I continue to wade my way through Elden Ring much later than everyone else, and what I’ve found is pretty much what everyone else has found. I don’t have some massively contrarian take here that Actually, Elden Ring Is Bad, because I mean, it isn’t. It’s incredible, and easily one of the best games of the last few years, and a likely shoe-in for GOTY 2022 barring some mindblowing showing by Starfield.
One of the main things I’ve experienced in Elden Ring is that its open world is the polar opposite in so many ways from more or less every other game I’ve played in this genre, even ones I’ve liked such as Skyrim way in the past or Genshin Impact most recently. It’s probably the most like Breath of the Wild, and yet ten times as big and as dense and as challenging.
The key lesson through all of this is that FromSoftware trusts its players. It trusts that its players are not stupid, specifically.
Elden Ring wants you to explore and discover its world on your own, and if not on your own, then through scraps of paper left by players around the world more or less written in code about what you should do or what you can expect.
Even in a game like Skyrim, you end up with a long, long list of quest markers and journal entries about X and Y objectives to complete. In more modern, Ubisoft-style games, your map is littered with countless icons and you have multiple objectives plastered on your screen at all times.
Elden Ring has none of that. It has a main questline which is vaguely, “move toward that giant glowing tree,” but it doesn’t demand you do so with any real urgency. It has sidequests, and while some are easy enough to understand (“go clean out this castle for this lost lord”) others are far more cryptic and require you puzzle out your objectives yourself. The same goes for navigating dungeons and finding the game’s hidden bosses and weapons and gear.
If you really want to hunt everything down, you are probably not going to be able to do it on your own, and you can consult the online guide industry which was made for such a situation. But generally speaking, the experience of discovering things on your own is what makes Elden Ring special, and the game allows this without giant glowing arrows pointing at everything you should see. If you miss stuff, you miss stuff, and that’s what repeat playthrough and NG+ is for.
Taking that open world philosophy and combining it with traditional Soulsborne-ish combat and difficulty makes this easily one of the best open world RPGs in history. It’s a genre that is going to outlive us all, but if it does so, I think it would be best if more companies followed From’s lead here. Clearly, in this case, that has also translated into mass sales, so that’s going to make more ears perk up than usual, even if we’ve known that Darks Souls games and Bloodborne have been beloved this whole time.
I also believe you have to build this in from the base, to some extent. Turning up the difficult of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to max and turning off map indicators in your options is not going to produce the same effect. It has to be mixed in with the batter from the beginning, and you can’t fake your way to this kind of wonderous world to explore.
I’ll have a lot more to say about Elden Ring as I continue my time with the game, but easily this is the aspect that’s stood out the most to me in this early period. I’ve just really never seen anything quite like it.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
