Elden Ring

[Mr EliteL]

I watched the gameplay video and so far looks great. Hoping the map markers can be customised as they blend in quite a bit to the map, or if not I'll just be fine with it.

Obviously the version I would like for pre-ordering was sold out quickly, I watched the day after the video was posted here, but I assume it was sold out soon after orders went live. Yay. Don't know if I will get the game for PS4 or PS5 so I suppose I can have longer to decide.

Haven't recieved a code for the Network Test but oh well.

[Dragon Lord]

I sadly did not get into the network test either. Oh well, would have been cool to get an early taste of the game, but it just means I have to wait a little while longer. I think I can manage to find something to play while I wait, with a backlog of several hundred games.

[Moonface]

I didn't get a code either. I'm not too bothered though since I have other games to play plus that recent gameplay video did enough to excite me. I didn't know if we'd get an official thing or it would just be journalists playing badly for their own previews and not letting the game shine properly.

Assuming that the five classes revealed for the network test are the final number we're getting, what class does everyone intend to go with for their first playthrough? - https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Classes

[Mr EliteL]

From that wiki page, and I trust Fextralife to get it correct, it's going to be 10 Classes in total, but out of the 5 there I'm leaning mostly towards Warrior. Looks to be the most agile, but compared to the other 5 has the less strength, I thought Warrior would at least be better in that stat than Prophet. If not that then either Champion or Bloody Wolf, but if Bloody Wolf is gong to be similar to Dark Souls style which I find to be too slow for my liking. I may end up choosing one out of the other 5 classes though.

[Dragon Lord]

It will be more than five. Souls games always have more than five classes, and this is basically a Souls game in everything but name.

Dark Souls 2 Network Test did the same thing as well. We were limited to only a handful of the classes in the game, with the actual release having more.

[Moonface]

From that wiki page, and I trust Fextralife to get it correct, it's going to be 10 Classes in total, but out of the 5 there I'm leaning mostly towards Warrior. Looks to be the most agile, but compared to the other 5 has the less strength, I thought Warrior would at least be better in that stat than Prophet. If not that then either Champion or Bloody Wolf, but if Bloody Wolf is gong to be similar to Dark Souls style which I find to be too slow for my liking. I may end up choosing one out of the other 5 classes though.

Looking at the classes, I think I'm in a similar boat of picking between Bloody Wolf and Warrior. Warrior is really tempting because of the focus on archery it has which feels really good for places like that dungeon at the end of the gameplay overview video because you can use the terrain to take people out without getting close all the time. Although if there's any sort of stealth kill stuff like Sekiro has then my choice would quickly change to something else. Basically I'm probably going to gravitate to a class that lets me get the drop on people where I can because I love doing that in Sekiro.

@Dragon Lord: Do you think the other five classes will have similarities to any of those from the Souls games, based on how the currently revealed five are?

[Moonface]

Elden Ring Story Trailer
Learn about the history of the Elden Ring in this new story trailer from tonight's The Game Awards presentation.

[Dragon Lord]

I'm not too far into the game yet, only having about an hour of play time, but man, so far I can tell you that from early impressions, this game is absolutely...



I can see why this game got 10/10 from pretty much every review out there. I had faith that Fromsoft was going to make something amazing with this game, taking all the experience they've gained from the Souls games + Sekiro, but man, this game is already blowing me away and I've barely scratched the surface. 

Game is absolutely gorgeous too. Then again, I am running it at maximum settings on my PC, so that helps make the game look this good, haha. I imagine the game would still look pretty beautiful on the PS5 though.

[Moonface]

I haven't got it yet to play it but I've been watching someone stream it since the game has so much going on that whatever I saw from them is probably barely even 1% of the whole experience. It looks absolutely beautiful though.

What class did you go for @Dragon Lord?

[Dragon Lord]

Samurai.

You give me a Katana (bleed) and a bow to start and I take it 9/10 times. Bleed is just as good in this game as it has been in past Souls games so far.

[Mr EliteL]

Oooh, Samurai gets a bow with their Katana? Dang that's really tempting, but I don't want to copy. I'll need to look at the other classes to decide what I'll pick, and as the rest of them are known now since the beta I should have a clear idea.

[Moonface]

That class is definitely tempting me because I'm very interested in using a bow class in this game unless bows turn out to be all around complete shit.

[Mr EliteL]

All I've done so far is try out Bandit and Warrior, since my copy arrived just before 7PM Friday and it took a long time to download and install, plus more installation that caused my PS4 to make so much noise. Eventually it calmed down then I created three characters (two female, one male) to pick between. As there's multiple save files you can have, I want to try Confessor, Vagabond, Hero, Samurai and Wretch in the tutorial section to decide who I truly want to start as. Between Bandit and Warrior, Warrior is my pick at the moment. I know you can gather weapons later and change builds to whatever you want, I just want to try those ones out too.

[Moonface]

Isn't Wretch basically no build at all and therefore the hardest class to start with? Just funny to see you mention it alongside "changing builds whenever you want" yet from what I can tell that class is whatever build you make it. XD

I've been watching gameplay on and off for this still and the only thing I've seen that concerns me is that bosses don't seem to scale with the player at all, and that can result in problems when you miss a boss that was designed for early game and encounter it later when you're overpowered compared to it. I'm not sure if I like that a portion of bosses in the game can become trivial just because the player was exploring elsewhere and missed that boss when it was intended to be seen and the only way to avoid that is to force yourself to stay in a single area until you think you've cleared every boss so that you don't end up in that situation.

[Dragon Lord]

A lot of the bosses in this game are already trivial because they just took normal enemies and gave them a health bar and called it a boss fight. One of the few things that rubs me the wrong way about this game is that they decided to go for quantity over quality for the boss fights.

The bosses who are actually designed to be boss fights are good for the most part, but they used a lot of filler for bosses as well just to pump up the number of them.

Also Wretch is probably the best class to start with if you want to min/max or not worry about "wasted" stats, because it's the only class that starts at level 1 with even stats across the board. Making it so you control where every level up goes, instead of having 8-10 levels of stat increases that you have no control over. The Club is also generally a pretty good starting weapon in the Souls games, so it's not as bad as it seems outside of starting with no armor, which isn't that big of a deal for the most part.