There are two times I last remember being totally entranced by a game: Breath of the Wild and Dark Souls 1. Unsurprisingly this game managed to do the same, being more or less a combination of the two. The game is enormous and being thorough with your exploration will lead to tens of hours spent fighting through dungeons and collecting loot. I believe I did a very good amount of exploration and questing and clocked in ~94 hours at completion.
I think there is something to be said about the nature of the open world format and the pros and cons that it entails. With a world this massive, there is only so much you can do to keep things fresh. I think they did well enough in this aspect to make exploration fun as long as possible. However it's certainly disappointing to be spelunking in very familiar tunnels and fighting even more familiar bosses so many hours into the game. It's frustrating when these bosses amount to just two of an earlier boss or multiple bosses in the same room. They don't feel fun or well designed. Just more difficult in the most basic way. DS2 would be proud of some of them.
There are some things present in this game that are also present in earlier FromSoft games that I find hard to justify for reasons other than "it is just how these games do it." Most obnoxious example being npc quests and how it feels impossible to see them through unless your lucky or looking at a guide. I'll talk to an npc in one place, and in order to continue the quest I need to talk to them again in another location somewhere on the HUGE map. In a way I can respect making chunks of the game easy to miss, but for the average player I think it is not a good thing. Had I not gone out of my way to look it up, I would have missed several cool bosses and quests.
Leading up to release I had a real fear that my PC could not handle the game. So much so that I panic bought 16 gigs of ram a day before. A lot of my specs are at or below the suggested minimum, but for the most part the game ran beautifully for me (on low settings) and still looked very good. That said, from what I've heard the game runs like shit on ALL specs. I don't think it's acceptable and should be held against it.
Elden Ring is now my favorite FromSoft title. If I got into what I liked about it I would be typing all day. I hate when very hyped up games get hyperbolic praise at release, but this game actually exceeded my expectations and I wouldn't argue against it being called a masterpiece.
I think there is something to be said about the nature of the open world format and the pros and cons that it entails. With a world this massive, there is only so much you can do to keep things fresh. I think they did well enough in this aspect to make exploration fun as long as possible. However it's certainly disappointing to be spelunking in very familiar tunnels and fighting even more familiar bosses so many hours into the game. It's frustrating when these bosses amount to just two of an earlier boss or multiple bosses in the same room. They don't feel fun or well designed. Just more difficult in the most basic way. DS2 would be proud of some of them.
There are some things present in this game that are also present in earlier FromSoft games that I find hard to justify for reasons other than "it is just how these games do it." Most obnoxious example being npc quests and how it feels impossible to see them through unless your lucky or looking at a guide. I'll talk to an npc in one place, and in order to continue the quest I need to talk to them again in another location somewhere on the HUGE map. In a way I can respect making chunks of the game easy to miss, but for the average player I think it is not a good thing. Had I not gone out of my way to look it up, I would have missed several cool bosses and quests.
Leading up to release I had a real fear that my PC could not handle the game. So much so that I panic bought 16 gigs of ram a day before. A lot of my specs are at or below the suggested minimum, but for the most part the game ran beautifully for me (on low settings) and still looked very good. That said, from what I've heard the game runs like shit on ALL specs. I don't think it's acceptable and should be held against it.
Elden Ring is now my favorite FromSoft title. If I got into what I liked about it I would be typing all day. I hate when very hyped up games get hyperbolic praise at release, but this game actually exceeded my expectations and I wouldn't argue against it being called a masterpiece.