At first this game looks like it will be an all-time great, the biggest souls game of all time. All of the pieces are here for a masterpiece, the art direction, the gameplay loop, the lore, everything, but after playing Elden Ring it becomes clear this is all a facade, and the more you play, the more the cracks begin to reveal themselves.
First the open world design. This game takes a page from the BotW book and it lets the player free almost immediately to go wherever they want in the world, free to fight any boss, however it seems Elden Ring just took the appeal of BotW without putting in the effort. Enemies and bosses aren't properly scaled meaning that while you can go anywhere, in reality you'll basically be going the same way every playthrough with some variation.
The other problem with the open world is exploration and loot. Elden Ring has a lot of cool things to find and they always reward you in some way, however due to the sheer amount of playstyles and character paths, 80% of the time the reward found will be useless, what this does is make the player no longer want to explore themselves and just google how to find the loot they can actually use, in turn killing a lot of the enjoyment.
Finally, there is the boss design themselves, and there has been a noticeable nosedive in quality. Bosses in souls game used to be tough bu fair, you learn what they did and you strategize a plan to beat them, however, it seems Fromsoftware this design philosophy and decided that the series was only known for difficulty so the bosses have to be obscenely hard with sporadic and delayed movements. It seems after years of everyone calling the souls franchise the "hardest games of all time" the design philosophy of the games has gone through Flanderization. This new philosophy reaches its singularity in the last third of the game where the boss design is so horrendous it punishes anyone trying to play their own way and slaps the player in the face for not using magic; having your 100-hour run basically be slapped in the face and being told it was the wrong way to play the game is frankly terrible game design. The cherry on top of all this is how in the last third the game becomes horribly balanced, bosses like fire giant take 20 years to beat, malenia feels like scrapped Sekiro DLC, and the character you play as is slower than Dark Souls 3, leading the game to not be hard but fair, but absurdly hard and unfair, leading the whole experience to be unfun.
I do like Elden Ring, it has the makings of a masterpiece, but it fails in so many ways and is only really enjoyable for the first 2/3rds of your first play-through.
First the open world design. This game takes a page from the BotW book and it lets the player free almost immediately to go wherever they want in the world, free to fight any boss, however it seems Elden Ring just took the appeal of BotW without putting in the effort. Enemies and bosses aren't properly scaled meaning that while you can go anywhere, in reality you'll basically be going the same way every playthrough with some variation.
The other problem with the open world is exploration and loot. Elden Ring has a lot of cool things to find and they always reward you in some way, however due to the sheer amount of playstyles and character paths, 80% of the time the reward found will be useless, what this does is make the player no longer want to explore themselves and just google how to find the loot they can actually use, in turn killing a lot of the enjoyment.
Finally, there is the boss design themselves, and there has been a noticeable nosedive in quality. Bosses in souls game used to be tough bu fair, you learn what they did and you strategize a plan to beat them, however, it seems Fromsoftware this design philosophy and decided that the series was only known for difficulty so the bosses have to be obscenely hard with sporadic and delayed movements. It seems after years of everyone calling the souls franchise the "hardest games of all time" the design philosophy of the games has gone through Flanderization. This new philosophy reaches its singularity in the last third of the game where the boss design is so horrendous it punishes anyone trying to play their own way and slaps the player in the face for not using magic; having your 100-hour run basically be slapped in the face and being told it was the wrong way to play the game is frankly terrible game design. The cherry on top of all this is how in the last third the game becomes horribly balanced, bosses like fire giant take 20 years to beat, malenia feels like scrapped Sekiro DLC, and the character you play as is slower than Dark Souls 3, leading the game to not be hard but fair, but absurdly hard and unfair, leading the whole experience to be unfun.
I do like Elden Ring, it has the makings of a masterpiece, but it fails in so many ways and is only really enjoyable for the first 2/3rds of your first play-through.