The biggest problem with this game is calling it Elden Ring and not Dark Souls 3.5. When From puts out a game with a new title (Bloodborne, Sekiro), I am used to expecting innovation and novelty. I want a unique setting, with a strong sense of theme evident through locations and enemies, with a fresh take on combat. This game doesnt deliver in that department.

In Elden Ring lots of enemies are directly lifted from Dark Souls 3 (slime, giant crab, skeletons etc), or are just reskinned with largely the same movesets. Unfortunately this extends to the bosses as well. The world lacks a distinct identity - you get a lot of swamp areas, dusky castles, and generic catacombs. The enemies you fight dont feel like they all belong, and just feel like random fantasy hodge podge.

The open doesnt feel fun to explore. You get a few well crafted longer dungeons (Stormveil Castle), but these are short compared to previous souls levels. The side content, which largely consists of short underground dungeons, light exploration, and field bosses is a huge let down. The side dungeons feel really short and extremely repetative. Go in, kill some enemies, disable a trap or pull a level, fight a boss. The exploration in my 20 hours just led me to find some souls, a few weapons, and a couple spells. I felt really unrewarded for trying to explore the whole map. Hell, Im still rocking half my samurai starting set. The field bosses also have too small a moveset and way too high a health pool to be interesting. They feel like stripped down versions of DS3 enemies.

Lastly, the combat feels like the exact same combat you have experienced in Dark Souls for years. You have light and heavy attack, a parry, and a new guard counter. The enemies now also have a hidden posture bar you break with heavy or jumping attack that lets you do a critical. Overall I found myself just dodge rolling, and doing light attacks. You have a horse, but the horse combat feels imprecise and boring. You mostly circle around your opponents and spam light attack. The other options just didnt feel practical. On top of this, nearly all the animations for combat are directly lifted from Dark Souls 3. This just feels like Im playing the same game. Another issue is the bosses. They are extremely fast, deal huge damage, and go on uninteruptible 4-6 hit combos. They have a lot of AOE that you just have to run away from. This essentially boils down to dodging around and having to wait for openings to attack. It feels like waiting to attack while the boss has fun spamming moves. Its completely opposite of Sekiro, where you feel like you are actively damaging the boss in some way at every turn. They really took a step back with this and it sucks.

Lastly, PC performance is abysmal. Lets be honest, this game is not a looked. I have a top end rig, and my fps struggles to stay at 60. In more intense scenes and fights I get drops as low as 43. This is simply unacceptable for a game that demands precise timing. I also experienced disconnects from the network, and a false positive with EAC. Hopefully this gets fixed in the future but I doubt we will ever get official unlocked frame rate.

In summary, this game is a let down for me - a huge From and Souls fan. I beat DS3, Bloodborne, and Sekiro 3 times. I thought that with Sekiro, From finally learned to put a distinct sense of place in their games, have interesting story in addition to lore, and have more involved combat from game to game. This is simply not the case in Elden Ring. A lot of assets are directly lifted from previous games, there is next to no story to speak of (mostly just lore), the new dungeons feel stripped down compared to previous offerings, combat is largely unchanged and feels too simplistic (dodge rolling and light attack feels most optimal), and the new open world sections and side content are bland and generic.

If all you wanted was Dark Souls 3.5 I am sure you will love this. I, however, was really hoping for more.

Edit: Ive played 67 more hours of this game, and my opinion only got worse. The end game is awful, with mostly recycled enemies from previous areas, recycled bosses, and artificial difficulty spikes (regular enemies hit you for 40-50% of ur hp even if you have 40 vigour). This game is a massive let down and the more you play, the more you realise it.

Edit: Upon finishing I still stand by the fact that this game is stale and rife with issues. Its not awful, but it is a massive letdown from the heights that Sekiro reached.