Elden Ring caught me completely off guard.
Prior to the game’s release people would ask me of I was “hyped” for it. I could only describe what I felt as a dull excitement. I knew that I would probably enjoy it, but I also felt like I knew exactly what to expect, and that the game would be nothing more than that, and nothing less at best. I didn’t ignore pre-release coverage of the game, but I didn’t really absorb it either. Pre-release coverage of most games is kind of useless to me, I don’t know what parts of marketing and previews I can really trust until I have the game in my hands. I saw the game, I watched others play the network test, but I didn’t have any real frame of reference for what exactly was going on or how it fit together.
My first run felt like I was going through the game at a breakneck pace. While I struggled early on, once I got some momentum I was killing many of the bosses on my first try. While I spent a good portion of my playthrough exploring the game naturally, at a certain point in the game I stopped doing optional content, and tried to rush to the end. I wanted to kill two birds with one stone: ignoring optional areas meant that I would have something new to do on subsequent playthroughs, and in reaching the end I would finally know the limits of the game’s scope and could play more leisurely, without such fervent thirst for whatever grand surprise could be next.
Even playing the game this way, it took 10 days of treating the game like a second job to beat it.
I remember when I was a kid I watched my dad reach Ganon’s Castle in Ocarina of Time. An area of the dungeon presents the player with about half a dozen paths laid out in a large circular room (or at least as circular as a room could be on the N64). Each of these doors lead to a short gauntlet, but I couldn't help but imagine: what would it be like if this style of action-adventure game had a Super Mario 64-style hub area. Demon’s Souls is perhaps the closest thing we ever got to the idea in my head, but it also made me realize that the hub world was never really the important part.
What I really wanted was an action-adventure game with environments that were varied, striking, unique, and imaginative. An action-adventure game that was willing to trade a realistic environment for an absolutely incomparable one. Early 3D games often made unusual choices in how to portray their settings, and while this more primitive aesthetic was born out of limitation, its abstract qualities allow us in retrospect to assign it certain romantic characteristics completely absent from even the most contemporary and sophisticated attempts at naturalism. Elden Ring may be the only modern game I have ever seen that so consistently offers up such numerous and diverse visuals of this same character, but with cutting intentionality.
The entirety of the Lands Between feels like an old secret, everything feels as impossible and forbidden as Ash Lake. Ash Lake, buried beneath a difficult downward platforming section, tucked away behind multiple trick walls in an out of the way corner of one of Dark Souls’ more sprawling areas, was something that From Software did not expect every player to see. In Elden Ring, virtually everything beyond the introduction and before one of the later dungeons is optional, and not just in the sense that it can be bypassed or circumvented. On my third playthrough I used a guide and tried to see as much of the game as I possibly could, and to try and play through each area in some semblance of an “appropriate order”, and I’m now confident that From Software did not really want people to play the game this way. There is so much content in this game that feels like it doesn’t want to be found, and having spoken to other players both online and in-person I know that many people miss even the more major areas in the game. While Ash Lake was a single hidden area, Elden Ring is an entire game that does not expect the vast majority of its players to see its whole, a game so vast and so truly free that even a person who has seen it all would have trouble feeling absolutely certain of it.
Of all the modern niceties that Elden Ring forgoes, its lack of progression trackers is one of the most appreciated absences. From annualized franchises to series reinventions, nearly every game of this type is constantly presenting the player with fractions: you have done X amount of objectives, and there are Y amount in the game. Breath of the Wild’s shrines, Forza Horizon’s races, all kinds of statistics shown during loading screens and in menus. Elden Ring lets you mark graces and place pins on your map screen, and you could use this, for example, to keep track of which dungeons you have or have not completed, but you can’t be sure for yourself that you’ve found all of them, or that you’ve found everything within. The first time that the player finds a dungeon behind an illusory wall, the first time they find a dungeon with multiple bosses, the first time they find a dungeon within a dungeon within a dungeon, how can they ever be sure?
In this sense, Elden Ring might be a game that, as far as the design of typical modern open world game is concerned, does a lot of things “wrong”. Whether its the complaints that some people have made about the minute details of its user interface and experience, or simple basic facts like From Software’s decision to not make this a direct continuation any of their more recognizable intellectual properties, people are having some trouble processing the idea that Elden Ring is not a sleek, edgeless product. This is almost without a doubt simply a result of Elden Ring’s massive popularity, having doubled the sales of From’s previous bestselling title; however, it is frankly embarrassing that we’re having the same tired conversations about this game that we were having about Dark Souls over a decade ago.
The game’s great triumph lies primarily in its structure. The reality of open world games is that the open world is almost always something necessarily separate from the rest of the game, and Elden Ring is no different. This is not a bad thing, the key to making a good open world game simply lies in making both the open world and the rest of the game equally interesting. From the loose platforming and exploration of the open world, to the careful crawl of dungeoneering, to the tight and tense combat and boss fights, Elden Ring’s core loop funnels the player into a more perfect rhythm than almost any other game of its kind.
I was a bit worried initially that background music would be more prominently featured throughout the game compared to previous From titles, but I have to admit they’ve knocked it out of the park. Every track so effectively created its mood, from the mystery of Liurnia, the oppressive noise of the Caelid wilds, the somber aura of Altus. I love how much of the game’s music is diegetic, the horns of the capital, the singing in the underground river city, the stringed instruments carried by the merchants. Where previous From games merely created feelings of tension in boss fights and relief in the hub areas, Elden Ring’s music gives the world its own sense of culture.
The only significant problem I have with the game is a handful of late-game bosses. It’s a particular shame both because the end of the game is basically just four back-to-back boss fights and its kind of a sour note to end on, and because if most of these bosses' individual phases were separate fights they would be some of my favorites that From has ever done. As they are though, they are at best brutal gauntlets requiring such a degree of consistent execution that it becomes difficult to really appreciate the encounter, and at their worst, they are Malenia, blade of Miquella.
I said once, and I’m not the only one, that “Elden Ring is someone’s dream game, but I’m not sure if it’s mine.” I now think that Elden Ring is a game I could not personally have dreamt in the first place. It’s a game that delivers on promises unkept by so many other games, that so thoroughly fleshes out ideas that other games only hint at. Often when a new game comes out I find myself wanting to replay games in the same series or genre to see how my perspective on them has shifted; no other game has forced me to reevaluate so many of its predecessors. No other game has so insistently made me grapple with the possibility that the best game I will ever play is one that has yet to be made.
Prior to the game’s release people would ask me of I was “hyped” for it. I could only describe what I felt as a dull excitement. I knew that I would probably enjoy it, but I also felt like I knew exactly what to expect, and that the game would be nothing more than that, and nothing less at best. I didn’t ignore pre-release coverage of the game, but I didn’t really absorb it either. Pre-release coverage of most games is kind of useless to me, I don’t know what parts of marketing and previews I can really trust until I have the game in my hands. I saw the game, I watched others play the network test, but I didn’t have any real frame of reference for what exactly was going on or how it fit together.
My first run felt like I was going through the game at a breakneck pace. While I struggled early on, once I got some momentum I was killing many of the bosses on my first try. While I spent a good portion of my playthrough exploring the game naturally, at a certain point in the game I stopped doing optional content, and tried to rush to the end. I wanted to kill two birds with one stone: ignoring optional areas meant that I would have something new to do on subsequent playthroughs, and in reaching the end I would finally know the limits of the game’s scope and could play more leisurely, without such fervent thirst for whatever grand surprise could be next.
Even playing the game this way, it took 10 days of treating the game like a second job to beat it.
I remember when I was a kid I watched my dad reach Ganon’s Castle in Ocarina of Time. An area of the dungeon presents the player with about half a dozen paths laid out in a large circular room (or at least as circular as a room could be on the N64). Each of these doors lead to a short gauntlet, but I couldn't help but imagine: what would it be like if this style of action-adventure game had a Super Mario 64-style hub area. Demon’s Souls is perhaps the closest thing we ever got to the idea in my head, but it also made me realize that the hub world was never really the important part.
What I really wanted was an action-adventure game with environments that were varied, striking, unique, and imaginative. An action-adventure game that was willing to trade a realistic environment for an absolutely incomparable one. Early 3D games often made unusual choices in how to portray their settings, and while this more primitive aesthetic was born out of limitation, its abstract qualities allow us in retrospect to assign it certain romantic characteristics completely absent from even the most contemporary and sophisticated attempts at naturalism. Elden Ring may be the only modern game I have ever seen that so consistently offers up such numerous and diverse visuals of this same character, but with cutting intentionality.
The entirety of the Lands Between feels like an old secret, everything feels as impossible and forbidden as Ash Lake. Ash Lake, buried beneath a difficult downward platforming section, tucked away behind multiple trick walls in an out of the way corner of one of Dark Souls’ more sprawling areas, was something that From Software did not expect every player to see. In Elden Ring, virtually everything beyond the introduction and before one of the later dungeons is optional, and not just in the sense that it can be bypassed or circumvented. On my third playthrough I used a guide and tried to see as much of the game as I possibly could, and to try and play through each area in some semblance of an “appropriate order”, and I’m now confident that From Software did not really want people to play the game this way. There is so much content in this game that feels like it doesn’t want to be found, and having spoken to other players both online and in-person I know that many people miss even the more major areas in the game. While Ash Lake was a single hidden area, Elden Ring is an entire game that does not expect the vast majority of its players to see its whole, a game so vast and so truly free that even a person who has seen it all would have trouble feeling absolutely certain of it.
Of all the modern niceties that Elden Ring forgoes, its lack of progression trackers is one of the most appreciated absences. From annualized franchises to series reinventions, nearly every game of this type is constantly presenting the player with fractions: you have done X amount of objectives, and there are Y amount in the game. Breath of the Wild’s shrines, Forza Horizon’s races, all kinds of statistics shown during loading screens and in menus. Elden Ring lets you mark graces and place pins on your map screen, and you could use this, for example, to keep track of which dungeons you have or have not completed, but you can’t be sure for yourself that you’ve found all of them, or that you’ve found everything within. The first time that the player finds a dungeon behind an illusory wall, the first time they find a dungeon with multiple bosses, the first time they find a dungeon within a dungeon within a dungeon, how can they ever be sure?
In this sense, Elden Ring might be a game that, as far as the design of typical modern open world game is concerned, does a lot of things “wrong”. Whether its the complaints that some people have made about the minute details of its user interface and experience, or simple basic facts like From Software’s decision to not make this a direct continuation any of their more recognizable intellectual properties, people are having some trouble processing the idea that Elden Ring is not a sleek, edgeless product. This is almost without a doubt simply a result of Elden Ring’s massive popularity, having doubled the sales of From’s previous bestselling title; however, it is frankly embarrassing that we’re having the same tired conversations about this game that we were having about Dark Souls over a decade ago.
The game’s great triumph lies primarily in its structure. The reality of open world games is that the open world is almost always something necessarily separate from the rest of the game, and Elden Ring is no different. This is not a bad thing, the key to making a good open world game simply lies in making both the open world and the rest of the game equally interesting. From the loose platforming and exploration of the open world, to the careful crawl of dungeoneering, to the tight and tense combat and boss fights, Elden Ring’s core loop funnels the player into a more perfect rhythm than almost any other game of its kind.
I was a bit worried initially that background music would be more prominently featured throughout the game compared to previous From titles, but I have to admit they’ve knocked it out of the park. Every track so effectively created its mood, from the mystery of Liurnia, the oppressive noise of the Caelid wilds, the somber aura of Altus. I love how much of the game’s music is diegetic, the horns of the capital, the singing in the underground river city, the stringed instruments carried by the merchants. Where previous From games merely created feelings of tension in boss fights and relief in the hub areas, Elden Ring’s music gives the world its own sense of culture.
The only significant problem I have with the game is a handful of late-game bosses. It’s a particular shame both because the end of the game is basically just four back-to-back boss fights and its kind of a sour note to end on, and because if most of these bosses' individual phases were separate fights they would be some of my favorites that From has ever done. As they are though, they are at best brutal gauntlets requiring such a degree of consistent execution that it becomes difficult to really appreciate the encounter, and at their worst, they are Malenia, blade of Miquella.
I said once, and I’m not the only one, that “Elden Ring is someone’s dream game, but I’m not sure if it’s mine.” I now think that Elden Ring is a game I could not personally have dreamt in the first place. It’s a game that delivers on promises unkept by so many other games, that so thoroughly fleshes out ideas that other games only hint at. Often when a new game comes out I find myself wanting to replay games in the same series or genre to see how my perspective on them has shifted; no other game has forced me to reevaluate so many of its predecessors. No other game has so insistently made me grapple with the possibility that the best game I will ever play is one that has yet to be made.