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the thing that's really cool about elden ring's gameplay loop is .... okay, runes are both experience points and money, and you get them when you kill enemies. once you level up, it uses up a certian amount of runes you're holding.
you also drop all of them when you die. :D
(you get one chance to retrieve them but then they're lost permanently if you die again)
so it actually forces you to play different play-styles aka "close to leveling up conservative" and "more risky/recklace when near zero" which is a total game changer from say, skyrim or tears of the kingdom, probably the two-most-similar games i've played. once when you find a play-style in both of those games (and most open world games) that cheeses the experience (aka assassin mage sneakbow crits in skyrim or puffshroom arrows in TOTK), you don't move away from it. ever. you might have a rare enemy that makes you mix it up but it's annoying.
but elden ring has a nice comfy yin-yang tension between stints of being much riskier ('time to yeet-run myself through the endgame capital to see if i can grab another save point before being OHKO'd') that's ACTION PACKED but also the stakes are comparatively lower versus if you're holding TONS of runes and you're on your last healing potion and ya gotta assassinate 5 enemies EXTREMELY CAREFULLY and you're literally sweating after. (even my weapon loadouts are different; if i'm riskier i'm usually using a whip that's great with diving into mobs head-first, or if i'm more careful i'm using a polearm that can do sneakstrikes and more likely to use arrows to soften/distract targets)
like you can cheese both. but they require to be cheesed in different ways.
i know the reputation that it's super difficult but ironically i feel like tears was actually.... slightly more difficult....? maybe specific major-story ER bosses are bottlenecks (radhann). ER gives you tons of options in general for open world enemies that you're underleveled for like slapping soft cotton on and sneaking/running by them - frankly you're encouraged to simply run past enemies you can't beat so there's usually some element of a cool-chase-and-shake-them-off-of-your-tail experience i wasn't expecting versus bashing everyone's heads in that's also not pure boring stealth.
anyway tl;dr after i finish a thing about to go test myself on morgott >;3
you also drop all of them when you die. :D
(you get one chance to retrieve them but then they're lost permanently if you die again)
so it actually forces you to play different play-styles aka "close to leveling up conservative" and "more risky/recklace when near zero" which is a total game changer from say, skyrim or tears of the kingdom, probably the two-most-similar games i've played. once when you find a play-style in both of those games (and most open world games) that cheeses the experience (aka assassin mage sneakbow crits in skyrim or puffshroom arrows in TOTK), you don't move away from it. ever. you might have a rare enemy that makes you mix it up but it's annoying.
but elden ring has a nice comfy yin-yang tension between stints of being much riskier ('time to yeet-run myself through the endgame capital to see if i can grab another save point before being OHKO'd') that's ACTION PACKED but also the stakes are comparatively lower versus if you're holding TONS of runes and you're on your last healing potion and ya gotta assassinate 5 enemies EXTREMELY CAREFULLY and you're literally sweating after. (even my weapon loadouts are different; if i'm riskier i'm usually using a whip that's great with diving into mobs head-first, or if i'm more careful i'm using a polearm that can do sneakstrikes and more likely to use arrows to soften/distract targets)
like you can cheese both. but they require to be cheesed in different ways.
i know the reputation that it's super difficult but ironically i feel like tears was actually.... slightly more difficult....? maybe specific major-story ER bosses are bottlenecks (radhann). ER gives you tons of options in general for open world enemies that you're underleveled for like slapping soft cotton on and sneaking/running by them - frankly you're encouraged to simply run past enemies you can't beat so there's usually some element of a cool-chase-and-shake-them-off-of-your-tail experience i wasn't expecting versus bashing everyone's heads in that's also not pure boring stealth.
anyway tl;dr after i finish a thing about to go test myself on morgott >;3