Long time Souls fans, how did we feel about Elden Ring?

For me, it's simply too long. DS2 had a sense of overstaying its welcome, Elden Ring turns that up to 11. I'm a completionist by nature and the sheer size of Elden Ring makes the idea of replaying it daunting.

Back in the day Bloodborne and DS3 bosses were often strawmanned as being spastic anime spectacles, but I feel in Elden Ring that strawman has become a reality.

I feel like Elden Ring still hits the mark in terms of lore, aesthetics, and atmosphere, and I keep getting the itch to come back, but playing it quickly starts to feel like a chore.

>>715890408 (OP)
It's fine. I'd play it over the other Nacmo games.

>>715890408 (OP)
once you beat Limgrave its all downhill

No it needs to be bigger.

>>715890408 (OP)
still the undisputed GOTD

>>715892823
once you beat Limgrave you've experienced 90% of the game

>>715890408 (OP)
The legacy dungeons were clearly the best part of the game but I didn't dislike the open world either.
It's an amazing game all around.

Ranni is for old men

>>715890408 (OP)
Shit game.
Bosses and areas are made for open workd but not fir combat whuch makes a lot of battles awful.
Camera isnt made for all the big enemies.
Opeb wirkd ruined the game and didnt add anythibg new or positive in this franchise.
But normies still eat up cause they love opeb world slop

>>715890408 (OP)
>Three years
>daily seethe thread
Why?

>>715890408 (OP)
>DS2 had a sense of overstaying its welcome
Not enough people bring this up when discussing DaS2, the game is just so fucking bloated.
As for ER, it's not even specifically the length that's the issue, it's the shitty open world. If you just axed the dog shit open world and just had traditional transitions between legacy dungeons, it would be a far more enjoyable game to replay. Just the though of wasting hours of playtime on simply traveling from point A to point B in the least engaging horse gameplay imaginable just kills any desire I have to come back.

I don't think the open world added anything substantial to the gameplay and From Software is at their best when they make well crafted maps

>>715890408 (OP)
Dark Souls of the Wild.

>>715890408 (OP)
Not that it was too long but just the amount of rehashed crap near the end of the game to justify the open world. Also Fromsoftware's development times are taking longer. Elden Ring came out 3 years ago and all we got was DLC and a couple multiplayer games since. Between 2014-2019 we got DS2, Bloodborne, SOTFS, DS3 and Sekiro, along with all their DLC.

DS2 is goated and you guys are retarded to use more then just dodge.

>>715890408 (OP)
The only negative was repetition, even duplicate bosses I can handle, but the fact you fight the same grunt/soldier/knight set of enemies in 6 different colors kinda sucks, and the mountaintops, the final open area of the game having zero new enemies, blows.
Just one more pass of enemy variety would make it a genuine 10/10 for me.
I also wouldn't mind like one more clue on what the fuck radagon/marika's deal is

>>715890408 (OP)
the core game mechanics had become tired after ds2. sekiro was one of the best action games ive played because it switched things up, elden ring just feels tired. i still played it and enjoyed it decently for a while, but havent bothered to finish it. will probably go back to it eventually.

also, their approach to difficulty has become worse. now it feels like every boss fight is a test of memorizing a bosses arbitrary attack patterns. for the majority of bosses in ds1, ds2, and sekiro it felt like you could rely on quick reaction times to be able to beat a boss first try. for elden ring and ds3 it feels like more of a memorization test than anything else. its harder and drags out game time, so i guess some people will prefer it, but I just find it less fun.

Armor variety was severely lacking

>>715892823
based truth teller

>>715890408 (OP)
Its flaws are not trivial, but I still liked it a lot. I do feel compared to other games, I need to micromanage my experience on replays in order to have a good time. In previous games, routing to optimize and realize a build concept as early as possible was a big part of the fun, but in ER it's easy to ruin the fun by doing so, and it requires a different approach. I think this is a downside, but it doesn't ruin the game for me. I think invasions are in a rough state, but not the worst in the series. I like the combat in Souls games, so increased boss and enemy complexity is a plus to me.

>>715890408 (OP)
I love it and its the second best fromsoft game after Sekiro. But it is a bit too long. Should have ended at the capital and not forced me to travel all the way to the mountains of the giants. Although I dd like that location.

>>715890408 (OP)
It's a patchwork of past ideas without a strong central idea to bring it all together. It's not a coherent GAME, it's "content".

>>715890408 (OP)
It's my least favorite game in the series. It feels like a bit of a "greatest hits" compilation of things from the other games.
I like how they reworked weapon arts into ashes of war and liked the spell and weapon variety in general, but that's unfortunately pretty much all that did it for me in Elden Ring.

I agree that the game is just too long, and I think it would have been a much better game if they had either greatly shrunk the overworld or just made another one of their usual game worlds with interconnected levels and dungeons.
The level and encounter design feel about on par with what we saw in Dark Souls 3 and 2, but it feels very spread thin in Elden Ring to me for one reason or another.

Elden Ring:
- builds suck, just spam whatever braindead OP thing that's available to you, anything else is just utterly underwhelming and identical.
- game wants you to item craft constantly, yet the frame data for everything that is not Ash of War or R1 is disgustingly slow.
- needed a minimap
- wants you to use the horse for everything that isn't a dungeon, game is scaled around horseback, walking is an empty/nihilistic experience.
- the mandatory gimmicks, why do I need a woman and a horse to beat your game? why do I need two great runes to access leyndell? why can't i go to farum azula from the start of the game?
- why is the longer path always worse? +25 my weapon, max my stats, deal fuck-all damage, but +10 some random gimmick weapon, do ash of war, three shot everything.
- defense sucks, rolling vs. trial and error is not fun.
- spirit ashes AI is completely retarded compared to normal enemy AI or even NPC summon AI.
- get an actual quest system, fuck off with this wiki shit. This game needed a quest log.
- let me do offline equivalents of online content. Stop always putting in dead mechanics in your games.

I love Elden Ring as a whole but I do agree it's too large for its own good. I remember on my first playthrough I started to get really tired of doing any more mini-dungeons by the time I got to Mountaintops, and I'm someone who usually obsessively explores every nook and cranny and clears out every single enemy in these games. It always blew my mind that ER supposedly has bigger enemy variety than any of their previous games, because to me it absolutely feels like the variety is much worse here compared to e.g. Bloodborne, but that's just because ER's size is so incredibly bloated. Really hope their next big singleplayer title will be something more constrained and similar in size to BB or Sekiro again. With all that legitimate criticism said, ER is still a beautiful and intricately crafted work of art with unironically the deepest lore of any From game thus far. Also the greatest variety of builds and possible playstyles they've ever included in a single game. It really is the culmination of the 'Dark Souls'/RPG-heavier branch of their catalogue. The hylic troons who obsessively hatepost about the game in every thread are annoying and cringe.

>>715890408 (OP)
I don't like the color yellow.

>>715900731
Brainpoisoned

>>715890408 (OP)
bloated game, shit fanbase

>>715901261
Mega brainpoisoned

>>715902753
this is the only good criticism of ER to which I can frankly not think of a single valid retort

>>715890408 (OP)
I liked it, it was fun, the combat evolved in a right way, they slowed down from the ds3 tempo, and the openness of the world made exploration the first time around incredibly fun.
But yeah, it was too long. I think in terms of sheer size, cutting out the mountaintops of the giants + snowfield and using that time to instead flesh out the rest of the world even more would have been preferable. It seems like they just bit more than they could chew.
That being said, my first playthrough took 150 hours and I've done pretty much every single bit of content I could find, and explored every piece of land inch by inch. For people who just blaze through the game ignoring majority of the side content, it's probably not too big, and the repeated bosses and enemies aren't much of an issue either, since they haven't seen them in every possible instance they appear in.

>>715890408 (OP)
Size was great the first time round.
Tons to explore, anybody who gets even halfway methodical has a ton to find and do.
Any time after first and it's skip the small things, find out where the weapon you want is on a wiki and go get it.
Then boss rush/co-op/invade as necessary.

Boss bullshit was more or less fine but the DLC ramped it up and it just didn't work as well anymore.

>>715890408 (OP)
>I'm a completionist by nature

you are blaming the game for your own fault/being a retard

you are the issue, retard

>>715890408 (OP)
It's a great game and I'll commend From for not calling it Dark Souls 4, because it couldn't be farther from the design philosophy of the originals, Des, Ds and Ds2 at least. It was a game made for fans of Dark Souls 3, where the action takes center stage and mechanical depth is the most important factor. I just wish they could go back to the ideas presented in Des and later improved with Ds1 and perfect them, now that they have the budget. Mysterious mechanics, weird interactions, lore that doesn't sound like a schizo talking about agartha, gimmicky areas and bosses and actual danger in exploration, DS1 could get insanely tense when you had souls, were lost and had no estus. The bonfire became a gaming hallmark not because of it's design but because of how it made players feel when they saw it.
I still like Elden Ring, but we lost more than we gained from it.

>>715900731
Succint and well put
They basically made a "Souls best of" hits album, bloated it and then spread the results over a massive open world

open world games are like a buffet and everyone likes something different.... if you are a sane person you pick and eat the stuff you want to eat.. if you are a retard you pick the stuff you dont want to eat, force it down your stupid face and then bitch about it afterwards.

>>715902450
Is that screenshot from the DLC? I don't think I've been there.
>>715902753
Then you're gonna HATE this! *pees*

>>715904210
>t. windows user

>>715904126
>DS3 and ER
>iframe simulators where you spam R1 in the former and L2 in the latter
>"mechanical depth"
lmao

>>715904394
Not a fan of it either, but there is clearly an audience for it that wasn't there in earlier entries. Maybe mechanical depth was the wrong term, but the actual one I'm looking for isn't coming to mind.

>>715904792
wider not deeper
breadth is the word you're looking for
more options, same shit

>>715892823
unironically agree. liurnia of the lakes is also peak. didn't really enjoy much else of the game after that.
on the other hand, what's with souls games having really strong starts but then falling off?

>>715905231
It's called frontloading. All the good shit is at the start because either there wasn't enough material to sustain the game's actual length or the devs have been looking at metrics and know that the average player doesn't finish games.

>>715905486
Nah, it's a linear planning problem. DeS skipped the issue because each Archstone was distinct and unlinked. So they had a concise idea for each and fleshed it out.
Once they get so far in the linear dev path, they've found a framework and get kinda lazy on building it out because a lot of mental capacity is lost in the background thinking of the next thing.
Project Manager issue basically.

>>715890408 (OP)
I was impressed by the sheer scale of the game and how it managed to maintain a high production value and that handcrafted feel you get from linear games. But I found the combat to be stale and outdated. The casualization in terms of checkpoint placement was disappointing as well.

It's only a s long as you make it. You don't need to 100% the game, and that may be even detrimental because there are dozens of dungeons with shitty spell at the end. There's like 10 or so mandatory bosses and the game is completely ok like that.

Anyway, I disliked how a lot of enemies now have long combos and how the stamina system isn't even present most for enemies most of the time. A dragon needs to wait to stomp and then breathe fire, while those midgets with armor can roll around for almost a full minute. Also how the progression feels kind of wonky. You return to Limgrave after being to the capital and most enemies just tickle you, while you fight a fucking DOG in Moghwyn's palace and it effortlessly bullies you. Why does a knight do 1/10 damage to my stamina bar while I'm blocking, while a shitty dog bites me twice and breaks my defense. No sense at all.

That reminds me, experience values also vary a lot. The 3 Crystalian fight gives you 7k runes while being one of the hardest fights in the original version, while you can kill suicide bird in Moghwyn's Palace and he gives you 11k with no effort.
Why does a sitting Albinauric give me 2k runes while those T-Rex dogs in Caelid barely give 400?

>>715902901
NTA, but quests suck major dick in Elden Ring. You can skip several steps and even make NPCs disappear just by progressing a little in the storyline. There are hundreds of threads on internet forums (here included) of people asking where the fuck did Millicent go or what did Sellen mean by "he's cooped up in Sellia"?

If you don't remember,the guy Sellen tells you to find is hidden in a dungeon way far from Sellia and the dungeon even has a illusory entrance!

all actual souls fans stopped playing after 2

>>715901261
This.
I also think this game is terribly desigbed in combat.
The open workd is not made for combat and it really shows as ylu get stuck by sone rabdom obstacles midfight making it a olayer vs terrain and not a player vs boss experience.

The camera is also to high up to show all the big sized shit but it means that i cant see shit and honestly, its way tk close to the character.
Everything positive about the game exists in other soulsgames but without the flaws of open world and repetitive design.
You know this game is the worst souls fame when all of its fan have no real good thing to saya bout this game.
Its just basic shit like:
"Game has a lot of (recycled) content."
"Its a masterpiece."

>>715901261
>fuck off with this wiki shit
I recall trying to do Kenneth Haight's quest and never even found the girl he told me to find. I recall she appeared once at Roundtable Hold (isn't she supposed to appear first at Stormveil Castle), and then never again. Left the quest unfinished.

Also I tried to do Ranni's quest and it broke at least 3 quests because if you get the knife in Nokron, Seluvis just dies.

>>715903879
>A ton of shit to do.
Aka go into a catacomb/cave kill an enemy with a healthbar disguised as a "boss." Get shit which depending on your build is worthless.
I am serious when i say that i just listed the majority if things you can do in this game.

>>715890408 (OP)
It's pretty incontestably the best 'classic' souls-style From game. Sekiro has better bosses and combat. My biggest gripes are the repetitiousness of the minor dungeons, the middling OST, the lack of major new mobs in the last few regions of the game, and some of the gaping questions left almost deliberately in the lore.
Elden Ring is the clearly the culmination of several ideas that the company had been slowly chiselling away at in an iterative process, like a series of statues that gradually become more refined and elegant.
You see this in the game's steadfast adherence to the 'if you see it, you can explore it' level and world design philosophy, the grandeur of the landmarks and landscapes, and the incredibly rich and informative environmental storytelling peppered everywhere across the map.
There are even numerous plot threads and concepts that From explored to varying effect in prior games that ER took to greater heights. Such as the giantslaying warrior king and his scheming wife, the accursed twins, the symbiotic humanoid-tree relation, the ruinous false flame, the dragon apostate heir of gods etc.
Elden Ring is really just the apotheosis of Souls design.
It genuinely is bizarre to me that some harbour such vitriol towards it while in the same breath professing a love for say, Dark Souls 1.
For a game as vast and sprawling as it is, it retains a remarkable level of quality throughout in a way that's pretty much unprecedented for From.
None of their previous game's other than Sekiro boast a higher class of bosses, and none of them offer levels, characters, stories, and overall world design as strong as ER. SOTE just seals the deal.

>>715907456
>camera
One of my issues with this game is how because giant enemies have borked lock-on targets, 90% of the time I just hit empty air because my character tried to attack upwards. Even disabling lock-on and trying to attack just the legs gives mixed results.

>>715906571
>Handcradted linear feel
Bro they shit enemies on some randome areas and called it a day.

I swear everyone whonsays elden ring is good has no actual praise but the 0 deph game journalist praise they do to promote the worst games.

Game is terribly designed as in "letsput an endgame area next to the starting one."
Like wtf?
You suddenly get beaten up by enemies who get suddenly way stronger then they should have been

>>715905917
I really want FS to return to the DeS formula, it's such a tightly designed game that's also rich in atmosphere and lore. DeS only suffers from being a little bit too short and having some braindead AI.
It won't happen of course, now that they know that their copy-paste bosses in an open world is praised as the second coming of Christ, but a man can dream.

>>715907639
That's because you don't enjoy the exploration itself. You're just reward hunting.

>>715904291
>Is that screenshot from the DLC?
Yes. Marika's village. A safe place.

>>715908278
I'm all for exploration, just not "Why is it always mushroom" exploration, or going into the 20th catacomb with reviving skeletons or farting flowers. It was shit in Skyrim with the fucking Draugr in every dungeon, it's shit in Elden Ring.

>>715890408 (OP)
I recently did a new playthrough of Elden Ring. I would just go straight for the achievement bosses and DLC remembrance bosses. I'd skip and run past most things, although sometimes I'd do the mines for weapon upgrades and scadutree fragments, I'd kill big easy bosses that were along the way like dragons or ulcerated tree spirits, and I did most of the Ainsel River/Nokstella stuff because I like that dungeon.

I ended the game at level 191, after Malenia, Miquella and Bayle, took around 25-30 hours. Most of the game literally doesn't matter at all. It's an exercise in riding from place to place on horseback, and the world being filled with repetitive encounters and setups and extending your playtime for possibly an extra 30 hours for items you don't even need. I don't think I'll be replaying the game anytime soon over other Souls games, and if the next one is open world too, then it'll probably be a one-and-one.

>>715907760
That's an understandable compromise, bit overzealous at times but there is so much character and artistry to any one of the enemy NPCs. The environments look even more impressive with them looking like paintings

>>715890408 (OP)
it peaks in liurnia (second act of the game) and the overall pacing and quality starts shitting itself as the game continues into caelid and beyond. the latter zones in the game can be blitzed through and have no content aside from major set pieces.

it also starts as an open world rpg but then slowly funnels itself into being a linear soulslike but with comparatively worse level design compared to all previous fromsoft games. you're still forced through open world zones, but they are so empty they just end up being barren fields you walk through to get to the actual levels. its really clear that fromsoft spent all their time on making the early game open world zones more well rounded.

its core story thesis is just a retelling of dark souls but with more character driven conflict instead of mythological deities like gwynn or izalith. it's not a bad story, but it's just the exact same thing that fromsoft has been doing since 2011

its the best open world game ever made which actually means its merely an ok game overall

>>715892823
this, but this is the case with most games.
the first 20h you'll know how the other 100 will be.
still waiting for games that unlock truly worthwhile upgrades every 20 hours of gameplay.
swim after 20h, fly after 40h, double movement speed after 60h, whatever

>>715908512
>Why is it always mushroom
Yeah, but now you've seen what was over there/down there and probably got into a stupid fight along the way.
The reward is whatever.
And while the catacombs are broadly the same, they do at least change somewhat as you go further. They're also fairly well spread out geographically and interesting to find in and of itself.

riding around mashing the "collect" button was a drag. Farmable consumables was a drag and just busywork. way too many sites of grace, especially when you can just blast around on the horse in an instant

>>715909017
try astlibra maybe

>>715910092
It was probably all the rage at the time, crafting. Devs started scaling down on it since then, but if amazes me how much crafting was crammed into games that never needed them, like Resident Evil 4 Remake.

>>715890408 (OP)
best thing since bloodborne