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FromSoftware’s Elden Ring is a perfect candidate for this article, and while we’ll probably be tackling the Dark Souls games as well, let’s first see how much more of a slog the performance here could have been.

The Elden Ring’s performance, despite the game’s reputation for being extremely difficult, had a lot 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 one playthrough and there’s nothing on the list (aside from maybe a few missables) that would need more than one run. With that in mind, let’s fire up the Nonsense Achievement Generator and see how rough Elden Ring could have been if the team had taken the achievements way too far.

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

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

There are over 170 boss fights in Elden Ring, and while a feat for simply finding and beating each last one would be pretty disgusting on its own, I thought we could take things to the next level here. Once you’ve got a good build up, it’s not that hard to go on a stomping spree, especially if you return to early dungeons where the bosses tend to scale, assuming you’d reach them at a lower level and would eventually go down in a few hits. So what if the game introduced a random restriction where the final blow to each boss in the game had to come from a different source of damage?

The first issue here is getting out of the comfort zone of a weapon type that clicks with you, as there aren’t nearly enough weapons of any particular archetype to meet this ridiculous requirement. It would mean using most types of weapons in the game, and to make matters worse, you’d probably have to use a lot of them with few upgrades unless you’re growing like crazy – upgrade materials aren’t exactly easy to come by and while you can buy them once you’ve found the relevant merchants and callers, you’ll have to weigh the runes to improve equipment rather than use weaker versions of weapons. And that would only become more of a problem with gear you didn’t really know how to use properly… I’ll bet most people who’ve beaten the game haven’t killed a single dagger by the boss (apart from maybe a few people using that crazy Bleed in the right build), and things like whips and fists feel pretty decent too. Let’s not forget that weapons have stat requirements too, so you’d have to mess up your build a bit by grinding out pretty much every stat just to use some of the equipment available.

But wait, it gets worse. What about subpoenas? For the sake of argument, let’s say that a final blow from a Spirit Ashes AI call counts as a unique weapon for this stupid feat, but that would still mean you’d have to mix up your summons and again only be able to would be to upgrade them so much due to limited resources, or just risk it and hope you get the death blow yourself with a unique weapon instead of the summons claiming two kills and ruining your run. Summoning player characters, though? Good luck with hours of calling other players only to have to fire them if they use a weapon you’ve already used to defeat a boss in case they score the kill. What about spells? Even if we say that a unique spell counts as another source of damage, you’d still need the stats to use them, and find them in the first place, so it wouldn’t make things much more manageable. All of this is related to another problem, and that is tracking. With no in-game way to see which bosses were killed with which weapons, you’d be forced to create a spreadsheet that records which boss went to which weapon to avoid getting doubled, and you could even run into situations where you have a boss with no unused weapon in your possession and you have to look for something else to use.

There’s also the fact that finding every boss in the game is a mission in itself. Some are locked behind questlines, others behind typically abstract terms for a FromSoftware game, and even the world would require deep exploration to not only clear every last dungeon in the massive world of Elden Ring, but also with various gear. And sure, this can be hijacked to some extent by dealing the majority of the boss damage with your favorite gear, then switching to something else to get the final hit. The problem there is that you’ll either have to invest in yet another stat to increase your gear load, or risk eating in the middle of a boss fight to swap your gear, and there are plenty of bosses who absolutely won’t let you. get away with that. This is already a terrible basic feat – beating every boss – taken to the next level… imagine killing an endgame boss with a weapon you’ve already used and having to put in dozens of hours to get back to it in NG+ or a new file to roll it back. No.

Beat Malenia at Level 1

Malenia is known for being one of Elden Ring’s toughest bosses, and while this could have easily been a feat to beat the game on L1 to become a Onebro, I thought I’d mix it up to get an optional one instead. boss that unequalized players would likely have. don’t even consider hiring because you don’t have to. This would be an absolute battle of attrition, as your damage output will suck without investing in stats, and you’d only need to be cut by one of her attacks to return her a ton of health thanks to her totally honest lifesteal mechanic, if not was downright deadly. You’d have to spend ages degrading her health and avoiding countless instances of the Waterfowl Dance anime combo nonsense, with one flaw that’s probably all that would cost you the attempt. Add to that the fact that you really should to achieve Malenia in the first place, meaning you get through most of the game without leveling up, and this would be an absolute nightmare, on so many levels.

Complete the game without calling Torrent or using fast travel

Let’s throw in one that’s just disrespectful to players’ time, because those are always “fun”. We can allow story-related teleportations as this is literally impossible otherwise, but it would be terrible to limit all other uses of fast travel and the mountain. Unless I’m mistaken, I believe there are some optional dungeons that cannot be exited without quickly traveling back to the entrance, which would result in you being able to soft-lock your run without divine gaming knowledge. Oh, and you’d just have to walk everywhere, and some optional areas would end up being off limits. Worse, some battles are designed to be done on horseback, so you’re making it that much harder by not using your mount. I actually have a friend who beat Skyrim without ever traveling fast and I have no idea how he had the patience to do it but this would probably be worse.

Collect every weapon

The Souls games often require you to forge all the boss soul weapons, and here even that would lead to multiple playthroughs to transform the boss memories into each of their unique weapon options. It also involves teaming up with more or less every merchant and dungeon in the game, getting incredibly lucky with rare items dropped by enemies, and keeping a personal checklist of what you’re missing to know what you’re missing. then have to do. Elden Ring does include an achievement for getting all the “legendary” armaments, but most of them aren’t bad and only one or two are missing. to get everything is something next level, and in a world this big, a random dagger in a random chest in any place in the open world could be all you need to miss this, so you should be on top of your collection at all times to even stand a chance to unlock it.

And it will! Hopefully you enjoyed this week’s BS GS shenanigans and if you have ideas for other charities for future articles, drop them in the comments and we’ll investigate them. Are there any BS achievements of their own that would make Elden Ring an even harder completion? Let them hear!