"Don't watch the weapon, watch the hand" That's what I learned from Elden Ring

“I 100% Sekiro within 3 days, I beat it 5 times in the first 3 days” my brother in Christ, did you sleep????

I'm sorry, you completed every sidequest, got every item, and every achievement the game had to offer in 7 days????

I really enjoyed this video. I honestly had to remind myself that the game is going to be different depending on how you approach it. What weapons you use, what talismans, how fast you get to bosses etc. I'm the opposite of objective based and can enjoy a game for 100s of hours without ever beating it, but for a bit when fighting the first mini-boss and remembrance boss I beat, I honestly thought that they were over-tuned and was not looking forward to bashing my head against the wall to beat the rest of the bosses. It wasn't until I was off of the game and reflecting on them that I remembered that a lot of the "difficulty" was manufactured from the way I like to play and I was blowing it out of proportion.

What I’ve realized is that many techniques that were useful in some fights are now mandatory in most. Biggest being positioning - not just “roll then attack” like you mentioned.

After beating Sekiro 5 times, HOW did you find Elden Ring to be "too hard?" I got the 4 endings in Sekiro, THEN went back and played Elden Ring, and was like "Is this the same company?"

“Don’t be stubborn”. That’s the mantra that Elden Ring wants to hammer home. It’s part of the design philosophy so that players are compelled to interact with all its systems. I’m only a few hours into the DLC. Haven’t fought a single main boss yet but have 3 scadutree levels on my character and my spirit ash already. Seems pretty clear that the game wants me to explore the area available before trying to take on a gate keeping boss, so that’s what I’m doing and enjoying :)

I love that you pronounce it "sk'doo tree"

I have a lot of fun with the DLC so far. I did quite a bit of random exploring, then watched a build guide and did two questlines and now I am back at taking things slow. I have two kids (8&5) and they like to watch me play Elden Ring every now and then for maybe 20min or so. In those moments I mostly just resort to exploring the world, which really makes me see and discover places I never would have when playing by myself. Man, I love the whole Soulsborne series so much, as it really makes me feel like a kid again.

Maliketh gang, he's also my favorite boss in all of souls (or rather, he was, Messmer overtook him for me). I just love how much the fight rewards smart positioning and jumping as a form of dodging, its one of my favorite paced and structured fights and it really opened my eyes to how the extra complexity of elden ring bosses wasnt artificial difficulty but a change in design.

Yeah, the change od mindset was something i needed back in the day druing my DS3 playthrough (my 1st souls game). I had a feeling that dying, loosing souls was such a setback that i couldnt force myself to play it. After a year i changed approach and instead of thinking about the whole game as a challenge i made my own challenges. Getting to the next bonfire, exploring one courner of the map or killing mini Boss. It helped me to keep my focus on smaller things. And it stays with me till this day. Already clocked 6k hrs into souls games, but like mentioned i focus on smaller things ie. Learning one combo pattern, mastering phase one and such. Great video, made me reflect on the topic

With what you said about Maliketh, my first playthrough was really like that. I had beaten all the other souls games (excluding sekiro, but I do need to try that sometime, deflecting physick tear is cracked), and I didn't understand how different and more complex the bosses were. I didn't enjoy my first playthrough, and kind of just resorted to cheese, because I thought that was the only way to beat the game. About 8 months later, I saw a video explaining the design philosphy of these bosses, and decided to give it another chance, with no cheese. And I loved it. I feel a lot of the negativity towards the DLC will die down once everyone gets used to the bosses.

Rellana is super vulnerable to guard counters and stance breaks (also reliably parryable). AoWs like Square Off are almost a hard counter for her. The final boss is surprisingly weak to parries and bleed. All bosses have major weaknesses, and its up to the player to be creative and figure it out. The skidoosh fragments simply help level the playing field a bit but its up to you to use ur noggin

The mental shift that helped me was switching from treating the combat like Metal Gear Rising to looking at it like Pokemon (or insert your own preferred turn-based RPG), if that makes sense. The boss is going to do something, and you have a "turn" to respond with something from your list of options: attack, evade, block, approach, disengage, or heal/buff. Plenty of options, but you get just

I've ruminated a lot on the perspective shift per-game with the Souls series. A big thing I've noticed is with the before/after Bloodborne (and to a lesser extent DaS2) paradigm shift. Before that, the combat was typically, barring oddball or uncommon build/play styles, to block attacks and strafe around until you saw an opening, then press the opening for typically one or twp attacks, then move away and block again, much of the challange coming from choosing moments to lower your shield to recover stamina, or needing to dodge if you got yourself cornered with low stamina. 2 made it much riskier to just block continually unless you had the stablest greatshields and actually leveled for stamina, since it (like Elden Ring more recently, which is a phrase you can use a lot when talking about Dark Souls 2) had a strong design focus on encouraging build diversity; Bloodborne had a single weaker, less accessible shield that called you a stupid crybaby for even looking at it in the item description.

Shadow of the Erdtree kind of shares some difficulty from Sekiro. I feel lots of Sekiro team worked on this DLC.

Very Well said Good sir

5:44

One clarification, the boss isn't holding an attack longer based on your panic rolls. They DO however have timing mix-ups, and many of these mix-ups are positionally based. The game isn't going to change an attack timing to make sure it hits during your roll, but it will change that attack timing as a mix-up, and that mix-up can lead to it feeling like the game "read your roll". Loopine has some goated videos delving into boss mechanics that explain some of the differences between input reading vs branching combo chains for those who are interested.

I think this is the best explanation, and something I've been trying to put into words for myself, that I've heard explaining the philosophy FROM has had for elden Ring and how the difficulty feels in relation. Awesome video dude and very well said!