the cool thing about elden ring is that it’s kind of impossible to get stuck like in other souls games. there is always something else you can go explore and check out, and you’ll probably gain several levels and some good equipment in the process. if you do want your balls stepped on you can also just go to areas that you’re underleveled for, but you don’t have to. none of it feels like grinding, and nothing feels superfluous or without purpose.
it’s maybe not the souls game I want most, but it’s definitely the open world game I want most and honestly it’s the zelda game I’ve been wanting my entire life. it takes the long, difficult away around to the same core experience of NES zelda, crafting it from the ground up. as aggressively huge as the game is it never stops Level Designing, without losing sight of that design anywhere on the spectrum from micro to macro. it’s such an impressive piece of work.
yeah i think this is definitely my take right now. It’s miles above pretty much every other open world game and i’m trying not to get too depressed thinking about how Nobody Will Learn Anything From It
but it’s nice to have, like, such a meaty game to play for…possibly the rest of my life? I mean how big is this fucking thing
Idk about you all but the response I’ve seen to this game has been people just having their minds blown wide open. I feel like open world game design is going to be much different from now on.
i think this game will be hard to learn any lessons from honestly, because to me the biggest ones are “make lots of unique content” and “trust the player”, which are super related to each other AND totally antithetical to modern AAA design.
And the indie space is not really good for this either since the scope of this is just…very fucking big.
Oh, also “don’t be afraid that players will miss your content, it’s actually good that people don’t see the majority of what you made”. Again, totally antithetical to modern game design.
I could be wrong but I don’t think this is as much a step forward as it is a perfection of what From was already doing, and what nobody seemed to learn anything from in the preceding uh 13 years since demon’s souls blew everyone’s minds.
Yeah it’ll be 100% exactly like how AAA game designed copped Dark Souls game design except, more.
I think what we’ll end up seeing is procedural quest/level/etc design used in the content creation process. Sort of like… a programmer generates a random quest and then a designer rounds out the corners. Tbh a lot of ER content is not good content, it’s just… content. Which is great! Because that’s what players want when they can’t kill Radanamama or whatever. When players want to progress the story the content is actually genuinely good, so… that’s also great.
In fact, outside of the part where it takes forever to everything about this thing is great.
Last night I finally collected two matching pieces of a medallion and activated one of the “grand lifts.” And it took me . . . to a place I’d already been long before and explored to some degree (Altus Plateau).
I’m continuing to not gain any levels because I keep dying or buying things, but I also still keep finding new areas. When I find a place that appears to be intended for later in the game, I become determined and keep at it until I reach the boss. I then mark it with a skull on my map and move on.
I think I will finally try fighting Margit tonight. I keep meaning to but then I get distracted.
So after you beat that boss, it goes to chamber that leads out to Liurnia of the Lakes, and there doesn’t seem to be a door or anything on it. Could I have just…walked in the back door? Or is it gated somehow if you haven’t beaten Godrick yet?
I’m not going to start a new character to find this out.
I looked up what boss that was just now, because I didn’t remember that the area was even behind a boss. (There have been so many areas.) I didn’t beat it in a straightforward fight. I kept circling the pillar until it wandered off a little and I could get several strong attacks in from behind. It took a while but I beat it on my first try that way.
yeah i had already found that grace point before beating godrick and when i walked out to see it i was like
wait this again???
then i gave that poor blind woman a rotten eyeball to chow down on in a trick that’s literally the opposite of peeling grapes and calling them eyeballs
for context, I think Outward is miles above most open world games, and elden ring is another mile above that, but they’re much closer to each other than to AAA open world lawnmower sim design
Elden Ring is actually a reverse lawnmower sim, you know you’re doing good as more icons appear on your map.
I’m not totally sure how I feel about Elden Ring’s open fields. There’s a fairly strict system to how they’re built and represented on the map, and once I fully understood it, the exploration lost most of its magic. It’s starting to feel like I’m just traversing randomized palette swaps of areas I’ve already been in.
The real reason I’ve been loving this game is that the shardbearer “dungeons” go back to From’s traditional level design approach, and in Elden Ring every one of them shows them at the absolute top of their game. I was starting to worry I had seen the best levels after completing the Capital and that the late-game was going to underwhelm in comparison. But I reached a late-game one yesterday and was blown away instead.
