Hilarious thread backfire.
Agree with all the complaints. I recently went back to it thinking I must have missed something and hated almost every second of it. There is a GOW Kratos built that went viral recently so I figured id try playing it with the frost axe and magma blades. Almost 8 hours of 'exploring' later, i still didnt even get to the enemies that have a 1/100 chance of dropping the magma blades and the frost axe didnt make the game play feel any different.
Because the enemy design is still absolutely awful. I always had trouble with their stupidly long windup mechanics. Every fucking enemy does this. But what stood out the most this time was just how aggressive and relentless they are. There is no window where you can get more than a few hits in. They all have attack combos that chain up to 5 attacks and within two seconds they have reloaded and launch another five attacks. Every fight with bosses or even smaller enemies take forever because of this ridiculous change to enemy design.
I was watching some high level gameplay and I realized that they wanted this game's combat to be a DPS game designed around maxing out builds. The only problem is that unless you youtube those builds or play on NG+, you wont get that experience until 60-80 hours in when you're overleveled. It took me hours to find the manor that has the chilled Ashes of War. Everywhere i went there was another hidden area where id get lost for a good 30 minutes. This is with following directions. Volcano manor was even more hard to find and then to get inside the entrance is actually hidden. Took forever to find the youtube video that showed which wall is a hidden entrance.
How this is supposed to be fun is beyond me. Give me bloodborne, DS3 and Sekiro over this repetitive copy pasta game with bad combat design decisions.
Some of the rare drops are too painful to base a new build around, you're better off in NG+ for that sort of thing. Especially getting the Magma Blades, that's one of the rarer ones - let alone two of them. If you know what you're doing you can get to that enemy within about 25 minutes of a new game, but the luck is too low to stand any real chance and the enemies are a higher area scaling than you have the gear for.
You're not wrong about delayed attacks, and it really takes some adjusting to. It's indicative of From's gameplay design progress, as they take something from a recent project and run with it. Dark Souls 2 was anti-[everything that worked in 1] to the point of annoyance. Rolls were nerfed, enemies got insane tracking to stop back stabs. When they made Bloodborne, all future games got faster. After they made Dark Souls 3 and Namless King kicked everyone's arse with his delayed attacks, Elden Ring had 400,000 delayed attacks. It's fine if you adapt, and the point is to stop people getting away with panic rolling, but it's almost a meta game From play with long time fans to catch them out and punish what works.
For better or worse, as time goes on it's emphasised the idea that the gameplay is sometimes less about acting and more about reacting. You wait for/create opportunities to safely get hits in. Then if you get good at that and don't play too safely, you can start to stagger enemies/bosses and be rewarded with bonus damage for your efforts.
I will recommend Strength builds to anyone coming into ER fresh, because not only do that absolutely encourage it (Great Axe, Axe talisman, Strength tear all in the first area) but bigger weapons do more for you than smaller ones will (stagger) while also discouraging lots of hits.
But the truth is that you're missing a lot because you're trying to take shortcuts. Of course things are hidden if your solution to everything is YouTube instead of playing the game, what do you expect? Volcano Manor's Rya gives you more and more dialogue that hints towards a hidden wall as you progress through the assignments. If you don't like the gameplay that's fine, but the game gives you so many more options than previous games did and they're all valid. Summon spirits, buff to fuck, find a nice powerful ash of war, craft sleep bombs. You get windows to attack when a summon is drawing aggro for you. Not all enemies have massive combos, you're salty because impatience is punished and it's clouded your judgement. I find it strange that you'll happily take some previous games, but ER isn't that far away from any of them so if you can play them you can definitely play this.
I agree. As much as I'm slobbing on ER's knob in this thread, I think it being open world is possibly the worst aspect of the game. Not that it doesn't do it well, it absolutely does in my opinion. But it also makes sacrifices because of it.
The Witcher 3 feels like a real place. Probably the only open world game that I think does. Elden Ring feels like a dream (which is cool in it's own respect).
I agree with this. A drawback of open world is that it feels less curated. Going back through DS3 after makes you remember how intentional everything is, and that's inevitably lost in open world.
