Where Elden Ring goes wrong

Praised – surprisingly – by practically everyone who was already a fan of the Souls family, Elden Ring is an absurd game, something I think nobody would have conceived.

But some features, having been carried straight over from the Souls lineage, did not translate as well to an open world – especially one as immense as Elden Ring’s.

After 100 hours in the digital Cracolândia (São Paulo’s infamous crack district), I decided to stop by the nearest rehab center, and while I was detoxing from the fumes of Caelid I paused to think… about what really didn’t work out so well in Elden Ring.

No, the difficulty is fine by me. In fact, one of the big problems is that the initial difficulty is very low.

Difficulty

Anyone who plays the SoulsKiroBorneKart franchise already knows that the way you learn in these games is “learn to play so you die more intelligently next time”.

Now I need to emphasize

I understand

I UNDERSTAND

putting two easy areas at the start of the game, one up and one down on the map. That is the hallmark of level design that wants to offer you proportionally harder challenges until you find a chest with a little smoke and end up at the Eclipse.

The problem starts when you explore one of them and then go to the other, or simply explore one and head to the far end of the map, which is much more common. An area that could have been tremendously fun, with interesting challenges, is a stroll because you arrived tremendously more overleveled than you should be. And you miss out on lessons that you don’t know whether the creators intended to be important or not.

An example without spoilers: I arrived massively overleveled in an early-ish area of the game. It’s a corridor full of rubble, kind of dark. Very faintly at the start of the corridor you hear the characteristic sound of the dung beetle.

• Dung beetles play the role of crystal lizards in Elden Ring. Killing the little pests always has some effect. The common trait of these monsters is that they run away as soon as you get close and vanish within a few seconds, so it’s relatively common to hear one, look around and run after it.

Alright. In that corridor, hearing the very quiet noise, the player runs to find where it comes from – and ignores the rats piled up on the left and right of the corridor, with a mama rat at the end.

For a low-level player willing to learn, that is an IMMENSE lesson about greed and haste. At high level you don’t even notice. Maybe a proportional level transition for the initially low-level areas would fix this. With a specific level cap per area, it would be a way to reduce the disappointment of reaching a clearly well-planned and complex corner and finding out the enemies die with a slap. In the SoulsKiroBorneKart series, which is linear in circles, it goes unnoticed because enemies are generally in a Crescendo of difficulty, and the occasional low-level areas you let slip by are the exception. In an open world, where you can go to basically any corner – it takes away quite a lot of the experience to discover that a new area now offers little or no challenge.

Equipment Upgrade Stones

This is definitely my biggest problem with Elden Ring.

So, let’s start with what is sensational: what defines the element of a regular weapon in the game is its Ashes of War (you know the Weapon Arts from DaS 3? Now they work).

You can – in a place that’s 100% possible to never come across during gameplay – get an item that lets you assign the affinities of each Ash of War, in addition to or in place of the one it already has.

This is, without exaggeration, fantastic. Being able to change a weapon’s element by switching to another ash is pure poetry. It costs zero of any resource and can be done at the bonfire.

Did I mention the good part? Okay.

Now the system of 3 upgrade points for each rank of stone in the game REALLY is the worst part of it. Not only because you need 12 stones of one rank to upgrade each piece of equipment by 3 points, but because it doesn’t stop there

Actually, it doesn’t stop. It’s bizarre to have something like 15 rank [5] stones in your inventory and your upgrade stuck at +5, for example, because you’re missing the 6 stones to unlock the next rank

Of all the upgrade systems, picking Bloodborne’s is enough to make your rear organ drop out. In Bloodborne it works because – again – it’s linear. There are areas that drop stones up to +3, areas for +6 and areas for +9, plus the two or three stones during gameplay that you can use to take the weapon to +10

In Elden Ring this is a complete and total mess. There are the Mines, but it’s hard to get enough for more than one weapon. Some are scattered around some scenarios, but you may simply not pass through there. Some drop from certain monsters, but that’s relatively rare without the stats to raise drop rate.

That leaves the bells as the reliable measure. You defeat the bell knights to deliver the bell to the 3 old ladies at the Roundtable Hold, and they start selling.

Anyway, I’ll complain more another time. See ya.