So welcome to the early access preview of Elden
Ring. This area is Limgrave or the north part of it anyway. This part has been sectioned
off for the network test, but it's still absolutely massive. And I'm going to show you
my favorite route through this place. But yours will be different. "Oh yes. Tarnished are we?
Come to the Lands Between for the Elden Ring. Of course you have" in the interest of time.
I'm going to keep exploring but I'll continue the NPC dialogueue in the background.
"But I'm afraid you're plumb out of luck. You're maidenless. A bit player fully
divorced from the strength of runes. Feel free to go off and die in a ditch somewhere."
So that guy's rude as hell, but he ain't wrong. the game has just started, but you should probably
be prepared to be put straight in the dirt. Yeah. So if you think you can beat this guy first
time, then you're a better player than I am. Fromsoftware, I'm passing up this opportunity
to remind you what kind of game you're playing. Luckily, there's a ruined church nearby,
and you're going to see why it's ruined in a minute. because he can't get
in there, but he can destroy it. Parts of the environment are destructible
now, and it has a gameplay purpose as well, because you can actually get up there
after he destroys it. Pretty cool. "You're a tarnished. I can see it. And I can also
see that you are not after my throat. Then why not purchase a little something. I am Kale purveyor of
fine goods. You know, if you can spare the runes, you should buy yourself a crafting kit. A crafting
kit allows you to make basic items on your own. Essential, really. If you intend to
survive out here for any duration. Goodbye. Nice to do business." So buying the
crafting kit from Kale is highly recommended. I'm making some bone knives now from animal
bones that I found out in the world, and that's how you craft most of the items that will
be familiar to you from Dark Souls, like firebombs or Prism Stones. You make these things from the
materials that you farm out in the world now. I also just equipped a spirit summon. That's
another thing I bought from Kale. Spirit summons are items they use FP to cast, and they
summon spirit helpers. You'll see them soon. So right there, I performed a guard counter. You
do this by blocking an attack, then following up with R2. It does a lot of damage. It does
a ton of posture damage and allows you to get a critical attack often. Highly
recommend getting the hang of that. Okay, another thing I'm getting the
hang of is the range of carian Piercer. One of the spells that the Sorcerer Knight starts
with. Sorcery's strong, It's balanced. I like it. You see that statue on the right? That's a statue
of Marika. It's essentially another type of checkpoint. You'll see them in difficult areas.
If I was to die in this area coming up here, then I'll spawn back there instantly.
One thing that'll help keep you alive is stealth. You click in the L3 button and you can
sneak around. Super important for areas like this, because a lot of enemies here will alert nearby
enemies and it can get out of hand pretty quickly. I'm making my way to this. This is a map fragment. Very important. The map is just a blur without
it, so don't go past without getting this. So, there's a reason why you're probably going
to want to stealth through this camp. That. That horn. Most enemies here carry us,
and it alerts the entire camp to your presence. It's for situations like this, I
think, that spirit summons were designed. These wolves act as a distraction, allowing
me to cleave through enemies more effectively. I'm doing some pretty good damage
here. But as soon as the wolves die and everyone turns to face you, you kind of
realize you're hopelessly outmatched. So spirit summons can also act as a distraction
for you to leg it, instead. Spirit summons can be very powerful, but remember, you can only
summon them in difficult areas. Nearby, These threads of light guide us to a third site of lost
grace. This is a really important one to visit. Greetings. tTraveler From
beyond the fog. I am Melina. I offer you an accord. Have you
heard of the Finger Maidens? They serve the two fingers, offering
guidance and aid to the tarnished. But you. I am afraid, are maidenless. I can play
the role of maiden. Turning rune fragments into strength to aid you in your search for the Elden
Ring. You need only take me with you to the foot of the Erdtree. Then it's settled. I bequeath to
you this ring. Use it to traverse great distances. It will summon a spectral steed named Torrent.
Torrent has chosen you. Treat him with respect." Now we have our mount, torrent. Who can take
us to some points of interest on the map. I just marked three beacons. We'll head there
now. But first... mounted combat. So I could go on for a really long time about its new
mechanics and its new control scheme. But for now, can I just say I love it? I
think it adds so much depth to this game. That was so much fun. My God. So make sure
you visit Melina. She also lets you level up. "Share them with me. Your thoughts, your
ambitions, the principles you would follow." This is Groveside cave. In my opinion, it is
perhaps the most important early game location that you can visit. The enemies aren't too
difficult, but the rewards you get are insane. This is the first reason we're
here. The twinblade. My weapon of choice in this network test. You'll see why. So that was a jumping attack. You can do jumping
R2s and jumping R1s as well. They are very good for breaking enemy posture and also
knocking some enemies out of the air. You can also do running R1s and running
R2s. So fire grease is one of the better craftable items I've found. It just requires two
things. It requires root resin from the trees and smoldering butterflies found near wildfires.
It's very good against this Bloodborne-esque boss. So you're probably starting to
understand why I like the Twinblade. Its default weapon art is very strong,
and it even stun locks this boss. On the left side of the screen you can see what
weapon art is currently active. The twinblades default art is called Spinning Slash, and it's
active because on two handing the weapon. If I was to one hand it and have my shield in the left
hand, I would use my shields weapon art instead. Beastman drops the Viridian Amber medallion, which
increases your maximum stamina. But that that in the chest is why we're here. The Flask of Wondrous
Physick. So let's return to a site of grace and check it out. Conveniently, this beam of light
will appear at the end of every dungeon, allowing you to easily warp to the surface. Hopefully,
this frees up a little bit of design space for Fromsoftware, allowing them to design deeper
dungeons that don't need to loop back around. Anyway, now we have the ability to mix wondrous
physick at a site of lost grace. Here you combine tears that you find out in the world to create a
potion with custom effects. Now we only have one of these flasks, but you know the best bit. These
replenish when you sit at a site of lost grace. So you'll get a ton of use out of these. Here,
I'm picking up some ruin fragments. These shards of stone are believed to have once been a part of
a temple in the sky. These hollow enemies, digging in the ground and wandering the lands between are
former nobles. According to an item description, they seem to have forgotten what they were
searching for, and now wander aimlessly. Elden ring has this unparalleled gameplay flow to
it, where you go seamlessly from the open world into these tightly designed dungeons. This second
one, we're exploring the stormfoot catacombs. It feels a lot like a chalice
dungeon from Bloodborne. These heavy doors require you to go
deeper into the dungeon and unlock them. These dungeons are full of traps and ambushes.
You're going to want to keep your shield up, but there's some things that your shield can't really
protect you against. The stressful thing is, you can hear the enemy chasing me. But the good
thing is, I think he gets burnt to a crisp here. We're in this dungeon specifically to
find one of my favorite ashes of war. An ash of war is essentially a skill that
you can assign to your weapon, shield, catalyst, or talisman. The Twinblade has a
really good weapon, but as you can see. But I believe there's one in here that's even
better. And it really suits the sorcerer build. As you can probably expect, every dungeon has a
main boss at the end, and sometimes in the middle of it. That last boss looked like it was inspired
by Bloodborne, but this one is the nightmare fuel. Oh, yeah. So the Flask of Wondrous Physick that
we mixed does two things. First, it restores my health, but then it also gets rid of it because
I explode. But the explosion does way more to the enemy than it does to us. So on the left side
of the screen, there's a little symbol. It looks like a gravestone. This lets you know that you can
summon help. And once again, these wolf boys are a very powerful tool. Maybe too powerful. I'm not
really sure where I stand on spirits summons yet. Bosses clearly have a lot of AoE attacks
now, and some bosses do just obliterate your summons instantly. But the fact remains,
if you want to be at your most powerful, it is going to almost always be a good idea to
summon your spirits when you can, because they don't cost that much FP and they distract the
boss long enough for you to do a ton of damage. This one didn't even die. It just dodged out of
the way all the time. I'll be interested to see how Fromsoftware decides to balance these.
In my opinion, they should be careful about making these too strong. But hey, that's the Dark
Souls formula, right? Like there's no easy mode, but there are in-game ways to make your character
more powerful, and there are in-game ways to find solutions to difficult encounters. And
that is the best way to do an easy mode. So they are cool additions in that regard. So
anyway, what we just got is an ash of war, which you can designate to a weapon here at the
bonfire. They're really interesting. Ashes of war add a different weapon art or skill to your
weapon. That's what this one is. It summons four homing missiles that stay with you even
on horseback. Look at this. This is powerful. Maybe too powerful... You'll see
what I mean later on in the video. But the other interesting thing about Ashes
of War is that they can also be used to easily assign scaling to your weapon. This ash
of war, the glintsword arc. For example, let me choose between keeping standard scaling
or intelligence scaling. Every ash of war is like this. And the best thing about it is it lets
you be more flexible with your build. Whereas in Dark Souls you had to go to Andre and smith
your weapon appropriately. The worst part is that now your scaling, and your ideal scaling might be
locked behind a weapon art You don't want to use. Hitting that total gave me one of the few frame
drops I think I've ever seen while playing this game. I mean, you guys can see for yourselves.
It looks and plays great on PlayStation five and roaming the open world. Man, I'm just...
The amount of content in here is staggering. So many bosses and places and NPCs. "Ah, you must
be the new tarnished. You do well to steer clear of Agheel lake, fledgling. A dragon roosts
there, and its fearsome as it is majestic." Mounted combat is really fun, and it's one of
the places where I feel like sorcery shines quite well, specifically because you can target
the horse and knock them off that way, and then fight them with the advantage of you being on
your horse. But the really fun way to fight is by doing jousts, and you can tell the enemy AI is
coded to engage in jousting with you. Because you can charge attacks, The timing aspect is just
as important as your reflexes and also your creativity while you fight. You know different
weapons have different timings and different charge attacks, and you can use a variety of
spells, some of which knock them off. Or you can use a bow and arrow while you ride, and even
sleep arrows to put them to sleep while they're on horseback and win that way, there's just a lot of
flexibility and creativity in the ways you prefer to do combat. This is a carriage that has some
really good loot at the back, if you can steal it or take out that huge group of enemies. But for
now, we're going to go to the post town remains, and this is where the horses
double jump really shines. Sometimes it's surprisingly useful to get on
top of a tall structure so that you can see everything that's below you. This lets us see
the remains of the town, and it reveals that there is a staircase in the little room that
cannot be accessed unless you jump that direction, or you jump over these fences. If you were
on foot, you might never have found it. Pumpkinhead, he's aptly named, and his head
is actually completely immune to damage, which can definitely screw you over depending on
the weapons you're using. He also make short work of our summons, so you'll see that
summons aren't always super useful. One thing it took me a while to remember is
that, you know, like Dark Souls shields are very, very effective. Rolling through everything might
get you killed more often than not. Interestingly, though, a lot of bosses now inflict a bleed
effect i've noticed, so you can't just rely on hiding behind your shield all the time. Well,
that bleed effect is going to get out of control. Another advantage of two handing weapons I found
is that it deals significantly more posture damage. Posture is now this weird blend of dark
Souls, and Sekiro where it's this invisible meter that you build up, like in Dark Souls, I guess.
But unlike Dark Souls, it builds up on them, regardless of whether they're blocking. So,
for example, any boss that you're hitting is probably taking posture damage. And
depending on the weapon you're using and the nature of the attacks you're doing,
you might open them up to a critical attack. It doesn't happen against this boss, but
it's definitely worth keeping in mind. "Tarnished, are we? A wonder you should turn
up here." This is Sorceress Sellen, an NPC who appears here in the network test, but I guess
it's unlikely she'll be here in the full game. She sells a few decent sorceries, but the real
reason we're here is for that lore. And she tells you some good stuff about Glintstone sorceries
and how it differs from sorcery in the souls games. "Our art draws upon the powers embedded in
Glintstone, but what is the nature of such power? Glintstone is the Ember of the cosmos. Golden
Ember contains the remnants of ancient life and houses its vitality, while
Glintstone contains residual life and thus the vitality of the stars. It should
not be forgotten that Glintstone sorcery is the study of the stars and the life they're in." While
roaming this way, you might come across the Black Knight guarding the bridge. He only appears here
at nighttime. He is also very difficult, so we'll continue. But we have time to look at this. It's
a sort of dung beetle, a sparkling one that gives items, and they can be found all across the
lands between. "Oi! You, you there. Could you help us out, cully?" Make sure you visit that
grove of trees when you finally play this game. For us now, though, it's time to breach the
storm gate and head towards Stormveil Castle. Stormveil Castle is the first legacy
dungeon in Elden Ring. It blocks your access to the next section of the open world,
and it's sort of like a traditional Dark Souls dungeon in the sense that it's this big, tightly
designed space where you can't use your horse. Breaking through here can be very
difficult if you take the time to fight, and even if you take the time to loot, it can
quickly become a really epic, a chase sequence. There are so many curiosities and points
of interest hidden around the place. You'll miss a lot if you just follow the main
path. This isn't really an open world, like Ghost of Tsushima or The Witcher or Skyrim, where it's
a lot of really vast distance for the sake of it feeling vast and making the world feel huge. So
far, I'm impressed with how densely populated the area is with intriguing things like these One-Eyed
snake statues and the evergaol that they guard. Foolishly, I think I forgot to sit at a Grace
before I fought Bloodhound Knight T Darriwil and I'm low on crimson tears. And I'm very low
on FP. And FP is kind of what I'm relying on to do most of my damage with. Since I haven't
taken the time to upgrade my weapon. Interestingly, this is a boss fight where you
can't use spirit summons, so there are going to be boss fights where you can't use that as a crutch.
Not that I could summon them anyway, with no FP. Feeling a bit desperate, I decide to play this
really, really defensively as I have basically no health left. But he is doing only physical
damage. The thing I forget is that he's also doing bleeding damage. Of course, when you die, your
runes are left behind and your point of death. They even show up on the compass, which
helps you to find your way back to them, as are in the evergaol with the bloodhound. I
wonder why he's locked away in here. Luckily, we can choose to respawn at a statue of Marika. At
first I thought I would be against these, but when you realize how vast the open world is and how
tedious it would be to ride back to everything, they are a nice convenience to have sometimes.
This time we go in with full FP and I can show you why Glintstone Arch is such a good weapon art.
Yeah. So weapon arts or skills or Ashes of War, whatever you call them. They're powerful.
Especially the magical ones. And especially when you consider that they get more powerful when
you upgrade your weapon. And I haven't upgraded my weapon yet. You can get weapons to +3 in this
beta. Weapon arts need to be powerful if they're going to be used by players. I feel like a lot
of the weapon arts in Dark Souls three and Sekiro just weren't used because they weren't powerful.
It's a difficult line for FromSoftware to walk. If I had to give one recommendation, it's
that Weapon arts should cost a lot more FP. That way, they're still powerful and people will
use them. But there is a drawback right now why would I use sorcery or faith If a weapon art can
do the same thing? and a weapon art doesn't even require me to invest stats into it necessarily.
But I'm curious to hear what you guys think. According to the Elden Ring Twitter, long
ago, in the time before, the shattering wolves dared not roam the lands between, but now
they're everywhere, apparently appearing out of gusts of wind. There is a lot of lore
in the network test, but the thing is, I think enemy drops have been tweaked so that
they don't drop, you know, their related items and weapons and equipment. So there is a lot
of lore in the network test in the items, but getting lore for a specific enemy has proven quite
difficult. You might have noticed. Now, sitting at this grace, there's a new option that says about
Grace. With this, you can ask Melina a little bit more about graces and sometimes a little bit more
about herself. "Me, I'm searching for my purpose given to me by my mother inside the Erdtree
long ago, for the reason that I yet live burned and bodiless. There is something for which
I must apologize. I've acted the finger maiden yet can offer no guidance.
I am no maiden. my purpose, Was long ago lost" when nearing the end of
Elden Rings first open world and the start of its legacy dungeon marking, this transition
is our first mandatory boss. The difficulty of this boss is what drove me to create such a
powerful character this time. "Foul tarnished, In search of the Elden Ring.
Emboldened by the flame of ambition. Someone must extinguish thy flame
Let it be Margit, The Fell." Margit, the Fell is tough. He has a lot of
attacks that come out at a moment's notice. And a lot of gap closes that can
catch you while you're trying to heal. When I finally beat him for the first time,
it was with way weaker greatsword build and no summons. The only way I could manage it was
by delaying his second phase as much as possible, and making sure I broke his posture
within it. Have a look. Well, thou'rt of passing skill. warrior blood must
truly run in thy veins, tarnished. I shall remember thee, tarnished.
Smouldering with thy meagre flame. Cower in fear of the night. The hands of
the Fell Omen shall brook thee no quarter" That's the end of this first preview. But
there's a lot more Elden Ring content to come, so subscribe for that. But beyond that,
there's a lot more content in this test that we weren't allowed to access, so that's
something to get truly excited about. Thank you to FromSoftware and Namco for helping me get
access to this. And thank you for watching.
