Happy Life
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I am insanely tired of playing this. It took even more hours than DS 2, except I didn't fully clear all the "content," and I completely skipped one part of the map — I couldn't figure out how to get there and couldn't be bothered to look it up.
Why did I put "content" in quotes? Because I can't call copy-pasted caves like in *Scrolls* by that name. I didn't think I'd ever see something like that again, but lo and behold — in 2022. And I'm not joking in the slightest. At first, I was suspicious of the open world idea — we all know open worlds are garbage — empty, dead, full of low-effort, tasteless filler. And in the first few hours, I really did feel lost, given that in *Ring*, unlike standard open worlds, there are no quests with markers, no tangible hand-holding, or anything else we're used to. You can go in any of the four directions from the start, but where and why is unclear.
Then I thought — okay, maybe, knowing that Miyazaki has some vision, the open world should serve worldbuilding. Recalling the diversity of patchwork-like locations in the other Souls games — perhaps the scope here would finally show us something resembling a full continent, with its own settlements, landscapes flowing smoothly into one another, and all that. I was wrong. This open world is literally the same patchwork quilt of locations, only first, these patches are much larger in area, and second, they have less variety than before; meanwhile, there's almost no effort put into organic placement or thoughtfulness. Here you have a desert, there a snowy area, here a swamp, there a meadow — the same crap as always, just with a distant view. At the same time, the only real landmark is the Erdtree, visible from any part of the map — while most nearby locations are often hidden by fog. And where they are visible, we see nothing interesting, just some generic cliff-plateau and maybe a couple of spires from a random minor castle.
All these vast expanses are ~87% empty. In the 13%, you might find some pack of standard mobs, a copy-pasted dungeon, and some herbs for crafting growing here and there. Crafting — that's exactly what Dark Souls was missing, I hope you agree. We have an open world, *Witcher*-style Roach, copy-pasted dungeons, so we need crafting too. Makes sense?
Regarding the copy-pasted dungeons — I'll say again, I'm not joking. There are a few types of dungeons: a regular cave, a crystal mine, a crypt with gargoyles, a crypt with skeletons, a crypt with a chariot from DS2; ... ... I actually stopped writing just now, leaned back in my chair, seriously thought for half a minute, and still couldn't remember other types. There were probably one or two more types of cave or crypt, but I really don't remember anymore. So, in all these dungeons, the texture and interior are the same, the same standard halls and corridors, differing only slightly in room layout — as if all these crypts and caves were built by Khrushchev himself. In all these crypts, there are about 5 types of enemies, varying in toughness depending on the dungeon's "difficulty," but these enemy types are completely identical. At the end, you face some miniboss — often just a slightly tougher regular mob, which rewards you with a few drops of souls, a random trash item (not necessarily gear), and a button to "teleport back to the entrance." And these bosses aren't just reused occasionally — there are literally about 5 boss types across dozens of dungeons, reused over and over, over and over, over and over — sometimes a bit beefier, sometimes in pairs. Oh, I remembered. Sometimes on the overworld map, you encounter circles instead of dungeons that instantly teleport you to an arena with a miniboss, so you can kill it without wandering through those Khrushchev-style caves. That's why this type of "content" is the best of its kind.
However, the reuse issue isn't just about the dungeons themselves. The thing is, across the entire game, all over the continent, spanning 150-200 hours of playtime, you can count the enemy types on the fingers of your extremities — maybe on four hands, or even three. In different locations, these 15 enemy types are repeatedly reused with different colored skins. For example — we have infantry from one "lord" (one of several large chunks of the continent) in chainmail of one color, another, a third, a fifth. We also have green poisonous flowers that spit poison, or identical ones in blue that spit magic, or identical ones in red that spit fire — and so on. You know, it's not like the Souls games were ever particularly dazzling in enemy variety before, but this is a new level of laziness for them.
The same can be said about many things. For instance, there are only about 10 types of armor — a couple of rags, a couple of gambesons, a couple of chainmails, a couple of full plates, etc., often hardly differing from each other in appearance, design, stats, or even color. In Souls 1, I remember something similar, but at least there honestly wasn't that much armor overall.
Same for weapons — the standard sword, dagger, katana, club, bow, spear, but each with 20 variations, hardly different from each other. Though that's not a problem — almost all standard weapons are completely useless because there are unique ones. You upgrade standard weapons with standard titanite, and unique ones with unique titanite, while unique weapons simply deal higher damage, and unique titanite isn't rare at all and doesn't gatekeep you from using unique weapons.
For example, I found a curved greatsword in the first hour of the game that scaled C and later B with dexterity and D => C with strength, and it dealt more damage at any point in the game than a strength-scaling A standard weapon fully upgraded, with base dexterity in my build and 40-50 strength. I used it all the way to the end. The only advantage of standard weapons is that you can apply a skill at the blacksmith that you want, but unique weapons generally have better skills too.
Essentially, skills similar to those in Dota are the only thing that adds some variety to weapons in this game, and they also largely define the combat. I beat almost all bosses just by spamming my sword's skill attack between their combos, without worrying about anything else. As a result, the only mob where this strategy failed was the story-driven mad dog near the end — there I had to use regular auto-attacks because my sword was slow, and he sometimes dodged the skill.
Similarly, there are plenty of spells and greases, but since I didn't use them myself, I can only judge what I saw from enemies, and while they have them, there isn't much variety in their attacks.
Btw, all this wonderful inventory filling is a total nightmare. The inventory is incredibly cumbersome and schizophrenic in the best traditions of Western RPGs — lots of item tabs you get confused in even after 100 hours, just clicking tabs at random until you visually spot what you need on the page, and you only need 1% of everything you loot throughout the game. Each of these tabs has multiple screens of cells to scroll up and down — ergonomics are out of the question. At some point, you have no idea what's in your consumables tab — you never use anything throughout the entire game. You almost never consciously check the weapon and armor tabs — what's the point, if you're immediately buried under monstrous, unwieldy menus full of dozens of useless rags and crap weapons? They're not interesting to look at and not productive. All you need is to equip or unequip a longbow from your hand slot. And when you find something new, roughly in the first half of the game, and it disappears before you can see what it was — just forget about it and let it go. You'll never find what you picked up in your schizophrenic hoarder inventory. Most likely, your only way to know is to open a wiki for your location and try to find that drop in its text.
Overall, this approach characterizes the game — you search for one and a half percent of anything quality — rare good weapons/spells/levels in a barn of bland hay.
Returning to the empty dead world — I previously liked Souls games for their level design and exploration. Not in every entry or everywhere, but overall you could expect some level design worth exploring. Here, there are maybe 4 locations, totaling 15-20 hours out of 150-200. And those are the main boss areas (and not even all). Here we have levels that depart from meadows, hills, and standard Khrushchev-style dungeons and are designed at least somewhat — on par with the oldest and roughest parts of Souls. Some even take a while to get through, but overall it's a drop in the ocean. During my playthrough, I almost dropped *Ring* several times — not because some boss or tough location wrecked me, but because I was just monstrously exhausted clearing it with a fork. After a few dozen hours, I even started skipping most of the open world — just galloping on horseback, mostly not killing mobs, not searching every nook for another piece of crap loot, and even then, seeing how much more of this swamp I had to wade through, I had zero motivation to continue.
Barely, gritting my teeth, taking breaks during which I played *Cyberpunk* (which I ended up liking more than I should have in comparison to *Ring*, and I won't say *Ring* was more enjoyable to play) and a couple of other projects, skipping quite a bit, I dragged myself through this slog to the end. Not my greatest achievement in life, I'll be honest.
Overall, in terms of rubles per hour, the raw amount of game content probably represents one of the best deals on the market. Much more profitable — if you're an autist who finds it fun to spend hundreds of hours clearing the same stuff with a fork without any reward factors except appeasing your inner OCD demon. Or if you're a stuffy, enthusiastic Souls fan who will eagerly gobble up everything this company regurgitates into your beak — which correlates with the above.
If you're a sane, healthy person with a good graphics card, you can play it for about 50 hours, enjoy the quite pleasant graphics, speedrun a few main areas, and happily finish the game. Any effort you put in beyond that will most likely be wasted time and energy, with horrifying diminishing returns.
To summarize with a score: at its best moments, I'd give the game a 7.5, no more. At its worst, blandest, most tedious stretches — a 3.5-4. Worst moments make up 87%.
Figure it out for yourselves.
I am insanely tired of playing this. It took even more hours than DS 2, except I didn't fully clear all the "content," and I completely skipped one part of the map — I couldn't figure out how to get there and couldn't be bothered to look it up.
Why did I put "content" in quotes? Because I can't call copy-pasted caves like in *Scrolls* by that name. I didn't think I'd ever see something like that again, but lo and behold — in 2022. And I'm not joking in the slightest. At first, I was suspicious of the open world idea — we all know open worlds are garbage — empty, dead, full of low-effort, tasteless filler. And in the first few hours, I really did feel lost, given that in *Ring*, unlike standard open worlds, there are no quests with markers, no tangible hand-holding, or anything else we're used to. You can go in any of the four directions from the start, but where and why is unclear.
Then I thought — okay, maybe, knowing that Miyazaki has some vision, the open world should serve worldbuilding. Recalling the diversity of patchwork-like locations in the other Souls games — perhaps the scope here would finally show us something resembling a full continent, with its own settlements, landscapes flowing smoothly into one another, and all that. I was wrong. This open world is literally the same patchwork quilt of locations, only first, these patches are much larger in area, and second, they have less variety than before; meanwhile, there's almost no effort put into organic placement or thoughtfulness. Here you have a desert, there a snowy area, here a swamp, there a meadow — the same crap as always, just with a distant view. At the same time, the only real landmark is the Erdtree, visible from any part of the map — while most nearby locations are often hidden by fog. And where they are visible, we see nothing interesting, just some generic cliff-plateau and maybe a couple of spires from a random minor castle.
All these vast expanses are ~87% empty. In the 13%, you might find some pack of standard mobs, a copy-pasted dungeon, and some herbs for crafting growing here and there. Crafting — that's exactly what Dark Souls was missing, I hope you agree. We have an open world, *Witcher*-style Roach, copy-pasted dungeons, so we need crafting too. Makes sense?
Regarding the copy-pasted dungeons — I'll say again, I'm not joking. There are a few types of dungeons: a regular cave, a crystal mine, a crypt with gargoyles, a crypt with skeletons, a crypt with a chariot from DS2; ... ... I actually stopped writing just now, leaned back in my chair, seriously thought for half a minute, and still couldn't remember other types. There were probably one or two more types of cave or crypt, but I really don't remember anymore. So, in all these dungeons, the texture and interior are the same, the same standard halls and corridors, differing only slightly in room layout — as if all these crypts and caves were built by Khrushchev himself. In all these crypts, there are about 5 types of enemies, varying in toughness depending on the dungeon's "difficulty," but these enemy types are completely identical. At the end, you face some miniboss — often just a slightly tougher regular mob, which rewards you with a few drops of souls, a random trash item (not necessarily gear), and a button to "teleport back to the entrance." And these bosses aren't just reused occasionally — there are literally about 5 boss types across dozens of dungeons, reused over and over, over and over, over and over — sometimes a bit beefier, sometimes in pairs. Oh, I remembered. Sometimes on the overworld map, you encounter circles instead of dungeons that instantly teleport you to an arena with a miniboss, so you can kill it without wandering through those Khrushchev-style caves. That's why this type of "content" is the best of its kind.
However, the reuse issue isn't just about the dungeons themselves. The thing is, across the entire game, all over the continent, spanning 150-200 hours of playtime, you can count the enemy types on the fingers of your extremities — maybe on four hands, or even three. In different locations, these 15 enemy types are repeatedly reused with different colored skins. For example — we have infantry from one "lord" (one of several large chunks of the continent) in chainmail of one color, another, a third, a fifth. We also have green poisonous flowers that spit poison, or identical ones in blue that spit magic, or identical ones in red that spit fire — and so on. You know, it's not like the Souls games were ever particularly dazzling in enemy variety before, but this is a new level of laziness for them.
The same can be said about many things. For instance, there are only about 10 types of armor — a couple of rags, a couple of gambesons, a couple of chainmails, a couple of full plates, etc., often hardly differing from each other in appearance, design, stats, or even color. In Souls 1, I remember something similar, but at least there honestly wasn't that much armor overall.
Same for weapons — the standard sword, dagger, katana, club, bow, spear, but each with 20 variations, hardly different from each other. Though that's not a problem — almost all standard weapons are completely useless because there are unique ones. You upgrade standard weapons with standard titanite, and unique ones with unique titanite, while unique weapons simply deal higher damage, and unique titanite isn't rare at all and doesn't gatekeep you from using unique weapons.
For example, I found a curved greatsword in the first hour of the game that scaled C and later B with dexterity and D => C with strength, and it dealt more damage at any point in the game than a strength-scaling A standard weapon fully upgraded, with base dexterity in my build and 40-50 strength. I used it all the way to the end. The only advantage of standard weapons is that you can apply a skill at the blacksmith that you want, but unique weapons generally have better skills too.
Essentially, skills similar to those in Dota are the only thing that adds some variety to weapons in this game, and they also largely define the combat. I beat almost all bosses just by spamming my sword's skill attack between their combos, without worrying about anything else. As a result, the only mob where this strategy failed was the story-driven mad dog near the end — there I had to use regular auto-attacks because my sword was slow, and he sometimes dodged the skill.
Similarly, there are plenty of spells and greases, but since I didn't use them myself, I can only judge what I saw from enemies, and while they have them, there isn't much variety in their attacks.
Btw, all this wonderful inventory filling is a total nightmare. The inventory is incredibly cumbersome and schizophrenic in the best traditions of Western RPGs — lots of item tabs you get confused in even after 100 hours, just clicking tabs at random until you visually spot what you need on the page, and you only need 1% of everything you loot throughout the game. Each of these tabs has multiple screens of cells to scroll up and down — ergonomics are out of the question. At some point, you have no idea what's in your consumables tab — you never use anything throughout the entire game. You almost never consciously check the weapon and armor tabs — what's the point, if you're immediately buried under monstrous, unwieldy menus full of dozens of useless rags and crap weapons? They're not interesting to look at and not productive. All you need is to equip or unequip a longbow from your hand slot. And when you find something new, roughly in the first half of the game, and it disappears before you can see what it was — just forget about it and let it go. You'll never find what you picked up in your schizophrenic hoarder inventory. Most likely, your only way to know is to open a wiki for your location and try to find that drop in its text.
Overall, this approach characterizes the game — you search for one and a half percent of anything quality — rare good weapons/spells/levels in a barn of bland hay.
Returning to the empty dead world — I previously liked Souls games for their level design and exploration. Not in every entry or everywhere, but overall you could expect some level design worth exploring. Here, there are maybe 4 locations, totaling 15-20 hours out of 150-200. And those are the main boss areas (and not even all). Here we have levels that depart from meadows, hills, and standard Khrushchev-style dungeons and are designed at least somewhat — on par with the oldest and roughest parts of Souls. Some even take a while to get through, but overall it's a drop in the ocean. During my playthrough, I almost dropped *Ring* several times — not because some boss or tough location wrecked me, but because I was just monstrously exhausted clearing it with a fork. After a few dozen hours, I even started skipping most of the open world — just galloping on horseback, mostly not killing mobs, not searching every nook for another piece of crap loot, and even then, seeing how much more of this swamp I had to wade through, I had zero motivation to continue.
Barely, gritting my teeth, taking breaks during which I played *Cyberpunk* (which I ended up liking more than I should have in comparison to *Ring*, and I won't say *Ring* was more enjoyable to play) and a couple of other projects, skipping quite a bit, I dragged myself through this slog to the end. Not my greatest achievement in life, I'll be honest.
Overall, in terms of rubles per hour, the raw amount of game content probably represents one of the best deals on the market. Much more profitable — if you're an autist who finds it fun to spend hundreds of hours clearing the same stuff with a fork without any reward factors except appeasing your inner OCD demon. Or if you're a stuffy, enthusiastic Souls fan who will eagerly gobble up everything this company regurgitates into your beak — which correlates with the above.
If you're a sane, healthy person with a good graphics card, you can play it for about 50 hours, enjoy the quite pleasant graphics, speedrun a few main areas, and happily finish the game. Any effort you put in beyond that will most likely be wasted time and energy, with horrifying diminishing returns.
To summarize with a score: at its best moments, I'd give the game a 7.5, no more. At its worst, blandest, most tedious stretches — a 3.5-4. Worst moments make up 87%.
Figure it out for yourselves.
My sword, my trusted ally, unphased by my aspect.
