I bought it because this one was marketed as being more accessible. You keep saying “But you bought it” but you don’t seem to understand WHY I bought this and not, say, Dark Souls 3.
I’d actually say the fact that they made a “more accessible” game in the genre waters down the “target audience” argument significantly. The point was to expand the “target audience”, otherwise they wouldn’t have been marketing it as more accessible in interviews, etc. If it was purely for the “target audience”, they’d have been talking up how it’s 2hard4casuals
For me, the most satisfying thing in this game is:
Getting my ass handed to me…going off to go other stuff and coming back and just piledriving the guy.
As for being accessible…its easily the most of all of them. WAY more checkpoints. More opportunities to cheese…rather, “Cheese”. If its in the game then its in the game. If I have to swing back and forth some 25 times on my horse, well then so be it.
If a boss accidentally gets himself stuck in a corner, and cant whip his tail or turn around while I’m under him? Fuck yeah, Im gonna sit there and hack at him.
Edit: I should admit, yes…I’ve also screamed at the game a number of times.
I don’t care why you bought it. The fact is that you did, and you finished it, which means you enjoyed it. So someone who isn’t in the target audience, bought the game and finished it, despite it not having a difficulty slider. It seems like he’s done everything right. Keep the core audience happy while also introducing new players to the Souls experience.
Which doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been better. I finish and enjoy a lot of games but I can pretty much always find ways they went wrong or could stand to be improved. If you think just finishing and enjoying a game, movie, album, book, etc means the creator did “everything right”, I dunno what to tell you.
But the thing you think they’ve “got wrong” is a core aspect of the game. It’s what they’re known for. I think if someone buys a game that they wouldn’t normally buy, and enjoy it enough to finish it, and the core audience also thinks it is great, then yes the developers have done everything right, even if that player things some aspects could be improved.
Or I could cheese it with a ranged build, but I want to beat these fuckers in melee combat without using summons, so I will continue to bang my head against the wall every now and then against a boss whose attack patterns I find particularly awkward.
Again, it was bought on the promise that the “core aspect” would be mitigated in this version. And enjoyed because the “core aspect” was weakened enough to find it enjoyable. So feeling that further weakening that aspect for those who wish would be a good choice (and refusing to do so is a bad one) is perfectly reasonable.
If there was a “Souls” genre lesson I took from it, it wasn’t “Wow, this core aspect is swell and so important” – it was “Less Souls 2hard4u nonsense makes for a better game”
In fact, if the supposed core audience thinks this game is great even with added accessibility, it would seem there’s more flexibility available with the core aspect than one might think.
I bought it and returned it. So they actively lost money on me due to credit card fees. Ok, it wasn’t exactly because it was difficult–more that I found the combat system tedious. Still, they might have retained me with more combat configurability.
The thing is that I don’t think the core players care that it is open world, but they do care that the difficulty is a set value. What the developer did was make levelling up your character more interesting. In the past if you couldn’t get past a boss, you just kept playing the same bit over and over until you levelled enough and your skills improve. With Elden Ring you have a much more expansive world to do the levelling part of that equation and the skills naturally come over time. It’s also possible that they would’ve liked to have made the world more open in the past but haven’t been able to due to technical limitations. This is not true of difficulty.
This game sold 12 million copies. The publisher expected it to sell 4 million copies. It doesn’t matter that some new players didn’t like it.
Yes. A good example that sales figures aren’t the only measure of success. And while I recognise your winkie smile there, it is true that the success of Elden Ring will hinge in part on sales of subsequent games. If Elden Ring 2 sells 3 million then I think you can say that Elden Ring was a failure, long term, and maybe the developers got it wrong.
One thing that kinda confuses me is that the “professional” reviews are basically calling it an absolutely perfect game, while on Steam at least the user reviews are more muted. My personal top-tier games (Portal 2, Subnautica, Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, others) are almost exclusively “Overwhelmingly Positive” on Steam, while Elden Ring is just “Very Positive”. That puts it alongside games like Skyrim, Fallout 4, and No Man’s Sky, which are certainly decent but don’t seem to have the quite the same level of adulation.
Even if Elden Ring grabbed a fair number of new players, it definitely feels like every review site threw the game to their resident Dark Souls player, for which it really was an absolutely perfect manifestation of a DS game. For others… less so, to varying degrees.
Maybe the early ones were, but the recent reviews are still just “very positive” and they are not as focused on the stuttering. Lots of stuff about recycled content, imbalanced gameplay, a difficulty curve that ramps up suddenly, and so on.
Ok, I just looked through them, it may have been oldest to newest.
Interestingly the non-performance based negative reviews seem to come from a range of players, Souls veterans and newbies. Gripes include PVP issues, difficult co-op setup, difficulty, poor late game bosses, and so on. I wonder how many reviewers bothered with multiplayer and how many finished the game prior to reviewing it?
Well, reviewers are certainly encouraged to get something out ASAP, and for a game that probably takes most people 80+ hours, I’m guessing most don’t complete it and/or skim past the less crucial stuff. A game that hooks people initially but kinda falls apart in the lategame might be biased toward better professional reviews as compared to user reviews.
I was hoping for a “finished the game” achievement in ER but it looks like there are separate ones for each ending. CP2077 has a 33.5% completion rate. 13.6% get “Elden Lord” but I guess there are others and they likely overlap in a hard to predict way.
There are 3 achievements for getting specific endings. (Elden Lord, Age of the Stars, and Lord of the Frenzied Flame)
It’s interesting that the default ending isn’t the one with the highest percentage. (Age of the Stars is the highest currently, with 19.4% on Steam) This is probably because the character associated with the Age of the Stars ending, Ranni the Witch, is incredibly popular with the fandom.
No, but from what I heard, you can backup your save right before the final boss fight, see the different endings and then restore the backup to get the ending you actually want.
One note is that fulfilling the requirements for getting the Lord of Frenzied Flame ending will lock you out from choosing the other endings, so if you decide to use the save backup method to get all of the endings at once, you need to first unlock the ability to remove the Frenzied Flame from your character (you need to defeat 2 optional bosses for this)
I did it this way - save scrub on PS5, so platinum after 2 playthroughs.
I did have to go get Miquella’s needle to remove the frenzied flame - because I wanted to see the different scene when lighting the fire (after fire giant). I think you might not need to do this if you save getting the frenzied flame till right at the end, so could skip Melenia.
Co-oping Melenia quite a bit atm and man, jury is out on that boss imho - she annihilates the host most of the time with waterfowl dance, and some common builds (e.g a shield) flat out can’t work against her. Bloodhound step counters her but that is the most broken move in the game - trying that with Shabriri’s woe - the talisman that draws aggro, and having a bit more success.
I have a clip of a co-summon cheesing her with a ridiculous fire weapon art glitch, he ran her over like a lawnmower, but I don’t know the name of it.
