Elden Ring - Review Roundup

[fadedc]

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.

To a degree, but in practice there are often still bottlenecks where you've looted the available area but there's a specific ridiculous boss that you need to kill to move forward. Or, as you say, where the boss might be guarding the level appropriate area, and the only other option is somewhere you will get erased.

I finally figured out my technical problems in Elden Ring and have been playing it. The open world is definitely very.....open. Not empty, just big. Not at all what I'm used to in a souls game. It's not just bosses you can avoid, if there's a difficult area filled with annoying enemies blocking your path you can often just go around it. Running away is also much more of an option than it is in previous games. It's fairly easy to get killed while exploring off the beaten path, but if I end up biting off more than I can chew, I can often just turn tail and run like hell.

 

[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.

Let me put it like this: this is apparently the best reviewed game of all time. Reviewers keep telling their readers it's amazing and that they should try it, even if they are not FromSoft fans. How do these journalists usually go about selling the game to those who aren't already sold on it? "It's not that hard, really!"

I get why they do it. Their supposed difficulty dominates the discourse around these games and often puts people off. But this pitch has skipped a beat. Forget about the game's difficulty level; why should anyone play it? That's not a rhetorical question; it is in fact just what a review's supposed to answer.

But I suspect websites assigned this game to their resident FromSoft fan (hence all the 9s and 10s), who takes the game's appeal for granted and supposes the only reason someone wouldn't be chomping at the bit to play is because they've heard it's too hard.

Or maybe it's because it's a AAA open world game and therefore the latest big thing, and you, dear reader, would not want to miss the zeitgeist whatever the game's intrinsic qualities. Perish the thought.

 

[JFarrell71]

Praising a game's "lore" is a backhanded compliment; if the interesting stories happened before the game starts, why aren't we playing that?

Haha, I like that. "Lore" (or what I would more expansively call the setting) is important to me because it makes the world we're exploring feel lived in, like it has a history, a mythology, societies, not just a bunch of orcs and bandits conveniently standing around waiting to meet my sword. It makes the stories we experience by playing the game feel more meaningful, richer.

I'm going to put the rest of this in spoiler tags because I"m going to get very specific about some details of Elden Ring to illustrate a couple of ways in which "story" happens in the game.

Spoiler: Story stuff

It does have what an RPG player would recognize as stories, told mostly through NPC interaction. To cite one early example, you come across a woman (later revealed to be named Roderika) who tells you of her lost companions, children as she describes them, turned to "chrysalids" by some kind of spider. She seems sad and lost. You encounter her later in another location, where you learn from another NPC that she is a spirit tuner, something she herself is unaware of. You can tell her what was said, or not. If you do, her voice takes on a tinge of hope. It's apparent that later on she will evolve down that path and be able to provide those services to you.

Much of what constitutes story in Elden Ring, however, are the stories you tell through what you do and find. There is a beach near the opening area, far below. I wondered how I could reach it. Eventually I found a recipe for a magic sort of cotton that would quiet my movement, and more importantly in this case, slow my fall. I was able to use that to get down to the beach. Off across the ocean I could see an island with a temple on it. Down the coast, among some beach detritus and continually re-animating skeletal remains, was a swirling plume of air. Riding my horse into that plume would carry me hundreds of feet in the air. I thought maybe I could ride it to the island, but I would crash halfway into the sea.

Wandering down the beach in the other direction, I found a tunnel descending into the earth. It was pitch black. Feeling my way along, I heard a stark scream, and raggedy men converged on me in the dark, shrieking. Swinging my sword, stumbling away from them, I found myself in a fight with their chieftains. I summoned an ancient knight to help me, and together we killed them and their followers. The tunnel continues after their chamber, back into the pitch black. But it began to ascend, and I emerged blinking into the sunlight, on the very island I had longingly looked at across the waters. Now to find what to whom this temple was devoted….

That's a story. One I can tell, one I "made".

About the reviews: I don't know what you're talking about. It doesn't seem like you're talking about the actual reviews. I haven't seen many, if any, that claim Elden Ring is easier. In fact, I've seen a bunch that say it's harder (I don't think I agree, but the point is that they say that). And of course they're telling you why you should play it! Maybe it all goes in one ear and out the other because you're not disposed to care, but they are telling you in great detail in many cases why this game is appealing.

 

[Nereida]

So, the technical side of the game could have been a little more polished, but this is a game to remember for many years. I feel From have set a new staple that will remain in time as a true diamond. It's like Dark Souls and LoZ: Breath of the Wild had a child, and took the best of both worlds to merge it into one grand dark epic fantasy setting that's just breathtaking in every aspect.

It won't be for everyone, thankfully. If it was for everyone it would be stupidly easy to beat, it would have difficulty sliders that would make balance impossible, it would allow pauses mid-fight, it would probably be way more cartoonish, or have way too much pointless dialogue getting in the way, trying to pretend that videogame writers can actually write - all of which would make it a worse game. From knows how to make their games, and made this one perfect in the way it is, a gift from an actually talented studio to those who can appreciate it.

 

[sakichop]

Let me put it like this: this is apparently the best reviewed game of all time. Reviewers keep telling their readers it's amazing and that they should try it, even if they are not FromSoft fans. How do these journalists usually go about selling the game to those who aren't already sold on it? "It's not that hard, really!"

I get why they do it. Their supposed difficulty dominates the discourse around these games and often puts people off. But this pitch has skipped a beat. Forget about the game's difficulty level; why should anyone play it? That's not a rhetorical question; it is in fact just what a review's supposed to answer.

But I suspect websites assigned this game to their resident FromSoft fan (hence all the 9s and 10s), who takes the game's appeal for granted and supposes the only reason someone wouldn't be chomping at the bit to play is because they've heard it's too hard.

Or maybe it's because it's a AAA open world game and therefore the latest big thing, and you, dear reader, would not want to miss the zeitgeist whatever the game's intrinsic qualities. Perish the thought.

It’s not a reviewers job to sell the game. They just give us their (hopefully ) unbiased opinion of the game. As for the score that’s what the reviewer thinks it deserves it’s not an objective quantity.

I already listed reasons why someone would play it. I don’t put a high value on it’s difficulty.