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Elden Ring is a crowning achievement for open worlds & is quite possibly the greatest game ever made.

TheDraconian

TheDraconian

Member
Pardon me my Tarnished brethren, but I just couldn't stand waiting till Feb 25th to celebrate this jewel.
I just want to hail this masterpiece of a game that is Elden Ring. One of the few chosen games worthy of being called Greatest of all Time, and to me a strong example of what a brilliant world with near flawless exploration should be. The sense of discovery this game provides is unparalleled and something Ive never experienced in games before. I've been completely floored by the top notch world designs, boss designs, gameplay, art style and whatnot. Complete absence of quest logs and free-reigned exploration is just a breath of fresh air. Especially in this fucking climate of general restricting and hand holding of gamers. And I just hope to God more games follow this shining template by giving players the choice to approach objectives in whatever damn way we see fit. Experiencing the sheer magic of ER heavily ruined the likes of BotW, Witcher3, Skyrim & RDR2 for me ever since. THIS is a crowning achievement for open world gaming in general. All the awards and industry rcognition are a sheer testament to it's greatness. I have so much admiration for FromSoft with this gem and I can't wait for those absolute madlads to push the boundaries of gaming with their next adventure. So here's to the groundbreaking Evolution of Souls that forever shook up open worlds.
Praise the Sun!
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TheDreadBaron

TheDreadBaron

Member
Vyne said:
Most predictable Souls fanboy counterpoint & defense line ever.
Make a compelling argument that's not centered around 2 words & try again.
Click to expand...
The dude posted why he thought it was good, why don’t you say why you think it was bad? What are these major flaws you speak of that are overlooked? Pretty funny you want to criticize the obligatory git gud response when you’re playing the tired role of elden ring thread shitter upper.
 
TheDraconian

TheDraconian

Member
TheDreadBaron said:
The dude posted why he thought it was good, why don’t you say why you think it was bad? What are these major flaws you speak of that are overlooked? Pretty funny you want to criticize the obligatory git gud response when you’re playing the tired role of elden ring thread shitter upper.
Click to expand...
Bosses? world assets? combat animations? Caves? Recycle X5 & mix. Winning formula.

Say we send gamers back to caveman-era gaming with no way to pause? Force folks online to garner bits & pieces of the incoherent storytelling? Absolutely brilliant design & nothing wrong there!

Towns? Villages? Inhabitants? Any actual world interaction? Fuck that. Take your braindead one-liner NPCs & enjoy it.

Elden Ring AI: If boss see MC -> attack with janky animations till MC dead. Else -> Nothing. Just roam round damn spot forever like a moron.

Same mediocre FromSoft tech? *Overworld Stuttering Intensifies*

ER's an Iteration. Not an evolution. Same shit Souls have been about, but HEY NOW here's a horse! an open world hub! We added jumping!
Saying that these "major additions" are groundbreaking for open-worlds is subjective, but incorrect imo.

Okay but very flawed game. Lotta what's being hailed here have already been done elsewhere & better.
 
cireza

cireza

Gold Member
Way too repetitive for me, I stopped playing at some point. Being open-world killed the game. What's the point of a huge-ass world if everything takes ages and is copy/pasted ? Interesting content is diluted to no end. Can't keep up with this shit anymore, I have a life, a work, kids. I can't spend 120 hours in a game that should have lasted 40 hours and would have been much better in the process.

Long live Sekiro.
 
gaming_again

gaming_again

Member
Vyne said:
Bosses? world assets? combat animations? Caves? Recycle X5 & mix. Winning formula.

Say we send gamers back to caveman-era gaming with no way to pause? Force folks online to garner bits & pieces of the incoherent storytelling? Absolutely brilliant design & nothing wrong there!

Towns? Villages? Inhabitants? Any actual world interaction? Fuck that. Take your braindead one-liner NPCs & enjoy it.

Elden Ring AI: If boss see MC -> attack with janky animations till MC dead. Else -> Nothing. Just roam round damn spot forever like a moron.

Same mediocre FromSoft tech? *Overworld Stuttering Intensifies*

ER's an Iteration. Not an evolution. Same shit Souls have been about, but HEY NOW here's a horse! an open world hub! We added jumping!
Saying that these "major additions" are groundbreaking for open-worlds is subjective, but incorrect imo.

Okay but very flawed game. Lotta what's being hailed here have already been done elsewhere & better.
Click to expand...
*unsheathes moonveil*
 
TheDreadBaron

TheDreadBaron

Member
Vyne said:
Bosses? world assets? combat animations? Caves? Recycle X5 & mix. Winning formula.

Say we send gamers back to caveman-era gaming with no way to pause? Force folks online to garner bits & pieces of the incoherent storytelling? Absolutely brilliant design & nothing wrong there!

Towns? Villages? Inhabitants? Any actual world interaction? Fuck that. Take your braindead one-liner NPCs & enjoy it.

Elden Ring AI: If boss see MC -> attack with janky animations till MC dead. Else -> Nothing. Just roam round damn spot forever like a moron.

Same mediocre FromSoft tech? *Overworld Stuttering Intensifies*

ER's an Iteration. Not an evolution. Same shit Souls have been about, but HEY NOW here's a horse! an open world hub! We added jumping!
Saying that these "major additions" are groundbreaking for open-worlds is subjective, but incorrect imo.

Okay but very flawed game. Lotta what's being hailed here have already been done elsewhere & better.
Click to expand...
I disagree, on all points. Good day.
 
Hobbygaming

Hobbygaming

has been asked to post in 'Grounded' mode.
I think we're finally seeing the honeymoon phase end with Elden Ring and people are now able to be critical of its flaws

It's a good game but it's nowhere near the greatest game ever made

Replaying Bloodborne after Elden Ring showed me how much Bloodborne is the much better game

dark souls kai GIF
boards hype GIF
 
TheSHEEEP

TheSHEEEP

Gold Member
It's a great game, for sure.

But it also has some major flaws:
Tons of recycled bosses are really kinda lame.
The map is huge, but about 50% of it is just empty with nothing worthwhile to discover. They could have made the map half as vast without losing anything.
Lack of pause (come on! This is game design 101) - and yes, I'm aware you can force pause through a sub-menu thing, but that's more a useful bug than a desired feature.
Very uneven distribution of different weapon types (one million swords vs 2 whips).
Very uneven utility of spells.
Lots of minor nuisances like dying resetting the time to daylight so you have to waste time on making it night if you are doing a night boss every time. It's not as bad as previous entries when it comes to wasting the player's time (eg much better bonfire/shrine placement before bosses), but there's still a lot of unnecessary time wasting going on.

That's just too many flaws for a "greatest game ever".
 
The artful mincer

The artful mincer

Member
It's amazing but for me it will be the game that finally got me tired of Souls combat.

It's got incredible build Varity but there's very little going in on the moment to moment combat. Just spam roll and spam L2. Nioh, God of War even Sekiro and Kenya ask more of you in average combat encounter( I don't even need to bring up the like's Devil may cry and Ninja Gaiden.)

It been great fun but after 500 to 700 hours across all game it starting to get old
 
DelireMan7

DelireMan7

Member
Elden Ring is a great game. I love how they kept the vagueness of the Souls in an open world. Amazing art direction and level design in legacy dungeon.
However, for me the size of the game really hurts its final quality. Many repetition, the small catacombs/cave are becoming tiring at one point. Of course this is if you explore everything.
But if you don't you will run short on smithing materials and it will be annoying too.
Also everything feel less unique when there is too many options.
Also personal but I find it to have several annoying main bosses (Radhan, Malenia, Elden Beast, Maliketh...)

Dark Souls remains at the top for me followed by Bloodborne and Sekiro. Then might come Elden Ring/Dark Souls 3 (but I would put DS3 above ER I think).
 
TheSHEEEP

TheSHEEEP

Gold Member
Dick Jones said:
Bloodborne is their best game. I dont understand the hate for Elden Ring (Great fucking game, but some negatives make it sound like Life of Black Tiger) but it's obvious from those who praise Elden Ring as the best From game that the person has not played Bloodborne.
Click to expand...
I'd say Bloodborne is better in some regards, but worse in others.
For me, I just can't get back to the kind of time wasting that is "fight through the same lame multi-minute approach to a boss every single time" because the game lacks the much better bonfire placement of Elden Ring.
That shit's not even challenging, never has been in any Souls-game. It's just wasting my time.
Doesn't matter what is better in Bloodborne, that right there prevents me from ever doing another playthrough.

Bloodborne is certainly the most unique Soulslike, though, especially in atmosphere. While Dark Souls and Elden Ring could as well be the same setting.
 
DevilMayFlyForAWhiteGuy

DevilMayFlyForAWhiteGuy

Member
After my first playthrough I didn’t really feel like playing it again. I tried with another build, but got to Caelid and just stopped caring about doing everything over again. I’ll replay every other Souls game multiple times, but ER is too bloated to put the time into that. Same thing happened with BotW and Witcher 3 to me. Great games, but after dumping 100+ hours of my life into it and feeling like I’ve seen 95% of what it has to offer, there’s little a replay can offer me.

I much prefer the smaller games where the meat isn’t spaced out by an open world to pad the game.
 
gaming_again

gaming_again

Member
The artful mincer said:
It's amazing but for me it will be the game that finally got me tired of Souls combat.

It's got incredible build Varity but there's very little going in on the moment to moment combat. Just spam roll and spam L2. Nioh, God of War even Sekiro and Kenya ask more of you in average combat encounter( I don't even need to bring up the like's Devil may cry and Ninja Gaiden.)

It been great fun but after 500 to 700 hours across all game it starting to get old
Click to expand...

Sounds as if you’re too overpowered. Lower level fighting reveals how complicated and subtle the bosses can be.
 
gaming_again

gaming_again

Member
DevilMayFlyForAWhiteGuy said:
After my first playthrough I didn’t really feel like playing it again. I tried with another build, but got to Caelid and just stopped caring about doing everything over again. I’ll replay every other Souls game multiple times, but ER is too bloated to put the time into that. Same thing happened with BotW and Witcher 3 to me. Great games, but after dumping 100+ hours of my life into it and feeling like I’ve seen 95% of what it has to offer, there’s little a replay can offer me.

I much prefer the smaller games where the meat isn’t spaced out by an open world to pad the game.
Click to expand...
I thought like this until my realisation that the game isn’t designed for 100% runs.

You can do a fresh play through in like 10 hours if you know what items you want and plan accordingly.

I think the gradual mastery of the world through game knowledge is where the joy of Elden Ring is.
 
Aldric

Aldric

Member
It does absolutely nothing interesting with the open world concept and recycles mechanics and tropes that got old in the mid 2010s. It's also a blatantly unbalanced and in many ways broken game with an ungodly number of useless loot, terrible boss AI, awful performance on PC, the same shithouse hitboxes as in 2010 etc etc.

I don't even like the game but even Death Stranding did something more creative and more coherent with its open world structure with the way it made traversal the main challenge. Of course BotW is still the gold standard with its systemic gameplay and world design.
 
nkarafo

nkarafo

Member
TheSHEEEP said:
The map is huge, but about 50% of it is just empty with nothing worthwhile to discover.
Click to expand...

I never understood this argument. If a map is 100% "usable" it would feel artificial. Empty landmasses are a part of any world, you don't have to discover something every few steps. And if a map is only as big as it's discoverable content, the game would feel less epic and your journey less of a journey and more like a dog walk.
 
Ar¢tos

Ar¢tos

Member
Vyne said:
Bosses? world assets? combat animations? Caves? Recycle X5 & mix. Winning formula.

Say we send gamers back to caveman-era gaming with no way to pause? Force folks online to garner bits & pieces of the incoherent storytelling? Absolutely brilliant design & nothing wrong there!

Towns? Villages? Inhabitants? Any actual world interaction? Fuck that. Take your braindead one-liner NPCs & enjoy it.

Elden Ring AI: If boss see MC -> attack with janky animations till MC dead. Else -> Nothing. Just roam round damn spot forever like a moron.

Same mediocre FromSoft tech? *Overworld Stuttering Intensifies*

ER's an Iteration. Not an evolution. Same shit Souls have been about, but HEY NOW here's a horse! an open world hub! We added jumping!
Saying that these "major additions" are groundbreaking for open-worlds is subjective, but incorrect imo.

Okay but very flawed game. Lotta what's being hailed here have already been done elsewhere & better.
Click to expand...
Can you pause a match of CoD? Do the other players get a message saying "please wait, player X has paused the game."
Wanting to pause an online game is a bit silly, if you are playing offline or alone, this is actually the first souls game that includes a way to do a real pause, if you are clever enough to look for it or if "Quit game" and then picking "Continue" is not good enough for you.
 
TheSHEEEP

TheSHEEEP

Gold Member
nkarafo said:
And if a map is only as big as it's discoverable content, the game would feel less epic and your journey less of a journey and more like a dog walk.
Click to expand...
Why do you need an empty traversable landmass with nothing in it to feel epic?
Doing nothing is boring - that's not why you play games. What's epic about doing nothing while going to a place where you can do something?

You don't need to actually be able to walk everywhere for a feeling of scale. 99.99% of games only allow you to go to certain spots within any place - the rest of that place is alluded to and that's more than enough to give a sense of scale.
 
TheSHEEEP

TheSHEEEP

Gold Member
Ar¢tos said:
Can you pause a match of CoD? Do the other players get a message saying "please wait, player X has paused the game."
Click to expand...
That's a multiplayer game.
Elden Ring is a single player game with opt-in multiplayer content.

There's exactly 0 technical problem in implementing it like "do not allow players to be invaded while paused, do not allow players to pause while being invaded". It's not rocket science...
It's not like it's fun for the invader, either, to invade someone who's just AFK.
 
T

Terenty

Member
It committed a mortal sin of adhering to the principles of the modern open world game design i.e. templates and copy-paste.

And for that: dismissed.
 
gaming_again

gaming_again

Member
The artful mincer said:
How? It seems like you just do the same thing but there's less room for error and the boss last's longer
Click to expand...
My view: the complexity isn’t in the button presses (a la Nioh) but the punish windows.

For example, two-hit combos branching into three-hitters with little tells, learning the timings to avoid delayed roll-catch hits, finding out which strikes you can jump over, or hyper armour through with an ash of war, where you can jump to avoid AoEs.

If you go in with an OP weapon you’ll miss most of this as you chaotically spam roll and get in enough lucky hits to defeat the boss. This was the defining feature of my first run through.

Godfrey the first Elden Lord will sometimes do a little stab with his axe face-on, a little move I can’t figure out how to avoid. Champion Gundyr did something similar in DS3 but you could roll out of it. Working this out is where the pleasure is.

I prefer complexity in reading animations and recognising patterns to stance-changing, face button combos and build min/maxing. It feels more… emergent and less perscriptive?
 
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TintoConCasera

TintoConCasera

I bought a sex doll, but I keep it inflated 100% of the time and use it like a regular wife
It's an amazing game, one which I enjoyed a lot.

It has some flaws: recycled assets, such as some locations (ruins) and specially bosses. Both camera and feedback when melee striking could also be improved.

That said, imo the "recycled" assets reaction is kinda overblown. There are tons of caves and ruins yeah, but all of them have a distinct tone to them, like having different enemies or different hazards.
It also have tons of good qualities, like an amazing art desing, cool world building and characters, and the action and exploration that has made modern FROM games so fun to play.
Also, having the balls to hide a ton of content and letting the player find it on his own instead of handholding like most games do. Man I wish more games did that.

It might not be "the greatest game ever made", but imo it's up there for sure.
 
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