Talk to me about elden ring

Elden Ring has classes but the skills and weapons you can use are based on the stats you level up, each class is more or less a starting canvas that favors certain playstyles.

Combat is infinitely better than elder scrolls.

Weapons are super important and you level them up +1 through +25 and they get stronger over time. You can customize them with a special ability and you can also customize them to where they scale better with certain stats. Each weapon class has very different move sets compared to each other, and some do strike, thrust, or slash damage. You can dual wield, 2 hand, or sword and shield. The combat is way more advanced than elder scrolls.

Talismans give your character special stat boosts such as charge attacks do more damage so you will want to change those based on your playstyle or enemies you're fighting.

Armor does not play a massive role, but generally heavier armor sets offer more physical mitigation, and the armor sets also have different resistances to different stats.

Then you have spells. There are a ton of spells and you need a certain combination of stats to be able to use them.

All things combined, there are a ton of different ways you can customize your character and they all multiply together to give tons of cool builds.

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As far as you getting it and liking it, be prepared to watch guides on youtube to get the most out of the game

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This is the primary reason I've stayed away from the game. That, combined with the "bang your head against different brick walls until you memorize the pattern of bricks" style of gameplay, and it just doesn't sound like my cup of tea.

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This is the primary reason I've stayed away from the game. That, combined with the "bang your head against different brick walls until you memorize of pattern of bricks" style of gameplay, and it just doesn't sound like my cup of tea.

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What does make Elden Ring nice compared to those is that you're not a railroad. If you encounter something that is too hard for you, then just go explore in a different direction. There are so many options for you to do at all times.

There are a ton of dungeons and secret bosses that are pretty easy to clear to cut your teeth on before trying that hard boss again.

Sounds like you're talking about how intuitive the gameplay feels, and I'll be blunt.

Dark Souls (all of em) and Elden Ring have some of the most non-intuitive combat I've seen in an action oriented game period.

The rolls have hilarious amount of i-frames (invincibility frames) on them that you use to avoid shite.

So when someone tells you to unironically roll into the sword being swung at you, they're not joking. They're actually serious

What direction you roll rarely matters, because you're invuln anyway until roughly the end of the roll. Explosions will do nothing to you while you're rolling, a dragon will swipe through you and do nothing, so on so forth.

The janky, clunky combat has always been one of my criticisms of the series despite its positive points.

ETA: The rolling is just one aspect of the non-intuitive stuff by the way, but it is the most egregious on the list.
What you can and can't parry is extremely inconsistent. It's a common issue to think you can parry something only for it not to work, and the inverse is also true. I've parried some shite that definitely made 0 sense.
There are other mechanics like this, which all contribute to a steep learning curve because it doesn't make any sense.

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Saying that roll direction doesn't matter is a comment that a super inexperienced player who didn't try to learn the game would make.

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This is just patently false in the overwhelming majority of situations
There are a few, specific situations where it does matter because the attack is active beyond the duration of the roll. Those are not particularly common.
If you're trying to be super duper optimal with spacing, then you value roll direction more. For someone who is new and just trying to survive, they don't really give a shite about that yet. Roll left, roll right, either way you're invuln.

The few times it does matter is because you either:
A) need to retreat (so roll backwards) to create space
B) need to roll behind the attacker to make some oncoming bullshite whiff completely.
Left vs right rarely matters because in the times they do, you're almost always better off just rolling through to behind the target anyway.

ETA: I will clarify that this is mainly because the game just doesn't punish lazy rolling most of the time. If it did, what I said would go out the window.

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Let’s slow the game down to an absurd level. Let’s say one frame per second, but silky smooth. You’re facing a boss that you’ve never faced before. Based solely on seeing the boss’ movements, would you be able to consistently choose correctly how to react, whether dodging, blocking, parrying, etc?

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Yes, but a lot of that is due to game sense in general from playing RPGs and the like.

That and the part where dodging is the catch all solution in almost all situations due to being invincible during it. The one thing that can frick you up despite that is timing variance on moves.
If you have a good shield, you can just be lazy and guard it assuming no crazy arse chip damage or something like that in the case of a DS game.

tl;dr it's because you can answer almost everything with 1 or 2 options and be correct, even if you're guessing. Exceptions can apply with really strong bosses on very specific moves and stuff.

This! Hated Dark Souls and Elden ring is open-world Dark Souls. Go get a cheap older DS first see if you like it.

Ok so I got th game. Rolling with mage. How do I get runes to level? What do I need to sell? I played on mouse and keyboard but it's was extremely frustrating so swapped to PS5 controller and man it's a totally new game.

So basically what happens is you play it for 30 minutes and the clock moves 3 hours.

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Hated Dark Souls

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I don’t understand how this is possible for anyone who enjoys video games. But yes it plays a lot like DS3.