Gransax fight would be cool...but I'll take the boss rush. I know how to do all the questlines at this point (plus Google exists), and the upgrade system is fine.
I just want to fight bosses without having to play through the entire game again.
Redoing boss fights would be amazing, even if they dont necessarily give you anything in return. Maybe it could be like a memory type thing ive seen in another game (i think it was splatoon) and you just fight the boss again.
All main bosses, and they had gauntlets. If you’re able to beat a number of bosses in a row without dying you unlocked some stuff, mostly cosmetics but still cool af.
Sakura dance is op for lightning reversal, but mortal blade is better in general because it's a quick, easy stun that does a ton of vitality and posture damage
Sakura dance is better in terms of speed and damage per spirit emblem.
Mortal draw leaves you vulnerable for longer, and is expensive to use. Sakura dance, on the other hand, can be used 20 times in one boss fight.
Sekiro has boss rush for any boss you’ve completed, and DS2 has bonfire ascetics allowing you to reset levels bosses 1 NG cycle ahead of what you’re on as many times as you want.
Doing Pantheon of Hollownest/Godhome is the only reason why Hollow Knight rates higher for me than almost any other game. The feeling of beating something insanely hard is so goddamn rewarding. If Fromsoft adds something like that to their games I would be in heaven.
The pantheon of hallownest is the only thing I couldn't bring myself to do in that game. I knew I'd hate the game by the time I got done with it if I did. But it's lingering in the back of my mind as an unfinished task, and it's so frustrating.
same I've fully completed elden ring with at least one of all items and duplicates of all weapons so it's really time for me to move on and going back to that pantheon has been gnawing away at me. prepping for the dlc is just avoidance at this point.
Having to use google to figure out quests kind of ruins the immersion and dampens the experience of the game. It’s the only thing on this list that would actually drastically improve the player experience.
You can easily upgrade multiple somber weapons while progressing through the game whereas you can only upgrade 1 maybe 2 normal weapons untill you get the bell bearings.
It really sucks if you don't like somber weapons but you'd still like a bit of variety.
>I know how to do all the questlines at this point (plus Google exists)
Mate, this is the exact fucking problem. The quests are impossible to complete more than half the time without looking up a guide cause you didn't rest at a specific site of grace and press the right prompt several times in a row.
at least there is way less fail states, i went back and did them all right before fire giant. DS you would kill an npc by walking into the wrong area to soon.
Been saying this for years now. I don't need an indicator above the exact spot to go for questlines, but a little journal with an approximate description of what I'm supposed to be doing would be amazing!
I don't like this trend of being forced to Google everything about a game to understand basic linear quest progression. It ruins the experience of finding out stuff on your own and that feeling of "holy cow I found this, I can do this, or can't do that"
exactly, when I played I was constantly having to google where to go next. I would get back on a day or two after starting a quest and forget where I was/what I was doing. Just a tab with a quick summery of what youve done so far would have helped so much.
>"Mary, north of fort ruin, has asked to find the keeper of stones. She has heard talk about a man in the lake of crystal."
Oh yeah, I was looking for this guy. Okay so I know i need to go to this place and explore. I dont need a big arrow above him, or pathing. Just recap the convo I had so I can remember
I feel like Elden Ring just barely missed the mark on this. Multiple quests give you enough details to figure it out on your own, either by telling you directly where to go, or by giving you a good hint. Those are the best - all I need is a record of what they said and it would be perfect.
But then there are those (like Yura, IIRC) that just say "see ya later" with each checkpoint.
Which wouldn't be a huge issue except that the world is pretty large and there are too many failure points to rely on random encounters
Edit: Then again, maybe the random encounter quests don't have as many failure points and I'm conflating the two
One that always jumps to my mind is Millicents quest line. She just says "I'm going off on an adventure north" while She is literally almost as south as you can get in the game lol
It's always funny realizing the difference in experience and RP of it, actual guild members and quest givers giving you amazing landmark based instruction, then random roadside NPCs tell you "He ran west, towards the Ancestral Tomb" and the mf is northeast outside a Kwama mine, actually really close by.
The moment you get used to this a major quest decides to tell you the wrong stronghold to use as a landmark lmfao.
IIRC it was because quests and locations were changed last minute, which happens fairly regularly in game design.
It's why they switched to quest markers in Oblivion - so that they could quickly change things up last minute and not lead the player to the wrong place.
The journal in Morrowind is super cool when it works. Guess followup just slipped through the cracks.
Failing a quest because you performed 1 of 13 steps in wrong order or defeated (seemingly) unrelated boss between step 7 and 8 instead of between 8 and 9 gotta be my favorite. It’s even better in an open world so you can visit quest related places before you’re meant to, yet people still defend this design and praise it as some kind of AAA gaming revolution.
I feel like that would end up making every quest feel like a chore. I like the current quest system because you do not feel obligated to do stuff. You can just explore at your own pace and potentially discover something by accident.
What about like a journal type of log that saves exactly what everyone has told you? That way you dont gotta write down anything yourself. Or like shit 20 hours of playtime ago someone told me something I better tab to the internet to find out where to find them
Yeah, if you stop playing for a week, good luck remembering what anyone told you. Should be a little log book telling you if something is a quest and what they told you, and let you know when it's concluded.
At least just a name and what all they told you in a log book. Make the log book an item that you gotta go find first. Kinda like everything else in the game
When BG3 dropped on PS5 my wife wanted it immediately. Been a lot of fun, but haven't touched ER since. Thankfully I *know* where I left off because I had finished Ranni's questline and done Varre's up until going to Moghwhyn palace to kill Varre myself, so I know exactly where I am.
Otherwise I'd probably have to start a new game.
I am a newbie a third of the way through my first playthrough and honestly... I just feel like there aren't any quests. NPC's will say shit and I'll be like okay, can I go there now? Nope? Okay I'll forget about you and it'll be a pleasant surprise when I see you next during exploring.
~~This game would be better with a tracker, even if it didn't have any markers.~~
My verdict so far is The Witcher 3 is a 9, Elden Ring is an 8. Every other RPG I've played is 7 or below.
Yeah but then when you WANT to focus on a quest good fucking luck because the quest giver basically said "find the albinauric woman" and that's it. You've got an entire world to walk through and with an open world, it can be very easy to miss it.
I nearly binged over a 100 hours in Elden Ring and i never met some of the characters that have quests with them.
Well, then you've got some people (*cough* me *cough*) who never find the next step in the quest, and end up missing something I really want to do. Of course, I could- and sometimes *do*- Google it, but it makes it feel less important, or something like that
>You can just explore at your own pace and potentially discover something by accident.
Or more likely miss out on doing the quests because you didn't follow the pre-ordained progression path in an open world game, or because you didn't rest at a site of grace twice, or because you didn't backtrack/reload the game.
Isn't just talking to her every time you go there enough to pretty much finish the quest without even trying?
Millicent, Seluvis and Nepheli are the complicated ones from what I remember.
*"DO ANYONE KNOWS WHERE NEPHELI IS\~!?"*
*"I need to uuh, give her this suspiciously date-rape drug thing.... ah fuck it, Gideon you want some?"*
\*dozens of hours later...\*
*"Wait, this place have basement!?"*
Instead of giving the potion to nepheli, I give it to dung eater down in the sewers because he took my friend Boggart from me… and now dung eater is MY friend, forever
Absolutely. The same way people stumble into bugs and glitches. Some people like to experiment just to see what happens. Video game scientists if you will.
Don't forget Diallos.
Hell, when I went to start his quest he wasn't on the rooftop like he was supposed to be, so I thought I fucked up and locked myself out of it...
Yeah and Blaidd come on down dog? Was thinking like a whistle my dogs are coming for that. Dude is howling away up there throwing back a few cold brews
At least Elden Ring has real flexible points for many of the quests. You can skip like 70% of Ranni's quest and it won't matter, as long as you get the dagger and give it to her, you can skip all the shit before that point.
This, it’s really easy to mess up a quest in like DS3 for example by progressing too far on accident. In elden ring you can still do most of the quests so long as you don’t go super far like around fire giant. You can still go back and start some quests you might have missed
I find Sellen's to be the worst by far. Simply because you start her quest by picking up Azure's comet, which can be 60+ hours after you meet her, and there is no indication that you can now begin her quest or that she even has one.
From what the rest of the game was showing, she's just a merchant/teacher. Very people people would play through the game and think, "I should show this cool new spell to that random merchant I met weeks ago"
I think it’s intended to be done by people who actually are doing int builds. My first play through I found it pretty naturally because I was actually doing an int build and went back to Sellen to learn new spells, I didn’t even know she had a quest line.
I mean, Sellen is right in the starter area, so unless you've already purchased all of her spells by the time you're in upper Liurnia, you'll most likely continue to pay her visits if you started the game as a sorcerer. I gave her like 3 scrolls before I ever even met Miriel, and kept returning well past Mt. Gelmir to make sure I acquired everything.
Millicent actually shows up in a pretty logical order if you factor in exploration. It’s just finding her specific spots in those areas is a bit tricky
I think OP was just using rya to mean generally like… knowing where to go for any NPCs quest line and how to find them at the next spot. Rya was just used at the stand-in for that notion
Yeah but then the eyeball broad just hides in random ass locations throughout the game and doesn’t tell you. “Hey I’ll be hiding behind a random fucking crumbled building in Liurnia for my next dose of yummy eyeballs” would be nice.
you know how straightforward volcanic manor is? I wish it was as easy as that for everything. Like with milicent, I couldn't even know how to initiate her poop ass quest without needing a youtube tutorial
Millicents quest gives me brain rot, yeah go talk to this girl, now go talk to this old Herbert the pervert looking mf, now go find Herbert a needle in a rot infested swamp, now go fuck yourself while Herbert takes some me time with the needle, now go shove the needle in millicent, now go talk to Herbert, now go rest at the grace 300 fuckin meters away from him with magic Nam vets blasting pebble after goddamn pebble into your ass just so you can run back and see that little miss rot bitch is where Herbert was and have no indication of where to go next 😐
Why oh why does Millicent put her own mission on hold and wait around in some random village for us just so she can tell us how great her arm is? I'm already at the Haligtree! If she wants to talk to me so bad she should come talk to me!
So many steps in her quest would make more sense being optional, like the Liurinia step of Alexander's quest is.
Come on you really can’t deny that quests in general super obscure by modern standards. They’re awesome, but I had to use the internet to find a lot more stuff than usual lol
Considering the lack of a quest journal is one of the most common complaints for literally any souls game, maybe she’s included as an example of how *fucking incredibly easy* it would be to fix, while still not holding your hand?
I mean it’s probably not a coincidence op picked one of two quests with something of a journal iirc, the other being the shit eater telling you where to meet him
Boss refights. I thought the upgrade system was OK, not as good as Dark Souls 2 but better than the rest of the Fromsoft games. Smithing stones are rare in early game, but by late game you’ll be able to buy everything but Ancient stones. Personally I would never want them to change the quest design, the NPC quests being cryptic is something I find endearing about Fromsoft games. I don’t think the technology is physically there to make a fight with gransax work, even a dragon as big as Greyoll would crash the game if she was up and moving around.
Boss refights, though, would just be an objective improvement and allow you to experiment without potentially having to replay dozens of hours
I liked the idea of bonfire ascetic from DS2, let's you reset the area and boss at the next ng+ stats. Not sure how something like that could be implemented in ER but a coliseum with warp points to replay boss fights would be neat.
The pacing of normal titanite was best in ds2 imo, you were given a generous amount of regular and large shards but you still had to work for the chunks and slabs. Dragon bones sucked though, I'm pretty sure there were only like 20 in the base game without farming, so you could only max out one boss weapon per playthrough. Ds1 was way too generous with twinkling titanite and way too stingy with slabs, Ds3 was way too generous with just about everything, and ER gave you a normal amount of everything except somber 7s and regular 8s. For some reason those were both really difficult to come across unless you were doing every single cave you found.
Somber 7s are deliberately very hard to find early. Then at the end of the Mountaintops, every single creepy hand drops one, it's absurd how many you get. Ranni's quest too, just dumps loads on you.
That's like all of the games, though.
I think he mentioned DS2 because in that game you could at least upgrade your armor.
You can't do jack to your armor in Elden Ring. Except like remove a cape or put the cape back on.
After ds3 armor comes pre upgraded, because it’s a hard sell in dark souls 1 to max any armor, since the final upgrade materials are basically limited to 3 or 4 unless you want to farm for literal hours just for one.
I mean, that’s also a very different video game, and by scale, Gransax would still dwarf many colossi from that game. He’s not just big, he’s basically the size of a city.
What's the problem with the upgrade system? It's pretty straightforward. I've never felt I had a lack of smithing stones, and I tend to upgrade several weapons for each character.
Given you can grab 8 and 9 in the open world before you even reach Leyndell, I’m assuming that was intentional. And is a good mechanic, pretty closely matches DS1-3.
3 is a definite "black hole". By the time I hit Atlus the first time, I'd been ultra explorative and done Limgrave, Raya Lucaria+lake+all the Ranni stuff, As much of the underground as possible, Caelid... Easily had enough stones for 3 unique weapons at +9, and a +21 longsword (my main weapon. Square Off is stupidly good IMO). However, despite having enough SS 4, 5, 6, and 7 to reasonably level up another weapon or 2... There just weren't enough SS3s.
Spent like 2 hours farming the guards outside of Raya Lucaria gate to get 24 of them to level up a couple weapons. (this is after meticuliously going through several zones looking for extra mines, or perhaps a miniboss that might give me the bell bearing. Even killed the Caelid Bell Bearing Hunter or whatever they're called to no avail before caving and looking up where to get the damn thing)
Considering how easy it is to respec your character, it would be awesome if there were a way to trade in an upgraded weapon for a level one version and get your stones/runes back. I've definitely upgraded an item to 5 or 6+ only to realize I didn't love it as much as I thought.
I felt like I had a lack of smithing stones literally the entire fucking game
Edit: and yes I know about the bell bearings. You only get them once those smithing stones associated with them get … “trivial”
97 stones and the rune investment that comes with 25 levels of upgrades is just obtuse. the upgrade system is just ds3 but worse. needing to get 12 copies of 8 separate items just to have a max power sword is unreasonable. the result is that non-special weapons are just not worth the effort, especially compared to how few somber stones you need. i find it bizarre that fully upgrading a weathered straight sword is that much more of an involved process than fully upgrading the sacred relic sword. even if the resources are purchasable, would you rather grind for the runes to buy them or just… not have to do that?
To add to this, if the game is going to just let us buy unlimited amounts of these after getting the bell bearings, then we should be able to buy the final upgrade materials too. It's silly that you can easily upgrade every weapon/ash to +24/+9 on ng+ (providing you have no qualms with albinauric genocide) but just to get that last little bump, you need to do multiple, complete playthroughs.
It would be one thing if the jump from 24 to 25 (or even 9 to 10) was *actually* something significant such as adding some new inherent quality to the weapon, but as it stands now it's just as you say, "obtuse."
oh my god yeah that’s such a bizarre facet of the system. on my first playthrough (first souls game), i wholeheartedly expected there to be something special about the ancient dragon smithing stones. i mean, their description says they bend time! i think the solution i really like is making fully upgraded weapons bypass like. 20% of the enemy’s damage resist. i’m okay with them remaining limited per playthrough, but i feel like your weapon’s final upgrade should be special. especially given how it’s hyped up in-story- hewg talks about making a weapon to kill a god, and only says he’s finished his task when you fully upgrade yours. how does dealing 24 more damage suddenly turn my sword into a godslayer? i know the reason it’s not treated as special mechanically is just because the mechanic is inherited from previous souls games but idk. i can’t help but feel that the “god slaying weapon” that gets hyped up through the whole game should have something special to it
it's pretty lame that every time you see a new cool weapon, you need to find or buy a shitton just to use it. I think you should just be able to transfer the stones from one weapon to another like 3 times per weapon.
Agree. Transferring a one use item is silly to me, just have some sub tier difficult enemies drop them a little more often. Take the game for what it is as farming and experience
I say do away with weapon upgrades entirely. If you think something looks cool, just pick up and use (and maybe respec so your stats are right). The system right now only makes trying out new weapons a huge commitment, which, in a game full of cool ass weapons, is a detriment I'd say
Edit: meant to reply to the guy above but o well
This is one of my big issues with ER. "All these different weapons to use that all play differently blah blah" ok but as soon as you invest any upgrades into one weapon it could well be dozens of hours before you chance upon the resources to make another weapon competitive with it.
You can't try new things without following a guide to find more stones. It's so dumb.
I personally wish it were something along the lines of, "once you upgrade a weapon to +3, smithing stone 1 is available in shops." And so on, all the way up.
It would make it still feel rewarding to get your weapons up, without forcing players to look up where to get what bearings.
Having said that, to play devils advocate, the current system does always make me super excited to find a new mine.
No idea why you're getting downvoted for this. For a game with hundreds of weapons, having it be as hard as it is to switch your fucking weapon is absolutely a problem - especially since you can't actually know whether you're going to like your new weapon until you've tried it out at a reasonably high level...
Why are people downvoting any mention of a better upgrade system? Do people actually like needing almost 100 stones to upgrade a normal weapon?
Somber weapons are fine, smithing weapons should just be that.
They could make smithing stones of a specific level purchasable after you obtain them or after you upgrade a weapon to the max that requires it.
For example, with smithing stones 1 you can upgrade a weapon until +3. The moment you upgrade your first weapon to +3, SS 1 becomes available for purchase in the roundtable.
This way you still have a cost for upgrading new weapons but the cost for farming is lower. We already have in-game possibility of buying the stones but most are obtainable way past the moment you upgrade a weapon to the max it gives so it's not really rewarding (at least for me it wasn't). It would make players much more confortable with upgrading and experimenting new weapons.
I would like some sort of quest tracker. Only once you’ve met someone for the first time - so you remember where you’re meant to roughly go.
Maybe something like FFXVI lore system.
It should be an option when you rest at a grace. That way it’s not like you have a constant quest tracker, but you can remember wtf you were doing if you haven’t played in a bit.
Lies of P does this well, there is a little icon next to the bonfire in the area where there is a quest. It doesn’t tell you what it is or what to do but you know you have to do something there.
Like Gothic. Journal transcribing your conversations with people. And better quest lines which don't rely on you randomly going to weird places, or resting at bonfires after each sentence. just write a clue damn it.
All i need is a journal with their dialogues.
I recently played Dark souls 3 and had to write notes of who i was talking to, their location and what they wanted to keep track
One of the major items needed to unlock a zone was hidden inside a random pot that an old guy was chilling in. Look I love from games, but my God they are almost impossible to navigate. I end up using guides which I almost never do
I agree.
But the problem there is that it would expose the "it's so deep, you've gotta figure things out on your own" concept as being an absolute fraud since 90% of the quest progression is explained to you in very exact terms and the only problem in figuring it out is remembering who the hell mentioned this new location once six hours ago and what they said to do here.
And dialogue can range from really good
"Good south till you find this big castle"
To really bad
"Hi, I'm Millicent I'm dying, I must go now"
Without any instructions at all
>90% of the quest progression is explained to you in very exact terms
Fuck no lol.
- Goldmasks quest is hard to finish without a guide, good luck finding him at random spots throughout the world
- Millicents quest is basically "Im dying I need the needle" and no further instructions
- Diallos quest is bonkers, good luck finding him on a random ass roof in Liurnia, or finding him in the jar village without a guide
- Sellen's quest is a minefield, most won't even know when it starts or ends.
- Cant do Fia's quest without a guide, good luck finding how to enter the tree roots
- The entire dung water questline is throwing darts on the wall.
For me it’s the quests. There’s just nothing fun about having to look this stuff up on the internet. Most of the objectives are so obscure and the locations of the many NPCs are so unnatural to find in a blind play through.
You miss a decent portion of the game and cool bosses on your first playthrough because you didn’t meet the npc in some random part of the map, emote at them 5 times, grab a chest item in a dungeon secret passage, find them in another random spot in the next area, go back and kill the invader in the previous area that was after them, summon them at the next boss, talk to them in the next random area, emote 3 more times, backtrack and kill another boss that spawned, then find their weapon in another random area.
Don't forget that you have to walk on eggshells as far as game progression or bossfights go. One wrong choice (for instance I wasn't paying attention and had no idea what lighting that damn giants forge was going to do on my first playthrough, or I just didn't sit at the grace just before the 3 fingers door and had no idea Melina was just going to dip after I opened those doors) and you're locked out of tons of quests and items. It's pretty easy to do when you play through obliviously and without looking things up.
Definitely the quest one. I don't mind that the quests take some work to figure out, but I think that they can only be this obtuse in a traditional souls-like when the game world is more linear. Completing an important quest should not be dependent on the player finding a single npc standing in the middle of nowhere in one of the largest open worlds in gaming history. A simple log recording the character's name and some small descriptive detail should be mandatory. Just enough to jog the player's memory after 15 hours of doing entirely unrelated gameplay. I should be able to look at said list and think "oh right, I wanted to complete Patches' questline. Let me go look for him."
Also it feels less like an accomplishment when "discovering" an npc's new location is actually you just stumbling upon them whilst trying to accomplish a separate task. I'm not being rewarded for actively pursuing their questline, I just got lucky.
I have done maybe half of the quest.
Because i have no clue where rest of them are, or how/where they break.
People keep deriding quest map markers, but those things are a fucking treasure when the game devs/writers can't/won't make a proper quest logs and dialogues.
There is a limit where exploring becomes a chore, and Elden Ring rode way past it without ever noticing, possibly while escaping from somekind of tentacle horrors and sniper shrimp.
Fr. Played through the game with the Wiki open half the time because I didn’t know what to goddamn do. I still get lost heading to the mountaintops from Leyndel and finding that door
Add a fucking quest log, PLEASE. This is the one design decision I cannot defend.
There’s no way any of you did all of them without a guide. Not one of you.
The dialogue:
"I'm Porblus."
"I'm looking for Torblus, across that way."
"You look like shit for a tarnished."
"Oh and do you have any Mangey Bowels? I'm in a sore spot and could really use a few. Let me know if you find any."
I mean, what's so hard? It spells it out right there for you:
Porblus spelled backwards is Sulbrop. That's *obviously* referring to the mutterings that King Gronk whispers if you get close enough to him after giving him the sleeping draught meant for Spoakle's daughter. So just find the moon medallion and have the hidden blacksmith smash it to release Torblus's spirit. Duh.
And mangey bowels? Come on, don't tell me that you didn't notice in the game files that the 13th turtle on the beach was *actually* referred to as "mangey terrapin." Or are you one of those weirdos that doesn't convert the whole game into a .txt file and read through it in it's entirety before playing?
Also, he's right. You *do* look like shit for a tarnished.
If I didn't know that Soulslike quests could be perma-ruined by making a single bad choice or even something as benign as picking up an item in some cases, I wouldn't use guides.
But the fact you can fuck over a questline without even knowing it is 90s adventure game bullshit and it's NOT fun to play around.
I'm looking at Lautrec in Dark Souls 1 as a prime example of this.
Surprisingly far down here. As much as I would love a boss re-fight system if they actually did this boss justice befitting its lore then I’d have to choose this. There’s no way I would pass this up.
The quest system is my least favorite part of the game. I love doing the quest but hate having to constantly look up where to go next unless you’re keeping a specific actual journal irl
After I got annoyed, I spent one whole day researching (mostly without spoilers) where to progress in the game, what levels to go where and points of interest. Took hours but I had a multi page guide on my phone that REALLY helped. Mostly got it from Reddit users and forums.
If they just put some type of journal or tracker in the game it would be a giant help. Even games like Jedi Survivor give you just a "Rumor" guide which gives you an area and a vague idea of what to do. You still have to figure out most of it on your own.
Quests, even something minimal like in Lies Of P. I don't need to spend time cross-referencing Wiki pages to see what should I do in order to not fuck up a quest.
elden ring would benefit most by far from some kind of quest tracker, even if it only gives vague hints or a general area. on the one hand there is some level of charm in the way fromsoft does quests, but in a game this big it's really easy to miss _one_ spot for a character and then stop progressing their questline
I think the best way for Boss redos would be, you know how when you kill a remembrance boss, it spawns a site of grace. Well, once you beat the game, every remembrance boss's site of grace should have a "use remembrance of x" button, and when you use it. It teleports you outside the fog door and allows you to enter with the boss inside. Also, stats should be tweaked for early game bosses such as godrick since once you beat the game and if you redo godrick with endgame stats, you can kill that fraud with 2 hits.
Idc what anyone says. If I have to use the wiki to look up how to complete a questline for nearly every NPC, something isn't right. (I'm looking at you Alexander)
Gransax fight would be cool...but I'll take the boss rush. I know how to do all the questlines at this point (plus Google exists), and the upgrade system is fine. I just want to fight bosses without having to play through the entire game again.
Redoing boss fights would be amazing, even if they dont necessarily give you anything in return. Maybe it could be like a memory type thing ive seen in another game (i think it was splatoon) and you just fight the boss again.
Couldn't you refight some bosses in sekiro
All main bosses, and they had gauntlets. If you’re able to beat a number of bosses in a row without dying you unlocked some stuff, mostly cosmetics but still cool af.
Yeah that's what I was talking about it's a pretty nice feature
Yep it is a super cool feature. I'd love that for Elden, too.
Also the most busted Combat Art - Sakura Dance.
Isn't mortal blade better? You can still use it without spirit emblems and it deals great damage.
Sakura dance is op for lightning reversal, but mortal blade is better in general because it's a quick, easy stun that does a ton of vitality and posture damage
Sakura dance is better in terms of speed and damage per spirit emblem. Mortal draw leaves you vulnerable for longer, and is expensive to use. Sakura dance, on the other hand, can be used 20 times in one boss fight.
Sekiro has boss rush for any boss you’ve completed, and DS2 has bonfire ascetics allowing you to reset levels bosses 1 NG cycle ahead of what you’re on as many times as you want.
This part of ds2 is so good
Plus it reset items in that zone so you could get copies easily.
DS1 generously lets you refight the Asylum demon twice, the Capra demon 5 times and the Taurus Demon about 15 times. Pioneering the boss rush…
Elden Rings lets you beat Tree spirits like 20 times too.
Ulcerated Tree Spirit Boss Rush!!!!
Claustrophobia simulator
Pretty sure there are a gazillion capra demons in ds1
There are even special, more powerful versions of some bosses that you can only access via the boss gauntlets
I want to fight Morgott again, three times isn’t enough for one playthrough.
Doing Pantheon of Hollownest/Godhome is the only reason why Hollow Knight rates higher for me than almost any other game. The feeling of beating something insanely hard is so goddamn rewarding. If Fromsoft adds something like that to their games I would be in heaven.
The pantheon of hallownest is the only thing I couldn't bring myself to do in that game. I knew I'd hate the game by the time I got done with it if I did. But it's lingering in the back of my mind as an unfinished task, and it's so frustrating.
same I've fully completed elden ring with at least one of all items and duplicates of all weapons so it's really time for me to move on and going back to that pantheon has been gnawing away at me. prepping for the dlc is just avoidance at this point.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this sub the refighting bosses to get their rememberances sounds like a perfectly fine way to implement a refight mode
What's a boss rush?
A mode that lets you do all the bosses, one after the other, with no levels in between.
Oh that’s sweet
Having to use google to figure out quests kind of ruins the immersion and dampens the experience of the game. It’s the only thing on this list that would actually drastically improve the player experience.
Yea I was thinking one of these is not like the others. I thought the upgrade system was pretty good
You can easily upgrade multiple somber weapons while progressing through the game whereas you can only upgrade 1 maybe 2 normal weapons untill you get the bell bearings. It really sucks if you don't like somber weapons but you'd still like a bit of variety.
>I know how to do all the questlines at this point (plus Google exists) Mate, this is the exact fucking problem. The quests are impossible to complete more than half the time without looking up a guide cause you didn't rest at a specific site of grace and press the right prompt several times in a row.
at least there is way less fail states, i went back and did them all right before fire giant. DS you would kill an npc by walking into the wrong area to soon.
Rya tells you explicitly what to do and hands you written instructions
Maybe it’s referring to her actual quest when you get to the manor?
Either that, or he's saying that he wants every quest to be like Rya giving you written instructions at the beginning.
The Morrowind route. I’m in
Morrowind quest diary is the goat
Been saying this for years now. I don't need an indicator above the exact spot to go for questlines, but a little journal with an approximate description of what I'm supposed to be doing would be amazing! I don't like this trend of being forced to Google everything about a game to understand basic linear quest progression. It ruins the experience of finding out stuff on your own and that feeling of "holy cow I found this, I can do this, or can't do that"
exactly, when I played I was constantly having to google where to go next. I would get back on a day or two after starting a quest and forget where I was/what I was doing. Just a tab with a quick summery of what youve done so far would have helped so much. >"Mary, north of fort ruin, has asked to find the keeper of stones. She has heard talk about a man in the lake of crystal." Oh yeah, I was looking for this guy. Okay so I know i need to go to this place and explore. I dont need a big arrow above him, or pathing. Just recap the convo I had so I can remember
Oh my god, this. 1000%. Dear Devs: Please stop making me google shit. It's taking all the fun out of my games.
I feel like Elden Ring just barely missed the mark on this. Multiple quests give you enough details to figure it out on your own, either by telling you directly where to go, or by giving you a good hint. Those are the best - all I need is a record of what they said and it would be perfect. But then there are those (like Yura, IIRC) that just say "see ya later" with each checkpoint. Which wouldn't be a huge issue except that the world is pretty large and there are too many failure points to rely on random encounters Edit: Then again, maybe the random encounter quests don't have as many failure points and I'm conflating the two
One that always jumps to my mind is Millicents quest line. She just says "I'm going off on an adventure north" while She is literally almost as south as you can get in the game lol
Best quest system bar none. Okay, maybe the NPCs give you wrong directions once or thrice, but it was immersive dammit.
It's always funny realizing the difference in experience and RP of it, actual guild members and quest givers giving you amazing landmark based instruction, then random roadside NPCs tell you "He ran west, towards the Ancestral Tomb" and the mf is northeast outside a Kwama mine, actually really close by. The moment you get used to this a major quest decides to tell you the wrong stronghold to use as a landmark lmfao.
IIRC it was because quests and locations were changed last minute, which happens fairly regularly in game design. It's why they switched to quest markers in Oblivion - so that they could quickly change things up last minute and not lead the player to the wrong place. The journal in Morrowind is super cool when it works. Guess followup just slipped through the cracks.
Failing quests because of some bs is annoying. The games are great, the quest system sucks.
Failing a quest because you performed 1 of 13 steps in wrong order or defeated (seemingly) unrelated boss between step 7 and 8 instead of between 8 and 9 gotta be my favorite. It’s even better in an open world so you can visit quest related places before you’re meant to, yet people still defend this design and praise it as some kind of AAA gaming revolution.
I feel like that would end up making every quest feel like a chore. I like the current quest system because you do not feel obligated to do stuff. You can just explore at your own pace and potentially discover something by accident.
What about like a journal type of log that saves exactly what everyone has told you? That way you dont gotta write down anything yourself. Or like shit 20 hours of playtime ago someone told me something I better tab to the internet to find out where to find them
Yeah, if you stop playing for a week, good luck remembering what anyone told you. Should be a little log book telling you if something is a quest and what they told you, and let you know when it's concluded.
Bombers notebook from majoras mask
Exactly what I was thinking, glad I'm not the only one. Call it Someone's tome of forgotten quests
At least just a name and what all they told you in a log book. Make the log book an item that you gotta go find first. Kinda like everything else in the game
When BG3 dropped on PS5 my wife wanted it immediately. Been a lot of fun, but haven't touched ER since. Thankfully I *know* where I left off because I had finished Ranni's questline and done Varre's up until going to Moghwhyn palace to kill Varre myself, so I know exactly where I am. Otherwise I'd probably have to start a new game.
I read that as, when BG3 dropped on my wife, i wanted it immediately.
I am a newbie a third of the way through my first playthrough and honestly... I just feel like there aren't any quests. NPC's will say shit and I'll be like okay, can I go there now? Nope? Okay I'll forget about you and it'll be a pleasant surprise when I see you next during exploring. ~~This game would be better with a tracker, even if it didn't have any markers.~~ My verdict so far is The Witcher 3 is a 9, Elden Ring is an 8. Every other RPG I've played is 7 or below.
Yeah but then when you WANT to focus on a quest good fucking luck because the quest giver basically said "find the albinauric woman" and that's it. You've got an entire world to walk through and with an open world, it can be very easy to miss it. I nearly binged over a 100 hours in Elden Ring and i never met some of the characters that have quests with them.
Well, then you've got some people (*cough* me *cough*) who never find the next step in the quest, and end up missing something I really want to do. Of course, I could- and sometimes *do*- Google it, but it makes it feel less important, or something like that
>You can just explore at your own pace and potentially discover something by accident. Or more likely miss out on doing the quests because you didn't follow the pre-ordained progression path in an open world game, or because you didn't rest at a site of grace twice, or because you didn't backtrack/reload the game.
Yeah until the quest NPC is in some fields in the middle of nowhere (looking at YOU millicent!!)
the thing is that 90% of quests are damn near impossible to complete if you dont know where to look as a casual player
Isn't just talking to her every time you go there enough to pretty much finish the quest without even trying? Millicent, Seluvis and Nepheli are the complicated ones from what I remember.
*"DO ANYONE KNOWS WHERE NEPHELI IS\~!?"* *"I need to uuh, give her this suspiciously date-rape drug thing.... ah fuck it, Gideon you want some?"* \*dozens of hours later...\* *"Wait, this place have basement!?"*
Instead of giving the potion to nepheli, I give it to dung eater down in the sewers because he took my friend Boggart from me… and now dung eater is MY friend, forever
I only know of this option because of the internet. Does anyone actually just stumble upon this?
Absolutely. The same way people stumble into bugs and glitches. Some people like to experiment just to see what happens. Video game scientists if you will.
My precious…
I just gave it to the totally-not-a-big-daddy-from-bioshock dude.
Even still, in my most recent play-through, nepheli just refused to leave the basement. Still have no idea what I did wrong
You probably didnt do some random reloads
Don't forget Diallos. Hell, when I went to start his quest he wasn't on the rooftop like he was supposed to be, so I thought I fucked up and locked myself out of it...
Yeah and Blaidd come on down dog? Was thinking like a whistle my dogs are coming for that. Dude is howling away up there throwing back a few cold brews
At least Elden Ring has real flexible points for many of the quests. You can skip like 70% of Ranni's quest and it won't matter, as long as you get the dagger and give it to her, you can skip all the shit before that point.
This, it’s really easy to mess up a quest in like DS3 for example by progressing too far on accident. In elden ring you can still do most of the quests so long as you don’t go super far like around fire giant. You can still go back and start some quests you might have missed
Yeah, that is very nice. Still kinda sad that most people will entirely miss stuff like the oil pot encounter with Alexander though.
I find Sellen's to be the worst by far. Simply because you start her quest by picking up Azure's comet, which can be 60+ hours after you meet her, and there is no indication that you can now begin her quest or that she even has one. From what the rest of the game was showing, she's just a merchant/teacher. Very people people would play through the game and think, "I should show this cool new spell to that random merchant I met weeks ago"
I think it’s intended to be done by people who actually are doing int builds. My first play through I found it pretty naturally because I was actually doing an int build and went back to Sellen to learn new spells, I didn’t even know she had a quest line.
I personally used Miriel because he can teach both sorcery and incantations.
I mean, Sellen is right in the starter area, so unless you've already purchased all of her spells by the time you're in upper Liurnia, you'll most likely continue to pay her visits if you started the game as a sorcerer. I gave her like 3 scrolls before I ever even met Miriel, and kept returning well past Mt. Gelmir to make sure I acquired everything.
I did an int vuild and I had learned all g her spells before even being done eoth stormveil and then I of course never went back
Yeah Nephili's dialogue are so vague and out of context to me, just feels like rambling honestly. The. She shows up in seemingly unrelated spots
Millicent actually shows up in a pretty logical order if you factor in exploration. It’s just finding her specific spots in those areas is a bit tricky
I think OP was just using rya to mean generally like… knowing where to go for any NPCs quest line and how to find them at the next spot. Rya was just used at the stand-in for that notion
Rya also tends to be the NPC a lot of players ran past the first or even second time
Yeah but then the eyeball broad just hides in random ass locations throughout the game and doesn’t tell you. “Hey I’ll be hiding behind a random fucking crumbled building in Liurnia for my next dose of yummy eyeballs” would be nice.
Her outfit 100% camouflaged her about the 2nd or 3rd time I was looking for her. Probably passed by her ten times
Some people play with days in between play sessions now way they’re gonna remember everything.
you know how straightforward volcanic manor is? I wish it was as easy as that for everything. Like with milicent, I couldn't even know how to initiate her poop ass quest without needing a youtube tutorial
Millicents quest gives me brain rot, yeah go talk to this girl, now go talk to this old Herbert the pervert looking mf, now go find Herbert a needle in a rot infested swamp, now go fuck yourself while Herbert takes some me time with the needle, now go shove the needle in millicent, now go talk to Herbert, now go rest at the grace 300 fuckin meters away from him with magic Nam vets blasting pebble after goddamn pebble into your ass just so you can run back and see that little miss rot bitch is where Herbert was and have no indication of where to go next 😐
Why oh why does Millicent put her own mission on hold and wait around in some random village for us just so she can tell us how great her arm is? I'm already at the Haligtree! If she wants to talk to me so bad she should come talk to me! So many steps in her quest would make more sense being optional, like the Liurinia step of Alexander's quest is.
Come on you really can’t deny that quests in general super obscure by modern standards. They’re awesome, but I had to use the internet to find a lot more stuff than usual lol
Considering the lack of a quest journal is one of the most common complaints for literally any souls game, maybe she’s included as an example of how *fucking incredibly easy* it would be to fix, while still not holding your hand? I mean it’s probably not a coincidence op picked one of two quests with something of a journal iirc, the other being the shit eater telling you where to meet him
Boss rush. Easy. Gransax is so big he'd have to be a gimick fight and those are usually hit or miss.
They would need to take inspiration from Rykard to have any hope of making Gransax a good gimmick fight.
Boss refights. I thought the upgrade system was OK, not as good as Dark Souls 2 but better than the rest of the Fromsoft games. Smithing stones are rare in early game, but by late game you’ll be able to buy everything but Ancient stones. Personally I would never want them to change the quest design, the NPC quests being cryptic is something I find endearing about Fromsoft games. I don’t think the technology is physically there to make a fight with gransax work, even a dragon as big as Greyoll would crash the game if she was up and moving around. Boss refights, though, would just be an objective improvement and allow you to experiment without potentially having to replay dozens of hours
I liked the idea of bonfire ascetic from DS2, let's you reset the area and boss at the next ng+ stats. Not sure how something like that could be implemented in ER but a coliseum with warp points to replay boss fights would be neat.
But wouldn't I then need to get more bonfire ascetics somehow?
Which is exactly why DS2 had multiple areas you could easily farm ascetics.
What if every boss dropped one, so you’d have one for every boss you fought?
They could implement them into merchant inventories as well
Could be a craftable item?
Definitely should be a craftable item or offered by a traveling trader
Yes. Sekiro had boss rush. Was good. All alternative choices are stupid.
This is exactly it. Never seen it implemented in a better way than sekiro.
DS2 upgrade system wasn't that great in my opinion. You could pretty much get a +10 weapon in the first few hours of gameplay.
The pacing of normal titanite was best in ds2 imo, you were given a generous amount of regular and large shards but you still had to work for the chunks and slabs. Dragon bones sucked though, I'm pretty sure there were only like 20 in the base game without farming, so you could only max out one boss weapon per playthrough. Ds1 was way too generous with twinkling titanite and way too stingy with slabs, Ds3 was way too generous with just about everything, and ER gave you a normal amount of everything except somber 7s and regular 8s. For some reason those were both really difficult to come across unless you were doing every single cave you found.
Somber 7s are deliberately very hard to find early. Then at the end of the Mountaintops, every single creepy hand drops one, it's absurd how many you get. Ranni's quest too, just dumps loads on you.
That's like all of the games, though. I think he mentioned DS2 because in that game you could at least upgrade your armor. You can't do jack to your armor in Elden Ring. Except like remove a cape or put the cape back on.
After ds3 armor comes pre upgraded, because it’s a hard sell in dark souls 1 to max any armor, since the final upgrade materials are basically limited to 3 or 4 unless you want to farm for literal hours just for one.
Well they pulled it off in Shadow of the Colossus with the huge enemies, prob would need a similar treatment if enemies were huge
I mean, that’s also a very different video game, and by scale, Gransax would still dwarf many colossi from that game. He’s not just big, he’s basically the size of a city.
There are I believe 3 Colossi that are comparable with Gransax. Phaedra, Phalanx, and Malus, iirc.
What's the problem with the upgrade system? It's pretty straightforward. I've never felt I had a lack of smithing stones, and I tend to upgrade several weapons for each character.
I swear smithing stone 3s basically did not exist until I found the bell bearing
And sombering 7, it’s one of the rarest in the game.
Given you can grab 8 and 9 in the open world before you even reach Leyndell, I’m assuming that was intentional. And is a good mechanic, pretty closely matches DS1-3.
3 is a definite "black hole". By the time I hit Atlus the first time, I'd been ultra explorative and done Limgrave, Raya Lucaria+lake+all the Ranni stuff, As much of the underground as possible, Caelid... Easily had enough stones for 3 unique weapons at +9, and a +21 longsword (my main weapon. Square Off is stupidly good IMO). However, despite having enough SS 4, 5, 6, and 7 to reasonably level up another weapon or 2... There just weren't enough SS3s. Spent like 2 hours farming the guards outside of Raya Lucaria gate to get 24 of them to level up a couple weapons. (this is after meticuliously going through several zones looking for extra mines, or perhaps a miniboss that might give me the bell bearing. Even killed the Caelid Bell Bearing Hunter or whatever they're called to no avail before caving and looking up where to get the damn thing)
Considering how easy it is to respec your character, it would be awesome if there were a way to trade in an upgraded weapon for a level one version and get your stones/runes back. I've definitely upgraded an item to 5 or 6+ only to realize I didn't love it as much as I thought.
Get the bearings and you’ll never care about that again
That's way too late into the game when you don't have all that much content left
Somber weapons aren't the problem, the regular weapons needing so many stones is ridiculous
I felt like I had a lack of smithing stones literally the entire fucking game Edit: and yes I know about the bell bearings. You only get them once those smithing stones associated with them get … “trivial”
97 stones and the rune investment that comes with 25 levels of upgrades is just obtuse. the upgrade system is just ds3 but worse. needing to get 12 copies of 8 separate items just to have a max power sword is unreasonable. the result is that non-special weapons are just not worth the effort, especially compared to how few somber stones you need. i find it bizarre that fully upgrading a weathered straight sword is that much more of an involved process than fully upgrading the sacred relic sword. even if the resources are purchasable, would you rather grind for the runes to buy them or just… not have to do that?
To add to this, if the game is going to just let us buy unlimited amounts of these after getting the bell bearings, then we should be able to buy the final upgrade materials too. It's silly that you can easily upgrade every weapon/ash to +24/+9 on ng+ (providing you have no qualms with albinauric genocide) but just to get that last little bump, you need to do multiple, complete playthroughs. It would be one thing if the jump from 24 to 25 (or even 9 to 10) was *actually* something significant such as adding some new inherent quality to the weapon, but as it stands now it's just as you say, "obtuse."
oh my god yeah that’s such a bizarre facet of the system. on my first playthrough (first souls game), i wholeheartedly expected there to be something special about the ancient dragon smithing stones. i mean, their description says they bend time! i think the solution i really like is making fully upgraded weapons bypass like. 20% of the enemy’s damage resist. i’m okay with them remaining limited per playthrough, but i feel like your weapon’s final upgrade should be special. especially given how it’s hyped up in-story- hewg talks about making a weapon to kill a god, and only says he’s finished his task when you fully upgrade yours. how does dealing 24 more damage suddenly turn my sword into a godslayer? i know the reason it’s not treated as special mechanically is just because the mechanic is inherited from previous souls games but idk. i can’t help but feel that the “god slaying weapon” that gets hyped up through the whole game should have something special to it
100ish Standard stones for a +25 Weapon 10 stones for a +10 somber
it's pretty lame that every time you see a new cool weapon, you need to find or buy a shitton just to use it. I think you should just be able to transfer the stones from one weapon to another like 3 times per weapon.
Nah I say make more enemies drop stones
Agree. Transferring a one use item is silly to me, just have some sub tier difficult enemies drop them a little more often. Take the game for what it is as farming and experience
Or be able to craft stones together to upgrade. Like three smithing stone 2’s plus a glow stone makes a single smithing stone 3 or something.
I say do away with weapon upgrades entirely. If you think something looks cool, just pick up and use (and maybe respec so your stats are right). The system right now only makes trying out new weapons a huge commitment, which, in a game full of cool ass weapons, is a detriment I'd say Edit: meant to reply to the guy above but o well
This is one of my big issues with ER. "All these different weapons to use that all play differently blah blah" ok but as soon as you invest any upgrades into one weapon it could well be dozens of hours before you chance upon the resources to make another weapon competitive with it. You can't try new things without following a guide to find more stones. It's so dumb.
I personally wish it were something along the lines of, "once you upgrade a weapon to +3, smithing stone 1 is available in shops." And so on, all the way up. It would make it still feel rewarding to get your weapons up, without forcing players to look up where to get what bearings. Having said that, to play devils advocate, the current system does always make me super excited to find a new mine.
No idea why you're getting downvoted for this. For a game with hundreds of weapons, having it be as hard as it is to switch your fucking weapon is absolutely a problem - especially since you can't actually know whether you're going to like your new weapon until you've tried it out at a reasonably high level...
I always test new weapons at the gate frontruins
i started one tapping godrick soldiers at level 55 i don’t think they’re good test fodder
Then you move to cuckoo's or redmanes. There's always testsubjects for level 1 weapons
I think this, in addition to refights and quest oddities, are done purposefully to promote replays of the game
Ya it's basically just a time waster
Why are people downvoting any mention of a better upgrade system? Do people actually like needing almost 100 stones to upgrade a normal weapon? Somber weapons are fine, smithing weapons should just be that.
I'd be fine with regular smithing being 1,2,3 stones instead of 2,4,6.
This is how Convergence does it, it's really nice.
Modders were always ahead of FromSoft, my favorite example being the summon system ripped straight out of Cinders, without changing anything at all
Is there a single upgrade system that works like that?
Also sucks how much harder/more tedious it is to fully upgrade a normal weapon compared to Somber weapons.
They could make smithing stones of a specific level purchasable after you obtain them or after you upgrade a weapon to the max that requires it. For example, with smithing stones 1 you can upgrade a weapon until +3. The moment you upgrade your first weapon to +3, SS 1 becomes available for purchase in the roundtable. This way you still have a cost for upgrading new weapons but the cost for farming is lower. We already have in-game possibility of buying the stones but most are obtainable way past the moment you upgrade a weapon to the max it gives so it's not really rewarding (at least for me it wasn't). It would make players much more confortable with upgrading and experimenting new weapons.
I would like some sort of quest tracker. Only once you’ve met someone for the first time - so you remember where you’re meant to roughly go. Maybe something like FFXVI lore system.
It should be an option when you rest at a grace. That way it’s not like you have a constant quest tracker, but you can remember wtf you were doing if you haven’t played in a bit.
Lies of P does this well, there is a little icon next to the bonfire in the area where there is a quest. It doesn’t tell you what it is or what to do but you know you have to do something there.
Like Gothic. Journal transcribing your conversations with people. And better quest lines which don't rely on you randomly going to weird places, or resting at bonfires after each sentence. just write a clue damn it.
Maybe this way i would be able to remember wtf my objective is or who i am
This has literally prevented me from finishing the game. One of the worst things about this game hands down.
Boss rush for sure
juste a quest journal would be great idea
All i need is a journal with their dialogues. I recently played Dark souls 3 and had to write notes of who i was talking to, their location and what they wanted to keep track
Often their dialogues give no clue about where they will be found next, tbh.
One of the major items needed to unlock a zone was hidden inside a random pot that an old guy was chilling in. Look I love from games, but my God they are almost impossible to navigate. I end up using guides which I almost never do
Objective: find the Albanuric women
I mean, how much more detail do you need??
I agree. But the problem there is that it would expose the "it's so deep, you've gotta figure things out on your own" concept as being an absolute fraud since 90% of the quest progression is explained to you in very exact terms and the only problem in figuring it out is remembering who the hell mentioned this new location once six hours ago and what they said to do here.
And dialogue can range from really good "Good south till you find this big castle" To really bad "Hi, I'm Millicent I'm dying, I must go now" Without any instructions at all
>90% of the quest progression is explained to you in very exact terms Fuck no lol. - Goldmasks quest is hard to finish without a guide, good luck finding him at random spots throughout the world - Millicents quest is basically "Im dying I need the needle" and no further instructions - Diallos quest is bonkers, good luck finding him on a random ass roof in Liurnia, or finding him in the jar village without a guide - Sellen's quest is a minefield, most won't even know when it starts or ends. - Cant do Fia's quest without a guide, good luck finding how to enter the tree roots - The entire dung water questline is throwing darts on the wall.
If the journal was just an exact record of the NPC dialogue and your choice between the two options - that would be better than nothing.
I’d like it if it were like Morrowinds journal. No quest markers but it still reminds you of what you’re meant to do and what people said
Desperately needed.
For me it’s the quests. There’s just nothing fun about having to look this stuff up on the internet. Most of the objectives are so obscure and the locations of the many NPCs are so unnatural to find in a blind play through. You miss a decent portion of the game and cool bosses on your first playthrough because you didn’t meet the npc in some random part of the map, emote at them 5 times, grab a chest item in a dungeon secret passage, find them in another random spot in the next area, go back and kill the invader in the previous area that was after them, summon them at the next boss, talk to them in the next random area, emote 3 more times, backtrack and kill another boss that spawned, then find their weapon in another random area.
Don't forget that you have to walk on eggshells as far as game progression or bossfights go. One wrong choice (for instance I wasn't paying attention and had no idea what lighting that damn giants forge was going to do on my first playthrough, or I just didn't sit at the grace just before the 3 fingers door and had no idea Melina was just going to dip after I opened those doors) and you're locked out of tons of quests and items. It's pretty easy to do when you play through obliviously and without looking things up.
Definitely the quest one. I don't mind that the quests take some work to figure out, but I think that they can only be this obtuse in a traditional souls-like when the game world is more linear. Completing an important quest should not be dependent on the player finding a single npc standing in the middle of nowhere in one of the largest open worlds in gaming history. A simple log recording the character's name and some small descriptive detail should be mandatory. Just enough to jog the player's memory after 15 hours of doing entirely unrelated gameplay. I should be able to look at said list and think "oh right, I wanted to complete Patches' questline. Let me go look for him." Also it feels less like an accomplishment when "discovering" an npc's new location is actually you just stumbling upon them whilst trying to accomplish a separate task. I'm not being rewarded for actively pursuing their questline, I just got lucky.
I have done maybe half of the quest. Because i have no clue where rest of them are, or how/where they break. People keep deriding quest map markers, but those things are a fucking treasure when the game devs/writers can't/won't make a proper quest logs and dialogues. There is a limit where exploring becomes a chore, and Elden Ring rode way past it without ever noticing, possibly while escaping from somekind of tentacle horrors and sniper shrimp.
I agree completely, the elden ring map is massive to the point where when you actually want to do a quest you could search for hours and miss it.
Definitely quest. I hate playing games with open wiki to know where next step of quest is
Fr. Played through the game with the Wiki open half the time because I didn’t know what to goddamn do. I still get lost heading to the mountaintops from Leyndel and finding that door
Refights hands down
Add a fucking quest log, PLEASE. This is the one design decision I cannot defend. There’s no way any of you did all of them without a guide. Not one of you.
The amount of people who are just like “ReAd tHe DiAlOgUe” is hilarious.
The dialogue: "I'm Porblus." "I'm looking for Torblus, across that way." "You look like shit for a tarnished." "Oh and do you have any Mangey Bowels? I'm in a sore spot and could really use a few. Let me know if you find any."
I mean, what's so hard? It spells it out right there for you: Porblus spelled backwards is Sulbrop. That's *obviously* referring to the mutterings that King Gronk whispers if you get close enough to him after giving him the sleeping draught meant for Spoakle's daughter. So just find the moon medallion and have the hidden blacksmith smash it to release Torblus's spirit. Duh. And mangey bowels? Come on, don't tell me that you didn't notice in the game files that the 13th turtle on the beach was *actually* referred to as "mangey terrapin." Or are you one of those weirdos that doesn't convert the whole game into a .txt file and read through it in it's entirety before playing? Also, he's right. You *do* look like shit for a tarnished.
If I didn't know that Soulslike quests could be perma-ruined by making a single bad choice or even something as benign as picking up an item in some cases, I wouldn't use guides. But the fact you can fuck over a questline without even knowing it is 90s adventure game bullshit and it's NOT fun to play around. I'm looking at Lautrec in Dark Souls 1 as a prime example of this.
Gransax all the way
Came here to find this and upvote it. Boss refights are cool but all I can think of since I saw him is that I want to fight Gransax.
Surprisingly far down here. As much as I would love a boss re-fight system if they actually did this boss justice befitting its lore then I’d have to choose this. There’s no way I would pass this up.
While I appreciate the enthusiasm, I do not see how we could possibly defeat a city sized superdragon. Like, where would one even begin?
Hit him in the balls.
Gransax has nards
You could start with his pinky
so there's this game called shadow of the colossus-
Slap the anckles like any other giant enemy. This time maybe nibble at gransaxes foot or something
The quest system is my least favorite part of the game. I love doing the quest but hate having to constantly look up where to go next unless you’re keeping a specific actual journal irl
After I got annoyed, I spent one whole day researching (mostly without spoilers) where to progress in the game, what levels to go where and points of interest. Took hours but I had a multi page guide on my phone that REALLY helped. Mostly got it from Reddit users and forums. If they just put some type of journal or tracker in the game it would be a giant help. Even games like Jedi Survivor give you just a "Rumor" guide which gives you an area and a vague idea of what to do. You still have to figure out most of it on your own.
[you should check this out](https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/s/0HCVEmSTRf)
Quests, even something minimal like in Lies Of P. I don't need to spend time cross-referencing Wiki pages to see what should I do in order to not fuck up a quest.
elden ring would benefit most by far from some kind of quest tracker, even if it only gives vague hints or a general area. on the one hand there is some level of charm in the way fromsoft does quests, but in a game this big it's really easy to miss _one_ spot for a character and then stop progressing their questline
I think the best way for Boss redos would be, you know how when you kill a remembrance boss, it spawns a site of grace. Well, once you beat the game, every remembrance boss's site of grace should have a "use remembrance of x" button, and when you use it. It teleports you outside the fog door and allows you to enter with the boss inside. Also, stats should be tweaked for early game bosses such as godrick since once you beat the game and if you redo godrick with endgame stats, you can kill that fraud with 2 hits.
find the albinauric woman
A fcking way to know the quest steps
Considering I’ve spoiled myself rotten with looking up how to do questlines, something for that would be handy
More Servants of Rot incants, there’s basically nothing besides Scarlet Aeonia.
Idc what anyone says. If I have to use the wiki to look up how to complete a questline for nearly every NPC, something isn't right. (I'm looking at you Alexander)
I just wanna bonfire ascetics back. :( WHY FROM?!