Elden Ring

[briareos_kerensky]

Oh yeah, when I first saw an interactive painting I was "mhmmm....no."

[fuse]

No Ariamis for you!

[Finsbury Girl]

Took on Astel naturalborn of the void,

->Open Spoiler<-

found him after riding a stone coffin at the bottom of the rot lake, pretty damn tough for melee build as his weak points are well guarded by nasty gravity aoe moves. After alot of fights, i nailed it down to hitting the ****er with rot and poison which is quickly applied as long as you can keep up the attacks to apply it which was made alot easier by use a automatic crossbow. Now i need to find some sort of ring to access whatever is behind his arena.

Tried takes on the Dog Solider in the Lakes of Rot, 1 hit kills regardless of my armour...

Also it looks like the Door thing may be a mistake by FS, the door has 999HP which is like other cutscene doors in previous Dark Souls games where they had 99HP and capped Def so it couldn't be broken by a player, seems they forgot to put the defence stat on the door.

I came up against this guy got completely WRECKED! Time to level up and come back.

I've been just sitting helping peeps with

->Open Spoiler<-

Godskin Apostle

it's a great fight (haven't managed to do it myself yet though )

Edit: decided to have a go managed to get him second go (I had so much practice being summoned it was fairly easy lol)

[gordon]

So I couldn't resist a second and third playthrough just to get the platinum, but the play times reduced quite dramatically. First run took 205 hours (including about 5 hours of farming runes at a certain spot in the late game), second run was 40 hours, third was 10 (today, basically). For the last one I did the minimum two early bosses then more or less ran through the areas to the rest. I was over-levelled after the first two runs, and I still needed help with the final bosses, but for the rest it was just me and the mimic.
I'm pleased (and relieved) to have finished, but I'll be revisiting on PS5, when I'll have forgotten what I have to do again.

[Finsbury Girl]

Good to know NG+ is a bit quicker. This game is so HUGE I'll probably get the plat with one char and muck around with new builds in new games.

After summoning a dagger wielding mage who absolutely stomped everything, I am super keen to test it out

[QualityChimp]

Embedded Tweet

[briareos_kerensky]

So I couldn't resist a second and third playthrough just to get the platinum,

Does a NG+ start automatically after watching the ending or do you have a choice to start it like in DS2 and DS3?

[fuse]

You are prompted to start it straight away but you can say no, at which point it tells you where / what to do when you're ready.

[briareos_kerensky]

Cool, thanks.

[briareos_kerensky]

Progressed a lot since my last post.

->Open Spoiler<-

Complete the Capital (that was huge), got to a location called the Lake Of Rot and chickend out due to the name, got to Deeproots and cleared the location, and now to the snowy Mountaintop of the Giants.
Right now I'm having more trouble with standard enemies than bosses, even the the fire-breathing, death-spewing, thunder-casting, giant balck dragon in the Deeproots went down the second try by slicing its ankles a few times.
In the Mountaintop the sturdy humanoid enemies in the ruined city after the bridge were difficult to deal with but now they seem gone, replaced by giant skeletons that might be scary once but they are actually rather easy to deal with.
I liked what happens when you approach the tower where you activate the rune from the Capital's boss (Morsomething...again, beaten him the second time so I don't really remember his name), and the world is still inspired and fun to wander around, but the freeroaming is really screwing up the difficulty curve.
I'm still running the curved greatsword nabbed from an early boss, bloodloss is not as effective as before but STR and DEX are a t40/40 like they were ten or so hours ago (levelling up magic-related stuff...without really using it) and still haven't foudn soemthing that insurmountable.
I want to switch to a weapon found in the Volcano Manor, but the greatsword still has more raw damage due to scaling and reinforcements.

[Finsbury Girl]

over 100 hours now ; rocking the

->Open Spoiler<-

starscourge greatsword

it is so awesome.

Wrapping up areas now and thinking about

->Open Spoiler<-

Volcano Manor

Still loving it.

[Yakumo]

Only level 30 myself and going solo too. I started last week, so still fairly new to the game.

[gordon]

Right. So instead of stopping at the third playthrough, I did playthroughs 4-8. Then I did a ninth and *definitely final* playthrough because I had to make sure that the 8th (NG+7) was where Elden Ring reached its final difficulty level. (It does: 8 and 9 are identical, so you can stick to 8 when you get there). The core gameplay remains as addictive as all the Soulsborne games before it, and the flexibility of approaches is as compelling as ever; but parts of the open world are just too big for the details they put in there. In previous DS games the environments were so tight that you could explore every inch of them and come across that character who sold you that particular item or changed the ending when you did a certain thing. In Elden Ring's case, hoping you stumble across Brother Corhyn's plot events in a vast open world is unsatisfactory. I literally didn't even discover the

->Open Spoiler<-

Boilprawn Shack and its connection to Volcano Manor

until my third playthrough, and even then it's not essential because the location it foreshadows is uncovered through exploration anyway.

I enjoyed most of the bosses too, but

->Open Spoiler<-

the Elden Beast is a chore. I miss Slave Knight Gael's balletic lightning attacks - a fight I could genuinely help others with by the end, and one I always looked forward to; it was a kind of mad dance. In Elden Ring's case I dreaded the last boss because it was a little... boring. The environment it takes place in is dull, and the slow grind of chipping away at its health and avoiding the instakill attacks is more an exercise of concentration and persistence than skill. Like compiling data in a spreadsheet rather than creating a story.

Of course, I still loved the experience. It's a wonderful, rich game full of Soulsborne goodness and I put 350 hours into it by the end. But I can't help feeling they stretched themselves too far this time, or ran out of ideas, or weren't quite sure how to marry the chaos of an open world with the narrow branching paths of their earlier games. It's flawed, but brilliantly flawed.

[dvdx2]

Some guy has found what looks like.a beta level from blood borne 2 in a hidden wall

Looks amazing - I’ll get the link up later today as I’m out at the moment

[gordon]

Almost had me for a moment.