Elden Ring releases tomorrow

[Gusington]

How are you all liking the George Martin written story and lore?

[al_infierno]

From what I understand Martin's contributions are minimal, mainly providing the lore and backstory that informs the game's world and writing.  That said there are a lot of neat touches that remind me of Game of Thrones, such as a greatsword that's made of many different grafted-together longswords taken from fallen warlords a la The Iron Throne, and characters who come from Great Houses that like to recite their family's house words.

[Gusington]

^Nice. As another guy who generally sucks at souls games, I will try this out when it gets discounted. Maybe the free-roaming, open world aspects will help me out.

[Skoop]

The Martin involvement kind of peaked my interest a little.  I'm not a fantasy d&d guy at all, game of thrones is as far as I'll go.  So if there's any of that lore in there, I might have to take a look at this.

[jamus34]

resurrecting this a bit as I was late to the party but after some early game running into the brick wall damn this thing has grabbed me.

To give an example of my love / hate of From Software games...I own everything except Sekiro Shadows die twice. (Original Demon Souls on PS3, all Dark Souls on PC, Bloodborne on PS4).

I bounced...HARD...off every single one.

I'm about 50 hours in now and just beat Radahn...what a cast iron bitch that battle was.

To me, Elden Ring is what a CRPG D&D wishes it could be.

No handholding...no mercy. You start weak as kitten and need to run from almost everything. You shouldn't fight what the game deems the first "true boss" until you leveled about 10-20 times and are like 10 hours into the game. Oh and that one sub-boss that everyone talks about...yeah you still need to run like hell from him.

Where as the early games made you focus on your technical gameplay...this gives you the option of "get gud" or walk away, gain a few more levels, maybe find a better spell / upgrade weapons and then come lay the smackdown.

The story is good...but overall the game is not big on introspection. The Radahn battle (pre and post) are probably the largest pieces I've seen so far.

The one thing I'd like to add that I never felt in the other FS games (granted it might be due to me not being able to get deep into them)...you can build your character a TON of ways, and they can all mostly be valid to play.

Barbarian swinging a gignomous colossal sword 2 handed, check.
An assassin type dual wielding daggers stacking a ton of elemental damage of your choice, yup.
A mage, But of course.
A cleric...ok, somewhat harder here but kinda possible, there are self healing spells, flails, maces and the like. Might be harder to play in some respects but doable.
Archer / ranger, Yessir.
Cavalier - horseback is limited in some areas but sure, right a horse with a spear / lance / halberd.

And that's just scratching the surface.

[CptHowdy]

got to the mountaintop of giants and havent logged back in since. playing a spellcaster so kinda easy mode. i also outleveled most areas and bosses before i tackled them. i dont know how people have done ng+ multiple times. don' think i will finish it once! steam shows i have 140 hours in game but most of that was alt tabbed as i was looking up stuff like where to find items, quest stuff and what to expect from certain areas. i did get farther with this game than i did with nioh so definitely got my moneys worth i would say.