My brother who hasn’t played a video game in 10 YEARS just got a Series X and Elden Ring as one of his first games. He struggled a lot at first but he never made the mistake of confusing a merchant for an enemy lol…he eventually beat Margit and even got decent at parrying him once I got him an iron roundshield and showed him how. He decided the game was too hard after getting stuck on Godrick but despite that praised the game for its art and the scale of the world.

And speaking of gatekeeping, any time I got stuck in a souls game you know what I did? Looked up a guide on gamefaqs or the wiki. Or watched a YouTube video. All managed by the community. Such gatekeeping. The person in the image sounds like a gatekeeper by trashing one of the highest rated games of all time with their “game dev” credentials.