Elden Ring - Gameplay Preview

The video looks amazing. The only concern I have is the consequence of having such an open world on the amazing level design of all their past games, which was mostly predicated on having a tight and interconencted world space, with plenty of surprise shortcuts that wind on each other.

Theoretically that can still be done with an open world, with what they proposed, with having independent dungeons, where each one tries to do what their past levels did. But the amount of work that sounds like it's gonna take makes me afraid that they will mostly be dilluted. So instead of one bug interconnected world, we'll have multiples, connected by open space, but all those multiple will never come close to the feeling of one big interconnected world. I hope I'm wrong. I'm excited to try it out.

So, the stats are

Vigor
Mind
Endurance
Strength
Dexterity
Intelligence
Faith
Arcane

What do you think they all do?

danutz_plusplus said:

The video looks amazing. The only concern I have is the consequence of having such an open world on the amazing level design of all their past games, which was mostly predicated on having a tight and interconencted world space, with plenty of surprise shortcuts that wind on each other.

Theoretically that can still be done with an open world, with what they proposed, with having independent dungeons, where each one tries to do what their past levels did. But the amount of work that sounds like it's gonna take makes me afraid that they will mostly be dilluted. So instead of one bug interconnected world, we'll have multiples, connected by open space, but all those multiple will never come close to the feeling of one big interconnected world. I hope I'm wrong. I'm excited to try it out.

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They did say there would be large dungeons that would have their usual level design. So sounds like the best of both worlds.

Couchpotato said:

I was targeting a certain member as he usually has offense to everything I write. In his words I just shit-post. My true feeling is just apathy as we all have different tastes.

Anyway glad to see you back even though our opinion on the genre differs.

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Thanks couch, it’s good to be back. I had a nice break.

Sorry for the double post it’s one of those days.

Couchpotato said:

As someone who despises the genre and it's thousands of clones I can put a smile on my face say who cares, I'm not watching it. If this post bothers you even better.

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So what are you going to play in 2022 if you ignore that one ? I am not seeing anything anytime soon, maybe queen wish 2 in summer and no reason to be super enthusiastic. It's rpg drought again.

sakichop said:

They did say there would be large dungeons that would have their usual level design. So sounds like the best of both worlds.

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Yeah, in theory they should achieve best of both. Unfortunately, I wonder how much the budget would need to swell to offer that. I hope they managed it. I love exploring their levels. So much fun, making gradual progress across a dungeon, where even the architecture doesn't make much sense. I hope there's plenty of that.

As a diehard Soulslike fan, I immediately preordered it. From the gameplay I saw, it seems it's a combination of Dark Souls, Sekiro and Skyrim. I hope they can fill that world with meaningful content rather than mindless, generic, copy-paste ones. If they can, we will have a new king in our hands.

One of the things I wonder is the level system of the game. Souls games are pretty much linear, so every area have foes with specific levels. Since Elden Ring will be an open world game and we can go wherever we want, they must make a different kind of approach to that. No level scaling means the game could be very easy at the second half of the game, but on the contrary pure level scaling (which I hate so much) could kill the progress feeling of the character. I hope they implement min-max level for each area or something like that.

Yeah, good point. I don't think I've read anything about how they're handling enemies and scaling. Will enemies respawn upon using those save points? I expect they'll keep that part of it.

I think the open level design is part of the game being "more accessible" than their past games according to FromSoft. Players will no longer be funneled towards boss fights, and most areas won't be gated by enemies.

I wouldn't worry about the game getting too easy in the second half. That's where all those optional boss fights come in.

Personally, I'm excited about the open world. That map looks pretty interesting.

I love the hand-drawn map. It's really beautiful.

The thing about difficulty in FromSoft games is that in all of them you could theoretically grind near endlessly and achieve character power that way. But it was never enough to overpower the bosses themselves. They'd still wipe the floor with you, but the margin of error would be smaller. Unless you really no-life it and grind way too much, but in that case you might as well just use cheat codes.

Their only game, that I played anyway, that disallowed grinding for power was Sekiro. In that one there was a hardcap to how much you could grind before encounter. So in this way, even being open-world, Elden Ring isn't really that much different from the rest of their games. You could grind for power in all of them (except Sekiro). But I wonder how they'll design the margin of error though. From the gameplay video apparently you should be able to pretty easily distract bosses (at least the one in the video) with summons. So that should ease the situation a lot. I also expect the summons to not be costly. In Bloodborne summons cost Insight, which is a very limited resource throughout the whole game, one that you cannot afford to waste if you want to min-max. So I wonder how costly they'll make those summons. But it seems like they shoudn't be very costly.

Anyway, ignoring all the speculation, it'll be interesting to see the many design decisions (that havent been published) they'll have made for Elden Ring, and seeing what they choose to take from the previous games, and what to change.

Couchpotato said:

As someone who despises the genre and it's thousands of clones I can put a smile on my face say who cares, I'm not watching it. If this post bothers you even better.

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I watched it for you. Dumbledore Calrissian takes the ring to Mordor. It's basically a shot for shot remake of Battlestar Galactica.

Caddy said:

I watched it for you. Dumbledore Calrissian takes the ring to Mordor. It's basically a shot for shot remake of Battlestar Galactica.

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You lie but hey that sounds much more interesting.

Caddy said:

I watched it for you. Dumbledore Calrissian takes the ring to Mordor. It's basically a shot for shot remake of Battlestar Galactica.

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Mortmal said:

So what are you going to play in 2022 if you ignore that one ? I am not seeing anything anytime soon, maybe queen wish 2 in summer and no reason to be super enthusiastic. It's rpg drought again.

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Plenty of games I never played, games I never finished, and games I finished I will play again. Anyway there are other genres besides RPGs I play and Starfield releases also.

Hope those rumors about Avowed releasing in late 2022 are true as well.

JDR13 said:

What else would you call it?

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soulslike but that's not my point. Path of exile , last epoch, grim dawn are arpgs, 3d open world stuff similar to gothic series is arpg too.

Something is not working about this tag. That's all.

They Live said:

soulslike but that's not my point. Path of exile , last epoch, grim dawn are arpgs, 3d open world stuff similar to gothic series is arpg too.

Something is not working about this tag. That's all.

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Other than having some soulslike features, how is it not similar to 3d open world games like Gothic?

After all, soulslikes are action-RPGs to begin with, or at least most of them are.

Age restricted, uh a major downer turner for me.

mercy said:

Age restricted, uh a major downer turner for me.

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That's understandable since you're obviously not mature enough for games like this.

JDR13 said:

Other than having some soulslike features, how is it not similar to 3d open world games like Gothic?

After all, soulslikes are action-RPGs to begin with, or at least most of them are.

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And how gothic is similar to grim dawn?

I honestly can't tell if you're just trolling at this point.