Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree currently has a 'Mixed' status on Steam, with many of the negative reviews complaining that the bosses are too hard [also game's PC performance]
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree currently has a 'Mixed' status on Steam, with many of the negative reviews complaining that the bosses are too hard [also game's PC performance]
Some of them are also down on the game's PC performance, which is fair.
I thought souls- like fans love tough bosses. Enjoy it then. I think they should git gud. /s
For full disclosure, I suck at souls-like and I beat Elden Ring by cheating(completely offline). I have been called Mentally removed for wanting an easy mode. I don’t like souls like fans, not all, just some of the more hardcore ones.
I play them offline because no way am I playing with that mostly asshole fanbase
If you're playing solo you can't be invaded.
You really need to be zealously masochistic and self-flagellant to enjoy that kind of shit. I don't know how people do it.
Once you've played enough, the fact that it's hard makes it better. I remember the first time I played dark souls, (dark souls III) I beat the 2nd boss months after the first try (i didn't play continuously for those months obviously). I was just unable to beat it. I looked at the wiki for builds, for that specific boss starts and so on.
Once I beat it, though, I kinda knew how to play, and the fact that the bosses were hard made it better, since now I got a big dopamine hit after I finally killed them after tens of tries.
Now, most games I play I beat them on the first try. Not because I'm good, but because the games are easy. I watch other people play and they kill them first try too. I don't get that same sense of "oh this is a boss, it's gonna be hard but fun." Instead I think "oh no, I was having fun oneshotting everyone and now here comes the bullet sponge".
Have you tried being zealously masochistic and self-flagellant? Gitting gud is another option.
But really though there's something endearing about a game being ruthlessly difficult with no easy mode slider. I'm normally the type of guy to crank everything down to easy to have a relaxing time, but when I'm in the mood for it Souls games scratch that itch juuuuust right.
Some people like developing an artistic skill. This is that. Fuck up on the piano? Start that part over and get it right this time. Fuck up in elden ring? Start that part over and get it right this time. Both have acceptable amounts of variation that lead to success. Elden ring is in fact easier, because things can change that aren't solely your skill level (stats/gear). There's a lot of reasons the souls series and similar games are conducive to speedrunning, this loop of self-improvement is a major one.
When I read comments like yours, they come across as saying "practicing anything is stupid and I do not see the benefit". It's easy: practicing anything is fun and you only get to see the benefit after you fail, then succeed. If there's some mental disconnect you have where you can't envision success for yourself, or you think succeeding won't be fun, it certainly isn't the fault of the game or the community.
Agreed. I'm glad there's so many difficulty sliders built into this game: big variety of guns, NPC summons, spirit summons.
Honestly, it was not enough. With Easy Mode mod, I could actually explore the game world and immerse myself more than I would ever have. One of my favourite moments is when I was fighting Dragonkin boss in front a giant throne occupied by a massive skeleton in first underground city. It was amazing. I could never experience it without that mod. I am too easily frustrated.
I've been playing video games my whole life and I've never been able to "git gud" at any game. I'm not going to put a significant amount of time and effort getting good at a game to figure out if I even like it
Getting good is what the games are about. There is no post-"git gud" phase of playing their games.
I don't do difficult games cause of physical issues. I tried Elden Ring and was very impressed, but ultimately it was unplayable for me even trying to go easy.
What do you recommend cheat wise? I'm running on Linux and I really don't care about online.
There is a mod called Easy Mode mod that you can use.
My only issue is that since the DLC was released I can no longer play online on linux. It says "Inappropriate behavior detected" no matter what. Didn't even buy the DLC.
Is your proton set to experimental? because mine is working on arch. If it is, try verifying files, or if that doesn't work, back up your saves and nuke the prefix.
No, it's set to whatever the default is. I'll try what you suggest, thanks!
Fromsoft is just checking up on you. Have you been acting differently since the dlc came out?
I've been spontaneously singing a lot
Didn't even buy the DLC.
That's the issue, game works fine with the DLC and fails without the DLC.
At least when playing offline you can use er-patcher to play it without framerate limit, chromatic aberration and in ultrawide. https://github.com/gurrgur/er-patcher
This was patched in experimental 2 days ago. I downloaded update as soon as it was live and I have almost finished the DLC.
I’m working my way through it now. They’re not really much different from the main game. The problem is the bosses in the main game were also pretty frustrating. A lot of absurdly long attack chains where it’s hard to read when you have an opening. Delayed attacks you have to memorize the timing for. Attacks where the enemy either dashes or stretches their model an absurd distance to hit you so it’s hard to get away from them or gauge distances. Damage values that will kill you in a few hits even with high health and armor. Attacks that start and execute so fast that anything with a cast time gets punished.
Outside bosses we have the enemies behind half the corners, we have platforming sections in a game that doesn’t really support that, etc.
I’ve always like their games in spite of a lot of the flaws. The level design, world building, atmosphere, weird writing, etc all are still great and what draws me to the games. In what in what other games can you see: bald scam man, onion man, sunny d man, “dip head in wax”, rolling lightning goats, doot doot boat ghost, etc?
But it feels like in terms of gameplay design it’s kind of stagnated. A lot of the same design patterns for difficulty plus the pressure to keep making the game feel hard to people who have played all their games before has led to them stretching their design about as much as they can. In my first play through of Elden Ring for the first time I gave up trying to play my usual Ooga booga strength build in favor of that stupid comet azure magic combo to just anihate the bosses rather than deal with their bullshit. And in previous games I happily smashed my face against things like Nameless King or Madam Butterfly and Dancer well before I was supposed to fight then.
I think at this point I just want to see FROM do some different things. Sekiro was a nice mix-up on the basic formula and while it wasn’t really my cup of tea, Armored Core 6 felt like a breath of fresh air. The mainline souls style games feel like they’re trying to keep linking the fire over and over.
Let's not forget how blatantly the bosses read your inputs. FROM bosses have always done this, but it's never been so obvious; it kinda breaks the "tough but fair" illusion.
My take is that since players have gotten so powerful, bosses had to adapt...but the only ways to make them stronger have upset the balance between "tough" and "fair". Hit boxes for attacks have gotten larger, which hurts readability; attacks that you used to be able to dodge now land, even though it didn't look like it. Bosses hit harder, combo their attacks, and they can even cancel into different combos now.
All of this happened because bosses are balanced around Spirit Ashes and the new insane weapon arts. It's harder than ever to SL1 the game, because if you don't have a good Ash summon or a crazy weapon art or didn't grind for upgrade materials, main quest bosses are stupidly hard. If you did do all of those things, they're almost trivial.
It's weird. The bosses used to be the highlight of Soulsborne games, and now they're the worst part because they're just not fun anymore. Dragonlord Placidusax is my favorite fight, and it's not even close. I either trivialize my way through the rest, or just wanted them to be over. The satisfaction of fighting a worthy opponent is gone, because it's almost always just unfair for the player, or unfair for the boss.
Yeah that's basically how I felt. It was binary. The game was unfairly and frustratingly hard when I was trying to play fair and take the game on its terms. And then when I went to cheese everything it was so trivial that it felt empty. Sometimes I think about going back to the game to try to get the "real" experience, but then I remember the frustration and just can't bring myself to do it.
Although part of my reluctance to replay the game has less to do with boss difficulty and more to do with the repetitiveness of the open world. Without the sense of exploration and discovery you get on the first playthrough, the world becomes a checklist of places you need to go to grab stuff for your build with little desire to go replay the other content because so much of it is copy pasted filler. Even going through the DLC now, with it being smaller in scope than the full game, but still pretty huge, I'm already seeing a lot of repeat content.
As much as I appreciate the attempt at putting a twist on the formula, I think the open world was a net negative for the game. The flaws in the reward systems of the previous games were exacerbated by the structure which led you to explore all the boring repetitive stuff on a first play-through because you don't know if the thing you need might be in catacomb #20 and then on subsequent playthroughs you just skip vast parts of the game which aren't relevant to you.
It also just doesn't seem like they have the content output necessary to fill an open world with content that is of a comparable level of novelty and quality to what we'd come to expect from their level design. There's a good dark souls game in Elden Ring, it's just that it's spaced out and everything in between is padding.
The funny thing is, despite all of that, Elden Ring is still one of the top 3 open world games alongside the 2 Zelda titles. But I think that says as much about the state of the industry and genre as much as it does about the skill of FROM's and Nintendo's designers.
Those aren't flaws. That's their whole design, and it's good.
I mean, to some extent yes. The hostile, uncaring world complemented by challenging gameplay that doesn't hold your hand is an important part of the design. I just think they went too far in Elden Ring to the point where it stops being a challenge I can feel good about overcoming. But that's not really what I meant as far as the flaws with the games.
Setting aside difficulty, their games are filled with flaws, both minor and major. Some they've learned from over the years, some they haven't, and some which they've gone backwards. I could get into a whole discussion about them, but it's a testament to the rest of the design that I can acknowledge all of these and look past them to enjoy what was done right. Just a few off the top of my head:
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The stats are obtuse and frequently either broken or useless. Resistance from DS 1, Poise from DS 3, armor in basically any game, etc. This makes engaging with the RPG elements feel kind of pointless and why in a lot of the games I played basically naked.
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The stat requirements and the need for upgrade materials makes it so that most items you find will be useless to you. They alone don't really contribute to the desire to explore. I do end up exploring around in these games, but it's in spite of the rewards rather than because of them.
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Demon Souls made you go back to a hub through a load screen to level. Dark Souls 1 fixed this. Then every game after that until Sekiro has gone back to forcing you to go through a load screen to level.
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The games are really inconsistent with their use of bonfires and shortcuts. I think to this day Dark Souls 1 has the best level design of the series. The lack of fast travel for the first half really makes you engage with the levels and makes you appreciate the shortcuts you find and eventually the fast travel once you have it. Since then all of the games have gone bananas with the bonfires/sites/etc with fast travel right from the start. There were some absolutely absurd places in DS3 where there was another bonfire within sight of the first. Then you have areas with absolutely no bonfires and shortcuts all the way through, or none at all. In Elden Ring sometimes you get sites of grace or stakes of Marika right outside the boss door and sometimes there just isn't one anywhere close.
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Consumables feel pretty useless since they're non-renewable. If you use them and still can't kill the boss before they run out, you're now just gonna have to beat the boss without them, so you might as well not have bothered. Elden Ring kind of helped this with crafting, but honestly I haven't used it much because I just am trained not to think about consumables in these games at this point.
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Some weapons/spells end up being completely useless. Some feel like they were designed for a different game. I don't know how they imagined people would make use of them. And iirc bows and spells have been a joke until like DS3, and even then from what I've heard people say bows are still pretty crap.
I think what's interesting about these games is that they're unpolished. That's not to say I wouldn't want these problems fixed with better design, but I think I prefer what we have to the usual AAA design where everything rough gets sanded down until the whole game is bland and appeals to nobody equally.
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A lot of absurdly long attack chains where it’s hard to read when you have an opening. Delayed attacks you have to memorize the timing for. Attacks where the enemy either dashes or stretches their model an absurd distance to hit you so it’s hard to get away from them or gauge distances.
That's also my main critique with Elden Ring. There's so many spin to win enemies in the game that will just keep attacking for 10 seconds straight, it gets old so quickly.
I miss the slow and methodical attacks from DS1 and to some extent DS3. DS3 was already a lot quicker than DS1 but most attacks were really well choreographed so I didn't really mind. When an enemy pulled their sword back in DS3 you knew they were about to attack. In Elden Ring they will hold that sword back and hold and hold and hold and then after you rolled 3 times they hit you. It's almost impossible to read an attack on the first try, which feels really unsatisfying.
Not to say I don't like Elden Ring, I do. But out of all From games it's one of the weaker entries.
Please note this article is 100% BS. The DLC currently has a Mostly Positive rating on Steam with 87% of the people leaving a positive review.
The people complaining are mostly about stuff like crashes, bad net code and poor fps. This is not a dlc thing, but a base game thing. The pc port simply has some issues, for most people it's totally fine. For others it's unplayable. With the amount of different systems out there, there is always going to be a group of people with issues. I feel like this is a very vocal minority though.
Check again, sitting at mixed reviews at 63% positive.
It's typical click bait from a once, long ago, enjoyable magazine about PC games. Now PCG just outputs game guides and incessantly complains about AI.
There's actually two listings for the DLC which is confusing but one is mostly positive and the other is mixed.
Check listings under publisher: Fromsoftware Inc
The base dlc is mixed reviews and there are plenty of reviews stating how hard bosses hit and how the scaling seems pointless, so no, the article is not BS.
The article title seems to oversimplify things a little with the "too hard" bit. I read a couple dozen negative reviews, and most cite poor performance, copy-paste boss design, too much hp and/or too little player damage, and unfair mechanics. Sure, those last two aspects could be seen as "too hard", but they read like there's a difficulty spike from the base game. Whether this is a case of players needing to adapt or whether there's an actual issue here, I don't know, but seems there's more to this than just a case of players complaining about a hard game being hard.
That's video game journalism in a nutshell right there. They'll always do anything they can to downplay legitimate criticisms from consumers. They're common tactic is to reduce everything to absurdity so that people just read the headlines won't look further. They truly are the lowest form of Journalism. Absolutely lowest.
Git gud
You don't even need to get good most of the time if you just spend more time learning the game by playing it's mostly a knowledge check. Fully upgraded weapon (way more important than leveling dmg stats passed min req), npc and PC summons, get vigor up in the 40-50 range, mark your map and come back later, etc. You could play it like a fighting game training against bosses to learn their moves or just go somewhere else to grind levels or equipment to come back later for an easier fight.
Its all about that bark now. You need the bark. Get the bark. Be gud with the bark.
I loved Elden Ring, I don't play many games these days but it really hooked me. But also it really needs to get over itself and add difficulty options.
I do think the difficulty is part of the fun but I almost didn't finish it because it was so all over the place, toward the end it just got grindy, bosses just turned into long roll fests until you got your one chance per minute to knock off 2% of its health bar. They feel more like endurance matches that test your patience more than skill.
Sometimes I'm dying a lot and having fun because the challenge is good, but sometimes it's just tedious and I want to move on to the next area. I would love to be able to drop the difficulty for a bit just for those spots, hell make it an in game item called cry baby bottle for losers and wimps for all I care.
It has difficulty options. Where the previous FromSoft games would just lock you in a closet with a boss, whilst flicking you in the balls and laughing at you "Git gud son", Elden Ring has a lot of stuff to make things more manageable. For example there is summons, in the form of NPC (often with interesting quest lines to get them), other players via online and your personal spirit summons. The game is also completely open. So when you get stuck on a boss, you can just leave and go do something else. Explore the world, go level up, go find weapons, armor and other items to help you. Overleveling is not hard and the world is huge and a lot of fun to explore. The game also almost never locks content behind a boss. You can do a lot in the game without beating any of the hard bosses. If with all that the game is still to hard, then maybe the game isn't for you. Hard games have a place in the world imho. And if you just want to enjoy the world for the fun of it, I would suggest one of the mods out there to make the game as easy as you want it to be.
Sure Elden Ring is a tough game to get the hang of, but it isn't hard at all and provides plenty of difficulty adjustments. There's also a lot of people that adjust the difficulty in the other direction. For example people that do RL1 runs or limit themselves to a certain kind of weapon. I think it's cool the game has so many options to enjoy it.
It has difficulty options but it's if you use summons, heavy shields and similar stuff. Bosses can become really easy that way if you want to. You could also go for a solo playthrough with no shield for more difficulty.
Elden Ring is both the easiest and hardest Fromsoft game in recent times because of how many really strong things are in it for the player to use. But if you play melee only, the bosses are harder than the old games.
I'm not amazing at these games, particularly the faster ones, but I'm pretty good to the point I tend to play thematic builds or and actively eshew OP stuff because it's funnier to kill a dragon with a dagger than a big sword.
I think elden ring is almost flawless until after leyndell. Going from one of the best levels they've ever made, filled with thoughtful design to bats that 2 hit your 60 vigur build in the flat, empty snowfields is... A decision.
It's basically tradition that the bottom falls out of these games in the last bits. I think elden ring is just too big, even the levels with great design like elphale end up becoming tedious slog fests because there's just nowhere for them to take it. Hey look it's those basic soldiers, but they're umm golden now and they hit like a truck and umm explode and uhhh 8 Royal revenants. Hmm game design!
The broken scaling of everything means that a lot of the boss fights end up either you wombo combo them, they wombo combo you, or it's a tedious scratch and run away event. There's no epic genichiro or owl level toe to toe lightning duels. Even malania, a boss with absolutely stunning design, becomes dying to waterfowl dance in one/two hit/s over and over till you learn to dodge it or just snap and pull out the blasphemous greatsword and chain pancake her to death.
I'm replaying the base game (waiting on a sale for the dlc) and I couldn't agree more. I was fighting a bell bearing hunter and they have massive combos they can mix up in the middle and do more hits and when you get the timing PERFECTLY you go do 1 charge attack and you get punished because they already started another combo,you get 1 hit and that's it.
People answering you talk about summons but for these guys you can't even summon your ashes, for some stupid reason the devs decided to limit that feature.
Before anyone tells me to git gud, I already beat the entire game before including a bugged Melania that healed even on missed attacks (she was bugged for some time). I can beat anything in the game but like you said, it's mega boring and slow.
The level designs are pretty top notch and feel much closer to the dangerous mazelike web of shortcuts and ambushes that worked for the Dark Souls series.
The base game spread content across dozens of small short dungeons. The DLC appears to feature fewer but longer dungeons, which I am inclined to agree with as 'a good thing'.
I'm at the end of Journey 3 level 200 with a character that I am using for the DLC. The only thing left for me is Melania in the main game, but I'm not rushing it because she's the only boss that really whooped my ass in the main game the first 3 times I fought her. The DLC bosses are giving me that Melania rush, again. When I beat one, I feel like I fucking WON that fight. Hell, I think 80% of the fights I've had so far I haven't even been able to summon my spirit buddies, which has admittedly been a crutch in the main game. I love it. It's a fucking challenge.
People need to stop being bitches
Skill issue
Kids these days don't know what it's like to play Nintendo Hard games... at least you have an HP bar in this one... imagine dying in one hit from any attack.
There are plenty of one shots in the dlc and stunlock combo equivalents. It’s not even that it’s that much more difficult it’s just tedious and unfun.
Imagine dropping into a room in Jetset Willy and falling to your death, then respawning and falling over and over til all your lives are gone.
Uh oh
I beat the first major boss: Dancing Lion from trailers. I'm not good at these games. Took me a dozen+ tries. I used the NPC summon because they tend to have story elements.
NPC doesn't do much damage and dies quickly in phase 2. It helps but not that much.
So far it's not that hard. Biggest hurdle is even with +24 weapons I cannot do sufficient damage to the wickermen or new dragons. I assume it's the leveling items? But their moves aren't hard, it just feels like chip damage.
I haven't played it yet myself, but based on the pre-release info I've read, I am assuming it's the separate progression system the DLC uses.
The normal strength of weapons in the rest of the game doesn't matter as much, there's a different way of powering up exclusive to the DLC content. So anyone who was buffed up like a god before the DLC is not that far ahead of someone jumping in early during their first playthrough.
The wicker men it's kinda like the golems in the base game, the real damage comes when you stagger them the 3rd time and the fall over, chunk them for like 60% of their health on the crit.
Ah I see. At least with golems it feels like you can still do damage at the glowing bits. I'll just keep hammering :)