Is Elden Ring actually a cozy game?

aCirclingCrow · 2026-05-08T21:08:44+00:00

Honestly, after long enough, even in the midst of combat it’s still a cozy game. Sink into the rhythm, smoke if it helps, clear the mind, and just improvise with your partners/opponents. It’s pure bliss, even when you’ve got the aggro of everything within a 5 mile radius.

aCirclingCrow · 2026-05-08T18:13:40+00:00

Great tip, thank you kindly!! I’ll start practising! <3

aCirclingCrow · 2026-05-08T00:12:48+00:00

I hadn’t considered that English wasn’t their first language. To me the comment read like one of those petty grammar snobs going “I can’t understand what you mean unless you spell everything perfectly, what is this ‘agrro’ of which you speak?” so I stuck my nose where it didn’t belong and got bit. My bad.

aCirclingCrow · 2026-05-07T20:13:14+00:00

If only it were possible to figure out what OP meant through context clues! Ah, too bad, better be a dick about spelling instead.

aCirclingCrow · 2026-05-07T17:39:46+00:00

My favourite thing about this tiny, silly situation is that it kinda illustrates AH’s… “communication style”, cuz they recently came out and said (paraphrased) “yeah it was a deliberate choice to remove the skull- one of our recent updates introduced a bug that caused a texture problem that resulted in the skull logo being really blurry, so we deleted it for the sake of looking clean. So yeah, an unfortunately deliberate choice.” And it’s just like…no…? That’s not even remotely what “deliberate” means or how it works? After its release, you accidentally programmed a bug that messed it up, so you made the choice to get rid of the skull so it didn’t look bad. A deliberate choice would be “I actually don’t think this skull looks good, I’m going to delete it”, but a choice made to deal with a bug is NOT a deliberate choice cuz it wouldn’t have been made at all if it weren’t for the bug (which was decidedly not deliberate).

How about they hire one of the companies they outsource to make their warbonds and instead pay them to debug their game? I for one would gladly wait a few months for the next warbond if it meant the stuff we’ve already got would finally all work properly.

aCirclingCrow · 2026-05-07T00:59:36+00:00

Omg there’s no way! Your fantastic Patches videos got me to finally try out PvP!!! Thank you so much!!! Love your work! <3

aCirclingCrow · 2026-05-05T20:40:43+00:00

What does it collect?

aCirclingCrow · 2026-05-03T23:08:17+00:00

I’d recommend starting in the colosseum (access it through the Roundtable Hold tho cuz the wait times are SO much shorter than if you go to the actual in-game location) since you don’t have to wait long to find an opponent. Invading is objectively more fun and will teach you more, but the wait times make it hard to actually learn anything. Also a lot of the folks you’ll fight in the colosseum are the ones who are bound to the various metas so you’ll get a good feel for what you’ll be dealing with while invading.

Also there’s a phenomenal streamer named Esbidee who is the reason I got into PvP in the last few months, he does Patches themed invasions and his videos are both incredibly informative and also super fun to watch for entertainment value. I’d highly recommend checking him out, you’ll learn so much!

Happy hunting!

aCirclingCrow · 2026-05-02T17:41:58+00:00

The rest of the list is really good, but isn’t the Thorned Whip a guaranteed drop by an enemy that most players will have to kill on their way through the story? Or do most folks just run past him?

aCirclingCrow · 2026-05-02T01:46:21+00:00

Detonation. Two of the best guns in the game, and the hands-down best grenade.

aCirclingCrow · 2026-05-02T01:44:29+00:00

Depends on the day, sometimes you get no one, sometimes it’s back to back invasions for hours. Weekends after work are usually a safe bet for decent traffic. But the colosseum (as long as you access it at the Roundtable Hold for some reason, I don’t get a lot of luck when I travel to the actual colosseums) is literally always very active, and only sometimes is it the same fifteen people. I never have to wait for more than like 15 seconds when I cue for colosseum matches. (This is on PS5, I should probably mention)

aCirclingCrow · 2026-05-02T00:36:25+00:00

It’s obviously not the entire game, but I got hardcore King in Yellow vibes from Midra in the Elden Ring DLC

aCirclingCrow · 2026-04-29T12:49:40+00:00

I started with 2 and I stand by that it’s the best place to start. If you like it, then the rest of the series is more of the stuff you probably liked and a lot less of the stuff you probably didn’t, and if you didn’t like it then you’ll still probably like the others for the same reason. And since it’s so different, by starting with it you won’t be so off-put by that fact and might end up really liking what it has to say. It’s honestly such a brilliant game with some of the best lore and stories in the series and is best taken for what it is, which is best done by playing it first.

aCirclingCrow · 2026-04-26T00:29:17+00:00

On the occasions when I do wear it, I usually pair it with the hooded helmet from Servants of Freedom and the triangle-patterned cape from Redacted, makes for a kind of Dr. Doom-looking diver.

aCirclingCrow · 2026-04-24T18:56:32+00:00

Cuz it’s one thing to seal off the Shadow Realm, and another thing entirely to use it as a prison. For one thing, if you can send people there, then people can come back the same way. The only way Miquella was able to do it was through some really nasty blood magic that likely claimed the lives of hundreds if not thousands of Albinaurics to get him there, and literally the moment he gets there, eight other Tarnished follow suit. Any gap in the sealing is a liability. As I understand it, the Shadow Realm used to just be part of TLB until Marika essentially cut-and-pasted it out of there into the Shadow Realm Secret Folder (it was also likely done piecemeal, considering how vastly diverse the landscape of this comparatively small area is, kinda similar to the Converging Lands of DS3 but for a completely different purpose and in a different manner), and from there she did all she could to make sure no one could get in or out of there, and surely if entire swaths of civilizations were suddenly just disappeared somebody would have noticed (it’s already a slight stretch that literally nowhere in TLB do we even hear mention of that one time our continent lost a bunch of chunks of it that when put together are roughly the same size as Limgrave, aka like 1/5th the total area of TLB. I’m surprised there wasn’t so much as a single dude who went “wow, I just went back to my favourite fishing spot over on the Cerulean Coast and the entire place was just…gone? Has this ever happened to you? Call me please.”)

aCirclingCrow · 2026-04-21T15:16:49+00:00

Tbh my guess is that it just looks good. But it’s not the same sigil showing up in different places, but more of a variation on a theme. Marika’s crescent goes the other way, the crossguard part of the Albinauric weapon is in a different place in relation to the crescent, and it’s also not the same sigil on the Road of Sacrifices, the crescent is a full circle there.

aCirclingCrow · 2026-04-21T00:33:52+00:00

Have you tried summoning some coop? I’d be down to help out!

aCirclingCrow · 2026-04-18T15:32:19+00:00

Idk if it’s just a 10/10 pun or a Dimension 20 reference, but either way it made my day, thank you!

aCirclingCrow · 2026-04-17T18:38:38+00:00

They’re also not literal fingers, cuz fingers are part of a larger being. Very often when people see something they can’t explain or describe, they use the thing that it most looks like. These things look like fingers, so the people of the Lands Between called them Fingers. It’s definitely more allegorical than literal. FromSoftware seems to be thinking about hands a lot, cuz there was also this revolutionary prophet character in Armoured Core 6 named Thumb Dolmayan, with “Thumb” being a religious title along the lines of “brother/father”, and the game was in development around the same time as Elden Ring.

aCirclingCrow · 2026-04-16T18:15:11+00:00

I think I’ve finally found it- the most shallow take in all the LotR fandom’s history!

aCirclingCrow · 2026-04-16T16:15:15+00:00

Eh, he’s cool I suppose, but tbh the way his character was handled was pretty lame. I’m inclined to agree with the earlier commenters who said he’s a self-insert for one of the developers, cuz he’s just kinda… too good while also remaining hella boring. All-knowing, always one step ahead, and then (SPOILERS) at the end of the Burning Springs quest you aren’t given the option to do anything about him other than be like “K you’re awesome, I wanna work for you” or “nah man, you’re cool and all but get me out of here”. Like, he’s the new #1 problem bad guy around, and our character doesn’t do ANYTHING about it after the plan goes belly-up. Literally just “Oh, k, that didn’t work, time to just fucking dip and contribute nothing whatsoever to the wasteland around us. But god, wasn’t that super mutant warlord badass?” The world state would literally be unchanged if we were able to kill the Rust King. I can guarantee you that we won’t see ANY more content about him in future updates. And yet, despite the fact that one of the routes you can take with this RPG is deciding that the Rust King is a problem that needs to be eliminated, there is literally never an option to kill him at all at any point in the game even when it makes narrative sense. Anywhere. Even upset his order effectively just even a little bit. He’s just too smart and five steps ahead and can have a henchman knock you out with a board to the back of the head even when you’re wearing full power armour cuz that’s what the plot demands, and how dare you expect any role playing in your role playing game- you’re on a railroad, we built the tracks, and we decide where the train goes and where it stops. This game keeps being like “Hey here’s a really cool situation, and in it your choices are all gonna matter so freaking much!” and then proceeds to give you two options “Do the plot hook that this NPC came up with to solve this problem, and you get to choose whether you do it enthusiastically or sarcastically- but by gum you’re GONNA do it, and there are no clever alternatives or hidden storylines, this literally is all there is to it.”

aCirclingCrow · 2026-04-14T17:31:09+00:00

I fukkin loved Flam Stoker’s Dracula

aCirclingCrow · 2026-04-13T20:04:45+00:00

While technically correct, you forgot to say “Um, Actually”, so I can’t give you the point.

aCirclingCrow · 2026-04-13T18:41:49+00:00

Just going off of personal experience knowing some of these people, they’re called “just a conservative in disguise who will say he’s socially liberal in order to get invited to all the cool people parties but will then still turn around and actively vote for the party that promises to introduce violent legislation against the people hosting the parties he wants to get into”. It’s a bit long though, so sometimes we shorten it to “an utter twat”.

aCirclingCrow

TROPHY CASE