Elden Ring is disappointing

eldon ring sold 12 million copies in just 17 days making it one of the best selling games of all time it received a score of 96 on metacritic making it one of the best reviewed games of all time and while it may not have happened yet it's hardly a bold prediction to say that eldon ring will win the majority of game of the year awards for 2022 and maybe even more honors beyond that this is a level of success that is eldon ring is easily one of the most successful new ips in gaming history and if you measure success by both critical and commercial metrics you could argue it is the most successful this game's legacy shall be writ in gold and it will leave its mark on the industry for many years to come and eldum ring is a good game from software have established themselves as perhaps the best developer of the modern era and they are on an incredible run of producing hit game after hit game in a time when so many other big names have become more notable for their failures than successes and i love from software but i still found eldon ring to be disappointing that may not sound all that remarkable after all you can't sell millions of copies without making a few people disappointed but it's not just that i didn't enjoy my time with this game quite as much as i was hoping but instead that i think from software have lost their way and forgotten what once made their game so special in fact i think the player base might have done the same and strange as it might sound i even think the player base might be partly to blame this video has three main sections focusing on the open world the difficulty and the story and the name of those sections might give you an indication of what they'll be about still i can't promise that every point raised within this video is completely unique this game has been out for a while and i'm sure a lot of people have said a lot of things what i can say is that the main argument i'm making is not something i've heard anyone else voice and yet to me it feels like something that needs to be said now you don't have to watch this video i've been upfront about what it's about and i think people should make up their own opinions on games and that people should think for themselves although i guess that's a little bit of a spoiler speaking of spoilers there will be plenty for eldon ring as well as several for dark souls and some minor references to other from software games and with that out of the way let's get into it i don't want to give the impression that i hate this game so before getting into my main criticisms it seems only fair to acknowledge some of the ways eldon ring is superior to other from software titles in many ways elder ring is like dark souls but rather than taking its familiar formula and trying to polish it to perfection eldon ring instead seems to be about exaggerating it to grandness this game is huge previous titles weren't small but elden ring still manages to dwarf them while consistently impressing with its unrivaled sense of grandeur which is supported by the game's art style soundtrack enemy design map size architecture weapon variety boss quantity and more and ultimately this ends up being one of the main qualities that gives eldering its own identity dark souls and demon souls had much more grounded settings and their specific flavor of fantasy was overwhelmingly dark but eldum ring is more high fantasy and its use of rich vibrant colors alongside diverse locations with an often imposing sense of scale is at its best absolutely jaw-dropping and it is often at its best some might argue that other games are more graphically impressive on a technical level but to me overall graphical fidelity means little when compared to a game's art direction and in this aspect eldon ring might be the most visually impressive game i have ever played exploring this world feels like stepping into a painting but unlike a painting it also offers the player freedom to go wherever you see from software have always excelled at creating impressive sites but this is the first time players aren't artificially limited by the edges of the game's levels you can go anywhere your journey is fully seamless and when you do get to one of the game's denser more traditionally structured locations you always have a sense of how each one fits into the world enhancing their contextual meaning to go alongside this freedom to explore eldon ring also provides the player with more tools than ever before the star of the show is the familiar stamina based combat system and this is still a very combat focused game but within this combat the player now has more options and no play style seems to have been completely overlooked shield users get guard counters to provide a new offensive option dual wielding returns with its own dedicated attack animations jumping offers new offensive and potentially defensive combat actions spirit ashes offer a strong enhancement for anyone who doesn't want to tackle all the game's challenges alone a stealth system now exists and can sometimes be useful enemies including some bosses can be stance broken giving the player a chance to critically hit them and providing a reward for player aggression and using heavy attacks ashes of war give individual weapons greater flexibility and allow for more experimentation while providing non-magic users some flashy magic like abilities to spend fp on magic users themselves have more spells to play around with and everyone has more weapons to choose from there's also a horse there are some balance problems of course but this is objectively the most complex and diverse the combat in this series has been and as this is such a long game with so much combat in it more options are always a positive as for the horse it provides a new way to approach combat encounters in the open world that is surprisingly successful i say surprising because the track record for pre-existing series successfully adding mounted combat is quite frankly appalling and i don't think many would have expected the souls like stamina based combat to prove an exception to this and yet from software have pulled it off remarkably well torrent feels responsive maneuvering in combat isn't overly restrictive and overall this adds a new option for players that feel suitably balanced mounted combat can feel rather unpredictable but in some ways i think this works in its favor in effect you trade defensive reliability for mobility while still getting to keep your high damage this means torrent becomes a great option for fights where mobility is particularly important like against dragons or for fights where you just don't really respect the enemy's offensive capabilities and if you do want to play it a little safer or you're just up against more dangerous opponents the player still has an incentive to dismount and tackle them on foot where you have your full array of combat options so as a way to balance mounted combat forcing the player to sacrifice defense seems the best option if you instead had to sacrifice damage it would just make mounted combat boring and if there were no drawbacks players would rely on mounted combat too much to the point where gameplay would be less varied the are you sure pop-up message for defaults to know for re-summoning torrent in combat was a strange choice but in the grand scheme of things mounted combat is a resounding success and so with more tools at your disposal and more content ahead of you than ever before eldon ring becomes this near never-ending adventure that takes you through countless stunning vistas that are always accompanied by the strong combat system and i can respect that this game didn't need to be this big and that size does lead to some drawbacks but it also makes eldon ring stand out and there is something special to a game that just keeps going that whisks your way to this whole other world and gives you so much content that you're able to completely lose yourself in the experience unfortunately as much as i wanted to enjoy that experience that wasn't quite what happened [Music] going open world is nothing new for big budget games the 2010s may have been the decade of the open world with many of the best-selling and most highly reviewed titles being as such and with many of the biggest and most acclaimed franchises becoming open world so at this point going open world feels a bit like jumping on the bandwagon and many people have come to be critical of this trend and then in comes eldon ring and now apparently open worlds are changed forever eldon ring has ruined no destroyed all other open worlds eldon ring has revolutionized the genre welcome comrade this is the revolution now grab your phone and smash that like button on twitter because that's how we do revolution in 2022 take that ubisoft revolutionizing the open world genre that would be pretty impressive if it were true really though elden rings world is the same open world we've been seeing for years it's designed in the same way and it has many of the same flaws outside of the unique setting there are only two things which set elden rings world apart from those so many people criticize the first is good combat which is not revolutionary but it is important most open world games regardless of how large their land masses might be or how many side activities they try to cram into them are still combat heavy games and therefore the better the combat the better the open world eldon ring has good combat it's like dark souls 3 with some extra bits and that's a hell of a lot more enjoyable than most games manage but it's not revolutionary the other thing that sets eldon rings world apart is the lack of map markers pop-up notifications quest logs and checklists eldenbring's exploration is much more intrinsically driven than most others in the genre you are still rewarded for exploring much like in other from software games with the usual equipment consumables and upgrade materials and as the game is challenging it means upgrades feel useful but in most ways the reason you head out into the world and explore is because it's fun you aren't doing things because a map marker or side quest is telling you to you're doing it because you want to you want to see what's over the horizon what enemy awaits you around the next corner and where the next stage of your journey will take you this is more immersive as there are less video gaming elements getting in your way and it's more freeing as you're making decisions for yourself without the developer's hand constantly guiding you basically eldon ring has faith in the player but you'll be able to find things on your own and it has faith in itself that the experience of playing the game is enough of a reward without adding additional extrinsic metrics on top to try to heighten your sense of accomplishment and this is an improvement it is insane how many open world games are so extrinsically driven and try so hard to signpost all of their content there is clearly a problem with this genre it is a disease these games are sick they have lost their mind these elements aren't needed they never have been and hopefully this will actually improve now that eldon ring has so clearly shown that if your game is actually fun then all these constant markers and notifications do is get in the way of that and if you think that is revolutionary then fine you are no comrade of mine but i will begrudgingly respect your different opinion but this isn't anything new because older open world games also lacked these elements and so do certain modern open world games and this is all just one step in the right direction because really the only thing you'd need to do to turn elden rings world into a ubisoft one is to add in map markers for its repeated side activities like the ruins caves mines catacombs evergels churches urge trees and world bosses that would then unlock when you pick up pieces of the map and then add some way to track your progress that gives you bonus runes for completing things and voila you have ubified eldum ring because the world itself isn't designed differently it just doesn't include the markers and checklists this is still a big pretty to look out world full of open space and evenly placed side activities inserted to make the world feel full of content and give players lots to do eldon ring is just a bit better at disguising this same structure so what's the problem you might ask i did just say better after all and in a comparison between eldon ring and assassin's creed whatever i'd happily be on elden ring's side but that's not what i feel elden ring should be compared to and compared to some of from software's other games eldon ring's open world is lacking in certain ways for example you no longer have to learn your way around and mentally map out each location as you explore them because you have an actual map with a marker that always shows your location there's also no sense of real danger or tension anymore because sites of grace are everywhere and new respawn points called stakes of america have been added so you always respawn close to where you die and your dropped runes now come with a map marker to help you find them and you can ride a horse making it easy to outrun any and all enemies to just whizz around the map retrieving your dropped runes picking up items or just traveling to your next destination if you do want to fight enemies you can but if enemies want to fight you they better ask nicely and hope you take pity on them so there's no longer a sense of real danger nor do you need to worry about running out of healing and nor is there any buildup of tension as you struggle to find the next bonfire or reclaim your runes because in this open world you're always safe and only endanger yourself when you opt into a combat encounter on your terms there's also no consequences to where you go and what you do anymore as you can't get lost or stuck because as long as you're not inside a mini dungeon you can just fast travel whenever you feel like it this difference is even more noticeable on subsequent playthroughs as when you're familiar with the world's general structure you can easily collect items like golden seeds sacred tiers and smithing stones to greatly increase your power right out the gate without engaging a single enemy the end result of all this is that the gameplay in the open world is less interesting than it is in a more traditional from software level it basically just comes down to riding around on torrent and enjoying how the world looks as you move between the more meaningful pieces of content much like many other open world games it doesn't help matters that much of the world is wide open space meaning from software are greatly limited in the ways they can use space to create combat variety you see usually it was the level design that from software utilized to keep things fresh by creating ambushes or limiting space so the player has to be careful with their weapon swings and dodges or using verticality to create areas the player can fall off or hiding enemies and traps around corners and out of sight or adding in environmental hazards and so on meanwhile in a wide open space you can't do any of this so from software instead resorts to throwing mini bosses or just very strong normal enemies of the player ad nauseum as these become the only way they have left to actually create challenge this comes at its own cost however as it leads to repetition and quite likely boss fight fatigue ask many from software fans why they like these games and the boss fights will be a common answer but as with most things in life they are still better in moderation eldon ring ignores this there are 157 boss fights in this game and 237 encounters with a boss or enemy that sometimes shows up as a boss that is quite a lot by comparison dark souls only has 26 boss fights and yet i never thought it was a game which needed more because each one of these encounters feels like a memorable event and this is even true for a boss that is incredibly easy because this lack of difficulty still at least makes this fight feel distinctive within the context of the rest of the game yes sleep easy pinwheel no one is making fun of you today for once of course we do have to be critical of dark souls for its use of repetition as the asylum demon actually shows up again not once but twice meaning really there are only 24 unique boss fights in dark souls this is something many people have harshly criticized this game for over the years as i guess everyone agrees that each boss fight should really be completely unique meanwhile eldon ring has nine unique bosses ranala radan reichard melania malakith radagon fire giant placidosax and sir gideon off near the all-knowing there are 157 bosses and just nine of them are unique if you're curious the average reuse rate of boss type entity is 3.89 that is how many times you fight each boss enemy on average and that number is quite frankly far too high even if the average player won't encounter every boss on a normal playthrough they will still encounter too many and too much repetition it is almost unavoidable when there is this much of it now to be fair eldon ring has many fantastic boss fights and when considered in their totality the number and quality of this game's bosses is incredibly impressive but that doesn't change the fact that the game's structure with its high frequency and repetition acts to diminish these boss fights to the point where they quickly stop feeling special this could be improved if there was simply less and no other change would be needed just take an eraser and remove around 50 of these less impressive encounters and then remove the boss health bar of a few more who don't deserve it and then let the remaining 70 or so shine so much brighter as distinctive unique and memorable events just like boss fights always were in the past 70 something would still be a lot and surely this would be enough this problem isn't unique to the bosses however as the same criticism can be made about the side content such as the caves mines catacombs and evergels which likewise include a staggering amount of repetition from enemy types to boss rooms layouts and other commonly used assets making them quickly feel repetitive and uninteresting there is no reason an open world needs to be absolutely packed with things to do and so many open world games do this to their detriment even the better ones skyrim has far too many dungeons to the point where it undermines the believability of the world breath of the wild has too many shrines making them feel repetitive the witcher 3 has too many points of interest making completionists go actually insane when they get to the waters of skellige and so on this feels a bit stupid as developers do more work to make their games worse and elden ring is no different clearly there must be reasons these games are designed this way and i can only conclude that developers are so scared of their worlds being called empty but they go too far in the other direction even when it comes at the detriment to the overall experience either that all these games are simply designed for the type of player that doesn't want to explore so that even those who rush through the game and only engage with a small amount of optional content will still discover lots to do this is particularly frustrating when it comes to eldon ring however because if there is one developer you would expect to not care about making their worlds feel arbitrarily full or trying to appeal to less engaged players it would be from software who have a well-established history of allowing secrets to feel secretive and not caring about whether players find everything as well as rewarding players who do take the time to thoroughly explore their worlds in eldon ring however it feels more like you're being punished for thoroughly exploring because of the quantity of repetition still i'd be willing to overlook a lot of this repetition if not for another problem it creates after all from software clearly wanted elder ring to be a huge game and as i said earlier that is something i can respect creating a game of this size means reusing certain assets is almost inevitable and it's not like other open world games don't reuse their fair share of content either but again this isn't a question of other open world games and one of the main things which has always made from software's world stand out is how cohesive and realistic they seem these are places where every single enemy and item seems like it exists for a specific reason and where game design always seems to be informed by the logic of the world and then you have eldon ring which has 49 minor dungeons where every single one of them has a boss in their final room guarding a single piece of treasure and everything about this just screams this is a video game that these are pieces of content designed from top to bottom to specifically meet the needs of a game and not as a reflection of what this world would actually be like that is why they are evenly spread out across the world that is why assets are repeated so much that is why there is always one boss fight instead of zero or two that is why the boss is always in the final room that is why there is always one end piece of treasure that is why there is always one sight of grace at the start and one teleporter at the end and that is why these places ultimately exist and to me this feels incredibly artificial no boss that comes at the end of a cave or tomb will ever be impressive because they don't feel like an actual part of the game's world and completing the same short cave that i've already completed 10 times before doesn't create any real build up and defeating them and continuing on my journey doesn't have any sense of genuine meaning also i don't understand how some of these bosses even got here the magma worm or the falling star beast literally cannot fit through the earlier parts of their cave and don't even get me started on a stell number two and it's not just the minor dungeons where repetition harms realism there are so many repeated bosses in this game that even entities as unique as the demigods aren't immune from it as we see with morgot mog godfrey and godric i mean what exactly is a goad freud the grafted this feels like walking into a little and seeing an off-brand copy of one of your favorite products all i can say is thank god there's no millennial blade of michaela skulking around in a cave somewhere not all repetition is unrealistic i have no problem with there being multiple night cavalry or urgery avatars because these seem like beings where multiple versions of them might exist but there is so little in this world that is allowed to be genuinely unique in a way that just screams classic open world developer desperate to squeeze out every last bit of value from any and all assets the thing is once the illusion of the world starts to crumble it can be hard to keep giving it the benefit of the doubt instead of seeing more and more areas of artificiality maybe my standards are too high but these are standards created by from software's other games and i didn't realize that going open world would mean they would have to be discarded and that's what seems to have happened with eldon ring the fear of a franchise going open world is that it results in its core appeal being diluted to fit into a bigger area across a longer play time with the only real benefit being an increasing spectacle from traveling around the world and enjoying how it looks and that describes eldon ring perfectly luckily however eldon ring is not just an open world and the game's six designated legacy dungeons as well as some of the denser underground and optional areas still capture much of what the open world loses all of these legacy dungeons are high quality but lindell in particular stands out as maybe the single greatest area from software have ever created it looks incredible it communicates a strong sense of history and lore it is deeply non-linear and it is massive in size particularly if you also include the sewers below here it feels like you're not just fighting strong enemies as you ride around but are actually exploring an entire city bit by bit where you have to be careful and methodical and you feel fully immersed and it is fantastic stormville castle wasn't far behind either particularly as it was the first place i went to in-game which led to it being the only time but i really felt the pressure of needing to preserve healing and care about taking damage the other legacy dungeons all have many positive qualities too although i did completely miss volcano manor on my first playthrough because i never found the entrance in the end though these legacy dungeons ended up saving eldon ring for me and without them i cannot imagine how hollow the open world experience would feel on its own and yet at the same time i can't help but wonder what this game would be like if it was all legacy dungeons you know if there was more of these areas and they were all interconnected seamlessly in a way that provides lots of non-linearity and loops back on itself as you progress through the game you know like dark souls 1 but bigger and with better graphics eldon ring benefits from having a larger budget and longer development than from software's other titles as well as from being able to iterate and learn from previous games but the open world itself just doesn't seem to have added much to the experience particularly when you get to repeat playthroughs maybe i would feel more charitable if it felt like the open world had taken more risks for example i have been waiting years for a developer to finally have the balls to not show a player marker on the map so that players must orient themselves through visuals alone this would require the world to be designed in a way that provides helpful visual references for players to use to orient themselves you know something like having a great big tree in the middle that players can always see but the benefit would be a more immersive experience when navigating the world involved genuine engagement from the player just like it used to in the end though i don't think there are any real risks taken by eldon ring in its world design and instead much of it is just copied from other games in the genre including unfortunately some of the problems you could say the open world was worth it because it looks good but the legacy dungeons don't exactly look bad and you could say the open world is worth it because it gives players more freedom but i'm not actually sure if overall that's really such a good thing because eldon rings freedom has some pretty severe consequences [Music] overall i found eldon ring to be too difficult the first thing i did after the opening is head to stormville castle because that was the advice the game gave me and in my time with from software games i have learned to never ignore some free advice as you don't tend to get much at stormville i encountered margaret who i found frustratingly challenging for the game's first boss it took me a little over one hour to defeat him during which i never once considered that this was the game's way of telling me to go somewhere else and come back later when stronger because the game had explicitly told me to come here both through npc and the new light of grace system and so instead i thought to myself huh i must be a bit rusty at these games because i'm sure the first boss isn't usually this hard afterwards i proceeded through stormbell and found it to be challenging but not overly so godric was similarly no pushover but considerably easier than marget probably because i had gained quite a few levels through exploring stormdale before continuing further i decided to explore limgrave which i found to be a bit too easy almost as if this content was meant to be completed before stormville then i found seofra river which was a fantastic moment of discovery and was about the right difficulty being challenging without seeming unfairly so and then i proceeded to lyania which again seemed well balanced then after some pharah exploration i moved on to mount gelmere assuming that's where the game wanted me to head next this seemed fine until i met the full grown space ball who destroyed me the problem was that getting hit a single time would always dismount me and after being dismounted my damage seemed incredibly low while the beast damage was very high with some attacks killing me in one hit even from full health after over an hour of attempts where i'd barely managed to push the beast into its second phase i decided this is not right and that this is clearly an enemy put here to tell me i'm too low level to complete the rest of the area this isn't actually true as this is just an unusually high level enemy and you can even just go around it to do the rest of the zone but this is what i assumed so off i went to the other area an npc had told me to go kaylid on arrival i found i was cutting through bosses rather easily making me think well [ __ ] i've accidentally over levelled by coming here too late but then as i explored a little further sticking to the north as that seemed like the best way to head first i found the game suddenly became a lot harder in fact i found an exact replica of a boss i had just killed only a little earlier and a short distance away and yet this time it was hitting like a truck and had four or five times as much health this seemed very strange to me as this was the same enemy in the same area and then eventually just like with the falling star beast i got stuck on another boss this time the godskin apostle this was again frustrating because i didn't feel like i was playing that badly i was dodging punishing improving but it still wasn't enough the numbers just seemed to be stacked against me with the boss doing too much damage and having too much health and so after one hour of never coming close to a kill i gave up at this point i couldn't understand why the bosses within a single area were so vastly different in difficulty but i decided i didn't want to get stuck again just yet so i went looking for somewhere new which led me to the south of limgrave and the weeping peninsula i figured as this was a completely separate area and no one had hinted that i should come here yet it's probably going to be an overly difficult endgame zone but then i found it was the complete opposite turns out you're meant to come here before stormville meaning i was so overlevelled that every enemy i encountered simply melted before me sometimes i did still press the dodge button but it was only out of a sense of politeness to my foes because i certainly didn't need to use it on this peninsula i also found many healing flask upgrades which was something i really could have benefited from gaining earlier still with this major healing boost i headed back to caled killed radhaan who i was able to dps down so fast he couldn't enter his second phase thanks maybe to a lucky stagger and yet other minor mini bosses in this area still destroyed me which felt odd as radhan seemed like he should have been powerful but was instead weaker than a lot of the other bosses here still from here i proceeded to the altus plateau and then lindell which both seemed too easy again and then i went to the sewers which were more challenging and then the mountaintop of the giants even more challenging and then i took my new medallion to find the consecrated snow fields and the hallig tree which were even more challenging and then finally i reached the bottom of the halight tree where i stayed for many many hours i am melania blade of mykola and i have never known defeat now hopefully you're still watching the video and haven't been bored away with so much recounting but i do have a reason for going into this much detail you see i played this game blind i avoided every piece of information every discussion every review every meme all to try and have a better experience with the game i did this for other from software games too although the one exception was actually dark souls which was the first game i played and which i found so intimidating but i remember checking several things online about where to go and when as well as how to upgrade weapons and things like that that said i didn't look up everything not even close and even then this was something i tried to avoid to create a better overall experience anyway after completing dark souls and gaining greater confidence in both myself and more importantly in from software i then resolved to play future titles with as little external information as possible and i did this led me to missing a lot of content on my first playthroughs including the entirety of bloodborne's dlc and cainhurst castle the nameless king and ancient wyvern in dark souls 3 several endgame bosses in sakura and dark lurker in dark souls 2. in fact i've still never found dark lurker where is he lurking maybe i will never know the point is there is obviously a downside to playing these games blind most clearly shown by how you can miss so much content but i still believe this is the objectively best way to play these games if you can it results in you being so much more immersed and absorbed in these worlds there's a much stronger sense of accomplishment from doing things on your own and certain moments of discovery you get to make by yourself can be amazing this is the best way to play or at least that's what i fought before playing elden ring my first trip through the lands between felt like a constant yo-yo between being under-levelled and over-leveled despite my best efforts to avoid this this didn't ruin the experience but it did harm it i don't want to win fights solely because i'm overlevelled as that's boring and i don't want to lose as a result of being under-leveled it's frustrating i also don't want to obsessively try to manage my character's level to always ensure some correct amount of difficulty really i just want to play the game and become immersed in its world not fixate on micromanaging its balance issues this has been caused by the open nature of the game's world and many have praised this feature but it clearly comes at a cost some have claimed higher level bosses are an effective way to communicate where to go but in my experience this wasn't true at all from software games are known for being challenging and how can you accurately determine what level of challenge is intended and what isn't of course if you go to kalid right at the start of the game enemies will be so high level that combined with the zone's oppressive appearance it does effectively communicate that you shouldn't be here yet but otherwise things are rarely so clear also running into a high level boss and dying for a long time only to eventually give up and go somewhere else is to me a firmly negative experience and returning when overlevelled to crush them is even worse the traditional souls experience of coming across a challenging boss and then trying to learn from your mistakes to eventually overcome them seems far better still marget i didn't mind the falling star beast i minded a little and the godskin apostle i minded rather a lot but this wasn't the worst part that came from times i found myself overlevelled as i said in the last section lindell is amazing and it was my favorite part of the game but i was still over leveled and this meant that the climax to spending hours exploring its streets and working my way upwards towards the foot of the earth tree was two easy boss fights both of which i killed on my first attempt this was particularly disappointing in the case of morgot because this was clearly an important story moment and i didn't achieve victory through anything resembling skill i got hit over and over and learnt to dodge nothing and instead just used my now abundant healing to power on through to victory anyway you only get to fight a boss for the first time once well i guess that's not really true for most bosses in eldon ring as you fight each boss for the first time an average of 3.89 times but in the story you only get to fight a boss for the first time once and it sucks to have that experience ruined for you just because you went to certain places in the wrong order that said there was still an upside to playing blind and certain moments of discovery that came from exploring particularly the world's underground sections are up there with some of my favorites across all of from software's games so there are positives and negatives to playing blind what's the big deal you might say well if this tale ended here i wouldn't be writing all this but that's not how this story ends because i did not complete eldon ring blind because i wasn't able to it was the 14th of june at 7 14 p.m when i first met melania blade of nicola and it was the 14th of june at 9 31 pm when i first killed melania blade of mikala and it was at 9 32 p.m that night that i realized something was wrong now robbed [Music] robbed two hours and 18 minutes is a long time i'm not sure if any one boss across any of these games has ever taken me that long to defeat before i think the final boss of sakura might be the only one to actually exceed this except two hours and 18 minutes wasn't how long it took me to defeat melania blade of nicola it was how long it took me to reach the second phase for the first time before this i assumed there was no second phase because this seemed rather hard enough finding out i was wrong was not a welcome revelation it was 11 39 p.m that night when i officially gave up and wrote into google melania spinney attack so four hours and 25 minutes that was how long it took for melania blade of mykola to end my blind playthrough i just couldn't work out how to deal with the big spinny attack the only times i survived it were as a result of getting lucky and just scraping through with a sliver of health and that didn't work in the second phase because of the added scarlet rot so i cheated i looked it up and read a wiki and through this i learnt a method to deal with waterfowl dance that is the name of the attack by the way the attack so many people including me struggled with you block the first hit dodge quickly into the second and then do a delayed dodge backwards or just walk back carefully to avoid deferred most people don't use a shield for the first part and instead either try to stay at range during the times they think this attack could happen or just use a specific art of war called bloodhound step to dodge it using a shield is not ideal as to block this successfully you still need to be some distance away when the attack triggers and to have near full stamina for your block to not be broken and outside of this single attack a shield is completely useless because melania heals when she hits you even when you block meaning you're sacrificing a lot of dps just to block a single part of a single attack and even that blocking is unreliable due to distance and stamina requirements however my playstyle involved staying close to enemies so trying to stay at range for an attack that can't be predicted seemed impossible and using bloodhound step is something i never could have discovered on my own so i felt like it would be wrong to use it of course i'm not sure if i ever could have worked out the block fast dodge in slow dodge back method on my own either it is a very specific set of moves the game is forcing the player to perform and i had already spent over four hours without developing the slightest idea of how to deal with this attack beyond frantic dodging while praying for good rng i would love to know how many hours this fight would have taken me if i hadn't looked this information up because i assume it would be quite a large number still i do know how long the fight took with this knowledge my final try of the night ended at 1 42 am at which point i went to bed at 11 14 the next morning i was back at it again and it was 10 01 p.m on june the 15th that millennia blade of mikala tasted for the first time that which i had come to know so well this means defeating this boss took me 26 hours and 47 minutes in real world time of which i believe about 12 to 14 hours were spent actively trying i did take breaks for various reasons on the second day the kill itself took just under 10 minutes and it ended with me only just surviving now there are many things i could say about this but i will try to be as brief as possible while covering as many important points as i can fit in so overall i found the experience to be not particularly enjoyable although it wasn't terrible or anything as the hours dragged on i did often find myself reflecting on just how long the boss fight was taking and just what else i could have been doing with my time instead i don't have much free time so it did feel a little wasteful to spend so long on a single boss that soon just felt repetitive you may wonder why i didn't just give up or even use a more meta approach but in my defense i had no idea the fight would take this long if i had known maybe i wouldn't have bothered or maybe i would have used the more meta build but i didn't also there were plenty of times i came relatively close even after just a few hours of attempts so in a way it made sense to keep trying lastly there was probably a little bit of pride involved the game had presented a challenge and i wanted to overcome it and in previous from software games this feat had always been made very achievable if you just keep trying and try to learn from your mistakes you may also wonder why i didn't experiment more as maybe it was my build or playstyle holding me back but i did experiment i tried positioning close verse keeping at distance being aggressive versus being more patient using a one hander with shield first two handing and trying to switch at the start of waterfowl dodging specific attacks to the left burst dodging to the right and all sorts of other little tweaks i did my best to experiment and to learn but in the end i found melania to be a rather poor teacher and i did consider changing weapon but i had no idea what other weapon might be better and the more time i spent with my axe the more i worried changing to anything else would force me to have to relearn all the timings and windows i had gotten used to in many ways being stuck on a boss fight is actually one of the least appealing times to go find a completely new weapon and play style so in the end i stuck with my axe it had worked on every other boss after all that said after spending more time with this game i do think experimentation with different weapons is a good thing both for increasing the player's strategic options and for providing more gameplay variety making me think that eldon ring should have been designed to try to encourage this as it is weapon upgrades require specific materials and this often ends up limiting the player's ability to change weapon without downgrading in power particularly for any weapons requiring normal smithing stones which the game is incredibly stingy with compared to somber ones so i think a much better system for eldon ring would be to instead upgrade the blacksmith's tools with smithing and somber smithing stones so that the player can just swap weapons freely upgrading individual weapons is tradition in these games but in such a big game with so many different weapons this doesn't seem like the best fit anymore on my second playthrough on a fresh character i killed melania using the bloodhound step ashes of war alongside some claws i found in stormville castle which i thought might make me look cool the second time was far easier taking me just under 1 hour and it did feel satisfying to get some revenge even if using bloodhound step to deal with waterfowl dance does feel rather cheap in how drastically it lowers the difficulty the main emotion i felt on killing melania the first time was confusion why did this take so long how much of this is me and how much the boss what were other people's experiences with this fight like what was the intended experience from software we're trying to create i also felt a little concerned over any remaining bosses because i wasn't sure if they were going to be even harder luckily they were not not even close still i did indulge my curiosity by checking what other people's experiences were like mostly youtubers and streamers as that's what's easy to find watching other people defeat melania was a little strange and not just as a result of some of the more questionable things i saw did i just beat millennia and show my dick on camera what i learned through this was that people do different things but most people use the summon by way of the spirit ash mimiktir and even those who in theory had a similar no magic no summon playstyle to me seemed to approach the fight very differently to what i did i think this is best displayed by asmongold who killed the boss in what i consider to be a rather impressive 2 hours and 20 minutes his playstyle involved two things running away and using jumping power attacks and this seemed to work well unlike me he didn't try to dodge melania's attacks outside of getting space to run away and he didn't use a single non-jumping attack he exclusively jump attacked from start to finish it turns out jumping power attacks are very meta for strength builds to the point where some players like asmongold might use them exclusively for certain fights these jumping attacks have several advantages they provide fast gap closers give you iframes on much of your hitbox do high damage do high amounts of stagger and do considerable posture damage which eventually grants your stance break and critical hits jumping power attacks are strong but i never knew that now in eldon ring's defense there is one pop-up message during the tutorial which mentions jump attacks alongside charged attacks as a means of stance breaking so the game does tell you they exist in my defense you can't see posture damage and to go alongside this brief pop-up the game only provides a basic enemy who doesn't even react upon receiving a jumping attack which doesn't do a very good job at communicating that this is an important or even useful part of your toolsets keep in mind that jumping attacks have been a part of these games since dark souls won and they have never seemed very useful in the past so i never thought to start using them now this may be a good thing having another tool at your disposal but you can strategically employ when it fits a specific situation is a big positive but i don't think i would enjoy playing through the entirety of elden ring doing nothing but jump attacks to me that would make the gameplay less varied and ruin some of the immersion even if it is a more effective way to play so maybe i was actually lucky that i didn't realize jump attacks are the meta for strength builds then again i spent over 12 hours fighting melania so maybe not there has been a lot of discussion about the difficulty of eldon ring and people seem to be broadly split into two groups on the one side you have people praising eldon ring for the way it has increased accessibility and lowered the high difficulty from software is usually known for and on the other side you have people criticizing the difficulty for being harder than from software's other titles and moving the experience towards being unfair or unfun these two groups would seem to hold contradictory beliefs as this game can't be both easier and harder but the reason for this difference of opinion is simple they are the results of different play styles now you might think there are hundreds of different play styles in a game with as many options as this but really there's only two which matter and it's not summoning and not summoning nor is it magic and non-magic the two play styles are following the meta or not and if you follow the meta this is quite likely the easiest game of this type from software have ever made and if you don't particularly if you go as far as to play the game blind this is the hardest game they've made by a landslide now in terms of boss movesets these games have become more challenging over time go and replay dark souls and you might be amazed at just how simple and easy many of these once infamous fights are by the standards set by later games enemies attack slowly and predictably with clearly telegraphed attacks that provide obvious windows for the player to counter-attack but as these games have evolved boss attacks have evolved with them to try to continually increase for difficulty in proportion to the player base's natural increase in skill by eldon ring this has resulted in longer combos shorter downtime between attacks more variable attack speeds to make dodge timing more confusing and more ranged tracking and aoe attacks basically dodging has become harder and harder and knowing when to counter-attack has been made less and less clear this has had two major consequences the first is that as the difficulty has risen higher and higher it has started to reveal the cracks in from software's core gameplay in many ways difficulty is a lot like pressure in that you can only turn it up so high before its container bursts for me this was melania and i could go into several specific grievances my time with this fight revealed but to name just a few when you stance break melania there is a chance that input buffering which is the way player inputs are cued leads to you attacking her again straight away which not only removes your chance to do a critical hit but for some reason also causes melania to instantly use waterfowl dance which you'll then be too close to avoid she does this every single time you hit her when starts broken and it killed me every single time i'd estimate i died 10 maybe 20 times to this alone now some people have been complaining about input buffering in these games since dark souls on the basis that action games should be responsive and i remember seeing these complaints and thinking that really this was no big deal until i reached a difficult boss where input buffering repeatedly killed me another problem i had was the inconsistency of staggering melania where sometimes an attack would stagger her but sometimes the same attack wouldn't and she would cancel straight into a now unavoidable attack someone actually made a youtube video proving this but the main point is that people need consistency to be able to learn so a boss reacting randomly to being hit is a problem a third problem is just waterfowl dance no attack should require such a specific counter and all this does is exclude many builds and play styles while making the fight exceptionally difficult to work out without external help still more generally speaking i think the higher than the game can handle difficulty is why so many people have described eldon ring's late game as unfair or unfun it's in the late game but the difficulty really jumps up and it's here that people start to question why they have to dodge so many times in a row just to get a single chance to counter-attack or why punish windows are so unclear now or why the camera doesn't zoom out against larger enemies or why certain attacks trigger quicker than the average human reaction time when the difficulty rises high enough the cracks start to show and when the cracks get big enough it risks bringing down the foundations these games are built on such as the idea that they are hard but fair or that if you keep trying you will improve or that all weapons are designed to be viable still this is just one of the consequences of turning up the difficulty the other is that players respond by setting their own difficulty this is what players are doing when they check a guide or a wiki or a beginner's tips videos or they look up the strongest weapons or best builds or ways to cheese bosses this is what leads them down the path of the meta the game effectively becomes too difficult for their standards so they try to push the odds back in their favor using whatever help they can find now to be fair this is obviously something that happens regardless of difficulty as there will always be some players who just want to make an experience as easy as they can and also this applies to more than just eldon ring however the problem is that eldon ring increases the difficulty so much that players feel forced to try to find more meta approaches or rely on other external help as this can feel like the only way to overcome the challenge i think this is clearly shown by looking at how streamers defeat melania on people's first attempts there is a lot of variance between different builds and playstyles but on their actual kills almost everyone have resorted to one of a few different specific meta approaches what counts as a meta approach differs between fights but in this case i would say mimic tear moonbale katana rivers of blood bloodhound step and possibly excessive use of dual heavy weapon jump attacks there are 309 weapons in this game plus 91 different ashes of war and 64 different spirit ashes so the fact that every single person is using the same two or three weapons the same one or two ashes of war and only one single spirit ash shows quite clearly just how dominant the meta is there are 1.8 million different combinations these tools provide so seeing only a handful getting used says something basically if you turn the difficulty up high enough this is how people respond hell even community legend let me solo her is still using the single most meta weapon possible for this fight clearly this is not a player who lacks skill but for melania they still followed the meta this higher difficulty has caused a fundamental change to these games dark souls was about learning persevering and overcoming and this was reflected in both its mechanics and story the solution to problems in dark souls was to keep trying don't give up don't go hollow and the game tried to encourage this through things like deliberately telegraphing enemy attacks so that players understand exactly what they did wrong when they die in eldon ring however the game seems to punish players for their persistence and tries to obscure information that might help players learn all while overly rewarding looking up external information for example exploring the game for yourself leads you to always being the wrong level and missing side quests balance is terrible making certain weapons ashes and builds far more effective than others and making many playstyles feel invalid on later bosses boss attacks are designed to be challenging and visually flashy with no care given to how well they communicate information to players no effort has been made to communicate how new mechanics like stance breaking work or to teach players their effectiveness compare this to sakura which added symbols a visible posture bar and specific boss encounters all to try to help players learn leveling up is more min max focus than ever before thanks to nonsensical scaling where things like vigor might increase your health by only 16 at level 8 but at level 40 it increases it by a massive 48. this makes leveling only bigger by far the best way to go early and yet this is deliberately hidden for the information that's available in game the addition of torrent and the open structure of the world makes it effortless to ride around and gather healing and weapon upgrades early if you've checked where they are while players who travel to areas in the wrong order can find themselves at a significant disadvantage the most difficult boss fights have been given specific counters that are hard to find organically like bloodhound step for melania the claw that parries malakith the invulnerability flask for mog and the ability to permanently sleep the godskin duo to make it a 1v1 and on it goes you could say that these are different games and that they don't need to be the same but for some players the process of struggling learning and overcoming is satisfying and meaningful in a way that simply looking up a guide online isn't now i won't try to argue but there aren't people who enjoy looking things up and playing these games that way for example here is noah gervais describing his experience of using a guide to defeat melania on my second try on the hardest boss of the game and perhaps the souls like genre in general i managed to use my tool set to completely min max my mimic tear so that all of her formidable advantages melted to nothing i was able to completely shut down and bypass just about every individual element of her difficulty there are people who would tell you that there is no way that this is satisfying that it is not a fair fight and therefore not a valid one i disagree i don't know if i have ever personally felt such absolute incandescent joy after a boss fight not across any other from software games where i fought in a way that was more obviously fair and my desperate desire to win by any means necessary and avoid being stuck on the 120th hour of the game i went so far past what was necessary that my mimikter represented a more dangerous and unbalanced foe than melania herself this to me is not a cheese it is a triumph perhaps the greatest triumph of my entire experience with sprum software games in general so clearly some people get great enjoyment from meta gaming and i think that's fine what i don't think is fine is creating a difficulty so high that players who don't want to play this way feel forced to or creating a difficulty so high that players aren't able to learn through perseverance anymore or creating a difficulty so high that the cracks in the gameplay systems are exposed and at the very least this is what melania and waterfowl dance do and i think you can make an argument that there might be more offenders than this now surely there must be a point where hard becomes too hard and have we not crossed it so i ask why does the game have to be quite so hard players with the highest skill that want the hardest challenges are basically just the inverse of people looking things up to make the game easier in that they do specific challenges or speed runs to make the game harder so having a very high base difficulty isn't really catering to them anyway meanwhile players with the least interest in a challenging experience already look things up to make the game easier so a game that's already easier surely wouldn't harm their experience and lastly players who want to do things themselves play with their preferred weapons and builds and learn through failure could then once again be included and by the way for all the different criticisms i have heard over the years of souls games bloodborne and sakura one thing i haven't heard very often is people complaining these games are too easy so maybe it's time from software stop trying to outdo themselves by continually one-upping the difficulty or if they really do want to continue down this path then at the very least they need to vastly improve the balance and address certain gameplay problems so that these games can actually cope with this ever greater pressure the difficulty puts on them if they don't the meta will only become more and more dominant as more and more players come to see this as the way these games are meant to be played while those who ignore the meta get punished more and more heavily and apparently even mocked there are a lot of things you could make fun of elon musk for but one thing you can't is his elder ring build not being meta enough and yet elon musk's only slightly unusual build led to 20 plus articles multiple youtube videos and thousands upon thousands of tweets all about how stupid he is for playing the game slightly off meta how dumb this is how this is apparently disgraceful and offensive even but i guess this is just what inclusive and accessible difficulty looks like thank you from software what a great improvement meta is the enemy of fun it ruins immersion diminishes accomplishment leads to less experimentation less individuality less agency worsens any existing balance problems reduces the sense of a shared experience leads to arguments about the correct way to play and just [ __ ] all over what should be an incredible gaming experience some games are about min maxing but this is not one of them some games suffer little if you look things up but this is not one of them and some games are competitive multiplayer experiences where there will always be a focus on the meta as players need every advantage to compete but this is not one of them i have seen the meta destroy entire genres i have seen it bring some of the greatest games of all time to their needs and i just [ __ ] hate the idea of from software's future games becoming more and more meta-centric although seems like i'm already too late the very final thing i need to address here is the inevitable question that ends up being asked alongside all this which is why don't you just use spirit ashes they make the game easier after all and you complain the game becomes too hard yet this is what spirit ashes are for the answer to this is that summoning changes the gameplay to the point where it becomes an entirely different experience and just because someone is a fan of one type of experience doesn't mean they enjoy the other in eldon ring summons are more impactful than ever before to some people using them makes the game more enjoyable and to other people it ruins the enjoyment because these are different experiences that appeal to different players many of the things which drew people to these games in the first place and led people to praise their gameplay aren't present when summoning like the feeling of a 1v1 duel or learning a boss's moveset or overcoming a challenge on your own some people say fromm software clearly intended all players to use summons otherwise they wouldn't have added them but i feel it's worth pointing out that from software have still not bothered to include boss ai for summons by which i mean bosses are not capable of detecting that multiple opponents exist meaning they always ignore one person dependent on who was the last one to damage them leading to very unrealistic and easily exploitable boss behavior from this i think it's clear that the gameplay experience with summons wasn't seen as much of a priority making it hard to believe that the developers did intend all players to have to use them also the argument that they exist therefore all players are meant to use them doesn't hold up as this could be applied to everything in game for example just because lots of shields exist doesn't mean that this is the developer's way of telling people all players should use shields if something exists it's proof the developers want it to be an option not proof that developers want it to be a requirement likewise i don't know how anyone could claim that spirit ashes are balanced mimiktier can solo any boss in the game and this is after being nerfed with a meta build all the player needs to do is summon them and then go afk this is quite obviously not balanced and i also don't see how this can be the intended experience for everyone still at the very least i hope people can understand how some might not find this very enjoyable and again i'm not claiming that no one would enjoy this i'm just saying that not everyone would these games have always had summons and most people have always chosen to play without them summoning has always made these games easier so players have a large incentive to use them and yet many people still didn't because for them it led to a less enjoyable experience you might try to tell yourself this isn't true and that people avoid summoning because of gatekeepers and elitists but if you really think that i would like to ask you what is it the gatekeepers and elitists do to stop people from summoning because when you play one of these games no one knows if you use summons or not and there are no negative consequences to using them nor are there special perks for avoiding summoning you cannot upload your no summon playthrough to tinder to help you find a maiden nor can you add it to your cv to find a higher paying job people were freely able to decide for themselves whether to use summons or not and many people chose not to because that's what they found more enjoyable still even if once upon a time most people didn't use summons this isn't true anymore in elder ring the majority of people do seem to use them which has led to a bit of a role reversal where now some people have started attacking anyone who dares not to use them for being an elitist or an idiot but they're not they are just people who enjoy something different to you that's all and if you were someone who considered it wrong to shame people for using summons in the past should you not also consider it wrong to shame people for not using them now for many things i've mentioned here a large part of the problem revolves around how poorly elden ring communicates things to the player unfortunately however this poor communication also harms another part of the game the fallen leaves tell a story but i'm not convinced it's a good one i have completed eldon ring two times i have watched a reasonable amount of lore videos and i have spent a considerable amount of time reflecting on the information presented within this game one thing i haven't found yet is any reason the player is meant to care about all this now from software have become famous for their confusing narratives but i would like to compare the different openings of these games in demon souls you find yourself stuck in the kingdom of balateria where demons are consuming the souls of humans to turn them into monsters humanity is facing an existential threat and you become another poor soul trying to fight this in dark souls the life-sustaining first flame is fading and it's resulting in humans losing their sanity humanity is facing an existential threat and you become another poor soul trying to fight this in bloodborne you wake up to find yourself trapped in a nightmare where people and worse are hunting you in the streets your objective is to survive the nightmare and to do this you undertake a journey that transforms you from hunted to hunter in sakura you take the role of sekuro who has dedicated his life to protecting a child named kuro someone secro has many reasons to care about like out of a sense of honor kuro saving his life and kuro being an innocent and so sakura tries to fulfill his duty and protect him in eldon ring you are a tarnished who wakes up in the lands between and then sets out to kill every important person here to try to become the elden lord but this is not your war so why would i want to get involved in it and this is not your land so why would i want to rule it i mean it doesn't seem like a very nice place everyone just tries to kill each other there is a religious aspect to these events where you were apparently once banished by the light of grace and now it is welcoming you back and trying to guide you and it is nice that the light of grace wants me back after banishing me but why would i want it back it banished me and as far as i can tell i don't owe it to anything in fact i don't even know what it is maybe we are stuck in the lands between but other people do seem to travel between here and other places like the badlands and the land of reeds so wouldn't a more sensible motivation be to look for a way off this rather dangerous island instead we just set off immediately to kill everyone this isn't completely insane because killing people does make you stronger but it's still very psychopathic imagine if you woke up on a strange island one day maybe your plane crashed and you find this island has some problems there's even a war going on would you then jump straight into action to kill everyone and try to become the new island ruler because i know i wouldn't so why does my character every important npc we end up killing has done nothing to us some of them don't seem very nice for one of them it seems to be a mercy kill but most of the time we just travel around looking for people to kill and steal power from now in fairness they do attack us but we're the one trespassing into their domain and killing all their men so we're starting it the only reason we eventually get through all this is to repair the elden ring but why would we want to do this i mean maybe repairing the elden ring is a good thing but maybe it's not and no one explains to us why it would be not all rings are good just ask keller brimbour now if it sounds like i'm pedantically picking at unimportant details then you are at least wrong about the last part because pedantic i might be but these are not unimportant details they are at the center of the game's story from software have always withheld information and obscured details but they've never tried to withhold and obscure everything and elden ring is so committed to making everything as vague and confusing as possible that in the process it completely abandons the aspects that made previous games narratives work like having a strong central theme or using obvious and easy to understand imagery and symbolism or giving the player motivation for their journey or ensuring the vagueness fits realistically with the setting for example in dark souls there is a clear theme of struggle and finding your own way forward in spite of this as well as death and facing an inevitable end the imagery and symbolism involve a dichotomy between light and dark as well as the fading of a flame and people going hollow and all of these are easy to understand even without playing the game in a way that elden rings and greater wills are not the setting is one where most humans have already went hollow so very few people are even left to explain things to the player and when you do find someone who knows more than you they do explain exactly what you should do how you should do it and why this is so important frampt isn't necessarily telling you the truth but that's because he has his own motivations and is giving the player this information to try to manipulate them eldon ring also has a character who knows a great deal of information that is trying to persuade the player to do their bidding and this character even travels with you for most of the game and yet melina never explains why you should help her despite this being something that's obviously in her best interest i mean it's not surprising so few players choose one of melanie's endings as she never bothers to give a single reason why you should clearly this is not out of a lack of commitment to her cause as she is quite willing to burn herself alive but i guess telling the player why they should seek the oldham throne is just too far i mean self-immolation is one thing but a conversation with someone yuck now there is a lot of law in elderbring and i'm not trying to deny that it can be interesting in its own right in fact i don't think there has ever been so much law in any of these games before but at the same time i also don't think there has ever been so little reason to care about it for some people discovering the law and trying to piece it together is like a game in itself and some content creators can produce incredible things out of this but i still believe that the players experience within the game itself is the most important part and that the only reason so many people even looked deeper into the lore of past games was because they felt their actions within the game had meant something as for the law i think some of it deserves credit for being creative and interesting but it also seems like there is a huge amount of unoriginality for example the main revelation in eldon ring is that the ruling organization of this land the golden order has a dark secret which is that it's being controlled by a secret power the greater will but this is pretty much the exact same as demon souls and dark souls and bloodborne and securo i don't think the corrupt church is a bad trope but i do think it's an overused trope particularly by from software who seem to operate as if it's a narrative requirement however this twist doesn't work quite so well when we see it in every single game likewise we are once more in a dying world where the history suggests repeating cycles where there used to be an age of dragons before humans came along where the current age is being prolonged leading to stagnation where death has again went wrong leading to no one staying dead and where there is manipulation of unknowable outer gods again not necessarily bad ideas but certainly not new ideas either still now that we have breached the topic of law i think it's about time the entire souls community faces up to a hard truth which is that telling your story through item descriptions is not good storytelling and if you disagree with me saying that perhaps you might believe the man who wrote them all hirataka miyazaki who said on a japanese podcast after dark souls released but the text is so small that he can't write anything decent and that he kind of gave up with them saying this wouldn't do for a big title or serious game but that it was good enough for them also the reason he decided to write them himself as opposed to hiring professional writers was because he was happy to sacrifice quality to allow the game to be developed quicker and so that he could keep updating them as the game evolved during development in the end this turned out well maybe miyazaki was a better writer than he gave himself credit for and maybe having a single writer allowed for the end result to be more cohesive still i also think this method worked because it just so happened to be a perfect fit for the game one of the greatest strengths of dark souls story was its minimalism and putting important law on item descriptions worked well to complement this precisely because many players wouldn't feel the need to read them all so in dark souls story never got in the way and the game's atmosphere emotion and themes were thus given greater emphasis all while the lack of direct storytelling was in a way able to become a part of the story still none of this means that telling your game story through item descriptions is itself a good method the act of reading item descriptions can often be boring and the questions of who wrote these and how are we managing to read them are simply never addressed some games avoid this by creating in-universe books you can read where their content reflects the knowledge and biases of the author to allow the developers to give players incomplete information in a realistic way and this is honestly a similar but superior method still more importantly just because eldon ring tells its story through item descriptions does not mean its story is good and just because this worked in the past is not proof it will always work in the future if the only way to understand even basic parts of the story like what are our characters motivations is to read every item description then i think the story has failed somewhere in dark souls item descriptions worked as they fit with the rest of the game while allowing those who wanted to dig deeper an opportunity to do so but dark souls wasn't reliant on its item descriptions item descriptions didn't exist to create an interest in the story they existed to reward your interest in the story and the vagueness of these item descriptions worked well with the game's themes of needing to struggle and find meaning for yourself a similar argument can be made for bloodborne in how a key theme of that game was this impossible search for knowledge in the face of unknowable horror that both the player and the world's other inhabitants experience basically plant eyes on our brains to cleanse our beastly idiocy so in dark souls and bloodborne being confused about the story is a part of the story meanwhile in demon souls and sakura the storytelling is not this vague in fact it's not even close demon souls and sacro don't spoon feed the player all information but they do feature moments of exposition as well as certain characters speaking plainly to the player about important events and what they mean so dark souls and bloodborne are vague for a reason and demon souls and sacro are not this vague so why is eldon ring i think this is the most cryptic from software have ever been but i never found a reason to suggest why this is and i don't think it works in the story's favor it's okay to leave players confused but that shouldn't be the only thing they're left feeling anyone can make something that's confusing it's not a sign that something's deep being confusing is the easiest thing in the world speaking about confusing it's time we return to both of the problems raised in the previous section to discuss the side quests these games have never done much to help players find these unofficial side quests but in previous games players were at least likely to travel through these worlds in a predictable order and so most players were able to find most npcs and see many of their interactions it has always been difficult to see everything secrets have always been allowed to be secret but there were plenty of chain npc interactions most players would see such as finding solaire in lost izalith or seeing the confrontation between pate and crichton eldon ring has more of these side quests than ever before and i explored the game thoroughly in previous games this would mean i was able to see much of this npc content but in eldon ring i saw almost none because so many quest lines have such specific requirements and rely on you going to different places at different times in a way that almost no one would do without following a quest guide some of these require you to backtrack to places you've already been but there's no way to know you should do this and you can't expect players to regularly backtrack to past locations just to check if an npc has turned up other quests might involve the player being told to do something which they won't be able to do until many hours later making it hard to remember the quest even exists others need you to exhaust all dialogue or reload areas to trigger an update and then there's blide attacking you on site unless you've bought a specific gesture from a specific merchant who you probably won't find until later which easily ends both his and ronnie's quest before they even begin if players missed some quests because some were complicated that would be fine but if players miss all quests because all are complicated then it's not fine much of this is the result of the open world that prevents from software from being able to accurately predict the player's path but they should have been able to predict this problem and implement this content better mostly though this just feels like another example of how these games have come to be designed more and more for players following a wiki or guide rather than anyone playing the game naturally after all it doesn't matter how complicated a side quest is if players have a guide to tell them what to do and i assume that is what many players resort to i mean you only need to look at the game's achievement statistics to see that something isn't right here the age of stars achievement that is linked to the game's secret ending something which has so many different requirements that it feels almost impossible to achieve without a guide has been achieved by more players than all four of the normal endings combined this doesn't just tell us that the majority of players use the guide to achieve the secret ending it tells us that the majority of players did this on their first playthrough as that's the only way this achievement could be more common than the others this is a strange revelation to me it is understandable that players might want what they feel is the best ending but i can't help but wonder that if you have to spoil the ending of the game in order to get it is it still the best ending overall though i think this is just the same thing that's happened with the difficulty where if you make something too hard players will just find a way to balance it themselves even if doing so has some negative consequences on the story i don't want to repeat points i made earlier so i'd like to provide a counter example instead to try to illustrate my overarching point in a different way while also talking about the one area where i think eldon ring's story does shine which is how its strong imagery can combine with the exploration in a way to capture the player's imagination provoking players to think for themselves and experience a sense of awe and wonder at the sights they see and the places they travel to this was perhaps the main inspiration for miyazaki's original decision to be so vague in his storytelling and this at least does still work in eldon ring so my highlight of elden ring's story and one of my favorite moments with this game came at the end of a long stretch of exploration it started with a map marker yes elden ring does have map markers sometimes this one was added in a later patch to signpost a new entrance to the underground that's opened after defeating radhan the underground already feels like this entirely new world hidden away beneath the main one but when exploring this new area i was lucky enough to spot a message and item that pointed me towards a hard to find hidden path which brought me to another new area that you can jump down to the aqueduct this is actually the only entrance to this zone but i didn't know that and jumping down onto this thin support beam made me feel like i was entering somewhere i wasn't meant to be like i was trespassing and going outside the intended game zone at the end of this area i found a coffin which turned out to be a lift that brought me to another new zone deep root depths and then after some more exploration i reached the end of this zone now i want you to try to imagine you're me you entered a hidden underground zone only to find an even more hidden zone which took you to another hidden zone and at this point you have no idea where you are or what you'll find or how this place can be so big you feel like you've stumbled into an entirely new part of this world that players were never meant to see a place of mystery and secrets and at the very end of this journey you find this a decaying swamp full of roots and flies with some unknown monstrosity at its center you notice a giant fishtail first and then an oddly angled arm and something else you can't quite see in the middle which you eventually realize as you get closer is a face misshapen oddly angled sunken and rotting but a face nevertheless i know where this is going you think to yourself things like this exist in these games to come alive and attack you this is a game about boss fights after all but that's not quite what happens instead at the foot of this disgusting abomination is a woman a woman you know ah there you are i knew you would come well that makes one of us because of all the things i expected to find here in the darkest depths of this world fear was not one of them fear is the deathbed companion mentioned in the game's opening and i met her in the round table hold where she once asked to hold me she said i felt very warm and offered to hold me as often as i needed by the way she actually permanently decreases your max health by five percent when she does this what the hell fear i didn't realize i was sharing my vigor quite so literally i could have done with those hit points against melania anyway i didn't know this at the time and i liked fear she seemed nice and here she was in this place of death and decay perched beneath this hideous monster where she asks you this what is it you intend to deny us and our ways like the dogmatic roots of the golden order and i thought about this all signs here point to this being bad this is not a pleasant place there is a constant sound of flies buzzing in your ears while you talk and it feels like the game is trying to tell you not to side with this person but what the [ __ ] do i know about fear or the golden order or what's right and wrong in this land how could i ever confidently deny her her ways i don't know anything about them which meant there was only one option left you are an odd one i am the guardian of those who live in death they call me a foul and rotten witch yet you still wish to be held by me and so she held me and whispered secrets in my ears and my god did they feel secret in this moment i felt like i'd wandered out of the game's intended playable area into somewhere completely new somewhere i was never meant to be only to find a person i was never meant to find who is now telling me secrets i was never meant to hear in this moment i felt like i was the only person in the world to have ever come here and knelt in this place of decay to listen to fear's whispers and i hope that if you maybe don't play these games like me and don't want to that you can at least understand how there is a magic to not knowing where you're going and what you'll find and instead just embracing the imperfections of wandering this world on your own uncovering the secrets you can find grasping at the little you do understand while letting your mind fill in the rest i never did find the item theo was looking for and so i wasn't able to progress her questline further but if i had found it i would have given it to her and if i did get a choice at the end of this game i would have chosen fear because [ __ ] the lands between i know nothing about this place and [ __ ] these people they mean nothing to me but a hug a hug is something i can understand and compared to everything else out there a hug seems as good a reason as any to take the elden throne and if anyone wants to call me a simp for this then i will at least need to see some proof that you didn't pick rani's ending because i refused to be talked down to by anyone that looked up all the endings and then just chose the one where they get to be ronnie's maiden anyway it is my sincere hope that i will come to regret this section of the video in the months and years to come i hope that time will prove me wrong but there is more to this story and that the reason eldon ring seems to have so little to say is because it is yet to reveal its full hand that eldon ring's narrative is perhaps not meant to be considered as a standalone tale but as the introduction to a new interesting world that will be built upon by future dlc and the inevitable sequel i hope i am wrong but as it stands it seems like eldum ring uses vagueness not to serve its story but as a mask to hide behind to obscure its other problems and people just accept this because vagueness is what from software fans are used to so how could it be bad still from where i'm standing the emperor doesn't appear to be wearing any clothes and i think most people are just afraid to say so and to be honest that sounds like a good segue for the conclusion so let's bring this to an end i think eldon ring is a good game i think from software are the best developer in the industry right now i don't begrudge eldon ring its metacritic score or sales and frankly i think it deserves them just as much as most other things out there i understand how so many people can enjoy their time with a game like this and i still look forward to whatever games from software will make in the future but i cannot deny that the main emotion i walked away from this game with was disappointment disappointment that it's a good game which could have been so much more disappointment that the best developer in the industry had taken so few risks and forgotten so much of what once made their game special disappointment that the lessons from software are likely to learn from this are the wrong ones and disappointment that the experiences other people seem to have had are so vastly different to mine making me feel like my playstyle is no longer valid despite the fact it was that same playstyle but still led to many of the best memories i did have with this game people worry about games going open world because it leads to them diluting their core appeal and that seems to be what happened with eldon ring people praised eldon ring for its more accessible difficulty and yet its higher difficulty has excluded more playstyles than ever before and people are unwilling to criticize eldon ring's story due to how impenetrable it is and the assumption that it must be good because it's from software even if that isn't actually true still none of these are what i find most disappointing in this post-elden ring world i can't help but think about the game which shot from software into stardom in a time where every game developer was trying to make their games more accessible and more broadly appealing while always holding the player's hand and explaining everything dark souls stood alone as a complete rejection of this it was a game about doing things for yourself finding where to go making sense of an unclear story overcoming challenging bosses and finding your own reason to keep going that was what dark souls was about and it incorporated this into its mechanics its setting and its narrative and people loved it for many it was one of the best gaming experiences they ever had and its success created the foundation that would one day make elder ring possible and yet here we are 11 years later and from software and their fan base have turned this game into the exact opposite elder ring punishes players for trying to do things themselves and now everyone just copies the same few meta builds while using a wiki to tell them how to do the side quests and to check which ending they want and then hopping over to youtube to get someone else to tell them what they're meant to think about the story dark souls was a game about thinking for yourself and finding your own way so i can't help but wonder what the [ __ ] happened and what is elden ring about well to me the main theme of the story seems to be about questioning and overcoming authority to try to create a future of your own after all the golden order is based on lies the outer gods are manipulating this world and its people your journey tasks you with defeating those with competing visions and the final boss we slay is the embodiment of the greater will itself which then allows us a chance to define our own future as elder lord so i do have to admit i find it ironic than in a game about escaping the influence of exterior powers and following your own path that the way people actually play this game and what the developers seem to encourage is the exact opposite a lot of people have said eldon ring is like dark souls it's not but i wish it was so thank you for watching my video you

Channel: NeverKnowsBest

Views: 740,806

Keywords: elden ring review, elden ring, elden ring critique, elden ring analysis, elden ring bad, elden ring disappointing

Id: B34PBHYmcnQ

Length: 104min 0sec (6240 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Stoneador]

Elden Ring is weird where I’d say that FromSoft absolutely nailed the open world aspect of it but I found most of the boss fights to be far more frustrating than fun or satisfying. Sucks because I absolutely loved the game, but I ended my play through with so many bad boss fights that it left a bad taste in my mouth.

This guy also has a video called Dark Souls is underrated. I love the game, but it’s probably one of the most overrated games of all time. The game might be the most influential game of the past few generations and there’s a lot I love about it, but there’s so much wrong with it too. Almost everything after O&S is absolute garbage from a design perspective and it’s a huge chunk of the game’s overall content.