Elden Ring (2022)

Woof. That Maliketh dude was a right pain in the ass with those AoE attacks that could almost one-shot me, the small hitbox and him constantly moving around. First stage was relatively straightforward but then in that second stage the SOB was so aggressive and mobile that I could barely get one hit before he was attacking again.

Anyway, he's done, as are the capital, that asshole Gideon and that dude Godfrey. I feel that the game acted as finding him was some sort of big revelation, but for me it was just yet another G-name.

I feel that I'm slowly approaching what would I think it's the endgame portion (after 80 hours, which is wild) so I'm now starting to look at all the various "quests" and NPCs that I obviously missed.

Some of them are cool, but I'm not sold on this quest design of having to talk to random NPCs in random places at random moments without seemingly any direction. Sure, not being pestered with questlogs and map icons is nice (it's different, it's unusual), but questlines are so obscure that I need to be constantly reading a wiki, so the questlogs and map markers are back, just in my phone instead of my game.

Raya Lucaria academy is amazing. The way through the academy twist and turn with many forking paths and surprising shortcuts. It felt like what little I played of Bloodborne.

Anyway, I killed Renala last night. First try and she didn't take more than 5 hits. Kind of a disappointment again. It didn't help that I didn't know how to enter Raya Lucaria Academy so I ended up even more overleveled by exploring more of the map. Also that apparently she is particularly weak to melee builds. And I also accidentally used a rune arc.

At first the online components bugged me so I turned them off. The messages that littered the landscape land mostly between useless and misleading, as were the bloodstains showing other players' deaths. And the ghosts running around every now and then were distracting.

But eventually I warmed into them. Most messages are not useful ("item ahead" literally in front of an item) but some are mildly amusing and are a good way of interacting with the community in a non-toxic way. You get to learn all the language (like turtle = dog) and stuff. I started to even write my own; some useful, like pointing out fake walls, some funny, like "ahead ahead" before a coffer with a head-based shield.

Today I *Gasp!* even went into multiplayer and helped a couple of players beat Radahn (it's by far the most co-oping areas, according to the map).

So far, I have to say that I'm really liking the exploring around the world because it's such a complex, pretty and interesting place. I love that most of the time platforming is done on things that don't look like platforms, like broken down structures and weird root systems. I also like that there are lots of little animals and some enemies seem to be doing stuff instead of just standing waiting to be killed. It doesn't feel like a level in a game, it feels like a real world.

The more I play, the more clear it is that the world is not in decay; the world is thriving. There are animals and plants doing perfectly fine on their own. A lot of them don't even attack you but even the ones that do seem mostly just defending themselves. I am the asshole going around killing stuff that hasn't done anything wrong to me. It gives me a somewhat Shadow of the Colossus vibe. Particularly those walking mausoleums.

The only openly hostile enemies seem to be remnants of the old world that desperately try to go back to it. I guess my "mission" is to fix the Ring to being back the world from.vefore the shattering but from what I've seen, the world after the shattering is doing just fine. I don't have the right to go around stomping all over it.

One issue with the open world structure, though, is that the game doesn't have a balanced and satisfying difficulty curve. If you find a boss or area that is too hard for you, you can just go explore somewhere else, get better gear, allies and level up and come back later, stronger. This works well in theory but, in practice, there is so much content that if you like exploring you can very easily find yourself overleveled and then you won't find any boss or area that is too hard for you.

And because the game has no way of gating of you get to a boss as a lowly first level with a broken sword or as a beefy steamroller dual wielding the gilded axes of death, the same boss or area can be either extremely hard or piss easy. So the game can't effectively use difficulty to tell the story. "Was this boss supposed to be pathetically weak as a plot point or I'm too strong for it?" "Is this enemy supposed to secretly the toughest motherfucker in the whole Lands Between or have I sequence broken myself into this fight too early?"

As an aside, I also feel that I'm beating bosses not because I'm getting better, but because my character is getting better.

This might change in the late game, since there must be a limit to gear and levels, but the mid game is very uneven.

Ranni Pixel Art by alpceliko