Quick note: A few minor corrections for this video are listed in the description. (If you're confused by the replies to this comment, they mostly pertain to an earlier version of it which simply announced my then-upcoming Demon's Souls analysis.)
I've unironically watched that video about 5 times now. The philosophy therein resonates so deeply with me, that I actively use the ideas and concepts as a basis for my own personal beliefs and views on "purpose" and "meaning" in my day to day life. A lot of it is just existentialism, I know, and so I've dug deeper into that through other sources, but I find that DS1 makes those concepts so much more tangible than reading about them in a book ever could. I can sit down and "live out" those ideas in Lordan in a way I normally can't with other philosophical ideas, and I have your work to thank for that deeper appreciation of the mechanics and world ^.^
@@KuroKitten You can easily talk about any tangible thing through philosophical lens. The problem is finding people who are willing to listen and discuss in good faith
I think it wouldve been super cool to have Melina give some kind of dialogue insight or lore upon first resting at a site of grace in a new area. Similar to the way the heart works in the Dishonored series. It would make her feel more present, rather than appearing at the beginning and end only. Which is kind of weird for a character that has so much narrative significance.
@@journeration1 ok not all of the church's but the point is that you have the option to talk to her in some specific locations... I'm not wrong, I'm just only 66% correct There are more locations you can talk to her at. Like the grace on the east gate of Raya Lucaria, when you do Boc's questline
This is a great suggestion, especially considering how Melina goes out of her way to explain that she's fulling the role despite NOT being a finger maiden. Having another character take up the role if Melina decides to leave is such an elegant and efficient solution, I'm honestly kind of amazed they didn't do something like that.
@@Trev81 yet despite that the games still stands above others ,its impressive ,this could’ve turned into another cyberpunk if they weren’t careful,there’s so much cut content that didn’t make it to the finish and Elden ring is still a brilliant game
That's an excellent idea! To add flavor, they also could've added a quirk where the value of runes is slightly different. Maybe, for some lore reason, enemies drop fewer runes upon inherting the Frenzied Flame but leveling up requires fewer runes? Items could retain their price, giving the choice of inherting the Flame or not an additional consequence in addition to being locked into an ending.
Another thing to add: It seems like tree sentinel is the only boss actually programmed and equipped to deal with magic/incantation projectiles. The other bosses will either dodge every single time or take projectiles to the face every time.
Late response but I had an easy time with it by sitting on the building near it and just spamming Rock Sling. It occasionally teleports away but it eventually comes back, gets stuck on the building wall, and I throw rocks at it until it dies.
I have to agree with most of this. It's strange how people won't accept that there's things that you wish were better in the game without taking it personally
What i have a problem with ia that reviewers all seem to call out style choices or thinga that arent really flaws as flaws. Thia guy isnt the worst, he actually touched on a few ideas ive had for improvements but some things he said i just flat out disagree with being called a flaw
People take personally which they are passionate about. The people that take it personally are the minority and they are very loud which makes them more visible. Most people can see it for what it is and carry on. Also, this review and criticism is done in a very logical and polite way. Even if you dont agree with something or most of it, I think you can respect it.
@@Ruffy112 ok have fun with this... 3:15 this is straight nonsense. We all know how double jump physics work? Seeing how double jumps are an imaginary thing in a video game i dont see how he or anyone else can say the "right way" they should work..... this is absolutely not a flaw... 6:40 theres a health bar. You should have an idea when you will stagger amd when torrent is out of hp. I dont feel like this is a flaw. I agree with the horse menu prompt. I beat my entire first run without horse combat so if you cant figure out how to use it just fight normally? I really never thought of it as option A and i dont think thats a flaw. 7:34 not a flaw,, be careful on cliffs. Torrent is not yoshi 12:34 get good. 13:49 "If the player has time to change his mind the character does to" Nonsense learn how to play or play something else. Stop mashing buttons. This is a style choice not a flaw. There are other games that cancel animations and he can play them. Its not an imperfection in any of the games. 16:45 ok the caves and catacombs are similar only in basic ascetic. He fails to mention every single cave and catacomb is unique. Many offering unique puzzles, challenges with remixes of enemies and themes, and unique items. The bosses are not real bosses, they are just the cherry on a unique puzzle box. This is c and d tier side content and the reused enemies are not a flaw. The game is not worse for having them. I believe the real flaw here is that the game needs a couple more legacy levels with unique shardbearers and enemies. He mentioned crabs wolves and a lack of new enemies in main levels and here i agree. Haligtree is probably my favorite level even with repeat enemies but the legacy levels overall repeating enemies is a flaw. Although what is in the game is well made 20:00 nonsense. He wants the game to have less content so that everyone will see it all and so it can be beaten quickly? The amount of content is not a flaw. There is enough solid A tier content here. The game would not be better if it had less. I couldnt disagree more The tree spirits arent really bosses by that point. Dont fight them if you want to. 25:29 bosses being balanced around summons isnt the truth at all. He is complaing the easy mode option is to easy... Dont use them if you want difficulty
@@Ruffy112 i had to trim a lot of what i wrote out it was to long. I only got three quarters through video... Just want to point out i left the things i disagree with most in and that i cut out a lot of what i do think he has a point on. Im not calling the entire video bad or nonsense
I also only ever used the crafting system for “cure poison” or “cure rot” items, but I’d much rather just have a vendor with an infinite supply of both that I could buy.
A critical problem with the crafting and consummables in general is that death to a boss doesn't restore them. With spells, skills, weapons - you can try them and repeat the fight until you find a set that works for you best, then fight the boss a dozen times more and finally win. With a consummables strategy you're out after first two-three tries and need to go gather more... if they respawn. Good luck making a sleep build if you aren't already good enough to do a deathless run, 'cause if you run out, that's it, you're out, St. Trina's Lilly is non-renewable.
I just beat Elden Ring today, and this video is just AWESOME. All of his points are totally valid, and I love that he gives a clear and valid critique while also loving and praising the game as much as it deserves. It's great to hear a game being treated like any other great work of art - we can critique it while still overwhelmingly enjoying and respecting it. That is something The Gemsbok does expertly in all of his game videos. I bow to you as Elden Lord.
Just to add to your point about Torrent and fall damage, they could've easily just disabled the double jump AFTER you've fallen the distance to reach the death threshold. Best case, there would be some kind of acceleration that allowed you to input the double jump, but stopped Torrent from actually changing his momentum. An animation where he tries, but you're going too fast, and he can't overcome it so splat you go. Just a tiny bit of additional polish would've done this game well in many ways, even with the month delay I think they could've let it cook another few months before release.
Funny thing is: they _did_ do that. Double jump is disabled after falling a lethal distance. The problem displayed in the video results from there being tons of edge cases where it's possible to double jump right before lethal distance, then fall just another 2-5 meters and die on impact. I like your animation idea, though. Combining that with raising the double jump cutoff to half or three quarters of lethal distance might've solved it.
@@TheGemsbok sure, I should have been more clear. Not after falling a lethal distance, but after falling something close to it would work better. Either that or, maybe a simpler and more consistent solution, making the double jump unavailable after you've fallen below the starting altitude of your original jump, so that you couldn't game the fall damage system like that but could still reach higher points and reposition mid-air. It would have to be communicated to the player clearly, but something like a special animation around Torrent's feet (particle effects or a light effect maybe, relatively subtle) to show when he could double jump and couldn't would work. I think people would get a feel for it quickly.
There is also a similar problem to this: If you run of a cliff without jumping you cant double jump at any distance because you never did the first jump.
@@chuckwood3426 As explained in the following video, that is a glitch that only affects certain weapon classes: ruclips.net/video/f5fOFivzGh4/видео.html
Another interesting way to handle double jump issues could be to take the banjo kazooie approach. Once you fall far enough the character loses control from the speed and it becomes impossible to double jump.
Don't forget, in your repetition sections, those ulcerated tree spirits usually drop golden seed items. But get this, there are more golden seeds in the game than there are upgrades available for your flasks. That means that not only are they repeated, but there may be a point that they don't even provide a reward since at a certain point Golden Seeds are useless to you. It's also worth noting, with regards to spirit ashes, that it's hard not to simply max out and use ONE summon not only because it's the most powerful, but it's the most mechanically interesting. Mimic Tear. Even after the nerf, it's still a ridiculously effective summon and because of its very nature it's also the most versatile. Like figuring out that it does, in fact, have all the same talismans on it that you had equipped when you summoned it. That means you can use the one that draws aggro, summon the Mimic Tear, remove it after its been summoned and then the Mimic Tear draws all the aggro because it has the talisman on still. That level of complexity not only makes it a very powerful summon but also the most fun to use because of how you can switch it up to assist you in an encounter and I wish more of them had additional features like that. NPCs and factions are always - always - ALWAYS an afterthought to From Software and honestly, now that they've tightened up combat this much I hope they spend less time working out the combat mechanics and invest more time in the areas they always neglect in their games. That being actual side characters and their usually lack-luster (and in the case of Elden Ring, entirely absent) covenant systems. Great critique video, fantastic points and fair assessments.
I think having a lot of golden seeds is good though, yes you have a surplus eventually and especially on ng+, but for newer players or someone who isn't trying to go everywhere or get everything I think its needed.
@@Dat___Cat I'm still in ng and can no longer upgrade the flasks. I just happened to find a lot of the sapplings. There's a few in the Altus Plateau that even give you two seeds. It's way easy to quickly max out the flasks. That's why there's hardly a point in having do many tree spirit bosses.
I honestly think this is as complex as Souls combat can get. It’s pretty outdated design. A Sekiro style combat system that accounts for any kind of weapon type, wether it’s a sword, spear, greatsword, etc, should be the future for the franchise.
@@CoolSmoovie it also still has a fair number of kinks and exploits left to tune up. But I hope they manage that this tome around so next time they can work on other aspects of gameplay and interaction.
@@CoolSmoovie I think it can maybe get a little more complex but I can't see how you think it's an outdated design. It's not something that degrades over time or gets massively improved upon like graphics. Anything else would just be a different design, not an improved one.
Great video. The only thing I would say feels like an omission is the extremely unintuitive way the game handles inventory overages. At this point, being in NG+4, I'm starting to experience quite frequent instances where a commonly encountered item (especially certain kinds of crossbow bolts) cause a menu to pop up informing me that I do not have space in my on-character inventory nor my chest to carry that item-a menu that seizes all other player actions besides movement until I have acknowledged this inventory notification by pressing "OK". This seems like a really unnecessary and bizarre way to handle this problem. It seems that it could've easily been addressed with some kind of icon or sound effect, both already liberally employed by the game, that does not cause the player to momentarily get locked out of combat or evasive actions in battle.
Interesting! I never actually maxed out any item stack before selling off excess materials, so I was unaware of that. Certainly does sound annoying, though.
Yeah, really the menu management in general is pretty bad. There are many other instances as well where menu options come up, you assume they'll just go away... but they don't unless you press the correct button. Anything else and the input will just be eaten and you'll do nothing, leading to a LOT of weird deaths for me because of that.
This is a random thought but when you talked about how Minibosses, like the Nights Cavalry vanish, I thought of how the Lynels in BOTW shoot at you with a bow when you're rapidly distancing yourself from them. They could have made the Night Cavalry stop at the border of his area where he is supposed to be and have him pull out a bow or crossbow to shoot you. This would incentivise the player to move closer and would also kinda work as a method to try stopping players from running away.
Other than the parts of combat that I find maddening in this game, the repetition is by far the biggest issue I have with it. After you get to Altus Plateau, there are almost no new enemies anywhere in the game--that I can think of at least. There are slight variations on enemies, such as the elite livery knights in the Haligtree area or the lightning caster beastmen in Farum Azula...and actually I just remembered the Albinauric archers in the Snowfield too which are entirely new as far as I know (other than Latenna but she doesn't count). But the POINT is, after you've done Limgrave, Weeping Peninsula, Liurnia, Caelid, and the outer part of Altus, you've seen almost everything the game has to offer in terms of enemy design. And you're not even halfway done yet. That's....way better than Breath of the Wild for example, but still kind of inexcusable. Especially for bosses. There is no quicker way to make an encounter feel not special than to duplicate it at the bottom of a random mineshaft for....reasons?
Case in point, Astel. Why did they clone him, one of the most unique and memorable bosses in the game, in a random cave in Mountaintops of the Giants? Why? Also fuckin GODRICK, why clone him in an evergaol with a different name???
@@leonardocontri8921 Yep that's exactly who I was referencing lol, I actually found mineshaft Astel first, but even then it was still incredibly weird to see a boss like that in a mining dungeon. Like....what is THIS atrocity doing here?? Fromsoft explain. But yeah it's a problem with way more bosses than just Astel. They clearly just made the game too big.
@@aperson9847 agreed bro, they made it so big in fact that not only they recycled allot of content, but they didn't really have the time to tune properly some fights in the late game. Case in point... Malenia
@@leonardocontri8921 It's true, and it's not even just bosses. Once you get to the Forbidden Lands it feels like every single enemy's damage output gets turned up by at least 30%. It's like they wanted to make the game harder at that point but they didn't have time to make new enemies, so they just cranked the old ones up to eleven.
the first half of DS1 with no fast travel is my favorite memory of the souls experience, also no separate hub. most fromsoft games didn't do that which is a bummer for me, as it made the progression dangerous and precious. the horse of elden ring also kills even more the dangers of exploration
It would be nice of you to point out the throwing system that still hasn't changed. A lot of the times you need to eyeball your "heavier" throws, like cracked and ritual pots. A great example of what i'm saying is the Warhawks at Stormeil, specifically the ones that sit on top of explosive barrels, or even the teleporting scarabs. If you were to lock on to them and throw a fire pot, it would completely miss.
What bothered me most about Elden Ring is how am always watched by the devs. The mixture of controlling where I can summon torrent, who I can kill, and when I can ash summon, harmed the immersion greatly. Also speaking of story elements that have no effect on the gameplay, shouldn't Maliketh be able to actually KILL us using destined death? Or am I missing something?
The lack of acknowledgement from the npc about our immortal status make me believe player death and revival arent canon. There are several character who confirmed to be able to see grace like us: Morgott, Vyke and all of them can die even without using destined death. Other possible explanation is Melina is an avatar or the Gloam Eye Queen herself, which you can see in a variation of the Frenzy Flame ending. Who give us protection against destined death.
bro those are basic restrictions to regulate exploration elements wtf. of course you can't summon torrent inside a building, or spirit summons anywhere. that would make normal encounters far too easy
The worst thing about input buffering that annoys me is when you are trying to roll an attack but the enemy attack comes first, the action is saved and performs the roll inmediately after and the enemy usually attacks again and you get hit another time xD
The amount of braindead monkeys instantly downvoting you and saying "your opinion is wrong" with no good rebuttal for criticising the game in any way is so funny. Especially on the EldenRing sub. Communities like these are actually a very nice places to observe formation of cult like behavior in people, as dramatic as it may sound. Its like these people are not capable of thinking for themselves and instead just repeat the same set of predictable responses whenever you dare to criticise their favourite game or developer.
I couldn't agree more with your comment that the game needed an "editor." Most of this game could, and maybe should, have been cut out or trimmed. The main dungeons and their bosses? Keep those. The open world bosses like Deathbirds and Night Cavalry knights? Those are fine. But most of the catacombs, caves, ruins, whatever, needed to be trimmed out. Take out the repeated encounters against anything you fight in a main dungeon. They clearly couldn't think of anything to fill the map with, and just threw in filler. If the map had been smaller, and had less but hand made side areas, it would have felt less like Skyrim and more like New Vegas. Something like Valhalla probably has the same amount of ruins this game does, but at least every one of those are both visually and mechanically different. I can't say that I found a single ruin in Valhalla that looked the exact same as another, or was the exact same thing as another except with an elevator room instead of a guillotine room. Meanwhile in ER, every ruin literally has the exact same hole in the ground with the exact same spiral staircase that leads to a chest. And I mean that quite literally, it's the exact staircase asset copied and pasted. It's maddening. I'd disagree that this is the best open world though, as aside from the Souls combat it doesn't do enough to distinguish from Skyrim or BotW. I'd hardly call the dozens and dozens of repeated catacombs and caves as being noteworthy or satisfying content for example. Especially when the exact same repetition is a known criticism of both BotW and Skyrim.
Hey folks. You can turn Torrent while in precarious situations by using the telescope to rotate Torrent 360 degrees with no lateral movements. JUST MAKE HABIT of exiting the telescope with the same input that you activated it with, because if you get all straightened out for your climb and press the B button to back out of the telescope causing Torrent to lunge forward, "yer gunna haveuh bad time"
the weirdest part of the double jump is that once you obtain enough vertical speed, you CANNOT double jump... which is weird because you hit that fall speed long, LONG after you hit the fall death threshold. its such an easy fix to put both of those things at the same threashold, why leave it the way it is?
Agree with all of your points. I also think there are lots of areas that feel wonderful and new and magical, but straying off the beaten theatrical path can lead you to disappointingly repetitive content. Yes, there are some cheeky homages to previous titles, but after a while they just feel self-derivative and uninspired. I went back and played some of the other titles, and somehow the chalice dungeons in BB feel LESS repetitive than the catacombs in ER. Raya Lucaria is cool, but it is also a discount version of Yharnam. It's too bad since there new and original areas in ER are some of the coolest areas in any game ever, but there's just a lot of boring fluff as well.
Also, I don't think you mentioned how jumping in combat does not feel implemented well. Big area attack on the ground? Well if it were Sekiro, you would jump. But in ER, you get baited to jump and then get clipped or the attack is still active by the time you land.
Surprised you were able to stop playing Elden ring for a few hours to make this video. Completely agree on all of the points. Going back to the game now.
I absolutely agree that fall damage should be implemented on the first Double jump , so you carry the weight and momentum of a fall damage death it makes a lot of sense
Yo, this whole video was good but that analogy at the end comparing it to a four hour greatest hits compilation... fucking transcendent. I've played a ton of this game, discussed it a lot, and listened to other people discuss it a lot but no one has ever quite hit the nail on the head like that. Well done.
I feel its good to have videos like this the critc the game while it is a very good game to call it a masterpiece is just dishonest After all criticing elden ring or any product you love is what helps the creator improve
Crafting isn’t much better if you are an archer. You have to kill a ton of birds for decent arrows, and the easiest way to kill birds it with a bow... it’s just not intuitive and you might as well just buy arrows. Plus it’s worse because by mid game even the most Expensive arrows can be bought 600 at a time with 20 minutes of runes earned through normal play. If bombs were stronger I’d be thrilled. Honestly, perfumes are the best crafted item. And even then, only a couple of them per build
It's refreshing to see some critique on the game other than 'boss is hard so game is bad', this is some solid analysis. I have more than a few thoughts of my own so please bear with me. 1. I too was under the assumption that Torrents double jump would negate the fall height of the initial jump, that is just what makes best physical sense. However, from an exploration perspective, it makes sense they did it this way. Being able to skip huge chunks of the map would ruin the intended progression of the player and just straight out spread the checkpoints all over the place. 2. I too have experienced not having my follow-up dodge act and not knowing whether I actually pressed the button, so thanks for clearing that up. 3. I seriously don't get why people have a problem with the reused/reskinned bosses. The game has plenty of variety in mobs and bosses as it is, so revisiting a boss is only a pleasure for me, due to my 'learned skillset' not going to waste. It's a geniuine sense of progression to see yourself do good on a boss that previously clapped hard (e.g. godskin apostle took me 30+ tries, but I beat godskin duo in my first try). Repeating a tough enemy for no virtual reward is another case that I'll go into later. 4. Your mentioned lore inconsistencies with the gameplay are really not a problem. It's a game before a story, so it's fine if you can still use Torrent after parting with Malenia. Although I do strongly agree with your point on the 'no attack' zones, it really shackles the players freedom. The fact that killing the merchants is not only a consequence, but an advantage is really a miss from FromSofts side. I'm not sure if these count as mechanical aspects of the game, but why not: 5. Seriously, I spent 120 hours for my first playthrough and still had no idea wtf was going on. ER has confused meaningful and intellectual dialogue with superficial gibberish, kind of like those pseudo-intellectual types that say 1000 words without really saying anything. I absolutely HATE the obscurity of questlines as well in this game. With the exception of Alexander's quest, there really isn't any way to know how to progress with a certain quest without looking it up online. So much to the point that the 'artistic presentation' is just straight out obnoxious. . You could make the argument that you're not meant to catch everything on your first playthrough or that the NPCs should be considered 'people that you meet on your way', but in reality your chance on following up on a quest is just left to randomness. This worked way better in previous souls games because of the linear composition, but in an open world this just does not work. 6. Rune proportions in this games are out of wack. When beating a crucible knight gives slightly more runes than a random mob enemy, you just feel cheated out of beating the challenge, since there also isn't any loot to go after. You don't even get anything for beating the uleceral tree spirit where the erdtree favor +2 talisman is and there is literally no incentive to fight any of the giants in the snow areas. 7. My last point is kind of a double-edged sword. I like the fact that FromSoft doesn't buck under peer pressure from the community (nerf this nerf that), but at the same time I can't help but feel that they're shitting all over the fans. For two months now there have been perfomance issues on the PC and Xbox, but there has been no noticeable changes so far (they mention it in the 1.04 patch but i still experience fps drops when fighting bigger enemies). PC does not even have any social features whatsoever, so we don't have any access to voicechat, or even have the possibillity of reporting recent players. When they seriously prioritize buffing ROB to oblivion instead of fixing essential game mechanics, I can't help but feeling shit on as a fan. EDIT: 8. Seriously, what the hell was the point of alternative endings, if they do not change ANYTHING? You got 1 good ending, 1 bad and 4 identical ones. IMO Sekiro did it way better, when you can fight different variations of enemies based on your ending, with new movesets and everything. Also, the thematic differences in the multiple endings really strengthed the story. I have been mainly playing PVP for the last 70+ hours of gameplay, and the fuckton of problems that arise there are essay worthy.
They are never going to give you chat options on PC, they don't want people chatting during co-op, console players use the OS chat software to chat. You need to download your own chat client because Fromsoft will never add one. They don't want people chatting while they play that's what the entire messaging system is for. It's just kinda pointless to complain about something they literally do by design. That's all.
@@aureateseigneur5317 Ah ok good to know. It's just funny that Bamco tells you in the information tab to report recent players, but you don't have anything to go off other than an in-game name. And the messaging system is pretty ass for anything other than memes
I strongly agree with your 5th reason. Like the Shabari grape lady is literally impossible to do without looking up. She requires 6 items 5 of which are compelety random to get and have no hints what so ever. Everytime you give her an item she teleports somewhere with no hints given. 7 times. Yay . . . Then you need to reach the secret boss in the maze of the secret underground map. Kill the secret boss, traverse a bunch of parkour in a souls game, then do a bunch of other things. Like wtf? In Ds3 all you did was gesture at a statue. Or hit an illusory wall to get to Ash Lake. It took me 15 minutes to do her. quest with full knowledge. If you went in blind It would probably take you 3 playthroughs. Also millicent just says "I have something to do" and teleports from Caelid to Mt Gelmir for no reason. If you never go to that one tiny cliff side in that huge optional side area of an already huge optional area, you just don't get her quest.
@@uyeah1234 All those people you meet are so enigmatic and their quests so convoluted that through the 160 hours it took me to beat the game i didnt bother with any of them because its almost impossible to predict where any of them might end up or when. And I dont intend to run around the map for 20 hours like an idiot looking for some blind bitch to give her a grape. Like come on. So in that aspect these twitter devs everyone made fun of were kind right. ER quest design is pretty bad. And what makes it worse is that if you are not porticularly interested in completing any of them your only goal for the whole runtime is to become Elden Lord. And you are not even given a good reason to become one. Or what does becoming and Elden Lord even entail. I had no motivation whatsoever to see this story through because i wasnt invested in any of the characters, their struggles or motivations at all. I only beat the game because i wanted to see what From would throw at me next. Even the intro doesnt make a good job of introducing any of the big players or what their role is in this world. They mostly only show you what they look like and maybe some NPCs get mentioned by name, but thats about it.
Came here expecting garbage takes but hey, would you look at that, i was pleasantly surprised, actual criticism and good takes, thumbs up my dude, i specifically like how you edited some characters dialogue in the transitions between topics that was a chefs kiss of a touch!
Various Dragon repeats is actually my main issue. They added 1 new attack and copy pasted the Midir moveset to every Dragon in game. Aside from the last one. Then simply changing visuals on the breath and volla. You have 6 Dragons for the assets of 1.
When I mention 'the various dragons,' I'm not talking only about the standard variety encountered around the early game and midgame with various breath types. Rather, I'm talking about them, the advanced variety in the endgame, the dragonkin soldiers, the wyrms, Greyoll, Fortissax, and Placidusax. The point is that I don't mind a few of those having a lot of repeats since they've crafted that whole family of different related dragon types. Compare those to the tree spirits, who have no apparent close relatives as a form of variance, and where the biggest change you'll encounter is that some of them also inflict rot.
I was thinking what if when they release the dlc they add a new item they negates all fall damage while on torrent but make it insanely hard to get like similar to the secret rings from dark souls 2 beating the game without resting at a bonfire
There is a plot reason for a mix of existing enemies only being at Haligtree however I get the gameplay complaint. Perhaps they should have had a slightly tougher class of cleanrot Knight unique to the area?
Yeah this is Miquella’s city that will be lead into a new age and there’s not a single Cleanrot General or elder Kindred of the Rot or hell even just a Haligtree sentinel.
Such a nice critique. Elden Ring is such a dissapointment considering how good many of its elements are. I wish From Software fans could pull the stick out of their asses and just say that the game has flaws rather than lash out at everyone who criticizes the game in any way (and it is something that is sadly visible under most critiques of the game).
Really interesting points brought up, I can't disagree with many. So far the only different opinion I have is that I don't find that much problem with multiple versions of an enemy being in the game (such as a boss popping up as an elite enemy later on or different versions of it appearing multiple times), and while I understand that taking something like the curse lizards or Sif's likeness into Elden Ring took a little bit from them, I do believe whole-heartedly that they make Elden Ring (at least for new players of the series) an amazing experience for new and old players: Old players get a "oh this is X" moment that gives a bit more meaning to their past experiences, letting them carry over some of the muscle memory and pattern recognition, and new players get to experience those enemies for the first time in their new (and arguably improved) form without having to go back to an old, more restrictive game. All in all, a sacrifice I understand and agree with, even if it removes a bit of replayability (by having a boss be fought 7 times in a single playthrough). I do agree that there should've been more "local" wildlife and enemies that aren't just a rehash of previous enemies with a different paintjob, and if there was to be some "global" wildlife, maybe wolves shouldn't be used (though I love crabs so I'm glad they are everywhere). There are 6 (yes 6) different KNIGHT type enemies, 6 SOLDIER type enemies, and 7 FOOT SOLDIER type enemies that manage to be the most common enemies around, most of the time the armors have different paintjobs and a different helmet.
You have no idea how good it felt to hear you say "it's not new." I've been thinking this ever since I finished my first playthrough of the game, and have been citing that as the reason why I'm disappointed with it. Despite Sekiro adopting a lot of trends in popular game design, that game still felt like a breath of fresh air to me in a lot of ways. Sekiro got me excited for what From Software could do if they decided to lean further into the action game genre. To me, Elden Ring felt like a regression in comparison.
Probably the best critique of Elden Ring on RUclips. Earlier reviews which focus on the difficulty are already feeling dated now that people have had a chance to 'git gud' and adapt to the game's mechanics. One additional thing I'd mention which ties in to some of your observations is the amount of cut or changed content that's been datamined out of the game in the past few months, showing how many NPCs, dialogue lines, items and enemy placements were modified or cut before and even immediately after release. Entire NPC questlines were removed, and even the names of some major characters were changed (Hoarah Loux the Goldmask???). Dialogue relating to unused covenants is also in the game. To me it feels like FromSoft put all their time into perfecting their open world, but then were rushed to populate it and stitch together a story for the player to follow. It explains why some parts of the game, like the online features and the brief opening level, feel unfinished or unpolished, and it cheapens any interpretations of the lore given that we know it was subject to so many changes before being finalized.
This is probably the best critiques video on Elden Ring. Although I disagree some of the point made in the video. The sheer knowledge about game mechanic and detail observation of the game is unmatched by any other video. The greatest hit collection example make the critique that much better.
Firstly, thank you, this is by far the best Elden Ring critique video I've seen. I feel like right now at least, the game is bombarded with endless amount of praise calling it a perfect masterpiece or is flooded with the exaggerated claims of how the game has fundementally ruined the Souls genre. Despite me liking this game and saying that it's close to a 9/10, there are still some issues in this game and they actually makes me place DS3 above this game. Though I have just have a few nitpicks with your points. 1. The copied and pasted assets from previous Souls titles are fine. I mean, there's really nothing wrong with loosing all of your souls/runes when you die after you failed to pick them up. There's nothing wrong with using the good old bonfire mechanics. Elden Ring is a huge game and such a massive game requires a lot of time and money put into it. There shouldn't be a need to make every animation different for the sake of being different when you could allocate that time and money to things such as boss mechanics, side quests and the open world. If it works well, it works well. 2. The Red Wolf of Radagon is actually cut content from Dark Souls 3. ZullieTheWitch made a video explaining this more in-depth. I think it is a good idea to bring back content that was previously cut so they are given a chance in a new title. 3. If anything, armor is actually more meaningful than it was in Dark Souls 3 because of just how much damage you take once you get to the later areas of the game. People with the Radagon/Marika sorseal talismans can feel this the most, especially past ng+2. Passive poise also see a return and despite not being as strong as it was in Dark Souls 1, it can give the player the option to roll a heavy tank build that is capable of withstanding multiple heavy hits. 4. I don't get why mid-late game events should heavily influence extremely important NPCs such as smithing or spirit tuning or converting remembrance to special items. I mean these things are needed. They're completely excusable. But other than these relatively minor complaints (which are honestly subjective), I agree with most of your takes.
I wish they had made the spirit more meaningful like in nioh, the serosh in godfrey could have been the type if conection between spirits in your character
These issues make it so much more difficult to play than the predecessors. You’re spot on that it’s mechanically more punishing than Sekiro even. It doesn’t feel fun to play if you don’t ever have flexibility to move without getting flattened. The buffering is pinning us down and the A.I. is landing a strike every time. It actually too frustrating! I hope with the attention this could bring, that there will be changes. Sincere hope, Thank you. The buffering, haha I just thought I was bad, so sad so frustrated.
Agree with the repetition of assets being re-used a little too much. Astel being re-used twice, too many of those annoying tree spirits and avatars... just too much. This was my first FromSoft game, and when I was done beating it after 168 hours....I was relieved it was over. Satisfying, a beautiful, challenging, fun game... but I ain't going back to it and probably pass on the sequel.
Minor addition to Torrent: Holding certain weapon types, you cannot double jump after running off a cliff. You can still double jump after a normal jump. Also I'm really glad you brought up the messed up input buffering. It's always the first thing that comes to my mind when people say these games are "hard, but fair". The way it gets me the worst is when dodging too late, making my character roll instantly after a stagger and getting hit by a follow-up attack. Getting punished not for button mashing, not even for calmly planning ahead, but for a single input, just a little mistimed. Don't think I agree with Elden Ring being "the best open world game". My favourite open world game is Gothic, but there's so many others out there as well. Hell, Outer Wilds is one of the best games, period, and technically that's open world, though not an rpg.
Really depends how you define it. Arguably Dark Souls, Jak & Daxter, Metroid Prime, and Myst are all open world games. For the purpose of that statement in this video, a fairly narrow definition was used. Also, I am confident you are already aware of this, but that weapon type quirk with Torrent's double jump is broadly thought to be a bug. I avoided discussing anything here that I thought was unlikely to be an intentional part of the game's design.
@@TheGemsbok I maintain that Elden Ring's world is far too empty and bland for my tastes, but I gathered by now from other comments that your priorities here are quite different from mine, so I won't dwell on it. Not talking about bugs for being unintended makes sense, as someone who was pretty much exclusively using the affected weapon classes it was just an additional stand-out annoyance to me that I felt strongly about and wanted to bring up.
Maaaan I really like guard counters. You make them sound cheesey, but if you try to use one during an enemy's combo you're just going to get hit out of it. They're a fantastic way to make guarding more engaging than in previous games because now you have to pay close attention during enemy combos for potential guard counter openings. They do large damage and stagger because they're actually not that easy to land against challenging enemies. They're one of my favorite new mechanical additions as someone who likes shields but found them a little simplistic in Dark Souls.
Great video, thank you. I too "perfected" ER on Steam (all achievements), so I feel my criticisms are more than fair. And those criticism are mainly boss mechanic design (too many BB/Sekiro bosses in a pure Souls combat game), the recycled assets (honestly, REALLY disappointed in Sif and basilisk recycling. re-skinned models w/ same movesets from old games are okay tho, I suppose), and yeah, come to think of it, the problems w/ Torrent and the Unjustified Mechancs were very annoying. But the spin-to-win bosses... I think Joseph Anderson said it best - I'm no longer excited for a new game from FromSoft if it has the same standard Souls combat, as I cannot trust their design sensibilities around that combat. I'll only get excited for something w/ new or different combat like Bloodborne 2 or Sekiro 2. ...and of course Armored Core.
To me Elden ring is this a a great game is a masterpiece maybe depending on who you ask the perfect no . no game is perfect I just hope in a few more updates they can proven at things that can help people get for the game better like a reducing the amount of repeat bosses I hope for the future DLC they can make the game better for everyone can I come please everyone but that comes with every game I love fromsoftware and not every game has to be original cuz originality comes once in awhile and overtime that's what happened to every Souls game overtime they lost originality because other games that came because Are there games come to replicate their Style some do it better than others some do better than fromsoftware . All-in-all man you did a great video the game will get better with time and I hope so 👍
I am surprised target lock on wasn't mentioned. I can't tell you how many times I was locked on to a boss or challenging enemy...only for my lock on to wildly fling itself off my intended target and instead focus on a squirrel 20 yards away. This lock change usually ends up confusing my camera angles in battle and leaves me wide open for attack. Drives me crazy.
I definitely agree that the lock-on is a bit odd. Not only does it have strange priorities as you've noted, but it also drops just a second or so after line-of-sight is lost. There are basically two reasons, however, that it doesn't appear in this video. The first is simply that the section on combat was one of the last ones I added, so by the time I wrote it I had gotten used to the lock-on over a hundred hours prior. The second is that I tried not to include anything that I had a reasonable suspicion might be addressed soon in a patch; lock-on is something they have actually adjusted post-release on prior games.
I'm pretty sure someone already mentioned this but just in case, You can fast travel out of catacombs *after* clearing the main boss inside there. This is a subtle mechanic and I actually quite like it because you can track which catacombs you have cleared and which ones you haven't by simply using this mechanic ;) Also, I dont necessarily agree with the armor argument. There are some really good armor sets in the game that give you lots of poise and dmg negation(please look into this in depth if you haven't as dmg negation gives you percentage based dmg reduction as opposed to flat numbers so its very important bt often overlooked). Combined with the right talismans, you can tank an absolute shit ton of dmg. Lastly, one major problem you haven't mentioned is the whole convoluted classification of special/unique weapons. A lot of them dont make sense, like weapons that upgrade with regular smithing stones bt then they are regarded as unique. Or the other way around where actual unique weapons are stuck with generic ash of war making them practically useless and unable to be enchanted. This is especially true for boss weapons that dont use the skills that the boss uses. Other than these I agree with pretty much everything else you pointed out in this video. These are things that I personally found worth talking about as well.
Regarding the fast travel out of dungeons: Yes, that's correct. I regret simply going off of my own experiences for that one, and not double-checking the particulars of that mechanic. It only seemed arbitrary to me because I practically never tried to teleport out of a cave, catacomb, grave, or mine before completing it. If I had caught it earlier, I could've easily rewritten the line to still fit in with the section---simply by instead mentioning that the game provides no in-universe justification for the fact that every conceivable dungeon boss suppresses teleportation. Regarding the armor: It is not claimed in this video that armor choice doesn't matter or isn't effective. Obviously, it matters a great deal in certain ways. It is only claimed here that it is less meaningful and less realistic than FromSoft has made it in the past, for the listed reasons. If compared to the armor system in Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and even Dark Souls II, the difference is obvious.
only problem with this game is bosses have unlimited stamina... "they are playing sekiro while were playing ds3" oh and repeated bosses constantly, lmao i was doing rannis quest and killed astel and ten minutes later did a cave and there he was again buffed up with more instakill combos lmao
Input buffering is terrible because you can get stunned after mistiming a roll and then roll after the stun even though you didn't press the button again so you get hit by the next attack. You get hit twice for making one mistake and I don't remember this being a problem in the older games. Maybe it's because the enemies are so fast now that they hit you twice within the time it takes to roll once, that's my only explanation for it but it's so annoying. Won't say it's gamebreaking but it feels like it should've been done much better
Yep, this is a problem in DS3 as well, but the buffer is even bigger in ER. This is my biggest engine gripe I have that I hope is addressed for whatever their next game is. At least 50% of all my death to bosses was because of this buffer, as you said - causing my 1 or 2 frame mistimed dodge to lead to another dodge 1 second later getting roll caught. It is absolutely infuriating.
It's less the buffering itself than not clearing the buffer when you take damage. Input buffering is all about letting you plan and execute chains of actions as efficiently as possible, and since taking damage is almost always unintentional, it seems obvious that the game should acknowledge that and allow you to make a new decision during your stun animation, or even just do nothing at all.
Tbh, there’s something to be said about game flow- I’m all for Torrent not taking damage if you skillfully pace a second jump down- it would just “feel” better. I think the break in momentum by a second jump would cover any explanation needed as well. Imagine if ‘fall damage’ was a feature in “Hollow Knight”…
Yeah hard to believe that magical horse with horns, while being immune to poison, rot, bleed, frost etc. and being able to tank multiple hits from dragons 100x his size dies from jumping 5cm too far
Yep. Also using fancy weapons or trick weapons. Try using those in ds3 for an example. Youre stuck with fancy weapons doing dogshit weapons and just look pretty. In elden ring, trick weapons are top tier. Im happy to use the weapons i want and not stuck with a normal sword for good damage
I’m glad you talked about input buffering, it’s definitely a serious issue, but for the most part ignored or even defended by the community. There’s also an annoying input delay, at least on PS5, as I can testify that, but it should be on other consoles as well and even on some PC setups. Not gamebreaking, but certainly makes the game feel a bit unresponsive.
I agree that it sometimes feels like a true input delay, but I noticed that it often correlates with me being out of stamina, combined with input buffering. This means I can’t perform the input until I have recovered, and once I do it feels like a delay
@@rubenweber6742 I’m talking about a different thing, there’s a constant input delay on every input, but it’s mostly noticeable on rolls for obvious reasons. I don’t know on what platform you’re playing on, but on PS5 I can press circle and rapidly move my hand away, and the roll will start like half a second after I pressed the button.
The input buffering isnt a bad thing because it punishes panic rolling and relieng on luck by madhing buttons. Ds3 is almost trivialized by roll spamming and r1 spamming.
This. I feel like right now, nearly every 'critique' or 'praise' for Elden Ring is on one side of the extreme. It's super good and a perfect masterpiece or it's super bad and it has ruined Souls games for me.
@@mingQWERTY To be honest Elden Ring kind of killed my interest for the series going forward for me and I don't think that's an unreasonable or extreme thing to say. These games have always treaded a very fine line between rewarding and frustrating difficulty for me, and subtle changes in the game mechanics can make a massive difference, and in Elden Ring it absolutely did that for me. I do not find the second half of this game fun, and I genuinely have no interest in playing through Elden Ring a second time, and I am not the only person who feels this way. I feel like this enlightened middle of the road diplomatic take can be just as tiresome as the extremes of either side...
@@Jalmerk except you're not in the middle of the road, you just straight out said that you don't like the game. A true middle of the road would be "it's a good game, but not as good as dark souls 3", you're just on the extreme end of "this game ruined future souls for me because too hard" and then you call yourself "enlightened" pah, more like pretentious, if you call your own path "enlightened" it's probably not enlightening and really you just have a chip on your shoulder telling you that your decision is the only right decision.
@@citizenvulpes4562 Dude who are you even talking to? I have said none of those things.. If you actually read my comment you would see that I am clearly not the one taking a middle of the road stance, nor calling myself enlightened. I am saying there are legitimate reasons to dislike this game as opposed to the other fromsoft games, and you don't have to be a crazed fanboy such as yourself to have an issue with the design trends we have been seeing with these games.
Given all the endless & very often mindless praise this game receives, I'm glad to see a level-headed critique of it, especially from as good a channel as yours. I spent just under 100 hours on a blind playthrough on patch 1.02, and honestly only finished it to say that I'd done so. I know you've already mentioned many of these, but just for the sake of getting this off my chest, I'm going to dump a poorly edited list of things which completely put me off doing another playthrough of the game: • Paucity of runes & smithing stones in the first half of the game (latter was improved in patch 1.03) • Strength weapons severely underperform (improved in patch 1.04) • Crafting system is largely useless, with only a small handful of items being worth crafting • Frustrating input delay & input buffering • DS3/Bloodborne-speed enemies, DS3 attacking mechanics for the player, but roll speed of DS1, i-frames of DS2 (i.e. you frequently get hit during the roll anim) • Actively frustrating enemy design & awful balancing - even normal mobs being hyper-aggressive and having excessively long combos, everyone but the player having infinite stamina, seemingly arbitrary hyper-armour on attacks, constant AoE spam by mid-late game bosses, insane attack tracking like in DS2 • Open world doesn't have much of anything in it beyond crafting consumables (which we established are largely useless), and dozens of animals & trash mobs like wandering clergymen • Ridiculous amounts of copy-paste dungeons, enemies, and even bosses from both the other Souls games & within Elden Ring itself, particularly in the latter half of the game (e.g. Haligtree & Helphael not having a single new enemy type) • Insane stat bloat on enemies in the second half of the game; seemingly getting killed or stunlocked to death from full health even with 55+ vigour, Bull Goat armour, and Morgott's great rune • When on foot, it has the same gameplay feeling as DS2: you bait out a spastic flailing 5-8 hit combo from the boss with infinite stamina, then you run up and get one or MAYBE two hits in, then backpedal and repeat until it's dead. DS2 didn't have spastic flailing enemies like DS3, but DS2 did have annoyingly long combos that chain into each other with zero cooldown, and infinite poise on enemies while doing their combo. The perfect example of this game being like DS2 (again, sans spastic flailing a la Ulcerated Tree Spirit) is the Crucible Knight in the evergaol on Stormwind Hill: • So many boss' attacks have an arbitrary delay to them, meaning you have to wait until the very last second to roll, but the input delay means you have to roll ~250ms early, which is more than the attack itself lasts, and when you do inevitably get hit, the horrific input queueing makes you automatically roll once the stagger wears off, thus fucking up your timing and all but guaranteeing you eat the next hit • EDIT: Poise felt useless unless wearing full Bull Goat armour + the talisman. I don't think I would've been as bothered by this game if its playtime wasn't so heavily padded with reused content, when it takes a good 100 hours to explore almost everything, these many faults end up being all I can see.
Ok so I agree with everything in here except some things you mentioned that I disagree with and some that are just plane wrong. From my experience there is literally no input delay at all other than the obvious delay you have since rolling is on release this is from playing the game a lot and doing two level 1 playthroughs. The input buffering has never bothered me except in demons souls but that’s more because demons souls has extremely jank controls compared to every other game in the series. I can tell you for a fact from playing countless hours of all the games and seeing frame data people have found on the rolls that the rolls are almost identical to ds3 in both distance recovery time and s. What your actually complaining about here is that they have made enemies that directly challenge how rolls function work to make the combat more varied what as much as I really don’t like a lot of the enemy design in this game this aspect of them is great because it makes the game not just a delay reading simulator what these games devolve into if they don’t make you worry about either timing (creating lingering attacks) or positioning (giving them moves that can’t simply be d because your recovery time is too slow for there quick hitting combos). Ok so I agree with the balancing issues however you complaining about enemies having infinite stamina just seems ridiculous to me considering the enemies in this game have never played by your rules. Also enemy tracking is a little stronger than ds3 what I do think is a slight misstep however it’s really only barely overdone imo. This increase in tracking compared to ds1 is pretty essential to how the combat functions in these later games since charge attacks in this game and bloodborn due to how much damage they do in this game and bloodborns very powerful vicerals you got from them and high damage are very very powerful and the main ways you get to use these in combat is mostly through strafing an attack so you can start charging much earlier. Really ever since bloodborn strafing was effectively a new parry or a risky move and ever since then it’s always been atleast high to very highly rewarded and in order for this skill ceiling increase and generally very very positive combat improvement to work they needed this much higher tracking. I do want to mention that the ds2 tracking usually less than the later games with the exception of mytha and lost sinner what are atrocious and are just bad in so many ways and it probably only feels that bad because your comparing it to ds1 and also because you need to strafe in ds2 a lot because of your much lesser s. Also the aoe spam has to do with the whole making you have to think about roll timing thing from before. Finally on this bit I never was ever caught out by hyper amour on an enemy other than the underworld ancestral warrior guys. The damage of the late game enemies didn’t bother me with my 40 vig but that’s mostly because I would be fine with the game one shotting me the whole game infact I would probably enjoy it but tbh you are right that it probably shouldn’t be like the way it is and the difficulty spike going into the late game is pretty absurd. I would personally be fine with the very long combos enemies have if they just had way more recovery time. Paradoxically most enemies have bigger openings in their shorter combos what is stupid. The flailing combos I am neutral on because they give more interesting fights but at the cost of making them pretty unreadable on first play. Final thing here is the delays on attacks definitely isn’t arbitrary and I can tell you this by the fact that without summons and with a average weapon (vykes war spear) I did the vast majority of bosses in only a few tries and could very frequently read how long a delay was on first play however this may be due to the lack of input delay that I have experienced. As I said earlier everything I haven’t mentioned here I totally agree with. Now I will do a quick few major things that I seriously dislike that you didn’t mention First and the absolute worst offender to the whole game imo is the amount of attacks bosses have that are either giant stallers or attacks that are straight undodgable without a very specific item or strategy. Not to mention the strategies to avoid said moves requires you to fight the boss in a very tedious way. Secondly is the move sets of bosses are horribly balanced towards the different builds you can have. Most notably is many bosses have no idea how to deal with range and will literally give ranged users huge damage opportunities repeatedly also slow weapons are almost unusable with the amount of some they give you to hit most enemies and bosses and it seems like they intend you to change what tbf does make some sense considering the benefits you will probably have with those builds but still I really don’t think this is fun however this was fixed in patch 1.04. Ok that’s everything if you read this all thank you so much honestly.
@@porkwhisperer3050 Thanks for taking the time to read and reply. Even if we disagree on some things, I greatly appreciate your well-written response. Also, apologies if I repeat a point you address later in your post, as I'm replying to each part as I read it. >From my experience there is literally no input delay at all other than the obvious delay you have since rolling is on release this is from playing the game a lot and doing two level 1 playthroughs. I played on PC, patch 1.02, with a wireless Xbox 360 controller, and I definitely felt noticeable input delay at times which I didn't feel in the other mainline Souls games. Maybe it's been patched since then, maybe it's better on consoles (I've heard people say the PS5 version is the most responsive), maybe the game just didn't like my system, but I definitely noticed it. >What your actually complaining about here is that they have made enemies that directly challenge how rolls function work to make the combat more varied I think your analysis is right, but again, I definitely noticed (and recorded) myself getting hit during rolls a lot more than in other Souls games. Maybe it's because of different hit boxes or longer active frames on the attacks. >Ok so I agree with the balancing issues however you complaining about enemies having infinite stamina just seems ridiculous to me considering the enemies in this game have never played by your rules. I should've explained this point a bit better; what bothers me is that they can chain combo into combo without stopping (like the greathammer dudes in Dragon Shrine in DS2), especially when they read your inputs. A perfect example of this is the Crucible Knight, who I recorded chaining 5 lunging stabs/cuts back-to-back, twice in a row. >Also enemy tracking is a little stronger than ds3 what I do think is a slight misstep however it’s really only barely overdone imo. This increase in tracking compared to ds1 is pretty essential to how the combat functions in these later games I agree that it needs to be a good bit stronger than in DS1, but many times I felt it was overtuned for normal mobs like in DS2, which made positioning feel less rewarding than in DS1 & DS3. >Really ever since bloodborn strafing was effectively a new parry or a risky move and ever since then it’s always been atleast high to very highly rewarded and in order for this skill ceiling increase and generally very very positive combat improvement to work they needed this much higher tracking. I agree that you shouldn't be able to just walk around attacks, but given how unreliable rolls felt a lot of the time (see the last dot point of my first post) and how many enemies have long, basically-true combos, I think good positioning needs to be a bit more rewarded as a preventative measure, rather than dodging attacks being purely reactive. Also, I'd argue that DS2 and not Bloodborne is the game where strafing bosses is the best - ZeroLenny's critique of the game provides an excellent showcase of this. I know that in the paragraph above I said that DS2 has insane tracking, but again, that was for normal mobs (e.g. the turtle shell dudes in Iron Keep, or the greathammer guys again). >Also the aoe spam has to do with the whole making you have to think about roll timing thing from before. Linking in to what I said above, the thing that annoyed me with the constant AoE on attacks is that it felt like positioning mattered very little compared to pure reaction time, at least for most bosses. >Finally on this bit I never was ever caught out by hyper amour on an enemy other than the underworld ancestral warrior guys. In response to this, I'm going to copy-paste a reply I made to someone else. As a foreword, I didn't struggle at all with the misbegotten champion on his own, but the double fight with him & a Crucible Knight was just awful; killing the misbegotten warrior isn't hard, but killing him before the knight drops down and ganks you makes it a DPS race, meaning I had to play extra aggressively and repeatedly ate shit when he suddenly began a combo and I couldn't override my buffered input. Also, another good example of sudden enemy hyper-armour messing me up is the drakeblood knights (like the guy guarding the dragon seal in the Fringefolk Hero's Grave) and their windy shield attack. "A great example of this is the misbegotten warrior, who can in most cases be pretty much stunlocked, but can also begin an extremely quick roar or stomp that grants hyper-armour and leads into a combo which you physically don't have time to avoid if you've got an attack queued or even outgoing. This interaction of sloppy controls and poor enemy design ends up making so many boss fights feel like the Dark Souls 2 special - attack once, backpedal and block, repeat ad nauseum. It kills any sort of rhythm that a boss fight might otherwise have, and makes so many fights feel completely identical." >I would personally be fine with the very long combos enemies have if they just had way more recovery time. Paradoxically most enemies have bigger openings in their shorter combos what is stupid. The flailing combos I am neutral on because they give more interesting fights but at the cost of making them pretty unreadable on first play. I completely agree on everything except that flailing combos make the fights more interesting - a lot of the time it felt like I couldn't weave between hits and establish any sort of rhythm or back-and-forth, I just had to run or roll away until the combo was over (again, Crucible Knight is a great example of this). >Final thing here is the delays on attacks definitely isn’t arbitrary What I meant by this is that a lot of attacks have windups that hold for an unnatural length of time, and then come out in just a few frames, usually with very few or no cues. I felt like many attacks had no way of being reasonably dodged the first time you saw them, and that it became an issue of rote memorisation rather than reading cues and establishing a rhythm. As for everything below here, I completely agree with you, and thanks again for reading & replying. EDIT: Another point I (we?) forgot to mention is how useless poise felt unless you had the full Bull Goat armour set + talisman equipped.
strength weapons still underperform, I was playing with Marika's hammer at +9 and helping some peeps in Leyndell who were using dual katana builds. they were doing 2x/3x the DPS I was doing.
I don't understand why they kept the old "kill boss/return to your world" and the "no boss/no summoning" aspects of multiplayer. I get it when it comes to instanced and phased content like dungeons, some bosses and teleport-gated areas, but it doesn't make sense when you are roaming the open world. Considering Elden Ring is an open world game, I can't fathom why this wasn't the first thing they changed about their general framework. It's so weird because they hit the nail on the head with passwords, summoning pools and effigies but this went completely under their radar. It's more of a mild nuissance than anything, but still. I just think it was a pretty obvious change to work on during early development. Perhaps the scale of the rework would've been too big to be viable, they are not a massive studio after all.
@@YeprilesteR not a problem, the host always has the *option* to not summon others if they find it boring, and they can always sever the connection after bosses if they so desire... but if you give them the *option* to summon people regardless of boss status they'd also be opening up a massive invassion pool, which would be good for the game overall
about the input queuing its funny how they added it to everything you don't want and the one thing that would benifit from a bit of queing is the roll, press roll 0.1 seconds before animation cancels and it will do nothing, press attack button 0.8 seconds before it finishes and you attack again, especially jarring with the jump attack which has an even higher spell queue after it spawn points, every boss should have the respawn be outside the arena, for the majority of the game they do this then on random bosses they don't, moon boss as the worst example, fara dragon boss another and any boss that spawns at night, its funny with the limgrave night horse they added a statue at the location but its useless as it will be daytime when you use it, and even if you spawn at grace you still have to set it to night time again and the ball bearing hunters have been bugged since release that you have to go to night time twice for them to spawn
Why do so many games act like horses can't just back up? Its so irritating. They have absolutely no problem with this in real life and can actually do it with considerable speed. Goats and rams do it frequently so it makes Torrent's inability to do it even more irritating.
this video was incredibly well structured, very well informative, and more than intriguing to watch. great video, i’d say. surprised it doesn’t have at least a million views
When you mentioned Melina's mechanical irrelevance when you choose the Frenzied Flame path, it made me think of something related I noticed from the beginning: much like in Skyrim, choosing to join factions that are "evil" or at least opposed to the main goal in some way doesn't really affect how other characters view you. For instance, in NG+2 I joined the Volcano Manor before finding Diallos swearing vengeance for Lanya's death in Academy Gate Town, and it had absolutely no effect on my interactions with him prior to his joining the Manor. No one else ever acknowledges you've become a recusant, despite Bernahl emphasizing the perils of your choice. I haven't done the Frenzied Flame path yet so I don't know if it changes any character interactions apart from Melina, but it's weird how the Volcano Manor choice carries no actual weight. Also: whatever happened to covenants? 🤨
Apparently, the Volcano Manor stands against the Erdtree. So I expected there to be some kind of trade off if I accept Tanith's invitation to join her manor. But lo and behold, there were no consequences at all lol.
From an excerpt of his interview: Miyazaki: "The covenants in the Dark Souls series are not present in this game. The network elements of the game were designed to lower the bar as much as possible and make it easier to match up players, such as signs, and the covenant system doesn't really fit in well with that." Feel like the lack of covenants and the areas of PvP (which is often in an open world area with no special traps etc., the dungeons are slightly better in that regard) really ruin the PvP experience; it's something you do a few times for fun but that's it, there's no real goal to work towards to.
Gideon's line in which he describes Rykard as an "enemy, never to be forgiven" stuck with me when I got to the Volcano Manor. Shame it didn't go anywhere.
I think the spirit summons should have been unlimited in use and have an instant cast but only active for a short time, they would have to be used strategically but you could build more in to them, able to used as many of them in a fight as you had FP or HP (or perhaps even runes for some). There would be 'tanky' summons but they would only stick around as a short distraction, the numerous status wielding summons would require you to occupy the boss long enough for them to apply them without being interrupted, for example if you staggered a boss you might forgo the crit so a rot hound could apply it's status, summons like the Black Knife would be able to do damage comparable to a primo ash of war. I think the fact the spirits ask only a flat cost of FP was a lost opportunity as it has the potential to be a new playstyle. Currently they occupy this strange region previously occupied by NPC summons, the lands between useless and laughably overpowered. A system like the one i'm trying to describe would make them less chaotic and fire & Forget and more easily balanced, still a 'free' advantage we haven't had before but one that could have it's impact more tightly controlled yet at the same time more expressive and empowering for the player. As for crafting i find it quite disappointing as the base functionality is all there and the 'cracked pot' system is actually a novelty but it really just comes off as an artificial layer of limiting consumables. All it's really done is make weak consumables unlimited, something that is somewhat undermined by the fact many of the vendors offer unlimited supplies of many superior options for negligible fees and that the game somewhat emphasises the use of signature legendary armaments that often don't benefit from greases etc or have abilities that supersede them. Many of the strongest consumables require resources with static drops (some are technically farmable but only if you looked it up in the wiki) so i just wonder why i bother, i'd rather have the old option of finding the enemy that rarely drops sleep pots or bloodboil aromatics etc. To put it succinctly If i can only have 50 sleep pots ever why would i need 500 fire grease? I would have loved to have a reason to gather materials, perhaps the Physick tears were recipes like in the Witcher that required a large investment of different ingredients, the Witcher also had a system where you needed a base spirit (a common drop) to refresh your potions; this would fit in nicely also, 'Exceedingly rare to find' ingredients could be circumvented with distillates of more common ingredients etc etc.
Amazing video. Incredibly well written. I hadn't thought of a lot of those things your brought up, but I think you nailed it and substatiated every point
Oh yeah, the leashing in an "open world" is awful. Another downside is enemies wasting the player's time, like the dragons that keep flying away or shuffling out of range of strikes.
I think the worst scenario of enemies wasting your time is when you get randomly spotted by an enemy and after running two miles away you cant look at the map yet because its still aggro
As much as i can appreciate the work that went behind creating such a gigantic map, i still prefer the hub zones of souls games. Way less watered down, every nook and cranny is meaninful and has a purpose.
Yeah, what's the point of creating BIG OPEN WORLD when it's filled with garbage quality repeated bosses, catacombs and worthless for your build loot. Give us more Stormveil Castle and less of ruins, Erdtrees and dragons.
Exactly. I'm tired of this quantity over quality trend. Time and time again I see people gush about huge ass maps while I'm like "Yeah but is there anything interesting in it?" ER isn't nearly as bad as many other open world games but it still suffers from the same issues. When content gets spread out like a little piece of butter on a huge bread, when shit repeats all the time, when there's obvious filler, a game starts losing its' flavor, it's immersive grip, and lack meaning and wow factor (gameplay wise I mean, pretty new environments can still wow you for a sec but it's the actual gameplay encounters that matter). Like you said: it all gets watered down. Basically every single boss fight of DS3 was memorable regardless of their mechanics. (E.g. many think Yhorm and Wolnir were letdowns mechanically but I still very fondly remember those fights). In ER hardly any fight has been memorable for me and even if they were at first, that feeling gets destroyed when you then have that same boss come back 3 times. The game has like, what, grand total of 8 unique bosses? Not to mention all the other repeated assets causing new regions to lose their luster. DS3 kept my interest to the very end and I still wanted more. In Elden Ring my interest suffered a harsh decline after Leyndell and I'm actually not looking forward to start NG+ or a new character.
The input buffering is baffling to me. Not just the fact that it's something that made it into the game, but also how no review mentioned it. It honestly makes the game barely playable sometimes. The worst part is that it isn't even consistent. Try to buffer a jump attack, a weapon switch or 2 handing, and the game will punish you for it. Also, I don't have a lot of experience with fromsoft games, but the crafting to me felt pretty generous. I usually hate crafting in game, and was ready to hate it here too, but being able to craft consumable made me use them way more, instead of stockpiling them because I only have 4 and there's no point wasting them on bosses that will just kill me in 20 seconds (but then when you learn the bosses, you don't need those item anymore). In Elden Ring when I didn't use an item, it because I was tired of the whole buffing phase before bosses :'D
@@shirakenpsyop6843 Then you aint seen the videos by Joe Anderson and Dunkey I guess. Those fools basically did challenge runs for the their first time playing, by purposely ignoring big new mechanics added into the game. Then they spend half their videos complaining the game gets too hard because of their self imposed challenge rules.
@@Stryfe52 I, for instance, finished my Greathammer pure melee build, and found that Joseph's trading damage argument was not only false but the result of sloppy playing. You have plenty of chances to attack and punish enemies and bosses with big weapons. But I understand his other criticisms.
Damn, I have no idea how I missed this. This is great. Once again I find myself in the weird position of having all of my own thoughts put to words in a better way than I ever could've managed.
Quick note: A few minor corrections for this video are listed in the description.
(If you're confused by the replies to this comment, they mostly pertain to an earlier version of it which simply announced my then-upcoming Demon's Souls analysis.)
I've been waiting for such an announcement, I'm mega hyped now!
I remember asking for a DS3 version of that video so im really hoping thats the case
I've unironically watched that video about 5 times now. The philosophy therein resonates so deeply with me, that I actively use the ideas and concepts as a basis for my own personal beliefs and views on "purpose" and "meaning" in my day to day life. A lot of it is just existentialism, I know, and so I've dug deeper into that through other sources, but I find that DS1 makes those concepts so much more tangible than reading about them in a book ever could. I can sit down and "live out" those ideas in Lordan in a way I normally can't with other philosophical ideas, and I have your work to thank for that deeper appreciation of the mechanics and world ^.^
@@KuroKitten You can easily talk about any tangible thing through philosophical lens. The problem is finding people who are willing to listen and discuss in good faith
That video is one of the best things ever put on YT
I think it wouldve been super cool to have Melina give some kind of dialogue insight or lore upon first resting at a site of grace in a new area. Similar to the way the heart works in the Dishonored series. It would make her feel more present, rather than appearing at the beginning and end only. Which is kind of weird for a character that has so much narrative significance.
Agree that she could use more screen time
i agree, but if you didn't already know, in certain locations you can choose to speak to her for some lore, specifically in church's of marika
@@homiespaghetti1522 never noticed, sucks that I missed out on that. But the point still stands.
@@JeffDripstein You didn't really miss out on it. Home Spaghetti is wrong. That only happens in 2 churches (and only 1 of them is a church of marika).
@@journeration1 ok not all of the church's but the point is that you have the option to talk to her in some specific locations... I'm not wrong, I'm just only 66% correct
There are more locations you can talk to her at. Like the grace on the east gate of Raya Lucaria, when you do Boc's questline
For the Melina thing, if you go Frenzied Flame, they could tie leveling up to Hyetta's quest. A maiden is a maiden.
This is a great suggestion, especially considering how Melina goes out of her way to explain that she's fulling the role despite NOT being a finger maiden. Having another character take up the role if Melina decides to leave is such an elegant and efficient solution, I'm honestly kind of amazed they didn't do something like that.
@@Trev81 I think they were running out of time and investor and consumer pressure pushed it out
@@BlueRidgeBubble Yeah I suspect that's exactly what happened. You can see a lot of loose ends that they didn't have time to resolve, sadly.
@@Trev81 yet despite that the games still stands above others ,its impressive ,this could’ve turned into another cyberpunk if they weren’t careful,there’s so much cut content that didn’t make it to the finish and Elden ring is still a brilliant game
That's an excellent idea! To add flavor, they also could've added a quirk where the value of runes is slightly different. Maybe, for some lore reason, enemies drop fewer runes upon inherting the Frenzied Flame but leveling up requires fewer runes? Items could retain their price, giving the choice of inherting the Flame or not an additional consequence in addition to being locked into an ending.
Another thing to add: It seems like tree sentinel is the only boss actually programmed and equipped to deal with magic/incantation projectiles. The other bosses will either dodge every single time or take projectiles to the face every time.
Radagon can parry as well
Late response but I had an easy time with it by sitting on the building near it and just spamming Rock Sling. It occasionally teleports away but it eventually comes back, gets stuck on the building wall, and I throw rocks at it until it dies.
I have to agree with most of this. It's strange how people won't accept that there's things that you wish were better in the game without taking it personally
What i have a problem with ia that reviewers all seem to call out style choices or thinga that arent really flaws as flaws.
Thia guy isnt the worst, he actually touched on a few ideas ive had for improvements but some things he said i just flat out disagree with being called a flaw
They want to change things i like and they ignore the actual flaws.
It is frustrating and they dont know what theyre talking about
People take personally which they are passionate about.
The people that take it personally are the minority and they are very loud which makes them more visible. Most people can see it for what it is and carry on.
Also, this review and criticism is done in a very logical and polite way. Even if you dont agree with something or most of it, I think you can respect it.
@@Ruffy112 ok have fun with this...
3:15 this is straight nonsense. We all know how double jump physics work?
Seeing how double jumps are an imaginary thing in a video game i dont see how he or anyone else can say the "right way" they should work..... this is absolutely not a flaw...
6:40 theres a health bar. You should have an idea when you will stagger amd when torrent is out of hp. I dont feel like this is a flaw.
I agree with the horse menu prompt.
I beat my entire first run without horse combat so if you cant figure out how to use it just fight normally? I really never thought of it as option A and i dont think thats a flaw.
7:34 not a flaw,, be careful on cliffs. Torrent is not yoshi
12:34 get good.
13:49 "If the player has time to change his mind the character does to"
Nonsense learn how to play or play something else. Stop mashing buttons. This is a style choice not a flaw. There are other games that cancel animations and he can play them.
Its not an imperfection in any of the games.
16:45 ok the caves and catacombs are similar only in basic ascetic. He fails to mention every single cave and catacomb is unique. Many offering unique puzzles, challenges with remixes of enemies and themes, and unique items.
The bosses are not real bosses, they are just the cherry on a unique puzzle box. This is c and d tier side content and the reused enemies are not a flaw. The game is not worse for having them.
I believe the real flaw here is that the game needs a couple more legacy levels with unique shardbearers and enemies.
He mentioned crabs wolves and a lack of new enemies in main levels and here i agree.
Haligtree is probably my favorite level even with repeat enemies but the legacy levels overall repeating enemies is a flaw. Although what is in the game is well made
20:00 nonsense. He wants the game to have less content so that everyone will see it all and so it can be beaten quickly?
The amount of content is not a flaw. There is enough solid A tier content here. The game would not be better if it had less. I couldnt disagree more
The tree spirits arent really bosses by that point. Dont fight them if you want to.
25:29 bosses being balanced around summons isnt the truth at all. He is complaing the easy mode option is to easy...
Dont use them if you want difficulty
@@Ruffy112 i had to trim a lot of what i wrote out it was to long.
I only got three quarters through video...
Just want to point out i left the things i disagree with most in and that i cut out a lot of what i do think he has a point on.
Im not calling the entire video bad or nonsense
I also only ever used the crafting system for “cure poison” or “cure rot” items, but I’d much rather just have a vendor with an infinite supply of both that I could buy.
A critical problem with the crafting and consummables in general is that death to a boss doesn't restore them. With spells, skills, weapons - you can try them and repeat the fight until you find a set that works for you best, then fight the boss a dozen times more and finally win. With a consummables strategy you're out after first two-three tries and need to go gather more... if they respawn. Good luck making a sleep build if you aren't already good enough to do a deathless run, 'cause if you run out, that's it, you're out, St. Trina's Lilly is non-renewable.
Git goud
st trina's lilly is renewable actually
Non renewable in the environment. They drop from the cleanrot knights
@@The_Minds_Butterflycleanrot knights drop miquellas lily
@@Abe_linc oh shit you're right. I forgot they dropped from the jellyfish next to the church In the snowfield
I just beat Elden Ring today, and this video is just AWESOME. All of his points are totally valid, and I love that he gives a clear and valid critique while also loving and praising the game as much as it deserves. It's great to hear a game being treated like any other great work of art - we can critique it while still overwhelmingly enjoying and respecting it. That is something The Gemsbok does expertly in all of his game videos. I bow to you as Elden Lord.
Just to add to your point about Torrent and fall damage, they could've easily just disabled the double jump AFTER you've fallen the distance to reach the death threshold. Best case, there would be some kind of acceleration that allowed you to input the double jump, but stopped Torrent from actually changing his momentum. An animation where he tries, but you're going too fast, and he can't overcome it so splat you go. Just a tiny bit of additional polish would've done this game well in many ways, even with the month delay I think they could've let it cook another few months before release.
Funny thing is: they _did_ do that. Double jump is disabled after falling a lethal distance. The problem displayed in the video results from there being tons of edge cases where it's possible to double jump right before lethal distance, then fall just another 2-5 meters and die on impact.
I like your animation idea, though. Combining that with raising the double jump cutoff to half or three quarters of lethal distance might've solved it.
@@TheGemsbok sure, I should have been more clear. Not after falling a lethal distance, but after falling something close to it would work better. Either that or, maybe a simpler and more consistent solution, making the double jump unavailable after you've fallen below the starting altitude of your original jump, so that you couldn't game the fall damage system like that but could still reach higher points and reposition mid-air. It would have to be communicated to the player clearly, but something like a special animation around Torrent's feet (particle effects or a light effect maybe, relatively subtle) to show when he could double jump and couldn't would work. I think people would get a feel for it quickly.
There is also a similar problem to this: If you run of a cliff without jumping you cant double jump at any distance because you never did the first jump.
@@chuckwood3426 As explained in the following video, that is a glitch that only affects certain weapon classes: ruclips.net/video/f5fOFivzGh4/видео.html
@@TheGemsbok Interesting!
Another interesting way to handle double jump issues could be to take the banjo kazooie approach.
Once you fall far enough the character loses control from the speed and it becomes impossible to double jump.
Don't forget, in your repetition sections, those ulcerated tree spirits usually drop golden seed items. But get this, there are more golden seeds in the game than there are upgrades available for your flasks. That means that not only are they repeated, but there may be a point that they don't even provide a reward since at a certain point Golden Seeds are useless to you.
It's also worth noting, with regards to spirit ashes, that it's hard not to simply max out and use ONE summon not only because it's the most powerful, but it's the most mechanically interesting. Mimic Tear. Even after the nerf, it's still a ridiculously effective summon and because of its very nature it's also the most versatile. Like figuring out that it does, in fact, have all the same talismans on it that you had equipped when you summoned it. That means you can use the one that draws aggro, summon the Mimic Tear, remove it after its been summoned and then the Mimic Tear draws all the aggro because it has the talisman on still. That level of complexity not only makes it a very powerful summon but also the most fun to use because of how you can switch it up to assist you in an encounter and I wish more of them had additional features like that.
NPCs and factions are always - always - ALWAYS an afterthought to From Software and honestly, now that they've tightened up combat this much I hope they spend less time working out the combat mechanics and invest more time in the areas they always neglect in their games. That being actual side characters and their usually lack-luster (and in the case of Elden Ring, entirely absent) covenant systems.
Great critique video, fantastic points and fair assessments.
I think having a lot of golden seeds is good though, yes you have a surplus eventually and especially on ng+, but for newer players or someone who isn't trying to go everywhere or get everything I think its needed.
@@Dat___Cat I'm still in ng and can no longer upgrade the flasks. I just happened to find a lot of the sapplings. There's a few in the Altus Plateau that even give you two seeds. It's way easy to quickly max out the flasks. That's why there's hardly a point in having do many tree spirit bosses.
I honestly think this is as complex as Souls combat can get. It’s pretty outdated design.
A Sekiro style combat system that accounts for any kind of weapon type, wether it’s a sword, spear, greatsword, etc, should be the future for the franchise.
@@CoolSmoovie it also still has a fair number of kinks and exploits left to tune up. But I hope they manage that this tome around so next time they can work on other aspects of gameplay and interaction.
@@CoolSmoovie I think it can maybe get a little more complex but I can't see how you think it's an outdated design. It's not something that degrades over time or gets massively improved upon like graphics. Anything else would just be a different design, not an improved one.
Great video. The only thing I would say feels like an omission is the extremely unintuitive way the game handles inventory overages. At this point, being in NG+4, I'm starting to experience quite frequent instances where a commonly encountered item (especially certain kinds of crossbow bolts) cause a menu to pop up informing me that I do not have space in my on-character inventory nor my chest to carry that item-a menu that seizes all other player actions besides movement until I have acknowledged this inventory notification by pressing "OK".
This seems like a really unnecessary and bizarre way to handle this problem. It seems that it could've easily been addressed with some kind of icon or sound effect, both already liberally employed by the game, that does not cause the player to momentarily get locked out of combat or evasive actions in battle.
Interesting! I never actually maxed out any item stack before selling off excess materials, so I was unaware of that. Certainly does sound annoying, though.
Yeah, really the menu management in general is pretty bad. There are many other instances as well where menu options come up, you assume they'll just go away... but they don't unless you press the correct button. Anything else and the input will just be eaten and you'll do nothing, leading to a LOT of weird deaths for me because of that.
@@desmondbrown5508 "Stonesword Key has been lost with use." 🤦🏻♂️
NG+4! How many hours you got in the game so far
@@ninjasites 230
This is a random thought but when you talked about how Minibosses, like the Nights Cavalry vanish, I thought of how the Lynels in BOTW shoot at you with a bow when you're rapidly distancing yourself from them. They could have made the Night Cavalry stop at the border of his area where he is supposed to be and have him pull out a bow or crossbow to shoot you.
This would incentivise the player to move closer and would also kinda work as a method to try stopping players from running away.
Other than the parts of combat that I find maddening in this game, the repetition is by far the biggest issue I have with it. After you get to Altus Plateau, there are almost no new enemies anywhere in the game--that I can think of at least. There are slight variations on enemies, such as the elite livery knights in the Haligtree area or the lightning caster beastmen in Farum Azula...and actually I just remembered the Albinauric archers in the Snowfield too which are entirely new as far as I know (other than Latenna but she doesn't count).
But the POINT is, after you've done Limgrave, Weeping Peninsula, Liurnia, Caelid, and the outer part of Altus, you've seen almost everything the game has to offer in terms of enemy design. And you're not even halfway done yet. That's....way better than Breath of the Wild for example, but still kind of inexcusable. Especially for bosses. There is no quicker way to make an encounter feel not special than to duplicate it at the bottom of a random mineshaft for....reasons?
Case in point, Astel.
Why did they clone him, one of the most unique and memorable bosses in the game, in a random cave in Mountaintops of the Giants? Why?
Also fuckin GODRICK, why clone him in an evergaol with a different name???
@@leonardocontri8921 Yep that's exactly who I was referencing lol, I actually found mineshaft Astel first, but even then it was still incredibly weird to see a boss like that in a mining dungeon. Like....what is THIS atrocity doing here?? Fromsoft explain.
But yeah it's a problem with way more bosses than just Astel. They clearly just made the game too big.
@@aperson9847 agreed bro, they made it so big in fact that not only they recycled allot of content, but they didn't really have the time to tune properly some fights in the late game.
Case in point... Malenia
@@leonardocontri8921 It's true, and it's not even just bosses. Once you get to the Forbidden Lands it feels like every single enemy's damage output gets turned up by at least 30%. It's like they wanted to make the game harder at that point but they didn't have time to make new enemies, so they just cranked the old ones up to eleven.
@@aperson9847 And put Ancient Heroes of Zamor all over the Zamor Ruins in Demon Ruins-Capra Demon fashion.
the first half of DS1 with no fast travel is my favorite memory of the souls experience, also no separate hub. most fromsoft games didn't do that which is a bummer for me, as it made the progression dangerous and precious. the horse of elden ring also kills even more the dangers of exploration
That’s a solid analogy at the end. Sums it up nicely, main strength and weakness combined
It would be nice of you to point out the throwing system that still hasn't changed. A lot of the times you need to eyeball your "heavier" throws, like cracked and ritual pots. A great example of what i'm saying is the Warhawks at Stormeil, specifically the ones that sit on top of explosive barrels, or even the teleporting scarabs. If you were to lock on to them and throw a fire pot, it would completely miss.
Dismouting Torrent on a small cliff can also deliver some "fun" surprises :)
I am blown away. Only 7 minutes in and you've spoken about issues that many other videos haven't.
What bothered me most about Elden Ring is how am always watched by the devs. The mixture of controlling where I can summon torrent, who I can kill, and when I can ash summon, harmed the immersion greatly.
Also speaking of story elements that have no effect on the gameplay, shouldn't Maliketh be able to actually KILL us using destined death? Or am I missing something?
The lack of acknowledgement from the npc about our immortal status make me believe player death and revival arent canon. There are several character who confirmed to be able to see grace like us: Morgott, Vyke and all of them can die even without using destined death.
Other possible explanation is Melina is an avatar or the Gloam Eye Queen herself, which you can see in a variation of the Frenzy Flame ending. Who give us protection against destined death.
bro those are basic restrictions to regulate exploration elements wtf. of course you can't summon torrent inside a building, or spirit summons anywhere. that would make normal encounters far too easy
@@artemaniaco293 I understand the need for them, they still kill immersion as they're not explained ingame.
@@gailardiagalane ......if that kills your immersion you can be pulled out of immersion pretty easy
@@gailardiagalane I think it's immersive that the only place you can summon a spirit is where the monument is placed.
finally an elden ring critique where literally any of the points fly
The worst thing about input buffering that annoys me is when you are trying to roll an attack but the enemy attack comes first, the action is saved and performs the roll inmediately after and the enemy usually attacks again and you get hit another time xD
Excellent video! You really killed it on this one. Keep up the great work! Quality research and solid structure goes a long way.
Holy shit I have listened to your dark souls breakdown philosophically at least 20 times hell yeah can’t wait to listen to this
You're not supposed to criticize From Software according to some people XD
The amount of braindead monkeys instantly downvoting you and saying "your opinion is wrong" with no good rebuttal for criticising the game in any way is so funny. Especially on the EldenRing sub. Communities like these are actually a very nice places to observe formation of cult like behavior in people, as dramatic as it may sound. Its like these people are not capable of thinking for themselves and instead just repeat the same set of predictable responses whenever you dare to criticise their favourite game or developer.
I do find it heartening tho that this is a functional game worth critique.
It seems rare nowadays to be able to do this sort of thing
I couldn't agree more with your comment that the game needed an "editor." Most of this game could, and maybe should, have been cut out or trimmed.
The main dungeons and their bosses? Keep those. The open world bosses like Deathbirds and Night Cavalry knights? Those are fine. But most of the catacombs, caves, ruins, whatever, needed to be trimmed out. Take out the repeated encounters against anything you fight in a main dungeon. They clearly couldn't think of anything to fill the map with, and just threw in filler. If the map had been smaller, and had less but hand made side areas, it would have felt less like Skyrim and more like New Vegas.
Something like Valhalla probably has the same amount of ruins this game does, but at least every one of those are both visually and mechanically different. I can't say that I found a single ruin in Valhalla that looked the exact same as another, or was the exact same thing as another except with an elevator room instead of a guillotine room. Meanwhile in ER, every ruin literally has the exact same hole in the ground with the exact same spiral staircase that leads to a chest. And I mean that quite literally, it's the exact staircase asset copied and pasted. It's maddening.
I'd disagree that this is the best open world though, as aside from the Souls combat it doesn't do enough to distinguish from Skyrim or BotW. I'd hardly call the dozens and dozens of repeated catacombs and caves as being noteworthy or satisfying content for example. Especially when the exact same repetition is a known criticism of both BotW and Skyrim.
Hey folks. You can turn Torrent while in precarious situations by using the telescope to rotate Torrent 360 degrees with no lateral movements. JUST MAKE HABIT of exiting the telescope with the same input that you activated it with, because if you get all straightened out for your climb and press the B button to back out of the telescope causing Torrent to lunge forward, "yer gunna haveuh bad time"
the weirdest part of the double jump is that once you obtain enough vertical speed, you CANNOT double jump... which is weird because you hit that fall speed long, LONG after you hit the fall death threshold.
its such an easy fix to put both of those things at the same threashold, why leave it the way it is?
Agree with all of your points. I also think there are lots of areas that feel wonderful and new and magical, but straying off the beaten theatrical path can lead you to disappointingly repetitive content. Yes, there are some cheeky homages to previous titles, but after a while they just feel self-derivative and uninspired. I went back and played some of the other titles, and somehow the chalice dungeons in BB feel LESS repetitive than the catacombs in ER. Raya Lucaria is cool, but it is also a discount version of Yharnam. It's too bad since there new and original areas in ER are some of the coolest areas in any game ever, but there's just a lot of boring fluff as well.
Also, I don't think you mentioned how jumping in combat does not feel implemented well. Big area attack on the ground? Well if it were Sekiro, you would jump. But in ER, you get baited to jump and then get clipped or the attack is still active by the time you land.
Honestly if they mixed sekiro and DS combat perfectly together it would be perfect
Surprised you were able to stop playing Elden ring for a few hours to make this video.
Completely agree on all of the points.
Going back to the game now.
Glad someone pointed out the horse mechanics. Don't know how many times I've struggled with specific platforms with it
I absolutely agree that fall damage should be implemented on the first Double jump , so you carry the weight and momentum of a fall damage death it makes a lot of sense
that ending analogy was the greatest analogy I have ever heard and perfectly places my feelings for the game into the context of words
✨Engagement✨
Yo, this whole video was good but that analogy at the end comparing it to a four hour greatest hits compilation... fucking transcendent. I've played a ton of this game, discussed it a lot, and listened to other people discuss it a lot but no one has ever quite hit the nail on the head like that.
Well done.
great commentary as always
I feel its good to have videos like this the critc the game while it is a very good game to call it a masterpiece is just dishonest
After all criticing elden ring or any product you love is what helps the creator improve
Crafting isn’t much better if you are an archer. You have to kill a ton of birds for decent arrows, and the easiest way to kill birds it with a bow... it’s just not intuitive and you might as well just buy arrows. Plus it’s worse because by mid game even the most Expensive arrows can be bought 600 at a time with 20 minutes of runes earned through normal play.
If bombs were stronger I’d be thrilled. Honestly, perfumes are the best crafted item. And even then, only a couple of them per build
it's faster to kill groups of birds with melee.
It's refreshing to see some critique on the game other than 'boss is hard so game is bad', this is some solid analysis. I have more than a few thoughts of my own so please bear with me.
1. I too was under the assumption that Torrents double jump would negate the fall height of the initial jump, that is just what makes best physical sense. However, from an exploration perspective, it makes sense they did it this way. Being able to skip huge chunks of the map would ruin the intended progression of the player and just straight out spread the checkpoints all over the place.
2. I too have experienced not having my follow-up dodge act and not knowing whether I actually pressed the button, so thanks for clearing that up.
3. I seriously don't get why people have a problem with the reused/reskinned bosses. The game has plenty of variety in mobs and bosses as it is, so revisiting a boss is only a pleasure for me, due to my 'learned skillset' not going to waste. It's a geniuine sense of progression to see yourself do good on a boss that previously clapped hard (e.g. godskin apostle took me 30+ tries, but I beat godskin duo in my first try). Repeating a tough enemy for no virtual reward is another case that I'll go into later.
4. Your mentioned lore inconsistencies with the gameplay are really not a problem. It's a game before a story, so it's fine if you can still use Torrent after parting with Malenia. Although I do strongly agree with your point on the 'no attack' zones, it really shackles the players freedom. The fact that killing the merchants is not only a consequence, but an advantage is really a miss from FromSofts side.
I'm not sure if these count as mechanical aspects of the game, but why not:
5. Seriously, I spent 120 hours for my first playthrough and still had no idea wtf was going on. ER has confused meaningful and intellectual dialogue with superficial gibberish, kind of like those pseudo-intellectual types that say 1000 words without really saying anything. I absolutely HATE the obscurity of questlines as well in this game. With the exception of Alexander's quest, there really isn't any way to know how to progress with a certain quest without looking it up online. So much to the point that the 'artistic presentation' is just straight out obnoxious. . You could make the argument that you're not meant to catch everything on your first playthrough or that the NPCs should be considered 'people that you meet on your way', but in reality your chance on following up on a quest is just left to randomness. This worked way better in previous souls games because of the linear composition, but in an open world this just does not work.
6. Rune proportions in this games are out of wack. When beating a crucible knight gives slightly more runes than a random mob enemy, you just feel cheated out of beating the challenge, since there also isn't any loot to go after. You don't even get anything for beating the uleceral tree spirit where the erdtree favor +2 talisman is and there is literally no incentive to fight any of the giants in the snow areas.
7. My last point is kind of a double-edged sword. I like the fact that FromSoft doesn't buck under peer pressure from the community (nerf this nerf that), but at the same time I can't help but feel that they're shitting all over the fans. For two months now there have been perfomance issues on the PC and Xbox, but there has been no noticeable changes so far (they mention it in the 1.04 patch but i still experience fps drops when fighting bigger enemies). PC does not even have any social features whatsoever, so we don't have any access to voicechat, or even have the possibillity of reporting recent players. When they seriously prioritize buffing ROB to oblivion instead of fixing essential game mechanics, I can't help but feeling shit on as a fan.
EDIT:
8. Seriously, what the hell was the point of alternative endings, if they do not change ANYTHING? You got 1 good ending, 1 bad and 4 identical ones. IMO Sekiro did it way better, when you can fight different variations of enemies based on your ending, with new movesets and everything. Also, the thematic differences in the multiple endings really strengthed the story.
I have been mainly playing PVP for the last 70+ hours of gameplay, and the fuckton of problems that arise there are essay worthy.
They are never going to give you chat options on PC, they don't want people chatting during co-op, console players use the OS chat software to chat. You need to download your own chat client because Fromsoft will never add one. They don't want people chatting while they play that's what the entire messaging system is for. It's just kinda pointless to complain about something they literally do by design. That's all.
@@aureateseigneur5317 Ah ok good to know. It's just funny that Bamco tells you in the information tab to report recent players, but you don't have anything to go off other than an in-game name. And the messaging system is pretty ass for anything other than memes
I strongly agree with your 5th reason. Like the Shabari grape lady is literally impossible to do without looking up. She requires 6 items 5 of which are compelety random to get and have no hints what so ever. Everytime you give her an item she teleports somewhere with no hints given. 7 times. Yay . . . Then you need to reach the secret boss in the maze of the secret underground map. Kill the secret boss, traverse a bunch of parkour in a souls game, then do a bunch of other things. Like wtf? In Ds3 all you did was gesture at a statue. Or hit an illusory wall to get to Ash Lake. It took me 15 minutes to do her. quest with full knowledge. If you went in blind It would probably take you 3 playthroughs. Also millicent just says "I have something to do" and teleports from Caelid to Mt Gelmir for no reason. If you never go to that one tiny cliff side in that huge optional side area of an already huge optional area, you just don't get her quest.
@@uyeah1234 All those people you meet are so enigmatic and their quests so convoluted that through the 160 hours it took me to beat the game i didnt bother with any of them because its almost impossible to predict where any of them might end up or when. And I dont intend to run around the map for 20 hours like an idiot looking for some blind bitch to give her a grape. Like come on. So in that aspect these twitter devs everyone made fun of were kind right. ER quest design is pretty bad. And what makes it worse is that if you are not porticularly interested in completing any of them your only goal for the whole runtime is to become Elden Lord. And you are not even given a good reason to become one. Or what does becoming and Elden Lord even entail. I had no motivation whatsoever to see this story through because i wasnt invested in any of the characters, their struggles or motivations at all. I only beat the game because i wanted to see what From would throw at me next. Even the intro doesnt make a good job of introducing any of the big players or what their role is in this world. They mostly only show you what they look like and maybe some NPCs get mentioned by name, but thats about it.
Came here expecting garbage takes but hey, would you look at that, i was pleasantly surprised, actual criticism and good takes, thumbs up my dude, i specifically like how you edited some characters dialogue in the transitions between topics that was a chefs kiss of a touch!
good take, thank you
Various Dragon repeats is actually my main issue. They added 1 new attack and copy pasted the Midir moveset to every Dragon in game. Aside from the last one. Then simply changing visuals on the breath and volla. You have 6 Dragons for the assets of 1.
When I mention 'the various dragons,' I'm not talking only about the standard variety encountered around the early game and midgame with various breath types. Rather, I'm talking about them, the advanced variety in the endgame, the dragonkin soldiers, the wyrms, Greyoll, Fortissax, and Placidusax. The point is that I don't mind a few of those having a lot of repeats since they've crafted that whole family of different related dragon types.
Compare those to the tree spirits, who have no apparent close relatives as a form of variance, and where the biggest change you'll encounter is that some of them also inflict rot.
inb4 this video gets downvoted to hell by people who haven't taken to watch it
"ElDeN rInG iS a FlAwLeSs MaStErPiEcE, gIt GuD iTs ClEaRlY nOt FoR yOu"
I was thinking what if when they release the dlc they add a new item they negates all fall damage while on torrent but make it insanely hard to get like similar to the secret rings from dark souls 2 beating the game without resting at a bonfire
pretty solid criticisms
What is the armor set or pieces your archer is wearing?
That character appears to be wearing the ronin's armor, banished knight greaves, fire prelate gauntlets, and twinned helm.
@@TheGemsbok Thank you for the reply!
There is a plot reason for a mix of existing enemies only being at Haligtree however I get the gameplay complaint. Perhaps they should have had a slightly tougher class of cleanrot Knight unique to the area?
Good idea! I would've welcomed that type of variation.
Yeah this is Miquella’s city that will be lead into a new age and there’s not a single Cleanrot General or elder Kindred of the Rot or hell even just a Haligtree sentinel.
I agree with every single point you made and it's still my favorite game yet.
I think you should unlock fast travel when you get the first great rune
Such a nice critique. Elden Ring is such a dissapointment considering how good many of its elements are. I wish From Software fans could pull the stick out of their asses and just say that the game has flaws rather than lash out at everyone who criticizes the game in any way (and it is something that is sadly visible under most critiques of the game).
Really interesting points brought up, I can't disagree with many.
So far the only different opinion I have is that I don't find that much problem with multiple versions of an enemy being in the game (such as a boss popping up as an elite enemy later on or different versions of it appearing multiple times), and while I understand that taking something like the curse lizards or Sif's likeness into Elden Ring took a little bit from them, I do believe whole-heartedly that they make Elden Ring (at least for new players of the series) an amazing experience for new and old players: Old players get a "oh this is X" moment that gives a bit more meaning to their past experiences, letting them carry over some of the muscle memory and pattern recognition, and new players get to experience those enemies for the first time in their new (and arguably improved) form without having to go back to an old, more restrictive game.
All in all, a sacrifice I understand and agree with, even if it removes a bit of replayability (by having a boss be fought 7 times in a single playthrough). I do agree that there should've been more "local" wildlife and enemies that aren't just a rehash of previous enemies with a different paintjob, and if there was to be some "global" wildlife, maybe wolves shouldn't be used (though I love crabs so I'm glad they are everywhere).
There are 6 (yes 6) different KNIGHT type enemies, 6 SOLDIER type enemies, and 7 FOOT SOLDIER type enemies that manage to be the most common enemies around, most of the time the armors have different paintjobs and a different helmet.
You have no idea how good it felt to hear you say "it's not new." I've been thinking this ever since I finished my first playthrough of the game, and have been citing that as the reason why I'm disappointed with it. Despite Sekiro adopting a lot of trends in popular game design, that game still felt like a breath of fresh air to me in a lot of ways. Sekiro got me excited for what From Software could do if they decided to lean further into the action game genre. To me, Elden Ring felt like a regression in comparison.
Probably the best critique of Elden Ring on RUclips. Earlier reviews which focus on the difficulty are already feeling dated now that people have had a chance to 'git gud' and adapt to the game's mechanics.
One additional thing I'd mention which ties in to some of your observations is the amount of cut or changed content that's been datamined out of the game in the past few months, showing how many NPCs, dialogue lines, items and enemy placements were modified or cut before and even immediately after release. Entire NPC questlines were removed, and even the names of some major characters were changed (Hoarah Loux the Goldmask???). Dialogue relating to unused covenants is also in the game. To me it feels like FromSoft put all their time into perfecting their open world, but then were rushed to populate it and stitch together a story for the player to follow. It explains why some parts of the game, like the online features and the brief opening level, feel unfinished or unpolished, and it cheapens any interpretations of the lore given that we know it was subject to so many changes before being finalized.
Good points about the NPCs and the last bits.
This is probably the best critiques video on Elden Ring. Although I disagree some of the point made in the video. The sheer knowledge about game mechanic and detail observation of the game is unmatched by any other video. The greatest hit collection example make the critique that much better.
Firstly, thank you, this is by far the best Elden Ring critique video I've seen. I feel like right now at least, the game is bombarded with endless amount of praise calling it a perfect masterpiece or is flooded with the exaggerated claims of how the game has fundementally ruined the Souls genre. Despite me liking this game and saying that it's close to a 9/10, there are still some issues in this game and they actually makes me place DS3 above this game.
Though I have just have a few nitpicks with your points.
1. The copied and pasted assets from previous Souls titles are fine. I mean, there's really nothing wrong with loosing all of your souls/runes when you die after you failed to pick them up. There's nothing wrong with using the good old bonfire mechanics. Elden Ring is a huge game and such a massive game requires a lot of time and money put into it. There shouldn't be a need to make every animation different for the sake of being different when you could allocate that time and money to things such as boss mechanics, side quests and the open world. If it works well, it works well.
2. The Red Wolf of Radagon is actually cut content from Dark Souls 3. ZullieTheWitch made a video explaining this more in-depth. I think it is a good idea to bring back content that was previously cut so they are given a chance in a new title.
3. If anything, armor is actually more meaningful than it was in Dark Souls 3 because of just how much damage you take once you get to the later areas of the game. People with the Radagon/Marika sorseal talismans can feel this the most, especially past ng+2. Passive poise also see a return and despite not being as strong as it was in Dark Souls 1, it can give the player the option to roll a heavy tank build that is capable of withstanding multiple heavy hits.
4. I don't get why mid-late game events should heavily influence extremely important NPCs such as smithing or spirit tuning or converting remembrance to special items. I mean these things are needed. They're completely excusable.
But other than these relatively minor complaints (which are honestly subjective), I agree with most of your takes.
for a game that is features such a frenetic pace of combat, the combat mechanics are absolutely awful. particularly the input buffering.
I wish they had made the spirit more meaningful like in nioh, the serosh in godfrey could have been the type if conection between spirits in your character
You deserve way more subscribers
These issues make it so much more difficult to play than the predecessors. You’re spot on that it’s mechanically more punishing than Sekiro even. It doesn’t feel fun to play if you don’t ever have flexibility to move without getting flattened. The buffering is pinning us down and the A.I. is landing a strike every time. It actually too frustrating! I hope with the attention this could bring, that there will be changes. Sincere hope, Thank you. The buffering, haha I just thought I was bad, so sad so frustrated.
Agree with the repetition of assets being re-used a little too much. Astel being re-used twice, too many of those annoying tree spirits and avatars... just too much. This was my first FromSoft game, and when I was done beating it after 168 hours....I was relieved it was over. Satisfying, a beautiful, challenging, fun game... but I ain't going back to it and probably pass on the sequel.
Minor addition to Torrent: Holding certain weapon types, you cannot double jump after running off a cliff. You can still double jump after a normal jump.
Also I'm really glad you brought up the messed up input buffering. It's always the first thing that comes to my mind when people say these games are "hard, but fair". The way it gets me the worst is when dodging too late, making my character roll instantly after a stagger and getting hit by a follow-up attack. Getting punished not for button mashing, not even for calmly planning ahead, but for a single input, just a little mistimed.
Don't think I agree with Elden Ring being "the best open world game". My favourite open world game is Gothic, but there's so many others out there as well. Hell, Outer Wilds is one of the best games, period, and technically that's open world, though not an rpg.
Really depends how you define it. Arguably Dark Souls, Jak & Daxter, Metroid Prime, and Myst are all open world games. For the purpose of that statement in this video, a fairly narrow definition was used.
Also, I am confident you are already aware of this, but that weapon type quirk with Torrent's double jump is broadly thought to be a bug. I avoided discussing anything here that I thought was unlikely to be an intentional part of the game's design.
@@TheGemsbok I maintain that Elden Ring's world is far too empty and bland for my tastes, but I gathered by now from other comments that your priorities here are quite different from mine, so I won't dwell on it.
Not talking about bugs for being unintended makes sense, as someone who was pretty much exclusively using the affected weapon classes it was just an additional stand-out annoyance to me that I felt strongly about and wanted to bring up.
Great breakdown!
Flying enemies can be escaped by climbing ladders! 🤣🤣🤣
*_"Reviving it when it has been _**_-Killed-_**_ BANISHED requires a crimson flask..."_*
Maaaan I really like guard counters. You make them sound cheesey, but if you try to use one during an enemy's combo you're just going to get hit out of it. They're a fantastic way to make guarding more engaging than in previous games because now you have to pay close attention during enemy combos for potential guard counter openings. They do large damage and stagger because they're actually not that easy to land against challenging enemies. They're one of my favorite new mechanical additions as someone who likes shields but found them a little simplistic in Dark Souls.
I'm not a big fan on how they handled casters in general in Elden Ring. The spells are great, but everything else ehhhh....
Great video, thank you. I too "perfected" ER on Steam (all achievements), so I feel my criticisms are more than fair. And those criticism are mainly boss mechanic design (too many BB/Sekiro bosses in a pure Souls combat game), the recycled assets (honestly, REALLY disappointed in Sif and basilisk recycling. re-skinned models w/ same movesets from old games are okay tho, I suppose), and yeah, come to think of it, the problems w/ Torrent and the Unjustified Mechancs were very annoying.
But the spin-to-win bosses... I think Joseph Anderson said it best - I'm no longer excited for a new game from FromSoft if it has the same standard Souls combat, as I cannot trust their design sensibilities around that combat. I'll only get excited for something w/ new or different combat like Bloodborne 2 or Sekiro 2. ...and of course Armored Core.
To me Elden ring is this a a great game is a masterpiece maybe depending on who you ask the perfect no . no game is perfect I just hope in a few more updates they can proven at things that can help people get for the game better like a reducing the amount of repeat bosses I hope for the future DLC they can make the game better for everyone can I come please everyone but that comes with every game I love fromsoftware and not every game has to be original cuz originality comes once in awhile and overtime that's what happened to every Souls game overtime they lost originality because other games that came because Are there games come to replicate their Style some do it better than others some do better than fromsoftware . All-in-all man you did a great video the game will get better with time and I hope so 👍
I am surprised target lock on wasn't mentioned. I can't tell you how many times I was locked on to a boss or challenging enemy...only for my lock on to wildly fling itself off my intended target and instead focus on a squirrel 20 yards away. This lock change usually ends up confusing my camera angles in battle and leaves me wide open for attack. Drives me crazy.
I definitely agree that the lock-on is a bit odd. Not only does it have strange priorities as you've noted, but it also drops just a second or so after line-of-sight is lost. There are basically two reasons, however, that it doesn't appear in this video. The first is simply that the section on combat was one of the last ones I added, so by the time I wrote it I had gotten used to the lock-on over a hundred hours prior. The second is that I tried not to include anything that I had a reasonable suspicion might be addressed soon in a patch; lock-on is something they have actually adjusted post-release on prior games.
I'm pretty sure someone already mentioned this but just in case,
You can fast travel out of catacombs *after* clearing the main boss inside there. This is a subtle mechanic and I actually quite like it because you can track which catacombs you have cleared and which ones you haven't by simply using this mechanic ;)
Also, I dont necessarily agree with the armor argument. There are some really good armor sets in the game that give you lots of poise and dmg negation(please look into this in depth if you haven't as dmg negation gives you percentage based dmg reduction as opposed to flat numbers so its very important bt often overlooked). Combined with the right talismans, you can tank an absolute shit ton of dmg.
Lastly, one major problem you haven't mentioned is the whole convoluted classification of special/unique weapons. A lot of them dont make sense, like weapons that upgrade with regular smithing stones bt then they are regarded as unique. Or the other way around where actual unique weapons are stuck with generic ash of war making them practically useless and unable to be enchanted. This is especially true for boss weapons that dont use the skills that the boss uses.
Other than these I agree with pretty much everything else you pointed out in this video. These are things that I personally found worth talking about as well.
Regarding the fast travel out of dungeons: Yes, that's correct. I regret simply going off of my own experiences for that one, and not double-checking the particulars of that mechanic. It only seemed arbitrary to me because I practically never tried to teleport out of a cave, catacomb, grave, or mine before completing it. If I had caught it earlier, I could've easily rewritten the line to still fit in with the section---simply by instead mentioning that the game provides no in-universe justification for the fact that every conceivable dungeon boss suppresses teleportation.
Regarding the armor: It is not claimed in this video that armor choice doesn't matter or isn't effective. Obviously, it matters a great deal in certain ways. It is only claimed here that it is less meaningful and less realistic than FromSoft has made it in the past, for the listed reasons. If compared to the armor system in Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and even Dark Souls II, the difference is obvious.
only problem with this game is bosses have unlimited stamina... "they are playing sekiro while were playing ds3" oh and repeated bosses constantly, lmao i was doing rannis quest and killed astel and ten minutes later did a cave and there he was again buffed up with more instakill combos lmao
Melina who?
60 hours in and I havent seen her since after killing Margit at Stormveil gate.
A pointless character.
Torrent on the cliff and toooogetttha we will devour the anxiety medication!
Input buffering is terrible because you can get stunned after mistiming a roll and then roll after the stun even though you didn't press the button again so you get hit by the next attack. You get hit twice for making one mistake and I don't remember this being a problem in the older games. Maybe it's because the enemies are so fast now that they hit you twice within the time it takes to roll once, that's my only explanation for it but it's so annoying. Won't say it's gamebreaking but it feels like it should've been done much better
Yep, this is a problem in DS3 as well, but the buffer is even bigger in ER. This is my biggest engine gripe I have that I hope is addressed for whatever their next game is. At least 50% of all my death to bosses was because of this buffer, as you said - causing my 1 or 2 frame mistimed dodge to lead to another dodge 1 second later getting roll caught. It is absolutely infuriating.
It's less the buffering itself than not clearing the buffer when you take damage. Input buffering is all about letting you plan and execute chains of actions as efficiently as possible, and since taking damage is almost always unintentional, it seems obvious that the game should acknowledge that and allow you to make a new decision during your stun animation, or even just do nothing at all.
@@idcompiler that is such a perfect solution, why the hell haven't they done that yet
OH THANK GOD someone else who has noticed this! So frustrating.
Can anyone explain to me why the jump heavy attack buffers a follow-up R1 at random even if no input has been made?
Tbh, there’s something to be said about game flow- I’m all for Torrent not taking damage if you skillfully pace a second jump down- it would just “feel” better. I think the break in momentum by a second jump would cover any explanation needed as well. Imagine if ‘fall damage’ was a feature in “Hollow Knight”…
Yeah hard to believe that magical horse with horns, while being immune to poison, rot, bleed, frost etc. and being able to tank multiple hits from dragons 100x his size dies from jumping 5cm too far
Hollow knight is built for platforming
The overhaul they did to magic in elden ring makes going back to previous entries almost impossible to play with magic characters.
I'm glad they managed to improve faith and arcane builds to be viable and competitive with int/sorcery builds.
Yep. Also using fancy weapons or trick weapons. Try using those in ds3 for an example. Youre stuck with fancy weapons doing dogshit weapons and just look pretty. In elden ring, trick weapons are top tier. Im happy to use the weapons i want and not stuck with a normal sword for good damage
RIP chain casting. It will be missed.
I still find it lacking compared to ds2. Utility spells of all sorts existed. I loved invading with normally unseen spells and miracles.
I’m glad you talked about input buffering, it’s definitely a serious issue, but for the most part ignored or even defended by the community. There’s also an annoying input delay, at least on PS5, as I can testify that, but it should be on other consoles as well and even on some PC setups. Not gamebreaking, but certainly makes the game feel a bit unresponsive.
I agree that it sometimes feels like a true input delay, but I noticed that it often correlates with me being out of stamina, combined with input buffering. This means I can’t perform the input until I have recovered, and once I do it feels like a delay
@@rubenweber6742 I’m talking about a different thing, there’s a constant input delay on every input, but it’s mostly noticeable on rolls for obvious reasons. I don’t know on what platform you’re playing on, but on PS5 I can press circle and rapidly move my hand away, and the roll will start like half a second after I pressed the button.
It is definitely still on PC. It really shows up with faster moving enemies/bosses.
@@m13579k I read that on PC there are some workarounds, like playing in borderless mode. Give it a try :)
The input buffering isnt a bad thing because it punishes panic rolling and relieng on luck by madhing buttons. Ds3 is almost trivialized by roll spamming and r1 spamming.
Thank you, finally a good take on this game, that doesn't make wild exaggerations about how it ruins from soft or saves gaming or whatever
Yes, people always go to the extremes in this kind of things, it's pathetic, really.
This. I feel like right now, nearly every 'critique' or 'praise' for Elden Ring is on one side of the extreme. It's super good and a perfect masterpiece or it's super bad and it has ruined Souls games for me.
@@mingQWERTY To be honest Elden Ring kind of killed my interest for the series going forward for me and I don't think that's an unreasonable or extreme thing to say. These games have always treaded a very fine line between rewarding and frustrating difficulty for me, and subtle changes in the game mechanics can make a massive difference, and in Elden Ring it absolutely did that for me. I do not find the second half of this game fun, and I genuinely have no interest in playing through Elden Ring a second time, and I am not the only person who feels this way. I feel like this enlightened middle of the road diplomatic take can be just as tiresome as the extremes of either side...
@@Jalmerk except you're not in the middle of the road, you just straight out said that you don't like the game.
A true middle of the road would be "it's a good game, but not as good as dark souls 3", you're just on the extreme end of "this game ruined future souls for me because too hard" and then you call yourself "enlightened" pah, more like pretentious, if you call your own path "enlightened" it's probably not enlightening and really you just have a chip on your shoulder telling you that your decision is the only right decision.
@@citizenvulpes4562 Dude who are you even talking to? I have said none of those things.. If you actually read my comment you would see that I am clearly not the one taking a middle of the road stance, nor calling myself enlightened. I am saying there are legitimate reasons to dislike this game as opposed to the other fromsoft games, and you don't have to be a crazed fanboy such as yourself to have an issue with the design trends we have been seeing with these games.
Given all the endless & very often mindless praise this game receives, I'm glad to see a level-headed critique of it, especially from as good a channel as yours. I spent just under 100 hours on a blind playthrough on patch 1.02, and honestly only finished it to say that I'd done so. I know you've already mentioned many of these, but just for the sake of getting this off my chest, I'm going to dump a poorly edited list of things which completely put me off doing another playthrough of the game:
• Paucity of runes & smithing stones in the first half of the game (latter was improved in patch 1.03)
• Strength weapons severely underperform (improved in patch 1.04)
• Crafting system is largely useless, with only a small handful of items being worth crafting
• Frustrating input delay & input buffering
• DS3/Bloodborne-speed enemies, DS3 attacking mechanics for the player, but roll speed of DS1, i-frames of DS2 (i.e. you frequently get hit during the roll anim)
• Actively frustrating enemy design & awful balancing - even normal mobs being hyper-aggressive and having excessively long combos, everyone but the player having infinite stamina, seemingly arbitrary hyper-armour on attacks, constant AoE spam by mid-late game bosses, insane attack tracking like in DS2
• Open world doesn't have much of anything in it beyond crafting consumables (which we established are largely useless), and dozens of animals & trash mobs like wandering clergymen
• Ridiculous amounts of copy-paste dungeons, enemies, and even bosses from both the other Souls games & within Elden Ring itself, particularly in the latter half of the game (e.g. Haligtree & Helphael not having a single new enemy type)
• Insane stat bloat on enemies in the second half of the game; seemingly getting killed or stunlocked to death from full health even with 55+ vigour, Bull Goat armour, and Morgott's great rune
• When on foot, it has the same gameplay feeling as DS2: you bait out a spastic flailing 5-8 hit combo from the boss with infinite stamina, then you run up and get one or MAYBE two hits in, then backpedal and repeat until it's dead. DS2 didn't have spastic flailing enemies like DS3, but DS2 did have annoyingly long combos that chain into each other with zero cooldown, and infinite poise on enemies while doing their combo. The perfect example of this game being like DS2 (again, sans spastic flailing a la Ulcerated Tree Spirit) is the Crucible Knight in the evergaol on Stormwind Hill:
• So many boss' attacks have an arbitrary delay to them, meaning you have to wait until the very last second to roll, but the input delay means you have to roll ~250ms early, which is more than the attack itself lasts, and when you do inevitably get hit, the horrific input queueing makes you automatically roll once the stagger wears off, thus fucking up your timing and all but guaranteeing you eat the next hit
• EDIT: Poise felt useless unless wearing full Bull Goat armour + the talisman.
I don't think I would've been as bothered by this game if its playtime wasn't so heavily padded with reused content, when it takes a good 100 hours to explore almost everything, these many faults end up being all I can see.
Ok so I agree with everything in here except some things you mentioned that I disagree with and some that are just plane wrong.
From my experience there is literally no input delay at all other than the obvious delay you have since rolling is on release this is from playing the game a lot and doing two level 1 playthroughs.
The input buffering has never bothered me except in demons souls but that’s more because demons souls has extremely jank controls compared to every other game in the series.
I can tell you for a fact from playing countless hours of all the games and seeing frame data people have found on the rolls that the rolls are almost identical to ds3 in both distance recovery time and s. What your actually complaining about here is that they have made enemies that directly challenge how rolls function work to make the combat more varied what as much as I really don’t like a lot of the enemy design in this game this aspect of them is great because it makes the game not just a delay reading simulator what these games devolve into if they don’t make you worry about either timing (creating lingering attacks) or positioning (giving them moves that can’t simply be d because your recovery time is too slow for there quick hitting combos).
Ok so I agree with the balancing issues however you complaining about enemies having infinite stamina just seems ridiculous to me considering the enemies in this game have never played by your rules. Also enemy tracking is a little stronger than ds3 what I do think is a slight misstep however it’s really only barely overdone imo. This increase in tracking compared to ds1 is pretty essential to how the combat functions in these later games since charge attacks in this game and bloodborn due to how much damage they do in this game and bloodborns very powerful vicerals you got from them and high damage are very very powerful and the main ways you get to use these in combat is mostly through strafing an attack so you can start charging much earlier. Really ever since bloodborn strafing was effectively a new parry or a risky move and ever since then it’s always been atleast high to very highly rewarded and in order for this skill ceiling increase and generally very very positive combat improvement to work they needed this much higher tracking.
I do want to mention that the ds2 tracking usually less than the later games with the exception of mytha and lost sinner what are atrocious and are just bad in so many ways and it probably only feels that bad because your comparing it to ds1 and also because you need to strafe in ds2 a lot because of your much lesser s.
Also the aoe spam has to do with the whole making you have to think about roll timing thing from before. Finally on this bit I never was ever caught out by hyper amour on an enemy other than the underworld ancestral warrior guys.
The damage of the late game enemies didn’t bother me with my 40 vig but that’s mostly because I would be fine with the game one shotting me the whole game infact I would probably enjoy it but tbh you are right that it probably shouldn’t be like the way it is and the difficulty spike going into the late game is pretty absurd.
I would personally be fine with the very long combos enemies have if they just had way more recovery time. Paradoxically most enemies have bigger openings in their shorter combos what is stupid. The flailing combos I am neutral on because they give more interesting fights but at the cost of making them pretty unreadable on first play. Final thing here is the delays on attacks definitely isn’t arbitrary and I can tell you this by the fact that without summons and with a average weapon (vykes war spear) I did the vast majority of bosses in only a few tries and could very frequently read how long a delay was on first play however this may be due to the lack of input delay that I have experienced.
As I said earlier everything I haven’t mentioned here I totally agree with. Now I will do a quick few major things that I seriously dislike that you didn’t mention
First and the absolute worst offender to the whole game imo is the amount of attacks bosses have that are either giant stallers or attacks that are straight undodgable without a very specific item or strategy. Not to mention the strategies to avoid said moves requires you to fight the boss in a very tedious way.
Secondly is the move sets of bosses are horribly balanced towards the different builds you can have.
Most notably is many bosses have no idea how to deal with range and will literally give ranged users huge damage opportunities repeatedly also slow weapons are almost unusable with the amount of some they give you to hit most enemies and bosses and it seems like they intend you to change what tbf does make some sense considering the benefits you will probably have with those builds but still I really don’t think this is fun however this was fixed in patch 1.04.
Ok that’s everything if you read this all thank you so much honestly.
@@porkwhisperer3050 Thanks for taking the time to read and reply. Even if we disagree on some things, I greatly appreciate your well-written response. Also, apologies if I repeat a point you address later in your post, as I'm replying to each part as I read it.
>From my experience there is literally no input delay at all other than the obvious delay you have since rolling is on release this is from playing the game a lot and doing two level 1 playthroughs.
I played on PC, patch 1.02, with a wireless Xbox 360 controller, and I definitely felt noticeable input delay at times which I didn't feel in the other mainline Souls games. Maybe it's been patched since then, maybe it's better on consoles (I've heard people say the PS5 version is the most responsive), maybe the game just didn't like my system, but I definitely noticed it.
>What your actually complaining about here is that they have made enemies that directly challenge how rolls function work to make the combat more varied
I think your analysis is right, but again, I definitely noticed (and recorded) myself getting hit during rolls a lot more than in other Souls games. Maybe it's because of different hit boxes or longer active frames on the attacks.
>Ok so I agree with the balancing issues however you complaining about enemies having infinite stamina just seems ridiculous to me considering the enemies in this game have never played by your rules.
I should've explained this point a bit better; what bothers me is that they can chain combo into combo without stopping (like the greathammer dudes in Dragon Shrine in DS2), especially when they read your inputs. A perfect example of this is the Crucible Knight, who I recorded chaining 5 lunging stabs/cuts back-to-back, twice in a row.
>Also enemy tracking is a little stronger than ds3 what I do think is a slight misstep however it’s really only barely overdone imo. This increase in tracking compared to ds1 is pretty essential to how the combat functions in these later games
I agree that it needs to be a good bit stronger than in DS1, but many times I felt it was overtuned for normal mobs like in DS2, which made positioning feel less rewarding than in DS1 & DS3.
>Really ever since bloodborn strafing was effectively a new parry or a risky move and ever since then it’s always been atleast high to very highly rewarded and in order for this skill ceiling increase and generally very very positive combat improvement to work they needed this much higher tracking.
I agree that you shouldn't be able to just walk around attacks, but given how unreliable rolls felt a lot of the time (see the last dot point of my first post) and how many enemies have long, basically-true combos, I think good positioning needs to be a bit more rewarded as a preventative measure, rather than dodging attacks being purely reactive. Also, I'd argue that DS2 and not Bloodborne is the game where strafing bosses is the best - ZeroLenny's critique of the game provides an excellent showcase of this. I know that in the paragraph above I said that DS2 has insane tracking, but again, that was for normal mobs (e.g. the turtle shell dudes in Iron Keep, or the greathammer guys again).
>Also the aoe spam has to do with the whole making you have to think about roll timing thing from before.
Linking in to what I said above, the thing that annoyed me with the constant AoE on attacks is that it felt like positioning mattered very little compared to pure reaction time, at least for most bosses.
>Finally on this bit I never was ever caught out by hyper amour on an enemy other than the underworld ancestral warrior guys.
In response to this, I'm going to copy-paste a reply I made to someone else. As a foreword, I didn't struggle at all with the misbegotten champion on his own, but the double fight with him & a Crucible Knight was just awful; killing the misbegotten warrior isn't hard, but killing him before the knight drops down and ganks you makes it a DPS race, meaning I had to play extra aggressively and repeatedly ate shit when he suddenly began a combo and I couldn't override my buffered input. Also, another good example of sudden enemy hyper-armour messing me up is the drakeblood knights (like the guy guarding the dragon seal in the Fringefolk Hero's Grave) and their windy shield attack.
"A great example of this is the misbegotten warrior, who can in most cases be pretty much stunlocked, but can also begin an extremely quick roar or stomp that grants hyper-armour and leads into a combo which you physically don't have time to avoid if you've got an attack queued or even outgoing. This interaction of sloppy controls and poor enemy design ends up making so many boss fights feel like the Dark Souls 2 special - attack once, backpedal and block, repeat ad nauseum. It kills any sort of rhythm that a boss fight might otherwise have, and makes so many fights feel completely identical."
>I would personally be fine with the very long combos enemies have if they just had way more recovery time. Paradoxically most enemies have bigger openings in their shorter combos what is stupid. The flailing combos I am neutral on because they give more interesting fights but at the cost of making them pretty unreadable on first play.
I completely agree on everything except that flailing combos make the fights more interesting - a lot of the time it felt like I couldn't weave between hits and establish any sort of rhythm or back-and-forth, I just had to run or roll away until the combo was over (again, Crucible Knight is a great example of this).
>Final thing here is the delays on attacks definitely isn’t arbitrary
What I meant by this is that a lot of attacks have windups that hold for an unnatural length of time, and then come out in just a few frames, usually with very few or no cues. I felt like many attacks had no way of being reasonably dodged the first time you saw them, and that it became an issue of rote memorisation rather than reading cues and establishing a rhythm.
As for everything below here, I completely agree with you, and thanks again for reading & replying.
EDIT: Another point I (we?) forgot to mention is how useless poise felt unless you had the full Bull Goat armour set + talisman equipped.
Damn too much text
strength weapons still underperform, I was playing with Marika's hammer at +9 and helping some peeps in Leyndell who were using dual katana builds. they were doing 2x/3x the DPS I was doing.
I don't understand why they kept the old "kill boss/return to your world" and the "no boss/no summoning" aspects of multiplayer.
I get it when it comes to instanced and phased content like dungeons, some bosses and teleport-gated areas, but it doesn't make sense when you are roaming the open world.
Considering Elden Ring is an open world game, I can't fathom why this wasn't the first thing they changed about their general framework. It's so weird because they hit the nail on the head with passwords, summoning pools and effigies but this went completely under their radar.
It's more of a mild nuissance than anything, but still. I just think it was a pretty obvious change to work on during early development. Perhaps the scale of the rework would've been too big to be viable, they are not a massive studio after all.
Multiple summons and players for normal enemies would just be boring, but the rest true
@@YeprilesteR not a problem, the host always has the *option* to not summon others if they find it boring, and they can always sever the connection after bosses if they so desire... but if you give them the *option* to summon people regardless of boss status they'd also be opening up a massive invassion pool, which would be good for the game overall
@@kokorochacarero8003 Hmm yeah maybe, I would buff the enemies's health a little if they summon but not too much, that sounds good I guess
@@YeprilesteR sounds about fine tbh. I don't personally think it'd be necesary, but it woudn't be a bad change either
about the input queuing its funny how they added it to everything you don't want and the one thing that would benifit from a bit of queing is the roll, press roll 0.1 seconds before animation cancels and it will do nothing, press attack button 0.8 seconds before it finishes and you attack again, especially jarring with the jump attack which has an even higher spell queue after it
spawn points, every boss should have the respawn be outside the arena, for the majority of the game they do this then on random bosses they don't, moon boss as the worst example, fara dragon boss another and any boss that spawns at night, its funny with the limgrave night horse they added a statue at the location but its useless as it will be daytime when you use it, and even if you spawn at grace you still have to set it to night time again
and the ball bearing hunters have been bugged since release that you have to go to night time twice for them to spawn
There's a 3rd option for turning the horse when in a tight space, but it's the slowest. Aim with a bow. You can turn completely in place.
Bad design. Just give us non clunky shitty controls
You can turn your camera and use either the binoculars or the bow to turn instantly instead of slowly spinning in place, actually
@@ChrisDaAce27 hold down ALT, for controller idfk get gud i guess
@@kizion7895 listen here fairyboy, on controller it's clunky. Suck dick, cope and move on
@@kizion7895what exactly is there to “get gud” at? it’s objectively bad design.
Why do so many games act like horses can't just back up? Its so irritating. They have absolutely no problem with this in real life and can actually do it with considerable speed. Goats and rams do it frequently so it makes Torrent's inability to do it even more irritating.
because the player character can't back up either
this video was incredibly well structured, very well informative, and more than intriguing to watch. great video, i’d say. surprised it doesn’t have at least a million views
When you mentioned Melina's mechanical irrelevance when you choose the Frenzied Flame path, it made me think of something related I noticed from the beginning: much like in Skyrim, choosing to join factions that are "evil" or at least opposed to the main goal in some way doesn't really affect how other characters view you. For instance, in NG+2 I joined the Volcano Manor before finding Diallos swearing vengeance for Lanya's death in Academy Gate Town, and it had absolutely no effect on my interactions with him prior to his joining the Manor. No one else ever acknowledges you've become a recusant, despite Bernahl emphasizing the perils of your choice. I haven't done the Frenzied Flame path yet so I don't know if it changes any character interactions apart from Melina, but it's weird how the Volcano Manor choice carries no actual weight.
Also: whatever happened to covenants? 🤨
Apparently, the Volcano Manor stands against the Erdtree. So I expected there to be some kind of trade off if I accept Tanith's invitation to join her manor. But lo and behold, there were no consequences at all lol.
From an excerpt of his interview:
Miyazaki: "The covenants in the Dark Souls series are not present in this game. The network elements of the game were designed to lower the bar as much as possible and make it easier to match up players, such as signs, and the covenant system doesn't really fit in well with that."
Feel like the lack of covenants and the areas of PvP (which is often in an open world area with no special traps etc., the dungeons are slightly better in that regard) really ruin the PvP experience; it's something you do a few times for fun but that's it, there's no real goal to work towards to.
Gideon's line in which he describes Rykard as an "enemy, never to be forgiven" stuck with me when I got to the Volcano Manor. Shame it didn't go anywhere.
I think the spirit summons should have been unlimited in use and have an instant cast but only active for a short time, they would have to be used strategically but you could build more in to them, able to used as many of them in a fight as you had FP or HP (or perhaps even runes for some). There would be 'tanky' summons but they would only stick around as a short distraction, the numerous status wielding summons would require you to occupy the boss long enough for them to apply them without being interrupted, for example if you staggered a boss you might forgo the crit so a rot hound could apply it's status, summons like the Black Knife would be able to do damage comparable to a primo ash of war. I think the fact the spirits ask only a flat cost of FP was a lost opportunity as it has the potential to be a new playstyle. Currently they occupy this strange region previously occupied by NPC summons, the lands between useless and laughably overpowered. A system like the one i'm trying to describe would make them less chaotic and fire & Forget and more easily balanced, still a 'free' advantage we haven't had before but one that could have it's impact more tightly controlled yet at the same time more expressive and empowering for the player.
As for crafting i find it quite disappointing as the base functionality is all there and the 'cracked pot' system is actually a novelty but it really just comes off as an artificial layer of limiting consumables. All it's really done is make weak consumables unlimited, something that is somewhat undermined by the fact many of the vendors offer unlimited supplies of many superior options for negligible fees and that the game somewhat emphasises the use of signature legendary armaments that often don't benefit from greases etc or have abilities that supersede them. Many of the strongest consumables require resources with static drops (some are technically farmable but only if you looked it up in the wiki) so i just wonder why i bother, i'd rather have the old option of finding the enemy that rarely drops sleep pots or bloodboil aromatics etc. To put it succinctly If i can only have 50 sleep pots ever why would i need 500 fire grease? I would have loved to have a reason to gather materials, perhaps the Physick tears were recipes like in the Witcher that required a large investment of different ingredients, the Witcher also had a system where you needed a base spirit (a common drop) to refresh your potions; this would fit in nicely also, 'Exceedingly rare to find' ingredients could be circumvented with distillates of more common ingredients etc etc.
Amazing video. Incredibly well written. I hadn't thought of a lot of those things your brought up, but I think you nailed it and substatiated every point
Oh yeah, the leashing in an "open world" is awful. Another downside is enemies wasting the player's time, like the dragons that keep flying away or shuffling out of range of strikes.
I think the worst scenario of enemies wasting your time is when you get randomly spotted by an enemy and after running two miles away you cant look at the map yet because its still aggro
@@abrahamrangel2326 That, too.
I have a dagger with assassin gambit ready always as part of my optional parry build.
This man is a god at parries.
I love the game, but this is an incredibly nuanced and balanced review. Well played!
Ah yes, dopamine
crafting is completely redundant in this game i finished it twice without crafting anything
As much as i can appreciate the work that went behind creating such a gigantic map, i still prefer the hub zones of souls games. Way less watered down, every nook and cranny is meaninful and has a purpose.
Yeah, what's the point of creating BIG OPEN WORLD when it's filled with garbage quality repeated bosses, catacombs and worthless for your build loot. Give us more Stormveil Castle and less of ruins, Erdtrees and dragons.
Exactly. I'm tired of this quantity over quality trend. Time and time again I see people gush about huge ass maps while I'm like "Yeah but is there anything interesting in it?" ER isn't nearly as bad as many other open world games but it still suffers from the same issues. When content gets spread out like a little piece of butter on a huge bread, when shit repeats all the time, when there's obvious filler, a game starts losing its' flavor, it's immersive grip, and lack meaning and wow factor (gameplay wise I mean, pretty new environments can still wow you for a sec but it's the actual gameplay encounters that matter). Like you said: it all gets watered down. Basically every single boss fight of DS3 was memorable regardless of their mechanics. (E.g. many think Yhorm and Wolnir were letdowns mechanically but I still very fondly remember those fights). In ER hardly any fight has been memorable for me and even if they were at first, that feeling gets destroyed when you then have that same boss come back 3 times. The game has like, what, grand total of 8 unique bosses? Not to mention all the other repeated assets causing new regions to lose their luster. DS3 kept my interest to the very end and I still wanted more. In Elden Ring my interest suffered a harsh decline after Leyndell and I'm actually not looking forward to start NG+ or a new character.
The input buffering is baffling to me. Not just the fact that it's something that made it into the game, but also how no review mentioned it. It honestly makes the game barely playable sometimes.
The worst part is that it isn't even consistent. Try to buffer a jump attack, a weapon switch or 2 handing, and the game will punish you for it.
Also, I don't have a lot of experience with fromsoft games, but the crafting to me felt pretty generous. I usually hate crafting in game, and was ready to hate it here too, but being able to craft consumable made me use them way more, instead of stockpiling them because I only have 4 and there's no point wasting them on bosses that will just kill me in 20 seconds (but then when you learn the bosses, you don't need those item anymore).
In Elden Ring when I didn't use an item, it because I was tired of the whole buffing phase before bosses :'D
It's good to see an Elden Ring criticism video that isn't just "Game hard therefore game bad" for once.
I mean p much all I’ve seen from the big content creators in the community have been very good critiques.
@@shirakenpsyop6843 Then you aint seen the videos by Joe Anderson and Dunkey I guess. Those fools basically did challenge runs for the their first time playing, by purposely ignoring big new mechanics added into the game. Then they spend half their videos complaining the game gets too hard because of their self imposed challenge rules.
@@tomorrowland8026 They were fine otherwise though(Melee only shouldn’t be considered a challenge run…). I don’t remember what Dunkey said
@@Stryfe52 I, for instance, finished my Greathammer pure melee build, and found that Joseph's trading damage argument was not only false but the result of sloppy playing. You have plenty of chances to attack and punish enemies and bosses with big weapons.
But I understand his other criticisms.
Almost none of them are like that, but ER fanboys misconstrue all of them as that because they can't take criticism
Damn, I have no idea how I missed this. This is great. Once again I find myself in the weird position of having all of my own thoughts put to words in a better way than I ever could've managed.
love Elden ring but sekiro will stay my favourite from soft game period