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The following is a post published on Cohost on 4th July, 2024.

Though I do ultimately like ELDEN RING, I have been very critical of it and see it as a bit of a disaster in a number of ways. After playing and mostly bouncing off the recent Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, I found myself doing a full playthrough of ELDEN RING Reforged, a wide-reaching and ambitious overhaul mod, promises to touch on just about every criticism I had of the base game.

After some 50 hours, having completed the game and defeated Malenia etc, I wanted to do a quick and casual writeup (that ended up being a little bit long, oops) just to put my thoughts out there, because I think this mod is fantastic — and there’s one big reason that I think it’s captivated me so well.

ERR‘s Nexus page puts this as its third bullet point:

Added engagement: Mechanics to engage with the game’s content instead of skipping it. Reasons to explore, reasons to do side content, reasons to fight enemies, reasons to learn boss & enemy movesets. Reforged draws every ounce of worth from the original game.

Rather than a single feature, this is a design principle. It is the ultimate goal of ERR, and it is achieved in two ways: by changing the open world, and by changing combat.

ELDEN RING’s open world sucks. Unless…?

In the run up to ELDEN RING‘s release, I was concerned about the shift to an open world structure. A huge strength of all of FROM’s games since Demons’ Souls had been level design, and I struggled to see any way in which this game could stand to benefit from the ideas that were being discussed in pre-release interviews.

When the game came out, I was definitely not pleasantly surprised. In fact, everything I was worried about seemed to come true – what was with these huge, empty fields? Why, instead of a smaller number of bespoke areas, were there so many repetitive, near-identical mines and catacombs and caves scattered everywhere? What was the point of any of this? I never found an answer, no matter how many diehard ELDEN RING lovers I asked. Nobody could give me a satisfactory answer for why they thought the open world was good, an improvement, a worthwhile shift in direction. If they had a reason, it was never one I could personally understand. I still don’t understand it. I probably never will.

Reforged doesn’t create the thousands or tens of thousands of new assets that would be necessary to make the copy-paste dungeons more distinct. It doesn’t rearrange their layouts. It doesn’t add more monsters to the empty overworld besides just a few bosses scattered here and there. Yet, exploration in ERR is fun and worthwhile, and I found myself wanting to do it rather than simply beelining towards each item or place I wanted to go to while ignoring everything else. Without addressing any of the most obvious problems with the base game’s open world, how does ERR achieve this?

Well, there isn’t just one reason. This mod’s authors are very thoughtful and take a multifaceted approach that makes many small changes to every aspect of the game, all of which come together to create something altogether more engaging. Nonetheless, there are a few standout reasons that exploration in ERR feels so much better than vanilla, not the least of which is “runeforging”.

We are apparently still learning from Banjo Kazooie

ERR scatters about a thousand “rune pieces” across the Lands Between, hidden in strange places; atop rocky outcrops, tucked behind a little bump in a cliffside, down otherwise empty corridors, beneath crabs, among barrels, even after jumping puzzles in a few places.

Rune pieces can be traded in increments of 10 for small but not insignificant passive bonuses to stats like stamina regen, equip load, max FP, even movement speed if you’ve obtained Malenia’s great rune — or in increments of 20 for +1 to a stat of choice, with limits to how many of each upgrade you can get.

This system alone, which predates SotE‘s Scadutree Fragments, makes exploration significantly more rewarding in the simplest way possible: by giving you a little treat for going out of your way to look somewhere that would have been utterly barren in vanilla. Even minor dungeons have rune pieces hidden in them, and as of last week, optional bosses also drop rune pieces – mostly 1 at a time, but as many as 5 for endgame superbosses like Malenia. This feature was previously exclusive to NG+, but was brought forwards to first playthroughs, introducing even more reasons to go out and clear the dungeons you’d normally ignore on any repeat playthroughs.

Crafting and weapon upgrades

Both the item crafting and weapon upgrade systems have also been reworked, with the latter making a hefty impact on overall game progression.

A somewhat smaller number of smithing stones can be found on the map, and smithing stone bell bearings have actually been removed outright; but every optional boss drops an appropriately-leveled smithing stone, and smithing stone drop rates from enemies are also increased. Together with a new system wherein fully upgrading a weapon past one tier of smithing stones will unlock that tier for purchase from Hewg, upgrading your weapon now depends on engaging with more of the game, rather than beelining to the bell-bearing and buying them all, though you still ultimately unlock the convenience of purchasing the upgrade materials for other weapons after your first.

The same goes for somber smithing stones, which are also harder to find but can likewise be purchased after upgrading a single weapon beyond each tier. Even ancient dragon smithing stones can be bought after completing the game, so you can fully upgrade as many weapons you want.

Crafting also becomes more worthwhile overall. Crafted items in ERR are not just stronger overall, but crafting is much more convenient: base materials are broken down by type into “essences”, which are used in recipes, so any given item doesn’t need an extremely specific set of base ingredients. On its face this might be a bad thing, but the actual result is that I found myself engaging much more with crafting in general, making it much less of a waste of time to go and grab items whenever i was traversing the overworld.

On the subject of crafted items being stronger: Greases are now universally drawstring-speed (faster, even!) and buff both weapons if you’re powerstancing, giving them a specific niche that cannot be attained by weapon arts or spell buffs. Some fortunes (ERR‘s class system) buff throwable items even further, allowing players to specialize in them as their primary damage source.

Some more generally useful crafts are also added. Held runes can be crafted into itemized versions at a small cost (2500 runes become 2000, and 12500 become 10000), larval tears are now craftable, and rune arcs can be crafted as well.

Runes and camps

Even if there are reasons to explore and fight bosses — to find rune pieces, to craft, to find precious weapon upgrade materials — what about normal enemies? ERR has multiple answers to this problem, too.

For a start, rune amounts are massively redistributed. Major bosses (and noteworthy rune farming spots) drop less, but minor bosses and normal enemies drop dramatically more. In addition, a number of minor locations have been turned into “camps”, horse-disabled areas containing chests which can only be opened after their elite enemies have all been defeated. These range from extremely simple, like a handful of enemies standing around, to more involved encounters with multiple distinct packs of enemies and environments that demand a more creative approach.

Areas also scale a little bit as you level up, meaning no area will become entirely trivial and that rune rewards from earlier areas will increase a small amount as the game goes on and you level higher and higher. I was a little worried about this particular concept before playing the mod, but in reality it suits ELDEN RING surprisingly well, maintaining the feeling of going back to the starting areas and being dramatically stronger than before, but still presenting enough of a challenge (and enough runes) not to be totally boring and unrewarding if you decide to go back and clear out a cave that you rode past earlier in the game.

Combat is a two-way street of bullshit, but they made the street a bit shorter

ELDEN RING is an unfair game stacked against the player. It was built from the ground up with the expectation that players look for, find, and use every possible tool at their disposal, to trivialize as much as possible. This is all well and good — it’s FROM’s most popular game by a tremendous margin — but this philosophy also made the game disappointing on some level for many players, myself included.

The game, as it released, is resistant to letting the player simply power through on mechanical skill and awareness. This doesn’t always manifest in things being too hard, but most often in the game simply being frustrating, such as ill-conceived double boss fights or certain enemies walling off particular builds because of extreme elemental resistances, with the expectation being that you call in a mimic tear and respec into something more effective rather than going straight for it. Though that certainly works, it isn’t always satisfying: personally speaking, I never felt much of a sense of accomplishment from successfully cheesing a boss compared to overcoming it on my own terms.

This brings us to what I see as the second pillar of ERR‘s philosophy of increasing player engagement: combat, and cutting the bullshit on both ends of the equation. The player’s strongest cheese strategies are nerfed on both numerical and mechanical levels, but bosses are also scaled back in various, mostly subtle ways.

Spirit ashes, one of vanilla’s primary counterweights against “bullshit” encounter design, deal less damage and are no longer targeted by enemies unless a second, additional FP cost is spent on a temporary enrage that boosts damage output and attracts aggro.

This way, any build can choose to use spirit ashes for damage or flavor without breaking the encounter design — but you can’t rely on Mimic Tear, Tiche or any of the other strong spirit ashes to pull double duty as tank and dps, so to speak, and you aren’t strictly missing out by choosing to spend your FP elsewhere.

Other dominant strategies like the ever-powerful bleed are nerfed in various ways, but also boss resistances and access to damage types are both retooled across the board such that you never feel the need to fully respec because an enemy has an extreme resistance to the one damage type you’re specialized in. This design softly encourages to stick out encounters with whatever build you’ve already made rather than seeking new, more optimal strategies, and those optimal strategies are much less overwhelmingly powerful compared to the average build anyway.

Without all the cheese, ELDEN RING‘s sometimes careful, sometimes clumsy balance of two-sided bullshit completely topples over and buries the player — so Reforged also takes care to turn bosses down a notch as well, primarily by simply adjusting camera distance for visibility, or subtly reducing attack hitboxes to more closely match animations rather than directly changing their attack patterns or behavior.

Not every boss is given such a light touch, though: especially frustrating outliers are changed much more significantly: the Elden Beast fight has a laundry list of changes that ultimately make it a much less miserable experience, and Godskin Duo has been completely reworked to remove the strongest cheese strategy (sleep) but make it beatable in a sensible, intuitive way rather than whatever the hell that fight was supposed to be in vanilla. Some of FROM’s worst ever bosses are in ELDEN RING, but in Reforged they’re almost all pretty good.

New defensive mechanics

Without cheese, and even with bosses adjusted in this way, ELDEN RING is an unfair game stacked against the player. But Reforged offers an alternative: robust, powerful and varied system mechanics on a universal level.

ERR‘s Sekiro-style deflect is great and fits the game surprisingly well (evidenced by FROM’s halfway-inclusion of it as a mechanic in SotE), but the MVP defensive mechanic in my eyes is the all-new “duck”. The classic Souls backstep is gone, replaced with an on-the-spot low duck reminiscent of Ling Xiaoyu’s beloathed Art of Phoenix stance in Tekken.

Duck is genius. It’s not merely fun, but it takes the common, accidental occurrence of low-profiling a boss attack during a jumping heavy attack’s recovery and turns it into an intentional, powerful, and rewarding mechanic. It’s one of ELDEN RING‘s accidents made into something real, and it’s perfect. It fits into ER‘s existing defensive ecosystem shockingly well, and is a great answer to a lot of moves that otherwise lack stable or rewarding answers.

The ultimate result of all of these changes is that Reforged’s default difficulty mode is broadly harder for players accustomed to bringing out Mimic Tear and the like, but easier for players like me who were more stubborn about approaching ELDEN RING in the same way they did other games in the series: alone, with whatever weapon is already in hand. In my eyes, this is evidence that a good baseline balance has been found for the mod authors’ stated goals.

All of these combat changes are the “reasons to learn boss and enemy movesets” referred to on ERR‘s Nexus page. Bosses can’t cheat you, but you can’t cheat them either. Rather than doing everything you can to functionally skip a bullshit fight, you’re encouraged to engage them more directly, to learn every move in their kit, and you’ve got new and fun tools with which to do so on more even footing.

Some other things I like

It’s hard to cover everything about Reforged that’s good, because the mod touches on just about every aspect of the game in some manner. Rather than going over absolutely everything (there’s really far too much: look at the Nexus page or wiki if you want a better overview), I do want to quickly highlight a few particular things I thought were especially interesting or appealing about this mod.

• Weapon trails are colored according to the weapon’s element. This is a small touch, but looks fantastic – there’s a particular pair of swords in the DLC that will look seriously incredible with this effect when development eventually catches up.
• The UI is a huge improvement over vanilla, in a way that feels polished and totally authentic to the original game. It’s really easy to forget that the UI is modded at all.
• THE INPUT BUFFER IS FIXED!!!!!!! THE INFINITE ROLL BUFFER ON HITSTUN IS FUCKING GONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Spellcasting, and FP in general, got completely reworked in a really fun way. FP costs are high, but spellcasting is faster overall and you slowly regenerate FP in combat. What really pulls ERR‘s FP system together, though, is that FP is gained by hitting enemies, as well as by casting certain “generator” spells which generate FP on hit. I’m a huge fan of the overall dynamic these changes introduce, where powerful spells are something you earn by fighting (although you can still use FP flasks if you want to!).
• Build variety is excellent! Every statline has access to a variety of damage types, and the fortune system makes relatively lightweight changes that nonetheless heavily influence a given character’s playstyle. In addition, big adjustments to stat softcaps and a level cap at 200 ensure that endgame builds must specialize in one way or another. The result is that different playthroughs of Reforged can feel very different in a way that wasn’t possible before, and players partying up with Seamless Co-op will feel more distinct from one another.
• THE INPUT BUFFER IS FIXED!!!!!!! THE INFINITE ROLL BUFFER ON HITSTUN IS FUCKING GONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Equip load is reworked completely. You now have a flat 100 equip load (with equipment weights adjusted appropriately) and cannot increase them with stats, only by using talismans and fortunes (or the baldachin’s blessing, which grants an additional 10%). Light roll is replaced with a Bloodborne step dodge which looks great and feels wonderful, and heavy rolling is also buffed slightly; so, combined with buffed armor ratings from equipment, your weight class is a more meaningful and impactful build decision that will differ between characters. You won’t be aiming for medium roll on the majority of builds, but will instead have to make a decision based on your personal and build priorities.
• THE INPUT BUFFER IS FIXED!!!!!!! THE INFINITE ROLL BUFFER ON HITSTUN IS FUCKING GONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• There’s a brilliant “perfect actions” mechanics, essentially a just-frame window on almost all combat actions which speed up and reduce the stamina cost on your next action if you hit them. This gives every weapon a distinct rhythm that’s satisfying to learn, even if it’s not too hard, and encourages you to pace your inputs rather than mashing R1 outright.
• THE INPUT BUFFER IS FIXED!!!!!!! THE INFINITE ROLL BUFFER ON HITSTUN IS FUCKING GONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• THE INPUT BUFFER IS FIXED!!!!!!! THE INFINITE ROLL BUFFER ON HITSTUN IS FUCKING GONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• THE INPUT BUFFER IS FIXED!!!!!!! THE INFINITE ROLL BUFFER ON HITSTUN IS FUCKING GONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• THE INPUT BUFFER IS FIXED!!!!!!! THE INFINITE ROLL BUFFER ON HITSTUN IS FUCKING GONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• THE INPUT BUFFER IS FIXED!!!!!!! THE INFINITE ROLL BUFFER ON HITSTUN IS FUCKING GONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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