And enemies will even retain their damage if you run away, so you can play hit and run on your horse all you want. There are automatically activated respawn points in key tough-to-beat areas, so you rarely ever have to make the long walk of shame back to your dropped currency if you die. Your character doesn’t expend any stamina when outside of combat so you can sprint, jump, and roll endlessly. It felt like every five minutes I would encounter something that made me go “what the heck is that?!”Įlden Ring is also surprisingly forgiving when it comes to its open-world exploration. From hidden NPCs to bosses just roaming out in the field, to a pack of extremely tough enemies that you could attempt to farm for weapon upgrade shards, to a plot of land where lightning continuously strikes leaving electrically charged rocks that you can scrounge up. What’s especially impressive about this Closed Network Test is despite how I was walled into a relatively small zone, there was still so much to explore and discover. That said, the area in the Closed Test is walled off by invisible barriers, so it’s hard to say how this will play out in the full game. You’d find equally challenging fights in all directions, and you could tackle them in any order you choose. The areas weren’t gated by having tougher enemies in one location versus another either. You can follow the recommended path, illuminated by the light of grace you could take a look to your right and decide to explore the ominous-looking lake and ruins, or you could turn around and spot a lone island off in the distance and think to yourself ‘I wonder how I can get over there…” Right from when you step out of the tutorial cave, you’re free to go in any direction you choose. A Truly Open WorldĪs cool as the Ashes of War are though the big departure for Elden Ring is the move to a completely open-world structure. It encourages experimentation with different weapons, opens up a ton of variety in build options, gives me another type of reward to get excited about finding in the world, and the skills themselves are just super cool to mess around with. If it isn’t already abundantly clear, I love this. The best part though is that Ashes of War are transferable and don’t get consumed upon use, so if I find a weapon later on that I enjoy more than the Twinblade, I can place the Glintstone Arch Ash of War onto it and easily transition to a new weapon, which has always been kind of difficult and costly to do in other Souls games once you’ve taken a weapon down a specific upgrade path. Now the twinblade not only works as a great melee weapon for my build, but it also comes with a powerful spell that doesn’t take up one of my actual spell slots. But it also grants me the Glintsword Arch skill which summons four magic swords that automatically fly towards enemies that get close. Later on, I find an Ash of War: Glintsword Arch, which not only gives the Twinblade intelligence scaling, making it viable as a melee weapon for my build. Typically not a weapon I’d want to use on a magic-focused character, but it’s the best thing I’ve got and hey, it’s got a cool move-set. As an example, let’s say my intelligence-focused character finds a Twinblade.
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