Elden Ring - Shadow of the Erdtree Expansion Announced

[Ste Pickford]

2 minutes ago, HarryBizzle said:

Seems identical to the Demon’s Souls to Dark Souls situation. Except I think Sony had exclusive rights to DeS and BB. 

 

Yeah, but at least the Demon's Souls / Dark Souls thing had a straightforward reason that Sony had rights to Demon's, so they had to make Demon's Souls 2 as technically a new IP for legal reasons.

[robdood]

25 minutes ago, John0 said:

 

The crystaline enemies were really odd. At first I wondered in with my longsword and was doing nothing to them.. but once I started breaking their super armour I was taking big chunks out of them with the same attacks, I swear. I wondered if it's not that Strike weapons specifically do more damage, but that Strike more easily breaks their super armour?

Hmm I'm not sure, as far as I know 'super armour' is another word for 'poise' i.e. it's an invisalb ebar that once filled mean the enemy falls into a postion where you can critical them (basckstab or face stab, etc).  Enemies do seem to take increased damage during this state, but it doesn't last long. 

 

Like, check this stupid damage, you can't hurt them this much with anything other than strike weapons:

 

[Onze]

53 minutes ago, Lovelyman said:

I wish they added an icon to tell you if you’ve killed the boss in the catacombs/mines etc once you’ve found them. 

I just mark the map at the site of grace or entry the cave etc with the skull icon. 

 

It's simple and only takes a couple of seconds. Then when the boss is done I just remove the marker.

 

Same for bosses that are just roaming around the map. 

[Captain Kelsten]

The pure strength struggle 

 

[HarryBizzle]

I am very interested in the world, but it doesn’t seem to be giving me much in the moment. I’m in Liurnia, intrigued by the little grey swamp Martian things and would love to know a bit more about them and what they are, but haven’t found any items with any useful info. 
 

I found the key to Raya Lucaria and pelted past the dragon that one-shotted me to find it. Not sure if how easily he took me out bodes well for me going there, but I’m going to check it out tonight. 
 

Oh, and I found a manor in the far North West of the map that seems very cool. Looking forward to checking it out. 

[friedgold]

Spoiler for a boss (RKL, if that helps), not that you can really see it:

 

Spoiler

 

See if you can see the remaing health bar. Yes, that's me dissolving into death in the foreground.

[kensei]

I think the switch of IP helps clean up the lore somewhat. Dark Souls was mysterious; the sequels felt the need to run with a lot of stuff that just made it more naff.

 

Just filtering out the temptation of go back to something being a little piece of Manus or here is the lost God from DS1 or something similar is worthwhile in itself. I think From have done their best work from a blank page, even if the ideas are coming from the same well.

[John0]

3 minutes ago, robdood said:

Hmm I'm not sure, as far as I know 'super armour' is another word for 'poise' i.e. it's an invisalb ebar that once filled mean the enemy falls into a postion where you can critical them (basckstab or face stab, etc).  Enemies do seem to take increased damage during this state, but it doesn't last long. 

 

Like, check this stupid damage, you can't hurt them this much with anything other than strike weapons:

 

Yeah I see! You're definitely doing more damage that I was right from the off.. but I swear I could do more damage the more I broke them down even with my Longsword. The single and double versions I've met so far haven't been a problem once I got past the initial 32 damage first few hits. I'll give it another go! Still have a trio of them to do that I haven't gone back to yet. And I assume there are few more to come after that.

[kensei]

The Crystallians shatter after a while and you can hit for a lot more damage, even if you are not using strike. You can visually see the damage. I assume Strike hastens the process.

[NecroMorrius]

4 hours ago, HarryBizzle said:

I’m not feeling quite as negative as you about it but it is definitely just DS4. I wish they’d made a world with a totally new aesthetic. Even the lore feels like a reskin. 

It’s a Soulsborne, a Soulslike, whatever you want. Dark Souls is just Demons Souls.

 

To me this is like a Fromsoft theme park. Most of the zones remind me of areas from previous From games. Mostly because of the asset reuse but they’ve always done that. 

[robdood]

7 minutes ago, John0 said:

 

Yeah I see! You're definitely doing more damage that I was right from the off.. but I swear I could do more damage the more I broke them down even with my Longsword. The single and double versions I've met so far haven't been a problem once I got past the initial 32 damage first few hits. I'll give it another go! Still have a trio of them to do that I haven't gone back to yet. And I assume there are few more to come after that.

Yes looking at it (and what you and Kensei have said) it does seem that once you've bust their poise once they are then permanently in a 'vulnerable' state.  They look all cracked and fucked.  Dunno, I quickly switched to strike when I notice my other weapons were barely damaging them!! 

[Timmo]

9 minutes ago, kensei said:

I think the switch of IP helps clean up the lore somewhat. Dark Souls was mysterious; the sequels felt the need to run with a lot of stuff that just made it more naff.

 

Just filtering out the temptation of go back to something being a little piece of Manus or here is the lost God from DS1 or something similar is worthwhile in itself. I think From have done their best work from a blank page, even if the ideas are coming from the same well.

 

There's huge overlaps with (high?) fantasy anyway, such that a complete reboot would be next to impossible. They could have changed the names of stuff but I think the nods to Souls are nice. To me it feels like a fresh world.

[Sun Tze]

1 hour ago, robdood said:

I would always recommend people try to carry a weapon of each of these damage types:

- Standard (your longsword does standard)

- Strike (blunt weapons like maces or clubs)

- Slash (curved swords/katanas) 

- Pierce (pikes / thrusting swords)

To add to this bit of excellent advice: adding a high crit dagger to your repertoire and punishing those staggered bosses with it helps them go down a good bit quicker. I'm not a dagger person but the Misericorde is joining me on boss fights as of late.  

[HarryBizzle]

13 minutes ago, Moz said:

It’s a Soulsborne, a Soulslike, whatever you want. Dark Souls is just Demons Souls.

 

To me this is like a Fromsoft theme park. Most of the zones remind me of areas from previous From games. Mostly because of the asset reuse but they’ve always done that. 

They’ve always done that except when they haven’t - BB and Sekiro. And I’d have preferred something that felt new and interesting here. 
 

One of the things I like most about Sekiro is how unmagical it all starts off. Apart from you being able to revive, there’s not much fantasy or magical stuff and then it goes off in a very different direction to their other games. 

[robdood]

Illusory wall started dissecting Elden Ring, here's a great video exploring fall damage

 

 

[Uncle Nasty]

12 hours ago, df0 said:

I'm losing interest at a rapid pace. After doing hours of the worst level design in eons (part of the mage's quest chain, it's beyond awful) I'm now in Lyndell. The longer I play the more it becomes apparent it's just Dark Souls 4. It's... Dark Souls with an open world that's tossed to the side the more the story progresses. For a new IP this is severely lacking, it's - again - just Dark Souls.

 

So who is this for? It'll not be for those who dislike Dark Souls in the first place and those who do like it might want something more than the same type of enemies and bosses, the same kind of exploration, the same kind of "aha, hidden enemy in alcove!" traps. I like the open world, that's fun. Dungeons and bosses is where the quality just nose dives, they had no idea what to do so they did what they always do.

 

I can't even remember what my character fights for. I genuinely can not remember the antagonist. I must become a lord blahblah, something something tree. And fingers.

 

I'm not as far in as you but the quality of the level design tanking later on is something I've read a fair bit. A real shame if that is the case. It feels like almost all games are cursed with that. Halo, Dark Souls, MGSV - all of my favourite games are front loaded with weak later levels.

 

As much as I love Elden Ring, after 120 hours I still much prefer Dark Souls 1, and not even the remaster with extra areas, I mean the original base game. For me that was as open world as a game needs to be, the systems were perfectly tuned to take advantage of the design of the world (meaning there were clear paths to take if you wanted to be Pyro, Faith etc) and the areas were distinctive and memorable enough that every single path and route was burned into your memory. That world was perfect and FROM have never come close to topping it. Despite it being smaller than Elden Ring the exploration felt more meaningful and significant. Better defined and tighter.

 

Not to put Elden Ring down because it is an incredible experience and an all time great. But when the honeymoon starts to fade I think we'll be ranking FROM thusly:

 

Dark Souls

Massive fucking gap

Bloodborne

Demon's Souls

Elden Ring

Dark Souls 3

Sekiro

Dark Souls 2

 

I do miss the boss encounters of Dark and Demon's. There are fewer of the mysterious, esoteric bosses in Elden Ring and I miss the variety of, say, Ceasless Discharge or the gargoyles where the fights were more kind of integrated with their environment.

 

Is Elden Ring a bit dry perhaps? Slightly more portentous and serious than before? When I think of Dark Souls I remember its laconic and sardonic wit, but there's not as much of that here. Some of the warmth and humour is missing.

 

Amazing game and deserving of all the praise and accolades. Dark Souls is still going to take some beating though.

 

 

 

 

[Timmo]

9 minutes ago, Uncle Nasty said:

 

I'm not as far in as you but the quality of the level design tanking later on is something I've read a fair bit. A real shame if that is the case. It feels like almost all games are cursed with that. Halo, Dark Souls, MGSV - all of my favourite games are front loaded with weak later levels.

 

As much as I love Elden Ring, after 120 hours I still much prefer Dark Souls 1, and not even the remaster with extra areas, I mean the original base game. For me that was as open world as a game needs to be, the systems were perfectly tuned to take advantage of the design of the world (meaning there were clear paths to take if you wanted to be Pyro, Faith etc) and the areas were distinctive and memorable enough that every single path and route was burned into your memory. That world was perfect and FROM have never come close to topping it. Despite it being smaller than Elden Ring the exploration felt more meaningful and significant. Better defined and tighter.

 

Not to put Elden Ring down because it is an incredible experience and an all time great. But when the honeymoon starts to fade I think we'll be ranking FROM thusly:

 

Dark Souls

Massive fucking gap

Bloodborne

Demon's Souls

Elden Ring

Dark Souls 3

Sekiro

Dark Souls 2

 

I do miss the boss encounters of Dark and Demon's. There are fewer of the mysterious, esoteric bosses in Elden Ring and I miss the variety of, say, Ceasless Discharge or the gargoyles where the fights were more kind of integrated with their environment.

 

Is Elden Ring a bit dry perhaps? Slightly more portentous and serious than before? When I think of Dark Souls I remember its laconic and sardonic wit, but there's not as much of that here. Some of the warmth and humour is missing.

 

Amazing game and deserving of all the praise and accolades. Dark Souls is still going to take some beating though.

 

 

 

 

 

Dark Souls takes a huuuuge dip in its last third. I still have probably a quarter of this left and I'd be very surprised if its anything like as much.

[hmm]

45 minutes ago, moosegrinder said:

Maybe the change to the onboarding of new people would have been much more difficult if it was called Dark Souls IV. PEople would go, subconsciously or otherwise, "Oh, it's like the previous 3 and I didn't like them." 12m copies in a few weeks would suggest so.

 

Well, that and the GRRM endorsement - I think that's a fairly significant factor too in opening up a wider market.

 

I did find it funny with the Tube/bus adverts for this, with the "... it looks incredible" quote from GRRM, when he's also billed as co-creator. I can't help but imagine the first half of the sentence was "I don't know the first thing about videogames but..."

[Anne Summers]

What other good summoning ashes are people using? I'm up to Castle Sol and still using Jellyfish, got a load of others but not sure which ones are worth levelling. 

[Triple A]

1 hour ago, robdood said:

I would always recommend people try to carry a weapon of each of these damage types:

- Standard (your longsword does standard)

- Strike (blunt weapons like maces or clubs)

- Slash (curved swords/katanas) 

- Pierce (pikes / thrusting swords)

 

Slash and pierce is a bit more optional, but the reason for carrying them is that enemies have weaknesses, not only to elemments like magic or holy or fire, but also to these damage types.  

 

For example, a strike weapon will DECIMATE the miners you fight in the mines.  Even when my Claymore was at +9, my +5 spiked mace did more damage to these enemies!  Carrying each of the above weapon types lets you experiment when you fight a new type of enemy to discover their weakness.

Deffo this.

Visions of Vagrant Story…

[Sun Tze]

53 minutes ago, Uncle Nasty said:

I do miss the boss encounters of Dark and Demon's. There are fewer of the mysterious, esoteric bosses in Elden Ring and I miss the variety of, say, Ceasless Discharge or the gargoyles where the fights were more kind of integrated with their environment.

 

Is Elden Ring a bit dry perhaps? Slightly more portentous and serious than before? When I think of Dark Souls I remember its laconic and sardonic wit, but there's not as much of that here. Some of the warmth and humour is missing.

Have a lot of thoughts on all that but it'll have to wait until i finish my first run. 

 

I'm not that fond of the boss fights in the later From games and so far really loved some in this. The Tabia Mariner, half-life assassin, Gladiator bro, Margit and the big Moose creature have all been very nice surprises that, thankfully, don't force you to follow the 1-hit, roll, roll, roll template and actually allow for some combo's. 

 

Sir Lautrec... eh, Kenneth, had me laughing and giggling more then any Fromsoft NPC prior. I think the voice acting for him, Rodericka and some others is better then it ever was before. 

[Girth Certificate]

Yeah I've had quite a lot of funny bits with NPCs (spoilers for up the land on west side of the lake district)

Spoiler

walking through an archway to be met by the giant blacksmith sitting reading a book was a highlight

 

[Dark Soldier]

All the chat about same themes and story beats within the From series of games and I still don't have a damn clue what happened in any of them. Wake up, wreck shit, explore wonderful, gorgeous lands, dabble in fashion. It's all I need.

 

No interest in some demigods having a tantrum and creating a celestial plateau or whatever the fuck.

[Timmo]

Just now, Dark Soldier said:

All the chat about same themes and story beats within the From series of games and I still don't have a damn clue what happened in any of them. Wake up, wreck shit, explore wonderful, gorgeous lands, dabble in fashion. It's all I need.

 

No interest in some demigods having a tantrum and creating a celestial plateau or whatever the fuck.

 

Generally agree but Bloodborne had a genuinely pretty brilliant story. 

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JL5acskAT_2t062HILImBkV8eXAwaqOj611mSjK-vZ8/edit

[Stanley]

1 hour ago, Doctor Shark said:

The pure strength struggle 

 

I don’t even know what int is.

[Davros sock drawer]

47 minutes ago, Uncle Nasty said:

 

I'm not as far in as you but the quality of the level design tanking later on is something I've read a fair bit. A real shame if that is the case. It feels like almost all games are cursed with that. Halo, Dark Souls, MGSV - all of my favourite games are front loaded with weak later levels.

 

As much as I love Elden Ring, after 120 hours I still much prefer Dark Souls 1, and not even the remaster with extra areas, I mean the original base game. For me that was as open world as a game needs to be, the systems were perfectly tuned to take advantage of the design of the world (meaning there were clear paths to take if you wanted to be Pyro, Faith etc) and the areas were distinctive and memorable enough that every single path and route was burned into your memory. That world was perfect and FROM have never come close to topping it. Despite it being smaller than Elden Ring the exploration felt more meaningful and significant. Better defined and tighter.

 

Not to put Elden Ring down because it is an incredible experience and an all time great. But when the honeymoon starts to fade I think we'll be ranking FROM thusly:

 

Dark Souls

Massive fucking gap

Bloodborne

Demon's Souls

Elden Ring

Dark Souls 3

Sekiro

Dark Souls 2

 

I do miss the boss encounters of Dark and Demon's. There are fewer of the mysterious, esoteric bosses in Elden Ring and I miss the variety of, say, Ceasless Discharge or the gargoyles where the fights were more kind of integrated with their environment.

 

Is Elden Ring a bit dry perhaps? Slightly more portentous and serious than before? When I think of Dark Souls I remember its laconic and sardonic wit, but there's not as much of that here. Some of the warmth and humour is missing.

 

Amazing game and deserving of all the praise and accolades. Dark Souls is still going to take some beating though.

 

 

 

 

As @Timmosaid, DS1 takes a biiiig nosedive once you get the Lord Vessel. So opinions and all that but I don’t think that list is going to be the consensus at all.

 

For me it’s:

 

Bloodborne (maybe Elden Ring, tbc)

 

huge gap…

 

Dark Souls

Dark Souls 3

Demon’s Souls (original, don’t have PS5)

 

huge gap…

 

no, bigger than that….

 

Dark Souls 2

 

I’ve not played Sekiro as the setting and combat style doesn’t appeal.

 

 

[Dark Soldier]

DkS2 is the best Souls game and third best FROM game. So good 

[Qazimod]

1 hour ago, Doctor Shark said:

The pure strength struggle 

 

Me.  

[Timmo]

5 minutes ago, Dark Soldier said:

DkS2 is the best Souls game and third best FROM game. So good 

 

Did your opinion change after playing the DLC? I've read it's easily the best part of the game but I've never got round to it. One day.

 

I also need to get into Nioh 2 again, a game I've played for about 80 hours and barely feel I've scratched the surface of. We're so fucking spoilt.

[kensei]

The dip in quality in the last third of DS1 is greatly exaggerated. Duke's Archives is in there for a start. Then there's the DLC which was incredible.

 

So far I think DS is a tighter design. That's the nature of the size of the thing. From could spend time tweaking bonfire placement, enemy placement and shortcuts much more easily there than they could here. But the open world adds so much more freedom that you won't hit a roadblock in the same way and exploration is even more rewarding. And it's banked genuine improvements to the combat and the field bosses on horseback are genuinely new fights that could sometimes go stale.

 

The best thing I can say about this is that it captures the feeling of the first Dark Souls in a way none of the sequels did.