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”.

ELDEN RING™_20221109213646

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.

ELDEN RING™_20221109213700

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:

ELDEN RING™_20221109214637

“He doesn’t look that big”, you might be tempted to say. That’s because you’re looking at him from quite a distance.

ELDEN RING™_20221109214648

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.

ELDEN RING™_20221109214908

ELDEN RING™_20221109215031

Going down the path a ways, we stumbled across a set of ruins that were absolutely crawling with these guys.

ELDEN RING™_20221109215153

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.

ELDEN RING™_20221109214521

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):

ELDEN RING™_20221107172548

ELDEN RING™_20221109214422

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.

ELDEN RING™_20221109214451

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?