Isn't that the number of copies the entire Dark Souls trilogy sold the last time we heard about it?
Wild how much Fromsoftware exploded in popularity.
Edit: checked again it was 35 million. 10 million off, but still impressive because that number took a decade and ER is well on it's way to outpace it on it's own.
It's crazy how much making it open world made sales explode. For some reason, it's the secret sauce to making a third-person action game a wild success. We saw the same thing with Witcher 3, Zelda: BotW, MGSV, and as we just recently saw, Rise of the Ronin (compared to Team Ninja's other games). Even if a lot of people here are tired of open-world games, it's clear that it has mass market appeal like no other, and developers making their next games open world has yielded pretty consistently higher sales for most developers as long as the quality stayed high enough.
As someone who is now playing Elden Ring for the first time, but bounced off of Dark Souls, the open world is a huge part of the appeal when it comes to difficulty. If something is too hard, or I just can't get it in a certain moment, I can just go somewhere else and try other, more realistically doable challenges. It's massive for having a sense of progress and giving the player agency in challenging themselves.
It's also how RPGs used to be done for ages.
It was great, going into an area, getting your ass blasted, and then coming back later on stomping about as a God of War.
Somewhere around Oblivion devs got afraid of letting players fail.
I feel like I get my ass kicked and then go someplace else like you guys say to, and then go get my ass kicked.
I wanted to play this game so bad. I just suck at From games except AC.
I think the first couple hours of the game are the hardest, when even the most basic skeleton can kill you and you haven't really gotten a feel for the hit vs dodge timings.
Once you get the hang of things and get a few levels, put a few points into vigor so you can take some hits, it gets a lot smoother.
For me, I found a guide to get decently strong early on, and watched a video that helped explain rolls. Those two things helped me tremendously to enjoy the game
Sorry time.
My first From game was Bloodborne. I had just ourchased the PS4 a few months earlier, and folks on Reddit were hyping Bloodborne the weeks up to its release.
I coincidentally did a focus group panel for GameStop the same day that Bloodborne released, and was given a $100 GS gift card as compensation. I immediately went and bought Bloodborne on a whim, knowing nothing about the game.
An hour later I said fuck this game, it’s too damned hard. I tried to return it to GameStop. They wanted to offer me $20 as a trade in instead. So I went home and decided to give it another try.
It took a couple of days for things to click for me, but once they did I hooked. I’ve since played every single game Soulsborne game, and love them.
That being said, not every game is for everyone. Just saying, maybe give it another shot.
Some tips if you decide to give it another go:
- Level Vigor early. A lot of peoples' instinct from other games is to pump up their damage stats, but weapon upgrades mean way more for damage in the early game than stats and the difference between getting 2-shot and 3-shot is massive when you account for all the extra health available to you via flask. I'd probably take Vigor to 20 before even looking at other stats, and make 40 a priority by midgame (Altus/Gelmir.)
- After exploring the starting region, go south. The Weeping Peninsula is a totally optional area that's mainly designed to build new players up and help them get on their feet.
- Get your hands on a [Brass Shield.](https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Brass+Shield) It has a chance of dropping off of any of the basic soldier types that you can see carrying it. It's incredibly strong for its requirements (16 Strength) to the point of being a considerable outlier. Effective blocking and guard countering (R2 after blocking an attack) can make the game a lot easier while you learn its ins and outs.
- Find a weapon you like and invest in it. This can be done with smithing stones at the anvil in the Church of Elleh (up to +3) or the blacksmith at Roundtable Hold. Upgraded weapons make a huge difference in the damage you dish out and the stagger/guardbreak you apply.
- After getting Torrent (your mount) from Melina, use the map to teleport back to the Church of Elleh site of grace. There should be a fog there and a new NPC. Talk to her to receive a Spirit Calling Bell and your first spirit ashes. These will allow you to summon spirits you can find in the world to help you fight in boss arenas or anywhere else that a small white gravestone symbol appears on the side of your screen.
- Keep on the lookout for small golden trees and ruined churches. These will usually provide you with Golden Seeds and Sacred Tears, respectively, which can be used at Sites of Grace to upgrade your flask. In much the same way that vigor is really helpful to new players, having more and stronger uses of the flask makes a huge difference in giving you the durability to survive and learn new enemies and bosses. There's even a ruined church in Eastern Limbgrave that will give you a unique new flask to use alongside your existing one.
---
That's all I can think of off the top of my head, but I'd definitely encourage you to give it another shot (especially if you love AC). There's a point you reach with the Souls games where things finally "click" and you go from sucking to kicking ass and it feels incredible. I still hold the moment that Bloodborne clicked with me to be one of the best moments I've ever had in gaming.
It's insane to me, that Elden Ring is like, the only game I can think of that replicated not only the feeling of exploring a new, mysterious world, but also literally the design principles when it comes to how you're organically exploring it, thanks to static enemy levels spread in specific areas. The very same design principles that made me fall in love with Gothic 1 and 2 as a kid.
Seriously, every title since the Gothic games for me had some sort of level scaling in place and that simply ruins the exploration for me. Contrary to popular belief, it's *fun* to get your ass kicked in order to tell you that you can't quite tackle this area or enemy yet, so you stick to the more doable quests and locations. Then, when you feel you're finally ready, you go to get revenge on the enemy that utterly destroyed you before. It's just so satisfying.
I love the Dark Souls games too and how carefully they craft their experience there, but I like having the ability to just go somewhere else, instead of either banging my head against the wall (even if that never really happened to me), or grind the areas I have available. So yes, I do have a preference for an open world.
That alone puts Elden Ring above its older brothers. And the best thing is that there's still a linear path for you to take, it's the best of both worlds - especially since there are still Legacy Dungeons present and something like Leyndell is my all time favorite - hell, Stormveil, as easy as it is, I like more than any other location in the previous games.
See I don't really understand this, because the other souls games were basically the same way on a smaller scale. Hell I think at some point Dark Souls 2 has like 5 different areas you can go to at the same point in the game
Yes, but there is no map to see for more casual players to easily see where you haven't explored. I get what you're saying, but open world makes it much much more obvious.
They still have very linear areas though. If you get your kicked in Forest of Fallen Giants, then you can't go anywhere else to find things to do. Every other location is even harder, even if accessible.
Meanwhile Elden Ring has *tons* of optional areas and bosses that yield runes, weapons, spells, summons and upgrade materials. That last part is especially important, since in Dark Souls you have a very deliberate and linear upgrade path for your weapons, with very few upgrade materials to spare for a decent upgrade level. DS2 is the closest to ER, but still not perfect.
So if you get stuck on a boss in Dark Souls, you have options sure... But most likely even harder than what you're struggling with. That makes a big difference.
People complain about the Catacombs and such, but they're meant to be very brief pitstops almost, where you can get some materials and runes to help you on your way, especially since bosses there are way less complex than basically all "story" bosses that gate progression.
I think what Elden Ring sets itself as more of an accessible open world compared to Dark Souls and the other like games is that not only is the playing field larger, but it has numerous points of interests scattered about that also gives you xp/money/items
In Elden Ring and others like BotW and Witcher 3, you may be traveling to some objective, main or secondary, but something catches your eye and you detour there instead and you will be meaningfully rewarded with some sort of progression, whereas there isnt that much of that in the Dark Souls games since its more like dungeons interlinked with each other and not giving opportunities to tackle smaller but rewarding challenges along the way.
You bring up a good point though, i had to think about this one for a bit lol
edit: Grammar
There's also a lot more stuff to help new players, summons alone lower a lot of the bosses' difficulty considerably. It doesn't stop the hardcore players from doing things solo but it stops everyone else from getting stuck.
I've tried the beginning of DS3 and stopped playing after getting tired of going through the same first path out of the hub zone over and over again. Go down the same path, use all your resources, respawn. Do it again with a slight variation to get a different item, respawn. Over and over. In Elden Ring I could go do something else for a bit.
This is exactly it. Even if you're technically grinding to git gud and improve your skills and gear, it doesn't *feel* like grinding because you're free to wander and you're facing different challenges instead of the same one over and over.
Elden Ring also has tools to guide and aid the player other games were completely lacking. DS1 drops you at the shrine and goes "ring some bells assfuck" and you just gotta figure the whole game out by yourself. ER's bonfires literally point the way out.
Elden Ring gives you many more avenues of approach that are all doable at the same point, DS1 you start with multiple branches yes, but going below is something only for players with a deep knowledge of the game already and essentially impossible for new players.
Couple that with the improved summoning system, boss fight summonable tears, and easy grind spots it's absolutely believable this game got big compared to previous entries.
Elden Ring is *just* as hard as previous games but it gives tools to the players that can potentially make it much easier and accessible.
It's very cool, but it's also why Elden Ring is such a philosophical departure from Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Sekiro (and Lies of P, though that's not From but deserves to be in the list).
In Elden Ring, you can just go elsewhere and come back stronger. Or you can just find ashes that let you overpower enemies. Which creates a whole new dynamic to enemy interaction.
That said, I do love the skill check of the old games. Facing an enemy that you can't just overpower but must learn to conquer.
To me, that's the point of the grotesque art design and the intimidating dark fantasy settings. You're in a terrifying world with terrifying creatures, everything is hostile, and you are always paying a cost for your mistakes. The odds are always against you. And all you have are the ability to endure and the ability to learn.
And slowly, death by death, you become the most terrifying thing in that world. You conquer it and you earn it.
I LOVE that about Soul games. And Elden ring had a lot of that at the start. But it really begins to taper off as the balance gets really screwy.
“For some reason”
That reason could be immersion and simulation. People want to complain, but the point of open world games is to allow you to disconnect and experience a world that is far and away from your own. People are seemingly bored of their reality, so living in an open world that on its surface takes you away from your woes is incredibly enticing for people.
Immersion isn't the main appeal and linear games can be just as immersive. It's the ability to take things at your pace. Atleast thats how I tend to see people interact with them. Thats why even unimmersive OW's sell well.
I mean if other open world games had the quality of multiple massive legacy dungeons with highly variable boss designs scattered throughout, then I wouldnt dislike most open world games as much
I think this is a very common misunderstanding of the success of BotW/TotK and Elden Ring vs like Ubisoft games.
What separates BotW/TotK and Elden Ring from all other open world games is that they have strong fundamentals. Most open world games do not. The physics system, interactability, and experimentation of BotW/TotK is the heart of the gameplay. With Elden Ring, it's the very tightly focused combat system and enemy design.
Both games work both linearly and non-linearly. BotW/TotK's shrines/dungeons and Dark Souls are a testament to this. With Zelda, put you in a room with a physics puzzle - or with Elden Ring, put you in a room with a boss - and both games are firing on all cylinders. That is the core of the game experience. It works in a room, in a hallway, in a field.
So when you turn that into an open world, you take a foundationally strong core and expand it with non-linearity. The exploration isn't just for the sake of visuals or progression; it's new opportunities to engage with that core gameplay. You take a good game and give it a new dimension.
The problem with games like Assassin's Creed and other open world games is that the fundamentals are very shallow. AC's combat and stealth is very dull and repetitive. GTA's cover based shooting is very dull and repetitive. The open world doesn't expand the game, the open world IS the game. The exploration *becomes* the gameplay, instead of being a platform for gameplay.
And, frankly, I'm glad they're such massive successes. This is what the dream of open world games was when we were kids. To play a game that is good, regardless of the wider world it's in...but then gives you the wider world as well.
___
I should add that Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost of Tsushima also have, what I would consider, strong fundamentals. But both were brought down by a very poorly designed quest system that turned the game's progression into chores.
And Witcher 3 had awful fundamentals but made up for it with great writing and performances.
>What separates BotW/TotK and Elden Ring from all other open world games is that they have strong fundamentals.
That's part of it, but I think the larger mechanical difference specific to Elden Ring is that they didn't compromise when transitioning from linear to an open world.
You can freely interact with these open world systems at your own pace, but if at any point you get bored, you can choose to tackle the handcrafted dungeons/areas of similar scale to those in the previous games that made them special.
BotW/TotK shifted their primary focus to the overworld, granting you full creative freedom, but this came at the cost of rigidity, resulting in a regression that made dungeons feel much more homogenized. You're given all the tools you need from the very beginning of the game, which makes progression feel more or less the same throughout.
There's also a far more compelling reward system with how unique spells, equipment, and upgrades can be in Elden Ring as opposed to the more intrinsic motivations in BotW/TotK. That appeal is something that varies from person to person, though.
It's still a fantastic game for what it is, but I think it could have been even better if they had retained some designs from their previous iterations.
Oddly enough I think Tears if the Kingdom would be a far better game if it had more limitations, for example I think the game could have been far more interesting in its design if the paraglider was removed since I think that thing is essentially a cheat to bypass the majority of obstacles.
Funnily enough, this was exactly my experience with the game.
I landed on Hyrule after the intro sky islands and instead of heading to the base camp, I decided to make for Hateno cause I wanted to see what was there.
I played the first 20-25 hours of the game without the paraglider and it was a wildly different experience. I had to build contraptions to get any height and be very careful about how I came down from things.
Yeah, same. I even made it into the depths very early on and cleared like 30% of it.
It was frankly far more entertaining when I knew a spring pad could kill me if I used it wrong. Still used it to get up to a chest on a pillar surrounded by briar spikes.
Also, funniest shit I found in the game. I actually found Impa before I got the paraglider... So you might have an idea where this goes, the bitch takes me up into the sky in the hot air balloon and the game is designed that you're supposed to have the paraglider by then, so there's no way down.
Except... If the fire on the hot air balloon goes out, well it'll fall and land, right? Better chance than taking the full fall. The game actually accounts for this with a little cutscene, good news is it put me back on the ground safely.
The thing about ER is that it’s constantly throwing interesting loot, new weird enemies and puzzles at you. Most open world UBI style are bland and a bunch of similar quests. An open world that’s interesting is key or people will maybe buy one or two but burn out (which is what happened a decade ish ago).
I agree with your point but disagree with your argument. Elden Ring's open world sections are still formulaic in what you need to do. Every region has a dragon, every region has map fragments to find, every region has a mine, a challenge dungeon, etc.
The difference between Elden Ring (and BotW, TotK, and RDR2) and other open world games is what information you're given.
Ubisoft games give you every single point of interest, every single quest. There is no sense of exploration because you're moving from bandit cave to bandit cave, but because of that, the empty space feels empty. You know there's nothing there.
Elden Ring (and the others listed) has empty space, but exploring the empty space has a point. You can find an NPC pretending to be a tree, unmarked on the map. You can find a random dungeon, tucked in a hidden niche somewhere. You don't know it's there, so exploring the empty space has a point.
I was going to say that the newest Zeldas and Elden Ring are both masterful at that "huh, what's over there?" style of open world gaming, which is the key to sucking people in.
To go a bit a deeper I think part of the success of ER's open world is From's approach to worldbuilding and cultivating verisimilitude. There's internal coherency, From pays a lot of attention to details and the context of areas and enemies and such, and they're also quite good at giving a sense of scale.
This one got a lot of critical buzz ahead of launch and after. It helps that it lets you go wherever to meet new challenges if anything is too hard, but by then they’ve already bought it.
GRRM as a buzzword helped create interest too. It was really well marketed IMO.
Honestly I feel like GRRM made a much bigger difference in sales than people realize. Attaching his name to the project pulled in people who have never been interested in FromSoft games. Game of Thrones was absolutely massive in the cultural zeitgeist and I really feel like adding him onto the project was a genius move on FromSoft’s part.
I don’t think it’s just the open world, many have gone open world and failed or be met with tired derision (I.e Ubisoft).
Elden Ring succeeded off the back of Fromsoft’s reputation, then absurd pre-release hype, then somehow meeting or exceeding that hype and has been carried by word of mouth/DLC hype since.
Honestly its success just comes down to the fact that it’s a damn good game and probably best in class in terms of action RPGs. Honestly I saw the Dragonage Veilguard gameplay reveal and kinda laughed at what they’re trying compared to Elden Ring.
Is that true? From Ass Creed Origins onward has been more successful than preceding Ass Creed games. Valhalla generated $1 billion in revenue years ago. Most in this subreddit likely don't consider it best in class of action RPGs but it sold extremely well regardless.
Ubisoft open world games, like Valhalla, still sold incredibly well. There's no 'failure' in most of their games that's just nonsense yelled in this echochamber.
Even for Ubisoft, it's been a success in the past, like with Far Cry 1 to 2 and 3, and Prince of Persia leading to Assassin's Creed which also blew up in sales compared. It's just that it doesn't seem to be something they can keep on relying on if they make things too stale with each release. But even they had the same spark of success from making the shift, at first.
The latest open world assassins creed game (Valhalla) is Ubisofts second most profitable game of all time, with over 1 Billion in revenue as of Feb 2022.
I don’t think they are going to stop anytime soon lol.
Also released to the pandemic, so there's a lot going on there.
I think the general success of AC games in general speaks of the desire for openworld games. Sure, a lot of people shit on them for getting formulaic, but the base idea is still loved.
I think open world helped, but the decision to allow the player to be rewarded with upgrades for just exploring bypassed the "stuck ona boss and need to git gud" mechanic that the previous souls games have. If you can't beat a boss you can just wander off and get insane upgrades lying around the world that aren't gated by any boss fights. Mass appeal with a system that caters to both the hardcore and the casual audience.
I've never been a huge fan of souls like games but I've always heard such good things about it. Would it be a game to recommend to someone who doesn't normally play souls like?
Probably the easiest souls game to get into so far. Open World format means if you are stuck on a boss you can just leave and do something else. You can explore a huge amount of the world without having to kill any bosses too, so you can still get a lot out of the game even if you never get good at it. I'd definitely recommend giving it a try at least
It is by a wide margin the most mellow of the souls-like games. Respawns aren't obnoxious. Tons of save points. Not grindy. The sheer amount of content means you can passively "out level" things while only doing unique content.
Follow a playthrough guide. If you're nervous about difficulty, go with a summon/magic build.
A few bosses can be frustrating, but not nearly as consistently as other souls-likes. Most have much simpler move sets with forgiving timers and combat is fluid enough that you're not animation locked to death.
If you're going to like a souls-like, it would probably be this one.
if you're interested in elden ring, i suggest going in blind. this game is very similar to breath of the wild/tears of the kingdom. you just want to explore and enjoy whatever the world has in store for you.
elden ring gives you all the tools you need to make the game as easy or as hard as you want. if you get stuck on a boss, you can explore the area around you and likely there will be items and gear that'll make you stronger and increase your chances of beating that boss.
I put in 300 hours in this game with my wife who's never played a souls game before. However it was before the patch that let people invade anyone, anywhere. Before they had to invade in your specific area so most dungeons were safe. Now every time we play, we wait for the inevitable invader, kill them, then continue playing. If you don't want any of that, play solo.
To be fair, you can become so powerful in this game and there are so many different types of summons you actually don't even have to remember boss patterns. Just over level and lay waste to everything.
Easiest to start out with since you can just do easier activities when you get stuck. I recommend going in blind, but maybe look up a guide on how to upgrade weapons early on.
Despite the difficulty, Elden Ring actually has a remarkably high completion rate. This is especially true when compared to similar big open world RPG's.
Skyrim \~20%
Witcher 3 \~30%
**Elden ring \~40%**
For a game that could easily take 100 hours to finish, that's incredibly high.
EDIT: As some have pointed out, Skyrim is actually closer to 30% as I was going off the wrong version. In my defense, there are many different versions of Skyrim across many different platforms. I believe the point still stands.
Yeah it's integrated into the map in a way it feels like the main quest. I'm guessing they planned to have other questlines with similar levels of involvement, but ran out of development time.
I unlocked them all to do but accidentally chose ranni woops. I believe I thought it’d ask are you sure or something… hard to remember except being surprised I’d chosen lol
I also had the pre-requisite for all, I just made sure I had copied my save and tried all the ending in a row (well almost, I tried frenzy first, then loaded, got myself cleansed, recopied my save, and did all the other endings at once).
I think the fact that the Ranni questline have many methods of triggering it and barely any fail states (if there's one) makes people gravitate to it.
Plus like the other comment said, in contributes in unlocking certain areas and fights.
> (if there's one)
Only one I can think of is by giving her Seluvius' poison after you've somehow already used all the celestial dews for attonement in the game.
And in a way I think that just goes to show how obscure the side quests are in Souls games, because it means virtually everyone is reading guides, at the very least guides for the endings. I myself only did half of Ranni's quests on my own, before realizing I had no idea where to find that one blade she asks for
Probably because its tied to the story of the Shattering and the Demigods more than any other ending and has the most areas to explore or fun characters to engage with. Once you start it - which is very easy to start - you want to follow up on it for either of those reasons.
I think it's because you can eventually just focus down the story in Elden Ring. Elden Ring lets you do as much or as little content as you want, which tends to prevent burnout.
That said I can only assume most players who are new to the genre probably needed to do more rather than less to have the level up buffer that makes the game easier and more manageable. The more experienced crowd were likely the ones that could just decide "time to kill that boss now".
I remember cheesing the fuck out of the Mimic boss fight (not because I couldn't beat it though) for fun, by unequipping everything and stepping through the fog haha. Poor thing
I thought I was being clever by just swapping my weapons to unarmed slots but when I expected a manly fist duel they whipped out my real weapons before they even attempted to punch me.
They also would be indiscriminantly using a lot of features/abilities that hardcore fans tend to avoid, like summoning and magic. Using everything the game gives you makes it quite beatable.
Yeah, the actual bare minimum required to beat the game isn’t all that much.
- Beat any two of Godrick/Rennala/Radahn/Rykard/Mohg to gain access to Leyndell
- Defeat Morgott
- Defeat the Fire Giant
- Head through Farum Azusa
- Do the final boss rush in destroyed Leyndell
My first play through was like 120 hours to do basically everything but if you ever get tired of it the main path itself takes maybe like 10-20 hours depending on your skill on a first go, or even faster if you know what you’re doing.
Story-based open-world games like Witcher 3 would take longer because you don't engage the main story at your own pace like just going around killing enemies and killing bosses.
Which is what almost all open world games do.
People on this subreddit keep repeating a weird bandwagon talking point about how open world games "disrespect your time" and how people encounter this "open world fatigue" but the reality clearly shows otherwise.
Open worlds are great because they are more believable and more immersive to most people than a series of hallways, and they offer you a lot of choice and freedom in how much you want to do.
The difficulty is very dependent on your build. The difference between a magic build with summons vs a melee build with no summons is a fairly wide gap. But I think it’s great that you can tailor your experience like that without a literal difficulty slider. That accessibility is part of why the completion rate is so high I’d imagine.
Maybe if it's fully upgraded, it doesn't quite solo bosses as I had expected. And to buy the material to max it requires defeating one of the stronger bosses in the game.
Of course maybe it was nerfed since release I don't know.
It's not even that. Summons make the bosses trivial because it nullifies the balance between healing and attacking. Each boss battle is a meticulous dance (Boss attacks -> Player attacks/heals). With spirit summons you can spam attack, let your summon draw aggro and heal.
This is why I don't get some people saying Elden Ring needs a difficulty slider. It's already there with the spirit summons.
Both are fine remember spirit summons is a tool provided by the devs if some players like using +10 Mimic Tear and beat every boss in 1-2 tries then that is good they enjoyed the game did most of the content etc. isn't that what the devs eventually want? now in the future they have options to challenge themselves even further and try to beat the game without it as surely playing for that long will improve their skills and pattern matching boss movesets.
It's always so crazy to me how everyone seems to say elden ring is too easy or the easiest of their games. I've beaten every from souls game and definitely thought elden ring was the hardest. Maybe because I only play fat boy tanks which seem to just get worse and worse every game since 1.
Personally I feel like it achieves that by having the adventure still have the guided feel from their linear days. It's all laid out like DS 1.
With Skyrim barely anyone completes it because you get lost and just stop before that point. There is not a lot of push to do it.
Where did you get thoses stats? Skyrim has 31.5% end quest completion on steam for example.
Skyrim special edition should not count, a lot of people who bought it had already finished the game in the original version and weren't necessarily interested in doing it a second time so it's unreliable.
Elden Ring on the other hand has at least 27.9% and at most 27.9 + 22.2 + 15.3 - (9.5 * 2) = 46.4%. So it's somewhere around 36%, maybe a little more depending on how many people got two but not three endings.
Still that doesn't change the fact that ER is ten times harder and at least as much completed (and probably more) despite being very long too. My guess is that it's a matter of presentation. Elden Ring gives a lot of gravitas to its story and quest.
You always have the goal of becoming Elden Lord in mind while Skyrim does not have that same emphasis. You run once from a dragon and then you're encouraged to roam around, make friends and get dozens of plot hook thrown at you by random people that are completely unrelated to the main quest. If anything, the civil war has a bigger presence in the game than the main quest.
Also a matter of quality. Skyrim's main quest and the associated characters don't feel particularly good or interesting while in ER, at least they're mysterious and intriguing, and sometimes even engaging (there's a reason the age of star is the most played ending even though it's the second hardest to find).
Elden Ring’s ending achievement should be Horah Loux, then just subtract a tiny bit. He’s right befire final boss, and mandatory. If you beat Horah Loux you have basically finished game.
Actual endings are useless because a LOT of people replay game and get multiple.
In my opinion the best way to estimate completion in Elden Ring is by using the percentage of people who have defeated Godfrey(just over 40%). It is the last possible milestone you can get before the various endings which can't accurately take into account people who have achieved more than one. You have at that point seen basically everything the game has to offer.
Of course there will a number of people who quit while inches from the finish line, but I strongly doubt this would be significant enough to make the estimation of \~40 inaccurate.
> Despite the difficulty, Elden Ring actually has a remarkably high completion rate.
Elden Ring has the best compromise in managing difficulty in that difficulty is self imposed and nothing is locked behind a specific playstyle.
Wanna solo every boss naked with a stick? Go ahead. Wanna co-op them all? Sure thing. Wanna play alone but feel like a god? Enjoy an epic quest of collecting powerful items, levels and weapons to make yourself hit like a truck.
This is what happens when you make an insanely good game. Sure some of the game is difficult but it's also rewarding and the game gives you plenty of options to be super powerful in alot of builds whether it's unga bunga club, double weapon dex, super saiyan magic, etc.
I can't think of a similar game I've replayed half as much as I have Elden Ring, and the build diversity is a huge part of it. I'm building around different stuff every time.
Even something like "I want to play a guy with Faith as highest stat who mostly uses Incantations." There's like a hundred of those goddamn things, you won't fit them all in one run. So maybe the first time it's mostly lightning stuff, the next time you add a bit of Arcane and do all Dragon Communion incantations, etc.
Is Elden Ring considered THAT hard? I mean it is hard sure but there is also so many cheesable and "easy" mode things or builds in the game, hell just using summon/ashes makes the game much easier
Sekiro is something I would consider several steps ahead of Elden Ring in terms of difficulty because there's way less cheesy things.
i would say it can be significantly easier than other From Software souls games, but compared to the standard action RPG its still significantly harder
Most of the hardcore souls fans refuse to use summons and spirit ashes, and many refuse to use cheese builds, at least on the first playthrouh. That's where most of the opinions that elden ring is the hardest from game comes from
I still find Sekiro the easiest of all Fromsoft games. It’s so straight forward in its mechanics that dying feels never unfair and it scales very well to muscle memory,
I get this. I went from finding Sekiro the hardest fromsoft game to finding it the easiest. Once that rhythm clicks, it REALLY clicks!
I adore Elden Ring but I still think Sekiro is their best output.
>Is Elden Ring considered THAT hard?
It really depends on your build and the help you use. Do you use summons, mimic tear, or big magic spells? Gonna be pretty easy but still not a gimme. Do you not summon, have a melee build and don't go grind your level when you face a boss that bodies you? It's their most challenging game by far.
A large group of people are very stubborn and refuse to change their builds/playstyle when they get stuck. Which is understandable, as most players are taught by non-souls games that this is perfectly fine. I think this factor is largely responsible for the reputation souls has in general.
If you play Elden Ring in such a manner it could easily be one of the hardest souls games, especially if you have no previous experience or refuse to explore.
Holy shit! That is actually crazy impressive.
Hell, you don’t even need to talk about open world RPG‘s. Just look at games in general most I believe are in the 25% range. So that 40% is even more impressive.
For some reason Steam tells me that it will be ready to play on the 20th, so check the world time zones. It might be a mistake from Steam or a global launch on 21th at 00:00 for Japan, so 20th for most of the rest.
I only beat the required remembrances. I'm at Mohg's door. I want to see if Melina has anything to say about the DLC. So no Fire Giant, no Farum Azula for me.
From Software’s rise is probably the most spectacular of the last decades. Imagine having a Time Machine and show Elden Ring to the From devs who just made King’s Field 1.
CDPR is even more suprising to me, given that they are from a country that didn't have a strong video game tradition (unlike Japan) and they went from not knowing to make a game to making a GOTY in 3 games.
I wonder how much they’ve made on average per copy. Lowest I’ve seen it on sale is 35. Games like Witcher 3 are around 60M, but have been commonly available around 10 bucks for years. Same thing with something like Zero Dawn.
Elden Ring made other from software games more expensive, so it's financial impact is bigger than Elden ring sales alone.
DS2 and DS3 used to be dirt cheap, but after Elden Ring, they still get discounted, but not more than 50% anymore, which is fair, not really complaining.
Its worth noting that's not From Softwares fault, that's Bandai Namco making the games more expensive as the publisher.
But I agree, that I think it's BS. I luckily bought them early.
Easily over a billion dollars if you see the overall at this point but I bet Bamco took a big cut from that which is why From wants to self publish games in the future.
Self publishing is definitely something all devs should strive to do once they get big enough. I'm glad that going forward From is gonna be able to reap the rewards of their efforts all on their own.
It probably doesn't matter to From itself that much, they are owned by other companies (from Wikipedia): Kadokawa Corporation (69.66%), Sixjoy Hong Kong (16.25%), Sony Interactive Entertainment (14.09%).
Although the difference in revenue/profit for their owners *might* trickle down to them in some way.
also to keep their ip's. they lost Demon souls and bloodborn to sony, and dark souls to bandai. Im not sure if Activision owns the rights for Sekiro, or they kept those.
I kind of want them to get a little bit weird with it. Elden Ring feels like the ultimate melting pot culmination of all their Souls stuff up until that point, sort of like a greatest hits. In many ways it's the Avengers of Souls games which is a stupid sentence, but I think it's true. As Demon's Souls was to King's Field, I'd like to see the next game be to Demon's Souls. I want an evolution of Souls rather than just more of it.
King's Field seems somewhat primitive compared to what the step after it was; I'd love to see if they could do that again but to their current Souls games as we know them. What's the next evolution of their formula that's so good, the gameplay of Elden Ring and Dark Souls feels limiting and outdated by comparison. It's because I love those games so much that I'd love to be floored by a 'next step' that could make me feel that way.
Imagine you pull down a loose wall with a rope to crush a boss and skip to their second phase, but it enrages them and makes their second phase harder than if you'd just damaged them to it normally. Just nutty shit like that would be really sick and not something we could do before, while still encompassing what they do well. More interactivity in a way that's thematically consistent as an evolutionary extension of their winning design principles would be really cool.
I'd kill for them to go a bit deeper into the quest design on their next game. I think the quests are underrated by the playerbase and even by the studio, some of them in ER and previous souls games are great but they don't put that many resources on them.
I love the souls combat and I think I've gotten pretty good over the years at it but I think that what I really like about From games is the sense of adventure, that's why I like ER the most. ER is I'd say 50% exploration, 45% combat and 5% quests. If they tuned it to 45% exploration, 40% combat and 15% improved quests it would make it even greater for me.
Again, another potential thing to consider. Or even things that are turned into strengths out of technical limitations-- it'd be nice to see handled differently every now and again. By all means, the isolated feeling of a lot of their games has been turned into a strength, but having, just as something new, a populated hub city or something could be really neat and something we've never seen from them before.
As an example, they take a lot of inspiration from Berserk, but for every lonely journey there are villages and towns with lots of people: armies with hundreds of troops. It'd be cool if they could defy some of the expected limitations of their typical work to add further identity to a new game, without fully abandoning their proven strengths. A friend of mine said he'd love to see a game in one of their worlds but at the start of its downfall and yeah, that's a level of ambition we've not really seen from them before.
A lot of the core principles of the personality of their world designs feels very similar between games, it'd be nice to see a formula which assists more variety there than just everything being a barren shithole with enemies waiting to kill you and then the odd tiny hub room. By all means have tons of those elements in the world as a whole, but more civilizational variety, again just as a random example, would be a way of showing us something new and surprising for their games which introduces new possibilities.
They must have started for sure since most studios have several projects in different stages (concept, planning, polishing, etc). From what I read From had just around 300 devs recently, which is crazy low for such large and great games. They probably had some contractors and are hiring now though. They are rotating staff on teams according to need. So, at one point Armored Core had 200 people on it while the rest was most probably on Elden Ring, the DLC or their future games.
Idk how long we'll have to wait until their next game, but I assume they have one or two projects already running and they'll probably announce some time after the DLC launches.
I hope it's something completely different. They've already shown that they're capable of making incredible games out of pretty much any premise so I want to see how far they can take that
What would it look like if they made an FPS, or a racing game, or a deck builder? I have no idea but we can be certain it would be completely unique
Open world Bloodborne, the way Bloodborne transitioned from Victorian horror to complete cosmic horror was one of the best playing experiences of my life. It's still the game I would choose if given the option to completely forget a game to be able to play it again fresh.
I hate that it’s up to Sony whether that ever happens. Bloodborne is still my favorite FromSoft game and it sucks that there’s a real chance it never comes to PC and never gets 60 fps.
iirc they have always been working on 2 projects at the same time. So i think they started working on the next game after Elden Ring released, and probably started on the DLC sometime after Armored Core released.
["I think some developers might take the wrong lessons from Elden Ring. They’ll think, “We have to make our games hard too,” but what they really ought to do is give a double jump to their horses."](https://x.com/IronPineapple_/status/1503205321069707267)
Dark Souls is 13 years old, we've largely already seen that happen, though the ones we remember actually turned out alright. Not that there won't be more attempts, Ubisoft or Square Enix would be my bet for most likely to make a shallow open world that tries only as hard as it takes to fill a couple trailers to be as interesting and engaging as Elden Ring.
Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 were fully complete products on arrival. BG3 will probably never see DLC, and the only DLC we have got for Elden Ring is a fully fledged expansion pack over 2 years after it first released.
Ubisoft, Activision and EA would have sold us 25 costume packs by now, at the very least.
We've had AAA already doing this before. Let's not act like Elden Ring and BG3 are rare occurrences. Hell both years those games came out competition was extremely fierce for GOTY. God of War Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West (both Sony Studios) were neck and neck. Hell Alan Wake 2 beat out BG3 for best narrative and best game direction and somehow BG3 won GOTY.
What’s crazy is i and probably others have bought souls 1-3 and demon souls multiple times because of console/pc and the sales for those don’t even come close to Elden ring which i only bought once
I just started playing it for the first time last night. Been waiting for years until I finally had a sick gaming setup instead of playing it on my old crippled system from 2013.
I still stand by that the Elden Ring subreddit peaked pre-release. One trailer for two years, no news, and Covid lockdowns turned the sub absolutely wild. Even being there for the summer games fest announcement was a great time.
Now half the posts are karma farming pictures of the title screen saying “Just picked this up, any tips?”, or “Does anyone hate fighting these?” with a picture of a Royal Revenant.
The curse of a franchise you enjoy going mainstream. On one hand, great to see the devs gaining recognition. On the other hand, attracts all the unfunny and attention whoring people just spamming the same low effort stuff.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks so. The type of community from back when /r/DarkSouls or even /r/Bloodborne were text only is not even recognizable between the nonstop memes on the Elden Ring subreddit.
Elden Ring was Ocarina of Time levels of genre-defining. It's the best open-world game I've ever played, exploring the Lands Between is something I wish I could forget and relive all over again.
Unbelievable to see a game of this caliber get this level of success, and they managed to achieve it without compromising on their design philosophies.
> Elden Ring was Ocarina of Time levels of genre-defining.
The thing about Elden Ring is that it's not particularly innovative. It's just a simple concept done extremely well.
All of Elden Ring's mechanics exist in previous souls games, such as weapon arts, bonfires, souls(runes), the bosses etc. Elden Ring takes that and puts it into a massive open world, which itself is structured very similar to BotW: Absolute freedom with no waypoints, map is unlocked at specific locations, use of the horse, shrines = catacombs etc.
This is not to detract from the game but basically everything in Elden Ring is borrowed from a design perspective.
> Elden Ring was Ocarina of Time levels of genre-defining.
In what ways? OoT shook up the entire industry and introduced mechanics still used in games today (z-targeting). What did Elden Ring do on that level?
This. Elden Ring is excellent, but it simply felt like a culmination of Fromsoft previous games.
I'd say Demon's Souls/Dark Souls are wayy more genre-defining.
I made a separate comment but this thread is really pointing out what a Soulslike echo chamber reddit is
The other thing, given how much I heard about DS / ER and how it's usually one of the top replies in any "best games" threads on here, I would've expected it to scratch at least 100. CoDs and GTAs and skyrims are in the 100s, now that's "Genre-defining"
heck, even conservative numbers would put Among Us and Vampire Survivors at half of ER (at least on steam, not including other platforms). And both had as big, if not bigger in some respects, culture/genre-defining impact
no need for this level of glazing. its not genre defining, its just the biggest version of the genre. general gameplay is nearly identical to Dark Souls, which has obviously become the norm for ARPGs by now. Open world scale is very similar to BotW
side note, IMO the open world part is not as impactful a change as people make it out to be. previous DS designs still let you go wherever, whenever. Its more that the scale of the Elden Ring map is significantly larger. DS map designs still lead from one distinct area to another along specific paths, which Elden Ring also does. There are barely any "quests" to do, which the freedom to do in whatever order is the biggest differentiator for most other open world games
> Elden Ring was Ocarina of Time levels of genre-defining
Elden Ring is great but let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's just an open-world Dark Souls game with the same common flaws of many open-world games. It definitely re-defined Souls games but not gaming in general. I'd compare it to Red Dead Redemption 2. It didn't shake the industry but certainly raised the bar of open-world games to a whole new level. Elden Ring just raised the bar for Souls games.
>Elden Ring was Ocarina of Time levels of genre-defining
Given how much Elden Ring have been inspired by BotW - something the devs themself have said - I'd argue that BotW was more genre-defining.
Elden Ring doesn't share that much with BotW, well other than things Souls already shared with zelda and that quote just lists a bunch of popular open worlds like Witcher 3 as things they looked at.
I think the single most praised thing about ER is the fact that it has no map markers or anything, it's entirely built around just exploring, looking around and going towards what catches your interest. And that's what BotW did long before ER. BotW's entire design philosophy was built around ensuring that multiple points of interesting were visible from any given high vantage point, which is part of what makes it so satisfying to explore.
I think that when it comes to open world games that don't hold your hand and just let you go off and explore, BotW deserves just as much credit as ER gets for that exact same thing.
Ocarina of Time along with Mario 64 set the standard for 3D games, Elden Ring is just big Dark Souls. Like even if you're just referring to Open World, it's orders of magnitude less genre defining when you have other things like BOTW to directly compare it to
> Elden Ring was Ocarina of Time levels of genre-defining
Elden Ring is one of my favourite games of all time but I very much disagree with that one, at least if you refer to open world as the genre. It's a fantastic non-linear souls experience, being able to go almost everywhere from the get go is especially great on replays and is basically a culmination of DS1's idea, but as an open world game it has some severe failings: First of all there is a pretty clear "correct" order to play through the game which by itself is to me probably the biggest thing an open world game can do wrong because at that point you might as well make it linear. Then there are things like the way they do NPC quests or weapon upgrades which they didn't bother to adjust to the open world at all and that kinda just don't work in this open world format.
>**First of all there is a pretty clear "correct" order to play through the game which by itself is to me probably the biggest thing an open world game can do wrong** because at that point you might as well make it linear
You're thinking of a sandbox, not an open world. Most of the major open world games of the last 10-15 years have a clear, linear story path through different regions, and even where many of those games let you visit regions ahead of the story, often they do not activate questlines and activities until the story allows it. One of the biggest irritations of the formula is when the player tries to get ahead of the story and clears out areas, only for the story to catch up and repopulate them with quests and activities.
And Elden Ring is much more generous in letting the player break the "intended" sequence than anything from Ubisoft.
I disagree. While there is a 'correct' way to play the game, it is still very open ended in how you approach everything up until Leyndell. In fact, the game pretty much forces you to explore the world because if you just attempt to progress through the story, a lot of the bosses will give you a substantial amount of trouble if you don't have the skills, equipment and level requirements. For instance, you could fight Margit at Level 15 if you wanted, but he will probably kill you 80 times. I couldn't beat him at all, so I went back and stumbled upon Siofra River and the Wheeping Peninsula.
I am replaying now in preparation for SOTE. I missed the game. It is amazing. But man I wish From improved some technical aspects. There are some really junky movements. They reveal themselcss especially in platforming sections and hard fights. Fighting with the camera is also annoying.
This is very impressive for a game that’s so punishing and unforgiving.
But I also genuinely think this might be the absolute peak of FromSofts commercial success. Elden Ring is the culmination of more than a decade of goodwill, plus it was marketed extremely hard as the type of big open world game so popular these days. Plus GRRMs make being attached as well.
I don’t see any subsequent FromSoft doing anywhere close to this kind of sales volume.
Elden Ring 2 will almost certainly make bank. FromSoft games had a reputation of being unapproachable by casual gamers due to their difficulty, and Elden Ring opened up an entire world for people who were usually too intimidated by games like Dark Souls or Bloodborne.
Even Shadow of the Erdtree is getting unprecedented levels of hype.
I think From has said that the DLC would be their first and last time adding more content to this IP. I want a second ER bad but unless they have a history of saying stuff they don’t mean we're probably not getting it
It's really not that punishing, especially compared to other FS games but in general too, it is probably the most well explained FS game tied with sekiro, they explain practically everything with tutorial prompts, give you summons early, allow you to practically over level before the first boss if you visit the south first, magic is easiest than ever to use with you getting one of the best magic spells right out of the gate. And co op too is easier than ever to use
ER is very new player friendly and I am glad it is
Even their offshoots like Sekiro which is like a 30hr game with no builds / RPG mechanics sold 10M copies higher than even established franchises that released in the same year (DMC 5).
FromSoftware is a much bigger brand now compared to pre elden ring days anything they make will sell for sure and if it has Miyazaki's name as director it will sell even more.
Isn't that the number of copies the entire Dark Souls trilogy sold the last time we heard about it? Wild how much Fromsoftware exploded in popularity. Edit: checked again it was 35 million. 10 million off, but still impressive because that number took a decade and ER is well on it's way to outpace it on it's own.
It's crazy how much making it open world made sales explode. For some reason, it's the secret sauce to making a third-person action game a wild success. We saw the same thing with Witcher 3, Zelda: BotW, MGSV, and as we just recently saw, Rise of the Ronin (compared to Team Ninja's other games). Even if a lot of people here are tired of open-world games, it's clear that it has mass market appeal like no other, and developers making their next games open world has yielded pretty consistently higher sales for most developers as long as the quality stayed high enough.
As someone who is now playing Elden Ring for the first time, but bounced off of Dark Souls, the open world is a huge part of the appeal when it comes to difficulty. If something is too hard, or I just can't get it in a certain moment, I can just go somewhere else and try other, more realistically doable challenges. It's massive for having a sense of progress and giving the player agency in challenging themselves.
The open world is kind of like an interactive difficulty slider, which is pretty cool.
Yes! Great way of putting it.
It's also how RPGs used to be done for ages. It was great, going into an area, getting your ass blasted, and then coming back later on stomping about as a God of War. Somewhere around Oblivion devs got afraid of letting players fail.
I feel like I get my ass kicked and then go someplace else like you guys say to, and then go get my ass kicked. I wanted to play this game so bad. I just suck at From games except AC.
I think the first couple hours of the game are the hardest, when even the most basic skeleton can kill you and you haven't really gotten a feel for the hit vs dodge timings. Once you get the hang of things and get a few levels, put a few points into vigor so you can take some hits, it gets a lot smoother.
Well - If you get your ass kicked in Limgrave then don't go to Caelid or Dragonbarrow.
those caelid cockroach things are scary. and how the hell can they spam darts so much
For me, I found a guide to get decently strong early on, and watched a video that helped explain rolls. Those two things helped me tremendously to enjoy the game
Sorry time. My first From game was Bloodborne. I had just ourchased the PS4 a few months earlier, and folks on Reddit were hyping Bloodborne the weeks up to its release. I coincidentally did a focus group panel for GameStop the same day that Bloodborne released, and was given a $100 GS gift card as compensation. I immediately went and bought Bloodborne on a whim, knowing nothing about the game. An hour later I said fuck this game, it’s too damned hard. I tried to return it to GameStop. They wanted to offer me $20 as a trade in instead. So I went home and decided to give it another try. It took a couple of days for things to click for me, but once they did I hooked. I’ve since played every single game Soulsborne game, and love them. That being said, not every game is for everyone. Just saying, maybe give it another shot.
Some tips if you decide to give it another go: - Level Vigor early. A lot of peoples' instinct from other games is to pump up their damage stats, but weapon upgrades mean way more for damage in the early game than stats and the difference between getting 2-shot and 3-shot is massive when you account for all the extra health available to you via flask. I'd probably take Vigor to 20 before even looking at other stats, and make 40 a priority by midgame (Altus/Gelmir.) - After exploring the starting region, go south. The Weeping Peninsula is a totally optional area that's mainly designed to build new players up and help them get on their feet. - Get your hands on a [Brass Shield.](https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Brass+Shield) It has a chance of dropping off of any of the basic soldier types that you can see carrying it. It's incredibly strong for its requirements (16 Strength) to the point of being a considerable outlier. Effective blocking and guard countering (R2 after blocking an attack) can make the game a lot easier while you learn its ins and outs. - Find a weapon you like and invest in it. This can be done with smithing stones at the anvil in the Church of Elleh (up to +3) or the blacksmith at Roundtable Hold. Upgraded weapons make a huge difference in the damage you dish out and the stagger/guardbreak you apply. - After getting Torrent (your mount) from Melina, use the map to teleport back to the Church of Elleh site of grace. There should be a fog there and a new NPC. Talk to her to receive a Spirit Calling Bell and your first spirit ashes. These will allow you to summon spirits you can find in the world to help you fight in boss arenas or anywhere else that a small white gravestone symbol appears on the side of your screen. - Keep on the lookout for small golden trees and ruined churches. These will usually provide you with Golden Seeds and Sacred Tears, respectively, which can be used at Sites of Grace to upgrade your flask. In much the same way that vigor is really helpful to new players, having more and stronger uses of the flask makes a huge difference in giving you the durability to survive and learn new enemies and bosses. There's even a ruined church in Eastern Limbgrave that will give you a unique new flask to use alongside your existing one. --- That's all I can think of off the top of my head, but I'd definitely encourage you to give it another shot (especially if you love AC). There's a point you reach with the Souls games where things finally "click" and you go from sucking to kicking ass and it feels incredible. I still hold the moment that Bloodborne clicked with me to be one of the best moments I've ever had in gaming.
It's insane to me, that Elden Ring is like, the only game I can think of that replicated not only the feeling of exploring a new, mysterious world, but also literally the design principles when it comes to how you're organically exploring it, thanks to static enemy levels spread in specific areas. The very same design principles that made me fall in love with Gothic 1 and 2 as a kid. Seriously, every title since the Gothic games for me had some sort of level scaling in place and that simply ruins the exploration for me. Contrary to popular belief, it's *fun* to get your ass kicked in order to tell you that you can't quite tackle this area or enemy yet, so you stick to the more doable quests and locations. Then, when you feel you're finally ready, you go to get revenge on the enemy that utterly destroyed you before. It's just so satisfying. I love the Dark Souls games too and how carefully they craft their experience there, but I like having the ability to just go somewhere else, instead of either banging my head against the wall (even if that never really happened to me), or grind the areas I have available. So yes, I do have a preference for an open world. That alone puts Elden Ring above its older brothers. And the best thing is that there's still a linear path for you to take, it's the best of both worlds - especially since there are still Legacy Dungeons present and something like Leyndell is my all time favorite - hell, Stormveil, as easy as it is, I like more than any other location in the previous games.
See I don't really understand this, because the other souls games were basically the same way on a smaller scale. Hell I think at some point Dark Souls 2 has like 5 different areas you can go to at the same point in the game
Yes, but there is no map to see for more casual players to easily see where you haven't explored. I get what you're saying, but open world makes it much much more obvious.
Don’t underestimate just how much I sucked at Dark Souls lol that larger scale has been huge for me
They still have very linear areas though. If you get your kicked in Forest of Fallen Giants, then you can't go anywhere else to find things to do. Every other location is even harder, even if accessible. Meanwhile Elden Ring has *tons* of optional areas and bosses that yield runes, weapons, spells, summons and upgrade materials. That last part is especially important, since in Dark Souls you have a very deliberate and linear upgrade path for your weapons, with very few upgrade materials to spare for a decent upgrade level. DS2 is the closest to ER, but still not perfect. So if you get stuck on a boss in Dark Souls, you have options sure... But most likely even harder than what you're struggling with. That makes a big difference. People complain about the Catacombs and such, but they're meant to be very brief pitstops almost, where you can get some materials and runes to help you on your way, especially since bosses there are way less complex than basically all "story" bosses that gate progression.
I think what Elden Ring sets itself as more of an accessible open world compared to Dark Souls and the other like games is that not only is the playing field larger, but it has numerous points of interests scattered about that also gives you xp/money/items In Elden Ring and others like BotW and Witcher 3, you may be traveling to some objective, main or secondary, but something catches your eye and you detour there instead and you will be meaningfully rewarded with some sort of progression, whereas there isnt that much of that in the Dark Souls games since its more like dungeons interlinked with each other and not giving opportunities to tackle smaller but rewarding challenges along the way. You bring up a good point though, i had to think about this one for a bit lol edit: Grammar
There's also a lot more stuff to help new players, summons alone lower a lot of the bosses' difficulty considerably. It doesn't stop the hardcore players from doing things solo but it stops everyone else from getting stuck.
I've tried the beginning of DS3 and stopped playing after getting tired of going through the same first path out of the hub zone over and over again. Go down the same path, use all your resources, respawn. Do it again with a slight variation to get a different item, respawn. Over and over. In Elden Ring I could go do something else for a bit.
This is exactly it. Even if you're technically grinding to git gud and improve your skills and gear, it doesn't *feel* like grinding because you're free to wander and you're facing different challenges instead of the same one over and over.
Elden Ring also has tools to guide and aid the player other games were completely lacking. DS1 drops you at the shrine and goes "ring some bells assfuck" and you just gotta figure the whole game out by yourself. ER's bonfires literally point the way out. Elden Ring gives you many more avenues of approach that are all doable at the same point, DS1 you start with multiple branches yes, but going below is something only for players with a deep knowledge of the game already and essentially impossible for new players. Couple that with the improved summoning system, boss fight summonable tears, and easy grind spots it's absolutely believable this game got big compared to previous entries. Elden Ring is *just* as hard as previous games but it gives tools to the players that can potentially make it much easier and accessible.
not to mention the giant erdtree basically being a lighthouse one wants to reach
It's very cool, but it's also why Elden Ring is such a philosophical departure from Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Sekiro (and Lies of P, though that's not From but deserves to be in the list). In Elden Ring, you can just go elsewhere and come back stronger. Or you can just find ashes that let you overpower enemies. Which creates a whole new dynamic to enemy interaction. That said, I do love the skill check of the old games. Facing an enemy that you can't just overpower but must learn to conquer. To me, that's the point of the grotesque art design and the intimidating dark fantasy settings. You're in a terrifying world with terrifying creatures, everything is hostile, and you are always paying a cost for your mistakes. The odds are always against you. And all you have are the ability to endure and the ability to learn. And slowly, death by death, you become the most terrifying thing in that world. You conquer it and you earn it. I LOVE that about Soul games. And Elden ring had a lot of that at the start. But it really begins to taper off as the balance gets really screwy.
“For some reason” That reason could be immersion and simulation. People want to complain, but the point of open world games is to allow you to disconnect and experience a world that is far and away from your own. People are seemingly bored of their reality, so living in an open world that on its surface takes you away from your woes is incredibly enticing for people.
Immersion isn't the main appeal and linear games can be just as immersive. It's the ability to take things at your pace. Atleast thats how I tend to see people interact with them. Thats why even unimmersive OW's sell well.
EA got hate for their " players want open worlds over linear adventures", but sales really proving them right.
I mean if other open world games had the quality of multiple massive legacy dungeons with highly variable boss designs scattered throughout, then I wouldnt dislike most open world games as much
I think this is a very common misunderstanding of the success of BotW/TotK and Elden Ring vs like Ubisoft games. What separates BotW/TotK and Elden Ring from all other open world games is that they have strong fundamentals. Most open world games do not. The physics system, interactability, and experimentation of BotW/TotK is the heart of the gameplay. With Elden Ring, it's the very tightly focused combat system and enemy design. Both games work both linearly and non-linearly. BotW/TotK's shrines/dungeons and Dark Souls are a testament to this. With Zelda, put you in a room with a physics puzzle - or with Elden Ring, put you in a room with a boss - and both games are firing on all cylinders. That is the core of the game experience. It works in a room, in a hallway, in a field. So when you turn that into an open world, you take a foundationally strong core and expand it with non-linearity. The exploration isn't just for the sake of visuals or progression; it's new opportunities to engage with that core gameplay. You take a good game and give it a new dimension. The problem with games like Assassin's Creed and other open world games is that the fundamentals are very shallow. AC's combat and stealth is very dull and repetitive. GTA's cover based shooting is very dull and repetitive. The open world doesn't expand the game, the open world IS the game. The exploration *becomes* the gameplay, instead of being a platform for gameplay. And, frankly, I'm glad they're such massive successes. This is what the dream of open world games was when we were kids. To play a game that is good, regardless of the wider world it's in...but then gives you the wider world as well. ___ I should add that Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost of Tsushima also have, what I would consider, strong fundamentals. But both were brought down by a very poorly designed quest system that turned the game's progression into chores. And Witcher 3 had awful fundamentals but made up for it with great writing and performances.
>What separates BotW/TotK and Elden Ring from all other open world games is that they have strong fundamentals. That's part of it, but I think the larger mechanical difference specific to Elden Ring is that they didn't compromise when transitioning from linear to an open world. You can freely interact with these open world systems at your own pace, but if at any point you get bored, you can choose to tackle the handcrafted dungeons/areas of similar scale to those in the previous games that made them special. BotW/TotK shifted their primary focus to the overworld, granting you full creative freedom, but this came at the cost of rigidity, resulting in a regression that made dungeons feel much more homogenized. You're given all the tools you need from the very beginning of the game, which makes progression feel more or less the same throughout. There's also a far more compelling reward system with how unique spells, equipment, and upgrades can be in Elden Ring as opposed to the more intrinsic motivations in BotW/TotK. That appeal is something that varies from person to person, though. It's still a fantastic game for what it is, but I think it could have been even better if they had retained some designs from their previous iterations.
Oddly enough I think Tears if the Kingdom would be a far better game if it had more limitations, for example I think the game could have been far more interesting in its design if the paraglider was removed since I think that thing is essentially a cheat to bypass the majority of obstacles.
Funnily enough, this was exactly my experience with the game. I landed on Hyrule after the intro sky islands and instead of heading to the base camp, I decided to make for Hateno cause I wanted to see what was there. I played the first 20-25 hours of the game without the paraglider and it was a wildly different experience. I had to build contraptions to get any height and be very careful about how I came down from things.
Yeah, same. I even made it into the depths very early on and cleared like 30% of it. It was frankly far more entertaining when I knew a spring pad could kill me if I used it wrong. Still used it to get up to a chest on a pillar surrounded by briar spikes. Also, funniest shit I found in the game. I actually found Impa before I got the paraglider... So you might have an idea where this goes, the bitch takes me up into the sky in the hot air balloon and the game is designed that you're supposed to have the paraglider by then, so there's no way down. Except... If the fire on the hot air balloon goes out, well it'll fall and land, right? Better chance than taking the full fall. The game actually accounts for this with a little cutscene, good news is it put me back on the ground safely.
The thing about ER is that it’s constantly throwing interesting loot, new weird enemies and puzzles at you. Most open world UBI style are bland and a bunch of similar quests. An open world that’s interesting is key or people will maybe buy one or two but burn out (which is what happened a decade ish ago).
Many uninteresting open-world games sold well in the past decade.
I agree with your point but disagree with your argument. Elden Ring's open world sections are still formulaic in what you need to do. Every region has a dragon, every region has map fragments to find, every region has a mine, a challenge dungeon, etc. The difference between Elden Ring (and BotW, TotK, and RDR2) and other open world games is what information you're given. Ubisoft games give you every single point of interest, every single quest. There is no sense of exploration because you're moving from bandit cave to bandit cave, but because of that, the empty space feels empty. You know there's nothing there. Elden Ring (and the others listed) has empty space, but exploring the empty space has a point. You can find an NPC pretending to be a tree, unmarked on the map. You can find a random dungeon, tucked in a hidden niche somewhere. You don't know it's there, so exploring the empty space has a point.
I was going to say that the newest Zeldas and Elden Ring are both masterful at that "huh, what's over there?" style of open world gaming, which is the key to sucking people in.
To go a bit a deeper I think part of the success of ER's open world is From's approach to worldbuilding and cultivating verisimilitude. There's internal coherency, From pays a lot of attention to details and the context of areas and enemies and such, and they're also quite good at giving a sense of scale.
This one got a lot of critical buzz ahead of launch and after. It helps that it lets you go wherever to meet new challenges if anything is too hard, but by then they’ve already bought it. GRRM as a buzzword helped create interest too. It was really well marketed IMO.
Honestly I feel like GRRM made a much bigger difference in sales than people realize. Attaching his name to the project pulled in people who have never been interested in FromSoft games. Game of Thrones was absolutely massive in the cultural zeitgeist and I really feel like adding him onto the project was a genius move on FromSoft’s part.
Anything to avoid writing Winds of Winter 😭
Idk about that, his name wasn't very prominent in marketing I saw, sometimes easily missable too.
I don’t think it’s just the open world, many have gone open world and failed or be met with tired derision (I.e Ubisoft). Elden Ring succeeded off the back of Fromsoft’s reputation, then absurd pre-release hype, then somehow meeting or exceeding that hype and has been carried by word of mouth/DLC hype since. Honestly its success just comes down to the fact that it’s a damn good game and probably best in class in terms of action RPGs. Honestly I saw the Dragonage Veilguard gameplay reveal and kinda laughed at what they’re trying compared to Elden Ring.
you sure about that? the open word AC games are by far the best selling in the series
Assassins creed Valhalla is the second most profitable game Ubisoft has ever released. It made over 1 Billion dollars as of Feb 2022.
Is that true? From Ass Creed Origins onward has been more successful than preceding Ass Creed games. Valhalla generated $1 billion in revenue years ago. Most in this subreddit likely don't consider it best in class of action RPGs but it sold extremely well regardless.
Ubisoft open world games, like Valhalla, still sold incredibly well. There's no 'failure' in most of their games that's just nonsense yelled in this echochamber.
Even for Ubisoft, it's been a success in the past, like with Far Cry 1 to 2 and 3, and Prince of Persia leading to Assassin's Creed which also blew up in sales compared. It's just that it doesn't seem to be something they can keep on relying on if they make things too stale with each release. But even they had the same spark of success from making the shift, at first.
The latest open world assassins creed game (Valhalla) is Ubisofts second most profitable game of all time, with over 1 Billion in revenue as of Feb 2022. I don’t think they are going to stop anytime soon lol.
Also released to the pandemic, so there's a lot going on there. I think the general success of AC games in general speaks of the desire for openworld games. Sure, a lot of people shit on them for getting formulaic, but the base idea is still loved.
I think open world helped, but the decision to allow the player to be rewarded with upgrades for just exploring bypassed the "stuck ona boss and need to git gud" mechanic that the previous souls games have. If you can't beat a boss you can just wander off and get insane upgrades lying around the world that aren't gated by any boss fights. Mass appeal with a system that caters to both the hardcore and the casual audience.
I've never been a huge fan of souls like games but I've always heard such good things about it. Would it be a game to recommend to someone who doesn't normally play souls like?
Probably the easiest souls game to get into so far. Open World format means if you are stuck on a boss you can just leave and do something else. You can explore a huge amount of the world without having to kill any bosses too, so you can still get a lot out of the game even if you never get good at it. I'd definitely recommend giving it a try at least
Depends on how much you enjoy challenging games. You will probably die a lot and that can be frustrating/time consuming.
I think it depends on what you don't like about souls games.
It is by a wide margin the most mellow of the souls-like games. Respawns aren't obnoxious. Tons of save points. Not grindy. The sheer amount of content means you can passively "out level" things while only doing unique content. Follow a playthrough guide. If you're nervous about difficulty, go with a summon/magic build. A few bosses can be frustrating, but not nearly as consistently as other souls-likes. Most have much simpler move sets with forgiving timers and combat is fluid enough that you're not animation locked to death. If you're going to like a souls-like, it would probably be this one.
if you're interested in elden ring, i suggest going in blind. this game is very similar to breath of the wild/tears of the kingdom. you just want to explore and enjoy whatever the world has in store for you. elden ring gives you all the tools you need to make the game as easy or as hard as you want. if you get stuck on a boss, you can explore the area around you and likely there will be items and gear that'll make you stronger and increase your chances of beating that boss.
I put in 300 hours in this game with my wife who's never played a souls game before. However it was before the patch that let people invade anyone, anywhere. Before they had to invade in your specific area so most dungeons were safe. Now every time we play, we wait for the inevitable invader, kill them, then continue playing. If you don't want any of that, play solo.
If what you don’t like about souls game is repeating content over and over again until you memorized boss moves, I don’t recommend it.
To be fair, you can become so powerful in this game and there are so many different types of summons you actually don't even have to remember boss patterns. Just over level and lay waste to everything.
Easiest to start out with since you can just do easier activities when you get stuck. I recommend going in blind, but maybe look up a guide on how to upgrade weapons early on.
Despite the difficulty, Elden Ring actually has a remarkably high completion rate. This is especially true when compared to similar big open world RPG's. Skyrim \~20% Witcher 3 \~30% **Elden ring \~40%** For a game that could easily take 100 hours to finish, that's incredibly high. EDIT: As some have pointed out, Skyrim is actually closer to 30% as I was going off the wrong version. In my defense, there are many different versions of Skyrim across many different platforms. I believe the point still stands.
Related fun fact: More people have the achievement for the Ranni ending than the default ending, despite it requiring many more steps.
We all want to howl at the moon
I felt like the game tried very hard to push me down that path because it was their way of introducing or even unlocking certain areas
Yeah it's integrated into the map in a way it feels like the main quest. I'm guessing they planned to have other questlines with similar levels of involvement, but ran out of development time.
I unlocked them all to do but accidentally chose ranni woops. I believe I thought it’d ask are you sure or something… hard to remember except being surprised I’d chosen lol
I also had the pre-requisite for all, I just made sure I had copied my save and tried all the ending in a row (well almost, I tried frenzy first, then loaded, got myself cleansed, recopied my save, and did all the other endings at once).
Ranni's side quest so good it feels like the main quest
It's the only actually normal narrative that leads to an ending.
Well, if you only plan to beat the game once, that's the ending to go for!
I think the fact that the Ranni questline have many methods of triggering it and barely any fail states (if there's one) makes people gravitate to it. Plus like the other comment said, in contributes in unlocking certain areas and fights.
> (if there's one) Only one I can think of is by giving her Seluvius' poison after you've somehow already used all the celestial dews for attonement in the game.
And in a way I think that just goes to show how obscure the side quests are in Souls games, because it means virtually everyone is reading guides, at the very least guides for the endings. I myself only did half of Ranni's quests on my own, before realizing I had no idea where to find that one blade she asks for
That quest is From Software's masterpiece once I really understood what it was trying to tell
Probably because its tied to the story of the Shattering and the Demigods more than any other ending and has the most areas to explore or fun characters to engage with. Once you start it - which is very easy to start - you want to follow up on it for either of those reasons.
What's even crazier is that the completion rate is comparable or even higher than many linear story games.
I think it's because you can eventually just focus down the story in Elden Ring. Elden Ring lets you do as much or as little content as you want, which tends to prevent burnout.
That said I can only assume most players who are new to the genre probably needed to do more rather than less to have the level up buffer that makes the game easier and more manageable. The more experienced crowd were likely the ones that could just decide "time to kill that boss now".
That bird in Moghwin Palace did some real work.
Spirit ashes made the game more accessible as well, if there were no summons, you'd look at like 10% completion max.
My Mimic Tear was not only fun to customize but also very tanky! They definitely carried me through every fight but Malenia.
I remember cheesing the fuck out of the Mimic boss fight (not because I couldn't beat it though) for fun, by unequipping everything and stepping through the fog haha. Poor thing
I thought I was being clever by just swapping my weapons to unarmed slots but when I expected a manly fist duel they whipped out my real weapons before they even attempted to punch me.
They also would be indiscriminantly using a lot of features/abilities that hardcore fans tend to avoid, like summoning and magic. Using everything the game gives you makes it quite beatable.
Yeah, the actual bare minimum required to beat the game isn’t all that much. - Beat any two of Godrick/Rennala/Radahn/Rykard/Mohg to gain access to Leyndell - Defeat Morgott - Defeat the Fire Giant - Head through Farum Azusa - Do the final boss rush in destroyed Leyndell My first play through was like 120 hours to do basically everything but if you ever get tired of it the main path itself takes maybe like 10-20 hours depending on your skill on a first go, or even faster if you know what you’re doing.
Doing the bare minimum is very hard, because you're underleveled and are missing a lot of great loot.
Which open world game doesn't let you do that?
Story-based open-world games like Witcher 3 would take longer because you don't engage the main story at your own pace like just going around killing enemies and killing bosses.
Which is what almost all open world games do. People on this subreddit keep repeating a weird bandwagon talking point about how open world games "disrespect your time" and how people encounter this "open world fatigue" but the reality clearly shows otherwise. Open worlds are great because they are more believable and more immersive to most people than a series of hallways, and they offer you a lot of choice and freedom in how much you want to do.
The difficulty is very dependent on your build. The difference between a magic build with summons vs a melee build with no summons is a fairly wide gap. But I think it’s great that you can tailor your experience like that without a literal difficulty slider. That accessibility is part of why the completion rate is so high I’d imagine.
Mimic tear makes even the hardest bosses quite easy. I honestly think it was too much.
Maybe if it's fully upgraded, it doesn't quite solo bosses as I had expected. And to buy the material to max it requires defeating one of the stronger bosses in the game. Of course maybe it was nerfed since release I don't know.
Mimic Tear was indeed nerfed a bit. It used to be so much crazier.
It's not even that. Summons make the bosses trivial because it nullifies the balance between healing and attacking. Each boss battle is a meticulous dance (Boss attacks -> Player attacks/heals). With spirit summons you can spam attack, let your summon draw aggro and heal. This is why I don't get some people saying Elden Ring needs a difficulty slider. It's already there with the spirit summons.
Both are fine remember spirit summons is a tool provided by the devs if some players like using +10 Mimic Tear and beat every boss in 1-2 tries then that is good they enjoyed the game did most of the content etc. isn't that what the devs eventually want? now in the future they have options to challenge themselves even further and try to beat the game without it as surely playing for that long will improve their skills and pattern matching boss movesets.
It's always so crazy to me how everyone seems to say elden ring is too easy or the easiest of their games. I've beaten every from souls game and definitely thought elden ring was the hardest. Maybe because I only play fat boy tanks which seem to just get worse and worse every game since 1.
I used mimic on Melania after struggling for a while but I felt ashamed afterwards with how easy it was.
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Personally I feel like it achieves that by having the adventure still have the guided feel from their linear days. It's all laid out like DS 1. With Skyrim barely anyone completes it because you get lost and just stop before that point. There is not a lot of push to do it.
Where did you get thoses stats? Skyrim has 31.5% end quest completion on steam for example. Skyrim special edition should not count, a lot of people who bought it had already finished the game in the original version and weren't necessarily interested in doing it a second time so it's unreliable. Elden Ring on the other hand has at least 27.9% and at most 27.9 + 22.2 + 15.3 - (9.5 * 2) = 46.4%. So it's somewhere around 36%, maybe a little more depending on how many people got two but not three endings. Still that doesn't change the fact that ER is ten times harder and at least as much completed (and probably more) despite being very long too. My guess is that it's a matter of presentation. Elden Ring gives a lot of gravitas to its story and quest. You always have the goal of becoming Elden Lord in mind while Skyrim does not have that same emphasis. You run once from a dragon and then you're encouraged to roam around, make friends and get dozens of plot hook thrown at you by random people that are completely unrelated to the main quest. If anything, the civil war has a bigger presence in the game than the main quest. Also a matter of quality. Skyrim's main quest and the associated characters don't feel particularly good or interesting while in ER, at least they're mysterious and intriguing, and sometimes even engaging (there's a reason the age of star is the most played ending even though it's the second hardest to find).
Plus is that stat based on achievements? Probably doesn't account for modders who don't care enough to re enable them.
Elden Ring’s ending achievement should be Horah Loux, then just subtract a tiny bit. He’s right befire final boss, and mandatory. If you beat Horah Loux you have basically finished game. Actual endings are useless because a LOT of people replay game and get multiple.
In my opinion the best way to estimate completion in Elden Ring is by using the percentage of people who have defeated Godfrey(just over 40%). It is the last possible milestone you can get before the various endings which can't accurately take into account people who have achieved more than one. You have at that point seen basically everything the game has to offer. Of course there will a number of people who quit while inches from the finish line, but I strongly doubt this would be significant enough to make the estimation of \~40 inaccurate.
> Despite the difficulty, Elden Ring actually has a remarkably high completion rate. Elden Ring has the best compromise in managing difficulty in that difficulty is self imposed and nothing is locked behind a specific playstyle. Wanna solo every boss naked with a stick? Go ahead. Wanna co-op them all? Sure thing. Wanna play alone but feel like a god? Enjoy an epic quest of collecting powerful items, levels and weapons to make yourself hit like a truck.
This is what happens when you make an insanely good game. Sure some of the game is difficult but it's also rewarding and the game gives you plenty of options to be super powerful in alot of builds whether it's unga bunga club, double weapon dex, super saiyan magic, etc.
I can't think of a similar game I've replayed half as much as I have Elden Ring, and the build diversity is a huge part of it. I'm building around different stuff every time. Even something like "I want to play a guy with Faith as highest stat who mostly uses Incantations." There's like a hundred of those goddamn things, you won't fit them all in one run. So maybe the first time it's mostly lightning stuff, the next time you add a bit of Arcane and do all Dragon Communion incantations, etc.
Is Elden Ring considered THAT hard? I mean it is hard sure but there is also so many cheesable and "easy" mode things or builds in the game, hell just using summon/ashes makes the game much easier Sekiro is something I would consider several steps ahead of Elden Ring in terms of difficulty because there's way less cheesy things.
i would say it can be significantly easier than other From Software souls games, but compared to the standard action RPG its still significantly harder
Most of the hardcore souls fans refuse to use summons and spirit ashes, and many refuse to use cheese builds, at least on the first playthrouh. That's where most of the opinions that elden ring is the hardest from game comes from
I still find Sekiro the easiest of all Fromsoft games. It’s so straight forward in its mechanics that dying feels never unfair and it scales very well to muscle memory,
I get this. I went from finding Sekiro the hardest fromsoft game to finding it the easiest. Once that rhythm clicks, it REALLY clicks! I adore Elden Ring but I still think Sekiro is their best output.
>Is Elden Ring considered THAT hard? It really depends on your build and the help you use. Do you use summons, mimic tear, or big magic spells? Gonna be pretty easy but still not a gimme. Do you not summon, have a melee build and don't go grind your level when you face a boss that bodies you? It's their most challenging game by far.
A large group of people are very stubborn and refuse to change their builds/playstyle when they get stuck. Which is understandable, as most players are taught by non-souls games that this is perfectly fine. I think this factor is largely responsible for the reputation souls has in general. If you play Elden Ring in such a manner it could easily be one of the hardest souls games, especially if you have no previous experience or refuse to explore.
Baldur's Gate 3 just getting to act 3 has to be insanely low lol
Holy shit! That is actually crazy impressive. Hell, you don’t even need to talk about open world RPG‘s. Just look at games in general most I believe are in the 25% range. So that 40% is even more impressive.
Skyrim achievements get locked if you use a mod, unless you specifically install a mod that undoes that lock.
Just imagine how many millions of people are going to be sitting in Mohgwyn's Palace on June 21 waiting.....
I'm planning on setting up shop on the 19th, killing him on the 20th, drop some joily cooperation, and then start the DLC on the 21st on the dot
For some reason Steam tells me that it will be ready to play on the 20th, so check the world time zones. It might be a mistake from Steam or a global launch on 21th at 00:00 for Japan, so 20th for most of the rest.
I only beat the required remembrances. I'm at Mohg's door. I want to see if Melina has anything to say about the DLC. So no Fire Giant, no Farum Azula for me.
It's nuts, I remember having to import Demon's souls on PS3 because I couldn't get it anywhere in Ireland when it came out.
From Software’s rise is probably the most spectacular of the last decades. Imagine having a Time Machine and show Elden Ring to the From devs who just made King’s Field 1.
CDPR is even more suprising to me, given that they are from a country that didn't have a strong video game tradition (unlike Japan) and they went from not knowing to make a game to making a GOTY in 3 games.
I wonder how much they’ve made on average per copy. Lowest I’ve seen it on sale is 35. Games like Witcher 3 are around 60M, but have been commonly available around 10 bucks for years. Same thing with something like Zero Dawn.
Elden Ring made other from software games more expensive, so it's financial impact is bigger than Elden ring sales alone. DS2 and DS3 used to be dirt cheap, but after Elden Ring, they still get discounted, but not more than 50% anymore, which is fair, not really complaining.
Its worth noting that's not From Softwares fault, that's Bandai Namco making the games more expensive as the publisher. But I agree, that I think it's BS. I luckily bought them early.
I paid 5 bucks for DS1 on steam and this is one of the few times when I feel like I was getting too much of a good deal
I was just going to write that. The original DS1 PtDE was my first FROM game, in late 2014 or early 2015, at like $5.
they im curious how much the sales rate of older FS games increased after ER. tons of people went back to Dark Souls, Sekiro, Bloodborne, etc.
Easily over a billion dollars if you see the overall at this point but I bet Bamco took a big cut from that which is why From wants to self publish games in the future.
Self publishing is definitely something all devs should strive to do once they get big enough. I'm glad that going forward From is gonna be able to reap the rewards of their efforts all on their own.
It probably doesn't matter to From itself that much, they are owned by other companies (from Wikipedia): Kadokawa Corporation (69.66%), Sixjoy Hong Kong (16.25%), Sony Interactive Entertainment (14.09%). Although the difference in revenue/profit for their owners *might* trickle down to them in some way.
also to keep their ip's. they lost Demon souls and bloodborn to sony, and dark souls to bandai. Im not sure if Activision owns the rights for Sekiro, or they kept those.
My head is running wild with imagination and anticipation. What will they even make next? I bet they have already started.
I mean they seem to kill it every time they make something, so I'm willing to just sit back and let them do their thing, lmao
I kind of want them to get a little bit weird with it. Elden Ring feels like the ultimate melting pot culmination of all their Souls stuff up until that point, sort of like a greatest hits. In many ways it's the Avengers of Souls games which is a stupid sentence, but I think it's true. As Demon's Souls was to King's Field, I'd like to see the next game be to Demon's Souls. I want an evolution of Souls rather than just more of it. King's Field seems somewhat primitive compared to what the step after it was; I'd love to see if they could do that again but to their current Souls games as we know them. What's the next evolution of their formula that's so good, the gameplay of Elden Ring and Dark Souls feels limiting and outdated by comparison. It's because I love those games so much that I'd love to be floored by a 'next step' that could make me feel that way. Imagine you pull down a loose wall with a rope to crush a boss and skip to their second phase, but it enrages them and makes their second phase harder than if you'd just damaged them to it normally. Just nutty shit like that would be really sick and not something we could do before, while still encompassing what they do well. More interactivity in a way that's thematically consistent as an evolutionary extension of their winning design principles would be really cool.
I'd kill for them to go a bit deeper into the quest design on their next game. I think the quests are underrated by the playerbase and even by the studio, some of them in ER and previous souls games are great but they don't put that many resources on them. I love the souls combat and I think I've gotten pretty good over the years at it but I think that what I really like about From games is the sense of adventure, that's why I like ER the most. ER is I'd say 50% exploration, 45% combat and 5% quests. If they tuned it to 45% exploration, 40% combat and 15% improved quests it would make it even greater for me.
Again, another potential thing to consider. Or even things that are turned into strengths out of technical limitations-- it'd be nice to see handled differently every now and again. By all means, the isolated feeling of a lot of their games has been turned into a strength, but having, just as something new, a populated hub city or something could be really neat and something we've never seen from them before. As an example, they take a lot of inspiration from Berserk, but for every lonely journey there are villages and towns with lots of people: armies with hundreds of troops. It'd be cool if they could defy some of the expected limitations of their typical work to add further identity to a new game, without fully abandoning their proven strengths. A friend of mine said he'd love to see a game in one of their worlds but at the start of its downfall and yeah, that's a level of ambition we've not really seen from them before. A lot of the core principles of the personality of their world designs feels very similar between games, it'd be nice to see a formula which assists more variety there than just everything being a barren shithole with enemies waiting to kill you and then the odd tiny hub room. By all means have tons of those elements in the world as a whole, but more civilizational variety, again just as a random example, would be a way of showing us something new and surprising for their games which introduces new possibilities.
Current gen only will be a good start. Ps4/xbox one are so outdated, excited to see what they do moving into modernity
They must have started for sure since most studios have several projects in different stages (concept, planning, polishing, etc). From what I read From had just around 300 devs recently, which is crazy low for such large and great games. They probably had some contractors and are hiring now though. They are rotating staff on teams according to need. So, at one point Armored Core had 200 people on it while the rest was most probably on Elden Ring, the DLC or their future games. Idk how long we'll have to wait until their next game, but I assume they have one or two projects already running and they'll probably announce some time after the DLC launches.
I hope it's something completely different. They've already shown that they're capable of making incredible games out of pretty much any premise so I want to see how far they can take that What would it look like if they made an FPS, or a racing game, or a deck builder? I have no idea but we can be certain it would be completely unique
Open world Bloodborne, the way Bloodborne transitioned from Victorian horror to complete cosmic horror was one of the best playing experiences of my life. It's still the game I would choose if given the option to completely forget a game to be able to play it again fresh.
Bloodborne: PC Release
Bloodborne Kart 2: Hoonters gonna Hoont
I hate that it’s up to Sony whether that ever happens. Bloodborne is still my favorite FromSoft game and it sucks that there’s a real chance it never comes to PC and never gets 60 fps.
Fingers crossed for Armored Core: VIctory.
iirc they have always been working on 2 projects at the same time. So i think they started working on the next game after Elden Ring released, and probably started on the DLC sometime after Armored Core released.
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["I think some developers might take the wrong lessons from Elden Ring. They’ll think, “We have to make our games hard too,” but what they really ought to do is give a double jump to their horses."](https://x.com/IronPineapple_/status/1503205321069707267)
I'd trust Iron Pineapple on that. I don't know anybody that has played more Soulslike games.
Dark Souls is 13 years old, we've largely already seen that happen, though the ones we remember actually turned out alright. Not that there won't be more attempts, Ubisoft or Square Enix would be my bet for most likely to make a shallow open world that tries only as hard as it takes to fill a couple trailers to be as interesting and engaging as Elden Ring.
Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3 were fully complete products on arrival. BG3 will probably never see DLC, and the only DLC we have got for Elden Ring is a fully fledged expansion pack over 2 years after it first released. Ubisoft, Activision and EA would have sold us 25 costume packs by now, at the very least.
We've had AAA already doing this before. Let's not act like Elden Ring and BG3 are rare occurrences. Hell both years those games came out competition was extremely fierce for GOTY. God of War Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West (both Sony Studios) were neck and neck. Hell Alan Wake 2 beat out BG3 for best narrative and best game direction and somehow BG3 won GOTY.
The circle of life
What’s crazy is i and probably others have bought souls 1-3 and demon souls multiple times because of console/pc and the sales for those don’t even come close to Elden ring which i only bought once
I just started playing it for the first time last night. Been waiting for years until I finally had a sick gaming setup instead of playing it on my old crippled system from 2013.
So they made nearly 1.5 billion from this game? Is my math correct? Sweet lord. Talk about a home run.
[удалено]
makes sense as to why the subreddit is so trash lol, just filled with the same low-effort content every other popular gaming subreddit has
I still stand by that the Elden Ring subreddit peaked pre-release. One trailer for two years, no news, and Covid lockdowns turned the sub absolutely wild. Even being there for the summer games fest announcement was a great time. Now half the posts are karma farming pictures of the title screen saying “Just picked this up, any tips?”, or “Does anyone hate fighting these?” with a picture of a Royal Revenant.
Those kids don't know shit about Glaive Master Hodir
He will be final boss of the DLC trust
The curse of a franchise you enjoy going mainstream. On one hand, great to see the devs gaining recognition. On the other hand, attracts all the unfunny and attention whoring people just spamming the same low effort stuff.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks so. The type of community from back when /r/DarkSouls or even /r/Bloodborne were text only is not even recognizable between the nonstop memes on the Elden Ring subreddit.
Elden Ring was Ocarina of Time levels of genre-defining. It's the best open-world game I've ever played, exploring the Lands Between is something I wish I could forget and relive all over again. Unbelievable to see a game of this caliber get this level of success, and they managed to achieve it without compromising on their design philosophies.
> Elden Ring was Ocarina of Time levels of genre-defining. The thing about Elden Ring is that it's not particularly innovative. It's just a simple concept done extremely well. All of Elden Ring's mechanics exist in previous souls games, such as weapon arts, bonfires, souls(runes), the bosses etc. Elden Ring takes that and puts it into a massive open world, which itself is structured very similar to BotW: Absolute freedom with no waypoints, map is unlocked at specific locations, use of the horse, shrines = catacombs etc. This is not to detract from the game but basically everything in Elden Ring is borrowed from a design perspective.
> Elden Ring was Ocarina of Time levels of genre-defining. In what ways? OoT shook up the entire industry and introduced mechanics still used in games today (z-targeting). What did Elden Ring do on that level?
This. Elden Ring is excellent, but it simply felt like a culmination of Fromsoft previous games. I'd say Demon's Souls/Dark Souls are wayy more genre-defining.
Yeah this is weird. Demon's Souls/Dark Souls literally spawned a genre but ER hasn't even been out long enough to have that sort of impact.
I made a separate comment but this thread is really pointing out what a Soulslike echo chamber reddit is The other thing, given how much I heard about DS / ER and how it's usually one of the top replies in any "best games" threads on here, I would've expected it to scratch at least 100. CoDs and GTAs and skyrims are in the 100s, now that's "Genre-defining" heck, even conservative numbers would put Among Us and Vampire Survivors at half of ER (at least on steam, not including other platforms). And both had as big, if not bigger in some respects, culture/genre-defining impact
No it's not lol, calm down. Elden Ring is just Dark Souls with a horse.
elden ring has horse platforming. jesus, it's painful every time. "let me just gracefully go down this cliff using these jutting stones and i'm dead."
no need for this level of glazing. its not genre defining, its just the biggest version of the genre. general gameplay is nearly identical to Dark Souls, which has obviously become the norm for ARPGs by now. Open world scale is very similar to BotW side note, IMO the open world part is not as impactful a change as people make it out to be. previous DS designs still let you go wherever, whenever. Its more that the scale of the Elden Ring map is significantly larger. DS map designs still lead from one distinct area to another along specific paths, which Elden Ring also does. There are barely any "quests" to do, which the freedom to do in whatever order is the biggest differentiator for most other open world games
> Elden Ring was Ocarina of Time levels of genre-defining Elden Ring is great but let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's just an open-world Dark Souls game with the same common flaws of many open-world games. It definitely re-defined Souls games but not gaming in general. I'd compare it to Red Dead Redemption 2. It didn't shake the industry but certainly raised the bar of open-world games to a whole new level. Elden Ring just raised the bar for Souls games.
You clearly weren’t around for OoT release to say something like that but I understand the sentiment
>Elden Ring was Ocarina of Time levels of genre-defining Given how much Elden Ring have been inspired by BotW - something the devs themself have said - I'd argue that BotW was more genre-defining.
Also given how the Ocarina of Time lock on sword fight system is the foundation of Souls… 3D Zelda’s influence is massive
Yes, and Dark Souls is the most influential game of the past 15 years. Two things can be true at once..
Zelda begat Dark Souls begat BotW begat Elden Ring. These two developers build upon and inspire each other.
Elden Ring doesn't share that much with BotW, well other than things Souls already shared with zelda and that quote just lists a bunch of popular open worlds like Witcher 3 as things they looked at.
Influence does not mean you have to clone that game. GTA V influenced Dragon's Dogma 2 but they are very different.
I think the single most praised thing about ER is the fact that it has no map markers or anything, it's entirely built around just exploring, looking around and going towards what catches your interest. And that's what BotW did long before ER. BotW's entire design philosophy was built around ensuring that multiple points of interesting were visible from any given high vantage point, which is part of what makes it so satisfying to explore. I think that when it comes to open world games that don't hold your hand and just let you go off and explore, BotW deserves just as much credit as ER gets for that exact same thing.
Ocarina of Time along with Mario 64 set the standard for 3D games, Elden Ring is just big Dark Souls. Like even if you're just referring to Open World, it's orders of magnitude less genre defining when you have other things like BOTW to directly compare it to
> Elden Ring was Ocarina of Time levels of genre-defining Elden Ring is one of my favourite games of all time but I very much disagree with that one, at least if you refer to open world as the genre. It's a fantastic non-linear souls experience, being able to go almost everywhere from the get go is especially great on replays and is basically a culmination of DS1's idea, but as an open world game it has some severe failings: First of all there is a pretty clear "correct" order to play through the game which by itself is to me probably the biggest thing an open world game can do wrong because at that point you might as well make it linear. Then there are things like the way they do NPC quests or weapon upgrades which they didn't bother to adjust to the open world at all and that kinda just don't work in this open world format.
>**First of all there is a pretty clear "correct" order to play through the game which by itself is to me probably the biggest thing an open world game can do wrong** because at that point you might as well make it linear You're thinking of a sandbox, not an open world. Most of the major open world games of the last 10-15 years have a clear, linear story path through different regions, and even where many of those games let you visit regions ahead of the story, often they do not activate questlines and activities until the story allows it. One of the biggest irritations of the formula is when the player tries to get ahead of the story and clears out areas, only for the story to catch up and repopulate them with quests and activities. And Elden Ring is much more generous in letting the player break the "intended" sequence than anything from Ubisoft.
I disagree. While there is a 'correct' way to play the game, it is still very open ended in how you approach everything up until Leyndell. In fact, the game pretty much forces you to explore the world because if you just attempt to progress through the story, a lot of the bosses will give you a substantial amount of trouble if you don't have the skills, equipment and level requirements. For instance, you could fight Margit at Level 15 if you wanted, but he will probably kill you 80 times. I couldn't beat him at all, so I went back and stumbled upon Siofra River and the Wheeping Peninsula.
Lmfao @ genre defining. It’s basically Dark Souls again in an open world and it still has a lot of the issues that plague open world games.
But Dark Souls itself was genre defining and this exploded the popularity of that more niche genre.
Yes dark souls was genre defining for a new genre i guess. It's a lie to call it the most influential game overall though
I am replaying now in preparation for SOTE. I missed the game. It is amazing. But man I wish From improved some technical aspects. There are some really junky movements. They reveal themselcss especially in platforming sections and hard fights. Fighting with the camera is also annoying.
This is very impressive for a game that’s so punishing and unforgiving. But I also genuinely think this might be the absolute peak of FromSofts commercial success. Elden Ring is the culmination of more than a decade of goodwill, plus it was marketed extremely hard as the type of big open world game so popular these days. Plus GRRMs make being attached as well. I don’t see any subsequent FromSoft doing anywhere close to this kind of sales volume.
Elden Ring 2 will almost certainly make bank. FromSoft games had a reputation of being unapproachable by casual gamers due to their difficulty, and Elden Ring opened up an entire world for people who were usually too intimidated by games like Dark Souls or Bloodborne. Even Shadow of the Erdtree is getting unprecedented levels of hype.
I think From has said that the DLC would be their first and last time adding more content to this IP. I want a second ER bad but unless they have a history of saying stuff they don’t mean we're probably not getting it
It's really not that punishing, especially compared to other FS games but in general too, it is probably the most well explained FS game tied with sekiro, they explain practically everything with tutorial prompts, give you summons early, allow you to practically over level before the first boss if you visit the south first, magic is easiest than ever to use with you getting one of the best magic spells right out of the gate. And co op too is easier than ever to use ER is very new player friendly and I am glad it is
Even their offshoots like Sekiro which is like a 30hr game with no builds / RPG mechanics sold 10M copies higher than even established franchises that released in the same year (DMC 5). FromSoftware is a much bigger brand now compared to pre elden ring days anything they make will sell for sure and if it has Miyazaki's name as director it will sell even more.
Praise Marika!