I'm having trouble seeing what everyone else sees in this game. Maybe it's because I went with a Strength+Endurance Great Sword build, maybe it's because I had covid while playing this and it's affected my mood towards the game. Maybe it just didn't click with me for reasons I'll get into. But whatever the case is, I didn't seem to enjoy Elden Ring as much as others have. And that bothers me.

In previous Souls games, a lot of what made those games interesting for me was that their design involved a lot of interlooping paths. It's similar to how a Metroidvania is designed, where one area is locked off by progression gates that you open to bring about shortcuts for that area. Elden Ring has this, but only in the more linear areas of the game that are there for progression. The rest of the world, in turn, is designed like a regular AAA open world map, albeit with the non-linearity of other Fromsoft games. The non-linearity is great, and I understand the appreciation for it. The open world part is where I get confused with the praise. A lot of it is your standard tropes of open world design; small dungeons, forts, repeating geometry, paths within the terrain that direct you where you need to go, enemies scattered everywhere, reused bosses to fill out open world. All of this is stuff I've already seen before in other games, and in games I love, but just with a Dark Souls twist to it. Which, if you're really, REALLY into open world games, and you're really, REALLY into Souls games, it's probably like chocolate and peanut butter making out for the first time. Which is great, I love seeing those two suck face! But to me, it's a lot more of the same from each. And I'm beginning to become fatigued by it.

This may be Breath of The Wild's fault. My brain may have decided, consciously or unconsciously, that anything that doesn't provide the same feelings that Breath of the Wild has given me for open world games is a lesser experience. Which isn't a fair point of comparison. Breath of the Wild isn't a perfect game, and if someone with different tastes felt the same way about it the way I do with Elden Ring, I think I would understand where their preferences lie. I am in love with exploring. I love interacting with the environment. So climbing everything and seeing where I could go, what I could do, what I could skip, what I could manipulate, was something that appealed greatly to me. Elden Ring is more for the type of person who wants to control a build, customize it, and do crazy damage to tough enemies through their own skill mastery.

But I think there's a point where the Dark Souls and the route they took with the open world design tends to clash. I think it's also, in part, because they've broaded the appeal of the games to a wider number of players. They provide the player with a lot of options to get through the game much easier. Dark Souls has done this before with things like summons, but they usually required some drawbacks like the use of humanity. Here, it's simply a matter of finding the right summon, leveling them up through grinding, and having them do most of the work, or distracting the boss. On top of this, enemies tend to be a lot easier, especially given the fact that you can summon your mount almost whenever. This means normal enemies, mid-boss enemies, and certain boss enemies become a repeated game of using your horse to circle around the boss and hit them until they're dead. And when the horse is essentially an incredibly fast option with the only drawback is if you take enough damage, your horse uses up a healing item, it's by far the best option to pick from. Not to say that the game can't be challenging, because it can be, but the selection pool of my options feels less strategic when all I'm really doing is circling an enemy with my horse and chopping them down as my summon distracts them. The easiest option for the player tends to be the one that the player goes and chooses. It's best to prevent those types of things entering your game if possible. It's like with back stabbing abuse in Dark Souls 1, it's usually the most effective, and would get used a lot. But you still had more interesting options to roll, dodge, parry attacks with Dark Souls 1, with the horse strat, you're just running around.

Maybe in a couple of years, I'll come back to Elden Ring, and give it another chance. I'll try a new build, I'll try different strategies, I'll try not to think about other games. Who knows, maybe I'll like it more. It would not be the first, nor will it be the last, where I go back to a game that I didn't much care for and take away something different. But as of right now, I don't get why people love Elden Ring. And it's going to keep bother me.