Hello to my fellow Americans, hope you are making the most of your long weekend. I finished my BG3 playthrough as “The Dark Urge”. I think the Urge origin character is a very fun playthrough, and enhances the story a bit because now your character is intertwined with the main villians, rather than just some guy who happened to also be on the Nautaloid. I also used this playthrough to experiment with different playstyles, and I gotta say, having 2 paladins in your party is OP. Hope everyone is having a safe weekend
Haven’t actually played anything so far this weekend, but I’ve been bashing my head up against Malenia on and off for a few dozen hours over the last few weeks. I’ll get there eventually (I’m being very stubborn–no summons, no cheese strats, just me and my trusty katana), but man, it’s really testing my patience. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not great at Elden Ring, but I’m at least competent enough that I managed to get past every single boss up to this point without too much struggle (maybe spent 2, 3 hours max on the worst ones?). Kinda baffling to me that they’ve left the encounter in its current state; I saw some pretty compelling evidence that she was originally a Sekiro boss, which would explain why her flurry attack doesn’t mesh well with the Elden Ring playstyle. In the last few hours of gameplay I switched from just trying to be super aggressive and hope that I can down her fast enough to avoid her most broken attacks (got very close a handful of times but it felt like pure RNG) to mostly parrying (among other things, playing more defensively makes it easier to interrupt her flurry with Freezing Pots), and while it’s a bit of a learning curve it also feels way more consistent and fun.
Also, this isn’t playing a game, but I worked through this nice little introductory tutorial on reverse engineering GBA games today and had a lot of fun with it! I really want to contribute to one of the many game dissassembly/decompilation projects out there but it’s pretty intimidating, so I’m trying to get the basics under my belt so I don’t have to be coddled too much by the main contributors. I don’t really like writing programs from scratch that much (I just write some basic utility scripts to automate things), but I love figuring out how things work and I’m detail-oriented, so reverse engineering seems like a perfect fit.
For what it’s worth, the game assumes you’re going to use spirit summons. It’s kind of annoying because the boss AI hasn’t really been updated since DS1 so the game doesn’t really respond to them well, but it is what it is.
Unless you saw something new, IIRC there was no real proof of this. There was a lot of speculation that Malenia was based on an unused Tomoe fight, but there are no signs anywhere in Sekiro’s files of such a boss. Zullie the Witch put out a video a whlie ago pointing out that Malenia’s animations would probably be close to Genichiro’s as he uses Tomoe’s style, but they’re very different.
i would say for malenia it’s better to not rush. I think with a lot of elden ring bosses they train you to DPS race the boss and malenia’s heal mechanic I think is there to bait you into thinking it’s a DPS race. But it’s actually better to learn her moveset that is relatively limited and predictable and chip her down.
i think a lot of elden ring bosses, especially melania and the dlc bosses, are showing cracks in the dodge, dive, dip, duck, and dodge playstyle. The next from game will have perfect parry/blocking like sekiro and lies of p, there’s no other way forward.