I’m enjoying Elden Ring, and you can too
Elden Ring is here, and it’s great!
That being said, these games have always been lauded as unforgiving, and while I’m fairly familiar with most of From Software’s recent titles I’m not great at really any of them. Elden Ring is the first of their games to really “click” with me. I’ve played about 20 hours in the last 7 days, so let that be a testament to how enthralled I am. Here’s a few tips for any FromSoft first timers. I want to be clear and put my line in the sand when it comes to these games as a whole. I’m no souls master, but damn it I have fun when I play them.
Yelling “FUCK” at my TV at 3 in the morning counts as fun right?
Pick 2 or 3 stats, and stick with em
FromSoft’s newest epic plays a lot like Dark Souls, and the rules of the game’s progression are as follows:
Kill an enemy, get EXP (called “runes”)
Go to a bonfire (they’re called “graces” in this game) to replenish your health potions, and level up using EXP. Every time you die in the game you drop your EXP and you return to the grace you last visited. You have a chance to get your runes back but if you die again before getting them they’re gone forever.
Every time you go to a grace all the enemies you kill come back to life, so be careful.
That’s the formula they’ve been using for over a decade. When you level up you pick one stat per level to increase by one point, and you have several to choose from:
I should preface all this by saying that it is 100 percent possible to play Elden Ring without leveling up at all, and without ever using anything more than your starting equipment. It’ll be difficult but it’s possible. I don’t recommend doing that however, at least not for your first time playing. When you start the game you’re given a choice of class, and these are essentially pre-built characters to choose from. You can choose no class (called the Wretch) but be warned that you will start with no real equipment to speak of and every stat at 10. What’s great about the Wretch is that you can make whatever class you want. Wanna be a glass cannon? Dump all your stats into strength. Wanna be a tank? Dump into vigor. No matter what class you choose my biggest tip is to pick 2 or three stats and focus on those through most of the game. There is a way to reset your stats later, but for now just worry about what you wanna do. Personally I put most of my stats into Vigor, Strength, and Endurance. That way I can hit hard, take hard hits, and I can run away for a long enough time to skip most unnecessary battles. If you pick more than a few stats to level, you’ll see yourself being stretched out too thin.
Talk to everyone, and read every message
Elden Ring, like Dark Souls and Bloodborne before it- has this cool feature where other players can leave little messages on the ground for people to read. People choose from various words in lieu of typing things out themselves (prevents people from saying literally whatever they want) and it can lead to funny situations. The word “butt” isn’t listed but the word “but” is, so we’ve all seen plenty of “Try Finger, but hole” messages sprawled onto floors like dirty messages in a seedy bar’s bathroom wall. Among the jokes you also have genuinely helpful messages like “be wary of right” meaning that there’s probably a monster on the right of the room just beyond sight who’s ready to sneak up on you. Then you get things like “try jumping” right next to a cliff.
“Maybe it’s something secret”, you tell yourself.
It never is.
Alongside the little messages are actual people who might want to talk to you. It’s almost always going to be something cryptic, but make sure to keep talking to them until they start repeating dialog. A lot of times characters will give you something cool, or tell you about something but they won’t do it at first. You gotta worm your way into the conversation.
Learn to enjoy dying
Alright this one’s a bit of a stretch but hear me out. You’re gonna die a lot. You’re also going to lose your EXP. Sometimes it’s gonna be a lot of EXP. I know it sucks. Especially in boss battles you’ll be seeing that red “YOU DIED” text splashed onto the screen more times than you would like. My biggest tip for bosses especially is to spend your EXP before a fight. Level up or buy some things (forgot to mention EXP is also currency in the game) before you fight the big bad evil guy that way when you die you won’t lose too much. If you feel like you can probably kill the boss with your current equipment and stats then dedicate all your time to learning the boss’s attack patterns and knowing when to strike. In the honorable words of the immortal legend himself Tak Fujii:
These games aren’t Devil May Cry. You can’t run in and hack and slash your way through the bosses. Elden Ring is almost a turn based RPG in this regard. You wait your turn to attack and you go for it. If you decide not to attack then you just have to wait for the boss to do their next big attack and try again. It’s like dancing while holding your breath. If you’re like me then you’ll probably have your guard up during most of the battle, but know that your stamina meter refills slower when you’re guarding, so you need to put your guard down to have more stamina for running and rolling. Watching your stamina refill while you have your defenses open is like finally taking a big breath, and once you start running around with your guard back up it’s back to holding your breath in.
Still having trouble with the boss? Summon a buddy!
Before your first two boss fights you’re given a grace to check into, and a spot to look for summons. Summoning is when you recruit a player character to hop into your game to help. You can have two at a time and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with getting assistance. If it was “wrong” to get help in the game then this system wouldn’t be here at all.
“The origin of that idea is actually due to a personal experience where a car suddenly stopped on a hillside after some heavy snow and started to slip. The car following me also got stuck, and then the one behind it spontaneously bumped into it and started pushing it up the hill… That’s it! That’s how everyone can get home! Then it was my turn and everyone started pushing my car up the hill, and I managed to get home safely.”
“But I couldn’t stop the car to say thanks to the people who gave me a shove. I’d have just got stuck again if I’d stopped. On the way back home I wondered whether the last person in the line had made it home, and thought that I would probably never meet the people who had helped me. I thought that maybe if we’d met in another place we’d become friends, or maybe we’d just fight…”
“You could probably call it a connection of mutual assistance between transient people. Oddly, that incident will probably linger in my heart for a long time. Simply because it’s fleeting, I think it stays with you a lot longer… like the cherry blossoms we Japanese love so much.”
-Director Hidetaka Miyazaki in 2010 explaining Demon’s Souls multiplayer- which has been the basis for the Dark Souls series, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring
On the offline side of things Elden Ring now has summonable NPC buddies. You’ve got plenty to find and choose from- wolves, jellyfish, zombies, etc. Alongside these NPC summons are your classic NPC humanoid characters that mimic real-life players. In your first boss area you can summon a skilled mage, and in your second area if you go through the dungeon you can meet a woman who will lend her help for when you decide to take the next boss on.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint
Elden Ring isn’t just a rush of boss fight after boss fight. It’s FromSoft’s first big open world game, and like those before it ER has lots of stuff to check out. Margit giving you too much trouble? Go explore. Ride your horsey around. Fill out the map. Put the game down for a second and drink some water. Eat dinner. Call your mom. So many things you can do between dungeons and bosses. I was on my way to the third main boss and all of a sudden i’m in this cool cave. I don’t know exactly why I was there, but I just kinda found myself there. It was fun. I found a cool knife and a special item a merchant was looking for. A few of my friends picked the game up on release day and we’ve basically played nothing else since as of writing, so i’ll put the controller down for a bit and talk to them on discord about what we’re finding. Don’t know where the next story beat is? Read a walkthrough up to where you’re at, then stop. Now you know where to go next but you won’t know too much. Community has always been a huge part of these games, and that applies to outside the game as well. Twitter might as well be a whole dungeon in the game. Elden Ring is doing a better job of Augmented Reality right now than anything Mark Zuckerberg has up his clammy, damp sleeves.
Learn to fight, and learn to fight dirty
Elden Ring has a pretty extensive (and thankfully optional) tutorial, but it doesn’t hurt to take some extra time in mastering the ins and outs of the game. You have backstabs, guard counters, ashes of war, two handing a weapon, etc but your biggest asset is your roll. If you time it right then you can essentially phase through an enemy’s attack completely unscathed. Those few milliseconds of time rolling are called “Invincibility frames” or Iframes for short. Be warned that if you have too many things equipped then you’ll notice that you’re carrying a “heavy load” and your roll will be significantly slower. Sort your gear out and your roll will be back to normal before you know it. Once you have the basics of combat down then it’s time for the fun part.
Exploitation.
FromSoft games can be kinda janky at times, and as you can see in the tweet above sometimes enemies get stuck on a wall. The hit detection is so off that I was able to take pot shots at this guy through the wall, and he was dead within a few seconds. There’s also large enemies that are simply too big to fit in nearby hallways, so what I’ll do is let them chase me to the entryway of the hall, and take shots at them while keeping my distance. Ranged weapons are perfect for this. I was getting absolutely murdered by a particular baddie so I started throwing knives at him until he died. The hit animation kept getting interrupted by the continuous hits so he didn’t have time to recover and attack. That’s called a stunlock. You’ll find yourself in plenty of situations where cheesing is not only fun but a downright necessity. Let me repeat myself. If this wasn’t allowed in the game then it wouldn’t be in the game.
Play something else
Too much of a good thing can’t be good right? Take a break from the game. Play something a little more chill. I bought that Pokemon Legends Arceus thinking it was gonna be a cool little bedtime game and well….it has a dodge roll in it. Oh man…
Is it Dark Souls?
I don’t really know on account of only playing it for like...twenty minutes. Keep in mind though that Elden Ring’s controls are unique, and after an extensive amount of time your muscle memory will only have enough space for Elden Ring.
Games are gonna feel weird to play. You’ll be playing Mario and ask yourself
“How to I riposte?”
IN CONCLUSION
Elden Ring is fun. It’s not gonna be for everyone and that’s fine, but if you have the time then it doesn’t hurt to try it out. I know a $60 investment isn’t something to be taken lightly, so maybe read this, bookmark it, wait for a sale, and read this again when you’re ready.
Or you know, pirate the game. I’m not the cops.
Elden Ring, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne are challenging, but they’re never downright cruel. That’s especially true for ER, because every few dozen feet there’s a new grace to touch- which then serves as a checkpoint. I didn’t mention Sekiro in this essay because well…
I didn’t play it!
I don’t even remember why if i’m being quite honest. Oh well. I guess that’ll be next on the docket if Elden Ring leaves me itching for more FromSoft content. If you like what you’ve read feel free to buy me a coffee. If you’re from discord or insert credit follow me on Twitter if you want to keep in touch with what i’m doing in between essays.
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