think you missed the point. Yes there are tons of combination you can use, different builds to experiment, but in the end at least 2/3 of the Ashes of War and Summons are useless, no matter the build of play style.
@@Ogilla Says who? There are certainly (and obviously) tools that are more effective, but that can be said of nearly every video game. I've beaten past DS games with nothing but bow or dagger, among an assortment of other things I tried out for fun. Was that as optimal as Giant dad build? Obviously not. There's so many "this skill is underrated" videos out there. Just because you think it's useless doesn't means it can't be used and enjoyed.
You mention how reviews said there were a lot of ashes but neglected to mention you won’t you most of them… okay how is that a negative? There’s also hundreds of weapons and you won’t use most of those. Does that mean the large amount of weapons is a bad thing? And just because a boss becomes a common enemy later doesn’t mean they weren’t good as a boss fight. I understand your criticism about reviewers barely playing the game but the examples you gave I think weren’t good to support that point, especially when most reviews are very short which means they’ll inevitably forget to mention a large amount of things. But having more options of ashes to choose isn’t a negative. Also your complaints about reusing and reskinning enemies is pretty insane when it’s a common practice in video games, including in things like Breath of the Wild. They don’t reuse that many, and when you look at the vast amount of unique enemies compared to reused it’s a nitpick. We’d all prefer new unique enemies but the reskins are fine because the enemies that are reskinned aren’t overused and do add some variety to areas. I’d say breath of the wild reuses and reskins enemies to an unacceptable extent while in Elden Ring it’s really a small part of the entire game Comparing Red Dead storytelling to Elden Ring is an absurd comparison. One is heavily based on story while the other is much more focused on combat. They pretty much polar opposite takes on open world adventure games. I don’t think it’s fair to compare these in story alone, while not comparing weapon variety and enemy variety. Two things Elden ring would Stomp RDR in but that’s because it’s an unfair comparison. Some of your arguments seem rather absurd when you make comparisons. “Guess I’ll fight the same thing I’ve been fighting all game.” What are you talking about. The enemies don’t get overused that much and there’s tons of different ones. You should despise breath of the wild and RDR more than any game
Elden Ring was definitely a bit much for me. I think everything up to Morgott is great, but I always seem to run out of steam after beating him. Mountaintops of the Giants just isn't that interesting of an area, and Farum Azula is grueling, full of enemies with tons of health that do incredibly high damage and are often placed in frustrating configurations (Placidusax is the only boss in the game I haven't beaten, and it's purely because the three beastmen on the way to him are so annoying). Bosses are a mixed bag too -- I think Mohg and Godfrey are really fun, but I have no desire to fight Malenia again and I really did not have a good time with the last boss It's kind of the same issue DS1 has now that I think about it. I'll gladly replay everything up to Ornstein and Smough, but then I have to force myself to get through the stuff that comes after
To me it's the DLC that motivates me to continue a DS1 playthrough past Anor Londo. I always leave it as the last thing to do before Gwyn, as a kind of reward. Here's to hoping a DLC can have that effect on Elden ring, too!
It's sad the state of expressing opinions on internet now, you really have to introduce yourself as "THIS IS JUST MY OPINION", and then do a small praise for the object of critic, to avoid the backlash and hate from people that cannot handle criticism. Back in the day people would say "this is shit" and not give a fuck.
At around 43:24 From what I can tell a lot of the complaints about the playstyle that people have isn't "hurr durr, play only using shield and sword" but actually something that has substance. And it works with the "increased accessibility" that the games added. It's how it seems that a lot of later bosses are designed with those options actually being used. Like Ash summons. The issue with that is how much it throws the overall balance out of whack. Generally the intended playstyle for souls games is being solo, using minimal items, and using a sword, rolling to avoid most damage. Magic is in the game, but it breaks a lot of the systems. So it's like an easy mode, that's built into the game. That's a good thing, it doesn't really affect people of either categories, and people not as skilled can stil win with magic. It's great. The issue in Elden ring, is how it seems like they ballance the lategame bosses while having in mind Ash summons. And that really makes their balance whack. Either you use the ashes, and the bosses are too easy, or you don't and they are too hard. (Also their over reliance on making the bosses so cool and giving them long ass combos that can someone cancel into each other, which makes them too unpredictable and makes players want to avoid them altogether and not engage with their mechanics)
A game made for everyone is a game made for no one... After playing ER & the DLC and then returning to DS3; ER feels like visiting that cheap bar where all the drinks are heavily watered down while DS3 is like drinking gasoline. I much prefer gasoline...
It's also important to note that dark souls 3 started in production before myazaki was promoted CEO. He has a distaste for sequels and much prefer making spiritual successors which explains why he wasn't as involved in ds2 and 3 (despite being a director in ds3, he joined late in development). I guess that makes Elden Ring the real dark souls 2, but I wouldn't expect a sequel especially considering how all of the endings seem to impact the state of the world in such drastic ways and that they seem to be against "canon ending" but oh well, unless Bandai Namco pressure them I wouldn't consider a sequel in the making.
@@ouraywind1208 exactly why their won't be a sequel to bloodborne either unless Sony has Bluepoint work on it. Although I'm sure with the success of Elden Ring I'm betting there will be another souls game coming in the distant future.
You aren't very familiar with souls titles as admitted by you and also evident from some of your commentary on it, like for example while comparing the stories between Elden Ring and Dark Souls. Despite not being very familiar with it, you then comment on how the community of the game used to be and what they've become with Elden Ring. Dark souls community has always been fairly toxic. It is not a new thing that "Git Gud" is unironic to a lot of people. Since DS1 people have been saying that you didn't really beat Dark Souls unless you did x y or z. It's a game that is a unique challenge in gaming. It's not particularly hard, but it is a sort of rite of passage, like learning to ride a bike. People have some amount of pride about it and denigrate others to elevate themselves. This is not a new phenomenon with Elden Ring.
The problem with this video is that you never take the story into the equation. There is a reason why we fight Margit and Morgott, and same for both versions of godfrey. Elden ring was my first fromsoft game, and i loved every second of my 3 playthroughs
As someone who loves Fromsoft stories and is pretty deep into Elden Ring lore, I do not think that they first had the story and then placed the bosses, I am fairly certain that they needed to reuse bosses and the added explanations for why you fight them more than once. But it doesn't really matter, especially since most wont get the story initially, it doesn't change that it FEELS reused to some. Edit: if it only happend with Mogh and Morgot, it would probably add some cool mystery, but since every smaller boss and even some main line bosses get reused all the time (Like, there is a second Godrick and in his case the explanation isn't even good like it is with Margit and Morgot), I can understand why ppl can't help but feel like its cheap to reuse bosses like that.
As someone who has played all of the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring, the story is lackluster. World was good for a while, except not really the bad parts just weren't apparent, world falls into decay, you fight the previous patriarchy, become Lord of whatever the fuck. It's all tonally the same shit I've already experienced in 3 previous games at this point, and I didn't even play Bloodbourne to make the comparison of fighting an eldritch space god as the _real_ final boss. Elden Ring, as someone who is fresh to the series, probably has a great story. But I'm not a newcomer, and as a result I find it the story boring. That doesn't mean I didn't get invested, but It's still something I didn't really "like" or considered "amazing."
@@michaelbowman6684 nah, ER' story is about us living in a fractured mind of a girl (?) who became a God, but her psyche was damaged so much with trauma (someone' death?) and/or pain, that said world, said mind (said "ring") is literally shattered and we need to reassemble all aspects ( "demigods all" ) of her psyche to reach dzen or whatever and finally be a True God ( Self as Jung called it ) I still don't get who we play as, thou
Those performance issues were very real. When I play the game now it runs perfectly but on launch you got major frame drops in a lot of the open world areas. Unfortunately one of the worst examples of this was literally right outside of Limgrave, where the Tree Sentinel is.
Overall copy pasted side content, makes me rush through open world to main stages rather than focus on it. Playing Dark Souls series still feels like a journey, not like a race.
Dark Souls/Bloodborne has wonderful pacing and each map area is special and unique. You’re not not being forced to face the same copy and pasted bosses over and over again. Imagine fighting Gwen, Artorias, and Ornstein/Smough 3+ times…….That’s Elden Ring 😂
I would prefer the same game with less enemies overall. Like Kingdom Come: Deliverance. That game did it better. You can play all day long without meeting a single enemy, unless you know where they are or you go searching for them.
I enjoy Elden ring it's just that it is different than dark souls and sometimes in a bad way, the bosses are very very interesting but also incredibly annoying to fight, the wind up attacks that are delayed and the camera issues just made certain bosses a chore to beat instead of feeling that classic dark souls reward when beating a boss
I restarted the game due to frustration 4+ times before I finally pushed through the majority of it. Sword and board build felt insanely weak against those unrelenting crackhead early bosses. Then tried dual wielding dex build for whatever reason and it was even harder early on. Swapped to magic and face rolled the game till I got bored. Now I've comeback months later with a faith build. Face rolled again all the way to mountain of giants and then couldn't kill any of the bosses there. I really didn't want to have to look up a specific build/items until I'd beaten the game, but looks like I need to.
I heard that NG+ wasn’t going to include any changes other than increased difficulty and rune gain, so i sprinted my first run so I could get the pay raise while I do my main run.
"My mimic tear was way better than I was" I felt that in my soul
random thought but wish mimic tear didn’t wish it a was a mano a mano but like the fight
between you and dark link in oot, would be cool
Bruh, I randomly scrolled 17 something minutes into the video and as I read your comment he said that 💀
its actually much worse but has a huge amount more hp to compensate for getting hit a lot.
My mimic got its shit slapped cause I'm just better(or my build is down on syndrome)
Bro, if your Mimic Tear plays better than you, you're garbage lol. Git gud
It's ridiculously funny how careful and timid most people are about criticizing this game. Every middly negative review I've seen starts with some type of disclaimer basically saying "sorry for not liking this masterpiece".
in my defense, my disclaimer doesnt say sorry for not liking it but that i did still like the game lol. i really hated starting out with that for the exact reason youre talking about though. everything feels so black and white with this game so i felt like it was a necessary evil to lead off with. too much of the elden ring content gets immediately grouped into "it sucks" or "its perfect" and most people are looking to judge based off of only those two opinions. that was my poor attempt at not creating a dividing line 4 seconds into an hour long video.
@@SwoopGoose well I may have worded it wrong, you sure didn't say that but it was more like a "forgive me for having these blasphemous opinions about this masterpiece, pls don kill me!" kind of disclaimer. Which I find hilarious and kinda sad because I've seen the same thing in a lot reviews that dare to criticize it, almost like people are afraid of the fandom (which is very toxic tbh) or afraid of going against the popular opinion.
Anyways, good review! I pretty much feel the same way about the game. It sure is "good" but in the end I had so many issues with it that almost dropped it by the time I reached the mountain top of the giants.
o ya i was just messing around with that first line of the reply. i knew exactly what you meant and its pretty true lol.
Just trying to avoid death threats and other toxic bullshit
Rabid Miyazaki fanboys are very dangerous.
This game definitely had a honeymoon phase for me where I thought it could do no wrong, a literal perfect game. As you start to really sink your teeth into this game the flaws unravel:
1. Boss variety is sorely lacking
2. Every side quest except volcano manor is ridiculously cryptic like you basically have to google everything
3. The difficulty is either too easy or too hard based on how you go through the game.
4. The end of the game feels empty and a bit rushed
This game to me is still an 8.75 or 9 out of 10, it does a lot of things right but I think the boss variety really hurts the experience. Why am I exploring this area to fight a boss I’ve fought 5 times for an item I probably won’t use?
100%. If they had got the boss combat right I think it could've been a 10, but the triple cristallian boss alone automatically takes off a point and a half for being such BS
@@ModernHonour you have summons my friend, the tools to make it easier are there. If you decide not to use them for the challenge, then you get what you ask for haha
@@hellion1193 Yeah but given that summons are a reasonably new addition and the template always used to work without them, they’re not really offering dark souls players a way of having a similar experience. Instead I have to let the computer do some of the fighting for me?
@@ModernHonour well, that's why I said you can choose not to use them, then you will have the dark souls experience.
@@hellion1193 I know, but it wasn’t the dark souls experience if you didn’t use them because ds3 didn’t have these stupid fights I’m talking about except for curse rotted greatwood
Fall Damage is based on height, but it's really weird. It's a scale from 1-20. If you fall up to 15 units, you take no damage. 16-19 is a percentage of damage, and 20 or more is death. That's why it feels so janky, the safe zone is so much bigger than the hurt zone.
As a PhD in Physics, I'd say this is more realistic than it being linear lols
@@hellion1193 I believe you. Lol
@@jasongriffin1517 lmao, not sure if sarcasm or not 😂
@@hellion1193
Having a fall damage be by percentage than by linear function makes sense, but ER completely disregard another crucial factor: momentum. Literally every other open world game implements both height and momentum to calculate their fall damage. The height itself doesn't kill you, it's the sudden stop that does. ER's fall damage is extremely consistent in a non-consistent map.
@@hellion1193 bruh just falling from 4 feet can fuck you up
The issue with *input queuing* is that the system cannot tell the difference between "button mashing" and simply adapting to the enemy's pattern changes. Especially in this entry where every other mob is on crack and (past Morgott) does ludicrous amounts of burst damage while being sponges themselves.
Best example of input queues screwing me over is when I mistime a dodge roll and press the button moments after I get hit, then the input is read after my stun lock is done and I end up dodging too early and getting hit, resulting in me getting punished twice when I made one mistake.
I have had no trouble with it for the most part. I don't see why they don't add the ability to cancel an attack before it's finished though, like Chivalry, Mordhau, or Sekiro... Let alone cancel a cue.
I had problems with the input queuing and healing for some reasons. Sometimes it just woudlnt queue a heal and I was so focused on watching the bosses next more I didn’t make sure it went off. Doubly so for say bigger lads like Radhan who you have to be watching the VERY top of the screen so I’m not looking if my gal chugged some tears
I had no problems of input queueing in elden ring. But in dark souls 3 tho....
@@cosmiclikesminecraft what size monitor are you playing on Jesus are you at the movie theatres ive never once not seen my character use a flask because I was looking up at a boss
by the time i got to the mountain tops of the giants i was mentally and physically exhausted. The game didnt need to be this big, especially if they're just going to recycle every enemy you've fought 100 times by the time you got to the snow area. That's when i started abusing summons to rush to finish the game.
Yeah the open world while nice had a lot of dead air and not enough value in the open area itself. While I guess it felt more “real” I don’t really come to games for “real” I’m a massive hater of photorealistic graphics and mechanics. Since 99% of the most interesting items are gonna be in villages or more commonly dungeons which can easily be spotted on the map
Also Stakes of Marika are great. Except when they’re not sometime they jsut aren’t in front of a boss so you Gotta do a stupid run back.
Equally disappointing is there’s still a lack of shortcuts, the last time levels really had shortcuts commonly was DS2 and even then they were far fewer then in DeS and DS1. I like shortcuts less graces more shortcuts please. It was rare for me to feel tense exploring because I was so sure the next grace was always gonna be around the corner when I started to run low on flasks
you shoulda took a break.
@@joeblunt6126 if i needed to take a break before finishing my first playthrough then that is exactly the proof that the game is too big for no good reason. Im not against big games with huge maps, but at least make them interesting. Elden Ring's map stopped being interesting after Lyndell. The mountains are generally empty, but also filled with recycled enemies with bloated numbers, not to mention the damn fog where you cant even see where you're going, which kills the fun of exploring.
Well the game didn't "need" to be anything. You just didn't want it to be this big.
@@AysarAburrub that's not proof at all.
No matter how big or interesting you think a map is... it will reach a point in size where you will get burned out.
That's a You problem
Not a game problem
As a Souls fan I was hyped for ER like never before. I played through 3 times now and my feeling is that it’s a great game but it’d have been better if Leyndel was the last level. Make the game shorter and use the saved resources for more unique bosses and it’s a best game in the series. As it stands I still think Bloodborne and Sekiro are better
It really felt like they were running out of ideas after Leyndell with how many bosses just had massive AOE spam. Not all of them and some major story fights were still pretty solid but the story could've easily been altered to fit them into Leyndell. Something like Fire Giant would've made for an excellent optional challenge even if it didn't fit there, keep his area as a lead in to the Haligtree as a purely optional challenge area.
Make the snowfield and mountain significantly smaller, make reaching the Haligtree much simpler. Keep Farum Azula as an interlude between Morgott and the final series of bosses but make everything else between the two optional. Being a proper legacy dungeon it is one of the more fleshed out areas and having boss level dragons as normal enemies for one endgame dungeon rather than scattered through the open world, is enemy reuse I can appreciate as a means of highlighting just how ridiculously powerful we are and by extension everything at that point is.
@@zeroattentiongaming820 I mean Haligtree is optional, but for Souls vets there’s no such thing as optional lol we always want more souls, I just think it got pretty tiresome with all the reused assets.
Yeah, ER has the same problem as ds1, in my opinion: the game is a masterpiece until you beat "the city of the gods" then the problems start showing it's ugly face.
Ds1 had a lack of time resulting in lower quality areas. (And the worst boss fromsoftware has ever designed)
ER has an overtuning problem, and recycling enemies we've already fought earlier in the game
This exactly. It would’ve also been an obvious setup for an obvious sequel
Fuck I agree with this. I still want all the last couple bosses but just put them in a more natural progression or in post game dungeons
I think most reviewers genuinely loved the game. The thing is very few of them played long enough or explored enough to see the repetition; most reviews were less than 60hrs of play.
Agreed. It took me a second playthrough as well until I started to really see some flaws. It's my third favorite game they ever made and i'm glad it was received so well. I just hope that FROM doesn't think they've peaked with Elden Ring and continues to evolve.
What repetition though? I'm 130 hours in and there's still fresh and unique things around every corner imo
@@camdenwyeth316 Don’t wanna spoil it, but when I was 130hrs in I was still having a great time finding new things too. It’s more obvious to those who’ve had the chance to explore most/all of the game. I personally don’t fault the game for repetition though since there’s soooo much content it’d be impossible to constantly introduce new things.
@@seananih7609 yeah that's fair enough then, I can see even what I've done getting stale to some people too. For a game this scale though I'm impressed it's managed to feel relatively immersive/fresh this long at least, even if it goes downhill going forwards
@@camdenwyeth316 Same. Right now I have 241 hrs clocked and about 130 of them are the most fun hours I’ve had with a game in my adult life. It’s amazing.
With the Godskin Duo, there's actually a grace if you turn from the grace you came from, and drop down! (fully down to the last level, itll take 2 jumps, 1 to the stairs, 1 to the bottom) and progressing through that area, you'll find a different entrance to the Godskin duo. I don't know why they were so misleading entrance wise for that boss that's frustrating enough. The grace I'm talking about though is literally just right next to the entrance, with no enemies in the way.
This grace irked me when I found it after the fact. Spent like an hour running around that place trying to figure out how the fuck I was supposed to get to it before fighting the boss. When I did find it I just sighed and moved on.
"my mimic tear was significantly better than i was" i felt that on a ridiculously whole other scale
On performance issues, if you are having them, they are enough to ruin the experience, especially during boss fights. I was one of the unlucky ones, but most of my friends seemed to get by okay. It wasn't enough to stop me from playing, but when you're dealing with the fine margins you so often have to in these games it becomes very frustrating, very quickly.
Game crashes are still way to frequent. Usually occurs when attempting to connect with multiplayer. Tho occasionally when fast traveling. With how big the game is sales wise I'd hope they'd put more attention into multiplayer, but fromsoft has always cared more about the single player experience, despite every game sans sekiro having invasions.
Yeah, the narrator lives among a blessed group. When I got the game I had the bug that made human size NPC and dogs invisible. I kept trying to play anyways. Eventually, a mod was released on Nexus that fixed the issue and then beyond that From finally patched it out but that was after like a month of owning the game. The suck part about the bug was that while people who didn't have it were so eager to tell everyone that our computers suck even though that was fa from the truth given the range of devices that had the issue, once the mod was made it was revealed that it was a load order issue in the Regulation.bin. I say all that to say, while I still love Elden Ring I still get annoyed at folks who dismiss people who have bugs as "looking for excuses to complain" I played the game for 12 hours unable to see most enemies before I had to stop and wait for a fix.
Maybe quit playing on PC. It’s not the best platform anymore like it was 20 years ago 😂. Zero performance issues on the P5 and I got a PC
@@jasonphillips9281 that’s just a shit excuse. It doesn’t have to be ‘the best’, the game isn’t technically groundbreaking. The game runs poorly on hardware more powerful than a PS5. If they didn’t want people to buy it on PC they wouldn’t have released it on the platform, they just did a bad job of it but go on posting bullshit.
I remember when I first loaded up the game there were weird see through black bars all over my screen that would rarely vanish and I had to get into a discord call and show my friends. I did find some fixes but that first day of Elden Ring was full of weird performance issues.
i feel like a lot of reviewers did not even come close to finishing the game prior to reviewing it. I love Elden Ring, but IMO after Leyndell there is a massive drop is quality and enjoyment and the last 25% or so of the game is a full on slog where it stops being fun and all the game's flaws are apparent. Ridiculously overtuned enemies that don't reward you with anything, no more rewarding exploration, constant re use of enemies and bosses, repetitive caves that don't offer rewards, and overly obtuse quests and storytelling that basically require you to look up a guide if you want to experience at all.
Totally agree. I already felt the drop right after Liurnia. There was just nothing new to see for me after that and it just became tedious.
I hate the reusing of enemies and low rewards. Elden Ring made me crave Dark Souls though and I’m half way through the remastered for the first time. Incredible experience!!
Mountaintop of gaints is what crossed the line for me.
Every area kept ramping up where enemies became brick walls or 95% untouchab...Maliketh.
When I'm double fisting giant hammers leaping off my horse and slamming those bad bois directly into the bonk zone I wanna see some stagger and some damage not hear a squeaky oh no my own organs why.
Didn't really become more difficult so much as more tedious. Longer wait times for an opening, longer volleys to get a poise break or other critical shot, longer hp bars. It didn't get harder for me it got harder for my patience.
I'd add two things you didn't mention... and I heard even some of the die hard dark souls fans with thousands of hours say these things about this game.
1) The input queue in this game is far worse than in any previous DS games
2) The input reading the enemies do is just unfair.
And in the end if nothing else, you gained a new sub with this video. Keep up the good work.
As a big souls fan I agree. I think it's possible the input queue is "this same" but the change in controls and ashes of war system plus all the extra stuff going on makes it considerably worse. The older games were far more focused so it didn't really feel as bad but as someone who can basically breeze through the older games I HATE the input buffering in this game with a passion
"feeble king" and "unleashed bread" both youtuber are souls vet oldfan and made some solid videos criticizing Elden ring. especially feeble king, check out his vids i case u are interested
@@btchiaintkidding7837 Don't know them.
I'll check them out for sure. Nowadays it's pretty hard to find good content creators.
Thanks for the tip!
Input queue is absolutely ridiculous but the input read is not as bad but i played close range while learning dodge timing to create gaps to heal myself
can confirm lmfao its really stupid
Being a big From Software fan, I think it's good that people have started criticizing the game. This game really made me feel burnt out on souls formula. But to be very honest with you, some criticisms did felt like you can easily find a workaround for them. For example the enemies attacking you through fog door, just roll once and you are good to go my dude!
You brought up some really good points man, thank you for this analysis! I really enjoyed it. And I feel frustrated towards people who bash others for criticizing a popular game... If you love something, you have to speak your mind so that the creators can improve on their shortcomings. It's sad that the "mob mentality" makes criticizing look like just mere hate, to me it's a sign of caring about the game and the creators behind it. This video to me reflects that, and I agree (as a souls fan btw) with many of your criticisms.
Hey it’s the funny parody animator
Its the Shezmen :)
A lot of his arguments were built off of false equivalences
@@lt_johnmcclane Your statement bears the fallacy of false alternatives.
I cannot express to you enough how godskin duo would still be terrible no matter how many times you fight them
Once you've seen it all once, the mystery and wonder is gone. Once you've fought every boss, you know how they work and the challenge disappears. I started NG+ a few weeks ago and I've only done a few hours of it, because I honestly just don't want to crawl through all the early-game stuff again, which is laughably easy now at level 201. Margit got absolutely SMOKED, and I was barely trying. It was fun to get revenge on him like that, and Tree Sentinel, who also got destroyed, but I just don't feel the same urge to get in and do it that I did on the first playthrough.
I get this all the time on all games tho, not just FromSoft games. Good games gives you a decent sense of finality once it's over, which actually makes your brain think there's nothing more to experience. It makes your brain associate continued playing with past memories, instead of being open to experiencing things in the moment. Ergo, little/no motivation. It sucks but it's actually the sign of a good game that it got you rly into it.
Best thing to do imo is take some time off from the game, then go back to it and play NG+ some other time; clear your mind from the atmosphere the game gives you. I took about a month or so off after finishing it, and did other things (Subnautica, a very different game). Now I find I can go back already (sometimes I need longer off). I have to do this with books and movies too, especially if I read/watch too many similar feeling ones in a row. It's just how the brain works.
@@glohan2122 nah I beat ds3 4 times and it stayed fun forever
To be fair, NG+ being very easy has always been the case, that's why I personally never used the feature that much, making a new character just feels a lot better because you can see how much you've improved.
I agree with the sense of mystery and wonder being gone tho. Exploration is one of it's biggest strongsuits when playing it the first time, but it also turns into it's biggest flaw on repeat playthroughs imo. There's just too much content that doesn't warrant being replayed. Too many dungeons with a copypaste boss and loot I can't find a use for, or am literally unable to use. When replaying DS3 or Bloodborne, there isn't a boss or area i'm not looking forward to (except 1 or 2 per game maybe), when replaying Elden Ring, at least a third of all bosses and dungeons feel like a chore.
That’s just false, after the first time is when you truly start exploring, when you take advantage of everything you thought you knew to make even more discoveries, open up new build potential, even start planning routes in your head.
@@glohan2122 Not to mention that in Dark Souls 3 we proved that the early game ng+ genuinely was easier but the difficulty did ramp up a towards mid to late game. Ng+3 and up is still where the real challenge comes in.
About your camera segment, it's actually really funny that sekiro has the current best camera in the series, especially in fights like demon of hatred, who is an enormous enemy where u can clearly see the moves he's doing, I don't understand how they downgraded from it, maybe it's the ds3 engine but idk
I think my biggest concern going into Elden Ring was the NPCs. The cryptic, non-linear questlines worked very well for DS1, DS2, DS3, and Bloodborne. But in a completely open world game... it does NOT translate well. I was hoping they'd be a little more straightforward and more like regular side quests, but... it wasn't. It was confusing and hard to find one specific NPC without looking it up. What are the odds you would go hear Blaidd's howl and then go talk to Kale and happen to see the dialogue option about said howl without looking that up? You might hear the howl and think it's just a background part of the game, or a random wolf. And, to be honest, that is one of the EASIER NPCs to figure out. There's even harder ones than that! How the hell are people supposed to logically follow these without guides?
I genuinely dont see why this is a problem though. This has always been how it is in most souls game except sekiro, most questline get left out until you started googling and elden ring is no different. Plus most encounters with these npcs are not compulsory and the compulsory ones are made very obvious. I didn’t meet blaidd in mistwood nor did i met alexander in stormhill or gael tunnel i just met both of them in redmane and continue their quest from there. I agree that theres a lot of problems with elden ring but I genuinely dont think npc quest being cryptic is a problem, its the same way it was in dark souls.
@@dudeiii2069 I'm not reading all that. To address the first point, it works in other games because they are relatively linear. You can literally go anywhere in Elden Ring right from the start. It's impossible to keep track of NPCs without looking things up. Also, it's incredible easy to miss almost all of them (again, because the map is way too big). Hell, I missed Ranni for SO long because I didn't visit her spot for ages.
@@TheTongueTwisler also a good chunk of quests just become incompletable because you killed that area's shardbearer which is genuinely retarded because they have nothing to do with the npc's quest in the first place.
@@TheTongueTwisler You couldn't bother to read "all that", despite the fact that it's less text than your comment? It's not even much text at all, neither were your comment to begin with. Talk about giving courtesy enough.
Furthermore, some of the questlines in Dark Souls were almost equally as difficult to follow, why would you spontaneously traverse all of Blighttown again after Anor Londo for Siegmeyer's quest? I didn't buy the key from the Undead Merchant, forgot about it and Griggs got left behind. My friend had to tell me about Greirat's location, and to progress Sirris' line I had to look up her soapstone placement.
Although for all of Fromsoft's games the obscurity may work in their favour. It's supposed to add replay value, you didn't find them/complete the questlines on your first time but maybe you do on a second playthrough. Even if the player didn't find either of Alexander and Blaidd both appear at the festival, which you're pointed to by the Guidance of Grace. The non-linearity of Elden Ring is what mostly impacts the questlines negatively, if you've already explored an area you're unlikely to return there, but that also goes for Dark Souls questlines; there's not much fundamentally different between the two.
@@Nen_niN Yeah... I ain't reading all that either! Sorry that happened. Or I'm happy for you!
Ranni's ending was actually mistranslated, it made the ending sound bleaker than it actually is
Stop trying to downplay legitimate performance concerns by saying "Oh I didn't have any problems". They're not trying to hate the game, they want it to perform better to enhance enjoyment 🙄
Second playthrough and I love it. The game was made for people like me apparently. I like grinding, I like build variety, I like freedom, and I like role playing or arcade action
Same here
I havve 5 characters already
It was made for tons of different people. That's why it is so popular. It's good that you can enjoy grinding, but this video kinda assumes grinding is needed, when it really isn't anyway.
@@lucascarracedo7421 I think it is. Eventually, you either have enough levels to learn a spell or have upgraded a good weapon enough to be able to do enough damage to take down a story boss’s health bar.
@@dr17719 but that doesn't meant you have to grind specifically. Just exploring a bit and killing a few optional bosses gives you enough resources to be able to beat bosses (depends on skill of course). In fact, just upgrading weapons and getting a bit more survivability is usually enough for subsequent playthroughs though. By that point you tend to know what you are doing anyway.
The reason the first run tends to take so long is that we want to see as much as possible, collect as much as we can.
Caelid needed a proper legacy dungeon. It’s kinda barren without it
As someone who loves this game and has played through this game multiple times, i have to say this review is spot on in most of its points. I can disagree with spots in this review and still understand why it was thought or experienced. Im looking forward to more!
I spent 2 months and a half to beat my first playthrough and it was a blast.
Now I'm on NG+, took a break for a week, went back to play... and I turned off the game 5 minutes after, not knowing what the fuck else to do.
I could do another character by starting a fun build you see on youtube, but that feels like too much effort to set everything up.
I love this game so much, but I think I'm burnt out and bored now. Will try some months later, especially for DLC.
I know what you mean! That emptiness after finishing it, but not wanting to do an NG+. Difficult.
Since soft is getting endless praise for how incredibly they are, don’t expect the dlc to actually change anything.
Couldn’t have said it better. Probably my favorite video game ever but the replay ability just isn’t there for me. I did like 130 hours my first play through and couldn’t pick it back up for a new build or NG+. Will probably play again down the road
New game + is not as fun as starting fresh as a new build. I deliverately didn't complete the game 100% on my first play through so I would still have some new content on my second playthrough. Also, I did hardly any of the quests on my first playthrough so I am focusing more on them during my second. If you complete everything 100% on your first playthrough, though, then I can understand why starting again isn't so appealing.
The problem is this game offers nothing more than exploration and once you've seen all the areas and fought the bosses, the magic is pretty much gone.
The weird part with ER and most fromsoft games is that you usually do it once completely blind and then on other playthrough just look where the stuff for your new build is (because you mostly forgot) and then just do that. It usually cut down playtime by half at least. In ER this is exacerbated even more. My first playthrough almost reached 100hours but my next fresh was 20ish and NG+ around 4 or 5. Once you have beaten it once you know what part of the game really matters.
Also after Leyndell content quality just drops.
I’m like that with almost every game I play. It’s very rare that I play any game again after I beat it once. Elden Ring is definitely one of the best games I’ve ever played but for now I won’t return to it. I did just about everything on my 1st play through and got 200 hours out of it. So I feel I got more than my money’s worth.
I just finished my second playthrough lately. It gets more fun when you don't explore everything and focus on your build rather than exploring every side dungeon and fighting every miniboss imo.
Actually i have more fun with my fight every mini boss play through
Don’t play many games then ?
200 hours on one play through? 😳 I thought I was lagging, I got 200 hours and I’m on NG+3. I’m amazed
@@jasonphillips9281 I suck at video games. Lol This was the exact and polar opposite of a “speedrun”.
You know, when I saw the title , I immediately thought "same"
Elden Ring is one of my favorite games, but there’s a lot wrong with it. For one, doing side quests is basically impossible without guides. I wanted to play this game blind, but it’s ridiculous how in order to do some, you need to talk to an NPC, do one thing, and then for the next step you have to go across the entire map down a very specific path and you’ll find them again. And then you do this again multiple times. And then the one questline where you need to climb inside a coffin and fall off a waterfall to continue it? Theres no way I’d ever figure that out by myself. And it sucks how most of the time the only hint youll get in game can only be found by buying a note from a random merchant who’s also probably located across the map in some out of the way place. Its just unreasonably difficult for players who want to go in blind.
One suggestion I’ve seen that would definitely improve this would be if your character had a little journal, and whenever you complete one step of a quest it would give you a little one or two sentence long hint on where to go next. You’d still have to figure it out yourself, but its much simpler than being completely blind on a map as big as this one
And the boss scaling (specifically for double bosses) just isn’t there at all. Its clear that this game was built around summons, and if you dont want to use any you’re gonna have a much harder time with double bosses. Both the bosses are always full aggression and give you no space to breathe. Even in low level areas. The double boss in Boc’s quest line is just constantly on you with both bosses being fast and overly aggressive. If you don’t have summons to help you distract one, youll just constantly get waffle stomped by double bosses. The game tries forcing you to play a certain way, and if you use summons then fights become much easier and lose a lot of the charm, and the sense of accomplishment you get from beating the bosses is just gone.
For me its Godskin Duo that fight took years off my life.
It really does feel like the game wants you to rely on summons and magic instead of fighting.
I started a Confessor and the game difficulty about halved when I got my first offensive incantation.
I hate the misleading boss design in Elden Ring. Almost every boss was designed to repeatedly bait the player into bad decisions, to a point where it's just annoying. For example: Margit and some other bosses can literally ignore gravity and float in the air for 1-2 seconds during a jump, just to bait you into a mistimed roll. Margit also has an overhead staff attack that he can delay for about 5 seconds if you stay out of range. Many combos can only be successfully evaded if you memorize the precise timing of the attack, because the delay of attacks within just one combo can vary between half a second and 5+ seconds. Not to mention that a couple bosses can read your input and react instantly, making things like healing inbetween their combos a very frustrating experience - Crucible Knights are insufferable in this regard.
I'm at my third playthrough now, and it's just tiring to fight bosses. Except for Malenia, she's not perfect but the 20 hours I spent practicing that fight were more enjoyable than dealing with the dumb gotcha combos of some other bosses.
Oh, and camera lock. Camera lock has always been broken and by now FromSoft has no excuse to continue copy-pasting that feature without change.
I wouldn’t say that it is misleading, it is simply a mechanic. It has been a mechanic in pretty much all other souls games where enemies will hold an attack to punish people who spam roll. Makes you have to focus and time your rolls.
@@kencer8320 Please name one Souls boss that can hold an attack for ~5 seconds and then cancel it if you stayed out of range.
What makes it actually bad is the way Elden Ring combines this with attacks that are too fast to react to, meaning you either memorize the precise timing of the attack delay or you get hit. I think the only Souls boss that really had this kind of sudden attack animation was Nameless King but his delays were much more consistent and predictable. Now of course this doesn't apply to all Elden Ring bosses, but enough to make it an annoyance throughout the whole game.
And if you care about people not spamming rolls, DS1 already solved that perfectly by making it cost a lot of stamina.
I don’t get these complaints on delayed boss attacks. It all comes down to learning there movesets & when to roll on those delays. There’s no gotcha moments
@@pigskin94pvp82 Almost every boss and a ton of regular enemies have these attacks. Super delayed wind-up+perfectly tracking instant strike that somehow always covers way more area than it should.
In other Soulsborne games only very few enemies and bosses have these and they use them sparingly and for a good reason because these attacks are meant to punish muscle memory which is hilariously stupid for games that actually want you to have good reflexes. ER makes the issue even worse by having variable wind up on so many attacks, so you can't even learn the timing and are instead forced to back away which means you're punished for actually trying to interact with the boss in melee.
@@shiroamakusa8075Blame Sekiro, everything shite in this game can be traced to Sekiro
a lot of the game feels like it's designed for you to run through without paying attention. The carian manor with all the crawling hands, for example. you're already reasonably far into Liurnia at that point, already presumably gotten at least one great rune, and yet those giant hands, which take a lot of time to kill and can wreck you, drop basically no runes and nothing else worth getting at that point in the game.
it's a stealth area.
I don’t like elden not because it’s bad I just want a dark souls game a game set in small world with amazing level design,bosses,enemies,Builds. I don’t wanna fight 170 bosses that half the same
Yeah I never do ng+ but just start completely fresh and currently I'm on my third playthrough and I'm loving every second, there is so much roleplaying potential with build variety and multiple endings.
Roleplayers will always enjoy any game that extra bit more than anyone else, it's nice tbh 💯
in true FromSoft fashion, it all goes downhill after the pretty golden city
great video! big fromsoft fan but NG+ has way less appeal to me in elden ring versus other titles
I’m on NG+2 now… I’ll definitely say the “exploration” appeal goes away, with the exception of maybe certain tunnels or quest lines for certain materials… but basically I treat these runs as legacy dungeon runs.. I rarely fight optional dungeon bosses now. But I still enjoy going thru all the main areas including Volcano Manor and Mohgwyn Palace
Agreed, I actually recently finally went through my first NG+ run after 300 hours, to make it more interesting and less of a pain on my part I decided to go in completely naked not using any ash summons for the major boss fights, and just focused on killing the major bosses, was it fun? Yea, but imo I found that allot of the exploration kinda just gets put on the back burner, and it just kinda felt like I was going through the motions to just be finished with the run through.
Idk man, I'm a good way into my first NG+ now and I'm having a shitload of fun.
I love the Souls revenge playthrough where you just disrespect every bastard that gave you trouble the first time.
I'll probably be playing this game over and over for ever.
@@brandonmclain2933 yeah I haven’t done ng+ but like 8 ng playthroughs for challenge run purposes and the abs section I can use my horse is a lot more boring than any dark souls pr el for the 8th time
Also haven’t finished the vid yet so idk if he says it but after doing rune level 1 a few bosses are a bit too hard usually only because of a couple specific moves and I don’t like the philosophy of making it harder for veterans and adding cheese for new players cuz it makes more play styles unviable like in ds3 I was able to do no roll no armor and most attacks could be avoided consistently just by running but in elden ring every attack required a specific combinations of timings and movement patterns
@@brandonmclain2933 Even on my first play through, by the time I got to the capital, my urge to explore faded. I just wanted to face each boss
The older I get the more I appreciate exploring From Software’s worlds and the less I enjoy fighting their bosses
I’ve unashamedly cheesed several bosses, and destroyed others by being vastly over levelled in this game, because it cheeses you. Getting hit through solid objects is my personal favourite.
Besides, if it stops me exploring then it’s just annoying because that’s what I enjoyed most about this game
The fall distance for death is consistent, but the distance from taking damage to death is very small, which makes it harder to intuitively judge height.
It is usually best to use rainbow stones to judge if a drop could kill you.
I've played DS3 to completion at least 10 times, and I've played ER to completion 1.5 times. My playtime for both games is about the same at 250-300 hours, so I got my moneys worth out of it. However I think more fondly of my time spent with DS3. In DS3 I played the same content 10 times, while with ER I played lots of recycled content. You'd think the recycled content would be superior as it offers more variation, but it is restrictive in how you can interact with that content. With DS3 each playthrough was done with a different class, playstyle or handicap, while with ER I was locked into playing one thing for the duration. The repeated content combined with the length really harms the replayability in a way that DS3 doesn't suffer from.
i pretty much feel the same. My first playthrough took 160 hours. At the end it felt like work.
The title is exactly what I know is going to happen to me when me and my buddy get done beating it. I know for a fact that no matter how much I'm having fun with this game I won't play it again for at least years to come.
Is it a great game? Yes.
Is it perfect? A 10/10? No.
Did I have a lot of fun with my first playthrough? Yes.
Do I want to play through it again right now? No.
Is it my favorite game in the series? No.
Yup
Bloodborne is #1
Couldn't have said it better myself
@@mikerzisu9508 bloodborne fans are so fucking obnoxious. Bloodborne is not that great
Sekiro still better
Same here man: I was exhausted after Castle Sol. Little to no motivation to plow through the last areas.
Finished the game yesterday and was relieved I do not have to touch it again. Took me 7 months.
Exactly my thoughts. The Souls Series in general for me personally feels something like "oh you got so far? Let's make it more unnecessarily difficult to piss you off as much as possible" and that's the point of no return where i just think nah fuck it, it ain't worth it.
I disagree. Yes it gets harder but it only does so in ways that build upon the skill you've gained over your play through, with endgame bosses being the most fun and engaging fights despite their difficulty.
Elden Ring chucks an endgame boss at you at the very start and the only way they figure to up the ante is make them one shot you unless your vigor is 60 and give them attack patterns that take ages to learn because they're in the second phase.
@@Kaiwala Yeah, maybe. I´m that rage-subsceptible type of person so i usually avoid games like this and stick instead to Skyrim, Witcher, Pillars of Eternity...and the list goes on. I tried Dark Souls 1, 2, 3, Demon Souls, Nioh 1, bloodborn and i was able only to complete Dark Souls 1 & 3 and Bloodborn as well. The others games i couldn´t stand it anymore to come home from work and rage till night becuse of dying 10 times at one single boss. It´s just frustrating. That´s the reason why I am passing Elden Ring no matter how good it looks.
The difficultly is absolutely necessary in these games
Personally, I think one thing about Fromsoftware and their approach to games is, they appreciate their audience. None of their games is without faults..DS tails off, DS2… DS3 (my first) not as integrated. ER does have a lot of repetition. I got bored with a few of the catacombs and caves etc. But after playing to get the 100%, for me I think it’s their most consistent, approachable and complete creation from start to finish. I am looking forward to the dlc. Regarding ‘community’ …ignore it. Most communities can be gate keepers or toxic. There are helpful folk out there but most gangs are…gangs. Finally, bird area is designed as a farming spot. They often do that sort of thing
I had the opposite happen, dark souls progressively had me more addicted ,I spent so many hours in 2 and 3 ,finished every possible part of them without hesitation ,I barely turn elden ring on now after beating the first 2 bosses
Agree. Elden Ring with all its splendor is soulless. I still haven't finished ER and I bought it on release day. I am on the final straight but I couldn't care what the outcome of the final story/ending is. That is something I have never experienced playing these games since Demon Souls.
@@Insp.CountMortisWinshipKlaw I still need to finish demons souls ,that's the only one I haven't ,but I have the original PS3 version as I don't own a PS5
@@CrashoutsDaily the original demon's souls is still my favorite souls game
dark souls 2 is awful
@@shionsonozaki5730 the level design is awful, the game is just as fun as the rest of them
If you're at level 10 in Limgrave, and you're level 50(5 times your starting level) when you get to Mountaintops of the giants, you did something wrong. Probably multiple somethings.
Edit: Yes, the different weapons once levelled up, are very different from each other. And the reason you should at least carry one of each type and affinity? All enemies are weak to something. Main bosses are mostly very weak to Bleed, so if you're having trouble, try using a Katana or imbue your weapon with Bloodflame. Erdtree Avatar giving you hell? Use a fire affinity weapon. That sort of thing.
I mean, he’s obviously new to souls games just by how he plays. He also ran the ultimate “new to soul’s games build”. Bull Goat armor, katana, ect. This game was probably terrifyingly difficult for him so he probably didn’t do a lot of exploring or fighting bosses in the open world so he just didn’t have to deal with it. Bosses in caves and catacombs don’t allow you to summon mimic tear and probably wasn’t taking on anything if he couldn’t summon. He has some valid points for sure but a lot of his critiques reflects a lack of understanding of souls games.
Yeah, I thought the platforming was godawful. That one Rune tower in Caelid with the boss at the bottom tested my patience more than most of the game.
But that's a good thing, if it was easier it would make the game less interesting considering there's not that much to do anyways
I hate how 95% of the bosses you kill are basically just a waste of your time. In Sekiro, every miniboss and boss dropped something that would power your character up. Beads, memories, or special items. In Elden Ring, I spend 45 minutes on some boss and get some stupid piece of crap my character can't use, and a pittance of souls. It's horrible feeling
Your comments on game performance were genuinely stupid. This game has mediocre to decent performance on PC, with it having been nearly unplayable for some on day one. Of course people will be upset that the game they had been waiting so long for (and paid money for) isn't even playable for them. If you had a good experience, great. Though even I am still having stutters considerably often on a high end PC.
I find your performance comments very disingenuous.
You didn’t have the performance issues, good for you. I did however and so did so many other PC players and while it wasn’t enough to ruin the experience for, I did find it laughable that Fromsoft fanboys were still trotting out the “Fromsoft isn’t bad like other AAA developers” nonsense when they released a game with glaring performance issues for PC.
Really good video! I appreciate that for a smaller channel you’ve got a good audio setup which makes listening so much better. Also nice to hear thoughts from a person who didn’t really vibe with the other souls games. Very engaging video!
Friendly tip for future videos: Don't do comparisons on a false and/or skewed premise.
I just found your channel, and I really like the content you're providing. However, I couldn't help but notice that you're building a lot of you comparisons and analyses with a heavy dose of bias and skewed perspectives. I'm fully aware that they're hard to overcome, but neutral positions are the best. I wrote 2 easy examples below, but the video was quite full of them.
In any case, good video! Looking forward to seeing more from you. :)
-- WEAPON COMPARISONS ----------------
"Elden Rings weapon choice is dominated by its war ash and the only difference other than that, is faster attack and less damage, or slower attack and heavier damage. Metal gear 5 gives you the wide array of different interchangeable guns that any third person shooter does. Along with different ways and items to mess around and have fun with its enemies in the process."
Here you are just wrong. The way you described Elden Rings weapon choices is like if I were to say that MGS5 only has 2 weapon types. Tranq and Kill, something both of us know is wrong. This faulty premise destroys your own point, since it's based on false information.
Weapons have: Attack speed, range and width. Health damage + stagger damage. Blocking mitigation. Combo/attack pattern. Weapon type. And lastly, applicable Ash of War.
For example, my last playthrough was with a halberd, which I chose for their attack range+speed compared to other heavy weapons. There are quite a few in the game, but I knew I wanted to have as many opening wide sweep attacks as possible + ability to enchant + a specific Ash of War. There was only one Halberd, out of probably 15, that lived up to my requirements.
Opposite argument for clarity:
MGS5 weapons are very basic. Either you have low damage with a high fire rate, or high damage with a low firerate. AKA, snipers or machineguns. The only thing that differentiates MGS5 from any other shooter are the tranquilizer bullets. And they're so OP you don't need anything else.
Elden Ring on the other hand has almost every kind of melee weapon type in existance. They even have 8 different kinds of swords, all of which have their own strengths and weaknesses. It doesn't even stop there either, you can apply various spells and items to them, plus even choose from a wide array of unique Ashes of War. All of this creates a very in-depth combat sandbox that is a blast to play around with. Especially when you learn that the hundreds of different enemy types have their own stats. Compared to MGS5 outdated AAA-standard of 3 different types.
-- PLAYSTYLE COMPARISONS ------------
"I can go in with a tranquilizer gun or a rocket launcher and both are viable choices that has positives and negatives. You also have to decide whether you want to airlift out soldiers and materials but risk setting off an alarm for all the other soldiers in the area.
In Elden Ring you pretty much have 2 choices in every scenario. Either fight what's in front of you or run past."
Again, you're building the critique on a false premise. You speak about MGS5 in experience-terms, but Elden Ring in overview-terms.
Opposite argument for clarity:
I can attack a castle head on with a hammer, or I can use spells to thin their numbers from afar. Both of these are viable choices that has positives and negatives. You also have to decide whether to use your flasks and items now, or save them for tougher areas ahead. Because you have no idea what might be around the next corner, and a single misstep can be fatal.
In MGS5 you only really have 2 choices, either deal with the enemies in front of you, or sneak past them. And even if you somehow manage to fail, there will be a checkpoint from 1 minute ago. Ruining any sense of challenge or difficulty that otherwise might have existed.
See what I did there? Neither your, nor my, gameplay description is wrong. But - the comparison isn't fair. Because they're described using skewed terms with a heavy bias.
----------------------------------------------------------
That was amazingly put. Thank you
Yeah some of his comparisons were absolutely idiotic.
Not only that but weapons also have a specific movesets for both 1 hand and 2 hand and with Elden Ring there's also powerstancing. Plenty ways to change up your playstyle, not only that but there are also sorcery and incantations way of playing for even more diverse gameplay. There are also items you can use for attacks where people have found ways to actually use to build their own "parry" magic hack.
At this point it's really up to the user's imagination on how you play the game. I'm not gonna lie, I saw him literally using a shield the entire video. No wonder he got bored AF. Sword and board is literally the most boring way to play the game >.>
Yeah I was gonna come down here to say that weapon variety and build variety point was idiotic. It’s especially comical considering this guy used the most op build in the game, and obviously didn’t try much else considering his opinion. I for one tried multiple builds and respeced many times during my playthrough
All his criticisms boil down to him clearly just not being a fan of the franchise, or enjoying the combat system enough to invest time in it to fully experience its depth/purpose. He also doesnt seem to understand how From designs these games in a very precise, deliberate manner. He needs to stop approaching them from a "Ok game, give me fun" place, and more from a "I want to fully engage with the experience this game provides" position. He isnt accepting the game on its own terms, hes trying to find a way to avoid what he doesnt like about it, rather than understanding it as a piece of media.
Playing it for the first time a few years after the hype. It’s not my first fromsoft experience, I’m finding myself very overwhelmed by the immense size of it in a way I never felt w the previous games. I’m constantly discovering new branches while I’m already committed to a certain path, and the primary feeling I get is anxiety that this is another point of interest I’m going to forget to come back to and explore. I guess there are worse problems to have in a game, but I feel like I’m leaving so much behind as I play through it. And I simply don’t have the time and patience now to explore every square inch like I did when I was a teenager with much smaller games. Always afraid I’m missing out.
This is my first FS game honestly. And I’m not buying another fs game. Not because I dislike it but it’s not for me. I’m glad I played this game ngl but this is the one experience I definitely do not want to try again. Because now I’m just beating the game because I spent 60$ lol. Definitely love the game it’s just too big for me and way to frustrating. Everyone have a good day ❤️
I'd highly suggest you at least try Dark Souls 1. It's far less punishing while still being challenging. I've played every Souls game, and ER by far felt the most unfair. Bosses on my first playthrough in ER towards the end were doing as much damage as a boss in Dark Souls 3 in NG+5 with comparable health (every NG+ raises enemy stats). If I can survive an entire boss combo in NG+5 in DS3 but not 2 hits from a dude with a sword in ER, that's a problem.
Game was definitely to large, reason I prefer all the past from soft games haha
I mean, you dislike it. It's fine to dislike it.
I have to disagree around the 7m mark because (I'm a games dev btw so professional opinion) the games pacing is atrocious, too much is too obsecure, and there's a lot of imbalance in there. I could talk about a lot of different things if you've played it you'll know that for the first couple of dozen hours you don't get much loot, you cant exploit the stats system, you don't get clues about where to go and what to do, and overall there's very little to hook the player and keep them there. Its not easy to play but hard to master - a cliche for a good reason - it's just hard because of the lack of information and incredibly slow burn. A lot of you don't want to hear that, I get it, but I think it's more than "Didn't know what they were getting into" and "Not for them". The game is flawed, yall just love it anyway.
Just to clarify on the fall damage, the reason it feels so inconsistent is because the maximum fall damage you can take is only something like half of your healthbar. In most games you take a linear amount of fall damage until it kills you. In this game, it jumps from taking roughly half of your health to killing you if you fall 1 meter further. That's why the difference between a jump that will and won't kill you can be so hard to gauge. You might think "I've fallen about that far before and only lost half my health" which leads you to believe you might just take 60-70% damage this time, however you pass the kill threshold (I believe it's 20 meters) and die instantly. It also doesn't help that fall damage doesn't even start until 15 meters if I recall correctly. So there's only a 5 meter window between where fall damage starts and where you die. I think there are some inconsistencies regarding falling while on Torrent, but otherwise it really is very consistent, it just doesn't feel like it at all due to the way it's set up.
Re: The fall damage. Walk to the edge and use a rainbow stone. If it falls and doesnt shatter, you won't die from the fall.
And since it based on meters if you jump before falling even on torrent. That jump can be the difference between life and death so you always want to just walk off instead of jumping off when on torrent but it feels natural to jump and Im sure many people havent realized this.
@@BaxBoogey22 Jumping on torrent is honestly one of the worse mistakes you can do. Double jumping is probably the worst. Because if you jump on torrent the 20 meter threshold is reached earlier and if you double jump then let's just say that you're most probably dying even if the height of the cliff is 15 meters (btw there is no fall damage until you pass the 15 meter threshold, just like OP pointed)
Me panic rolling into a headstone while getting squashed screaming at the tv "what are you doing man!!"
I feel like Elden Ring is just going to be a game that I need some time to pass before I do another playthrough. I enjoyed it a lot, but after sinking over 100 hours into completing the world, it's a big commitment for me to play it through again. I'm a bit if a completionist so I'll probably end up doing the majority of the content The second time through too. The prospect of playing with a different build sounds pretty fun though.
Yeah, if anything, it requires a clearer replaying mindset that previous games didn't require being so linear. My second run wasn't even close in length to the first one. But now I can finish an actual casual in a few hours. As in, not trying to speedrun it, but knowing where to go and having a somewhat clear route in my head. Of course it depends on how much you need to level up and upgrade weapons to beat the hardest bosses.
I don't really agree when some reviewers see it's length as an issue when the length is easily controlled by just avoiding optional stuff, which is like 95% of the game. I mean, following that approach you could go as far as "you'll never 100% an rpg until you've collected every single flower". Following the tradicional souls approach of killing everything in sight doesn't work here for subsequent playthroughs.
@@lucascarracedo7421 complaining about length in an open world RPG just seems silly to me. It's like saying Skyrim has too many dungeons. I'd never complain about a game having too much content (unless it's a repetitive grindfest like many MMOs or Ubisoft titles). The fact of the matter is, Elden Ring can be completed in a similar amount of time to DS3 if you ignore the optional content.
It's just dependent on what type of gamer you are. For me, I like to defeat all the bosses and complete all dungeons, so it's a bigger time commitment for me as opposed to someone who selectively goes through content. At the end of the day, anyone purchasing an open world RPG should go in with the expectation that its going to be a large world with a lot to do, and that will require a certain amount of time dedicated to the game.
@@lordthruxawe504 I am not exactly sure if you agree with me or not. What I basically said is the same, it's silly since you can either do everything, or skip as much as you want. So I don't know what the point of the video complaining about it's length really is.
But then, what you say after about not being able to skip stuff more or less goes against that. I mean, I get that you would want to visit literally every dungeon and part of the map the first time, I did the same clearly. But if that is what's preventing you from replaying the game, I doubt there's much to gain from doing literally all that again when it's not even new anymore. Although of course I respect that you might not like skipping things, that's personal preference. And that's the point, having too much to do is not an issue, it just covers more gamer's preferences.
It was wasn't that much of a decision on previous games since they didn't have as much optional content, and just by going through the maps you more or less visited the whole thing to some degree in every run.
What I mean is that, yeah I agree the first time is usually a massive time commitment. But it doesn't have to be in subsequent runs. In fact the long term replayability of Elden Ring depends on accepting that you can't spend over 100+ hours for each run, unless time isn't a problem, which it is for most people.
Once you finished the game you can easily beat it again in a very short time.
Same I platinum the game like a week ago so idk what more to do
I would like to add a few points that I think are forgotten, some of the problems you have listed here would be issues in all the older souls games except with the older souls games, you don't need to sit at bonfires to talk to certain people. Dark Souls II honestly has this problem a lot more than Dark Souls I, doing NPC questlines in DS1 is a lot easier since the world feels a lot more complete and running around in most places with NPC quests is not annoying at all since most of the time, the early game is where a lot of the NPC's are and the best interconnected level design is in the early game of Dark Souls I. Elden Ring is too big to have reasonable NPC questlines that don't feel like a chore to complete.
Also honestly I think crafting doesn't need to be more fleshed out for a souls game because you really want the weapons you pick up to have more oomph and impact in a souls game. Because what happens in Skyrim is you eventually just keep your smithed weapon for the whole game and all other loot basically becomes worthless. Souls games are about the loot scattered around the area so that when you reach a hard area and a reward for getting somewhere is given and that reward could be a really good weapon.
I think this is one of the most level headed opinions on this game I've seen. I absolutely LOVE this game, it might be my favorite game ever, but I can see its flaws, and I understand the problems it has.
I also see many reviewers sort of equating their idea of finding sth fun or not fun to a sort of objective measurement on the game. You don't do this, you recognize that you just don't like it that much, and that's perfectly fine.
If anything, it's very similar to my own opinion on God of war 2018: I liked it, I can see why people loved it, but I just didn't like it nearly as much as most folks. That doesn't mean it's not a masterpiece of its genre, it means it didn't meet my personal tastes as much as other ppl, and that is.. fine.
I've watched the entire GoW 2018 story back when it released and was eager to play it when i heard about releasing on PC. Let me tell you, i played like 10-20% of it and got bored with it, the gameplay is just boring and their cinematic camera makes me puke.
@@angeltzepesh1 I want it to back to how it was before God of War 4. 3 is my favorite in the series.
Well, most people can't detach their preferences and taste from their opinion on something. That's why you get so many bad arguments following some comments. I don't get where that idea that if you like something it means it's good comes from.
Of course nobody can really be objective, but loving something while seeing it for what it is has a lot more value than blindly defending it for no actual reason.
So in summary, you are judging games with your own brain, which comes with its own set of tastes, dislikes, obsessions, flaws and upsides different from even the next person over. A rare occurrence to see in this modern landscape of game critique
The problem is that a lot of Elden ring problem are things most reviewers and commentators have claimed are bad design. By their own claims Elden ring is not as incredible as they claim.
I don’t know why but the righteously indignant “You’re god damned right I shot that bird for an hour and my mashed potatoes and meatloaf was delicious!” Was incredibly amusing for me
i love elden ring, but after beating it i don’t feel the urge to play again. i’ve tried to do a second playthrough around 5 times and ended up deleting my character after a few hours. every dark souls game i always feel good about replaying. i dont know why i like dark souls more.
the title is the exact same sentiment that i have. playing the dlc now and im fine with one playthrough. 😊
It is by no means a perfect game. Once the Capital/Sewers are done, the game really goes downhill
My biggest problem with elden ring is that is very long. It took my 3 months to beat and loved every second of it but I really don't want to replay it
I'm glad someone else felt the same way about the end. The last third or so was a frustrating, mostly unfun slog. Some of the most frustrating bosses in the series and felt like it had lost the wow factor of the first part of the game.
Even common enemies started hitting like trucks toward the end. It just got tiresome.
While I disagree with a lot of what was said in this video, I appreciate getting such a comprehensive and well expressed window into such a different experience.
Some points are factual you just can't disagree but some points don't make much sense like comparing this game to an FPS or saying the combat feels the same throughout the game. If you stick to a boring melee only build and chose to not engage with all the other options it is your fault, not the game's fault.
Also saying all there is to do is go somewhere and kill the boss really is a dishonnest simplification, you even mention that yourself just like you mention that you can't compare this game to an FPS yet you still do it i don't understand.
There are a lot of bad takes in this review
For me its just the pure frustration of dying over and over again at every boss especially bosses like Mogh and sometimes even Margit where you spend all this time learning their attacks and then just when you think you have an opening they use a bs attack move like margits knives or moghs close up swipe attack that leaves you zero time to react. Boss attacks have too long of a time winding up their attacks where normally you reaction would be to dodge immediately but have to wait not knowing when they're going to strike more often than not. Another complaint from the boss side of things comes from moghs undodgeable attack where he speaks in latin that nothing can be done about. You just have to sit there and outheal massive amounts of damage or get the item you need to avoid the shit ton of damage he does from it. Even when I've finally beat the boss I've been struggling with the sense of accomplisment was just not there for me and add to the fact that most of the items you get from defeating them are subpar at best, it leaves much to be desired.
In conclusion: Elden Ring is a fantastic game but one with many flaws and a lot of patience is needed.
love the video! personally i don’t agree with the idea they should have had less ashes of war or that a lot of them are pointless. i think it allows for soooo much potential for many many different kinds of builds which we have seen hella unique cool builds going around n what not. i feel like even weak or bad ones create for also unique or cool challenges you’ll see the community do with them. i absolutely love this game. personally, dark souls was too much for me and i was too impatient with it. but elden ring was exactly what i’ve been looking for in a game and it makes me so happy to see such a dope ass community behind it. BUT if you are above LVL 150 BE CAREFUL WITH PVP those higher LVL mfs are the snakiest bitches out there ong. i think 150 or below is a good cap for your lvling if u still tryna pvp in the game
SL120 and I can barely get an invasion. Every other souls game never had this problem. The PVP is dying because its not balanced, in fact its an absolute mess. PVE it is a superb game but it will die if the PVP is not fixed
My biggest issue was the lack of any relevant narrative throughout the game.
I lost interest after about 85 hours since I still had no real feel for why the world is how it is, why the characters had the motivations they had, and what I was supposed to do to advance various quests.
Interesting lore and art style IS NOT a story. I need character development and cohesion.
A log of some sort was desperately needed just to keep track of what the fuck I was doing. I would meet an NPC and start a quest then go hours upon hours of play time without seeing that NPC. So I inevitably forget what that quest line was about or how to progress it. The amount of times I had to literally Google "what to do for xyz quest in Elden Ring" was ridiculous. That issue applies to the game on general.
Hey man, I just wanted to clear up the point of reused assets, as someone who's been playing since Demon's Souls.
The reused assets/bosses were always a point of criticism. In Dark Souls 1 especially, an entire area was widely known to have suffered from being unfinished, and it reused 2 bosses as enemies and just threw the tutorial boss in but on fire.
The problem is that in the other games, there weren't many reused bosses. Dark Souls 1 only had the aforementioned bosses (the tutorial boss was uses 3 times), but at least in that case it was only those, and they had the excuse of just being nameless demons. In Souls 2, there were only a handful of reused bosses as well (mostly in the DLC, from the main game). Dark Souls 3 had maybe 2? Bloodborne only reused a couple in the optional randomized dungeons (and even these had unique bosses and enemies only found here). Sekiro reused quite a few minibosses, but again, this made sense: you were fighting an actual army and organizations. It was always seen as underwhelming or lazy at worst, but at least it either made sense or you could stomach it easier because they were so few. But basically, 99% of the time it was only minibosses or non-named, important bosses that were reused
In ER there are less than 10 unique bosses, out of about a 100. It's the opposite problem as before, where the ujique bosses vastly outnumbered the reused ones, but now people are suddenly defending it because it's ER. Even a few supposed major story bosses end up reused in ER, it's like if in Dark Souls 1 you fought Artorias of the Abyss then 5 hours later you fought Artorius of the Deep. This is also actually the only game where reused enemies are a problem, because it used to be if an area didn't have 100% unique enemies, it would hover around 80-90% being unique to that area. Here the enemy variety per area is abysmal, but is again only defended because it's ER.
I do agree with pretty much everything you said though. Good game overall but far from a 10/10 game of the century.
Ain't there more like 150 bosses in the game?
@@elitereptilian200That's correct
Dude what are you smoking lol. "Less tham 10 unique bosses in the game?"
1. Margit.
2. Godrick.
3. Radahn.
4. Malenia.
5. Rennala
6. Wolf of Radagon (gets re used as a mini boss in a hidden area later but the first one still counts).
7. Tree Sentinel
8. Rykard.
9. Godskin Apostle
10. Godskin Noble
11. Death rite Bird
12. Night Cavalry
14. Magma Wyrms
15. Dragons (agheel, adula, smarag, etc.. ount as at least one unique fight.
16. Ancient dragons (Fortissax and Lansseax) waaaay different than the other dragons.
17. Crystalians.
18. Astel
19. Crucible Knight
20. Mimic Tear
21. Dragonkin Soldiers
22. Gargoyles
23. Fire Giant
24. Mohg
25. Radagon
26. Elden Beast
27. Commander Oneil
28. Maliketh
I can literally go on and on and on after this amd STILL not repeat anything. Are some bosses used more than once? Sure. Are there darn near 50 specific unique boss encounters despite that? Damn straight.
@@scleless1342 unique means you only fight them once in the game.. if you only fought crucible knight for example just once, you didn't do very good exploration because you fight him multiple time through the game, margit also twice, night cavalry muktiple times etc etc.. your list is just plain wrong mate..
From someone who played them all Elden Ring had the most re-used assets.
What’s really funny is. All these issues have been a problem in every FromSoft game and they just refuse to do anything about it.
I also hate the ash summons mechanic. If you use them every encounter becomes a joke but it sure feels like a lot of bosses, especially dual fights and late game bosses were designed with the summon in mind
Tbh I don't like em because I don't want to trek through the game or do questioned just to find a summon that'll make it possible to beat Radagon + EB. It seems to break the Souls formula where bosses were designed to be beaten solo
@@slamislife74 this game is more casual than any other Souls game. That's why they give the player so many options. Trust me, if it wasn't open world, didn't have op gear or didn't have summons, a lot of people would've quit half way through. But to be fair, it was the easiest way to make a Souls game main stream.
@@thelgpain6529 idk man I think making the game open world and giving OP weapons is where they should’ve stopped as it still gives newbies options but doesn’t take away from the souls formula. In a way both of these options are in pretty much every from game
@@slamislife74 “souls bosses were designed to be beaten solo” whoohoo that sounded dangerously close to something HBomberGuy would have said.
@@slamislife74It doesn’t break the souls formula at all
I think this game is just too long and too big for its own good. The first few regions like Limgrave, Weeping Peninsula, Stormveil Castle and Liurnia of the Lakes are absolutely magnificent when you play for the first time. You keep coming across brand new enemy types, finding unique places, admiring the stunning views and the game feels like the best thing in the world. But around the time you reach Caelid most of the game's flaws that you haven't noticed yet start to show all at once. By the time I reached Altus Plateau and then Mountaintops of the Giants, Farum Azula and Consecrates Snowfield, I was tired of the game and completely burned out. At the time I'm writing this comment, I still haven't finished the game. I gave up at the moment I reached this annoying liturgical town with invisible assassins that leads to the Malenia's tree. I just couldn't be bothered. The game became too boring, repetitive and frustrating to me and I no longer was having fun. I think Elden Ring would be 5 times better if some content was cut and devs instead focused on refining what's left. I would much rather play a 60-hour-long game that constantly introduces new and exciting things rather than a 100-hour-long game that drags on unnecessarily and starts throwing recycled, uninteresting and poorly designed content at me halfway through. Personally, I would cut at least Mountaintops of the Giants and Consecrated Snowfield. They are the most boring locations in the game and they don't even offer any unique enemies, bosses or cool vistas for that matter. A frozen wasteland filled with trolls is just pathetic compared to the creative and and dense areas the game starts with.
I could write a whole essay about game's faults here but let me just summarize the most important points:
1. The game recycles enemies and bosses way too much. I could understand a few instances of recycling like fighting Morgot who is hellbent on avenging Margit. This is a cool concept that would work perfectly if it was used sparingly. But the content is recycled all over the place! Caelid's unique dinodogs and giant birds are all over snowy Mountaintops for some reason! Stormveil Castle's weird stormhawks suddenly appear in other locations later on. There are way too many copy-pasted dragons that diminish the initial fight in Limgrave's lake. I think the game should have maximum of 5 dragons, where each one has a unique moveset and different elemental breath. Every dragon encounter should be a special and memorable event, not a chore. It's even worse with bosses. I fought about 10 identical Erdtree Avatars, 5 giant Erdtree monsters, 3 Fallingstar Beasts, 5 Magma Wyrms, multiple Tibia Mariners, 5 separate Gargoyles etc. The game just keeps reusing the same bosses with identical movesets. The only difference is a slight reskin sometimes but even that isn't guaranteed. It diminishes the experience because the game stops surprising me with unique designs and cool encounters. Halfway through the game I saw everything it had to offer.
2. Side quests are too vague and the game doesn't have any quest log so it's virtually impossible to keep track of everything. If you want to complete questlines, you basically have to google everything. It should not be a case in a game that aspires to be so unique and immersive. I should be able to play on my own and discover everything organically, not rely on guides to find a specific character the game never told me where to look for.
3. The camera and movement are extremely clunky. I hate how the camera keeps automatically recentering every goddamn second. I fought it harder than some of the bosses. It was distracting, annoying and I couldn't even admire the views properly because every time I wanted to look to the side, the game would pull my camera back. I don't know if you guys noticed but the game doesn't really respond to controller input smoothly. You can test this by riding your horse diagonally relative to the camera. It seems like the game was designed with 8 main directions you can achieve with a keyboard and when you try to be more precise with your controller, the character or your horse start to twitch between 2 different directions. Apart from that, some animations are too detached from the world and they feel weightless. I didn't expect fully realistic and grounded animations like in RDR2 but the game would definitely feel better if Torrent felt more like a real horse and there was some momentum attached to your movement. Ghost of Tsushima's feel would be perfect here.
4. The loot is not rewarding because most of it is useless for your character build. There should be more universal upgrades like parts to upgrade armor, ways to level up Torrent and items that permanently buff your stats like health, stamina or FP. Most gear you find also becomes useless the longer you play. At some point I found weapons that made everything else obsolete. Once I got the Golden Halberd and the Golden Greatshield, this became the only gear I used. The halberd was too OP compared to everything else I had so there was no point in trying to upgrade other weapons. I used the Brass shield for like half of the game and then switched to Golden Greatshield to beat the other half. Never felt the need to experiment with other shields.
5. The combat system is weirdly designed. Sometimes the game feels like a slow-paced Demon Soul's clone where you have to dodge at the right moment to avoid damage and other times enemies and bosses do ridiculous 50-hit anime combos, jump every 5 seconds or spam area attacks which makes the player feel too slow and to clunky to deal with them properly. I feel like many encounters were designed with either Bloodhound Step or great shields in mind. But if this is the case, then why not just make bloodhound step your default dodge? If devs wanted to have those hyperaggressive and lightning-fast enemies, they should have made players faster and more agile as well. Imagine how much better the game would be if the roll dodge was replaced with bloodhound step at some point in the story. I felt like a Dark Souls character being forced to deal with Bloodborne enemies. Instead of getting more aggressive and confident with my attacks, I became more and more defensive. The game very quickly taught me that turtling behind a big shield is the best approach. I would just hide behind a Golden Shield with Barricade ability and wait for enemies to attack me so I can do a quick counter with my OP halberd. It works like a charm because I can just tank ridiculous combos enemies throw my way and easily stagger them for a critical hit. I competely removed the need to dodge from the game. Every fight devolved into this and it made the game extremely boring for me.
6. And finally, I want to point out one flaw that everyone seems to be ignoring. LOSING RUNES MAKES NO SENSE IN THIS GAME! I get that many people are used to this mechanic. I also understand the idea behind it. Devs wanted to introduce some risk so that players are more careful and they think about what they are about to do. If you can lose the runes you have at any point, it makes the game more tense. However, it completely ruined the flow of the game for me. Especially in the caves and dungeons. Elden Ring has an annoying tendency of putting hard bosses in low-level areas. And because the boss rooms are hidden behind the fog wall, you can't really tell what's waiting for you on the other side. I had multiple moments in my playthrough where I cleared the whole dungeon, got a bunch of runes and then entered the boss room just to discover that my character is way too weak to defeat it. The lost runes respawn INSIDE the boss room which you can't leave unless you kill the boss. This means that sometimes you can enter a boss room and effectively LOSE all of the runes you just acquired in the dungeon because you're forced to leave them inside the boss room. This became so annoying to me that I stopped completing boss rooms at the end of a dungeon! Instead, I would always leave the dungeon with all of my runes and quickly farm some enemies in the open world so I can level up. I would just stop doing the dungeon, farm runes for a moment, level up and then come back to face the boss when I don't have any runes to lose. This was the only way for me to ensure that I'm not wasting my time by losing runes to some random boss who's too OP for my character. At a later stage, I just started cheating to solve this issue. I installed a trainer and ticked the option "never lose runes". That way I could progress through the game in an organic way and not teleport away before every boss fight. Losing runes doesn't even make sense in Elden Ring because it's an open world game with respawnable enemies! This means you can farm as many runes as you want. If you lose runes, it only means the game wasted your time because you can always go to a farming spot and regain them.
I'm a souls veteran but absolutely despise elden ring, the open world element killed the joy of the game for me.
43:30 When I started playing, I told myself that I would not use any summons and it was so fun to me to overcome certain bosses. But later, it started to be tedious so I started summoning random players and it was so much fun again too. Especially if the players are not too overpowered and we can beat the boss together.
The input queue system worked really well in Demon's and DS1, and less well since then. They've dialled it down a bit, I think, to deal with the fact that the games keep getting faster and less 'clunky' which means you're more likely to either button mash or just queue up inputs which you then change your mind about because something new happened. Also the range of possible inputs has got bigger with jumping, weapon arts etc. But the net result is that I never quite know if the game is going to queue my inputs correctly or not. That exquisite feeling of queueing up a roll and a combo 2-3 presses in advance that you get duelling silver knights in DS1 just doesn't quite happen in ER. The old games felt like clockwork, yes, but clockwork that YOU were building in real time.
That doesn't make ER bad I just don't think they've quite figured things out. Sekiro did new things but worked because the combat system was so drastically streamlined, aggressively balanced and prescriptive.
He just said he knows that a spider knows he’s about to kill it awe man
I wasn't convinced by the announcement, trailer or reviews of Elden Ring
2 years later I forced myself to try again and beat the game solo
I did
I dislike Elden Ring. My gut reaction was correct
People really overhyped this game
22:07 Re:; The fall damage. Walk to the edge and use a rainbow stone. If it falls and doesnt shatter, you won't die from the fall.
An elden ring type game with bloodbornes trick weapons and a mix of sekiros combat would be pretty cool.
Repetition > waiting 6 more years
I get the "boss reuse" criticism, but I don't think "you aren't going to use 2/3rds of the spells/items/weapons etc" goes very far. Everything in the game is there as options for you to explore. SOMEONE out there is using that weapon your build can't, and if you did want to experiment, it's ridiculously easy to re-spec in this game. In fact, experimenting with builds and equipment is the main reason I would replay the previous titles. ER is the exception, because like I said in my last comment, it's just too damn long.
I think you missed the point. Yes there are tons of combination you can use, different builds to experiment, but in the end at least 2/3 of the Ashes of War and Summons are useless, no matter the build of play style.
@@Ogilla Says who? There are certainly (and obviously) tools that are more effective, but that can be said of nearly every video game. I've beaten past DS games with nothing but bow or dagger, among an assortment of other things I tried out for fun. Was that as optimal as Giant dad build? Obviously not.
There's so many "this skill is underrated" videos out there. Just because you think it's useless doesn't means it can't be used and enjoyed.
You mention how reviews said there were a lot of ashes but neglected to mention you won’t you most of them… okay how is that a negative? There’s also hundreds of weapons and you won’t use most of those. Does that mean the large amount of weapons is a bad thing? And just because a boss becomes a common enemy later doesn’t mean they weren’t good as a boss fight. I understand your criticism about reviewers barely playing the game but the examples you gave I think weren’t good to support that point, especially when most reviews are very short which means they’ll inevitably forget to mention a large amount of things. But having more options of ashes to choose isn’t a negative.
Also your complaints about reusing and reskinning enemies is pretty insane when it’s a common practice in video games, including in things like Breath of the Wild. They don’t reuse that many, and when you look at the vast amount of unique enemies compared to reused it’s a nitpick. We’d all prefer new unique enemies but the reskins are fine because the enemies that are reskinned aren’t overused and do add some variety to areas. I’d say breath of the wild reuses and reskins enemies to an unacceptable extent while in Elden Ring it’s really a small part of the entire game
Comparing Red Dead storytelling to Elden Ring is an absurd comparison. One is heavily based on story while the other is much more focused on combat. They pretty much polar opposite takes on open world adventure games. I don’t think it’s fair to compare these in story alone, while not comparing weapon variety and enemy variety. Two things Elden ring would Stomp RDR in but that’s because it’s an unfair comparison. Some of your arguments seem rather absurd when you make comparisons.
“Guess I’ll fight the same thing I’ve been fighting all game.” What are you talking about. The enemies don’t get overused that much and there’s tons of different ones. You should despise breath of the wild and RDR more than any game
Elden Ring was definitely a bit much for me. I think everything up to Morgott is great, but I always seem to run out of steam after beating him. Mountaintops of the Giants just isn't that interesting of an area, and Farum Azula is grueling, full of enemies with tons of health that do incredibly high damage and are often placed in frustrating configurations (Placidusax is the only boss in the game I haven't beaten, and it's purely because the three beastmen on the way to him are so annoying). Bosses are a mixed bag too -- I think Mohg and Godfrey are really fun, but I have no desire to fight Malenia again and I really did not have a good time with the last boss
It's kind of the same issue DS1 has now that I think about it. I'll gladly replay everything up to Ornstein and Smough, but then I have to force myself to get through the stuff that comes after
To me it's the DLC that motivates me to continue a DS1 playthrough past Anor Londo. I always leave it as the last thing to do before Gwyn, as a kind of reward. Here's to hoping a DLC can have that effect on Elden ring, too!
It's sad the state of expressing opinions on internet now, you really have to introduce yourself as "THIS IS JUST MY OPINION", and then do a small praise for the object of critic, to avoid the backlash and hate from people that cannot handle criticism.
Back in the day people would say "this is shit" and not give a fuck.
At around 43:24
From what I can tell a lot of the complaints about the playstyle that people have isn't "hurr durr, play only using shield and sword" but actually something that has substance. And it works with the "increased accessibility" that the games added. It's how it seems that a lot of later bosses are designed with those options actually being used. Like Ash summons.
The issue with that is how much it throws the overall balance out of whack. Generally the intended playstyle for souls games is being solo, using minimal items, and using a sword, rolling to avoid most damage. Magic is in the game, but it breaks a lot of the systems. So it's like an easy mode, that's built into the game.
That's a good thing, it doesn't really affect people of either categories, and people not as skilled can stil win with magic. It's great.
The issue in Elden ring, is how it seems like they ballance the lategame bosses while having in mind Ash summons. And that really makes their balance whack. Either you use the ashes, and the bosses are too easy, or you don't and they are too hard. (Also their over reliance on making the bosses so cool and giving them long ass combos that can someone cancel into each other, which makes them too unpredictable and makes players want to avoid them altogether and not engage with their mechanics)
A game made for everyone is a game made for no one... After playing ER & the DLC and then returning to DS3; ER feels like visiting that cheap bar where all the drinks are heavily watered down while DS3 is like drinking gasoline. I much prefer gasoline...
I don't think there will ever be a Dark Souls 4 though. Pretty sure they ended that IP with 3.
It's also important to note that dark souls 3 started in production before myazaki was promoted CEO. He has a distaste for sequels and much prefer making spiritual successors which explains why he wasn't as involved in ds2 and 3 (despite being a director in ds3, he joined late in development). I guess that makes Elden Ring the real dark souls 2, but I wouldn't expect a sequel especially considering how all of the endings seem to impact the state of the world in such drastic ways and that they seem to be against "canon ending" but oh well, unless Bandai Namco pressure them I wouldn't consider a sequel in the making.
@@ouraywind1208 exactly why their won't be a sequel to bloodborne either unless Sony has Bluepoint work on it. Although I'm sure with the success of Elden Ring I'm betting there will be another souls game coming in the distant future.
You aren't very familiar with souls titles as admitted by you and also evident from some of your commentary on it, like for example while comparing the stories between Elden Ring and Dark Souls. Despite not being very familiar with it, you then comment on how the community of the game used to be and what they've become with Elden Ring. Dark souls community has always been fairly toxic. It is not a new thing that "Git Gud" is unironic to a lot of people. Since DS1 people have been saying that you didn't really beat Dark Souls unless you did x y or z. It's a game that is a unique challenge in gaming. It's not particularly hard, but it is a sort of rite of passage, like learning to ride a bike. People have some amount of pride about it and denigrate others to elevate themselves. This is not a new phenomenon with Elden Ring.
The problem with this video is that you never take the story into the equation. There is a reason why we fight Margit and Morgott, and same for both versions of godfrey. Elden ring was my first fromsoft game, and i loved every second of my 3 playthroughs
Oh he forgot, if there is a reason something sucks it doesn't suck anymore. What a doofus the video maker was to not realize this.
As someone who loves Fromsoft stories and is pretty deep into Elden Ring lore, I do not think that they first had the story and then placed the bosses, I am fairly certain that they needed to reuse bosses and the added explanations for why you fight them more than once. But it doesn't really matter, especially since most wont get the story initially, it doesn't change that it FEELS reused to some.
Edit: if it only happend with Mogh and Morgot, it would probably add some cool mystery, but since every smaller boss and even some main line bosses get reused all the time (Like, there is a second Godrick and in his case the explanation isn't even good like it is with Margit and Morgot), I can understand why ppl can't help but feel like its cheap to reuse bosses like that.
As someone who has played all of the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring, the story is lackluster.
World was good for a while, except not really the bad parts just weren't apparent, world falls into decay, you fight the previous patriarchy, become Lord of whatever the fuck. It's all tonally the same shit I've already experienced in 3 previous games at this point, and I didn't even play Bloodbourne to make the comparison of fighting an eldritch space god as the _real_ final boss.
Elden Ring, as someone who is fresh to the series, probably has a great story. But I'm not a newcomer, and as a result I find it the story boring. That doesn't mean I didn't get invested, but It's still something I didn't really "like" or considered "amazing."
@@michaelbowman6684 exactly, this reviewer didn’t mention the story because he forgot, it’s because they’re frankly irrelevant.
@@michaelbowman6684 nah, ER' story is about us living in a fractured mind of a girl (?) who became a God, but her psyche was damaged so much with trauma (someone' death?) and/or pain, that said world, said mind (said "ring") is literally shattered and we need to reassemble all aspects ( "demigods all" ) of her psyche to reach dzen or whatever and finally be a True God ( Self as Jung called it )
I still don't get who we play as, thou
Those performance issues were very real. When I play the game now it runs perfectly but on launch you got major frame drops in a lot of the open world areas. Unfortunately one of the worst examples of this was literally right outside of Limgrave, where the Tree Sentinel is.
Overall copy pasted side content, makes me rush through open world to main stages rather than focus on it.
Playing Dark Souls series still feels like a journey, not like a race.
Dark Souls/Bloodborne has wonderful pacing and each map area is special and unique. You’re not not being forced to face the same copy and pasted bosses over and over again. Imagine fighting Gwen, Artorias, and Ornstein/Smough 3+ times…….That’s Elden Ring 😂
I would prefer the same game with less enemies overall. Like Kingdom Come: Deliverance. That game did it better. You can play all day long without meeting a single enemy, unless you know where they are or you go searching for them.
I enjoy Elden ring it's just that it is different than dark souls and sometimes in a bad way, the bosses are very very interesting but also incredibly annoying to fight, the wind up attacks that are delayed and the camera issues just made certain bosses a chore to beat instead of feeling that classic dark souls reward when beating a boss
I restarted the game due to frustration 4+ times before I finally pushed through the majority of it. Sword and board build felt insanely weak against those unrelenting crackhead early bosses. Then tried dual wielding dex build for whatever reason and it was even harder early on. Swapped to magic and face rolled the game till I got bored. Now I've comeback months later with a faith build. Face rolled again all the way to mountain of giants and then couldn't kill any of the bosses there. I really didn't want to have to look up a specific build/items until I'd beaten the game, but looks like I need to.
I heard that NG+ wasn’t going to include any changes other than increased difficulty and rune gain, so i sprinted my first run so I could get the pay raise while I do my main run.