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Installed, spawned in the first area, (accessible from Sister thingy in the Painted World DLC), looks cool and bonkers so far. Seems to continue direct after the end game, sort of?? Then some giant smoke penis ghost slug dildo monster killed me....
Surprisingly large, many areas to explore, cool shortcuts, good style, at least in the actual Ringed City bits. Properly infuriatingly hard in parts. Four bosses in total, plus a bunch of what could be called mini-bosses/encounters. First two are fine; optional one only tried briefly, possibly annoying; final one seems like a real dick. Some nice armors; not sure about the weapons. Cool enemies, fun to fight individually, but tricky in hordes (only one location where this gets a bit over the top, though).
Surprisingly large, many areas to explore, cool shortcuts, good style, at least in the actual Ringed City bits. Properly infuriatingly hard in parts. Four bosses in total, plus a bunch of what could be called mini-bosses/encounters. First two are fine; optional one only tried briefly, possibly annoying; final one seems like a real dick. Some nice armors; not sure about the weapons. Cool enemies, fun to fight individually, but tricky in hordes (only one location where this gets a bit over the top, though).
Spot on! Although I'd say the art style in the Dreg Heap is pretty damn cool too. And the first boss is hard, second is - randomly - very easy Embered, last is hard again. Some of the NPCs are hard too. Didn't try the dragon because dragon reasons. Very impressed with this DLC. First one was good, this one is great. Worth twice the price. ....that you don't get to go in the seperate tower in the Ringed City though. A spiral around up to that would have been ace.
Tried the demo, was a bit weird but liked it.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1243140/Hellpoint_The_Thespian_Feast/ Played the game, was a bit weird but liked it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/628670/Hellpoint/ The demo is actually a small segment of the final game and gives a perfectly good flavour of it, except a relative lack of exploration / complexity compared to the main game. Honestly though, I think it sneaked in to my Top 3 GOTYS 2020 after Control and Metro Ex, just booting Jedi Fallen Order out. Despite the theme being still slightly jarringly empty / abstract, the properly soulslike non-linearity / exploration / convoluted progression / secret hunting / route unlocking was as good as usual and it kept me motivated the whole way. Bosses were mostly not that terrible apart from the final couple (first one glitched on my so I essentially cheated it, second one I didn't bother with). The most frustration was some thankfully optional jumping puzzles miles from the previous bonfire. So yeah. Give it a try! Some shameless propaganda here. I'm making the levels for this:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1277130/Deathbound/ Nothing to be ashamed of, good on you. Looks a bit stylised and cartoony which could be interesting, movement looks very janky but I'm sure that can be smoothed out and refined. Hope it goes well.
P.S. Hydd / Orl helped me fix Sekiro - I had to edit a graphics settings XML file and set it as read only to override the game not saving windowed mode. THEN I could use a borderless mod. Good fun once I worked out what you have to do (follow the main path, meet the blacksmith, upgrade with runes, BEFORE even thinking of going through the Cellar or Catacombs which are accessible but totally gashbalanced before that point). Once that little issue was resolved I got into it and had a good time. A LOT more compact and a bit less exploratory than a typical Soulslike but still nice in it's own way.
Just noting here for future reference, the final boss combat was properly hard by the game's standards although not as ridiculous as the worst DS3 / Remnant broken bosses. But with some trial and error I found quite a successful way of dealing with him. For most of the game I was running a cleric / brawler build with fairly equal strength and faith, and relying successfully on gauntlet projectile + poison rune, single handed axe + poison rune, Ram prayer, light armour, and a lot of dodging. For the final boss I had to switch this up to using a double handed pole sword with double poison runes, and the Rage prayer. Crucially the pole sword has a very quick poke attack even on the heavy attack. I found this boss ALWAYS got in a ground slam when I tried to attack following his combos with the axe, but the polesword was much better. So.... His charge and jump attack - BLOCK with the polesword, it's almost impossible to dodge. The very common triple combo (two swipes then a slam), dodge these, heavy attack his butt, then immediately dodge (not possible with axe / gauntlet). With poison I was getting 400 damage over time. All other attacks ignore and dodge, although the double combo (swipe then ground stab) can also be followed with your attack. When he starts summoning, cast Rage ASAP then rag on him with normal attacks (and infinite stamina). When he disappears, do NOT do what online guides say and try to kill the summons and dodge his fire attack, far too difficult. Instead just hide in the doorway under him. After the second fire attack (out of 3) cast Rage again. When he jumps down rag on him senseless again, he'll get a lot of health steal from the remaining summons BUT you'll take a lot of that off (I was getting maybe 1000-1200 damage at least). Rinse and repeat. It took me 2 goes once I'd worked out this precise tactic (about 10-15 failed goes before that). Okay so Elden Ring is clearly massively flawed:
- PC port is bolloxed as usual with inadequate key rebinds, and very clunky menus. - Mouse movement is also bolloxed, being cripplingly slow on highest settings, then if this is overcome in Window's settings, the horse riding is nauseatingly jerky and bow-aiming is near-impossible. - The game runs really slowly, partly because the graphics scalability is woeful (i.e. still looks amazing on lowest settings, and could have been scaled down further). - "Invisible monster" bug took months to be fixed. - The lore and story is even more utter gobbledegook and before, managing to simultaneously be tediously generic and off-puttingly incomprehensible. It's like FromSoft put "generic epic fantasy cliches" into an AI text simulator, then translated it to Japanese and back to English using Google translate. - The copy'n'paste dungeons and re-used monsters / bosses are blatantly lazy filler design. - The open world can be a bit dull and tedious with too much empty wandering and lack of design. - The aesthetics and splendour sometimes rely too much on BIG for the sake of BIG and overwhelm the viewer by size rather than purpose. - The general aesthetics of the open world areas are a bit bland / chromatically jarring with the endless rocks and trees being a bit tiresome. - As usual some of the progression / exploration can be just as obscure as the lore with quests / areas requiring specific actions that are easy to miss / bugger up, and/or outright obscure secret-hunting. - The monster design is quite variable in quality from mundane (endless zombies and oversized real world critters) to OTT and bonkers (without logic to the combination). - In short it's a weird mish-mash of open world, tight but basic dungeons, and more conventional souls-like interconnected maps, almost certain to annoy both open-world RPG players who will get frustrated with the bosses / difficulty / FromSoft obscurity, AND traditional Soulsborne players who will get fed up with some bland emptiness and endless wandering around picking flowers and mushrooms. Okay so a few minor things I like:
+ quality-of-life tweaks are great: no stamina use outside of combat, open world mobs refill health flasks, all merchants buy almost all stuff so all collecting has value. + accessibility tweaks are great: almost all bosses are optional, bonfire spacing much closer, bonfires / stakes closer to bosses, coop / spirit ashes for all bosses, easy to explore / grind / level up + combat seems to give the player lots of valid options depending on playstyle preferences, with added bonus of spirit ashes and ashes of war + amount of exploration is as good as any open world RPG, plus loot selling makes it generally worthwhile + as usual some of the monsters are completely bonkers and very cool + the larger legacy dungeons are great in classic Soulslike style + the underground world is also great and atmospheric and almost an entire game in itself + the ambient music is really nice (i've unusually turned it back up from 20% that I usually set game music to) + occasional combats between other groups of enemies is a cool touch + the scenery and backdrops and vistas of the world as shockingly, anal-wart-poppingly, stunning in many and various ways. I've actually been laughing out loud about how ridiculously spectacular it looks in some areas. + the changing of the weather, day/night, and related ambience is a great touch. + the whole vibe of the world is a bit darker, a bit creepier, a bit WTF-ier than the open world average which provides a strong and gripping atmosphere + in short, I'm 140 hours in and I don't want to leave it It's a direct mixture of a Souls game with an open world RPG game, and everything that entails (very open-ended, lots of exploration, sometimes little interconnectivity, fast-movement option to compensate for size, plenty of crafting and resource-gathering options, the ability to avoid a lot of bosses, etc etc). It is exactly Dark Skyrim, or Elden Scrolls, and in that context... It's not the best Souls game around. It's not the best open world RPG around. It IS by far the best Open World Soulslike (released this spring).
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