I have 300 hours in the game and I've only seen the default ending 🫠

Yeah, this bummed me out in the game, a bit. Not like I was not expecting it though.

FromSoft sort of brought it upon themselves with their design philosophy to be fair, going back at least as far as Dark Souls. Selling a DLC and having it locked behind a convoluted puzzle you wouldn't figure out without a guide was certainly a choice, for example.

It is very fun if you want to be sure that you aren't missing anything the game has to offer. You never know when a game may put something very obscure in a very limited timeframe.

In the case of elden ring or from software games in general NPC's are usually so cryptic that solving the puzzles/quests would take you a lot of trial and error which isnt very fun for me.

There are some things you just can't do without a guide/wiki. For example the achievements of "collect every weapon/ring".

Also, the NPC quests are just undoable. There are basically no hints as to how to do them, and there are many ways to permanently lose the quest. Doing correctly a NPC quest going blind as an average player consists of plain luck.

I think most people have used guides, but I wonder how much guide people use. Take me for instance, I play blind as much as possible, but I look up a guide to see if there are any weapons that I can miss in a playthrough.

It isn't. Having to look up everything about a game to know how to play doesn't make a fun game. I quit games with convoluted solutions. I'm not a Dark Souls player for that reason.

I typically play the FromSoft games without a guide the first time through, then look up what I missed for subsequent playthroughs.

You don't really need to follow a "build" guide because it's not really that kind of game. There are a lot of weapons to choose from, and some choices in rings, but it's not like Path of Exile where you have a ton of interconnected, semi permanent changes.

Eh, if you want specific endings you need a guide or you can spend hundreds of hours finding and talking to each npc after each boss fight. I don’t have that kind of time and I don’t like getting locked out of things because I only talked to the creepy dead looking guy five times instead of six.

I can get it for one or two really hard puzzles in a game, but elden ring at least had no need for a guide at all

Arguably the first Dark Souls is one of these. Most of the classes push you towards shields as the cornerstone of defense. The studio felt like this overemphasis on shields was such a mistake they took 2 whole games (Bloodborne and Sekiro) in an almost entirely shield-free direction to teach players there were other ways.

Pyromancy (and magic in general) were also undervalued in DS1 initially due to how the game presents them. People eventually figured out that Pyro is so OP you don't even need to use leveling with it to have an easy time.

Elden Ring's tutorial consists of a single little cave that merely tells you all the basics of the game (how to move, your basic attack buttons, dodging, blocking, parrying, backstabs, sneaking, posture breaking and guard breaks) and then gives you an emote to perform as if to say "have fun" on your way out. The best part, to me coming from previous From games, is that you can skip it. It's just off to the right from where you start the game proper and if you don't want that emote, you can just go off to play the game. All the other games have a forced tutorial section (you can still sprint through it though).

The game is amazing. It was easily GOTY for me when I got it and I dumped around 300 hours into it. That said, there are a lot of players out there that really deserve to enjoy it, but it’s insanely tough and not ideal for some people, especially if you’re someone that plays mostly for the story. So I appreciate that the ER devs are thinking about this to some degree.

Tbf both of those are completely optional. But to continue tbf, the lord souls are damn near impossible to find if you don't have the golden fog gate locations memorized / didn't find them before the lordvessel in the first place.

Still my favorite soulslike tho lol