Elden Ring: YOU DIED on a horse

Yeah, I remember reading a recommendation that sometimes when you hit a wall, just turn off the sound. Though sometimes you miss certain cues when you do that. Regardless of moves or scale or whatever, there will always be some bosses that some people can beat with their bare fists blindfolded the first attempt, but you'll fight 50 times and barely make headway. I tend to get bored after a while more than frustrated, which is another reason to turn down or off the sound.

I definitely turn off the music sometimes (you can do that and leave the sound on).

!

Yeah! Just go into settings and there should be separate volume sliders for music and sound fx.

I never had a PS3 so it was interesting to come to the Demon's Souls remake after playing all the other games. Some of the levels, one bonfire and all, seem monstrously punishing compared to later stuff, but the bosses don't really have any capacity to surprise when you've been through all the more developed, multi-stage/gimmicky ones from later games

I beat most of them in one try so far

Didn't get a network test code :(

Tons of info & videos out there today from people who have early access. I'm trying to avoid spoilers for the most part, except for stuff about the mechanics.

Standing poise (instead of Dark Souls 3-style hyperarmor) = in (not sure how I feel about this)
Powerstancing (ie you can equip two weapons of the same type and get a different dual-wielding moveset) = in
Mixing your own combo potions that can make you explode = sure why not
Solo hosts can't be invaded unless they use a few items = ok, fine
Invaders get a compass to see what direction the host is = sick
Invaders also get an item to quickly vanish from the host's world and reappear nearby = oh my god

It really does seem like a blend of all their games plus a bunch of new stuff, can't wait.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzFR5HsPcng

all sounds cool. I have no problem with spoilers, because not only will I forget by the time I get it, I can't play any of these games without walkthrough help anyway lol.

i have the same problem/gift with forgetting everything! really comes in handy on very rare occasions

Just finished that video and have some thoughts. One, I've never played Dark Souls II because I've ... well, I guess I just skipped it, but I've heard mixed things (and there are essentially two versions of it, for that matter). But it is interesting that some of its elements have made their way to other games, despite its reputation as a disappointment. For example, as I understand it your health can be halved in DS2, and a similar mechanic was brought into Sekiro. And according to this video, power stances from DS2 have made their way to this one, too. Second, I've never used magic in any of these games, because choosing magic is like choosing an entirely different, novel way to play the game, and if you're only going to play it once I'm not sure magic is the way to do it. But maybe it is in this game, because magic looks super cool. Third, I really hope this plays well on PS4 (and other last generation systems), but I have a bad feeling between it being open world and generally newer than the past several From games it might really benefit from the speed and power of newer systems. That's one advantage of (as this video points out) From never being on the tech vanguard, because it means the games generally don't *need* next gen tech to run. (I know Demon's Souls is PS5 exclusive, but those that have played it, do you think it could run on a PS4?)

Anyway, I can already tell there are going to be a lot of funny videos generated by this game.

Oh, also, looks like you don't take fall damage when you jump, which would have been a very perverse thing for From to do, so I'm glad they didn't do it! Or at least, maybe there are height restrictions/allowances? And I like how there is environmental damage that can be done by at least bosses, which I know was in "Sekiro," though I can't recall if it was introduced there.

Demon's Souls is quite a tech showcase, it wouldn't have been able to run at that framerate on ps4, and some of the lighting/particle effects look like they would have been a big stretch too

I like Dark Souls 2 to some degree, some dispiritingly shit world design like the infamous Earthen Peak Elevator Jaunt travesty aside. It's like a difficult 3rd album that isn't among the classics but fits a certain mood when you happen to want it. I found the DLC far too much of a grim slog though

Elden Ring looks unreasonably good, can't wait

This game looks fun, and by early accounts the open world design is supposed to be good, but I can't help but wonder whether the openness actually adds much to the Souls formula. The main draw of the world design in DS1 (admittedly the only one of these I've played) was for me, its labyrinthine density. Eldenringland just looks kinda vast and drab to me.

i was moderately interested in this game, but after watching some of those videos posted above i am now EAGERLY ANTICIPATING. my only problem is i don't have a system for it, and i was leaning toward getting a steam deck rather than a ps5.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9DWTt37khU

Fwiw, both videos note the difficulty of the first mandatory boss.

i showed the game a friend of mine who really likes dark souls, and he seemed to be a bit disappointed at first. i think he was thinking of it as a souls-like game, which, it is in some ways of course, very much so. but just being open world and adding jumping completely changes it. it reminds me of GTAIII or breath of the wild in terms of how those games were a departure from the games they built on

Souls-like.

And something else I was thinking about, given From's propensity for hidden walls/loot/enemies/NPCs/entire levels and/or alternate endgames, I wonder what that portends for an open world game? Gonna be a lot of OCD dudes slashing at every bush, rock or piece of foliage, looking for secret stuff, a la the first Zelda.

To be honest the open world part isn't particularly compelling to me. I do like the idea of all the new handcrafted zones that are the equivalent of large Dark souls areas, and a whole bunch of new build options and mechanics (and invasions, of course).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEypd23I0pQ

here's footage of the PS4 version - it seems like it runs without any serious issues or significant visual downgrades. i got into the network test on PS4 so i'll see how it is in a few hours from now.

i'm not at all concerned about the open world, all the footage of the network test has made it very clear that it's avoiding all the common open world pitfalls (repetitive content, big for the sake of being big, etc.) & is very dense with unique content. there are at least 10 bosses in the network test area alone (which is estimated to be around 1/12 of the full game's map). it's a big change, sure, but i don't think anywhere near as radical a shift as say GTA3 or BOTW were - the core gameplay is still very much the same despite the change in environmental scale.

For example, as I understand it your health can be halved in DS2, and a similar mechanic was brought into Sekiro.

DS2's max health decreasing on death (in increments down to a min of 50%) was more of an iteration on Demon's Souls' mechanic where you lost half your max health when you were in 'soul form' opposed to 'human form', which happened upon dying while human. in both cases, the game was generally balanced around the halved max health, with more than that being a bonus, but it was still kinda presented as a punishment. i think both were intended to give the player another incentive to go into human form, which enabled being invaded as well as summoning other players as well as removing the max health penalty. DS3 improved upon this by having embers, which worked the same way in enabling multiplayer, provide a bonus to your max health instead.

there wasn't any sort of max health restriction upon death mechanic in Sekiro though, and there doesn't seem to be in Elden Ring either.

DS2 is one of the weaker souls games but it's still worth playing. the issues with it are largely that the encounter design isn't quite as tight, the world design is clumsier & it rarely reaches the same sorts of high-point boss fights as the best of the series. i'd still put it above Demon's Souls at least.

i may be a minority opinion here, but i don't worry at all about whether something can run well enough on a certain machine. i can count the number of times i have been bothered by the framerate/slowdown of a game on one hand. i think part of it is that i came to gaming age playing games like LIFE FORCE. the slowdown was part of the game. the bug became the feature. aiming for this perfect-smooth framerate ideal is understandable but also kind of disappointing. it's just different, i guess

blighttown was pretty miserable at times in the original console versions of ds1 due to all the slowdown. it's certainly something to be concerned about & can make experiences much worse. with cross-gen games like this, it does happen sometimes that the last-gen versions are significantly inferior due to cutting corners trying to get the game to run on hardware they weren't focusing on, but that thankfully doesn't seem to be the case here at all.

IDK I think having a smooth frame rate is critical for a game like this where you have to time movements precisely. And while 60 is nice, 30 is perfectly good as long as it stays consistent. I played DS1 on Switch and it runs great!

As a relatively recent returner to games, I've learned my lesson the hard way. When I got "Doom" for the Switch it kinda ran like shit, even after a few updates. The slowdowns definitely affected game play in such a fast paced game, and even things like jumping were impacted. Like, you would run at a couple of spots (even with no enemies) and suddenly things would slow down, right before you pressed jump, and you would fall to your death. But tbf, "Doom" is almost uniquely busy and fast paced, and yeah, I can't think of another game off the top of my head with issues like that.

That said, I sort of suspect at least some of my problems with "Sekiro" were related to the frame rate. Usually I don't notice/care, but that game was all about timing, and while it could have been me (I mean, for sure it was me), it's also possible it was just that much trickier for me at 30fps than it would have been at 60.

there wasn't any sort of max health restriction upon death mechanic in Sekiro though

Oh, I just meant the mechanic that makes you lose half your souls or whatever. And gives everybody dragonrot. There's a cost of dying, which I found irritating since these games are built around dying over and over again. DS1 and DS3 don't have that cost, and Bloodborne gives you a shot to get some echoes back, too.

I never minded slow downs either, it's like slo mo at a dramatic moment.

Glad the PS4 version runs well, I never cared about graphics but had to admit that 60fps is really nice after playing the DS1 remaster and now DS3 on PS5. But I played all of the other games at 30fps for hundreds of hours and had a great time, so it's definitely not essential.

very positive impressions

https://kotaku.com/elden-ring-may-just-reinvent-the-open-world-genre-1848093261

I look forward to suddenly earning souls from some NPC that dies fighting enemies on the other side of the map.

I keep wondering if I should give the other From games a shot? I just got incredibly fed up with BB but maybe having a shield would make me feel better? (Probably not.)

On the one hand having experience in one of these games helps with all of them since they have some basics in common, but on the other hand, ER looks to be the most user-friendly of them all (from little things like the menus and upgrade systems, to how the combat system seems to align with what you see onscreen in a more intuitive way, rather than having to look up online how combos/poise/parries/etc work...that's mostly for pvp though).

Generally speaking though Dark Souls 1 and 2 are slower paced, while the combat in Bloodborne is faster (and DS3 is somewhere in-between).

Shields in these games are mostly there to taunt you and weigh you down.

i have played defense heavy builds to some advantage in these games on occasion; it's a preferred method. it makes me shit at pvp tho!

I haven't used a shield in DS3 since my first playthrough, but I might use one for ER! For one thing, there's a shield weapon art (or "ash of war" I guess) that acts as both a normal parry AND can parry spells (and turn them into little magic swords you send back):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BBLmt_DI50

In the pvp world, there's been a lot of talk of the big changes from Dark Souls 3, particularly:

-No guaranteed combos, ie hitting someone once doesn't necessarily mean you can hit them again if they decide to roll out of it. In DS3, most small and medium weapons had a guaranteed 2-hit combo on normal attacks, with a shorter stun window after that so the other person could get away.

-Backstabs are de-emphasized, and no one's sure if they're "working as intended" or not. Basically the backstab doesn't work if the other person isn't perfectly aligned with your character, or possibly if they're in any kind of animation. In DS3, it would work as long as the other person wasn't moving away from you, meaning that you could sneakily backstab someone if they were in a long animation (like after swinging a large weapon, or casting a healing spell). I enjoyed that system, but it makes sense that From is trying to smooth over elements that looked or felt weird to anyone not super versed in the mechanics.

I'm all for the changes if they make the pvp more intuitive and appealing to people. Although I hope there are some good unparryable attacks to use when someone keeps throwing out parries, since that still seems strong, and in DS3 you could run around behind them, use a kick, etc.

This looks really good. I mean, it's very Soulsy and sometimes these things can feel like Scategories. Just replace bonfire with lamp; souls with blood echoes etc...
But I'm down with this. It looks a lot more open and less fiendishly claustro than Bloodborne. I also like how you can actually jump. There also seem to be a few more NPCs about the place, so it's got more of a Witchery vibe to it. Yeah looking forward to it

This is gonna own me isn't it.

There has been much Oroboro watching in our household this past month

just bought the lil baby xbox series s in a chip-shortage panic, just in case they disappear again before this comes out

I also got the lil' baby Xbox, the first Microsoft console I've ever had! Personally, I think it's great as an affordable, stand-alone Game Pass machine

are they readily available?

though frankly i don't think i can hang with that joystick

got one at a gamestop on myrtle ave, looked like there were tons

https://kotaku.com/the-elden-ring-community-is-now-arguing-over-horse-crot-1848315650

They should split the difference between Dark Souls and Red Dead Redemption and make horse genitalia prominent, dynamic and a stat. Because you know there would be hundreds of level one players who will put every single soul into horse dick.

Counterpoint, you should have a separate character creation menu for your horse, complete with gender and appearance sliders

Why not both! Customizable horse would be next level From. Hell, you should be able to *play* as a horse, that would be rad.

If they did have horse dick, what stat would it scale with

Luck

girth

The beauty of these games is that they're highly appreciable for many many different reasons, and those reasons will vary from person to person.

For example, I have barely touched PVP and while I appreciate the spectacle of a good boss fight, I see them as rather frustrating and tedious roadblocks to my adventuring that I would rather cheese than go to the trouble of learning how to beat. Other players see the bosses as a highlight, and get frustrated on subsequent playthroughs that they have to go and do all the tedious exploring again before they can find a certain boss.

I think one of the reasons I went heavy on incantations, despite still essentially remaining a strength build (though tbf, for most of this DLC most of my stats were pretty high across the board, save intelligence), is because there were so many cool or useful magic things to do, but not much in the way of interesting weapons. In fact, I think I stuck with bloodhound's fang for most of the DLC, for its speed, bleed and sheer damage. But I also used a couple of boss weapons for specific purposes, the Sacred Blade for its massive AOE and the Blasphemous Blade for both health regen and modest range damage. Ranged weapons/spells were key in the DLC, given how many groups of enemies you encounter, or ambushes hiding up high or whatever.

Did anyone else find that a couple of the regular enemies, like curseblades and horned warriors, were often as or even more challenging than some of the bosses? The curseblades in particular, from the one you immediately meet on, are so aggressive and relentless that eventually I usually just found some way around them. Same with those laser shooting caterpillar things. Oh, and those dopey forge trolls, too, why would anyone bother with them? They are a huge PIA to take down, but generally move slow enough to avoid, and I don't think they drop anything good. At least those grabby things in stealth spookyland sometimes dropped skibbidi fragments, right? (I didn't bother killing them).

And what about bear-land, that region full of aggressive bears? Seemed more like a gag/gimmick than anything else. The forges, too, for that matter, I can't remember what, if anything, made any of them particularly memorable or worthwhile, especially with no bosses. Just another head-scratcher of the DLC (which again I liked and thought looked and played great!), like those big empty towers that look like they'd be important but really aren't. Maybe whatever seemingly missed opportunities do stem from fgti's apt observation that the base game already feels pretty complete, satisfying, which may explain why the DLC also felt, in terms of its relatively linear "narrative" (as such), almost more of a stand-alone adventure or sequel.

I don't remember bear-land in particular but I had a good laugh in angry lightning sheep land.

In playthrough 1 the finger gardens seemed very nothing-y, but I used my horse to stick to outskirts and had my giant hammer to one-shot the lampreys. In playthrough 2 the enemies at least got to do their thing when I was on foot (mostly because I kept getting invaded via Taunter's Tongue), and I got to experience being continually paralyzed by one while another teleported in to attack, lol.

I totally forgot about electric sheep land!

And oh yeah, finger gardens were big and empty, too, save for that one esoteric NPC quest. It's like, here's this huge dramatic imposing area! Now zip on through, because there's nothing there.

Yeah it really was weird how densely and sparsely respective areas were laid out in the DLC.

bearland, electric sheep land and dog land.

Personally I am most interested in seeing how Elden Ring's universe might transfer over into a purely online structure. I feel that it's a dev cycle away from being an amazing MMPORG. But I dunno. I haven't actually ever played an MMPORG.

Have you all seen the seamless co-op mod for pc? I don't play on pc, but it's pretty crazy...up to six players can play together, plus invaders, and everyone can use the horse, with no forced disconnects after beating bosses. Also everyone gets credit in their own world for making progress (bosses etc). Pretty wild.

Wow really!! I wish I could play that, sounds amazing

I love reading about and watching clips of mods. I've played all of these games exclusively offline, so I already feel like I'm missing out, but some of the mods look super fun, I imagine especially for those familiar with every nook and cranny. Like, you enter a room expecting one enemy or treasure, but you get something totally different.

A FromSoft MMORPG is an interesting idea but I doubt I'd want to see an Elden Ring one

I would definitely play a Dark Souls randomizer if I were on pc, normally I'm not into rogue-likes but love the idea of getting a new & surprising experience out of one of these games (which I do think pvp can provide at its best).

I love watching clips where someone enters a room expecting a scrub but instead is surprised by a random boss.

Watched the dunkey video of the new Zelda game, and through ER eyes it looks like all the combat is based on spirit summons, lol.

just noticed that the new Dummy album Free Energy has a song on it called "Opaline Bubbletear". Elden Ring/Madchester cross-over anyone?

Haha, I always thought Pest Threads would be a good name for a metal band

A working title for my album was Ivory Sickle for a few weeks

i like that. although i'm imagining a future where Gen-Beta kids are doing nothing but release music that references obscure FromSoft ephemera

Ha, nice. It's so tempting to do so but I've tried to avoid it for the most part, although on my recent record there's a track called 'The Quickstepper' that while also being an uptempo dancehall tune, isn't NOT referencing Bloodborne & ER.

Bloodhound Step

'Refined Claymore' is my favourite Silver Jews song

Any of you nerds watching Bingo Brawlers? It's a lot of fun!

Ok it's my turn to ask - what's that? A mod?

I just heard about it myself. It's a competition where two players are dropped into the game and there is a bingo board, and working in parallel they have 2 hours to either get a bingo row, or a majority of squares, with each board featuring a variety of randomized in-game tasks and achievements. It's kind of like watching a scavenger hunt. I've watched a couple and they are tons of fun. There are commentators and judges, and it rewards and challenges players who know the game inside out.

For example, here's a good match:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfMxfyrttqs