Elden Ring: First-ish Impressions

One of the most hyped games of recent memory has undoubtedly been the latest of many masterclass titles from the developers at FromSoftware – Elden Ring. The game follows the design of their previous titles, most notably the “Souls games” and it is by far their greatest achievement. I have gone through the game twice thus far and enjoyed one playthrough more than the other, in the following post I will describe my First(ish) impressions from these two playthroughs.

I didn’t enjoy my first playthrough. I didn't find much fun due to the limitations of the combat system given in the game. My main criticism comes from the fact that both the bosses and the player have amazing and unique combat systems within them, however they are not fully compatible. The bosses don't have a proper stamina bar, they have long winded combos and react to the player's input in order to artificially inflate the difficulty. Even the best of designs like Margit have this issue of incredibly long attack chains with little to no proper room to react until you get incredibly good or simply create distance wait it out and get 1 or 2 strikes in. Meanwhile your character similarly has these incredible spells, ashes and incantations with intricate combos of weapons and power-stancing, however unlike your foes you are limited by your stamina bar and health bar. This being my first souls game the main response to this issue I got was "this is a from soft game max vigour idiot". Didn't solve my main gripe with the game. It is incredibly hard to dodge a full combo string from an enemy land your own special ability and get away without any punishment which feels like you are doing something wrong, when in reality your foes just don't operate on the same playing field as you do.

Taking Nioh 2 for instance where the player and the enemies have a visible stamina bar which can be depleted, and despite having long winded combos they always offer you a way to punish the enemy after them without taking any sort of punishment, regardless if you go into a series of combos and regardless if you use a heavy or light weapon.

Similarly, this bleeds into another problem which I too fell into my first playthrough - this being the fact that some things are just outright better than other and it's by a large margin. Stuff like Rivers of Blood (which ruined my first playthrough) bloodhound step, sorceries in general and the mimic tear all are vastly superior in spite of the nerfs they received, to almost anything in the game. This leads to the players on subsequent playthroughs having to outright weaken themselves in order to avoid these over tuned things which leads to my final problem with the game, which doesn't fall into the "personal preference category" and that's issues with exploration. This method of best builds and so on leads to so much content being outright obsolete and waisted because it just doesn't fit your playstyle or build, which is fine, however this means that some of the best crafted dungeons, legacy dungeons or even areas will offer no rewards whatsoever and it significantly brings down the absolutely best aspect of the game. This coupled with repeat enemies, dull catacombs and lacklustre rewards to exploration really brings down the true masterclass in design this game has to offer.

And that masterclass is absolutely exploration. Every bit of the game is incredibly crafted from Limgrave, (which could have been done slightly better with the player starting off at the Weeping Peninsula instead) all through Caelid and Liurnia up to the Mountaintop of the giants where the game has a significant drop in quality in terms of the sheer amount of content, however the barrenness of the area fits the lore and i appreciated the more sombre yet chilling (pun intended) stroll through the area. And after that the game clearly feels like it's missing some content as it feels mostly like a boss rush after you explore the Crumbling Farum Azula (though I suspect the DLC areas will remedy this).

But all of that is incredibly jampacked with content that I couldn't imagine a triple A having. Not because of its sheer amount - see the shitstorm Valhalla is, but because of its overall quality and consistency in throwing one incredible and breath-taking scene after another at the player. It's simply marvellous how the game leaves the player with an endless stream of content both visually and mechanically. This too has the aforementioned gripes, however they pale in comparison, because visiting and exploring these places is a reward in its own right. And the most shocking thing is, you are never done exploring. There is a whole subsection underground which is undoubtedly the best this game has to offer. You just keep going and going and going through an endless list of awe-inspiring areas (and the shitty Lake of Rot), and all of this is coupled with one of the most fun and interesting SIDE QUESTS (it's Not even mandatory for the main story) I’ve ever experienced.

And that's my thought of the game perfectly summarized - " You don't play Elden Ring, you Experience it". The game isn't a mechanical masterpiece, far from it, the game is clunky in terms of it's weird parkour, input queuing and weird hitboxes, it's not ideal in terms of a reward structure for beating these foes, it's absolutely the best gaming experience in terms of visual and artistic design, and absolutely the best exploration experience by far.

After completing my first playthrough which was riddled with issues of me not being used to an input queuing combat system, not knowing which items are good and bad, how the upgrade system works and how the quests worked. I found myself bomb rushing through content, completing no side quests and dropping the game at Elden beast, because I hated the design of the boss fight. Recently I decided to restart while modding the game, I reduced the input queuing a bit making it faster to cancel out of abilities, gave all the golden runes the value of 99k mostly to buy whatever spell or incantation I wanted and removed the smithing stone and grave flower requirement for upgrades. This led me to exploring everything in detail, going through initial areas like a madman in pursuit of every nook and cranny, trying to jam as much content as humanly possible. Then I stumbled onto Ranni's questline which gave me one of, if not the best, gaming experience of my life, it was constant exploration, constant awe at the new locations and the surprise which kept on giving, a new area yet again! And I realised what I was missing from this game, the true value it posses, the exploration.

The combat still doesn't feel satisfying to me, probably because great swords are incredibly bad in this game, but that doesn't matter because I can make it look flashy with ashes of war, spells and incantations, that doesn't matter because, all I care about is seeing another fun questline with amazingly acted characters and surprising plotlines, that doesn't matter because this game is about exploration first and not much more second.

I plan on doing another playthrough, completely raw without mods, because the game has so much to offer and any other criticism I may give is due to personal preference, like how I prefer a more " Ubisoft- esque" approach to quests where I can properly track it and not lose it because I accidentally did a wrong and miss out on so much dialogue which can only be retraced with a new playthrough, or the fact that the parkour, if you can call it that, is clunky and slow, but that's because I am a huge AC fan, or how the upgrade system feels dull, tedious and limiting, but none of that is ruining my experience. It's mostly overlooked and rarely an issue with a game this awe inspiring.

And I wanna end on the same note i previously mentioned - " You don't play Elden Ring, you Experience it."