This article is the second in a series exploring the game Elden Ring and its design. You can read the prior entry here.
Ever since The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild released I’ve found myself debating what makes a “good” open-world with my friend and titular podcast cohort Steve. After five years and an additional one-hundred and fifty hours in Elden Ring, I think I’ve come to recognize just how much of that debate is over the unimportant specifics. While icons on a map are a part of the problem to someone such as myself, it does not get to the heart of what I enjoy about an open-world. Towards the end of our ninth conversational grab bag, I asked a simple question:
What is the point of a giant, open world if you don’t even engage with it?
Of course, this question itself could easily lead to more semantics and unimportant bickering over minor details. From my perspective, however, if I’m following the GPS on the mini-map or looking for icons rather than topography, then I’m not actually engaging with the world. It simply exists to look good on screenshots and pad time between linear missions or mini-game style activities.
Again, this is from my perspective, and I’m not even sure what forms the foundation of that perspective. All I know is there are some activities that exhaust me when exploring an open-world, and others that do not. When I played Breath of the Wild, I found it refreshing to explore a mountain range only to discover a hidden shrine or, even better, a dragon roosting upon its peak. There was no icon on the map saying to go there for that thing specifically. It was… well, it was a discovery, and it was driven purely by my own curiosity. When there’s an objective marker present, I tend to look at the mini-map more than the environment around me. When no such marker is present, my eyes are instead scanning every bit of the world, and this activity allows me to appreciate the world even more.
It is this same sense of discovery that embodies Elden Ring, but unlike Breath of the Wild, the Lands Between are far less accommodating than even the harshest corners of Hyrule.
Exoprimal is a childhood dream game made real. It’s the figurative mashing together of plastic power armor against mouth breathing dinosaur models whose joints lack proper flexibility. The very premise is ripped right out of B-movie havens such as The Asylum, distributor of the intentionally bad Sharknado, but executed with a decently budgeted spit-shine polish that can only come out of a video game studio like Capcom. The network test’s introductory news reels and exposition indicate that the developers are self-aware enough regarding their silly, stupid, and ridiculous premise, but they execute upon it with a straight face.
It’s that Venn Diagram of dumb and cool, where a concept is so bizarre or implausible yet captures our very fantasies like no other. The sight of raptors literally raining from the sky, smashing and splashing onto the hard ground only to stand back up and charge forward in a flood of gnashing teeth and slashing claws, is simultaneously funny and yet wonderful. Despite the impossibility of a Tyrannosaurus Rex leaping into the air and performing a flying kick, the very animation and depiction activates just the right neurons in the brain to generate excitement. The logical parts of our brain clash with our most primal or childish, and in the end, it’s that youthful exuberance that wins out. Reject reality and accept the fantasy of robots fighting dinosaurs as the jovial dream that it is.
Despite this overwhelming sense of joy that the test delivered, there are still plenty of question marks left hanging over one’s head. Just how diverse will the final game modes be on release? Prior trailers, interviews, and marketing materials insinuated that there will be a story mode that follows some uniquely designed characters, but how exactly will they pull it off? Will it be a lengthy tutorial for the multiplayer disguised as a single-player campaign, or will it be a unique experience all its own? Does every game mode have a competitive element to it? What sort of monetization can players come to expect? Does Capcom plan on providing regular content updates to keep the community coming back?
There’s no doubt that Exoprimal made for a fantastic two hours of gameplay, but does it stand a chance of lasting for two-hundred hours?
Back towards the end of March I wrote some glowing thoughts on the quality of Elden Ring. It was planned to be the first of at least two pieces, expecting to have at least a bit more to say once I had finished the game. The thoughts and opinions expressed in that post are, admittedly, a bit dishonest. They were rationalizations of things I recognized as flaws for other games, but twisted around to sound like compliments.
In other words, I wanted to try and convince myself why I’d been so light on this game despite committing crimes I’d otherwise be critical of elsewhere. The box art for Elden Ring might as well have the emblem of a recycling bin on it given just how much content is rehashed. Even Godrick, a unique character and the first of the Rune Bearers most players will likely face off against, has a clone locked away within one of the Evergaols.
There is a lot of recycled content in Elden Ring, but to simply point that out as a criticism is, I think, doing the game a disservice. This is partially due to the nature in which other games littered with recycled content are built, and by more closely looking at the manner in which Elden Ring is designed, I hope to highlight why so many more players are willing to tolerate it from From Software than they are the likes of Ubisoft or Activision.
Before we get that deep, however, we need to look at one of the earliest mixtures of praise and critique from the From Software fans themselves: core mechanics that are over a decade old.
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