Elden Ring

The AAA-gaming space today is wholly homogeneous, no doubt fueled by the publishers and studios who want their products to appeal to as wide of an audience as humanly possible. The capitalist undercurrents that puppeteer the entertainment industry no doubt run through video games as well, and consumers are forcefully dragged into the familiar riptides of the annual Call of Dutys, the Assassin’s Creeds, and the NBA 2ks. If you’re a gamer and you’ve played one of these, you’ve likely played all of them. The single-player RPGs are supposedly groundbreaking yet feature the same quest structure and level design with shallow roleplaying mechanics and a lackluster narrative. The first-person shooters add in some new yearly gimmick in the form of new movement abilities or battle royale modes yet do nothing to re-invent gunplay or combat in interesting ways. The sports games are so similar from year-to-year that you wouldn’t even be able to tell which one you’re looking at or what the difference from this year’s release is to that of the year before, unless you glimpse closely at a player’s sweat droplets.

Don’t get me wrong, though, there is a sort of familiar comfort in this. I play every new Pokémon game released every single year despite there being little to no meaningful changes to the formula since the original Red & Blue versions came out over twenty-five years ago. Knowing what you’re getting into, just with a shiny new coat of paint, has a homecoming-esque vibe of your favorite coffee shop to it. I get why they’re successful and why the developers don’t want to change a formula that’s brought them so much revenue over the years. It’s risky to try new things, especially new IPs, and why do that when they can just release a sequel to their annual franchise that they know people like and one for which they can make strong sales projections? It’s a tempting offer that many studios fall prey to year after year.

There is one studio, though, that seems to be cranking out consistent bangers every few years that are adored by fans everywhere. I’m of course talking about FromSoftware, the Japan-based studio best known for its combat-focused RPGs in the fan-named Soulsborne series that feature the games Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls (three titles), Bloodborne, Sekiro, and most recently — Elden Ring. Their games break the traditional AAA-game formula and do something extraordinary. They deliver narrative and lore not through cutscenes and character interactions but through item descriptions. They don’t handhold the player through difficult and challenging fights but instead just provide the player with an arsenal of tools that the player is left to experiment with and figure out how to best utilize. They don’t have traditional tutorials or waypoints and instead rely on templatized player-generated messages in the overworld to help the community guide themselves through the game. There’s a lot that they flip the script on, and it’s why fans love their games.

When Elden Ring was announced, I was immediately intrigued. FromSoftware namedropped a collaboration with George R.R. Martin for this title, and I knew they were likely going all out with this. I had played and enjoyed almost all of their past titles, and it seemed that Elden Ring promised to take the Soulsborne formula to the open-world with Elden Ring. Years passed with no updates about the game’s development, and finally, earlier this year, the game was released to near-universal acclaim, with critics and fans praising the game as the single greatest video game ever released. It’s nowhere close to that, of course. The game has a lot of issues, but I can understand how someone could think it’s one of the best. Having now played it, I definitely think it’s very good but is also flawed in a lot of ways that keep it from reaching the heights that many claim it realistically should.

The first thing that struck me about Elden Ring’s open-world game design is its verticality. I’ve played a lot of open-world games, and usually, if you set a waypoint from one end of the map to another, you can just sort of hold the forward stick and ride on your mount all the way across the map. In fact, many will even show you a mini-map with exact turns to make on the bottom-left of the screen. The games will brag about their map size based on how long it takes to ride from one end to another. You can’t do this in Elden Ring. If you tried, you’d come across massive, sheer cliffs and sudden, deep vertical drops that you’d have to pause and figure out how to traverse. Figuring out how to get up or down is half the challenge when traversing the map, and I think they did an excellent job of it in this game.

Death Stranding was another game where traversal was converted into a game mechanic, but I think Elden Ring does it better. In Death Stranding, your moment-to-moment gameplay consists of balancing your character across treacherous terrain while you’re loaded up with precious cargo. Every footstep and every choice of which rock to avoid plays a huge role in your success. The game was praised for forcing players to be very intentional about just walking, an act so simple and ingrained in us that almost every other game just has you hold a stick forward (or hit the “W” key on a keyboard) to perform it. Elden Ring makes traversal interesting by asking you to investigate the world around you. Where can you find a way to access this cliff? How can you safely drop down from this immense height without taking fall damage? The answer is hidden in the world around you, and you just need to take that first step to be curious and investigate to find that route.

The next most impressive thing about Elden Ring that stood out to me was its interconnected level design. This was a forte of the Dark Souls series, so it’s not a surprise to me, but I was wowed with how they managed to translate it to an open-world. There are entire areas and “legacy dungeons” that can be skipped or avoided entirely just by exploring the world around you and discovering an alternate route to a new area. If you come across a difficult enemy guarding the entrance to a new region that you can’t seem to defeat yet, there’s always a different route to get to that region. And it’s always extremely unexpected, usually hidden behind some portal deep within a cave or a magic key hidden at the highest battlements of a random castle that unlocks a seal on an elevator that will take you to the new region. It’s these hidden secrets that make the world worth exploring, and the game does an excellent job at rewarding you for it. At the very least, you’ll find a useful item or a shortcut to a previous area you’ve visited.

And of course, since it’s a combat-focused RPG, there is a surprising amount of build variety and depth to progression. It all blends in masterfully to the organic manner in which you encounter enemies and bosses in the world as well as the rune system used for leveling up. You can specialize in sorcery as a mage, within which you can choose to focus in on various options like glintstone or gravity or full moon sorcery. You can choose to have a faith build with incantations, choosing again to focus in on frenzied flame or holy or black flame incantations. Or you can just go full melee, within which you can choose to two-hand or one-hand swords, spears, whips, knives, axes, halberds, hammers, and even try out colossal weapon variations of those. Beyond that, there is a stunning amount of depth to Ashes of War that you can apply to your weapons for special moves, Spirit Ashes that you can call as summon aids in battle, and a plethora of consumable items that can drastically turn the tide of the fight in your favor.

The boss fights in this game are also incredible. The lore of the world has a storied conflict between warring families, and every major boss has an in-depth backstory that somehow plays into your encounter with them. I’m personally not the biggest fan of boss fights in video games, but I found all of Elden Ring’s bosses to be interesting, unique, and entertaining. Some of them were truly a nightmare to deal with while others were pushovers. The sheer amount of enemies, bosses, areas, weapons, spells, items, and consumables in this game can feel extremely overwhelming at times. In fact, I’m not even sure how they managed to cram all of this into one game. Every dungeon, every random catacomb, and every secret path has that hand-designed curated feel to it, masterfully carrying forth the linear level design philosophy from prior titles into the open-world. It feels like this game with this much content shouldn’t theoretically be possible and shouldn’t exist, but here it is, flaunting its success for the world to see. The best part is that it doesn’t try to shove this content down your throat; it lets you organically stumble into various parts of it your own pace, if you so desire. And it doesn’t care if you miss long questlines or entire areas of the game without ever setting foot in them (these actually serve as an incentive for a second playthrough). That’s what makes everything feel so special.

It doesn’t succeed at everything, though. For one, the game can still feel very inaccessible for someone who isn’t already familiar with the Souls series. The game makes you pick a character right away, all of whom have a different distribution of stats, without any explanation of what each stat does. If this is your first Souls game, you’ll need a guide to tell you what everything is. The ideal way to play these games is to min-max your build to specialize either as a melee character or a hybrid faith/strength build or a full/partial mage. Veteran Souls players know these things but it’s never explained to new players, causing them to uniformly level-up all stats and think that they have a “well-balanced” build while at the same time wondering why they’re not able to kill bosses in the game (note: for the unfamiliar, it’s not recommended to evenly split your stats across all available options).

The level-up screen is an absolute UX nightmare. The game doesn’t bother explaining what each stat is displayed and assumes you know that “L Hand Armament 1” is the weapon you’ve currently got equipped on your left hand in the first slot. You figure this out eventually, but you shouldn’t have to think so much to figure out something so essential for taking down enemies. The game doesn’t tell you what attributes titled “Immunity,” “Robustness,” and “Focus” do and makes you guess or look it up elsewhere. I can understand the desire to keep the stats screen similar to the Souls series, but I was hoping this game would at least try to be a bit more accessible to those that are new to the franchise. This decision by the devs in turn leads to a lot of gatekeeping by the community of fans who have just gotten accustomed to these bad design decisions, looking down upon new players who have a genuine question about an unclear game mechanic due to poor UX design in the menus.

Many things you can do in-game are also not at all clear to new players. When you run across thin strips of ledges on the sides of buildings, Elden Ring doesn’t have a special animation where you character precariously hugs the wall and shimmies down the side carefully. So when you do jump onto a narrow ledge across a castle wall and your character is moving as they normally would on solid ground, it feels like you’re “breaking” the game. But you’re not, the game is intentionally designed this way (but not explicitly made clear). Fans of the series have been conditioned to look for these routes and follow them, but any new player wouldn’t even know that you can do this in the game. Same with hidden walls and hidden entrances as a game mechanic, you’d have to discover this through player-written messages in the game (which requires online multiplayer and is inherently inaccessible because of that).

Moreover, there is no indication of fall damage and what the scaling for it is. The game hides important items and essential NPCs in optional interactions near the beginning of the game, causing players to easily miss these things if they don’t go out of their way to explore everything and talk to everyone within the first few hours of the game. The game cannot be paused (due to the multiplayer invasion mechanic), so you’re left a sitting duck for anyone to join your game and kill you if you needed to tend to something around the house or had to deal with a child/pet emergency. Switching between spells and incantations using one button on the D-pad is cumbersome and terrible to the point that I’ve only started using two or three equipped spells at any point; any more and I’m dead while I’m busy switching spells. Beyond that, there’s obvious usability bugs in the game — like when you use a key to unlock a door, the game flashes a banner saying “Stonesword Key was lost with use” but doesn’t auto-dismiss the banner like it does with every other banner. Worse, it blocks your attack and evasion buttons until you’ve dismissed the banner with the confirm button, the prompt for which doesn’t even show on-screen to this day.

After having experienced all these issues, I’m left wondering what makes these sort of UX quirks and usability issues passable in a FromSoftware game but would be a huge game design crime in any other game. Is the overall experience that much better that the game can get away with these seemingly minor flaws? A lot of them add up to make the game a more frustrating and less accessible to everyone, so what was it about Elden Ring specifically that made all the critics and fans ignore these things and shower it with ten out of ten reviews anyway? I’m not entirely sure.

Despite these issues, I do think Elden Ring is a landmark open-world game in the same way that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Grand Theft Auto III were. It redefines the same-y open world game design formula in its own unique way, and sets a new benchmark for all future titles to aspire to. Every other open-world game wants you to feel like an explorer but is afraid of you getting lost, constantly nagging you with helpful hints and tutorials and breadcrumb trails throughout your journey. Elden Ring says screw it; you’ll get lost and you’ll stumble into a random village in an underground cave that will eventually teleport you to a high-up plateau from which you can carefully horse-jump onto rock formations that will let you visit a special NPC who has a very involved questline that unlocks two new gigantic areas to explore filled with rare items and then — as a final reward — gives you the choice of a special ending, if you wish to use it. It’s this type of trust and freedom that makes the game work, and playing the game is special because of it.

There are so many games out there that promise a sense of “freedom and exploration” but miss the mark due to their gameplay being an endless checklist of quests and tasks to complete. I’ve forgotten what I did in most of the generic big budget AAA-titles, but I remember so many fond moments in Elden Ring, like deciding to check out a small cave expecting it to be a “ten minute detour” from my main path and emerging on the other side of a sprawling multi-level dungeon with containing big boss fights and unique loot. This sense of “creating” your own adventure is what makes the game so special, and I personally think it even tops Breath of the Wild when it comes to providing the player with a true sense of exploration and organic discovery. Elden Ring ends up being so memorable because every player takes a different path in their journey and tackles objectives in a different way that tailors the experience to their own decision-making and desires, providing players with an unparalleled sense of agency in the vast open world that few other games can ever hope to match. I hope that other game studios use this formula while improving on its many shortcomings to deliver even greater experiences that transcends the already high bar set by Elden Ring.