If you want to "torture" a player who is not very good at action games, the best option at this stage may be to ask him to play Eldon's Ring of Law. But if you want this "torture" to be a little milder, then remember to choose the Xbox version at least for now.
When it comes to open-world games, what comes to mind first? Is it the popular "Red Dead Redemption 2" of previous years, or the more classic "GTA" series, or the favorite "Old Man Scroll Bar (The Elder Scroll)" of our Editor of the Three Easy Life Review Room?
Obviously, different people will have different game preferences. But if you want to talk about the open-world game that most players have paid the most attention to in recent times, there is no doubt that it is Hidetaka Miyazaki's new work, commonly known as the "Old Man's Ring", "Eldon's Ring".
Date, we Three Easy Life also have to decide to try the "Eldon Ring of Law". However, for all reasons, we did not choose the PC version, but started the Xbox version of the "old man ring", and handed over to one of our colleagues to be responsible for the game experience and data recording. As for why not a colleague in the evaluation room? Don't ask, ask, is that we are too handicapped, do not want to, do not dare to "suffer."
So without further ado, let's get into the feelings and analysis of the Eldon Ring of Law (hereinafter referred to as the "Old Man Ring"), and the billions of points of spitting.
The change is really big, albeit with business considerations
First of all, is the "old man ring" difficult? This is actually a very metaphysical question. As we all know, most of Miyazaki's games will not make players too good.
But if you think about it from a business point of view, if a game has too high a threshold for operation, then it is likely to be difficult to achieve excellent market performance. This is no exception even for the "soul" system. After all, even Hidetaka Miyazaki can't help but give investors an explanation, so how to broaden the audience of the game is also a problem he needs to think about.
So we can see that as two projects that started almost at the same time, "Old Man Ring" and "Only Wolf" have actually made a lot of changes in the way the story is advanced and the operation of the battle, compared with the past "Soul" series. Among them, "Only Wolf" has added a knife operation similar to QTE, so that players can no longer only passively dodge; and in the "Old Man Ring", more classes and the introduction of open worlds mean that players have a much richer way of killing enemies than in the past.
In the Old Man Ring, you can no longer slash at the enemy head-on, but instead can "suppress fire" with ranged spells. And this point must have been played by friends know that the beginning of different career choices, almost means a completely different difficulty experience.
The strengthening of the "spawning leveling" mechanism means that even the most "handicapped" small white players have ushered in the redemption of being able to easily kill through the map this time. Of course, we do not encourage everyone to do the "Ten Mile Slope Sword God", but looking at many Japanese games this year, we will find that allowing players to "brush brush" seems to have become a common trick for many difficult game series to lower the threshold.
And the most important change of the "old man ring" this time is undoubtedly the "open world". From an art design perspective, "open world" means that the game can use a realistic vision (rather than a post) to present the player with a more natural plot guide. For example, from the beginning of the game, you can directly look at Stonewell City and know the direction you should explore, which is also an effect that could not be achieved in the previous box-style maze.
However, from the perspective of game experience, the "open world" brings some confusion, for example, the most typical is that you may accidentally break into the difficulty area that you can't cope with at your level, and then fully experience the "pleasure" of being moved by the enemy for a second. Of course, if you're good enough, skipping the level will provide a lot more experience points, which will make the character's combat power increase faster. In a way, this also makes the "old man ring" more like a classic JRPG.
The "soul" of the open world? In fact, there is no need to have old ideas
To be fair, as another of Miyazaki's ninth art masterpieces, "Old Man Ring" is always used to compare with the "soul" works in the discussion of social platforms. For example, we have seen people trying to explore the "hidden relationship" between the central idea of the game and the "Soul" series; for example, there are many players who will analyze the moves of various bosses in the game and happily take a seat with the bosses of the previous games of the "Soul" system.
The dim dungeon is a favorite of Soul Players .)
Honestly, that's not really good. On the one hand, although in terms of interface design and art style, the "old man ring" can indeed make people see the shadow of The Miyazaki-style works at a glance, it is a brand new game series after all, and it is not and should not be a sequel or derivative work of "Soul".
On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, the Old Man Ring has clearly compromised on the needs of a more diverse set of players, such as greatly enhanced ranged spell damage and more flexible weapon "combat skills" that significantly enhance the thrill of battle. Secondly, the addition of open maps makes some bosses no longer a must-play "unit drama", but can easily "skip class" and re-challenge after the level rises in the future. As for the various emotional entanglements newly added in the plot, it has triggered the debate of players in different camps choosing "wives".
Obviously, "Old Man Ring" is a brand new work that caters to the needs of current players. To some extent, it greatly reduces the probability of the player's impulse to smash the TV/computer after a few hours of hard work, and it also gives the player more of the "warmth" from Miyazaki. Of course, this change is naturally reflected in its market performance.
Want to enjoy the game a little more easily? Maybe you should choose the Xbox version
Finally, let's talk about some issues that are not very relevant to the game itself. That's why we chose to use the Xbox version instead of the PC version to experience the "old man ring".
First of all, we made this decision first, mainly to be able to experience it on a larger screen, while taking advantage of XSX's more convenient screenshot feature to simplify the amount of work required to write this content.
And after starting the game and talking to some of our friends who played the PC version, we were more and more thankful for how wise this initial decision was.
After all, compared to the early days of the PC version, we don't have to worry about the experience of a tree guarding down and the frame rate is instantly halved on XSX (although this also means that the death is faster and smoother).
At the same time, although the XSX we use is theoretically not very high for the GPU function to be put to the present, from the real-time picture data given by the TV, the experience of 4K + HDR + high frame rate VRR is quite perfect throughout the game. For the "wandering" party that likes to explore slowly, the visual immersion brought about by high image quality, high frame rate, and large screen size is undoubtedly a fairly obvious experience advantage.
【Some of the pictures in this article are from the network】