Poking holes in the ever-sexist "men die in war, women affected most" commentary from the usual always-woke sources, it's the latest episode of Splash Damage:
Game Rant published a bizarre article arguing that the tragedies Elden Ring characters endure are gender coded, or, in other words, women and men in the game suffer in different ways and somehow that’s a problem. We break this idea down and also discuss a popular easy mode mod for Elden Ring along with a New York Times article that claims the game is successful only due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Blizzard’s new diversity officer’s influence on games and the company’s reversal on its vaccine mandate, and plenty more.
Find the episode here or on your favorite podcasting app, and thanks for your support!
Standartd disclaimer: I'm not Scrivonaut and I'm not associated with the podcast, I'm just reposting this from Reddit as a signal boost for the show.
Yes and no. Late game areas seem horrifically poorly balanced but you have a ton of options and if you’re really stuck pretty much every boss can be cheesed by something, plus you can respec pretty freely.
Playing pure melee without summoning or using spirit ashes felt really shitty and frustrating, and a lot of the larger bosses just weren’t fun to fight. I think it might have the worst hitboxes of any Fromsoft game, I lost count of the times my SUV sized sword just sailed right through an enemy and did zero damage. The input delay on rolls is also worse than it’s ever been -I had to use ReWASD to split up the sprint/roll buttons for it to not suck ass- couple that with enemies having gigantic combos with weird delays that are just put in there to punish mistimed rolls and you have a recipe for disaster.
Ive been fucking around with yapped modding the game and some of the data on scaling and stuff is pretty crazy as well.
The colossal weapons were originally a meme in souls games. They only became a real weapon category because people likes the meme, and now Fromsoft has to balance bosses around players taking three seconds to swing their stupid weapons.
Idk, I didn’t have much issue with the dragon bone smasher back in Demon’s Souls.
Be that as it may, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for an enemy to actually take damage when I see my sword making contact with its flabby body.
Or I guess we should all just break down and use katanas like Miyazaki intended.
I think the game needed one more balance pass before release. That said, it is by no means unfinished in the way that so many other AAA games are these days.
I didn’t have much trouble with any of the late-game bosses save Malenia, and she only required one simple tweak in my loadout.