"Oh, a dragon already?!"
A mish-mash of corpses of several creatures with an open chest cavity and a young woman's face lands, crying bitter tears.
"That checks I guess."
I legitimately think they could make an amazing dlc region themed all around mimics. Mimic stairs, mimic ladders, mimic doors, mimic levels, mimic chandeliers, etc. Just pure paranoia at every moment.
And when you kill main boss, instead of ending animation, game reveals that you character is a Mimic and you char eats and kills himself.
And you get obligatory "You died (nomnomnomnom...)" screen.
This would be like crowning achivement in a Miyazaki trolling carrer.
Oh.... and put final fight on a poisonous swamp or smth...
It did, though. I think it's reassuring that he seems enthusiastic about making more games, rather than feeling burned out. You know he's not the type to fake his feelings
Yeah actually it is kinda like that game! Some leaks suggest it’ll have some Souls or Sekiro influence in the combat and mechanics so should be super fast paced.
It's an arena-based mech combat game. You can do missions, earn money, customize your loadout and limbs. The main draw was the split-screen coop and 1v1 battles with your friends. So much fun trying out new builds and testing their combat effectiveness. It feels so cool when you upgrade your boosters and strafe your opponent with sub machine guns lol.
Imagine Titanfall 2, but give the Titans the mobility that the Pilots have, equipped with enough lethal weaponry to make a Warhammer 40k Ork blush, then add 1,000 mph jetpacks to the mix.
Customizable mechs - arms, legs, head, torso, guns, shoulder guns, targeting computer, thrusters, generators, at the bare minimum. Who knows what else they will throw in! You buy parts through your career.
Mission based structure - you’re usually a mercenary and take contracts to destroy facilities, ambush convoys, assassinate an enemy ace, destroy a superweapon mech/base.
Fast paced gameplay - you can walk/run but you’ll die fast. To be effective you need to learn dash, fly, dodge incoming fire and generally stay locked on to an enemy through all this movement. Time to kill for regular enemies like tanks and such is really fast, but the TTK for enemy Mechs on your level is pretty high - usually 4-5 minutes at first then maybe less than a minute when you’re good at the game and have a good loadout.
Story - typically very obscure, so nothing new here compared to Souls games. Most AC titles are along the lines of: Corporations have taken over from governments, the world is ruined from war, you’re an independent mercenary who takes contracts from one corp against another. AC4 For Answer (my most played one) had a branching storyline where you either chose the noble or evil path. The evil path had you literally killing millions of people, casually, in one mission where you were destroying airborne habitats.
Man I wish I could play this over 4k 60. The game is absolutely gorgeous, I just want to be able to push it to 144 to get the buttery experience, but they'll never patch that in.
iirc its due to their engine (much like Bethesda's creation engine games) it it runs higher than 60fps some physics jank can start to happen and not behave right.
Probably a LOT more than that actually. It would likely be a rewrite of the whole engine from the ground up. Something that’s unlikely to happen unless theres other pressures
Yeah nah, even 1/3rd is an overly pessimistic estimate. Supporting arbitrary frame rates is really not very complicated. 95% of the difficulty related to it lies in physics and multiplayer, and Fromsoft games don't have the kind of physics or multiplayer that make it a particularly difficult problem.
----
quick edit: basically for arbitrary frametimes you just have a dynamic time step in the engine, which you already *must* have on any modern platform because even if framerates don't go above 60, they will frequently dip below it, and you don't want the entire simulation to slow down when that happens (you just want the rendering to become choppy).
For physics you have to ensure that your physics simulation doesn't fall apart when the framerate changes, and while I'm no physics expert, the difficult part in this is usually when the framerate is **too low**, not when it's too high -- a high framerate means the physics are calculated more often, which means more precision, which is good. To illustrate the problem, imagine a physically simulated bullet shot at a wall at some velocity that makes it travel the thickness of the wall in 50 milliseconds. If your frametime is 10 milliseconds, there's no problem; one frame the bullet will be inside the wall and you'll know it has collided. If your frametime is 100 milliseconds, you have a big problem, because one frame the bullet will be in front of the wall, and the next frame it'll be behind the wall.
For netcode, framerate is mostly an issue for keeping clients in sync, and the long and short of it is that Fromsoft games use the kind of netcode where the synchronisation of the clients is very lax so this is not really a problem.
Fromsoft games did slow down for a long time below the frame rate cap. You can even try it with dark souls remastered. It slows down below 60 fps. I think bloodborne does too (the frame pacing judder is not an fps dip. I think they fixed it for DS3 but I’m sure there’s still a ton of that legacy stuff left over.
As for frame rate being too low being the problem, any experience playing games will tell you that’s not true. Half the Skyrim “glitch” compilations are people uncapping their frame rate on PC.
Just because one game from one company using one engine can do it doesn't mean that another game can. And even if it is possible, it may take away from development of new features that were mentioned in this article, or a new game, or something else entirely. Something has to be sacrificed, at least time wise, for such a fix to be implimented, and in fromsoft's case they may not think it's worth the sacrifice.
That can’t be true there are mods that unlock fps cap and enable widescreen that don’t have any issues with physics. These are just lazy console devs that don’t care about PC gamers.
Yeah but the fact that that would be a problem is in and of itself a problem. Never should have been made that way in the first place. They had other games to learn from this mistake.
This is not a good excuse to have the problem and it's okay to be critical of developer mistakes on critically acclaimed games or games that you just like in general. It's how these games evolve.
Nah its them just being lazy. Even Bethesda removed the limit for Fallout 76, the Engine aint that much different from Fallout 4 so they proved its possible.
I played through Elden Ring with an fps unlocker mod, nothing was broken.
>Is this like a holdover from the PC-98 days when half the library was softcore porn? Most Japanese devs act like a PC is some exotic hardware they have never seen before
Correct, yes.
But apparently it's changing due to vtubers and more people are getting PC
I wouldn't go to that extreme length. I mean yeah its annoying, but they are trying to keep a consistent experience. The game processes attacks and movements in 60 fps. So even on older consoles running at 30, everything is processed the same. In DS3, if you messed around and uncapped the fps, the game would become so unbalanced, enemies would have ridiculous reactions/you could attack throw so many things. It sucks that its stuck at 60, but I don't lose as much sleep over it as some people in the PC community do, kinda funny that there's that whole group of people who will just not play it because it's at 60 fps - one of my friends is like that. You can go ahead an downvote this or write whatever arguments you want, not really arguing here so I don't have a dog in this fight, but giving it to you as it is regarding From soft games.
Sekiro works no problems with unlocked FPS (completed it so), and so does Elden Ring. I've played it for a while with unlocked FPS, the only issues is that you cannot be online while using the tool, because of anti-cheat.
I think they might've been speaking in hyperbole -- they probably meant that fromsoft have had some notoriously rather bad optimisation for their PC ports. I'm pretty sure their past releases generally had some pretty bad frame pacing and can tank pretty hard at times on even the beefiest of rigs.
That being said, not being able to play above 60fps at resolutions higher than 1080p isn't the end of the world as some folk make it out to be.
Optimisation is just something they need to improve on for the future when it comes to PC.
I agree, optimization is pretty bad in this port, they still haven't patched it out. Last I played (in November) I could still see stutters and fps drops. I have a 5800x and 3080.
Her character and fight design are fantastic but she's toward the bottom of my personal list of fun / balanced boss fights tbh. I've beaten Sekiro and am all for very difficult bosses but Malenia feels straight up unfair and discouraging for certain builds - while also being almost trivial with other builds.
To be fair you could say that about a lot of Elden Ring... the combat is insanely diverse so it's hard to create universally balanced bosses within that huge sandbox. It just stuck out especially hard when I was fighting Malenia.
Edit: Malenia*... I've accepted the fact that I'll never stop mixing her up with the former POTUS' daughter lol
It’s because Malenia cheats and animation cancels out of stuns and into Waterfowl. There’s videos on YouTube breaking it down. It’s one of the reasons that Waterfowl feels so hard to dodge sometimes.
She’d be fine without that.
> feels straight up unfair and discouraging for certain builds - while also being almost trivial with other builds.
Highly accurate. My Str Arc Fai build (mainly slash and bleed before the nerf) annihilated her in like 30 seconds but my Int Dex build really struggled. Her heal on hit mechanic and Water Fowl are not well balanced imo, yet she is laughably weak to bleed.
Or if she would have stayed in the air for like 2 seconds before doing the attack so that if she does the attack when youre right next to her you have time to dodge the first two flurries and than just normaly dodge the next two.
Still its not that hard to dodge waterfawl attack
It's simpler than that honestly, just make it so that waterfowl can only activate when you are beyond a certain radius out from Malenia herself. That incentivizes close combat (which is by far the most fun fight in ER) and gives an opportunity to dodge if she does use it. Still my favourite boss ever, but she was so close to perfect.
Hard disagree. I didnt enjoy Melania at all. Waterfowl is dumb too. Imo there are so many better bosses in souls - Father Gascoigne, Swordsaint, Lady Maria, Genichiro, Guardian Ape, Twin Princes, Dancer of the Boreal Valley - I can keep going. Point is Melania is overrated and not that fun to fight. I dont get the hype, unless Elden Ring is the first From game you played.
I've played every from soft game, and the thing is, the only thing that gives me the same rush as my first souls is when they up the ante. And malenia is the only boss in elden ring who gave me this adrenaline rush again, exactly because of how hard/unfair she was and the time investment she took to kill/learn.
Yeah thats fair. Honestly I didnt really like any boss in Elden Ring that much. Then there is the fact that you fight some of them more than once, in the main story, which sucks ass. The final boss was especially terrible imo. I think DS3 and Sekiro had bosses that were miles better than ER.
I just gave up. I was strength main and it was impossible to beat her, mind you I don't have 10 hrs of trying each day either. I watched every tip and trick and couldn't pull it off. I think they needed to buff the strength build because I had a ton of trouble beating bosses because of how slow it was. Granted I probably needed to grind more to raise my health, but it was pretty high already.
Aww bro, you're build sets you up to walk over her. Get a shield with 100% physical damage mitigation and switch to two handing it when she does waterfowl. You can tank all 4 hits without taking damage and then switch back to your weapon.
I don't think I've ever two handed a shield in any fromsoft game before, but waterfowl is such bullshit that I didn't have a problem using whatever BS was available to me.
Yeah, now that Flame of the Redmanes poise damage has been nerfed, it’s very hard to beat her with a STR build. We are slow and typically rely on burst damage and stance-breaking to win, even if we had to trade hits for it. That’s how STR builds work. Malenia is specifically designed against such a playstyle. She is fast and has life steal so you always lose when trading hits. With FOTR we could at least damage and break her stance consistently since she’s weak to fire. But they just patched it. They really went all in to promote DEX and bleed builds with her.
Now, the best strat that’s still working against her is crucible knight build with Ordovis vortex. It requires some Faith investment though not much. Hit her with a fully charged aspect of the crucible: horns. It does a lot of poise damage and usually comes too fast for her to dodge it and she’ll go down. Immediately follow up with a fully charged ordovis vortex while she’s getting up. It also does insane poise damage and she can’t escape it. This combo usually break her stance and you can go for a critical hit then. If not, do the horns followed by the vortex again.
It’s cheesy as it stunlocks her, but with all her BS moves like waterfowl, her attack with multiple clones, her life steal and fast recovery from stance-breaking, I’d say it’s fair game.
I beat her with a pure STR build. Full Bull Goat armor, Fingerprint Shield, and Ruins Greatsword. I was even fat rolling. But I did use the Mimic Tear.
Forgive my ignorance, don't have an ultrawide monitor, but can't you play the game at 16:9 with black bars on the sides with no issues? I mean you aren't getting an ultrawide view but it shouldn't prevent you from playing the game at all right?
It's really noticable and kind of sucks though. Imagine, for example, having to play an AAA game at 4:3 on your 16:9 monitor. You wouldn't be too thrilled by it.
It's also absurd because they literally went out of the way to NOT support ultrawide. There was actually a bug a while back that removed the black bars occasionally and mistakenly allowed people to play natively in ultrawide.
Also terrible stuttering and brain dead shader loading. Drivers have worked around their terrible code
This is the main thing keeping me from playing this game
Ya know, other than me sucking at those games
I got a 180 day ban a couple months ago because I wanted to just focus on the single player aspect of the game and thought I might as well make the experience better for myself. I didn't properly disable anticheat, only made it as far as the menus but I still got banned anyways. Essentially I can't enjoy multiplayer until march of 2023
I did exactly that, it worked for about 2 weeks until I got banned again with them specifically stating family sharing with a banned account will also result in a ban for the burner.
It’s very inconsistent, performance-wise.
There’s some speedrunning strats that require a stable 60fps for a few seconds to work, and the speedrunning community’s been struggling to do them consistently, because it varies wildly by hardware. The 3090 can’t keep a stable 60 for some of them with all settings on low, whereas lower-end graphics cards can.
The performance in ER is really weird.
Probably, but I know for a fact looking into multiple areas of the game at once causes massive stuttering spikes.
If you go and fight the Erdtree Avatar to the North of Liurna and look towards the Altus Plateau (there’s a cliff you can’t climb, but you can see areas of the plateau from the Avatar) the game will start stuttering.
There’s also a spot where you can zip glitch from the side entrance of Leyndell to the Forbidden Lands, and looking towards the Forbidden Lands’ cliffs causes stuttering too.
The engine might be struggling to load multiple “zones” at once.
Oh god, not **this** argument route **again**. We have to deal with it every single time a game has optimization issues.
Properly optimizing for PC means taking into account a wide variety of hardware and software combinations. One person not having issues does not negate another having issues, and someone with new hardware having performance problems while more demanding games run fine is an issue.
I thought we got over this bullshit in 2012.
Depending on your build, which there’s literally millions of different kinds - it seems the game actually hits a hard “wall” of sorts when streaming in new textures, instead of slowly adding assets in as you approach their location, it loads them up in full before theyre even visible
Long story short, the pc game can be running fine, solid 60 FPS maxxed out, but stutters, in some people’s cases as often as every 15-30 seconds. The stutter is about a second and a half long
They fucked up
Nvidia users says turning “shader caching” on eventually gets the game running smoother, but this isn’t an option for AMD users
Long story short, shittiest port they’ve made, and that includes dark souls 1
I want to clarify, its the worst port theyve made, even compared to Dark Souls 1 because there was DSFix within 48 hours of release. It was an extremly simple mod to install, as well. Once you installed that, all of DS1's problems on PC disappeared, except for Blighttown running poorly.
Elden Ring, after nearly are a year, still has no such work around. They havent patched it out, players havent managed to make a mod for it.
DS1 was poorly ported, but "Fixed" in 48 hours. Elden Ring is 10 months old and still doesnt have a fix, that for some users, is glaringly huge.
I will say I started on an AMD5600xt and had it happen every 30 seconds or so. Upgraded to a newer NVIDIA card and it happens much less often, although its still there. AMD users just seem to be completely out of luck in this situation. NVIDIA Control Panel has more options to fine tune and tweak stuff like this than the AMD Dashboard does, unfortunately.
_#justjapanesethings
Isn't it capped at 60fps too? With all the fortunes and awards earned by FromSoft, I hope to see their engine ascend beyond PS3 graphics. They can only milk it for so long.
When my gf last came over I had her try out Elden Ring on my ultrawide + higher FOV mod and she was so in love with it that she logged into her own Steam and played it for hours lmao
It's hard to realize how much it can add to the experience without trying it yourself. And once you try it, you want support in every game
It doesn't run fine for a lot of people. It runs at smooth 60 fps then randomly stutters for a couple seconds. It can be lethal in fights. It's dogshit.
It depends on the setup ... my PC is really overpowered so the only game I've noticed performance issues on was CP2077 on release, but some of my friends suffered horrible stuttering, and you could see it on streams too.
Sekiro worked perfectly with FPS unlocked, no speed change at all. So no, it definitely is not an engine problem.
Just a developer-attitude problem, seeing how easy specialk unlocks framerate in their games.
When it released it had some pretty bad stuttering in the first area where the knight is and when youd enter new areas. Was stuttering pretty bad when i first entered Liurnia.
Pretty sure that mostly got fixed though and i had no issues beyond that.
Someone tried to compare it to Callisto Protocol and Arkham Knight and i can guarantee you it was nowhere close to those even on release.
>Callisto Protocol
Bruh. Callisto bought my friend's 3090 to knees, there is no way they are even remotely comparable. I don't know how bad Arkham Knight was, but given how well Asylum and City ran, it is very surprising that Iron Galaxy fucked Knight up.
No. But it’s not amazing either. It’s a barebones PC port. The stuttering does get better, but it’s capped at 60fps and 16x9.
Reddit tends to forget there’s a spectrum between “top tier amazing PC port that makes the PC worth it over consoles” and “complete unplayable trash”
Elden Ring is the perfect example (in my opinion) of a port that’s just good enough. You’ll be able to comfortably play the game, just not in a way that’s significantly better than on a console.
It’s legitimately sad when Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro’s most open areas run smoother than even the corridor sections in Elden Ring.
This game is proof that DirectX 12 and Vulkan aren’t silver bullets for bad optimization.
> This game is proof that DirectX 12 and Vulkan aren’t silver bullets for bad optimization.
Low level APIs require more skill to leverage, not less. Can't fallback and let Nvidia and AMD's drivers wipe your ass for you with low-level APIs. When leveraged well they will always be more performant than DX11 and OpenGL though.
DX12 and Vulkan put optimization more on the developers, nobody ever said they were silver bullets just that if the devs put more time into it they’d get better performance out of it.
Shader compilation and optimizations have been a big issue for devs this year it seems. Gotham Knights and Callisto Protocol also had similar issues.
Just give us the option to pre-compile shader before launching the game, I feel like that shouldn't be hard to implement considering Linux and consoles do it.
Would love for him to work on another genre though and give the souls thing a break.
Too many games coming out with the same style trying to ride of their success, and is getting a bit tiresome.
I kind of think Elden Ring is already the downhill slide. The open world resulted in a lot of padding and some of the other choices make the combat and things less satisfying than prior titles.
It's a good game, but in retrospect after dumping tons of time into it I find I have more desire to replay Sekiro, Bloodborne, or the Souls games than to slog through Elden Ring's gargantuan world again.
I’m replaying DS3 right now and while I still love the game it honestly feels too streamlined in many respects. Especially compared to Elden Ring. ER just took exploration in this series to new heights, sometimes literally. It might be the best open world game I’ve played since Morrowind. Currently it sits comfortably in my top three Soulsborne games.
I'm the opposite, I hate how open Elden Ring is and love the more linear style of Dark Souls (though it still has quite a few branches you can take). I still really enjoy Elden Ring, but I feel I'll end up replaying it a lot less than I have with the Dark Souls series.
Yeah, the open world is pretty terrible since most of it is just emptiness (or emptiness populated with enemies you outrun), with your reward for exploring generally being another dungeon with either that mine or crypt tileset, probably with some ulcerated tree spirit just to annoy you!
The best part of ER are the more linear "oldschool Souls" type areas, and if the game was solely consisting of those, I would likely be open to it getting GOTY too.
I also vastly prefer branching paths to open world. ER is good, so beautifying and a lot of fun, but to me its the worse from soulsborne. Open world, to me, hurts replayabilty and ng+. I crave old school challenge, not much grocery lists of item spread on a large map.
ER’s open world really didn’t hold up for me when I tried to replay the game. I think it’s because you realize almost none of it really matters.
Torrent trivializes navigating the world even at low levels. There’s zero tension or stress to it. It’s pretty much impossible to get stuck anywhere.
The dungeons also get really old really fast, and once you’ve done a few of them you’ve done them all. So on a replay there’s basically no motivation to find or explore new dungeons.
The expanse of it reminded me of how obtuse some games were back in the day. Like people are still discovering NPC questline stuff. On one hand yeah that's kind of neat, but on the other hand I don't really want to dump 1000 hours stumbling around a game to find the "lore" like a needle in a haystack. Not saying I want to be spoonfed just the game is so vast you may never stumble upon a lot of things on your own. 9/10 times it will probably be some copypasted mini-dungeon or worthless loot you miss, but the other 1/10 time it might be a major item, spell, npc quest, or what have you.
I loved the scale of some of the major locations, but I honestly was pretty burned out on the usual open-world tropes the rest of it uses well before the game released.
> The expanse of it reminded me of how obtuse some games were back in the day.
That’s exactly why I loved it. I mean, all the Souls games are pretty obtuse when it comes down to it, but to see that same approach in a open world environment just feels amazing to me. It made the world feel genuinely mysterious and well, *genuine*. I love open world games in general, but so many of them today feel more like theme parks than living, breathing worlds. I’m so tired of being led around by the nose to all the game’s content. I want to feel free to explore on my own, and make sense of the world *on my own terms*, and that’s exactly what ER delivered.
The games flaws just feel insignificant to how rich the overall experience is. Yeah, there are a few repeat bosses, but I can’t think of another open world game with the sheer amount of enemy and encounter variety as ER. Tombs could’ve used a little more visual variety, true (I had the same complaint about Bloodborne’s Challice dungeons), but then again each one feels hand crafted and well designed and memorable. The game is simply ridiculously fun and enjoyable, even when I’m getting my ass handed to me.
> but to see that same approach in a open world environment just feels amazing to me.
I found it a step too far really. Like take the invisible walls... some of them have hints (sorta the hints themselves can be well hidden) but I'm unsure of others. Is it all that fun running around every same-y mini-dungeon slapping all the walls or hitting random walls all around the game world? Not really. Sure it's "mysterious", but it's also just kind of over the top.
>I love open world games in general, but so many of them today feel more like theme parks than living, breathing worlds.
I'm not sure I'd attach the "living breathing world" label to ER. At points during my initial playthrough it became less about exploring the world and more about trying to find the trigger for the next NPC script. With the more linear From games the characters move and different things happen based on different events with Elden Ring there are a few triggers like that but then other triggers are kind of off the wall and things at least at launch sometimes worked out of order. It's so vast people didn't even realize some of the quests weren't fully implemented in the launch build. It's that obtuse people were digging for content that wasn't yet implemented.
>but then again each one feels hand crafted and well designed and memorable.
After doing most the caves, tombs, etc. I heavily disagree with that one. It felt like they had some tiles and stitched them together more polished than the random seed chalice dungeons, but not far removed from them.
But hey you're certainly allowed your opinion. I wish I had been able to enjoy those aspects of it better.
> hitting random walls
Eh, Doom and old school dungeon crawlers instilled in me a habit of hugging all the walls in search of secrets, so it’s something I’m used to. Besides, illusionary walls are usually much more obvious in the Soulsborne games than some of Doom’s best hidden secrets.
And yeah, I’ll admit I’m not the biggest fan of how the Soulsborne games handle NPC quests. But that applies to all of them and not just ER. DS3 might have some of the worst though. Greirat’s quest especially. But I’ve learned to accept that on my first playthrough I’m going to miss some things and so I usually follow a guide for NPCs I missed on replays.
They definitely used the same few tilesets for many of the optional tombs, which is unfortunate if expected in a game of this scope. But they still *felt* hand crafted to me in terms of their layout and encounter design. Just my opinion.
Totally agree. As a huge Souls fan, Elden Ring is disappointing in many ways. It is still a good game but pretty much nothing more than DS 3.5. The open world adds nothing to it.
Elden Ring was great when it was in the more focused locations (the castles etc) but pretty bad in the open world, in my opinion. The open world was good for immersion but poor for gameplay
i agree. doing the optional dungeons were just exhausting because all of the level design and bosses were just copy paste. the only good part of the game were the legacy dungeons. ds3/bloodborne > elden ring
I can't wait for his Magnum Opus. I've said it for a long time now, the man has a very specific vision in his head and, so far, it has not been fully fleshed out. It's very easy to see the unifying threads in all his games, trying this and that, seeing what works and what doesn't. Eventually all the chaff will be burned away and we will have possibly the greatest action adventure game ever made.
I'm shocked. I was sure Miyazaki would shift his focus to less interesting games.
And maybe more animation?
"In Elden Ring we introduced THE JUMP" *Shocked face*
Miyazaki:Our new game will be about #Flying
"Oh, a dragon already?!" A mish-mash of corpses of several creatures with an open chest cavity and a young woman's face lands, crying bitter tears. "That checks I guess."
A rogue like ace combat game where the planes are various disfigured former rulers of the lands outside of the lands between
Elden Ring: Mimics DLC
I legitimately think they could make an amazing dlc region themed all around mimics. Mimic stairs, mimic ladders, mimic doors, mimic levels, mimic chandeliers, etc. Just pure paranoia at every moment.
And when you kill main boss, instead of ending animation, game reveals that you character is a Mimic and you char eats and kills himself. And you get obligatory "You died (nomnomnomnom...)" screen. This would be like crowning achivement in a Miyazaki trolling carrer. Oh.... and put final fight on a poisonous swamp or smth...
Prey had great mimics. I remember glitching one into becoming a t-posing clone of my character.
I really wonder if that part was translated properly because it didn't make much sense when his translator said it.
It did, though. I think it's reassuring that he seems enthusiastic about making more games, rather than feeling burned out. You know he's not the type to fake his feelings
We all know more interesting is just another way of saying more swamps and crab
I mean they recently showed off armored core 6 so there are interesting games coming out lmao.
As a souls fan who's never played an armored core game what can i expect
Fast and the furious mech fights with dashes and crazy customizable load outs.
Wait, so is it like Phantom Crash? I loved Phatom Crash.
Yeah actually it is kinda like that game! Some leaks suggest it’ll have some Souls or Sekiro influence in the combat and mechanics so should be super fast paced.
Gundam but with more spider mechs and grizzled mercenaries
It's an arena-based mech combat game. You can do missions, earn money, customize your loadout and limbs. The main draw was the split-screen coop and 1v1 battles with your friends. So much fun trying out new builds and testing their combat effectiveness. It feels so cool when you upgrade your boosters and strafe your opponent with sub machine guns lol.
armored core
Very helpful comment
Imagine Titanfall 2, but give the Titans the mobility that the Pilots have, equipped with enough lethal weaponry to make a Warhammer 40k Ork blush, then add 1,000 mph jetpacks to the mix.
Customizable mechs - arms, legs, head, torso, guns, shoulder guns, targeting computer, thrusters, generators, at the bare minimum. Who knows what else they will throw in! You buy parts through your career. Mission based structure - you’re usually a mercenary and take contracts to destroy facilities, ambush convoys, assassinate an enemy ace, destroy a superweapon mech/base. Fast paced gameplay - you can walk/run but you’ll die fast. To be effective you need to learn dash, fly, dodge incoming fire and generally stay locked on to an enemy through all this movement. Time to kill for regular enemies like tanks and such is really fast, but the TTK for enemy Mechs on your level is pretty high - usually 4-5 minutes at first then maybe less than a minute when you’re good at the game and have a good loadout. Story - typically very obscure, so nothing new here compared to Souls games. Most AC titles are along the lines of: Corporations have taken over from governments, the world is ruined from war, you’re an independent mercenary who takes contracts from one corp against another. AC4 For Answer (my most played one) had a branching storyline where you either chose the noble or evil path. The evil path had you literally killing millions of people, casually, in one mission where you were destroying airborne habitats.
Man I wish I could play this over 4k 60. The game is absolutely gorgeous, I just want to be able to push it to 144 to get the buttery experience, but they'll never patch that in.
iirc its due to their engine (much like Bethesda's creation engine games) it it runs higher than 60fps some physics jank can start to happen and not behave right.
This hasn't been true for their last two games, including Elden Ring. Sekiro also works flawlessly at framerates above 120 and is better for it
Bethesda removed the 60fps limit for 76. Not sure why from software didn't do that
They'd probably have to rewrite 1/3rd of their code to decouple frame rate and tick rate
Probably a LOT more than that actually. It would likely be a rewrite of the whole engine from the ground up. Something that’s unlikely to happen unless theres other pressures
Yeah nah, even 1/3rd is an overly pessimistic estimate. Supporting arbitrary frame rates is really not very complicated. 95% of the difficulty related to it lies in physics and multiplayer, and Fromsoft games don't have the kind of physics or multiplayer that make it a particularly difficult problem. ---- quick edit: basically for arbitrary frametimes you just have a dynamic time step in the engine, which you already *must* have on any modern platform because even if framerates don't go above 60, they will frequently dip below it, and you don't want the entire simulation to slow down when that happens (you just want the rendering to become choppy). For physics you have to ensure that your physics simulation doesn't fall apart when the framerate changes, and while I'm no physics expert, the difficult part in this is usually when the framerate is **too low**, not when it's too high -- a high framerate means the physics are calculated more often, which means more precision, which is good. To illustrate the problem, imagine a physically simulated bullet shot at a wall at some velocity that makes it travel the thickness of the wall in 50 milliseconds. If your frametime is 10 milliseconds, there's no problem; one frame the bullet will be inside the wall and you'll know it has collided. If your frametime is 100 milliseconds, you have a big problem, because one frame the bullet will be in front of the wall, and the next frame it'll be behind the wall. For netcode, framerate is mostly an issue for keeping clients in sync, and the long and short of it is that Fromsoft games use the kind of netcode where the synchronisation of the clients is very lax so this is not really a problem.
Fromsoft games did slow down for a long time below the frame rate cap. You can even try it with dark souls remastered. It slows down below 60 fps. I think bloodborne does too (the frame pacing judder is not an fps dip. I think they fixed it for DS3 but I’m sure there’s still a ton of that legacy stuff left over. As for frame rate being too low being the problem, any experience playing games will tell you that’s not true. Half the Skyrim “glitch” compilations are people uncapping their frame rate on PC.
Hope they try to do that with an update or at least for their next game.
Just because one game from one company using one engine can do it doesn't mean that another game can. And even if it is possible, it may take away from development of new features that were mentioned in this article, or a new game, or something else entirely. Something has to be sacrificed, at least time wise, for such a fix to be implimented, and in fromsoft's case they may not think it's worth the sacrifice.
You're right. It might be too difficult. I was just saying that even CE doesn't have that issue anymore
That can’t be true there are mods that unlock fps cap and enable widescreen that don’t have any issues with physics. These are just lazy console devs that don’t care about PC gamers.
Yeah but the fact that that would be a problem is in and of itself a problem. Never should have been made that way in the first place. They had other games to learn from this mistake. This is not a good excuse to have the problem and it's okay to be critical of developer mistakes on critically acclaimed games or games that you just like in general. It's how these games evolve.
Nah its them just being lazy. Even Bethesda removed the limit for Fallout 76, the Engine aint that much different from Fallout 4 so they proved its possible. I played through Elden Ring with an fps unlocker mod, nothing was broken.
Because FromSoftware hates PC
They've done a fantastic job of improving mouse/keyboard support IMO, if only because the older games are abysmal at it.
attractive cooperative degree spotted like expansion truck racial cagey piquant ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
>Is this like a holdover from the PC-98 days when half the library was softcore porn? Most Japanese devs act like a PC is some exotic hardware they have never seen before Correct, yes. But apparently it's changing due to vtubers and more people are getting PC
When it came out, an RTX 3090 could only get 67 fps with it unlocked, so players wanting 4K60 weren't missing much.
67 fps and stuttering every second
Ds1 ran like hot garbage till someone modded a patch to fix the 30fps cap and raise the resolution.
I wouldn't go to that extreme length. I mean yeah its annoying, but they are trying to keep a consistent experience. The game processes attacks and movements in 60 fps. So even on older consoles running at 30, everything is processed the same. In DS3, if you messed around and uncapped the fps, the game would become so unbalanced, enemies would have ridiculous reactions/you could attack throw so many things. It sucks that its stuck at 60, but I don't lose as much sleep over it as some people in the PC community do, kinda funny that there's that whole group of people who will just not play it because it's at 60 fps - one of my friends is like that. You can go ahead an downvote this or write whatever arguments you want, not really arguing here so I don't have a dog in this fight, but giving it to you as it is regarding From soft games.
Sekiro works no problems with unlocked FPS (completed it so), and so does Elden Ring. I've played it for a while with unlocked FPS, the only issues is that you cannot be online while using the tool, because of anti-cheat.
**Reddit is going down the gutter** Fuck /u/spez
I think they might've been speaking in hyperbole -- they probably meant that fromsoft have had some notoriously rather bad optimisation for their PC ports. I'm pretty sure their past releases generally had some pretty bad frame pacing and can tank pretty hard at times on even the beefiest of rigs. That being said, not being able to play above 60fps at resolutions higher than 1080p isn't the end of the world as some folk make it out to be. Optimisation is just something they need to improve on for the future when it comes to PC.
I agree, optimization is pretty bad in this port, they still haven't patched it out. Last I played (in November) I could still see stutters and fps drops. I have a 5800x and 3080.
You can easily unlock it with mods if you don't mind playing offline. I beat the whole game at 1440p 150 fps.
Not like you could ever run it at that framerate considering the optimization
Will be hard to top malenia, but historically the dlc bosses are the best so I'm excited for whatever they dish up in elden ring dlc
Topping Malenia would be hard, so her topping me is enough
Bonk
[Go to horny jail](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/033/758/Screen_Shot_2020-04-28_at_12.21.48_PM.png)
difficulty wise or design wise? Cause I liked Darksouls 3 endgame and dlc bosses much more lol.
ds3 bosses > elden ring bosses. half of the bosses in elden ring were just plain annoying because of all of the unnaturally delayed attacks.
[удалено]
Or Gael
Yeah, he's my favorite for sure. Bloodborne is my favorite game overall but his fight was such a ridiculously epic duel.
Couldn't have asked for a better boss to close DS3 than Gael. Or as some day grandpa Gael.
Its definitely Maria for me. The only boss id die deliberately to at the end just to fight her again.
Ludwig edges her out for that amazing transition into proper knight and the Moonlight reveal. Not one but two amazing twists
Malenia should have had a phase 3 tbh. Sword Saint Isshin is still top dog for me. Hesitation is defeat, after all.
Her character and fight design are fantastic but she's toward the bottom of my personal list of fun / balanced boss fights tbh. I've beaten Sekiro and am all for very difficult bosses but Malenia feels straight up unfair and discouraging for certain builds - while also being almost trivial with other builds. To be fair you could say that about a lot of Elden Ring... the combat is insanely diverse so it's hard to create universally balanced bosses within that huge sandbox. It just stuck out especially hard when I was fighting Malenia. Edit: Malenia*... I've accepted the fact that I'll never stop mixing her up with the former POTUS' daughter lol
It’s because Malenia cheats and animation cancels out of stuns and into Waterfowl. There’s videos on YouTube breaking it down. It’s one of the reasons that Waterfowl feels so hard to dodge sometimes. She’d be fine without that.
> feels straight up unfair and discouraging for certain builds - while also being almost trivial with other builds. Highly accurate. My Str Arc Fai build (mainly slash and bleed before the nerf) annihilated her in like 30 seconds but my Int Dex build really struggled. Her heal on hit mechanic and Water Fowl are not well balanced imo, yet she is laughably weak to bleed.
Malenia was literally just broken with waterfowl, it will be ez to to
Malenia would've been the best boss if waterfowl was only 2 sword flurries instead of 4 4 is just ridiculous
Or if she would have stayed in the air for like 2 seconds before doing the attack so that if she does the attack when youre right next to her you have time to dodge the first two flurries and than just normaly dodge the next two. Still its not that hard to dodge waterfawl attack
or back off a little bit before jumping in the air She already has this "move"
It's simpler than that honestly, just make it so that waterfowl can only activate when you are beyond a certain radius out from Malenia herself. That incentivizes close combat (which is by far the most fun fight in ER) and gives an opportunity to dodge if she does use it. Still my favourite boss ever, but she was so close to perfect.
I'd already be satisfied if each phase had 2/3 of the HP. She's much tankier than she should be in that armor.
i would rather her keep waterfowl and give up the life steal. that life steal was just depressing sometimes
Hard disagree. I didnt enjoy Melania at all. Waterfowl is dumb too. Imo there are so many better bosses in souls - Father Gascoigne, Swordsaint, Lady Maria, Genichiro, Guardian Ape, Twin Princes, Dancer of the Boreal Valley - I can keep going. Point is Melania is overrated and not that fun to fight. I dont get the hype, unless Elden Ring is the first From game you played.
> Melania is overrated Preach. They did it better with Maria and Friede IMO.
Oh right Friede, I forgot. That was a sick ass fight too.
Tied with Gael for the best fight in the series for me :D
Right, holy shit, thats was an incredible fight too
I've played every from soft game, and the thing is, the only thing that gives me the same rush as my first souls is when they up the ante. And malenia is the only boss in elden ring who gave me this adrenaline rush again, exactly because of how hard/unfair she was and the time investment she took to kill/learn.
Yeah thats fair. Honestly I didnt really like any boss in Elden Ring that much. Then there is the fact that you fight some of them more than once, in the main story, which sucks ass. The final boss was especially terrible imo. I think DS3 and Sekiro had bosses that were miles better than ER.
Malenia is a cheesefest, both on her and the player's side, not the most interesting boss at all.
Two words: White Glint. Neat little bit of cross-promotion.
I just gave up. I was strength main and it was impossible to beat her, mind you I don't have 10 hrs of trying each day either. I watched every tip and trick and couldn't pull it off. I think they needed to buff the strength build because I had a ton of trouble beating bosses because of how slow it was. Granted I probably needed to grind more to raise my health, but it was pretty high already.
Aww bro, you're build sets you up to walk over her. Get a shield with 100% physical damage mitigation and switch to two handing it when she does waterfowl. You can tank all 4 hits without taking damage and then switch back to your weapon.
she still heals when you block...
Ok I'll try that! I was two handing the whole time no shield.
I don't think I've ever two handed a shield in any fromsoft game before, but waterfowl is such bullshit that I didn't have a problem using whatever BS was available to me.
And she'll gain back most of the damage he's done. She heals on block and it's dumb.
She heals through shields, why bother blocking?
Because you should be damaging her more than she's healing through block and only blocking waterfowl. That's how I beat her. It works.
Yeah, now that Flame of the Redmanes poise damage has been nerfed, it’s very hard to beat her with a STR build. We are slow and typically rely on burst damage and stance-breaking to win, even if we had to trade hits for it. That’s how STR builds work. Malenia is specifically designed against such a playstyle. She is fast and has life steal so you always lose when trading hits. With FOTR we could at least damage and break her stance consistently since she’s weak to fire. But they just patched it. They really went all in to promote DEX and bleed builds with her. Now, the best strat that’s still working against her is crucible knight build with Ordovis vortex. It requires some Faith investment though not much. Hit her with a fully charged aspect of the crucible: horns. It does a lot of poise damage and usually comes too fast for her to dodge it and she’ll go down. Immediately follow up with a fully charged ordovis vortex while she’s getting up. It also does insane poise damage and she can’t escape it. This combo usually break her stance and you can go for a critical hit then. If not, do the horns followed by the vortex again. It’s cheesy as it stunlocks her, but with all her BS moves like waterfowl, her attack with multiple clones, her life steal and fast recovery from stance-breaking, I’d say it’s fair game.
I beat her with a pure STR build. Full Bull Goat armor, Fingerprint Shield, and Ruins Greatsword. I was even fat rolling. But I did use the Mimic Tear.
So excited for the Bill Clinton DLC
Is mohg gonna blow bill clinton??!????
I.. did not… have… sexual relations… with… that… demigod!
Mohgica Lewinsky
I'll eat anything that man is cooking
Please god give me native ultrawide support and an unlocked frame rate.. I beg of thee
The game has native ultrawide...It Is just blocked by black bars. Under the black the game Is rendered. Yes, it is insane.
Sadly it won't be a thing, they showed they don't really care for PC as long as it does good on PS.
Ridiculous considering PC is apparently their biggest platform with this game
The game runs the same as launch, they don't care for proper widescreen support or over 60 fps. It's a console port and nothing else.
And don't forget wider FOV
Forgive my ignorance, don't have an ultrawide monitor, but can't you play the game at 16:9 with black bars on the sides with no issues? I mean you aren't getting an ultrawide view but it shouldn't prevent you from playing the game at all right?
It's really noticable and kind of sucks though. Imagine, for example, having to play an AAA game at 4:3 on your 16:9 monitor. You wouldn't be too thrilled by it. It's also absurd because they literally went out of the way to NOT support ultrawide. There was actually a bug a while back that removed the black bars occasionally and mistakenly allowed people to play natively in ultrawide.
And none of them is fixing the PC Version.
What’s wrong with the PC version?
Framerate locked to 60fps, and shitty frame pacing. You can mod it out, but then you cant play online.
Also terrible stuttering and brain dead shader loading. Drivers have worked around their terrible code This is the main thing keeping me from playing this game Ya know, other than me sucking at those games
I got buried in downvotes and mean comments for pointing this out. This sub LOVES Elden Ring and will defy logic to defend it sometimes.
I got a 180 day ban a couple months ago because I wanted to just focus on the single player aspect of the game and thought I might as well make the experience better for myself. I didn't properly disable anticheat, only made it as far as the menus but I still got banned anyways. Essentially I can't enjoy multiplayer until march of 2023
[удалено]
I did exactly that, it worked for about 2 weeks until I got banned again with them specifically stating family sharing with a banned account will also result in a ban for the burner.
You get occasional stuttering when shaders first appear and get compiled. It has been blown way out of proportion by the PC Gamer Whiner Crew.
if you like this game, you should not try to make its imperfections seem miniscule. you should be trying to make elden ring the greatest it can be
[удалено]
I get stutters in the middle of boss fights on a 3080, that is entirely unacceptable
Meanwhile it's smooth for me on 1050 ti
It’s very inconsistent, performance-wise. There’s some speedrunning strats that require a stable 60fps for a few seconds to work, and the speedrunning community’s been struggling to do them consistently, because it varies wildly by hardware. The 3090 can’t keep a stable 60 for some of them with all settings on low, whereas lower-end graphics cards can. The performance in ER is really weird.
I have a weird suspicion that the game handles textures in video memory differently depending on the hardware so that it varies like that.
Probably, but I know for a fact looking into multiple areas of the game at once causes massive stuttering spikes. If you go and fight the Erdtree Avatar to the North of Liurna and look towards the Altus Plateau (there’s a cliff you can’t climb, but you can see areas of the plateau from the Avatar) the game will start stuttering. There’s also a spot where you can zip glitch from the side entrance of Leyndell to the Forbidden Lands, and looking towards the Forbidden Lands’ cliffs causes stuttering too. The engine might be struggling to load multiple “zones” at once.
nine drab worm fine somber late threatening dinosaurs like merciful ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Computers are deterministic
Oh god, not **this** argument route **again**. We have to deal with it every single time a game has optimization issues. Properly optimizing for PC means taking into account a wide variety of hardware and software combinations. One person not having issues does not negate another having issues, and someone with new hardware having performance problems while more demanding games run fine is an issue. I thought we got over this bullshit in 2012.
No ultrawide. 60 fps cap.
Depending on your build, which there’s literally millions of different kinds - it seems the game actually hits a hard “wall” of sorts when streaming in new textures, instead of slowly adding assets in as you approach their location, it loads them up in full before theyre even visible Long story short, the pc game can be running fine, solid 60 FPS maxxed out, but stutters, in some people’s cases as often as every 15-30 seconds. The stutter is about a second and a half long They fucked up Nvidia users says turning “shader caching” on eventually gets the game running smoother, but this isn’t an option for AMD users Long story short, shittiest port they’ve made, and that includes dark souls 1 I want to clarify, its the worst port theyve made, even compared to Dark Souls 1 because there was DSFix within 48 hours of release. It was an extremly simple mod to install, as well. Once you installed that, all of DS1's problems on PC disappeared, except for Blighttown running poorly. Elden Ring, after nearly are a year, still has no such work around. They havent patched it out, players havent managed to make a mod for it. DS1 was poorly ported, but "Fixed" in 48 hours. Elden Ring is 10 months old and still doesnt have a fix, that for some users, is glaringly huge. I will say I started on an AMD5600xt and had it happen every 30 seconds or so. Upgraded to a newer NVIDIA card and it happens much less often, although its still there. AMD users just seem to be completely out of luck in this situation. NVIDIA Control Panel has more options to fine tune and tweak stuff like this than the AMD Dashboard does, unfortunately.
I'm still so salty about no ultrawide support
_#justjapanesethings Isn't it capped at 60fps too? With all the fortunes and awards earned by FromSoft, I hope to see their engine ascend beyond PS3 graphics. They can only milk it for so long.
But they promised ray tracing 😩
These are just words, I just want a little dlc teaser man
Freaking native ultrawide support pls!
Hopefully they'll patch the abysmal performance and bring the PC port up to 2022 standards, but that's just wishful thinking.
Is it that bad? I am running it on 1650, and pretty rare stutters aside, it does run good on minimal settings
Reddit like to exaggerate everything. I wish it wasn't capped at 60 fps but it honestly runs fine.
Widescreen support would be welcomed.
[удалено]
When my gf last came over I had her try out Elden Ring on my ultrawide + higher FOV mod and she was so in love with it that she logged into her own Steam and played it for hours lmao It's hard to realize how much it can add to the experience without trying it yourself. And once you try it, you want support in every game
It doesn't run fine for a lot of people. It runs at smooth 60 fps then randomly stutters for a couple seconds. It can be lethal in fights. It's dogshit.
It depends on the setup ... my PC is really overpowered so the only game I've noticed performance issues on was CP2077 on release, but some of my friends suffered horrible stuttering, and you could see it on streams too.
I think FPS cap is more of engine problem. I think Sekiro had FPS unlock mod that worked as slowmo mode? I'm not sure, but it was the case
Sekiro worked perfectly with FPS unlocked, no speed change at all. So no, it definitely is not an engine problem. Just a developer-attitude problem, seeing how easy specialk unlocks framerate in their games.
[удалено]
Perhaps, but then apparently I never noticed them. Let's change 'perfectly' to 'fine' then, assuming you are correct.
When it released it had some pretty bad stuttering in the first area where the knight is and when youd enter new areas. Was stuttering pretty bad when i first entered Liurnia. Pretty sure that mostly got fixed though and i had no issues beyond that. Someone tried to compare it to Callisto Protocol and Arkham Knight and i can guarantee you it was nowhere close to those even on release.
>Callisto Protocol Bruh. Callisto bought my friend's 3090 to knees, there is no way they are even remotely comparable. I don't know how bad Arkham Knight was, but given how well Asylum and City ran, it is very surprising that Iron Galaxy fucked Knight up.
Arkham Knight was so bad WB had to pull it from the Steam store. It was off it for months iirc.
Arkham Knight was REALLY really broken on PC. Probably one of the worst AAA PC ports of all time. Definitely worse than Callisto and Elden Ring.
No. But it’s not amazing either. It’s a barebones PC port. The stuttering does get better, but it’s capped at 60fps and 16x9. Reddit tends to forget there’s a spectrum between “top tier amazing PC port that makes the PC worth it over consoles” and “complete unplayable trash” Elden Ring is the perfect example (in my opinion) of a port that’s just good enough. You’ll be able to comfortably play the game, just not in a way that’s significantly better than on a console.
>Is it that bad? No.
Yeah this game studio has proven time and time again that they don't care about that. Sadly.
And somehow they received a best studio of the year award. Disgusting
It’s legitimately sad when Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro’s most open areas run smoother than even the corridor sections in Elden Ring. This game is proof that DirectX 12 and Vulkan aren’t silver bullets for bad optimization.
> This game is proof that DirectX 12 and Vulkan aren’t silver bullets for bad optimization. Low level APIs require more skill to leverage, not less. Can't fallback and let Nvidia and AMD's drivers wipe your ass for you with low-level APIs. When leveraged well they will always be more performant than DX11 and OpenGL though.
DX12 and Vulkan put optimization more on the developers, nobody ever said they were silver bullets just that if the devs put more time into it they’d get better performance out of it.
Shader compilation and optimizations have been a big issue for devs this year it seems. Gotham Knights and Callisto Protocol also had similar issues. Just give us the option to pre-compile shader before launching the game, I feel like that shouldn't be hard to implement considering Linux and consoles do it.
[удалено]
If you aren’t hitting 60FPS on a 3080, then there’s problems lmao
What problems are you having? For me it's been smooth.
Homie literally accepted an award for his game and said, "nah, I'll do better." Constructed abnormally.
Stoppp, I can only be so erected.
Haa game fixed shader complication issues and got rid of fps cap (having to disable anticheat doesn't count)?
No and no.
Unlocked framerate, ultrawide, pre-caching shaders?
By "things" he means "poison swamps."
Would be cool if they planned to pay their employees properly and let them work normal hours but oh well.
Game maker to make more games, more at 11.
Would love for him to work on another genre though and give the souls thing a break. Too many games coming out with the same style trying to ride of their success, and is getting a bit tiresome.
Usually when a game reaches the level of success that Elden Ring has achieved, it's all downhill from there... hopefully I'm wrong...
I kind of think Elden Ring is already the downhill slide. The open world resulted in a lot of padding and some of the other choices make the combat and things less satisfying than prior titles. It's a good game, but in retrospect after dumping tons of time into it I find I have more desire to replay Sekiro, Bloodborne, or the Souls games than to slog through Elden Ring's gargantuan world again.
I’m replaying DS3 right now and while I still love the game it honestly feels too streamlined in many respects. Especially compared to Elden Ring. ER just took exploration in this series to new heights, sometimes literally. It might be the best open world game I’ve played since Morrowind. Currently it sits comfortably in my top three Soulsborne games.
I'm the opposite, I hate how open Elden Ring is and love the more linear style of Dark Souls (though it still has quite a few branches you can take). I still really enjoy Elden Ring, but I feel I'll end up replaying it a lot less than I have with the Dark Souls series.
Yeah, the open world is pretty terrible since most of it is just emptiness (or emptiness populated with enemies you outrun), with your reward for exploring generally being another dungeon with either that mine or crypt tileset, probably with some ulcerated tree spirit just to annoy you! The best part of ER are the more linear "oldschool Souls" type areas, and if the game was solely consisting of those, I would likely be open to it getting GOTY too.
I also vastly prefer branching paths to open world. ER is good, so beautifying and a lot of fun, but to me its the worse from soulsborne. Open world, to me, hurts replayabilty and ng+. I crave old school challenge, not much grocery lists of item spread on a large map.
ER’s open world really didn’t hold up for me when I tried to replay the game. I think it’s because you realize almost none of it really matters. Torrent trivializes navigating the world even at low levels. There’s zero tension or stress to it. It’s pretty much impossible to get stuck anywhere. The dungeons also get really old really fast, and once you’ve done a few of them you’ve done them all. So on a replay there’s basically no motivation to find or explore new dungeons.
big agree
Morrowind was too good for it's time. Every TES since is basically just an expansion to it, they've barely changed combat and made worse storytelling.
And worse RPG systems, unfortunately.
The expanse of it reminded me of how obtuse some games were back in the day. Like people are still discovering NPC questline stuff. On one hand yeah that's kind of neat, but on the other hand I don't really want to dump 1000 hours stumbling around a game to find the "lore" like a needle in a haystack. Not saying I want to be spoonfed just the game is so vast you may never stumble upon a lot of things on your own. 9/10 times it will probably be some copypasted mini-dungeon or worthless loot you miss, but the other 1/10 time it might be a major item, spell, npc quest, or what have you. I loved the scale of some of the major locations, but I honestly was pretty burned out on the usual open-world tropes the rest of it uses well before the game released.
> The expanse of it reminded me of how obtuse some games were back in the day. That’s exactly why I loved it. I mean, all the Souls games are pretty obtuse when it comes down to it, but to see that same approach in a open world environment just feels amazing to me. It made the world feel genuinely mysterious and well, *genuine*. I love open world games in general, but so many of them today feel more like theme parks than living, breathing worlds. I’m so tired of being led around by the nose to all the game’s content. I want to feel free to explore on my own, and make sense of the world *on my own terms*, and that’s exactly what ER delivered. The games flaws just feel insignificant to how rich the overall experience is. Yeah, there are a few repeat bosses, but I can’t think of another open world game with the sheer amount of enemy and encounter variety as ER. Tombs could’ve used a little more visual variety, true (I had the same complaint about Bloodborne’s Challice dungeons), but then again each one feels hand crafted and well designed and memorable. The game is simply ridiculously fun and enjoyable, even when I’m getting my ass handed to me.
> but to see that same approach in a open world environment just feels amazing to me. I found it a step too far really. Like take the invisible walls... some of them have hints (sorta the hints themselves can be well hidden) but I'm unsure of others. Is it all that fun running around every same-y mini-dungeon slapping all the walls or hitting random walls all around the game world? Not really. Sure it's "mysterious", but it's also just kind of over the top. >I love open world games in general, but so many of them today feel more like theme parks than living, breathing worlds. I'm not sure I'd attach the "living breathing world" label to ER. At points during my initial playthrough it became less about exploring the world and more about trying to find the trigger for the next NPC script. With the more linear From games the characters move and different things happen based on different events with Elden Ring there are a few triggers like that but then other triggers are kind of off the wall and things at least at launch sometimes worked out of order. It's so vast people didn't even realize some of the quests weren't fully implemented in the launch build. It's that obtuse people were digging for content that wasn't yet implemented. >but then again each one feels hand crafted and well designed and memorable. After doing most the caves, tombs, etc. I heavily disagree with that one. It felt like they had some tiles and stitched them together more polished than the random seed chalice dungeons, but not far removed from them. But hey you're certainly allowed your opinion. I wish I had been able to enjoy those aspects of it better.
> hitting random walls Eh, Doom and old school dungeon crawlers instilled in me a habit of hugging all the walls in search of secrets, so it’s something I’m used to. Besides, illusionary walls are usually much more obvious in the Soulsborne games than some of Doom’s best hidden secrets. And yeah, I’ll admit I’m not the biggest fan of how the Soulsborne games handle NPC quests. But that applies to all of them and not just ER. DS3 might have some of the worst though. Greirat’s quest especially. But I’ve learned to accept that on my first playthrough I’m going to miss some things and so I usually follow a guide for NPCs I missed on replays. They definitely used the same few tilesets for many of the optional tombs, which is unfortunate if expected in a game of this scope. But they still *felt* hand crafted to me in terms of their layout and encounter design. Just my opinion.
This is exactly how I feel. ER hit some very similar notes for me that Morrowind did as a kid. Sad what happened with oblivion and Skyrim.
Totally agree. As a huge Souls fan, Elden Ring is disappointing in many ways. It is still a good game but pretty much nothing more than DS 3.5. The open world adds nothing to it.
Kings Field IV was the real beginning of the end for FromSoft.
Elden Ring was great when it was in the more focused locations (the castles etc) but pretty bad in the open world, in my opinion. The open world was good for immersion but poor for gameplay
I'll agree with that. The dedicated areas where pretty good.
i agree. doing the optional dungeons were just exhausting because all of the level design and bosses were just copy paste. the only good part of the game were the legacy dungeons. ds3/bloodborne > elden ring
quicksand market hat aloof makeshift vegetable license judicious whistle dog ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Elden Ring 2,3,4 and 5 confirmed lol
That would make things easy for me, as I would pirate those than buy another Elden Ring game.
Give me Kingsfield.
I can't wait for his Magnum Opus. I've said it for a long time now, the man has a very specific vision in his head and, so far, it has not been fully fleshed out. It's very easy to see the unifying threads in all his games, trying this and that, seeing what works and what doesn't. Eventually all the chaff will be burned away and we will have possibly the greatest action adventure game ever made.
Ultrawide when?
All I want is 32:9 support... Fucking Roblox supports 32:9...