Comments by "Crazy Eyes" (@CrizzyEyes) on "There is an Easy Mode in Elden Ring" video.

@Lumpofchicken You need to do part of Ranni's questline just to do the Divine Tower in Liurnia so assuming you'd want to activate all your runes, you'd be doing the same thing
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Correct, there have always been easy builds in Souls games and they're not exactly difficult to figure out. Magic users and greatshield vitality/vigor/"whatever the HP stat is" builds have always been the option for players who either didn't like or were somehow unable to grasp the fast action parts of the combat. Two-handed weapon melee builds are not intended for beginners. The disadvantage is that these builds are typically bad in PVP, although magic did have its moments (especially dark magic). Bloodborne was a bit of a notable exception in that it provided less options and emphasized the action part, and Sekiro was almost closer to a Ninja Gaiden successor than a Souls RPG.
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@reJECT0 Honestly the fact that this game has no quest journal is infuriating at times. It was hard enough in the previous Souls games, but NPC quests were few and far between in those games and generally you don't need to do much except explore each area thoroughly to advance them. This is fairly easy since the game is mostly linear with a couple of branching paths. In this game I can be on several NPC quests at the same time and I'll be damned if I know where I'm at on any of them at any time. From Soft is definitely stuck in their ways a bit, it's baffling to me that they'd make an open world game like this without considering some of these basic problems that never really existed in the genre (Elder Scrolls 2 Daggerfall, one of the first open world games, had a quest journal).
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@watchingforfuncarroll6450 For Godrick's rune, absolutely. You get +5 to all stats which means you get roughly 100 extra HP and something like 15 more FP, higher resistances, damage, etc. Plus the Rune Arc gives you an HP buff regardless of whether you have an active rune or not. I have not activated any other runes yet, trying to figure out if they're worth it or not myself.
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@watchingforfuncarroll6450 You have to do a challenge dungeon called a Divine Tower to activate them. Then you equip a rune in the grace menu and when you use a Rune Arc, it gives you the benefits from the equipped and activated rune until you die. Really unnecessarily complicated, but I guess it's a way for them to add more content.
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@reJECT0 For me, someone who has terrible vision, it actually kind of is. It's certainly a tedious annoyance. I guess I could alt-tab and use notepad when I'm on PC, but then, why would I do that instead of just looking the NPC up on the wiki? I mean at least in a game with a similar problem like Etrian Odyssey, you're drawing maps. Taking notes is schoolwork. Regardless it doesn't excuse From Soft defying 25 year old genre conventions. I'd expect a quest journal in an open world game.
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To be fair, to get this sword, you need to get past (or bypass) Godrick and then find it in a dungeon deep in the next area. So "activating easy mode" is not exactly easy in itself, and then you also need to have a specialized dual casting build to use this particular sword (which grants the flame and laser attacks you see here). Basically you start getting some of the really good weapons and spells all over the game at the same time that you should be finding this sword.
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@winloc_5681 Wait, really? That explains a lot. I was wondering why I needed to kill another rune-bearer just so I could activate the previous rune...
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@bofa722 Do you mean NPC/Player summons or the bell summons? Most fights seem designed with summons in mind now so I don't know how "unbalanced" it is anymore. Personally I never summoned in previous games very much because it increases the boss HP pool by a ton, not because I thought it made the game easy mode. It made the bosses less predictable and more tedious to kill. Bosses can change targets mid-attack animation.
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