One of my favourite traits of Fromsoft's work on their assorted Souls games is their ability to make worlds feel larger than they actually are. The way these games will have you be able to visually see in the distance places you will reach over ten hours in the future, or looking back and seeing where you journeyed from and feeling so small compared to this world around you. How the very existence of illusory walls makes it feel like there could be a secret hiding basically anywhere. Huge chunks of content being hidden in compelling, obtuse or even outright bizarre ways, with no concern for the notion of players missing out on literal entire regions or multiple major boss fights as a result, leading both to excitement and surprise when you manage to stumble upon these secrets or figure them out on your own, and to those amazing moments where you get to share discoveries with others or learn from them, the game repeatedly opening up to be even bigger and more mysterious somehow. I typically don't love the npc quests in these games but even those, with their habit of careening off-course as if some player's unfortunate choices unknowingly ruined their dungeon master's plans, make the world feel somehow larger than you and beyond your strict control.
This is also why I think lore videos for these games have ended up coming awfully close to just being their own miniature industry. You're always playing as someone showing up long after the main event has already concluded, with the history of these worlds and characters being something spoken of in riddles and hidden in item descriptions of the relics you find, etched into the environment around you. You have to piece together what happened to get the world to this state from incomplete information, often with the gaps leaving things up to player interpretation. Yet again this all leads to you feeling very small, and the world around you feeling incomprehensibly large with a history so rich that someone as inconsequential as some random undead/hunter/unkindled can't possibly hope to fully grasp all it.
A lot of this would be considered by many to go against a lot of principles of Industry Standard Good Game Design™, but the sum total of it is game worlds that become just endlessly fascinating and evocative to the people they connect with; it turns out designing games is a lot more than just fulfilling a bunch of heuristics on how games and narratives should look, and FromSoft's holistic approach to how the design and lore of these worlds interact with their mechanics is such a great example of this.
This is the environment into which Elden Ring is born. On the one hand an open world game feels almost inevitable in some sense; FromSoft has spent so much time designing game worlds that have their first priority set as making you feel miniscule contrasted with your environment, the player often feeling like a footnote in a long and storied history, and so going ahead and making these feelings come a bit less from smoke and mirrors and a bit more from something literal feels like, at the very least, something they must have been curious to experiment with ever since the original Dark Souls' deeply interlinked, almost Metroidvania-esque map design. On the other hand, isn't it a bit redundant? If they're already instilling these emotions in people what is there to gain from actual, physical vastness, and wildly excessive runtimes, and aren't there just too many costs involved in pushing your game to be this large? This forms the central conflict at the heart of Elden Ring's existence, and whilst I do largely have a lot of fondness for this game, laying out the conflict in this manner makes it very easy both to see why some people are so besotted with Elden Ring, and also to see why others feel like FromSoft jumped the shark here compared to their previous work. Towering, spectacular, intoxicating ambition meets the awkward reality of trying to make that sense of scale be something rendered so literally in a world where realising that takes unfathomable hours of labour.
If you had asked me what I thought of Elden Ring 30 hours into my playthrough I would have said it felt like one of the best games I'd ever played, and that I was anticipating the possible reality where it ends up becoming my favourite FromSoft game. This opening act for me was frankly magical, and really shows what FromSoft can bring to open world games as they apply many of the principles that they approached their previous Souls games with but on a grander scale. I'm going to avoid explicit spoilers here and make oblique references instead, but the manner in which I first discovered Caelid and Leyndell, how you are shown Siofra, and interacting with The Four Belfries for the first time, all rank as some of my favourite moments in gaming as multiple different tricks are taken advantage of, that follow through on FromSoft's usual strategies but writ unthinkably large, to impart a sense of scale, wonder, curiosity and awe on the player. Combine these tricks with how rich these environments are to explore, the handcrafted element that even the various catacombs or caves had to them, and the ways in which, in stark contrast with other open world games, ticking off lists and markers is heavily de-emphasised in favour of advocating for intrinsic motivation and player agency being much greater focal points of your journey, and I found exploring the Lands Between simply enchanting.
If you had asked me what I thought of Elden Ring 60 hours into my playthrough I would have said it was a really great game, but one that is not without sizable flaws. This is the point at which the cracks start to show as the sad reality of trying to make any open world game is you're going to need to re-use a lot of content to make that achievable. The Erdtree Avatar fight that I'd really enjoyed several hours into my playthrough had been repeated to the point where it had become mundane, the wriggly Tree Spirit I'd found in Stormveil Castle that really wasn't very fun to fight but was still interesting because it was a fairly unique encounter was, apparently, nowhere even close to being a unique encounter, and almost any boss that I found in a catacomb or cave would end up being dredged up again, sometimes multiple times, sometimes even as a normal mob enemy. Even some of the wonderful early-game surprises become diluted a bit as they're repeated, the recurrence of the walking mausoleum being the saddest example to me. The crafting system, that I touched only a handful of times in my entire playthrough, is very much a symptom of the open world format too; you need something you can scatter around the world for players to pick up, some reason for them to jump to that hard to reach ledge, but you can only put so many runes and swords and hats in the game so crafting materials start to seem like a necessity and yet it's hard to say that they really add anything to the game except more menus and a slight pang of disappointment when you finally fight your way to that shiny purple item and it turns out it's just another Arteria Leaf.
Despite this I understand that these design decisions are largely just a necessity in a game this large, and outside of them the game was a really great time for me at this point in my playthrough. Exploring was still lots of fun and whilst the exciting moments of discovery had become a bit less frequent they were still there, often delightful, and the quieter, emptier moments found in areas like the Altus Plateau made for a sense of palpable loneliness that served the game well. Build variety felt the best it ever has to the point where I was toying with the idea of a second playthrough later this year. Ranni's and Fia's questlines were very compelling to me, emotionally, narratively and in terms of the physical journeys they involve, and are among the highlights of the game. The bosses felt like a clear step down in quality from Dark Souls 3, but there were a handful of fights that were still really enjoyable to me in different ways, and the game has a great sense of spectacle that sold even some of its overwise more uneven fights.
By far the most impressive portion of the game at this point were its legacy dungeons though. Even the weakest ones among these are still largely fantastic, and the level design in the two highlights, Stormveil Castle and Leyndell, is among the finest work FromSoft has ever done; packed with secrets to an almost ludicrous extent, constantly looping back in on themselves in really cool ways, and with great encounter design throughout. I adored these portions of the game, but I could never fully shake the notion from my head that if the very best portions of this game are the bits that are contained to a single zone then why exactly is it open world?
Sadly, this is where things start to really drop off for me. My playthrough landed at a little over 90 hours and I'm honestly a little exhausted? Leyndell was the highlight of the game for me, and after this area was complete I was very satisfied with my experience and honestly pretty ready for the game to end soon but it just kept going.
A part of the problem here is that I'm not convinced a game like this was ever meant to be this long; the various Souls design tropes that are very entertaining in a shorter game start to wear thin when you're seeing an enemy with their back to you mournfully looking at an item on the ground for the 25th time. A part of this too is that reused content was starting to rear its head to an absurd extent; a beloved enemy type that I was thrilled to see be brought back and placed in a tonally appropriate area earlier in the game would go on to reappear a few more times in areas much less fitting to it, earlier enemies in general just get brought back far too much (the hands are a great example of this; I adored their first appearance and how well suited they were to that locale, and every appearance since felt like the game was just struggling to know what to fill the environments with), Erdtree Avatars, dragons and Tree Spirits showing up yet again would just start prompting eyerolls from me, even a storyline boss from earlier in the game could be found roaming out in the wild in multiple different places. In possibly the most insulting example a secret boss from earlier in the game, that felt very important from a lore perspective and which was very visually unique and impressive, ends up reappearing as the final boss of an otherwise inconsequential cave. This is the sad reality of trying to make a game this literally vast instead of simply instilling a sense of vastness.
Despite all of this I think I would still have mostly been onboard with the late-game stretch, or would have at least been more forgiving towards it, if all the bosses after you leave Leyndell didn't just...kind of suck? There are far too many ridiculous AoE attacks with some bosses having a few different variations of these, shockwave attacks that hit on multiple different frames and so feel very janky and unintuitive to dodge, ridiculous combo attack strings that would appear a couple times per game previously become the norm now instead, every boss had multiple attacks with ridiculous wind-ups (again, a thing that was used but sparingly so in previous games) to the point that fights feel weirdly disjointed and impossible to sight read, multiple bosses are placed in the same arena without any real concern for how these are going to interact with one another, windows to get in attacks are narrowed to the bare minimum especially for anyone who wants to play the game purely melee, and there are a handful of bosses that are gigantic to the point where you can only see their feet as you slash at them oblivious to whatever is actually happening. In two different cases with these oversized bosses I felt like I spent as much time charging across the arena to reach them whenever they ran away as I did actually engaging in combat.
Many of these late-game bosses are just not fun, poorly designed, and beating them for me felt less like I learnt the fight and played it well and more like I just got lucky and rng landed correctly. Even that exciting feeling of how much build variety the game had started to slip away at this point; the late-game requires that your build be incredibly powerful and severely limits what things are viable as a result. Maybe this is just a case of FromSoft just misbalancing things or having an off-day, a bunch of the bosses in Dark Souls 2 are very disappointing too so it's not like this is a first, but I think this is actually the final, and most frustrating, manifestation of the downsides of open world games. It's so hard to keep one-upping yourself over the course of a 90 hour playtime, in a game with a colossal number of boss fights, that the only way you can guarantee the bosses become even more spectacular is to start pushing them in the direction where they also start to feel unfair too, and with how big the game is leading to there being so much game to test it's easy to believe that maybe these bosses just weren't given as much playtesting as they should have as a result.
I see everyone talking about how Elden Ring refined open world games and is going to change them for years to come and whilst I do think there are a bunch of elements of Elden Ring's approach to the quasi-genre that make for a more satisfying, rewarding, and less cloying experience than what you'd find elsewhere, I think ultimately it made me feel like the best thing this game could do for open world games is convince more developers to just make tighter, more refined experiences instead.
I wouldn't blame someone for being just completely turned off of Elden Ring by these problems that crop up in this final stretch. It left a really sour taste in my mouth at points, even in between moments of still genuinely enchanting imagery and art direction. Ultimately though I really loved so much of my experience with Elden Ring in its earlier hours, and there are many moments from this game that will stick with me for a long time, so despite its fairly severe flaws I can't help but find a lot of love in my heart for it regardless. Elden Ring is a display both of the reasons I love FromSoft's approach to game development, and of why I hope they never make another open world game again.
This is also why I think lore videos for these games have ended up coming awfully close to just being their own miniature industry. You're always playing as someone showing up long after the main event has already concluded, with the history of these worlds and characters being something spoken of in riddles and hidden in item descriptions of the relics you find, etched into the environment around you. You have to piece together what happened to get the world to this state from incomplete information, often with the gaps leaving things up to player interpretation. Yet again this all leads to you feeling very small, and the world around you feeling incomprehensibly large with a history so rich that someone as inconsequential as some random undead/hunter/unkindled can't possibly hope to fully grasp all it.
A lot of this would be considered by many to go against a lot of principles of Industry Standard Good Game Design™, but the sum total of it is game worlds that become just endlessly fascinating and evocative to the people they connect with; it turns out designing games is a lot more than just fulfilling a bunch of heuristics on how games and narratives should look, and FromSoft's holistic approach to how the design and lore of these worlds interact with their mechanics is such a great example of this.
This is the environment into which Elden Ring is born. On the one hand an open world game feels almost inevitable in some sense; FromSoft has spent so much time designing game worlds that have their first priority set as making you feel miniscule contrasted with your environment, the player often feeling like a footnote in a long and storied history, and so going ahead and making these feelings come a bit less from smoke and mirrors and a bit more from something literal feels like, at the very least, something they must have been curious to experiment with ever since the original Dark Souls' deeply interlinked, almost Metroidvania-esque map design. On the other hand, isn't it a bit redundant? If they're already instilling these emotions in people what is there to gain from actual, physical vastness, and wildly excessive runtimes, and aren't there just too many costs involved in pushing your game to be this large? This forms the central conflict at the heart of Elden Ring's existence, and whilst I do largely have a lot of fondness for this game, laying out the conflict in this manner makes it very easy both to see why some people are so besotted with Elden Ring, and also to see why others feel like FromSoft jumped the shark here compared to their previous work. Towering, spectacular, intoxicating ambition meets the awkward reality of trying to make that sense of scale be something rendered so literally in a world where realising that takes unfathomable hours of labour.
If you had asked me what I thought of Elden Ring 30 hours into my playthrough I would have said it felt like one of the best games I'd ever played, and that I was anticipating the possible reality where it ends up becoming my favourite FromSoft game. This opening act for me was frankly magical, and really shows what FromSoft can bring to open world games as they apply many of the principles that they approached their previous Souls games with but on a grander scale. I'm going to avoid explicit spoilers here and make oblique references instead, but the manner in which I first discovered Caelid and Leyndell, how you are shown Siofra, and interacting with The Four Belfries for the first time, all rank as some of my favourite moments in gaming as multiple different tricks are taken advantage of, that follow through on FromSoft's usual strategies but writ unthinkably large, to impart a sense of scale, wonder, curiosity and awe on the player. Combine these tricks with how rich these environments are to explore, the handcrafted element that even the various catacombs or caves had to them, and the ways in which, in stark contrast with other open world games, ticking off lists and markers is heavily de-emphasised in favour of advocating for intrinsic motivation and player agency being much greater focal points of your journey, and I found exploring the Lands Between simply enchanting.
If you had asked me what I thought of Elden Ring 60 hours into my playthrough I would have said it was a really great game, but one that is not without sizable flaws. This is the point at which the cracks start to show as the sad reality of trying to make any open world game is you're going to need to re-use a lot of content to make that achievable. The Erdtree Avatar fight that I'd really enjoyed several hours into my playthrough had been repeated to the point where it had become mundane, the wriggly Tree Spirit I'd found in Stormveil Castle that really wasn't very fun to fight but was still interesting because it was a fairly unique encounter was, apparently, nowhere even close to being a unique encounter, and almost any boss that I found in a catacomb or cave would end up being dredged up again, sometimes multiple times, sometimes even as a normal mob enemy. Even some of the wonderful early-game surprises become diluted a bit as they're repeated, the recurrence of the walking mausoleum being the saddest example to me. The crafting system, that I touched only a handful of times in my entire playthrough, is very much a symptom of the open world format too; you need something you can scatter around the world for players to pick up, some reason for them to jump to that hard to reach ledge, but you can only put so many runes and swords and hats in the game so crafting materials start to seem like a necessity and yet it's hard to say that they really add anything to the game except more menus and a slight pang of disappointment when you finally fight your way to that shiny purple item and it turns out it's just another Arteria Leaf.
Despite this I understand that these design decisions are largely just a necessity in a game this large, and outside of them the game was a really great time for me at this point in my playthrough. Exploring was still lots of fun and whilst the exciting moments of discovery had become a bit less frequent they were still there, often delightful, and the quieter, emptier moments found in areas like the Altus Plateau made for a sense of palpable loneliness that served the game well. Build variety felt the best it ever has to the point where I was toying with the idea of a second playthrough later this year. Ranni's and Fia's questlines were very compelling to me, emotionally, narratively and in terms of the physical journeys they involve, and are among the highlights of the game. The bosses felt like a clear step down in quality from Dark Souls 3, but there were a handful of fights that were still really enjoyable to me in different ways, and the game has a great sense of spectacle that sold even some of its overwise more uneven fights.
By far the most impressive portion of the game at this point were its legacy dungeons though. Even the weakest ones among these are still largely fantastic, and the level design in the two highlights, Stormveil Castle and Leyndell, is among the finest work FromSoft has ever done; packed with secrets to an almost ludicrous extent, constantly looping back in on themselves in really cool ways, and with great encounter design throughout. I adored these portions of the game, but I could never fully shake the notion from my head that if the very best portions of this game are the bits that are contained to a single zone then why exactly is it open world?
Sadly, this is where things start to really drop off for me. My playthrough landed at a little over 90 hours and I'm honestly a little exhausted? Leyndell was the highlight of the game for me, and after this area was complete I was very satisfied with my experience and honestly pretty ready for the game to end soon but it just kept going.
A part of the problem here is that I'm not convinced a game like this was ever meant to be this long; the various Souls design tropes that are very entertaining in a shorter game start to wear thin when you're seeing an enemy with their back to you mournfully looking at an item on the ground for the 25th time. A part of this too is that reused content was starting to rear its head to an absurd extent; a beloved enemy type that I was thrilled to see be brought back and placed in a tonally appropriate area earlier in the game would go on to reappear a few more times in areas much less fitting to it, earlier enemies in general just get brought back far too much (the hands are a great example of this; I adored their first appearance and how well suited they were to that locale, and every appearance since felt like the game was just struggling to know what to fill the environments with), Erdtree Avatars, dragons and Tree Spirits showing up yet again would just start prompting eyerolls from me, even a storyline boss from earlier in the game could be found roaming out in the wild in multiple different places. In possibly the most insulting example a secret boss from earlier in the game, that felt very important from a lore perspective and which was very visually unique and impressive, ends up reappearing as the final boss of an otherwise inconsequential cave. This is the sad reality of trying to make a game this literally vast instead of simply instilling a sense of vastness.
Despite all of this I think I would still have mostly been onboard with the late-game stretch, or would have at least been more forgiving towards it, if all the bosses after you leave Leyndell didn't just...kind of suck? There are far too many ridiculous AoE attacks with some bosses having a few different variations of these, shockwave attacks that hit on multiple different frames and so feel very janky and unintuitive to dodge, ridiculous combo attack strings that would appear a couple times per game previously become the norm now instead, every boss had multiple attacks with ridiculous wind-ups (again, a thing that was used but sparingly so in previous games) to the point that fights feel weirdly disjointed and impossible to sight read, multiple bosses are placed in the same arena without any real concern for how these are going to interact with one another, windows to get in attacks are narrowed to the bare minimum especially for anyone who wants to play the game purely melee, and there are a handful of bosses that are gigantic to the point where you can only see their feet as you slash at them oblivious to whatever is actually happening. In two different cases with these oversized bosses I felt like I spent as much time charging across the arena to reach them whenever they ran away as I did actually engaging in combat.
Many of these late-game bosses are just not fun, poorly designed, and beating them for me felt less like I learnt the fight and played it well and more like I just got lucky and rng landed correctly. Even that exciting feeling of how much build variety the game had started to slip away at this point; the late-game requires that your build be incredibly powerful and severely limits what things are viable as a result. Maybe this is just a case of FromSoft just misbalancing things or having an off-day, a bunch of the bosses in Dark Souls 2 are very disappointing too so it's not like this is a first, but I think this is actually the final, and most frustrating, manifestation of the downsides of open world games. It's so hard to keep one-upping yourself over the course of a 90 hour playtime, in a game with a colossal number of boss fights, that the only way you can guarantee the bosses become even more spectacular is to start pushing them in the direction where they also start to feel unfair too, and with how big the game is leading to there being so much game to test it's easy to believe that maybe these bosses just weren't given as much playtesting as they should have as a result.
I see everyone talking about how Elden Ring refined open world games and is going to change them for years to come and whilst I do think there are a bunch of elements of Elden Ring's approach to the quasi-genre that make for a more satisfying, rewarding, and less cloying experience than what you'd find elsewhere, I think ultimately it made me feel like the best thing this game could do for open world games is convince more developers to just make tighter, more refined experiences instead.
I wouldn't blame someone for being just completely turned off of Elden Ring by these problems that crop up in this final stretch. It left a really sour taste in my mouth at points, even in between moments of still genuinely enchanting imagery and art direction. Ultimately though I really loved so much of my experience with Elden Ring in its earlier hours, and there are many moments from this game that will stick with me for a long time, so despite its fairly severe flaws I can't help but find a lot of love in my heart for it regardless. Elden Ring is a display both of the reasons I love FromSoft's approach to game development, and of why I hope they never make another open world game again.