Just my own opinions to respond to a couple of your points:
- Visuals: Disappointing. Looked like a cheap free-to-play MMO. Cheap-looking textures, stock-looking characters
What settings did you have the game on? This has never been my experience with a Souls game - and definitely not Elden Ring.
- bad rigging (e.g. characters holding things in unnatural poses), etc.
Yeah, agree. Pretty typical for every game though.
- Controls: Unpleasant. Controls felt very sluggish. If this is supposed to make the game more challenging or something, this isn't a very fun mechanic.
The Souls series is definitely a little slower in that sense than most other games. If you want a faster weapon, use a faster weapon. There are a ton available, but there are tradeoffs! The series puts a focus on calculated, well-timed strikes; the most successful strategy is to learn your opponents' attack patterns and take advantage of the right moment to strike. Once you hit the attack button you're locked in to the attack, so you absolutely have to know the boss isn't winding up for another attack.
- Software quality: Terrible. Performance is not good, tons of bugs, graphics issues, wouldn't recognize my controller when I had multiple input devices plugged in.
Keep in mind these games are designed for and primarily sold on consoles - PC is the minority.
- Dialogue: What little I saw was super corny. Used as a crutch for poor level design. E.g. a ghost telling you something to the effect of "you need to jump into this hole to continue the game".
I won't comment on the "corny" part other than saying you kind of just have to lean into it... Enjoy it for the fantasy it is.
"you need to jump into this hole to continue the game" - that's the first 15 minutes of the game, teaching you that you'll need to pay attention to that kind of stuff later. There is very little handholding past the intro.
- Multiplayer felt like a cheap gimmick. I wanted to turn it off.
I'm curious about this, can you elaborate?
- Am I missing something? This is my first souls game;
In my opinion yes. But the genre is just not for everyone. It's a really different type of game and some people just won't like the gameplay.
- is feeling cheap and clunky part of the aesthetic?
Yes, but as someone who enjoys the genre, I wouldn't use the word "clunky". It intentionally pushes the player away from the modern norm where a game can be blown through by mashing the attack button.
1440p "high" on 3060 Ti. My visual objections weren't just the low-quality lighting, textures, framerate cap, etc. (objectively kind of bad) but also the visual design of the game (which I thought was kind of tacky/garish and reminiscent of 2010-era low-budget multiplayer games).
> Pretty typical for every game though.
I saw some stuff that looked really out-of-place in an AAA game.
> If you want a faster weapon, use a faster weapon.
Yeah, I think this was me confusing an intentional design decision with poor UI. Still, I subjectively definitely prefer more responsive games.
> can you elaborate
The multiplayer didn't feel like an integral part of the game. They had to artificially incentivize you to use it in a ham-fisted way ("you get HP if people upvote the ugly textures you leave littered all over the place"), and the random ghosts popping up all over the place (I think part of multiplayer?) seemed useless and distracting.
> It intentionally pushes the player away from the modern norm where a game can be blown through by mashing the attack button.
I think this is an uncharitable comparison for non-souls games. I can think of several games I've played recently which absolutely ace many of the things that bothered me about ER and are by no means button-mashers. For example, Ori 2 (beautiful graphics and design, ultra-smooth rendering, extremely snappy response time, etc. - excellent implementation of a singleplayer timing-heavy game) and HL Alyx (incredibly good level design, solid graphics, very smooth, intense focus on control experience)
I’ve watched around an hour or so of gameplay and reviews, mostly with footage from consoles (I think almost entirely PS5) and while I noticed some frame rate inconsistency and some image quality weirdness on like shadows and vegetation, mostly I’ve found the game to be extremely impressive visually. Sometimes jawdroppingly so.
To compare it to low budget free to play games from 10 years ago honestly makes me wonder if your setup is majorly borked somehow. I’d love to see footage straight from your system to know if you’re seeing something very different or if our ideas of what looks good are truly so fundamentally different. Maybe the PC version is uniquely terrible or something?
> The multiplayer didn't feel like an integral part of the game.
That's because it's not. These are not "multiplayer games" like CoD or Smash. These are single player games with some online/multiplayer elements.
> the random ghosts popping up all over the place (I think part of multiplayer?) seemed useless and distracting
Those pop up when you touch "bloodstains," i.e. seeing what other players did that caused them to die. Farthest thing from useless, actually -- they've saved my ass many times.
- Visuals: Disappointing. Looked like a cheap free-to-play MMO. Cheap-looking textures, stock-looking characters
What settings did you have the game on? This has never been my experience with a Souls game - and definitely not Elden Ring.
- bad rigging (e.g. characters holding things in unnatural poses), etc.
Yeah, agree. Pretty typical for every game though.
- Controls: Unpleasant. Controls felt very sluggish. If this is supposed to make the game more challenging or something, this isn't a very fun mechanic.
The Souls series is definitely a little slower in that sense than most other games. If you want a faster weapon, use a faster weapon. There are a ton available, but there are tradeoffs! The series puts a focus on calculated, well-timed strikes; the most successful strategy is to learn your opponents' attack patterns and take advantage of the right moment to strike. Once you hit the attack button you're locked in to the attack, so you absolutely have to know the boss isn't winding up for another attack.
- Software quality: Terrible. Performance is not good, tons of bugs, graphics issues, wouldn't recognize my controller when I had multiple input devices plugged in.
Keep in mind these games are designed for and primarily sold on consoles - PC is the minority.
- Dialogue: What little I saw was super corny. Used as a crutch for poor level design. E.g. a ghost telling you something to the effect of "you need to jump into this hole to continue the game".
I won't comment on the "corny" part other than saying you kind of just have to lean into it... Enjoy it for the fantasy it is.
"you need to jump into this hole to continue the game" - that's the first 15 minutes of the game, teaching you that you'll need to pay attention to that kind of stuff later. There is very little handholding past the intro.
- Multiplayer felt like a cheap gimmick. I wanted to turn it off.
I'm curious about this, can you elaborate?
- Am I missing something? This is my first souls game;
In my opinion yes. But the genre is just not for everyone. It's a really different type of game and some people just won't like the gameplay.
- is feeling cheap and clunky part of the aesthetic?
Yes, but as someone who enjoys the genre, I wouldn't use the word "clunky". It intentionally pushes the player away from the modern norm where a game can be blown through by mashing the attack button.