me_in_japan wrote: ↑Thu Mar 03, 2022 5:02 am
I'm curious, genuinely. What's the big wahoo about elden ring? I watched some trailers and it looks...kinda ok? Like, aesthetically it seems pretty generic dark fantasy style. Gameplay wise I believe it's kind of an RPG? The only concrete thing I've heard is that it's very unforgiving, a la dark souls. I don't quite follow how being forced to retread ground you've already covered, but without the stuff you used to get there (a la dark souls) has become a positive thing. Like, I'd rather spend 100hours playing and completing 3 games than retreading one game 3 times, yknow?
So what's the big deal, hmmmn? *raises eyebrow questioningly*
(Context: I can play games for about 30mins to an hour per day, maybe 2-3 hours on a weekend day, if I do nothing else at all with my free time. This says more about me needing free time than anything it might say about the merits of Elden Ring's gameplay, but my point is: making a game long/difficult is not necessarily a selling point.)
So the following is not to sell you on it, but try to contextualise why people enjoy it. It is probably not for you and that's OK.
TLDR: It's Dark Souls crossed with Breath of the Wild, by the Dark Souls team. Combat and boss battles many of us have come to love in a gorgeous and striking open world of massive scale.
On Souls itself, it doesn't really work the way you're describing it. It's relatively easy to die in Souls style games but rather than revert to an earlier save you respawn at an earlier point, and the enemies respawn too. So anything you've picked up you absolutely still have! What you lose is essentially currency, the stuff you use to level up and buy things (though you can recover it if you reach your body). But you never go backwards in any sense, and the amount of currency you can lose fairly rapidly becomes meaningless; it only really hurts right at the start. Getting to know the level, unlocking shortcuts etc usually means you don't usually have a bad trip to where you need to be, and the things you've done stay done (shortcuts stay open, bosses and minibosses stay dead etc).
The bosses are quite challenging, but not in a twitch sense. They're mostly about patience and nerve. I die a lot on them because I'm terrible, but it's always my fault for deciding that I could absolutely get another attack in, or spamming dodge rather than reading the cue, or just running my stamina bar out rather than taking a second to reset. They're incredibly rewarding to beat, though the secret is in most cases you can just outlevel them and give yourself a much larger margin for error.
Souls does not do level scaling and that works against you early but increasingly for you as you progress.
(The *difficulty* of Souls is wildly overstated and it's not actually a good game series to prove your l33t skills with. But there are definitely some bosses that mean business, and beating them is just as good as beating a tough MMO raid fight for me)
Elden Ring is interesting because it translates all this to an open world context. While it does have some intricately designed, folding-back-on-themselves classic Souls dungeons on that big map, there's basically never a time where you're forced to take on a particular challenge. You can always just wander off to something else that catches your eye and naturally grow stronger as you do it. This I think will make it a more accessible and enjoyable game for many people because the experience of calibrating your strength to the difficulty of a boss that is easiest to get by grinding in normal Souls games is achieved by just...adventuring...in this one.
It's still not for everyone! But a lot of people have *loved* the Souls experience, and a lot of people will learn to love it here where the natural gameplay makes it more obvious what there is to love about it and how easily even poorly skilled gamers like myself can thrive there.
