Planning for Elden Ring

 So, Elden Ring is (I presume) sitting there, downloaded to my PS4. I haven't had a chance to play it (yesterday was bonkers for reasons that aren't relevant to this blog) but I have been itching to do so.

In the past, I've always come to Soulsborne games long after their initial release. Given the difficulty and obscurity of these games, I've tended to feel zero qualms about looking up guides, planning out for specific items and weapons, and making sure I find all the proper NPCs and questlines.

For Elden Ring, I think... I think I'm going to try going in relatively blind. At this point, the game's community hasn't had that much time to go over it with a fine-tooth comb, so this is going to be sort of enforced anyway.

I will say this: I have areas of interest.

First off, in my return to Dark Souls III last year, I finally committed to a spellcaster build, and found that it was actually quite fun and effective (likewise a hybrid Strength/Faith "paladin" build). Elden Ring is a new world with totally new lore, and I think the aspect of it that interests me the most is the "cosmic" element, with Sorcery related to the stars and gravitational magic.

So, first time out, I think I'm going to try to play an intelligence (if that's still the stat) spellcaster. I'm glad to see that weapon scaling looks like it can be swapped out freely and early, which will be very useful for an intelligence build (granted DS3 had the Deep Greataxe you could find early on, which did dark damage with no scaling, and thus was a great option for basically anyone, so maybe there's a similar "one-size-fits-all" weapon that you can get early in Elden Ring.)

One thing I'm really happy to see is that the world of Elden Ring seems a lot more colorful than that of Dark Souls or even Bloodborne. The bleak grey of those games works great for their tone, but visually it can get a little... monotonous. Elden Ring seems to still have that sense of cataclysmic ruin, but with a bit more going on color-wise.

I'm really excited to dig into this. Hopefully I'll be able to do so later today.