I read that Dark Souls 2 was the one game to let you enchant weapons that already have non-physical damage and it seems that was one of its good design choices.

When you do enchant a thing, go look at your equipment screen, it’ll often list new damage numbers while the enchantment is active. If not, it’s usually something that behaves like you’d expect, like a poison enchantment inflicting poison on an enemy that can be poisoned when you fill up their poison status gauge.

To be honest I’m surprise with the praise that the game allows you to tune the difficulty of the main story by allowing you to get stronger by doing side content. Because it’s what every RPG does since the 90′s, isn’t it?.. Dark Souls itself did it to a lesser extent. In that regard the game goes as far away as possible from their previous game, Sekiro. That game had a defined character and most of upgrades came from finding specific items in the world, so when the game told you to kill someone you had to bang your head against the wall till it’s done. Never finished even half of that game. Elden Ring’s exploration part feels like a necessary part of this style of game, it lets you mix the constant dread with some relatively relaxing ways to progress.

Items and builds are still bad. Just please tell me how and what that stuff does, don’t make me spend several levels to get right stats to be able to see that “enchant weapon” spell doesn’t work on upgraded weapons. I still don’t know what exactly it does when it does work.

That and I have approximately zero patience for grinding, or boss battles. Grinding to do boss battles sounds less appealing than folding laundry, where at least I get clean socks at the end.

I was annoyed that the parry system is back to being so bad after Sekiro, but apparently Sekiro began development after Elden Ring, so presumably not all lessons could be applied. Incidentally, Sekiro is the From title I’d recommend most if you want to talk about the fairness of the combat. It’s the simplest of this style of game, easily beatable in a weekend once you know what you’re doing, and yet also the game with the highest difficulty curve. And while it has some long, brutal fights, I don’t feel like it leaned on cheapness the same way that so many Souls/Borne/Ring bosses do.