How to progress without guides?

[Juken]

I'm usually really bad at these 3D open world type of games because I always get lost. FOR HOURS. Is anyone else this way who's made it through Elden Ring? Tell me your secrets please.

[Alpo]

I played without a guide for 60 hours on and off and only get past limgrave. I didn't know what to do, what are remembrances, what to do with it, and so on. When you don't play for a week (work and so on), you just forget about the "quests" and npc dialogues make no sense, you forget the names, the world makes no sense. You get teleported to another region, what happened, what is that? no clue. what do I have to do there? no clue. Was it random, was it intended? no clue.

Then after my first playthough, I saw that I completely missed probably the best fight of the game with Malenia, because at some point there's something to do (no spoiler) and I totally missed that, and no reasons to go back to that point.

Now I'm kind a fan of this world, overall a nice game. Maybe the game was intended to be discovered collectively, all players making sense of it collectively.

Zelda Totk was doable without any guide (it has the traditional quest list, some of them are still vague, but the npc dialogues are sufficient to be understood, but you probably won't discover or have the idea to make a hoverboard by yourself), Elden ring is another beast.

[Faust Wither]

no, i just follow the grace and head to big tree direction.

[Lu2]

folow golden pointers

[Speed Malus]

For starters, just following the Grace "arrows" and actually listen to dialogue from Melina & Sir Gideon Ofnir, THE ALL KNOWING!

[Yes Man]

searching for clues? read item description? how do you think guides existed in first place? what do you think ppls spent thousand hours into this game for?

[nullpo]

No worries, I also like to get lost in open world without main objective. But here I just follow one simple rule. Go straight till it's a cliff or the enemy kick me ass. When using that rule I pretty much went to the mainstream path judging via achievement acquisition

[TERRØR♕]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Busk if you Must:

I'm usually really bad at these 3D open world type of games because I always get lost. FOR HOURS. Is anyone else this way who's made it through Elden Ring? Tell me your secrets please.

you have to read a lot of discreptions and pay attention to npc dialogues....its hard

[Fineous🔥]

Avoid the forums, Youtube and Fextra. Other than that play the game without giving a damn about everything else, explore, read, die, kill and have fun.

I played the main game and expansion blind so YOU can do it. Now.....advices, just one. Open your map. You will notice a mark in areas you didnt explored before, thats the map you need to loot and actually be able to spot ways to enter other areas.


Oh yes.....dont kill non hostile NPCs.

[Kim]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Mu:

Początkowo opublikowane przez Kim:

Try to "clear" an area without moving on to the next, every location, every dungeon, every NPC to talk to, sometimes multiple times (talk to him, exhaust his dialogue, rest in a grace site, talk to him again to see if anything has changed)

When you discover a map fragment you are in (Limgrave for exemple) try to stay in it , clear it and then move to the next map fragment visible on your map, following the road leading to it (even if the map is dark/grey , you will still see that the road leading to it is connected to the road visible on your map already discovered)

If you stick to this, your feeling of being lost should lessen

Playing this way will take you 100 hours just to get to Altus Plateau from personal experience and will cause burn out, not advisable for people with lives/work.

There is no clear cut solution to playing this game without exploring every nook and cranny as you will definitely miss out on interesting items, one solace is that a NG+ run will have much less filler to go through as you'll have most items in your inventory though the problem there is that this game doesn't allow you to reset your level so you'll feel overleveled for a good portion of your subsequent playthrough.

A bit of an exaggeration but yes, playing without a guide will take you a lot more time than without, after all, guides are there to save people time, yes.

Remember the question asked by Op:

Początkowo opublikowane przez Busk if you Must:

How to progress without guides?

To each their own, time doesn't have to be an issue when you're enjoying the game you're playing, even if you have a life/work, especially when you have a life/work.

[nfinite.recursion]

Learn how to read a map.

[Dr.Acula]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Busk if you Must:

I'm usually really bad at these 3D open world type of games because I always get lost. FOR HOURS. Is anyone else this way who's made it through Elden Ring? Tell me your secrets please.

Well, if you're bad at that these open world games then I wouldn't recommend to play Elden Ring as you're basically abandoned as a player without any proper sense of direction.

What I can suggest is that if you hit "walls" where you can't progress, check out other areas on the map you haven't been to. Elden Ring will add point of interest entries onto your map when you enter these areas. Like if you go into a ruin you haven't explored before that ruin will then appear on your map as a "dot" with it's name. This also goes for the graces you touch while exploring.

Outside of that there's not much to recommend.

If you actually want to play through the game at a "faster" pace then using a guide would be sensible. With a guide the game can basically be completed in about 40-60 hours (without dlc). And by completing I really mean completing it in a sense of getting all the Steam achievements as well (including all the endings - even though you have "screw" around with the save files a bit to do that at the end).

If you play on your own without guidance and explore it thuroughly then you're pretty much guaranteed to reach over 100 hours. My first playthrough with partial guide usage from halfway through (because I got frustrated with the atrocious quest system) was about 140 hours.

[vamirez]

Make sure to read the tutorial messages - you can find them again in your inventory under "info items" (last category)

Look at the map - you can see where the map pieces are - try to get the next map piece.

Now look at the filled in map closely. You can actually see most of the locations there. Mark the next four with markers. Go there and do these locations. Also do other small encounters on the way if you like. Any boss you can't beat yet mark with a special icon on the map. Mark other things you want to remember with other icons if you want.

When you feel ready, follow one of the golden grace lines to one of the story points.

Try stuff out. Don't respec all the time for everything, but try out what you can use, including the crafting recipes. That stuff isn't bad at all, but even if you don't use it later, you now know what it is.

[Burdpal]

It's inarguable that From's quest designs are a bit dated. Look no further than the Dragon Communion Priestess. I can guarantee you people miss this, alongside getting the cookbook from Moore after healing a kindred of rot, entirely when playing the DLC.

[Drybonz]

The getting lost and exploring can be pretty fun... I like to do a first playthrough without looking anything up... and then, do a second playthrough with outside information to find what I missed.