Elden Ring - Review Roundup

[Zloth]

I can turn off the invasions? Hmmm, might need to give this a shot then. AFTER it has sufficiently aged, of course. Or maybe try out the remaster of Dark Souls 1.

 

[DArtTooEarly]

According to ACG (a rather reliable sort of YT personality) - the 1.021 patch has made the game significantly worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yma9dJRAlo4

I was almost ready to pull the trigger - even if it's stupid when I have HFW, Elex 2 and CP 1.5 just waiting for me.

I don't know why I'm so fucking dumb when it comes to saturating myself with needless and impossible gaming choices.

I don't think I've EVER experienced having 4 fresh huge high quality open world RPGs available at the same damned time.

 

[DArtTooEarly]

Not to belabor the point, but Steam reviews are mixed at 60% - mostly citing performance issues.

I have zero clue how any reasonable critic could rate this 10/10 with that kind of issue persisting.

To me, that really tells me all I need to know about how reliable those reviews are.

It could be the best open world game of all time - but having serious stutters and performance issues should, at the very minimum, detract SOMEWHAT from the score.

 

[Morrandir]

In my simple world my simplistic approach to x/10 ratings is that they're just an equidistant discretization of a continous rating between 0 and 100%, so:

• 0/10: 0,0 - 9,1%
• 1/10: 9,1 - 18,2%
• 2/10: 18,2 - 27,3%
• …
• 10/10: 90,9 - 100%

So a 10/10 still leaves anough wiggle room for not being a perfect game.

However I'm quite aware that the massage a 10/10 gives is a little different…

 

[Redglyph]

In my simple world my simplistic approach to x/10 ratings is that they're just an equidistant discretization of a continous rating between 0 and 100%, so:

• 0/10: 0,0 - 9,1%
• 1/10: 9,1 - 18,2%
• 2/10: 18,2 - 27,3%
• …
• 10/10: 90,9 - 100%

So a 10/10 still leaves anough wiggle room for not being a perfect game.

However I'm quite aware that the massage a 10/10 gives is a little different…

Very nice! That's a clever method of quantization indeed, it removes the problem of otherwise uneven steps. With rounding to the nearest - the most classic, there's actually 50% less chance to get extreme values.

 

[largh]

Hmm…I was supposed to save my time and not open this thread but now I did. Oh well. See, when reading averaged scores from Metacritic and such you need to think about it the other way.

Say that we got three reviews for a game. On 0-100 scale, they would be 91, 95, and 96.

Their "Metacritic" average would be (91 + 95 + 96)/3 = 94.

Now we have the same scores rounded mathematically: 9, 10, 10. The "metacritic" average becomes (100*(9 + 10 + 10))/3 = 96.667 which again is rounded to 97.

With @Morrandir; scale, which is probably more realistic way an average reviewer would think we would get straight "metacritic" average of 100.

Similarly to 1-5 scale: 5, 5, 5 => 100, 100, 100.

Note that a decimal scale from 0 to 10 with one digit is effectively the same than 0-100 scale in this context.

Now I have picked numbers which exemplify my point but you'll notice the tendency if you study the numbers. In the case of game reviews the average scores are biased toward 100 the more the less intervals a review scale has. In other cases, values would be biased toward 0. This only happens when the values are close to the extremes of the scale, which they are in this case (or actually, they get aggregated to bins, but the extreme bins influence the arithmetic mean the most). We typically correct for such effect using transformations (for example take a logarithm of the numbers, called logarithmic mean as opposed to arithmetic mean) or using models (general linear mixed model with a binomial logit link function would be appropriate tool in this case). Metacritic and Opencritic do not do that as far as I know so you need to look how many reviews are using 10 (and 5) scales when interpreting the score.

And once more 10 does not mean "perfect game". Just accept the fact For instance in Game spot it means "essential" and in IGN a "masterpiece".

 

[JDR13]

However I'm quite aware that the massage a 10/10 gives is a little different…

A massage from a 10/10 sounds great to me.

 

[Morrandir]

A massage from a 10/10 sounds great to me.

Hahaha, indeed!
Where can I get one?

 

[DArtTooEarly]

I would prefer something other than a massage, but I'm also difficult

 

[Redglyph]

I would prefer something other than a massage, but I'm also difficult

You mean a game with a happy ending?

 

[ChaosTheory]

I've never played a Dark Souls game as I don't find enjoyment running head-first into a wall 50 times before I defeat a boss. But now that it's open world, I may give it a try on sale if the story is good.

There is a story, right? ...or are you still just trying to get out of hell?

 

[sakichop]

I've never played a Dark Souls game as I don't find enjoyment running head-first into a wall 50 times before I defeat a boss. But now that it's open world, I may give it a try on sale if the story is good.

There is a story, right? …or are you still just trying to get out of hell?

I’m not sure why people think open world is going to make this so different from DS. It doesn’t your still doing DS stuff but now in an open world. If you died 50 times at a boss in DS you probably will in elden ring too. Don’t get me wrong there’s plenty of changes but not changes that will make someone that dislikes DS as much as you to sudden like it.

My advice save your money and spend. It on a story driven game.

 

[JFarrell71]

Don’t get me wrong there’s plenty of changes but not changes that will make someone that dislikes DS as much as you to sudden like it.

1 - you haven't played it, so you don't know what has changed and what hasn't except what you read. And you're reading things through a Souls hating lens, as evidenced by…

2 - they said they've "never played a Dark Souls game". Getting from there to "dislikes DS as much as you" is sheer projection.

ChaosTheory, yes, there's a story. The story is told through NPC interaction and occasional cutscenes (very occasional). Do not expect dialogue trees and a heavy plot, however.

By the way, for you and for anyone reading this who has been frustrated by Dark Souls (or Bloodborne or Sekiro) in the past, there are some changes that make Elden Ring a lot less onerous/frustrating, if not exactly easier:

You can fast travel very freely. As long as you're not aggroing enemies and you're not in a dungeon, you can open your map at any time and fast travel to any of the various sites of grace you've found (there are a lot of sites of grace). You don't have to be at a site to travel to another site. This is more lenient than even Horizon: Forbidden West, which at least requires a travel pack to do that.

At the end of a dungeon, after you defeat the boss, there's a marker at which you can teleport back to the entrance of that dungeon. No need to backtrack your way out of there.

You have a horse, so on the overland map you can move very quickly and ride right past some troublesome areas/enemies.

This all adds up to an almost zero need to do stuff over again unless you want to. In past games, there were times when if you died, you had to run a gauntlet of traps/enemies to get back to what you were trying to do (like beat a boss). You'd rarely if ever have to do that in Elden Ring. And there were times when you might be far from a bonfire laden with souls, nervous that you were going to die before you got a chance to use them. In this game, you can just fast travel back to a site of grace.

And oh, that reminds me of another change that makes things easier. You can level up from any site of grace. Previously, you had to go back to a specific spot (person) to level up.

 

[sakichop]

1 - you haven't played it, so you don't know what has changed and what hasn't except what you read. And you're reading things through a Souls hating lens, as evidenced by…

2 - they said they've "never played a Dark Souls game". Getting from there to "dislikes DS as much as you" is sheer projection.

I'm not sure if I'm totally misunderstanding you or not but I've played 1000's of hours of souls games and have been playing elden ring since release. Probably before you since it released several hours earlier on PC.

The reasons he gave for not playing seemed to indicate a strong sense of dislike but that's really irrelevant.

 

[JFarrell71]

I'm not sure if I'm totally misunderstanding you or not but I've played 1000's of hours of souls games and have been playing elden ring since release. Probably before you since it released several hours earlier on PC.

The reasons he gave for not playing seemed to indicate a strong sense of dislike but that's really irrelevant.

You didn't misunderstand me. I misremembered you as bashing Elden Ring at every opportunity. I must have mixed your username up with somebody else.

You can't dislike something you have no direct experience with. You may think you would dislike it, but you can't know that you do dislike it. And it's very relevant, as you're giving advice to him based on what he thinks might be the case rather than what is the case.

 

[sakichop]

You didn't misunderstand me. I misremembered you as bashing Elden Ring at every opportunity. I must have mixed your username up with somebody else.

You can't dislike something you have no direct experience with. You may think you would dislike it, but you can't know that you do dislike it. And it's very relevant, as you're giving advice to him based on what he thinks might be the case rather than what is the case.

I get what your saying now. I understand he hasn't played it. My point was if he didn't buy any souls games because dying 50 times to a boss isn't something he would enjoy then don't buy Elden ring because your probably going to die to a boss 50 times in it as well. Being open world isn't going to change that.

He referenced open world and better story as reasons he may buy elden ring on sale. Maybe by the time I finish the game my opinion will change but as it stands now the story isn't any more present than it is in a DS game and being openworld isn't going to change that this is a souls game at heart.

Two thing I'm actually happy about.

I'm surprised you thought I didn't like DS I've was praising DS around here when praising DS around wasn't cool.

Now back to the game.

 

[fadedc]

Some aspects of the Souls games would feel less punishing in an open world. If there's a boss you can't beat right now, it makes a big difference if he's not blocking progression and you can come back to him later after you've leveled up your character, improved your gear, and gotten access to new fighting options.

 

[wolfgrimdark]

Some aspects of the Souls games would feel less punishing in an open world. If there's a boss you can't beat right now, it makes a big difference if he's not blocking progression and you can come back to him later after you've leveled up your character, improved your gear, and gotten access to new fighting options.

That is a really good point and one thing I like about some open worlds where you can come back later to fight things.

 

[Gwydden]

You are 100% correct. You would not like their games, based on these three things […]

A bit late to the party, but… I'm not categorically opposed to trying Elden Ring at some point. I quite enjoyed Hollow Knight, which some describe as a soulslike, and while I find earlier FromSoft games hideous, I do like what I've seen of Elden Ring's art direction.

But I'm not convinced that wandering around getting into random fights (which is what even gushing reviews describe as the overwhelming bulk of the Elden Ring experience) wouldn't get old fast. Seeing as I rarely buy AAA games and never at full price--and with the complaints that abound about the PC port and mouse/keyboard support--, maybe if it shows up patched and at a discount down the line when I have nothing else to play, I'll give it a shot.

I do think fans of these games (not talking about you specifically) generally do a terrible job of selling them, at least to someone like me. "Mastering" a game does nothing for me; I won't do something unfun just so I can say I was able to do it. Praising a game's "lore" is a backhanded compliment; if the interesting stories happened before the game starts, why aren't we playing that?

 

[sakichop]

Some aspects of the Souls games would feel less punishing in an open world. If there's a boss you can't beat right now, it makes a big difference if he's not blocking progression and you can come back to him later after you've leveled up your character, improved your gear, and gotten access to new fighting options.

Except you can already do that in all the souls. games. getting stuck on a boss and going somewhere else to level, find new gear etc. is already a staple of the games. Now in theory an open world should add more places to go and it technically does but in practice many of the places you go also kick your butt and you get stuck to a much smaller area or exploring and running from everything.
@Gwydden;

If by people like you, you mean people that play games for story then there's nothing us souls fans can sell you on. The games are about combat, game mechanics, exploration, atmosphere, builds and learning your enemies all to overcome a vast world that's stacked against you. If that doesn't interest you then the games probably aren't for you.