Episode 128 - The Hill That Killed Me - Elden Ring

Put these podcast ambitions to rest. Welcome back to the podcast, where we absolutely couldn’t not talk about Elden Ring. This is the latest game from From Software, the developer behind the Dark Souls franchise and the creator of the genre that spawned a million imitators. These are all things you probably knew before going in, though. The surprising thing about Elden Ring though is just how much like Dark Souls it ends up being. The design philosophy behind all of the Souls-like titles is present, but now set in an enormous open world, which is a change that really shouldn’t be discounted. The emphasis on exploration that the Souls games have always had is pushed to a different kind of emphasis now, with a larger than ever amount of optional content and a huge space to work with. This presents some issues, for sure, as all open world games have: things that could be important certain builds can be hard to find, there being a sort of directionless feeling to parts of the game and boss fights repeating themselves in some of the optional dungeons, but these issues rarely come to the forefront of your mind while playing due to the sheer amount of authored content throughout the huge open world. We’re going to be talking about build variety and how the way you choose to play can make the game feel completely different, bosses we like and those we don’t and how the design of the major bosses makes them stand out in a game full of unique enemies, and we flaunt our knowledge and understanding of the game when we talk about the “whatever temple of Marika.” Thank you, as always, for joining us this week. As we state up front in the podcast, the first time experience of playing Elden Ring is unlike much else in the world of video games, so I’d like to drop at least one more warning that the blind experience is something you want to have and we’d recommend playing the game before listening if you have any intention of doing so. Otherwise I hope you enjoy the episode, all six billion hours of it. How did the game stack up against your expectations? Were you as surprised as we were as to how much like Dark Souls 3 it ended up playing? Was the difficulty in the mama bear, papa bear or baby bear range for you? Let us know down in the comments or over on our Discord server where we talk about the games. Next time, we’re breaking tone pretty severely and entering into another themed month everyone didn’t ask for: it’s Ape-ril, and we’re going to be talking about Diddy Kong Racing, so be ready for that.