#max plays elden ring

[eluvixns]

shots taken moments before disaster

[rawrl1ns]

How Lestappen girlie plays Elden Ring:

[dimir-charmer]

When you start a game like elden ring, with a reputation like elden ring's, you think that the required Gamer's Temperament is something like this:

determination to overcome obstacles

appreciation for esoteric and obscured story beats

undeterred by "unfair" gameplay

willing to learn from each death

And what they dont tell you is a crucial part of the cocktail that makes you enjoy elden ring is

appreciation for slapstick comedy

[sotc]

i finally beat da2 and this is what it felt like

I have some criticisms about the ending but I don't know if I have it in me to get fully into it so instead I will simply just say...

Carver as a Grey Warden is one of the best character developments to me out of all the companions, hands down. I would probably argue he has the most character growth out of everyone in those three acts and most of it is off screen in the years him and Hawke are apart. LOL. And even then I was still SO satisfied with how Hawke and him came together as family in the end!

RIP to Isabela leaving my Hawke behind in Act 2 though btw.

ALSO OF COURSE, HONORABLE MENTION TO MY BELOVEDST FENRIS. ✨💗 It was lovely to see his puppy dog eyes again 🥺

I mentioned before I do not take a lot of interest in templar/mage or the Qunari plots and that still holds true. Act 3 was Hawke fighting for her fucking life trying to support mages but every fucking one of them just kept resorting to blood magic. By the end I was getting so sick of the story falling to the same plot device over and over LOL.

Overall, I still enjoyed myself revisting the game after a decade though! I can't say I hold it as highly as I used to. It was my first game into the series afterall so I didn't know any better lol (origins my beloved) but yeah just... the personal relationships between Hawke and her companions/family was carrying the game for me.

Anyways..... now on to INQUISITION!! 🤺

[kathrynmjaneway]

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[death-rebirth-senshi]

Forget the coliseums Elden Ring needs to patch in a room at the roundtable specifically for taking screenshots of your character with decent lighting that doesn't weirdly obscure face details

[waywardsalt]

my recording of finally beating the caelid divine tower godskin apostle :)

[liimonadas]

been on a bit of an art block, but i just started elden ring so here's my tarnished creature

[kuromi-hoemie]

okok i got my day planned out then 🫡 go get a chicken sandwich breakfast, watch the untamed, get crossfaded, whenever i "want" to stop watching the untamed clean and then keep playing ori. perhaps keep reading at some point, but ori is Really nice as an experience.

[ettadunham]

'i'm obsessed with her' me about the silly little character i just made in a video game

[eluvixns]

wish she was my gf not gonna lie

[communist-hatsunemiku]

Poll for my from soft people. Elden Ring, Dark Souls, Bloodborne specifically

So some people may not know this, but when you rate other peoples messages, good OR bad, it heals them fully in their game. I've literally had my life saved by this feature so I always make sure I have the max amount of messages laid down AND I rate every single message I see because I'm going to save somebody from dieing at least a few of those times. Rate the messages!!

[sexhaver]

in relation to your recent post, can I actually ask you for tips on playing Elden Ring while I'm rehabilitating my motor skills? I suffered a stroke and am rebuilding dexterity in my hands, have never played a fromsoft game, only have a keyboard, and am wondering what build would work best.

the two main builds i usually see disabled gamers using in Elden Ring are full caster (so you kill everything at range and minimize/eliminate melee engagements) or a melee build that uses a greatshield + spear or heavy thrusting sword + heavy armor to spam poke attacks while still blocking and taking minimal damage. a really funny alternative to this second build is to get the Great Stars colossal weapon (regens HP per hit) and put the Prayerful Strike ash of war on it (heals for like 30% of your max HP every time it hits) so you can just spam the weapon art in the boss's face and regain more HP than you lose during the windup. also don't be ashamed to use co-op signs and spirit summons as needed. good luck and have fun!

[frankiesmileshow]

Crystal Project Review

Ive been having a lot of fun with Crystal Project, a well made FF5-inspired RPG. The combat is very tightly designed and the exploration aspect is top notch. The art style put me off a bit at first, but I think it grew on me over time.

The game does a great job of slowly uncovering its breadth and letting you break its sequence through curious exploring. Lots of fun to search every part of its gigantic map for secrets. This is a game that loves hiding secrets within secrets within secrets. You might even occasionally stumble into a late game area, and exploring carefully could lead to finding items meant for the end of the game, giving your party a significant early game boost.

Exploring will often lead to surprise optional boss battles that are completely out of your league - but dying has few consequences in the game (you just lose a bit of money) and dying from bosses has no consequences at all, so you rarely feel truly punished for having explored too far, and its always worth it to have a peek at a boss battle.

Don't expect too much of a story. There is one, but it keeps a very light touch, this is mainly a game about exploring and fighting monsters. It does have characters and some personality, but dont expect something dense story wise.

It manages to avoid feeling like an open world game - it feels more like a linear game that just lets you break out of the confines of its intended path if you explore enough. It strikes a very good balance between having direction and having freedom. The world map just keeps expanding as you play, leading to many little shocks about the games' scope, a feeling you might be familiar with if you played Elden Ring.

The games combat uses a very well balanced, strategic system. Battles give you a lot of information to let you choose your actions carefully - you can see any enemies' next action in advance, and you even know who the enemy will attack next (notice the dotted lines in the screenshot above). Manipulating the enemies' current target is actually one of the fundamentals of the game- enemies choose their next target based on a "Threat" system which is entirely open to you as you fight, and many classes have abilities to help you manipulate this. Some class abilities also depend on the current threat state of a character - for instance, the rogues' many powerful skills only work if they are considered an enemy's bottom threat, and will otherwise always miss, which requires careful actions on your part.

The class system will be familiar if you played Final Fantasy 5 - you obtain new classes by exploring the world and finding large crystals, each unlocking a new one. The classes set a characters' stat growth on level-up, equippable items, main abilities and all have a unique "Innate passive" which are usually quite powerful (for instance, the base Cleric class receives a significant boost to all healing spells).

You can also add the abilities of a secondary class to your characters' moveset- like adding a clerics' healing spells to your Samurai. There is a lot of fun to be had mixing one class's abilities with anothers' passive boost - for instance, one class has an ability which makes the first action this character makes in a battle always target All enemies or All allies, allowing you to either massively boost your whole party or nuke the enemy party with a powerful spell usually meant for a single foe.

There are also passive abilities you can unlock from any class and assign regardless of a characters' current class, limited by a point cost system. These can range from a boost to max HP, to adding a poison effect to any weapon attacks, to allowing your character to equip a shield regardless of their class.

You can get very creative with the games' class system, there are countless ways to mix and match character abilities and classes to figure out some powerful strategy. The endgame has several challenges that might require you to make custom party setups just for them, turning the combat system into something resembling a kind of puzzle - though one with many possible solutions.

Boss battles have a way of feeling like a desperate struggle of improvising as your strategy falls apart - then winning by the skin of your teeth. This happens a lot. At least half of the boss battles for me ended with most of my party dead, and being one or two turns away from a full wipe-out.

I think the only real misstep is the games' analogue to chocobo breeding, introduced at the very end of the game. It feels tedious, I gave up on it after an hour of wasting my money on food for the creatures and not getting anywhere. Luckily it seems to be completely optional.

All in all I recommend it to anyone who likes FF5 and who likes RPGs that have a focus on exploring. Visually it might look a bit basic, but underneath that is an extremely robust game.

[glngrbred]

Hot take, Elden ring is a really good souls like, but that doesn't mean its actually a good game.

within the subgenre, souls-likes have always had really huge issues with accessibility, and i don't mean for disability alone. Elden ring especially had extremely horrible performance issues at launch, which they did eventually fix. Even then you still have to get a 400 dollar PC. Aside from that there are some strange decisions made with teaching the player, like the tutorial is just a hole that players had to point out to each other, and On my barely stable first 20 minutes, i couldn't even find (my b i guess). Obviously alot of extremely experienced gamers would be able to handle themselves super well in Elden ring even without a tutorial. But there's another issue there with accessibility.

2 last things on accessibility. The game's audio is mixed like a movie, (so barely audible or ripping out your eardrums ;-;) witch is another accessibility issue, that you have to put a lot of work in to fix. And the graphics range from maxing out the brightness, to being completely black on bad screens. obviously an issue. I'm not going to go into the issues with explanations and the general tell don't show nature of alot of souls likes, because people have already complained about the text tunnels enough

I do really appreciate the artistry and just beautiful atmosphere Elden ring has, my only issue with the graphics is the performance requirements for them. Also if you never turned the graphics all the way down, it used to cause bit lag spikes just because it wanted to i guess :")

So, my argument is that a game can be a good version of the predecessors it bases itself off of, but if it doesn't actually deliver on playability and accessibility, I really don't think its deserving of the praise it gets. here are examples of games I think are flawless Unraveled/Unraveled 2 Hades Minecraft (Java edition only [cuz bedrock is completely broken somehow???) Never alone (a cool 2 player co op platformer that me and my brother played through when we were 6 and 8 or smthn, it was incredible, and i still think its worth playing as an adult) Spelunky 2 ***Monster Hunter (except for the extremely slow RPG elements) [takes 3 months to get 1 armor set built fully :)]

So i actually have some great news for the difficulty purists, You can actually do a hardcore game well, So long as you make failure quick and readable, Make trying immediate, and Make learning a part of the design. Spelunky is not my cup of tea, i have a bad time with reaction time, but spelunky is really great, in that your goal every attempt is simply to get as far as possible. In elden ring, you have the opposite problem, where instead of completing the objective being extraordinarily hard, getting from point a to point b is tediouse, saving the game takes time, occasionally you can be attacked without knowing why, and you dont get a clear read on what went wrong, ETC. If Elden ring was only the boss fights, I would say its almost a great game. Which is why I included Monster hunter on that list, despite its insufferable grind. Also BTW spelunky 2 has four fun minigames. a requirement for any game to be truly perfect is for there to be appeal for casual gamers, and i don't think adding casual elements makes a game worse, like, ever.

Anyways, last little thing, I really dislike it when People praise games for not catering to the needs of some players. Like everyone has heard dudebros or their friends be like "It doesn't have any difficulty settings! that's so sick!" But, like, Have you ever met someone with a motor function disability, or like, just someone who doesn't play games for 30000 hours every year? Difficulty settings and the ability to control your experience are important. and this isn't about Elden ring, But if you care about being an ally you should want your games to have accessibility features, they only benefit people. and if you're so worked up about about an extra tab being in the settings window, maybe you should like, go to therapy or something.

Also Elden ring's UI is so ass it gave my design teacher a heart attack and they hired a Pe*o as our sub.

[sunshades]

Long time bell fans will remember I spent several hours of my elden ring playthrough cursed because I liked fia and didnt know her item was reducing my max hp while I fought through several bosses. They will be delighted to learn today we found out I actually played the entire game under the effect of an actual curse called CPU lag because I didnt know I should've installed optional updates so my GAMING LAPTOP would be able to RUN GAMES