Saturday Morning Gaming: Elden Ring and Getting Gud
Having a week off, I went over to a buddy’s and we played Elden Ring every day over vacation.
When it started, we were not very good at it. I mean, the game gives you a *HARD* pass/fail exam in the first minute. It drops you off and the first creature you encounter is a boss monster. If you die, you get a cutscene and wake up in a cave that tells you “down there is the tutorial level” where you can jump down, learn how to use your sword, how to block, how to sneak, how to roll, and then it kicks you outside into the regular world where the first person you meet calls you “Maidenless”.
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Dang, game. You did not have to go there.
Anyway, if you attack him, he will quickly kill you. Best to not attack him. Anyway, after you learn to not attack the guy who insults you immediately upon meeting you, you start over and do the tutorial again. And this time you look around first. See this horsey guy? He’ll kill you too. So if you want to go to the church you see, you have to go up and around the long way.
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And the game is *FULL* of stuff like that. “Here, look at this thing that you can’t fight yet.”
Here’s a troll that is about 150 yards away from your starting position:
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“He doesn’t look that big”, you might be tempted to say. That’s because you’re looking at him from quite a distance.
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Don’t fight him until you have a horse. I mean, get the horse and then go up a bunch of levels and then fight him. But don’t even think about it until you get the horse.
Well, when my buddy and I started playing the game, after we explored getting killed by the big guys, we started exploring and seeing if there were people that might not kill us immediately.
We found a few.
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Going down the path a ways, we stumbled across a set of ruins that were absolutely crawling with these guys.
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And they *SLAUGHTERED* us. They put us through a dang meat grinder. We saw the save point in the upper left corner and went the long way around to get there and… hey. Some Melina lady showed up and said that, hey, she could play the role of “maiden” for us. Hey! Sounds good! Then we’ll no longer be maidenless! Wait. Maybe that’s what the guy meant. He wasn’t just randomly insulting us. Okay. That makes sense. Now we can go up levels! Back to the ruins and… We handed the controller back and forth and kept saying “try this, now try this, I’m going to go up and… dang, the horn guy saw me and tooted his horn. Let’s do it again. Dang. I aggroed 3 three of them? And two dogs? There are dogs in here?” and we kept dying and trying to get our runes back and dying again.
“This game sucks”, we kept saying. We finally cleared out the camp and said “we should go back and talk to the guy who called us maidenless” and he told us that we had to go up to the castle. Okay, so we have to go up to the castle.
We got to Stormhill and the weather changed from “a pleasant late summer day” to “windy, windy, windy… like, if you have wind anxiety, this will make you grab a lap blanket” kinda windy.
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So we pretty much started our way to the castle where we had to go through a tunnel that had a bunch of soldiers in it and, get this, a troll joined in. So we decided we needed to go up a few more levels and then we got a horse and then we tried to kill the troll on the way to the beach to figure out how to kill trolls and we went up a few more levels and got comfortable with that and went through the tunnel again and regularly got slaughtered but we kept trying and handing the controller back and forth and explaining how this game sucks and we cleared the tunnel out and got to the next checkpoint! And then we got slaughtered by the next group of soldiers that had a ballista.
So then we got through *THAT*.
And then we met Margit.
Which brings me to my first kinda complaint about the game. The game says “you should go here!” and, really, you shouldn’t. We spent about 5-6 hours, all told, fighting Margit and dying and fighting and dying and looking up youtube videos and figuring out that we needed the Spectral Jellyfish and reading that he was weak to poison when, really, we should have just said “oh, we’re going to go here and there and this other place and we’ll come back to fight Margit when we’re level 35 or so instead of level 20.”
But we didn’t know any better and we spent 5-6 hours fighting Margit. We *FINALLY* beat him through use of poison and then running away and watching his last 10% of HP just dwindle, dwindle, dwindle while we cowered on the other side of the map running away quickly the second we saw him look at us.
We started exploring more and asking “wait, where are we supposed to go next?” and we finally broke and opened a walkthrough and found out that we skipped over about 20ish side quests. So then we started doing side quests and going up levels and more side quests and more levels and we finally reached the point in the walkthrough where it said “okay, *NOW* go for Margit.”
And we were half proud that we beat Margit. Half irritated as heck.
And from then on, we just did the walkthrough. Okay, now go here. Now go here. Now go here. We would hand the controller back and forth for a particularly troublesome dragon or mounted knight but we found ourselves on an upward climb that was reasonable now instead of “this game sucks”. This culminated in a fight against Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon in a boss fight that I might want to call the best boss fight I’ve ever fought. Holy cow, it was amazing. The surreal academy setting surrounded by smiling legless juvenile scholars who sang praises of Rennala that turned into a fight on water where she would throw the Full Moon at you and the water rippled as if it were the tide.
Wow. This game is friggin’ amazing, we told each other.
And then vacation was over and we looked at the percentages and it said that we had completed 16% of the game.
So I came home and dusted off my own copy to play on my own PS5 and I started from level 1 and… huh. I survived for a few moments with that early boss fight. Still killed me, but I knew how to dodge now. I went out into the world and went back to the ruins and I had gone from being slaughtered every two minutes to being a freakin’ ninja. I was a silent assassin swooping in and taking out the entire camp.
I went around to do side quests and I was completing them and while I encountered the occasional boss fight that was troublesome, “troublesome” now meant “three or four attempts” rather than “more than 50”.
And, yesterday, I called in my bud to assist in multiplayer and we killed Margit on the 3rd attempt.
I asked for his and my stats and here they are (he’s the good one):
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And I’m wandering around on the map with the help of the walkthrough and am accomplishing in a dozen hours what it took me and my friend three or four days to do.
Which brings me to my main complaint about Elden Ring:
You need a walkthrough. Everybody seems to recommend this one. The walkthrough turns the game from a “what the heck?” situation to a “okay, this is doable” situation.
I learned that the game tells you where the ending of the next chapter is. But it took me a hard lesson to learn that I needed to go through the beginning and the middle of the chapter before I should even *THINK* about the end of the chapter.
And so now I’m wandering around the map at the direction of the walkthrough.
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I suppose my main complaint is that I prefer games where a walkthrough is helpful on the second playthrough rather than necessary on the first one.
But my experience with the game where I didn’t use a walkthrough resulted in me finding that, somehow, I got… well, I didn’t “get gud”. But I got better.
And that was an exceptionally *FUN* realization.
Elden Ring is an amazing game… if you have a walkthrough. If you don’t, the frustration level probably isn’t worth it if you’re an old guy like me. But if you’re willing to endure the humiliation of using the walkthrough as a crutch?
Oh my gosh. Get it. It even had a price drop.
So… what are you playing?
As an fellow old guy, it does look amazing, but I just don’t have the time to sink into something like that. And I’m usually playing at the end of a day where I’m probably mentally tapped out and looking to unwind and I know this isn’t the kind of game for that. Maybe when I’m retired-retired and don’t have kids in the house and an overstuffed schedule.Report
Replaying God of War (2018) as prep for Ragnarok.
Holy cow! Compared to Elden Ring, this game is on rails! And there’s so much exposition! They come out and just tell you stuff!Report
Is it “Elden Ring has ruined the experience” or more “thank the gods they’re actually TELLING ME what I need to do!”Report
It’s more that I’m noticing how very little Elden Ring holds your hand and how very much God of War does.
You want to look at something? Tough noogies, the guy is giving a speech and you’re going to listen to it.
The map in Elden Ring doesn’t tell you a whole lot. Mostly where you’ve been. The map in God of War? It will tell you how many side quests you’ve left unfinished, how many collection quests remain, and how many of the little things you’re supposed to be collecting you’ve missed. You know whether or not you’ve 100%ed an area.
There is none of this “wait, there was a mine under the bridge behind the bushes? And it had a talisman that would help protect me against flame? AND THE GAME WOULD ONLY LET ME KNOW IF I DID STUFF LIKE GO BEHIND THE BUSHES UNDER THE BRIDGE?!?!?Report
Lemme give a gameplay example:
In Elden Ring, you will drop off a ledge to land on the ground below and if the drop is too high, you will die. There are areas devoted to you doing some light platforming and, if you miss your jump, you get to start over!
In God of War, they clearly mark where you are supposed to be dropping down. No, you don’t get to drop down somewhere else. You get to drop down HERE or else you get to keep walkin’.
Some of the puzzles are designed around how to get to the other side of a room when, if you could drop down at will, you’d have solved the puzzle in seconds!
Not bad, just different.Report
Been playing Red Dead Redemption 2. God I hate games that are ported over from console to PC. Change the damn saves so where I am in the world is where I reappear when I reload a save not “somewhere nearby”. Christ.
Anyway, not buying new games until I’ve gotten my new pc and a shinny new monitor. Then I’m playing the updated Witcher 3 game. Then maybe I’ll try this game.Report
That sounds like maybe an anti-save-scumming measure, but I haven’t played the game. Would the ability to save anywhere and load in the exact same place provide any meaningful gameplay advantage?Report
I looked up that definition and yes it could be. I typically save before entering a fight/boss fight, or an extended video sequence. So let’s say I’m about to enter a cave to kill a bad guy. I save outside the cave. If I get killed and reload the game, I don’t spawn outside the cave, I spawn nearby and have to travel AGAIN to the cave. It’s a pain the ass. Not only that, the save game doesn’t save the world info either. So, if I’m trying to shoot 3 guy’s hat’s off in RDR2 when I reload after failing the challenge, there are often no longer three guys with hats in the area I loaded into and have perversely saved. That’s god damn annoying.Report
I kinda sorta agree you need a walkthrough (I certainly used one on my first playthrough when I got stuck or when I wondered “Is this area worth fighting through?”) but I probably should have stressed more in my advice for a newbie that if you are having a hard time with something, just go somewhere and do something else to either level up and get better gear, or just give yourself a break from banging your head against the wall. That’s where the series “get gud” reputation works against players. In this game it’s often better to just get out and do something else. [Your mileage may vary in the late game when the bullshit is fast and furious and there are many fewer options to explore.]Report
I can’t tell the difference between “this is impossible for a level X guy to do… I need to be level X+Y” and “I just need to figure out the timing.”Report
I’ve been gone all week, but I plan on picking it up again today. I’m rather enjoying just wandering around trying to figure out where the sites of grace are trying to tell me where to go. This game is really counter-intuitive in that you don’t have to fight everything! Really, that troll, thoese soldiers, those annoying nobles…they’re all going to respawn anyway so kill them for the XP but if you’ve got somewhere to go, just run around them!
I started as a Wretch (because why wouldn’t you) and I enjoyed going from “literally everything can kill me” to “I can fight 2-3 soldiers at the same time; I can one-shot a wolf; I can kill a troll with A LOT of effort.” And it was useful to have youngest son look over my shoulder and point out that I was heavy-rolling (taking off my cool imp helmet fixed that).
This isn’t a game I would normally gravitate toward (oldest boy shared his Steam liberry with me so I’m playing his copy), but it has opened my eyes to the possibilities in controller-based games, specifically the Batman and God of War games.Report
Does “Elden” mean anything, or is it just a one-letter change to avoid saying “Elven Ring” and being sued by the Tolkien estate?Report
I think that there are enough differences between Tolkien’s ring and the “Elden” one.
For one thing, the Elden Ring was shattered into seven different pieces that ended up in the hands of seven very powerful leaders…
oh crapReport
More seriously, George RR Martin was involved with the worldbuilding of Elden Ring.
The important paragraph:
Have you ever seen the Elden Ring opening cinematic? Here you go… (for what it’s worth, I see a light touch of George RR Martin in there):
Now the fact that Martin is in there could lead someone to assume that “yeah, this plagiarizes the ever living crap out of Tolkien” without knowing a single thing more.
I won’t say anything about that.Report
Japanese games are notorious for containing words that look like they were generated by GPT-2 trained on an English dictionary.Report
In their titles, I mean.
Elden actually is an archaic English verb meaning to grow old, but it doesn’t work syntactically here.Report
My current game is also dependent on a walkthrough. I have been playing Super Robot Wars 30. I would not put this down as a particularly amazing game if you are not interested in the subject matter. It basically combines various giant robots from assorted anime series (and a few originals for the game) into a shared universe. Gundams fight alongside Mazinger and Rune Gods and Ultraman against aliens, kaiju, and other robots. It’s basically fan service (of the non-adult variety. It’s fun, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
One thing it does have is secrets. There are certain characters/mechs/upgrades that can only be acquired if you meet certain requirements. Often these requirements are having a certain character shoot down a certain named opponent (which usually makes sense in the context of the anime they come from). The game does not actually give you any clues to when this is required though, and if you miss it, you miss it. Playing requires checking the walkthrough before every mission to make sure there is not something that needs to be done to avoid missing something.
I also got through most of what there is to do in Vampire Survivors. There are a few things to unlock and some scattered challenges, but I am not sure if I will go after those things are not. Definitely a nice, fun, short game to play.Report
Playing requires checking the walkthrough before every mission to make sure there is not something that needs to be done to avoid missing something.
This always bugs me. I don’t mind missing content if I’m stupid or lazy, but I mind “if you miss it, you have to start over from the beginning” challenges.
There was a surprisingly good game that came out in 2010 called Enslaved: Odyssey to the West that did the thing where you were supposed to collect macguffins and the game would kill the player if they backtracked too much.
WHICH WAS NUTSReport
Just beat God of War (2018). I didn’t 100% it like last time (well, I didn’t kill every raven, but got all of the Valkyries last time).
I have thoughts.
But they can wait until Friday night. (By which point I will have played some Ragnarok which I haven’t yet.)Report
I’m still having a lot of fun with Elden Ring. I’m trying to decide whether to take on the Fire Giant or go underneath Leyndell first.Report