My partner RA and I game together and have been for many years. We couch co-op, by which I mean that we pass the controller back and forth.
So Elden Ring is an open world action-RPG with extremely high ratings. This is 100% our jam; we fully completed Breath Of The Wild (literally got everything except all the seeds), both Horizon games, Skyrim (I mean, sort of; it’s not like we did every dungeon) and several Assassin’s Creed games.
But.
It’s a Souls game. Or at least close enough. This is a definite problem for us. So I want to talk about how we game so that you can tell us if we should try this one.
The problem is that we want to share the controller fairly evenly, but RA has real trouble with combat, and I’m only OK at it. In particular, ranged combat is effectively impossible for RA except from stealth (i.e. she can’t target a moving opponent). This was a fairly serious problem with Mass Effect 3, where I ended up holding the controller for much more of the game than is our preference, because there was very little to do besides combat (as opposed to the first ME game which had lots of low-to-no-combat side quests) and I was the only one who could do it.
For my part, I’m just OK. Like, I beat the whole H:FW arena on Normal, but the last fight took me at least 30 tries. To put it another way, I strongly avoided Lynels in BotW until I had end-game gear.
Boss battles are fine, but they need to not take up the majority of the play time.
How we typically play out an open world game goes like this:
In the first quarter-to-third of our playthrough (in terms of wall-clock hours played), I’m largely in charge of what we’re doing, and the goal is to get us levelled and geared to the point where we’re badly overpowered in melee combat vs. the normal run-of-the-mill enemies that you see everywhere. During this segment I’m holding the controller a majority of the time because I have to do all the random-orcs-or-rats-or-whatever combat.
Once we’ve blown the power curve a bit, we switch to RA keeping the controller for basic combat and only handing it over when things get exciting. At this point she’s in charge of what we’re doing, and it stays that way for the rest of the game.
Our play then proceeds in a mixture of “very occasionally advance the plot” and “play every sidequest we can find” until we’re out of side content, then we complete the game and then we do all the crazy completist stuff like finding all the chests.
My concern about Elden Ring is that I’d end up holding the controller most of the time, which I definitely do not want.
Thoughts?