Git gud
You don’t even need to get good most of the time if you just spend more time learning the game by playing it’s mostly a knowledge check. Fully upgraded weapon (way more important than leveling dmg stats passed min req), npc and PC summons, get vigor up in the 40-50 range, mark your map and come back later, etc. You could play it like a fighting game training against bosses to learn their moves or just go somewhere else to grind levels or equipment to come back later for an easier fight.
I loved Elden Ring, I don’t play many games these days but it really hooked me. But also it really needs to get over itself and add difficulty options.
I do think the difficulty is part of the fun but I almost didn’t finish it because it was so all over the place, toward the end it just got grindy, bosses just turned into long roll fests until you got your one chance per minute to knock off 2% of its health bar. They feel more like endurance matches that test your patience more than skill.
Sometimes I’m dying a lot and having fun because the challenge is good, but sometimes it’s just tedious and I want to move on to the next area. I would love to be able to drop the difficulty for a bit just for those spots, hell make it an in game item called cry baby bottle for losers and wimps for all I care.
It has difficulty options. Where the previous FromSoft games would just lock you in a closet with a boss, whilst flicking you in the balls and laughing at you “Git gud son”, Elden Ring has a lot of stuff to make things more manageable. For example there is summons, in the form of NPC (often with interesting quest lines to get them), other players via online and your personal spirit summons. The game is also completely open. So when you get stuck on a boss, you can just leave and go do something else. Explore the world, go level up, go find weapons, armor and other items to help you. Overleveling is not hard and the world is huge and a lot of fun to explore. The game also almost never locks content behind a boss. You can do a lot in the game without beating any of the hard bosses. If with all that the game is still to hard, then maybe the game isn’t for you. Hard games have a place in the world imho. And if you just want to enjoy the world for the fun of it, I would suggest one of the mods out there to make the game as easy as you want it to be.
Sure Elden Ring is a tough game to get the hang of, but it isn’t hard at all and provides plenty of difficulty adjustments. There’s also a lot of people that adjust the difficulty in the other direction. For example people that do RL1 runs or limit themselves to a certain kind of weapon. I think it’s cool the game has so many options to enjoy it.
I’m replaying the base game (waiting on a sale for the dlc) and I couldn’t agree more. I was fighting a bell bearing hunter and they have massive combos they can mix up in the middle and do more hits and when you get the timing PERFECTLY you go do 1 charge attack and you get punished because they already started another combo,you get 1 hit and that’s it.
People answering you talk about summons but for these guys you can’t even summon your ashes, for some stupid reason the devs decided to limit that feature.
Before anyone tells me to git gud, I already beat the entire game before including a bugged Melania that healed even on missed attacks (she was bugged for some times). I can beat anything in the game but like you said, it’s mega boring and slow.
Maybe you and your gear are under leveled for the fight, that is essentially the difficulty selector lol
Im not sure you read my comment but at no point did I say Im getting one shot or doing too little damage. The problem is 90% of the game is you dodging attacks so you can get 1 quick attack, maybe 2, dont even think about a charged strong. When I mentioned summons its only because summons give you opening to be able to actually play the game instead of rolling till infinity.
It has difficulty options but it’s if you use summons, heavy shields and similar stuff. Bosses can become really easy that way if you want to. You could also go for a solo playthrough with no shield for more difficulty.
Elden Ring is both the easiest and hardest Fromsoft game in recent times because of how many really strong things are in it for the player to use. But if you play melee only, the bosses are harder than the old games.
I’m not amazing at these games, particularly the faster ones, but I’m pretty good to the point I tend to play thematic builds or and actively eshew OP stuff because it’s funnier to kill a dragon with a dagger than a big sword.
I think elden ring is almost flawless until after leyndell. Going from one of the best levels they’ve ever made, filled with thoughtful design to bats that 2 hit your 60 vigur build in the flat, empty snowfields is… A decision.
It’s basically tradition that the bottom falls out of these games in the last bits. I think elden ring is just too big, even the levels with great design like elphale end up becoming tedious slog fests because there’s just nowhere for them to take it. Hey look it’s those basic soldiers, but they’re umm golden now and they hit like a truck and umm explode and uhhh 8 Royal revenants. Hmm game design!
The broken scaling of everything means that a lot of the boss fights end up either you wombo combo them, they wombo combo you, or it’s a tedious scratch and run away event. There’s no epic genichiro or owl level toe to toe lightning duels. Even malania, a boss with absolutely stunning design, becomes dying to waterfowl dance in one/two hit/s over and over till you learn to dodge it or just snap and pull out the blasphemous greatsword and chain pancake her to death.
Please note this article is 100% BS. The DLC currently has a Mostly Positive rating on Steam with 87% of the people leaving a positive review.
The people complaining are mostly about stuff like crashes, bad net code and poor fps. This is not a dlc thing, but a base game thing. The pc port simply has some issues, for most people it’s totally fine. For others it’s unplayable. With the amount of different systems out there, there is always going to be a group of people with issues. I feel like this is a very vocal minority though.
Or just use seamless coop and don’t worry about it too much. It’s funny when a modder can do a better job than an entire gaming company.
People absolutely should be mentioning in their reviews of a product that it has bad netcode, or any other positives or negatives they think are worth mentioning. People use reviews to inform their purchases of products. Victim blaming people for certain developers’ inability to produce robust netcode is wild.
There’s going to be a lot of people confused because there are actually TWO Shadow of the Erdtree listings.
One is the premium bundle which is at mostly positive and there is the DLC by itself which is mixed.
Check listings under publisher: Fromsoftware Inc
I thought souls- like fans love tough bosses. Enjoy it then. I think they should git gud. /s
For full disclosure, I suck at souls-like and I beat Elden Ring by cheating(completely offline). I have been called Mentally removed for wanting an easy mode. I don’t like souls like fans, not all, just some of the more hardcore ones.
You really need to be zealously masochistic and self-flagellant to enjoy that kind of shit. I don’t know how people do it.
Have you tried being zealously masochistic and self-flagellant? Gitting gud is another option.
But really though there’s something endearing about a game being ruthlessly difficult with no easy mode slider. I’m normally the type of guy to crank everything down to easy to have a relaxing time, but when I’m in the mood for it Souls games scratch that itch juuuuust right.
Some people like developing an artistic skill. This is that. Fuck up on the piano? Start that part over and get it right this time. Fuck up in elden ring? Start that part over and get it right this time. Both have acceptable amounts of variation that lead to success. Elden ring is in fact easier, because things can change that aren’t solely your skill level (stats/gear). There’s a lot of reasons the souls series and similar games are conducive to speedrunning, this loop of self-improvement is a major one.
When I read comments like yours, they come across as saying “practicing anything is stupid and I do not see the benefit”. It’s easy: practicing anything is fun and you only get to see the benefit after you fail, then succeed. If there’s some mental disconnect you have where you can’t envision success for yourself, or you think succeeding won’t be fun, it certainly isn’t the fault of the game or the community.
And some people don’t want to deal with the difficulty and just want to explore. Sure, it’s not rewarding for you, but it is for them. So yeah, I think a separate easy mode would be fine as long as you still get to choose it and it’s not forced on you.
Once you’ve played enough, the fact that it’s hard makes it better. I remember the first time I played dark souls, (dark souls III) I beat the 2nd boss months after the first try (i didn’t play continuously for those months obviously). I was just unable to beat it. I looked at the wiki for builds, for that specific boss starts and so on.
Once I beat it, though, I kinda knew how to play, and the fact that the bosses were hard made it better, since now I got a big dopamine hit after I finally killed them after tens of tries.
Now, most games I play I beat them on the first try. Not because I’m good, but because the games are easy. I watch other people play and they kill them first try too. I don’t get that same sense of “oh this is a boss, it’s gonna be hard but fun.” Instead I think “oh no, I was having fun oneshotting everyone and now here comes the bullet sponge”.
Look, I personally consider myself a “hardcore” fan, but I don’t have a problem with legitimate criticisms. Things like the need for optimizations, bug fixes, etc. The criticisms of the DLC by other so-called “hardcore” fans, are not legitimate. The problem is, these people are straight fucking morons that can’t bother to learn the game in the first place. They think they can just run to the bosses with their over-leveled, NG+17 character and expect to use the same methods they used for the base game and beat it the first day it’s out. IT IS NOT THE SAME. The DLC is like playing a “sequel” that let’s you load your character and equipment from the previous game so you can look cool, but your still starting from essentially zero. You HAVE to level up the new stuff to get back to where you were power-wise, which means you HAVE to explore, and you HAVE to change up how you approach things. You cannot just rush through the bosses to see the ending. You HAVE to play the game to be able to play the game, and the pissy babies can’t fucking grasp that.
The real problem with the “community” is that a huge, huge amount of its members are shitty, asshole children with shitty, asshole parents that buy them these games, which they shouldn’t be playing in the first place. The other big part of the community are the shitty neckbeards that are still children mentally.
All that said, if you genuinely suck at a game, that game isn’t for you. That’s why I quit playing Balatro. Not everyone is good at everything they try to do- like how my birth-giver was a home ec major (yes, that was actually a thing), but she can’t cook for shit. She can fuck up Kraft Dinner. But damn can she sew, and craft, and all the rest. (She’s still a narcissistic sociopath, so she can fuck right off.) So if you like the game, but can’t play it, maybe just watch a streamer or something so you can still enjoy it. Hell, my wife was so into Elden Ring just from watching me play that I bought it for her so she could play it. She tried. She really, really tried. But she just couldn’t do it. So we got a refund and she still loves watching me play so she can get to experience it. Not everything is, or needs to be, for everyone.
Agreed. I’m glad there’s so many difficulty sliders built into this game: big variety of guns, NPC summons, spirit summons.
Honestly, it was not enough. With Easy Mode mod, I could actually explore the game world and immerse myself more than I would ever have. One of my favourite moments is when I was fighting Dragonkin boss in front a giant throne occupied by a massive skeleton in first underground city. It was amazing. I could never experience it without that mod. I am too easily frustrated.
As someone who has never used story mode/easy mode options, I agree with you completely.
Nine Sols, Celeste, Hades. Some of my favorite ‘hardcore’ games with great stories and great difficulty options. The only result of their presence is letting more people play the games who wouldn’t have otherwise. I don’t feel like my experience is cheapened in any way if others use the options.
And even if I don’t use them now, maybe there comes a day when my hands can’t keep up anymore, and I’ll be very grateful to be able to keep participating in my favorite hobby. Just an unambiguous good imo
To clarify: I support easy mode. I am curious: Would it be more rewarding for you to explore and deep dive into the world, or to beat a boss on the normal difficulty? I totally see the appeal of both honestly lol
I play them offline because no way am I playing with that mostly asshole fanbase
I’ve been playing video games my whole life and I’ve never been able to “git gud” at any game. I’m not going to put a significant amount of time and effort getting good at a game to figure out if I even like it
I don’t do difficult games cause of physical issues. I tried Elden Ring and was very impressed, but ultimately it was unplayable for me even trying to go easy.
What do you recommend cheat wise? I’m running on Linux and I really don’t care about online.
Skill issue
