Life lessons that Elden Ring can teach us

Intro

Elden Ring is an outstanding game for tons of reasons, but the most catching for me was that how it messes with your brain regarding problem-solving. It teaches you how to be patient, even if you want to run and scream in panic, how to pick your enemies and actually prepare for a fight. Half of the game happens not on computer, but inside your mind. So I thought it would be fun to figure out what it can teach us outside of gaming station.

If you never played Elden Ring, it's not required for this article, even gaming experience in general is not needed 👌

👝 Starting stats matters, but not in long term

Elden Ring: There are different classes to start the game with, if you pick samurai or vagabond, then your first few locations and first few bosses will be noticeably easier, than if you start as a wretch. But these differences won't be any noticeable when you go to mid or late game.

Life: It will be obviously easier to get into coding career if you were born in a first world country with a rich parents, but it doesn't mean you should give up if you weren't a part of a lucky few. Once you made your way to the first job opportunity, starting background won't almost matter. Once you have a few years experience, it won't matter at all.

😓 Don't knock the closed door, prepare instead

Elden Ring: First NPC you meet will send you to the castle, when you will most probably be obliterated, because recommended level is around 30, but you will approach it with 10th or 15th. So gamewise, you need to explore other locations, level up and upgrade the gear before approaching this bad fella.

Life: Sometimes you may face the issue or learning topic, which looks far beyond that you can comprehend, e.g. computer science theme or data science math. If it's hard right now, it doesn't mean it will be hard in some foreseeable future. Try to get back to basics or learn related topics, once you have enough context, you will be able to tackle the original issue with much more ease than before. Just don't rush into closed doors with no avail, prepare and break them.

🗡️ Equip a better gear

Elden Ring: There are enemies, which deals high amount of special damage type, e.g. final boss and holy damage. If you spend some time gathering the right armor and talismans, you can buff your holy damage negation up to 70-80%, which will make your final fight MUCH easier than if you had normal 10-20% holy damage negation.

Life: There are different tools for different needs, if you can't make your instrument to solve the task for you, maybe you need a better tool. If you need caching there is Redis, if you need text search there is ElasticSearch or Algolia. Not everything needed to be solved via PostgreSQL and backend.

🌐 Search for guides and best practices online

Elden Ring: Some bosses as Malenia or Rykard have strong weird move sets, which makes fighting them kinda hard. Sometimes the fastest way to tackle it is to just search on YouTube guides, there are plenty of good ones about how to beat each and every boss in Elden Ring.

Life: You probably know about Stack Overflow already, you search there if you see an unusual bug, but the same thing applies to each problem you have. If you need to implement caching, but not sure what approach to use, just google it, search conferences talks on YouTube, browse Reddit. A lot of people out there are trying hard to make these articles and videos to make your life easier, why not appreciate it and actually get help?

🤝 Ask a friend for help

Elden Ring: For the majority of bosses and tough enemies, you can summon ghosts to assist you in the fight. Some attract bosses attention, some deal tons of damage. Using them will give you some room to heal, buff, cast spells and get back to fight recovered. Also, you can summon friends and fight tough bosses in co-op.

Life: Same thing applies to the real life, it's always better to have someone to discuss the issue. Sometimes the only act of discussion will help you find the solution yourself, just because you structured your knowledge. Some people also use ducks, some people like pair-programming. Don't be afraid to ask for help, this will help to strengthen bonds with coworkers, today they help you, tomorrow you will help them.

🧀 Try to cheese it

Elden Ring: Even if you are well-prepared for a boss, your level is ok, your gear is ok, but you still can't beat it, sometimes there is another way to deal with it. You can just cheese it aka abuse some mechanics to defeat the boss without much effort. Some people say it's bad, some people say it's ok, but feels like it's up to you to choose to use it or not, at the end, we all just want to have fun and beat the game.

Life: As in the games, there are ways to cheese things in life. If you can't get to a job interview because every recruiter just rejects you based on your few experience years, maybe it's possible to add an extra year to the CV, so you can get to an actual interview and present yourself and answer all the tricky questions yourself.

🧙‍♂️ Experiment with different builds

Elden Ring: The game is kinda long, it is about 60 hours, so you may get bored at some point to fight the same style as you started. You can reset all your skill points and choose a completely different build. You were a warrior with a colossal sword? Maybe it's time to be a mage, paladin or rogue 🤔 Or even mage with a colossal sword, why not?

Life: You're also not obliged to code from first year of university to the deathbed. Try something new, dive into design or product management or machine learning or crypto or anything else you are interested in. You also don't need to switch completely, try to do 50% of coding and 50% of something else and see how it goes. Try different things, pick which works for you.

🧘 Instead of panicking, calm down and breath

Elden Ring: There are so many moments, when you are overwhelmed with things, which are happening on the screen, e.g. a massive dragon prepared to breathe fire, you want to run away by your instinct, but the safest place is actually under his belly. Same thing is when you see a boss rushing to you, you want to roll back, but the safest spot is actually behind the boss, so you need to roll right into the scary enemy.

Life: Keeping your brain calm is an essential skill in life, if your production server is down, the last thing you want to do is to restart everything you can randomly and expect luck. If someone calls you and asks for money urgently, the last thing you need to do is to send them right away. Keeping yourself calm and cold headed is also counterintuitive, but important in adult life.

Final thoughts

The most important thing I learned from Elden Ring is that if I can't solve the issue, it's not the end of the world, I will be able to approach it one way or another, just need to step back, breath, think, prepare and try again something different.

Just don't give up, no matter what are you doing, you will make it sooner or later, just keep going and that's it.

Also, if you never played Elden Ring, give it a try, it is worth your time, it's not that hard, but also it's not that casual.

I took some photos from Google, so referencing the sources:

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