What made Elden Ring good

I'm not saying this game is trying to mimic the Elden Ring formula, it doesn't appear to be, but both games are punishing however Elden Ring has a positive element to punishing gameplay that this game unfortunately lacks.

I have about 550 hours in Elden Ring, and have the DLC, a number which seems small when comparing to my time in PoE 1. Both Elden Ring and Path of Exile 2 are punishing. Path of Exile 2 appears to try to create mechanically oriented gameplay with a dodge roll, however I feel it constrains your movement too much with surrounds and tight map design that works against it.

In Elden Ring if you get hit by a boss mechanic you likely lose a flask charge, in path of exile 2 you might be just dead. Sure there are one shot mechanics in Elden Ring, like the Promised Consort Radahn fight where you cant be hugged, but even there you get 2-3 misses.

I remember fighting certain Elden Ring bosses like 60 times, and feeling overwhelmed when they finally died. But after trying to beat something in PoE2 and failing that first time...

- You might a bit of currency down from juicing
- You lost 10% experience
- Your Map modifiers are gone
- You cant make even a 2nd attempt
- If it was a citadel you cant even put a new map in, you might spend a long time searching for a new one
- Even someone in your hideout tells you that you suck ><

The game really lays it on, in kind of a bad way.

Elden Ring was good because of the feeling you got when you finally beat that difficult obstacle. That's missing here, because there's no multiple attempts. Instead you are simply relieved that you didn't fail in the first place. It doesn't feel as good.

There’s also the “getting your souls back” mechanic that’s so key to what makes souls games so fun. When you die the games not just over, you get to go right back - except now the stakes are higher. You’re more dialed in because the cost of dying again is higher than it was a moment ago until you collect your souls. That’s completely missing right now in poe2. You’re just always at the same level of focus. The cost of death is flat.

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Rivance#3976 wrote:

There’s also the “getting your souls back” mechanic that’s so key to what makes souls games so fun. When you die the games not just over, you get to go right back - except now the stakes are higher. You’re more dialed in because the cost of dying again is higher than it was a moment ago until you collect your souls. That’s completely missing right now in poe2. You’re just always at the same level of focus. The cost of death is flat.

Literally this.

If they allowed you a way to get back into the map (which you can't currently) and get your lost exp back... either through a nemesis buff to the mob that killed you (You kill them, you get exp equal to the amount lost) or some other mechanic where you don't have LOST TIME in a game... that's supposed to be fun.

I can deal with that.

Yeah, just like the souls games, instead of 10%, it should be 100%. And if you suddenly die to a mysterious off-screen one-shot, that just makes it all the more fun!

Totally agree, there are two types of difficulty, I think. Instead of difficulty in puzzle solving, we want difficulty in boss fights. Currently, the game's fighting looks exactly like POE1, but the experience is bad, mapping is bad, and the map system is neutral.

I'm fine with losing it all but exp.

this is the most annoying part. I have loads of boss matts but i'm not actually going for bosses just in case i get one shotted. I'm 95 now and I was playing with the build (which i think we should be doing in POE :D) and while I was testing different things my xp progress went from 70+ to 40%. Most od the times dying to on death effects that you can't even see with all of the skills, map mods.

Right now you could just say dying gives you negative progression and that is really bad. Dying and having some chances to get back to where you are again is really important to get a feeling of overcoming a challenge. Here your not allowed to get back to where you are and retry the challenge and are in a worse state then before the try in the first place. That would be like dying in a Soulsike and not respawning at the bonfire but a few bonfires before the last one you touched. That is just weird and not how you create a challenging gameplay loop.

Agree hard. Terrible to lose your 6 portal defense in a game which wants to be easy to get into.

Well - All I'm gonna say here... I would never play Elden Ring campaign online with 50-90ms lag on top of huge server lagspikes. It's beyound me that GGG has forgotten they are online only and are not providing the quality or fairness for those that do not sit few miles from the servers.