Elden Ring: YOU DIED on a horse

i'm also in the bittorrent scene now, i didn't ask to be part of this

I literally zipped off to Montreal to get away from my PS5 because I have deadlines I have to meet and I knew I wouldn't be able to resist this game's launch date

Glad to see you're all having fun

may have to do some fingering as part of the deal :-o

― dig your way out of the shit with a gold magic shovel! (Karl Malone), Friday, February 25, 2022 12:04 PM (twenty-one minutes ago)

wait what is this game about

apparently there is a two finger method that is spreading across the land - this is from the game

That's probably GRRM's contribution

It’s not a new game invention, but it’s done particularly well here. Being in a huge landscape and seeing all these landmarks off in the distance. Then after a few hours of scrubbing through a dungeon or on some lower path, you climb a peak and look around and you see where you came from. The paths you took to get there that you didn’t even realize. Get an entirely new idea of the geography.

Love that shit.

I can't/won't play for a while, but I have been peeking at a couple of playthroughs in progress, and I found a guy playing who had never played a single From game before, so I watched it until he died for the first time, which was maybe ... three minutes into the actual game?

Lol, he just referred to the thing that killed him as "clearly the Lynels of this game" and I immediately thought, he has no idea what he's in for, in Souls games, almost everything is a Lynel.

oops all lynels

OK, gotta stop watching this stuff. This game looks totally awesome. After so many years of games borrowing from From, now we get a From game that incorporates stuff from other games (namely, open world stuff). Seems like it's going to be a totally fresh, perhaps overwhelming, possibly all-encompassing experience.

WHY AM I NOT PLAYING THIS RIGHT NOW

I did not find a map yet, I love how different the experiences are. It seems hard to get spoiled by reading about things, because where the hell is it anyway.

I do not love that I'm now in Florida and can't play for a few days.

Just fired this up, I’m excited for my nightfolk prisoner to meet the Loathsome Dung Eater

part of this game takes place in Florida? it might be too dark for me

We knew there was a poison swamp

Senator Loathsome Dung Eater (FL-R)

That's probably GRRM's contribution

― feed me with your chips (zchyrs),

lol, that's probably correct! there's also this from another early character:

"just give me a nice clean lick from the rear, and i'm sure it'll come clean out. give it your all, i say"

Is there a drop attack move in this? Was pretty crucial on occasion in the previous games, but wasn’t happening the few times I’ve tried it.

I guess “plunge attack” is the term. Can’t find any info on it, guess it’s gone?

there must be. i found a note with a tip on an enemy suggesting i do one

i'm getting way off the "main path" (the yellow arrows where the campfires point), going off to the east. but it seems easier for now? love this game

TEN

spent 7 hours yesterday wandering around exploring limgrave and it's really lived up to expectations, this is the best open world design i've ever seen. reminiscent of how much i loved playing breath of the wild for the first time, but even better

like botw was fantastic to explore & dense with interesting puzzles, but the end result was always shrines, and the enemy variety was very limited. while here there's a ton of interesting things organically integrated into the game world, and the combat is fantastic as always with from

pc performance is a bit rough but still playable at least

yeah i'm having a fantastic time. just got into the storm castle thing near the beginning, after avoiding it for quite a while.

My friend says he’s being invaded constantly since the roundtable? He’s not playing co-op, not seeing anything online about it, we’re both baffled.

there's one place i've seen so far where you seem to get invaded automatically (and it doesn't seem to be a real human). i encountered it right before the roundtable and not since

like botw was fantastic to explore & dense with interesting puzzles, but the end result was always shrines, and the enemy variety was very limited. while here there's a ton of interesting things organically integrated into the game world, and the combat is fantastic as always with from

haven't played this at all but i feel like you could've said the same thing about botw up to a certain point? the game world seems wondrous and varied at first but the further out you go the more you start to notice the repetition

Maybe, but this is definitely not “go to x landmark, get y item” at all so far like BOTW was.

Closer to Red Dead 2’s open world in its uniqueness of encounters.

Oh, uh, I kinda misread that.

Anyway, my friend rebooted his PS and the invasion problem went away. Guess it was a bug, but with something like that you’d just assume…

Huh, that sounds like my kinda bug, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a designated post-Pontiff Sulvayhn style invasion area where the rules are different.

I guess we’ll find out if that’s a bug or a feature eventually.

I binged the hell out of this, taking a break. Half delirious. It’s kinda insane that what I’ve seen so far is apparently just a small fraction of the total.

I'm a bit stuck at the first Stormveil boss, but i did a ton of extracurricular exploring otherwise, especially in the south peninsula. i managed to find a map for that one, too. finding a map is crucial for me, and it's hilarious because finding a map feels so rando

I was struggling to find the map for that eastern portion, but its location was apparently marked… on the map.

Granted in the grey mass of the map, but it was there.

Looking it up, they’re typically along the main roads.

put in about two hours and got killed all over, found at least four separate solid possibilities for deep exploration. there's too much stuff almost immediately! I need to settle down and follow the storyline so i can get the horse and level up!

good moooooooorning

PRAISE THE SUN!

I’m gonna be back on the grind in a minute. Been doing a lot of texting trying to explain myself to friends who bought this on my recommendation.

It has turned from “wtf, this is impossible” to “i just cleared some caves!” pretty fast though.

I'm gonna restart i think. Doing wretched was a bad idea as I think i want a thief build.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/hidetaka-miyazaki-sees-death-as-a-feature-not-a-bug
^presented unread

i love this anecdote

In Elden Ring, if your game system is connected to the Internet, the ghostly outlines of other players occasionally flicker onscreen while you roam, suggesting that you share the burden of your experiences. It’s even possible to summon another player for help during a taxing encounter. The players can’t readily talk to one another, so the difficulty is leavened by trust; after the challenge is complete, the summoned player dissolves in a shower of light. Miyazaki had the idea for such moments years ago, after his car became trapped in snow on a hill. A group of strangers pushed the vehicle to the top, then disappeared soundlessly into the night.

You guys are going to make me buy this shit
Hoping for a lot of strand type gameplay on the horse

xp That’s an amazing anecdote.

Beautifully rendered anyway.

I’m back on this and have been texting with friends about the pain and the glory. Special kind of game, like it’s very much not always fun. But coming out the other side of a struggle is uniquely, brilliantly rewarding.

I'm trying to remember, but maybe because it is most fore of mind I felt that dark souls 2 played up in-game NPC phantom helpers more than the other installments did, so that those playing offline like I do get a bit more of that experience.

Turns out the kick is now an L2 weapon art connected to certain weapons like the mace you can get in the area to the south of Limgrave

I like how there are so many non-hostile creatures on the map, just sheep running on armadillo code and minding their own business, but what are those jellyfish that hang out near piles of corpses up to you have to wonder

Finding a flail that you swing around wildly made me want to restart as a dex build, but making do squishing people with the regular mace for now

love too inadvertently jump off my spectral steed while trying to make a rapid escape from being You Died.

also i have not yet got the hang of fighting mounted enemies, on my spectral steed or no.

On early thing that seems to work is attaching the hors and knocking them off

I died a bunch of times to the tree sentinel but god it was good

finding a cave with wolves guarding a beastmaster stuck in some forest is kind of a perfect way to get the ball rolling here. roll d10 for initiative.

I want to find the wolf cave. When I stopped I had ridden into bear country.

Yeah I've played all of two hours so far and the Beastman guy is kicking my arse

I need to get used to defending more. I'm used to Bloodborne which I guess has the gun parry, but you don't have to use it all that much

Found the Beastman later than I was perhaps expected to so that was no problem. I think he's supposed to teach you to use your jump attack to get over his sweeps? Very Sekiro-like. In learning that the jump and guard counter mechanics are pretty key.

Now I'm approaching Stormveil.