Tag: elden ring

A Genuinely Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: I finally beat ELDEN RING

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video games1 Comment

I finally– FINALLY— managed to put Elden Ring to bed just now, after a completely ridiculous 122 hours of gameplay over roughly a month and a half (the game came out on February 25) of my actual life. I’m not doing the math to figure out how many hours a day that represents; I can tell you I did actually take a couple of days off here and there, but not many.

Here’s the review: this is easily one of the best games I’ve ever played, and I’m probably never touching it again. Now, there are plenty of other games I’ve put more than 120 hours into– there are other Fromsoft games I’ve put more than 122 hours into (Sekiro and Dark Souls III, definitely, and while they aren’t Fromsoft, Nioh and Nioh 2 as well) but those have all been on multiple playthroughs. Even something like Skyrim, which is legendary for the amount of content it contains, wasn’t close to 122 hours on my first playthrough. 122 hours is twice the length of a really big game, and I am one hundred percent certain that there is a ton of stuff left to do in this game that I left on the table– even if it’s just as simple as the fact that I was playing a strength build and so I went basically the entire game without casting a spell. I’m sure I missed dungeons. I probably missed entire quest lines scattered here and there, and who knows what other little landmarks or interesting bits of content I just never noticed.

It’s difficult to explain to people who don’t play video games just how big this game is, and how– much as I predicted, about 90 hours ago– that kind of scope ends up actually being detrimental to the game. Because, okay, this was my first playthrough, and subsequent playthroughs won’t need to be nearly as long, because 1) I really won’t feel the need to do every single thing that I can possibly do on a second playthrough and 2) Since I know the general layout of the world and the basic path for exploration I won’t need to do as much fiddlefarting around as I did on the first playthrough, where there were big stretches where I didn’t really know what to do next so I just sort of wandered around until I stumbled over something. So I’m not in for another 120 hours, but even 50-60 for a second playthrough of something I’ve done before is just a big investment of time. That’s literally multiple days of playtime. Like, I loved it, it’s delicious, but if I eat any more I’m gonna throw up, and that’s not what I want.

I am uploading the final batch of episodes now; episodes 88 and 89 will go live today, so that’s 22 more episodes, meaning that the last episode will air on the 21st, since I don’t intend to bump up the release speed at all. I need to decide what I’m doing with the channel now; I’m closing in on a year that I’ve been doing this (I started in June of 2021) and I was really hoping that this series would goose my follower count a bit. I started the series with 116 followers on YouTube. I currently have, after 88 episodes of what at least to me seems like quality content about the hottest game on the market, have … 116 followers. I think a year of an hour of content every single day— I didn’t miss a single deadline once I started– is probably enough to determine whether I’m 1) going to blow up or 2) want to blow up on YouTube as a platform. I think the first answer is no; I had heard all kinds of stories about how follower counts pick up a lot once you get your 100th follower and your first video with 500 views; I’ve done both and they haven’t. The second … I’m tired, y’all. Video games and reading are my two big leisure activities and I effectively converted one of them into a job over the last year and I’m really not sure I want to keep doing it. I’m going to take those eleven days and play a game or two and not record at all, just to see if I feel differently about it, and we’ll see if I pick things back up in a couple of weeks (I could always just finish that year out and make it official) or if I decide to walk away from the channel for a while. I mean, I could always just record stuff when I want to, or cut down on the recorded episodes and do more livestreams or something. There are avenues in between “keep doing exactly what I’m doing” and “completely shut down.”

Elden Ring, 35 hours in, and the channel

On By Luther M. SilerIn video games1 Comment

First, the I’m-maybe-a-third-of-the-way-through review: Elden Ring is phenomenal, a towering achievement that has all sorts of interesting things to say about its predecessors from FromSoft and the notion of “open world” gaming to boot; this is one of the best games I’ve ever played on any console, and if my opinion ends up changing on that front it will be because ultimately there ended up being too much of it and it got overwhelming.

What’s killing me is I’ve got the next two games for the channel on deck already, and they’re both also huge, and I recorded episode forty-seven tonight for Elden Ring and … yeah, I’m maybe a third of the way through. Maybe. This is going to dominate my channel for two months, easy, unless I increase the number of episodes per day that I’m airing, and even then I could see it going two months. Three episodes a day for 60 days is 180 episodes. That’s not unimaginable. And I’m regularly crushing my typical 30-minute limit because breaking every half hour just doesn’t make sense the way the game is structured– there are no missions, like there usually are in an open-world game, so there’s not a situation where you can go do something and it takes 20 minutes and it’s discrete. There’s always a tower in the distance or a cave to explore or a new boss that’s killed me five times in this episode and I’m pretty damn sure I can kill the motherfucker with one more try, and it leads to longer episodes. The cool factor is off the charts. I’ve already used the word overwhelming once; it’s absolutely the right word.

What’s a real pain in the ass is feeling like I’ve got to record it all. I started the channel last June, so we’re at about 9 months now, give or take, and I’ve been rock-solid about not missing episodes that entire time; at least two a day, with occasional but rare 8:00 episodes as well. I’ve got 115 subscribers; I was led to believe by the Internet that subscriber counts would start rising more drastically once I hit 100, and so far that hasn’t happened, and … I may be getting tired of waiting. I mean, the chance that this was going to lead to any kind of money was slim to begin with (it is worth pointing out that that 115 followers puts me in the top 5% of YouTubers globally) and the channel definitely has some fans, but having to spend an hour a night or more locked in my office playing video games and occasionally dealing with tech or editing hiccups which takes even longer is kinda getting old. I think I remember what the boy looks like; he comes in occasionally to ask for money.

I dunno. This could just be the tired talking, but I’m starting to feel like the work/fun balance in this whole thing is starting to tilt too much toward work, and I might need to reevaluate some things. I’ll finish this series out, so it’ll be a minute, but I need to think.

(I uploaded four episodes while I was writing this, by the way.)

Well, crap

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I have recorded, as of ten minutes ago, twenty-five episodes of my Elden Ring series. I discovered before doing tonight’s recordings that episode 22 has just … disappeared. The audio files are there, and the folder is there, but the recording itself? Gone. Anybody out there wanna recommend some good Mac file recovery programs? I can’t imagine how the hell I might have deleted just the .mp4 file out of that folder and kept everything else; that doesn’t adhere to anything about how I manage game files, but it appears to have happened, unless what actually happened is I made the file invisible somehow, and showing invisible files on a Mac is literally just a button-press and it’s not happening. So I need to see if I can find it.

It’s actually been a decent couple of days at work; I can proudly report that I have been to school three whole days in a row, and am planning, like a grown-up, to attend tomorrow as well! And if I pull that off all I have to do is go to work on Friday and then I’ll have shown up a whole week in a row!

It’s madness, I know.

My eyes are bleeding but that’s fine

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

I have recorded nine episodes so far, and I’ve done some offscreen screwing around during my– heh– “breaks” from playing, and I’m having a Goddamn blast so far. I spent a good chunk of last night as a spitting, rage mess because my microphone abruptly decided to shit the Goddamn bed on me, and the workaround that I finally came up with so that I could actually get started recording wasn’t nearly of the quality I wanted.

I replaced the mic first thing this morning, and we are rolling now. It’s 6:40, and I’m hoping to get another four or five episodes in at least before I go to bed. Staying up late to keep playing is absolutely on the table. We’ll see what happens. I’d love to be twenty episodes in by the end of the weekend but I have a fair amount of stuff from my stupid actual life that needs to get done tomorrow, including more grading than I really want to think about, so we’ll see how it goes.

I also owe somebody a book review, which will be written tomorrow. Teaser:

Short version: read these.

In which I’ll see y’all later

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

I think I said this a couple of days ago- I do not remember the last time I was this excited about anything, and I fully expect this game to eat my life for a month. I will probably post a character creation video on the channel at 8:00 and then full coverage starts tomorrow. If you need me, call my wife.

Love y’all. ELDEN RIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGG

In which I’m almost there

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, video gamesLeave a comment

I have been an utter wreck for the last few days. Monday was spent in a nameless bad mood, to the point where I actually took a brain pill in the middle of the day, which is something that I generally don’t do; I almost always use the emergency pills for nights when I can’t shut my brain off and need to sleep. I was out of work yesterday and today, yesterday with something vile and digestive, with shooting pains in my stomach, and today with a massive headache. I’m out of sick days for the year, so the next three months are gonna be interesting. I’ve gotten roughly an extra day and a half worth of sleep in the last 48 hours and feel fine right now, so I’m going in tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes.

(I’ve missed a ton of work in 2022. This is the first two days I’ve had to take off because something was wrong with me, however.)

Anyway, Elden Ring comes out on Friday, and while I don’t know it’ll help my mental health any it’ll certainly fill the hours. Next week will be that horror of horrors, a five-day work week, something that sounds nearly insurmountable the way the last two months have gone. The following week ends the quarter and features a teacher record day, and then the two weeks following are full weeks, but then we have Spring Break. I want to try to make it that far without missing any days, or at least without missing any days under circumstances I can control.

Meanwhile, the world is slowly catching on fire again, in any number of ways and any number of places, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about any of it, so I might as well burn my hours on video games. I said on Twitter earlier today that I can’t remember the last time I was looking forward to anything as much as I was looking forward to getting home from work on Friday and getting to play this game, and that remains true; the closest I can think of is Avengers: Endgame, and while we don’t all know how that ended up, enough of you do that you’ll understand why I don’t care to repeat the experience.

Tomorrow, though, I’m gonna teach somebody math for a while. I’m going to get through tomorrow, and I’m going to get through Friday. One day at a time, one week at a time, one month at a time; three months from now, I may be done teaching. We’ll see what happens. One way or another, the time is going to pass.

(You really really ought to follow me on YouTube. Even if you’re not a video game person, my current project, What Remains of Edith Finch, has been … really interesting so far in a way that sidesteps a lot of what people who don’t play video games don’t like about them. If that makes any sense. Anyway, go subscribe.)

ELDEN RING post-Network Test impressions

On By Luther M. SilerIn video games2 Comments

One thing is absolutely clear: I need to clear my calendar for late February and probably all of March, and I am going to take a personal day the day this game comes out and I’m not going to feel even the tiniest bit bad about it. I will flat-out tell people that I am staying home to play video games. Deal with it.

I recorded five hours of footage from the network beta test of this game– three hours on Friday night and two more on Sunday night, before hitting a situation that ended the stream so perfectly that continuing to play (and cost myself sleep the night before work) seemed wholly unnecessary. During that time I explored a pretty good chunk of the map we had available to us, defeated several bosses including Margit the Fell up there, who appears to be the first major storyline boss in the game, found but did not seriously attempt to kill the dragon, and cleared out three caves. I dipped my toe in multiplayer a bit, letting myself be summoned to help one player (unsuccessfully, unfortunately) defeat a boss, and summoning people myself to take out Margit and one other boss. I also got invaded once and killed the invader. I only really tried out the one class, deciding to get deeper into progression with a single character rather than repeat the same content with a bunch of them, but I chose the Enchanted Knight class, meaning that I had access to melee and magic abilities.

This game is a fucking blast, y’all, and while I have some scattered concerns here and there I think they mostly fall into either “this was the beta test” or “you will get used to it” categories. I’m going to switch to bullet points now; note that any references I should happen to make to the development of the game come from a position of nearly total ignorance, so I may have the idea that very complicated things are easy or that easy things are very complicated. Take everything with as much salt as you’d like.

  • The combat and basic game itself is pure Dark Souls, which is a good thing (because that’s my favorite game series) and a bad thing (because they are literally reusing tons of animations from Dark Souls 3.) This is one of those places where I’m wondering if a lot of the animations are placeholders that are going to get swapped out later. Other things, like fonts and such, are also pretty similar and I suspect might see some polishing in the next several months. It’s important to remember that this isn’t a Dark Souls game; it’s a whole new IP and while nobody’s complaining about the obvious shared DNA it does need to have more of its own identity.
  • The look of the game is fantastic, and the network test covered a diverse enough swath of environments (and weather conditions!) to give you a good idea of how all sorts of things are going to look. Graphical fidelity is not going to be a problem here.
  • The game was very, very clean. The only bugs I noticed (and didn’t bother reporting) was that sometimes player messages were floating off the ground rather than being where they were supposed to be. I had no crashes at all, no glitching, nothing like that, and I haven’t really seen any reports of major bugs either. AI seemed on point across the board, although sneaking up and backstabbing enemies is maybe a little easier than it ought to be.
  • That might not be true. There were a couple places during the Friday session where I was trying to summon people and having no luck at all. That could be a bug issue or could be a result of summons getting snatched up the second they got placed; it’s hard to say from this end. But if it was a bug, it was the only one, and I wasn’t having those issues nearly as much Sunday night.
  • I didn’t feel like there was enough variation in weapons and armor available. There were next to no drops from humanoid enemies, and nonhuman enemies mostly dropped crafting materials. Five hours into any other Fromsoft game other than Sekiro would have given you tons of different weapons and armor. I found a twinblade really quickly that I used for most of my run, but by the end of the five hours I only had maybe four or five weapons, which is ludicrously low. This is something else that I assume they’ll correct by the time of the game’s full release. No reason to give everybody full customizability right off the bat.
  • Similarly, the demo had no initial character customization at all, and made sure to put most characters’ faces behind helmets. I figure they left it out on purpose.
  • Other than the fact that there is an Elden Ring out there and it is destroyed and you’re looking for it, there were no real hints at the story at all. Which is, to be clear, absolutely fine.
  • Changes from the Dark Souls model: the ability to charge spells is awesome. I also really like being able to replace special abilities on weapons with others that you’ve picked up, and turning enemy summons into an item is a fantastic move even if I thought the three wolves summon was flat-out unfair by the end of the second stream. There will be rebalancing; there’s no doubt about that. It’s inevitable. I also really like the mechanic where wiping out entire groups of enemies can result in recharging your heals. This does two things: one, it encourages more aggressive gameplay, and two, it adds another element of risk/reward to the game, which is something Fromsoft games have always excelled at. If I only have half a health bar and no heals left, do I attack that last enemy or two knowing that if they hit me, I’m dead, but if I beat them without any mistakes I get all my heals back?
  • Boss difficulty and design is pretty solid, and Margit the Fell is one of the most complex early bosses I’ve ever encountered in one of these games. I was pretty sure I could take him sooner or later by myself, but went with summons to help out because with a clock ticking I felt like I didn’t have time to fuck around learning attack patterns that could change by the time the game comes out. Better to steamroll the bastard so I can see what’s after him. 🙂
  • Recording this game is going to be tricky. Open-world games lend themselves better to streaming, but I don’t have a lot of time to stream, and half-hour episodes are going to feel really inadequate, especially considering how frequently I was getting distracted. Assuming I’m still running the YouTube channel by then, I may have to reconsider how I present the episodes. Luckily I’ve got plenty of time to figure that out.
  • EDIT: Just discovered there was an whole entire-ass tutorial area that I completely missed. Oops?

I may add some details here and there as I continue to think about this, but I figure this is enough to get started with. Damn, I need more friends who play video games.

Elden Ring TOMORROW

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

Am I excited about this? HELL YES I am excited about this.

I got into the Elden Ring network test beta, naturally on a weekend where I’m going to be out of town Saturday to Sunday, but I’m going to be live-streaming all three hours tomorrow night (10:00 pm – 1:00 am EST) and there’s a slight (read: nonexistent) chance that I’ll even be up hella early in the morning streaming as well. The test has five three-hour chunks over the weekend and I plan to stream for two of them even without the crack of dawn thing, so I’ll get at least six hours in of checking the game out and every last second of it will be online for the Internet’s perusal.

Unfortunately, I got home from work tonight and went straight to parent/teacher conferences for my son and then came home and had to grade, so this is the limit of my energy for the day. But best believe I’m going to spend all day waiting for 10:00 to roll around tomorrow. I’ll take a nap when I get home if I have to.