Elden Ring is simply a game that the player naturally adapts to their own style of play. Challenging at times, vicious at others, but mostly incredibly fun. The enjoyable pace makes the hours of play pass by like water, and each path opens up a few more, only to come together again after a fair amount of exploration before the next big reveal. [Issue#318]
Elden Ring is a superlative title, one of those works capable of becoming an event and becoming engraved in the collective imagination. It achieves this by remaining faithful to its formula and exporting its identity to the concept of the open world, achieving its own personal approach, resulting in a world that is visually stunning, and that works with overwhelming precision in terms of mechanics. An excellent videogame that also maintains the concreteness of its proposal.
Elden Ring has an incredible number of fascinating locations to explore and cool enemies to fight. The developer studio has refined the precision of combat over their past five games, and it still feels so good to outmaneuver dangerous foes. The music and art direction are as beautiful and powerful as ever before. They really do most of the work to set the tone for an epic adventure with a dramatic finale. Elden Ring is more accessible than any Dark Souls game. Example #1: Stakes of Marika allow players to revive closer to the boss arenas and get back to the action quicker. Example #2: The mount in this game spawns out of thin air and moves through the open world faster than the normal movement speed. Example #3: Spirit ashes enable a variety of NPC summons to be upgraded, and they make boss fights a lot easier. Example #4: Invasions only happen when you voluntarily interact with the online summons. They do not happen randomly in the open world. Example #5: Fast travel is more convenient than before. All of these quality-of-life improvements make Elden Ring more enjoyable for the average player by cutting out some of the tedium.
Elden Ring packs its intricately crafted world - a world which should be used as a reference point for open-world design moving forward - with more impressive boss fights and secrets than you can shake a giant greatsword at. Although its punishing combat system may not be to everyone’s taste, it is an essential experience both for FromSoftware newcomers and seasoned veterans alike.
Elden Ring is a crowning achievement of over a decade of Miyazaki’s and FromSoftware’s work, and an amazing example of how to find a whole new level of fun in a well-known and somewhat worn-out formula. The open world turned out to be a perfect fit for the genre and you can still tell this masterpiece was created by the famous Japanese studio. I honestly haven’t been so excited about a game since the first Dark Souls.
Elden Ring feels like the natural evolution of a video game series that continues to reinvent itself after more than 13 years of its birth. FromSoftware is simply the best at what they do. While there are some technical issues and repetitive structures and creatures, Elden Ring is a cruelly wonderful piece of work and one of the best adventure games of recent years.
The years of waiting were worth it, Elden Ring is brilliant. It offers a huge amount of content, a beautiful world and addictive gameplay. But the series does start to feel a little bit stale.
Elden Ring needed to be fresh and bold, and
it succeeds, putting you in charge of your
own adventure. However the open world has
some uneven terrain. [Issue#12, p.80]
COMBAT/BOSSES:
Fantastic boss fights. Enemy designs are great.Build diversity is good. Combat system is certainly an upgrade from the previous souls games, with the introduction of stance stagger system, jumping/crouching attacks and customizable ashes of war. I also like how you're incentivized to be aggressive with heavy weapons despite their slow movesets, since they are the most effective at breaking stances.
RPG: The leveling system is as shallow as it's always been, meaning it's just a numbers game. It can barely be called an RPG system.
The only stat that (kinda) affects how you PLAY is endurance, which determines how aggressive you can be, and how much you can block with shields.
Everything else is merely numbers. More HP, more damage, that's it. You increase *your* numbers for the higher numbers the *enemies* will have in the next area. Nothing but a game of cat and mouse.
Leveling stats doesn't expand your gameplay, it just gives you the illusion of your character getting 'stronger'. Whether you're at level 50 or level 200, what you can do is essentially the same. They could've implemented a light skill tree system that will add more variety/flavor to your playstyle and personalize your build.
OPEN WORLD/LEVEL DESIGN:
Did it really have to be...? Other than the few night-only mini-bosses, there's no randomized or rare encounters at all. Everything is exactly the same whenever you open the game. Same enemies, same number of them, same spot, every single time. No random NPC inhabitants either. Everything is 100% scripted. After you're greeted with all the 'surprises' on your first playthrough, the open world parts will only get more tedious on consecutive runs.
The amount of reused enemies, especially in the snowy mountain, is laughable. There's like 15 or so enemy types in that area and ONLY 1 of them is unique (well technically... since they also appear in an evergaol and a catacomb) to that area. Apparently everything in this game is built to be able to survive under any climate. Very immersion breaking.
They really missed the opportunity to take advantage of the open world formula. At core, it really is just a stretched out version of any of the previous souls game. Even the Legacy Dungeons, which are good for the most part, aren't on par with some of the best levels they made in the past.
Too much **** thing? Maybe. Elden Ring takes the souls formula and improves on it in some ways, but hinders it in others. The primary offender for me is making the into a vastly more open-world structure. The experience seems to lose some of the carefully curated design and structure of its predecessors. Nevertheless, the gameplay and creativity shines through, delivering one of the best experiences available for the current generation of consoles.
Man kann alles und nichts machen. Es gibt keinen roten Faden. Es gibt keine Hilfestellung für Ausrüstung und Fähigkeiten. Wenn man auflevelt spürt man keine Verbesserung. Wenn man Spaß am verlieren und sterben hat ist es ein tolles Spiel.
Game world is bland. Story and cinematics is almost non-existant. NPCs are boring and only give riddles.
Gameplay is also boring and made for mmo-kiddies that like to grind and grind and grind.
SummaryA New World Created By Hidetaka Miyazaki And George R. R. Martin
ELDEN RING, developed by FromSoftware, Inc. and BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc., is a fantasy action-RPG adventure set within a world created by Hidetaka Miyazaki creator of the influential DARK SOULS video game series; and George R.R. Martin author of The New York Times b...