Red is showing you people who died. White are people playing right now so near bonfires you’ll see a lot of traffic if you are online.
I love that Elden Ring (and the whole Souls franchise) has embraced the metaverse concept, like DC and Marvel. Every game is its own reality/dimension, and it’s a single player game in that sense. But the different realities bleed over to look like ghosts, you can send messages between them, and can even temporarily cross over. It’s fun and brilliant.
I am quite dense that I never realized red = dead. I appreciate you pointing that out. I will look more carefully at those spots now.
Are we sure white are people playing right now? I see them sometimes pointing at things for me, like at secret walls and so forth. Did they not record that and send it out to the world?
Uh…am I or my ghost going out to others? I hope so!
So there are two kind of white ghosts as far as I know.
There are the ones that show up out of nowhere as you’re doing stuff and those are echoes of other players who are playing at the same time as you.
Then there are the ones that appear when you read messages, those are tied to the person who left the message. Those show people pointing or kneeling or whatever.
That’s my understanding at least. I am also a neophyte in this game.
Yes, this makes sense.
I presume people are seeing me time to time…
Same as me though I never know.
If you see a guy in a staff with robes in Limgrave running around late at night that might be me. Though I play Xbox and I think you said that you’re on PC, and I’m not sure that crosses over.
Yes, PC. No idea if they cross over.
I have to say, my gaming PC is a lightweight and it still runs this game very well. I am no stickler for perfection and super high framerates, but the game runs super smoothly for me and I haven’t had any real glitch the first 8-10 hours I’ve played.
I get just a bit of pop-in when I ride on Torrent, but otherwise the game seems very smooth. Nice to see a more or less finished product delivered. I heard about the game running poorly on PC for some people. I lowered two settings that IGN recommended and turned off Steam Overlay and it runs and even loads quickly.
If you’re interested in the events that happened before the game started, make sure to rest at churches and speak to Melina when the option presents itself. IIRC, you can only do this the first time you rest at a church’s site of grace.
expanding on Teuton’s reply, you only need to hold your shield up to block attacks. However, don’t hold it up all the time as it slows down your stamina recovery.
The smithing stones are dirt cheap now compared to the prices at launch. The bigger issue is getting the bell-bearings that unlock them in the shop, but you’re encouraged to explore and find everything anyway.
There is also a Parry, which is a shields default ‘special’ (L2 on my pc controller), which does require timing but which can break an enemies poise. I’ve never got the hang of parry timing, and don’t bother with it now.
I am trying to take on the castle in the far Southern point of the Weeping Peninsula. A lady gave me a letter to deliver to her father there and I am finding the interior of the castle to be a tough battle even though I am sneaking around.
What is your build? What about the castle is bugging you? That particular area was a wall for me at first, too.
Well, my build is a Vagabond and I have invested in Vigor to raise my HP. I use a mace that I found in a chest in a wagon behind a soldier.
Well, I’m using the guys who are worshiping at the pyre where they killed a guy as my rune collecting place right now. There is a convenient grace point right near there and I can clear it out fairly well. It has a large pumpkinhead guy in the back and I have been able to kill him somewhat reasonably.
You can ride your horse here. It helps.
It’s ascending the ladder and fighting along the walls that is difficult. I’m learning to see “death” as “try again with more knowledge”. The warp point is mercifully close in this area.
Three things that might help:
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You might already have figured this out, but just in case you haven’t: If you block an attack with your shield, and then hit the heavy attack button as soon as the enemy weapon bounces off, you’ll do a souped-up counterattack that often breaks enemy poise and lets you get an easy critical (this is not the same as the parry, which I could never get right). This works on basically any melee attack the basic slobbery monster creatures in that castle can do.
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Get a bow. Upgrade your stats so you can use it and buy a buttload of basic arrows from the merchant near the anvil in the starting region. As you advance along the narrow walkways on top of the walls of the castle, hit each enemy with an arrow so they will charge you, wait for them to arrive, and then do #1. If they try to hang back and shoot arrows, just shoot them back until they die.
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Important hint: you will eventually reach a spot where you can turn right and you see a bonfire. Don’t go to it yet! First turn left, move through an ongoing battle between soldiers and monsters, and talk to the NPC you find at the end of that path. If you do this, you can summon him to fight the boss, who is a huge pain in the butt if you try to take him on alone.
Hmmmm…not sure what you are referencing, but I did actually find Edgar one time. Despite its flaws, at least going back to a grace point does NOT undo the actual things you’ve done in the area you are. I had this vision of everywhere being a “get through this all in one push” type thing and that is not the case so far.
One thing I have never done is exit the game without resting a grace point. The game says “Are you sure you want to save and quit?”
I’m too nervous to trust it outside myself standing by a grace point. If I save just out on the field, where will it load me? Or in the middle of a larger dunegon-like area after the enemies have been killed.
If you’ve already found Edgar, you can just ignore my paragraph. It’s just that he lies off the critical path - you have to detour to get him, and it would be very easy to get all the way to the boss of the castle without running past him at all.
With one exception, it will re-load you exactly where you were, with everything that you previously killed still dead and everything that you’ve done (doors opened, levers pulled, etc) still done.
The exception is if you “save and quit” in the middle of a boss room. In such a case, it will drop you back outside the boss fog when you reload. This is a good, if cheesy, way to avoid losing a lot of runes to a tough boss - if you feel the fight isn’t going your way, save and quit and then run back to the Site of Grace and refuel/grind until you try again.
easy way to beat the boss in the castle:
two-handing a big weapon should allow you to stunlock the poor thing until you put it out of its misery.
I was able to find Grace Point out back behind the castle by dropping down. One of the few times I really owe the other players who left notes. I know people are kind of setting us up sometimes with wrong information, but there was valid information from people about jumping downwards a bit to get out to the save point in the back. I think way, way in the South…I do roughly see where this nasty boss is.
I typically get one or two shotted(like die in one big multi-sweeping attack) from almost all bosses. I beat Patches, a guy inside a tunnel. I also beat that chess piece over in the west of Limgrave.
A lot of other field bosses have been brutal.
if you find messages telling you to jump, see if there’s a bunch of bloodstains around the area; that’s a surefire way to tell that the message is a big lie.
Yes, I jumped off the first cliff in the game, like before the tutorial. I didn’t realize red meant they died.
You can use Rainbow Stones to see if a drop is survivable. If you drop the stone off the edge, you can see if it survives or breaks. If it survives, so will you.