I *very* strongly recommend: Elden Ring (Review - Spoiler Free)

this video is brought to you by green man gaming who is selling elden ring for up to 18 off its offer code skillup18 at checkout so click the link below if you can but i'll talk some more about it at the end of the video before we begin a quick note on spoilers the embargo for the review permits me to show only the first two regions of eldon ring's world which is similar to what you would have seen in both trailers and gameplay previews i will be showing a number of locations and boss encounters within that but should you wish to go in completely blind you can listen to this review as you would a podcast as i'll not be making any specific mentions or call outs that will spoil things such as major boss encounters law or anything else should you choose it i want you to be able to experience elden ring the same way i did totally blind so this review will be written to protect that experience [Music] i expect that the arrival of eldon ring will proceed months or even years of discussion about whether or not it is fromsoft's best game i think it's important to remember just how many vectors that discussion exists on is it demon souls for establishing the foundation of the souls-like formula or was it dark souls for solidifying those ideas and bringing them into a singular contiguous world was it dark souls 2 no was it bloodborne with its lovecraftian horror and reinvention of from soft combat or was it sakiro which didn't redefine from soft combat so much as it showed an entirely different brutally exacting vision of it it is remarkable enough that a studio that made dark souls can also lay claim to multiple other titles that match the quality and influence of that founding work but fromsoft have proven that they are anything but one-trick ponies and as the souls-like genre continues to version as an established sub-genre of video games fromsoft continues to stand firmly atop and astrided other studios can make games like this and some of them can do a brilliant job of it but no studio can make these games quite like fromsoft can to from soft storied pantheon is now added eldon ring and while it's not for me or anyone really to say that this is their best game i can confidently say that this is so far absolutely without a doubt my favorite from game my favorite souls like and if all of this holds to the conclusion then this will be one of the best open world games i've ever played i phrase it that way because i have not finished this yet and i expect most reviewers have not code for this went out late later for some than others i'm now 60 hours deep into this game i've killed dozens of mida bosses but i've killed just over half of what i believe are the main bosses and it's possible that there are more main bosses than that that i don't even know about yet in that time i've had minimal wipes i'm actually one-shotting most of the bosses because at this point i'm so farmed up from exploring the world in the way that i have this game is absolutely gigantic i spoke to one reviewer who is up to the last boss after 80 hours and i know he's moving through the game more briskly than i am i suspect and this is a guess but i suspect an average thorough playthrough of this game one where you aim to fully explore the map and kill most of the bosses that's gonna be somewhere in the vicinity of 90 to 100 hours that makes it twice the size of dark souls games two and a half times the size of bloodborne and three times the size of sakiro like i said it's absolutely gigantic so while i've not yet finished this game i've already spent more time with it than i have on any other souls like during a first playthrough and that's more than enough time for me to come to the conclusions that i have though admittedly some of them may evolve as i continue to play more of the game eldon ring is a culmination of everything that fromsoft has learned and achieved in their time making games like this with dark souls in particular being the central anchoring point all of the aesthetics the world the enemy and combat of dark souls are here but they are amplified systems like magic which seem to sit somewhat awkwardly within the series have now been brought into its center with a vast arsenal of spells weapon arts and summonable spirits weaving seamlessly into even the most stringent strength focused builds melee combat has been greatly expanded with jump attacks guard counters and borrowing from sakiro a focus on breaking enemy posture rather than just whittling them down the range of enemies on display is staggering as is the individual tuning of each of them even minor foes have combos and follow-up attacks that are specifically designed to mess with you because fromsoft know when you expect that combo or animation to end and they love saying surprise leading you back to that all too familiar you died screen as an open world game i expect that elden ring will serve as a line break the same way that breath of the wild did or before that shadow of the colossus at every turn eldon ring rejects the modernity of open world game design quest lists map markers gps trackers copy and pasted locations there are no crutch systems here that the player can lean on to lead them somewhere and no rhythm to be found in how this landscape is explored or conquered in fact i'd argue that the defining characteristic of elder rings topography and layout is how it exists in response to almost any other open world level design i've experienced most other open worlds feel as though they were built there is an order to them no matter how much the developers try to avoid it the land between feels as though it came into being through the cataclysmic collision of tectonic plates uneven formless and splintered fromsoft have captured the creative destruction of nature in a way that no other game has the very land on which this epic saga unfolds is to borrow the term built different and just wait until you see the wonders that fromsoft have breathed into this absolutely mammoth world finally eldon ring is a fundamentally different game in how approachable it is there was a narrowing of the final occurring at fromsoft since dark souls was released each subsequent title offering a more challenging experience that demanded more of the player culminating in sakiro which unlike most other fromsoft titles offered an extremely narrow set of options in both combat and progression path eldon ring is the opposite of that the amount of choice in this game is unparalleled within the souls-like sub-genre characters stats weapons spells weapon arts summons the simple choice to either fight or run to fight or stealth to fight alone or with the help of others to fight here and now or to fight elsewhere and then return later with the benefit of better weapons and more experience i would not recommend bloodborne and sakiro to most people because most people will not be able to play them they will immediately meet one of the many impossible walls erected by those games and be too crestfallen to continue i wouldn't recommend eldon ring to anyone but i would definitely recommend it to a far wider group of people owing to how many options there are to deal with each challenge if you have eyed souls like games from afar but were too scared to jump in then elden ring may prove to be the perfect entry point into the souls-like sub-genre the wait for elden ring was long but it was worth it eldon ring exceeds every single one of my expectations so thoroughly that i constantly found myself wondering how fromsoft could still have this much in reserve after decades of producing industry defining experiences this is a double album with fromsoft at the peak of their creative power unfathomably large fathoms deep and utterly remarkable so i want to talk briefly about performance stability and bugs since i know there's been some anxiety about that particularly on the pc front firstly a quick tour of the pc options menu eldon ring does offer a basic suite of settings that get the job done but they're far from enthusiast level i did not test this game on a keyboard and mouse because i can't imagine anything worse than playing elden ring on a keyboard and mouse but xbox controller support worked just fine you can remap a number of buttons for both controller and keyboard and mouse however not everything system commands like opening and closing the menu or map are not rebindable and the default bindings for these on keyboard are really bad so be aware of that if you're playing on kbm for some reason there's a handful of graphical options allowing you to tweak performance but there's no fov slider from games do typically have a fairly narrow native field of view so that would have been nice especially when the world offers up vistas like this outside of that there's nothing like amd fsr or dlss to give you a performance boost but there is an auto detect best rendering settings toggle which claims to scale things to maintain consistent performance though i'm not exactly sure how that works i left it off during my playthrough and it was fine i tested eldon ring on an rtx 2080 ti and an amd ryzen 3700x i tried to run it first at native 4k but that wasn't good i was able to reach 60 fps at times but i did get a lot of frame drops particularly as i panned over vistas i don't want to play any souls like game with frame drops so i dropped it down to 1440p and i had silky smooth performance the game is capped at 60fps on pc which i know will disappoint some but it doesn't bother me personally i think 60fps is enough and i was just glad to see how rock-solid that fps was during my playthrough whether it was distant vistas or densely lit internal spaces or combat sequences full of multiple enemies with spell and particle effects i never lost any frames it almost always felt extremely smooth extremely reliable there was one notable exception to that however and that was some micro stuttering now micro stuttering in elden ring is not a common random occurrence rather it's a recreatable bug that occurs in precise areas for example when i fight the tree sentinel boss in the overworld if i find him at the top of this hill i don't get any stuttering but if the fight ever cascades to the bottom of the hill i will always get stuttering there were other examples where i was able to identify this phenomenon and was again able to recreate this issue so these instances are very rare at least they work for me and crucially they're very localized so you're unlikely to have these randomly occur throughout your playthrough also make the point that i did not review this on the day one patch that patch was pushed out after i had finalized this script so it's possible that the patch could have corrected this micro stuttering issue but we didn't get any patch notes for that so i can't say bottom line though this is not a thing you should be worried about if your experience is anything like mine this will be so rare an occurrence that it will not disrupt your playthrough at all outside of that i had almost zero bugs the only one i encountered was that i would sometimes call my mount torrent and instead of him appearing i would just kind of float in the air for a few seconds and then i would die i don't have any footage for that but it happened like maybe three times over my 60 hours play through so yeah overall a very bug-free watertight experience the only other thing to call out here in the technical section is the pop-in pop-in was definitely a feature of the game when i tested it on consoles some of it was pretty noticeable with even items in the medium distance popping in suddenly in my time reviewing the game it was clear that the issue persists but it seems to be far less of an occurrence i can't say whether that's due to it being better on pc or if broader work was done across all versions of the game to improve this to put the pop in in perspective i definitely found it to be a distracting problem in horizon forbidden west admittedly one i was willing to look past here in eldon ring it's just a thing that you'll notice if you're really looking for it i mean i spent 60 hours in this world and i was just never thinking about the pop-up occurring i was just taking in the landscape the incredible art design the foes i was fighting it's only now as i look back to this footage again and really look at it that i could see this pop-up occurring on occasion i think that tells you that fromsoft have done a pretty solid job overall in what is easily the most expansive vast and detailed world they have ever created [Music] to the lands between to stand before the elden ring [Music] the lands between is a space unlike any i have explored in a video game its topography its landmarks its secrets its supporting gameplay systems the entire design philosophy of it is almost an inversion of every tenet of modern open world video game design the best way i can describe it is that most level design including open world design is designed around building a rule set the players can internalize and then apply to new locations regardless of how different those new locations may look new spaces are meant to be disorienting at first but eventually patterns and algorithms emerge that players can use to get their bearings like if i step into a new region in assassin's creed valhalla or the witcher 3 or fallout 4 the new region will look different but it will follow a familiar set of rules topographical layout the function and location of key landmarks the way that secrets are hidden the placement of enemies the power of those enemies relative to each other and to me the player is meant to quickly develop a template for understanding all of this that can be reapplied wherever they might end up elden ring isn't entirely devoid of that there are some rules to be found in some parts of it you will look for grey sites when it feels as though there should be one nearby you'll find some structure in the mini dungeons that are peppered throughout the landscape but that's pretty much about it outside of that the lands between are such a discombobulating space to move through because they are specifically designed to never let you arrive at that template of understanding that underpins other games it starts with the topography and i know it's weird to talk about this so much but the very lands of the lands between are their own fascinating approach to level design the landscape is so uneven and multi-tiered in one moment it flows out before you like a riverbed and you can sweep through it like a current and in the next moment it's jagged rocks and plateaus and you're performing successive jumping puzzles to make your way up and through it this land undulates it arcs and dips and it does so for a reason most open world game design is meant to subtly or overtly guide the player to the things that are meant to be found a starting point for that is that topography needs to let things be seen you don't want a small hill or recess obscuring the thing you want your players to find even when developers are trying to make something look hidden it's not really that hidden there's a lot of subtle arrows pointing you toward that thing most of the time eldon ring is at all times working so hard to hide things from you and the landscape itself is the key tool it uses in that subterfuge so often the remote corners of the most remote regions have some sort of tree lining or narrow drop or hidden elevation that makes it impossible to see what might be there and on top of that those sections are often shrouded in pitch black shadow so the only way to see the small black dungeon door hiding there is to ride right up to it so you can see it for yourself looking at the map wouldn't have shown it to you looking at it from afar wouldn't have revealed it to you you had to go and check thoroughly check otherwise you would have missed it in this way the lands between invert the way we typically conceive of space in open world games a common complaint one that i often put forth is that open world games are full of empty useless space real estate for real estate's sake because unless something is visible from afar or already marked on your map then you know that there's not going to be anything there in eldon ring every single square inch of the lands between is valuable territory because you know that there could be something there nine times out of ten there will not be anything there but the fact that you are engaging this landscape the way that you are that you are scouring every nook and cranny immediately makes that space worthwhile hell i even loved using the map in this game because topography is so important you will absolutely study the elden ring map in a way that few other video games will ask you to do you will look at the way roads flow and connect you look at where cliff lines end you'll always be asking yourself how can i get up there how can i get over there how can i get to that place and the map walks such a fine line between giving you the clues and the solution that opening it and studying it always feels like such a rewarding investigative process i've not had a better more fulfilling time exploring any open world landscape in any game than i have here in eldon ring the arrival at a new region is this incredibly exciting prospect because i know i'm about to do battle with this landscape i'm not talking about combat with enemies by the way i'm talking about the struggle to wrench free every secret that these landscapes clench in their jaws when i look back over the regions i've completed and i see the collection of map markers now populated i get the same sense of satisfaction that i do when i recall eldon ring's marquee boss encounters more so in fact because a boss is you know it's a few wipes and they're dead these regions are so massive and so dense that on average it takes 15 to 20 hours to fully explore and conquer them i mean just as a point of reference it took me 25 hours to reach and kill the first major boss in stormvale castle because before i did that i fully completed the limb grave region which is what we saw in the technical test as well as another southern island which is also part of limgrave i did a bunch of other minor exploration as well but i was not wiping to bosses like i said i was one-shotting most of the bosses but the density of these regions how much there is to discover within each of them it's unbelievable at times i would circle back to areas as i move between different locations and as i did i would discover new things even though i was so thorough the first time through i can't think of a more dense secret rich open world game than this one but its most attractive feature is what i spoke about earlier how little rhyme or reason there is to it new regions in eldon ring are not similar to the last either in their aesthetic their enemy populations or the rules that govern them they don't have x number of outposts and x number of bosses to fight an x number of items to collect a region you encounter might not be at all connected to your main quest of becoming elden lord or it might be integral to it it might start as a beautiful expansive blue lit lake region but round one corner and suddenly you find yourself in a pitch-black ruined town hidden in the bowels of the greatest structure above it one npc you encounter might be so unimportant now but later is revealed to be of the utmost importance and when you return to speak to them they vanished with no clue whatsoever as to where they might have relocated a simple way to say this is that the lands between is full of surprises and that's true but it's really short-changing what fromsoft have done here it's not about surprises it's about the erasure of the concept of surprise you very quickly give up on trying to predict what each new space has in store for you you just kind of succumb to its fever dream s quality each new region or landmark or boss encounter is the manifestation of fromsoft's unparalleled imagination for dark fantasy and here in this open world structure fromsoft have delivered their most haunting and beautiful world yet [Music] in addition to the open world structure that eldon ring adopts it retains the classic dungeon structure of previous fromsoft titles these exist in three forms which i'll just call minor middle and major dungeons the minor dungeons are the ones you'll find hidden away throughout the open world as i mentioned earlier these dungeons are the rare parts of eldon ring that follow a formula of sorts but there's always a satisfying level of variation within that formula they look similar aesthetically and the pool of enemies and bosses they draw from are similar but the layouts for each of these spaces is always entirely unique and often has a puzzle of some kind that on some occasions i just couldn't even solve so i had to kind of just walk out of the dungeon defeated enemies will utilize new weapons or status effects where they didn't before and bosses will always have some evolution of their capabilities making them increasingly more challenging as you face them in subsequent dungeons they'll gain raw stats new movesets and often allies to fight alongside them meaning that the challenge these bosses pose continues to scale with both your raw stats and your knowledge of the boss's capabilities these dungeons are not the standout feature of elden ring but nor are they repetitive filler despite the similarities they share there is always enough work put into each of them to make them engaging and worthy of your time and crucially these dungeons always reward you with an item or spell that can transform your build depending on how powerful it is or how well it might synergize with your current loadout i never once walked out of a dungeon disappointed by it i never felt like fromsoft had phoned that one in and i'll also mention that some of these dungeons diverge from the mould i've described quite substantially and they're awesome you'll find some of those later the middle tier of those dungeons are it's almost not fair to call them dungeons they're more like parts of the open world that are so big and fleshed out that they straddle the line between open world activity and classic dungeon imagine a mine that will take you an hour or more to move through imagine an old ruined castle culminating in a massive boss encounter that awards a legendary weapon i really enjoy these activities because they bring together these old and new worlds they couldn't exist in a game like dark souls because dark souls isn't structured like that but they borrow so much of how dark souls design dungeons and internal spaces the other thing is that these middle tier dungeons are entirely optional you don't have to do them but the rewards for doing them are always so worthwhile for example two of the weapons i'm using in my final build are from two of these middle tier dungeons finally there's the major dungeons i know there were some concerns that these would suffer a drop in quality owing to how many resources were being put into the rest of the game's open world but no such drop in quality exists at least not as far as i'm concerned firstly these dungeons are massive at least one of them is larger than anything i've seen in any other fromsoft title staggeringly large and just as intricate and interlocking eldon rings major dungeons are multi-layered labyrinthine affairs that reward exploration through not necessarily items or experience but through the sheer satisfaction of finally being able to map this space in your head that familiar process of circling back to follow alternative pathways dropping down to walkways below making sure that every dark crevice has been explored you'll do that exact same thing here in eldon ring and in fact i found the exploration of these spaces to be greatly enhanced by the inclusion of the jump button which allows you to jump straight up without having to run first this seems to open up so many exploratory paths and you really do think about space very differently before you were on the golden path that fromsoft had laid down now you're often searching for ways to break free of that path by hopping up to a ledge or leaping across rooftops you have a different relationship with space in these dungeons now i do think it makes things a little easier since it's now easier to avoid enemies you don't want to fight but it's less about difficulty and more about options and a more organic relationship to space than previous fromsoft games have allowed for sakura aside if you're worried that eldon ring would lose the tense curated spaces that are the hallmark of fromsoft games i think you can rest easy eldon rings dungeons delivered just as impressively and comprehensively as its open world does which in my view makes this structural transition a success and as ambitious as eldon ring is in its overhauling of fromsoft's classic game structure it's equally ambitious with the way it overhauls and expands combat so first of all i'm going to tell you that any single review you see for this game is going to give you only one very specific slice of what combat and eldon ring is like because we only got to build one build the full picture of eldon rings combat will take months to assemble as gear and spells are located and tested builds are put together pvp metas are established and speed runners do their dangers to thoroughly break this game so what i can provide you here are my own personal impressions based on 60 hours played and that's all i started in character creation which is extremely robust and flexible i'm not huge into that stuff but i'm sure you could make some truly fugly characters if you tried i chose the confessor class which is a hybrid of strength and faith i kind of wish i chose otherwise because what i would learn is that a lot of faith spells come in much later and by that point my build had kind of morphed into a strength-based sword and board affair so that's essentially what most of my playthrough was having said that magic spells be they faith or arcane based are so woven into the fabric of this game's combat and progression that it's highly likely that at least some of them will weave their way into whatever builds you're creating unless you're really actively trying to avoid them in elden ring magic is a central part of this game's combat and progression model where in previous fromsoft games it felt like more of a specific or niche choice here many minor dungeons will culminate in a boss that awards you a spell many bosses you'll encounter in the open world will do the same many of the npcs you meet will expand your arsenal of spells and many of the items hidden throughout the open world will unlock further spell training options at those npcs let me put it this way you will find more spells than you will weapons or armor because there are so many spells that the game can afford to constantly feed them to you without ever running out a lot of that has to do with how many spell categories there are there are arcane spells that deal magic damage and there are different subsets within those there are multiple subsets of faith-based spells harnessing the power of dragons of fire of cleansing holy light and more there are summon spells which call forth a variety of units to the battlefield stuff ranging from lowly skeletons to wolves to ghosts of ancient warriors past more than capable of holding their own against even the toughest bosses these summons in particular are going to be a big part of almost everyone's arsenal because of how much utility they provide unless you specifically prefer the challenge of fighting unassisted by ai companions the most interesting spells aren't really spells they're more like weapon arts they're called ashes of war and they're consumable items that can be fused with select categories of weapons and they unlock a range of different combat maneuvers my shield for example i use this barricade ability which greatly improves my block strength on the next attack i block this is often enough to make the enemy recoil which opens them up to a guard counter extremely powerful ability even when used against bosses on my weapon i have this leaping guillotine style attack that leaves a pool of magma wherever i jump that will damage my foes if they continue to stand in it it's awesome there are so many of these ashes of war dozens of them in fact some of them are unique to legendary weapons but many of them are just pickups that can be fused with almost any weapon of your choosing providing an absolutely crazy amount of build diversity i kind of regret my build to be honest i think it's the most boring way to play this game i think this game is going to shine brightest when you forego your shield and use offensive spells in your off hand i think that a melee build is fine don't get me wrong but there are so many amazing spells and summons that can be utilized here that it's almost a shame to ignore them in the way that i did i look through my vast library of spells and incantations and summons and ashes of war and think damn i really wish i'd put more stats into intellect faith and mind because i feel like this is the part of the combat experience that fromsoft worked hardest to innovate on versus previous entries having said that if you do want to play a melee only build then that's also great i mean from a hygiene perspective i've had zero instances of egregious hitbox pawn with hit registration feeling now essentially flawless in terms of my capabilities as a melee fighter each weapon has its own unique move sets and combos but the focus of combat has changed it's less about r1 spam to whittle down your enemies and more about charged r2 attacks jump attacks and guard counters these things will wear down the enemy's invisible poise meter opening them up to critical attacks this is eldon ring's take on sakura's combat model or before that bloodborne with its focus on push forward combat you can turtle behind a shield here and it will work splendidly but you are very much incentivized to be relentless in the face of your foe and bring them to their knees with your aggression that last point speaks to a broader evolution that eldon ring achieves and that is in relation to how accessible this game is versus other from soft titles i'm not talking about settings in the options menu for people with a disability nor am i talking about the old easy mode debate i'm talking about the core concept of accessibility as it relates to everyone because from soft games are typically inaccessible to most people i don't mean you watching this video if you watch this channel you are probably like myself a massive nerd who plays too many video games we represent a tiny tiny portion of the overall market i'm talking about your average punter who looks at the challenge imposed by souls likes and says nope that's not for me i can't blame those people like i said earlier fromsoft games have become more challenging over the years as they cater to an increasingly experienced player base bloodborne upped the ante on this with its removal of the shield and its focus on push forward combat but sakiro took it even further as it was so singular in its design one weapon one way if you couldn't click with that then sakiro offered you essentially nothing the inelegant ask this whole time has been add an easy mode and miyazaki has been like no but clearly he was listening to those demands and he has responded to them through not an easy mode toggle but through a raft of options that at any point can make the game vastly easier should you choose to employ them i mean obviously there's the whole spell system which on balance is an easier way to play because you're keeping distance from your foes there's the summonable ai companions who do a huge amount of heavy lifting during fights there's the summonable npcs outside certain boss encounters as has always been the case just as there's the option to summon in other players to assist you during either exploration or for bosses there's an unparalleled amount of build craft here allowing you to choose between safe defensive styles of play or hyper aggressive glass cannon builds there's stealth i mean that is a seriously important component of this game allowing you to avoid so many unwanted fights or get the upper hand in the opening of an engagement which makes the rest of it super easy crucially the open world structure gives you the choice to fight here and now or just leave and then come back later that was the thing about other fromsoft titles yeah you could go back and farm souls or whatever to level up but that same boss was still waiting for you as the singular bottleneck you need to pass now if that boss just isn't working for you there are like 10 other bosses that you could go and fight right now awarding you experience new gear new spells and so much more it's never been so easy to farm up so that you can overstat and over gear and encounter and like i said i've actually been one-shotting most encounters in this game not because i am good believe me i'm not but because i've spent so much time exploring the world that i am fat with stats at this point for real i'm gonna say this it's a big call but it's true this is among the easiest souls likes i've ever played sakiro and neo kicked my ass repeatedly from the first boss to the last elden ring has been a cakewalk compared to that because i am so farmed up because i'm utilizing a safe and defensive style of play and because i'm utilizing things like stealth and ai summons to assist me that's what i mean when i talk about how accessible this game now is people who have never been able to finish these sorts of games in the past i really feel like they've got a fair shot here so if you've been eyeing the souls like sub genre and you've been too scared to jump in then this is really the best possible entry point not only because of the accessibility i've described but also because eldon ring is just a amazing game and everyone should play it greetings [Music] i would consider myself a casual fromsoft fan in the sense that i've played and finished all of their games i've platinum dark souls 1 but i'm not the person who goes back and repeatedly plays through each game 5 10 20 times there are legitimate reasons to do that of course obviously there's the completionist desire to get every collectible every weapon every trophy there's the sheer mastery of it where you memorize the layouts and shortcuts in each level or the attack patterns of each boss such that subsequent playthroughs are vastly different owing to your ability to play more aggressively and dominate your foes in a way you simply couldn't while you were still learning then there's the invasion based pvp where a devoted community of people will invest thousands of hours and then there's the buildcraft side of things where new playthroughs allow you to build highly specialized builds and you set for yourself a new challenge to play through the game in a new way as i look over what i've experienced of eldon ring i'm awestruck by the degree to which each part of the fromsoft formula has been elevated such that this is now an incredibly massive dense rpg experience that even as i conclude this playthrough i'm planning my second i'll never again have the joy of experiencing this world for the first time but i want to revisit this landscape with experienced eyes and surgically extract from it what i need i want to be pvp invaded which is not something that happened during the review window i want to redo my build so that i can experience the fullest potential of this game's combat in a way that i don't think anyone fully can on a first play through and i think that's a really important point to conclude on eldon ring is so immense in scale in its depth in its systems and its secrets that one playthrough even at 100 hours long is nowhere enough to fully extract the value of this game it's simply too dense for you to process all of it as you take it in the first time you will make wrong decisions you will miss so much you will experience only a tiny slice of what the combat and rpg systems allow for the complexity is so overwhelming that no single person can grasp all of this in the next few weeks or months it becomes a community effort to find all of these secrets to break down all of these rpg stats and combat systems to share knowledge what other single player games could this be said of very few but a big chunk of games on that list are other fromsoft titles here in eldon ring fromsoft remind us why years after their seminal work that spawned a sub-genre they are still the undisputed masters of that sub-genre they evolved their formula while retaining its most essential aspects they delivered a world so massive in scale that it dwarfs anything that they or their contemporaries have created in the past they have refined deepened and broadened every aspect of their combat and rpg systems and in so doing they've opened up this game to a population of people that might never have had the opportunity to experience a fromsoft title before eldon ring is by every metric and astounding work and is sure to be regarded by many as a new pinnacle for a studio that has already delivered some of the greatest video games ever made [Music] all right so if you're planning on grabbing eldon ring on pc then you can get it cheaper from green man gaming how much cheaper well 16 is the base discount but if you're a new customer of gmg they're going to give you 18 off that's just a regular steam key by the way sourced directly from bandai namco and it's like 16 or 18 off not bad if you haven't heard of green man gaming before then you have been missing out i've been buying stuff from them for years because they always offer excellent prices on pc titles but they're not a grey market key reseller every single key they sell has been sourced directly from the publisher themselves so there's no scammy stolen keys that end up being cancelled weeks or months after you bought them it's 100 legit all the money goes directly to the publisher and all the savings go directly to you beyond elden ring there are of course lots of games in the gmg library so you can peruse their extensive range of titles many of which are regularly discounted so it's always a good idea to check back regularly and see what green men are up to the odd and ring offer is strictly limited so do get in there fast it's only available to those in the us uk canada and eu i guess that's because of local publishing deals or whatever i don't exactly know i know that's a bummer to anyone that falls outside those territories my australian brethren included but i'd rather give a bunch of you a nice discount than nobody at all once again that offer code is skillup 18 at checkout for up to 18 off elden ring for pc link in the description and the pinned comment thanks greenman for sponsoring the video and thank you for watching [Music] you

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Keywords: skill up, skill, up, gameplay, games, guide, Action, Elden Ring, Elden Ring Gameplay, Elden Ring Impressions, Elden Ring Preview, Elden Ring info, FromSoftware, PC, PS4, PS5, Preview, RPG, Xbox, Xbox One, bloodborne, dark souls, demon's souls, elden ring dark souls, elden ring from software, elden ring lore, elden ring stormveil castle, from software, new elden ring, sekiro, Elden Ring 4k, Elden Ring review, elden ring bosses, eldgen ring part 1, elden ring guide

Id: gfcJv3oZNcc

Length: 36min 38sec (2198 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 23 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Rogue_Leader_X]

When he says he was "one shoting" the bosses, I assume he means beating them in one attempt, not one hit.

That would be pretty insane to be that powerful.

[u/Queef-Elizabeth]

For real, other studios can make fantastic soulslike game but no one does them like From Soft

[u/9BluesFan]

First time playing a FromSoftware game but my god am I pumped! I cannot wait for Friday...conveniently booked a few "appointments" in my work calendar haha

[u/Rain1dog]

Will be my 2nd time attempting a From Soft game. Hopefully things go better this time.

[u/FrankSucks89]

This game is going to be such a massive time sink that honestly I don’t think I will ever have enough time for with kids and work etc.
I feel like HFW is gonna take me months to complete.

[u/Stockpile_Tom_Remake]

How spoilery is this?

[u/EmeraldWeapon56]

is this review for the PC version or PS5 version?

[u/need_dopamine95]

Miyazaki is kingpin

[u/PussyLunch]

Skillup always hits on everything. He is so good at encapsulating what games are trying to achieve.