Elden Ring is a very entertaining videogame.
The movement and combat is the most polished of any Souls style game developed by From Software to date (besides Bloodborne perhaps), there's a bunch of cool abilities and spells which the game does a good job at encouraging you to try out and experiment with even when playing non-magic builds, riding around on a horse is fun and feels surprisingly intuitive to Souls style gameplay, and you can enjoy all of this is in a truly massive and often times beautiful open world with Hundreds of Hours of Content™. This is "junk food gaming" at its absolute finest.
Elden Ring could have also been so, so much better.
When I first saw the announcement trailer for Elden Ring and subsequently heard that it was going to be a Souls style game, but with an open world, I was hoping for, if not outright anticipating a truly special take on the formula, which blends the weird and wonderful aspects of Souls style level design with open world progression.
I was imagining vast, non-euclidian labyrinths, dense fog-filled forests which warp the player's sense of perspective and scale, giant Shadow of the Colossus style bosses which traverse the world, some as passive wanderers and others as active pursuers. A game where the world itself is another enemy to defeat and puzzle to solve, but can also lend a helping hand to more observant players through a wealth of environmental interactions.
All of this in a setting which takes unique inspiration from traditional depictions of fairy tales alongside a helping of Celtic and Norse folklore to distinguish itself from Dark Souls, like how Bloodborne used the unique inspiration of Lovecraftian fiction to effectively distinguish itself from Dark Souls whilst having similar game mechanics.
What we ended up with is a bunch of generic swamps and fields dotted with ubisoft-style enemy camps and the occasional scripted encounter against a dragon or yet another big guy in armour wielding a large weapon. The lore of Elden Ring, while interesting and presented just as well as any other modern From Soft game, doesn't really do anything to make itself distinctive from Dark Souls.
I like to believe that the version of Elden Ring that is actually an industry-shaking masterpiece is out there somewhere, if even just in the heads of certain developers and fans, but the Elden Ring we're playing is a literal world of missed potential. Now I understand I am probably sounding contrarian, maybe even melodramatic here, and I admit that I'm not exactly the biggest fan of open world game design even at the best of times so I may be biased, as such I'll take some time to elaborate on my issues with Elden Ring's gameplay and setting:
It's no exaggeration to say that the open world is the main draw of Elden Ring, as evidenced by the fact that most of the game's content is in the huge world that is The Lands Between, and various standard Souls mechanics have been changed slightly to account for open world progression. To give credit where its due, the world in Elden Ring is massive and beautiful, at the same time it is capable of showing a restraint that feels refreshing compared to many other AAA games, with its comfortably minimalist UI and lack of annoying checklist side quest markers. Unfortunately, this is where my praises of Elden Ring's open world end.
Elden Ring's world feels like less of an actual, breathing world and more like a painting. It's pretty for sure, but it's next to completely static and falls into the tedious open world loop of move to new place, clear enemy camps, maybe fight a boss or two, pick up loot, rinse and repeat.
I've seen plenty of people compare Elden Ring's open world to Breath of the Wild, or even saying that Elden Ring surpasses BotW, but I just never saw this at any moment in my 55 hour playthrough. For all of BotW's many flaws, BotW excelled at making you feel like a guest of Hyrule. The world was rich with many different environmental interactions and you needed to respect the game's environment to survive. More skilled/knowledgeable players could take advantage of the interactions to perform tricks that allow them to traverse the world faster and more efficiently.
In comparison, Elden Ring feels like something more akin to Far Cry 3, where you can't do a whole lot besides move around and kill enemies. Hell, even Genshin fucking Impact has considerably more environmental interaction and variety in its open world compared to Elden Ring, since at least that game has scripted elemental reactions and environmental puzzles to solve. The only things that could even constitute as environmental interaction I found in my playthrough of Elden Ring were that non-threatening storms could appear in certain areas at night and very few special enemy types and bosses would appear only at night. There's also a surprising amount of invisible walls that railroad progression and in the worst cases, punish players for jumping across a gap to what they would reasonably think is a secret area. For the so-called "greatest open world of all time", this feels pathetic.
Others on this website have already talked plenty about the reuse of discoveries/boss fights in Elden Ring, so I won't elaborate much on that here, but it really can't be understated how much this further makes Elden Ring feel static. The aforementioned restraint goes out of the window when you keep seeing the giant walking cathedrals and erdtree avatars in each new area you get to. This feels like the most "AAA" FromSoft title to date, and you can tell that a lot of magic and soul has been sacrificed to the great altar of Content.
While exploring the world of Elden Ring, it's inevitable that you will come across dungeons pretty regularly which serve as both a break and distinction from the open world. These come in two main varieties: optional underground dungeons, and what the community has come to call Legacy Dungeons (some of which are also optional).
To avoid dancing around the issue, the underground dungeons are bad. They take the form of either mines, caverns or crypts, and most of the dungeons in these three archetypes repeat the same ideas and enemy types constantly even in Limgrave - the game's first region. At the end you get a boss that typically represents the bottom tier of Elden Ring's many boss fights. There's not much else to say other than that these dungeons are trash and I stopped bothering with them after the first 10 or so hours of my playthrough. Some of them are so badly designed that I refuse to believe that they weren't procedurally generated in some way.
The Legacy Dungeons can be described as areas in the style of previous modern FromSoft titles scattered across the open world of Elden Ring. Each of these dungeons are an oasis in the proverbial desert of the static open world. Once I was in the middle of Stormveil Castle, I had already decided to myself that the legacy dungeons were my favourite areas in Elden Ring and this impression lasted all the way to the end of my first playthrough.
At the same time however, these Legacy Dungeons aren't anything amazing. While they are as well designed as Dark Souls 3's areas, they also suffer from the same issue as Dark Souls 3's areas that they feel iterative at this point. Exploring a large castle with cleverly-placed shortcuts that loop around in satisfying ways is still fun, but it also evokes feelings of "been there, done that". It also doesn't help that most of the Legacy Dungeons in Elden Ring are castles of some kind.
The only Legacy Dungeons that felt like something new were the locations in the underground section of the world (not to be confused with the aforementioned crappy underground dungeons), and it's a good thing that best girl Ranni's side quest has you exploring most of these areas.
This game has a ton of boss fights to find and overcome. I glanced on the wiki that including repeated battles, there are at least 120 (!!) boss fights in Elden Ring. This is a massive step up from previous FromSoft titles (and most other games in existence). Players who are just looking for a completionist challenge will have a field day here.
However, you can tell that quantity over quality was the focus with the boss design in Elden Ring, and in a general sense the bosses in Elden Ring feel like the strongest culmination yet of the misguided design priorities at FromSoft ever since Dark Souls 2.
Gone are the interesting, puzzling encounters of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1, all bosses must be homogenised into being flashy, fast, high execution skill tests, with an increasing presence of annoying tricks such as attack animations that are delayed to the point of being unintuitive and unfun to dodge that are only there to keep veterans from getting too complacent.
These games are action RPGs, so of course there's nothing wrong with boss fights including an element of testing mechanical skill, but the simple matter of fact is that while Souls style games are certainly challenging, the combat systems themselves lack depth. As such, there's not really any mechanical skills that can be tested in these fights outside of dodge roll timings and capitalising on punish windows. There are still some bosses that I greatly enjoyed in Elden Ring, such as Radahn (who is closest to what I was hoping boss fights in this game would be like), Rennala and the second phase of Maleketh, but the idea of going through over 120 fights that ultimately boil down to testing the same couple of skills is one that will inevitably become a tedious slog towards the end.
There are plenty of other, more nitpicky issues I have with Elden Ring that I could talk about, including but not limited to not being able to talk to NPCs while on horseback, the lock-on system still failing to focus on the enemy that's closest to you when there's many enemies charging at you from different distances, and FromSoft's previous title: Sekiro, actually having better QoL than Elden Ring in various ways, but this review is already long enough.
Elden Ring is a good timesink while it lasts, and part of me respects it for just how ambitious FromSoft were with the scope of this game, but at the same time, it misses the mark in so many ways and tries to hide these ways with the smoke and mirrors that are the size and beauty of its game world. Once you look past that, Elden Ring feels like an iterative game, which has a lot of good ideas but fails to fully commit to any of them out of a desire to be as "AAA" as possible.
I know my more critical take on Elden Ring probably feels contrarian as of the time of writing this review, but once the hype fully wears off a year or two from now, I'm confident that the community consensus regarding this game will be much closer to my outlook.
The movement and combat is the most polished of any Souls style game developed by From Software to date (besides Bloodborne perhaps), there's a bunch of cool abilities and spells which the game does a good job at encouraging you to try out and experiment with even when playing non-magic builds, riding around on a horse is fun and feels surprisingly intuitive to Souls style gameplay, and you can enjoy all of this is in a truly massive and often times beautiful open world with Hundreds of Hours of Content™. This is "junk food gaming" at its absolute finest.
Elden Ring could have also been so, so much better.
When I first saw the announcement trailer for Elden Ring and subsequently heard that it was going to be a Souls style game, but with an open world, I was hoping for, if not outright anticipating a truly special take on the formula, which blends the weird and wonderful aspects of Souls style level design with open world progression.
I was imagining vast, non-euclidian labyrinths, dense fog-filled forests which warp the player's sense of perspective and scale, giant Shadow of the Colossus style bosses which traverse the world, some as passive wanderers and others as active pursuers. A game where the world itself is another enemy to defeat and puzzle to solve, but can also lend a helping hand to more observant players through a wealth of environmental interactions.
All of this in a setting which takes unique inspiration from traditional depictions of fairy tales alongside a helping of Celtic and Norse folklore to distinguish itself from Dark Souls, like how Bloodborne used the unique inspiration of Lovecraftian fiction to effectively distinguish itself from Dark Souls whilst having similar game mechanics.
What we ended up with is a bunch of generic swamps and fields dotted with ubisoft-style enemy camps and the occasional scripted encounter against a dragon or yet another big guy in armour wielding a large weapon. The lore of Elden Ring, while interesting and presented just as well as any other modern From Soft game, doesn't really do anything to make itself distinctive from Dark Souls.
I like to believe that the version of Elden Ring that is actually an industry-shaking masterpiece is out there somewhere, if even just in the heads of certain developers and fans, but the Elden Ring we're playing is a literal world of missed potential. Now I understand I am probably sounding contrarian, maybe even melodramatic here, and I admit that I'm not exactly the biggest fan of open world game design even at the best of times so I may be biased, as such I'll take some time to elaborate on my issues with Elden Ring's gameplay and setting:
It's no exaggeration to say that the open world is the main draw of Elden Ring, as evidenced by the fact that most of the game's content is in the huge world that is The Lands Between, and various standard Souls mechanics have been changed slightly to account for open world progression. To give credit where its due, the world in Elden Ring is massive and beautiful, at the same time it is capable of showing a restraint that feels refreshing compared to many other AAA games, with its comfortably minimalist UI and lack of annoying checklist side quest markers. Unfortunately, this is where my praises of Elden Ring's open world end.
Elden Ring's world feels like less of an actual, breathing world and more like a painting. It's pretty for sure, but it's next to completely static and falls into the tedious open world loop of move to new place, clear enemy camps, maybe fight a boss or two, pick up loot, rinse and repeat.
I've seen plenty of people compare Elden Ring's open world to Breath of the Wild, or even saying that Elden Ring surpasses BotW, but I just never saw this at any moment in my 55 hour playthrough. For all of BotW's many flaws, BotW excelled at making you feel like a guest of Hyrule. The world was rich with many different environmental interactions and you needed to respect the game's environment to survive. More skilled/knowledgeable players could take advantage of the interactions to perform tricks that allow them to traverse the world faster and more efficiently.
In comparison, Elden Ring feels like something more akin to Far Cry 3, where you can't do a whole lot besides move around and kill enemies. Hell, even Genshin fucking Impact has considerably more environmental interaction and variety in its open world compared to Elden Ring, since at least that game has scripted elemental reactions and environmental puzzles to solve. The only things that could even constitute as environmental interaction I found in my playthrough of Elden Ring were that non-threatening storms could appear in certain areas at night and very few special enemy types and bosses would appear only at night. There's also a surprising amount of invisible walls that railroad progression and in the worst cases, punish players for jumping across a gap to what they would reasonably think is a secret area. For the so-called "greatest open world of all time", this feels pathetic.
Others on this website have already talked plenty about the reuse of discoveries/boss fights in Elden Ring, so I won't elaborate much on that here, but it really can't be understated how much this further makes Elden Ring feel static. The aforementioned restraint goes out of the window when you keep seeing the giant walking cathedrals and erdtree avatars in each new area you get to. This feels like the most "AAA" FromSoft title to date, and you can tell that a lot of magic and soul has been sacrificed to the great altar of Content.
While exploring the world of Elden Ring, it's inevitable that you will come across dungeons pretty regularly which serve as both a break and distinction from the open world. These come in two main varieties: optional underground dungeons, and what the community has come to call Legacy Dungeons (some of which are also optional).
To avoid dancing around the issue, the underground dungeons are bad. They take the form of either mines, caverns or crypts, and most of the dungeons in these three archetypes repeat the same ideas and enemy types constantly even in Limgrave - the game's first region. At the end you get a boss that typically represents the bottom tier of Elden Ring's many boss fights. There's not much else to say other than that these dungeons are trash and I stopped bothering with them after the first 10 or so hours of my playthrough. Some of them are so badly designed that I refuse to believe that they weren't procedurally generated in some way.
The Legacy Dungeons can be described as areas in the style of previous modern FromSoft titles scattered across the open world of Elden Ring. Each of these dungeons are an oasis in the proverbial desert of the static open world. Once I was in the middle of Stormveil Castle, I had already decided to myself that the legacy dungeons were my favourite areas in Elden Ring and this impression lasted all the way to the end of my first playthrough.
At the same time however, these Legacy Dungeons aren't anything amazing. While they are as well designed as Dark Souls 3's areas, they also suffer from the same issue as Dark Souls 3's areas that they feel iterative at this point. Exploring a large castle with cleverly-placed shortcuts that loop around in satisfying ways is still fun, but it also evokes feelings of "been there, done that". It also doesn't help that most of the Legacy Dungeons in Elden Ring are castles of some kind.
The only Legacy Dungeons that felt like something new were the locations in the underground section of the world (not to be confused with the aforementioned crappy underground dungeons), and it's a good thing that best girl Ranni's side quest has you exploring most of these areas.
This game has a ton of boss fights to find and overcome. I glanced on the wiki that including repeated battles, there are at least 120 (!!) boss fights in Elden Ring. This is a massive step up from previous FromSoft titles (and most other games in existence). Players who are just looking for a completionist challenge will have a field day here.
However, you can tell that quantity over quality was the focus with the boss design in Elden Ring, and in a general sense the bosses in Elden Ring feel like the strongest culmination yet of the misguided design priorities at FromSoft ever since Dark Souls 2.
Gone are the interesting, puzzling encounters of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1, all bosses must be homogenised into being flashy, fast, high execution skill tests, with an increasing presence of annoying tricks such as attack animations that are delayed to the point of being unintuitive and unfun to dodge that are only there to keep veterans from getting too complacent.
These games are action RPGs, so of course there's nothing wrong with boss fights including an element of testing mechanical skill, but the simple matter of fact is that while Souls style games are certainly challenging, the combat systems themselves lack depth. As such, there's not really any mechanical skills that can be tested in these fights outside of dodge roll timings and capitalising on punish windows. There are still some bosses that I greatly enjoyed in Elden Ring, such as Radahn (who is closest to what I was hoping boss fights in this game would be like), Rennala and the second phase of Maleketh, but the idea of going through over 120 fights that ultimately boil down to testing the same couple of skills is one that will inevitably become a tedious slog towards the end.
There are plenty of other, more nitpicky issues I have with Elden Ring that I could talk about, including but not limited to not being able to talk to NPCs while on horseback, the lock-on system still failing to focus on the enemy that's closest to you when there's many enemies charging at you from different distances, and FromSoft's previous title: Sekiro, actually having better QoL than Elden Ring in various ways, but this review is already long enough.
Elden Ring is a good timesink while it lasts, and part of me respects it for just how ambitious FromSoft were with the scope of this game, but at the same time, it misses the mark in so many ways and tries to hide these ways with the smoke and mirrors that are the size and beauty of its game world. Once you look past that, Elden Ring feels like an iterative game, which has a lot of good ideas but fails to fully commit to any of them out of a desire to be as "AAA" as possible.
I know my more critical take on Elden Ring probably feels contrarian as of the time of writing this review, but once the hype fully wears off a year or two from now, I'm confident that the community consensus regarding this game will be much closer to my outlook.
2 Comments
your review def is not contrarian, there have been lost of critical reviews on elden ring tbh
ExAndOh
2 years ago