 I think one of my favorite character names that I had came from Rags, and there was Chuck the Coom. Chuck the Coom? Chuck the Coom? Yeah. I named the character like that. I mean, is Chuck the Coom or is he... He is Chuck the Coom. My God. That was a very good name. What about Lightning? I don't know if you can say that on screen. You got a good old Lightning Mac flimbo. You got to get that white flammable. I'm scared now. I think a God Slayer, God Slayer Fireball or something like that is like the white one you can throw. It's black flame, yeah. I just need to go public and... Well, we are already... The re-upload people are listening to this right now. Oh, hello re-upload people. Hi guys, how are you doing? I'm doing alright. I hope you enjoyed the stream the first time. The unlisted people as well because they'll hear this. You know, they'll be the first to hear this. Because all the live people are going to miss this bit right here. Well, they're going to be so mad. It's a secret. They'll catch this bit though. This bit. Oh, this bit? Yeah. Man, they miss all the part where the live people heard how bad they are and what we hate them. I think the plan is going to be that I'm going to throw on the muted playthroughs of me in the background. So I don't need to give more together to anybody. That's just a vision. Those at home. And I will do my best, depending on what everyone's talking about, to find the parts of my playthrough that match what we're talking about. Okay. That is my plan. It's a plan. I like your plan. Ew. I like this metal guy. We should bring him on. Nice. Ugly. Oh. That's fine. You can smell the ugliness. So hello, everybody, and welcome to the Elden Ring Fap, where we talk about a video game that is taken the world by storm. Again. It's true. Yes. Storm Veil. That's going to have to be a topic on its own. Elden Ring's cultural impact, I suppose. Oh. Okay. Geez. Like Elden Ring's cultural impact. Oh my goodness, crazy. I'm not. No. See, I was just mad that his little cool game is being liked by everyone. Yes. Yes. That's exactly what I have mad. Ironically. Wow. This is my game. Go away. Give me a loan. Okay. So, structure, we're probably just going to get right into it. I don't see why not. Should we do the thing we typically do, if everyone gives a short version of their thoughts on the game that we start talking about all of everything. I think that's probably wise. Do we start with rags? Honestly, I thought that it was far too difficult, and there needs to be an easy mode for people like me, because all I play is, all I do is pay my way through Plants for Zombies 2 on my phone, and I just, a game that challenges me, I just don't really appreciate that. That's not why I buy games, so that I could pay money in video games, and I don't appreciate this kind of game. Before you know it, I'm going to kill myself. Oh, no. Because of Elden Ring. I am owed victory. Well, one person less, but the viewers will worry about. There you go. Absolutely, Chad. No, I have not played Elden Ring. I've watched probably four, five, probably about six, seven hours' worth of Mahler's playthrough of it. What did you gain from that? There's things that I'd like about it, there's things that I wouldn't like about it. By watching you, it's tough to say, because it was sped up a bit, I wasn't absorbed fully into it. But it seems like it's a game that, I think it's sort of confirmed to me what I sort of figured all along. Dark Souls and these Souls games, this is not for me. They're not the kind of game that I enjoy. I just rather play other things. It's just not for me. Maybe later, I'll delve in and see if maybe this one is something that I could add to my list of beat games. Maybe it's some project that I sort of chiseled away at over time. But as it stands right now, it's just not really my thing. But a lot of people seem to love it, and I'm being, not that great. Huh? I didn't hear you. What's that? Do you think that these types of games are not that great? Or do you think that they are, like, fantastic? I just don't think they're, I can't make much of a qualitative statement. I just sort of, my understanding of them and sort of watching people play them is just, I just don't think that I would enjoy them. It's not really what I find fun and engaging in a game, though it's always subject to change. Maybe one day down the road, I'll pick up Elden Ring and I'll be like, wow, this is amazing and I really love it. But my, my relationship with hardcore games is very strange. There are some that I love. There are some that I hate. And it's, it's very much, I don't know, it's, it's just, it's strange, but I, I wouldn't, I don't think it's strange at all, right? Like people have different tastes. Yeah, it depends on how it's done, but hardcore is such a broad kind of term because it's everything from dark souls to escape from Tarkov to all kinds of different things. And they have, they cover such a swath of mechanics and punishments and challenges and expectations of the player. Maybe that's the, the big thing that separates them all. So just saying that I like hardcore games, I don't know if that means you like dark souls or you like Daisy or if you like escape from Tarkov or if you like whatever hardcore game you're talking about. So I haven't played it. I'm just sort of here to listen, ask a question here and there. All like, what I can say that was, I think the game is very lovely. It has a, it looks very good from what I've seen. I really like a lot of the art style in it. I love this dark fantasy kind of western-ish style. Almost like, it's like a, it's like the old, the old sword sorcery movies from like the 70s and 80s where they're just kind of dark and they're like early D&D sort of stuff. It kind of has that vibe to it for me. And I really like it. I really appreciate the aesthetic and there seems to be a huge amount of content in it and I really, I'm really glad to hear that and I'm glad it's selling well because I'm glad when a single-player game sells really, really well because I don't want the gaming trends to just issue us into the multiplayer microtransaction territory. Um, alright then. I figured that there's not in any way to torture you. It was literally just so people understand. This one's going to have a lot less rags and fringing in it compared to everyone else because the difference here is that I think everyone else has completed it which can take up to a hundred hours. And so, if anyone is like wow, fringing in rags didn't complete it this isn't a movie, okay? This isn't two hours. This is a big commitment. I don't want to play a game that I don't think is for me that I'd like because I would just hate it and I don't want to because not everything's for me. I'm not seven years old and I don't think that everything in the world needs to conform to what I like and everything needs to be something that I can beat and give me challenges that are just meant for me to overcome. So I'm going to let everyone else sort of enjoy their video. Their vidya. Oh, this might be worth the wrestling. I actually spoke with Az about this honor stream. I said to him that unfortunately we've already got too many people and he's not the first person that I said we've got too many people for there are three other YouTubers who were interested. Unfortunately, they were further down the queue in terms of asking to come in. I figured that myself and one other of the people here would be enough to get us five hours of talking about this game. But yeah, I threw in a couple extras. The thing is, Theo Fortier, Mattle myself and Mark I imagine we've got a shit ton to say about this game. Adding anyone else just means that the individual will be able to talk a lot less. There are so many fucking subjects to go over. Hi, Mola. Hello. Maybe you should kick me out of the I'm saying some people want me to leave so that someone else can take this vlog. But if you were going to talk anyway then it wouldn't matter. It can go over the nature of what EFAP is, I guess. It's a show that's run by myself, Friggy and Rags. Hi. They will be here because they are the hosts and they will discuss mechanics as brought up. The thing is, the really cool and interesting thing is random subject like graphics. We all talk for a while about how the game looks and then we talk more broadly about what games should look like. And you know what, Rags and Friggy can jump in on that easily. They don't actually need to have played the game at that point. Well, I mean, here's an idea. I might just boot up my Elden Ring right now and just play a little bit of it while I'm sitting here. Kick Mola. Alright, fine, I'll leave. Bye. Well, in that case then, I'll just move up the ladder in a sense because Rags has washed a decent chunk. Friggy is the next step with having played what we could call a chunk. It's all relative. You want to just go over quickly what you've got so far and then I will go through the rest of us who have all got bazillions of hours. Yes, ma'am. Stage fright, it's okay. Stage fright. Are you there? Yeah. Oh, nice. I was like kind of scared. I was like, did he say Mark before that? I was like, Millie's saying anything. Am I dropping the wall? In my defense, I'm very tired. What was the... What were the... Oh, just a quick sort of... Sort of a brief thing of what is your relationship with Elden Ring right now and any thoughts you have just so that people get a grip and then we'll move on with it. Sure. I've played three hours because I got bogged down with other things. Like Mario Kart. Did you play Mario Kart instead of Elden Ring? That's fine. Yeah. The reason why I'm playing Mario Kart instead of Elden Ring is because Mario Kart is nice and safe. It's a friendly world that takes care of things. It's funny because if I'm going to play something random, it's like, oh, I guess I'll play some Dark Souls. Mario Kart doesn't steal my runes when I come in 8th place. Well, it's just... It'll throw a blue shell at you when you're in 1st, though. Yeah, Mario Kart is kind of a hardcore experience online, but nevertheless I... I know side of the things that... I played a little bit, though, a few days ago. I would have played more, but then things came up. My experience with FromSoft Games is I've beaten Dark Souls 3 basically Bloodborne until I got up to Orphan of Kos, and then 8 hours later, they kind of just stopped. And I played a bunch of Sekiro, but I didn't beat it. I don't think I've played like a couple hours of Dark Souls 1. That's basically me. So I'm somewhat familiar with the series. And in what little I've played of Elden Ring, I like it, but I don't think I have anything of value to add to this discussion. But, well, apart from questions and... and yeah, this is very much a... I'm very keen to hear what everybody else has to say. And I'm much sad, but I'm going to keep pressing on with it. One of the things that is super beneficial for having myself, Metal, Theo, Fortia, I'm not actually sure about Mark on this one is that we have a vast and obsessive knowledge of all the other games that came before this one, except for me with Sekiro. But I played the fuck out of DS1, 2, and 3, and Bloodborne. And so we'll have a lot of probably tangential discussions on how they've taken stuff from the old games and used it, or not used it. Different choices in that way. Which even if... Well, I mean, I guess POV on this one is interesting because I wonder how the discussion changes depending on if the only game that someone's played is Elden Ring, or if they haven't played any of their Souls games, but they played Bloodborne, you know? Because I think this is a game that is always going to get compared to those games because you can see the DNA of like demon souls in all of the games. It is very much Dark Souls 4. Oh, yeah. Well, I guess maybe that'll be the discussion because I do know that like the big difference between Elden Ring and pretty much every other game that, uh, FromSoft made, this one is like just a full-fledged open world game as opposed to a Metroidvania kind of, uh, where like it opens up in time as you explore different areas and then you can loop back and things like that. Uh, whereas this one's just like a I've heard comparisons to Breath of the Wild which might be interesting because I have played Breath of the Wild so there may be points where it's might be interesting to compare then again, I've played that game in a while, but yeah. I'm mostly observing this one, but I'm looking forward to it. Um, I figure with the rest of us we'll just go left to right, nice and simple. For Tia, take as long as you want but preferably keep it under 5 minutes, you know? Just, uh, what's your broad takes on Elden Ring? Um, well I think it's amazing. Um, I, let's see, right now I have 150 hours in the game, a little bit more. Um, and like my background with these games is like, I'm a souls born geek. Like Muller said I've, I have several hours in all of the previous games except for Demon's Souls. I haven't played Demon's Souls but the others I've played hundreds of hundreds of hours of um, and I think it's super fun. Uh, the further I play the more I got like odd, I guess of how much content there was. Like, I played for I explored an area for ages and I was like, alright, I'm probably done here and then I turned the corner and was like, alright, there's another 20 hours of content, neat. And um, but I do think that when we start diving into things more in depth I think the objective value of this game is going to drop lower than my opinion of the game is. There are a few tisms that I've noticed and that other people have noticed and we have discussed a little bit before, before this stream um but I, I, like my personal opinion is it's absolutely amazing. I've had so much fun in this game absolutely amazing. Alright, Mach, you next up. Hey, hello there everybody. I'm in a similar boat to 14 that I've played all of the other Souls games. Um, I actually I've not played Demon's Souls though, but I actually just played it for the first time on PS5 last year. I was reviewing it for Geeks and Gamers. I found though that that was the easiest one in the series by far for me at least. I don't know if it was just because I had experience at that point or what but um, I, I'm a bit of a Souls born geek as well. I would say I'm not incredible at the games. Like, because I mean often when you say like, yeah, some of my favorite games are the Souls games and Pro is the only game I have all the steam achievements of, but I'm not like a Soul level one like Wretch build, just nothing but a club and one shotting every boss kind of player. I have to learn and need to take the time to learn the boss patterns and you know, like to use the meme get good at them. But I've got 150 hours in Elden Ring. I did finish the game and I am kind of regret the tactics I used in the latter half from Gods Can Dua on, especially with things like Millenia. I was kind of abusing the whorefrost stomp and the mimic summon, but I think very, very similar to Fortia. I think my personal subjective rating of it will probably be higher than what the objective will be because there are a couple of those elements that break the balance. Do do a no small part to the fact that this is absolutely the most ambitious game that ever made. But I think overall it's very good and if you like this kind of game, I would strongly recommend it. Wait. Alright. For me, anybody who's watched my streams pretty much already know, I quite adore this game. I think it's wonderful in all kinds of ways and I can't wait to appreciate a lot of those in a meta sense as well is just what the game is offering and where it sits in the progression of Soulsborne games because I'm also a little obsessed with all of them, but at the same time I realize the more I think about and criticize different elements, the more I'm like, there is a lot in here that would definitely be considered flaws and not just of like balancing that can be fixed but also just choices they made that relate to the grander ideas that they have. But I wouldn't want to be looking to make any kind of crazy statements of flaws or praises that wipe out either of the other. That's why I think this conversation is probably going to be pretty long. But I love it. It would definitely be in the ranks of some of my favorite games of all times. And I think once I've done enough playthroughs of it, I'll probably have a way better view of exactly where it sits and how good it is, but I'm still pretty impressed overall. It's just that when we get into the specific details, I imagine it could come across much more clearly in some other direction. But yeah, I still loved it. I kind of loved them all and that's the reality of it. I think in our Bloodborne streams we went over loads of things that we thought were wrong with that game, but we still all fucking adore it. It's complicated but hopefully we can be clear on how all that kind of makes sense. Yeah, that's that. I suppose metal? What do you think? I mean, it's going to be pretty similar to all the other things that just been said. I fucking love this game. I've basically been streaming non-stop when I'm not having work. I'm just online streaming this game every goddamn day because I'm fucking obsessed with the game. I think right now it would actually rate it as my second favorite Souls game at the moment, but maybe the honeymoon phase will stop at some point, but we'll see. That's just me at the moment. I really love this. A really good time. I have 130 hours or something in the game right now. Similar kind of regret my build choice the first time around. Not that I didn't have fun but I didn't really learn the bosses and stuff like that, but we'll be going over that in more detail, I'm sure. And yeah, I'm already halfway through my second playthrough pretty much just a melee build now which is very different gaming experience right now because I did a ranged build last time and that was very, very different. A bunch of tisms as I already mentioned which we will go over I just keep it at short because otherwise I'm just going to go rand, so I'm finished. Alright. And finally Theo how much did you love the game? Oh man. Well I've used the word hate in recent discourse. I'm starting to come down to the opinion that might be a bit too strong. However, I have a distinct degree of disdain for this game because I think it stands as a betrayal of everything that makes Dark Souls 1 as special as it is. I think I'm really, really annoyed and upset by this game being what it is in like very short form. Oh I mean you can go a little longer than that if you want. Where to begin like in every regard I think it's no longer what Fromsoft were originally good at and what originally made their games worthwhile other than maybe in terms of boss design I think it's lost all of the spark in terms of the cohesiveness of how their games tend to be put together this one just being sort of haphazard in its execution I think it's got all sorts of mechanical issues that are showing the limits of this framework that they design their games in as action games because they're leaning increasingly more on the action side of their gameplay and the more they do the more it becomes clear why they didn't do that in the first place with Dark Souls as much I think something that will be interesting for people just to know really quick going from left to right no offence but I'm probably going to ignore Fringing and Rags on this one what is everybody's favourite in the whole series um if you just say basically favourite Fromsoftware game um I was going to say favourite and best which one do you think is the best that's the question I think I'd prefer to ask so from left to right just name the game and that's the information for everybody basically uh Dark Souls 1 I think I'd say Dark Souls 1 as well subjectively Sekiro Dark Souls 1 Dark Souls 1 and it's not close alright there you go just so chat have an idea but anyway um there I guess that summarizes the uh the kind of intros um so we could really start anywhere um I wonder if it's an idea to just uh start with whatever you think is the biggest flaw Theo maybe we could go with that um hmm so many I guess the easy one to start with in that regard is the one everyone's noticed which would be iterative content and you know spam of repeated enemies and whatnot which I guess would lead into boss design itself well yeah so to explain I guess exactly what you you're looking to talk about there from I'm guessing um there's a lot of repeated stuff assets in this game uh from everything you could imagine I'd imagine is is repeated but um the one that as you just said everyone noticed and has even compared to Dark Souls 2 which is kind of fair is that you'll end up fighting different creatures a fucking lot uh the one that I think most people can directly associate with would be the ulcerated tree spirit and then the tree avatar those are the two you fight a lot in this game and neither fight is particularly strong I don't think uh tree avatars are just asylum demons so yeah and people complained about fighting three of those in Dark Souls 1 now we get like 14 I fought over six way over six probably and then I fought like three magma worms I fought like a shitload of ulcerated tree spirits I fought a bunch of crucible knights I fought so many fucking bosses and none of them were good the ones that got the most play were always the bad ones here's a question is the problem that the bosses have repeated or is the problem more so that fights aren't great I think it's a combination of both yeah because if it would be like an amazing boss I would not be annoyed after like seven times maybe if it's like a really really good boss but still after that if it's like the best boss I've ever thought I don't want to fight orphan of cars 20 times in my play through yeah every zone ends with orphan of cars I think what you've said reminds me of Halo 5 the Warden Eternal here's a really cool boss the first time I fought him but then like the seventh time it was pretty shit I think like a good example of what I thought was a pretty okay boss is the big like scorpion magic guy that hangs off the ceiling you like I know he's talking about you're saying he's a good boss yeah I thought he was okay like he had some interesting stuff and some cool moves and stuff and then they repeated him oh you mean that guy I thought you were talking about the random mob that's hanging around in caves oh no no no not that guy you mean the Elstah Astell oh that guy was like a scorpion oh yeah Astell was right people if you watch my stream you know I was fucking pissed off when I found the second one just with more health and stronger attacks I thought that was possible yeah I remember that because that guy was actually okay but then all of a sudden there's just another one in a random cave which is like it's kind of like a mild version of fighting orphan of cost the second time in one playthrough just like I don't know if I want to fight this guy again like I've beaten him already I did the harder one first because there's the one that's up in the secret snowy area and that's the one I fought first and then when I came across the other one it was kind of a cakewalk boss fight so I wasn't as annoyed by it because it's like oh I was sitting there like oh my god I gotta fight another one of these and then he went down to like five minutes because for me I was like oh I'm doing this Runny's Rise quest line stuff and then I get to this boss at the end and I was like oh this is what a cool boss I really like they put this here it's like really unique and then probably like 20 hours later I'm just like oh there's like a little cave I want to do that one get some resources and stuff it's gonna be great and then I enter the weird wooden door I think and I was like why are you here why is this big arena down here what is happening why do you have double the health why do you one hit kill me what is happening and I got really annoyed and more annoyed because he just he was there just even there would be an easier one I would be annoyed because why would you recycle that boss this boss was like cool for this quest line that's the thing I think it's pretty damaging on the experiential level because half of what makes me interested to explore in these games is the finding of new things regardless of what those new things are it will usually be interesting on an experiential level even if it's not mechanically engaging I use Moonlight Butterfly as an example of this that was a fairly unique sort of experience that I ran into in a game that I wasn't expecting and it kind of stuck with me even though the boss fight is mechanically bad I guess just like it repeated in Crystal Caves yeah makes sense for it to be there though and you don't have to fight it yeah it's a mob at that point it's not even a mob they don't fight you unless you hit them yeah I can do it for reference I got it on screen this is Estelle and you find him in the middle of a mine which is like wait what because the first time you're supposed to find him is much more of a grand journey into the depths of a place but this is just like he's just in a mine at the presentation of his arena is significantly more interesting because he's got the big I don't even know how to describe the vista behind him yeah it's like space maybe it's worth clarifying for anybody in Shadow hasn't played the game mandatory versus non-mandatory boss battles is there any way to sort of make clear I guess how much is one or the other and like how you figure out which ones which that's a fair thought considering the fight that's on screen right now isn't mandatory but it is a boss fight like it is and it's like so what's the difference well I guess that they get their own music arena and boss bar versus something that you can walk past in the open world sort of thing right I did like the fact that I found a lot of the repeated bosses were at least one fight with or the additional fights with them are usually optional so if you don't want to fight the same boss again you you don't really have to you just you kind of can and it's there my what's the problem with that is sorry if I can just my problem with that is I often find them at the end of a catacomb or a dungeon or something so I don't know that my time's been wasted until I walk through that fog door and see the same guy again who I didn't like the first time yeah that's fair I'm not fond of the cat statues either by the way what are the cat statues so many of them you fight like 15 others as well yeah they become just normal guys and heroes caves later on and there's like five of them in a cave and they just go jump jump jump the stone gargoyles too are kind of like that the first time you fight one it's almost like a boss fight and then you see so many of them in the capital city there are fucking two dungeon bosses in this game that are the big flower the big flower that sits there and does nothing those were very fun with my mage build I was just standing there and throwing rocks at it until it died for me it was just a matter of like I'll kill you before your poison will kill me if it does the zap you just walk back yeah it is kind of like we don't know we just threw them there I don't know it feels like my time has been wasted because I haven't discovered anything interesting I haven't I've got nothing new to think about or you know consider in terms of the game it's world it's you know atmospheric storytelling I was not given any kind of mechanical experience I was interested in the encounter and design of the encounters in the care home is nothing so what am I just persisting on the hope that there's stuff in there that I want yeah because the the caves I need to clear my mind because I think the caves give you sometimes bell bearings those are pretty useful yeah mines specifically the mines yeah then you have heroes caves they mostly have legendary summons I think your ashes from a lot of them yeah ashes yeah but then others just have weapons I think like the anchor I think for Tia I've got that one as his first weapon in his playthrough I think catacombs have the ghost glove that you upgrade to ashes yeah exactly and of course I've already noticed in my second playthrough I was like I'm just not going to go to probably 85% of the caves ever again let me specifically want that item that's been my experience with my second playthrough that I'm about halfway through now I just pull open a map and I don't visit 90% of each area I'm in because I don't need or care about anything to experience there anymore but I feel like the same could be said about the older games put on a smaller scale like you don't go and collect every single weapon in a playthrough where you use a katana but it's like a smaller scale but to go and get that weapon is less of a time investment and it's less of a diversion from a level that is more rigorously designed as opposed to me having to partake in a catacomb which is chalice dungeon tier in design yeah but you don't have to go through that chalice dungeon if you don't want to sure so I'm not gonna are you able to here's a are you able to identify clearly what is and isn't mandatory not exactly not on your first playthrough I think the only way that you could very clearly designate if something is mandatory or not is if it's a legacy dungeon it is most likely mandatory like with a couple exceptions and as far as bosses go it's is there any way for you to just walk around this boss because if there is it's not mandatory and if you it seems like you have to kill this boss in order to progress then it is I guess the game's quite clear with what the critical path is I guess I would say yeah if you're talking to the NPCs especially then it'll help point you in the right path the points you point you in certain directions as well the one place you might run into trouble is the lift of dectus but and then there's a way around that and there's an NPC or two that tells you about the way around that if you don't go and collect the medallions as you would if you were exploring there talking to anyone and then someone said why didn't you use the lift and I was like what lift it was funny for me I went to the land of the giants and shit when I still had the key to the dectus lift and I had the location I hadn't done it yet I was like oh it's gonna but okay I guess I don't need to yeah I got to volcano manor without it I didn't even realize that the dectus lift is what brought you there and I was like oh I just kind of walked around and climbed a bunch of mountains I did a little side quest I got an invitation I just got teleported there people in chat were very upset that I just found this without looking it up I completely missed it on my first playthrough so yeah I guess the boss is we got compliments for them as opposed to criticisms no not just kidding I can over would just say that if we call it a ratio of good to bad I don't think it's fantastic I think it's staggeringly bad cool so it's so you're saying the relationship of bad bosses to good is staggeringly most of them are bad yes the vast majority and how does that compare to the rest of the series for you well DS3 has a lot of stinkers but it's got also the best boss quality overall yeah the early game bosses in Dark Souls 3 oh yeah it's got the best boss roster but a lot of the early ones so you know bad there's your favorite one in Dark Souls 3 oh Gale I could go on there's a shitload of really good bosses in that game yeah just for reference for other people that may not even I feel like this is going to be people who are just like wait why are you talking about it's like you're dealing with a group of people that think Bloodborne has like three good bosses they shouldn't know this already from the stream even I know that based on what you said I also like more than three Bloodborne bosses there's only about three good ones who are the three good ones is it Maria so like all three from the deals oh uh oh yeah I was about to say is that Ludwig would be on my list for sure I like Ludwig's second phase a lot I do not like his first phase I think it's bullshit second big floppy one first phase is one of the worst fights in the game second phase is one of the best fights in the game for me the first phase of Ludwig was the one where I was so pleased with how good I had gotten at Bloodborne I was just like oh man I actually I finished that that's amazing Sekiro had some cool boss battles Sekiro has the best ones in the series is he over the first one like at the top I was dumb that one's really yeah oh yeah I played Sekiro a little bit I played Sekiro a little bit I don't know why they led with the ogre oh funnily enough I I led with the ogre I don't like the um the first boss in this game the fucking multiple arms sword man with the shield yeah I don't like him at all just mini Ludwig dumb flailing that case oh gosh there's so many ways we go this conversation um I don't so like attack attack attack attack attack attack attack attack attack attack attack attack and you're just like when the fuck is my opportunity I just like attack okay you mean you mean you're just right from the start do that grafted scion yeah that's what it's called um and he's the the you should die at this fight boss in the intro yeah which um I like the idea of at least a chance of beating the thing didn't feel like they would give him a much of a chance at all with that one like nah you're right we want you to die here and it's like okay um compare them to the you know the asylum this is the thing I I think we're gonna do a lot of comparisons in this I think that the the opening like half of Dark Souls there's so much to say about how well crafted I believe that to be as a game that's telling you how to do everything without the standard overt ways of doing it and man the whole asylum opening it's one of the best tutorials I think uh just forgetting you to understand what the fuck the game's gonna be about and I think most people will come at it just feeling like nah I'm playing the game I'm not even playing a tutorial obviously there are tool tips but what I'm saying is the actual like mechanical interactions you have with all the enemies they're all tutorials but they don't quite come across that way even the bowling ball thing that hits you I feel that's a tutorial they are teaching you about how the game is going to take place from then on and if you don't take those lessons that's what causes people to struggle in the bug generally yeah um but in this game I was just like oh yeah I guess we're doing the whole you know fist thing you fight you actually die to it and that's a part of the story alrighty then I don't know it's like I got annihilated by the scion in all three times I've started this game as a test and uh you know I'm not useless like I'm pretty bad but I'm not useless at the game I was just like oh man it would have been nice to have at least a chance and I feel like I could probably take it right now without taking any hits but then someone would be like so it's too easy is what you're saying be like ah well I think it is perfect tutorial maybe not perfect it is a very good tutorial boss the funny thing is Sekiro kind of starts the same way with you going up against like a end game boss and you're supposed to die but you can actually win and I guess the same goes for this only difference is that I think if you win in Sekiro you get like a slightly altered story you get a slightly different cut scene yeah so what what happens if you if you get beaten by Genichiro in the intro is he just cuts off your arm and that's what sets up the story development of Sekiro having that prosthetic with all the different tools but if you beat him there's just an assassin that throws a shuriken at you and then he cuts off your arm it kind of it doesn't really make too much of a difference but in Elden Ring it's worse than that because if you win over the mini Ludwig then like progress and then you literally fall off a cliff and then you go wow the ground collapses underneath you I did it in my new game yeah there's a clip of me doing that when I went back there so question does that mean all the runes you get from killing that are lost no no no you get them you get to spend them you just have them when you respawn at least you got that because I was going to say that would be really fucking rude to just be like nah that's not for you especially if you kept on starting new runs as your first run to be like nah I'm beating this thing before I go and if you're like a really great player and you don't get any of the rewards for it um what bosses did you guys like millennia millennia yeah Malekith is my favorite I think Malekith is my favorite as well I think he's the best fight in the game I haven't fought him I like to unmitigatedly I haven't fought him in melee yet but I'm looking forward to it the only criticism I have and I think you mentioned this his shit goes through the big pillars which is really fucking annoying yeah that's true I know that's not true someone in my chat was like well then don't stand behind the pillars and I was like they are protecting me or at least I thought they would they really do they block most they block most of his attacks it's just the ones that swing the widest they can still hit you which is the to be fair in all of these games enemies can hit you through walls you can sometimes hit enemies through walls oh it's always great when you are in a narrow corridor and you start fighting someone and your blade just goes through like a twink and then there's this other guy you're fighting just like the biggest swing you can imagine through all the walls and hits you pretty cool so great so I agree Malekith it sounds like we may as well just get into talking about the bosses there's no reason not to so if we start with so why is Malekith good let's go with that unfortunately on my first playthrough I haven't gotten into him in a second time but on my first playthrough I actually just I got him on my second try I think because at that time I was still using summons and I just shat on him I staggered him today I almost wiped him out with my mimic cat whoever you were I saw it and I was like someone was like please try him without a summoning and an ash and I was like alright fine because my mimic almost got him out of phase 1 on its own and I was like Jesus Christ this is too good and a lot of people were complimenting it so I was like alright I'll try it without and it was a lot harder and a lot more interesting I was getting through phase 1 of Malekith really reliably with no summoning just like playing as honorably as I possibly could and then the second phase started bothering me and I hadn't really summoned at all prior to that point and I summoned the mimic and it basically wiped him out so I kind of feel like I screwed myself on that one by winning which is why the the method by which you approach these fights will sometimes greatly affect your enjoyment as for reasons he's good I think I think he's some of the best examples of some of the things Elden Ring is doing in terms of its boss design he has the best use of I guess subtle telegraphing and how he telegraphs he has the best kind of persistent combos because they do still have definitive endpoints and they don't really fake you out in the same way a lot of other bosses do where you know no it isn't I remember being surprised that like his first phase went down pretty quick I think I described him as a glass cannon using a lot because that second phase is a fucking nightmare for taking your health but at the same time if I got like a couple of blood strikes off he was pretty much dead and that's not even a comment on how OP the bloody slash was before the nerf it's more so a comment because like other bosses could tank a lot more than that he couldn't and I knew at that point I just need to play well enough to survive him for just long enough that I can kill him so in a way, I feel like I may have the perspective on him that I do on Maria I fucking love the fight but man she needs more health and I think Malekith needs more health I think I think his lack of health is supposed to be counterbalanced by his aggression yeah he goes in in second phase especially because he jumps away from you a lot with several of his attacks so it can be hard to actually punish his openings because he covers them as well with explosions and stuff sometimes which is where I think the fight is succeeding on a positional level as well because that's the thing that's general with Elden Ring's boss design is they know that you're going to roll through things so as a way of increasing the challenge they've now mandated that to dodge certain strings and certain attacks you have to dodge through the attack but in a certain direction so that positional aspect comes through best with Malekith where several of his attacks you can roll them in any old direction in a bad position for the follow-up or be unable to punish if you don't roll in the correct direction something I think is worth appreciating is the fact that when he ground pounds in the first phase it's not an AOE it's a series of circles that shit to me is so much more interesting than a simple AOE correctly identify where the rocks are actually coming from and you can stay right on top of them um so I don't know I was going to say quick tangent but I don't think that'll be accurate in terms of talking about Ashes I think we'll talk about Ashes next we'll try and get a bit more bosses in general I had the same I was just going to say that the happiest I think I was in the game was I have to be in Malekith I felt very good funnily enough my number two for that was probably is that a name? yeah let's talk about her shall we I don't remember where in my playthrough she was I have six hours of stream for that if you need it personally I found her ability to heal a little bit overpowered particularly because she can still heal herself as you're blocking which kind of makes using a shield almost entirely useless for which sucks a little her ability to heal on block like when you block her attacks is one of three I think problems I have with the fight I'm fine with the healing but her ability to heal when you block her attacks anyway I think that's a bit silly and makes shields a bit more worthless than they already were they didn't need any help not being good I think it should have been health steal right because she does heal more than more damage she does if she gets you with her grab attack then she heals like a shit ton and if she just does the quick swing she heals for a little but I really think if you're blocking and you have 100% block in your shield it should be 100% because it shouldn't heal anything because there's no health steal if you have 100% block that's probably my second biggest gripe with the fight it's an interesting way to I think it isn't interesting that mechanic is an interesting way for them to essentially mandate that millennia is essentially a no hit boss like you kind of have to learn how to beat her entirely without getting hit or without really taking a lot of damage because you need to still be able to dish out the DPS to counteract her healing but I think I found for me that I was at that point in the game where my tactics started getting cheap I just was like the only way I'm doing enough damage to outpace that healing is by playing really cheesy and I don't know I think that if she was healing by about 50% less than she actually does or as far as damage she does versus how much she heals and you were able to tank some hits with your shield I honestly think that would have been a much better boss fight that wouldn't require as many cheesy tactics other than the healing on block I really want to defend the healing because I think it's another good way from Soft to figure out to increase the challenge in their fights so you don't necessarily want this one everywhere because the fact that she heals as you said means you really have to master the fight and it's a difficult fight to master because she's got a very complex move set that's very modular and how she executes it I assume that's why Mark said reduce it by 50% and not get rid of it right because I'm on board with that the only other thing I want to change about her is half the length of her big spin move if not remove it I would remove it I think that attack is very silly everything else about it I was enjoying a lot I probably had the different experience because I did the mage build my first playthrough for once she did not handle that well I had trouble I mean I fought her for a long time I had to change my strats multiple times because when I fought on my own she just bum rushed me all the time and I couldn't even get my spells out properly and my moon veil didn't really do enough damage I had a bad time alone so I started using summoning I couldn't use my mimic because the mimic is not as good for when you're a mage I found because the mage tends to just run in and not use spells that often Oh I learned something about that actually If you unequip your melee weapon and spawn the mimic just with your catalyst or whatever you're using if it's enchantments or what not only will use the equipment they spawned with yeah yeah I know but that's time that I didn't have to just get everything in and out I used Oleg most of the time because he did some good tanking but also the downside when she attacked Oleg she obviously got more health back all the time for me it was a race to out DPS all the time which kind of worked in the beginning it's not really working but sometimes Oleg gets killed in the first phase already and then I'm just bare bones on the second phase and I was like damn what am I going to do here this is actually just on that thought with Oleg this is the fight I think the best in the game represented to me the management of your mimic slash ash more so than just dropping him into wind because when I did well I had an Oleg with almost full health in the second phase and I managed it correctly that's what I'm saying because we're going to get to the ashes but there was a management aspect with millennia that I felt was I wouldn't go as far as saying they deliberately designed it this way I think it's just the fact that she's so difficult that it ended up being that way but yeah you have to keep your ash alive because if you don't keep that thing alive you die that was an interesting aspect that could have been deliberately implemented as a result of how much they gave her healing that's how it ended up but can I I think an interesting way they could rebalance the fight to combine a way to increase that aspect but also do what I was saying about making her healing feel less like a kick in the balls is if they have the healing she does on you but doubles the healing she does on an ash like on a spear yeah you could do it that way mm-hmm uh where was I right so second phase and it was I was pretty consistent on the first phase at some point but the second phase I just couldn't get through that one I was like man what am I gonna do now and then I respect and I had this sort of flame and whatever the fuck which was good there's a bunch of damage but I was much less consistent with that one so I respect again back to my old build and I think the next day I was like oh wait isn't there like this stupid kamehameha spell I get that for a meme and that turned out to be really good uh so when she starts the second phase she does like a dive immediately so I could get like a quarter of a health down just by her sitting there because it doesn't deal as much damage there uh because she has like super armor at that point while she's waiting so I pretty much combined the the physics flask with unlimited fp for a couple of seconds so I just blasted her while she was there and then it still took me like another hour to perfect it to not just get yeeted from the fight at the end so that was pretty enjoyable for me just to get the right strategy going for that fight really much looking forward to do it solo on my melee build here because that's gonna be fun I'm not looking forward to that triple slashing move because that was still hard to dodge even with a mage uh only the only thing that was better for me was I could run away from the first one and then I figured out how to dodge the second two ones but every time I was close it was almost impossible for me to dodge the first one I saw a video by now you can do like some weird movement below her in a circle and then you kinda don't get hit apparently but yeah the triple slash thingy I think you get that one where you get her weapon as well yeah it's her weapon man this one fucked me off a bunch because I was mailing her to shit in the corner and it just jumps up and is like oh I guess I'm dead now I'm not even gonna move yeah don't have any stamina what am I supposed to exactly yeah that was the only attack of hers where I did use my shield because I found that I thought it was four abilities that she does because I remember I would be able to tank the first two and I would run away for the first couple if I could but if I was right underneath her when she activated it I was like okay if I turn my back she's just gonna slice me up so with the plus 25 carrying shield you can tank the first two without it draining all of your endurance as long as it's not like super low and then just run away and dodge do a roll to the side like a lateral roll will dodge the second two into her is generally better than away for the last two because it's the mistake a lot of people make but my problem with the attack overall is it's so fucking difficult to tell what is actually happening and what you're supposed to do about it and I think that's really bad in this sort of game where that's the entire basis of the combat is knowing what's happening and then what you're supposed to do about it I think you know her little three hit thing she does rushes at you then does three quick sort hits then a follow up I think that's a that's a better example of a similar thing happening where that attacks kind of like it fucks you up the first two times because it always catches you if you roll back but that makes clear okay there's probably an expected response that doesn't roll back I can roll to her side and then you know there's the different timings of the follow ups that creates a bit more engagement with knowing what's actually going on as opposed to just not even being able to tell what's actually happening as she just spazzes all over your screen with like hitboxes everywhere yeah it's weird because I figured out the second two like I can dodge those pretty consistently but the first one is just an absolute mystery to me when you're close because the only way I've been able to dodge it consistently is just running away as soon as I could and if I got lucky and I was close and I dodged super late I could hit like two times but I still got hit so I don't know what to expect me to do if you could hit even a couple times it means she's getting better that attack is where the life steal is a big problem just because yeah it's so unclear how you're supposed to get away without taking damage and of course she's doing so much damage she's gonna heal a bunch the funny sort of thing that happens with people who are using ashes to their benefit is that full spinning movement hits both of you for the whole thing she can heal like half her fucking health bar and you're just like well that was a bad run I'm out every time I saw her she jumps up like oh I'm far away that's good and then she turns around to the ash and I was like oh fuck she's gonna heal so much just spam all the spells I could just to get her health back down that's the sole instance where I wouldn't defend the life steal I think in that case it's agreed my response to that attack was pulling out a shield and blocking the first part of it yeah so I just had to tolerate the amount of health she got back I was playing with a like big slow great sword and I figured out that like my best way of getting to second phase consistently when I wasn't using summons at all was to play hyper aggressive like basically get her to stagger more and sometimes even trade with her even if she does heal because eventually my damage will outweigh hers but if I had just swung even if I had stamina and stuff left if I just finished a swing and I was in my recovery animation of picking up my heavy weapon if she jumped up because her AI seemed to be very reactive like she was very passive unless you did something first and if I was the thing I did was a simple swing just an R1 with a heavy weapon and her response to that was jumping up in the air I was dead because by the time I had recovered I couldn't pick up my shield because I tried everything with her I couldn't pick up my shield in time for me to be able to block her attack and in the few instances that I did if you're directly beneath her she will kind of dead angle your shield because her flurry will be all around you so you won't even block the attack properly she will like dead angle it and she will hit you anyway and sometimes if you just finished a combo and you were out of stamina then your shield won't help because she will break your poise so like using a great sword in that fight was so so punishing if you tried to play aggressively what's crazy for me is that I knew that if I was gonna win it would be a run where she didn't roll that move the big spin move like I was just waiting for the run where she had the limited amount of those so basically what I ended up doing I got her to about 60% and then I just ran away and I waited for her AI to finally jump up in the air because she seems to have some sort of grace period in between where she won't do it again for a little bit and that was the window where I tried to get her to second phase seems to be like very loosely tied to health thresholds exactly what you're describing because that's how I've heard a few of my friends dealt with it is they realized it was about roughly the threshold where she would start doing that move or it was about time better to do that move and they just run the fuck away and I hate that in a boss fight where you have to just run the fuck away and wait for them to do the one move because if you don't respect that they might do it you just die on the spot I think there's a big problem if that's what we've arrived at in terms of our boss fight so that move especially with a great sword and the fact that she heals off of 100% blocking shields is my 2 biggest reps with the fight otherwise I thought it was absolutely amazing I personally don't care for phase 2 because I find it to be pretty much the same thing but the wings really get in the way of being able to tell what's going on I was actually going to say that I think that's my issue with phase 2 as well oh cool there's so many particle effects and animations and stuff that it's much harder to see her and this is a boss that she does really well because her telegraphing is not all that subtle but she's quick and she's a like I said her move set is really modular in that she can put it together in a lot of different ways kind of like a champion gun there so it's really important to be able to see what's going on so that you can actually deal with all of the various possibilities from each move she's just done and when there's giant wings that are spitting butterflies everywhere constantly I don't know and I feel like it's a bit of an issue Scarlet Rod is just the worst not worse than the death mechanic though why do they do that why do they do that mechanic every time why the gecko ones that just spit the foggy fog there's no pretense about it this time it's not curse it's the death mechanic they just want to put it in because it's fucking annoying it always comes across that way I thought it was worth mentioning as well because we seem to when talking about these bosses relate to our playthroughs I had the pizza cutter which I think it's called geese's wheel man this weapon is like a big old dice throw in terms of its special ability it basically just spins the wheel and puts it on the boss and cause bleed as well as daggers and if you have a mimic and both of you use that move by happenstance you can basically just shred bosses like almost instantly there's like a lot of things I think all of us would have come across metals magic rocks Theo you said you had like a sword was it or something my first playthrough I was using moon veil and some magic yeah and then the whore frost stomp I think mark that was me yeah great sword with whore frost stomp is weapon it did cold damage and I think that we're all seasoned enough players that sometimes you're using it and you're like I'm so like I'm so resourceful for being able to put thing and thing together to be able to figure out that this is something I can use but then eventually sometimes you might just go man this doesn't feel good actually yeah I think the first time I had that was for tia talked about this without telling me what it was but it was the fight in the capital the first one the first end fight in the capital what's his face is it also god rick margot margot yeah cause like this epic build I was like oh cutscene this is gonna be great and then I started throwing stones at the guy and he got staggered and then for more stones he got staggered and then he died I was like oh that's a shame but then I fought him again with my melee build here and I really enjoyed the fight but this is another fight where I feel like you need more health you died way too quick I relate that to a problem I think is kind of endemic throughout the game where I think it's very very easy especially around the mid game for you to become over leveled or overpowered otherwise yeah you need to restrict yourself if you want a super good boss experience because I started steamrolling hard later on in the game oh dude post market I don't think I was challenged until well there was a brief break and when I did the black blade kindred outside geranks but other than that I wasn't challenged in like multiple tens of hours of playtime and that felt really bad I was just exploring a whole bunch can we talk about the Elden Beast do we have to I really didn't like that that's probably the most disappointing end boss this series has ever had the Elden Beast was super fun and then Elden Beast was just the fucking worst I wasn't fond of either of them really I hated that they were back to back with no ability to rest or save or anything like that because I liked fighting but it got to the point that I kept on getting one shot by the AoE attacks that Elden Beast had in the second phase it's just the second fight that I was like ah I wouldn't mind learning Elden Beast attacks but it just kind of it sucks that I have to get through all of Radegon every single time first it just didn't feel very good I was pretty done with the game by the time I was on the final boss stretch I had pretty much cashed my check after being Malekith I was like yeah that's probably the best thing the game is going to throw at me let's just get this over with but Radegon I probably would have liked him if not for that kind of feeling this motherfucker though to start off this isn't a mechanical thing but why did they give it a fucking sword man why have some restraint from soft for fuck's sake I don't even know what looks cool though I don't even know what I was expecting in terms of what I should fight as the final boss to summarize this game but this wasn't it and a cool mononoke rip off the move that's on screen right now fuck that move oh shit if you're close to that there's like no way for you to escape it has a pretty short range so I was okay with it it was okay in terms of my mage build but man if I got close to that it was just GG it's another fucking thing in this game where I look at it I just wonder what they expect a player to do when they played it during testing like what did you is this just what happens to be clear this for people who aren't following it is a yellow ball that follows you and it spews off loads of little yellow balls that will hold on to you you can't destroy it you can run you can roll but it's going to keep up with you as long as it was in range of you and it started and it lasts forever yeah it lasts like 20 seconds or something and don't think the LB stops attacking while that thing is out it still shoots other things at you so you can get caught with like fucking frame traps where you're guaranteed to take damage yeah I had one time where it was like three different attacks happening while this ball was out it was like I don't know what the fuck am I supposed to do here oh shit the arena is also limited by a thin fog wall that you can't cross so just all of a sudden you'll be running into a wall and just be like what what the hell oh I'm at the end of the arena it's just not clear that this is that time and space just decides to end here it doesn't feel right does it the boss arena in the second phase seems like it should go on forever or at least fucking longer than it does but also because I think I was watching you Bell and you would try to avoid literally this move and you ran into the wall and you were like oh fucking hell what this wall someone in chat said all you have to do is run it's like we tried that both me and Beth we tried that it doesn't work Chad do you think nobody tried it's definitely a try a ball's chasing me I'm gonna run from it do you think nobody tried that the only thing that worked for me was you gotta unlock from the boss like you can't focus on them and you just need to run in one direction even that and that obviously highlights then the problem of if you don't have any information about the Elden Beast then you're gonna get hit by something else potentially which is not handy well if you get hit immediately when the fucker casts it and you're close you can't I don't think you can run away because it's a little bit every hit doesn't it I think I can't quite remember but I remember hating that fucking move yeah yeah it wasn't a great way to cap off the game I felt very mad about it I wonder how it would have been if they just like made Radegon do slightly more damage and have like three times the health pool he did maybe a few extra minutes I'd be happy with that personally I'd be much happier if the game ended on Radegon they tried to do a neat kind of experiential thing but they're bad at that now so just to be clear Assassin's Creed 2 ended with you fist fighting the Pope in a secret town there was legendary if Endring would have finished with that I was like yeah this is a 10 out of 10 actually that was my first suggestion instead of Elden Beast it should have been a fist fight with a Pope that seems to match the game a bit better Demon Rodriguez was up to you bitch slap him that'd be great Elden Ring or Elden Beast was the boss where I decided to break my rule of no summoning after I decided to do that and I basically just summoned to get that fight over with and I basically did what my build allowed me to do with the summon which is just stagger the boss to death how useful was the summon in the Elden Beast fight though because when I had all like Eldy couldn't keep up with the Elden Beast it was just flying around everywhere it was kind of like an RNG thing because I seemed to be able to get him stuck in some sort of like half stagger thing where he was like recoiled or something from my heavy attack and then my mimic would do the same and he would just like stand there for a while and I was able to just chomp his health but then other times he would obviously just fly away and my mimic would walk towards him and I would just like okay so you're useless this fight yeah I'm pretty sure speedrunners already found a way to break this guy's AI consistently there's so many AI breaks I don't think there's one for Elden Beast yet but weird question were there any bosses you guys beat first time that you thought that was a pretty damn good boss I mean first time I don't know if I'd be any boss's first time well because I'm thinking about it but it was the first dragon I thought by the academy I think the dragons are awful I mean it was I had a pretty decent time with it just fighting it on horseback it was the first one I came across I liked that I actually figured it out and took it down on the first try and I think it was not really it wasn't the first dragon you come across in Limgrave it's the one over by the academy so it gave me a whole shitload of runes so I was like maybe I wasn't supposed to fight that I wouldn't have much criticism for the dragon fights if there weren't 10,000 of them I think if there were just one, two, maybe five at maximum I'd probably be like I think I would still have a lot to criticize because it's a fucking dragon man come on well the obvious thing I think we were talking about this when I was streaming in chat but just Calamite and Medea are like really good boss fights that are dragons and so what's up here we have flying dragon Agheil and it's Medea but slow, clumsy and terrible in every way the only I got rock fling all the dragon fights were null and void because I knew I cast rock fling three times stagger and that every time as I stood there let Oleg wail on them for quicker kills and that's it the only dragon who killed me uh was the one in Caled I think because that fucker spawns like a huge cloud of rot that just kills you and I was like what he killed me a bunch because he's one of I think two dragons who have an attack where Miyazaki bursts into your room and holds you at gunpoint until you get on the board yeah pretty much like that and Borealis they're both not fightable off horse back entirely when I got on screen Mel you did the same thing oh yeah but I used my triple I don't have your shit can I just say uh how does this happen exactly same position than my guy it's practically it's caused by the player and I think I don't know how they missed this is this like a course of play that's gonna do this there's like a series of platforms and there's a boss on a platform and it can't leave a platform it's even worse I think you're going toward it the game expects you to walk up to him and you're like why would I do that why would I kill me I'll just sit here and fucking snipe it it's dark souls it's really hard right it's so awkward because it's like the intimidation factor is completely flattened what it looks like he's just stroking the corner of the building I didn't even notice him the first I was still fighting the guys on this platform it's like alright I'll go ahead and it's like what is going on with that dragon over there see alright it's like oh can I reach him with my spells I can well guess you'll die it's like repeatable and almost everybody experiences this like what are you doing what are you doing what's up what's happening the way a lot of the dragon bosses fucking spaz out in the open world arenas that they're placed in when they jump back and go into like some mountains they're not supposed to and go like oh god a couple times happened they just straight up teleported back to the original position because the game was like I don't know what to do I'm just gonna put it back here have fun Adula was the worst one for me with that the one up on that place you get through Ranny's questline because the arena limits for it seem to be really small compared to other ones so it just sort of vanishes constantly during the fight and resets to where it was and well either that or it goes and clips and falls off a cliff and it looks horrendous and it's immersion annihilating now we discuss the king of the dragons dragon lord I don't know what his name is Clatchity Sax yeah the one of Saxon's name I'll try and find him and play through give me a sec but yeah you mean the big sleeping one or the secret one the secret one I think I mean my fight didn't take very long because I think it was already overpowered when I finally get there I found it was pretty epic like I really liked how it looked was much better than all the other ranked fights because he actually did other stuff and not just ram you and kick you I don't know how it goes melee I don't know I think your experience is way better than mine because like I just I think I ran up to him and just minced him basically oh really also I think people are saying he glitched on my play through as well I think he might have because my guy just flew all over the place and actually really enjoyed enjoyed that fight yeah I think that would actually be my answer to your question your original question because I thought that fight was really cool and I had a lot of fun but I did actually get him on first try with zero estus left so I was pretty close to dying but I thought that fight was pretty cool I liked the way he like disappeared into the clouds and stuff I thought that was epic but another fight that I did beat first try which made me apply the restriction onto myself to not use mimic anymore were summons at all rather was Morgoth before you get to the tree because that fight seemed like it was probably good I still don't know because I haven't reached it on my second play through but it seemed like it had some interesting movesets and stuff that you need to pay attention to dodge but I absolutely shat on that boss because of the mimic and I regret it still yeah I think the same thing happened for me we both did the spinny move on the thing and he just got flattened I wasn't using summons but his health I was so overpowered by that point in the game that again, this is a problem I want to keep coming back to because I think it's really really game breaking but yeah, Morgoth my experience with him was kind of like because I just did so much damage to him that he can really handle it I don't know I'm excited to fight him again on my second play through and see if I like the fight more because I was kind of lukewarm on it despite it being I could tell it was mechanically sound just from fighting him but I didn't need to engage with any of it because I had a really good ass this fast guy had a well upgraded weapon and I had a bunch of levels so I just beat him up and he died fair enough can't remember what I thought so this is a game where everything in area like everything has a set amount of hit points every boss has yeah it doesn't scale yeah it only scales when you go to a new game plus yeah unless they change this but no and then even the new game plus one not by much I'm running through stuff yeah plus run right now new game plus one does not scale hard enough to be a challenge at really any point okay I haven't started new game plus yet I just started different play throughs never have I so I guess take that as my uninformed opinion from what I've heard alright how much how much stuff outside of the main quest line do you have to do to feel like you're keeping up if that makes sense how do you feel like a lot of games that are it kind of depends on your skill level because some people can get through these games at very low levels so if you're if you're really good at the souls games then you really don't have to do anything outside the critical path at all but if if this is your first souls game you should probably do everything you possibly can to get stronger sorry my dog's growling it's something I'm worried about because I feel like if you do purely the critical path you could very easily end up feeling too weak in terms of not just levels but upgrade materials as well because early game your damage is not dependent at all upon stat scaling really it's almost all coming from weapon upgrade level so if you're not going to the mines if you're not you know going and finding a bunch of upgrade materials to go and get your weapon beefed up and stuff I think it could be very easy to end up feeling very weak on the critical path and if you don't do the mines you won't be able to purchase upgrade materials from any vendor or like they'll have a limited amount of like two or three each but Jojo gosh this dog is creeping me out anyways but yeah so you basically have to go and do the mine quest or your oh god or your weapons will stay at the lowest possible level by the way on screen right now is just the more got like look at this man it's a you could be like well maybe you shouldn't have been using that way it's like no no no no you just stumbled into this on his playthrough the game let him do this did they present this weapon to you I was like okay and then I was like oh that moves kind of fun and then I yeah just look what it did to him I'll show it again now it's just hard to navigate but it's like five hours but fucking responsibility to nerf myself when the game can't properly account for my level yeah yeah that's a big problem in this game this game is fucked in that regard because my mimic gets a hit on him as well I think but the problem is like I'm dealing so much damage this is before by the way that I was actually realizing dude oh wow yeah you just got messed up what the fuck yeah I was pretty much the same for all of those I feel like someone I want to highlight as well about these builds in the game some of that I found out anyway I chose just a I think a long sword is what I started with my first playthrough when I came to Miga I was like yeah I'm gonna need to back off this is this is a tough boy though I think if I was forced to in a hell scenario fight him until death it would probably take me like half a day I think but I wouldn't want to do it that way it's like I get the message game I'll go look other places but my second playthrough I did just for a bit of fun offline I chose the Samurai you get the Uchi-Gatana I killed Miga on my first try or one of the first tries because I propped Bleed like three or four times in my fight with him and like that knocks out like half the health bar on its own it's insane I was just like this is almost unfair man like how the long sword doesn't get this benefit at all I feel like you shouldn't get a Bleed it wasn't sold in with Glorious Nippon steel enough times I feel like you shouldn't get a strong Bleed weapon as your starting weapon I just I realized that like had I chosen that arbitrarily it might start just being like oh Samurai that'd be cool it's like I would have had a much easier time because I know they've ever nerfed Bleed in general if they only nerf particular Bleed things they haven't nerfed anything to do with Bleed I was told they did it for Blood Strike that they've nerfed that yeah oh yeah they nerfed that just the damage on that skill rather than anything to do with Bleed Bleed's broken in this game it's too good way too good it's not and someone might be like well how have you determined that it's like it's just comparative to everything else it's too good everything else suffers Katanas in general are too good in this game because they have the Bleed which is insane there's stamina is not real in this game so that's not a concern and they have a really quick weapon art that they get to use in combat more often than most other weapons get to use their weapon arts like the Uchikatana's weapon art R2 it hits really fucking hard and you get to use it so much more often than other equivalent weapon arts like the weapon art R2 of the Longsword it takes longer to come out and does about half the damage and that's the damage version the one that's not supposed to be used for guard breaking so like what I used the Moon Veil with my int build and that thing shredded it just rips things apart if I wasn't fighting bosses I was just using that one and just used the weapon arts because it's like slash slash sometimes two people at once slash no problem hopefully we'll do some kind of like a conclusion on bosses but I would like to submit the worst boss in the game that isn't repeated that's the way I'll categorize this God Devouring Serpent this boss is embarrassing to me and you'll see if you keep an eye on the stream you'll see why yeah this one was funny for you watching you finish that fight and then you came over to my stream was like you need to show this on stream it was embarrassing right card yeah which is a cool name not a cool boss okay so the idea they had so actually did anyone get PTSD when they had they picked up a weapon in the opening of the fight I was like oh not your again I never found this zone so I never did this Storm King from Demon's Souls also yeah I was just like oh god but you know I thought to myself maybe they maybe they'll do it right this time somehow maybe it'll be really fun I think when I was initially doing the fight I was like this is fine you know okay it's not quite yawn there's something there's more here but yeah I just the idea is he's got a ring of lava around him so you can't get to him directly you have to use the ring well the moves on this weapon they provide you which has range and you have to dodge his moves obviously though I was like I was a little curious about this because I think when you see me in my playthrough when I first come across lava in the Volcano Mana area I was like ooh better not go in there that's probably an insta death and then I was like well it's not in a lot of the games actually I think Dark Souls 1's damage on lava without the lava ring is like pretty intense if I remember but I'd have to fucking look at it again because I can't remember anymore but anyway I was surprised to find out in the normal parts of the game there's a lot of places you get to by running across lava and I was like oh okay lava's pretty chill actually it's not even as damaging as poison or at least I think it's close and I was just like that's really odd but okay and so when it showed up in this fight I was like I can stand on this right and if you look at my health bar yes the answer is definitely fucking yes the problem is if you do that I don't think the devs expected anyone to do that they were like well no it's lava why would you stand on lava you idiot it was like well it's not hitting me and so now most of his attacks can't get to me oh wow can't do anything about it and so this happens and then I was just like so that was weird and then it was like phase 2 and I was like okay maybe phase 2 is like better phase 2 is basically the same he just has a couple extra moves I think and a big stupid sword another big stupid sword yes and yeah this this boss was absolutely ruined by me being brain dead and just going I attack close monkey I even think that I misunderstood my weapon I used all of its the fp move the special move on it and when I ran out of fp I was like oh now it's ranged only it's like no it's not sorry it's melee only I was like no it's not but I thought that but that thought led me to annihilate this boss in like a secret exploit I didn't even try I didn't even try the light attacks I was just confused that all of a sudden I'm not allowed to use that move anymore and then I was like oh I guess I have to use my fp but people in chat were like oh our one is buff too it's like yeah I guess melee but look at all the lava I'm not going in there and then later on I figured out lava's pretty fun look at it it's not doing anything to your health it's lava a game and then I figured out it's like oh wait the other attacks are ranged too so you can just stand there and and I just chugged my ass to everyone but then he did a move that I was just like holy mother of hell what the hell move is this devs you're being cunts like look at this move now um oh it's I don't know if it's given a name or anything but he's just skull spam there's just skulls everywhere oh yeah the skull spam but then he ends it with like a one hit kill sword slash that has stupid range if you look at me right now I just took an opportunity to drink ass doesn't happen to be the right one I was just like oh I didn't get hit okay so this one was weird to me cool respect I guess but like I panicked there when that happened I was like oh shit I started running around I just kinda disappeared on top of me I think Mock look when he's about to throw the sword down he staggers from my mimic yeah yeah you got lucky early he's about to bring it down to get stagged that's hilarious I didn't even know that happened I was still not summoning at all at that point in the game and like his hit that sword attack I was just like there's no way around that because even if you if you run to the side of it it will still kill you even though the hitbox doesn't seem like it's anywhere near you and I found the trick you have to do is just once he starts throwing those skulls just run as far away from him as possible like 180 degrees from where he is just run in the opposite direction and if you get far enough away the skulls eventually kinda dissipate and he'll wave on that sword strike that was another one you can see it when Morda's just rolling around it's like can I please tell what's actually happening game? yeah I don't have any respect for a big like almost cinematic millions of skulls flying into me and exploding I'm just like what is this mechanically what the fuck is happening the entire thing that makes these games work in the fucking first place is that you're kinda shit in terms of what you're actually capable of as a character but you have your really good role so if you're paying attention to what's going on and you manage to tell what's going on you can roll through everything and punish at the correct times I'd really love to be able to actually tell what's happening and we need a text where you can tell what's happening in order for the system to work so am I throwing a vote for funniest boss? this is probably gonna be more so tied to just everyone's experiences I'm trying to find it I definitely I clipped it out to show you metal the chunky guy no he was well so I don't even know if you I should really be counting this as a boss if anyone in chat can remember when I killed this guy I think it was my last stream which one is this development he was a guy that I think everyone finds kind of amusing because he turns up and I think he's an actual boss fight and when you kill him this is great enemy he fell but he's just I called him the Game of Thrones guy just because he's got a northern type accent he sounds like he's out of Game of Thrones oh here it is alright everyone just watch and enjoy this look at the subtitles as well for his little speech like I knew you'd come to stand before the Elden Ring to become Elden Lord what a sass it's Gideon oh Gideon fine I don't know anybody in this game that's a guy from the roundtable you talked to yeah he was at your home base so he finishes his speech the fight begins I backstab him nice and then I just do this oh my god oh my god oh no what is that thing even like yours was even worse than mine I was like oh shit we're fighting Gideon oh shit he's pretty super strong and then I just fucking shed on him it's like why am I so weak I imagine the little ghost boys you see running around are other players imagine someone staying yours of that and they're in the middle of this fight and they're like wait what what you're done you just got here it's so funny because of the way they introduced this it's like are you ready to oh okay that's fine and the one move he got was a move that wouldn't hit me because it's a ring around him just outside of his close range his gimmick by the way is he does like all the magic he does he does millennia's big scarlet rock dive thing he does black flame stuff he does it all but this guy is part of a running trend in this game where the term well the boss health bar and the boss music have never meant less than they need now like good lord fucking random ass npcs getting boss health bars a big fucking flower that does nothing boss health bar regular enemies with boss health bars dude I'd be more forgiving of that compared to saying great enemy felled that's ridiculous great enemy felled how do you are but yeah I had a couple of times and I was like why do you have a health bar it kills like 80 of you why do you have a health bar like boss music fuck off this is a this is an issue stemming from balance or like a it's got to be it's an issue of balance and presentation it's balanced in a lot of cases where you know things like Gideon just he can't do anything and yet he's presented like this big deal for some reason why I think this is fine if he doesn't have a fucking big introduction well no he doesn't have a fucking boss health bar if he's just a guy if he's just a dude because he's not presented some big threat or anything because what I find weird about this fight particularly is because you get some of these NPC invades that have the name over his health bar on top of his character model like yeah it's also a health bar as a boss so I don't know why they just didn't put him in as like a normal NPC invader I don't know why they didn't do that for every NPC invader who's also a boss yeah to clarify with something like Morgoth he needed more health game but everything in presentation felt like it makes a lot of sense with Gideon you're just like what was that what are you doing there's just a rat in the room it's just like the monster of Gideon all the health bar and music and you're just one slash is dead you're like why the experience was like half of the non-critical well no half I'm gonna say 99% of the non-critical path bosses was I walk into it it's got a boss health bar and music so it wants to be like all threatening and stuff and then I blow through it in seconds because it's not mechanically engaging and it's not tough and it's not scaled to me oh also he's worth 150,000 runes what the hell oh the fucking judging off of his health bar it seems like he has around 7 to 8,000 health judging off of how much damage you did to him so that's not even boss territory I'm sorry I mean it's a weird moment in the game and it does it's microcosm of a lot of the stuff that they do in terms of making boss fights feel a lot less impactful yeah so what's weird also is there's like random enemies in the game they're like super fucking tanky and much more challenging to fight than some bosses and they give you and then all of a sudden they give you like 2,000 runes that's like I just, there was a lot of effort can I get some more for that like what is happening I suppose you can't balance for that very effectively in terms of like should they give you rune rewards based on how much trouble you had or should it just be on what they believe to be the difficulty of the boss because I found that it was almost an indicator of just how well I was doing if I like annihilate a boss and it's 150k runes I'm like oh my god I am way ahead of this game right now but if I have trouble at a boss and it's like 25k I'm like really? Jesus oh god like I can't do it so good but it could also just be because they just didn't quite smooth that out I don't know because yeah Gideon should not be worth that yeah none of the like not even half of the bosses in this game deserve their fucking boss health bar because half of them get recycled as regular enemies later on more than half pretty much every boss that isn't not critical pass you can find as a fucking regular enemy somewhere for some reason and it's interesting I don't think that's an issue though I find it frustrating because it's a devaluation of the boss health bar it doesn't mean anything anymore I mean in Dark Souls 1 you have Capra Demon and uh what was the other one we talked about before Album and Taurus yeah Taurus is always a boss sure I think that's okay because at the point where you reach them in the lava land you're like it's endgame time and I think it's kind of like fun to see that this used to be a boss but now you're so much stronger to the point where it's no longer a boss it's just a normal enemy If they weren't still throwing it at you as a boss I was going to say if you went to lava land and you moved through into a room boss walls appear boss health and it's Capra Demon you're like wait really yeah no I get that but I don't have an issue with them just being an enemy in the world I'm down with it if it makes sense like finding tree sentinels around or whatever well I don't think tree sentinels should have boss musical boss health bars in general but that's a different matter finding that kind of enemy around where it makes sense to find it sure so long as it's not spammed and well no yeah I'd still say so long as it's not spammed if it's supposed to be a boss tier enemy I'm trying to think of well so I was actually going to say god free for example as a boss I kind of like it was I think I went through it too quickly and so I didn't even get to really appreciate him mechanically but I thought that there's potential with him how did everyone else find him right before you go to elin beasts yeah he's pretty good I don't like his stompspan nah me too I also didn't like that you fight the spirit version of him earlier in the game I don't know why that was weird yeah I got a little confused if I'm honest with you I was like so god drick and god free what's going on there I think it's that they were really trying to make it so that the initials the first initial for all of the demigods were either grm oh this is the golden lineage right so god drick is a descendant of god free you have god drick god free go to froy which is a re-skinned god drick in an ever jail go to froy that sounds hilarious it was hilarious I remember coming across him go to froy I thought that was a fucking meme it's like a wombo weird he's the mutated version he's called go to froy did we need to every boss in the fucking game including one of the demigods I don't know I don't know man no you know what I don't think we did I don't think we needed golden spirit god god free in the capital for no real reason no fanfare around it it's got its normal boss music as well from when you encounter him normally it kind of cheapens his final battle I found the second I saw him as like a golden ghost I was like okay I'm gonna fight the real version of this guy later they did the same thing in Sekiro a few times it just makes me so confused cause I don't know what's happening did he have all of his mechanics cause that was at the point where I was still using summons and I basically just killed him he had all of his his phase one mechanics he doesn't go into the horral or whatever he calls himself in the last part he didn't have all of his axe stuff either I think he was limited to his fairly basic axe move sir which made me like a Dark Souls 2 boss you know who I would like to talk about why is it Revealio was that is that the name of the boss oh Revealio I thought Revealio was the name of the boss Dark Gorge Radon look at this fucking set piece you've stumbled into I fucking hate this boss and this but it's not even I think a lot of people are gonna be like knee jerking me we're very good at it since understanding fully how this thing works I still hate it it doesn't matter whether or not I figured out exactly what I was supposed to do the whole time which by the way it seems that you're supposed to summon all of the randies I'm not even a fan of that it's fucking worthless anyways I think if this is supposed to be a big you know dumb raid boss thing they should just be here I don't think you should have to summon spawners a big group and charge him that'd be way cooler but I'm not a fan of this opening I'm not a fan of his spazzy nature and I think he looks absurd a lot of people think he looks amazing I think he looks fun as hell well I was gonna say can we get a good image of this to show rags as a concept I can't tell yet based on the silhouette he's a big lad but as you can see he's moving pretty fast and it doesn't quite look like his legs are doing it and that's because he is sitting on a regular horse oh wow I didn't even notice that I thought he was just sliding around can you see that horse what the fuck is that like one of his legs no that's his horse he learned gravity magic so he could ride it literally they wanted to look out for how absurd this is he learned gravity magic in order to ride this horse efficiently you may also notice he doesn't have any feet he loves his horse rags he loves his horse you may notice he doesn't have any feet any sense of dramatic tragic grandeur or whatever that this fight was going for annihilated because I didn't even see it people in the chat were like he has a little horse can you even compare this to like Gwyn what you just like you can't compare it to Artorias no that's what most people have been doing I'd go as far as saying like stupid motherfucker look look at the little horse what is that I'm kind of happy I didn't notice the horse I don't know how you didn't I think that like there's so many sort of eldritch looking creatures in this game that have all sorts of weird limbs and stuff like that that I'm more focusing on what his swords are doing and it sort of seemed like he was skating around the desert and I just thought okay so that's the way he moves then I had to have it point out to me as well because I was the same lighting and stuff and then people were like do you know this small horse there's no horse fuck off they open the fight with this really dramatic but kind of solemn music and then you get to him and he's on this tiny little fucking horse scaffolding I get the impression looking at chat that this is a controversial perspective that you guys would hear that's really strange to me look at this almost everyone I've talked to like you're looking at a Taurus or whatever what was a a Taurus that you're looking at him with rice colored glasses a Taurus is fantastic I'm personally offended I'm personally offended is a Taurus the only thing here that we unanimously like a Taurus has ummed the past in terms of visual presentation in terms of the mechanically gorgeous a Taurus has moved beautiful good lower I'm personally offended that people compare this boss to our Taurus I think the only comparisons I've heard to it are from a lower standpoint of this being sort of a tragic tragic fight against a hero that he's not a horse well I mean this is not a divine how is it not a divine the tragedy is annihilated by the stupid fucking horse and his roller skating around on it I didn't 100% agree with it before and I didn't notice the horse until you guys pointed it out to me just now oh boy it's a distraction uh yeah like I was gonna bring up you know Gwyn with something else in terms of a choice for a final thing for a game especially the boss music and then Soul of Cinder having what I believe it fit to describe a subtle references to Gwyn another another just I love that choice as well as references to everything almost if Radon is supposed to be an equivalent in any way to those I really stop but put the controller down he's a good reference to everything in Elden Ring because he's a flailing nutcase who looks stupid a flailing nutcase who looks stupid so hard I need to get this across as well they just got out of a cutscene describing him as like lost to base instinct like he's a fucking animal now he just he just fights and kills and eats the corpses of those around him and then they decide to open the boss fight by having him camp you with a bow yeah what are you doing? I hate that they decided to do that ugh I hate it what an awful intro they're basically forced to dodge the first two and then get on your horse and just run up to him it's a fucking it's a design or a boros where it's fucking eating its own tail because he needs to do that so that you can summon the people and why do you need to summon the people again? instead of them just being him everyone came here to fight why are they not ready to fight I was actually hoping for that when I was talking to them in the festival and they were like we're gonna fucking take out Rodan I was fucking hyper shift for this I was like what are we gonna be getting here cause this is a new game from Fromm they could do anything they want theoretically what are we gonna be doing oh god do you get more choices of summons if you've done more side quests? I found that there's at least more people standing there at the festival cause I realized on my second play for when I got there there was only like three instead of four for me so there might be it might be on to something there did anyone have patches? patches oh but I heard he fucking gives them like a minute he shows up and then it's just like patches left nice patches someone just suggested in chat wouldn't it have been awesome if you had a selection of an amount and you could take a team in you have to choose and they will offer different things there's nothing stopping them from making that a thing the only thing stopping them is their own cynicism can I summon 14 glides also all game you can summon your an ash that you leveled up all game but in this fight where you can summon everything except your ash we are almost to the ash conversation I actually only have one more boss I want to talk about I have a couple I guess fair enough however many you guys want to talk about is that it for Radam? let me see he affirms to me that fromsoft are not capable of anything like Artorias anymore in terms of presentation I think he's a victim it's Polo now he's not that doing he's the most spectacle destroyed thing in this game as far as I'm concerned with a close second being Rycard there's one upside us you don't have to fight him to finish the game which is so bizarre to me that he's not necessary I think you only need to kill two only two of the great runes which comprise the Elden Ring are needed to restore the Elden Ring that's just that's weird it's not intuitive at all to me what the fuck when people told that to me I was like wait, why? he tells me about like 5 or something and there's like 6 you can fight over all the next one I want to talk about anyone else can choose is the god skin duo this is the fight that broke me the fight that broke you oh no I wasn't summoning or using any weapon arts at all prior to this fight every single one of my boss fights is on my channel if I could just complain what the fuck are you doing creating a boss or you can't go through you idiots what the hell is that look at this oh my god there's nothing more frustrating than that ever what the fuck I think what happened here is the longest boss run in the game I can remember at least so you can walk through all the other boss doors except for this one where you just care because Elden Fog you can fuck her up oh god it's so annoying that's like you're lying to me I think the reason is the boss is like further down and the boss gate that you can't walk through is like upstairs exactly that's why you can't fight them up there but that's their fucking fault for building the place like this no no I just wanted to point out why that even happens but just put a fucking door there like a normal door you can only open after the boss fight yeah that's all you have to do kind of a block from the other side that's not actually the door I entered this boss fight from I don't think I think it's two you can get into it from right but one of them is a fucking fake we'll do the upper stairs once there's three different it's a chunky boy that's mean you can't give me a boss door that throughout every single game in your entire series and this game they've been walk throughable and you drop this on me and there's enemies outside it so I'm getting fucking railed by them it looks like those enemies are there to take advantage of you thinking that doors work like doors that work forever you can imagine the conversation right this will be really funny one to be fair they are not doing shit like that it's just funny to me what would make this funnier what if you can't go through it well that's pretty funny when we put a bunch of enemies there the reason why we have so many swamp thingies in this game is because me as I said I just can't help myself dude I'm very surprised we didn't get any mimics in this mimic chests there are a couple chests that teleport you though instead of being a idol there are a lot of communities a lot of the time that's a really cool idea that isn't utilized and can't be because it's kneecapped by the warping someone said God's skin duo was literally fine do you agree no so I guess I'll do my take first because it's going to be the most positive when I played this I've explained this before a couple of you are so sorry about that but when I played this I was like God's skin apostle I like you a lot I really enjoyed the fight with you less so not a huge fan of him mainly because of his second phase where he just becomes giant and fat and rolls around until he gets you look at that guy's back it's so long yeah he's definitely the long man of this game but fat guy yeah he goes fat and rolls until he gets you I heard you guys talking about it briefly on stream he does stop eventually I got him caught on a thing and he rolled at me for about 10 seconds I had him roll in circles around me for I think 20 seconds it's fucking absurd I don't know why they do this sometimes I just wonder anyway I was like I don't want fat man getting to phase 2 because it'll fuck up my ability to maintain this this area but I guess I'll just focus on apostle and we'll see what ends up happening in terms of spawns he's got the four kings element well it's not even the four kings element actually it's a variant I guess you will spawn the one that you've killed again and again and again yeah and so I was like I can have my boss fight with apostle and enjoy it and I'll just keep moving around to avoid the fat guy and that's essentially how I played the fight and it was kind of fun but I just don't know that that's not how I describe why ONS is so well designed what I'm describing is essentially trying to ignore what this game is going for and try and fight it my own way and so I had fun with it I don't think I can confidently say it's very good I think it's pretty terrible I think it shows a lot of misunderstanding of what makes ONS good in the first place because a lot of what makes that fight because there's superficial elements of it here right there's the pillars because they knew that the pillars helped you out with ONS but with ONS they had different but complementary movesets and that was very important to how they played out SMO was very very very slow but he was huge and you could fairly easily separate him from ONS time because ONS time could zip around the arena a lot faster ONS time was also the only one who had ranged attacks they didn't both have ranged attacks the input read your heels and I want to highlight it's one of my suggestions for the best fight in the whole thing it's so god damn good ONS if you focus on SMO you can move the camera around so that you'll basically they've built it so that you'll always have an idea of where ONS team is they usually you can account for his charges while also focusing SMO but at the same time if you want to play to focus ONS time instead SMO will usually easily be within your field of view when you're focusing him which is something I genuinely think they gave up on trying to fix anymore I've complained about it thoroughly in Bloodborne the game problem focus is not fully considered it can fuck you over all the time I don't think that's good people like if it's fucking you over turn it off I don't like that as a counter that's not a counter especially the more they start to design fights and mechanics around the lock on system you lose access to your good dodge by not being locked on ONS moves felt like they were designed knowing the systems in the game and how you play these feel like two bosses they made and then threw together and put in a room I guess that's probably going to always be the difficulty with dual boss battles is that you need to I would imagine that there's the variables if you have two AI driven that are separate entities but need to cooperate in a way or like they need to synergize in order to work and that's probably incredibly difficult to achieve and so from what I understand like everybody loves on stand and smoke but that there's no boss battles that have two of them that are close to that there's only one other good duo boss I can think of in this series and that's the twin demons in Dark Souls 3's DLC what about what about Lorian and Lothra I don't really consider that a duo fight the single entity really it's only a duo in the sense that it's one entity with two attacks that are happening at this different times or at least which I guess is different than two enemies that are just acting independently and running around yeah which I think is so much harder to get them to synergize you need all of their moves set because they'll roll a dice on what move they'll use and you need all of them to have some level of fair synergy for the player to account for which is difficult to design I think I'm sure that's incredibly difficult to design it's probably why that on stand and smoke fight why it's so beloved right I've always felt if you beat that then Dark Souls is beatable for you that's like the last major hurdle before it means you've probably understood the game well enough that you can make it to the end now the thing I'd also like to point out that distinguishes this fight from on stand and smoke so distinctly is that on stand and smoke both operate at fairly different ranges on stand he's quick and he moves a lot but he doesn't have the reach that smoke does, smoke has a shit load of reach and he's able to get you from further away but he also has to, he has to move around smoke he can't really hit you through smoke because his reach is so low right so it's almost like a balance in the sense that smoke is slow which means it's hard for him to keep up with you but he doesn't need to keep up with you because he's got long reach whereas on stand has to keep up with you but he needs to get close that's why it goes so quick and his telegraphs tend to be longer smows meanwhile so I wonder if this is I know this is a discussion maybe this is something worth bringing up I know that matthew methoek has talked about it telegraphing how do you feel about telegraphing I wonder if that's an subject whatever just watching marta's play through as someone who plays because I played a lot of I've played a lot of Vermintide 1 and 2, I've played a lot of Mordhau, and granted these are melee combat focus games. I'm very big into the, how can you tell something is about to attack you and how do you distinguish that from it's just normal moving around? So I'm definitely interested to see how you guys talk about it here. I don't want to open up that discussion yet because we'll get to it, but telegraphing is just tied to, I think, a fundamental aspect of game design, which is communicating clearly to the player what is happening. I think communication, and of course, communication can take multiple forms because, you know, we're talking about tutorials earlier, right? A tutorial can communicate things to you without the game explicitly saying, this is how this mechanic works, you need to think about this. This is what you need to do, that there's subtle ways of it, like when I enter into a new level, the framing of this world may tell me where I need to go without telling me where I need to go, or the way that an enemy moves around might indicate to me something about their moveset before I even fight them. Communication is incredibly integral, but also it's hard to know how to communicate something that most people, if not everybody, is going to understand, but I guess we want to end with that discussion for now. One thing I was going to mention, this is about to come up as well, just the way I ended this fight felt so fucking good. It just happened to be that my Mimic and the Fat guy were fighting where the next one will spawn, and I saw that as a huge fuck up, I was like, ah, damn, if I could have just focused the Fat guy, I could have killed them before God's skin apostle came back to fuck me up. The fact that they were together meant that my Blood Slash was going to hit them both if I used it, and so I finished the fight with tagging them both twice with that move. Nice. Noice. Man, that damage. Feels badass as hell to do something like that, which is one of the many highs you can get from a game like this, but yeah, I feel like the enemy felled. Why felled? It's a tree. That was a good choice of words. The comparison I was making just really quickly. I said the Onestand and Samoa are very different in the way they operate. They have very different ranges. These guys, they both operate at the same range fairly consistently, or at least are capable of operating at the same range and at the same kind of speed. Like God's skin Fatty, he's not actually that slow, and he has- Yeah, he's fast. He has big thrusts that you can do that carry him quite a distance forward very quickly with his rapier stuff. Oh, yes, he can. Yeah. He's as fast as Onestand. He's fucking ridiculous with some of those moves. If you put it next to someone who can't. And the fucking roll, you know like Smo's charge? He like goes boom, boom, boom, swing. It's all very, like that's his charge move. And it's big and heavy and you can really feel the weight behind it. Fucking fat man just goes, he's exonic. Yeah. Like there's no rhythm to it. There's no- There is, but it's way faster than you think something like that should be able to move, especially that flurry thrust attack that he has. And they jam you. Does it feel like the enemies are weightless in that sense? That things that just seem massive don't act as if they just are super fast and they don't act like they have momentum to themselves? The other big thing contributing to their lack of distinction from one another that hurts this being a two enemy boss fight is that they can both throw fireballs at you and they both input read your heels to throw fire. Yeah, that's one of the things I was going to bring up because I was like the element of the fireballs, A, almost automatically firing off every time you heal and B, the only cover you have from them getting destroyed as the fight goes on, it doesn't really work for me. I'm just like, man- Imagine you're fighting Onstein and Smo and then you go to heal because you just dodged an attack from Onstein and then Smo just throws a fireball at you. What do you guys think about that mechanic in general? Input reading? Input healing? Heal punishes? I'm not a fan of it as often as it is and I don't think it should be on every boss. I think it's the kind of thing that you can use for certain bosses because it can help make them feel a certain way. Not every boss can be Psycho-Manus. Yeah. Pretty much. I think Win has it and Dark Souls 1, Margaret has it and this. Everyone has it. I was going to say, I thought everyone had it in this. When Margaret kept doing the charge move every time I healed, I was like, okay, I get it. But then later on, I found that if ever I did heal the boss, it would always do something, look at me, move, start up so that I was just like, you know, don't you? You know I'm doing this. It's because, again, they're running into the limitations of what they can do within this framework. So they're trying to find new ways to actually make things punishing. And one of those ways kind of ends up having to be, well, I guess they need to be able to heal punished you. So I guess they just know. Dude, I hate the fact that they can walk across the pillar of breakages. That's also something that wasn't a troll. Yeah, because that's genuinely the pillars are so important in the O&S fight. Yeah. Yeah. It's all of this that I'm talking about when I say they just don't understand what made that fight good because everything in this fight is the same on the most superficial of levels. The way to subvert your expectations in that regard is, because I have some understanding, I guess, is that in the O&S fight, the pillars break and they become like barriers or like part of the terrain, right? They are a barrier. They break in such a way that they no longer are tall pillars. They're like, you know, broken shorter ones, but they are the exact same level of obstacle for the enemies. Like they don't change. It's just a cool sort of environmental breakage. That thing. Yeah, these ones get eliminated. Yeah, they may not be, unfortunately. Yeah, although you can... Where does Dean go to second face? I think his lightning can hit you over the pillar. I think so, because it's coming from so high up. I was going to say that would be, I think, fair because he's on his own at that point. Yeah. I have the pillars, though. You can still stun, I'm not stunlock exactly, but trap the noble, the fat guy, when he's doing that ball attack, you can trap him on the low remains of the pillars still. But it's, because you're dealing with two enemies, you can't really stay at the angle that traps them there very easily because you also have to be dodging the noble, not the noble, sorry, the apostle. The positioning is pretty tight for it as well, because if he's, I think it's that he's too close, he'll just clip over it. Did you see my effort was to make it so that he never does the fat roll, because I fucking hate that move. And he's about to begin it when I kill him. I was just like, oof, I hate that move. It seems a trigger when he's at half health. Yeah, it's a second phase move. He can do it more than the one time though. So it's not just this transition. It's just he can fire it off in phase two. And I found he usually alternated it with the other attack he does where he floats up in the air and becomes super fat, where he'll just do like the asylum demon type butt slam. And that one's pretty easy to get a few hits on him afterwards. But if he does the roll, it's like, ah, shit, time to start running. I just fought the solo version of the fat guy. And I think I'm not entirely sure about this because I killed him like two pulls after I noticed it. But I think he does the slam down if you're close and the roll if you're far away. After he starts by doing the belly flop and he becomes fat. And if you're close, like trying to punish the belly flop, he does the slam down. And if you're far away, he starts rolling. Me maybe I'm I'm not a hundred percent because I kill him pretty soon after. But but I think he does that. What? What boss is next? Um, I guess this one's a decent segue for me. On the topic of input, read, heal, punishes. How do you guys feel about Crucible Knight? Oh, I was about to bring them up, too. I'll say there are too many of them. Well, I would say that for most bosses. Oh, man, I don't know. I have kind of a hate relationship with them. I feel like every time I encountered them, they just got like triple the health. And then they, no matter what I did, they just punished me for every move. I don't know. They're like super aggressive. Well, and I don't know to say it. They're like super aggressive. You heal and they come come forward with some dash or with like a slash or whatever. And then they have like these these tail whips, scorpion tail whip or whatever it's called. Yeah. God, I felt like I was really bad at fighting them. I wasn't sure of what I thought design wise. No, even even with mage, like they're so tanky. I had a hard time keeping them at range even because they see you and it's like, oh, I'm going to fuck your day up. I'm just going to fuck you up and obviously because the devs hate us. There's a boss fight where you have to fight two of them at once. Yeah, they love that deal. And you have to fight the fight with misbegotten warrior and the Crucible Knight where the only way I was getting through this fire is if I could kill a misbegotten warrior before the Crucible Knight can get to me. I fucking hate misbegotten warrior, dude. Fucking flame, little stupid ass. I think in general, I think their attacks are pretty well telegraphed, I think. But it just takes so long to kill every single one of them. And they respawn in certain areas later on, I think, if I'm not mistaken. So I actually as bosses, as single bosses, I thought Crucible Knights were actually really good because I fought one really early in one of the jails. Yeah. And I actually enjoy that fight a lot, like I struggle a lot with it. And like, I had to learn how to counter all of his moves, his tail whip and all that jazz. So as bosses, when they're just one of them and, you know, there's the boss room and you know that, like, because it's a boss room, it's supposed to be slightly harder. All that's fine. But when you start encounter them in the just open world and they have all of their moves still, like it's basically like an absolutely overtuned wild enemy, like they shouldn't have their entire movesets when they're out in the world, I feel like, because they can do the fly up and dash, they can do the tail, they can do the fucking uber stab move that they have. Like they can do all that stuff. And I don't think a repeated enemy in the world should be able to do all that because I think that's a bit too much, unless it's like a world boss type of thing where they will eventually go away if you do kill them. But like, is it knock run, I think, where there's like two of them? And then I think the aqueduct, yeah, there's like a bunch of them. And then in the capital, there's a couple of them hiding around corners and shit as well. But as a single boss, I actually enjoy them quite a bit. I thought they were pretty good early boss for one. I've I had a sort of love hate relationship with this boss as well because I spent a long time grinding out that one in the other jail in Storm Hill. Because I was actually pretty much enjoying the fight. I was having a pretty good time with it. I liked Crucible Knight for a good long while and only on my second playthrough and some of the later ones in my first playthrough. Did I start to really have quite a few problems with him? Because I think the concept of the fight at the very least is he's this big defensive powerhouse. He doesn't have that many openings. He's got the big shield that can get in your way. He doesn't go on very long, but, you know, he doesn't have leave the strongest openings for you to punish. And he's also got a lot of HP. However, this is all coming combined with a boss that has some of the most insane heal punishes this game has ever seen because he has a stab. He can chain into a thrust, which he can chain into the stab again. He can cross an insane amount of ground in order to heal punish you while also being this insane defensive powerhouse that you cannot openly challenge. Yeah. So what I found, sorry, I was going to say with him more than a lot of people I found I was like, where is my opportunity? Because I feel like every time I go for it, he's starting up another chain that's a part of the movie was just doing, but it didn't look like it was. But it did, you know, like that confusion. I I fought him in my second playthrough. I'm using a great sword and I found fighting him with any weapon larger than approximately katana sized to be miserable in terms of finding openings. And I imagine it only gets worse as you get bigger from great sword because especially in second phase, his tail swipe covers his openings, which is a cool way to escalate the fight. I think that's neat in concept. However, the recovery time on the tail and the recovery time on his moves is so low that the ambiguity as to whether or not he's going to do the tail swipe means you miss a shitload of opportunities to punish. And he's also very prone to just wandering around for upwards of like five seconds, doing nothing with a ship like this on screen right now. And it just makes the fight so fucking boring. And it takes forever because he's not doing anything. I'm never safe to heal unless he does one of two moves. I'm never really safe to attack unless he does one of like two moves. Can you bury him? Is it a variable? Yeah. OK, because I know you can bury the fat guy as well. The noble skin fat guy you compare. Yeah, that's how I beat him in the one on one fight for the God skin noble. I just parried a bunch of his attacks, but you can't really parry in the duo fight because then Apostle gets you while you're trying to parry the noble. And a lot of his attacks, even if even if there is an opportunity to punish, he often just flies out of reach of you like the big wing dive thing. You can't get to him before he's finished. Yeah, it's easy to dodge. But he's like all the way on the other side of where we're fighting. Because I first found them as a normal enemy and I was really confused why they're so tanky. Because I never fought the one in the Evergirl or ever gel or whatever the fuck. I still don't know to pronounce it. Who cares? But yeah, I was like, man, these guys are tanky. What is going on? I think the first time I fought them as a boss is when you get the two of them in one of the hero's dungeons or whatever it is. And I was like, man, those are tough. Oh, who's next? If I want to add one more thing quickly, this crucible knights to me. I'm not certain on this thought, but it's something that occurred to me once I started to sour on them is I think they're a pretty decent case study as to why black knights don't have boss health bars. And there's a lot of similarities to them in that they're big, tough poise monsters with swords with relatively simple movesets. But, you know, you have to be careful with what you're actually doing against them. But crucible knight having the enormous health bar that he does and alongside all of his defensive options means you're stuck fighting him for so fucking long as opposed to a black knight, which once you know how to deal with a black knight, you can take them down pretty quick. Especially if you can get behind them and back. Yeah, if you just circle and backstab. Yeah. Yeah. Who else? Hmm. If you wrote the one up, I once were growing up. So I got nothing anymore in bosses. Did you guys fight? Oh, sorry, I got magic lady. Look over that. Oh, Rinala. Oh, yeah, Rinala. Beyonce. Rinala, I guess. Yeah, his her name. We should take it in terms of describing our experiences, Mel. You first. No, I'm very annoying. Specifically, because I was doing a magic build, all my magic basically didn't do shit. So I had to go and get any weapon that deals damage to her because at this point, I haven't found any in scaling weapon, like a melee weapon. So I was like, man, this little short sword I'm using is like 50 damage. That's not going to cut it. No. So yeah, that's nice. So I think that's when I got the moon veil or I got another one. No, I got the I know what's called. I don't know what it's called. It's like a short sword with in scaling has like blue stuff on it. Karen might so it might be. Yeah, I think that's the one you fight the carrion night just before her. But I think I think he drops a shield there. Yeah, but I think I got that that sword. Yeah, because that had had some in at some in scaling. So I could actually deal a little bit more damage. Uh, so first phase is just like, OK, just kill children, which is always a good thing, obviously. Yes. I wonder if Anakin mode is pretty cool. So obviously this can go fast or less fast, depending on your RNG, because sometimes the glowy child is somewhere behind some corner and you have to follow the singing and find them. If you're lucky, you can already kill three of the glowing children before she even can start the next attacks. Yeah. So that's just a whatever. You just do that quickly. That's fine with my build. It took like four cycles every time, I think, to actually kill your first phase. So it was very annoying. And then the second phase is just, oh, finally, I can get close to attack you. No, I'm going to summon now. And that's going to stagger you back. And I'm going to fuck off. And she did that some she can do that like so many times. And she can summon like dragons and some fucking dragon. Absolute madlass. And so now just just just because I was at the stage a little bit and playing my experience of this, let me fast forward a little bit. I didn't really understand what the fuck was happening in first phase at all. It was only until later that I understood like I had to kill the particular children. I was just trying to slaughter children. I was like, this is surely the way I went. This is the way. And yeah, fuck's sake. Try not. Yeah. So fine to. So this is what happened in the phase two, which I was worried about because I was like, my resource is a very low right now. I don't know what I'm going to do. And then I was just like, all right, let's just try attacking it. Turns out she's very easy to stagger. And yeah, me and Oleg were like, all right, if we just just keep hitting it. We smack her with our swords. That should work. That'll do that. I didn't have too tough a time with her with my my great sword build on my first play through. But I was I was fighting her with a confessor last night where I'm kind of doing like almost like a pyromancy build. And my fire spells were doing nothing to her. Like it was it was pretty rough. But I yeah, I went through almost instantly and I was just like, well, that's that. And it was just funny because like if you build magic, this is like a nightmare fight or it can be. Obviously, we're just merely I was just like, well, she's dead. Moving on. Like, yeah, I have like nothing to say on this boss because in both play throughs, I've run boss arena. I just blasted her immediately. Yeah, but they've done this before. It's just wrong again. It is wrong. And wrong. It's going to spawn. It's like, well, almost every single cool vista in this game they've done before. I don't know if I'd go that far. Certainly a lot of them. I actually I mean, we haven't gone to that as a topic, but I think this is one of the best of the lot for different places, whether or not they've been done before. I don't know if that's a decent of criticism compared to what we should say about how they look, how well they did the thing. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know anything else as for the fight. Yeah, just she just kind of dies. I don't know. I wish it would have been true for my life, bro. I was like one of the roadblocks I hid. I had to go somewhere else and do stuff. I actually got to her pretty early in my first playthrough and I didn't have a proper weapon yet. So her fight to me was actually like, I mean, not really a struggle because I guess I killed her in like maybe 10 or so tries. But like her summons and stuff, like I have a couple pulls. I realized that you don't have to kill the summons. They go away eventually. So anytime she's summoned, I basically just ran, especially when she summoned the fucking dragon. She didn't summon anything for me. I didn't see anything. Yeah. I didn't know if someone could do it. Shit, nothing easy to do. Because what happens when you get close and she summons something, she staggers you. So every time I finally get close to her when the last summon went away, she's like, no, you're gonna stop attack now. I was gonna stag at you. Was a good one. In my first playthrough, I got, well, in the second phase, I killed her, but then as she died, her dragon killed me. There was a dragon there, didn't you? That happened to me with like three bosses. It's hilarious, but it's so relieving when you find out that you don't have to do the fight again. I'm wondering now if I didn't look thoroughly enough, but I swear I did because my souls, I think got trapped in the fucking mirror dimension that she created and I couldn't get them. Because I swear, but I'm not sure about that because I died in phase two on my second playthrough and I was able to pick them back up. So I'm wondering if I just didn't look thoroughly enough, but I swear I stood right on the spot where they were. But yeah, that was my experience with the boss. I traded with it and lost all of the souls for it. And then she was just sitting in the room. That happened to me in, have any of you gotten teleported to Volcano Manor by getting grabbed by the Iron Maiden? Yep. No, I was always killed. She never teleported me. There's a boss fight there that you, I don't know if you can access it otherwise, but there is a boss fight there at least with where you fight double Iron Maidens. And that was annoying. I can imagine, I was pretty fucking annoyed. I never... It's in a really cramped room that's shaped weirdly too. That was really fucking annoying. And once I finally got them down, and I was pretty low level at this point as well, this is all my second playthrough though. I finally got them down and my game crashed as the boss was falling to the floor. And I fucking panicked because I was stuck at these fuckers for like two hours and just like screaming at a rage. And I spawned back in and I spawned outside of the boss room. So as if I would have quit out as you can do, but my souls were dropped inside of the boss room. So I must have died as I crashed or something, but I could walk into the boss room, pick up my souls, which also contained the boss reward souls. That was really strange for me. I don't know what the fuck happened there, but... Well, who's next? I just remember the boss, but I don't know if anyone wanted to go first or whatever they were looking for. My only other thing to say is just a, I guess a general topic rather than a specific boss. Well, what about the fire giant? I'll let you guys go first on that. Kind of exists as a big hitbox, then he dies. I don't know. He didn't like his second phase very much personally. It was kind of freaky. I don't know, I don't have much of it. It's just whatever. He was kind of whatever to me. I was like, no, okay. Yeah, I didn't really have any strong feelings about him. Like he wasn't good, but I didn't necessarily think he was terrible either. He was just kind of there. And I died a couple of times. I went back in and then eventually I won. I mean, for a boss that's that fucking big, I guess he's a lot better than some of his, some like comparisons that exist in the Soul series. But it wasn't amazing. Definitely not. I guess this is just confirming that my opinions are fucking weird because I quite liked fire giant. I mean, I think the first phase, I remember, I think I killed him too quickly to have an opinion. I am quite bad at these games, I think overall. So I got stuck on him for a little bit just because I wanted to experience the fight a little bit more. I like it for reasons that aren't limited to the mechanics, though I think the mechanics are pretty good in that fight. I feel like with fire giant, it was one of the first times in the game they had a really well presented spectacle to me. In terms of going through the fog door, the combination of the music, his placement, his design and his moves tells you a lot about him and his role in this world without them needing to say a word about it. Because he's all damaged around his wrists and his ankles and stuff. He's got the splint and thing to keep his leg together. You can tell he's like fucking ancient and powerful and his placement right close to this big important thing adds to that gravitas as well as just the general vista around him and his size. And his mechanics are like, they're fine. They're pretty okay and it's a rare case of them rewarding you for. I don't even want to necessarily say thinking about something but just identifying, oh, one of his legs is fucked. Maybe if I target that, then I'll get an advantage. And yeah, the fight falls around you breaking down his leg and then that stuff. I mean, I don't necessarily think about all that stuff too much whenever I do my first playthrough. But I mean, I would probably agree with what you said there. That's the kind of stuff. Sorry, guy. But as you said, in terms of mechanics, it's okay. Like I don't really necessarily have anything to bash on. Like he has a couple of big hitboxes but they aren't like, I never felt like it was like, oh man, that's bullshit. Like how the fuck am I supposed to dodge that? Because a lot of them actually did have proper eye frame windows. Yeah, I was surprised with how well I was dodging some of it when I was like, it's an enormous shield. He's slamming to the ground one dodge and I managed to get through it nice. Because usually like the reason why I say that he's better than other bosses that are like his size is that usually they have like big lingering hitboxes. Like for example, if he slammed down his shield and I dodged away from it because it's so big as I come out of my dodge, I would have usually gotten hit or I expected to get hit because that's what I'm used to when it comes to these games. But for some reason I didn't here. So I thought it was actually pretty good. Or better than I expected. Did you guys fight him on horseback or on foot? Completely on foot. Oh, I fought him on horseback. So my experience was a bit different. I just went back to my roots like, oh, there's a big enemy. I'll just stand between his legs and hope for the best. All of Bloodborne. That's how you fight giants. The stuff I mentioned about like the more experiential side of things is what I really felt like I was missing with this game for a large part of it. Because it wasn't giving me that same feeling or anything like that feeling I got when going through Dark Souls I or Bloodborne or Dark Souls III even for the same time. Nothing that kind of accessed my brain on a level that wasn't, wow, cool boss, you know? As to when I got to this, it was quite refreshing in that regard. No, that makes sense. Surely Melania must have been that to a degree as well. Well, Melania to me was just, wow, cool boss. It funneled into the cool boss side of things because, you know, it's the humanoid, the katana, and it has the big moveset. Yeah, that's fair. What would you say? What, who is, have we talked about who your least favorite boss is, you know, in this game? In this game, I think we've, huh. Mine was the one that we started off the boss descriptions with Godskin duo. I really did not like that fight. Right. It's probably Godskin. Well, hmm. I think mine is probably Ulcer Tree Spirit. Yeah. Actually, maybe Elden Beast. Yeah, yeah, there's an argument there. Yeah, it might be. I don't think it acts for me. I don't think I would have hated Elden Beast as much if it wasn't preceded by the whole Rattagon fight. Yeah, I just didn't like the fact that you have to chase him like you tell five billion light years away. Someone mentioned in Canada, there's a lot of that in the bosses in this game as a whole, even fire giant. You have to do a bit of chasing. Yeah, it rolls around. That isn't that really cool, though, because bosses don't typically run away from you. Oh, fuck, we haven't talked about Malou, Malim, Milis, Mel, and Wizards girl. No, the one in the upside down place. Oh, Miriam to Miriam. She's she's the worst. She's the worst. The worst. There's no competition. I don't think I've got her. She's the absolute worst thing in the whole game. She's horrible. It's a list of worst things I've run into in a Souls game. And I was so angry. This is not look at chat. This is not controversial. This is just like she's the worst. She's just a random NPC in a tower. And you you hit her a couple of times, and then she teleports away, which in the beginning is like, OK, that's annoying. But when she gets to her last place, which is like a basically like a roundabout, like on a catwalk, I would almost say, if that makes sense. Uh, and if you get close to her, she teleports away. But here's the kicker. She can still charge her spells while she's teleporting around. So it happened to me like twice. She charged her big ass magic arrow thingy, teleported back. I was like, oh, I can just walk on and she teleported back to me and just hit me in the face and I died. Yeah, that sucks. And I am so glad I did that part of the quest line really late. Like, I basically did that before I killed Ellenbeast. So I was at my peak power. I basically broke. I mean, I don't know. I was worried that I was going to break her eye because I killed the first version of her like on the second place where she teleported to. So I wasn't even halfway off the fucking upside down tower before I killed her. And then like I was in on call with metal and he was like talking about all the time she told for basically what he told you guys right now and how much he hated her. I'm just like, she's gone. Did I break the quest that I was like getting really anxious? What the fuck is going on? Because she died on the second appearance for me because I just did that much damage with my greatsword. I hate. Well, what area of the world is she in? Because I didn't fire at all. The Divine Tower for Leonia. Have you ever come across the Divine Tower where you need to place something in a pedestal? Yeah, no, I don't think I did. I might just that is the one that's how we were just talking about. That's the exact time. No, I definitely didn't see it. We haven't like when you get in, there's like a little pedestal. And if you go after it, it's like something might fit here. And that's all I just know the case of a Resident Evil puzzle clue. Miriam's just yet another case of, I can't understand what they were expecting or what they wanted that to be. Dude, she reminds me of Mikolash so much. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's Mikolash, but like 10 times worse. Yeah, it's much worse. It's the way it might be my take for the worst thing in all the Soulsborne, which is quite an achievement. Don't think it quite beats out a bit of chaos for me. But I'm not sure. It's it's fair. You can I think you can make the argument. But I was going to say that someone I forgot about the blood lord man, the king of blood, whatever. Oh, oh, God. That was a rough one. I didn't find or fight Mogue and I'm kind of sad about it. And there's two of them and you didn't fight him. Yeah, I forgot this. Two of them shouldn't be two of a boss like this. It feels weird. Yeah, he's ultra powerful. Well, it's not even just it's just narratively. When you're playing this, you're like, this is a big dude. He's an important dude. He's got stuff about him. Boss. Yeah. And it's like, oh, he's also here. You're like, what? What? You kill Malakas and fucking Faramazula, then you teleport to Landel Capital of Ash and he's just walking around. He's like, hey, it seems like this guy and Melania seems to be like the two big optional end game boss that you can fight. Because this guy drops like three hundred and eighty case-olds and Melania drops four hundred and eighty case-olds. And no other boss really. I think the closest is like 200 K, which I think is like fire giants at the giant area. But but yeah, so I don't know. This guy should not be repeated. Like imagine finding Melania someplace else. So just find him in the park and on the health. I only fought him the one time and my shadow play wasn't on. Like, I don't know if you guys use the G force capture software. But I normally just hit alt F 10 at the end of a boss fight and it just didn't do anything. I'm like, what? No, no. And then I hit alt said and it's a replay off. I was just like, oh, no, no. Mokes arena looks great, by the way. That's a yeah, I think I think he was pretty cool. I can't quite remember what I have to say about him because there's another fight that went too quick. I have my issue with the fight from what I've seen of it is me, but other than that, the fight looks pretty cool. I don't like his his AOEs. They're really hard to figure out where exactly you should be moving because he has that blood flame stuff that just kind of spews out of him. And it lands in very bizarre patterns. So every time it happens, you got to just kind of roll in a direction and hope for the best. I mean, there's probably a better way around it, but that's that's all I was able to figure out. Yeah, I actually fought him quite a bit and I liked him a lot. And I like think about it now. I actually think he he was pretty good. I was a little bit annoyed at the time because I didn't have the sacred tear that allows you to immune his face transition. So it was kind of like getting annoyed by that. And then I started getting annoyed by the smaller things that he did. So I basically just like I have to waste like four estus every time he faced transition. Yeah, I was getting annoyed by that. That's what I ended up doing. I didn't have that. I had it, but I just didn't think to use it. Yeah, because I mean, I even tried to use my physics stuff because there's like one that gives you more immunity to bleeds and stuff. And I tried using that that didn't work and one that makes you take less damage, but that didn't work in the bleed. And but yeah, so I just didn't have the proper sacred tear. I don't know how you guys feel about this, but I felt it was weird. The bleed works really well on the Lord of Blood. Yeah, that shouldn't be very just healthy or intuitive. Like, oh, wouldn't you? OK, all right. Like it kills him. You're like, oh, well, he's Lord of Blood. You set a fire monster on fire. It's like, oh, OK, yeah. Metal is looking at his Rinaldo fight just like, yeah, you didn't. You didn't forget to make her magic immunity on him, didn't you? Yeah, that's all. I could have done better with the design on the knee heel thing, because I didn't, like I said, I didn't fight this boss. But when I first saw it, I saw that he has the, you know, Tres duo unos kind of things that he does and they put rings around you if they hit you. I thought, oh, that's kind of neat. That's probably going to play into something later. But when I saw that it was just at the phase transition, he's just going to do a shitload of damage to you unless you have an item. I don't know. I feel like that's a that's a lame way to pay that out. I think they could have done a lot better. Yeah, you have to heal through it, because I mean, even with that big health but Mauler has this like kind of tank through it. Yeah, no, yeah. Yeah, because I just said it was like, oh, I guess I'm just going to chuck all these, all these asses real quick so I don't die. The death you showed on screen just now is kind of comical. It was like, I'll save you. Yeah, this guy, I wish I had fought him and I'm tempted to go back to my first character just to go and find him and fight him because he looks pretty rad. He's pretty easy to get to, actually, because there's a quest line, like a PvP quest line that takes you to the area almost immediately. Like as soon as you reach the magic lake, you you can get there pretty much. Yeah, I did that on my current playthrough because I needed levels. I missed the entirety of Mount Gelmere on my first playthrough. Oh boy, my game crashed. Well, that's another issue we can talk about later. Well, so maybe it's my idea now to say, what are your closing statements on the bosses? A lot of mid, a bunch of stinkers and a handful of good bosses. More bad than good, I would say. Most of them are shit and kind of a disgrace to the boss health bar. They have no rhyme or reason behind them. They're just there because we need a boss at the end of the catacomb. A lot of them are ill thought out duo fights as well. The enemies themselves aren't mechanically engaging. However, when they're actually making a boss like a real boss from soft, have still got it for the most part. There's some issues in this game in terms of things I think about boss design, but on the whole, they've still got it. They can still make really good bosses. Yeah, yeah, I think that's pretty much my stance as well. Like even though it's unfair, like in my head, I kind of want to like ignore. Like if you put a troll as a boss after you've already fought like 10 of them out in the wild, it doesn't really feel like a boss. It's just like a hurdle you need to get through to be able to finish whatever dungeon you're in. And if you put whatever, like where are those? I don't know what they're called, but it's like a big hairy dude that sometimes he has an axe and sometimes it has like a halberd. You find them pretty early on in the castle, I think. Do list people? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. It's just like a random enemy that you find all over the place. And he's at the end of a dungeon as well. And you kind of, I mean, not boss hurdle. So like I don't really want to want to categorize them together with like Melania and Moog and whatever the fuck. But basically what Theo said, like the bosses that are main bosses, like big bosses are pretty fucking good with obvious exceptions like Rodan, Raikon, yeah, as much as I like him. Well, I don't yet to bring him up quickly. How do you guys feel about Godric? Oh, well, I think I mentioned it right. I was just like, oh, no, wait. Sorry, Godric. Yeah, I remember him. That's the log ago, boy. What? Yeah, it's a guy in Stormvale, right? The main boss? Yeah, I think it was pretty good. It was he's a bit too easy for my taste. I was going to say, I probably could use some more health as well. He's not even close to as difficult as market. Yeah. Oh, really, I found him harder than market. But I mean, I was also fighting in both at a pretty low level. Yes, same. He has a little bit of Ludwig Ness in his in his like flimpy arms moves. He's got a lot of it in his music as well. But yeah, so I don't know. I thought it was a pretty OK fight, but not the best. I found myself about to shit on him as a main boss. And I wasn't sure if that's entirely fair, because I think he's OK. He's just not particularly balanced, I think, is the problem. He's he's a bit too weak. He leaves himself to open for how weak he is. Like, this is the kind of boss because he leaves openings everywhere constantly. This is the kind of thing where I think more health is an easy fix. I also like how hard the voice actor goes during the the screen. Excellent. I love the voice acting throughout these these games, typically. It's almost like an unsung part of them, because most people want to talk about the mechanics. Yeah. This one in particular jumped out at me the way he fucking screams four fathers, one and all bear witness. Like, I like that a lot. The only one, the only voice acting that stood out to me was the fucking record one. We was like, well, I'm going to fucking kill you. I'll get you. It's kind of silly to me to be honest. Stupid fucking voice. Yeah. Well, for God's sake, I'm still overall got a bit of a sad face for the bosses myself. Yeah, I like I like a lot of the fights, but I was hoping to get more experiences that I loved instead of very few. Pretty much all of the bosses that I would want to fight again are right at the late late game or end game as well. No, which is miserable in terms of the amount of time that there is basically a bloodbond. I'm like, I like gas coin. All right, now I've got to wait for me. It's I have mixed feelings on market overall, probably positive. But, you know, and then after that, it's just a drought all the way until I think more got. And then after that, it's another drought until I can get all the way down the fucking Hallig treats to Melania and all the way to Faramazula. Mm hmm. By the way, just a random thought. It seems like like once like we've nerded the game enough and you start to understand like, OK, this is this boss's weakness. I just need to do this and I win. I think a lot of that is going to be parries. A lot of bosses seem to be parryable. Like some bosses like Radegon and Melania, you need to parry three times before it gives you the repost. But a lot of bosses just seems to be weak to parries, which is interesting. You don't really see that a lot in those games. But you'll have some bosses like, oh, wow, I can actually parry this guy. Yeah, it was a lot of how I was able to kill. Did you guys fight commander Niall? Yeah, actually, on that fight right now, I found that it was I actually kind of like that fight because it was the only one where I had to switch my weapon configuration because for each of the three enemies, I found different tactics worked. So the first the first ghost knight thing that I engaged, I just two handed my great sword. Then for the shield knight, I had was running sword and shield. And then I switched my shield to the buckler so that I could parry the main guy that you fight at the end because I found that his AOE attacks were just making it so that I had no window to punish him. So I found parrying parrying his standard spear attacks was was the way to do it. Interesting. I remember when I fought him or whether. If I even is, I think I got him my first try again. I was just like because of just stuff I was using. Which, by the way, I was going to say I'm totally ready to talk about ashes now is everyone else. Sure. You're right. Yeah, I'm going to parrying point again. Oh, well, you can do that first for one. Oh, I don't know how much I want to get into this because it's all of the games, but I don't think parrying is a very good mechanic. I think it's quite bad, especially in boss fights. So I would be dis-cheesed if the best way to beat all bosses was, you know, parrying. Anyone have any thoughts on that? I don't use parry very often. I really don't use it at all myself. So I don't really have anything on it. I only saw like a lot of videos where they even kind of cheat. I don't know if it's cheese because it's actually pretty hard still. They use it on millennia. I think for theater, maybe you actually just know hitting millennia almost and just parry, parry, parry, which is still pretty hard. But yeah, I don't know. I don't use it myself. You're going to have to fight on this one, apparently. With you because I can't really I can't talk about parry that much because I just don't use it. I don't use it because I think it ruins boss fights. It ruins the experience with them because you boil it down to one timing, one timing and you win as opposed to having to deal with an entire boss's moveset. But you don't even have to find correct punish timings when you're parrying because you get a repost. So you just hit them or rather you repost them. They fall to the ground, they get back up, they do anything. You parry them again. They fall over, you repost them and then they get back up again. And it takes any sense of back and forth or flow out of the fight and boils it down to something that's really mechanically uninteresting. Well, that's not entirely true because not all attacks are parryable. Yeah, that's something I think. I think that's more in this game, which is probably a positive because I have more positive to say about the parry in this game, I'd probably say some attacks aren't parryable. So is there a consistent rule set for finding out which ones are and are not? Or is it a matter of guesswork? I think there's a set of rules like you can't parry things like millennia's kick because it's a kick, not a weapon swing. Yeah, and I think like usually like overhead attacks seem to not be parryable. Like it seems to be whenever it's a swing from either left to right to right to left in any capacity, like whether it's semi overhead or if it's just like a straight up slash, it seems to be parryable. But if it's just straight up overhead or a jump attack or sometimes power attacks, also stab attacks are kind of 50-50. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can. I've not been able to verify it myself, but something I've seen people say is that when the enemy is holding their weapon with both hands, you can't parry them. Which if that's true, that's that's a decent way of signifying that. In fact, I'd say that's a good way of signifying that, but I don't know if that's actually true or not. And something I found is that when you stagger an enemy and obviously you get that when you parry and you've got the option the opportunity and option, I want to say the same time. The option of getting the, let's call it the visceral, whatever. It's funny that I think in my playthrough, I started to realize I was doing less damage if I took the visceral instead of just attacking. Yeah, I was still going to mention that too. The visceral and repost seem to deal not as much damage because I found myself just hitting people in the meantime instead of doing the repost, even though I did it a lot because I just like doing it. It's especially the case because enemies or a lot of enemies and a lot of bosses, I think mostly just bosses are invulnerable while getting up in this game as opposed to before when you could still damage them as they were standing up from the repost. So the repost is even less worth it against things like magma worm or whatever the fuck, because you can't get the charged R2 that you used to be able to get as they were standing. Well, you can if you time it, right? Yeah, it comes later, but for some their recovery is quick enough that there's no time. Like for example, Crucible Knight, you're not getting anything if anything more than like an R1 is unsafe. I've always liked the assessment, though, that it's like low risk, low reward is to just roll back or roll and then try and attack mid risk, mid reward. It's like when you're moving around or away so that you're ready to attack, but you're still risking getting hit and then high risk, high reward is the parry repost. The problem with it is that I think people got really good at parry repost. It wasn't really high risk, high reward. It was just low risk, high reward almost. Oh, I'd argue the risk isn't all that high because the timings on parries are generally pretty generous. Because the problem comes in then of just is that assessed from the average skill level or people who know these games very well? I mean, and should it be? Even if parries were super difficult, I think I would have the same problem because, you know, it takes any sense of flow out of the fight because they're just getting up repeatedly and then getting reposted back down to the floor. Like Ponte of Sullivan is a fight that's ruined by that. There's a pretty shade. The what the bini ox one just had in chat risk. Isn't that high? OK. What do you guys think about the guard countering? Because that's sort of like a parry, but not really interesting. I found that that was actually that was a god that exists. I'd never really used the shield in a souls game before this one because I found guard countering was something that was it was too useful to pass up and it kind of changed my play style. So personally, I enjoyed it. I like how they do a lot of stagger damage to. Yeah, I didn't use it a lot, but I thought it was really interesting. I kind of like metal did like I kind of forgot about it until I was reminded like when I was at 90% done with my play through. But it's a pretty cool thing. And I think I'm going to mess around with it more on on my future play through. I would I think it's a good system and it's a good way of increasing, I guess, the depth of the combat in these games because that's needed the more they focus on being action games. So big thumbs up to guard counter for me. However, for a lot of the specific animations, I noticed that they really lack reach. So I've seen guard counters whiffing like all over the place where you block an attack and then guard countering your sword just slams into the ground in front of the guy. I wonder if it was on purpose because it's so easy to do. Like, is it supposed to be the extra damage? Yeah, maybe the big thing I found with it was the timing because I figured I mean, granted, this isn't going to be down to the the number on the math, but I found that it was like launching one of your heavy attacks with about 70 percent of the speed. So say 30 percent faster than it normally is. So it is still a valuable thing to be able to use, but it's not fast enough that it's a guaranteed hit that you can throw into the first hit of a combo. Like a boss starts a five hit combo and on hit two, you try to throw in a guard counter. It's probably not going to work. So you had to almost learn, OK, I can guard counter this move and then get some good stagger damage on him, or I could roll behind him and just do a standard attack. And I found that it gave you more options to figure out. Hey, what's what's the best thing for me to do right here? I think the stance system they've got going on in general is a big thumbs up the idea because it encourages you to use more of your moveset and it gives you more reason to use more of your moveset because our twos don't really exist in Dark Souls 3, unless they are a specific move that you might want like a poke. And even then, a lot of the time it's too slow. In this, you have active incentive to use your charged R2s, to use your weapon arts, to use guard counters and stuff because you will get extra rewards. Yeah, yeah, yeah, extra rewards out of it. I think it's a good expansion on the system. So can I mention the boss real quick because I'm just fighting it and I want to kill myself? Do it. Who thought it was a good idea to make the Archie avatar split into two Archie avatars? Well, it's harder because I didn't do that one. I did that one with magic and it was like whatever. I'm fighting with melee now. What the fuck? Like the one guy pushes me over and then the other one just crashes me on the ground and I'm dead. Would it be cooler if you fought like two asylum demons at once? No. Oh, what? Oh, I mean, if they were actually asylum demons, it would probably be better. Maybe. But one more tiny thing with those guys, the Archie avatars, you know, the Putrid avatars, the fucking Scarlet Rott ones. Oh, yeah, those are great. Those guys, you can't detect them while they did that. So you just walk away and wait and stupid because the Rott they throw out is like in a big cone in front of them. But it doesn't hit behind or to the side of them. So you just roll around them. And then, of course, because you're slightly off to their side and behind them, that encourages them to do the butt slam again. So they just span it over and over and over and over again. I have to do it seven times in a row for me. Leave it to me, Azaki, to say, yeah, we need poison and super poison. I think that's been in all the games, unfortunately. Well, I mean, in this game, you have super duper poison because you have you have actual poison. I think you have actual poison, right? And then you have scarlet. Scarlet Rott, yeah. Oh, wait, there's I didn't know there was a Rott that wasn't Scarlet Rott. I thought it was Scarlet Rott. And there's different tiers to the Scarlet Rott to make it better for you. Yes, there is. The Scarlet Rott from wandering around in Lake of Rott is stronger than the stuff that normal enemies will hit and give you. Also, the the dust that makes you poisonous or Rott already deals damage to you while you're getting the thing. And after that, you get like a chunk of more damage and then you get the actual dot. I found also that both for the poison and the scarlet Rott, there wasn't a lot of the materials for crafting the antidotes to them. So it was pretty much just if you like, I found 90% of the time I had to just heal my way through them as opposed to, OK, I'm poisoned now, I'll take antidote. And it just found that you couldn't buy them anywhere or the completed ones and finding the crafting materials was it unclear, I guess would be the best way to put it. I want to come back to that when we get to the crafting stuff. Crafting the whole thing as well. I have a lot to say on that. Well, so, you know, since we're at a clean three hours for the first topic, do you guys want to go to the next one? No. Yeah, sorry. OK. Nobody needs to apologize. This is EFAP. So anyway, I want to talk about ashes and it's going to make so specifically. I don't know what name are they given? The ash summons or something like that, the spirit ashes, spirit ashes. Now, the game introduces them to you as like a fun little mechanic of, hey, you can summon this and you don't even have to do like a magic build. This is just an additional sort of weapon to take advantage of in the same way as jump attacks or like a new thing or the horse and horse combat. That's a new thing. It's like you've got these. And when I first got them, I think I got the wolves like most people. And I was like, oh, that's kind of neat. And they I was saying this to Theo, I thought that the idea was going to be it's like a one time summon and wolves will appear and scratch at the enemy and then disappear. I thought that's what we were going to be getting. And that I was kind of excited by the idea because I was like, oh, I want to do it like Lord of the Rings, the Third Age. Yes, I'm referencing that where the spirit, so many things you get in that game. The best one is like, I think one of the birds coming in and doing shit or you summon the banner of a lend deal or something like that. But I was just like, I wonder what the best one will be. One of my favorite ones in that was just the end that throws a boulder or whatever you're fighting. And you can summon that on Sauron, which is really funny. Just throw it a boulder. One more off. And I was like, that would be cool if as the game progresses, instead it like spawns an actual thing that can help you in the fight. And wolves, you know, they're OK. They find as a starting thing. Jellyfish, a lot of people ended up getting because I think you get that as sort of like a part of the campaign when you talk to the girl in the little cabin next to the one of the initial grace points. And so everyone usually has played with the jellyfish. Jellyfish isn't great damage, but it's a pretty great distraction. And so already it's like, hmm, this is this changes the gameplay quite a bit, actually. And then I ended up grabbing Oleg early by happenstance. I just happened to go to the place that he was at. And Oleg is like really good for damage, distraction and health. Yeah, he's good with everything. And then later on in the game, I found Tish and the mimic and the mimic has been nerfed already because it is fucking broken. That is the intro. Say whatever you want to say, everybody. I posted a meme in the discord that I found very funny. Very well. That's my only opinion on Spirit Ashes, which opinion that I was I was kidding, just that that meme was my only opinion. But no, I think that they definitely break the combat in some pretty serious. No, well, no, I was I was joking. Oh, so it isn't your opinion. I meant my opinion was that I posted a meme. It was a joke that didn't land up. Sorry. But my opinion on Spirit Ashes, I do think they sort of break the the boss design in general. And I've mixed feeling on whether they should be in the game at all. So I wasn't laughing at you. I was laughing at what happened on. Yeah, yeah. I think much in the same way as summoning a player, the summons are very prone to violating the experience with a boss because enemies in these games are just not capable of handling multiple foes because they're not designed to be designed for one guy. You'd hope they'd be designed for more guys because, you know, you have access to spirits and they're upgradeable, making them appear more as like a main part of your kit in this game. But from what I have seen, I didn't use any of them myself because that's I just wasn't interested in that as part of my experience and I wanted my FP for other things. But from what I have seen, they are still just as good as they ever were at really kind of fucking with the experience bosses and even basic enemies can present. Yeah. So my I didn't get Oleg, but I did get the mimic once I reached that part of the game. Before that, I didn't really use them that much. I used the wolves every now and then. I think I leveled up my wolves just a little bit because I thought it was like a neat little extra damage. Sometimes the wolves would even help you get a stagger off, which was nice. But they had like fuck all health, so they died pretty quickly. So I thought it was like pretty cool. But then I got the mimic and with a big chunky great sword, the mimic breaks what I felt like 90 percent of bosses, even millennia. Yeah, that's how I beat her. Like I I at the point where I reached millennia, I told myself that I OK, I'm not going to summon anymore because it's fucking stupid. And I fought her for a couple of hours on stream. And then I then I was like, I think it was talking about it with the people in chat. And I was like, OK, let me show you. Let me show you what someones do. And I I summoned the mimic and I basically got the second face and I. I don't wait, this might not have been on stream, but I got the second face and the boss had five percent health left, at which point I quit out of the game because I didn't want to beat the boss that way. So I basically could have just killed millennia then and there. The first time I used the summon. And I think it's just too game breaking. The fact that it allows me to ignore boss mechanics and just spam R1. It's game breaking to me because that's like there's no way the devs intended you to just ignore all of the mechanics they pumped into a boss fight. And just, you know, press one button and then another just spammed another button and then you win. Like it's so fucking broken. I'm seeing it already in chat. People saying, don't use it. That's not the point, guys. Yeah. It's hard to every game or every game's balance, then. Yeah, every game is balanced. Yeah, every game is balanced. Just don't use the unbalanced things. Shit, fucking hell, we saw. I was going to say, why does anyone can play about noob tube? Just don't use it. It's like, well, other people use it. Oh, yeah. Well, that's what makes it a self imposed challenge. Exactly. You'd be fine. Yeah, it's also it's having that tool in your toolkit to be able to grab if you're getting frustrated is you can't really argue that the game's balanced around you deciding to resist that urge. Like that's a weird argument to make. It's well, I mean, if the game should be played as a one on one fight between you and these bosses and if you're having tons of trouble, you can summon another player. That's one thing. But if it's like, I want to play this single player, I'm just not going to use one of my most powerful weapons. It's it puts you in a weird spot to argue from. And it's not like there's like two of them. Like there's probably 40. Yeah, you get like a fuck on them easily with exploring. I think that's the important part is there's a shitload of them and they upgrade like your weapon does. They're a part of your toolkit. They're not something separate like summons, which still exist and are hidden further away now even because you have to tap a thing in order to see some signs. Yeah, which is interesting, right? Like the summons for the lot of us, I think we are much more happy to consider them. May it's like additional that you have the game. And then it's like, you can summon and you don't even know necessarily what you're going to get, because you can summon people, the real people, and then they can come in and just annihilate or they can get killed easily because they could be a new player or whatever. And it feels like it feels like an alternative feature of the game. This is introduced to you as a mechanic that you should take advantage of. But it's not the same as summons in any way in terms of like, I don't think this is a thing. Someone might be like, well, are you condemning people for choosing to? But it's like, well, so I use them. The problem is I realize way too late that I'm like, I don't think I've really played this game properly, unfortunately, because a lot of these bosses are annihilated by my mimic. Summons in terms of presentation are very different in that there if you want help, you can bring in some other guy and you can feel however you want about that. But at the end of the day, who cares what some idiot on the Internet thinks about your willingness to use some another player or whatever to beat the game. Go crazy if you want to. But the mimic tier, the ashes, they are they are a part of your toolkit. They're given to you as an upgradeable resource that you have at your disposal. And they're just a thing you have. The it seems like the game is expecting to account for because of the way they're given to you. And yeah, I think initially I thought they'd be chill because the wolves died pretty quick and they would just little guys that ran around for a little bit and I was pretty chill. But like Oleg really enjoyed it first that I was like, oh, wait, hang on. And then the fact that people were like, a pretty sure Mimic is better. And it's like, yeah, Mimic is better than like a summon because it's it's health is insane. It has so much seen health and it can heal, especially on the on the build that I had because it like since it adapts your stats, it basically took because I was wearing Lionel's armor, like the big chunky guy's armor. And so my mimic had a shit ton of armor. And then on top of the fact that I had 50 vigor, so I had a shit ton of health. And then that is like multiplied by like a bajillion for some reason. So the mimic just never died for me. And they can use potions, the mimics. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they can do everything. So someone said you're only criticizing the mimics. It's like, so this is applicable to all the late game ashes, basically. Yeah, I say, you can find some of these. Well, I was going to say, Oleg is actually really early game. You can get him. Oh, it's like in the beginning. Just get the sword key gift and you can go there right away. And so I'll say these are elitism talking points. I'd be curious what you think what we've said so far is an elitism talking point. You've actually said you kind of shouldn't use them for the record. I'm a cripple. Well, for the fucking record, I used them throughout my whole play through. So what's going on? Like it's like it's just so automatically defensive of a thing that we haven't even said. I think they found out that they seem super unbalanced. They are definitely unbalanced. There's no way about that. One of the ashes that you mentioned, Tish, can actually. So I've seen there's a video on YouTube where a fully level Tish, I don't know what his full name is, but he can solo a couple of endgame bosses on New Game Plus. Yes, you literally just summon him, step back and he will win the fight for you. Tell me that is not like you're literally not even playing the game. Like I was being hyperbolic when I said that I wasn't playing the game because I was just spamming R1. That summon literally makes it not makes you not play the game. You can literally win the fight without even touching the boss. I think that Tish is the reason I won the game, ultimately, because I tried out the mimic and it was like fine in the endgame bosses. But Tish, the I'm assuming everyone here may or may not know or not everyone, but each has a projectile move that when it hits an enemy, it deals like 10% of their total health no matter what. What? Yeah, I didn't know that. Which is insane when you fight something like the elder elder beast. You just like Tish can take care of it because Tish's health isn't as good as the mimic, I don't think, but Tish's damage is absolutely fucked. Like, I don't know why they allowed this to happen. Is that, see that dot? Yeah, that dot is fucking insane, melting the boss. And another one. Tish can just keep throwing him. And he just spams it. He just throws those fucking dashes of fire or whatever the fuck. Like, you have to appreciate how much this completely changes the boss. Like, it's. Wow. It's just living. It's the boss enough. Yeah, you hit the boss three times and it's a half health. Yeah, I'm playing pretty piss poorly right now. Like Tish is making up for it completely. Anyone could be confused as to like, oh, wow, you do it really well. I'm like, yeah, sure. Like somebody. We're going out there. Oh, damn. He's the final boss in the game. By deciding to summon Tish. Yeah, so please, someone in chat used to just don't use the argument again. OK, because you can literally just win the fight without touching the boss and summon by some. Oh, yeah, I could totally have chosen to armor up, health up, like respect and just keep healing and running around until Tish kills it. Yeah. Yeah, and the experience on me and players only sometimes can when you summon them. So just don't use it. Well, I mean, that's the thing. It's like the don't use it argument. There's not technically a hole in it because you're right. You don't technically have to use them. But if we're going to like be talking about how well this game's designed or how it could be designed better, there can be a balance point there. Well, I think the problem with just don't use it is it's like you're asking me to handicap myself. Like you're telling me with an option that's going to help me tremendously and you're telling me not to use it. Well, just kind of the point of the the Spider-Man meme I posted there, like it's like saying, yeah, no, that's it's a tool that's thrown in the game. So saying, like, just don't use it is it's not really like there. I think I think it's broken. I mean, I shouldn't use any bleed items. It's it's just vapid commentary. It doesn't mean anything because this is about criticising what's going on in the game. Just don't use it as meaningless in that discussion. Well, I mean. Just don't use it as it's like, yeah, I I'm not sure what is to be said about that because then what happens when we start thinking about a whole bunch of things that are like just make it easier for you and just just don't use it. You know, I don't understand how we can ever talk about balance ever. Well, yeah, yeah, like just just make it harder for yourself. If ever anything's too easy, let yourself get hit a couple of times, give yourself a challenge, don't use any of the flasks. Yeah, don't heal. It's a good one. Don't heal. The music is bad. Just don't listen to it. One something like this in terms of game design, it brings up two kind of issues, even if like the the whole don't use it thing still has problems. One being I don't know the mindset of the developers in terms of was this game balanced with the assumption that I will use these or that it's always an emergency button that I can press. I don't know. I don't know how this game is balanced around it, knowing that it's super unbalanced. And even if we go and say that, yes, it is super unbalanced in the game, maybe takes that into account or maybe if it doesn't, either way, if you know or if you don't. It puts a it puts a doubt in your mind from everything else you find in the game that I have to constantly be essentially doing the developers work for them as I'm playing the game, discovering if something is not balanced and then telling myself that I don't need to be using it until ever. Can I can I just not it's it's the developers part of their job. I think in terms of game qualities to balance something. I don't know that it's the game's job to identify which tools they ought to use and they ought not use in order to have a challenge. I don't know that that's the game's responsibility to answer these questions. That can become an emergent piece of knowledge based off of playing a game enough like I'm going to play Risk of Rain and only use this one item and see how good I could do or something like that. I'm going to make like self-imposed challenges exist. But it should. But those are different than this is a blatantly overpowered mechanic that the game seems to really encourage have established and encouraged and it's really fleshed out. How does somebody figure out that they they they're still allowed to use the flask to heal but then not allowed to use the summon? Just look at it. Well, I don't sound like does everyone in chat disagree with me when I said that the healing is broken in Dark Souls 2 because it's only broken if you choose to use it. Just don't use it. Yeah, just don't use any life gen. I spent like a whole hour going through how fucked that whole system is. But yeah, the solution is just don't use life gems. And then the question is, are the levels and the boss fights balanced around the fact that you are likely going to be using both your Estis and your life gems? Or are they designing it around Estis and then just saying, well, if you really want, you can use a life gem. But just so you know, that's the easy mode button. That's kind of a weird thing with this game, actually, because I feel like it's half and half balanced around the ashes. There are some encounters, mostly like the duo things, where it feels like this had ashes in mind. But then there's other things like Malakith and, well, half the other bosses where the mimic just completely violates the experience or any other summon really would probably do the same thing if well upgraded. What one thing that's kind of interesting, too, is there's that little icon that's above your inventory in the bottom left corner that basically says, yeah, you can summon here or you can summon one of your ashes. But there's plenty of areas where you can't. So it's a bit strange that in boss fights like Theo was referring to, it's not like, OK, Malakith, this is a one on one. You don't have like your bell can't be heard by the heavens or wherever the hell you're summoning your spirit actually. You're so fucking right. That's a really important point. They have handcrafted where and when you can and cannot use this mechanic. Why would they do that if it means nothing in terms of just, no, if you want to just play the game without playing it summon? Like what they knew that there are places you shouldn't use it or they didn't want you to use it. So that implies all those other places are places they're fine with me using it. Such an important observation. Oh, yeah, there was a very deliberate choice from the developers on where you're allowed to use it. And there are some fights where you pulling out Tish can make it so that I'm not even playing the game anymore. This is the difference. I want people to understand this isn't easy, normal, hard difficulty differences. Some of this is you don't even have to play the game. That cannot be intentional, right? Especially not how it could be. I don't like to go outside the game, but from soft have said many times that challenges an important part of the world. Yes, they have. And so, yeah. I guess just don't use it, though. There is a level in which I'm willing to accept this as an idea. But we're broken well beyond just mimic Tish or like, there's there's a lot of them, all of the better ashes, basically. They go to cool. Are actually pretty decent to they basically hang back and just launch arrows at anyone. It's kind of sad, because I think it's a neat idea in concept. I especially because when I first saw the system, I identified it kind of similar to the way Mola was looking at it. I thought it'd be like Ronaldo summons where they come in, they do that thing and then they go. Yeah, yeah, I was actually going to suggest that a time limit, I think would be a good way to balance them. So then it's more like using a magic attack than summoning a helpline. And the most I'd want to see is like, you can get the Tish one and it'll last about five seconds. And what it'll do is it'll launch one of those attacks. It'll take 10% of the health off the enemy. It's like, whoa, that's a pretty useful one. Or you can get. It's already useful as fuck, yeah. Yeah, just that then disappears. The imagine it's like, you can summon the turtle and this is like a meme one. You're like, what does it do? It's like it doesn't attack, but it can. It lasts for maybe 30 seconds and the boss goes nuts on the fucking turtle. It'll just keep attacking the turtle. So it's like, it gives you 30 seconds of a window. You can summon some magic users and they'll cast a buff on you or something like that. That would be way better. Honestly, it's what I really wanted out of the system when I saw some of the various uses of it. It's really kind of sounding like they would probably be more fun if they were or more, I guess, balanced if they worked more like the summons in Final Fantasy games where it's just, it's more like a super powerful spell that shows up, does one thing, costs a ton of mana, but then that's it. It's not like the best summons are in a Final Fantasy or Bahamut shows up and then fights with you for the rest of the boss battle or whatever. And it's kind of weird as well to me that most of them cost FP because it seems with the way that they're designed, I don't know, because it feels almost cruel to mage builds or people relying a lot on magic who really have a lot of other things they wanna do with their FP because that was the reason I never gave spirits a chance. I was fairly set on, yeah, I'm not interested in using this, but I considered a few times, maybe I'll give them a go, but I didn't want to because I wanted all of my FP for doing other things. So I guess that saves me from never having my experience violated by summoning a mimic, but also, I guess, if I wanted to summon something, it's kind of just a fuck you. Is there any other than the mimic? Oh, no, the mimic costs health, yeah, good point. Yeah, is it anything else but the mimic that costs health or is it everything else? Someone in chat said rats are free. Three rats, rats are free on this free, take them home. No, I guess. I'll have 326 rats at home. Oh no, OP. Yeah, I would just go as far as saying, I think it's bad. And you'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, bad. And it's like, well, mechanically, I guess it works, but it's damaging other portions of the game. And it needs heavy balancing that. Yeah, but I don't think they're gonna do that though because they just nerf what they thought was appropriate for the mimic. And apparently it's still just as broken as it used to be. Like they nerf the damage a little bit and the behavioral patterns, which I'm not really sure what that means, but someone in metals chats said earlier that they're just as broken as they used to be. So, GGs. I mean, it's just to clarify, it's the same logic I used to call a couple of things bad and lots of different things we talk about to a gaming. Just like, anything can be outbalanced when pushed to an extreme and then just damages the whole experience as far as I'm concerned. And I feel like this absolutely qualifies. I know a lot of you like it. I liked it. Oh, very good though. I feel like it's, oh man, how can I bring up Tetris? Well, I can't. You can't really like break Tetris. You know, like there was no mechanic that allows you to like break that game. And you could say that it's because the mechanics are simple but that's not really a counter-argument, is it? Like, the complexity only explains I guess the presence of an issue. That being when pushed to its extreme, does the game begin to break? I think that's, that feels like a broader topic. But yeah, when you play a game and you test it, whether by playing it in incredibly hard difficulty or messing around with the mechanics, that's when some of the issues with the design that just don't appear because of the difficulty setting, sort of a laid bare. And you know, it's opposite ways around, right? Like something can be so difficult that it becomes bullshit. Like Halo 2 legendary Sniper Jackals is bullshit. It's just bullshit. It's not fair. And then conversely, the other way around, when you play a game on the hardest difficulty and then you realize, oh damn, this is how the difficulty essentially works. Like it's fake, it's a whole bunch of different examples. Yeah, I'm trying to explain that like mechanically it functions and in the same way that if every boss in this game were a one hit kill for whatever build you have, it's like, well, I guess it all functions, but that game is fucked now. Like can you imagine how many people would just be like, what is the deal with this? Like you just run in every room and you just tap them and they're dead. Is it broken? Is it some kind of glit? And if you're like, no, no, no, I think it makes for a better experience. You'd be like, okay. I think it's also important to recognize that people buy certain games looking for certain kinds of experience, not to say that developers should pigeonhole themselves into what people tend to expect out of them, but people buying from soft games generally looking for a challenge. And that challenge is violated by a core mechanic in this game being the summons. Which you can self impose a restriction on, but if we're talking about what is present in this game, and I would go as far as saying encouraged and explained to you as part of the game, like this is a big portion of it and you should be taking advantage of it. When it makes it so that in certain instances you don't even have to play. Yeah, I think that was a mistake. Yeah. I honestly think an interesting way to incentivize it at a metal level would just be to make an achievement that's finished the game with no spirit ash summons. Like that, I think would make it so that everyone who wants to summon spirit ashes would, but the people who kind of want an incentive to be like, what's a reason I should not summon them beyond I just want to self impose difficulty on myself. If you can say, oh, well, there's that digital achievement that I can go for that says, hey, you did that thing. Was it violated only a handful of the maroon balanced? Only a handful of the maroon balance. Only a handful? Oh, okay. Only. Oh, wow. All right. That is a bit awkward, isn't it? Stop fucking side stepping the issue. Fucking stop it. Stop fucking wiggling all around the goddamn issue and just address the goddamn point. Like if someone said, why do you have an issue with noob tube is only one gun attachment. So fucking tiresome. I always like use modern warfare to such a great example. You are disadvantaging yourself. If you not got like martyrdom or you're disadvantaged, if you don't have grenade launcher, it costs you like basically nothing. It's one slot and it's just incredibly useful by choosing not to have it. You are just imposing a challenge on yourself. And when you're in multiplayer, why do that? You handicap your ability to score compared to everyone else. Why would you not use commando? It's so good. Like by not using commando, you're just making it so much harder on yourself. Why would you not call in your kill streak rewards? Why would you not? Yeah. Why would you not call it? Yeah. And if you're using kill streaks, why are you not going to have like a UAV or a maybe that's well, no, you always have UAV. UAV is incredibly useful. There's no reason never to have like UAV there. It's so helpful. But like if you choose all of these, if you choose that's an online game against other players, of course that's bull. Well, so I would agree that there is a difference when we're talking about a competitive game versus a PVE game, but nevertheless, what is the distinction that you are drawing in terms of the effect that it has on you? Why don't you just not use it? Why don't they just not use it? It's been addressed multiple times already throughout this entire fucking section, that yes, you can just not use it. And most people who identify something like this is going to be bad for their experience, they will stop using it. That doesn't detract from the system having issues. There's a reason why you have to ban Meta Knight at Brawl matches instead of just asking why you're not using it, all right? What if it's just developer-minded? It's towards the developer. So if we were having a LAN party, playing Mon Warfare 2, and then I was like, all right, lads, do whatever build you want, but can we not use any Nude 2? Can nobody use Nude 2? And then someone is just like, you can not use it. I'd be like, all right, look, I think it's a broken part of this game. If we all agree to just not use it, it improves the game. The acknowledgement there is it's bad. There are things we can do to circumvent it. It happens to me, yeah. It's the same for this game. It is bad, but it's something we can circumvent. I think the important part to mention is it is bad, but the reason why it is bad is because I can look at other examples where it is balanced to where we don't have to make these decisions to not use. Exactly. And there's a difference between a game that took that. This is a false equivalence. The player is capable of doing that, but it shouldn't be their responsibility at all times. I think I can bring up an equivalence that wouldn't be false. Sekiro. Sekiro is a from-software game. Well, life jams you like that. We've already, yeah, the life jams already killed this argument. They got nothing. I think Sekiro, though, is a really good example of a from-software game that is very difficult. But one of the reasons it's difficult is that your toolkit is very limited. And it's one of the reasons I would say it's not the best of the from-software games, or at least objectively, because you have zero build diversity at all. You're just a ninja and that's your only choice. But it's designed in a way that every tool that's in your toolkit is not none of them will break the game. It will always be challenging and you have to actually get good at the mechanics. And I think that the spirit ashes, if they were implemented in a more balanced way, they wouldn't shatter that, but they sort of do in this game. And like, honestly, I hated that they were there. And like towards the end of the game, when I kind of felt like I started needing them because I sort of think that those last few bosses that I did end up using my mimic on, I would have been able to beat if I just was was a little bit more limited or even limited myself. But, you know, the the tool was there, so I grabbed it when I was angry and would kill someone. Someone said grinding is overpowered to then. Yes, you have to go out of your way to grind. So this is how they go the natural balance in the game. First of all, you have to spend a lot of time to grind. So that's your loss at that point. It's what's costing you. It's like an offer from the game to do that. These things are handed to you and upgrades are just findable throughout the world. So and they scale with the game. So like, you know, a level one, a leg against early bosses is fine. Level 10, like against late bosses is fine. And then secondly, even with grinding, you still have to fight the boss. So no, bad comparison. Unless you're grinding to beyond the pale, at which point you're investing multiple hours. Well, even I think if we're if we're talking about someone who like levels themselves to 200 in Dark Souls before even like going past Undead Burg, I should be like, um, yeah, I don't even know. How much time did you? How much time does that take? Yeah, I think it was a long time ago. It's killed a lot of rats. And I find that that's the easy. Bores. This is the thing. How could I highlight that in a video? Like this is the game is broken. It's like, how long does that take? It's like, I've won. Because one of the requirements for the life gems being broken as far as I was concerned is if you unlocked infinite life gems will have to kill the final boss. I don't think that's a problem. When you get it from the fucking tutorial boss. Moller, are we moving the goalposts? Someone so if I can move the goalposts but not Chad, I've just seen this. This is me today. It's just like, you get things. I'm saying it just to see what your answer is. And someone's making the argument that Sekiro is a samurai, not a ninja. That is he is a ninja. He's absolutely a ninja. Let me just call the shinobi throughout the game. Shut the fuck up. Also, just to address, you know, his Japanese for weeb. Yeah, one of the problems with the idea is like, chats can't really like move the goalposts because people in chat are not everybody is going to be making the same argument. So it may seem like chat, you know, like questions. Yeah, I don't wait. Hold on. So, OK. So, apparently, the grind argument was moving the goalposts. Someone said that in shadow. It was there. I was a large part of the dress because it was brought up. That was not the goalpost being moved. That's just a question being answered. A large part of what makes the distinction there to me as well is the fact is how hard you have to try to try and ruin your experience. If you've really, really put your mind to it and commit a shitload of hours, you can, in fact, trivialize all of Dark Souls and be level 200 before the bell gargoyles. But you have to work super hard and your wife left you. So it's fine if you do that. Which is what I was trying to highlight. Both the ashes and the life gems, they're all handed to you. Yeah, almost free of charge. Getting to level 200 in Dark Souls is fucking tough. Try and do that in the opening. I don't even know how many hours that takes, honestly. That's going to be intense. You have to do nothing to ruin your experience in with those sorts of things. And there has to be a difference between those two things. It can't be considered the same thing. That's ridiculous. Hmm. Yes, magic is broken in DS1, Chatter. Yeah, magic's often broken. Enemies can't account for it. Because all of the enemies we're designing was out of gotcha. Well, no, because they probably think that we think Dark Souls 1 is perfect when that means they just haven't listened to our opinions on Dark Souls 1 before. But what about something I haven't noticed is there being some people who are like, well, wait, I thought you guys said that you liked this game. But I love this game. Yeah, I know. I hate this game. It's honestly one of the best games I've played in years. Making myself angry, talking about it. We all have different perspectives on this. I know it's terrifying, but that's OK. That's OK. And conversely, I love Dark Souls 1. There's a shitload of criticise in that game. Ash is not an issue. You just don't like them. I feel like they definitely don't like them. They just don't like them. Yeah, you need to go back an hour to when we started this discussion. Yeah, life ends on an issue. You just don't like them. We can safely call the discourse over. Yeah, I can. I'm going to just balance the session. I don't like it. Well, it's, yeah, like, what are we saying at this point on the nature of balance in video games if we're saying that all of the criticisms that were just levied at this system are, I just don't like them. Like, the games are meant to be balanced. Like, the idea is that the game is going to present you with some sort of experience that is fair, but also ask something of you. But if you have to deliberately choose not to, if you have to choose not to use something that's incredibly helpful, that's just present in the game as a mechanic in order to make it challenging, I don't know how you can say that that's like neutral, like that that is a neutral thing that is neither good nor bad, that just is. And then it's incumbent on you to make the call on whether you ought to use that in order to have a challenge. Like, it feels like the challenge is ought to be presented by the developer, that they're like, well, this is the challenge. These are the systems that you need to grapple with and then go do that. And if it's a game with difficulty options, here's how it's going to be harder or here's how it's going to be made easier to your call. I'm just done engaging with this. Why don't people use magic if it makes it easier? Well, people may well make the decision to go for something that's harder, but I mean, ideally a game will present you with. Unbalanced? Is that what is being said here? I think, I mean, the point is that people make the choice not to use these mechanics. So what is the, like if people are making this choice consciously, then what's the problem? Maybe, but I don't, that feels like a non-circuit. I understand, why does not apply to everything that's unbalanced? Why does anyone ever complain about anything balanced? I don't understand. I don't know why this game is getting a free pass where other games wouldn't. Because it's a from soft game. Hmm. Gonna say like this. No, it's just me trying to guess. So then I choose not to use magic and I can choose not to use ashes. We've, you, I feel like you haven't been here for this conversation. Like that's been brought up, hasn't it? I think we're just done. Isn't that like the crux? That's, yeah. No, actually, yeah. No, I think, like it feels like you haven't heard the things that have been raised. Also, in choosing not to use magic, it means you're probably building your character more towards melee weapons or like bows and things like that. So there's a trade-off. By choosing to not use spirit ashes, it's not like you get access. There's no trade-off, yeah. Yeah, like your sword doesn't get stronger if you just do it in spirit ashes. I guess you can argue there's less FP being used, but I mean, it's an incredibly low cost compared to a whole different build. Yep. We done? I think so. Yeah. Very unimpressed with this mechanic, more so for its implementation, not for the idea. I would consider myself disappointed in it. I think there's the nugget of a good idea in there and I would like to see them do more with it. However, kind of black-pilled on Promsoft in terms of innovation. But considering like they seem to want it to be this strong though, since they nerf only the mimic and it was just like the tiniest nerf. Look, they created bed of chaos. We don't understand their decisions sometimes. Yeah. I'm just curious, like, do you think that this is actually like a play the game on easy mode to have it be more accessible to more people out there? I think they've overcompensated. They've tried to have the cake and eat it. They've given an easy mode without giving an easy mode. Even though summons are already right there. I felt like we had it taken care of with them, but apparently not. We already have the easy mode. Summons exist. Yeah, and I look forward to playing through the game without using ashes. Yeah. Yeah, I'm doing a Dicks playthrough now and now. My rule is that if it's just a Tism boss, like one of the millions we've mentioned already, where it's just like a hurdle to get from point A to point B, I might use summons just because I don't really want to fight those Tisms. But if it's a, you know, big boy, good boss, then I will definitely not be using summons. So does it really expect better from E-Fab? That just reminds me of what I was playing at the last of us two. It's almost like I'm so disappointed in you. You've fallen so far. Your critiques are poor. Your critiques are poor. It's like, all right, I love all the arguments, man. They're really good. Yeah, nice response to the point. I feel like we've had that conversation before. When you make the broad sweeping statement about how someone on the stream is like wrong and stupid, include the criticism as part of the message. Otherwise, it just comes across as like kind of hollow. They said wrong. Ah, that's helpful. You know, it's like when you're getting feedback on an assignment, it's like, what did you do? Just wrong, fuck you, let's try again. It was just wrong. How? It can be hard sometimes to tell whether or not we've fully explained it or if we're getting fucking trolled, like by people who are just like, I just disagree and you're like, why? I just disagree. Why? You're wrong. I just agree. Nice, total logical thinking. And then you just take that as concession. Pretty much. That's what it is. At that point, yeah. Which makes me think we should probably talk about difficulty, because it feels like we've almost talked about it. This is difficulty adjacent, certainly. Yeah, we've been brushing up on it this entire topic. Brushy, brushy. Do you wanna talk now, Theo, about telegraphing? This might be an opportunity. Sure, yeah. Does anyone else have anything to say on that point, I guess, before I take it in my face? Telegraphing or? On the point of telegraphing in this game. I have, like, there are some bosses where, like the fat guy, the apostle, no, not the apostle. Noble, noble. Noble. He has a few attacks where he lifts his arm and then it can either go into a quick stab or it's a really, really delayed attack where you can literally get two or three rolls off before he actually does anything. I mean, there might be some other stuff that I'm missing, but I feel like a lot, or not, I wouldn't say a lot, but there are a decent chunk of enemies where it's really hard to tell certain attacks apart and if you mistime the dodge, they seem to be designed to roll catch you. So I think that's my sense of telegraphing. Before I go any further, it is worth saying that this is not new to the Souls series. Even as far back as Dark Souls 1, there have been attacks that are specifically delayed to an extent that you might not expect in order to catch you for rolling too early. Yeah, well, I'm actually kind of fine with that. It's just the fact that it's hard to tell that attack apart from the one that is instant. That's where I'm coming from, yeah. Yeah, because I'm okay with the delayed attacks where, and I know there's people that aren't okay with that. They think that it's stupid and annoying, but I'm okay with that because I find that's just a part of the learning experience of the boss that, okay, I need to wait a little bit before I press the dodge button here. Oh, that death I just had from Dungust. That's why I fucking hate him. Wow, very cool. Yeah. I'll just hate fat people. Yeah, I'm more okay with the delays and stuff, but the fact that they're hard to tell apart from the insta, like stabby moves and stuff that exist is my bigger issue with the fact. One thing I've been noticing now on my current playthrough with melee, there's a bunch of attacks where you know, oh, he's gonna do a slash forward. And it's like, oh, I'm just gonna circle around him because I know he's doing that. But then all of a sudden, he does like a little attack backwards. If you guys noticed those ones, because I had that just now with Commander Neil. So he does like an attack, he charges it, and it's like, oh, I'm gonna circle backwards. But then he does an attack backwards, like it stabs you in the gut or something and staggers you, and then there's a follow up attack. And there's this bunch of those where I'm not actually sure when they apply because I feel like they don't do it all the time. So I'm not sure about that one. I don't think a lot of bosses do it, but I caught it here and there. I'm just like, oh, that's weird. Don't understand how this works. Throw into the mix as well with this. The cat statue bosses have this type of move. Margit had one of them where really fucking quick, they just sort of at you, and then it goes, and you're just like, whoa. And it's like, yep, that was a slice, just a quick one. And it's usually one. And it's specifically, I think, designed so that you don't like assume that every single move in this game is gonna be a, I lift my arm. Is it gonna be one second? Two, three, four, who knows. Like there are some moves that some characters have that just go boom. And you're just like, oh, that wasn't, I wouldn't want to confidently say there's no telegraphing on them, but it certainly fucking feels that way because of how much you're trained in this game to be like, don't just roll whenever you see the move. And then there are moves where it's like, no, sometimes you need to roll when you see the move. Maybe it might be worthwhile to make a definitive statement on this, or should be able to dodge every attack ever, like theoretically. As in assuming you know, yeah, as in should it be possible to no damage run the game? Is that the question? Yes, but maybe barring, if we take it as a game where you encounter enemies one at a time, rather than getting mobbed, that you ought to be able to dodge every single attack? I would say in a Souls game, absolutely ought to be able to dodge any attack and enemies. Yeah, I'd imagine, yeah, because if the idea of an enemy that just gets free damage against you is frustrating in pretty much every game, there might be exceptions, but generally, if you just feel like you're cheated, if it's like, oh, I just take damage because I just take damage and it doesn't have anything to do with me. Specific scenarios I just want to account for, like if it starts doing a big old charge-up spell, that's AOE, and you decide to commit to hitting it over and over and over and over again, knowing this spell is going to hit me because I can't escape it after a certain amount of time, but I want to eat the damage. As long as you have the capacity to have evaded it in some way, shape or form, then that's... Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the thing, because that's part of the decision-making that's at the core of these games, because, like I said, the combat mechanics are not deep, so they rely heavily on this idea of correct decision-making and mistake allowance by being punishing, which is why damages going up was like... Ah, sure, springy. You haven't even played it yet. You don't have to play a game on the question. Come on. I was going to say, springy drags, but I'll say very... I haven't played it. I've literally the only one, I think I'm the only one here who hasn't even purchased the game and he yells at yous. Like, all right. Well, I guess to make the point clear, you're allowed to ask questions about a game you haven't played yet. No, you can certainly talk about general game mechanics. Oh, so this is a general topic at this point. Yeah, totally. It's telegraphing, yeah, absolutely. Also, I have played the game for three hours. Yeah, boy. That's right. Get absolutely wrecked, Chatter. Yeah. Okay, so it sounds like the sentiment is, yeah, she ought to be able to dodge every attack. I think so, yeah. I guess broadly, broadly speaking. Yeah, yeah. I would jump to saying you should be able to, but I guess I'm open to the idea. Someone could convince me otherwise. I guess it would depend on semantics at that point of the, if they said like, well, should you be able to dodge a giant laser that opens up a grand entrance that is guaranteed not to kill you, but it's more so just about, I don't know, something to do with the story or whatever, I'd be like, oh, maybe. Maybe. If you're trying to use it as... Yeah, I don't wanna focus the question down. I guess in terms of what my criticism of this game would be, do you think it should be, well, do you think it should be reasonable to expect a player to be able to dodge an attack on their first time seeing it? Yeah. Right, that's, I think that's kind of where the question was heading. For the, I would say for the most part. Yeah. That's where I tend to lean, which is why I have a problem with this game, because no enemies or at least very few of them behave in a manner that can be considered anything remotely regular. Well, everyone, sorry. Just to give, I guess, an example of what I assume you're going for. So when you first play it, and let's say a character lifts this sword up to swing and you're like, ah, so when he comes down, I'm gonna roll, and then he digs it into the ground and it does an explosion all around and you get hit by it. Oh, for fuck's sake. Okay, that's an AOE attack. Right, because you talk about that where you just, you can't know a lot of what these moves are even gonna do since you have to get hit by them in order to kind of learn what they're gonna do. Yeah, along those lines. I guess the thing is, In other... Ideally, you don't want it to reach, you don't want people to see your game for what it is, which is mechanics, I think. I think like ideally when a game is happening, you don't want the player to go, well, this is a boss with set moves, so I'm gonna memorize the moves and then I'm gonna beat this computer program. Like you kind of... Yeah, what's the low reason why I can't stand in this spot? Well, I guess what I mean by that is you don't want people to see it for what it is, which is a challenge that is designed in a specific way with specific moves that need to be dodged. And the reason why you know to dodge those attacks is because you recognize the animation that's like, oh, that's the animation that means he's gonna do this attack, better do this. Yeah, they say you wanna dress up because animations is being believable and immersive. Like, oh, he's raising up his axe over his head. I better not stay in front of him. He's about to hit me with it because that's what people do when they wanna hit people with an axe. That's kind of where my issue is, I guess, two-fold, at least. On the first hand, the way enemies behave is at this point so far beyond the pale of regularity in terms of like normalness, because this isn't the greatest, this isn't the greatest consideration in any given player's mind, but you like to try and think that the thing you're fighting is fighting you, right? And for me, at least, I can't really speak for anyone else, but for me, that is a bit damaged when they're doing attacks that take five seconds to wind up because they know I'm gonna try and roll. Yeah, this is the opposite of what someone would actually do if they wanted to hit me with a weapon. Because they're just letting me see the next few times. Yeah, this meta. Yeah, like if this was in a movie, if Shab was watching a movie, he'd be like, what the fuck are you doing? Why are you standing there like a lemon? What's going on here? It's too meta? I think that's the thing. It is, when you're fighting like the dancer of the Boreal Valley, it's like you're attacking me weird because you know that I wanna roll a torture attack. Because you know that I'm a player playing a video game, not a knight fighting. That's why you're moving it away because I don't understand. That's why it works for dancer and why it works in limited use because dancer is this really weird alien thing that's entire combat premise is its strange movement. Yeah. Everything when it's some other regular dude and he's just like, I'm gonna hold it. I'm just stretching. Oh, I got you. When it's literally the three ones you run into. Like in Dark Souls 3, the shit isn't really, it is there like Plumtiff Sullivan's overhead. He holds that like a beat longer than you would expect. But other than that, his sword swings are just sword swings, man. He just swings his sword. I guess that's kind of what's happening here when we're talking about telegraphing. You know that they play tested it and on average, players reacted at X times. So they just give an X for a second. Well, it's the reality of the cultural impact that From Software Games have had. Dark Souls 1, you didn't, even though this is present in all of them, right? I just think it's the most present in Elden Ring. Dark Souls 1 is just like, it was of a popularity. Dark Souls 2 of a popularity. 3 was where I remember thinking like, man, I'm seeing a lot of people play Dark Souls 3. Like Dark Souls 3 is pretty well known as well. I was like, this shit is getting to be pretty mainstream. And then Bloodborne was adored. I don't know anybody who typically says like anything negative about Bloodborne that much. Sacuro was it's, again, people were just like, From Software, you're out. Then we finally get to this one and it really feels like they're like, okay, everybody knows that you dodge when the sword's coming down, but do they know when the sword's coming down? That's where my issue is kind of coming from on the mechanical side, because in terms of being able to reasonably expect to dodge and attack the first time I see it, often that's not gonna be the case. Even when enemies are behaving normally, because the exact swing timing or what not, or exactly what they're doing isn't apparent to me, or I don't know when to react. You get some really awkward when you see an attack, it's like, oh, he's having his arm up. And then you dodge like, oh, that was too early. I guess I still have time. I dodged a second time. Then he still doesn't do the attack. You dodged four times. Then you dodged like three times and the fourth time he hits you or something along those lines. Sometimes I can even just still dodge on the third one. So I dodged a dodge roll three times and the third one was the only one I needed. Yeah. We're at the point with Elden Ring where the enemy's behavior is giving me no clues as to what their intentions are. I see them, they raise their arm. That could mean fucking anything, dude. The result leads to who I just didn't know what he was doing. I was like, I don't even understand how I'm supposed to fight that thing. And sadly I had discovered Horde Frost stomp at that point. So I feel I robbed myself of the proper experience of Malakov. It is very much. Because I've noticed some people are saying, like, does this actually make it bad, this telegraphing thing? I think it's a little... Not exactly. It's complicated. I think it's complicated, yeah. I don't know if I'm ready to say it makes it bad, but I know that I don't like it. I imagine it would annoy me. One of the things that I like about, you go ahead. No, actually, I'm interested. What are you about to say? So one of the things, like, when I was watching Mahler, he was in a catacombs, and it was the one with the rolly thing going up and down the ramps. Oh, yeah. And you fought that weird slimy monster, right? In that room? Oh, you also raised a tree spirit. I also raised a tree spirit, yeah. And I was like, man, watching you fight this, this doesn't look fun at all. Because I was like watching it, and I can't tell it's attacks from it's just normal movement and the camera being pressed up around. It's harsh, but I described that, I think, as a bloodbath boss. I was like, this is... It totally is. This, the pastor and the hair and the water effects, the particles. Eventually, a whole screen is filled with garbage and you're just like, I guess I'll just attack and roll and attack and roll. And it's just thrashing everywhere. Try to get to wherever behind it is. So there is an aspect of, let's, I mentioned Mordhau, right? The way that Mordhau works is you have a certain, every melee attack is in two phases. You have the wind up and then you have the release. Now, when you're winding up, you can choose to, when you wind up, your character will make an appropriate movement based on what direction you'll be attacking from. Whether it's a slash, whether it's a stab and you can do all sorts of things. You can cancel it and then just go back to being neutral in order to maybe draw your opponent out to blocking early. You can morph from a slash to a stab or vice versa or from one direction to the other. But regardless of what you choose to do, there's always the wind up in the release. And once you hit that release phase, because you can only wind up for so long, you hit that release point. Your character will always make a noise. You'll go, ah, and then you have to commit to it, right? So you know that when you're watching someone who's trying to kill you, that you watch them wind up and there's a set amount of things that they can do and they're all intuitive and you know what can be done, it all makes sense based on what the character model's doing. And if you see them wind up and you just instinctively block, that's your fault. Because it's a game about discipline in melee combat, not panicking and blocking. It's about staying calm and paying attention. And from watching some of the bosses in this game, at grand, of course, I haven't played it, I would be very confused as to the cause and effect of a motion that something does and the result of what that motion is in terms of an attack. Yeah, absolutely. The combat in the front games is generally based on fixed animation timing. And once you initiate an action, you are committed to it unless you're staggered out of it or something like that happens. So it's not too far off, but there are some bosses like also Rated Tree Spirit, I think would actually be a really good example of one where it's difficult to really tell exactly what you're trying to avoid because you're fighting this like John Carpenter's, the thing mutation or like a Resident Evil Endgame boss that's just mutated to something crazy looking. I think it's, sorry, go ahead. I think it's like everyone. Very, it's so many enemies in this game where it's almost impossible to tell what their intentions are until you've actually seen the attack for yourself. There's, I feel like you have almost no hope of being able to reliably dodge something on first time seeing it in this game, especially since not only are there these incredibly delayed attacks with the fake out like animations and the fake out timings and stuff, but there's also like Marla mentioned, the really fucking quick ones to keep you on your toes, which means you cannot fully relax and go into disciplined mode because you still do have to reaction dodge a lot. Margit being a great example of this, everything he does is slow as balls except for his dagger and his sword moves which come out lightning fast and you have to react to them incredibly quickly. Yeah, I think I left a position where sometimes you have to reaction dodge, but sometimes you have to play disciplined and it's impossible to kind of really get any kind of rhythm going or any understanding of how you need to tackle that particular challenge. He's got a move that I think illustrates this pretty well. When I was first fighting, right? It's like this first time you see it, he lifts up his big stick and you're like, okay. So I roll back, roll back, roll back. Then he starts walking forward with it. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And he slams it down. I was like, okay, dodge that. And then if you do dodge that and you are successful just that he'll just do a spin after it. I think if he hits you with it, he doesn't do the spin. I remember just being like, dude, this is all, this all feels very unpredictable. I guess there's several attacks like that that are really obnoxious with market that he uses the daggers for. Like in phase two, do you know his weird sword combo where he does a thrust with it, then a slash and then he stabs his stuff into the ground. Yeah. That's a string and it looks like he's done. If you approach him, he'll do a quick dagger swing just because, ha ha, you saw what my combo was over. He likes tossing this fucking daggers at you as well whenever you heal. While jumping away. While jumping away, yeah. Yeah. I do have to go. It is six and something happened yesterday and I was made notified of the thing I need to be at. So I need to head out out. So you guys can talk about the Elden Ring game and I will catch back up on this EFAP later on. Very well. Good talking to you, Rags. You bet forever. I will see all of you later. Toodaloo, bye-bye. See you, ciao. Bye-bye. So I actually don't mind. The delayed attack as much as I said before, like I don't mind the like having to. Like pull a boss like ten or whatever something times before you start to realize or before you fully learn that, OK, so this attack is delayed. Like, basically, you pick up on the patterns and the telegraphs and stuff like that. Like, for example, Dancer, I know Malor knows this, is my favorite fight in Arkham 3. I absolutely love that fight because it took me a lot of time before I actually like learn how to perfect that fight because I played it once. When I did like a no health leveling play through and I had to perfect that fight and know all of the timings perfectly otherwise because basically any attack that Dancer did, except for one, would one shot me. And like the satisfaction I got from finally beating Dancer after having perfected all of her moves for his or whatever it is was incredible. Like, it was the most fun I've had in this whole game for a long time at that point. I absolutely adored the fight. For me, I think I'm I want to be clear that this issue is mostly a case of how prolific and how extensive and how frequent these sorts of attacks are because I think it's fine. In fact, I think it is good when it is done, when it is fitting and in a very limited sort of sense. I think just like drugs. I think that's one of the best fights in the S3 because she moves in such an alien way compared to most other things you run into. It really throws you off and gives the fight its own unique feel. However, in Elden Ring, everyone's doing it. And there's a specific comparison that I fucking love. You know, Dancers, you know, her spin slash thing. I don't know. It's the phase one attack where she does a big step around and it looks like she's going to bring the sword down, but then it turns into a swipe that's a bit more delayed and you might expect that attack. Fucking Magma Worm has that. Why does a big stupid lizard dragon have some the same sort of graceful, but alien kind of maneuver that the dancer of the Boreal Valley has? But within its same moveset, it also has attacks like it has a it does the big machete slam that every enemy with that kind of weapon in these games does where it grabs the thing with both hands and presses it into the ground. But this is in the phase when it's still crawling on its belly. But that stuff, that one, he lifts up and like, you know, telegraphs the attack for a second and then snaps right back down in an instant, which is another variation that they love in this game, which is it looks like it's going to be a long telegraph. And then it comes out, you know, immediately. Margaret has a few of those. Like is the hammer slam you can mix into his combos. He winds that up for a good long while. And then in like the course of a couple of frames, suddenly the hammer hits you and his staff attack, where he like uppercuts you. Yeah, that one looks like it's going to be a wind up. And then he's like, I still can dodge that one. I still have no idea what I want because it was like, it's like, ah, hey. I guess I don't know how. Again, I'm not sure how far I'm willing to be definitive with this. I just wish it wasn't every enemy all the time because to me, it just gets a bit nauseating and obnoxious. And it's like, oh, look, another boss who's winding up. How long is he going to wind up for this time and how long is it going to take him to actually swing? And what even is the swing going to actually look like when he does it? I mean, I'm like, I probably wouldn't even be bothered by the frequency of it as long as it wasn't baited. Like, like you said, it before with Margaret, like she has, were he, whatever, I don't know, has like the really quick, like magic daggers that they do. And so you have to be on your toes at all times because any movement can mean that you're about to take some damage. Yeah, precisely. But then at the same time, they also have the move that's and I swear to God, it has to be this because it seems like it's perfectly timed so that if you react like react like as a reflex, then it will 100 percent hit you as you come out of the role. Like they have so many attacks, especially markets that are like perfect roll catches. So many of them. His his horizontal staff swings are the best example of that. They're timed just after you would roll for a delayed attack, even. They're a delayed delay to catch you because you hold for a delay. And one thing that Margaret did as well, and I don't know if this is something that we want to get into more later or whatever, but one thing that Margaret had as well was that if you were too late with dodging an attack, you get staggered and then accuse your role. So you would roll after you got staggered and then they would have an attack where they hit you. Like it was perfectly timed to hit you as you come out of the stagger and then the role. Like that was another thing that really bothered me with that fight. I think I think the input buffering because it's usually severe in Souls games. It feels more severe in this game to me. I don't know if that's just my impression, but no, right. I think in this game, I think it's like extra damaging because of that sort of stuff, because I've had it happen so many times where I hit the roll button just a second too late to dodge an attack, get clipped, it stores my role, I roll and I get roll catched. No, it's like I tap the button once game. Come on. One to make a theory that went around in my chat at the time was that maybe it's because the the action you do happens at release of the button and not when you press it. So maybe that makes it feel artificially longer when you fuck up a dodge. So you get hit and then you release the button and right then it buffers the thing because you just pressed it in the game's mind. Has it not always been that way for Souls games, though? Because circles always been sprint as well. So. Yeah, it's yeah, you're right. So so that's another thing about that. I'll take it makes it difficult to deal with the quicker stuff, though, because your dash is coming out on release. So, you know, your timing has to be even better. But I was just going to say, hello, Daphne. Hello, Daphne. We lost a dog and gained a, well, I guess he's just like a guy. I'm just a guy. Yeah, he's just a guy. But I assume it would be fair to if you've been listening and what you've got things to say about past subjects or future ones. I don't know. Or do you want to? Do you want to say about Halloween ring? Well, let me see. I'm trying to like because I didn't like sit down write notes or nothing on like what was discussed because there's been doing shit in terms of I guess in terms of bosses. Yeah, I don't know if you mentioned it or not. I like to the I like the skinny cultist guy in terms of bosses. I don't remember his name. I think it was that's going to be awesome. Yeah, I was honestly kind of surprised by him because like I first met him over at the top of the Windmill City or the Windmill Village and that's right. Yeah, that's where I first ran into him. And it's like at first it was it looked just like some just dude at the top of the hill. I'm like, what the fuck is your deal? And all of a sudden the boss music kicks in. It's unique boss fight music and it's a unique boss. And it's like it was funky in its second form. And like I got to be honest, like the eco friendliness of this game is wearing on me really bad. I'm really tired of the copy pasted bosses. So him coming along is like a breath of fresh air and he wasn't even behind a fog wall. So I dug him. The Apostle was pretty cool. Not so great about his second. Just should I tell you something about that boss? Well, about what are you? You haven't completed the game, right? No, I'm playing it right now. Actually, it's just all I mean, it's OK. I'm kind of where I'm over the spoilers. OK, well, so everyone right now who's completed this game is very baffled by you saying I don't like repeated bosses love the one time I fought the Apostle. Yeah, but now like I understand he probably does come back later. And it's like I've come to expect that. But when I first came across him, it was like, oh, that was cool. Yeah, yeah, I don't know if they have used him often in this one, like they do the fucking tree sentinel. No, but definitely there is one more critical path fight with him. OK, yeah, that's fine. I figure they were going to they recycled everyone else to like an nauseating degree. So I expect I expect I'm going to sour on him pretty soon. But for now, it's a pretty cool guy. There are well bosses in this game that do not appear anywhere else. Well, you know, there's the main main, you know, main story path type bosses like the fire giant. Fire giant was pretty cool, although I kind of I have a problem. One of his attacks where he like uses his shield is like a shovel and like, you know, swings at you like all with a shoveling motion. Yeah, that's a jump dodge one. It. Yeah, but didn't work. I just rolled through that. Oh, really? Well, the problem is I was trying to roll. Well, the problem was I was trying to roll through that as well. But the problem comes from the fact that his it's not only a hit box. It's just a big old collision box, too. So a lot of the times he'll when you're dodging through the iframes will kick in and work, but then he'll scoop you. And then basically you'll you'll just be scooped into his attack as soon as your iframes wear off. And so it's like that's really irritating. That's something that the daughter of the Cosmos and Bloodborne pissed me off on. Oh, God, that's a pasta monster, right? The charge attacks where she flies forward is like, oops, I'm going to carry you out of your iframes. No, don't do that. Am I getting that right? Is the one you just described from Bloodborne, is that the pasta monster or is that someone else? Pasta monster. No, daughter of the Cosmos is that fucking Tathulu bastard with the big pasta monster. Yeah, it's got loads of pasta in its face. And the reason why I know it is pasta is because I always get behind it and just dig in and it kills it. Pasta monster. I think I said pasta monster like he's a church. Vicar Amelia? No, not her. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, she's a hairball monster, Amelia. Screaming hairball. Yeah, the reading for her is kind of that's the thing about Bloodborne, whatever I stream it. It's like, when I get into a boss, if I'm going to call with someone, I'm like, you have to wait. I like the reading. I like it a lot. Ibritas, that's her name. Every other Ibritas. Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure. I'm super stole. Yeah, but it was it was the same phenomenon and it was kind of irritating. But overall, pretty cool, very big spectacle. He was pretty neat. I he was pretty cool. Ripping his leg off and I always dig that shit whenever they they they they they're so angry. They don't even care if I have any cringy body parts as weapons. Well, I knew he was going to do it to him. I'm like, oh, no, here it comes. I've seen this before from soft. Yeah, right off that initial break. Me on stream, I was like, oh. I feel like they've really started to like that one, the pull off the body part and rip off the arms and use it as a weapon sort of thing. Yeah, pulling swords out of goo and flash and stuff. Sort of the way what they do. Yeah, I got texted by pretty much every single one of my friends who got to the second phase of the flame giant whenever they did, they're like, hey, you know what boss you're like. I'm like flame giant. Like, oh, so you got that. I don't know if we've gotten to like regular monsters yet, so I'll just not funny enough. No, we have four hours that we've done. Ashes, bosses, difficulty, telegraphings, summoning. That's about it. Oh, yeah. So we kind of telegraph some. Yeah, telegraphs I'm fine with. I think they work for this type of game because the combat is like really kind of unremarkable, as Matthew Matosis said. So it's like you really kind of got to mix things up a bit. And so it's all like the telegraphs are kind of necessary because if they didn't telegraph, it would be I feel it would be actually an easier game. It's it's the way in which they telegraph. That's a delayed telegraph. Yeah, like I said, what the enemy is doing by and large in this game no longer gives me any information as to what its intentions are. And there's always there's always the extra follow up that you wouldn't expect. Like, ah, the combo is still going. Yes, I can go back to market with this again. He has. He has that one combo that mixes up between the staff swings and the dagger swings so I think it's like swings the staff twice. Then there's a couple of dagger things and then there's a big staff slam. And then right after that, when it looks like he's just standing there, he like snaps into an attack animation and lunges at you for another couple of dagger swings. Yeah, I'm not too big on that. Yeah. I don't like how things like the Leonine misbegotten flail either. Yeah, Ash is my first Ash that I really wanted to put points into was actually Loodle the Headless because she can teleport and not get like, you know, stuck in a corner or nothing like that, throw her spear and she kind of has a little of everything. I think the only issue was when she teleport, she wipes aggro so it's like, okay, well, in terms of a distraction, you're not great. Right. But I don't use the summons very much at all. I will use summons whenever I go to Mr. Hands, which, you know, we'll get to that. But like when it comes to like areas where there's just a big old Spam Bush lined up for you, I'll use like Ashes because I'm really fucking tired of the Spam Bushes at this point. There's a lot of them. Got some DS2 level designs. DS2DNA, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I'm noticing they didn't fire the DS2 guy that came up with the controls. DS2 was the blueprint. Yeah, but the copy-paste guy. Why is he not fired? Because apparently he's come back with a vengeance and I'm actually at a part right now where the most annoying enemy in the game has been copy-pasted about 12 times and I'm kind of fucking over it. Oh, are you in a room that, where are you? I'm not in a room. Oh, okay. I'm outside. So we could move into talking about, instead of bosses now, just enemies, I would like to open the discussion on finding, it's gonna be difficult for me to find, maybe I can get a picture of him actually. Basically the enemy I hate the fucking most in the entire game. There's a couple of really good choices. I forget what his name, well to be fair, I don't have a clue what his name is. Telepolis and Spitzpoison and Flames. There he is. All right, you know what? Oh good, this is useful. I just most hate it. That was exactly, when I said Mr. Hands, that's what I was referring to. Mr. Hands is the one. Oh yeah. He's the fucking worst enemy in the game. Bottom right, yeah. Bottom right, I despise that fucking thing. I hate him so much. He's never designed this guy. You need to have a work with yourself, dude. Jesus Christ. You're gonna want to settle down on the drugs. It's funny to me, like they've got, this is an example of like most hated enemies in the game, I guess. The other three don't even come close to him as far as I understand. Yeah, it's those guys and the wrong people who are. There are consistent ways to counter the other three. Him. Ooh, ooh, ooh. I do not like those little gecko things in the top right. Man, it's just gonna fucking flay a little. Oh, you don't like the gecko? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The petrified toads or whatever they're called now? Yeah, surprise, you're dead now, guys. So yeah. Especially if you walk into a room where you didn't know they were in there and then four of them do the attack and you just go, do, do, do, do, dead. You're like, oh, okay. Aha, we got you. And it's like, if you craft those things that undo these, it's like, shut up. Just shut up. But yeah, Mr. Hands, if you want to call him that. When he does like a sprint toward you, you go in like hit, hit, hit, hit, and you roll back, roll back, and then he does another one. You get tagged by it, and then another one, and then another, and you're like, you're not serious. You cannot keep fucking doing this. And then he stops and you're like, finally, a hit and you go to him and he teleports because he goes into the fucking floor, appears behind you and spits poison. You're like, all right. Yep. Okay. Just the absolute worst. What? He's got a rocket engine on his ass, and it's pissing me off. And there's like five or six in the helly tree area. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was already down there. That's one of the instances where I had to summon my mimic tier because I was not putting up with this anymore. A lot of them escaped from the first evil within game. Can I highlight one of the worst portions for random enemy encounter? I'm going to put it on screen and see if you guys know what I'm talking about. Oh, I hoped you would bring that up. I'm actually very close to that. Ah, cool. Ah, so fun. This fucking place. What else can you say about this other than, guys, what are you doing? What are you doing? You're not a stealth game. Stop trying. Like, what is this crap where there's invisible enemies that do a backstab grab on me? Why? And they have a mountain of health and poise. It's just what the fuck is this? I don't think they're even designed to be fought. I think you're supposed to kind of run around and just light the four. Is it four? Yeah, four candles. It's a dumb stealth section. It's fucking stupid as shit. That's what it is. Is it stealth? Because, I mean, it's nothing stealthy about it. You run around and suddenly bam, backstabs. Like, what? Look at that. Oh, God, this is going to be great. I've got all the footage ready for this. Yeah, maybe when you're going to do something like this, don't give them a lunging grab attack when I can't see them, you know? Yeah, there's a torch that you can use to reveal them. The problem is you need to have that torch in your hands. If you switch to a shield, she will go invisible again. So you have to hold this torch. In your left hand, you can switch to like one-handed mode for your right hand and it'll be OK. But if you dare switch to anything else, she's gone again. So you have to hold that torch out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me find the torch. I was going to say, where's the torch? I didn't come across the torch, unfortunately. Oh, really? It's a torch just in this game. Oh, just any torch? Oh, no, no, no. Centry torch. I don't know what that is. Centry torch. That's what it is. If the kinds of moves I would give enemies like this, a lunging grab is not one of them. It's just cruel. Why would you do this? It's so mean. That is really mean. Centry's torch. So you have to hold this thing. So you're essentially handicapping yourself to hold a stupid torch in your hands so you can fight this health-inflated poise monster. Tomb of the Giants. That's worth complaining about. Fucking yes, it is. Did you see this? You see the footage? And there's five of them. There is five of these fuckers in this area. Oh, yeah, I didn't even opt to try and kill them. Yeah, they are. Dude, I killed them out of spite. I couldn't kill them. Like, yeah, it was slow. You can tell me that it was lame. It wasn't fun, but they're all dead. And thank God they don't ever come back. You know, it's been a cool thing to do. You can see if it steps in the snow or something. There's a thing that's short. Just one undone thing. And then you're out of there. Oh, thank fuck it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's an ever jail. It's just one with no actual combat boss. And the archers fucking annihilate health as well. They have seen amounts of damage. Oh, God, they were really funny. Yeah. Oh, I'm lots of fun. Just fun, fun, fun. It just makes you wonder what fun. Do you think people are getting out of this? It's like, it's a challenge. Like, yeah, yeah, more than any other Souls game. And I usually ask this a decent amount with Souls games. I just keep asking with this game, what were they thinking? What did they hope was going to happen? What did they hope that gameplay of this zone would look like? Running around, right? Oh, yeah, this part for me. I was like, am I I can't get over there? And I don't know yet. Oh, yeah, they have kind of a mountain of health, too. Those those little cloth boys that those crippled little cloth boys take like a ton of hits to kill them, too. They're also the other ones got a beat on you. They also shoot too fast to spell cast something on them, which is also fun. That's great. So you need a weapon. Just going to rock fling them. It's like, nah, I'm just going to shoot three arrows this whole time. Yeah, no, it's literally spamming me. I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think my strategy was running the game. Now, I love it. It's awesome. I do adore this game, but this is the thing. When you deal with the game 100 fucking hours long, they're going to be pots of it. Or I'm like, oh, look what? Well, I guess more central would be that I think that it's easier to identify what isn't working and it's harder to and it takes longer to explain what is working. Do that bring? What? Oh, no, I didn't actually hold on. I saw I saw the backstabbed. Yeah, yeah, like, what are you meant to do to counter this? I'm not sure. Apparently it was a torch. Yeah, yeah, hold a torch. And then it's going to take a fucking age to kill them. They fly forward in most of their attacks. That grab is actually harder to dodge than you think because she doesn't have like a grab animation. Yeah, well, she's got a grab animation, but instead of like the grab happening when she squeezes her arms in, no, no, no. She just holds her hand out in front of you and flies forward. And if she bumps into you, you are grabbed. For me, it was just attrition of surviving long enough to find the four candles and then executing a run where I just didn't engage a single one of those assassins. Wow, that's actually those candles stay lit. That's not our ideal, right? You feel like once they're lit, once they're lit. Well, but I mean, it's kind of, there's sort of like a route. I guess the last one you can, or I mean, the last one I got was kind of at the other end and you had to climb it up. But the first three, I think, or I mean, the two that are on rooftops, those ones, you kind of get to one and then the path to the next one is along the same route. So you kind of end up running the same circuit either way and just hoping that you don't get killed. Yeah, these things are awful. That was no fun at all. I just don't get it. I just don't get it. Yeah, so much that's mentioned. Remember, painted world and visible boss with footprints. Yeah, footprints. And it didn't come on to grab you out of self. Yeah. So a boss I would like to mention for this portion because of the fact that it started to appear so fucking much, I wasn't even sure if I could refer to it as a normal enemy anymore. Was the the fox. Yeah, the yeah, I think it's a red wolf. But yeah, red wolf. Yeah, the same Lucifer reference. Oh, oh, is that a spicy take? Well, I hope not. I thought it does with a sword in its mouth. Only this time it's an enemy and it does spells. It's an energy sword. And it runs away from you constantly. Yeah, that's not as big. No, but it's faster, dare I say. I don't know, maybe not. Oh, definitely. Oh, I don't know, I think it's faster. Run from you like a fucking pussy. It is in Elden Ring, therefore it is faster and more aggressive than Sif. Like it's... When I first fought him, I was like, oh, bye. Because he was really easy. He was in the magic place. And then every subsequent time I was just like, oh, it's you again, but why? Like, okay, and just each time, the most annoying was in the Winter Wonderland area. I don't know if you fought him there. I think I may have fought him off stream because I was walking around and I bumped into him and I was like, oh, this should be pretty easy. He was the hardest there than throughout the whole game. And yeah, I just started to be like, why don't they just drop you in if they don't have anything else to do, don't they? And it's like, what, you mean the Sulfurated Tree Spirits? And I'm like, no, those tend to have locations that are set with the Erd Trees, right? Sometimes they pop that away. You kinda need a more room for them. It felt so out of place the first time I fought him, like in the magic area. Like, sure, he does the magic, but what the fuck? It's a wolf. Yeah. Just have him have the fucking sword in his mouth and place him somewhere else, not in a fucking school, whatever the fuck that was. Some lecture hall, see somebody's pet. Yeah, it was there. The debate hall, yeah. It was like, oh, here's the wolf and his debate hall. It's just like Sif fucking. The bitterness, I can smell it. I hate it, dude. I hate it. So what can we, to better, I don't know, it's like, what do you say about the average enemy in this game? Well, you've got your hollows when, I don't know if there should be hollows in this universe. You've got your knights when they all look the same despite serving different people, which, you know, that's whatever. They have different coloration, but the styling of their armor is the same. Maybe I'm asking too much, but I found that a bit disappointing that the Landel knights look the same as the Raya Lucaria knights, look the same as the Godric knights, look the same as whatever the hell else. In terms of actual moveset, a fair few of the basic enemies do fine, but so many of them have the inane flailing plus heavy delay combination that makes them just a pain to deal with. Do you think that there's a lack of variety in saying that or? Yes, probably. Everything seems to behave in a pretty similar way. I guess that's, because it gets complicated because there might be, isn't one of the big criticisms of Dark Souls 2 that a lot of the enemies are knights with swords, but like there's an armor on them. If people level that criticism of the bosses, I think the real criticism is beneath that, they just don't realize it. Well, that's why I brought it up because the aesthetics is one thing, but it really what matters is how do they affect gameplay? How do you fight each person? The problem with DS2's dudes and armor is they all behave the same way. Not that they are all dudes and armor, because you could have all dudes and armor. Had the unique fucking position of having bosses that killed themselves. Not to say that not all of the games have that to some degree, but DS2's ones were much more commonly killing themselves. It was funny as fuck. What do you mean? What do you mean? What does that mean? The dudes and armor falling into water pit. Watch off a bridge. Yeah, it was in my video, like I had several examples of, I forget the name of him, but he's a big knight and he just fucking commits suicide. Dragon rider. Yeah, several times. He just, doesn't want to live, yeah. I... Every time... Equals one prayer. Every time I got to a niche, it was just a case of, oh boy, I can't wait for it to do a three hit combo, ending in either a slam or a stab, and I can't wait for it to have its one magic attack. It's jumping attack and its attack when I'm next to it. And that was all of them. They all had the same moveset. It was pretty impressive, actually. You would say Elden Ring has more variety than that. Yes. Yeah. It has a lot more variety. Does it have as much variety as Dark Souls 1? More so, but also several more enemies. So I guess that's, are you talking percentages? Well, maybe that's... Oh, well, I guess maybe it's both, right? It's probably not fair to downplay how big Elden Ring is compared to the other games. You know, that is a part of it. Yeah, Elden Ring's fucking weird. Yeah. In that sense, I'd say it's actually a tricky question to answer, because I'm willing to bet that Elden Ring definitely has more unique enemy types than DS1, but... The ratio of the unique enemy type for the amount of commentary. To ones that are similar, yeah. The lane bell knights are technically distinct from the Godric knights. However, they behave, they look nearly identical, and they have a lot of the same moves. It's like a variation on the same enemy. This lad was pretty funny. Ah, fucking... That's gonna be guys! It's just a mad ball. Oh, yeah. I can't just point out that... I shouldn't be here, I should be in Bloodborne. Where am I? Flail, flail, flail, flail! Screwball of damage. His weak spot is as hard as part on his body. Yeah? I just wanted to point that out. Because there's a beat that's harder than everything else, but I saw it just there. I appreciate the fact that they made the critical hit location glow. Yes, that was a good type. Oh, that's what I wanted to bring up, especially related to the Ulcerative Tree Spirit. So sometimes you can proc the, like, stagger where they glow, and you can hit them. Fuck me, so many enemies in this game are so bulbous and nonsense that by the time you can even get to the place where you've got the weak spot on, it's too late. Plus, in many cases, in many, many cases, depending on the size of the boss, the weak spot falls into the floor, and you can't actually hit it. Or you go to a wall. Or go to a wall, too, yeah. I hate the go-wums, because the way they fall down, you can get tangled into them, and then you can no longer reach the weak spot. It's like, fuck you, Gabe. Like, I'm trying to... If you drop a dragon and you get stuck behind his wings, fuck you, you're not getting that weak spot now. You can't jump those wings. I almost argue that that has something to do with budget and development time, because I'm willing to bet they probably would want to take the time to have different animals. Like, almost like the Glory Kills in Doom. We're depending on the angle you approach it. You get a different animation, and it's sort of a different attack, but I imagine that would be very difficult to do for every enemy. Not impossible, though. Did any of you guys take the transport trap that takes you up to Landel, and there's a golem up there that you fight? Yeah. I think so. Sorry, I said it again. The transport trap that takes you up to Landel, and there's a big golem that you fight, and that's where you find the talisman that slowly restores HP. I definitely did that, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a distinct moment of, I guess, longing when I did that, because I had him standing with his back to the fucking sheer drop behind him, doing his attack that carries him backwards, and then I knocked him over, and he fell backwards, and he didn't fall off the bridge. And I couldn't help but think of I am golem, man. Oh, yeah. It's like, oh, hey, we have a mechanic where this boss falls over, and it's on an actual platform. Maybe we should make that a thing that's part of the fight that he can just fall off. And then this guy's just like, no, I guess we're just going to ignore that as a possibility and break my immersion. Re. Re. Re. Oh, hey, quick mention, the ashes of Oleg. I saw this happen to you as well, Mel. Sometimes he gets confused, tries to attack things outside the fucking boss room. Oh, yeah. Thanks a lot. I need you to help here. I was squishy mage. I need you to add him. Let me add him. He was like, no, no. There's a severe threat on the other side of this fondor. Trust me, buddy. I can't let them ambush us. I was supposed to say, like, the golem was easy as hell. It's like, well, they're all different amounts of health and damage and stuff, but the way I saw it, when he got staggered, I was like, just keep hitting the feet. Don't even go for the weak spot, because it's just going to get fucked. Eh. Eh. Yeah, if you do two charged strong attacks at their feet and they have, like, the exposed lava feet, you'll knock them down way quicker, and then you can just go for that crit attack, provided the torso doesn't fall into the floor again. Mm-hmm. Um, what about the vampires? Do you guys, what do you think of the eagles with the blade feet? Fuck them. Oh, fuck. I hate them. I hate them. I hate them. It's just really obnoxious. In my mage build, they didn't bother me at all, because I just shoot them down, but when I started my melee build, I was like, Jesus fucking Christ, I want these enemies to be gone forever, because I just can't hit them. I just don't understand. They have everything. They're quick. They're agile. They're hard to hit. They fly. They do a shit ton of damage. Yeah, they hit hard, too. That's what I'm supposed to say. Like, they literally have everything. They're so much stronger than any enemy in the surrounding area to where they're at. And then they appear, like, later on in the game, and it's just the same thing. They just do so much more damage than anything in the surrounding area. They also get flame breath later on. Yeah. They deal more damage. I was going to say, they can chuck explosive barrels at you. They deal more damage than the knights in the castles. It's like, why is this bird stronger than them? Help me. Yeah. I didn't have too bad a time. I forgot to use guard counter all the goddamn time, but whenever it came to the birds, guard counter actually helped a lot for them. So as long as there weren't like more than one at an okay time, but if there were like two, I'm like, I'm out. I found a jump and jump and light attack with the great sword was pretty good for them because it was a really big arc and it kind of angles up. And that helped. Another really fun enemy type I encountered that flies because I hate flying enemies in this game. It was down in that castle in the southern area of Limgrave across the bridge. I think it was there. You run into a couple of flying beast men people with bows. Oh, yeah. And they just hover above you of your reach. And they're just, yeah, castle mourn. That's it. Thanks. And they just hover above you shooting you. And none of my swing arcs were high enough to reach them. And they just hovered there shooting me. That was pretty cool. My jump attacks can attack them either because of the particular swing arcs of the weapon I was using. I have an enemy that is in like basically tied with Mr. Hands for like the worst enemy that I hate fighting in the world. And that's the shrimp people. Oh, yeah. Oh, the shrimp people. Yeah, they're annoying. Shrimp people can go fuck themselves because they have so much annoying about them. First of all, they don't disappear when you've killed them. Obviously they won't. But every single time you hit them, they do a retreating attack that has a ton of poise on it. So if you try to follow it up with a second combo attack, it's not going to stagger them. And your mid swing, now you're open, they're going to stab you in the face. Shrimp people. Yeah, they're like prawns. They're like prawns, yeah. So we're just to step away from crab people, really. Oh, there are also crab people. There are also crab people. Oh, god. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're under the ground. They're not crab people. Also, fuck the shrimp people's projectile attack. It hits you from cover. If they fall into a pit, they can still hit you. They can hit you from anywhere. They really are. What would attract you? We have a prawn enemy with a halberd that shoots missiles. Yeah. And whenever they flee from you too, you're much more likely to clump together a bunch more enemies along with them. Their attacks are numerous, and they stuff yours if you're using a large weapon. And worse yet, these fuckers know that they're full of shit because they can stab you through a wall and they know it. They know. Yes, because while you're hiding, where you're sitting like behind a full wall, they don't care. They'll still stab you through it, and they'll keep trying too. They just go the fuck on forever. Yeah, they just keep going. They know they can stab through walls, so they do. And I hate them. And that place that I had, I was talking about where there were like 12 enemies that I hate, it was them. It was 12 of them. And they had little baby shrimp men along with them that also shoot projectiles. It took me like forever to clear the area. The underground area? Do you guys have anything cavern with the tree land? No, I like tree area, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like tree. Metal already knows. Oh, yeah, yeah. I fucking rage at these motherfuckers on stream. Yeah, fuck off. Do you guys know the Claymen? The Claymen underground? Yeah, yeah. They're tanky. They take like a million hits. Yeah. There's a room underground that I counted no less than 26 of them. Yeah. They're not very aggressive though. You can just walk past them, I think. Yeah. I don't understand why they made a room full of, like, yeah, just walk past the enemies. The lore, Theo, the lore. They're fucking Clay people. Don't you disrespect the Clay people, you fucking racist. Oh my God, you killed them? Oh, no. Somebody said you could be someone that you don't need. Oh, no. I bet summon shrimp men actually suck ass. Well, I guess since a lot of complaining is being done, does anyone have any enemy types they like? Honestly, I never even think about the normal enemies. I just kill them. Yeah. For me, it's more of a just if I'm fighting them and I feel like the fight was fine. I don't register that as like a compliment. Yeah, yeah. It's a regular enemy and it did what it was supposed to do. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's another enemy type. I hate though. The fucking frosty anime dual wielding swordsman up in Castle Soul. There is one of those in the fight with Neal. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, the enemy Oleg. They're frosty? I kind of thought of them as ghosts. I think bandaged knights is what they are called. Yeah, they are horrendous and I hate them. They're as strong as Oleg. And now I know why Oleg is so strong. That's why. One of the Neal fight. I'm telling you, it's a two-hander weapon and kill that one before the fight even really begins. Yeah. But one on one, I don't think they're a big problem. I think they're fine. For me, they were like a huge issue because they just go on and on and on and on. They never fucking stop and they can chase you forever because they have all sorts of variations on their weird windings stomping move thing. Little that never sits down to any enemy. Well, you know, you've got a point. But they go even more on. The enemies don't fight back. Yeah, why can't the enemy just let me kill it? What the fuck? Just stand there and be my favorite. Just be a Lothric knight and let me R1 needed that. How dare you be more challenging than the other ones? You prick. Shall we bite into another subject perhaps? The champs? Fine. I saw people in chat mention how come you haven't talked about the ashes of war, which are, did I say weapon arts? Yeah. Oh yeah. I haven't used a lot of them, but there's a few that I like. I was just using bloody slash throughout the whole game pretty much. I heard that got a bit of a nerf. I don't know how substantial it was. Did you ever find out? Well, to show just how powerful it was in a sense, I was stuck on a Crucible Knight plus of a guy for a while. I think the run I won was the run where I was like, I can keep using bloody slash. It was like, it's pretty good. I should keep using it. That his health started to get absolutely just flattened. Yeah, I like it a lot, but I haven't played with it since. The thing is I was planning on my next run to not use it. I was going to try other things along with not using the summon spirit things, but yeah, that one was really good. I tested out a whole bunch of them. I thought they were kind of neat. I'm okay with them. I think they just have a bit of a balancing issue, which apparently they're someone else. Yeah. Because Horfros Stomp has been fixed as well, apparently. Yeah, see the Horfros Stomp was really the first one I used because what I initially had on my greatsword, it was still a cold damage greatsword that scaled on strength. But my weapon was just like this little tornado that formed around me for a split second and did almost nothing. So for the vast majority of the game, I was just like, okay, whatever, I'm a melee build. I'm just not going to use any spells, whether they're part of my sword or not. And then it was Godskin Duo that I was stuck on and someone said, yeah, Horfros Stomp is really good for that. I was like, what's that? They're like, it's a weapon art. They're like, you can probably use it under greatsword. Just go out of this place and find it. So I did came back and beat Godskin Duo and then found I was kind of relying on it. I did start a confessor and I got this spear that has a frenzy attack on it on the weapon art. And I'm starting to think that that one might also be broken. So my conclusion is that the weapon arts I've used are either useless or so strong, they're broken. So I like the idea. There is no in between. Yeah, but I'm not sure that I've found one that suits my play style and doesn't feel like, okay, well now this is the only attack I'm using for the rest of the game. I had spinning slash for a little bit in my first like three parts, I think. And I liked it. It was a very chill weapon art of just, you do like two attacks quickly. It's like, it's like worth two light attacks or even three for the cost of time of two. It's like that. And it's just like this. Yeah. Right. I think an issue the ashes of war start to showcase about Souls games is that it's a fairly long running one and it's part of the DNA of why they didn't focus on the combat in the first place. Attacks don't provoke any response from the enemies and there's no difference in how they affect the enemy. So the properties on attacks are often completely void other than their speed and their damage or maybe a status effect if they apply them. There are other games sometimes that you have comparisons for this. I know it sounds ridiculous, but killing floor is like one of the things they really took care with in that game was how enemies will react to where you hit them on the body and it'll do something to them as a result and they always react to the impact of your weaponry. I think Monster Hunter is probably a closer example. Yeah. Fantastic in that regard. Yeah. Monster Hunter and Vermintide as well is a lot like that. And Rags was talking about that earlier. That just compared to other action games in general because other action games, they are tackling this sort of thing, their attacks, the attacks in them allow you to do different things generally, which that doesn't, as Matthew Matosis put it again, this doesn't necessarily mean you should be able to juggle hollows. I don't know that anyone's arguing that. It's just that with the way things currently are, the more action elements are leaned upon, the more it becomes clear that a lot of your options don't really mean much beyond how it feels to swing your weapon, which is more important than you might think, but it's not making a substantial difference in how things play out. So I found a lot of my weapon art selections were, yeah, I'll take the one that does a lot of damage, or the one that gives me a dash. It seemed to me like it really fits in with the idea that we're trying to get more spectacular and cinematic these thought art things. Yes. Like how cool is that spin that I do? And I'm like, it is pretty cool. It's like the stomp. That's pretty awesome. The blood slash, so they're all really like, ooh. Flashing. Yes. Any sense of a grounded aesthetic for the soul series is like long dead by now. It's actually really funny that you mentioned that because I was just about to say one of the weapon arts I had the most fun using was in the broadsword that you spawn with when you start a confessor. The weapon art there is you hold like the left trigger and you assume a stance. Yeah, a square. Oh, a square. That's good. Well, then that's the thing. The only way to attack once you're in that stance is you kind of can charge it to an agree and release it when you want. And it just does insane posture damage. Yeah, somebody's kind of walking that far. Yeah. And it's like, okay, this is kind of cool because it's like, it's not a very crazy attack. It's basically just like a different heavy attack. And it's one that's a little bit hard to land, but it also is really good at staggering enemies. So it's, I don't know, I found that I was using it quite a bit until I started because I was making a confessor, investing more in faith stuff. So scaling strength didn't really make any more sense. But I did like that webinar quite a bit. I feel like a lot of weapon arts seem to be more for PvP builds. It seems that way. Let's scale that way. A lot of the like the twin blade ones, you do like a spinny, spinny, and they don't really do that much poise damage to regular enemies, but in PvP they actually stagger you. So you can actually get your entire spinny, spinny move off. But regular enemies in the game are just like, huh, now I'm going to stab you and I'm going to stagger you out of your move instead. Yeah, that was cool and all what you did, but I'm going to stab you now. I played with a few. There was the barricade shield was great for whenever the bullshit bear showed up. Because like, you know, you just press it and then for like eight seconds, your shield is basically like indestructible and like they can't get through to your stamina. So it's great for enemies that just spam attacks a whole lot. I use that for a little while. I got a little bored with it. The other one, the one I'm currently using right now is the golden parry for my brass shield. It's basically like the parry strength of like a buckler shield, but like long distance. So you don't even have to be close to the enemy to parry them. Whoa. Yeah, it's it's it's pretty nuts. Bloodhound step is great. I like using that for my I like the claw weapons and it actually comes with the bloodhound step. So I like you like using the bloodhound step for like a nice little close in bleed type. That's pretty great. Um, SEPICU who doesn't like SEPICU? I no one alive. Annoying weapons I used had hard baked in ashes of war, which were pretty alright, but well, I guess I was frustrated that some of the ones that had, you know, locked in ashes of war. It was just the same as another ash of war, but with a slightly different effect like moon veil is just like Katana's unsheath, but it fires projectiles, which in effect just means it's the same thing, but it deals a billion damage. I experimented with a few of them. Like I liked spinning slash, which is or not spinning slash sword dance. It's one where you like dash forward with the weapon, do a quick couple of swings and then you can do a third follow up. It was nice to have that kind of dash in effect. But the problem I ran into with most of them is probably to do with how broken Katanas are actually. Or their weapon art being too good, because all of them were just slower and did less damage. So I had no real reason to want them. So I was just getting less damage and on a slower animation for no real game in any direction. For a really long time I was using a bloodhounds fang. It's a. I used that a lot early game as well. Yeah, yeah, that was it's an extremely good weapon and it's weapon art does a ton of damage. It's got like an errant dodge in it. I used that for a really long time. So I didn't get to use Ash's award too much until later on when I decided to mix things up. That's a really good weapon art. That's a thing actually. That's worth pointing out. They pumped the damage that weapon arts do in this game. Yeah, they did. I say the Katana one does a lot, but all of them do a lot. The Katana one just has the advantage of being super quick. And I'm not certain how I feel about that because it feels like it makes it very possible to not really cheese bosses, but you know, you just you spam your weapon at them and it does a billion damage per hit. Staggerism. The risk with that isn't so much making it so that you have a tool that's that powerful, but it it makes you not want to use your standard attacks as much because that's kind of what I was thinking with the whorefrost stomp. It's not so much that it was there and it's like, well, if I want a better experience, I should just not use this. It's like, well, if I've got a minute to launch a heavy attack at an enemy, I can either swing my sword by pressing R2 or the right trigger or press the left trigger and do twice as much damage for a little bit of mana. I think related to that is part of the problem with them being so powerful is it doesn't feel, it's not a kind of powerful to me because it doesn't feel like they're enabling me to do anything that I couldn't do before. They're not giving me access to a new kind of tool. They're giving me access to a bigger damage button. I mean, the current speedruns are the one, I guess they won't really be used anymore now since the nerf, but the speedruns right now literally just have an offhand with Royal Knights Resolve. So you buff yourself and then in your main hand, you have the icicle thingy that gives you whore for a stomp. So you buff yourself and then you stomp and then you buff yourself and then you stomp and you can three shot most bosses. It's okay. Now the speedruns are all about abusing mimic tier. It's funny because you got nerfed, but nope. I've been watching someone try and route the all-remembrances speedrun and figure out what the fuck is good after everything gets nerfed and he reckons it's just the mimic tier abusing a spell because he has infinite FB, which is... Apparently Predator said earlier that the behavioral changes that they did is apparently that they won't use the L2 as often anymore. So they will be more of a swinging. So they'll be more swinging now, apparently. If that's true, I don't know what his source for that was, but that's what he said. I exploited a bit of an imbalance with the Erd Tree shield. Are you aware of the imbalance that was in the Erd Tree shield that got mega-nerfed? Nope. So there's an Erd Tree shield that you can get from one of the 20 fucking tree sentinel bosses. There's the two up top of that golden ramp. One of them will drop the Erd Tree shield. What this sucker does is it's supposed to be used to counter spells that hit you. So it's like a reflector. It turns whatever hits the shield into this golden blast of death. It's really cool. Is that the machine gun thing that people were talking about? I think that's what they're calling it. Yeah, I discovered it by accident when I got poisoned trying to fight some flowers. I was trying to reflect. I was trying to see what happens if I could reflect maybe some Scarlet Rotman. I realized I fired off a blast before that thing even hit me. So I kept hitting it, and apparently being poisoned was enough to just fire this thing off whenever I wanted. So it's all like this thing does massive damage. And while you're doing the blast, you still count as blocking. So even if you could sit there and you could blast this thing over and over again, and if something tries to hit you, nope, you've just blocked it too. So there would be instances where there would be like spam bushes, because I'm so fucking tired of the spam bushes at some point. It's like, oh look, there's 20 gargoyles just up this hill. Screw this. Light myself on fire and shoot these things. There's a spell to literally light yourself on fire, and that counts too. So I would do that whenever I'd see the spam bush, but I restricted myself. I didn't use it on bosses. Too cheap. Too cheap. Didn't use it on bosses, but spam bushes, I didn't have any quarrel. I just want to address something I saw in chat, which was someone saying they thought like doing more damage with a weapon art was like the point. So don't really get the criticism. The point is that there's the system in place that allows you to swap between all of the different weapon arts to, you know, pick whichever one you most want to use or whatever. The problem with this being the choice doesn't actually impact a lot because they're so similar in how they actually play out in gameplay because there's no real new properties on many attacks in this game. So the actual choice doesn't really mean a whole lot beyond, I guess I'll just slap on whichever one does the most damage the quickest. Well, I mean, they also changed the scaling of your weapon, like depending on which ash you attached to your weapon. So I mean, I actually, I learned this the hard way. I was handicapping myself because I had a holy ash of war on my greatsword that was kind of the only one I had, like it was the only one I could attach to it. So I was like, okay, I might as well make it a holy greatsword. Why not? And then didn't realize until later that I'd been handicapping my sword because then it started scaling on faith and I was doing a strength build. So that's actually kind of why I ended up switching to the cold greatsword because it scales on strength still. Well, what's cool, what's kind of weird is the game does like if you're first into the game and you're not familiar with the ashes, you'll realize if you try to put an ash on, you notice it like screws the scaling up. So you think that putting the ash will inherently screw the weapon up. But what it doesn't tell you is you could just set it to standard and it won't do that. So it's like it doesn't communicate itself particularly well in this regard until you've tried it out. Also, I don't think, did it ever tell you that ashes were an equip, unequip thing? I don't remember how that was communicated because it was... Because for a while I thought once you used them they were lost. So I was like afraid to use any. I remember having that inclination. I can't remember if it was well founded or if it was me just being paranoid or not. Well, I think when you understand Souls games for a while and you know certain items are like limited, you start to think well that's probably the direction they're going, right? And it wasn't until like I watched, like I decided to just watch somebody else like put on that ash and see what it does before I realized oh wait a minute he just unequipped the fucking thing. God damn it. I was afraid for nothing. I was actually going to say the possible segue there into the general topic of hand holding or lack thereof. In the game? Thoughts on? Because obviously that's a big topic surrounding the game. I like how hands off a lot of it is. Maybe systems like that though having not necessarily a tutorial but like a codex that you could go into in the menu to be like hey how does weapon scaling work and things like that I think would be handy. But I sort of like that stuff like the quest logs are not really present. It's more just this is a world that you can go explore and you can kind of remember where people are and go talk to them and if you've got an option for dialogue other than buy or sell something from this person that's probably something you can click to advance the side story or a side quest and then investigate it further from there and I think it suits really well in this open world format more so than in the other Souls games for the most part because you can fast travel around pretty easily and it's not like okay well I see the Onion Knight guy here and if I might not ever see him again or I might see him around that corner who knows but I do like that it's the anti Ubisoft game actually it's funny Fringy had it earlier brought up Breath of the Wild and I used to actually think it was always kind of cringe that every time a new open world game came out all the mainstream game journalists would coverage the words like Breath of the Wild would be written at least once this is one of those games that it actually it's impossible to kind of not compare it to Breath of the Wild because they're both the inversion of the Ubisoft cluttered map format of like the Ubisoft map or like an Assassin's Creed game a Far Cry game those it's the maps loaded with icons that are things for you to do whereas the map screen and both Elden Ring and Breath of the Wild are the inverse of that they're empty and you need to explore to fill them with stuff and I really like that design for an open world because I think it actually justifies it as opposed to just being hey this game's huge and it'll take you 60 hours even though there is probably about six hours of story content and then a bunch of busy work which is what I find most open world games boiled down to well this meme got made and I assume that I have to bring it up now is it the Ubisoft led meme that was great I want to ask this how far does hand holding extend also because I think that these games have a definite idea on what they think should be and shouldn't be hand held for the player we all know this they have over tutorials on some stuff and then some things that seem pretty important that they just don't give a fuck if you figured it out or not something that I don't know if this counts as within this sort of topic is something that I'm not a fan of is like you pick up a thing and it's like it will increase your attack like okay how much like well you're gonna have to look at your stats before you equip it and then after you equip it and it's like that's fucking annoying but okay and that pretty much goes for everything and so it's like why do they do it make it that way it's like I'm not sure I don't know do they want the flavor text to be shorter on these items that you equip instead of just saying increases attack stat or increases you know strength stat by plus five or it will increase right hand weapon by blah blah blah if it blah blah like I don't know stuff like that annoys me like how nonspecific a lot of the stat increases are when they are super important as well as I'm pretty sure there are Vega ones like you have all the talismans right yeah I think I looked up one talisman because I thought it sounded super interesting and I was like maybe I should do a build around this oh I know what you mean it was like yeah exactly like if something is affected by poison or wrought in the vicinity then you gain a damage buff and I was like ooh wow maybe I can do something with daggers or some shit and I looked it up and you get a 15 second buff of 10 AR like 10 AR yeah I'm just like not 10% just 10 like your damage goes up by 10 points per attack and I'm like you can't even have the equivalent of an extra hit in the time that I would run out yeah and the thing is you have to reapply it for you to get the buff so you get the buff for 15 seconds and poison lasts for what like 2 minutes yeah so it's like you better hope there's another enemy that's got enough health to withstand your blows right yeah so that went from being like oh wow how interesting to well no that's shit oh by the way don't put us off topic I should have bought this one up earlier I hate it man it's funny that's a good one step forward do a half swing then phrase for half a second actually swing I like Theo's idea of there being a codex of systems I think it'd be nice to like but no the codex would be a good idea for things like I think a lot of people would did have trouble with understanding scaling like what heavy meant what dex you know what this and that meant so it's like that'd be nice incantations like what the hell are bestial incantations you know how to cast spells in the first place but don't do it in like menus that pause the game or nothing like that just have a codex yeah so just if you're at a point of grace it's like hey I don't really understand how this spell I just got works basically just things that can go into more depth than just the item descriptions yeah according to chat there is a codex no there's a bunch of stuff in the you're not yeah I was about to say you're not just talking about there's stuff in the inventory hang on so if you go all the way to the right you get like I don't even know just info it just says info on the right and then you have like a bunch of stuff like about guidance of grace about the map about round hole table all that stuff yeah that was my bad man I just didn't notice I forgot so I'm happy someone brought it up in chat because I completely forgot about that because I never looked at it and I was like oh right yeah you can actually look at this my assessment is game is pretty good in this regard there's just a couple of tweaks I would like them to make and they haven't made them since all the way back in their first attempt they just refuse to tell they way prefer to tell me attack increase and I'm like fucking troll just save me the time unequipping and equipping the things all the time yeah exactly also make sure the fucking pc release can actually run well yeah have any of you have the invisible like invisible enemy glitch where the enemies are going to appear no that's new what happened so they just can't see them at all when I was playing whenever I jumped on my horse that seemed to cause the problem my horse would disappear and the enemies would disappear too like they're still there and they can still hit me mine was a different problem my horse I would mount my horse and then my horse would run off without me I'd freeze in the air and die you'd be there for like 10 seconds I'm pretty sure that the issue that I had was something to do with like draw distances I don't know what it was but it was specifically if I jumped on my horse and then I like went running the enemies and the horse would disappear so it would just be my guy sitting on air and I couldn't see the enemies and I think I nearly died once that was kind of annoying so hopefully that was a persistent problem though it sounds like I'm the only person who died that issue here I came across like zero bugs except a couple graphical glitches and I had about 10 freezes in total something like that I think someone would be like wow that's a lot and I'd be like I had 100 hours so no that's not bad I had a micro stuttering issue PC I don't know why it would be my computer's fault that the enemies disappear but maybe it is that's probably a glitch have you considered getting good getting good getting good less bugs in your game I know that the performance issues were worse when I was streaming it because once I stopped but I don't know that that has any bearing on the enemies disappearing I was still getting a decent chunk of micro stuttering if we're calling it that streaming and non-streaming and I've had a crash once per session whenever I relaunch the game it never happens again but I can always expect at least one crash per session game takes for fucking ever to actually close as well yeah that is a bit of a weird thing since the blasting menu you used to get me I found that damn how did we get into this we were talking about handholding I'd like to come back to handholding quickly let's do it I would say it's fine I say like handholding becomes an issue because games have been doing that for so fucking long that I think people have become attached to handholding it was really weird how a friend of mine was playing and they're like I don't want to progress the story so where should I go just go I mean handholding is by degrees I'm sure we would all agree there's handholding in this game there's a specific thing perhaps you might argue they could use more and fromsoft would maybe agree with that assessment and that's character quests because of the way he solves character quests work and interact with an open world because you know you talk to them at a place you do a thing and then they go somewhere else in the world that's fine in a world like Dark Souls usually because it's small enough that they can reliably expect that you'll probably run back into them or they're relatively easy to find that's a bit less okay in a game as fucking enormous as Elden Ring especially when NPCs are not giving any indication of what their intentions are you speak to them and then they're gonna go somewhere but maybe in the new patch though they have added something to facilitate making that more easy because now when you highlight a site of grace on the map it will say which NPCs are there or like in that area so if you know who you're looking for you can I think it's Millicent that just says oh I'm gonna go off to my quest now bye goodbye hey that's pretty immersive right because you wouldn't know where they're going this yeah it's true I'm such a bad housewife with these sorts of games that I just never with this one I was like I ain't gonna even bother learning people's names whatever if I see you I see I'll talk to you if I talk to you but yeah I'm just running through kill and stuff alright that's how I tend to treat it and it was fine with Soleir because you know Soleir just follows your progression it's fine to an extent with Siegmeier because Siegmeier he well he's fine up to a point and then he disappears down to Blighttown after Annalondo and you wonder what the fuck he's doing down there really? no I didn't know that's where he won yeah after I think it's after Annalondo it's certainly after Sen's Fortress he goes back to Firelink and then after Firelink he goes down to Blighttown because he's heading to the Demon Runs and then he dies in Ash Lake which is a secret zone so I know that yeah but doesn't he join a fight too? no that's the Darkest 3 no there's the fight with the Chaos Eaters which is like the critical point in his quest line if you talk to him he's gonna jump down there and he can either die what you were supposed to wait for me here I go found a similar thing well meanwhile my comparison point I guess would be Alexander in this game because he's just Siegmeier again shamelessly he's talking about I'm gonna go to the Festival of Combat it's gonna be so cool and then you go to the Festival of Combat because his progression leads him there you find him in Gale Tunnel because he's looking for a way to redone Castle or whatever and goes down there and he's like oh no the door's shut and then you let him through and you have some of them to fight Radar or whatever you have a chat with him and then he vanishes off to fucking Leonea why the fuck am I gonna be in Leonea if I've done Kaleid well I have no reason to be there apparently his questline ends really strangely as well they might have fixed up now as they added a bunch of stuff to NPC quests but I don't know if he was a part of that I find a lot of the discussion cringe-worthy when you have people who are just like I've been playing the game for 20 hours and I haven't even found a boss I'm like okay how the fuck actively avoiding the boss there's no way there's not too many bosses in this game somebody shared that on like there was this huge paragraph talking about how broken the open world is, how it makes no sense at all one of the many complaints involved 20 hours of gameplay and they haven't come across any bosses outside of the initial one and like the person just like I disregard everything you say and after you said that I'm just done I played for like 3 hours and I encountered this like wolf dungeon where there are a bunch of wolves in there and then a wolf boss and then they're going to bridge that was like after 2 hours so this is the funny thing if you watched my playthrough if anyone did I could totally have expected people would assume I would have been critical of it but I really wasn't I spent the first like 4 hours walking around the world without having talked to a tutorial man and so I didn't even get my horse but like some people were like what a fucking disaster idiot how do you miss but I was like no you don't understand I'm having fun I got my horse when I went to a I sat down and then the lady was like oh hey I'm gonna help you I think what they intend is for you to walk forward and you see the guy and he tells you the basic idea of where you're going which is the castle on your way to the castle you'll get to the church sit there and then she gives you your horse and then further up you get your ashes before you get to the castle I think and then they want you kind of to kill a few things on the way get to Murgat he fucking annihilates you and then you go open world I think that's what they were looking for people to do I immediately got out of the opening building was curious about the building itself I was like I wonder what's behind it just in case what are they hiding I saw the landscape and I was like I'm just gonna go wonder here I go I think yeah what happened with me was I walked out and I'm like you know what I'm gonna go the opposite way that I think you want me to go I'm gonna go backward and see what's that way that felt fun see I pretty much moved right towards Stormvale and fought market I think by the time I got there I was level 17 and then I had one of those I don't know if you guys ever have this happening in the souls games but the first time you fight a boss you do better than your next 20 attempts yeah so I had against market I had that beginners luck one where I got him down to about 30% health and I'm like okay I can do this and yeah I was there for about three hours I got him and felt like I was way over level because the runes I got from him I think boosted me from level 17 to level 26 or something like I was like oh okay it's nice though that he's designed in a way that it's it was possible for me to beat him even if it wasn't easy but yeah it is interesting though what having an open world game as compared to like the closed world of Dark Souls what I just highlighted about what I think the pathway they wanted players to typically go for through a little bit of pushing I really don't have much reference outside of that that kind of direction in the game outside of that I feel like they really were just like you can fucking go anywhere and do anything you want in any order really we'll make it so that there is technically a pathway I'd imagine someone could probably build one in terms of... Grace's point you yeah yeah you got well so what I'm saying is like some of them aren't even you don't want to like you don't want to go to Murgat is it Murgat? Market first yeah I say you don't want to you totally can if you think you can take him of course but like they direct you to him first it's like you don't want to go there you want to go elsewhere wherever that may entail like a couple of catacombs or caves or whatever else to build up some levels that's I guess what I'm trying to say is yes they have the the vague idea because we got a general direction if you need to collect the shards right but I don't think this game had and I think this is just a consequence of the open world it doesn't feel like it has the same direction as a lot of the other souls games in terms of a linear world of undead burg is the first place you're supposed to go to in Dark Souls at least that's the way it comes across it's like you could go other places but that's gonna be very fucking dangerous for you in this I think it's the initial continent you're on and then you're supposed to go the Limgrave then Leonea then I don't know if you're supposed to go to Altus okay lead first I don't know you can kind of find the quote-unquote intended path I guess because Metal and I we're messing around with like this interactive map that they have on the wiki I think where you can you can see where literally any item in the game is placed on the map and then you can search for the smithing stones and by searching like by the tier as you can kind of see like oh so the tier 4 is this like at this part of the map and at this part of the map so you can kind of get a sense of okay so this is what they is the natural progression that's kind of what I was trying to say in terms of I think someone could build what the thing that the developers were would be aware of by like mapping all that out but even to the point of mapping out boss health or boss rune counts you could probably see where they're expecting a vague idea of where you'd go and you know it's cool in the sense that it's like you could fight something that's a bit above you and then fight something that's way below you later or you could fight them in the quote-unquote the correct order and face them all as you're growing as a strength of character and there's nothing wrong with either of those experiences necessarily the only thing is when magnified to this level and I'm almost turning this conversation into open world versus linear right now um the the dramatic nature of like I just fought 17 things in a row that I was out over leveled for and then two guys in a row that were just so beyond me I had no chance yeah that's an issue I suppose it always came across to me in the opposite direction you were under leveled well just by naturally playing the game I was finding myself over leveled for things that's why I was dissatisfied with morgot and it's basically why the entire middle section of the game was ruined for me because nothing could even I obliterated everything I ran into and nothing could really cause any kind of trouble for me apart from an optional super boss that I fought I felt like that was a similar you gotta get less good you wanna oh yeah we'll stop using it oh yeah you're right your skills stop using it I had a similar situation it actually got to the point where I thought maybe I'll just stop leveling at 110 and then I got to snow land where everything was bullshit and like okay never mind this game is not over yet I guess that's worth asking what level did you guys beat the game at 174 I think I was something like that like 126 and currently 137 I'm not done yet I don't know how far I am from done I imagine there's too much left but I kind of like I kind of set a challenge for myself where I'm going to see as much of this game as I can before I play it or before I beat it because I don't think I'm going to pick it up again afterward so it's all like enjoy it while it lasts I don't have my game open but I think I'm like 140 ish 130 ish okay I was about 120 110 I think when I finished the game just curious about that in terms of how well they managed to get people to a roughly equivalent point or how over leveled I had originally said I had originally said 110 because I wasn't it looked like I was about to win and then I was far from it it's like okay never mind I think I was at about 106 when I got to millenia and then decided it was time to grind for a bit because wow it was about 90 for millenia and then I got like massive soul infusions from the next few bosses that took me to the end I didn't grind per se like you know farming or anything like that it's just that I kept getting a whole bunch of souls but rather than just blow it on like stones or shit I didn't need or whatever I keep myself at 110 and I decided fuck it I'll just keep leveling then I asked because I have kind of I guess weird relationship with open world games in that it just sounds like I'm completely opposite to most of you guys where the act of exploring without any directional purpose given to me to go in that direction beyond maybe find stuff is very taxing to me and I lose patience for it incredibly quickly I can see where you're coming from on that because I would say like having explored for this long I am very fatigued of the eco friendliness going on there is too much recycling going on it's actually to the point where I thought of saying just fuck it I'm going to complete the game now I'm over this but then you know I come back later and I keep exploring and now I'm stuck maybe I'm not going to complete it so it's like I can see exactly where you're coming from because you know take too long you can see a little too much recycling and it can get boring it's the recycling among a bunch of other things because for me at the time I was in Altus I couldn't do it anymore I just ran straight to Landel I couldn't make myself I couldn't make myself just run around on the vague promises of stuff to find anymore because make no mistake there is always stuff to find but it wasn't things that were engaging me and I couldn't handle it anymore I knew I was missing Gelmer I've seen a pathway up there but I just wanted it to end I wanted to go feel like I had a reason to go in the direction I was going it might seem like kind of a strange point but I sort of like that almost everything you find is not that big of a deal like no reward in any one of the mini dungeons that you're around is like oh man this is the thing that's going to turn the game around for me or this is going to make me twice as strong as I was it's like oh here's a weapon that I don't know I can maybe use if I respect or yeah I just got some smithing stones it's cool and I kind of like that it's not like oh you have to do this one because it has the real valuable weapon I think you're right but you're also incorrect because sometimes it does have the real valuable one because gale tunnel some random dungeon in the middle of nowhere has moon veil and to be fair I don't I never got moon veil and didn't use any katana and it's not as if you need those things to like break the game wide open far from necessary it's a souls game you just can use them if you want them it's good yeah as I was just saying like sometimes there is like a big cool weapon to find sometimes it's just smithing stones and I do agree that it shouldn't be dramatically important in the grand scheme of things if I'm just going around doing a catacombe I think that it is probably times we're already almost there to just talk about how does it fare as an open world game for me I normally don't really like open world games in the sense that we know them so I was pretty happy with this one because I didn't really want it to end yeah I'm to that like how long have I been playing 117 hours and I'm not even I don't think I'm even close to done yet 150 for me started a new game plus run on PC and I've been streaming it on PlayStation because I was just like what's this going it's like oh shit there's like a whole another area I'm exploring it's like okay but after this I'm done right like I can go to oh there's another area okay okay now for this main boss oh I'm just gonna get teleported to this completely different area as well it's like oh Jesus just real quick so someone said are you not gonna talk about the horse then it's like okay so 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 20 15 subjects I've got left listed okay and we are 5 hours and 20 minutes in the horse nice way to get around I hate fighting on it we're on open will for now we'll come back to the horse okay well that's all I'm saying I don't have much to say at all about the horse I have plenty to say about it so anyway the hope of will I I'm pretty much line up entirely with metal and I think the this is gonna be a big old subjectism for me because I just love the way everything looks in this world I yeah really get a good sense of exploring places rather than just repeated assets though I think if I were more cynical or if someone was to show me how much everything is similar maybe I could be changed on that but I was just enjoying my time especially with the vista changes there are some areas that are so impactful to me stylistically that I was just like man I'm just happy to be here I don't care what there is or what enemies there are I'm just happy to be here I like it on that point there are some like really cinematic almost like you'll turn a corner and it seems like they they've just up the render distance for that particular area where you'll see like a big fucking building etched into a mountain or something and you're just like holy fuck this looks actually cinematic as if they pre-recorded but they didn't because you literally just turned the corner yourself for any share I might give the open world which is mostly a personal thing I cannot deny that the way they use their space is very impressive in places they they do really well with the sense of scale because you can tell it's you know you know the view from Firelink Shrine where you put these giant walls rising up all around you it felt like it felt like with that so they want to make the full world but they can't and here they're finally allowed okay we can we can take the scale of Lordran and we can just make that we can make the entire thing I was blown away by how there wasn't really anything I ever saw in the distance that I couldn't just walk over to yeah the divine towers are the most impressive one that for me which has always been yeah that's always been a staple of souls and then they like upped it to the nth degree on this one so Dark Souls 1 gets appreciated for the fact that there are some areas where logistically you should be able to see other areas from there and you can see they've attempted to recreate it as a background and it's like that's really cool nice but it's not actually there it hasn't been loaded this game was like nah we're going full chat on this you see this over there you can jump on this the funny part being Dark Souls 2's like it can't because there are places that are inside the current places that are like any fucking sets at all but it's complete in it's incompleteness the first time the first time I went into the underworld I was like oh no is this some Dark Souls 2 shit where I went down into an elevator and somehow there's like a big world with a night sky under here and then I was like whaaat nope it's not that and it quickly turned into one of my favorite areas just as aesthetically it looks so fucking cool down there knockron it's just like like a death city basically basically oh yeah that was a creepy one I thought what was crazy is when I realized that the shooting star after the raton fight actually just blew a crater into the world that revealed an entire other map underground I was like oh okay this is what I'm doing today then oh that was a really we're kind of drifting into talking about how much stuff there is in this game but I started a stream with the intention to just carry on with uh I was talking to Rani and she was like I need a thing and I was like yeah I guess we can go get that thing and I was like it's gonna be at that crash site and I was like yeah okay I went there and I was just like wait and it's just like welcome to a whole city and you're gonna have to spend the whole stream just doing that and it's just like well side quests in this or little tangential moments or even just a small doorway can lead to enormous pieces of content and you're just like whoa and you can just miss it you can just miss huge amounts of content if you don't explore it this game couldn't give less of a fuck if you didn't play all of it it's just like you do whatever the fuck you want and you're like wow hey thanks man if you ever see a coffin by a cliff it's an elevator trust me okay yeah and not probably a way that reminded me of the DLC city and DS2 I was like please don't be that shit just be good remember that place guys do you remember the Toleman? I never played the DLC in Dark Souls 2 Dark Souls 2 didn't deserve that much attention I'm pretty sure I did is that the one where is it the fume night at the end of it no I think it's the Queen of the Poison or whatever whatever she is well so it's the place funnily enough where Fortia found the safety square did you guys know that I'm pretty sure Dark Souls 2 had the highest metacritic score of every from soft game until Elden Ring came out did you know that higher than Dark Souls 1 and 3 and Sekiro let's talk about how games journalists don't know what the fuck they're talking about oh we already know yeah Demon's Souls had an 89 I'm pretty sure Dark Souls had a 90 and then Dark Souls 2 had 91 Dark Souls 2's biggest achievement is being Dark Souls's son no actually Dark Souls had 89 and then Dark Souls 2 got a 91 and then Dark Souls 3 I think got an 89 second game rides Dark Souls coattails hardcore what's Sekiro again we need to not start talking about the horrors of Dark Souls 2 because it will be for so long Sandage Bomber got the one I'm Bloodborne in better than Dark Souls 2 there you go Bloodborne success I think Bloodborne success is kind of interesting because I will I think I could almost entirely knock that down to the time it was released and being a PS4 exclusive at a time when there are hardly any games on PlayStation so I honestly think that Bloodborne got a lot of people who never would have tried Dark Souls 3 to be like okay well this is the new you might be right about that I will also go as far as saying Bloodborne is just like Eldritch plus Victorian like the first half of Brom Stonkman's books I can have some lifecraft books it's just the style of that game so gorgeous but I mean the biggest thing with that game was that it's shields suck so they took it away and that was like there's two shields in it one was pretty much useless, one was a magic shield it's not proof of fucking anything but passivity Moller in genders passivity you were telling us in chat like you know shield play like a gameplay could fuck Malinia up but I was just like I didn't shut up but also good that there's shield builds because that's fine it's not engendering passivity I still kind of wonder though where Bloodborne would be on my hierarchy of which of the from games I like the most if it ran at like a proper frame rate because it still makes me sad that that one stuck it struggling to sometimes hit 30 it would definitely be higher for me because that's one of my major it's honestly it's my biggest problem with it Bloodborne's great but it kind of runs like traffic Amelia Placy release fucking 5 FPS give us a PC release and we'll talk I follow a Twitter account called Bloodborne on PC and just every day it posts as of March 19th 2022 Bloodborne has not been announced for PC every single day it's not okay the frame rate is not okay not okay some guy made like a like a patch for it himself where he made it Lance McDonald yeah it might be him he made it so you could play at 720 instead of 1080 and that unlocked the frame rate or should get the frame rate up to 60 FPS yeah with a PS4 pro running it at 720 and you need to like jailbreak or have like a dev kit PS4 pro in order to do it but I got a mid like there was part of me that was like should I go through what it takes to do this I never did but yeah he shows on gameplay of the Amelia fight when he makes her bleed and it's just like oh my god that looks so good the game honestly will look so much better if the frame rate was stable damn yeah exactly I was about to say it's all like it's not even just about looks it's just that there's there's so much delay in the game and I think that's because of the frame rate that's what I always say to people though like there's kind of a meme on like the geeks and gamers streams that I'm like obsessed with frame rate I'm just like guys you can't make the argument that you care about gameplay and not graphics and then don't care about frame rate I was about to say how can you not be obsessed with frame rate when you're a game big gamer big game of wids oh you can say game of wards and stream I will have at least game of wids oh my god you said it again I will happily sacrifice like graphics for FPS 100% I do too because I remember in fact I remember in Neo when it came out on the PlayStation 4 it had a graphics mode or performance mode yeah and it was great to have the option a lot of the games are coming out now on like PS5 and Xbox have that option performance and like fidelity which is good that that exists yeah it is good I worry though that as this generation plugs along Lord to be like okay well we're releasing the Last of Us part 3 and it needs to look super real we need to see the testosterone leaking out of Abby's cheeks I remember when Uncharted 4 was god damn that was a while ago actually when Uncharted 4 was coming out there was a talk of aiming for 60 FPS across the board and then when the game eventually came out they went 30 FPS per camp like you know single player and then 60 FPS per console and it's just like yeah the reason why that happens is because graphics cells you need them fancy schmancy graphics and you want to know why that is because when you do television commercials like celestial TV yeah that's always going to be exactly so they say okay we need the commercials because the normies don't understand frame rate but they'll see really realistic looking high fidelity graphics and be like oh that must be a good video it's super interesting to me because Call of Duty was pretty consistently going for higher frame rates on consoles back in the day and I don't know that it's a surprise that Call of Duty ended up being so successful perhaps in part because all of the games heavily prioritized running well over graphics that's it I meant terrestrial sorry I just saw Celestial TV I meant terrestrial TV I'm just welcome to God TV it's me God yeah no frame rate is super important but it does feel like as each generation presses on we just kind of give up I remember that at the end of the PS3 360 yet holy crap like utter dog shit on PS3 one of the points I made in the God of War video that I made I made a video just going over every game in the God of War series is that that is a series that seems like it is designed for the generation after the games release because God of War 1 and 2 play better in the PS3 HD version that came out the performance is much more consistent the controls feel more responsive it's just overall better the PS4 remaster and God of War 2018 played a lot better on PS5 and I mean now it's on PC and you can run it at whatever you want but I was like man it's almost seems like they're making this series so that it looks absolutely incredible but they're pushing the hardware that they're releasing it on like a generation ahead of where it needs to be so that's kind of the problem is for the awkward truth is people care about graphics more than performance they do because if they didn't games wouldn't be made this way they would all prioritize performance over graphics they used to be at time when performance did matter more than graphics PlayStation 2 generation the amount of games that ran at like 60 frames per second it would surprise you how many games were running like Jack and Baxter, Ratchet and Clang Devil May Cry a whole bunch of games were going for better performance over graphics something changed with the PS3 through the generation though I don't know what happened, something changed we pushed hardcore for graphics that were like beyond what the hardware was ever capable of oh it's kind of nuts go back and fire up games from the PS3 360 era on a decent PC now if you get the Steam versions or GOG versions of them they look and play incredibly like you're just like wow I don't remember Spec Ops the line being this awesome I thought it was a good story but no it actually looks pretty good in motion if you're running it on hardware that can handle it lots of N64 catalog runs at 60 was something that became very apparent during the 6th yeah that was the 6th generation PS2 N64 only has one 60 FPS game that's what I I actually didn't think that was the case because it was the gen after that that it was like okay we passed like the very beginnings of 3D we're now into like proper 3D and we can try and push that there was a lot of innovations at that time in terms of hiding loading screens and just really pushing performance but then something changed do you guys remember that Killzone 2 pre-rendered that might have been the thing the thing that did it because everyone was like oh my god that looks like real well it was that it was motor storm and the thing is you look at those now it's still kind of beyond what can be achieved in real time um but it's like shit you put that into people's minds that that's what we're going for in terms of graphics well beyond what even the PS4 can do you just end up in this problem where you have to push so hard for graphics that it's just beyond what the console can do when and the reality is that most people are pretty chill with that because if they weren't it wouldn't happen I think people like graphics I don't necessarily think that people are okay with it I think it's just easier for companies to sell their game if it looks amazing you can't really go and say like oh this game plays at 120 FPS perfectly that doesn't really sell as well as showing like a really high graphic picture I think that's still indicative of a bottom up problem that it is easier to convince people to buy a game because of how good it looks without any consideration for how well it plays I would also go as far as saying there are plenty of Bloodborne players that'll like ask a good game and go like whatever the FPS and they'll be like huh what does that matter human beings can only see in 30 FPS well I'm not sure if you guys remember but Miyazaki actually when he was talking about Bloodborne I think he tried to defend the 30 FPS option saying that it was like better for action fuck I don't want to miss I just remember that there was a quote from about Bloodborne Bloodborne framerate let me see if I can find it for Miyazaki well so I guess the thing is it was like a decision that he gets to make ah oh ok so he hopes that you will be kind with Bloodborne's framerate ok that's not the case so obviously whatever we can do within the technical limitations while making sure we deliver the best thing we possibly can for Bloodborne and I understand that there are many voices saying why aren't you running at 60 FPS and I get it but at the same time we're not here to make excuses why we can't do it this is where we are the reality is it's running and it's the best of what can offer for Bloodborne today let me see if I can find the oh here it is so um oh no it wasn't him it was a producer Bloodborne producer said said oh god holy shit so he said there was some miscommunication in particular QA in which the subtle nuance was misunderstood um oh no no no the original story so this is what was said we got there we got there sorry it's just uh the producer said from the beginning quote we weren't targeting 60 FPS because it's not first person shooting it's an action game that was the original quote he doesn't say that I don't know that there was any game except maybe South Park the stick of truth and the fraction but hold that has ever benefited from having a lower frame rate I don't know that it's I don't know what that means for it that it's better that you've got less information coming to you I think you could even probably make the argument the South Park games if they were running at 60 they might actually end up looking better than the show stick of truth is running at 60 it's just the animations aren't yeah right right it's still 60 but they just kept it down to low animations on the animation assets to make it look like the show something that I found really frustrating about the discussion I remember a lot I don't know if it happens anymore because of performance options and stuff but um the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 3 like the PlayStation 2 were more than capable of running games at 60 FPS just at lower graphics that's it like there is no there is there is no console that is going to become incapable of achieving something um you know like post PS2 you can you can achieve a level of fidelity that will give you 60 FPS the question is whether you feel like it whether you want to make that decision for a game it's the priorities of the fidelity targets and I think that Nintendo's first party games for the most part are pretty decent with this the sad exception being Breath of the Wild which like I think has the bloodborne problem of this game is really good but man does it run like crap but when you have things like Mario Kart and Smash Brothers even Mario Odyssey they all run at 60 even though they're on the Switch which is less powerful than my phone so like yeah it's about your priorities Nintendo tends to prioritize a higher frame rate for the sake of like uh gameplay it's super important uh and it is important because when people say that I can't see it it's like well that's not true but even if that was true you can you can feel the difference yeah you're getting twice the amount of visual information to react to the input lag is half as long so no matter what it will make the gameplay better whether you're perceiving it or not and you know I suppose the important point to address would be well why don't we always push for then like 120 but at that point it's just about feasibility most people's tv's only display 60 at 60 hertz for frustrating you know my answer to that would be why indeed let's do it let's go for 120 uh go for 120 I guess it's just because like there's very few films or television shows that are that are more than 24 frames per second so yeah well and I mean for live action that's the it's always the debate because we might get you know for something to watch it doesn't matter because I'm not interacting with it when I watch it it's fine when I'm playing it you definitely feel it like it's definitely something you feel when you play games on PC it's like I want to play on Charmed 4 holy shit also when you see live action footage above 24 frames a second it looks it looks fake like it kind of ends up looking like a reality show it's well I think it's because reality shows do uh do just play it at higher rates and sports often do as well but there's there's just an element that it pulls you out of say like a cinematic experience anyone ever see the the Hobbit in uh in the high frame rate modes in the in the theaters I don't think they ever release them with that but what I found with that is it made any dialogue scene look ridiculous but then when like in the second one when you'd see Smog he'd look really good because it kind of removes a layer of uncanny valley and one layer of uncanny valley between you and live action actors I think makes things look more cinematic and a little more dreamy a little more like a movie but when then you see a computer animated character there and they have that little bit of unrealism to it so if you remove that layer of uncanny valley from that and up the frame rate on it computer animated characters can end up looking more real than they did at a lower frame rate and that's kind of why I think video games tend to look a lot better in um higher frame rate modes than not so there's something interesting in chat someone said I worked on Need for Speed for PlayStation 1 we shipped at 30 fps but we all played Dotoner and loved 60 fps yeah I imagine that a lot of the time the decision is like beyond marketing publishers well yeah broader objectives that need to be achieved like with uh with Battlefield graphics is always a big push with like Naughty Dog games it's always a big push in fact pretty much all of Sony's first party games make a big push for graphics Nintendo I guess has an advantage in that their games are never trying to be cutting edge so like there was no expectation there of delivering um but I mean I do want we will end this tangent shortly but just one more thought I had was I wonder how long it's gonna be before it just becomes increasingly unfeasible for developers to push graphics further you know like I gotta be so costly my yeah my thought is soon because of costs and I think things like the launch of Battlefield 2042 is a good indicator that maybe the ultra AAA super big budget Hollywood blockbuster games are hitting a bit of a ceiling as far as how much money they're costing versus how much they're making back because the thing is is that we can do a lot better with like video game graphics are not close to what you can achieve with like pre-rendered CGI stuff but it's not about that it's a matter of feasibility how many people do you need to make all of this stuff how long is it gonna take yeah who knows sorry that was a long tangent well that's just alien to this show long tangent bad I suppose can we round off the open will discussion if that's possible it's it is definitely jam packed with shit to do and not in the annoying sense where you gotta do time trial races or collect flags collect all that stupid like busy work that's clearly in there to break your experience part it's like now the game is still grounded in the story and the world and everything like that and all of the side paths usually lead to sweet loot or a boss fight or both and it's just kind of fun to find all the cool shit that you can use as a tangible reward later for all kinds of crazy experiences so rather than just you know concept art so it's good as an open world game I like it it's refreshing are we just an open world or open world versus the the prior the approach they've had in their other games which funnily enough there are differences in each of the souls games for how they've done it but this one feels like the broadest departure compared to the rest well if you had to make me choose between the two I would go with the older format to be honest with you like I like this open world but not more than like the Dark Souls 3 type of world because one thing that I know we've discussed a bit before is that if you know the game like you know where things are and where to find them or you know you have access to Google you can get super empowered immediately as you start your playthrough I think about the video I made like a 30 minute video on how to become uber powerful before the first boss or something I made a video on gaming with geeks showing people how to from the tutorial like from once you exit into Limgrave how to get the sword of night in flame and go to a place where you could level yourself up to the stats to use it within 90 minutes less than two hours you can have what was at least one of the most powerful weapons in the game I actually got it for x-ray girl, my wife she's never played a from soft game before and still summons me during boss fights but we have a good time because in the older games the areas were usually you know blocked off by behind bosses and stuff so you couldn't really go and get whatever weapon you wanted and then go on farm or find the upgrade materials that you needed the same way you can in elder ring because again like getting a really OP upgrade material was usually tied to being behind a pretty strong boss most of the time so it's easier to get overpowered in this game than it is in the other ones I think my piece actually the easiest to get powerful as a mage early on because you can just go to not to Caleb to the rotten swamp which I think you can go to almost immediately if you just right there and you can get to meteorite staff which is super powerful you can't upgrade that thing but it's already powerful and basically right next to it is the rock fling spell which is arguably the best spell in the game so if you ask me because Stagger is crazy it's got a lot of damage incredible range from what I saw you play through that that seemed like the move that thing is just a Stagger machine like dragons, 3d cast Stagger no problem you can get that pretty early on but yeah later on you want something else obviously but for like early to early late game even you can use that thing no problem because that incredible sorcery scaling like over 200 I think if I'm not mistaken so it's like incredibly good so I feel as though the open world is really neat in that I can run around anywhere and basically be entertained with whatever I'm finding and get a good sense of oh I shouldn't be here yet or hey this seems like kind of a place I should be however I think this is where I'm going with this conversation has the effect of allowing me to snowball through the entire game we mentioned this a couple of times I just want to be more specific with this basically like you can build a momentum and that is if you are like over leveled for let's say Murgit kill him then his souls push you up oh echoes no fuck roots the juice pushes you you're already too much for him and it pushes you past that and then everything in the area following him you're just going to make it through with mostly not dying and that means you basically eat everything like rune wise and that just can keep going and going and going to the point where as Theo was describing I do think that that's more of a consequence of having it be open world sometimes you can spend some time running around and then you go back to playing like dark souls designed dungeons or castles playing in them meanwhile and dark souls one seems to me to be just the best example of this like it feels so much more handcrafted to the point where that as a problem is mitigated to a significant degree you can still cause it to happen but it seems much less likely to happen you kind of have to really push through they very they do a really good job of controlling what you have access to and when is the big thing that makes it distinct not to mention when it's much more crafted experience like that it feels like a lot of the places feel more special in terms of like enemy design, aesthetic and bosses especially because I feel like this game having as many bosses as it was was like let the experience down later they started to become like lollipops you go through an area and you're like here's your boss, what is it? it's this guy, you remember him? I just had that one I don't want to I can't relate my experience to your guys so I don't want to spend too long on it but that was basically my experience of interacting with the open world was I'd see a path that I have a narrative reason to go down and then I'd feel a compulsion to just run off in some other direction because I don't know maybe there's stuff that way and I'd stumble into catacombs or ruins full of haphazardly placed enemies that were like easy to get past and had no real thought into how they were positioned relative to one another then maybe I'd go down through an inspired level design to find a boss that's terrible and dies in like two or three hits and that was that was all of it that was everything I did it seems like that is kind of the story with the catacombs and stuff but I think you actually hit the nail on the head earlier, Theo, when you compared them to the chalice dungeons from Bloodborne that's basically what a lot of the catacombs are I guess they're more of a design though sorry because the chalice dungeons were procedural right, like they weren't and they were tile based so it looked like a lot of swappables kept showing up I was actually saying this Theo the other day but it felt like the catacombs were procedurally generated and then taken by the dev to look at and be like this is good enough or we need to move this here and this here otherwise it's broken I guess to round off from my perspective it just I never felt like my time was being respected unless I was doing critical path content or something constructed in that way and then it felt like I was just playing Dark Souls 3 which is level design level wise worse than Dark Souls 1 and I get sad again I think it's honestly hard for them to make strong level design when you've got this much game eventually and it does seem like places were designed and then they were placed in the big map that some guy was working on with some other people and it's like alright we got Stormvale is done, it's like alright put it here, that should probably work out just fine and it's like that really works that's great, everything's like I've done my castle what one's yours, it's like Castle Wombo and you're like oh fuck I need to change it at 9 and it's like okay there it goes alright what are we going to put in this some fucking Ulcerage Respirator in there another one I guess I'd want to be sympathetic in that with this much space to cover having like rigorously designed content throughout all of it that is rewarding to engage with as opposed to gives you rewards is like that's an incredibly difficult thing to do but that's why I think the ambition of filling all of that space might be misguided in the first place I don't know so you're kind of with me in the sense that you think the game would benefit from being a little smaller either smaller or unironically emptier actually that might be kind of what I was going to bring up is that I I think that if you focus in on stuff like the catacombs and mines and the things that seem similar to each other it's easy to forget that a lot of the stuff like just the way the land and the mountains and the rocks and stuff are formed where there's just like little structures or bombed out villages or not bombed out but you know like dragon burnt or whatever and I actually think that the just outside in the game is is pretty cool a lot of the times and there is some interesting stuff to engage in outside as opposed to like this just open space until I find my next dungeon to go into you know maybe me being too poisoned against the game but I never felt the same degree of atmosphere and atmospheric storytelling that Dark Souls was able to pull off where the way the place looks and I guess an easy comparison is Blight Town Blight Town that area is like that area is a master class in visual storytelling but the enormous huge structures that have this shanty town built around them which then creates a really engaging level in and of itself I never really never really got that in this game except maybe with Narkron maybe some of the legacy dungeons but even then they're just ah, it was missing something it felt I don't know how to put it I think it's a super controversial thing to say but you know imagine take half of the dungeons out of this game and use that time to be spent on refining the current ones in older games so for example I really enjoyed the capital because that felt like you got all those shortcuts and it was like one of the only places where it's like oh man I could really use like a grace right now because I'm running out of resources I need a safe spot or a shortcut please oh yeah Caleb does quite well in terms of visual storytelling as well intel stuff happened there it was like a scarred landscape basically yeah the rest of the world I found really I don't want to use the word holo because I sound like a fucking video essayist I think yeah someone was just highlighting as well you might encounter a problem if you start emptying the world in that some of these caves are literally very tiny caves at the side of a mountain very easy to miss as openings to dungeons and then it's like so wait are we saying we should implement some kind of system that's like you know I've got the dungeon horn when I blow it it takes me to any dungeon I haven't been to it's like a dungeon or the thing I it's not the same kind of experience at all so the comparison isn't fully apt but I guess just as a display that the sort of thing is possible I want to point at shadow of the colossus oh yeah that is a very empty open world in a sense yeah that's not a criticism that game is not full of stuff it doesn't need to be full of stuff to do what it's trying to do with its space and I don't know that Elden Ring needs to be full of stuff for its space to have the effect that it needs I feel like they should have just had less space honestly like I like the amount of stuff going on but maybe they should have done like less space I'm hesitant to say that because they use the scale to good effect you know well yeah sure but maybe just lessen the scale a little bit and you'd still have a good game sure but I'm trying to piece together what they were trying to do I guess and how I think would be a better way of representing what they were aiming for of course this is me not being cynical and saying they wanted to make an open world game because that shit sells like hotcakes this dude sounds like this isn't this this is Theo who was on EFAP jeez who's this dude in me this dude feels like he just wants Dark Souls ones like well I am mad it's not Dark Souls actually yes you're right I was gonna say if anyone pushed back on that I'd be like well I mean wouldn't that make sense if you thought Dark Souls one was superior not just superior I think it is something special in and of its own right I think that there is a lot about Dark Souls one that makes it good outside of it just being hard action game or whatever and I think that all of that has been lost as fromsoft have gone forward and that's why I'm annoyed yeah I think it's impossible not to compare these games to their predecessors because it's all being built on itself and they're making decisions to change certain ideas when I think all of us can agree there are some ideas like ooh you shouldn't have changed that one that one was a neat one the easy one is why'd they change the healing system again they change it every single time and they'll never be as good as Dark Souls one for a quick I don't mind the healing system so Dark Souls well yeah let's just do a quick version right Dark Souls one's healing system was we're going to build these landscapes and enemies based around the fact that we assume everyone's pretty much going to have 5 but they might have 10 estus if they sacrifice some humanities and then the pro players will have unlocked 20 to that point you know it's nothing to worry about that's just something they're using to benefit themselves so most places will be balanced around the fact that you can make a certain amount of mistakes which are tied to how much you can heal that's how Dark Souls one ran it was really fucking cool really simple and it just creates a very balanced way of dictating difficulty DS2 fucked everything it gave you loads of health it has no idea what it's doing it's a spazzing out game it's just like all health lead Dark Souls 3 was like we're kind of going with a different idea now we're going to give you you can find resources in the world that can increase the amount you get and to the point where I'm pretty sure most people who played Dark Souls up to that point were like man this is a lot of health you're giving me a lot of health Bloodborne has his own mistakes but there's things I like and things I don't like about that health system the fact that having to farm it is a big problem yeah that should have just been removed there's just no reason for that to be there why is it a minimum amount I don't understand exactly or even past a certain point like if they say okay if you get past Vick or Emilia you fill up to 20 blood vials after every rest oh yeah yeah and a big thing as well is the vials in that game they just get upgraded automatically if you level health by the nature of the fact that their percentage heals which I don't even know that they recognized how significant that is in terms of changing how difficult the game is I don't know because in this game I remember I got a lot of flasks at one point but I hadn't gone past plus six and I realized like man it takes like four of these to heal my health out of full when it got absurd and I was just like yeah I need to actually get the quality upgrades sort of Bloodborne doesn't have that problem even at max quality I'm still using two flasks to heal from almost dead which I think is a little on the strange side I don't know if that's okay that might be okay because of the amount of flasks you have this is the thing maybe but I guess if you're also using magic then like your those same charges are going towards your mana also true yeah so this game it's like a variation on DS3's systems so that's the quick vision do you want to open with what you hate about it Theo presumably about what specifically? healing healing I it's hard to start really because it just lets you get so overpowered and there's no reason for it to ever have changed from how it was in Dark Souls 1 like by the end of this game you end up with it's not as bad as DS3 so I guess credit there but you end up with such an insane estus flask by the end of these last few games it's much easier to just trade and steam roll your way through whatever challenging endgame content there is unless it has something like life steal going on which is interesting right because we combo that up with the other things we've highlighted about the lack of balance so if my mimic for any reason should not be able to tank something or if it dies I'm like well I've still got all of this so I should be alright like I remember I did actually it was mostly a subconscious thing but I did have to handicap myself a bit when fighting Malakith so I didn't just blast him because I had so much damage and so much healing by that point in the game because I had snowballed and gotten overpowered and I had a well upgraded estus flask um yeah and this one's just a little bit complicated I suppose um the criticism is coming in with balance but I know a lot of people would just be like isn't this going to depend on how good you are pretty much yeah yeah it is every balance factor in a from game can be chalked up to well if you're good enough you don't need to worry about that my criticism of the ashes is that you don't even need to fucking swing your sword sometimes so at that point at least with healing it's like alright but what if you're really bad it's just like well I guess that just comes into talking about the challenging nature of the games as a whole right like if you can you can only land one hit per 10 hours if you have 10 trillion estus flask I guess you can make it but nobody would play that game like if that was the if that was the parameters of it it's like so what's the right decision then it's like well we know that DS2 is definitely not the fucking way 100 heals plus your estus plus all those other items you can find it's like that is a fucking bloated mess so definitely not that I just like the reference to the thing after my second playthrough where I just go all the healing items in my inventory can you never get past using lifegems because you restock them with leftover souls yeah it's so easy it's not even a risk reward or offset with you know you spend it on your levels or your health you know it's none of that sorry anyway but um yeah I I think the healing is probably a bit much in this game but it's lower down on my list of complaints I would say how do we put in the reallocation of flasks in this regard because of my mage build I had to sacrifice a bunch of my health for fp that's that's an opinion I've been cooking and I wonder if fp is the way to go or if the memory system yeah because I really shouldn't be allocating them that way maybe it should be that health estus and then pots for restoring mana or just their own things yeah it seems like an interesting trade off at one like at first glance but then you realise that certain builds just use their fp more there's almost this implication that melee builds need more health restore because that's just the nature of what we expect is going to happen with our players I guess which is like okay I guess so I don't know what if they just made it so that there were separate there were separate charges for each one so you didn't really have to worry about oh man like I have four charges for my healing and four charges for my fp why I think putting it on the player to decide the allocation makes it trickier but if they just made it so that the golden seeds could then be invested to add an additional charge and that's when you had to made the decision as opposed to being at your point of grace and deciding for any given encounter okay I'm going to lean more towards healing or lean more towards recovering mana or just make the mana something that slowly recharges so that's that's why I wonder about going back to the memory system because something I ran into in my first playthrough where I was using magic I wasn't using really ranged magic I was just using the carry and spells that give you basically extra sword move sets in your offhand because I found that a lot of fun to pair with my katana by the way the magic in this game is pretty cool yeah I like my magic play through the concern I ran into later on was I had this one really good spell called a doula's moonblade and it did a shit fucking zillion damage compared to anything else I could do with my fp when you close enough it hits twice yeah you fire upwards to an ergery avatar or something and it hits him like three times and does a 4k damage so the reason that's a problem to me is I start the thought started occurring to me why do I spend my fp on anything else and I think that's problem I don't know if that's necessarily a balance problem inherently with the things because the bigger spells should have the more powerful effect right but it should also conversely cost well I would probably argue that you need to be close for this and normally as a major pretty squishy so there's like a risk reward kind of deal because I tended to not use that one because I had to get close and then I got killed so I opted for the rock spell but then I had the problem you just said with the rock spell because the rock fling is just so fucking good I just that that just became my main mainstay for most of the things and I didn't really run into that because I wasn't so much a mage character I was just using magic my main go to was still I'm using moon veil I'm running at people and I'm hitting them with a weapon because I just went full mage on my first playthrough yeah fair enough which was weird to me because normally first play for me as always but this was like what I'm gonna mix it up this time yeah same I got tempted to try out the magic because I'd heard from people it was a bit cooler in this game and I was happy to see they were right I enjoyed playing the magic but yeah I was very concerned towards the end of my playthrough that all of my FP probably should just go to moon veil weapon R2s or to a doula's moonblade because carrying slices nice and all but it doesn't its benefits don't do anything for me in PvE really because properties aren't real so funny about that to me is like oh yes I wouldn't want to spend my FP on an ash and someone could be like ah so there is a balance there isn't there and be like well you know are there any that cost health it's like oh just one which one is that the best one the best one in the game ah I don't know did you get a flask charge I gave you infinite magic for 10 seconds I did get that one it was very helpful combined with the kamehameha spell while I was fighting millenia because that gave me a nice little push for getting a bunch of health off of her I needed that for the rest of summoning throughout the game so I respected and lost all my FP and I was just like well I'll just use that every time I summon yeah you can do some some crazy combo with the azure combat spell and the FP thingy it's like damn I guess to round out the thought that's the thing that makes me wonder if maybe the memory system would be better so that my usage of a doula moonblade is not infringing on my usage of carrying slicer hmm in the same vein just balancing it seems like mages are going to be more likely to think that the healing system is pretty fair yeah while mealy builds will just be like I didn't even allocate one I didn't need it maybe depends on what you're building I kept myself at one mana flask the entire way through and I actually kind of balanced out towards the end game because my flask wasn't too overpowered because I stopped exploring so I wasn't just able to fully face tank my way through everything I ran into and I was having to double chug for a lot of attacks um we kind of partially covered it so I was thinking of just rounding it out as well through having talked about other things but I had a subject of will design but I guess that would entail like what do you think of the world of and I was about to name it and I don't even know what the name of it is what is the world of the land oh there you go what do you think of the lands between visually fucking great I'm just looking around right now and it's like I will screenshot that and put that on my desktop and when I look the other direction yeah I will put that on my desktop too visually some zones great some zones meh I guess design wise I might lean towards not so great any map with falling snow is like super pretty and then I realize any map with falling snow is also where the design of enemies fall apart it's kind of seems to me like every map that has snow falling in it usually you can expect to have enemies in like with a lot of health are that are in clumps or they range attack you from all directions I hated the parts of that area that are in blizzards I fucking hate that shit yeah sorry in a game a small drop can kill me I need to not have that happening okay I so nearly had a moment where I was like ah the game is doing something kind of neat when you know the fog swept in and then Borealis the ice dragon showed up and then the ice dragon called the freezing fog landed shouted at me and the fog went away and it was just a normal dragon fight yeah same thoughts I did it offline and I was like oh so the blizzards being caused by this no he died inside dude I was so ready for the game to give me something kind of interesting and then it didn't it backpedaled out chicken doubt one of the dragons used to sword on me that was in terms of world design any sense of well interconnectedness is kind of a rough one to talk about considering you know the zones are so huge and they're just open fields a lot of time as opposed to anything else you can celebrate on that I completely disregard this even talking about it because it's kind of pointless in the open world as well it is all available to walk to but yeah with that I'm more focused on the small areas like the capital or ODL things that I can't think the names of was like oh yeah those are kind of neat can we have more of those on the map like more of those or no but yeah I would like to have more of those well dark soulsy areas where you go around get your little shortcuts and stuff and you have like the hellic tree area which you can just completely miss on your play through which is a huge area which has that really big that is a really interesting element of this like one of the biggest payoffs for me and I'm assuming similar for you guys was the connecting filing shrine to be the chapel undead parish when you first come fucking down that elevator dude that's why that's part why I adore that game so much what a way to implement a payoff it's a mechanical understanding of how the world reconnects to itself because it's all there it's not nonsense levels that just teleport you like I said another dump it's like holy shit I'm back home and now I can get to the latest place I was at directly from my home that's so fucking cool and also I can get all these healing things down there because this is about a fault 10 this is great and you connect all these different shortcuts in all different areas because like it's been compared to a flower dark souls one where as you progress through the game the shortcuts are longer and the areas connect to fewer places but that initial set because the game is small it's like the perfect size to be able to do those sorts of payoffs doesn't a lot in this game there's like five times I was like oh that's yeah that's a shortcut okay and the shortcuts are the dark souls three shortcuts they exist for the sake of your convenience and to get you to where you want to go after you've done a zone which is fine it's okay I guess but it feels like that one in dark souls one and there's a couple of them were almost crafted for that moment of realizing that and it's just like oh yeah it will design the world in this game feels uh I'm gonna say linear because you start in limb grave you can go to Caleb can probably don't uh but a lead being the main exception then it's you know a path up to Learnea Learnea doesn't connect to Caleb uh then Learnea takes you to Altus and Learnea takes you to Altus and then Altus takes you to mountaintops and yeah then you're in the endgame you teleport to Landel again and do the final boss with Gale there off to the left you could probably argue the weeping peninsula is the actual beginner area is the misbegotten warrior, misbegotten warrior Leon and whatever his name is he's a lot easier than Margit is the boss of um keep forgetting the name of that castle something about that me um I'm not sure how I feel about that cooling it linear as a result of that yeah I don't either it's funny too because you just mentioned you can go to Caleb but it's like a big path it's like well yeah there's a little chest in the rat cave that'll bring you straight there whether you like it or not sure but then you go back you could once you get out of that cave you go right away I agree it's a good moment though my concern is it's in the way the world is built I mean the physical geographic masses is none of them really connect to each other other than to one other which is informed by the game's progression generally I just got a notification that says Disney's laying the perfect groundwork for its buffy reboot no they just not go away but you that hits particularly close to hope for you Mahler it's this disgusting rat creature that's poking its tendrils into all these nice things in our nice room of nice things get out it's just like hasn't just even gone through enough let him rest they're coming for it it's a stupid creature okay wish we go next um graphics? very pretty tying into how many locations in the world that I thought were pretty damn mckiesh maxi I think these graphics are more than acceptable and that the style makes up for any shortcomings for the most part in the graphics I don't have a huge amount of say I think I'll pass this over to anybody else who has more stuff to say there's no peach fuzz on millenius cheek so 2 out of 10 push ya man I'm kidding I think it's a beautiful game but it's beautiful because of its art direction and I think that that tends to tends to be the kind of good looking video game that sticks around longer than oh my god this is so awesome looking for this current point in history that's just for me just randomly standing around like just now this is like god damn this looks great yeah I mean this is the thing I've got I don't know man there's a lot of gorgeousness in this game yeah lots of little details I mean blight's dick looks beautiful oh nobody else is okay no no okay um yeah I like how it looks a lot I think we're all good yeah I mean I don't have anything to say really I'm not supposed to say it's a pretty ass game I mean I guess this people say the graphics are bad maybe I don't know I was thinking in my head like what do things people say about this like I don't think there's many folks saying the graphics are very good right that's not really the people who are saying the graphics are bad tend to be the community at least at what I've seen on twitter and facebook of playstation fanboys who are upset that this game is kind of stolen a bit of horizon forbidden west thunder the reference I was making with the peach fuzz cause I was there I was lost yeah sorry about that well yeah I just love the meme of the guy being like what is she a guy or something like that cause it's a beard and it's like oh my god dude what not exactly it but when I'm playing an open world action game the last thing I'm thinking it was like well can I see the peach fuzz on my character's cheeks or not cause if not terrible big poop well you know what let's go to crafting it shouldn't take too long oh crafting oh really you'd be forgiven my take will be I'd be a fan of the idea that you collect these little cookbooks and then you would further unlock a lot of little things you can take advantage of them so thus exploring gives you more access to more things to do with I didn't fucking craft anything and to be honest with you there was a couple things I was looking to craft throughout the whole game and I never seemed to pick up the right fucking cookbooks and I to be honest I think that they should have been default stuff like slow down or cure poison just like if you want to put that in a fucking book and I miss that book dude not cool I think it's pretty damaging it seems to expect that you have found certain cookbooks in terms of your related cure certain things I was thinking is this a solution to make it so that the cookbook pages don't have definitive locations instead they're all like they all have the same location in that all of them are everywhere but you pick the first one up wherever it may be and it'll be page one and then whenever you pick up the next one it'll be page two and then they can craft it so that the things that you're going to desperately need they're the first couple things you pick up by the time you get to page 100 you unlock something that's pretty fucking cool let's say is that better or worse because I know people like to have locations so that they can just pick up the direct one they need as long as you lose that but um I don't know man the fact that they had a crafting system it all surprised me and then the fact that I realized halfway through was like I'm not using that ever what the hell it just worked a lot of useful shit crafting is a reward for exploring craft rewarding you with what you need you need so much to make most things too like and you honestly to make arrows which is should be a pretty simple thing to craft you have to be killing just the NPC animals that aren't enemies like you have to be taking out like sheep and stuff to get them on firepapers I can't put on my weapon because it's magic oh my god Bloodborne wins for this one just having the cost insight insight can be valuable for other things you can store insight boosts and get them from bosses and then you just stock up on firepapers and boltpapers and uh I love you Bloodborne some stuff you're a very cool game I love you Bloodborne for everything except your frame rate I love you Bloodborne can you please come to PCI I would love you forever you'll find a home here seriously we all will I think it does actually get damaging though when the game is expecting or seems to be expecting you to have ways to deal with certain things either through crafting or through spells like the lake of rot being my main example it's it's a big lake of scarlet rot that does more damage than the normal scarlet rot it seems to me that that zone is designed expecting that you will have either a shitload of the boluses that cure it or the ability to make them that's what I realized I don't have those ones I had all of them except that one I had neither of those things I had I had a faith spell that cured rotten poison so it was like okay easy okay easy ooh someone said this is the worst e-fap they've ever heard at least we've got it out of the way now oh it's one well it goes up from here it's just good to know we got the one that's the worst like we don't it always feels like there is no clear identifiable metric by which we can judge how good these episodes are people would just say it's the worst one if they disagree with the spell now not to say that we've never been wrong but you got to qualify it a little bit so who said that and specifically what is wrong with this episode the answer is the cyborg guy just keep it to yourself I'm assuming it's because of the fact that we're making fun of the crafting system and they don't like that well I mean it's not a great crafting system I haven't seen anyone complimenting the crafting system I'm surprised this is a bit hard for people to take most people don't acknowledge this that's the fun part of this episode my dude I'm all for it anyone saying that it's the worst efep has not seen the debates the debates are loved what do you mean I guess on the note of the cook books if I might make a comparison real quick notice how in Dark Souls 1 you can very easily end up just stumbling into dark root garden thinking this is the next zone I'm in and you get a lot of these weird purple moss clump things there that might be helpful in a future zone notice how this is nowhere present in Elden Ring's design because they have this cookbook I think and they expect that you'll probably just find that or you'll have the flame cleanse me spell neither of which is necessarily the most likely thing ever because it's an item in an open world it's a single item in a location I think we shouldn't really underestimate how easy a single item out in the open world's overworld is to miss you just run past that shit easily this place is giant so the game is not as good making sure you have the things necessary to handle where you're going next as Dark Souls 1 was which is a side effect of the open world stuff that's also that's also kind of what makes it so that you'll often have to outpace status anomalies with just over healing them like oh I got bleed damage okay I guess I'm using two flasks now okay it looks like Scarlet Rod I remember every four seconds to drink a flask and it kind of sucks for me every trip through the lake of wrought was a one-way trip Thunder said I crafted mainly food for Torrent stuff that gets rid of Scarlet Raw and I think bone darts and stuff oh yeah I only made horse food that's all I made I made it tried it out decided fuck it it's just awesome when I give a shit about and you be like what do you mean it's like well one time the few times I can give it to Torrent is when I'm exploring for a long while and Torrent's taking some damage that I can heal five berries down his throat or just be like no just die and I'll resurrect you with an estus just die and maybe we could transition it's talking about the horse now you can 150 hours in this game and I'm asking this question you can heal Torrent you can make horse food you can like respawn him with an estus I didn't know there was another option for healer Torrent also gets health back when you chuck estus on horseback oh okay but there are these berries that you can craft with extremely common flowers and then like it's really easy to make and then I just bound them to my pouch up and then that was it I never knew that I know it's a thing but I never used it because I just I tried to use it and just gave up I was like I don't need to it's fine I crafted it and I was like wow I can just craft whatever papers I need and then I never used them yeah I guess it is why is it grease in this game it has changed all the names dude this is fucking me it frees here he would appreciate it but some of you may I don't know if you know this reference doxels players especially when they're introduced to this a lot of the time you're like oh man this is a good item should I use it here it's like well no if I use it here I might not be able to use it later and you eventually just hoard everything and end the game with 500 of them and yeah like they had the idea of you you've collected all these different greases and you still just don't want to use them it's just like what if I need them for a later fight and then they had Grantskeeper Willie from Simpsons you say you use your grease for the first time it just shows him saying my retirement grease oh no I can't remember what he says grease bad bits I think oh what was it when he started punching him it's like oh that really hurts it's like oh it's okay I'll strangle you for a while yeah the point being there were things to hold precious a little bit because for me at least I was like I might have so few materials to be able to make a lot of them I should be careful with them yeah make sure you hold on to that retirement grease you know the future is certain never use an elixir in a Final Fantasy game unless it's the final boss see it's everything it's so useful ammo at the end of a Resident Evil game too I tried to understand the system and I tried to use it but I just found I slipped into not caring that I could even craft at all I just poorly integrated I want to say not gonna push back on that I'm not gonna do it not enormously poorly it's just kind of esoteric and pointless so let's talk about Tarn yeah okay how did you like to double jump so I don't know if this is like an alien experience for a lot of people but if you watch my play through when I discover that I can double jump on the horse I'm like laughing my ass off this is stupid as shit what in the world am I fucking doing this is my horse why can it double jump I have to like pass this out a little for people I'm like I don't know man it just seems out of the fucking blue that my horse can double jump that was so funny to me it feels like a Mario game what's happening do you have a problem with double jump as a thing for a horsey I think it's absurd what about a lot of video games in general stupid that the double jump can't be used in a gate fall damage though oh yeah I remember I was playing and I saw a clip and I'm like I want to go down there I'll just jump with the double jump for my horsey and then we go flat it's a mechanic it's straightforward it functions you know why it's there I just thought it was hilarious and I think I'd find it as hilarious as your character being able to double jump it just doesn't come into my realm of how this world works at all and there's a couple of things that I like that in Dark Souls and I honestly think of them as just really funny moments like the big fat guy doing his big roll that's so like what that's the thing that he does what you're like no yeah fine okay there's just some things here and there he's doing his little roll his rolls are really funny as well big Dark Souls rolls he's like that's good even like ripping someone's own head off and pulling a sword out of his mouth I was like what are we what makes sense yeah the people would be like there are magic things in this game I'm like yeah I know you just think that this is silly magic everyone would have a different line for this I think the horse double jump it just took me off guard completely I thought it was hilarious I could grumble about you know grounded aesthetic or whatever but that's like long gone so this is the thing if someone was like so you wouldn't have it I'm just saying it was funny for me that's all mechanically it worked relatively well the problem I have with the horse is the something that's a feature which is it's awkward control it's supposed to have awkward control it's a horse and it's just like yeah but like you demand a lot of platforming from me on my horse yeah maybe if you're gonna make it control weirdly there's a good level of bosses that kind of ask you to hop on the horse and fighting on the horse is a pain in the ass considering a little torchman can just kind of stick the fucking torch to the horse's nose and the horse loads dude it doesn't help with the sound effects it's like okay okay okay yeah I get it your horse exploded is he dead? No! he's fine just hop back on I'd question the idea there's a lot of bosses that like mandate horse usage what would you be I guess which ones I don't feel any mandated it but several may have been made with that in mind I imagine a lot were but I found pretty much everything that didn't force the idea to use the horse was a lot easier to fight on foot and a lot less clumsy by the way on screen right now the guy on screen right now you're about to see a good crucible man about to fly off the yeah yeah yeah go go go I'm so jealous I tried to make those guys do that so many times and never worked see you at the party Richter a little bit a little bit yeah nice what were we talking about? the horse not fun horse combat is it's not the worst horse combat I've played but unfortunately it's horse combat so I feel like it's designed deliberately to have a level of awkwardness to offset the efficiency of speed and I'm just like yeah I just it's not that fun though all that means you're doing is I'm just not going to interact with enemies I run past at all pretty much all you do a pass hit pass hit pass hit so it's much more straight forward instead of awkwardly shlubbling around and trying to get and then someone with a torch goes god that shit was in Bloodborne too fucking torch people I hate them away away away there was a Twitter post the other day that was like Bloodborne was very radical in having you fight such a varied amount of bosses including like anything from eldritch monsters to rats to English people truly bold truly bold most fearsome enemy type English people hoodlums disgusting what else can you be what can be said about the horse the horse kind of fucks any idea of encounter design in the open world but I don't know if there ever was an idea of encounter design enemies are just sort of around and you can deal with them if you want I guess it does I'm bombed that you can't get other mounts yeah I guess yeah or edit some appearance you think that'll be a little bonus but something like that like that big ass what's that that there's this big ass like line with an eye patch on I thought that'd be a riding mount on the cover there's like the way the arts are lying in stone veil I guess so I thought that was a mount on the cover I'm like yeah I want to unlock that mount oh it's awesome nope I was just going to mention yeah and I think that does take away from the game a little bit when it's like you're running around just goes welcome great dragon argon ore of filibond and then it's fucking lightning strikes I always disappeared I ran past him yeah I'm good whatever it's a little awkward and it's like what's the solution to that and I'm like I don't know there's a bunch of fortifications here leading up to stone veil or leading up to castle morn or whatever leading up to red main castle I am it's going to be a challenge now I'm just going to ride past whatever and you know a lot of great enemy even boss fights like one of the magma worms is one that's in the open world this is more than one actually and like I remember seeing it when I was playing offline I was like oh shit I should probably kill that online so like he had his grand entrance lava spewed everywhere he's like duh duh duh music goodbye and yeah I'm not sure how they can account for that but it can create a bit of an awkward experience that could affect the overall immersion nice they put the they put the academy key like behind a dragon you're like I shouldn't fight the dragons like nah actually you just go on top and just grab the key and fuck off I think I did that I thought about second play first like oh I'm here now I might as well grab the key real quick I'm just not fond of fighting dragons it's like the dragons in this game suck fucking awful I liked fighting that one is that a hot take no I think mine is the hot take for liking fighting the dragons because I'm the only one who seemed to enjoy it I just used a massive sword that might like the dragons I don't know I didn't find them particularly if you don't like the dragons and lose any faith I might have had left in them oh my god I mean like aside from I guess a monster hunter game I can't think of a lot of games where we're fighting dragons and Skyrim it's pretty much just like okay so use a bow and just constantly shoot arrows at it and that's it yeah I think I'll say that Wyvern's chat they are fucking dragon in their name like well yeah that's just gonna I remember fighting my child about this before to be fair I haven't played dragons dogma I see a bunch of people saying dragons in dogma I don't know why but everyone feels the need to definitively be like make sure you don't call the dragon a wyvern a wyvern a dragon I'm just sitting here like look flying dragon grail what is what is meant to be the difference between so a wyvern has two legs they're both they're both winged like reptiles that breathe fire and so you're realizing for any of the the substance of what we're talking about the encounters with those creatures that's what matters but there's people getting hung up on whether or not it's the correct fucking labeling I don't I don't know why is it because I'm a legendary dragon so sounds like dragon well according to wikipedia don't a lot of the dragons I guess do they get on all fours or I guess they have legs and and hands don't they I'm not sure if I doesn't matter the difference is present I'm just waiting for the part where it's like can we go back to what we were talking about whether or not they're called fucking dragons they're slow and clumsy and they don't really do anything and focus is just out pretty much because of the way they fly around the camera just spins around being like I don't know what are you looking at I found that focusing on its legs helped target my sword and just switching the leg if they were gonna do that stomp strike do you remember coming from insane or not when you get to Ludwig's second phase and you focus on him the camera like goes out further than normal yes that's a thing I fucking wish they did more effort it's like that's evidence right there that they are aware that focus can get fucked sometimes and then they were like let's try and account for that this time it's like let's not most of the time it's like hey count for it more every game must be three steps forward two steps back, five to the side another one back, maybe two more forward because they cannot consistently learn lessons it's really fucking weird what's that one Ubisoft Melee based PvP game for Honor was it for Honor they did, I loved how the camera would phase into the world rather than have the camera ram into it and fuck up it phased into the world but you can still see your character so even if you are backed against the wall you can see your character perfectly I really wish that fromsoft would eventually do that I'm reminded of a fun instance of a bad camera in this game where you guys know the big gargoyle outside of the beast deal sanctuary yes, the boss I was fighting him just a couple of days ago and he fought on the stairs which is of course horrible, I hate it when he fights on the stairs enemies in these games still don't know how to handle elevation but more importantly sometimes when I was like next to him on the stairs my camera would clip back to the staircase to my side but there was foliage on it so the foliage would just obscure my entire screen so I couldn't see anything because for some reason that stuff needs to be able to persist in front of the camera that was really good there are ways around these things and Fromm just refused to do anything about it especially considering they've shown evidence that they're interested in doing something about it sometimes because that Ludwig's second phase is so good and it would be much worse if not for that zoom out of the camera and his music is fucking the best in the game there's a lot of better action games that know that the camera needs to do some work on its own to be able to see what the fuck is happening and so you're not wrestling with it we just say then we just did the camera segment it's the same fucking thing in all of the games it's a problem but it's also fine you know what I mean it's fine it bugs me when people complain about camera too much in reference to the idea as though this is the only one that has this problem it's like a lot of games have this problem camera's tough to nail it I honestly think it's a way bigger problem than God of War like the newest one I just recently played it on the highest difficulty and especially on that difficulty not knowing that there's an enemy behind you about to attack is a serious problem to the point that the target focus is essentially useless at that difficulty mode you need to be spinning the camera around tiny little arrows but like on give me God of War difficulty they attack so fast and hit so hard that you can't really rely on that so what you have to end up doing is kind of kiting yourself into a corner and then being able to see all the enemies that are currently attacking you and I mean I got through the game but it was a constant struggle against the camera and I find that the field of view in the from software games tends to be more comfortable than that at the very least like I said most of the time I think it works as intended and it's kind of okay but sometimes it just fucks you up and I don't know about you guys just jammed in enemies or into a wall and the camera is actually the reason you die sometimes because you're like yes I'm stuck but if I could just see where I am where they are and maybe I can make a move but it's just like the camera's fucked it's gone up, it's gone down, it has no idea where anything is anymore it's buried in the gargoyle I can't see what it do so many better action games have better cameras not all of them are perfect cameras very few of them do because camera is incredibly hard to nail but we can do a lot better than this from Soft Neo got it half right it doesn't like phase through the wait did I just disconnect the hotel oh Fortier has fallen asleep oh yeah I heard the disconnect anyway Neo had it half right so if you do like buildings and like houses and stuff the camera would clip through the house but not so much in like solid mountains and stuff so I got it half right I mean it's almost hard to compare but I'd compare to good action games like Devil May Cry Bayonetta where the camera is doing a lot of work on its own without needing to be micromanaged by me to keep enemies on the screen got a word 2 and 3 did that you didn't even have camera controls in that game and it was great yeah I think I've always felt the 3 was the one that like finally figured everything out about God of War 1 and 2 so anyway that's it for camera and because Das vaguely alluded to it in Bloodborne I'm gonna open with saying I fucking adore Bloodborne soundtrack this game's soundtrack's pretty neat yeah that's alright it's okay I guess I love the menu theme my love for Bloodborne soundtrack is like an anger I love it that much oh no I have problems with this game's soundtrack but I won't god damn it Theo I've just written in the one word Theo's like yeah you know what the music perfect spot on a lot of the music's really good I was too harsh on it my first impression because I was over exposed to the bad tracks because they're the ones that constantly playing okay so is it the the tree tree sentinel's music dragon music oh dragon music and the the asylum demon I mean the tree monster uh yeah is that the same track the dragons and the asylum demon share the same fucking track no they're different tracks the uh the problem I have with a lot of the game's music is it feels like someone took Dark Souls 3's entire soundtrack and fed it into an algorithm and then had that algorithm make new songs and this is what we got it's the most incredibly generic epic music that you ever did here a lot of the more designed boss themes specific to particular bosses are really well done Malekiths is fantastic uh Godrix is great in the first phase, Melania's is pretty good in the first phase I actually really like the Godskin lads music yeah I was about to say how's this for a double I just sort of fucking cobbletry I was like I got stuck on Godskin Apostle for a little while like 3rd or 4th stream I think and I remember once I completed it I was like oh thank God one of the bosses got stuck on had a really good track and in my head I was like that's a bit bad to say isn't it uh yeah I um I wasn't as impacted by the soundtrack in this game as I would very much like to be though there were plenty of soundtrack parts that I was like oh my ears they're orgasm the theme is great the themes I don't like the main theme well I do I do it's just that you know you can get it's easy to get tired of because you've heard it too many times it feels like I said it feels very generically epic to me in a way that I find uninspiring what do you think of the uh Dark Souls 3 main theme by comparison it's okay I see now I actually really like Dark Souls 3 better watch your fucking mouth Theo well the thing is it's a bit much for me I uh I kind of adore the soundtrack to Dark Souls 3 I think it's there's a lot of really good tracks Loretta Lothric is awesome I like Soul of Cinder and I like both phases of Soul of Cinder not just the second half Abyss Watchers is cool as fuck Abyss Watchers I really like I like the first phase of Dragon Slayer Armor it's really cool the second stage I don't like the proof monster ruins it well it does and uh I really like um Vort's music is embarrassing for him because it's one of the most insanely grandiose tracks you have in one of the videos I adore Vort's track Vort of the Boreal Valley is amazing I love that watch something that is interesting about the Fromsoft game this is coming someone who hasn't even played a lot of these ones but uh Demon's Souls has a very uh understated soundtrack by comparisons um like I think the clear Flame Lurker's theme in Demon's Souls is really understated but in the Demon's Souls remake it's this big epic bombastic song and I like it but Flame Lurker is super you know it's dialed down um and it just sort of I guess is that like would you say that your issue with the music in this game is that a lot of it is very loud and dramatic right with not much variety it feels unstructured kind of like you're like yeah I would go in the opposite direction I'd say it's too formulaic well I think um I think it's contrast is interesting when you think about soundtracks because um is the reason why Gwyn's theme is probably so impactful is because you don't expect the final boss of this game to have a really melancholic piano um you would expect something more yeah and and like and uh Sif is uh there's kind of a sadness to that one it's like oh I don't like this that's what I really I think it's fucking great but it makes you sad but what I really like to melody soundtrack for it's got a lot of that it's got a lot of quieter tracks and it's got a lot more melancholy to it it feels like it has a lot more character to it and well even when it's being more aggressive and you know up toned it's nowhere near as dramatic with how it takes itself I say as if I know anything about music well I that's that was what I was about to call I I think it is difficult to say what a soundtrack is in its totality because is it really good enough to say that there was a lack of variety in a soundtrack what you know is that is that necessarily a bad thing that a lot of the music is falling into uh I guess a broad archetype uh or is it better when a soundtrack in its whole has more variety um I I don't know I'm not sure how you and also the problem is that context of where it's placed yeah and again makes a big difference to that's how I would try and connect it back is how the track is used within the game and what each track represents and thereby if there's lots of similar tracks that means the game is playing a lot of similar notes the same like over and over again which is I think I would accuse this game of yeah there's not a lot of hummable melodies in this game it's all sounds like a fucking a mud well I guess uh it's it's it's hard to I think uh I think one of the strengths that a lot of video game music had uh especially back in the 8 bit and 16 bit uh era was that the lack of instruments meant that there needed to be strong melodies are like pretty clearly identifiable and a lot of the like most iconic songs of that time because they really needed to lean in on those melodies now we don't really have those limitations but it feels like a lot of video games still lean into strong melodies and I think you can see that in um I think you can see that in even like the grand orchestra music that you have in like Dark Souls 3 that there are strong melodies for a lot of them yeah I mean if you want if you want if you want a memorable soundtrack those melodies do got to have to stick you you need to be able to hum that shit well I think a big part of it is that because video games often repeats the music over and over and over again that music needs to be good you you need you don't want to get bored of that music because you're going to be hearing it a lot part of why I'm always happy to fight Ludwig even in his first phase I get the track like yeah and that that's quite an accomplishment isn't it when you're so excited so I mean Lady Maria holy shit they're so so good also yeah it is I was literally humming to the god skin soundtrack by the way or whatever you want to call it a track that's maybe the maybe my favorite one in the game probably not as good as Malekitz for me but it's really good when I listen to it I went and listened to a bunch of Elden Ring music the other day because there was a conversation about it in the discord and yeah I gave that sound the game I gave the game soundtrack a much worse rather than it really deserved because I was overexposed to the tracks I hate is well so yeah I guess I guess I don't know how you would might be worthwhile to qualify for chat by the way I'm not really talking about Elden Ring soundtrack because I don't know it much I know the main theme and I like the ambient music in the first area that you go to I guess that might be a difference though this game has ambient music more so than how do you guys feel about that choice I found Bloodborne to have a fair amount of ambient music in fact Bloodborne I found it quiet when I say ambient music I mean we're not counting boss areas and we're not counting like a safe zone when you're out in the open world when the music is just playing or like when the music plays when you have an encounter which I don't think the other games have right I think Sekiro has ambient music Sekiro has ambient and combo music it does yes but I I don't think I think it's just the time era or the theme the yeah the style I guess like when you get into like that really Japanese or samurai type style I guess I just personally really do not like that type of music have you played Ghost of Tsushima yes a little bit Ghost of Tsushima has a banger soundtrack and it leaves yeah I think I think it's on the way of the ghost it's fucking awesome that's a real strong melody as well throughout the whole game yeah because like Sekiro and Sifu both are very similar in the regards of like their songs they seem really simple with very minimal instruments and they don't and the the songs aren't very strong it's just kind of weird and distorted flutes and shit I don't really like that I really like is it called the wind flute the wind it is right the wind flute that's like the sort of recognizable jet I need to double check if that's what it's called I know that that's I really like the way that I don't yeah I think yes I think it is or am I mixing up with something else no they're just giving me flutes I need the wind flute this what's it oh there we go there it is I can't pronounce that that's uh but I really love the sound that that instrument makes and that's kind of one of the ones that you associate a lot with I guess like feudal Japanese kind of yeah yeah it's not my thing I didn't so for that I didn't really dig Sekiro's soundtrack but we're not talking about Sekiro are we well you is I am sorry so uh I guess the reference the guy that you find in the bridge what's his name again yeah I like the music for him in the first phase is that similar to what it is throughout the game or yeah most of the music is along that style or the dragon flute no I guess the thing is is that I don't hmm I'm not yeah I guess I can't say anything I haven't played I haven't played enough of this game to get it rough on the soundtrack it's a position for me of too much of the same thing I'm okay with grandiose bombastic tracks where they are warranted but I feel like this game has them everywhere and oftentimes they feel kind of mismatched to what I run into like the tree sentinel is kind of just a guy when his soundtrack goes harder than O&S I guess the thing is I'm thinking about Metal Gear Rising because the context as well because Metal Gear Rising has dynamic music where depending on which stage you're in the battle the music will change the vocals kick in well yeah the vocals will kick in usually when you like about to initiate you know the quick time event and the battle but that's an interesting one because I mean all of the music is loud and aggressive and in your face but it still feels like so good the soundtrack yeah it's one of the best gaming has to offer I feel probably what's funny too is like I think didn't the artist say that he'd never tried that type of music before really yeah I think I heard somewhere that that was the first time he never attempted that kind of music damn that game does so many cool things with it soundtrack from different stylings of each track to the lyrics giving insight into different characters motivations and stories it's like more games need to do that as well as just the dynamic stuff going on in it well I mean the Dark Souls games I guess kind of have it in that there are multiple phases for the boss battles and the music changes but there's not yeah but it's great to classify that as dynamic I've noticed on that note I've noticed in this game there seems to be a lot less phase transition music and a lot more the music cuts and then the second phase music starts playing just from listening to tracks like market the fellow men for example he doesn't have there is no transition from phase one to phase two in terms of the track as it is on YouTube it's just there's the phase one music then there's the phase two music is that it I wonder if there's like an issue of technical because I mean if you've done it before you figure that you'd be able to do it again yeah I guess it is you know that you need to try and musically justify the transition find a way to make it work and that can be a bit complicated but I mean if they've done it before I figure that they can is it the same composer as the other games yeah this game is mainly Yuka Kitamoto who's been in charge of games from like Dark Souls 3 you can tell as an extremely similar sound to Dark Souls 3 well it says that there are five composers who worked on Elden Ring yeah this game big old team some of them what's the guy's name he made my yeah showing me as our first time working as a composer in on this game and made some of the best tracks for it responsible for Godric the grafted and he's responsible for Malakit's theme it's like insane work for first time as a composer on a project it's really yeah right uh so it sounds like the general sentiment is that that you all generally seem to like it but you don't think that it's as strong as like Bloodborne or not even close really it doesn't come close to Dark Souls 1 3 or Bloodborne to me but I do like it one has so much character dude that none of the others ever really it had that really somber quietness about it at times and none of the others ever recaptured that um I mean Bloodborne has some chill well not chill but like when Bloodborne's getting quiet it tends to be unsettling the whole idea of that is just scary I love the soundtrack for that yeah it's Hail the Nightmare the one playing in the Hippogyne Jail and it being fucking diagetic as well that's it sums up for me I really love that uh that little like viola or cello melody that plays in the Hunter's Dream oh that's very cozy yeah well I was about to ask what is everybody's favorite track from the whole Soulsborne series Gem and the First Hunter it's gotta be it's gotta go to um it's gotta go to um shit pass for a minute not yet Norris I have a long list of honorable mentions but it's pretty easily Gem and the First Hunter might be Ludwig's track for me that's the one yeah that's the one Ludwig's second half it's right there I like Hard Day's Night that's a solid song metal I'm just really bad at remembering songs and video games oh you're a bad person but I really like Vord's theme I really love that one Vord's theme is great I love it intense as fuck yeah I know like the second half I love how it just matches the second phase where I'm grumpy man but then all of a sudden the whole rush and then the music just kicks in there's huge fucking pounding drums and the grass going fucking crazy it's like this is Vort man he's shit by the way what a screenshot right there yeah poor man one HP the sliver problem I uh is anybody's favorite the filing shrine from Dark Souls 1 that's excellent I love it so much I mean I love Gwyn's theme a lot like I said I have a very long list of honorable mentions I love Lauren and Lothric that's their names right am I mixing them up that one's really great the transition oh this sounds good when you get a phase transition just right it's some of the most like Ludwig's is so powerful for that reason as well because the phase transition is so well executed and that's actually something Sekiro does quite wrong um mostly Sekiro I can't think of any other games someone said come on guys module is the a couple a couple of people in chat have said nameless song now nameless song is that that made me like deeply emotional when I beat the game for the first time and that played the song sounds similar to the one from Demon Souls right the uh the credits the demon souls I haven't heard demon souls credits song in a long time I uh yeah it's just reminding me of that one Demon Souls credit one is really great yes it does have the vocals no father gas coin is pretty cool I like it how many times does Theo need to say there would be a lot of honorable mentions though a lot of honorable mentions I guess we're going through the mole now yeah I mean like I don't know would you say that Bloodborne has the best soundtrack of all there it's my favorite I don't know if it's the best well I guess the problem is what are we saying when we say best that's the problem I don't I don't have enough arguments for the music number of tracks like the number of tracks that you like the one that you like the most wins I guess so just say favorite right yeah I mean sure I mean if you've got more tracks that you like than the games and the most let's say it's your favorite my Bloodborne with Dark Souls one just coming behind it overall I probably like more tracks in Dark Souls one and maybe three than Bloodborne but Bloodborne has higher highs yeah well often a first phase I think it's fantastic I really like the second phase as well I like the second phase too I like it it go it really is especially because you can't hear over the fucking screaming I like the second phase a lot because it goes really above and beyond a lot of what the game has been doing in terms of bombast and it gives off this very strong impression yeah it's this is really strong impression of good god this thing needs to die now matches really well with a player's position when they're in that point because usually if you're not like a Dark Souls god you get to orphan phase two and suddenly you're chugging through blood vials you're getting tagged as he flies all over your fucking screen because this thing is he's so far beyond I still haven't been in that fight oh no you just do it so far beyond your control at that point and it's an incredible experience with the music going as crazy as it does yeah I think soundtrack is not as great I would say it's the weakest of the whole series I just I wasn't as impacted by it that's the best I can say I wouldn't want to claim anything stronger than that they do some really good things in terms of fitting a track to a boss for example Godfrey not Godfrey, Godric's track has a lot of really random dramatic flourishes in among this it uses the same sinister waltz kind of thing that Ludwig's track had going in the first and second the second phase not the first phase and then with Godric's track it's like he's just making it up as he goes along there's just random musical flourishes just here and there scattered like whatever cause he's just doing whatever he wants which is very fitting to the boss I think narratively and I really like it when soundtracks are made to fit like that I guess I just want it said is like loads of people will adore this one more than any other and they'll be like confused just like for me I'm just like I mean I don't really do anything to explain more I mean it's wrong I don't know that you can talk somebody into or out of a perspective on on like music and the impact on them like nobody can come up to me but like well no you see this is the reason why like filing shrine is actually terribly composed first of all I wouldn't believe that but second of all even if you could prove it mathematically it's like well I still like it a lot you can't retroactively change someone's experience when it comes to listening to a song filing is so somber but sad and just peaceful it is a weird mix of peaceful and sad and yeah it's like a home such as it is kind of thing a home this sucks I'm sad well I think that is the great thing about that track is it does actually make you feel a little bit safe like at least a little bit it's kind of like resident evil's savory music it's fucking uncanny that you were thinking about that because I was literally thinking about it and having it play in my head as you were talking about that weird sort of neutral unsettling but safe at the same time music done done done resident evil is really great for that because it feels it's sad but it's like but you are safe here you know safe and it's just like you're yeah it's like you're safe the song alright resident evil with the best save room uh I can't remember enough of them I've seen quite many resident evil games two is pretty fucking good the one rags was humming in my head is the only one I don't know if I just play it in my head whenever I get to a save room in other resident evil games or what but I like the second thing you said I can't remember any other save rooms doon doon doon like instantly it's like a refricks I really liked the resident evil 2 one because there's sort of two I really liked RE2 is pretty yeah I'd say that's my favorite RE2 it's so good yeah it's really fantastic I'm almost certain that resident evil village had a soundtrack it definitely had one I think but I can't remember any of it might need to confirm later yeah we'll find out get science on it um well what is next it's a bit of a broad topic I suppose but it's something to address as with all of their games the RPG side of everything what are we thinking there is a lot of shit you can do yeah well there was a funny thing about that some people I guess square it as a criticism but it's just something to be discussed they're like this is just doxels a doxels 3 in an open world it's like that's why I'm here yeah I know there was some asshole on discord that said like you guys got suckered into buying the doxels 3 again it's like um no why I'm here let's be honest for a second if they released a doxels 3 expansion that was as big as doxels 3 again and they charged 60 dollars or whatever I think we would just be like wait I'm in I probably would have liked that more than this Theo you always find a way to dampen any statement between me I'm sorry the thought occurred to me and it was really outrageous well we we've talked about this it's like no these are tight night shots they're somber smithing stones no these aren't stones they're runes it's flasks of crimson tears you're like what I think even did anyone ever see the interview with George R R Martin where he's talking about this game and it almost sounds like he doesn't really know anything about it because people are asking we're talking about a video game in that interview he's like oh yeah it's a sequel to a game called Dark Souls this one's called The Elden Ring so like he actually said it's a sequel I don't even know what he did in the game so I guess it's just like a back and forth relationship it sounds like his work on it was done like four years ago he said he helped with the world building so my guess is he, Miyazaki and a translator went out for coffee and talked for a few hours that's probably it and then George R R Martin said he was going to do it and then didn't and Miyazaki finished it and Miyazaki eventually just wrote it for him actually this contribution was like make it about a ring and it's like does that have a dump for it it's like no a fantasy series sinnering around whenever the enemies die they're felled alright like a tree like a lumberjack and make a big snake man who says took out the eye and a stupid voice took out the eye there are some dragons in there too people love dragons make them shit though we have a lot of dragons no just one copy pasted I would go as far as saying that whatever commentary you have for the RPG system it's going to be very similar to what you have to say in this game probably yeah mega similar I don't know that we need weapons to go up to plus 25 but I certainly made that the case though yeah why not bigger, better, more plus 15 was fine I thought but maybe it's a way to keep new or old weapons more viable longer not sure but you don't need to go to 25 you don't need to do a lot of things because there's a problem right because to upgrade normal weapons that don't upgrade using somber stones you need vastly more quantities of normal smithing for reference the somber ones they go to a plus 10 on the weapons these are plus 25 and the plus and you need about 12 stones per I think it was three levels and the somber ones they need one they need one of each type and I don't really know why that's the case feels weirdly punishing maybe it's to encourage I guess with so much content in this game it gives you another reason to keep looking for them eventually you can buy a lot of somber stones even too so it's like actually I was expecting once I figured out the weapon leveling system knowing that the legendary weapons are only upgraded with the somber stones I kind of figured though those would be items that you can only find but you get bell bearings for the somber ones too and once you get the bell bearings for the standard ones it kind of trivializes the like well we need to up these by 25 levels because all it means is if you want to totally switch to a new weapon and get it up to level 24 you can do that by buying the shards that you need or not shards but you know the stones that you need for it it's only the the ancient dragon stones will be for the level 25 upgrade and those ones I believe you have to get by killing one of the ancient dragons it's like slabs in the old games getting this is a big deal you got the big upgrade material but the fact that it takes normal non somber stone weapons so long to scale up compared to somber stone weapons has a knock-on effect of making them feel a lot weaker in moment to moment gameplay because I don't know if anyone else had the same experience but I found it a lot easier actually to scrounge together the materials to upgrade my somber stone weapons and each upgrade mattered a lot more like a plus 4 Bloodhounds Fang versus my plus 4 Ruchigatana the plus 4 Bloodhounds Fang is like miles ahead yeah so it feels like I don't know why it is this way yeah I was I really wanted to start using Ashes of War on a great sword and so I thought okay well we got this great sword that's got bleed on it so I don't have to keep on using the beast fang right but then when I got the other bleed sword to level 20 Beast Fang level 9 was still like leagues above it damn dude I was just wondering when my Ruchigatana would catch up if ever and I just found the somber stone katana and then you know it was over um yeah the general statement I guess would just be that you can pursue many different stats and it seems to be it has like a general sense of a strong balance as far as I'm concerned seems to work pretty well like there's a lot of different options you can go for obviously it can always be stronger I just think that all of the souls born things have problems with how exactly it can work and how you can exploit it but I'm not sure else we should say about it basically I'm wondering what other commentary I can offer because I noticed this game is kind of like Bloodborne early game in the sense that you don't really get much out of putting points into damage stats because your weapon scalings scale up with upgrade level so your scalings kind of suck when you first get the weapons you want to use uh so there's no real point in investing into damage stats and because the damage in this game is so high you're pretty much just better off pumping health and you don't need stamina you do not need to love the stamina in this game I think the only time I really needed stamina was when I got to millenia I did a test with a friend and it's fucking bonkers I started Dark Souls 1 again recently because I wanted to cleanse the pallet and that game I started as the Banditman with the Simitar you can with your starting stamina and your starting equipment on you can roll four times or swing four times the last swing or roll coming out with like a tiny sliver of stamina in this game, in Elden Ring with your starting stamina you can swing an Ultra Greatsword six times and you're good I'll say this I love that running when you're not in combat does not consume stamina oh with the distances you have to travel that's a good one yeah it is a good one I think the DS3 was the one that started that big change for how stamina worked or was it DS2? I think it was DS3 stamina has been trending down and important for every single one Dark Souls 1 is seriously important Dark Souls 1 becomes a very deliberate game especially with your choices when your stamina is that limited I am especially with how quickly it regenerates as well because in this game it regenerates a shitload faster as well I am this close to saying this game may as well not actually have stamina it was funny because I think Dark Souls 1 trained people to level stamina and I remember in Dark Souls 3 when I was playing it online I was like why aren't you leveling stamina and I was like I still really need to and in this game I didn't even consider it really I did level a fair amount of endurance I think part of that was so I could carry my shield in addition to my great sword and not bad roll to be fair that was the only time I considered it was a quick load it wasn't stamina I was about to say you level endurance when you want a quick load because I got like this big big chunky armor the goat one and then it's like a fucked up endurance if you also want to equip a weapon later on at that point it was like stat and stamina just doesn't even stamina should be much more important I don't know why it's not because they want to do action combat ooh and they need you to be able to actually move and I don't know then maybe they should have it tied to if they want to strike that balance where you don't like need it I guess then maybe the compromises you need it for like heavy attacks or you need it for particular like if there was two different you know how the Witcher 3 had two dodges right you had the short one and then you had the long roll maybe something like that but there's gotta be a way to strike that balance I'm sure there is I do feel like if they're going to keep going in this direction their time with the stamina mechanic is probably done because in this game in 90% of cases the limiting factor on my ability to do things was not my stamina it was what the enemy was doing I'm never going to be able to exhaust my stamina unless I get a really lucky sequence of boss attacks or I'm just flailing an enemy way too hard what about blocking though because blocking hits your stamina and like I mean that's kind of the factor of how many hits you can tank before getting knocked off balance I'm not sure what the answer is you'd have to jury rig something together yeah maybe blocking could deplete your stamina and then after that it starts depleting health well I mean actually I answered my own question by saying Sekiro has no stamina bar and Sekiro it's your posture so you have a posture bar that fills and if you're just doing standard blocks every single hit will add to your posture bar and when it's full you get knocked off balance but if you're deflecting so if you're timing your blocks with the actual hits landing on your sword then you deflect basically like parry the enemy just several tiny parries as opposed to the single big ones that you do in the Souls games instead of adding to your posture bar it adds to your enemies posture bar and one thing I really liked about Sekiro that you can actually hurt your enemy by being good at defense and that I thought was a pretty cool mechanic people are seeing someone say that great sworders still rely on stamina I'm using a great sword in my second playthrough no they're not don't run out of stamina yeah no not really for attacking I used a great sword in my playthrough I suppose with mentioning it's like we all will hit zero on stamina are you really noticing that as opposed to simply happening because DS1 you have to be aware of your stamina in this game I was really having to be concerned about it I have enough stamina right now with all the endurance I had to level for this armor I can swing my hell bird two handed full combo twice before I run out of stamina Jesus Christ yeah because like I said I've been playing a little bit of Dark Souls 1 again as a comparison and Jesus Christ you really have to be aware of your stamina because it runs out really quick and it's not coming back that fast as compared to the newer games also your dodge roll only goes in four directions and that's really off-putting yeah could have fixed that with the remaster but then they decided yeah they did that was the only thing they changed for the gameplay the blue point steam and souls remake that they made it omnidirectional rolling and I was like yeah that's a good change I wish I could play that I also wish I cared about PS5 yeah I don't use mine very often to be honest I wouldn't recommend the financial investment yeah it needs more games why is game not other game God I mean for a second there I was like are you saying that about our commentary for how Dark Souls does not have the mechanic but the funny thing is they said it right after we were saying like four directions not cool omnidirection cool why is this game not the other game well yeah yeah the four directions in Dark Souls 1 I think is only complimented in the fact that Dark Souls 1 compared to the rest of them has enemies that are much more predictable because that was before a lot more of the attitudes of making them fast and unpredictable would come in four directions is not as hampering at this point at the same time I would prefer omnidirectional still annoying I would still change it yeah um alright sorry sorry I'm playing right now I had to take care of an invader named DS2 is bad hahaha he is not wrong I am ashamed that I had to kill him um there's two options here we've kind of covered them briefly I don't know if there's anything else that wish to be said about encounter and level design sorry say it again encounter and level design basically how they've constructed the game for you to complete it uh how much thought do you believe has gone into it versus not and do you think there are any problems or praises I think I just wanted you to give you this whole big area and just like go wild I don't think there was any world that has enemies in terms of how the player is going to approach them I don't think there was any really yeah I mean any world that is easy to distract me in like a good way that makes me want to see like what's in there is uh it's good in my book well definitely I liked it any is not correct uh sorry because there are cases where there's clearly an effort put into the level design things like storm veil I don't think storm veil is like a fantastic level I think it's probably pretty good maybe a bit less than pretty good they're about it's about on the level of a DS3 level I suppose I was much more excited by entering castles than I was entering catacombs or whatever because I was like at least the castle the castle will likely have started as someone trying to design a real castle and then match it to be mechanically satisfying in some way and so I was always like here we go with catacombs it's just like alright gotta find the lever wherever that may be and then the capital sewers made me want to kill myself going around in tubes and pipes like oh please don't I'm better than this I only went into the sewers at all because I thought that that's where you had to go to fight the final boss because it seems like you get you get done a firm zula you respawn and then the first thing ahead of you is a big hole into the sewer so I'm like alright down we go and then got through the entire dungeon it was like wait I just I just leave now well you do got to go down to the sewers to take care of the poop man quest storm veil had a pretty neat thing going on in the it was approachable from two directions because of the do you want to take the front gate or you know clamber around the side thing yeah that was reasonably interesting but would I be right in saying the level is pretty like tiny feels pretty tiny thinking about it storm veil storm veil yeah some sort of a very I mean the capital is much bigger but I guess it is actually much bigger so you know yeah which you know using scale appropriately so maybe storm veil should be small but I didn't find as much to be impressed by with when I was approaching each thing in the world I was more so just like alright who's next alright what's next as opposed to oh they want me to try and okay oh this that oh this is a challenge or oh this is going to take advantage of what I've learned recently the bubble but not really which I can forgive to some degree because of how enormous this fucking game is that somebody said small but complex I like that I don't know if I would call storm veil all that complex it's small certainly and it's a pretty good level but I don't think it's complex also question is if I go into the forge of giants and I head toward the end game yeah yeah still a bit to go still a bit to go are you worried about locking yourself off from something I don't want to like go straight to the end boss just yet no there are two areas there's a couple areas where I thought I was going in bossing and I don't want to go there yet you've got two more areas with one being significantly bigger than the other and the other one being a variation of something you visited before okay so I'm I tried to say that with as few spoilers as possible I'm in the hallowed tree it looked kind of and gave me up here so I wasn't sure no you have you got to the bottom of the hallowed tree I think so I had to kill another pain in the ass tree worm guy and scarlet rod that was great how do you feel about how do you feel about redheads redheads yeah are you talking about Millicent no you know when it happens you'll know Millicent went bye-bye so I don't know what you're talking about but I've already helped Millicent out how do you guys feel about the Raya Lucario Academy I really don't like the fact that the whole big network of rooftops and everything with all the marionet soldiers and gargoyles and everything is sort of an area that you don't even have to go to at all and I've played that area three times and I keep on forgetting that to get to the boss you just have to go right instead of left once you get to that courtyard after the first boss that's actually another enemy I fucking hate is those weird dudes with like a million bows and arrows and when they spaz out and go I hate them why did you do this to me because if the enemy fails then it's difficult that's Bloodborne's fault by the way yeah we learned that one from Bloodborne and they haven't been able to let go of it at least in Bloodborne they were like your character is really fast and the gameplay is really fast so we need some enemies that are real fast you know like I see how that happened but then you just put it in everything and the things that are flailing at you are literal beasts like they're huge monsters you know we can get something out of this I like the marionet guys okay that's an opinion that's fine it is fine and one had killed them finally had about some other opinions on the academy though you just best not miss I enjoy the way it loops back in on itself with the rooftop segment but the enemies in it are and the encounters in it they decided you know Shrine of Amarna Shrine of Amarna was cool let's do that it looked cool that is it yeah as well as the oh boy there are three different magic cast guys who are just going to spam spells at you meanwhile the floor may fall out from under you because your torch was moving down oh god don't anyone attempting to defend Shrine of Amarna I feel sorry for them that's fine Hbomber guy was desperate when defending that place to the point where he was like some people say it's hard when you don't have people to help you through it and it's like well I guess it sucks for anybody who doesn't have friends Hbomber guys enter the chat is it just DS2 this is the thing by the way I'm just going to say it now in case it was any confusion this game is leagues ahead of DS2 it's like a different realm of existence okay oh god yeah I think it did pull some things from DS2 but luckily it's probably going to agree they have three things that it pulled from it power stancing repeated enemies that are out in the open world and I guess yeah, maybe getting the third one might be kind of tricky and oh, disgracing the boss health bar oh, disgracing the boss health bar well I fucking hate the logic that it's got DS2's DNA DS2 and this have Dark Souls DNA which has demon souls it's a vindication of Dark Souls 2 which is another interesting thought if anything it's a condemnation of Dark Souls 2 because it tried to do things that that game did but implement the better and it still managed to fail in certain regards look look most of this game is DS3 I'm sorry, that's just the truth it's not DS2 or 1 or demon souls it's DS3 this game the thing is, you'd be like where does most of DS3 come from you're like DS1 not 2 and then where does most of DS1 come from demon souls, then where does demon souls come from you're just like Mario you know it's all the same Mario um what do you guys think about the scaling of that optional area the Hallig tree thingy um, I hate this place I kind of hate it a little bit I just want to say, I hate the Hallig tree I kind of hate the Hallig tree honestly, as stupid as it sounds putting a jump button in this game is a game changer for the platforming it is it changes a lot of how you approach everything in this game it really does my problem isn't with the platforming it's just that this place is DS2 written all the fuck over it's full of the worst enemies in the game I was gonna say, oh god there's so many poo enemies in that fucking area and it's all running through it right now dude, who the hell thought, hey how about this upgrade to the ulcerated tree spirit put him in a scarlet rot lake it's like what the fuck why would you I was so happy I didn't have to fight that thing I died grabbing the item that was in the middle of that rot my pride was challenged hey man, Mr. Hens you want to fight two of him at once how about six? yeah I was gonna say, if you run through that area you run to evade one of them spawns another one you are fucking kidding me right now or three of the crystal lines at a time that you gotta break their armor before you can the crystal dudes are annoying as hell yeah I hate them the best thing about that zone is skip the speedrunner found where you can throw yourself down an elevator shaft to land on the button killing yourself to bring the elevator back up to skip that time wow that's thinking outside the box you skip the entire zone damn that fucking I want to do that now yeah you gotta get the jump like perfect yeah you have to nail the aim also the enemies in here there's like triple the damage from everything else everything just becomes super tanky it's definitely that kind of area we are like oh I see I see what we are doing also we have another recycled boss here I only just noticed this Loretta you fight her what's the fucking rena's class carry a manor yeah yeah that's another one where you fight a ghost version of her and I was kind of thinking oh well probably fight her later and I got to that one is baffling yeah I really don't like that they made godfrey a spirit and then he's the second last boss of the game oh this area I like the fight trying to fight um double big boy knights with one of those tree avatar things yeah there were ways to cheese this but I was desperately trying to engage with this on a level that I thought the game wanted me to and my god it was absolute cancer he's doing it and I'm not even near him look and the funny thing is the mimic managed to survive that with half health it's fucking insane absurd yeah look at this absolute carnage of just this is what I mean so this is what encounter design I think is definitely being commented on this is just stuff this stuff everywhere it feels to me like the game does this a lot where there's just stuff around and you'll fight the stuff and in doing so you'll pull more stuff and then there's stuff everywhere by the way it was my big criticism of DS2's encounter design yeah that's exactly when I say DS2 all over the place this is new maruna right here the spam bush now that I'm in the hellic tree I regret my choice to make a tank build because it's worthless now it's absolutely worthless worthless now all the tankiness I had this whole game just like yeah you died in three hits the good news is if you have two larval tears you can completely respect and then spec back I have probably like five or so how do you have like ten I had some first playthrough I had so many of them it's like oh what do I actually need to respect like oh I have okay I can respect lots of time I accidentally put some points into stamina early on might as well respect real quick all in back for some reason a billion damage with that those ends with the big head yeah super tanky and when they ram you they take away half your health it's like what is happening your ends how about the little ass to you I don't know why the weird spew attack hits as hard as it does oh it's so fucking quick the fucking big lobsters with the spew attack I can just shoot across the map speaking of fucking do you remember the railgun archers in Seofra river the weird minor talk oh I hated them what were they thinking oh my god what the fuck happened when they made those I hate the normal versions of those enemies as well because they just don't stop that was a huge mistake and I'm so glad that was like the only place they were at holy shit there is more of them somewhere in Leonea I wish for all of you to see this okay so I did a jumping attack onto him and I was like it'll land and then I will walk around him on the edge of the man unfortunately for me that's not quite how it goes and boom I'm knocked down but hey that's not so bad I've survived and ultimately where I am is actually safe compared to where I was oh fucking vomit falls to the ground pain pain look at him like take this with you um but yeah those enemies you're talking about they drove me nuts there's the most fear I felt in the entire game because I was actually like trying to keep my 10,000 runes at the time I think um so for the sake of people out there who wondering what we have to say about it I feel like we must mention story who here knows what happened in this game I had a ring you win and um guys you win I have a very good question fellas what's the Elden Ring it's a magical thing and when it broke everybody got fucked in the face what does it do it's the name of an elderly stripper what do you think the Elden Ring does powerful it is the one ring that would rule them the Elden Ring is a MacGuffin it's several shards of the MacGuffin is it not hilarious that I have no fucking clue what the answers are to these questions and I don't even care I'm just like whatever I'm kind of to that point as well somebody was asking me it's like so what's the story and I'm like oh shit was I just not paying attention I think there's more first tools have gained had we read every flavour text of every fucking item but I just don't care to and it is funny because we'd be like oh have you not played the game for very long it's like a hundred hours but yeah the real who did some explaining of some lore things to me because I just came to him with questions from time to time and I had some interest in some of the lore stuff from that because there's some kind of neat concepts going on but the story oh geez there's some NPCs and their story quests I can recall what happened Millicent was pretty cool follow up question poor fucking blide and all of his friends what's an Elden Lord it's like an old person I think it is the person that holds the Elden Ring and I actually I'm pretty sure that is that he puts it on his Elden finger I have no clue man I don't know why it's meaningful either here's one we'll find out in like a month Vati video put some videos we'll get a nice smooth base I talk into the game code and I uncovered this story what no questions like what do you think of the characters fucking characters everyone really likes the blue girl I hate her because everyone likes her Theo, you shouldn't have said that people are just gonna believe that your kid takes on everything I hate it because everyone likes it I ended the game as the concert of a four armed waifu and I'm not sorry that can't be true of me entirely more because I like arcane I knew you'd say that and I'm pretty sure you don't like how mainstream it is yes oh shit oh no exposed immediately you're very much a person of I like my things and no one else can like them stay away oh my god that was getting really angry at Theo it's just a stupid fucking boss it doesn't stop attacking which one are you talking about it's a knight of the hellic tree you like her spamming the magic swords that you know zone you out but then she doesn't really do anything on her own so you just have to sit around it's just been dodging like forever and can't do shit it's just so annoying I mean that what else do we have to say about the story I can try and tie it into something that I guess affected my experience with the game if that'll get us anywhere so for me I quite value having direction in games that may have come across in my experience of interacting with the open world I don't do well in terms of mindlessly just sort of wandering in a direction on the promises that there might be something that way I like to have a reason to go in the directions I go in a game that's provided to me or at least it can be justified within the narrative ideally in this game that means just following the critical path or wherever the grace leads so I got to market and you know you might think you can go somewhere else but I couldn't it was so hard for me to think of a justification for going and exploring the other 60% of Limegrave because I was like why would I, markets here this is where I'm supposed to go maybe I'm too much of an NPC or whatever but the idea of just not mattering at all to why I do any of the things I do in the game kind of bums me out I think that it does within the world it's just that it didn't to most of us because like all the front software games really with the possible exception of Sekiro the story is just not really it's not on the front burner like it's there if you want to dive into it if you want to read a bunch of item descriptions if you want to talk to more NPCs more NPCs but I mean realistically it's a video game that you're playing for the gameplay for the most part or I find most of their games tend to be it's got lore and gameplay less story and plot and characters I would actually fight that a little bit I would argue Dark Souls 1 is pretty clear with what's going on with that it's very explicit it's really explicit I think it's understandable in terms of what going for in that game and what meaning you can pull out of it even in the surface level Vegas sense in this game I don't know what the Elden Ring is come on yeah okay I don't know what anything I'm doing is or means or the context of any of it from a guidance standpoint though as far as like how the plot directs the player to do the thing in Dark Souls 1 it's kind of just the Oscars like hey yeah I gotta go ring that bell you want to take care of that for me and then you're off to ask it's a pretty pretty simple trajectory go and ring escape from the asylum go and ring the bell to find the fate of the undead okay there's two bells go and ring them you ring both the bells Frampt tells you your fate is to succeed Lord Gwynn cool let's go and do that it's essentially obfuscated from me what that actually means I just know cool I'm gonna succeed Gwynn but I mean they don't tell you where the bells are and you don't really have to do one and he says he says he tells the bell tower and then he tells you the ones at the bottom of Blighttown at the ruins of the depths of Blighttown yeah so you like Ubisoft games like what the fuck ah yes Ubisoft games that one of my complaints about it is that there's too much story and they try to go away if you're gonna try and at least listen to what I'm saying I don't even know how they got that from what we said I guess I love the story of Splinter Cell Blacklist I sure do love the story of going around and finding the tower and then Elden Tower Tom Clancy's Elden Ring yeah then the more information you find out what is the history of this world that led to it being this way for Dark Souls and then why does your decision matter and what does it ultimately mean when you get both the serpents giving you the essentially both options yeah I feel like maybe this is where the open world kind of bit him in the ass when they were trying to stay with this story structure when you get too much to see you can easily lose sight of what you were here for I think a good opening cutscene solves that pretty quickly though like it did with Dark Souls 1 we haven't talked about that's amazing we're at 8 hours almost we haven't talked about how the opening cutscene is just a rehash of the other games again they need to think of a new way to start the fucking games man that's not true mohler instead of the boss run down from the man you get the NPC you run down like man just when you watch the Dark Souls 1 opening cutscene it is baller it is so awesome but with each game they make it's becoming more like oh yes once again there's a big thing the thing is this corner and then a bunch of these crazy creatures they'll grab a piece of the thing and you gotta go kill em all I wonder if you might run into any of them nooo will you succeed the last one or will you end the cycle the Elven Ring yeah I was like oh man and I don't want to be too critical of the opening in this but I don't know it's just the images instead of a full cutscene sort of thing I already forgot about it I don't know why I'd remember it it was funny because I think when I got to Godric I was like he was in the opening right was he I don't know was he in the opening the thing I'd be critical of it for is it fails where Dark Souls 1 succeeded in terms of inform even Dark Souls 3 was fine in this count of informing you on why you're doing what you're doing and what you're doing exactly like Dark Souls 1 so in no unclear terms informs you of the state of the world and then Astora well yeah you're told fairly clearly what you're going to be doing in the game and then Dark Souls 3 the opening cutscene makes pretty clear what you're going to be doing in the game a bunch of lords came back they abdicated their thrones because fuck it you have to go and get them back cool done and this is in service of linking the flame cool Blood Bones is a lot more obscure but to an extent that plays into the game's presentation the amount of fucking work that's been done in Blood Bones lore like when you go looking it's like Jesus Christ they've got so much here it makes me think they're wasting it it needs to be adapted into other things or get a fucking sequel what are you doing you've got loads of this stuff here there's a comic series they have a lineup that's not good enough those are 10,300 million dollar movies let's get the arcane studio for a case to make a bloodbomb dude that'd be fucking awesome I know Chris Pratt divorced the protagonist of Dark Soul Dark Soul Dark Soul I am John Dark Soul the good hunter and he plays the doll lady what it's worth for anyone angry with me over this I understand that to most players this probably doesn't matter a lot and that's completely fine and to me honestly in terms of my experience with Elden Ring it was only specifically damaging in the sense of my engagement with the open world let us take this moment to acknowledge this game is quite beloved like hardcore by many, including myself and many people here so of course Theo has come across as a crazy person in all of this which is fine let's talk about it all that probably wraps up talking about story and characters which leaves not much left for me to say topic wise I just want to reaffirm the approach I gave today and I don't think this is going to be shared by all of you but this is how I feel I kind of went with an idea of if we start with it's a masterpiece and then I will explain all the things I don't think work that's kind of the way I did it there I'm taking for granted all the things I think work in this I just worked for kind of a while with refinements here and laws added there the game is just frozen on the fucking replay by the way this is a free screen that's the amount it gets to loading before it freezes but yeah I really love this game I'm not going to have trouble replaying it I think it slots in really well I like it as an attempt to make dark souls but open world sort of thing with all of my criticisms I still really really like it I think maybe it's worthwhile to do this as a closing thing not necessarily to close a stream but just after everything we've discussed of your thoughts in any way changed and what do you think now I'm just saying I still love it there's still plenty I think to love and I enjoyed the fuck out of my time with it even with all of the horrible frustrating things all the things we've highlighted as problems as well as like enemies that I just fucking despise that I even had to fight and anywhere near to the whole experience as far as I'm concerned I just want that sad and explained I'm going to leave it up to whoever wants to go next with this sort of idea alright I'm just going to sit down someone else can take it I want to just mention kind of quickly I've been doing a whole bunch of criticizing but I don't want that to be taken as me not having things that I like about this game there are things that I like and I think it does make palpable improvements on the souls formula they're going to keep going in this action oriented direction I think the game does a few things right I think one of the main areas of improvement for me has been magic they made the magic like vastly more interesting in this game than it ever was in the previous ones and the game is a bit better accounting for your ability to use it so I think you know bravo on that good job on trying to make like the memory stone system in that regard yeah yeah actually that's a very good system I think hmm it's something that I don't think is entirely fair but I don't know about cycling spells and even items by using the d-pad because that means I have to stop moving but again I don't know where else you'd put it so I don't think I can very fairly criticize that loser you don't engage the claw hand claw hand yeah I do engage the claw hand but I try to reserve the claw hand for games that you know deserve it like they don't make a right you were talking about these things Theo you didn't you fucked it up shit you're right from a control standard just that the claw hand reminded me I play with an Xbox Elite controller and I've got those paddles on the back that you can kind of map to any button game changer when I mapped B to one of the paddles on the left and now any time I pop over the PlayStation to like fiddle around with the console version because that's the one I've been streaming I don't have that paddle so I'm like oh no I can't control the camera while running anymore without doing the claw hand and it's uh it really makes me wish that paddles on the back of controllers were a default thing on everything but sadly still not this bitch got a cutscene she's not a story boss is she this is the bitch on the bottom of the halling tree good luck have a good one um who else wants to give more closing thoughts thoughts I've been playing it all through the stream just on the side just fucking around everywhere it's pretty much the same for me I thought I would be more disappointed at the end after we done but pretty much everything I already thought about it was already caught up as well so I haven't changed that much I think it was pretty much the same things that I already talked about on my streams and everything I mean I'm already almost through my second playthrough having a co-playthrough plan with Fortia which we're gonna play on stream so it's gonna be fun I started a new playthrough on the YouTube stream last night just with some faith I'm gonna do that one yeah I'm gonna get like a fuck ton of hours out of this game and I will be returning to that game at some point later again when I'm finally bored of the game for the time being I'm certain there's gonna be DLC coming out at some point that would be very surprising what was it like 12 million copies this thing sold dude I wouldn't be surprised if Elden Ring 2 was already in production this is the most popular fromsoft game by orders of magnitude they didn't even expect it to sell that well I think they were expecting like way less in much more time I think it's a good place to talk about a subject I actually did mean to bring up but I kind of forgot which is almost I'd consider it the meta this game exists in a particular place that I absolutely love that it does it comes out it is more than three times the content that you get in most full wedge like triple A games of high price these days for the same price absolutely nuts amount of content it is insane it is intense I can't over exaggerate that it is impossible the amount of time you can spend in this game a friend of mine was like ah this game I've I realize already I've spent more time in it in like a week than I have in all of my time with Halo Infinite and it's just like they're a fan of Halo Infinite as well I'm not sure what they are right now you know how it works oh yeah didn't the player base drop off really hard on Infinite this game took so long I got 134 in Infinite and 115 in Elden Rings this game took so long to get through it was so fucking interesting to watch the conversation evolve over the days going by like people were citing are the most annoying enemies this this this and like one person would post millennia and people would be like who the fuck's that it's just like yeah right because everyone's at different stages it takes so long to beat this game because there's so much to do and then of course there's no microtransactions how did you do it how did you create a game with no micro I didn't know that was possible um and it you know it didn't even it didn't even brag before it came out like oh this is gonna have like a million things to do there's like oh yeah here's Elden Ring you wanted that right you can miss huge portions of the game but they just don't care like what else the entire TF mount gal mere like all of it exactly it's an absolutely insane bang for your buck one that I'm not even is this like the biggest bang for your buck for a game maybe yeah maybe I feel like Witcher 3 maybe fights it yeah I could see that with the DLC Witcher 3 maybe yeah Witcher 3 is big although I guess stuff in it yeah also I guess Witcher you've got to kind of take into account how much more time they spent on doing things like recording voice lines and writing where is this like Elden Ring again like we were kind of addressing that on the story end but it's much more focused on gameplay being the thing that you're here for whereas Witcher like you can play Witcher on story mode or whatever they call the easiest mode there and still still enjoy it quite a lot whereas I think if you if you added a like a games journalist hand holding mode into this game it would kind of kill it and yeah to sort of close it out just the it's an intense amount of content and the price is just normal it's not even like yeah they said they could have chopped like a gelmere or the Halec the Halec tree could have been DLC none of us were bad a fucking eye if that was cut out of the game and sold as DLC they could have done that it's insane and intense that they didn't and I love the fact that it can baffle so many fucking developers right now or maybe not developers just produces like how could this be possible you know how do we replicate something so successful it's like well they didn't do any of the usual shit we might have to just make a game time time to make it because this started developing during Sekiro or right before it or something they were concurrent I think Elden Ring started before Sekiro yeah like seven years or something like this this is what happens when you take time with your game well and and from software have had copycats now for a while they still can't be beaten in making these types of games yeah and granted they've had an engine that they can build on and build on and build on and experience teammates but I'm just saying like there's so many people who have tried to copy them people argue that Neo is better in some respects I've played all of the original Neo and you can maybe argue that the combat is but 10 times better but the world is not and neither is the story by comparison my I think my initial problem with Neo was just how the world came together yeah same I could never and it was it was not well they had cut scenes and everything and I still didn't understand what the fuck was happening the level select thing going on with the with the car at the map Neo even we've done it out of actual history and didn't make much sense yeah but yeah it wasn't never for me not because it was bad or something I was just like I don't know it's not into this the way I always said it is that Neo was the Ninja Gaiden team making a Dark Souls game and the Sekiro is the Dark Souls team making a Ninja Gaiden game yeah that's not an unfair comparison I do honestly believe that if fromsoft are gonna keep going in this direction that Sekiro is the blueprint to take from rather than souls that Sekiro is still my personal favorite but again I think the the narrow play style of Sekiro is probably why it would be hard for me to make the objective argument for it and zero multiplayer at all too I really liked Sekiro I did one playthrough and like half of a new game plus one I mean I know what's going on now I know how to fight the bosses and how to play it again for me it's so funny I'm happy with Dark Souls I don't need another one I've had my fail sort of thing I'm very happy with Dark Souls 1 and 3 and Elden Ring has even got I want another Bloodborne because I like Bloodborne so much and I think they fucked up so many things like Bloodborne with a sequel it's like give me more I want more Bloodborne here's the question though would you want Bloodborne 2 to take Q's from Elden Ring and be in like not post apocalyptic but like a big open world thing where you've got a horse please no God Bloodborne there's so much right in Bloodborne I just feel like just follow along from that just make all the tweaks you need first of all get that FPS up make a frame rate look at the blood vial system and I'm sure there's something we can do there people like no will let us stay it's like well no we can trust From to make a decent Bloodborne 2 it's not like Disney a lot of the rumors have been saying that Blue Points is just going to be making Bloodborne 2 that From apparently doesn't have any interest in returning to it I don't know how credible they are if this game is a group of anything it's that From Software will not let you down well I think it would be nice if From's made the game and then Blue Point executed it to make it actually run good we're in business Demon's Souls looks fantastic I think you could argue that the visuals in Demon's Souls are better than Elden Ring but it performs really well it's smooth as butter and I want to address some people who have this thought it's just like why not something new in general something newer than even Sekiro or Bloodborne Art of Dark Souls newer than that and it's like well sure sure I'm not against that absolutely I'm down for them to make whatever they want to make but my preference is towards innovation I'm not I'm less so with that right now I'm just desperate for another Bloodborne soundtrack gaming just skip the game just give it a soundtrack PC port motherfucker hurry the fuck up but that's Elden Ring then anything else anybody wants to say about it no I'm just going to play the fuck out of it until I die it's killing me that I can't play it more than I already have because there's a lot going on the fact that I'm still itching to play it this long even this long into it I'm still itching so there's nothing really anything out right now that I want to play instead of should we give a number 9 out of 10 I'm going to I already feel you're going last buddy I'm going to go with I'm going to go with because with everything that I've said I still think about how this game sits in relation to all our other games just in our fucking world and I want to say it's I'm going to give it a solid 7.5 to 8 yeah I'm the same like I said in the beginning somewhere between 7.5 and 8 7.5 and 8 somewhere between 7.5 and 8 I realized I kind of ate the point there and it was like between 7.5 and 8 just take a number I'm the same as you I'm going to go 8 with the possibility to go up to a 9 once they've smoothed out all the technical issues as much as I do think that there are some all the things we discussed as far as design issues go I think the overall experience is still extremely high quality to the point that I think if I was asked hey make a list of your top 10 games of all time there's a bit of recency bias obviously but I don't think that I could not include this game and I don't know I've had such an amazing time playing it that said obviously there's the objective criticism that we've gone over so 8-9 I just don't do .5s fair enough I think that's everyone yeah it's everyone oh right I give it an Elden Ring out of 10 whatever that is for context I guess very quickly before I give the number to Elden Ring I give Dark Souls 1 an 8 for all I rabbit on about it that game gets an 8 it's not better than an 8 there's a lot wrong with it this game I've gone back and forth in terms of numbers quite a lot I guess it might be worth stating by the way I imagine all of us have a scale that is different than what is often used for video games where like anything lower than an 8 is considered to be like seriously lacking 5 is average 5 is average 5 is average 5 is average 5 is average 5 is average 5 is average 5 is average yeah 5 is average man I was asked like I think it was last night oh what would you give Elden Ring it's like oh yeah probably like a 7.5 to 8 it's like man that's low it's like low that's like a really good score that's really high probably that's how it works in the video game world it's really critical 97 an IGN 6 is a real world 2 yeah kind of and what I hope is that we move the scale a bit to something more normal so that it's not that if it's anything below a 7.5 there really thinks it sucks we need to fix the scale that we think about with video games to be more like film fellas there's some really fucking good video games out there hell yeah oh yeah absolutely I can probably count on one hand the games I would give above an 8 I'd need to think about it more off the top of my head I can come up with like a 3 it seems like movies by the way yeah which I feel have less variables by far I wonder there are only on one hand video games that you could write higher than an 8 ones that I've played and would be confident in my rating thereof I guess it's worth stipulating right okay are you adjusting for time like are you saying like well when this came out in 1997 it was the best thing I'd ever played I'm not sure how I don't I don't believe in dating in that yeah okay yeah no fair enough that's a I think Super Metroid is super strong now Tetris is like yeah Tetris yeah Space Spaces so much more simple there's so many original quake original quake I still think yeah I don't know how much great theory I'm not sure what it means when people say dating you're like if something becomes dated I think it's a little you know I guess control schemes can become antiquated but I don't even know that that's the right word to describe it like I don't yeah to defend them to some degree like in the equivalent for movies is just if someone really went frame by frame in like Star Wars as in a new hope and they were like these special effects don't even hold I was like okay but they were incredible considering they came out 50 years ago at the same time I'm still okay with you judging them by modern standards because I actually do think there are some movies out there that can survive that scrutiny I think video games are difficult as well because for instance maybe I don't need to say it because people would figure it out I think Tetris is probably I ah man it's I don't like making definitive statements Tetris is incredible but it almost feels a little bit unfair because it's so straightforward fundamentally that's like oh man well yeah like is it fair to compare Elden Ring to something like Tetris well that's what we bring up about Lord of the Rings right well yeah yeah right like um do you how do you compare a bottle episode how do you compare a twelve end remence to Lord of the Rings you know one of them is a massive story in a fantasy world ah that has several major characters and um it's like there are so many more plot lines yeah and I think with video games it becomes really clear because the more complex these games make the more variables there are at play the design of like Super Mario World it's pretty radically simpler than Super Mario Odyssey even though both games are about jumping through a level they're both platformers where you need to get to the end well get to the end in a sense but they're really different it's not fair but at the same time it is fair right because they're both video games they're both games that provide an experience to you that is whatever you know whatever it ends up being I think that's one of the interesting things about the video game medium that the the range between different products and different genres can be so dramatically wide that it would it would almost be like comparing a Pixar short like one of those little like five minute things that happens in front of a Pixar movie to like five seasons of a TV show like which one of those is better it's like I don't know I think the the singing volcanoes from the I don't know that I always remember that ukulele song and stuff is is better than Breaking Bad it's like well I mean should they even be on the same scale together right and it gets awkward with video games because how do I like Katana Zero was a game that provides like a very you know it is X hours of gameplay that is very specifically trying to be this thing and it executes on it really well how do I compare that to League of Legends a totally different game that you're expected to play for hundreds or potentially thousands of hours with a vast amount of content like it's how do I compare these two in terms of saying you know how well it achieves what it's trying to be and also how much does it matter what a game is trying to be versus what it ends up being the math and reviews store scores starts to get really messy because it's why I don't put numbers on my videos well it's like how do I rate Super Mario Galaxy as a game overall versus how would I rate it as a platformer versus how would I rate it as compared to the rest of the games in the Mario series I think that those comparisons can make a big difference more so than comparing I don't know one superhero film to other superhero films it's like they're all films fundamentally they're all roughly the same length they all have narrative structures that translate to different genres yeah the point of this is that an 8 amongst this crowd is really high yes yes I agree and with that we're at 8 hours so we will probably end there and we will do it's 8 hours it's insane it's fucking 4am I legit am fuck me we will do all the super chats for this one on the Wednesday they'll be the first ones we catch up with and then just catch up in general because I'm gonna allow everybody to do life things though before we we run off into the wilderness I guess we should talk a little about who we got here today we'll start with good ol mark the cyborg since you haven't been here in a little while what are you up to soon where can people find you I have been working on a big kind of documentary on the Metroid series where I played every single one of the Metroid games and written my longest video yet but I was in school doing some extra army training over the last few months and then I was almost finished getting through the audio editing and Elden Ring came out so hopefully if you guys do want to sub to my channel there will be a big video on Metroid coming soon and I'm going to be playing Elden Ring with my wife on Sunday after she's done playing Dying Light 2 with As in Quarter Black Garrett yeah I make videos hi well I got you linked in chat thanks so much for spending 8 hours with us talking about this video it's been a pleasure I appreciate it gosh how do I even I mean because Theo you still haven't made any videos right and yet you have so many opinions to share you must make videos I should really get on that I still have that devil maker I think that I fucks with from time to time I have a bit of it like maybe just shave off and make him do a video on its own and I maybe try that so that I can just make things short we'll see very well Moodle what are you even up to lately you little fuck whoa I'm a big fuck excuse me all kinds of stuff like we have a fuck ton of Elden Ring streams like I don't think I've ever streamed that much in a row in multiple days it's basically like all 100 hours plus have been streamed and are being released on the archive channel if you don't want to watch them on the Twitch also Metalsforged every week now with Schmexie graphics looking real weird real Schmexie thumbnails overlay looks good as shit Omega Ridley did the big good on that really good shit go check him out there's some we did who's afraid of Virginia Wolf two weeks ago I think Marcus and two days ago I talked about shoot him up which is just a really fun movie to talk about so yeah go check that out and next week I'll have me repository on and we're going to talk about some Superman animated shleems which is what was it Superman versus the elite oh good movie so apparently that one is supposed to be good yeah and yesterday I did a live stream on the archive channel on YouTube because I remember that months ago I did a poll on the YouTube channel and there were a lot of people who don't even watch on Twitch I was like oh I should probably do some live streams for those people and then I did three and then we did the the Halloween one and then I never did another one again and then I felt bad so that was again so I might think about doing more of those maybe like once a week on the YouTube channel there just doing some things there so yeah just pumping out the content for you guys so you better go subscribe or I'll eat your toes oh no I need those DAS is there anything you wanted to talk about or any way ship form uh good delbs in the works boys oh yes I'm doing the best I can well Fringian rags I don't know is there anything you guys want to talk about oh no uh not really comics done yeah right now I gotta figure out and I'm working on it's just working working on this end game Leviathan still working on it I have still not begun work I did work on gedelb and now I'm working on something else which you will see in a week's time that's got nothing to do with my main channel it's an eFap thing oh boy next week's gonna be an interesting time there's a little I did a little work for gedelb he did alright did you guys sort that out we're not gonna say anything Fringian I didn't know if he knew I thought it would be a surprise people in chat will be able to figure it out because it was written live what thing you're referring to why are you treating it like a huge secret I've ruined it I have ruined it oh well it's still funny it is funny it's gonna be fun it's gonna be great okay then as you heard stuff is all the way and that's about that I'm really glad that we managed to get through so much eldering chatter and it's really nice that we had a game like that come out that was real nice it was real nice okay okay stop yelling at me Theo what the fun to like things thank you all for creating such a fun little chat and thanks chat for creating a fun little chat and thank you for the donations and the company and that's it for tonight good night and we shall see you next time good night everybody sleep tight good night bye bye goodbye bye