Was watching Peeve and Oroboros who I guess are in the top 1% of souls players in terms of knowledge and ability. Playing with their squads, usually Level 9-10 by end of day 1, level 14-15 by night 3. Then trying pugs, instantly down to 7-9, 10-12, which makes a huge difference.
From watching them, their "reviews" condensed down from listening to them would be something like
- Watching a stream of a team with voice chat doesn't give an accurate representation of how the game will be just queuing up with randoms. If people don't go the optimal route, you have to follow since you can't do the optimal route alone, which will limit your run.
- Timer is so fast it doesn't really allow for mistakes if you want to beat the last boss, which all progress is tied to. What enemies to kill, what enemies and areas to rush past to kill the boss. (Watching them do the volcano or ice mountain for the legendary upgrades is just funny. Just rush past everything in the volcano for the path down, or skyrimskip up the side of the ice mountain passing everything. But.... if they don't do that, they don't have time to do it since if you stop to do anything in those places, the circle will close before you even get to fight the bosses.)
- Not being in an actual team will also limit you by not having voice chat to call out items you get to swap around as you might get abilities that are really useful for someone else. This can add a lot of power. Not to mention some classes really function better with communication (like the mage one, forget its name). Also for stagger chains on the last bosses, since nearly all of them have constant massive AE abilities that are very suseptible to staggers.
- There also isn't much variation, though assume that will come with patches. But further added that another problem with the variation is also that many events / bosses are "traps" for time. They are not equal. Some are more optimal than others, and once you learn this, everything else is skipped. (Example, they will run into a castle, look down a hallway towards a boss, and with a glance know to call out for killing the boss, or just skipping it because it will take 1 minute to kill instead of 20 seconds)
- It's zoomer Elden Ring.
Patching it to allow for better solo play might make me more interested, but the gameloop itself isn't for me. I enjoy the exploration and taking my time in souls games. This is the opposite.
That said, wouldn't be surprised if this is one of the biggest financial successes for FromSoft since I assume the budget for this is a fraction of their main games reusing 95% of their assets, and it has already sold 3+ million copies.
