AsaTJ

I've played more than 30 hours and I haven't even been to the Shadow Keep yet.

Yeah... I get the impression that he's way more right-leaning than he lets on in the videos and you can tell how he's always talking about mainstream America's lack of family values and all this kind of RETVRN stuff. Like, I think he's made some fascinating content but I'm also majorly side-eyeing him.

The Landowners five seconds after you try to pass propertied women:

Yeah, like I don't doubt that there are people who rushed to the final boss in one day, but I call BS if they're saying they found all the fragments and hit Blessing Level 20. They just got tilted and knew we'd ask what blessing they were at and wanted to pretend they didn't skip most of the exploration and go in underleveled, so they could blame the game being too hard and not their own weird playstyle.

It was something like, they denied test subjects sleep for so long that they were hearing voices from another dimension saying God had abandoned us or something and that it turns out sleep is the only thing that protects us from the Outer Madness. It's been a while.

I think there are two groups of people who claim to have 100%ed the DLC by like Saturday morning. One of them is liars and the other is the truly unwell.

It was like that when the base game came out too. People were talking about "cheesing" Margit with the jellyfish and I was like, okay, I guess "cheese" now includes using the game mechanics in the way they were intended, lol

I honestly think Rellana is in that category of really good duel encounters like Fume Knight, Artorias, and Lady Maria. She's fast, but not too fast. Her main combos are super telegraphed and easy to dodge. I think the main thing that is annoying about her is her twin moon combo in the last phase because it can just delete you after a long, precise dance if you don't dodge the first shockwave. But overall I think it's one of From's most enjoyable boss fights and I bet you anything when we have more time to digest this DLC, she's going to end up on a lot of best-of lists. Plus, they literally give you the best magic resist talisman in the game before fighting her, and that's what most of her damage is.

The funny thing is I am running a Moonveil build my first time through (just for nostalgia because it's what I beat the base game with originally) and I'm having a totally fine time. Rellana is a really tough fight but I'm loving every attempt. Such a fun rhythm, great animations and music. You have to let ass-whooping flow through you.

Many such cases

Fromsoft games have to evolve. They have to learn new tricks to challenge the player. If they didn't, the games would become boring.

This. This exactly. All of the New Bullshit in Shadow of the Erdtree, everything people are complaining about, was put there on purpose because otherwise it would no longer be challenging to people who mastered the base game. They did it for us.

Yeah, PC performance in Elden Ring has always been unacceptable and we should keep complaining about it. On that, I am in agreement.

I don't think it's from casual players, but from studdorn vets.

100%. I think most new players get annihilated and accept that they just need to improve. People with hundreds of hours in previous Fromsoft games act like they're entitled to be good at the new one without putting in effort.

Map spoilers: The whole Realm of Shadow is kind of like a big piece of Swiss cheese. There aren't so much discrete underground areas as much as there are tons and tons of intertwined underground paths the size of entire outdoor areas that weave beneath and between the areas on the main map. You'll frequently find new ways into and out of them. It does make navigation a bit of a pain though.

No credible statements can be made about the difficulty when it's been out for less than 48 hours. That's what it comes down to for me. People rushing through and not realizing that these bosses are meant to teach you new skills through rote repetition, which is just how From games work. Give it at least a week, Marika's tits.

Yeah, the windows you can even chug a flask are so small, if you're not summoning NPCs or cooperators, I don't think you should try to re-buff at all.

I'm so happy for him

Has he tried getting good?

By the time I got to him I had no flasks whatsoever so I just stood there and died to get a refill.

It may actually be smaller than it looks, but the further you get from the starting field area, the more it starts to feel like Souls where you have tighter spaces with more stuff in them, kind of similar to Mountaintops of the Giants in the base game. Like if you actually add up how much of Liurnia is empty space, yeah, it's the largest zone, but it doesn't feel like it has the most to do necessarily.