Elden Ring sucks

The world is too big for the sake of it with too much reused shit. They had enough unique content for an 80 hour game, but they made it 140. The game peaks with Stormveil, Sofria and Caelid and then gets boring and repetitive. This isn't an open world problem like a lot of retards who get mad at anything other than hallways will pretend it is, it's a problem with making the world too big. The first time you ride the elevator down to Sofria is amazing, and so is the first visit to Caelid (usually through the trap chest) but was anyone really wowed by the starry skybox on their third trip underground? By the time you get to Atlus, it’s just boring. There's almost nothing to do but kill enemies in the world. At one point there was a potbro quest where I couldn't get him unstuck and had to craft oil to lubricate him to get him out. I was excited to use mechanics that didn't boil down to whacking everything, but that was never built on. Every area is just you running around with some jank platforming with your dumb horse. There are open world games that make movement fun, but this isn’t one of them. Riding Torrent through Gelmir is the same as Limgrave is the same as Caelid. This wouldn’t be a problem if there wasn’t so much enemy reuse, but super late game enemies are mostly the same shit you see early game except now they kill you in 1 hit instead of 2. The side dungeons are too repetitive. Some of them have fun puzzles like the one where you need to ride the blades up, or the one with the duplicate rooms where you have to figure out that it’s actually 2 different sets of rooms, but most of them are samey or downright trash like the chariots, and then your reward for going through them is a weapon or an ash you’ll never use given to you by a watchdog or a tree spirit. Just make the world smaller. Dragon’s Dogma was open world, but much smaller and every area felt unique. The Witchwood fog puzzle happened once in the game. In Elden Ring, it would have been used 5 times.

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Some people pretend that this is fine because you might use something in a later playthrough so all of the items are useful, but they’re just not. How many people need a cookbook to craft 45 types of arrows? Why not make it so that cookbooks have duplicates scattered around, or they come in sequential sets that way there are 3 of a specific set and you only need to find 1 of them to be able to make basic poison curing items and getting all 3 will let you make good buffing items? As it is, you can miss a cookbook in some random spot and then spend most of the game not having a basic curative item. Upgrade material distribution is beyond fucked. The game leans incredibly hard on somber weapons, but there are no somber stone 7s for most of the game. You can buy 1 through 4 and find 5 and 6 and then 8 and 9 all from the start of the game, but 7s are all locked behind a lot of progression. The stones in general are really rare, and this hurts the game because it discourages you from trying out different weapons. The enemies and bosses all have so much HP that you can’t really use a wet noodle to try hitting them. The graveworts for summons are just as bad with late game showering you with ones you’ll never use. Why not have more golden seeds in the mini dungeons since those are always useful?

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The story, lore and characters are all terribly lazy rehashes of ideas from DaS with a dung eater and corpse fuckers (courtesy of GRRM) thrown in. GRRM was also arrogant enough to start every character’s name with one of his initials. Miyazaki's "I couldn't read English books so I made things up in my head" story telling has lost its novelty, and the characters are all predictable with some absolutely retarded quest triggers. There are also a lot of quests that should affect other things in the world but don't. You can join the Volcano Manor and they make a big deal about killing other tarnished, but even if you kill other Tarnished no one cares. Doing Gurraclergyiketh’s quest line does nothing significant even though he’s a major endgame story boss. If you finished his quest, all that really changes is a single line of dialog before you fight him. Nepheli’s quest goes nowhere even if you finish it. You can take the frenzied flame, save Melina, use the needle from the Millicent quest to purge the flame and become Elden Lord without sacrificing Melina, but the game never acknowledges in any way that you outsmarted the need for a sacrifice. Then there are characters like D who stop reacting to anything at all more than a few minutes into the game if they live because they’re supposed to die in their quest line, or characters like Gideon who you can easily break triggers for early on and have them disappear only to show up at the very end to fight you like they matter. There are still no real settlements or NPC gathering places (outside of Jarburg where no one says anything) and it stands out even more in an open world game. Leyndell was just boring. It’s a big fancy capital in decay with sad string music. We get it Miyazaki. Have another idea.

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The only 2 NPCs I found that were likable were prawnbro, who of course gets killed and defiled by dung eating AIDSman if you do all the quests, and Roderika, who I liked until she inexplicably spawned in 2 places at the end of the game because the scripting is a joke and who then decided to stay with Hewg and die because “it’s what he wants” even though he was literally a mindbroken slave and not a captain going down with his ship. Melancholy for the sake it is not compelling story telling. It’s amazing that a guy who rips off so much from Berserk still has such a simplistic view of that. A bunch of NPC sidequests end in them “going mad” and attacking you even if you only helped them because that’s 1 of 2 ways Miyazaki knows how to end a questline. Then there’s stuff like the Malenia fight. Why does she attack you? She’s entirely sane and lucid when you find her and you’ve done nothing to wrong her so why does she attack? On top of the bad storytelling and boring themes, the music is entirely forgettable. And Ranni is shit. She’s a waifubait character for plebs like Makoto from Persona 5. She doesn’t love you, she just wants power like everyone else and in her ending you’re stupid enough to give it to her instead of taking it yourself. You’re waifu a shit.

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The biggest problem is the combat. It's the centerpiece of the game but it's shit. The balance is all kinds of fucked . Vigor is king, armor and poise and nearly worthless. If you do melee, guard counter with barricade shield and jump R2 is the best option. There's also hoarfrost if you want to cheese the game to a comical degree. For casting, early game high efficiency spells and late game 70int high scaling nukes are good, but 90% of what you find in the middle is trash. The enemies have DaS3 movement times 3 coupled with DaS2 magic 360noscope tracking and input reads. Enemies can quite literally change direction by 180 degrees midair. The Fire Giant rolls around the arena like a toddler. It’s too stupid looking. They reuse bosses to an insane degree, and the lol2boss fights are shit. It worked with Oreo and Smores because they weren't enemies you fought 1 on 1. They were 2 distinct enemies with different movement and attack patterns designed to be fought as a pair. In ER, you get 2 of the same type of enemy with the same attacks half a second apart which ends in you getting stunlocked if you try to counter 1 of them, and them always being at the same distance from you. The Godskin “duo” fight is especially bad because it’s not even a duo. If you use ash summons, then bosses lose focus on you and are open to be staggered instantly. Everything including you and bosses are very clearly only designed to fight one enemy at a time, and anything else breaks it. I know a lot of retards think it's a difficulty issue, but it's not. Sekiro charmless with the bell on is more challenging, but it's mechanically sound and more fun to play. You feel like you're fighting on par with bosses as opposed to feeling like you're cheesing them or getting cheesed. In Sekiro or BB when you beat a boss you usually think “Wow that was fun, I want to do it again.” In Elden Ring, you think “Wow I’m glad I don’t have to do that again” except you do 5 more times.

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One of the big problems that gets brought up is the input reading. I’ve seen a lot of people insist that all games work like that so it’s okay. No, you subhuman retarded pieces of shit, it’s not. Flags to make decisions and raycasts to actually see the player are how competent devs make AI. Enemies jump to dodge a spell based on when you press the cast button, not based on what the spell is. This ends up with them jumping too early for spells from a distance, and way too early for things like rock sling with the cast delay. For the flask drink punishes, I’ve seen retards insist that it’s good because “the enemies should punish you while you’re vulnerable.” You can literally lay down in front of enemies and they don’t give a shit. Vulnerability has nothing to do with it. It’s just reading your input and automatically triggering your attack. Your button presses as the player should not control the enemy’s actions directly. “Just adapt to it” is not an excuse. Any game can be adapted to, and these mechanics aren’t hard to overcome. They're just broken. On top of that, the enemy AI is bad in general. Pathfinding is a joke, they almost never interact with one another outside of killing a demi-human leader, and everything is just stat bloated enemies haphazardly rushing at you. There’s also a problem with inconsistency and balancing not making sense. Why do some AoE moves for poison or scarlet rot just give you an ailment while others do insane damage ticks that stunlock? Why do late game rats hit harder than most dragons? Why do semen shamans have semen lasers that can curve around and through doorways? Why are sewer lobsters so powerful? Why does walking on lava hurt me less than a rag wearing peasant holding a torch just because that peasant is in a late game area? When they said there was no level scaling I was excited because I thought it meant they’d avoid this kind of shit.

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Finally, the game is jank as fuck. This is the type of game they've been making for well over a decade now, and it's the same fucking engine. How is it even possible for it to be this jank? There are save data issues, PC performance issues even on high end cards, issues with your character not properly mounting Torrent and then dying from fall damage, random falling through floors, the camera is fuck terrible for tracking enemies, the input buffering is garbage and will frequently lock you into slow animations, and the hit tracking and hitboxes are a joke. The input buffering is especially bad for bosses like Malenia where being able to quickly switch to a shield would save your life. If she starts waterfowl when you’re in an attack animation, you’re dead. There are 2 very simple fixes that would make the game much better. Switch the fucking icon for equipment on the button press if the input buffer actually went through. That way you always know if you actually switched equipment instead of having to wait on the animation like a lottery. The second thing is making a left stick click sprinting instead of stealth. Stealth is completely useless, and mapping that button to sprinting would let dodge work on press instead of release. You should never feel like you’re fighting the controls in a game, but that’s always your biggest enemy in ER. At one point I mounted the chariot where you have to ride one for its puzzle, and I died because its hitbox clipped into me while I was standing on top of it. They can’t handle sloped surfaces in general, which is really bad when you have lots of large enemies that move a lot on lots of sloped surfaces. Then there's all the lazy shit like items all being blue orbs that you pick up. In Dragon's Dogma that released around a decade ago, you could cut off a cyclops's tusk and it would fall to the ground to pick up. In this, the enemy's weapon models don't even fall for you to pick up, it's glowing blue orbs.

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I like From games. I started with DeS and enjoyed them all a lot (except for DaS2) and I wanted to love Elden Ring, it’s just shit. It hurts extra bad coming off the heels of Sekiro, which was so phenomenal and evolved the combat system so well and had such amazingly well designed fights. And remember, if you didn't start with DeS then you're a tryhard secondary and your opinion doesn't matter no matter how many times you try to tell others to git gud.

Didn't read lol

>that hitbox
Holy shit. Fromedrones will unironically defend this.