Reference to my previous post wondering what the default intended method of play is.
https://hexbear.net/post/2831733
known liar miyazaki
"dlc is the size of limgrave"
"im bad at games"
Is this still discourse? Why would you balance a game around players not using cool items and builds?
Elden Ring is as hard as you want it to be, and allows players to self-adjust.
The redditor in the corner of my room said I'm not hot and sexy if I don't complete the game naked with a wooden club
No magic, no flasks, no summons, no fun, you've only finished Elden Ring once you've beaten the final boss wearing your barbed chastity belt.
you will be praised once (1 time (uno)) upon the moment of the completion of your one millionth dodge roll
I think it's hotter and sexier to enjoy games at your own pace, rather than trying to appease terminally online redditors, fwiw
Gamers like being miserable online instead of doing the things they claim to enjoy
The new golem guy is a pretty good friend. He's good for taking the heat off me in boss fights.
Other than that, I agree - mimic tear (and maybe black knife tiche for the odd field boss) number 1!
Those smith golems are such an incredible pain in the ass to fight. I haven't killed one yet even with non-stop backstabs and I've taken down a furnace golem just by whacking its legs
Rolling sparks on the lightning perfume kills them really quickly. Mind you rolling sparks kills most things quickly right now. With the right setup you can kill
spoiler
Radahn
in seconds just by spamming it.
Yeah, I always run past those smith golems whenever I end up in those forge dungeons. They're frustrating damage sponges, and that's why he makes such a great buddy :)
Really? I just did one or two rolling attacks to the buttruby and that was enough to stagger every time (admittedly, that's with a UGS). You might not have enough skidoo blessing if they're giving you that much trouble.
I was at scrabble level 4-5 in the first forge you can reach and landing crits non-stop, using eleonora's poleblade since it combos with the Ranah outfit buff, and I think they're just crazy resistant to fire and piercing. Might try again with the dragon Hunter katana I levelled to kill the lightning dragon in the pool before Bayle
Yeah, but the mechanics really push you towards certain builds. Bosses are too fast so 90% of the time you can't use slower, heavier weapons effectively.
I also didn't like how they went hard on "long wind up but extremely quick execution" for lots of boss attacks. In DS1 and DS2, you can kinda dodge attacks on instinct alone if your reaction times are good. In Elden Ring, you just have to remember the timing on the attacks which isn't that engaging. Eventually, I just used my first attempt on ER bosses to kite the boss and study their patterns.
For the base game I was annoyed that every fucking weapon I found along the way was either a dex weapon or intelligence scaling magic weapon, when I'd gone strength/faith. Every dungeon I'd come out with either new spells, a new casting staff, or an intelligence weapon
By the time the game really starts giving you good faith scaling stuff and faith spells, the game's reached the point where most enemies and bosses are resistant to faith
At some point I'll probably try again and just not do the strength route again
Hot take, smithing stones and souls should drop with twice the rate to make experimentation easier. I played blind on my first playthrough and managed to miss the Bell Bearing for Smithing Stones 1 & 2. It really hindered my experimentation, knowing there would be some grinding when I found a cool weapon late game or realized a boss took +%100 damage from some weird spellbomb or grease.
Game needs a lot of medium-sized tweaks to really be excellent. Right now it's good but it's flawed and doesn't actually utilize open-world mechanics much beyond saying people could do things even though the game design is slanted against it.
doesn't actually utilize open-world mechanics
Elden Ring is the only open world game I've actually enjoyed exploring. Why do you say the game design is slanted against it?
One example is how the Souls mechanics of the corpse run/death stain doesn't really mean or improve anything in an open world. It makes sense in the more linear Souls games because you're usually progressing in a single stage linearly and there's a push-pull/risk-reward mechanic of how far into a new area you want to push before you retreat to a bonfire to heal and having to risk losing more souls father away into a new area harmonizes with that kind of level design. In Elden Ring, particularly in the overworld at least, you can just hop on Torrent and grab it easily. There's no tension.
The overworld is also cluttered with repeated dungeons and bosses and fixed item placement that makes exploring on a second playthrough basically useless, you might as well just use your memory or a guide to speed through to whatever item you want. If the items and bosses in those repeated dungeons were randomized there'd always be a reason to go down one, but how it is now it's great for most of the first playthrough but the open world closes up pretty tightly after you realize once cool-as-fuck bosses repeat again and again and it's more rewarding to look up what item you'd want to do a STR/INT build than hope you chance upon one in aimless exploration, especially when the bosses are generally so hard and rigid that experimentation is punished.
Elden Ring is a game screaming for community servers. Like, let people make servers for trading or with different drop rates or mixed up enemy locations.
Honestly wish they'd drop the pvp entirely. It's a tiny fraction of the player base and they're unbelievably toxic even for souls gamers. The Seamless Coop mod dev got death threats because it removes the possibility of pvp invaders and thus reduces their potential victim pool
There are mods that do similar things (randomizers and overhauls) and I think you can trade items already (by dropping them on the ground).
I think they could fix Elden Ring with a few changes:
- Make items and bosses randomized or semi-randomized in the overworld dungeons
- Make maybe 6 more starting classes with more starting gift options
- Cut out most of the overworld boss repeats
- Make the bosses slightly easier and more diverse by making their AI and movesets less aggressive and attack-spammy, especially in regards to making them more vulnerable for longer periods of time after their more powerful attacks -Make respeccing possible earlier but maybe slightly more resource intensive to do
- Have regions scale to your player character level in some way so exploring is more enjoyable because right now it's basically you could go to a difficult area but you'll get curb stomped and mostly do it to grab later-game items and early-game regions are easy to miss so coming back to them makes them too easy
I really, really like the idea of Elden Ring being an open-world RPG that rewards build experimentation and problem solving, using whatever tools you have available to you like crafting items, talisman/magic/ash of war combos/spirit ashes, etc. etc. But I find in actuality the bosses serve as hard gates to player creativity and I always end up giving in to use mimics tear, spellsword-style build, etc.
I kinda like the repeating bosses. Sort of similar to fighting Genichiro multiple times over the course of Sekiro, and each time there's something new to the fight. Granted, Elden Rings repeat fights aren't quite so developed... but it's also a decent way to make assets stretch and save on dev time.
Not souls but the re-spec resource. Souls would just be power-creep.
If you're on pc there's a lovely little mod that adds every item to the first merchant in the game, it's a game changer for experimenting. I found some cool bow talismans late in the DLC and wanted to start a new character to play through the whole game again but the prospect of having to go through 90% of it just to get an integral part of the build got me to finally "cheat" and I am I never going back. I've been able to just play the game and have fun doing the parts I actually want to instead of hunting down every bell bearing again and consulting the wiki constantly to ensure I don't accidentally break some obtuse npc quest chain that gives me an item I need. I also used it on my level 200 character so that I could play around with different weapons without grinding out a million+ souls to buy the stones and level them, having an infinite number of respec items is also great. The game clearly doesn't respect the player's time so why respect it at this point? I've already had "real souls vets" tell me that uncapping the framerate and playing in ultrawide is cheating so fuck it
I usually try and solo bosses becuase I'm a Soulsborne pervert. But I was fighting Rellana last night and got her down to like 1% before dying. I wanted to go to bed, so I got the summon and used a Mimic Tear to just finish the fight.
The three-way curb stomping we did to her was ... horrifying, like I was ashamed at how easily and completely we humiliated her. I felt so guilty that I betrayed the git gud lifestyle that I'm beelining to Elden Beast and NG++ today so I can do the fight properly.
I did that with Messmer lol. I beat him with mimic tear and immediately regretted it because I felt that he's a cool fight that I would have loved to have mastered. Gonna have to create a new character
Summons were not available in Dark Souls, so it's a pretty good baseline for "hard mode" and "easy mode". I suck at the game and almost always use mimic or Tiche, could not beat the game without them. But it's so obvious that they reduce the difficulty of the game by about half
i will never beat a dark souls game. i could, but it would be (and has been so far) a joyless slog of grinding for resources so that i can make any new weapons or armor i find actually worth using. getting new items isn't fun, it only means awkwardly travelling to whatever region has enemies that drop the most titanite shards and spending hours battling enemies in a region you finished hours ago just so that the new item does more than a pittance of damage. plus i really really expected elden ring to have any kind of climbing, even a simple ledge-clamber, after sekiro's ninja-parkour, and instead all we got was a useless crouch button and a less flavorful jumping mechanic. they've essentially been re-releasing the same game with a different map since demon's souls. overrated trash series, from software should have stuck to armored core games imo and i'm only partially saying that because i am obsessed with mechs. i would rather play EVE online and i hate spreadsheets.
"but finally beating that boss will be the most satisfying thing ever!"
No, I'm just glad its over, but now I have to do it all over again. And again.
EXACTLY
i've never gotten 'fun' or 'satisfaction' out of beating a difficult videogame, even when i beat MGS3, which is one of my favorite games of all time, on the European Extreme difficulty, i just get that 'thank goodness i don't have to do that anymore' vibe like i got done with a particularly unpleasant chore.
What? No, I was just asking out of curiosity. I don't know too much about the community and the whole instance, but from what I understand, hexbear is for people who are fond of communism/socialism and countries like China, Russia, North Korea, etc. It just so happened, that before seeing this post and noticing the background in question, I've seen the news about Russian LGBGQ+ communities switching to more independent social media (e.g. Telegram), because of the crackdown, and there was also that story about the politician who had to change their gender back for similar reasons. And now I am a bit lost, because from what I see here, people in hexbear, lemmygrad, and ml instances tend to support LGBTQ+.
They're not mutually exclusive. The west/USA isn't some bastion of LGBT rights, and using us as a cudgel against the enemies of the empire helps noone.
We're a pretty robust little queer/commie group on independent social media. What does it mean?
are you lgbt yourself?
If you were looking for a country that matches Lemmygrad and hexbears politics the closest it'd probably be Cuba
Not really, no. I'm just interested to see these communities sometimes express support for my country, especially considering its stance on issues that are important here. Again, not trying to criticize or anything, just a very different perspective.
Soyborne games are no longer good.
