Tobold's Blog

Wednesday, March 02, 2022

Old Man Ring - Part 4

While I will continue to play Elden Ring some more, I will stop blogging daily about it. Not sure if there will be a part 5 of this series at all, but it won't be tomorrow. In this last past I will talk about the elephant in the room, the reason why user reviews for Elden Ring are less positive than critics reviews: Technical game performance.

I followed about a dozen different pieces of advice to change various settings in Windows, with the display drivers, and inside the game. But Elden Ring is still stuttering on my Nvidia Geforce RTX 2070, which is not a bad graphics card. Actually it feels as if the problem doesn't have anything to do with the graphics card at all, rather the game in random intervals freezes for a second or two, and then plays the events of those 2 seconds in fast forward. As you can't really control your character that way, you probably die if that happens while you were in a boss fight, or running towards a cliff. I'd call it "lag", but then I am playing offline, so the term wouldn't be correct either. In any case, I am just one of many people who are having problem with the technical performance of Elden Ring, and in a game which is all about microsecond reaction time, stuttering is very bad.

There is probably going to be a patch that improves stuttering in the foreseeable future. However, while we are at it, it has to be said that Elden Ring simply is programmed rather badly. Once you use cheat modes and are less worried about battling monsters, you realize that you spend a lot of time battling the user interface, which is godawful. Just look at the very simple and fundamental operation of quitting the game: The number of operations and the time it takes to do this in Elden Ring is staggering. You can't just press ESC a couple of times and be out.

I have the impression that in a game this dark and gloomy, which is all about punishing the player, the players think that the lack of UI quality of life features is just part of the design philosophy. But me, coming at Elden Ring with a background of MMORPGs, not souls games, I notice how much worse Elden Ring is with regards to controls in comparison. Also, Elden Ring isn't very friendly to new players, because it refuses to explain how the game works. The tutorial is just covering some basics, and for example never explained to me how to sprint or sprint-jump. I constantly find items of which I have no idea what they do in the game. And finding out whether the new weapon you just found is better or worse than the weapon you have is very difficult if you haven't played the previous games, because there is a page full of rather meaningless stats and you don't know which ones are important.

Don't get me wrong, Elden Ring certainly has its good side, and some entertaining potential, even for me as a slow old man. But sorry, the current Metacritic score of 97 is just overhyped. For a game to have such a score, it would have to be technically excellent and user-friendly, which Elden Ring certainly isn't.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:07 AM Permanent Link (1) comments

Tuesday, March 01, 2022

Old Man Ring - Part 3

In this part of my ongoing series on Elden Ring, I will talk about exploration. I love exploration. It was probably my favorite part of the MMORPGs that I played. So how does Elden Ring stack up?

Elden Ring fulfills two conditions of a good exploration game: It has a large world with not too many restrictions on where you can go, and there are lots of things to discover when exploring that large world. So, yes, I am having fun with exploration in Elden Ring. And if I understand correctly, previous Dark Souls games were much more linear, so open world exploration is really a big plus for Elden Ring for fans of the "souls" genre.

Having said that, I had originally read some reviews that compared Elden Ring with Breath of the Wild. Breath of the Wild is probably the benchmark of open world exploration games. And sorry, Elden Ring doesn't come anywhere close, it isn't even playing in the same league. What made Breath of the Wild special was the fact that if you saw a landmark on the horizon, you a) could get there, and b) there would be something interesting there. Elden Ring fails on both counts of that. Elden Ring has neither climbing nor swimming, and limited jumping, which improves a bit if you are on a horse. But as a result, there are many, many spots on the map to which you simply can't go. Elden Ring sticks to the old school world design of having mountains and water that restrict where you can go, and thus lead the player along certain paths. It's okay, and there still are a lot of places you can explore, but it isn't Breath of the Wild.

Also, in Elden Ring, what you see is not necessarily what you get. I went to interesting looking structures in Elden Ring to find out there was no entrance, and nothing much to find there. I liberated a fortress that had a suspicious absence of interior rooms, several buildings of it simply had no entrance anywhere. I saw magnificent pillars spanning a sort of bridge between islands, only to find that there is no way to reach the top and cross that way. The world design in Elden Ring is great for looks, but it hasn't been designed to be reachable everywhere. You can't even get on the roof of most buildings, so it doesn't even match Assassin's Creed games.

In World of Warcraft, some of my more fun expeditions where taking a low level character to a high level spot for something, e.g. fishing. That usually involved dying several times, because the lower you are in WoW compared to the monsters, the higher their aggro radius becomes. In comparison, exploring higher level areas in Elden Ring is somewhat trivial: Aggro radius is tiny and doesn't get bigger with level difference, monsters are mostly slow to react to your presence, and with the horse you can get very early in the game you can basically get anywhere without much risk.

So, overall I enjoy exploration in Elden Ring, but I would grade it just okay, not great. If you are looking for a replacement for Breath of the Wild, you'll have to wait for Breath of the Wild 2, releasing later this year.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:18 AM Permanent Link (4) comments

Sunday, February 27, 2022

Old Man Ring - Part 1

This is part 1 of a series of blog posts that I am planning about me, an old man, playing Elden Ring, a game that isn't suited for old men with slow reaction times. Basically I am using cheats to make up for my lack of ability in action based RPG combat.

The first good news is that I have been able to play Elden Ring for 6 hours and had a lot of fun with it. I reached level 20 and got a basic grasp of what the game is about. Following advice on YouTube, also by Bigeye in the comments on this blog, I took an Astrologer spellcasting class, which is very much oriented to ranged combat. As Bigeye said, using summons in combination with ranged spells is "easy mode", at least for regular monsters and mini-bosses.

Now I spent many years playing MMORPGs, and this is my first "souls" game, so I am somewhat struck by the differences. Elden Ring has game design elements that would make a MMORPG developer cringe. MMORPGs are designed to not make farming too efficient, and to avoid combat situations in which there is no danger to the player. Elden Ring has none of that. In the starting area there are two giants slowly pulling a huge wagon. You can kill them with ranged weapons without them ever being able to touch you, as they are chained to the wagon. They each give over 1,000 runes, which is both the "gold" and the "xp" in Elden Ring. And after you killed them, you can teleport to the closest rest area, and by resting not only regain all your mana, but also respawn the giants. Rinse, lather, repeat, this is how I got to level 20 in no time.

On the other hand, some monsters can be extremely hard, especially boss monsters. I haven't reached the first story boss yet. But right at the start there is a boss that pretty much automatically kills you, and then you come to the first outside area and there is another boss on a horse riding up and down a path. Of course he killed me immediately when I checked him out. So I turned on god mode and tried again. And he killed me again! Apparently the god mode only provides unlimited health, and boss mobs frequently have insta-death abilities that aren't prevented by unlimited health. Doh! There are other cheats giving *you* insta-kills, so I don't think I'll ever really get stuck, but this was kind of unexpected.

So in my experience I haven't been able to find cheat settings yet that would make combat both challenging and fun for me. Even without cheats, many regular mobs are just pushovers against a summon plus ranged strategy. I am beginning to suspect that the game is based on melee combat, not ranged. While being a spellcaster is efficient, I constantly get rewards or discover game elements that are of absolutely no use to me: Strength or dexterity based weapons, armor, shields, "ashes of war" that add combat skills to melee weapons, smithing to improve weapons and armor, nothing really applies to my character yet. Kiting enemies is ridiculously easy.

Elden Ring is sometimes frustrating in that it doesn't tell you a lot on how to play the game. Somewhat ridiculously there are guide videos that show you how to reach the tutorial area, which is very easy to miss. And even with the tutorial you understand only a fraction of the game if you haven't played previous incarnations. Experience in other games doesn't help much, because things are very weirdly balanced. As an Astrologer I start with a cheap spell, Glintstone Pebble, that fires a magic missile rather quickly, and for a low mana cost. Then I find a sorceress selling expensive other spells (Glintstone Stars, Crystal Barrage), only to realize that these "improved" spells actually deal less damage than my basic spell. I don't think I fully understand the magic system yet.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:06 AM Permanent Link (4) comments

Sunday, March 06, 2022

Old Man Ring - Final Part

I just uninstalled Elden Ring. I had spent the last few days playing a new character, a confessor, because I thought that maybe a character with melee combat would be more fun. That was true, to a degree: There are parts of the game, like Ashes of War, that simply aren't usable by mages, because there aren't any ashes for staves. And the whole weapon/shield/armor collection and upgrading made a lot more sense with a melee character.

Then I decided it was time to finally leave Limgrave, and, still using the infinite hitpoints cheat, managed to kill Margit, the Fell Omen. But the story still made absolutely no sense to me, and other than following the glowing pointers at sites of grace, I still had no clue what to do next. So, with the pointers and help from YouTube, I set out to understand the story, by doing a sort of cheating speedrun from boss to boss. I got until Starscourge Radahn until I noticed something: Without external help I would never have discovered the rather laborious sequence of tasks needed to unlock that boss fight. And after having done it and killing Radahn, the whole thing still made no sense to me. And I still needed external help to find out where to go next.

At that point I realized that it was unlikely that even if I followed the story all the way to the end, there would be some sort of satisfying narrative emerging. So what is the interest of playing? Generally, for a RPG, I am interested in mastering the (turn-based) combat and progression system, and in following the story. With Elden Ring I thought I could skip the combat part and just do the exploration and story part. But after a grand total of 39 hours, the exploration had become boring and the story was still far too obscure. Time to stop and uninstall the game.

While I can see the attraction of Elden Ring, I still think that in many aspects it is a very flawed game. Not just technically, but also in game design, regarding exploration. Much has been said about Elden Ring being such a great open world game. But Elden Ring is only open world until you reach a location. Locations are very often rather linear, with sites of grace telling you that you are on the right path, until you reach the location boss. Very often there is just a single way to get from A to B within a location. Often you are forced on a linear path by the fact that you can't climb, that jumping is very limited, and that you can drop down only a certain distance without dying (which curiously is true even if you have god mode cheat on). Even in the open world I quite often had to take the long way round for a cliff or mountain. It wasn't the most fun exploration experience, not like Breath of the Wild. Not even as good as Assassin's Creed or Horizon games.

In the end, Elden Ring is the best Dark Souls games. And the number of people who can really enjoy a Dark Souls games is small. For the average gamer, I wouldn't recommend Elden Ring. And even with cheat mode, Elden Ring was an experience for me, but not a great one. I don't regret having tried it, but I reached the limit of my patience with the game. It simply doesn't have many of the features that I enjoy in a game. I would rather play something like Triangle Strategy. Or replay Breath of the Wild, if I wanted an open world game.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:56 PM Permanent Link (9) comments

Monday, February 28, 2022

Old Man Ring - Part 2

I am up to 10 hours of Elden Ring played, and I am still having fun. The purpose of this post is to tell you my thoughts on what the appeal of "souls" games is, and why even beyond the fact that I am getting too slow for them, they aren't really for me.

Did you like raiding in World of Warcraft? Failing the first attempts at a raid boss, then learning "the dance", the correct moves and reactions to signals that allow you to overcome that boss, until your guild finally succeeds beating him? Elden Ring is the solo version of that.

There are a lot of games these days, especially in the mobile space, that shower you with rewards for doing very trivial tasks. Some people like that, for others it is not very satisfying. A reward should be granted for actually achieving something! But how do you know that you actually achieved something worthwhile? Well, if you failed repeatedly at a task, that task must be difficult. And so, finally beating that challenge feels very rewarding and worthwhile.

Only, of course, all of this is as manufactured as the mobile game rewards. Elden Ring is full of surprises that you couldn't possibly have foreseen, and that are likely to kill you. Bosses even more so, because they tend to have initial moves you learn to overcome, only to then get surprised when the boss pulls some very different surprise move after being down to half health and kills you again. You have to learn the whole "dance" of a boss over multiple failures to be able to beat him. And that, to many people, will feel very good.

Not for me though. I already hated the "dance" of WoW raiding. I definitively don't want a solo version of that. But I kept playing WoW long after I stopped raiding, because there are a lot of other things to do as well in that game. Elden Ring with the option of turning cheats on is very much the same. Without cheats I might be blocked at some point, or not being able to do certain things or reach certain things. With cheats I can just fast forward the boss encounters and pretend I beat them.

Note that I am pretty certain that if I wanted, I would be able to beat the first story boss, Margit, without the use of cheats. To some extent you can overcome a lack of reaction speed in Elden Ring by grinding to gain more levels and better equipment. So if I wanted, I could play until I feel really powerful, and then try Margit. It would take me multiple attempts, but as long as you spend all your runes before you don't lose anything from dying. So I could "learn the dance" in X failed attempts, and ultimately succeed. It is just that I absolutely feel no desire to do so. Overcoming challenges isn't rewarding to me when the "challenge" is only pressing buttons in the right sequence and the right timing. Of course, your mileage may vary. As there is a way to circumvent the first boss and reach other regions of Elden Ring without beating him, you could potentially become rather powerful before trying him. And then you probably would be able to manage this challenge, even if you are a bit slow. The question is, do you want to? Is that something that would be fun for you? Or do you find, fail, fail, fail again, until you succeed a not-so-fun game mechanic?

- posted by Tobold @ 10:43 AM Permanent Link (4) comments