Tag: co-op | A Banana Peeled

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Elden Ring–you take the good….

Posted on October 14, 2022 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I am finally writing the post on Elden Ring that I wanted to write in the first place. I got side-tracked in my two previous posts, so here we go. This is about co-op because the Eurogamer video team was complaining about it as they played in the Closed Network Test (CNT). So did the PlayStation Access video team. It was pretty constant. “Why must I keep summoning?” “Why do I need to craft the material needed to summon?” “Why can’t I ride my horse in co-op?” “I hate being invaded!”

I will admit I was getting pretty impatient with the complaining. The game is meant to be played solo so FromSoft has made it a chore to summon. It’s meant to be a treat or a perk, which means working for it. I don’t play co-op, so I was not very sympathetic to the complaints, I’ll admit.

Then, Ian and I played co-op for a few hours. Without talking to each other while playing. That was annoying, I will say. Being summoned was not that big a deal. I have a million of the erdleaf flower needed for crafting the furlcalling finger remedy, which is the item you have to use to summon someone. Oh wait. I didn’t even need that to play with Ian as he was the one summoning me. I was severely nerfed in his world, which was understandable. I was level 168 or so at that point, and he was probably around 50. We were in early Caelid, whereas I had finished the game with that character. But I did not appreciate HOW nerfed I was in his world. I still had to hit a giant rabid dog several times to kill it, whereas in my world, I could kill them with two hits of a Lightning Spear. I get why From would not want me to be able to lay waste to the enemies in Ian’s world, but I don’t agree with that.

Look. If he wants to mow through the game like a god, why shouldn’t he? In allowing summoning at all, FromSoft is already tacitly saying, “You want to be OP, ok, fine!” Yes, you can be OP as a summon, but you pretty much have to spec for that. I am not a min-maxer in any way, so I was not OP as a summon. I was stronger than Ian was, yes, but not outrageously so.

Having fun in Elden Ring

Posted on September 13, 2022 by Minna Hong • 0 Comments

I hadn’t played Elden Ring (FromSoft) in some time for reasons. Just wasn’t feeling it, mostly. I watched a few videos on the best and most rare armors in the game and decided to give it a go. That means farming, which is not fun. One of them was fairly easy to get, but another, I had trouble getting the head piece. It’s an armor that has both an altered and unaltered helm and chest piece. Different sources gave conflicting info as to how to get the pieces. These enemies (Banished Knights) are in a few areas, and there’s one at the entrance to–oh, spoilers for the whole game, I guess–the Cathedral of Dragon Communion in Caelid. They are a bastard hard enemy, and I normally just avoid them. I wanted their armor, though, so this time, I backstabbed them and then slashed them once, and they were dead. I did that over and over again and got most pieces to armor set. The chest armor (unaltered) is supposedly one you can only get from the Banished Knight in Sol Castle, which is really late in the game and twice as hard as the regular version of the enemy because it can disappear and teleport.

The way to do him is to get above and spell him rapidly so he can’t teleport. I didn’t manage to do it the first few times, and he killed me handily. I was told in a video this would take hours, but to persevere. I was thinking I might have to give up because there was no fucking way I was going to farm this asshole for hours. I got the chest piece the first time I killed him, though, so that was a boon. I went back to farming the other guy for the rest of the armor, and I look fly now with the altered helm and the unaltered chest piece.

It took me an hour or so to get the whole set, and I can see how people would get into farming for hours. It’s soothing in a way, and farming one guy over and over again isn’t a big deal. There was another armor set that you could get by having the enemy break a tent in a late-game area, and I found out something neat about the area as well. It’s a platforming section that for some reason didn’t faze me. Talking about it in the RKG Discord, many people took hours to get down it. I got it in ten minutes or so, which is nothing for me!