You're viewing a single thread.
I love the open world of Elden Ring so much. I go around collecting crafting materials and recipes. Sometimes I even fight a boss in order to get the recipes. My collection of grease is unmatched. Even though my collection is never complete, I feel I have enough to retire.
As a Souls' player since PS3 Demons Souls, this concept is so foreign to me and I love it. I have opened the crafting menu to craft a furnace pot once and instead beat my head against the game over and over until I "succeeded".
Crafting used to be fairly useless (glowstones exempted) and now you've convinced me to do a "crafting only" run and make try make it ER a survival game. Not like I needed another 150 hours invested in this masterpiece.
I did a bow and consumables run of ER and it's actually pretty fun. There needs to be a little rune grinding because for some reason we can't just have infinite arrows once you find the recipe. But Mogh bird takes 5 minutes to get enough for a good few hours of gaming, so it's fine.
Bows and arrows feel very incomplete in ER. There are a lot of bows with good ashes and a lot of interesting different bolts and arrows. But that's where it ends. Crafting arrows is pretty dumb, because it's just a grind. Arrows also do basically no damage, so being only able to carry 99 of them is stupid. Enemy AI has no idea what to do when you use arrows. Some of them basically freeze up and get confused about what is actually happening.
But I had a lot of fun using arrows to inflict bleed and poison. Jumping around arenas as boss fights take a long time, focusing on dodging instead of doing damage. Pots are also fun to quickly do some damage, but are very limited. It was a cool way to experience the game and showed me different aspects of the bosses I didn't even notice before.
I'm currently doing a run with my brother where I am a dwarf with a big unga bunga axe and he's an elf with a small dagger and a bow. It's super fun to do together and incorporate a lot of elements normally not present. The new version of Seamless coop is broken af atm, but we're helping with testing and reporting bugs so I'm sure it will be better than ever before in no time.