New scripts for work in progress videos! 1. What Returning to Dark Souls Taught Me About Elden Ring (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

I'll start with a TL;DR for what's to follow if you don't have time to read the update on what's happening: basically, I've been crunching on two videos simultaneously, trying to get them done in time for Patreon's month-end deadline for paid posts, so I have some income for the next month. That said, the crunching (combined with the rocketing scope of one of the videos) has left me exhausted to the point that I need to take an extra day or two to get them both completed, and so I hope you can understand that I'll be posting the scripts now just so I'm not worrying about keeping the lights on for the next month. 

Then, when the videos get posted in the next few days, I'll post the finished products here and importantly you won't be charged again. I always hate having to do this, but people tell me they're mainly just pledging to support me and to make things a bit more comfortable, so they don't mind waiting a day or two for the videos. That's a level of generosity I can never fully thank you for, and I sincerely hope you understand this mainly logistical situation. Now, on with the update and the scripts!

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So it's that time of the month again, the point at which every creator you know is racing to get videos done to meet the end of the month deadline for Patreon. Obviously I am very much part of that rat race myself, and so I have been crunching like hell the last couple of weeks to try and get things done. 

I've been working on two videos simultaneously that are both relatively close to completion, but in sacrificing sleep to get to that deadline, combined with the fact that one of the vids in particular kinda ballooned in scope in a way I didn't anticipate... I'm just exhausted, and I'm hoping you can understand that at this stage I'm just saying "...I'll give it a day." 

I took a break after the slew of videos that released in February/March because I was similarly tired, and honestly found it really hard to get back into the swing of things when the time came to get cracking on the Lost Judgment DLC video (which you can see here, by the way, probably should have posted that to Patreon) as well as getting these other ideas in my head onto the page/digital audio workstation/video editing software, all kind of at the same time across the last few weeks. 

I've been feeling kinda weird about that honestly - with my thoughts instinctively going to "I shouldn't have taken the break," (the first in a long time I should add), "it just made things harder!" But I'm trying to tell myself (as well as my girlfriend telling me too, haha) that I needed that break—that part of that call for support in January was to do with allowing myself more room for this to be comfortable, because ultimately that will make the work better too. 

And so, I'm now trying to internalise that it's OK if things get delayed a day or two. I mean, the Dark Souls video I'm about to post the script for turned into a mini-dissertation, the video's gonna be about 40 minutes long (I know in the current landscape of multiple hour retrospectives that sounds like nothing, but all my video scripts end up with about 75% of their original length edited out in order to remain as concise as possible). Trust me when I say a lot of work has gone into this thing, and to throw another video on top of it just compounded that. 

Rest assured, there's a lot of video coming your way in the next few days, and so I hope you can understand me just putting the scripts through as paid posts now so you have something to whet your appetites for the full thing, while also ensuring that I'm not freaking out about keeping the lights on for the next month thanks to Patreon's weird deadline system. To be absolutely clear, these scripts are going through as paid posts that you'll get charged for. You will not be charged for the final product, actual videos that go up in the next few days. This is purely a logistical measure—think of it as a pre-order for the videos, except you've only got a couple of days to wait. 

I hate having to think about things this way but I hope I've explained the situation well enough. Basically this allows me to fuckin chill out for a few hours (I really have been working day and night at these vids for the last week and a bit), ensure the vids are as good as they can be by finishing the edits and running final checks, and keep the whole thing comfortable for me going into the next month, whose videos I've already started work on (so I guess that's... five videos I've been working on simultaneously? Man, that break really did a number on me haha).

Either way, I seriously cannot thank you all for your continued and unbelievably generous support—in an age where YouTube is making it harder and harder to get by, you are the ones that keep this channel and my work going. I am majorly sorry for the slight delay and I hope you enjoy the final videos when they release. 

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Now here's the actual script after all that waffle—the aforementioned mini-dissertation on what returning to Dark Souls helped me realise about my time with the recently released Elden Ring. From boss fights to levelling to exploration, so much about both games ended up completely recontextualised for me, giving me a new appreciation for both, despite some shortcomings. I hope you enjoy it!

In perhaps the least controversial take of all time, I cannot stop playing Elden Ring. I’ve put dozens upon dozens of hours in, beaten it, gone back for more, and I keep finding new pathways, new things to poke and prod at that are leading me on whole new adventures. I, like so many others, absolutely adore this thing. I’ve learned over the years not to make statements like “one of the best games of all time” for titles that have recently released, but safe to say it is widely considered to be the peak of From Software’s creative output—it’s certainly their most popular by some margin; seeming to reflect the developer’s endless refinement of their uniquely weighty, intensely difficult action RPG formula that they have been *very strictly* sticking to for over a decade at this point.

In this regard, Elden Ring’s quality was especially pleasant news for me, because for the longest time in the run up to release, I was almost ready to write it off—to say “you know, I’ve played this game many, many, many times before, and at this stage I think I’m good.” And then I got my hands on it in the network test last year and those worries were swiftly put to rest.

But that’s the thing—that pre-release fatigue is something I’ve felt for multiple Soulsborne games at this point. Of course that feeling is similarly reversed once I actually play the things, but one could make the argument that, rather than seeking truly ground-breaking innovation in the ideas they pursue, From Software’s focus has been to iterate, again and again, on one idea—that is to say, they make one type of game extremely well, but it’s variations on a theme.

And that started to bring up some interesting thoughts for me—you know, despite their sharing of a lot of fundamental similarities, arguments often rage about which is the superior entry in the Soulsborne canon, but given how monumentally popular Elden Ring has proven to be in comparison to the rest of the series, surely that argument is settled now, right?

After all of these years of refinement, all these quality-of-life features introduced to a famously obtuse franchise, we now have the most accessible instalment with the grandest, most expansive yet simultaneously most interconnected environments; the most fluid combat that is crucially also the most flexible. Surely, to return to prior instalments would require having to put up with so much mechanical clunkiness, to do away with the luxuries of Elden Ring’s design, that would have you wishing you could return to the most modern, best instalment, right?

Well, obviously to a certain extent, we know this isn’t how it works—popularity is rarely a marker of absolute quality and any number of factors can contribute to a particular entry gripping the mainstream; and while you can definitely tell both were made by From Software, Elden Ring is a very different game from, say, Sekiro.

But it did get me thinking about how I might feel now, returning to a game that does share more concrete roots with Elden Ring. My fondness for the original Dark Souls is well documented – I’d always be the one arguing its place as the peak of the series – but how much of that, at this stage, could be chalked up to rose-tinted glasses?

Outside of loading it up occasionally for footage, it’s been a number of years since I’ve done a full start-to-end playthrough of that original Dark Souls. I could already recognise certain elements of its design as needlessly obtuse or visibly patchier than they should be – how would the experience of having played the comparatively streamlined Elden Ring affect my view of those things now?

And so, while nearing the end of my first Elden Ring playthrough, I decided to, somewhat nervously, install Dark Souls once more – anxious about how my views on one of my favourite games might have changed. Cut to me walking away from the first flame one more time, and not only were my assumptions patently untrue, but something interesting happened – turns out all those years of refinements and changes to the series’ core design meant that returning to Dark Souls (a game I would describe myself as incredibly familiar with, whose myriad mysteries have long been solved) felt delightfully unfamiliar once more.

It’s like returning to a distant, hazy dream; one I know the basic shapes of, but one whose intricacies would have to be learned anew, and that process of refamiliarization turned out to be kind of fascinating in its own right – deepening my appreciation for an old favourite as well as a new classic; contextualising some of the small shortcomings I was finding within that newer game; but crucially, allowing me to see very directly that all those small iterations between games amount to two titles whose raison d’etre could not be more distinct from one another; who, mechanically, could not feel more different.

See, I started out in these games with little trust in my reflexes—trying to tank as much damage as possible by piling as much armour as possible on my character, rendering the series’ trademark roll as a last ditch evasive manoeuvre if things went south. As time went on though—and the fluidity and subsequent intensity of enemy attacks increased since 2015’s Bloodborne—speed, reflex became more and more the defining challenge of these games. As a player, I was not only required to keep up—the games encouraging me through health regeneration and the like to respond to these barrages as aggressively and constantly as they hurtled towards me—but I started to see the roll as more than a mere defensive tool, realising its offensive potential as my confidence with the move grew.

It might seem counterintuitive to a newcomer, gazing upon these imposing beasts with fear and confusion, but rolling into attacks and closing that distance brings those enemies down to size somewhat; you don’t have to cower away from these hits—thanks to invincibility frames afforded by rolling at the moment that swing comes down, that enemy, no matter how huge or intimidating, just opened themselves up for punishment – and you want to be close by in order to administer it (unless you’re a mage, obviously, in which case just pile spells into them from wherever you feel like – a totally valid and delightfully fun method of play, I might add).

Cut to Elden Ring, though, where the focus on avoiding hits entirely rather than tanking them just feels like the logical strategy now. I pay careful attention to the equipment load percentage meter in the corner, shedding whatever armour I can, to ensure I can stay as nimble as possible; to escape whatever flurry or world-shaking thump comes my way, completely unscathed.

And then I return to Dark Souls. Confident in my rolling abilities I two hand my weapon, enter a boss battle and roll through an attack… only to still take a great deal of damage as the enemy hadn’t quite completed their swing animation, and I happened to be on the end of their blade as I came out of the roll. Not only that, the kind of loadout that in Elden Ring would see me leaping about like without a care in the world, felt like it was steadily approaching the dreaded heavy roll—the kind that would see me lumbering about while the enemy took their time to decide just how they were going to eviscerate me for my hubris, in thinking I could just somersault towards them.

In short, I knew that returning to Dark Souls after Elden Ring would take a bit of getting used to; but I guess I was shocked at just howdifferent they were; how those differences arose not from mere technical improvements (it’s not merely a case of Dark Souls being jankier or Elden Ring feeling smoother) but from very deliberate choices made as to what the purposes of each game actually are.

Obviously I’m not coming to this as a newbie, I’ve internalised the unique rhythm of these games over the years which gives me a bit of a head start, but I was genuinely taken aback at how immediately I was forced to unlearn strategies I had come to take for granted in From Soft’s most recent title. Because the thing is, even if I wanted to rely on rolling in the way I now do in Elden Ring, there’s one aspect that would stop me from doing so—stamina.

It was a strange sensation to realise how little attention I’d been paying to this once all-important stat in the newer game—in fact, most encounters here saw me barely look at the meter at all. For some reason, I was always pretty confident that whatever I wanted to do, I would always have enough stamina to do so, and this was almost always the case. I’d become totally accustomed to that abundance.

But said abundance has not always been a given as it turns out; stamina really is at a premium in Dark Souls—it truly defines every move you make in combat. Even piling level after level into the endurance stat, I found that I was maybe getting a few rolls and swings in before having to pull back and let the meter recharge. I’d become so used to getting up close and personal with enemies, that relearning that flow of engaging and retreating was a lurching sensation – in the best possible way, I have to emphasise; it felt like an old challenge that I had to meet once more.

It was so novel that I could notice my eyes darting around the screen in ways they haven’t had to for multiple games at this point, frantically checking on that meter I would be using to gauge my response to enemy attacks. But of course, thanks to the slower speed of enemies (that truly seemed as if they were wading through molasses now that I was used to Elden Ring’s often dazzlingly acrobatic foes), you’re given the time to shift your attention to multiple different areas of the HUD at once, rather than focusing purely on an incoming attack.

As a result, Dark Souls ends up playing like either the slowest action game or the fastest strategy game ever made. It isn’t leisurely by any means but rather allows you to be more calculated in your approach, literally—I found myself actively running the numbers in my head between each swing of my axe, each stab of my halberd; remaining constantly aware of the slight delay in the meter’s regeneration should you expend it completely, and figuring out how many chunks I could afford to take out of it; real, active number crunching (combined with relearning the muscle memory of using a shield, for example) that spoke to how comparatively tactical this game feels in relation to From’s recently released open world.

When going back and forth between the two, it can often seem fairly comical how forgiving i-frames have become in order to match the increase in combat speed; the reduced emphasis on purely defensive tools like shields. To be clear, this isn’t a bad thing per se, on a purely kinaesthetic level the sensation of rolling through attacks is viscerally satisfying, and when you get into a good rhythm with it, it truly feels like nothing can stop your constant forward momentum.

That said, where Dark Souls keeps things broadly within the realm of believability (if your roll ends with you in direct contact with a sword, then you’re going to take some damage) there’s something legitimately funny about going back to Elden Ring, and seeing some utterly towering foe go into a series of furious anime-style swings, culminating in an impact so colossal that it shakes the very foundations of the world around you… only for you to do a wee roly-poly and somehow it’s as if nothing happened.

All of this speaks, however, to just how much focus has been placed on fluidity as the series has progressed. Animation fidelity has improved to the point that the ballet of rolling and cutting through your enemies like a hot knife through butter is a kind of violent visual poetry all of its own; as you seamlessly move from a roll into your own flurry of attacks, into casting spells, then back to melee in one flowing, continuous movement. Very prevalent lock-on issues aside, it all feels so delightfully responsive in a way that Dark Souls doesn’t even attempt to keep up with - it’s impossible to deny the comparatively heavier, borderline sluggish pace of it all, as deliberate a choice as that may be.

But well-designed combat systems don’t amount to much unless you have similarly well-designed encounters to utilise them in, and despite Dark Souls lacking some of the mechanical finesse or speed of its successor, what it did remind me of is that From Soft boss battles were once the stuff of absolute legend, and for good reason.

God, these boss battles feel great to return to. Not only do they look incredible, replete with weapons and armour sets that inspire that collect-em-all mentality as much as they strike fear into players; with a few notable exceptions, thanks to the smaller scope of the game, each boss seems specifically designed for the arena you fight them in; each serving a slightly different purpose, requiring you to figure out one more piece of Dark Souls’ labyrinthine combat puzzle. As a result of the slower pace, you really get a chance to read everything about an enemy as you fight them, with the one test they all share being one of focus—if you breathe and take your time, you can find the weakness here and exploit it.

And obviously part of this is down to my familiarity with this series over the years, but there was something kind of amazing about remembering just how badly the game wants you to beat these things – it desperately wants you to learn the ins-and-outs of these encounters and get through whatever way you can. Cruelly beating you into the ground couldn’t be further from this game’s goal.

See, even with those bosses that once gave me so much trouble back when I first picked up Dark Souls, the game gives you multiple chances to learn from your mistakes in the heat of battle. That is to say, these bosses rarely hit as hard as you think they might. Of course, if your instant response is to go “my health is low, I need to heal immediately,” then you will be summarily obliterated while in the animation that accompanies downing an Estus Flask– but in almost all cases, the game gives you more than enough chances to learn the lesson early on, that if you roll away a bit first, you can easily get that health back and continue your methodical experimentation to find the boss’ Achilles heel.

And that word I used before – exploit – really is the key here. For all the talk of “honour” and the quote-unquote “correct way to play these games” that has reared its utterly exhausting head once more with this recent release (that, despite recent pushback to the idea that the “git gud” mentality was ever a serious thing, one doesn’t need to look particularly far to find many examples of, especially if you make the daft decision like I have to talk about these games on YouTube), it was interesting to go back and really examine the accepted strategies for dealing with these hulking enemies.

Whether it’s getting under Sif’s legs to confuse the AI as to where you really are, or baiting Smough into aiming his pulverising charge move directly at a pillar, when you break them down, while you may not be thinking of them this technically in the moment, are far more to do with how you use the jankier elements of the game’s construction to your advantage, rather than true, honourable tests of mettle and skill.

Because whether deliberate or not, anyone that has spent any time fighting Ornstein and Smough likely knows this technique I just mentioned. Those discussions of “honour” surprisingly don’t bring up the weird way you can interrupt the big dude’s hammer animation by having him goofily clip through an already broken pillar.

The lesson this boss fight is testing you on is how well you can focus your attention, when you’re fighting two functionally different enemies who are both aggro’d towards you; how you split them up effectively (in a way that’s distinct from the Bell Gargoyle fight for example, in that here there’s the knowledge that beating one fills up the other’s health bar, and so chipping away at both is a pointless endeavour).

That’s a lot to take on board, but with all of that in mind, this weird clipping thing is an incredibly effective, unspoken but basically universally recognised part of that strategy—I’m willing to bet that almost everyone who knows about it uses it instinctively, even though mechanically, it’s an animation exploit. It’s a cheese—a minor one, but one that you’re encouraged to utilise.

The multiple variations on the Asylum Demon fight saw me specifically positioning myself to consistently draw out the butt stomp move—providing the best balance between ease of avoidance and minimising of distance to punish. Despite the ease with which I could take these things down solo, I can’t really say it felt particularly honourable to so, but these exploits still feel good to pull off because they see you calculating and executing on strategies directly related to how you position enemies, how you use your accrued knowledge of this game’s rhythm and nuances of its animations, to control a seemingly uncontrollable, insurmountable encounter.

Everything about overcoming these challenges revolves around player-driven self-improvement. And crucially, that was something I could pull off no matter what level I was at—something that I came to realise, unfortunately, I can’t say with such confidence about Elden Ring. In fact, I can say with some confidence that (and obviously this is largely subjective and everything I’m about to go into is related to the experiences of my friends and I, and if you had a better time with all this stuff that’s great and I’m happy for you), while I can go through every other title and find at least a couple of bosses that evoke the same kind of positive memories, the kind of superiority that From Soft once had in how well-designed their boss encounters were, I honestly can’t think of a single encounter in Elden Ring that I would consider worthy of that pantheon.

Even putting to the side the reuse of bosses that a lot of people have complained about (that honestly I think Dark Souls is just as bad for pound for pound), these bosses are either so bafflingly easy that they make me wonder if I’d missed the actual boss in a particular area, or so difficult, relying on such ridiculous tactics that they are an absolute chore to fight. For my money they are easily the worst aspect of Elden Ring—one of the few criticisms I have of the game as a whole—and that’s even more of a shame given how crucial bosses have previously been to this series’ formula.

Radahn perhaps comes closest to meeting that From Soft standard, with the ceremony of it all and the summoning of multiple NPCs providing at least some welcome change from the typical big arm dudes or horse guys or dragons or regular enemies given an inexplicably large health bar at the end of dungeons but outside of that gimmick, the challenge remains largely the same as it is for almost every one of the harder bosses in the game – try to make sense of the nigh-unreadable, unpredictable and inconsistent flurries of attacks coming your way, and unless you’re at a high enough level, try not to get hit even once.

To be clear, the speed isn’t necessarily the issue here—while the challenge for the vast majority of bosses coming down to sheer reflexes doesn’t make for particularly varied encounters, and does present very real problems for those who, for whatever reason, simply can’t keep up with the truly relentless pace of it all, this is the way it’s been for a while now. The “not getting hit once part” of that equation, on the other hand, very much is an issue.

Of course, as I mentioned earlier, using rolling to avoid getting hit as opposed to simply tanking damage has been a viable strategy for multiple games now, and one that I’ve tried to utilise myself. But unless you’re some speed running maestro, you’re still almost certainly going to get hit at some point.

The interesting challenge there is, how do you recover from that disruption of your strategy and get back into the swing of things – this is the kind of thought process Bloodborne encouraged through its health regen mechanic, and Sekiro through its rhythm game-esque focus on parrying – but as Dark Souls illustrated to me perhaps most clearly, that specific brand of challenge hinges entirely on the player getting a second chance; an opportunity to respond to that disruption.

Even in the early to mid-game, Elden Ring’s bosses can either hit you so hard that your health is gone in an instant, or get you caught in such an unreadable flurry that you simply get stunlocked to death. These attacks can often come with incredibly hard to read tells, and can strike you down before you even realise what’s happening.

But in those earlier stages of the game, this wasn’t an insurmountable thing – as always, these games are as difficult as you want to make them, right? And while it required me sacrificing about ten hours of progress to go back and create a more viable magic build than the greatsword one I was trying to level into, using spells to create some much-needed distance proved to be an incredibly effective method of taking down Margitt, and feeling like I could actually move forward with the game. I mean, there’s a boss very much designed to tell you “go back and explore the open world out there,” anyway, and so this wasn’t too much of an issue. Said distance also proved to work pretty well against many subsequent encounters I came across too, as I simultaneously tried to build up a more balanced build, realising that reliance on magic usually only ever gets you so far in these games.

But already I was hitting problems – namely in the fact that levelling up even slightly often felt like the truly monumental task of the entire game, in that exploring dungeons and beating not-insubstantial challenges through exploration (journeys that would sometimes take upwards of fifteen minutes to complete) would usually reward a fraction of the runes required to gain a single stat point. The premium that Dark Souls places on stamina is here replaced with an infinitely greater premium placed on health – you want that second chance to respond to a boss attack without being totally obliterated? Get grinding.

And weirdly, as daft as it sounds, this is a problem I actually think is at least partially exacerbated by the sheer cavalcade of options available to you, rather than helped. For example, after getting stuck on the aforementioned Radahn fight for a period of time, I decided to have a look at what people were saying online to see if there were any strategies I was missing. I saw someone mention the ash of war Hoarfrost Stomp, and so I equipped it on my sword, returned to the battle and indeed, a fight that previously gave me a good deal of trouble, went down in seconds… and I kinda felt… nothing.

Fine, you might think, you took down the boss, you talked about using exploits in Dark Souls, so why did victory here feel so hollow when before it felt like a satisfying way of gaining the upper hand? Well, as I say, those prior examples all revolved around clever positioning and management of enemies – studying them and realising the nuances of how they interacted with the arena, with me. Even figuring that out, there was still a challenge of execution there.

What happened here was that I stumbled upon a combination of equipment and elemental damage that just so happened to be unusually strong against this enemy in a way that rendered him zero threat whatsoever.

And then comes the late game. Once again I want to reiterate that this is all subjective and if you are rushing to the comments to tell me how you had absolutely no trouble with this stuff whatsoever, cool, got it. But talking from my own experience, having soloed multiple From Soft games prior and despite feeling like I’d built a pretty decent, well-rounded character after around 60 hours of solidly exploring everything I came across, the difficulty spike I was suddenly presented with in the Forge of the Giants saw me wondering how the hell I was ever going to be able to get enough health to withstand even a single strike in some cases, while also gaining enough attack power to whittle down the frankly obscene number of hit points many of those later bosses possess.

Those late game bosses especially either have so much health or move so fast that it’s hard to really know what they’re testing you on that’s distinct to that boss alone—the reflex exams of the post-Bloodborne games taken to a new, exhausting extreme? A pure battle of attrition where the game punishes you for not meeting what would previously have felt like a fairly arbitrary level count (and that’s another thing, looking at guides after the fact and seeing that many suggest that a level count into the hundreds should get you more or less towards the end of the game? That seems absolutely ludicrous for a Souls title!).

And then I fought the dude from the Roundtable Hold which might be the easiest 100000 points I’ve earned in any Souls game. The balance and pacing of these bosses is all over the place, and almost never lands in the sweet spot a From Soft enemy roster needs to exist within. As a result of that comparative lack of coherency in the function of these bosses, it’s hard for me to really remember the ins-and-outs of many of them at all, outside of how frustrated they left me; how little joy or triumph I felt after overcoming them.

I’m legitimately not sure how I would have gotten through that endgame boss gauntlet in the end were it not for my pal taking me through a detailed path, to get a weapon I would later find out many in the community see as comically overpowered, getting all kinds of trinkets that would add certain points to intelligence or elemental damage and the like, and crucially showing me an infinitely exploitable, outrageously broken farming spot that, at the very least, removed some of that abject despair about how long I was going to have to re-do old areas to grind runes, because here I was suddenly gaining several levels every few minutes it felt like. And only then, grinding those stats waaaay beyond the point that most Souls games would consider a soft cap, did I feel like I stood a fair chance against these later enemies.

Again, even if you had a different experience, hopefully you still see my point here as it relates back to Dark Souls – maybe it’s down to how comparatively streamlined that game’s progression is, but I’ve legitimately never been in a boss battle in any other Souls game and thought “I am too underlevelled to do anything effective here.”

In Elden Ring, on the other hand, sure, there’s something to be said for stumbling across that right combination of overpowered weapon with bleed damage heightened by these stacked spells and mixed physick effects activated in this specific order, with the correct armour setup and elemental talisman… but whether I was struggling earlier on, or building that correct setup in later areas, it always seemed to centre on how thoroughly I could game the numbers, rather than relying on my own skill.

To be clear, this was something that only really became apparent to me after returning to that older title, where every single boss got me at least two or three levels-worth of currency—this reward felt proportional to the task and served as a constant reminder that I was getting somewhere; even if, thinking back, the stats themselves felt like more of a pacing device—a concrete marker of your progress in a sea of vague systems and storytelling—rather than a true necessity to get through the game.

At the very least, it surprised me just how early on in Dark Souls you hit that intersection of soft level caps, the emphasis shifting towards the less costly option of upgrading weapons over your character, and your own knowledge of the game’s systems developing to the point that losing thousands of souls becomes more of a minor frustration than seeing you cascade into absolute peril; the same peril I was experiencing alarmingly late into Elden Ring’s already lengthy playtime.

The talk I was seeing in many reviews-in-progress about how Elden Ring was somehow the easiest, most accessible, most forgiving of the From games, either makes me question whether those reviewers made it to this late game (given how little time they actually had to review the thing, but that’s a topic for another video), or requires such a vast array of caveats as to make the statement kind of redundant. Like, yes, there are a number of quality-of-life features implemented, there are all these tools available to customise your setup, but that doesn’t change the fact that even after all these years playing these games, I still needed to look up a guide to find the uniquely esoteric steps Elden Ring requires in order to access multiplayer—one of the series’ defining features.

And I found myself using the feature a lot—again, I don’t know how I would have finished the game without it—because even after grinding levels, and even re-speccing multiple times to see if maybe I was just taking the wrong approach to any given boss, I still found that most of those later encounters would pretty easily destroy me with daft AoE attacks and the like, without at least someone else (someone with an actual human brain that is) to draw aggro.

I love Elden Ring so dearly, it’s easily my game of the year so far—possibly of the last few years—but whether or not this makes me some kind of scrub that just needs to git gud, I have to be honest when I say that the end game of Elden Ring, despite featuring some of the wildest environment design this series has ever seen, was kind of a miserable experience for me; a sensation only heightened when I went back to Dark Souls and didn’t need to think about any of that stuff anymore.

It really showed me that what felt infinitely more rewarding to me than agonising over the correct build that would inexplicably break a daunting boss in half, was whether I could use my instincts to find the right opening to swing a sword real good—and Elden Ring, for all its unmatched wonder in exploration, could never quite reach those lofty, pure heights of Dark Souls enemy encounters for me.

But that’s just it, as I realised very early on in my time with Elden Ring, maybe all of this wasn’t what I was coming to this game for anyway—Elden Ring’s strengths, the ones that keep it elevated as an easy contender for best Soulsborne game, arguably lie in the other aspects of its spectacular experience—namely, the stunning open world of the Lands Between—a world so compelling that returning to Dark Souls and Lordran, one of the most well-realised environments video games have yet seen in my opinion, left me wanting. Elden Ring’s exploration is just that good.

I already made an entire video about this very subject, but Elden Ring’s world is not only one of the most staggeringly beautiful I’ve ever come across, but also one that makes it impossible not to go sticking your nose into every single nook and cranny, because even when you think you’ve seen all there is to see, Elden Ring will pull the rug out from under you with a scale that doesn’t seem comprehensible in a video game. For me, exploration is Elden Ring’s purpose distinct from other Souls games, and that purpose is signposted from the minute you set foot in the Lands Between.

When you lift up the door to reveal Limgrave, the emotion that’s meant to wash over you is a kind of quiet wonder. It’s a change from the dank, grey catacombs you awaken from, revealing a seemingly endless expanse of lush greenery, massive towers and giant ruins just waiting to be traversed. From the first shot of the game starting proper, it’s a scenario that’s fairly easy to read—regardless of how much attention you paid to the intro telling you about dung eaters and the like, I imagine most of you, like me, saw the big shiny thing glowing in the distance and thought “that’s where I need to go.”

Of course, this is a From Soft game and so that wonder is to be swiftly tempered with the knowledge that you are on your own for now, and what’s out there could easily slaughter you, but the placement of a lost grace checkpoint (replete with friendly Santa Claus lookalike merchant) within seconds of your actual starting point, is a pretty key indicator that such crushing atmosphere isn’t the sole focus here—the designers want you to feel like you’re capable of poking and prodding at different things from the get-go, to follow whatever tangent you come across without too much in the way of consequence.

Rather than the typical approach of having you take part in a lengthy tutorial to learn the controls, only to be capped off with a massive boss where all that remains is certain death, Elden Ring gets all that stuff out of the way early here—this is a From Soft game, you know the drill. Of course this is going to be hard, death is going to occur, now let’s get you to the stuff that really matters. You don’t even have to take part in the actual mechanical tutorial if you don’t want to—the game is doing everything it can to sweep any detritus out your path. Death isn’t the crucial component here like it has been previously—instead, it’s freedom.

Compare that relatively straight-ahead, forgiving scenario to the opening of Dark Souls. I get comments and messages all the time talking about how easy the Asylum Demon is from seasoned Souls players and, of course, that’s true if you’ve spent as much time with the series as a lot of people have. Think about it from a new player’s perspective though. While you don’t have to die as with, say, Demon’s Souls, you don’t get to progress past the tutorial area until you beat this massive beast blocking your way, that the first time you encounter it, you have to figure out that you can’t even effectively fight it—all while you’re trying to get used to this rather esoteric control setup and game feel.

Even once you get past that initial boss, some giant crow unceremoniously, inexplicably dumps you in the middle of this clearly dying world, where you’re told by some moody arsehole that there are some bells out there somewhere and you’ve got to go ring them, wherever they may be—and also if you choose to take the route signposted by the massive inviting ruins lying right in front of you, you’ll get cornered into a skeleton-infested dead end… if you’re lucky.

It was interesting to see that, to this day, that initial shot of Firelink, as majestic as it is, still evokes more trepidation and melancholy than exploratory curiosity. While Elden Ring certainly isn’t free of its own grime, rot and decay, and even as familiar as I am with Dark Souls’ environments, returning to the sheer sorrow of Lordran, with areas ranging from dank and dimly lit, to pure abyssal void (with its most glorious sights proving to be little more than illusion), felt as shockingly oppressive as it did the first time I set foot in the game way back when, all thanks to the comparative majesty and vitality of Elden Ring.

You know, The Lands Between are rife with cute animals just grazing, doing their thing; there’s a massive golden waypoint sticking out of the ground; no matter what dangers lie ahead of you, there’s the feeling that there’s still life to this world somewhere—and the prospect of finding it among the rot, in whatever way you choose, is exciting. In Dark Souls, you’re smack bang in the middle of a world in readily apparent decline, where things will kill you if you don’t take the weird side route around the game’s unforgiving terrain, that you lack the mechanical tools to elegantly traverse—those tools that Elden Ring provides you in abundance.

Perhaps this is a consequence of the exploration feeling so rewarding in itself that I didn’t pay much attention at all to Elden Ring’s typically vague, lore-focused means of storytelling, but that feeling of environmental mastery is perhaps the key tonal difference between Elden Ring and Dark Souls. No longer do I feel like a such a miniscule speck in an uncaring world—instead, Elden Ring’s otherworldly grandeur feels openly inviting, as if the remnants of civilisations past were meant to be clambered over and conquered in their own right.

There are so many points in Dark Souls, by comparison, where you feel like the environment is actively out to get you. Lordran’s terrain isn’t to be conquered in the same way—it’s to be survived, to be learned and adapted to—a process that, reflective of the game’s combat, comes with its own triumph for sure, but it’s a triumph that brings with it a very distinct reminder of your place in this world. You are small here—there are places you can’t go, things you can’t understand.

Thinking about all of this with the context of playing through Dark Souls again, the few shortcomings I see in Elden Ring start to make a bit more sense to me personally. Where the process of navigating Lordran’s decaying expanse felt like it mirrored the Sisyphean struggle of getting to grips with the game’s combat, I feel like with Elden Ring there’s something more incongruous between how powerful you feel merely navigating its open world, and how relatively power*less* you are in comparison to these ridiculously fast, hard-hitting bosses; with the level grinding I felt forced to do in order to alleviate some of that challenge, feeling all the more artificial and game-y; the bosses themselves coming across far more as irritating roadblocks to the exploration I’m here for, than meaningful tests of the skills the game has been focusing on.

You know, despite featuring perhaps the most fluid, flexible combat of the entire Soulsborne franchise, I felt like I wanted to fight less in Elden Ring than any game of its ilk prior. Somehow, it didn’t seem like that was the point of things here—a suspicion that solidifies when you revisit Dark Souls, where every step taken is a battle of survival.

I love Dark Souls’ world, obviously—prior to The Lands Between I would have said Lordran’s interconnectivity made it one of the most glorious environments to inhabit in a video game. But in the same way that Dark Souls’ world is not exactly constructed with ease of traversal in mind, putting dozens of hours into Elden Ring does bring with it some expectations that made returning to Lordran a little more frustrating than it had felt previously.

For one thing, while the typical debate around bonfires in these games is about the ability to warp between them, and whether or not that trivialises true exploration of the world, one thing that doesn’t get brought up as often is the frequency of said bonfires. That is to say, going from Elden Ring where you can’t go two minutes without coming across a lost grace checkpoint or Statue of Marika, Dark Souls’ dedication to the idea of shortcuts often sees entire massive areas revolve around a single bonfire.

And on one level, obviously this is great! It both contributes to the tension of worrying how much progress you’ve made, how many souls you’re carrying, as well as building familiarity with an environment, leading to the ever-novel reveal when you find this lengthy path you’ve taken, loop back around to that original checkpoint, highlighting just how web-like this world actually is. And as much as it’s been talked about to death, the Lordvessel feels like it comes at just the right time when you’ve trudged through enough of the world for warping to feel like a true reward.

All that said, I’m convinced you could shave at least a couple of hours off of that already surprisingly short overall playtime just by cutting out the often absurdly lengthy runs back to the boss after each death. In some areas it balances out—the knights littering the path to Lord Gwyn in the Kiln of the First Flame give you ample opportunities to practice the parry timing crucial to taking the boss down quickly, and also shower you with valuable upgrade items for your trouble; somewhat alleviating the frustration of the minutes-long journey just to get another shot because you messed up last time. But when you slip off a narrow pathway or get ganked by a ghost gang in the New Londo Ruins, only to get zapped right back to Firelink… that’s the kind of worryingly frequent trek that made me put down the controller for the night.

Elden Ring, by comparison, constantly saw me internally saying “just one more lost grace… I promise.” While the late game bosses might act as a truly frustrating roadblock, that initial act of pioneering through this gargantuan world is made inherently, mechanically compelling.

And further, after returning to Elden Ring’s New Game Plus mode, aside from simply being powerful enough to barrel through bosses and encounters that once gave me so much trouble, it’s been remarkable to see just how little you actually have to do as part of the critical path before heading to the late game. Obviously you can break down Dark Souls in a similar fashion – you simply need to ring the bells of awakening, get the Lordvessel, get the Lord Souls and kill Gwyn – but bear in mind that game is but a *fraction* of Elden Ring’s size.

Proportionally, it’d be as if you’d rung the first Bell and suddenly you could just go to the Kiln of the First Flame. And it says a lot for not just how densely packed Elden Ring’s world is but how meaningful the activities used to pack it are in their own right, that realising how little of it was actually mandatory was such a revelation to me. For as critical as I’ve been with some of Elden Ring’s combat encounters, part of why they stick out like they do is because this world achieves something truly special that few games could ever dream of matching.

And I guess that’s just it. If there’s anything this experiment has taught me it’s that, despite the feeling you can sometimes get, that From Soft are putting out the same game over and over again, to say that Dark Souls is merely some demo for what Elden Ring would become is inaccurate. The changes between Soulsborne instalments, when examined in a vacuum, might seem miniscule, but in totality they amount to two games, in this case, that couldn’t require a more different mindset from players, that fulfil completely different functions from one another.

Elden Ring, for me, is a game about exploration of a massive world that just so happens to be attached to one of the best combat systems ever envisioned, broken up by some largely pretty rubbish, forgettable boss fights. Dark Souls is a game about learning combat specifically, with each encounter along the way teaching you something about how to deal with certain enemies before getting to a specifically curated boss encounter testing you on that newly gained knowledge.

And the thing is, regardless of whatever shortcomings highlighted by the direct comparison of the two games, and given all my talk of Souls fatigue earlier in the piece, perhaps the most shocking thing of all was that playing two of these games at the same time just had me equally excited for both games at once. Indeed, whether exploring the Lands Between or fighting my way through Lordran, this endeavour confirmed in no uncertain terms, that while From Soft might be making the same game over and over again, there’s no denying… they do make a damn good video game.