Elden Ring has the same difficulty progression of games like Hades – it initially has a high skill requirement, but everything gets easier the longer you play it, so challenges eventually reach your skill level.
It’s way more accessible than it seems! It’s just that this model means everybody beats bosses when they’re “difficult but achievable” , hence the reputation, but the game is working with you personally to find the right balance.
I wont tell if you don’t. I will prolly install this if and when I get the game but It never goes on sale for PC.
Just don’t play on line with it or you will get banned. Probably. Almost all mods lead to a banning.
Yeah from everything I’ve read if you start up a save that is “unearned” in any way you lose online forever.
What I will probably do is settle in after Christmas and get good. Or git gud as the kids say.
Yeah, the fact that it doesn’t surface neither its structure nor story makes you engage with it differently than if every dungeon was a checkmark.
It also really rewards engaging with its systems - it’s not my jam, but you can use the summons system to do absurd challenge runs like beating the game without ever attacking, so it’s not like have to have godlike reflexes to see the end.
The game does know if you use someone else’s save file. But mods as a rule will get you banned. There are a few but they deal in duplicate items, and I have no idea why they are okay to use.
Currently the main mod in use is one that allows for co-op play in a much better way than the game does and since you have to be offline to use it you can’t be invaded. That mod has a lot of people playing offline.
The exploration in this game is what kept me hooked. You regularly come across new areas or scenes that just make you go ‘wtf?’ And you know there is something even weirder beyond that pulling you forward. It consistently pulled that off all the way through.
I actually didn’t “get” Dark Souls until my third attempt. Each of the previous two had stalled out about 5 hours in.
That third time, though, I understood more about what the game was expecting of me, and learned to take it slower than I was used to, and play to my character’s strengths instead of what I was used to.
Now these are my favorite games of all, but it definitely took a while. Maybe something about being in the right headspace will help? There’s a bunch of great thoughts in this thread around release about the right headspace to be in.
Hope that helps! You can do it, skeleton!
Something else. If you use guides or watch YouTube experts or go to the Steam forum you will see guys telling you what to do, how to farm runes and not to get OP. Well bull***t, do whatever you want but don’t worry about getting items right away, or farming to level up. Just look around the world and do things.
And don’t worry about getting OP, because about 2/3 of the way thru the game gets tougher and if you need to be higher level to handle it, so be it.
My first DS game was Dark Souls 1, and it took me forever to finish that game. I used to text a guy my daughter knew who was playing the game to ask him how he got by certain bosses and he would volunteer to help me, but I wanted to do it on my own. And I finally did, but there were bosses that took me days to beat. But the satisfaction of doing that, that is what made the game special to me. Now ER gives you some built in help with the Spirit Ashes, so don’t forget to level them up.
For me I like how there is a sense of progress.
I am getting better at this game, starting to understand things, starting to appreciate different weapons.
I am playing a Vagabond, using the Polearm heavily.
And I beat the mounted guy who gives you the Vow of Determination Ashes and a shiny new lance.
It’s not much better than the old Pole weapon, but hold down r2 on your horse and you charge like a Knight.
Your weapon hits 2 or 3 times and then flips the enmy up in the air.
It’s hilarious, and I found that by accident.
And that doesn’t get old.
The bunch of guys near the the grace where you unlock Torrent, well at the start of my game they were challenging, and now I routinely smash them, and it feels good.
And last night I had a duel with the Night Cav in Limgrave, and dammit I was winning, until dawn came and he slipped away.
Internet recommends you fight him on foot. Thoughts?
Level 24 or so, no special weapons, have wolves and jelly fish but I don’t think you can use them here.
Every fight in ER is a process of learning very specific timings. It’s a game that requires immense patience, and you often spend more time avoiding than attacking. Just have to look for his windups, and get position on them, a lot of enemies don’t do well if you close on them and circle/roll at the right time. If you’re primarily melee, it’s really the only option. You can try and catch him with drive by’s, but it takes a long time.
The one thing that really is pretty amazing about ER, is that they re-use mob mechanics so rarely, just about every mob has it’s own set of moves and timing. Once you crack a particular group of mobs timing, most of the game is pretty easy (other than some of the super cheese tactics fights).
I tried to play with no guides, etc. but there are some things you have to look up due to lack of documentation. For example, the various status icons at the top left of the screen: nowhere does the game tell you what those are. I expected a tool tips like description but nowhere in the game are these described. I’ve always bounced off of Souls games but the open world drew me in and has kept me in so far. If you’re new to the game and Souls games, I would say embrace exploring (go south first!) and being extremely fragile and dying as you learn (the game lore even has a reason that you and most of the ones you kill don’t stay killed, though it frustrates me that every time I rest at a point of grace every area respawns, with everyone in the exact same location.) Don’t worry about “winning” or anything but exploring as you learn.
One thing you might want to look up, even right at the beginning, however is the rolling technique and timing to avoid being hit.
I fight everything on foot as I tend to push the controller button forward causing a dismount. But a lot of people fight things mounted.
Yes! This is sorely lacking in these games. And it’s crazy since there are so many status effects.
It has been that way in every game, and yea, they should somewhere show you what they mean.
And in many cases it is better to roll into an enemy than away from them. Kinda counter-intuitive.
I like these games, but it’s funny that the “get good” creed also contains the unspoken “and also have perfect mechanical knowledge from reading volumes of third party information online”
I disagree with this take. I’ve gained plenty of stuff from third party information online. But mechanical knowledge of the fight and dodge mechanics isn’t really one of them. Most of that knowledge comes the hard way: from fighting bosses. Like in Dark Souls 3, the very first boss. Iodex Gundam or something. It really forced me to learn dodge timing in a way I couldn’t really pick up from reading info online.
In the original Dark Souls, fighting Knight Artorias, I got my ass kicked sooooooo many times, but that was the best time I had with that game, because each defeat programmed my brain on the subtle nuances of that boss fight. Sometimes he jumps this way. Sometimes he swings his sword that way. It all seeps in, as your brain adapts and begins to recognize the patterns at an unconscious level. The boss fights in these games, to me, have been the main teachers of game mechanics, not third party sites.
He may have been referring to things like the status icons having no explanation rather than combat.
Yeah, I think you can be perfectly fine at this game without reading anything online, and the game teaches you about its most important mechanics.
But it does leave a lot unexplained. You can post your character online and somebody might say “why did you go over the soft cap for that stat”, and a valid answer is that game never teaches you about stuff like that.
Just remap this.
Default left joystick push down is a dismount, which got me killed so many times…
So I made it direcrion pad up button.