Earlier this week invited me and Sky down to their offices to try out a near final build at the Ring Preview Event for a couple of hours. Having never been to Singapore’s offices, it was also a chance to take a look at how they looked.
That is to say… was a
Turns out their offices looked every bit like I imagined! Walls upon walls of statues and other merchandise from releases! It’s like I was back in all over again…except nothing’s for sale!
Anyways, enough about that…back to the preview being the Souls and the Surge…and all the other ‘inspired’ expert, I tagged along to see how Ring has evolved since its Technical Closed Beta last year.
The answer? Not a lot that’s not a bad thing by any mean considering that the beta was already pretty polished, even if it was all kinds of buggy. The good news here is that the version we played (which was the final or near final build that’ll be released at launch) at the Ring Preview for one cutscene not triggering. The game just went to a black screen that time to skip the cutscene to continue.
No biggie, it’s probably going to be patched out.
It felt like as you could reassign how many flasks you can carry. Like in Dark Souls 3, you could just carry health restoring ones or ones that a mixture of both.
Despite bringing as much health as we could, we still died a lot…as expected. We got stabbed, we fell off cliffs, I got smashed by a giant club when I was invaded by a Red Phantom…we died all sorts of deaths and got really familiar with the loading screens in between respawns. We were playing on the PlayStation 5 and death reloads took around 6 – 8 a bit too lengthy for my tastes But I’m going to reserve judgment till the final version’s in my hands being revived at stakes of lessened the pain a bite as they served as mid-area checkpoints. I got so used to them that I don’t know how I’ll be able to play the Souls games again without them
One thing that surprised me was how empty the huge environment enemies were peppered throughout in small numbers (unless you stumbled upon a camp) but traversing the world on the spectral horse (Torrent) made them seem trivial. I’d thought that the enemy numbers would’ve been buffed up from the beta, but it doesn’t seem that way at all.
On the environments are beautiful. We only got to explore what we impressed. Visually, the art design’s more in like with Dark Souls so if you’re into medieval castles ruined forts, you’ll definitely be at home in the game. I love that there’s more platforming (in the form of ledges) integrated into the world now. With Torrent’s double jump, you can easily use shortcuts to navigate quickly, though fall too high you’ll still die.
Height’s much more of a problem in Ring than in most other From Software titles…maybe apart from. Being able to jump (or double jump with Torrent) means you’ll frequently need to go vertical to progress or escape your enemies.
Speaking of progression, the open world is a major departure from similar games in the genre. Right off the bat, you’re free to wander around. It’s a refreshing change from the linear nature of past From Software games to be sure, but it’s not all perfect There’s also a ton of foliage and object pop-in, a rather unwelcome surprise other foliage will fade into view as you get closer, leading to plains that look barren from far suddenly becoming a garden when you get closer. It’s jarring to say I’d have thought the SSD in the PS5 would’ve eliminated this entirely.
it's the same thing objects torches on the wall would fade in and out of existence depending on how far we were from them. It’s especially irksome when they’re much more noticeable.
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