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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.