They took the genre and distilled it down to the purest gameplay-focused form that they could. And for an Early Access title, it could absolutely be a full release today. No bugs, no performance issues, nothing feels missing or incomplete, except maybe a few minor QoL bits. The success is deserved.
I'm echoing your thoughts, almost exactly. It's the base game, with many of its best and worst aspects cranked up to 11. It's best parts are its fantastic boss fights.
Rellana was BRUTALLY difficult (at least, at the BL I was at) but I loved every moment of it.
Midra was visually stunning, and EXTREMELY clean to play, while still being a solid challenge.
Messmer was just a solid fight, all around.
Scadutree Avatar initially had me annoyed, but by the time I got through it, it was one of my favorites. Very unique.
Romina needed a massive buff, my goodness. I barely had a chance to DECIDE if I like the fight or not.
The Furnace Golems were a really cool concept, but in gameplay are just tedious and annoying, and had way too many "fuck you, there is no counter to this move, except to abandon the fight for the next 30 seconds" noves that they can just spam repeatedly.
Promised Consort Radahn is also BRUTALLY difficult, but ultimately learnable, like Rellana, but unlike Rellana is 0% fun to fight. One of those bosses that crosses the line from "learnavle because you get more skillful" to "learnable because you figure out how to metagame it".
Radahn, Consort of Miquella can actually die in a fire. "Let's take the design concepts that ruined Malenia, even though they were a minority of the fight, and build an entire fight around them, exclusively." I.E. it's and entire fight made of Waterfowls. It's every combat concept that was a step backwards for FromSoft, across the entirety of Elden Ring, rolled up into one. Seriously, guys, your job as devs is to make difficult but learnable challenges that an average gamer can overcome, with enough effort, within the rules that the rest of the game has established, not to engage in an arms race against speedrunners and hitless runners. They are not your core audience.
Overall, an experience thst mostly improves on the base game, but was disappointing due to a few VERY significant lowlights. But it's still Elden Ring, so still an excellent game.
You should definitely consider having a small handful of weapons you can swap out for different situations, but yeah, Miyazaki is kinda notorious for doting on heavy weapon builds, and the Darkmoon Greatsword is basically always the best one, or close to it. Learn the moveset and make good use of the weapon art, and you're gonna have a great time.
It sure sounds like you would like it. I will say that for me, everything about the game is fantastic, except for the combat, which is kinda terrible. Especially the boss fights. Feels to me like they're trying to mimic a souls-like style, but really really overshot on difficulty.
Basically, I say go for it, but don't hesitate to drop the difficulty settings, if you're like me.
Also, get yourself a physical notepad. Yeah, I kind of agree that if note-taking and such is intended as part of the game, there should be a venue to support that in-game, but there isn't really.
Also, also, don't feel bad about having to look up some stuff for the really late/post-game puzzles. One thing they toom WELL from Dark Souls is the idea of puzzles that are really made to be solved by the collective wisdom of the community, not just you.
Also, also, also, don't disregard the language puzzle, completely. I did, and when I looked it up later, I wish I hadn't I wish I'd at least have given it a shot, for myself.
The XZ exploit was found because some dude was investigating performance issues in a system, and noticed an unusual amount of time being spent in SSH processing, IIRC.
Unfortunately, the best method by far for identifying bad components is "have a spare you can try instead" or "take suspect parts and swap them into a known-good system."
I.E. test your parts.
Memory and hard drive tests are the first thing you should run, for almost any problem, just because they're so low-effort. Swap them into a separate system to test, if possible, and definitely make sure you're running tests from a USB stick or CD-ROM, to help eliminate as many variables as you can.
PSU is a good bet after those, for intermittent problems, since the ENTIRE rest of the computer relies on it, and unreliable power can cause really weird and unpredictable failures. But there really isn't much you can do to TEST a PSU without buying an electronic load tester that's gonna cost you more than a new PSU itself. If you don't have anyone to borrow from, a spare PSU is really a solid investment.
A notice would have been nice, cause there was a bit of downtime, and then a few hours more of instability after coming back up.
However, as of now, for me, all the serious issues are resolved by 0.19.1, and the server performance in general seems to be a lot better than before" although there are still occasional timeouts in Jerboa.
Whatever the admin(s) did, it was effective and welcome. If you see this, thanks for your time and effort!
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Remind me never to let this guy cook for me.