I will start by saying that the open-world side confused me a bit at first, it's hard to know if you're where you're supposed to be or if you're just grinding your nose away on something not worthwhile or just not for your character yet. Ultimately, I think it's better. One thing that really sucks with a more linear souls game is that you can't just go and try something new, go screw around, when a boss is just killing you inside. Gotta either push through or quit. I guess there's a virtue in that but personally it's not my favorite thing ever in a game and in my mind is EXACTLY what good parents teach kids NOT to do when a game is just handing it back to you over and over, because it's a good way to burn yourself out and blow a day in rage. And that culminates in behavior that makes you less rational over time. Some people can take a lot of that and be fine. But I think it's equally likely to just be bad for you. It's not a good kind of obsession to have, and in my time playing these games and reading about them... well, you see that in fans with these games. I'm purposely avoiding reading about it... not for direct spoilers necessarily, but rather just to keep my focus on my experience. But I'm betting it's the same with Elden Ring talk as it's been since Demon Souls. A bunch of people going "Why is this so hard? I am dying INSIDE with how much I have died in just one place. What is wrong with me? Why does this game seem like it sucks and is never fun?" and a bunch of other people going "You just suck. I ate 12 ghost peppers before beating that boss. Try chewing on glass for 10 hours. If that doesn't work, masturbate with a cheese grater until it starts feeling good and maybe you will be ready. It's so easy after that and the feeling is worth it! Join us in Valhalla!"
Here, you just run away and go check out some cave instead. Or maybe just slip past some enemies and grab useful stuff before taking to the fields... iunno, find some flowers to frolic in I guess, look at how pretty everything is
But it's a big step away from just having the shortcuts and backtracking with the fires. You have a lot more freedom that keeps you from being chained into stuff you can't handle on that day, but have to pass before you do pretty much anything else. Just keep on your runes and consider where they'll be dropped otherwise and you won't get chained to a challenge in the way that other souls games do. It's like you never have to stop when something holds you back. There are other paths in your adventure, because it is an adventure, not Dante's Inferno.
I like that this one kind of breaks out of that pattern of keeping you trapped in hell for hours to days to weeks, while still leaving the high stakes in.... just distributing it in an open world makes a big difference when it comes to burnout. You can still enter that hell any time you want, but it's not the only place you can be, the only challenge that will advance you in some way. You can't have constant hard-ass fights as a requirement and not break a lot of people down. To me, there is nothing fun about losing to one boss for hours and feeling like I got nowhere, knowing there's just more of that waiting. There needs to be other options at that point, for me. I've divorced these games countless times just for that. Whereas if I can explore and simply *try* a handful of challenges in that same time, I'm less demotivated by failures. I may come back around ready to win (already reflected and come up with new plans) and there was constant flow from when the boss was wrecking me, to everything I did after, to when I came back and won. That works because it's not the SAME failure, over and over until I'm just messing up because I've lost my patience and reaction times. Instead, I have ways of continuing to experience a sense of progress, even when there are bosses I can't take on yet. Hell, I'd say it makes taking them on more appealing, because I don't have a headache by the end and instead got to enjoy something else in the game that became part of my journey in approaching that boss/dungeon.
I get that obtuseness is kind of the charm with these games, but there's being obtuse or subtle, and then there is being bluntly tedious to the point of devouring my motivation and making it a bad experience where all I can do is walk away. A standard souls has both. It takes forever to figure out, and it's an unrelenting gauntlet. Walking into one fresh is like going to a boxing gym for your first day and being told you can't even train until you defeat a guy who's got 5" and 70lbs on you. It's a game you learn through boss fights. Kind of a raw deal to get stuck progressing on a hard wall of a boss when you can pay some serious cash for that, not really knowing if it'll be like that for you or not... whether or not you'll actually finish it, or if playing and not finishing is even worth it. It's always that bittersweet abusive relationship story with these games. Before playing this one, I was convinced this style of game wasn't growing anymore and that they might actually slip off at some point in the future. This might be the game that kills those games, TBH. But I think that might be good in the end, give us better things from what made those games work, more than what makes people quit them. There is a balance between opacity and accessibility. Most open-worlds are so accessible that they all end up being about the same. Dark Souls is so opaque that it is inaccessible to half of all gamers. Neither is ideal, and to stop there is a crime against human creativity and appreciation for novel experiences. If we can't do better than those two extremes without losing the good in them, let's just stop making games while we are ahead. And then, there was this game. They have learned from player experiences with souls games and successfully applied out-of-genre design sensibilities to a major video game release in order to synthesize a novel advancement in game experiences. Gotta givem kudos there. That really doesn't happen often with games as big as this.
It's not like these bosses and even simple enemies don't still dish it out, you gotta take the time to learn them, stumble and come back... but the open-world approach tempers it better. You choose when you jump down the rabbit hole much more, and which ones. It's a lot easier to engage when you can set the pace via open-world travel... and it's not like this is an open-world that holds your hand in the way they usually do. The world and tools for navigating it also have that obtuse charm in many ways
Though I will say, I think this world has the right simplifications and QOL to make it flow nicely if you treat it with patience and learn the clues to what is what. It's not like it's hard to look around, see something interesting, and go. There's probably something worth checking out. Maybe you're ready, maybe you aren't. And it's okay if you aren't, there are options for you, whether in an alternative path of attempt, or another worthwhile challenge.
You don't need much more in a good open world imo. You're constantly finding easily spottable crafting items and such, but they still blend nicely in how they stand out. They are well incorporated into the surroundings, and yet you still can't miss their glow. There's not that feeling of gui elements constantly bleeding over the universe to make everything make sense. You look around and it kind of just makes all of the sense it needs to, without really needing strong markers everywhere that such and such is of interest or a path to something, so you can experience mystery. Nothing pushes too hard, but you can easily find some wicked tests. That golden fuck on the horse waiting to wreck you in the starting area lets you know how it works. Picking battles is much more of a factor. This kind of thing also has a side effect of providing incentives to look forward to that a normal souls game doesn't have the ability to even show you.
That's the secret all of these devs relying on tons of linear elements in their open worlds keep... their worlds aren't designed well enough to navigate without all of that overlayed guidance and overt pressing. With enough care, these things can be incorporated more organically so that you do not NEED so many markers, waypoints, sequencing, and linear hand holding. At least not for discovery or progression. Fast travel is nice for traversal in a dungeon/boss driven game with high stakes for even its more general overworld combat. You don't just do every task you uncover right away.
The actual understanding and getting around the world you see is really a matter of level design. Good level design guides and incentivizes without the player knowing. Most open worlds are very poorly designed in this regard. This one is doing a lot better right out of the gate. It is tight in its fundamental elements, and so doesn't require a lot of tacking-on to actually function relatively seamlessly. Whereas I feel like the standard for the open-world genre as a whole is to have a very loose world that doesn't make a ton of sense on its own, and then tie it *tightly* and *neatly* together with quest, script, navigation, and gui elements. Basically, pack it with a lot of stuff that can easily conflict if unchecked and then tell you when and where to go (often explicitly) through multiple reinforcing elements in order to stitch you past encountering them, or simply realize nothing else is as interesting as sticking mostly with where it's obviously trying to point you. I have come to really resent this as a way of hiding the seams brought on by what I call 'feature creep,' but what is in reality pretty standard procedure for open world-games. It's like they just can't run out of things to show you. Gotta take you thereeee. You might bonk your head on the big painted horizon backdrop if they didn't have another thing to take you to. It just doesn't work on me anymore. It feels parloresque, the way the whole experience is set up.
It's like how there are two basic vacation types: the more open a-b road trip, plan major parts, hit some spots with room to branch out between or just relax at points - and the Disney trip, itenerary starts at 7, time and order everything, stay only at this hotel, take these paths to catch these lines, remember your bracelet and pass. Plan well to save on extras.
I prefer the former. Most open worlds are the latter. Packed to the brim, but confoundingly, confiningly inorganic. There are not a lot of established ways to get it done at the scale and granularity that people seem to want. The best successes there are pocked with flaws. I think part of that is due to expectations built by marketing and the culture influenced by it for years and years, and devs finding themselves trying to play to pipedream expectations of a game with all of the things, that everyone can and will want to play. It's a stage set to exclude any *real* new ideas imo. I really do think that getting away from the whole idea of how open worlds are conceived today, is going to be the only thing really moving it forward anytime soon. There are plenty of problems to solve that no games are seeming to so much as try at. People need to actually start playing with whole new ways of delivering the open world experience. Tinker with the unfurling of these worlds. Surely there are other ways, but it might take venturing those backroads. I mean, who would think to make an open world souls game? Yet, it brings a very different feel to both open-world-adventure/RPG and souls. And I think all they really did was apply the unique mindset of souls to their whole open-world framework, that's the general wellspring I'm imagining.
Already, it is very foreign to me, even though open-world games take up many spots on my favorites list and I have beaten 3 souls games several times each. I find myself learning to enjoy forgetting a little of how I think open worlds work in order to get into this one... and also having quite a different combat experience at the same time. It really feels like it has its own character, to the point that it kind of puts a lot of open-world games I'd say are very good for different reasons in one box for me - it has actually aged them a little for me.
The problem for me is that open-world games in the Disney vacay category have poor execution on actual level fundamentals without those helpers - their worlds look nice but without all of the guides and interface points it would just be a gray mess. People sometimes think they need those assists because in those games it IS frustrating to go off of the rails, because they don't really want you to in the first place, and they're not strong in the areas that would support that better. The world winds up feeling like somebody just went beyond the boundary line for some linear game world and made it into a fully-featured open-world that looks really nice everywhere with little to nothing apparently interesting to *go* to and do outside of towns. The bare loop will still hold, but that whittles quickly. The gameplay loop is just a basic circulatory system, without a backbone it's kinda floppy. And if you find something to check out, you think about coming back when you've gotten the quest that takes you to it so you can get the actual reward. It feels like you shouldn't be there... almost out of bounds in a way. So it's ultimately more like a Lion Country Safari tour than a still-yet-to-be-defined adventure of consequence and reward. Elden Ring is not that tour experience, my god! Its world actually has subtlety that you need to tease into and marinate in and it is just SO refreshing. You need to respect it, it knows you aren't dumb. Distrust it and think about it. Take hold of your adventure. You find yourself on it as you take in (and take on) the world.
Honestly, I wish more open worlds were like this. I am truly lost here - no idea where I'm at or going half of the time, but because of that I'm taking a lot more time to observe and I get to actually *discover* things by reading the cues. Everything I do feels small in the beginning, but big in the end. It has more of that classic RPG overworld feel. You have a general quest, but you don't really know exactly where you're going and you've gotta actually learn the whole place for yourself and remember what people say, in order to figure out for yourself, things that you can do in the world. Other things, you gotta intuit. And you don't need to know the whole world to start progressing. You just start with what you know and little by little you carve out a journey through every little endeavor and interaction. It feels really organic. I haven't fully had that experience since Morrowind, reading the damned road signs and asking NPCs while I try to cross the overworld on foot and having a blast doing it.
It's cool so far, digging what they're bringing with this game.
who says ADL uses tons of power. Certainly not for gaming.
The cognitive dissonance is stronk!
