Idle Thoughts

A worthy sequel with all the qualities and flaws that come with going open world (★★★★☆)

By my account, Elden Ring is Demon’s Souls 7, or Dark Souls 7 (i.e., three Darks Souls, Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro). I’m opening with this to give a sense of what Elden Ring is: a sequel with one major new element, not some great reinvention of the franchise, despite what the new title might make you think.

So the basic recipe of what makes a Souls game good is still there, essentially unchanged since Demon’s Souls in 2009. If you don’t know what that recipe is, this probably isn’t the place to explain, but let me have a quick stab at it anyway. A Souls game is all about high-stakes combat, both you and your enemies are fairly fragile, waiting for the right moment to strike… and dodge rolling with precise timing through bosses’ enormous and frantic attack patterns. It’s about having a whole host of possible equipment to choose from. It’s about carefully navigating buildings of cyclopean scope, through narrow passageways and daring drops. Anyway, all of this is perfectly intact and present in copious amounts in Elden Ring, so if you want more Dark Souls, it’s a no-brainer. Get it now, don’t delay!

The element I’d rather focus on is what’s new to the series: open world structure. I’d like to preface this by saying I don’t really like open worlds: they dilute coherent design and encourage recycling content, all for the sake of having a bigger game. And surprise, surprise, guess what happens to Elden Ring.

Let’s start with the good. The feeling of freedom upon starting Elden Ring is just phenomenal. You can pick any direction on the map, look for an area that seems suspicious and what do you know, you’ll find a cave or ruins, usually containing at least one item that is genuinely unique to that place. The world is speckled with bite-sized mini-dungeons, many of them clocking at around 15 minutes or so. Ironically, these short dungeons are very conductive to binge gaming because… why not one more, right? Gotta go see what’s at the end of that cliff, right? To aid traversal, you’ve been given a horse. Its speed is really fun and the ease with which you mount and dismount is really great. It also has a double jump, which creates some opportunities for fancy platforming. To be fair, the horse controls are pretty iffy in tight spaces and horseback combat, while a welcome change of pace, is generally janky and overall pretty poor.

Another thing that makes Elden Ring much better than most open-world games is that the items you get MATTER. Most open-world games are so easy and your character so powerful that the concept usually devolves into cleaning icons from the map for stuff of no relevance. Souls games are (pretty) hard. Every weapon upgrade, every experience level, every talisman helps. A Souls game being open world gives many, many avenues for progression if something is too hard for you. The game pretty much teaches you this at the start with its first “real” dungeon.

Now for the bad. Simply put, Elden Ring isn’t really a bigger game than Dark Souls 3, not really. You’ll find roughly the same items, the same kind of quests, levels, bosses, etc. It’s only the world that’s bigger… and the game longer, 100-120 hours long. To compensate, there’s a lot of reused content. In other words, there’s the same amount of jam on your toast, it’s just spread way thinner over a much bigger piece of bread. Instead of having one big crypt level, you get twenty mediocre ones! Those 15-minute mini-dungeons? They get old eventually… go there, see copy-pasted rooms, beat a regular enemy promoted to boss status, obtain a goofy oversized weapon you’ll never, ever use. Yay! Look, I know we should recycle to save the planet, but this level of content-recycling is sometimes beyond the pale… how is it that every natural cave has exactly the same mine shaft? I’m okay with a boss coming back but now he’s fire-themed instead of ice-themed. I’m also okay with a 2 for 1 rematch with old bosses. But here… I swear some bosses show up a dozen times, plus every mid-sized enemy gets turned into a boss at least once. It’s shameless.

With that being said, the “bespoke” dungeons are the real draw, but there’s really only five or so of those, depending on how you count. Still, they’re the highlight of the game: complex areas of enormous size and verticality, plus optional areas and bosses, not to mention troves of unique items.

Another problem with the recycling is that the game obviously keeps its flashiest boss fights for the end. Sadly, by then I was just eager for the game to be over: I had most of my patience wasted on throwaway bosses. I didn’t really appreciate the final fights, I just used whatever got them killed the fastest and moved on.

One technical tweak that’s welcome is the Ashes of War. Basically, they work as both equipable special attacks for weapons and modifiers for damage types/affinities. In other words, they replace special mining materials and they let you customize your weapon of choice. The downside to having fewer upgrading materials is that you can keep fewer weapons upgraded at the same time. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with the series that they’ve never corrected. Smithing materials are time-consuming to find, not to mention the costs. What’s the point of putting hundreds of weapons in the game if switching between them is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming? They’ve also added Spirit Ashes to the game, which are basically summonable NPC enemies that fight for you. Those let you get help for major fights without going online, but they have the same problem of needing to be upgraded with rare resources. So here too despite having dozens of choices you’ll just pick 2-3 and never, ever try the others.

Speaking of things that were never corrected, there’s also the story. It’s exactly the same as always: the world is dying, you’re a nameless Something that needs to beat the dudes from the intro video to find the Gimmick that will save the world. Basically the real story is: just kill anything that has a health bar. It’s not really a bad setup per se, but it’s hard to see what was George R. R. Martin’s input in all of this. You’d think they’d try something else with an open world structure, like factions, or actually rebuilding the world before the final cutscene, or even just NPCs that don’t drop dead for no particular reason the second their quest is over. Ironically, a few quests point at you rebuilding the world, but the end result is almost pathetically disappointing.

Since we’re on the subject of quests, I think they’re the game’s biggest flaw: they’re vastly below average for a game of this calibre. They’re roughly the same they’ve always been for the series: characters mumble incoherently about things you’ve never heard of, but now that the game is open world, you have a much bigger area to not know where to find what they’re talking about! Oddly enough, most of the quests are hardly essential, but since the game doesn’t tell you this, the frustration is there nonetheless. Hey, one of a handful of people still alive is asking for something, it must be important, right? The classic annoyances are all there, like characters that decide to “go on a journey” without telling you where they’re going on the enormous map and characters asking for something without telling you clearly where it is, even when it should be obvious to them (you have a compass now… cardinal points, use them!).

Truth be told, I was confused for most of the game. An early note speaks about “Land Squirts”, but it took me hours to figure out what it was talking about. Your main goal changes midway through the game, but it’s not clear how much of it you have to accomplish before that, or if the old goal is still important somehow. Rest points are supposed to guide you, but they just point at a nearby major area, not at what your next objective to advance the story should be. I also spent hours trying to reach an area, only to figure out much later that the only way to get there is through a teleporter on the other side of the world. Gotcha! (Seriously, teleporters are such a cop out in an open world game). Characters are very forgettable and hard to keep track of. I killed many of them in self-defense without realizing who they were supposed to be. One character suddenly murders another one in the name of their Great Cause, and my only reaction was: wha? It sure doesn’t help that characters have similar names by design: there’s Radhan, Radagon, Rennala, Renna and Ranni, then Godwyn, Godrick and Godfrey, etc.

The confusion is almost hilarious sometimes. Multiple bosses proclaim a new identity mid-fight: “Behold! I am not really Swordmistress Varyla, I am Linda, Keeper of the Ledger, Accountant of Balance!” Whoah, calm down there buddy, you’re just a HP bar at the bottom of the screen to me. Besides, this is the first and last time I’ll ever see you. One boss is the same person you meet earlier, but since bosses are repeated multiple times, even major ones, I thought he was just a reused asset. Also, why do these extremely recognizable characters think they can create a secret identity by shifting a few letters of their name around? To be fair, as usual, a lot of the lore tidbits are intriguing and full of hidden implications. It’s just not a story, or even a coherent world.

One last thing I’d like to talk about is the multiplayer. It’s another classic element that really hasn’t been updated. First of all, there’s leaving messages for other players. Starting the game around release, I was submerged with messages falsely talking about secret walls, idiots begging for attention and the lamest sex jokes possible with the limited vocabulary. What a terrible, terrible way to sell your mysterious secret-filled new world. The amount of crap also obscured important elements of the world. I immediately went offline and never connected again because there’s no option to just shut off messages. Why have they not thought of that by now? PVP I couldn’t care less about, but since so many players love it, I don’t know why they don’t just make a separate mode and let players have at it. The developers have long since realized that getting invaded is just tedious unless you’re expecting it. I understand the concept of the game being one consistent world, no separate modes or anything, but you could create level divisions without players stressing out about overleveling. It seems unused areas of the game are meant for PVP, but they’re not in the game as of right now.

I may have sounded negative in my review, but I state again just how good the Souls series is and Elden Ring is no different. Despite what some may claim, they are tough but fair action games, full of possibilities for creating your own playstyle. The games still towers above the “Souls-like” copycats, but the competition is catching up in some aspects : Mortal Shell created a very fun roguelike mode with a very tiny world, Death Stranding did something much more interesting with the concept of passive multiplayer, and Nioh improved upon the stamina system and has combat just as solid as the Souls games. With that being said, having also recently played the remake of Demon’s Souls, I’m amazed at how much of the formula was already perfected from its very first iteration. Heck, in some ways Demon’s Souls is a better open world game, since you can mostly choose any area to start from and they are of a relatively similar difficulty, unlike Elden Ring where the same enemies get clearly boosted stats in later areas. What I’m getting at is that the seventh game in this series is not necessarily better than the first one with a fresh coat of paint. All the Souls games are solid titles in their own right, as is Elden Ring, just don’t expect anything too out of the ordinary except the open world structure.