Elden Ring Network Test Preview Has Souls YouTube Excited
Elden Ring‘s closed network test begins tomorrow, but some journalists and influencers have had access to the game for about a week. This early access has produced several videos, two of which have made me drool over the game’s release date in January for completely different reasons.
First up, it dumpster diving Souls aficionado Pineapple iron put together a look at Elden Rings new features, tweaks and overall design. Notable features include the game’s Ash of War, which you can use to modify your weapons, and the powerful weapon art that accompanies them. Dark Souls III introduced weapon art to the series, which increases the weapon’s movement set by giving each one a special ability that ranges from mundane to incredibly wild. A shield pairing is, for example, a weapon art in Dark Souls III, but the same thing is to summon a wave of ice from your nightmare sled or throw a handful of daggers. Elden Ring seems to be expanding this system greatly by letting you switch these arts out to suit your particular build.
He also highlights the game’s new and recurring combat mechanics. Most notable is the new guard-counter system, which allows you to deliver a powerful attack after blocking an enemy’s turn. These counters do a host of shear damage that can shock an enemy and leave them open to a critical strike. He suggests that this new mechanic will give more shield-heavy, defensive players a more active role in the game’s battle.
Both Iron Pineapple and eminent Souls loremaster VaatiVidya is thrilled with the game’s mounted match, which seems more concrete than I expected. You have both light and heavy attacks on each side of your horse, where the heavy attacks are a little more involved and flashy than their light counterparts. In addition, in a brilliant move from FromSoft’s side, your horse can double jump. All horses, including real ones, should be allowed to double jump, and anyone who says otherwise is a coward.
VaatiVidya has released a live review of the network test that takes the viewer from the game’s tutorial all the way to its first major boss battle, sprinkling his usual pieces of NPC dialogue and lore fragments along the way. I found it a phenomenal showcase for how Elden Ring‘s open world designs actually come together.
At one point, he switches from mounted combat to dungeon diving in seconds after noticing a door tucked into the bottom of a cliff. Inside, there are a handful of enemies and traps followed by a small boss. For those of you who are familiar with the series, the smaller dungeon bosses seem to share scale with Deacons of the depths from Dark Souls II, or a Ax miniboss. They seem deadly, but not a 15-minute commitment.
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However, the first real boss of the network test seems like a walking nightmare. Both Soulsborne veterans admitted that they fought significantly against this boss, with VaatiVidya choosing to use a powerful spell construction to alleviate the difficulty of the battle.
These short look at Elden Ring has been deeply promising and reinforces FromSoftware’s reputation for strong iteration. I’m still curious to see if Elden Ring can embody revolutionary ingenuity of its previous work, but I am becoming increasingly hopeful that the game will live up to the history of the studio.
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