I think one of the interesting things about Elden Ring, compared to many other games, is that it’s much more about the enemies than it is about you, and that makes it substantially more difficult for it to become stale. [A similar game in that regard is Undertale, where (on a nice playthru) your character basically doesn’t get any better, you just get better at not getting hurt by the enemies / going thru the conversational sequence necessary to befriend them.]
Like, consider this YouTube video, where a game exploiter sets up a super powerful combo (a very expensive spell to deal lots of continuous damage, plus a temporary buff that makes spells do more damage, plus a temporary buff that makes spells free!) and… gets one-hit-killed by the first dragon that he tries it on. In other games, this might be the point at which every battle from then on out becomes a repetitive exercise in performing the combo. [Despite the combo’s significant limitations, it’s nevertheless situationally useful and I used it a bunch on my mage.]
There are other solutions to keep things fresh; for example, in Hades, you are mostly choosing powerups from a random set of options, and so can’t execute the same combo every run, but during a run there will typically be a point where you lock in your combo and then it’s all execution from then on out. [Hades has the same dynamic of binomially avoiding trouble.]
If, instead, you’re playing something downstream of Dungeons and Dragons or Warhammer or so on, you often have the experience of being locked in to a playstyle; you wanted to be an archer? Great, here’s fifty hours of being an archer. Want a different playstyle? Well… I guess you could start over.
I think one of the interesting things about Elden Ring, compared to many other games, is that it’s much more about the enemies than it is about you, and that makes it substantially more difficult for it to become stale. [A similar game in that regard is Undertale, where (on a nice playthru) your character basically doesn’t get any better, you just get better at not getting hurt by the enemies / going thru the conversational sequence necessary to befriend them.]
Like, consider this YouTube video, where a game exploiter sets up a super powerful combo (a very expensive spell to deal lots of continuous damage, plus a temporary buff that makes spells do more damage, plus a temporary buff that makes spells free!) and… gets one-hit-killed by the first dragon that he tries it on. In other games, this might be the point at which every battle from then on out becomes a repetitive exercise in performing the combo. [Despite the combo’s significant limitations, it’s nevertheless situationally useful and I used it a bunch on my mage.]
There are other solutions to keep things fresh; for example, in Hades, you are mostly choosing powerups from a random set of options, and so can’t execute the same combo every run, but during a run there will typically be a point where you lock in your combo and then it’s all execution from then on out. [Hades has the same dynamic of binomially avoiding trouble.]
If, instead, you’re playing something downstream of Dungeons and Dragons or Warhammer or so on, you often have the experience of being locked in to a playstyle; you wanted to be an archer? Great, here’s fifty hours of being an archer. Want a different playstyle? Well… I guess you could start over.