Tag Archives: Elden Ring

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The Queen Of Elden Ring Keeps Finding New Ways To Beat The Game

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Image: FromSoftware / MissMikkaa / Kotaku

At the start of 2023, Twitch streamer MissMikkaa made headlines for beating Elden Ring’s notorious rot queen, Malenia, Blade of Miquella, with two completely different controllers at the same time. It was a ridiculous feat of dexterity and focus, but would you believe this method of play was how she finished FromSoftware’s latest Soulslike in its entirety? Well, it turns out MissMikkaa has been embarking on what she’s dubbed the “Ultimate Challenge Run” and, now that she’s wrapped up Elden Ring, she’s doing the same thing with Dark Souls Remastered.

MissMikkaa

Challenge runs aren’t new within the FromSoft community. Kotaku has reported on plenty of wild ones, from using a drawing tablet to playing with an electronic saxophone. MissMikkaa’s, however, is probably the most intense challenge run I’ve seen in a minute as she plays two copies of the FromSoft game simultaneously with two different types of controller inputs: a DDR-compatible dance pad and a PlayStation 5 DualSense. This is the basis for her “Ultimate Challenge Run.” As MissMikkaa specifies in her livestream overlays, the goal is to “kill bosses on the same try on both game instances” using the two different controllers. Kotaku caught up with MissMikkaa to pick her brain about playing FromSoft games in such a peculiar and difficult manner.

This Takes Lots Of Focus To Pull Off

Image: FromSoftware

MissMikkaa explained the process of setting up the “Ultimate Challenge Run,” including the model of the dance pad she’s using. After getting the dance pad hooked up to her PC, she used the software remapper JoyToKey to synch the pad’s movement arrows to the WASD keys, with the other buttons performing actions like attacking, dodging, healing, and the like. The dance pad has a limited number of buttons, though, so she would sometimes have to “create specific profiles for certain bosses or scenarios” to switch between before encounters like the one with Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy. But aside from fine-tuning the dance pad’s keybindings, this “Ultimate Challenge Run” challenged MissMikkaa in many other ways.

“In the beginning, I had a lot of trouble focusing on playing two games at once. It’s not an easy task trying to position your character, attack, dodge, and heal twice as much as what you’re used to,” MissMikkaa tells Kotaku. “There were a few days where I was feeling mentally fatigued from the amount of work my brain was doing, but the further I got in the run the more used to it I became. Physically it wasn’t much different from the previous runs I had done, luckily I was already used to 6-hour dance pad sessions. Midway through this run there were definitely a few moments of smooth sailing, but towards the end, things definitely got much harder and that was also partially used as a motivator to get me through.”

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Focus was difficult to maintain during the entire run, MissMikkaa says. Playing a FromSoft game, whether that’s Bloodborne or Sekiro, can already seem like an insurmountable challenge requiring tons of concentration. These are punishing games, after all! Adding a second layer on top—that is, playing another instance of the same game but with a separate controller simultaneously—increases both the level of difficulty you’ll face when playing and the focus required. Gravity killed her, a lot, because she “lost track of [her] character’s position and instead focused more on attacking and dodging.” But navigation got better as time went on.

The Bosses Were Equally Challenging

MissMikkaa

As you might expect with a FromSoft game, the bosses were a particular sore spot for this “Ultimate Challenge Run.” MissMikkaa says she died some 198 times to Malenia and her long sword alone. It doesn’t compare to the level 1 dance pad run she did back in October, in which she died over 500 times to the goddess, but she still points to Malenia as a true test.

“Malenia was by far the hardest boss in this run,” MissMikkaa admits. “She is a true test of skill and experience in most challenge runs. It was a lot of trial and error to kill Malenia both in regards to figuring out what build I wanted to use and just trying to survive when I got two waterfowl dances at the same time. But besides the obvious answer, I had a lot of trouble with Margit due to falling out of the arena. I was also struggling a lot with Mohg, specifically with his second phase transition since I didn’t use any in-game items like Mohg’s Shackle or Purifying Crystal Tear.”

That she prevented herself from using specific equipment also added to the difficulty. MissMikkaa says she not only tried to “not use any weapons or Ashes of War that would be considered too ‘OP’,” but she also couldn’t summon anyone or use any of the spirit ashes in battle.

It was just her, the enemies in front of her, and her two controller inputs. That’s it. In addition to these self-imposed limitations, MissMikkaa explains that she relegated herself to certain kinds of character builds, starting with a strength-focused one in the beginning before switching to an arcane one for the late game. Thankfully her gear of choice—bleed weapons such as the Great Stars great hammer and high-defense armor like the Bull-Goat set—helped ease the restrictions a little bit by letting her “outpoise [a boss’] poise damage in order to hit them through their attacks.” She’s tanky. And of course, because she’s playing two copies of the same game, she’s forced to have equipment parity between her two characters.

Giving Up On This Was Never In The Cards

Image: FromSoftware

Regardless of how challenging this “Ultimate Challenge Run” has been for MissMikkaa, she promises that she “never once thought about giving up.” The difficulty is a big reason why she was so motivated to finish the challenge. She found herself adapting to the process after every livestream and, once she got to Malenia, who is already an optional endgame boss, MissMikkaa said she was “pretty confident” that she could beat the queen of rot alongside many of the game’s other brutal enemies.

“The easiest part of this run was keeping myself motivated throughout,” MissMikkaa explains. “It was a fun challenge and I enjoyed every aspect of learning and mastering it. I love finding new ways to challenge myself, especially in Elden Ring. This idea was not really seriously considered at first, but when I found myself with an extra capture card in my streaming PC I started thinking to myself, ‘What would happen if I played two games at once?’ At first, I was unsure if the challenge was even possible to begin with, and so were the people around me. But I was kind of curious to see how far I could go. I’ve got to say…I’ve never had so many people coming in and questioning my sanity as I have during this run.”

I mean, I’m questioning MissMikkaa’s sanity, too. It’s hard enough stepping into a FromSoft boss arena on just one platform. Doing that twice, at the same time, with one of your controllers being essentially a slipper bath mat, and still walking away victorious makes me both envious of her skills and stoked about her accomplishment. Talk about “getting good.”

MissMikkaa tells us she finished Elden Ring around January 8, performing an All Remembrances playthrough which requires you beat a FromSoft game by defeating all the bosses that drop consumable “boss souls.” Since then, she’s been bouncing between games on Twitch, like Forspoken and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, while embarking on another “Ultimate Challenge Run” in Dark Souls Remastered. At some point, she said she wants to play through Elden Ring with “a real guitar,” with actions like attacking and healing tied to full chords instead of just individual strings. Lord help her.

 

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Twitch Streamer Plays Elden Ring Using Only Her Brain

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Screenshot: Perrikaryal / Kotaku

When you tune into Twitch streamer Perrikaryal’s channel, you might see her playing FromSoftware’s role-playing game epic Elden Ring with fourteen, unfamiliar black sensors stuck to her scalp. It’s her—as she said during an informational stream earlier today—“just for fun” electroencephalogram (EEG) device, something researchers use to record the brain’s electrical activity, which she’s repurposed to let her play Elden Ring hands-free.

“Okay what and how,” publisher Bandai Namco responded to a clip of Perri (whose name seems to refer to the perikaryon, the cell body of a neuron) describing how she linked brain activity to key binds to help her play the game, shared by esports reporter Jake Lucky on Twitter.

Cue the disbelief (“I’ve gotten a lot of stuff online being like, […] ‘are you for real?’” Perri says in that Twitter clip) and cries of Ex Machina.

It does look incredible—in the clip, you see Perri simply say “attack” to her screen like a gamer girl Matilda and then, after a short delay, her Elden Ring character responds by casting Rock Sling at an irritated boss. But I spent my undergrad fixing eye-tracking devices to my friends’ heads while they helped me fill my lab requirements, and I know that, although brain technology can look complicated, some of it was still easy enough for me as a 19-year-old. So I reached out to my former classmate, University of Michigan cognitive neuroscience PhD candidate Cody Cao, for his thoughts.

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“EEG has really good temporal resolution,” he said, “meaning that the collected neural response to gaming stimuli is down to milliseconds. If the neural responses corresponding to available actions present vastly different neural patterns, algorithms can decode or differentiate which is which after training. Then, you play the game with EEG.”

But playing a game with your brain—something Elon Musk tried to shock the public with in 2021, when his brain-computer interface company Neuralink released a video of a monkey playing Pong using its technology—won’t give you an advantage.

“Decoding is still janky,” Cao told me, “60 percent to 70 percent accuracy is considered pretty good,” compared to 90 to 100 percent accuracy in performing an action manually (which also requires your brain!).

“It takes algorithms a lot of training to get to an acceptable performance. They likely need to experience a lot of different examples of the same thing (like Perri saying ‘attack’ before attacking) to be able to account for a vast majority of attacks,” Cao continued. “It’s like FaceID on your iPhone—it gets better with the more examples it sees.”

Perri also emphasized in her stream today that she isn’t necessarily innovating, but bringing the possibilities of EEG usage to the general public’s attention.

“It’s not that crazy, it’s really easy to do. And it’s been done since 1988,” she said about gaming with her brain. “It’s not necessarily anything new that I’m doing, I’m just not sure that it’s very well known.” But now you know, and maybe you’ll figure out how to mind control me a grilled cheese that doesn’t hurt my stomach next.

 



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Elden Ring Was The Most Completed, And Most Quit, Game Of 2022

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Image: FromSoftware / Bandai Namco

2022 was truly the year of Elden Ring, with FromSoftware’s latest game exploding into the mainstream unlike anything it had previously created. As such, a lot of people played and finished Elden Ring. In fact, according to one set of data, Elden Ring was the most completed game of 2022. But funnily enough, the same source also pegs it as the game players were most likely to abandon before reaching the end.

If you’ve read Kotaku (or any other gaming website) in 2022, you are likely already familiar with Elden Ring, the latest game from Dark Souls creators FromSoftware. And like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, Elden Ring is a tough-as-nails action-RPG with a heavy focus on mystery, world-building, and boss fights. However, this time around FromSoftware added a true open world to its popular “Soulslike” formula. The end result? One of 2022’s most acclaimed, best-selling games. The open world in particular helped sway many to try Elden Ring for the first time, letting players avoid harder areas until later and ostensibly making it easier to finish than past FromSoftware adventures. And it seems that design choice paid off.

According to data on HowLongToBeat.com, Elden Ring is 2022’s most completed game, with nearly 6,000 users of the site reporting they have played and finished the massive open-world RPG. That’s an impressive number when you look at the runner-up games on the list. Stray, that adorable futuristic cat game, was completed by nearly 4,000 users. Meanwhile, in third with 2,500 completions, was Game Freak and Nintendo’s Switch hit, Pokemon Legends: Arceus. To see such a big and difficult game top the list is both a sign that Elden Ring is very good and also a hint at the kind of audience that is primarily using HowLongToBeat.com.

Screenshot: Howlongtobeat.com / Kotaku

But perhaps more interesting is that Elden Ring is also the most “retired” game. When users “retire” from a game on Howlongtobeat.com it means they have given up on it, either permanently or temporarily. Now, even though only 261 players officially retired from Elden Ring on the site, that’s still more than double any other game in 2022. Even if the dataset is a bit small and weird (how many people are logging into this site to admit defeat?) it’s still an interesting data point.

This all makes sense to me. Elden Ring was the most talked-about game of 2022, and with that many people playing, it makes sense that a good chunk of them might give up on it. Other data seems to suggest around half the people playing Elden Ring never reached the end. So I buy that Elden Ring could be the most completed game of 2022 while also being the game more people gave up on than anything else.

Some other interesting 2022 data from the site: Turns out Elden Ring is also on the most backlogs, has the most reviews, and is the longest game of 2022. However, Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us Part 1 is the most positively reviewed game, and Diablo Immortal is the worst-reviewed.

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2022 Was the Year Of Elden Ring

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2022 was the year of Elden Ring, of Miyazaki, of Malenia. The highly anticipated FromSoftware title held the industry by its throat for months, dominating the conversation around difficulty, damage scaling, and player builds (including everyone’s favorite nepo baby, Elon Musk). It took over streaming, it renamed every animal ‘dog,’ it created legends. 

After over a decade of FromSoftware games holding court as the quintessential ‘git gud’ franchise, locking those of us without a masochist bent out of the discourse, Elden Ring’s open world opened up the gates for an entirely new player base. As such, it catapulted the work of Hidetaka Miyezaki to entirely new heights: Elden Ring is by far the best-selling FromSoftware title, it’s snatching up GOTY awards like Rowa Fruit, and it’s still generating passionate conversations 10 months after its release.

By subtly divesting from the tried and true FromSoftware formula and giving us a game unshackled by a single, punishing, linear path, Elden Ring offered up the Lands Between on a beautifully ornate (but slightly Tarnished) silver platter. And we gobbled that shit up.

Feeding The Difficulty Discourse Machine

These guys are called Abductor Virgins, and they suck.
Image: FromSoftware

The Souls game discourse has almost solely revolved around difficulty. Before Elden Ring was released, FromSoftware’s Yasuhiro Kitao told Eurogamer that the game was “made for all sorts of players,” not just “hardened veterans.” This sent the fanboys into a tailspin, but it piqued the interest of those who have never been able to enjoy the punishing gameplay of FromSoft’s oeuvre.

I wrote about Kitao’s quotes back when I was at GamesRadar, suggesting that what would make Elden Ring great would be its approachability, and that that approachability was made possible by its open world. It’s a helluva lot easier to avoid difficult areas if you can run around them on horseback, but previous Souls games forced you to choose between the difficult path and the bang-your-head-against-the-wall-because-it’s-impossible path. The promise of ample choice made me think that maybe, just maybe, Elden Ring could be a game I’d enjoy.

Image: FromSoftware / Kotaku

Conversely, Forbes published a response to my piece, one that hoped Elden Ring’s open world wouldn’t ruin the FromSoftware vibes by focusing too much on “making these games approachable rather than tough and gritty.” This was months before the release date, but the discourse machine turned and turned and turned, smoke spewing from every inch, its cogs grinding and grating with each new take chucked into its gaping maw.

Until February came, and brought with it the Lands Between, wide open for exploration like a darker, deadlier Breath of the Wild. Players quickly learned that most of them were accidentally skipping the combat tutorial, and a bit more slowly learned that the first boss (that fucking Tree Sentinel) was avoidable. Many of us who could never latch onto a FromSoft game willingly clung to Elden Ring’s teat, as we learned we could, in fact, get on a horse and fuck off away from some horrifying eldritch beast.

As we collectively made our way through Elden Ring, we were given the gift that comes only with truly open-world games: seemingly endless discoveries by ourselves, our friends, and other players on the internet.

Braving Brutal Battles For A Glimpse Of Beauty

Need a hand?
Image: FromSoftware

The beauty of Elden Ring lies in its world that teems, bubbles, and spews with both friendly and deadly life, that tantalizes and terrifies with its landscapes, that beckons and shuns you in a single breath. I find this beauty in so many moments during my time with the game, like when I accidentally descend down to the Siofra River, not too long into my playthrough.

In Limgrave, I step on a platform and am whisked down, down, down, until I emerge into an astounding space: a fully realized night sky in a variety of bruise colors, littered with pinholes of light. Crumbling classical architecture obfuscates my view of this impossible galaxy and tombstones line the path leading away from the platform, which glowed a bizarre green during my descent but now lies dormant.

I am, as the kids say, gagged, and stumble aimlessly away from the platform, paying little attention to what enemies may lie in my path for the first time since booting up Elden Ring. This is a mistake I quickly pay for, as I walk directly into a horde of Claymen. They move slowly, but they hurt, and I am severely underleveled for this area. One of the weaponless magic conjurers takes me out in seconds with his weird bubbles, sending me back to the Site of Grace right next to the platform that brought me here. When I go back to fetch my several hundred runes, the same guy takes me out again.

“Fuck that,” I mumble before stepping on the stone circle at the center of the lift. “I’ll come back later.”

And I do, just much, much later. After I’ve discovered I’m a battle mage with an affinity for gravity magic and summons, and long after I fell the Tree Sentinel with a single Rock Sling, I return to the Siofra River from a completely different direction, and lay waste to its inhabitants. Then, after I’ve collected every last item dropped by a fallen NPC and picked all the Ghost Glovewort my eyes can see, I allow myself a second to breathe. I glance up at that still-impossible night sky, and exhale. I earned this. Elden Ring, unlike other FromSoftware games, gave me ample chances to amass the tools and experience I’d need to earn a brief respite.

Elden Ring Eternal

I’m an Aries.
Screenshot: FromSoftware / Kotaku

But Elden Ring isn’t just somber and serious, it’s not just hours of grueling gameplay with brief, meditative breaks. It’s goofy as hell, like all FromSoftware games inherently are. There are stupid, dirty messages littered all over the ground, dozens upon dozens of ways to die that will make you chuckle in disbelief, and the ever-popular but always somewhat broken online play that encourages players to fuck with one another.

It’s this combination of punishing play, engaging story (thanks, George R.R. Martin), and asinine antics that make FromSoftware games, especially this one, so special. Elden Ring gives you enemies like Starscourge Radahn, who will in one moment beat the brakes off of you with gigantic meteors flung from a blood-red sky and in another send you into a fit of hysterics when you realize that he is, in fact, sitting on top of a very tiny horse. Elden Ring plays with you, offering up prophecies and moral quandaries that will have you scratching your head, but undercutting it with both accidental and purposeful absurdism.

Screenshot: FromSoftware

Elden Ring gives you a gigantic turtle wearing a pope hat. It gives you strange, unsettling storylines about grapes that are actually eyeballs. It tucks a giant bat grandma away amongst a rocky outcropping and gives her a haunting song to sing ad infinitum—or until you slash at her leathery, gray skin. It deflates your hope in humankind at one juncture just to build it back up again at the next.

It lets you explore this incredibly fucked-up world for hours upon hours, fall in love with some of its characters and revile the rest, taxing you physically and mentally with enemies plucked from the deepest depths of game design hell, and at the end, it presents you with a few options that don’t really fucking matter. It does all of this while making itself playable for us FromSoft plebeians, which therefore (brilliantly) means more of us will be talking about it than any game that came before.

When we inevitably look back at Elden Ring a decade from now, it will be difficult for us to remember exactly how much it defined the zeitgeist, just how far it permeated popular culture outside of gaming, and just how much we couldn’t stop talking about it. But now, ten months after its release, it’s hard to imagine we ever existed in a world without it.

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Game Awards Erases Bill Clinton Kid Out Of Elden Ring Speech

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Screenshot: The Game Awards / Kotaku

The 2022 Game Awards ended with a random kid sneaking up on stage and muttering nonsense about “reformed Rabbi Bill Clinton.” The 2022 Game Awards is now, understandably, trying to pretend that never happened, blurring the kid out of a picture celebrating Elden Ring developer FromSoftware’s second Game of the Year win.

“FromSoftware is the first studio to win 2 Game of the Year awards at The Game Awards,” the event’s social media account tweeted on Wednesday. The studio won in 2019 for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and again earlier this month for Elden Ring. “Congratulations FromSoftware,” it concludes. Attached was a picture of director and studio president, Hidetaka Miyazaki, holding the award alongside a member of the team who was translating his acceptance speech that night.

But it didn’t take an eagle-eyed observer to notice that the Bill Clinton prankster from that night, who had been standing behind both men, was sloppily Photoshopped out of the image. “LOSING MY MIND THAT THEY BLURRED THE KID LMFAOO,” quote-tweeted Twitch streamer GamesCage. “Hahaha you gotta use ‘content aware fill’ tool in photoshop to remove background assets next time,” added FromSoftware dataminer, Lance McDonald.

The kid who crashed the Game Awards that night was later revealed to be Matan Even, a high schooler with a penchant for clout-chasing IRL stunts, who later gained notoriety on the internet. He previously trolled an NBA fan cam with a freedom for Hong Kong t-shirt, and interrupted a BlizzCon panel with a similar message. He’s appeared twice on InfoWars to discuss Chinese censorship, but his social media presence shows no allegiance to one particular political ideology, and he has since distanced himself from InfoWars host Owen Shroyer, whom he had previously called his “favorite person” on the right-wing conspiracy network.

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Even’s stunt at The Game Awards was seemingly devoid of any larger substance or meaning, but it did momentarily steal the spotlight away from the rest of the ceremony. Host Geoff Keighley laughed it off as security escorted the minor off stage, and though he later tweeted that Even had been arrested, LAPD claim he was only escorted to a local police station before being released without any charges.

The blurred tweet would seem to indicate that Keighley’s Game Awards still feels besmirched on some level by the interloper that night. Apparently not besmirched enough to get someone with more Photoshop experience to fix the image, however. It took Kotaku’s own Zack Zwiezen less than fifteen minutes to properly edit the kid out of the image. Or as one person pointed out, The Game Awards could have simply used one of the many other stills in which the kid is out of view.

The Game Awards did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

                



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Elden Ring’s PvP Colosseums Are Fun And Easy With These Tips

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Screenshot: FromSoftware / Kotaku

Elden Ring got a free PvP expansion with update 1.08’s December 7 rollout, which opened up three colosseums in the Lands Between, all ready for your spilled blood. I returned to developer FromSoftware’s open world after a long vacation (I hadn’t touched it since the spring, I needed to experience other games with in-universe indoor plumbing) to test it out, and was surprised by how much fun I had, even as decidedly not a “PvP person.”

Each colosseum, all empty and fairly nondescript battlegrounds in Limgrave, Leyndell, and Caelid, houses a different type of conflict. Leyndell’s Royal Colosseum contains a 1v1 “Duel Mode” with no respawn, the Limgrave Colosseum offers “United Combat” 2v2 with respawn or “Combat Ordeal” free-for-all with respawn, and the Caelid Colosseum has the previously mentioned modes with the added ability to summon Spirit Ashes.

Read More: Elden Ring’s Colosseum Update Arrives With Three New PvP Modes

And along with colosseums, the update brought a few necessary balance changes (and five new-but-Eurocentric hairstyles), which I think help level the playing field, despite a few immediate deaths on my end. In any case, I’ll gather my scattered bones and talk you through what you need to know about Elden Ring’s PvP refresh.

How do I access Elden Ring’s PvP colosseums?

Tricky FromSoftware wasn’t going to let you have your Roman fun that easily—you have to break down the gristle before you eat. But unlocking all three colosseums isn’t difficult, as long as you know where to go.

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  • Limgrave Colosseum: from the Warmaster’s Shack site of grace, head north toward the circular building (aka the colosseum) by the shore. Open the main door and touch the stake of Marika inside to enter a match.
  • Leyndell Colosseum: start at the Leyndell, Capital of Ash site of grace, and head southwest until you’re behind the dead dragon. Jump onto the ruins, head up the ladder, continue straight, then west along the mountain path until you reach the large doors. Open them and touch Marika’s effigy.
  • Caelid Colosseum: You’ll need to start at the slightly arcane Deep Siofra Well site of grace. Ride your horse west around the mountain pass, past the big guys trying to kill you with giant arrows, and behind the large, disappointed-seeming jar. Open the door there, touch the effigy.

After you access all three colosseums for the first time, they’ll be available for fast travel. Go to the Roundtable Hold—a smaller Marika statue to the right of the fireplace in the main room will let you choose your combat mode and venue.

What balance changes should I expect?

FromSoftware altered some builds’ power, so players’ fixation on thrust weapons has definitely abated. According to update notes, these are the following colosseum balance changes:

  • Thrust weapons have reduced counterattack damage
  • Some weapon types elicit reduced guard efficiency for attacks performed with a raised shield
  • Straight Swords, Thrusting Swords, Heavy Thrusting Swords, Curved Swords, Axes, Spears, Twinblade Swords, Katanas all have reduced poise damage
  • Bestial Sling also has reduced poise damage (but people still love to spam it!)
  • Carian Slicer is less powerful

What’s the best PvP build right now?

There doesn’t seem to be one build above the rest at the moment. People are vibing, letting their Spirit Ashes take care of each other in “Pokémon” battles and one-shotting you with their black magic.

Because of prevailing one-shots, I would recommend you opt for sweeping, ultra powerful attacks that can hold their own like Dragonfire, Collapsing Stars, and Giantsflame Take Thee, or weapons like Twinblades or a Curved Sword.

And if I really had to choose the best build… not pure strength, I’ll tell you that much. My Great Hammer-wielding, level 134 character died instantly trying to get close to some spellcasters, and I’ve noticed that fast, blood-letting, and dexterity-scaling weapons are most popular. Sluggish strength weapons struggle against them, though I was able to eliminate opponents in three hits when they finally let me land some.

But, I don’t know, I still had fun while losing. It’s certainly amusing to try shit out, especially in password-protected combat rooms where you can coordinate with your friends. I made my friend engage in torch-only warfare, for example, and learned that the Torchpole is much more punishing than the Torch. I also found that the rot-inducing Scorpion’s Stinger is a funny thing to whip out when you’ve agreed to a bare knuckle fistfight. Now you learned it, too.

I wouldn’t worry about what attacks should be considered “toxic,” or OP, or recommended builds, or whatever—this is a really relaxed update, and more than anything else, I think you should just try to enjoy yourself.

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Elden Ring Wins Ultimate Game of the Year Award at Golden Joysticks

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@QualityGeezer I don’t enjoy FromSoft games because they’re difficult, exactly. If I just wanted difficulty I’d just whack up the difficulty on everything (I actually play on normal or even easy on most other games)

I think it helps that there’s no difficulty levels.

And when I beat a boss, if it’s on my own (with Spirit ashes or NPC summons admittedly) there’s a sense of accomplishment. If I do it with a mate or two, and we’re communicating different strategies, it’s immensely satisfying. There’s almost always a sense of overcoming something.

Plus FromSoft games are 99% gameplay. I love that games are getting more cinematic and story driven, but there’s nothing more frustrating than getting in the rhythm and flow of combat before a walking section, then a fairly mediocre puzzle and a long cutscene.

I absolutely understand why the difficulty of the games puts a lot of people off. I had so many moments in ER where I was ready to quit, whether it was Margit or Caelid in general. Or Malenia. The difficulty spikes in this game could get disgusting at times. Which is why I can also understand ER winning best Multiplayer :’)

Sorry, turned into a bit of a ramble



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The Scariest Things That Happened In Gaming In 2022

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Image: Warner Bros. / Devolver Digital / Bandai Namco / Innersloth / Kotaku / Mia Stendal / Bibadash (Shutterstock)

On an average day, my friends might ask me how my job is going. I’ll smile, tell them “It’s going great,” and then launch into a story about one of the most fucked up things they’ve ever heard of. And now I get to give the recap to you.

Spooky season is upon us, but the chronically online gamers at Kotaku know that terrifying shit is happening in our space all the time. It’s not just the games that are occasionally horrifying—it’s also how the industry grinds humans into dust, how giant corporations are increasingly looking to put the screws to the average consumer, and how abuse of power comes as no surprise.

Some of the spookiest gaming news stories this year are sad. Some of them are funny. Others will make you want to pull your hair out over the general state of the world. But hey, me too! Let’s be scared and [some other unidentifiable emotion] together!

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Tencent And Sony Acquire 30% Of Elden Ring Maker FromSoftware

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Image: FromSoftware

Elden Ring wasn’t just a hit with fans of FromSoftware’s notoriously difficult action-RPGs. Today Tencent Holdings and Sony announced they’ve acquired 30% of the Souls-series developer’s shares, split in favor of Tencent. FromSoftware is expected to gain $260 million from the arrangement.

Today’s announcement from FromSoft’s parent company Kadokawa revealed that Sony and Tencent are acquiring 14.09% and 16.25% of FromSoft, respectively. The statement indicates that Kadokawa wants FromSoftware to be able to expand its development efforts; Kadokawa sees the “enhancement of capabilities for the creation, development and deployment of [FromSoft] game IP as one of the [Kadokawa] Group’s highest priorities.”

One of the aims is to give FromSoft the resources needed to grow Elden Ring into a franchise that extends beyond just video games.

Elden Ring was a long time coming, built on a foundation first laid down in FromSoftware’s pioneering 2009 PS3 game Demon’s Souls. A set of three spiritual sequels in the form of the Dark Souls trilogy, as well as two other similar titles (Bloodborne and Sekiro), certainly broadened the audience for these difficult and cryptic action-RPGs. But none have reached critical mass quite like Elden Ring, which outsold household names like Call of Duty and led to viral streaming sensations and hype that just won’t die.

Tencent, a Shanghai-based conglomerate, has continued its trend of investments and acquisitions. It owns 5% of Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry publisher Ubisoft, completed an acquisition of League of Legends’ developer Riot Games, owns 40% of Epic Games, and has stakes in many, many, many, many other game companies. As Polygon notes, it also owns 5% of Activision Blizzard, which will transfer over to Microsoft should that megacorp’s notable attempt to acquire the Call of Duty publisher clear regulatory screening.

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Great news for PC gamers out there looking to save money and add more games to your backlog which you’ll eventually get to. Humble Bundle has kicked off its Summer Sale in which you can save up to 90% on games.

Sony has also been on a spending spree too, though it looks a bit more modest compared to Tencent. Perhaps most notably, Sony acquired the once Microsoft-affiliated Bungie for $3.6 billion in January. The house of PlayStation also made a move to acquire Bluepoint, the studio which made a name for itself with critically acclaimed remakes. Sony also invested a billion dollars in Epic Games back in April.

Anyway, maybe FromSoft can use the new money to add an easy mode so I can finally finish the damn things.

 

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Technology

You Gotta See Elden Ring’s First Real Creepypasta

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Screenshot: FromSoftware / Kotaku

With the advent of data mining and instant information, getting video game campfire stories has become a rarity. It’s hard to spread a rumor that can immediately be fact-checked, and even legitimate mysteries tend to be deconstructed pretty quickly. But the beauty of modding is that it doesn’t have to be real. You can make it real.

That’s what I love so much about king bore haha’s quick but effective new Elden Ring film, which shows an area of the game you’ve likely never seen before. “Saint’s Descent” sees the player going down a seemingly endless, pitch-black staircase where there is eventually a pit.

The player goes down the pit, of course, because by now we’ve learned that you miss critical content in Elden Ring if you don’t throw yourself into every abyss. I won’t spoil the rest.

Like I said, it’s a simple story that is nonetheless good at what it sets out to do, partially because it isn’t some wild thing. It seems believable, and some people watching legitimately thought it was real before being informed it actually isn’t.

Read More: Elden Ring Fan’s Incredible DLC Concept Project Almost Looks Real

King bore haha has actually made an entire playlist of “spooky mod” videos and mods like this one, but for older Dark Souls games, if you’d like to take a look. What gets me is some of the exceedingly normal situations that take a sudden turn, like getting trapped in a claustrophobic elevator. Something like that could actually happen to someone, maybe by sheer bad glitch luck, but no one would believe you, would they? The alternative can be equally scary: a fall that just never ends. It’s so good!

The fiction aspect here is critical to the enjoyment, in a way. When news broke of the Elden Ring mystery wall that took 50 hits to knock down, it tore the internet up. Who would ever find that anomaly naturally? Why would they do something like that? Miyazaki, you devil!

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Humble Bundle’s Summer Sale

Game and Save
Great news for PC gamers out there looking to save money and add more games to your backlog which you’ll eventually get to. Humble Bundle has kicked off its Summer Sale in which you can save up to 90% on games.

Out came the investigators, to take a closer look. That’s when we found out it was actually just a glitch, it never took 50 hits, and there wasn’t actually anything particularly interesting “hiding” behind the wall. The moment was cool while it lasted, but anyone coming in now can’t recreate the feeling of not knowing what the hell was happening when it was an enigma. Now we just tell each other it’s a glitched wall.

Sure, I can tell you that this Elden Ring video isn’t real, but that’s not the point, is it? For a moment, you get sucked into a different reality where evoking a feeling is all that matters. It reminds me a lot of the modern advent of Super Mario 64 scary stories. Anyone with critical thinking skills would be able to suss out that the elaborate stories never actually happened, or we would have heard about it well before now. We pull out the popcorn all the same.

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