Saturday Morning Gaming: On Having Beaten Elden Ring
Having beaten Elden Ring, I have a handful of thoughts on it. It’s an exceptionally good game. Like, it’s uncommonly good. It might be the best game I’ve played in years.
Having beaten what might be the best game I’ve played in years, I have thoughts about it. Like… how did it pull that off?
Well, the first thing that it does is this… here’s the first map that the game gives you when you walk out into the world and get your first piece of the map:
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Wowsers, you may think. “Better start exploring!”
By the time you beat the game, your map will look more like this:
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You may notice that it took *TWO* screenshots to show you the entire map.
One of the tricks the game pulls on you is the slowly dawning horror that the map is *HUGE*. Like, you’ll ask “how big is this freaking map?” when you pick up your fifth or sixth map fragment.
The second trick the game pulls on you is the whole “open world” thing. They don’t put artificial obstacles in front of you. Now, they put *REAL* obstacles in front of you… bosses you have to fight, monsters that will swarm you, and so on… but if you know the tricks of the various monsters, you can wander up to the mandatory bosses from the starting area. Sure, you’re not going to have levelled your weapon or your shield or yourself for that matter… but there are folks out there who have beaten the game using only their fists (or with only fist weapons, anyway). There is a guy out there who beat the game WITHOUT GETTING HIT A SINGLE TIME.
There’s a guy out there who figured out how to one-shot each boss (or each boss phase).
Yes. I know. It’s nuts.
So, in theory, the entire game is open to you the second you walk out the door. Which means that the non-crazy player is likely to wander into a place where s/he is not yet ready to go… and then, after the player is ready to go there, it feels like the player has “gotten gud”.
For me, in my playthrough, I completely forgot about The Weeping Peninsula until well after I had defeated the Academy. When I realized my mistake and rode through, I was like a hot knife and the enemies were like butter. Room temperature butter. Had I tried to go down there when I was still somewhere around level 20ish, I would have found the area frustratingly difficult. If I went down there in the 30s, I would have found it appropriately difficult. I went down there in my 70s and it was pretty much effortless.
When it comes to combat, there are pretty much three different levels of it:
Killing stuff with three (or fewer) swipes of your sword. The good old fashioned buttonmash will get you to the other side of the monster.
Killing stuff with more than six swipes of your sword. The swipe-swipe-swipe-dodge-swipe-swipe-swipe won’t do the job… so you actually have to think about it.
No way, no how, not without being one of those crazy people or watching youtube “how to cheese” vids.
And you can see the various monsters moving from “no way, no how” to “maybe I could do this” to “I did it!” is *EXCEPTIONALLY* rewarding. You experience progressing. You feel yourself “getting gud”.
And the game does it without feeling particularly cheesy. If you’re getting slaughtered, it’s because you’re not ready for that level just yet. When games like God of War do that sort of thing to you, it feels like the game is cheating because the game is pretty much on rails. When Elden Ring did it? Hey. You shouldn’t be in Caelid just yet.
There are a *LOT* of problems with the game but it feels like half of them are solved by thinking about the game differently. When you switch from thinking about the game like that to thinking about it like this, the game transitions from being frustratingly frustrating to being frustratingly fun. The game teaches you how to play it. And when you succeed, it feels like you’ve learned something.
The game won Steam’s “Game of the Year” for 2022. And I couldn’t possibly agree more.
If you haven’t played it and you have any facility for playing ARPGs at all, you should check it out. It’s absolutely amazing.
The only downside is that, after playing it, other games are less fun. (I completely gave up on Gotham Knights, for example. It’s just not… it’s just not fun.)
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is a screenshot of the title. All screenshots taken by the author.)
Can you expand on “There are a *LOT* of problems with the game…?” I remember watching over both boys’ shoulders as they played and thinking, “This doesn’t look fun at all. The game is just…really hard. Why would that be fun?” But I’ve found that the game is kind of self-balancing in the ways you describe above–if an area is too hard, come back later because you aren’t ready for it. If the game DOES have a problem, I’d say it’s almost impossible to fully enjoy without the help of at least a buddy giving you tips, if not a full-fledged walkthrough. The game gives you almost nothing at the start and takes away as you progress!
But you’re right about how great it feels to finally overcome that big obstacle. That feeling of “I did it!” is just about unmatched.Report
Quest design. The whole thing where you have to talk to a person, reset the area, then talk to him again? That’s *NUTS*.
The lack of a quest log strikes me as a poor decision. I understand what they’re trying to go for, I guess, but it results in pretty much requiring a walkthrough in order to be successful.
Those are the two big ones.Report
Yeah, a quest log would be nice, but Elden Ring is aggressively anti-hand-holding.
Heck, I don’t even associate the idea of “quests” with this game. I don’t have “quests.” This game is a sitcom: I’ve gotten myself into yet another zany situation I have to somehow extract myself from! Or maybe the game is a complex obstacle course, in which I’m now required to overcome the next obstacle.
But also also…the lack of linear gameplay, a quest log, and any real help at all makes the game super wide open and provides endless ways to “win” the game.Report
Oh, one other thing that kinda bugs me:
Armor. I started off with decent enough armor. It wasn’t for hours until I found a better set. And then I had to beat Radahn to get a better set which was hours and hours after that.
A similar thing happens with Ashes. You start out with the wolves, right? You won’t find a better summon until you’re halfway through the game!
The game has so very many toys but there’s no real use for 80% of them.
(But that’s probably a playstyle thing.)Report
For me that’s a feature. I don’t like looter shooter games where you are constantly discarding stuff for new stuff that’s only marginally better.
Though I agree that it’s sometimes frustrating to grind through a generic dungeon to find that the big treasure is something your build can’t use.Report
Heh. I started out as a Wretch. I made the mistake of buying armor before realizing that all those soldiers of Godrick in the woods and just over the hill in Gatefront just couldn’t WAIT to drop their armor for me. But to your point, I bought a suit of chain and I wore it right up until recently when I picked up a full suit of tree guardian armor and I’m wearing that now simply because it looks cool (it’s a little worse against physical, a little better on resistances). I used my starting club until a soldier dropped a straight sword and a really sweet brass shield. And the wolves are absolutely BOSS.
I kind of enjoy the scarcity. “This is all you’re gonna get. Make it work.”Report
I think the second part of the sentence is important: “There are a *LOT* of problems with the game but it feels like half of them are solved by thinking about the game differently.”
So much depends on the player’s expectations. If you have played Dark Souls games before, so much of Elden Ring seems familiar, or even a little less extreme than you are used to: I thought Miyzaki had gone soft when I heard Elden Ring had a map! As for NPCs/quests, I really liked the way Souls games handled them where it’s pretty unclear what you are supposed to do, and when you talk to an NPC it might be one time only, or you might run into them again, and it’s hard to tell if it’s due to something that you did or by design or at random. Kind of like life in that small way. But if you are used to most other modern games, Elden Ring seems very stingy with information.
Elden Ring tries to have it both ways a bit, where many of the NPCs are similar to those in previous games, but then they throw in others, particularly Ranni, where it does seem like more of a “quest” and that kind of mucks up the feeling of fatalism.
My biggest complaint is that there are non-optional bosses especially in the late game that hit awfully hard. It would be nice to have those fights exactly as difficult as they are, only with the damage dialed down 20% or so. Also needs more cute hats.Report
Oh, and I’m playing Dark Souls and Marvel Snap. Damn that game is addictive.Report
Congrats on finishing it. I’m still dragging my heels. I’ve made it through Farum Azula, and I just have to face the boss (and then string of bosses) to finish. But I decided I better make it to the Haligtree first. What helped me with the game is accepting that death is going to happen. It’s kind of an “eff around and find out” kind of game, where if you’re not careful, even if you’re powerful, you’ll get killed. I think the game’s biggest weakness is that you almost need a guide to figure some important stuff out. But I’m still having lots of fun with it.
It’s true that most of the good fashion comes later in the game; I’m looking forward to NG+ where I can go through most places like a boss and play with my build a bit. And forgive my ackchually, but Banished Knight Engvall and Lhutel are both available in the first areas (and realistically attainable) and they’re both better than the dogs. But you’re also right: it does feel like so much cool stuff is unusable for your build or not as good as the optimum. I don’t know that I want to play without my Blasphemous Blade.Report
Lemme check to see if I got Lhutel. I know I got Engvall and he was okay but I really liked how the wolves can stunlock and I didn’t see Engvall as better than that.
To get the screenshots above, I put Elden Ring back in my PS5 and fiddled about for a little bit and, next thing you know, I found myself fighting Margit and Godrick the Grafted in quick succession and thinking “this took me days the last time I tried this”.Report
Yeah, I’ll fly through NG+ if I ever get around to it. For me, Engvall (or Oleg is even a bit better) was more aggressive, did more damage to enemies, and was tankier–he can last if you upgrade him a bit. Of course, I mostly use mimic tear now or Oleg.Report
I never got Lhutel! So now I’m going to go get Lhutel.
The Mimic Tear is *AMAZING*. There are a handful of monsters that are weak to this or that weapon that I suck with and I’ve found that I can equip the weapon, summon the Mimic, then swap weapons to the one that I’m good at and the Mimic will carry on as if he were a skilled weapon user.
Seriously, there’s at least one boss that I would have been unable to beat without this little trick.Report