How would you fix Elden Ring?

Serious thread. Post suggestions or ideas to make the game better. I'll start

>Make the open-world map 15-20% smaller
Currently, the open world map is too big, and there isn't a lot to do other than fighting mobs, finding crafting materials and admiring the visuals. It becomes jarring to traverse after 60+ hours. Make it smaller, not by much, just a bit

>Remove at least 30 of the dungeons
At the moment, the dungeons serve no purpose other than making you fight the same boss you fought before, but with a new name and an item to hit that dopamine. Either do what DSII did with the Bonfire Ascetic, if you really want to get those items, or Bloodborne with Chalice Dungeons. Just do something that doesn't make it repetitive. If I explore a new dungeon, I expect something new, not the same thing again. With a BA or CD, I will know what I'm getting myself into

>Improve boss qualities
60% of the bosses are re-skins. However, out of those 60%, almost half of them are garbage bosses that are either mob enemies with bigger HP or throw autistic tantrums as attacks (Tree Spirit, Magma Wyverns, Grafted Scion, Lion, etc.) These aren't fun bosses. They don't test your skills or build, they test your patience and RNG. Either improve their AI or replace them with better bosses

>Using Torrent in a fight is a nightmare
If you get hit once, you'll be stun-locked, and if they hit you enough, you'll fall and have to slowly get back up. If you don't play circles around the boss, you'll get one-shot easily. An easy way to fix this is using your skill points to improve upon that mechanic. Maybe if you increase your STR, it'll take longer to stun-lock you. Or maybe with DEX, your recovery time on the ground will be faster.

The game could be a 10/10, it is really fun, but there are major problems that are holding it back severely.

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it'll be fixed in the dlc :^)

>Remove Horse
The horse is janky and doesn't add much to the game. Also combat on it fucking sucks.
>Remove 90% of all bonfires
There are way too fucking many checkpoints. I understand retards need help to navigate through the world but there has to be a better way than plant a bonfire every 10 meters.
>Change grace sites back to bonfires
Grace sites are lame. Finding a bonfire after a long adernous journey would have been peak comfyness.
>Make the world bigger
The world feels really cramped at times
>Sekiro Parry
The mechanic is already in the game but it's ass to use due to long parry animations and parry being limited to shields and some weapons. Should have been on every fucking weapon
>BB dodge
Again, the mechanic is already in the game, just make it the standard dodge instead of limiting it to an Ash of War
>Boss HP
Bosses are way too squishy, being able to kill most bosses with a few heavy jump attacks or weapon skill is fucking boring
>less crafting materials
Reaching a hidden corpse on a ledge and then getting fucking mushrooms is incredible lame. Fuck off with that shit.
>More mini dungeons
Really liked how they got more intricate and weird as time went on. They should have added more of them.

make the map bigger and add more dungeons.
make DEX worse and delete INT

>Make the map smaller and more interconnective
They had all the time in the world to make a ds1-like world on a bigger scale yet somehow they made a map less interconnective than what ds3 had
In ds3 there are 2 areas you can't go on foot, in ER the areas you can't go to without teleport/cutscene are the following: entirety of haligtree, western half of winterland, farum azula, all the underground areas except one, Moonlight Altar and many of the great rune towers
They could fit all the other areas around Altus Plateau and they could connect every area in countless ways
If they did that there would be no need for fast travel since you have horse now as well

>Cut down the fat
You will go trough 3 or 4 dungeons before it gets boring, so make it 6 with a couple mines and that's enough, they could reuse bosses less that way and for the love of god, don't reuse main bosses, reusing mohg, astel and godrick was embarrassing
Also crafting is fucking useless

>Make the map smaller and more interconnective
when will you people drop this stupid fucking meme ? this stopped being relevant the moment they made it so you can teleport anywhere you want at the start of the game. There's a bit of interconection and it's enough for its purpose, that really is the least of the game's problems

Then what would you consider to be the more 'major' problems than the game's literal map?

Cut every recycled boss
Cut 15% of the map

But how am I supposed to get my internet cool points by not shitting on [popular thing]?

Make normal smithing stones up weapons to +10 too, change scaling and make them even more obtainable than somber ss.

Rework most bosses, add a lot of new ones to replace the most used ones, add a lot of boss cutscenes.

Make Ranni and Melina more involved in the story (I think that this will actually happened in the dlc). Make the npcs in general either be more direct about their next step (like when Alexander tells you that he'll rejuvenate in the lava of mt gelmir).

Remove input reading and make the bosses act on their own.

Add more pure strength weapons, add more hyperarmor for strength weapons, add more poise break for strength weapons, even for bosses.

Add more new enemies in the later stages.

Change the look of most dungeons. Some of the later ones in the snow area show big changes from the standard ones. More should have been like that.

I wish the items were randomly placed, would make exploration way better

>Fewer bosses
It becomes a bit underwhelming eventually when you get normal enemies as bosses and vice versa. I kind of get the idea of adding "forced fights" to dungeons but you could achieve that without the fog door just by, like, having the player have to drop down a ledge, especially with the "teleport back to entrance" thing they added. I've fought Godskin Noble like four times now but I haven't fought the "main" one for the achievement, which is kinda funny. It's more of a perception thing, where bosses become less "special" eventually.

>Torrent needs to be buffed
Torrent is VERY weak, especially toward the end of the game. He dies quickly, you can't use a shield on horseback, you can't use Ashes of War, when he dies you have to go through a PROMPT to revive him (awful idea) etc. Riding Torrent should feel like it gives you an advantage, not just lets you escape certain attacks.

>Bosses need better balance
Most bosses are unpleasant to fight with input reading, inconsistent attacks, the ability to interrupt their own attack to respond to the player, placing bosses in arenas that aren't appropriate for their size or attack patterns, etc. There are some great bosses in the game (Radagon is among my favorites) but there are far more bullshit ones.

>Remove some of the more bullshit areas
Lake of Rot, Ordina and Haligtree are an absolute assache to get through in a way that's just unpleasant. Having some Scarlet Rot areas make it so you can't run or jump just feels unfair -- you'll get Rot and there's really nothing you can do about it. Lake of Rot is especially annoying since a lot of the time, you're just...standing there waiting for you gauge to go back down so you can run to the next platform.

Those are my major complaints. Continuing in a sec.

I'm still not that far in the game so I don't want to give a full critique at this point but imo the game is just dark souls in bigger scale, it's not really what a grand adventure / open world really means. The game world doesn't feel alive, it doesn't feel like things are happening. It's just mobs placed here and there waiting for you to come get the items. It doesn't make it bad but it's imo inferior to witcher 3. The game mechanics so far are almost identical to previous entries, so there isn't much novelty from there, mobs are much more agressive and punishing, I guess in order to account for the fact a lot of players enjoy summoning. PVP is a bit better because you can invade a larger region (so a bigger pool of players), but it's also worse because there is a vast terrain meant to be roamed on horse. That means when you invade (and it's almost always a gank squad), it's much harder to use the terrain and the mobs to spice up the fight. I haven't gotten many spells so far but it seems, just like in previous entries, there are a lot of complete trash spells with no specific situation where it can be useful. All in all I'm enjoying dark souls 4 but I don't think they nailed the open world part, and I don't think they pushed their formula that much, sekiro and even DS3 did more in that sense.

Honestly I don't mind repeated boss fights that much when they are optional
The problem is when they decide to slap two bosses who don't belong together in one fight

>Add auto-crafting and buying options
Most of us I think just forget crafting exists in the game. It would be good to let us craft things automatically when we have the ingredients. Moreover, though, make craftable items also purchasable, or at least the ingredients. Late game it's really inconvenient and feels menial.

>Add inventory management
Let us favorite items so they show up at the top of our equipment list without having to sort things into our chest, sort by Scaling stats, etc.

>Make Rune Arcs easier to get
Rune Arcs are WAY more scarce than they should be; they're unreasonably rare from Rats and having to help players online is tedious and inconsistent. A lot of players just never use Great Runes because they're so much harder to get than Humanities were in the Souls games. As with usable items, I think Rune Arcs should have a Bell or something added that make them unlimited resources you can buy, even if they're very expensive in that form (say 15K per, rather than the normal 5K or whatever.)

>Add more non-hostile areas with unique NPCs
Granted, ER is better than other games in the franchise at this, with not just Roudtable but also the Festival and Jarburg, but it feels like the world is much more "alive" than any of the other settings, so it's odd that almost nowhere else in the game is welcoming to the player. If we get an ER2 and it takes place after one of the Elden Lord endings, I hope they take that opportunity to add some settlements to the game after the Ring is mended, but maybe the new player character is trying to oppose the Greater Will or something.

>If you get hit once, you'll be stun-locked, and if they hit you enough, you'll fall and have to slowly get back up
That's to punish you trying to cheese every fight with Torrent you fucking retard

I would make 1 change only.
Dying reduces your total level by 1.
No need to thank me ;)

add romance and porn

>Lake of Rot, Ordina and Haligtree are an absolute assache to get through in a way that's just unpleasant
This is the most retarded thing I have ever heard. The game needs MORE dungeons with actual level design, not less. Haligtree is amazing
And if Lake of Rot bothers you that much, just run straight through while healing. I loved the gimmick to make it different from other poison swamps

By not ending Sellen's questline the way they did.

Either line up zones or scrap levelling all together and balance bosses around a always consistent stat-set that can be modified with gear.

Delete godskin apostle and rebalance the end game.

Horse armor for Torrent in the Elden Ring store.

>all these shitty takes
Jesus.

Your skill issue and your inability to not write blogposts about Elden Ring every day.

It is so fucking bizarre to me that they make such a big deal out of the great rune system, only for it to be nearly useless due to how fucking scarce the enablers are.
The worst part is that the system was clearly gutted in some respect and they forgot to fix it. There is that initial prompt when you first get access to great runes that tells you that you need a rune arc to get a "greater effect" or something like that, implying that there is a base effect for each of them. A miscommunication that literally everybody I know why played the game was confused by. This to me tells me that great runes simply used to have some kind of base effect, and that you just needed the rune arcs to get a better version of that effect. Which would have been a way more elegant system if they decided to make rune arcs to impossible to get. They probably nerfed them at the last minute and forgot to actually balance it out by making rune arcs accessible.

Make some enemies 30-50% slower.
Turn up the balance.

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No clue but if they put in a way to save Melina in a non-retroactive way in the dlc after I went through the hassle of getting the frenzy and curing it with the needle I will lose the sole amount of ounce of faith I have left in FROM after all of the unfinished, bullshit that they shipped in this game.

>>Boss HP
>Bosses are way too squishy, being able to kill most bosses with a few heavy jump attacks or weapon skill is fucking boring
what the fuck am I reading

The base of the game is very good. It’s all the extra fat leeching off of it that ruins the experience. Most important things to change:

>Remove many sites of grace and place them better
>Only allow fast traveling at a grace site
>Remove all evergoal boss fights and reduce the amount of bosses overall, especially reused ones.
>Combine the shorter dungeons with other short dungeons to make them feel more unique
>Add more aesthetic variety to the dungeons
>Make the map size overall smaller to accommodate all these changes while still retaining the same amount of content

Improve all enemy health by 100% and player damage by 100%