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S3 Ep199: Elden Ring - Spoiler Free
87 Plays4 years ago
Join Dave and Jake about everything Elden Ring (except spoilers) in this week's episode! Next week we're going FULL SPOILERS BABYYYYY
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Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
Welcome and Introduction
00:00:36
Speaker
you
00:01:18
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake and I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going tonight, Dave?
Dave's Unusual Day
00:01:27
Speaker
I think it's actually going pretty good. Though after work, I felt very tired. I was having some weird gas and I just laid down for an hour, which I do not do. The gas happens all the time, but I don't fucking take naps. I never know when you need to take a nap. If anything, you've looked down on people with disdain. Whenever they mention taking naps, you're like, really? Really? If you're going to cheat on sleep like that, get out of here.
00:01:54
Speaker
I mean, anytime somebody's like, I'm tired. I'm like, you should rest and like take care of yourself. And then I'm like, no naps. I don't know. I, I like the idea of like, Oh, at a time that evening I'll get tired and they'll have a full sleep. Um, so usually if I can just like push past to that, I will, but I felt really weirdly zonked. So I was just like, we don't feel so great. Let's lay down. Did you lay down or did you sleep? This is the important distinction.
00:02:22
Speaker
Uh, I think I actually did take a nap. I did those off for like 30, 40 minutes. And I worked up an eight Chinese food. Um, how about you? What's funny. If it was me, the ordering could be rearranged. It's like eight Chinese food. Then I had gas. I didn't feel so good. So I laid down and took a nap. You ever fart so hard, you went unconscious. No, but it doesn't sound good.
Mid-20s Life and Socializing
00:02:51
Speaker
I'm imagining like an old like Disney style animation of like you lay down, you fart, the blankets go up and then they slowly like ripple back down and cover your whole body and tuck you in. Yeah. Now that would be pretty funny.
00:03:07
Speaker
But I'm glad you're doing well. It's good to hear. I was going to cynically ask you to justify it when you said you were actually doing good. Explain that. Oh, I mean, I would dive into it. If I actually was providing a reason, it'd be Elden Ring probably.
00:03:24
Speaker
That's like doing a lot of the heavy lifting these days. Yeah. And like interacting with friends when I get the chance. That's always fucking so nice and wholesome and lifts my spirits. Yeah. Like a lot of them are willing to talk about Elden Ring and share interests. I was hanging out with Justin and Rachel yesterday and like, again, like I was just coming off work stuff and I was kind of like mentally just
00:03:49
Speaker
fucking done with the day. But we went on a walk and we're talking about some live stuff. And I don't have a lot going on unless I'm complaining about health issues or something, which I don't really enjoy doing. So you're like, this thing sucks. You're like, yeah, that does suck. I'm like, OK. For me, it's a dead end conversation, so I don't usually bring it up.
00:04:07
Speaker
Um, after a certain point, like all of your friends also have health issues. They're just different health issues. I think the point hit like it was around 25 to 30. Everybody got something and it's just like, yeah. Yeah. This is life now. Well, I think everybody has something. We just now have the insight to like, see what it is. Like, Oh, yeah. But now we can hopefully get prescribed medications who help with whatever. Yeah. Delta.
Elden Ring: A New Obsession
00:04:40
Speaker
But like, then somebody said like, so Elden Ring? And I was like, yeah. And then I realized I had more to talk about and share with Elden Ring than I do my own life. So take that with a grain of salt and as you will, but that's who I am currently. I mean, Elden Ring boy.
00:04:57
Speaker
I touched on it a little bit, but it is nice to have a touch point, something you're excited about. Other people are excited about. It's fresh. It's not like you're not that person talking about Dark Souls 2 X years later, still trying to justify it to everybody else. You're just like, Elden Ring is pretty good. And then a bunch of other people are like, Elden Ring is pretty good. And you're like, yeah, let's talk about that.
00:05:25
Speaker
and then you know how many good mythical warning things are you doing right now accounting two yeah i'm just saying they're a little bit ahead of us and the podcast rankings oh i think they're ranked
00:05:41
Speaker
But yeah, Elden Ring. So this is our first episode in Soapstone, which is now an Elden Ring podcast. Probably have at least one follow-up, but this is the spoiler-free one. So you should have read the description because, I mean, we put a lot of work into those.
00:06:06
Speaker
It's okay. I copy paste it and I change it. But yeah, we're not going to be naming, you know, anything that's not in a previous game, I guess. We'll talk about some mechanics. I think if it's in a trailer, I think if it's in a trailer, we're good because there's at least one boss I'd probably talk about. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. We can talk about
00:06:30
Speaker
Is it the first boss? I can't actually, cause some people actually do skip the trailers, which is fair, but we can talk about the first boss. I think that's fair. It's good to do a comparison. I think just some of the other to compare to other like bosses, you know, across the series, but this is Elden Ring from the top level perspective, not story plot details.
00:06:52
Speaker
where you find anything. It's not going to be pure rambling of like, did you see this one thing, this one side? It's not going to be that type of discussion. We're not the prima strategy guide. No. It is very much though like even like pre-recording, we talked for like an hour and most of that was just about Elden Ring things. A lot of which we could get some of the spoilers out of the way. Also like
00:07:17
Speaker
I've played like 140 hours of the game, roughly. Yeah. I'm on my second playthrough. I'm still finding stuff. Hey, Dave, how much did you play when it first came out? I forgot it was my mom's birthday. There's something, I forgot that Attack on Titan came out.
00:07:34
Speaker
You know, it was like Tuesday. I was like, Oh shit. Right. Watch that. Um, but I've been very much in it for at least that first play through. And now I'm cognizant of things happening in society again. I'm still very much focused on that. Coming up for air a little bit. It's still the dedicated game. You play some other things still, but it's mostly it's like social breaks. Would you say? Yeah. Yeah. Do some stuff with people. And then.
00:08:04
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say I play hots by myself. So maybe that's not a social break. I don't know what that is. Um, I clear daily, so whatever, but then I, you know, go back to it. Um, I took a little bit of a break cause I moved. Um, and so I'm behind in play time. I think you're about 30% up on play time compared to my save looking at like 80 hours or so on my first play through. Um, but.
00:08:32
Speaker
for our credentials, uh, before we jump into the critique of Elden Ring, um, podcast is based on Dark Souls. We talk about Dark Souls a lot. Um, not as much as body video, but still a lot, right? Like, um, so, you know, expect comparisons to other things in the series. Um,
00:08:58
Speaker
And you know That's
Elden Ring's Open World and Mechanics
00:09:00
Speaker
that's our credentials. That's literally we played the other games Not king's field though. Haven't played demon souls because how the fuck do you get a ps5? But like I don't even want one not anymore, you know I really just want it for demon souls and like that's it. It's the one game I want to play but the thing is I mean we're gonna talk about all the drink but like
00:09:19
Speaker
How excited are you to play Demon's Souls since Elden Rings came out? Like you know it's going to be a more classic style. So here's the thing, right? Remember that game Tunic that I've been talking about for like three or four years? Yeah. That came out yesterday. Oh.
00:09:35
Speaker
I have no plans to play it. Like at some point in like a year, it will go on sale and I'll check it out. I'll be like, this is cute and fun. But for right now, everything seems to pale in comparison for like this big grandiose Dark Souls adventure that I've very much been looking forward to. I didn't even know like what it would be. But now that I have it.
00:09:59
Speaker
everything else just seems to really pale. Yeah. Unless it's a very specific thing, like, Oh, I'm doing magic, the gathering dailies. Oh, I'm doing a multiplayer of a different type of game. Yeah. It's the spotlight right now. This is definitely on Elden ring. I mean, horizon, new dollar. It's called like, I'm going to be a month eventually before Elden ring. I would have checked it out. Yeah. It was a little too close. I am so excited to play. I'll play it eventually, but I mean, saying I'm excited to play is a little,
00:10:29
Speaker
It's in the shadow. Everything exists currently in the Eclipse. I don't know whether it's the Penumbra or Antumbra. Nerds chime in and chat, I guess. Wait, this isn't Twitch. Chime in on Facebook, wherever this is posted, whether it's Penumbra or Antumbra. It's in the shadow of Elden Ring, which has surprised nobody.
00:10:50
Speaker
We've been talking about this game. We've wanted to talk about this game more than we did leading up to it. That was restraint on our part. It's really weird because every time I see somebody playing it on Steam, I message them like, hey, how's it going? Where are you? I just want to suck their life energy away by living vicariously through them.
00:11:16
Speaker
Because I want to be like, oh, oh, I found this cool thing. I'm like, oh, that's so cool. And then I want them to share the same experiences I did, like the first time you see like a certain boss or like what they do. Like, how cool is that? That's really cool. I want a vibe off of that so much, which is why every time I talk to you, I'm like, have you done the thing?
00:11:36
Speaker
And I just keep it varying terms. Latitude, longitude. Have you seen anything in this area? Even we were talking about an NPC at one point, and I said, is the NPC related to this?
00:11:55
Speaker
And the other descriptions, they could have been the same person, and then I said something, and you're like, oh, it's a different one. I'm like, okay, and then I just stopped talking. And I don't think it would ruin it for you, but it's so much, I don't want my experience to taint somebody else's experience. I want them to have their own thing, love it or hate it. How could you not love it? Dave will hate you if you hate it. Just throw that out there.
00:12:21
Speaker
If good reasons are provided, I am willing to hear you out, but it's like going to... Did you ever go to like a church summer camp type thing? Yeah. You know how you're like riding that high of like everybody's on the exact same wavelength because you're all there for the same thing? Yeah. It's like that. Jesus, you're high on Jesus. High on Jesus, entirely. And I'm high on this game.
00:12:48
Speaker
Yeah, I've actually thought about that concept a little bit because there is this search church summer camp, like worship vibe. Like everybody gets into it and it is like electric.
00:13:00
Speaker
I assume it's the same as if you go to like a concert. Yeah. You're there for the band and then you're having this live music experience with people and not to get like hippy dippy, but like you, do you feel the vibe and the energy? Like if everybody's having a really good time, like, okay, yeah, I can, I can get on board with this. Or if you're somebody who likes to mosh, you very much feel it in the mosh pit. Right. Like it's a, it's an active thing that you're a part of and you experience it more because of the people are feeling the same way. Yeah.
00:13:29
Speaker
I mean, like, and this isn't even the first time that we've had this type of experience. Dark Souls 3 was also very much like that. We had a bunch of friends playing at the same time. We had people sharing their discoveries and, you know, their builds and all of that.
00:13:45
Speaker
That's the advantage to getting in ground floor for this type of game is a lot of people are still in that exploration high. So that's where we're at or where I'm at. Dave's beat the game. He's seen it all. Not all. Just a lot. I've seen a lot. There's a lot. I've seen everything. It's too late.
00:14:10
Speaker
But I guess for the people who somehow don't know what Elden
Combat and Exploration in Elden Ring
00:14:17
Speaker
Ring is in 2022, current year, maybe they don't know what video games are. We have to make that assumption. How would you describe Elden Ring? Do I have the podcast out of this week? I think so.
00:14:33
Speaker
Put a deep breath sound effect right here. I could have just breathed deeply. It's essentially big Dark Souls. A lot of the combat and how the game feels and is designed
00:14:52
Speaker
is very much the same. But obviously with this, as they've kind of shown in trailers and other things, it is open world, meaning you're not gated to you have to go here and do this thing. Or if you can't do it, you're stuck in this limited area of stuff. You can really fuck off to a lot of places and skip a lot of content if for some reason you don't want to do this current thing that's blocking you.
00:15:19
Speaker
or you just want to explore, right? Yeah. It's the Dark Souls of open world games. I had to interrupt you. It's got to come up a couple times. But yeah, it is still very much the same flavor and style of game, just on a much, much larger scale. Yeah.
00:15:43
Speaker
It only benefits the game because we love Dark Souls very much for how it's designed, how you have to go out of your way to get a deeper story, the combat's fun, the level design's cool, but imagine that to a billion percent.
00:16:02
Speaker
Yeah, like it's not anytime you see open a world. It's always the hey, how fucking vapid is it going to be? How copy pasted will this type of thing be? Yeah, and like there are certain things that have similarities, but it doesn't feel like.
00:16:18
Speaker
Oh, it's that exact same shit again. I get so much exhilaration from exploring and finding things. Even on the second playthrough, I just found something before we started recording. I was like, oh shit, how did I miss that? Right. So to finish my 13 hour sentence, I would say it is very much big Dark Souls. Yeah.
00:16:44
Speaker
Would you agree with that? Would you add to it or subtract a lot of what I said? Yeah, I was going to say third person action adventure, but I mean, that works too. That's fine. I agree with all of it. I would say that even when in the past in Dark Souls, mostly, I guess everything in the series really had some degree of pick your path.
00:17:08
Speaker
Obviously an open world game is a lot more of pick your path. It's not just like, do I want to go to the northern area or the western area or the southern area first? It's like, go wherever I want. There's a bunch of super dangerous enemies. I'm going to giddy up horsey past all of them.
00:17:28
Speaker
Um, which is a lot of times actually the right call, just, you know, do that. Um, we haven't talked about the horse, obviously that's every open world game has a horse. That's just, it's mandatory now. Um, and I think like they still have a lot of that.
00:17:47
Speaker
classic Dark Souls level design, specifically like forts or like different areas you can explore that are explicitly, hey, this is a level for you to play in. Yeah. And there's really no difference in those areas. In fact, they're usually horse disallowed. No pony here. I would even say some of the horse-allowed areas still feel very Dark Souls.
00:18:14
Speaker
But like the major breakdown of some of the areas, Jake mentioned forts, which is a fort. You will find certain like dungeons or caverns where you can have like a more of a mini dungeon experience where the caverns usually you'll find resource to kind of upgrade your weapons and gear. And then the dungeons are usually for a specific item reward or ash reward.
00:18:41
Speaker
Yeah. And that was actually, I don't know, I don't know if I intend this to be critique or not, maybe. He mentioned copy pasting, like the catacomb like areas are very copy pasted. They're different.
00:18:57
Speaker
There's a lot of them. But they share a lot of the same DNA. Yes, exactly. They use the same pallets. They use the same entrances and exits between like rooms. Sometimes they have unique rooms. They share some traps. Occasionally you get like a unique one that is very different. But for the most part, you just send into one of these and you know what the experience is going to be. Go through, you know, find switch, fight boss, get out, get a reward. And the reward oftentimes is worth it.
00:19:28
Speaker
A friend actually criticized how every review mentions Breath of the Wild, but it's impossible not to make some comparisons, obviously the horse in the open world, all of that, but specifically when it comes to the dungeons.
00:19:46
Speaker
It is somewhat similar to the Breath of the Wild shrines and that they also shared the same palette. And it was literally just, you know, different puzzle this time. This one's less puzzle focused. It's more combat focused in most instances because Dark Souls is more of a combat game than a puzzle game. Thank goodness. Or I'd be careful at it. But it is the point I was trying to make is it is the flip side of the coin. There is all of the open world stuff.
00:20:13
Speaker
that's innovative and changes up the Dark Souls formula, adds a bunch of things that have never been present in a Soulsborne series game before. And then they do have more traditional content where it's like, you want to just play Dark Souls with some of the gear and the spells and stuff like that? Go for it.
00:20:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I agree with what you're saying. I do. As somebody else has said as well, like it's definitely the weakest part of the content overall, because it is very much like the most similar to each thing. But specifically like the catacombs, right? Like the forts I actually kind of enjoyed the traditional levels of castles and things like that.
00:20:56
Speaker
Well, I'm actually separating forts from like the bigger. Hey, this is like a main main main story quest type. Yeah. I mean, it's still usually a fucking castle. It's like things that will have like multiple checkpoints and like shortcuts and like intricacies. Yeah, it's.
00:21:20
Speaker
I'd say that those are like the main big things, open world, dungeons for its big bases, whatever the fuck you want to call it.
00:21:31
Speaker
And like, I guess, uh, to continue talking about like how it's different or similar to previous series, like, so usually in Dark Souls, you have different areas and it's literally just like you walk through a transition and the text comes up on the screen and it's like, here you go. You're in Blighttown or whatever. Um, and since this is an open world game and it's a very big world, it takes time to run across it. Thankfully you can fast travel anytime you're not in combat.
00:22:00
Speaker
I actually was talking to somebody at work who didn't realize they thought that you could only fast travel from the bonfire equivalents. They're called shrines of grace in this game. Weird. I don't know why anybody would have that assumption. Person who's done it a billion times as well. I didn't actually know.
00:22:18
Speaker
that you could fast travel from them. I thought you had to be not interacting with them to fast travel, but Dark Souls has pretty early in the series. They were like, okay, fast travel all the time is kind of convenient and right out the gate. They open up with it and Elden Ring, and thank goodness, because the world is gigantic.
00:22:41
Speaker
But it's got a bunch of very diverse biomes that usually, based off of how ominous it is, give you a feel for how potentially dangerous it might be, how scared you should be to be there.
00:22:55
Speaker
And you get to run around, fight things on horseback or any other levels on foot if they disallow the horse. How do you think the introduction of the horse has changed Dark Souls? Better or worse? Or non-change?
00:23:17
Speaker
So blanket statement, they they allowed jumping blanket
Innovations and Comparisons
00:23:22
Speaker
statement. There is now such a degree of verticality that they have injected into the series because of that. So you as a person can jump.
00:23:32
Speaker
you on a horse can double jump. Like Jake said, it is gated in certain areas because that'd be cheesy as fuck to be like flying around a horse through like just skipping everything. But it really makes travel a lot easier and enjoyable because like you have these beautifully fucking crafted landscapes
00:23:55
Speaker
And some of them were just like, fine, like starting area. Fine. Very pretty. Loved it. Yeah. Then you found some other areas that I was like mouth agape, like, holy fuck. And I was just vibing, loving how it was designed and laid out. Um, but having the horse as far as movement and changing things around.
00:24:15
Speaker
It opens up everything because with that double jump, you're like, could I get over here? Can you run around an enemy and cheese them and just hit them and then try and not get hit? Yeah, you can do that too. It just opens up so, so much.
00:24:33
Speaker
And it feels good to run around and do shit on it. Yeah. Like for mobility in general, it's amazing. Obviously, it's very fast and kind of necessary to have some sort of accelerated movement in an open world game. It's like this big. But like mounted combat is something not all games do when they introduce horses originally. I'm going back, I guess, to oblivion at this point. I don't know why I'm comparing this to oblivion, but didn't even know you could have a horse in oblivion.
00:25:03
Speaker
You could have a horse, Shadow Mirror. I didn't play that game. That's fair. The horse armor was the notorious DLC for it. But you could give armor for your horse, but you couldn't fight on horseback. I don't know if any mods ever enabled that or not.
00:25:19
Speaker
It's fully supported in Elden Ring. I keep wanting to say it's not Dark Souls 3 or 4, it's Elden Ring. And beyond that, they've made some improvements to the combat system we can talk about in general, but on horseback you can cast a lot of spells. Not all of them, not things that are massive casts or require you to
00:25:44
Speaker
wave your body real weird as part of casting the spell. But otherwise, you can run around and cast spells. You can do horseback archery.
00:25:54
Speaker
Yeah. And that's something I didn't know about for a long time. I thought it's like, cause usually I have like man hand weapon, left hand spell shit, but you can switch your weapons so that you're like throwing spells from your right hand. And like that for me was huge. Yeah. I haven't even tried bows, but like you can do that while mounted. Holy shit. You can now kite a lot of enemies. Yeah. Anyone who's played like mountain blade.
00:26:20
Speaker
and like set your army to just be horse archers. You know how devastatingly good that can be when you can just kite the enemy. And there's a lot of open world foes that personally, I like I've really engaged with mounted combat and like I feel significantly more dangerous if they let me have the horse than I do off of the horse. Yeah, it's.
00:26:51
Speaker
I don't know. It's just so fun. Also the fucking jump pads, which for the longest time, like as soon as you go on a jump pad, it launches you so high into the air. So high. Um, it's, it's like going on a roller coaster ride, which I hear is fun, but I've never tried it. Um, have you not? I have been once or twice. It makes me feel nauseous and panicked. No one likes it. Yeah. No, it's, uh, the fear is what drives people. I think.
00:27:18
Speaker
Yeah, it's like it was fun, like jumping off of these pads to like get to certain areas. But then I found out later from talking to people, oh, you can throw your horse off a cliff, land on that and you'll get the same buff so you don't die from the fall damage. I'm like, oh, shit. So now you can go up really high or you can go down really low instead of trying to go all the way around a certain path, which is if you've played Dark Souls in Blighttown, you have to go through manually.
00:27:48
Speaker
Yeah. So it feels good to be able to see a thing and be like, Oh, I want to go check that out. And then you go do it. Yeah. Yeah. The, the world is very much designed for you to come at it at like different angles. Yeah. There's certain points where it's like, Hey, specifically there's a few points of ingress to this particular plateau or whatever you've got. But like.
00:28:09
Speaker
For the most part, you can just explore. You can just figure it out at your own pace. Fight whatever you want to fight, ignore whatever you want to ignore. And it's the open world. And have a good time with it. To that end, the map is, well, one, it exists. So that's a first for a Soulsborne game.
00:28:31
Speaker
But just to clarify, this is the overworld map. Yes. So if you're in like some it's more nitty gritty, it won't be the most obvious for like, oh, there's this hallway in this room here. It doesn't go down to that scale. But as far as the Legend of Zelda, no map at all. Or that you very much get like important landmarks and where you are. Yeah, you have the compass all the time, actually, but you don't see yourself in a room, an overhead room or anything quite that convenient.
00:29:01
Speaker
Here you're hitting walls I mean legend was all that did that they would literally say like here is where a wall is well If it was like a breakable wall, it wouldn't show you I guess but you would see all of the exits anyways But yeah the overworld map tremendously useful. Obviously you kind of need it in an open-world game You're gonna have a rough time Another thing they took from Legend of Zelda
00:29:25
Speaker
presumably use the ability to put icons all over the map you can denote like oh here's where i think you know here's a plant symbol and that could mean anything to you for me it started out meaning here's where plants are and then i realized
00:29:41
Speaker
Jamie put a lot of plant markers on the map. Well, I realized I didn't care most of the time where plants were because I could just like record somewhere else, you know, a good farming spot for something. We haven't talked about crafting yet, but like I realized that symbol didn't really mean anything. So recent development, I was like, okay, it's not single use plant. It's going to be the word farm.
00:30:07
Speaker
So if I want to farm something, like a boss in co-op or something like that, boss symbol, plant symbol. And now this is the system I'm basically developing for how I want to mark things. And it's really useful. Yeah. Initially, before the patch that just happened yesterday, I was just marking, oh, NPCs for shops. Oh, they have stone sword keys I want to get later.
00:30:37
Speaker
They're here for later. I'll check it out if I have extra stuff because I wasn't like, oh, I got to save up for this now because I'll never come back. But with the options of fast travel, you're just like, I'm here now doing this shit, which is really nice because.
00:30:54
Speaker
I don't know how you explore, but for me, I don't do traveling salesman. I do, ooh, and then I go and then I'm like, okay, this area on the map looks kind of empty as far as icons or other things. Maybe I'll draw a line between these two points and see if I find anything.
00:31:12
Speaker
Yeah, I usually do left or right hand rule. So you'll hug something around? I'll hug, go around, and then just circle in until I'm confident I've explored or marked everything. I do have a symbol. There's like a banner symbol you can mark on the map. It's like a flag. And that's my unexplored point of interest that I've seen. So I like to throw that out. I do the same for that. Yeah. Sometimes I'll find something. I'm like, there's a split in the path here. I'm going to forget one of these. Put a marker down.
00:31:42
Speaker
Yeah, which is nice. I would encourage anyone who hasn't played the game, but is planning on getting into it, to straight up write a journal though. It's gonna be a little bit easier if an NPC tells you something and you're like, that seems important.
00:31:56
Speaker
Write it down. If there's a goal that you don't want to tackle immediately, just write it down. It'll be a lot easier for task tracking. The game doesn't have a quest journal. We can talk about this a little bit, I think.
00:32:14
Speaker
It's very on Elder Scrolls in that matter. And the Elder Scrolls is like, don't use your memory. There's a journal. We're going to list out every quest, even some of the little miscellaneous things we'll throw under the miscellaneous quest category. And we'll put up a map marker for it. This game does not do that.
00:32:35
Speaker
No, this isn't a standard AAA game where it's like feeding you stuff. I'm not saying that to like the little how that's designed. It's just FromSoft games have never been designed that way. They're always like, hey, we told you once or like we gave you an item that says like a vague description of something. You go figure that shit out if you want to. So it rewards people who very much are like looking to find that puzzle piece or like finish somebody's quest line.
00:33:04
Speaker
um or somebody who's willing to look up a wiki afterwards because they didn't even know that there was a questline type thing versus like hey it's on your map which i like because i don't
00:33:17
Speaker
I get more out of the discovery and doing from that than if they said, hey, here, pick one of these overarching quest lines. Because some of this stuff's honestly just optional content. You don't have to beat everything in this game and do everything to beat the game. Most of it's optional.
00:33:35
Speaker
Yeah, but I've really, really loved exploring the area. I can't talk to Jake about it yet, because he hasn't done it. And the stuff in there, because it's really cool, but I also had to do a quest line, and then go explore the area, and then you see all this bright and cool, shiny new shit. And it felt good, instead of putting a marker on the top saying, hey, here are the requisite steps you need to do for this. Yeah. There are actually a few quests.
00:34:05
Speaker
I think maybe I've seen two where they do actually put a marker on your map and it's explicitly like that. And it's actually thrown me off because I'm like, wait a minute. Nobody else is doing this. Why is there a marker on the map now? I'm not actually sure exactly what the distinction was.
00:34:25
Speaker
that they decided to throw that marker on the map. It's convenient. I think I only did one of those quests so far, but it's very rare. For the most part, it holds true that any NPC will tell you literal directions, geographical, like go north of this location, check out this thing.
00:34:50
Speaker
But if you pay attention to that, if you write it down, if you keep a journal on the side, it's actually a really rewarding way to play. And I think it can be a lot more engaging than a quest marker, simulator type situation. Because I know sometimes I just brain off in Skyrim and follow the arrow, kill things that were in the way. And if you try to brain off in Dark Souls, you tend to die.
00:35:19
Speaker
unless you're just like really good. I'm not. And, you know, apprehension is the number one defense you have in any Soulsborne game. You're just like, I don't think I'm comfortable here. And then it's justified. Yeah, typically, like with all of these games, like something's trying to fuck you over. It's just sometimes, you know, and other times you're about to find out
Survival Strategies in Elden Ring
00:35:46
Speaker
Yeah, like what I love is like some of these things that have held true is like design principles since FromSoft day one. Like, oh, there's a lone enemy just like minding his own business, you know, picking his nose.
00:36:02
Speaker
He has friends nearby. I'll let you know that right now. Yeah, one enemy hits back towards you, looking at a wall. Oh, do you want to try the backstab critical attack? Yeah. Are you in the tutorial? No. It's probably not that easy. Yeah, there's always something. But I feel like a lot of that is you learn and find out and get punished, and then you get better at it.
00:36:24
Speaker
But even so, I've watched Seoul's veterans, myself included, fall into these same patterns. And you still get caught by it. And I'm like, ah, you got me again. And I knew. And I knew.
00:36:37
Speaker
The important thing is you basically follow the exact same mantra that you do in Eve which is don't fly a ship you're not willing to lose and it's Don't investigate a dangerous area if you have ruins and you're willing to lose
00:36:55
Speaker
Yeah, which are this game souls There are times like I'll still Because I'm like level let's say 110 for sake of already been at the moment on this character and Like I need a decent number of runes to level up. Yeah, but I still feel confident usually running through most areas and killing enemies That said there are times where I have lost like I
00:37:21
Speaker
a chunk of stuff because I'm like, oh, OK, they got me. I'm just going to run back and get my stuff real quick. And then something happened. You get taps. And they're gone. Yeah. Yeah, the game is dangerous. There's lots of different ways you can build your build out, obviously, for people who are new to the series or not new to the series. Putting points into health is recommended. Put points into health. That's my beginner advice.
00:37:51
Speaker
Yeah, all enemies do this thing called damage and it hits your health. Now, if you run out of that health, you die. You die. Shows up on the screen to inform you of what just happened. So like at this point in the game, like I have enough stats to have certain gear that I want to have equipped and scale in a certain way. But like a lot of the extra points, I say extra like I just have to floating about. It's going into health because a lot of what will kill me is just I take a hit that's too big.
00:38:21
Speaker
I need to heal back up so I can survive other hits. Yeah. Really what helps you in like these bigger fights is having a health pool. Yeah. So you can like essentially recuperate space up, heal up and be like, okay, I got to watch out for that attack again. And then you start to learn the patterns. But if you die in one hit all the time, you can't really learn as much.
00:38:45
Speaker
Yeah, I guess not to turn this literally into in the middle intermission, the beginner's tips for Elden Ring, but also you mentioned learn a pattern. And that is my recommendation for like anybody fighting a boss or enemy they haven't seen before. I'm not always the best at doing it.
00:39:06
Speaker
But just running at them is attacking as quickly as possible. It really only works if you've got Dave's late game strength build. Otherwise, you tend to get punished really quickly because one of the mechanics that carried over is poise. And it's basically just a value. How much of a beating can you take before you'll get staggered?
00:39:30
Speaker
You have poise. Most bosses, maybe most, I think most, also has poise. Every single enemy in the game has poise.
00:39:40
Speaker
I'm going to find one enemy just to prove you wrong, where it just can't be staggered. But they all have, I mean, obviously it's easier on smaller enemies who are kind of like a wandering undead. They don't have armor or anything. But one of the things they added specifically in this game is all of the bosses will have poise as well. So if you keep getting good hits on them, even if it doesn't look like it's affecting them, you are essentially building up a meter of their poise breaking.
00:40:06
Speaker
And when that happens, you have the opportunity to perform a critical attack on them where they'll have like a glowing weak spot and you have a really bad ass animation for a huge chunk of damage, which really oftentimes will help in the boss fight.
00:40:19
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of other, it's existed in a lot of, I guess Dark Souls two and three started more. It also was in one to a certain extent, but very few enemies I feel like in one, mostly humanoid enemies. And they introduced it to a lot of different types. I think they started with Sekiro, honestly, a lot of enemies had posture, I think they called it there. But yeah, anyways, in any case,
00:40:46
Speaker
It's really dangerous to just get hit by all of these attacks because you have less health than the boss in pretty much every case, almost every case. So playing patiently, learning the move set of what the boss is going to throw out and looking for little windows when you can attack. That is actually the better way to have a chance to beat a boss on the first attempt or second attempt.
00:41:10
Speaker
I have never done that once. As far as like learn the first time, I'm very much like, let me hit them. And then I start to slowly piece together. I'm like, all right, every time I do this, this seems to happen. Let me not do that. Respect starts at zero until you get hit. It's a meter that builds up over time based on my number of deaths. Yeah.
00:41:30
Speaker
But anyways, end of intermission, we should talk about some of the mechanical differences in combat, some of the other differences. Obviously, all of our other Dark Souls-like game episodes are up there, so you could hear those to hear more about the other ones in the series.
00:41:47
Speaker
One of the big ones for me, one of the standouts is the build variety. What is actually viable and what you can run with is kind of insane in Elden Ring. If there was something esoteric that you liked running, unless it was literally adaptability,
00:42:08
Speaker
in Dark Souls 2. You should have leveled it. It probably works in Elden Ring. From a selling point of what has been added or changed,
00:42:28
Speaker
A lot of the weapons and if you have a straight sword, performs like a straight sword. If you have a great sword, performs like a great sword. And there's other varieties of weapons where you can do different things. But on top of that, if it's not a special weapon, meaning it has to be baked into it,
00:42:48
Speaker
There are these things called Ashes of War. And Ashes of War are special abilities you can use your FP or your magic for to use that ability. But what's cool is I could take, let's say, a war stomp for like a big AOE to kind of like shake some enemies off me. I could put it on my shortsword. I could move that over to my greatsword. I could do something else that's more magical that deals fire damage, right?
00:43:15
Speaker
But me doing that to the weapon, I can switch that around. I don't have to have it. And even if I have a fire effect on my straight sword, I don't need to have it scale off of something that would be for fire damage. So like in my late game of like my first playthrough, I had like this big ass weapon.
00:43:33
Speaker
it had poison as the Ash of War on it. I poisoned big enemies and it was helpful for damage, but it scaled off strength. That was my big stat, still getting a lot of damage from strength. Also, that weapon just had bleed on it. I was going to town on these people, but if I wanted to, I could have switched up from poison to something else. I could have scaled my weapon differently. I could have reinvested my points. That alone
00:44:01
Speaker
Not even talking about magic really opens up a lot of options for how you want to play because Jake could play something with a straight sword entirely different from how I did. I am actually right now, basically. Really cool straight sword that I'm not going to talk about because it's very unique.
00:44:21
Speaker
Yeah, and in fact to contrast that to like previous games and something ideologically the Elden Ring is done is and it started honestly in Dark Souls 3 Dark Souls 3 was the game where they were like
00:44:36
Speaker
Is there a reason that we're not just letting players do this conveniently? They started asking themselves that. Um, good example of this is, uh, co-op across the Soulsborne games.
00:44:52
Speaker
Oh my fucking god, yeah. Like in Dark Souls 1, I think it was plus or minus 10 levels plus 10%. It was your co-op range, something like that. Dark Souls 2 was a similar system, but it also used soul memory, which nobody liked. But it was, the intent was to keep people from like,
00:45:12
Speaker
Griefing other yes. Yeah, like getting a really low level It's never leveling up and then going back and just killing new players tons There was a good intent behind it. But the idea is Yeah, I kind of fell flat on its face because it's just like
00:45:29
Speaker
You died a bunch, you lost a bunch of souls, you can't co-op with people at your own level anymore. And Dark Souls 3 was like a password system. If you want to play with a friend, which is most of the time what you want to do here, or someone that you met online, whatever Discord and the Sun Bros, Reddit, doesn't matter.
00:45:51
Speaker
You just set your own password and you can play with them no matter what. It literally doesn't matter what your level is. And they've taken that system and they put it into Elden Ring. There's a lot of systems that they've learned what they should run with and then put it into Elden Ring. But this type of concept of should we just let people do this without penalty?
00:46:12
Speaker
they say yes more than ever in the past for Elden Ring. So going back to, they have the password system, but going back to Ashes of War, that was the imbue, I think, system from previous games where it was just like, oh, you have
00:46:28
Speaker
Well, I mean, it was with imbuing. I was specifically for like the item damage type and scaling. But you were very much locked into that for like you've put all of this investment of a certain type of resource into this weapon. It's now like a plus 10 fire weapon. It is a bitch and a half to get that to something else at that point, because you don't have to like essentially delete your progress on that and then reinvest to put it to be like, oh, it's now plus 10 of lightning. Exactly.
00:46:56
Speaker
You could switch it, but it would start off at the baseline again. Lightning plus five becomes fire plus zero. In this one, it's all just hot swap. The easiest way to think about it, I think the Ashes of War is every weapon
00:47:15
Speaker
that is Ashes of War capable just has like a gem slot that you just put the Ash in, essentially. You can take it out by switching it out for anything else. I don't see the, I haven't seen the option to just straight up restore it to the original like default, but you can replace it with like anything else.
00:47:33
Speaker
Yeah. Also of note, you can duplicate Ashes of War. So by default, you're not going to have multiple, you're not going to have like 13 poison ones. You get one poison one, and then if you want, you can use a special item to make another one. For whatever reason, if you want to have two weapons with the exact same thing, because you're for some reason running two weapons. I'm somebody who's very much like, I have a left hand and a right hand, and that's it. Because every time you carry something,
00:48:01
Speaker
It goes towards your equip load, and I'm not trying to fat roll anywhere. Right. Yeah, and that's another place they've made a lot of optimizations. It's back to basically like, so Dark Souls 1 had basically this system. If you're below this percentage of your maximum encumbrance, you roll fast. This percentage will medium, higher you roll.
00:48:26
Speaker
You fat roll or heavy roll. And even higher than that, you can't roll at all and you walk very slowly and you're going to die if you get hit by anything. Dark Souls 2, I think, had a variable roll rate. So it was actually not easily pick out. You couldn't pick out like, okay, this is a light roll and a medium roll and a heavy roll. It was a range, the number of frames you got. It was related to adaptability and like the equipment load.
00:48:55
Speaker
Um, I wasn't a huge fan of it. I'm not going to defend that part. Uh, Dark Souls three was kind of back to the first, if I remember correctly, and they carried forward with that and Elden ring, just really straight, simple.
Combat Resources and Improvements
00:49:08
Speaker
Um, you know, you're a 69.99% encumbrance or less medium roll, which is really fast. Uh, fast stamina regeneration. Uh, also like Dark Souls three, basically like.
00:49:25
Speaker
These are casual, they're more casual quality of life things that let the game be difficult in other ways, if that makes any sense. You're not fighting your stamina bar.
00:49:36
Speaker
Yeah, it sucks to have like if you go back and play Dark Souls one, as I said, love it. Great game. One of the best games probably ever made for like setting the groundwork for everything else to where we are now. It's it's weighty as fuck. It's so fucking clunky. If you do an action, you have like three actions, you can do tops and you take a short rest. It is bullshit. And it's very punishing. And that's one of the reasons it has such a legacy behind it.
00:50:04
Speaker
is that difficulty because of that and a myriad of other things. But especially with Dark Souls 3 and then Sekiro that didn't even have fucking stamina, there's like, hey, do you want to just play the game? And it feels good. I still have stamina as a resource, but I can't infinitely spam stuff.
00:50:24
Speaker
but I've never really felt like I needed to invest in it so I could theoretically do something. I feel like from the get-go, they're enabling you to go and do whatever your RPG experience is going to be. You mentioned stamina.
00:50:41
Speaker
Real quick. Yeah. Yeah. So you've done a couple of comparisons going back through like all of the Dark Souls on several points as like things that they've improved on for Elden Ring. Is there anything that you would say you feel like still could be improved or you feel like they went in a bad direction with or would you say that everything has been net upgrade for you? Hmm. That one's interesting. Uh,
00:51:10
Speaker
That one's a little tough. A lot of, I think because it has so much choice, it's hard to pick out one thing. We already mentioned it, but like the catacombs. Those are the closest the game comes to copy paste. A lot of them are basically very, very similar. I don't want to say palette swaps. They're not that. They change the order of rooms. They change the enemies you encounter, whatever, but they feel very similar. That's a space that's very clearly like, hey,
00:51:41
Speaker
make all of this first. And if we have time, come back and make some of this content more unique. Um, and the uniqueness went to other spaces. That's, I mean, just the game design. It makes sense. It's a pragmatic decision, but are those areas engaging? Could I remember the difference between, you know, about a catacomb or experiences in a catacomb?
00:52:07
Speaker
Yeah, a couple of unique ones like have unique encounters or some unique enemies and like we co-op one of them But I do think that that's a place you know where the the open world gotcha
00:52:22
Speaker
kind of like grasps its claws in and it's like, you're not going to create 200 distinct hand tailored open areas. Are you like areas? Are you dungeons? No, no, you're not. Zelda didn't. So I don't hold it against them. But yeah, again, I want to point out for anybody who's listening is like, that kind of sounds and they are entirely optional, entirely optional.
00:52:48
Speaker
Because like for where they don't put the attention to detail in that So there's like a big area up near the center of the map. I think you know what I'm talking about Hmm for a boss you recently thought that we talked about sure, but that area is pretty big
00:53:05
Speaker
You're like, wow, this is a big area. Because of the verticality we now have access to, it's a huge area. You're like, okay, I've definitely explored all this area. Then with many parts of the map, you're like, oh, what's under here? Then you find an entirely new area. Not like, oh, this connects to an item over here. It's, hey, here's a new fucking biome underground. You're like, what the fuck?
00:53:29
Speaker
Yeah. And that happens way too frequently, in my opinion, for me to be like, how big is this game? Yeah. Yeah.
00:53:39
Speaker
No, I think I think that's fair. Not in a bad way. Like, I love it. But it's how many times were you playing where you're like, and they and this, too? Yeah, no, that's it's very much as in this two type of game. It's a game that benefited from them not talking too much about it before it was ready to ship. Yeah, then it's not it's not bug free. I do want to mention the one thing I'm going to go back. I'm going to rabbit trail all the way back. Look at stamina, quality of life.
00:54:07
Speaker
If you're out of combat, nothing that you do takes stamina. Full stop. Sprinting on the horse doesn't take stamina. Dashing on the horse. Well, that's the only thing that takes stamina while you're on the horse anyways. Dashing doesn't take stamina. Running doesn't take stamina. Attacking doesn't take stamina. None of it matters until an enemy attacks you. Now it matters. And if that's so far beyond what they've been doing in like Dark Souls 1,
00:54:35
Speaker
Right. It's like Dark Souls one was just like, how do we like insert the screws into your body?
00:54:41
Speaker
and just extract. I want to say extract enjoyment, but we're going to make the experience difficult so that you feel like you've overcome all of these things to get there. And they don't care about the stamina bar anymore. Doing death runs in Dark Souls 1, I'm just going to sprint past these enemies. I know roughly when I'm going to be attacked. So I'm going to try and save enough stamina to dodge roll through, walk a little bit, regain some stamina, start running again. I've done this math in my head multiple times.
00:55:08
Speaker
Whereas if I want to go from point A to point B, I run there or hop on the horse and I don't feel restricted in any way. Stamina is a combat resource in Elden Ring. Like it could impact your build. Maybe you choose to put, it's attached to equipment load now, which is kind of a big deal. It makes the stat more valuable. But like if you're a caster, I mean, that doesn't impact your out of combat running from one location to another. So maybe you care about it less.
00:55:38
Speaker
Um, yeah, I haven't put any points in, um, for bill to, which has been like more faith Casti, no points in it. So you're like basically wearing cloth it to some degree. I assume if you're still medium rolling, I usually have a little bit of like.
00:55:56
Speaker
Head to waist is usually like face drip, richest shitty cloth things that like help with that as much as possible. And then my legs, you're like, and we're going to war because that's where I have the extra equip load space to put in for a stronger defense before the weight goes too crazy. Yeah.
00:56:23
Speaker
I was going to say lightning around some of the other improvements. Stealth system, they played around with it in previous games. I forgot about it this time around, but it is strong to sneak up and backstab an enemy for a free kill and then do it to another enemy because they weren't paying attention. I've chained backstabs several enemies, and it's pretty nice.
00:56:49
Speaker
Um, there's, there's spells that actually like assist it too. Um, I know that there's an item that like assists it. And there's I, just today I cleared a cave like, uh, encounter, um, or actually didn't beat the boss. I got to the boss and I was like, this is no.
00:57:10
Speaker
And then I took my death and I left, coming back to it later. But there's a section where it's explicitly just like, if you do not stealth this,
00:57:21
Speaker
You will die because the enemies are numerous and they will kill you. And they can actually implement that. This would have been miserable in any other Souls game. Sekiro had stealth, it would have worked there to some degree, but it's even better here. And I don't hate them for having that segment in the game because the stealth is so reliable and good. And you can dash in stealth, you can run quickly.
00:57:49
Speaker
Yeah, you can kind of like shimmy your body. Scurry. Yeah, it's definitely useful. Also, going back to jumping, it's so strong. Because with jumping, besides like, you know, basic traversal of getting to a spot higher up, you can do jump attacks, which- One team attacks from previous games, right?
00:58:12
Speaker
Essentially, yeah. It hits their poise harder, which is just fun for fucking out somebody with a shield. If somebody's about to do a sweeping attack on the ground, you can jump over it. Are you surrounded by a bunch of enemies who are rats in a cave because you fucked up? You can jump over them versus trying to roll. They're like, hey, our bodies are physically here. I'm here. You can't roll. Having those options just available is really huge for combat, I feel.
00:58:42
Speaker
Yeah, that was part of the learning curve for me was just like, am I utilizing jumping? No, like not nearly enough. The game even tells you it's just tutorial mode like, hey, jump attacks are really going to mess some guys up. And I'm like, cool, but what is jump like jumping? Like I use that to get from one rock to the other rock.
00:59:04
Speaker
It's not a combat thing. They're like, it is a combat thing. It is. Again, going back to old Souls games, jumping was always some very odd combination of B is your back step, or if you do it with a direction, your dodge roll, and then running. Or in one of the games, I think it was running and then letting go of the run button.
00:59:24
Speaker
It was always something very convoluted to where, if they were hiding items via platforming, it felt very risky to try and do. And they're tiny little spaces. It was the most miniscule of jumps. And now it's just, you jump a place.
00:59:43
Speaker
Dark Souls one was literally the same button. You'd hold it dash and then tap the button quickly to jump. You know, when you're holding a button, then you press it again, release and tap. And that was your jump. Uh, and then Dark Souls, so you had the massive quality of life improvement. Maybe it was to where you, uh, uh, left thumbstick button would jump if you were running again, little tiny spaces.
01:00:07
Speaker
Yeah, but again, that still sucks in comparison to pressing A. Yeah. Yeah. Nintendo's over here like, yeah, we figured that shit out years ago. Right. This is revolutionary for us. Let us have this. So that's good. Here's the thing. The FromSoft games, all of these Dark Souls that we're talking about, like, oh, it sucked back in the day. Win X, Y, and Z. We still love these games.
01:00:31
Speaker
even for their mechanical challenges because of how it was designed, how it plays. So the fact that they're taking something that we've loved so much and just improving upon it, in my opinion, in every fucking way is huge. Yeah.
01:00:47
Speaker
So I think it's a big win for me. And also, I don't know how far we're going on time, but if this doesn't get Game of the Year, I'm going to stab somebody. In Elden Ring, I hope. PVP. Somebody put a meme on Instagram that I saw of now that the children are done playing Elden Ring, Kirby comes out in two weeks for the real men. And I understood that it was a joke.
01:01:14
Speaker
But it also bothered me a little bit because it's like we don't joke about these things. Yeah.
01:01:23
Speaker
Oh, I know. We have to talk about spirit summons a little bit. Sure. So for anybody who doesn't know, spirit summons are a thing they added in this game where you can essentially use a spirit calling bell. And if you've got like an ash from typically these dungeons or catacombs we've talked about, you can summon in enemies or NPCs to fight alongside you and you have a ways to upgrade them. But they're typically enemies that you have encountered before.
01:01:54
Speaker
I think they are strong. They usually- Any time you pause, I'm like, all right, I will jump in. Sorry. But they're meant for if you come up to an encampment where there's 20 enemies scattered about, you can then summon them. Or if you're doing a boss fight, you can summon them in to help out.
01:02:11
Speaker
The game's pretty explicit about it. There's like, here's more enemies than you should fight at once and they're all going to come at you. Do you want to use the thing that's going to give you a fighting chance here? And you're like, I don't really know if I need, and then you die. No, somebody's for cowards. Yeah. They also function as the NPC summon in replacement. There's very few NPCs that you can summon into boss fights.
01:02:34
Speaker
I've personally seen maybe two or three and If you count the open world bosses, which is kind of like cheating There's a ridiculous number of bosses. Yeah in this game. I mean, do you find yourself like using them a lot?
01:02:51
Speaker
Oh yeah, pretty much anytime I see that little icon come up, I'm pulling them into the fight because why wouldn't I? They're ridiculously useful and they only cost some resources. Renewable, hopefully.
01:03:09
Speaker
They're really good. They're a good change of pace. It helps you get more of an attachment. If I could have had Black Iron Tarkus from Dark Souls 1 as a Phantom, yes, I would have used them in every boss fight. So if you're the type of person that that makes any sense to, then you'll probably also enjoy Phantoms, particularly like they've mentioned, the ability to upgrade them so you can
01:03:33
Speaker
We had an episode on the convergence mod for Dark Souls 3. This is a callback, but I talked about how I had my Pokemon build, which was literally like me casting heal and rejuvenating my summons.
01:03:48
Speaker
to keep them alive in the fight where I was just like, get them Pikachu. And that was the fight, like versus the boss. This is that. Exactly. Actually, it is the summoner or druid archetype essentially from Convergence mod, but just made a gameplay mechanic for everybody.
01:04:12
Speaker
Yeah. And it's really fucking fun to find something or like, Oh, that enemy seems kind of annoying to fight. And you're like, but what if I made them fight other people?
Spirit Summons and Strategic Adaptation
01:04:22
Speaker
And then you try and experiment with different things. Like pretty early on, they give you wolves. So you have three wolves and they very much run at people. And for some like smaller bosses, they can kind of just like keep the pressure on. Well, it gives you freedom to also get in some heads or step back, take a sippy sip or something.
01:04:42
Speaker
And people will use that for a while, and it's fine. But then you'll find something else. You're like, oh, this is actually really cool. So I did wolves, and then I did something else that had more of a ranged option. Then I found something else that was even better. And I was like, we're never switching from this. And to be fair, I've never switched from that. But there are a lot of cool ones that you can play around with. Yeah, there's a ton. There's like 20 or something in total. I keep finding them, and a lot of them I'm not using at this point.
01:05:09
Speaker
Because I've also found a pretty viable option but like a really cool mechanic I'm massively in favor of it instead of like the one-off NPCs you could pull in
01:05:20
Speaker
Yeah. Also, I think it's safe for me to say if I did not have these summons as an option, I don't know how I would have done certain bosses. They're definitely balanced. This is my hot take. They're balanced around you bringing your favorite summon in because some of them would not be
01:05:42
Speaker
Viable. Yeah. If you have like the full attention of the boss and they're like, I'm going to hit you 18, 20 times. What you feel like? And you have like no buffer. It's, it's rough. It's nice to have like a, here, take this sacrifice or just look at them briefly.
01:06:01
Speaker
Specifically like, so in Dark Souls one, a comparison touchstone in the series, Ornstein and Smough is considered the wall of Dark Souls one. Like welcome to Anor Londo. You're not going to have a great time. Um, because you're fighting like two bosses at the same time and there's a mechanic in there and it exists in Eldering to a certain extent too, where like it has anti,
01:06:28
Speaker
Well, sure, I'll just say it's anti-gang bang AI, essentially. They will not just all attack you at the same time as rapidly as possible because it would suck to play against. But if you're up against a bunch of combatants, like it doesn't matter that that's in place. Like you'll still get hit a ton and it'll feel unfair. And there's boss fights in this game where it's just straight up
01:06:55
Speaker
Not two people you're fighting at one time where you, maybe you could do it. It's, or it is two people, but they attack rapidly. It's like three people or something like that. And it's clearly intended that even if you're going through with that solo mentality, I'm going to beat all the bosses myself. You're going to bring summons. Yeah. And it's, it's possible to do without, I'm sure. Um, but.
01:07:21
Speaker
So I think for anybody who's curious about Elden Ring as like an entry point, I don't get, I don't, I'm not a gatekeeper, right? I think literally however you get from point A to point B, that's your own business. If you succeed, I am happy for you. I have done such a variety of things in my attempts. I've brute forced it. I've tried poisoning things to death or running away. That's a classic. I've tried just like delegating for like other people to do that shit.
01:07:52
Speaker
cheese, you name it. I've tried it as a viable thing and I think it is viable. So however you want to get there, by all means, do it. I just personally really enjoy using the summons.
01:08:06
Speaker
I would say challenge runs for subsequent playthroughs. The game is... We've actually even said this line, I think, about previous Dark Souls games. Like, it is going to try to be unfair to you. You should try to be unfair to it. Yeah. And that's the way I've played it. Now, any game, I think it started with Dark Souls 3, allows you to pull in two co-op player characters.
01:08:36
Speaker
I'm not going to hold it against you. I've done the same thing for some bosses. It's not going to be as difficult if all you have to do is dodge attacks as the other two players unload insane amounts of damage onto the boss. But it's perfectly fine. Play it that way, however you want, really. But if you are struggling against a boss, take a break. Explore somewhere else.
01:09:12
Speaker
In general, they provide you tools to make your character better. Or sometimes give you a straight up item. It's like, hey, this will fuck the boss. This will fuck them over pretty bad. But you have to explore to find it. And that's, again, an option if you feel gated. You can keep throwing your head against the wall. You can come back after you've leveled. You can find a different gear, maybe. Yeah, change your build. Or placed out. That suits you better. Do whatever you got to do.
01:09:27
Speaker
Yeah. Because I didn't do it and I should have.
01:09:42
Speaker
But like the game is just the suck its dick briefly. I love it. Like you haven't. Dave, you haven't come up for air in the last hour. Do I get it this week? Put in a gulp sound effects here. Yeah, it's.
01:10:00
Speaker
It is so beautiful as far as design. It's the same gameplay style that I've really loved, but they've just improved upon it. I'm still exploring and finding new things, which is another big win for me. And it's all of the things I love, turned up to 11. And if they make DLC for this or do another game in a couple of years,
01:10:26
Speaker
Please. Like, I love the direction it's going. I think this is such a huge win for FromSoft. Not like they've had like, that was kind of a shitter. I feel like they've continually added and played around with things and they've combined a lot of good ideas in this.
Future Hopes and Player Interaction
01:10:42
Speaker
Thank you for not saying accept Dark Souls 2. I know it was like it was right there. It laid some groundwork. They tried some stuff. It absolutely did.
01:10:50
Speaker
It's the first game with powers dancing, which the throne also has. I haven't used it, but same. Yeah. Um, yeah, no, I mean, no gripes here. No, uh, it has bugs, you know, depending on a graphics card, whatever, make sure your system could run it.
01:11:07
Speaker
Um, but I mean, nothing more than I would expect. It had a major patch fixed a bunch of things they do in balancing right now. Um, or recently. So I have high hopes for it. It's one of the few recent highly anticipated games that has more than delivered. So.
01:11:30
Speaker
Also, they're still an active community. I mean, not still, but like... Yeah, I was like, I hope so. For anybody who's not aware of FromSoft games, there's an ability for players to leave messages based off of certain built-in to the game keywords. Sometimes it's memes. Sometimes the community will try and fuck you over to have you jump off a cliff. Sometimes they'll call things a dog when it's not a dog. But also a lot of times I've found cool things because I'm reading player messages as well.
01:11:59
Speaker
Oh yeah, playing online, very, very encouraged. Obviously it's a gimme if you're on PC, but if you're playing this game on like PlayStation or Xbox, yeah, it's on both. I would definitely recommend having the online service. Unless you co-op, you're not going to get invaded by players, which was an interesting decision.
01:12:21
Speaker
There's so many mechanics and things that we could have talked about or differences. It's pretty much impossible. It's a lot.
01:12:32
Speaker
If we're still technically in rapid fire recap, I know we're a little over time. Okay. This is, you know, the Elden Ring podcast. I didn't even want to play Smash this week. It's cool. It's cool. Well, that's good. Cause I don't have it set up yet. I mean, I have to get the projector shot. This is now just like the saddest end of the episode for me. I know. Oh no. That's unfortunate. You can help me with an Elden Ring's boss instead.
01:12:54
Speaker
But I would say build diversity. It's not been as good since like Dark Souls 2. Faith builds. This is actually kind of esoteric I realized to end the episode on, but like there's so much in build diversity in this game. I found like a weapon that's strength and intelligence, which to my knowledge is like not a thing that has ever been a thing.
01:13:19
Speaker
and build in the series. I'm sure something exists, but I couldn't think of it. It's like casting the scales off strength, dexterity in it. That's a little more common. Dexterity and strength, value builds, it's all here. You could put points anywhere and be like, huh, it's weird how this weapon fits exactly this weird mosaic of rainbow-colored nonsense that is my character sheet.
01:13:48
Speaker
But, uh, that's amazing. And it feels like a lot of it could work in a pretty hilarious way. Yeah. I swear to God, certain things are just there for memes. Um, and for some reason, if you feel like you invested poorly and you're like, this fucking sucks. Don't roll a new character.
01:14:06
Speaker
There are ways to just redo, reallocate all your points at that point in the game. Thank you, Dark Souls 2. They've always had something like this, where you have an option to kind of like respect, but this is definitely the easiest one, where you just need a resource, and there is a place to farm it if you look it up. So yeah, try out what's fun for you, what works for you, or just watch a YouTube video like, that looks fucking silly. I want to learn how to do that.
01:14:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's very much a, like I, I have no judgment. I've like respect my character once already. And I was very much, I looked over the tools and I was like, what are the, which of these tools do I want to use? What spells do I want? What weapons do I want? Like, I should probably keep some points in health, right? Like, and then allocated to fit all of that. And then I was like, nice. And the resource to continue respecking is,
01:15:06
Speaker
pretty common, even if I didn't know you could farm it, but even if you get to the point where you can farm it before you get to that point, um, very forgiving on the built. You're not going to build yourself into a corner where you can't beat bosses. True.
01:15:23
Speaker
But yeah, the game is solid and fun. If you've had an interest in checking it out, I do recommend checking it out. Or if you're still on the fence, there's plenty of content you can watch on it, whether that be game trailers, reviews, other things, listening to this podcast yet again, or DMing me directly, and I will do the verbal equivalent of sucking its dick.
01:15:51
Speaker
It's really good. I would love for more people to have the same type of fun that I've been having with this game. Yeah. Which is why we're going to have another episode on this because there's so much stuff that we could not fit into it. And we want to just go spoiler heavy and just talk about all like the cool hype moments we encounter with certain bosses, certain NPC quest lines, cool fucking items we found and other things.
01:16:17
Speaker
Yeah. So get ready for that manic panic of an episode. And thank you guys for sticking around for our off week. I was in the process of moving and it would have been a pain. Um, but, uh, appreciate you all. Hopefully, uh, you're also having fun playing whatever you're playing. If it's altering then awesome. If not, then I hope it's still, still good. Hope you're all keeping safe.
01:16:44
Speaker
Dave's just like, no. If it's not Elden Ring, it's not good. Hopefully everybody's keep it safe and continues to do so. Do you guys have any feedback for Elden Ring related episodes as this is an Elden Ring podcast now?
01:17:02
Speaker
You can send in those ideas to soapstone podcast at gmail.com. Just prefix those Elgin ring. Um, or you could discuss Elgin ring on Facebook. No spoilers please at facebook.com slash soapstone podcast. I almost said Elgin ring almost definitely exists, but nobody has that one. Um, Facebook.com slash soapstone podcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night tarnished.