Fromsoft generally teaches you things by killing you with it. That’s a style decision that I personally enjoy (usually…) but it’s not for everyone. Then once you master the thing, they hit you with another new thing and kill you with it, so on and so forth until the end of the game.
Doom (and don’t take this as a complaint, I loved the game), is a game that wants you to beat it. It gives you tools and information up front and generally speaking, presents you a path of least resistance that you can take for optimal slaying. The Doomslayer isn’t intended to die, he is an engine of destruction. Elden Ring and by extension earlier Souls games, don’t do that. Those games want you to die and learn from it. The Tarnished, the Chosen Undead, all of them, canonically in lore die over and over and over in pursuit of their goals, and you as the player are expected to act that out. It’s a fundamentally different approach to gameplay style and intent. Elden Ring provides you the tools to succeed, but they aren’t laid out in front of you. You’ll have to explore and experiment and die a few times to understand what you’re working with.
Sekiro in particular was a little bit of a departure from this with its popup explanations for tutorials, and that was taken into Elden Ring to get even as much explanation as we got in that game. It’s still cryptic, more so than Sekiro I think, but cryptic is Fromsoft’s style, for better or worse, and this is the refinement of that.
I do, genuinely, recommend the game. It takes some getting used to and has a learning curve, but if you understand the language the game is speaking to you it becomes a little less frustrating. I’ve learned to love that language from as far back as Dark Souls 1, but if you learn to love Elden Ring first it will translate well backward in time if you’d like to try the earlier games.
Fromsoft generally teaches you things by killing you with it. That’s a style decision that I personally enjoy (usually…) but it’s not for everyone. Then once you master the thing, they hit you with another new thing and kill you with it, so on and so forth until the end of the game.
Doom (and don’t take this as a complaint, I loved the game), is a game that wants you to beat it. It gives you tools and information up front and generally speaking, presents you a path of least resistance that you can take for optimal slaying. The Doomslayer isn’t intended to die, he is an engine of destruction. Elden Ring and by extension earlier Souls games, don’t do that. Those games want you to die and learn from it. The Tarnished, the Chosen Undead, all of them, canonically in lore die over and over and over in pursuit of their goals, and you as the player are expected to act that out. It’s a fundamentally different approach to gameplay style and intent. Elden Ring provides you the tools to succeed, but they aren’t laid out in front of you. You’ll have to explore and experiment and die a few times to understand what you’re working with.
Sekiro in particular was a little bit of a departure from this with its popup explanations for tutorials, and that was taken into Elden Ring to get even as much explanation as we got in that game. It’s still cryptic, more so than Sekiro I think, but cryptic is Fromsoft’s style, for better or worse, and this is the refinement of that.
I do, genuinely, recommend the game. It takes some getting used to and has a learning curve, but if you understand the language the game is speaking to you it becomes a little less frustrating. I’ve learned to love that language from as far back as Dark Souls 1, but if you learn to love Elden Ring first it will translate well backward in time if you’d like to try the earlier games.