The Crazy Accomplishments We’re Happy About Aren’t Real #4 – Elden Ring

FromSoftware’s Elden Ring is a perfect candidate for this article, and while we’ll probably be discussing Dark Souls games down the line as well, let’s first look at how much more of a pain the achievements could have been here.

The Elden Ring achievements, although the game has a reputation for being extremely difficult, could have been a plot worse. Unlike most Souls games, you don’t even have to tackle New Game+ as you can save your way to all three endings in a single match and there’s nothing on the list (other than no doubt some missables) that would require more than one run. With that in mind, let’s run the Absurd Achievement Generator and see how difficult Elden Ring could have been had the team pushed the achievements too far.

BS GS is a TA original editorial series where we ruminate on how difficult things could have been had the developers taken their achievement lists to the next level. We’ll try to focus on specific details and possibilities rather than just the grinds – a billion kills, playing every day for a year, etc. – to keep things interesting, if possible using other examples of ridiculous achievements as a precedent for what we’re dreaming up.

Elden Ring – Defeat every boss in the game with a different weapon

There are over 170 boss fights in Elden Ring, and while an achievement to simply find and beat all the latest would be pretty crude on its own, I thought we could take things to the next level here. Once you’ve got a good build it’s not too hard to go for a spree, especially if you go back to the early dungeons where the bosses tend to scale assuming you reach them at a lower level and that you end up falling in couple. shots. What if the game introduced an arbitrary restriction where the final hit to each boss in the game had to come from a different damage source?

The first problem here is leaving the comfort zone of a weapon type that clicks with you, as there aren’t enough weapons of an archetype to fulfill this ridiculous condition. That would mean using most weapon types in the game, and to make matters worse, you’d probably have to use a lot of them with few upgrades, unless you’re farming like crazy – upgrade materials are not. not exactly easy to find and although you can buy them once you find the right merchants and bell bearings, you’ll have to weigh grinding runes to upgrade gear versus using weaker versions of them. weapons. And that would only become more of a concern with gear you didn’t really know how to use… I’d bet most people who beat the game didn’t kill a single dagger boss (except maybe- being a few people using that crazy Bleed in the right build), and stuff like whips and fists also feel pretty sleepy. Let’s not forget that weapons also have stat requirements, so you’ll have to ruin your build a bit by knocking out pretty much every stat just to use up some of the available gear.

But wait, it gets even worse. What about invitations? For the sake of discussion, let’s say that a final hit from a Spirit Ashes AI summon counts as a single weapon under this stupid achievement, but that would still mean you’d have to mix up your summons and again not be able to Whether upgrade them so much due to limited resources, or just take the risk and hope you get the killing blow yourself with a unique weapon rather than having the summon claim two kills and ruin your run. Player Character Summon, though? Good luck spending hours summoning other players only to have to dismiss them if they use a weapon you’ve already used to beat a boss in case they score the kill. And the spells? Even though we say a single spell counts as a different source of damage, you’ll still need the stats to use them, and you’ll have to find them first, so that wouldn’t make things much more manageable. This all ties into another issue, and that’s tracking. With no in-game way to see which bosses were killed with which weapons, you’d be forced to create a spreadsheet documenting which boss went down to which weapon in order to avoid doubling down, and you might even find yourself in situations where you come across a boss with no unused weapon in your possession and need to hold off and find something else to use.

There’s also the fact that finding all the bosses in the game is a mission in itself. Some are locked behind questlines, others behind generally abstract conditions for a FromSoftware game, and even those in the world would require deep exploration not just to clear all the last dungeons of the massive world of Elden Ring, but with a different equipment. And of course, that could be mitigated, to some extent, by dealing the majority of boss damage with your favorite loadout, then moving on to land the final hit. The problem is that you either have to invest in another stat to increase your gear load, or risk finding yourself in the middle of a boss battle to swap out your gear, and there are plenty of bosses that absolutely won’t let you down. not. get away with that. It’s an already awful baseline achievement – beat every boss – taken to the next level… imagine killing an endgame boss with a weapon you’ve used before and having to spend dozens of more hours just to do it go back to NG+ or a new file to run it again. No.

Defeat Malenia at level 1

Malenia is known to be one of the toughest bosses in Elden Ring, and while it could easily have been an achievement to beat the game in L1 to become a Onebro, I thought I’d mix it up to imply instead an optional boss that unleveled players probably wouldn’t. don’t even consider doing it, because they don’t need it. This would be an absolute attrition war, as your damage output with no investment in any stats is going to be zero, and you’d only have to get cut by just one of his attacks to restore a ton of health to him from it totally just life-stealing mechanic, if he doesn’t kill on the spot. You’d need to spend years whittling down its health and avoiding countless instances of Waterfowl Dance anime combo nonsense, with one mistake probably being all it would take to cost you the attempt. Add the fact that you would actually have to reach Malenia in the first place, which involves going through most of the game without leveling up, and that would be an absolute nightmare, on so many levels.

Complete the game without summoning Torrent or using fast travel

Let’s throw in one that’s just disrespectful of players’ time, because those are always “fun”. We can allow story-related teleports because otherwise it’s literally impossible, but restricting all other uses of fast travel and mount would be horrible. Unless I’m mistaken, I believe there are optional dungeons that can’t be exited without quickly returning to the entrance, which would lock your run without knowledge of god-level play. Oh, and you would just have to walk everywhere, and a bunch of optional areas would end up being off limits. Worse still, some fights are designed to be fought on horseback, so you’re making things much more difficult by not using your mount. I actually have a friend who beat Skyrim without ever using fast travel and I don’t know how he had the patience to do it, but it would probably be even worse.

Collect all weapons

Souls games often require you to forge all of the boss’ soul weapons, and here even that would lead to multiple playthroughs in order to turn the boss’ memories into each of their unique weapon options. It would also involve engaging with more or less every vendor and dungeon in the game, being incredibly lucky with rare items from enemies, and keeping a personal checklist of what you’re missing so you know what you need to do next. Elden Ring includes an achievement to get all “legendary” weaponry, but most of them aren’t really too bad and only one or two are missable. Obtain everything is next level stuff, and in such a big world, a random dagger in a random chest in a random open world location might be all it takes for you to miss that, so you should be on top of your game collection at any time for even a chance to unlock it.

And it will! Hope you enjoyed this week’s BS GS shenanigans and if you have any ideas for other good targets for future articles, go ahead and drop them in the comments and we’ll take a look. Do you have any BS achievements that would make Elden Ring even harder to complete? Let’s listen to them!