Elden Ring

[X-SOLDIER]

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Having completed the game for a while now, I realized this is the best game I played on the last 10 years at least and the last truly outstanding one was Bloodborne; From Software is slowly cementing itself as my favorite company. The Shadow of the Erdtree hype is through the roof.

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Also, I was meaning to ask @X-SOLDIER...

Spoiler

Whom is the Scarlet Blossom right at the entrance of the Site of Grace leading to Malenia? The one where you find the Traveler's set?

It really is surprising just how much everything about the game has stuck with me in the same way. Like, I feel like I enjoy it DIFFERENTLY than the way in which I enjoy basically any other game I can think of.


I believe that the Scarlet Aeonia there is likely intended to be a bloom of one of Malenia's daughters. While we meet 5 of them (Millicent, Mary, Maureen, Amy, & Polyanna), that's not ever stated to be all the daughters of hers that there were. Additionally, Gowry seems to be familiar with this sort of rebirth process with her daughters, and so it's possible that the flower here belonged to a predecessor daughter to Millicent & the others. Millicent wears a version of the Traveller's set and the blooms form when one of the daughters' physical bodies falls and is reborn as one of the Valkyries – hence Malenia being naked in her Phase 2 aside from her prosthetics that are made of gold & interconnected into her body directly just like the Miquella's Needle that's inside her.

Insofar as I'm aware it doesn't correspond to any of the specific named Valkyries that we know of.

That being said, Melina does wear a version of this set with a green cloak, and there's an inherent relationship between the flowers & fire. The Erdtree Guardian Garb (Fullbloom) increases the HP recovery of the Flask of Crimson Tears but makes you far more susceptible to Fire damage, whereas Malenia's Great Rune reduces the HP recovery of the Flask of Crimson Tears and allows you to recover HP through siphoning life from others Bloodborne-style. With Melina no longer having a body and also being the Kindling Maiden who's meant to set fire to the Erdtree, it's HIGHLY probable that back when the lore encompassed "Miranda, the first maiden of the Flower Crucible" who is referred to in the Miranda's Prayer item that Melina uses to trigger the flower's falling light attack, this could have been intended to be her – especially since, unlike Millicent (whose armor set exists but like Miranda's Prayer isn't player obtainable), Melina doesn't have an explicit armor set in the game and the Traveller's Set is the closest thing.

At this point though, it feels fairly unlikely that this particular angle of the narrative will end up being followed any more than Asimi's removed questline or any of the other things that were intentionally not made available to the player, and Shadow of the Erdtree will likely recontextualize those story elements into a form that matches how the lore evolved – leaving it likely that this was just a previous Valkyrie whose name we don't know similar to how little we know about the fates of many of the Finger Maidens in the game.




X

 

[wander]

I did two playthroughs after it came out, first one trying to go in blind and not following any guides - fission mailed, ended up with the

Spoiler

LET CHAOS TAKE THE WORLD!11

ending, second one a fuck it, I'll cheese it doing magic because Comet Azure is OP and hillarious, but with that one went down Ranni's rabbithole and it was a great experience, .

Love how they were able to craft a "choose your own adventure" type of game without the choices being obvious choices like e.g. modern day interactive novel video games, and for the most part avoiding points of no return / you can no longer achieve this ending. The downside there is that you either need a video explaining things or a lot of red yarn to connect all the dots though, and there's A Lot of dots to connect.

Anyway I'll probably do a Faith build when the DLC lands, it seems faith builds get the more interesting and diverse spells, whereas glintstone magic mainly has a dozen variations of simple projectile spells,

Yeah I liked how the game didn't tell you what to do for divergent endings. There is joy in discovery.

I'd play it more if the PvP was more than L2 spam. I'm thinking of doing another run just for the sake of a condensed LP.

also holy shit sup yop. X-Soldier. good to see y'all again.

 

[Cthulhu]

Ohai,

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Yeah I liked how the game didn't tell you what to do for divergent endings. There is joy in discovery.

I'd play it more if the PvP was more than L2 spam. I'm thinking of doing another run just for the sake of a condensed LP.

also holy shit sup yop. X-Soldier. good to see y'all again.

y halo thar, nice ta see you as well

I think that the reason PvP hasn't ever really been that intriguing to me in the Souls games (aside from vastly preferring PvE type games) is that it predicates itself around the community self-defining a sort of expected fair for duels like the Level 120/150 in Elden Ring which also has a tendency to bring along a lot of the tryhard elitism because it's about maximizing a very specific understanding of the game's combat interactions & attack reads, where the idea of using other tools like Summons & Magic are generally frowned upon – because they are ways to help players circumvent that part of the challenge.

That's why I think that emphasizing that Elden Ring is technically a Souls game, but you have a veritable cornucopia of tools to address those challenges in ways where they're not NEARLY as reliant upon that skill set as something like Bloodborne can make a huge difference in who is willing to approach that. Then this inevitably means that the exact same type of min-max-focused gamer types are going to discover that L2 spam is stupidly effective in countering the more reading-and-counter combat, and so PvP becomes less fun and thus the cycle of those types being even more opposed to those other game elements increases and the cycle continues.

I don't know how much the Colosseums and its restrictions can address things like that, as I think that it's just the fundamental difficulty in attempting to communicate what type of shared experience you want from an opponent – which requires trust, but expecting an opponent will deceive you is something that you HAVE to expect and thus it's very difficult to have that work out even when a lot of the community is SURPRISINGLY capable at creating those sorts of constraints external to the game's own tools.

A condensed LP run seems like a solid way to de-rust on the game, and it'd be fun ta hear about!



X

 

[Wol]

Now my PVP/Farming marathon comes to a close... that alone added +100h of playtime.

Absolutely loved PVPing in Bloodborne and Dark Souls III and that didn't change here. Each invasion brings its own challenges and opportunities to explore, which makes it unpredictable and that's why its so engaging to me; even in the middle of L2 spam you can find your way to victory if you are focused enough, baiting invaders helps tremendously. High Poise is an absolute must here, so I had Bull Goat's Talisman all the time. Recorded a lot of invasions so I'll be sharing some of them soon.

I have an itch of building a STR/FTH character next, focusing on Crucible incantations, but that's for the DLC.

Luckily, by PVPing I also got tons of runes (with cooperators sometimes dropping 300k or 400k), and now I'm stocked and ready to craft the new DLC weapons as soon as I get them.

Last shot I took (Endgame spoiler):

Spoiler

 

[X-SOLDIER]

So, Shadow of the Erdtree was genuinely impressive.

The overlapping verticality feels a lot more like the more constrained Souls series level design, whilst maintaining the open world elements of the main game. The only things that I would consider flaws about that are first time experience where the upper Rauh Ruins & Jagged Peak don't have their own map fragments, and that the maps to both of those are contained in the lower regions (which you can't get to from the upper areas). This meant that I made it all the way to both Romina & Bayle the Dread totally blind and with a prolific amount of messages along the lines of, "Victory... but still no map." along the way to let me know I wasn't alone in the experience. That and that there were a few pathways into lower regions that are unexpectedly obtuse, as well as how there's a very arbitrary boundary around the outside of Shadow Keep that triggers the shattering of Miquella's Rune and changes a number of the NPC relationships just for exploring.

The rest went really smoothly, and I think that there were some extremely unique experiences like the Abyssal Woods being a deeply sinister and oppressive environment that reinforced a sense of fear & helplessness to the presence of the Madness. As expected there's still a lot of early thematic design here & there, lending itself towards a lot of the elements in the DLC being designed well in advance of the main game's completion, even if there were changes made along the way. Personally, I really liked the implementation of the story-driven NPC participation in some of the boss fights, as that kind of thing felt exceptionally satisfying in making it feel like a more deeply layered story that connects to you as a character, and set up for a lot more interesting relationships between everyone drawn to the Realm of Shadow.

I got through the DLC on my game that was completed and then circled back to do DLC+ to get all the things from the Boss Remembrances (I'm on NG+3 or 4 now in my playthrough). Even without Igon's absolutely iconic monologuing, Bayle is far and away my favourite fight. There're also a number of impressive vistas and locations that gave that same sense of wondrous exploration that the base game did, but with a feeling that was often strange and new. The use of the main theme harp leitmotif in the Shaman Village being isolated out from everything else still hits particularly poignantly to the way it tells bits & pieces of Marika's story.

While I have been gradually poking in and making my way through Bloodborne since as a way to chew on some more of the design themes and poke around at the overlapping visual design themes, the far more constrained nature of that game's layout is a lot more difficult for me to put time into, as it's very cognitively draining (especially in the Chalice Dungeons with their lack of background music), whereas Elden Ring is always exceptionally relaxing to explore for me since I can flex into or out of those more constrained environments into just a meandering exploration at basically any interval, which isn't possible when a setting is more fixed into a hub world and its intertwined levels.

If anything, I've found that I'm definitely the sort of player who'd vastly prefer if I had the option to just to be a god-mode-tourist for a lot of games these days, as I'm far less drawn to a potential challenge of the mechanics as I am drawn in by exploring the details of the environments.

Now my PVP/Farming marathon comes to a close... that alone added +100h of playtime.

Absolutely loved PVPing in Bloodborne and Dark Souls III and that didn't change here. Each invasion brings its own challenges and opportunities to explore, which makes it unpredictable and that's why its so engaging to me; even in the middle of L2 spam you can find your way to victory if you are focused enough, baiting invaders helps tremendously. High Poise is an absolute must here, so I had Bull Goat's Talisman all the time. Recorded a lot of invasions so I'll be sharing some of them soon.

I have an itch of building a STR/FTH character next, focusing on Crucible incantations, but that's for the DLC.

Luckily, by PVPing I also got tons of runes (with cooperators sometimes dropping 300k or 400k), and now I'm stocked and ready to craft the new DLC weapons as soon as I get them.

Last shot I took (Endgame spoiler):

Spoiler

View attachment 15430

I do dig the Dragon Halberd and Ice Lightning is still one of the most interesting and under-represented things in the game As a heavy armor look that's a good-lookin' kit. I'm rather curious if you found anything new in the DLC that you particularly were drawn to. The Winged Serpent Helm is has the coolest look as a knight helm, and for Poise, the Greaves of Solitude have become the defacto ones I moved to from the Fire Prelate Greaves, as they don't get as enormous if I'm swapping the chest armor I'm using. While there're a boatload of cool weapons, I really like wandering whilst two-handing Rellana's Twinblades and the Beast-Repellant Torch on my back, as it's got a neat attack string, really cool and diverse L2 abilities, as well as meaning that Wolves will leave you be which fits the Carian vibe. That being said – Bolt of Gransax is still absurdly god-tier for the PvE stuff.

I am quite curious in more perspectives on things from the PvP & more combat-focused side of things.



X

 

[Wol]

So, Shadow of the Erdtree was genuinely impressive.

The overlapping verticality feels a lot more like the more constrained Souls series level design, whilst maintaining the open world elements of the main game. The only things that I would consider flaws about that are first time experience where the upper Rauh Ruins & Jagged Peak don't have their own map fragments, and that the maps to both of those are contained in the lower regions (which you can't get to from the upper areas). This meant that I made it all the way to both Romina & Bayle the Dread totally blind and with a prolific amount of messages along the lines of, "Victory... but still no map." along the way to let me know I wasn't alone in the experience. That and that there were a few pathways into lower regions that are unexpectedly obtuse, as well as how there's a very arbitrary boundary around the outside of Shadow Keep that triggers the shattering of Miquella's Rune and changes a number of the NPC relationships just for exploring.

The rest went really smoothly, and I think that there were some extremely unique experiences like the Abyssal Woods being a deeply sinister and oppressive environment that reinforced a sense of fear & helplessness to the presence of the Madness. As expected there's still a lot of early thematic design here & there, lending itself towards a lot of the elements in the DLC being designed well in advance of the main game's completion, even if there were changes made along the way. Personally, I really liked the implementation of the story-driven NPC participation in some of the boss fights, as that kind of thing felt exceptionally satisfying in making it feel like a more deeply layered story that connects to you as a character, and set up for a lot more interesting relationships between everyone drawn to the Realm of Shadow.

I got through the DLC on my game that was completed and then circled back to do DLC+ to get all the things from the Boss Remembrances (I'm on NG+3 or 4 now in my playthrough). Even without Igon's absolutely iconic monologuing, Bayle is far and away my favourite fight. There're also a number of impressive vistas and locations that gave that same sense of wondrous exploration that the base game did, but with a feeling that was often strange and new. The use of the main theme harp leitmotif in the Shaman Village being isolated out from everything else still hits particularly poignantly to the way it tells bits & pieces of Marika's story.

While I have been gradually poking in and making my way through Bloodborne since as a way to chew on some more of the design themes and poke around at the overlapping visual design themes, the far more constrained nature of that game's layout is a lot more difficult for me to put time into, as it's very cognitively draining (especially in the Chalice Dungeons with their lack of background music), whereas Elden Ring is always exceptionally relaxing to explore for me since I can flex into or out of those more constrained environments into just a meandering exploration at basically any interval, which isn't possible when a setting is more fixed into a hub world and its intertwined levels.

If anything, I've found that I'm definitely the sort of player who'd vastly prefer if I had the option to just to be a god-mode-tourist for a lot of games these days, as I'm far less drawn to a potential challenge of the mechanics as I am drawn in by exploring the details of the environments.



I do dig the Dragon Halberd and Ice Lightning is still one of the most interesting and under-represented things in the game As a heavy armor look that's a good-lookin' kit. I'm rather curious if you found anything new in the DLC that you particularly were drawn to. The Winged Serpent Helm is has the coolest look as a knight helm, and for Poise, the Greaves of Solitude have become the defacto ones I moved to from the Fire Prelate Greaves, as they don't get as enormous if I'm swapping the chest armor I'm using. While there're a boatload of cool weapons, I really like wandering whilst two-handing Rellana's Twinblades and the Beast-Repellant Torch on my back, as it's got a neat attack string, really cool and diverse L2 abilities, as well as meaning that Wolves will leave you be which fits the Carian vibe. That being said – Bolt of Gransax is still absurdly god-tier for the PvE stuff.

I am quite curious in more perspectives on things from the PvP & more combat-focused side of things.



X

I consumed (or was consumed by) the Shadow of the Erdtree for this entire month; can't wait to share my thoughts on it, but just like you I was completely blown away by the quality and amount of content. +100 hours into it (at least 6h of those getting punched by the final boss 2nd phase).

Calling it a DLC is a disservice, it's a glorified expansion (a full game for half the price), which delivers the best Elden Ring experience at times.