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That's Elden Ring with no learning curve. It's a process that lets FromSoftware essentially throw players in the water and urge them to swim for safety. Would the interface for users be more explicit? I would think so. Could the devs make an unison effort to evolve the combat mechanics past the confusion of the previous versions? Absolutely, anything is possible. But personally, I don't want a game that plays similar to every other game with Elden Ring Runes. It's also helpful that I gain a disproportionate amount of satisfaction from Elden Ring's constant die-retry-die loop, of course--and it's pleasing to witness FromSoftware persistently adhere to its decades-old rules. Similar to a game that eschews modern sensibilities like high-definition images and higher frame rates for a smoother experience to attain the desired aesthetic, Elden Ring wouldn't be an appropriate successor to the Souls lineage should it not kindly request players to modulate themselves to its eccentricities , not and the reverse.
Mind you, Elden Ring isn't what that it or its predecessors were claimed to be by ardent fans as well as detractors. The new, open-world structure appears to be an intentional choice of FromSoftware to give an opportunity to those who bounced off different Souls games, many of which were less linear as Elden Ring. Being stuck by a challenge within Dark Souls or Bloodborne, for example, typically meant slamming into that same wall repeatedly again until finally breaking through bloody and bruised, but the Lands Between provide much more to explore and experience. A lot of time can be spent exploring these regions prior to the first major dungeon , and the skill test of a boss. This includes collecting loot and increasing levels until you're strong enough to reduce Godrick the Grafted into a pile of amputated limbs and limbs with no effort. You can even skip the fortress completely if you've concluded that you're done with the nonsense he's been delivering, a feasible option for those who want to explore the remainder of the game has to offer.
In the core, the charm of Elden Ring is found not in its difficulty, but in the little things you do between the massive boss battles. It's about exploring every shadowy nook and fog-obscured cranny of the world in search of items you'll never use. It's about rotating the camera in the right direction to see at corners and across slick walls for hidden dangers. It's about clambering into coffins which take you over and up waterfalls, to caves that were largely in the past and now filled with elven creatures from far beyond the stars. It's about scaling the crags of a dead, impossible massive dragon or the giant branchings of a golden Tree each of which has been so incorporated into the structures of a decaying capital city that, long before your arrival it was more architecture than biology.
Elden Ring manages to pull off the amazing ability to make you feel small and yet able to create shifts in the tectonics of the world around you.
If you are one of Tarnished members, a group that consists of "chosen" "undead" who return to the mythical world known by the name of Lands Between long after an unidentified exile, Elden Ring puts you in the role of both visitor and vaccine. The shattered phenomenon that is known as"the Elden Ring resulted in the death of demi-gods as well as the end of the great kingdoms creating a massive mess for players to clean up by a variety of methods upon your arrival. As with the more desolated setting of the earlier Souls games The Lands Between is a shadow of what it was before, and the miserable few that still have to sort through the rubble pick through the rubble based on an urge to move instead of a concerted effort to reconnect the pieces. It's not easy for the human race to endure in Elden Ring so much as it plods along with its eyes fixed on the ground, unable face the end of the world.
The best way I can describe the experience of playing a Souls game such as Elden Ring is to compare it to the cost of renting or purchasing a used role-playing game in the days of cartridges. In the past, before the game's progress was saved on memory cards, consoles or even on cloud storage, playing a previously owned game was a chance to be in contact with the history of someone else's. This usually resulted in a few tedious minutes of wiping the cartridge's internal memory, sometimes it provided you with the perfect opportunity to experience the ending of the game before taking your first steps to cheap Elden Ring Items. After paying a ridiculous amount to get a boxed copy of Super Mario RPG as a child playing through a saved game and observing how characters reacted to the final boss' defeat was like going to a museum in an alternate dimension. In reality, the Mushroom Kingdom had moved on and I was merely an uninvolved tourist in the digital body of somebody they once knew.