I finally got to try Elden Ring

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

I'll take weakass counterarguments for 800, Alex.

Sorry, I should have taken pretentious 2000 word essay instead, my bad

I've seen your posts over the years and say with absolute confidence, no. You shouldn't have. And you didn't. So that's good.

Done being snippy or do we need to really drag this out? It was a bad response that you made to DS44 and you know it. Saying not all games need dlc and/or Games As Service features doesn't invalidate the opinion that some games could do with them.

Own your error and move on please.

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I'd heard that arcane didn't scale well so that is good news indeed. I'm surprised a mere update also has additions like extra quests, but maybe they just didn't make it to the party on time. I doubt it's 'new content' so to speak.

I think some of the realization was that in a game of this size and scale, trying to remember the stages of the npc questline, where they were, or where they might go, was daunting. Or hell the quest might have ended and you didnt even realize, and likely multiple quests were going on simultaneously.

One of the cool things about Souls games was the fact that the game didnt really guide you much. That becomes less "cool" with this ambitious scale. I think some of this Qol will be pretty well recieved, without impacting the spirit of the game.

I love the mystery of it. All the surprises. The fact that a place can be safe during the day but deadly at night. All a learning process. Elden Ring is one of those games that might look like retreading old ground but the more you play the more you can't miss just how much experience and expertise went into making its moving parts function as a machine that can be used without a college degree in engineering.

When we look at that ubisoft UI mockup that made the rounds, we can see complexity unexplained, merely shoved in our faces. Look at all this stuff going on! I think a cluttered UI is the game design version of telling vs showing. It's not that Elden Ring is any less complex than a Western made Open Worlder, it's that the devs trusted players to absorb that complexity at their own pace. Offer us the tools, don't tell us when to use them.

This shouldn't be revolutionary because it's nothing new. It's just something that has been forgotten by devs who worry too much about "players putting the controller down at the merest sign of frustration" to paraphrase Blizzard's testing philosophy. We didn't have complex overlays before due to tech limitations, and we didn't have games balanced around the assumptions that we could trade online or watch guides to minmax the game.

In a way, an overreliance on tech and modern practices like overly insistent UIs is a form of budget poisoning. Oh, players seem lost? Here's a minimap. Don't know what to do next? Nearby attraction marker. Got lost on a quest thread? Tracker. And so on. And each of these lazy elements takes away a little more of the gamer's incentive to engage with the game and simply follow orders in the guise of aggressive helpfulness.

It took Elden Ring to remind me that games were not lesser for the lack of these features. Not inherently. It's just that those that needed them had deeper problems and helpful features were and are just a spoonful of sugar without the medicine.

Not saying ER can't do with some clarity regarding shit like ailments/buffs and god damn does it need item comparison when shopping BUT I will take its slightly too minimalist approach to UI that teaches by engagement and critical reasoning over a far too heavy-handed approach that teaches nothing but how to follow instructions any day.

FH:

The game does generally cover ailments in all of the three following ways:

1) They rotate in loading transition screens, and the descriptions are pretty in depth.

2) There are tooltip descriptors in items you craft of how they work.

3) They put up a meter telling you when it’s going to activate.

A unique thing about ER ailments is that they don’t actually activate until you’ve taken successive hits that max out an ailment bar or run your stamina out. You don’t take damage from poison or rot until they are full bars. Bleed applies and gets worse the more you get hit by it. Stuns happen when stamina drops and you auto fail a Poise check.

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rekikyo wrote:

FH:

The game does generally cover ailments in all of the three following ways:

1) They rotate in loading transition screens, and the descriptions are pretty in depth.

2) There are tooltip descriptors in items you craft of how they work.

3) They put up a meter telling you when it’s going to activate.

A unique thing about ER ailments is that they don’t actually activate until you’ve taken successive hits that max out an ailment bar or run your stamina out. You don’t take damage from poison or rot until they are full bars. Bleed applies and gets worse the more you get hit by it. Stuns happen when stamina drops and you auto fail a Poise check.

Having an ailment bar is a thing at least since Dark Souls 2 that i played last time 5 years ago. So that is not really unique to ER but more or less normal way in Soulsgames how ailments work.

Eh I get the build-up thing, I meant more the usage of icons for both buffs and debuffs under life bars. Not like I can mouse-over those...

Anyone know where you can find people to play with other than eldenringforum.com ? No one uses it anymore

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NarcNark wrote:

Anyone know where you can find people to play with other than eldenringforum.com ? No one uses it anymore

The best way would be to create a thread in the steam forums of Elden Ring.
I often see there (generally speaking for all sorts of games) posts where people ask for multiplayer gameplay and they usually get lots of replies if the game's community is not dead.