Elden Ring Hype (no spoilers) (Patreon)

I recently received some of those Elden Ring chocolates, courtesy of Namco Bandai!

It was the first time I've ever been gifted any kind of promotional video game content, and I'm not even entirely sure how it came about. They reached out to me, so I must've gotten on their radar. But it was all still kind of mysterious. I basically just filled out an interest form for a promotional opportunity, which meant answering a bunch of questions without even really knowing what was being offered.

I was pleasantly surprised when the chocolates arrived, but then figured that was probably it. Well, I was quite wrong! I received an e-mail yesterday with download codes for both a Playstation and PC version of the game, and I was also whitelisted for early access. Holy cow!

I know the whole content-creators-getting-a-special-headstart thing can be controversial, but this whole experience has been kind of mindblowing and very encouraging. In the end, it doesn't make too huge a difference in terms of me being able to make content in a timely fashion (more on this in a moment); The couple extra days' head start is going to be offset by having plans this weekend, so come Monday I'll likely be around the same place in the game as everyone else. But this doesn't mean I'm not incredibly thankful for it, I was anxious about FOMO and falling behind this weekend and quite the opposite happened. I'm very, very lucky to be in a group of people given a bit of an advance, and two free versions for different platforms that I absolutely would have otherwise double-dipped on.

I've already had a few "what the fuck?!" moments, things in the early game that still surprised me after having participated in the Network Test. I don't want to spoil anything but I'll just say for now that I'm really enjoying the game so far and I can't stop thinking about it.

Bear in mind that this doesn't necessarily mean that Elden Ring Dissected is right around the corner. The sorts of deep dives I like to do don't usually lend themselves to stuff that can be done soon after a game's release. I might consider redoing my "How Elden Ring is fixing..." vids with more finalized info, and it's entirely possible I'll get sucked into some testing weirdness that I'll want to make videos about, but I can't say for sure until I get there.

What this does mean is that I've been a little distracted this week on progressing my DS2 Iron Keep episode. I'm a little over halfway finished with the script, and next week I'll be balancing my time between working on that and Elden Ring.