Back in the Lands Between

A month or so ago I was looking for something to stream – as I often am – and a thought occurred to me. “The Elden Ring DLC is coming out in a couple of months,” I thought. “Perhaps I should stream myself getting the DLC unlocked.” I sat down and booted up my PS5 to check and see how far I had gotten with the second character I started some time ago. She was standing right at the base of Godrick’s castle looking out over the swampy landscape of Liurnia. It felt perfect. I’d boot up Elden Ring, keep playing with that character, and make my way to the boss who unlocks the DLC portion of the game. It was this idea that led me to begin revisiting the game not just on stream, but on my own time on weeknights or during the weekend as well.

Elden Ring is a game I knew with confidence I would come back to someday. When I originally played the game I found a build I liked relatively early and stuck to it throughout my run. But with so many weapons and spells available in the game, there was still so much about Elden Ring that I had never experienced. I wanted to try out different approaches to the game’s mechanics beyond just the initial build that felt immediately comfortable for me. I imagined making sorcerers or priestesses or heavily-armored knights, using shields or spells or huge fuck-off swords twice the size of my body. When I started my second character, I decided to do a build primarily focused on faith with a sword as her backup weapon against foes resistant to fire or holy magic.

The initial rush of playing with that character was great. Magic felt so much more powerful than the claw weapons I had been using during my first playthrough and it seemed like I was beating every boss more easily than I had before. At some level I knew I could probably chalk it up to experience, but it seemed too like this character could potentially be better conceptually than the one I came up with originally. However, as time went on and I built the character out more, I started to run into some issues with her.

My first issue was that of the stat spread. My first character only really cared about three statistics: vigor to take damage, endurance to dodge and swing his weapon, and dexterity to deal increased weapon damage. The new character functionally replaced dexterity with faith but then still had two other things to worry about: mind as a way to build more MP, and strength as a backup damage source for when magic wasn’t effective. Having to build five stats instead of three meant that I couldn’t min-max to the same degree I had with my first character, and as time went on the challenges that came with that began to show. This was further aggravated by the fact that the faith spells and weapons that I wanted to experiment with cost ludicrous amounts of faith, which meant that I either needed to wait until I was a lot deeper in the game to access them or I needed to power-level faith at the expense of everything else.

What I ultimately ended up with was a character who had too many things going on at once for my skill level; I don’t know that she was bad, necessarily, but she was bad for me because I didn’t have the level of skill to play her. Her vigor was low to the point that I needed to be functionally hitless during certain combat encounters. And let me tell you, I am not good enough at Elden Ring to be hitless. This by itself didn’t necessarily have to be the death knell for my character – part of the beauty of the game is that you can go to different parts of the world and try different bosses, using the runes you get from the ones you can beat in order to level up and then overcome the ones who are harder for you. But during a particularly bad stream session on a night where I really had no business streaming because of how stressed I had been at work, I made the mistake of trying one particular battle over and over and over again with my ill-suited character. By the end of the session I was thoroughly done with my incantation build.

I wasn’t done with Elden Ring, though. If anything, that experience made me more determined to push myself to master the game. I wrote recently for a Charming and Open response about my journey with higher difficulty games and expanding my gaming comfort zone, and how the thought process of “if I can play Hollow Knight then I can play Bloodborne” started a domino effect that led to my broader interest in FromSoft’s work. If I can beat Elden Ring, what else can I do? Beat it with a build that feels less natural to me, surely. How else could I challenge myself? One possible method would be learning the speedrun.

Ever since my positive experience speedrunning Chrono Cross and my, uh, less positive experience speedrunning Fire Emblem: Three Houses, I have been hungry to find another game that I’m interested in running. I’ve been hesitant to learn any action games or platformers because, well, I suck at them. But I’m really interested in improving my skills at Elden Ring, and speedrunning is something I’m excited about, so it seemed like a promising combination. So far at the time of writing I have mainly been practicing some of the early movement and setup for the run, and the first boss battle (with limited success – by which I mean I have not won yet haha). My main barrier has been less about my skill level and more about the process by which I have had to learn the run. Most of the resources for speedrunning Elden Ring seem to be sequestered into a Discord somewhere and I’m not particularly interested in messing with that, so I have been making my own notes based off of a GDQ run that I can barely see because the runner played the game on the standard brightness and my eyesight is shit.

When not working on the speedrun I’ve instead spent time playing the game in other ways. I went back to my first character and beat Mohg to unlock the DLC with that build, then hopped over to a brand new character focusing on just one key alteration to my original build: running strength instead of dexterity. My new character still has solid vigor and endurance so I can make some mistakes and some errant dodges, but the weapon I carry is completely different and plays differently in combat. My swings are slower but more powerful and deal more poise damage; I can make fewer quick swipes during an opening but I’m a lot more likely to poise break bosses than I am used to. It’s leading me to a more aggressive style than what I usually ran, which does feel like an interesting change of pace.

Overall I’ve been having a lot of fun revisiting Elden Ring, despite some of the challenges and missteps along the way. It’s a game that – because of its massive scale – I have barely scratched the surface of despite having put in over 100 hours and rolling credits. I’m excited to continue pushing myself to experience the game in new ways. I’m even more excited for the additional content in the DLC. And I’m excited for the next domino to fall in the growth of my gaming experience. If I can play Elden Ring, I can play…what’s next?