The first group blodstain I found was right there on the First Step. Must have gotten hit by the Sentinel, lol. Also that was the first bloodstain that worked for me ever.
I think the sheer quantity of players is making certain features messy– you gotta get lucky to catch a summon sign before someone else. On the plus side I get summoned immediately for every boss.
here's the messages I've written
[upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/7vWuwes.png]
seems familiar is in front of a tree in the castle. it reminds me of the dragon fruit trees in King's Field 2 but I think my appraisals were because it's also similar to the fallen giant trees in dks2/3.
"Monarch" is the closest I could write to "king's field" for a section where you can fall through a floor just like the start of king's field 4.
Attacking is in front of a fallen statue of a woman in the castle where the rotten fatty with a curved greatsword is standing. the statue is glowing from within and I think there should be a way to break it or something.
Finally installing it, gonna try and jump in today! I’m on PC, so all these performance reports and making me a bit concerned…how’s everyone’s experience been? Looks like there was a minor patch today, but based on the wording From seems to be aware that there’s work to be done. Pondering my starting class, but I might go with Samurai in honor of SMT IV lol. I’ve barely every touched magic in Souls games, so I doubt I’ll be starting now.
Looking forward to seeing everyone’s blood stains (and contributing a few of my own)!!
@“tapevulture”#p60308 Stormfoot is my first achievement! I say achievement, but it mostly consisted of chugging flask while two friendly co-opers wailed on the [redacted]
As a general note, I really really want to talk about everything I've seen, but also don't want to spoil or by spoiled by anyone. How do we reach some sort of Elden Ring Book Club consensus??
@“rejj”#p60340 exactly. Not only is everyone a different number of hours in, but everyone’s hours look very different - and yet this game just feeds you stories you want to tell someone.
when getting owned repeatedly by the beast man in groveside cave (took 10 or so tries) i said out loud to myself “i've beaten hollow knight, i can do this.” do you think that‘s a fair statement? serious question, i’ve never finished a souls game
@"tapevulture"#p60354 Seems like a roughly equal comparison in difficulty for different game types. Guessing Hollow Knight would be the more difficult game. It seems like on the surface Dark Souls games have a lot of methods to reduce the skill requirement to beat the games like certain play styles, cheesing and more grinding. I could see someone ham-fisting their way through a souls game a lot easier.
I get the shard-bearer defeated messages, but outside of that I've still had zero indication the group password works. Anyone on PC seen group messages/bloodstains yet?
||I stumbled upon a huge ole dragon last night and vanquished him with ease. I was feeling as self-satisfied about doing something in a game as my mind would afford. In celebration, I did what I always do, I obsessively scaled the nearest tall object like some degenerate billy-goat man. My confidence had peaked, just like my tube-topped sumarai on that rocky spire. It also immediately plummeted, like Torrent's locomotion over the top of said spire. I might've had like three levels worth of runes on me as well. I'm a jackass.||
@“Herb”#p60363 At least on Xbox I‘ve seen a couple of group bloodstains and seen a shard-bearer defeated notification, haven’t spotted any messages from the group, however.
Just to let people know, there is also conversation about the game ongoing on the Fromsoft Thread, wouldn't be a bad idea to decide on one place to hold all the discussion for the sake of convenience, what do you guys think.
To be clear, anybody who discovers sick and or nasty dark clothing for my witch to wear let me know. The “bandit” set ain’t it, and the only way to get it as far as anybody knows is just by starting as a bandit.
I for sure have better weapons/armor but I really enjoy the aesthetic of a fucked up imp lady with a turtle shell shield whipping the shit out of monsters (pls excuse the graphics settings lol)
|| Found this stuff in the academy:|| ||[img]https://i.imgur.com/kaVFyeP.jpg[/img]||
||The masks you can find, the robe was a drop. If you meant sick and nasty more literally, I've been wearing the gloves and pants to this set to make my character look like a hobo. ||
If you can't get there yet and want this stuff: ||There was a cave that was on the NW perimeter of the academy that had a bunch of these guys in there.||
Am I cursed??? First I die with 9000 runes and only get 6k back, then I died with 11000 runes and only got back up to 10k after killing 5 of the exile knights. What gives??? Is it cause I popped a rune arc?? This shits ain’t all it’s cracked up to be!
Thanks @Herb , flintstones ain’t exactly it, but I just fought an NPC invasion with armor that resembles rot so I think I’m on the right path
@“yeso”#p60324 So I spent about 6-7 hours with it today and I completely agree–the stuttering is noticeable, but very, very far from a “do not recommend.” There was one point where controls stopped responding for about a second (I thought my controller had run out of batteries!) as I approached a large gate, but otherwise the performance has not detracted from my enjoyment. I‘ve tried it out on both my gtx 1080 and rtx 2080ti PCs (1440p, did not touch any settings otherwise) and have found it completely playable on both (I’m not monitoring FPS…I feel like as soon as I do that I start noticing the performance drops more…ignorance is bliss :)).
I've seen a couple group bloodstains and messages, really warms my heart each time! I suppose I'll save more substantive comments for the other thread, but so far I have mixed feelings. It sure is "open world Dark Souls," no doubt about that, both for better and worse. So far the world feels more aimless and less meticulously crafted than any of the other Souls games, but I'm definitely reserving judgement until I've seen some more variety. The horse riding and open world traversal feel _okay_, but I can't shake the feeling that they have been somewhat unnaturally grafted onto the classic Souls controls and mechanics, which have been honed for small-to-medium-sized environments. It's also taking a bit of time for me to get my Souls-legs back after years of playing Monster Hunter...I keep mashing Y to attack and holding R1 to run, which has led to some comically inept enemy encounters.
So far I've made it to one _very large and important-seeming_ boss encounter (||Margit|| I think), though I seem to be woefully under-leveled or otherwise underprepared for this fella.
@“Syzygy”#p60468 HECK!!! I forgot that mechanic completely……… It's been said so much that the gold glowing eyes give “five times exp” and are completely random…… The whole time, they were picking up your dropped runes…. doy
@kory , I also feel ya, anyone who is saying they miss the more focused design of previous souls games, I feel it sometimes. Like I said going into this, I don't exactly expect this to be a better game than Sekiro. The focused design of dark souls 1 and all the rest is why I loved it so much, but so many average gamers always said stuff like "it's not _actually_ open werld :/" and Elden Rune is just a different beast now, one made to spread the joy of souls to a much larger audience.
Not to mention, an amazing feat, no one could imagine how they'd pull it off since all the prior games were antithetical to what open world experiences have been like so far. I think they've done so many souls games at this point, and I'm glad to see them keeping it fresh and clearly having a ton of fun trying new things like this. A good president & director knows what motivates their team, and it seems like there was a lot of energy behind this.
