Episode 128 - The Hill That Killed Me - Elden Ring

Put these podcast ambitions to rest. Welcome back to the podcast,
where we absolutely couldn’t not talk about Elden Ring. This is the
latest game from From Software, the developer behind the Dark Souls
franchise and the creator of the genre that spawned a million
imitators. These are all things you probably knew before going in,
though. The surprising thing about Elden Ring though is just how
much like Dark Souls it ends up being. The design philosophy behind
all of the Souls-like titles is present, but now set in an enormous
open world, which is a change that really shouldn’t be discounted.
The emphasis on exploration that the Souls games have always had is
pushed to a different kind of emphasis now, with a larger than ever
amount of optional content and a huge space to work with. This
presents some issues, for sure, as all open world games have:
things that could be important certain builds can be hard to find,
there being a sort of directionless feeling to parts of the game
and boss fights repeating themselves in some of the optional
dungeons, but these issues rarely come to the forefront of your
mind while playing due to the sheer amount of authored content
throughout the huge open world. We’re going to be talking about
build variety and how the way you choose to play can make the game
feel completely different, bosses we like and those we don’t and
how the design of the major bosses makes them stand out in a game
full of unique enemies, and we flaunt our knowledge and
understanding of the game when we talk about the “whatever temple
of Marika.” Thank you, as always, for joining us this week. As we
state up front in the podcast, the first time experience of playing
Elden Ring is unlike much else in the world of video games, so I’d
like to drop at least one more warning that the blind experience is
something you want to have and we’d recommend playing the game
before listening if you have any intention of doing so. Otherwise I
hope you enjoy the episode, all six billion hours of it. How did
the game stack up against your expectations? Were you as surprised
as we were as to how much like Dark Souls 3 it ended up playing?
Was the difficulty in the mama bear, papa bear or baby bear range
for you? Let us know down in the comments or over on our Discord
server where we talk about the games. Next time, we’re breaking
tone pretty severely and entering into another themed month
everyone didn’t ask for: it’s Ape-ril, and we’re going to be
talking about Diddy Kong Racing, so be ready for that.