Hey! This video does cover the entirety of Elden Ring, but if you're worried about spoilers then the beginning of the video only discusses content up the end of Leyndell Royal Capital. Then, from 15:50 onwards, I discuss the final section of the game and show all of the end bosses.
Could you cover the different sections in the combat system video into their own separate parts of a mini series. I felt their wasn’t enough an explanation of each topic in that video
You missed how the maps take no effort to grab and the blank map even shows the road to follow to get them. So their no reason to not have a full map. Then all of the poi are either posted on the map at the end of liner paths, with hidden activities sites all along obvious wall. Coupled with no major activities being hidden in the actual open area, it takes almost no effort to actually find all the activities. And of course we hav our sparrow that can boost out of almost any problem we ever seen in the empty wilderness. It’s a very safe open world that doesn’t ask much of you explore, just some pointless padding as you check the walls for the specific location of the activities. Sadly though this dose make the world somewhat boring as it very predictable and safe. Your never really challenged when checking off the activities. It less like an adventure and more like a grocery store. The isle have the general concept of what your looking for, but you still have to check each self in the are to see your target.
The fact that this was From Softwares first attempt at a true open world and it turned out this spectacular makes me incredibly excited for whatever they do next with this framework.
@@lmarcos21 And both are Japanese studios as well. It seems they just understand that the joy of exploration and discovery is what makes an open world worthwhile and not the amount of copy-pasted checklist content.
first darksoul is also kind of open world to me. but instead make the landscape horizontal like typical open world game, they choose vertical path. and we can traverse it at random direction. the interconnect is really good too. imagine you have all the subteranean dungeon in elden ring but they pack it below 1 or 2 castle. the castle itself is kind of castle above castle above castle lol. the sense of discovery is really good in 1st darksoul
@@lmarcos21 They had a decade worth of other open world games to look at and study though. You can tell in Breath of the Wild that Nintendo carefully looked at games like Assassin's Creed or Shadow of the Colossus, took what worked and subverted what they didn't like. And with Elden Ring From Software clearly looked at what BotW did and put their own spin on that. Even if the devs had never made a game like this before. These games didn't just spawn in a vacuum.
Witcher 3 was the same way. I think good teams trying open worlds offer better ideas than teams who have already done a lot of these types of games and fallen into patterns.
There are two sides to enemy balancing. On the one hand, it could perhaps get a little boring when you're overlevelled. However, that also makes for a very tangible sense of progression and makes you feel actively rewarded for all your struggles throughout the game; and feeling like a legitimate badass adventurer who earned it the hard way is a great power fantasy.
This is such a great point. If the only change is that enemies' damage and health scale along with you, it undermines a levelling system overall (and the power fantasy that comes with it), and can just increase the length of enemy encounters without adding to the depth of the encounter. I would prefer alternative solutions like he exemplified with BotW or Hollow Knight. I don't know if it has sense been patched, but I played Fallout 4 on release and by the end of the of my playthrough it took 3 mini-nuclear bombs to kill a single human enemy. At that point, I no longer had interest in playing because the combat encounters were too much of a timesink, and hadn't changed in mechanical challenge for the whole length of the game.
Treadmill difficulty like in Skyrim and Diablo games is more questionable in a lot of ways. Why shouldn't you eventually get so powerful you feel done with the game and go do something else? Granted, I love Skyrim because the progression is made tangible in other ways, the combat is always easy and fun, and because it's funny to see a cave dwelling bandit wearing dragonbone armor when just a few weeks ago no one believed in dragons. But in most games I want to set myself some goals, achieve them, and then uninstall. I don't know why people ever talk about it being desirable that a game never ends, becomes addictive, always sets new shallow goals to chase. I was already motivated to buy the game, I don't need anything other than the core experience I signed up for.
Assassin's Creed Origins/Odyssey/Valhalla gets boring because you never feel powerful, since the enemies are always equally leveled or 2 levels above/below. I'd like to wreck some enemies with ease sometimes.
I actually love the fact that the game is very open at the start and more focused in the end. When I started playing I loved exploring and levelling but as the hours flew by I became more focused on progressing the story and killing the main bosses. The game accommodated this perfectly.
honestly, the funnel towards the end is one of my favourite design decisions from soft made for this game. it starts right around the point where thorough players (like me) start feeling open world fatigue. also, the difficulty in the subsequent areas force players who skimmed through the previous areas to double back and see what they missed so they can get powerful enough to face the end game bosses. however, the game has completely played its hand at this point so there are no major surprises along the way (except for haligtree) which, imo, is the reason why players find the last few areas to be less interesting than what came before.
(before reading this know I don't remember the names of the address so I will describe what they look like if I can) That part where you said players who rushed have to go back and see what they missed... That's what happened to me. (I thought I did a decent amount of exploring, but apparently not enough.) And it's why I didn't finish the game. I beat all the first half bosses. Then I went up to that snowy area and I got really frustrated because it felt like I was at the start again. Normal enemies were brutalizing me. After several hours of making little to no progress I did some googling and found a game map with suggested player levels for each area. That snowy area l was trying to go through said I should be 25 levels higher than I was. I thought to myself how did I get all the way to beating all the bosses and I even felt over powered in the area with the yellowy fall colors, but now I'm supposed to grind out 25 levels? I tried to level up, after a while though you get diminishing returns and I just wasn't having fun anymore so I quit.
I feel like those desigm elements borrow in a great and nostalgic way from the Pokemon games. The Endgame there led you through a difficult dungeon on to the League where you battle the best Trainers of the Region one after another. It was a great feeling
@@nothanks6549 I was in the same boat, except I guess I have more of a "souls player" mindset despite this being my first and only souls game I got my ass kicked at the mountaintop of the giants, but I kept trying, kept pushing until I was successful I was only about level 70-90ish, when most people recommend atleast level 100 but closer to level 125 I vowed not to use a guide other then small ones like a rune farm and not to summon other players (tho I did cave on godskin duo and summon someone) I made my way to the final boss 30 levels under level, that's when I finally grinded runes and leveled up
I would agree if the area was actually satisfying, instead of being one of those Izalith esque areas they just poop out when they've run out of ideas. The final set of areas should have just been a short trek through the mountains to the Haligtree, which then takes you somehow to the Cauldron.
I was actually scared because I didn't know what to expect from game like this. You see, it was pretty sad to see lots of games dying and being bad, but I remembered: "bro, its FromSoft. Its their first open-world game? Yes, but it can't be that bad right? But why is it so small rn." And later on, I discovered the game was getting bigger and bigger and I was in awe. Didn't understand some haters, I really loved this game. The only problem is community being an arses sometimes :ddd
@@pandora8734 that's the beauty of it, as a vet of fromsoft game, i would say, the adrenaline that you get every time you enter new area on their game, i can't quite get that feeling in any other game
I thought It would be a medium size map, but everytime I explored the map kept getting bigger and bigger. Definitely one of my favorite videogame settings of all time.
I think that the “funneling” of the game that you mention is a great observation, but I also think it was a good decision on the part of FromSoft. As much as I loved the amazing scope of the early game and all of the options to explore, I felt like the narrowing the scope at the late game brought a sense of “ok, now it’s time to get to business and finish this.” The purpose became much clearer at that point in the game - especially after putting in 100+hours by the time I got to Maliketh. I honestly think I would have gotten fatigued if the late game was as just expansive as the early game. In fact, I think I was a bit fatigued already, so I went ahead and finished the game before exploring everything else. I’ll save that for another playthrough. As other commenters have noted, there are still several large late game areas that provide opportunities for exploration and discovery which I am excited to dig through myself, even if they’ve all been spoiled for me at this point. I think From did a marvelous job with this game. The passion into building the world is evident. And the design is impeccable.
Take it from me, no matter how much RUclips tries to spoil things, there will always be something that makes you go "Oh shit... that's cool!", even in the late-game.
I think the funneling was actually a good thing. Ludonaritvly, things start funneling when your character actually starts figuring out what they need/want to do.
Yah, I was really appreciative of the funneling. By the time I got to the Capital I was sort of spent on the whole exploring thing. I actually started craving a more linear experience anyways, and then it did just that. I think it did a good job at swapping the feel of the game from, explore around to ‘it game time. Complete your mission’
@@JanbluTheDerg This is very true. I saw plenty of Lore videos about Godwyn but when it came time to stand in front of him I found myself nervous, my gaming brain kept worrying he was gonna spring to life. It was a different experience, being in control vs just watching brief clips float by. Narratively speaking the funneling makes sense given the events that lead you to head north from the Capital.
One thing that greatly affected my first playthrough was actual the fact that they didn't show the true size of the map. Every time I think "Ok surely they're out of stuff now" and then another segment of the map opens up, instead of knowing exactly how much land there is to explore. Really kept wanting to explore, see just how far the map streches (also getting to see the map massively expand whenever you teleport to some faraway spot with a chest was wild
It was also really smart how they only gradually expanded the actual scale of the map screen the more you explored. When you first start out Limgrave takes up almost the entire map screen but by the end it's probably less than 20%.
Giving players tastes of other areas (like teleporting us to Crumbling Farum Azula from the Four Belfries, or to the Divine Bridge from the Tower of Return) is really fun, yeah!
@@firefly5247 The only downside to that was that I feel as though it sometimes detracted from the „intended“ reveal. For example, entering Leyndell for the first time would have probably been more impactful if the chest hadn’t teleported me to it before.
I also liked the fact, that the size of the map is restricted to the places you have been in the beginning. When I first played the game I thought it would be just Limgrave, then I discovered the teleporter chest to Caelid and thought "surely this has to be the endgame area" and thought it was just Limgrave, Liurnia and Caelid as endgame area, then I discovered Altus Plateau and thought "surely the Capital has to be the endgame area", then mountaintops of gigants, then Farum Azula...
One thing about the funneling is that most of it really starts once you've triggered the burning of the Tree, which is a cosmic point of no return for your character and the world. It makes sense for it to start funneling you HARD after that point--you've made a decision with insane consequences, and now everything demands you keep up with them.
@@GRE3NT yeah, like even if you wanna count the mountaintops as the 50 percent of the game hes refering, thats still really off. Sure it may have the same number of required bosses, but he himself said that there are 120 bosses and they sure as hell are not 120 of them in the mountaintops. Id say with mountaintops and haligtree thats like 25 percent through the game
I think the funneling was fine, too, but I hated how the wise dude offered to trade secret great runes, then was suddenly trying to kill me before I had a chance to get the runes to trade with him.
at this point in the game, i feel as though it has become obvious that you’re the only tarnished destined to become lord. you go from being “just another tarnished” to “THE tarnished”
@@IschiVezon They literally do that in every Souls game, though. Minus the lame funneling of literally killing the fire giant and burning ghost bae, teleporting you to a floating castle because they couldn't think of a better way for you to get there, then teleporting you again after beating Maliketh because a majority of players wouldn't think to go back to the capital city at this point and then topping it off with a rush of 4 1/2 bosses.
yeah, I really like this static level enemies, like in Gothic. It feels really good to come back an be able to beat an enemy or to realize that you're now just strong enough to survive against 1 enemy of type x and then a little later you can survive against 2 etc. also it feels great to overcome them by other means, like getting beaten up but then just sneaking around them or changing your tactics. Or in Gothic, going through all those powerful spell scrolls you were saving up for something and then finally use them. also this can add another sense of direction like: I'm not strong enough to beat this enemy, I'll try something else. moreover although in ER you become strong enough to 1hit most stuff, it still is dangerous, because the enemy damage stays relatively high compared to other games. so getting swarmed by weak enemies can still be deadly. lastly: most scalling systems make the world feel stale. Everything is supposed to be challenging, but in the end nothing is or it's a constant challenge, which also gets exhausting.
That's why I think Bethesda screwed up from Elder Scrolls 4 on. No real sense of danger. Breath of the Wild also screwed up the other way around, in a sense that you can go anywhere, but enemies can be downright impossible to beat if your level is too low, regardless of your skills, because your weapons break after a few swings.
"most scalling systems make the world feel stale. Everything is supposed to be challenging, but in the end nothing is or it's a constant challenge, which also gets exhausting." - I completely agree. Scaling systems do more harm than good, mostly diminishing the player's journey as their gained strength becomes irrelevant anyway.
Scaled enemies keep the power creep in check. Statically levelled enemies make early game more challenging and rewarding, but make the mid to late game an absolute cakewalk.
@@Digger-Nick If the endgame was an absolute cakewalk for you... kudos, that's more skill than "power creep" in a game where even maxed out vigor doesn't do all that much.
@@Digger-Nick I would say, it depends. There's different ways to keep power creep in check (balancing is hard, especially given vastly different skill ceilings). But combination is always possible. You could have a generally static approach going from region to region but inside a certain margin there can be scaling. Like a region where enemies are scaled lvl 5-10 but after lvl 10 all those enemies stay at lvl 10. That would still give you the overpowered feeling, when coming back, but keeping the challenge engaging while you're in that specific region.
I love Uhl palace ruins. The statues at the ground, going underground through a well, foreshadowing the city, then after riding a random coffin, finally reaching the other side of wall. Epic
i feel like the tighter final act stopped the open world fatigue for me. i like freedom but sometimes being told what to do is good too. i 100% agree with the fact its kinda easy to get too overlevelled to have fun by virtue of its openness but that feels like a goal in itself for a lot of players. also runes being the sole currency makes players choose between levels and gear. new players can also easily have fun with crazy 'sub-optimal' builds and such with loads of runes to spend.
I agree on the aspect of the more linear final act, and I'll add in that I actually really enjoyed the repetition of the catacombs and mage towers. In a game that's so open world, it was nice to find the occasional thing that I *knew*. No great mystery or surprise, but a quick 5 minute romp where I knew the general, but not the specific. It occasionally let me ground myself, rewarding me for learning a stable mechanic, and then let me go back out into the open.
I'm sorry but static enemy levels are absolutely essential for this kind of open world design and I'm really glad FromSoft took this route, games like Oblivion have shown us that tying enemy levels to player level makes games dull and takes away that feeling of acomplishment of finally being able to explore a high level area, or going backtracking to a previously explored area only to now blast through every enemy with ease. I really hope FromSoft (and all other open-world rpgs) keep doing this, auto-leveling can still be done but it needs to be way more intricate than "all enemies are within your lvl range except for a few bosses". Also, you can still tackle bosses after the capital in different order, that's how I did it and it even wasn't on purpose.
I wonder if an alternative to both would be to have a larger variety of leveled enemies in a section. Might make the world feel more believable since it looks like there is a real hierarchy/food chain in a given area.
Exactly my thought, how am I supposed to enjoy my increased damage output if every enemy gets their defenses buffed. Besides, the intricate combat of the souls games allows players to beat stronger enemies through skill alone
I think it is possible to combine the two designs. For example, if a mob has 2000 HP in current game, 1500 HP part can be fixed, and the other part(500 HP) can range from 0 to 1000 HP based on changes of the player's weapon level(or other stats), and finally range from 1500 to 2500 HP.
Level scaling is essential to making open world game open world. Elden ring is completely linear with it's awful upgrade mechanics, get that shit away from my Bethesda games that have actual quests and stories to tell.
The fact that I was able to grind levels to the point that I was "overleveled" allowed to enjoy more of the stylish places and cool bosses. It's my first from soft game, and I'm not really into difficult games. Still went all the way to journey 4 and got all the achievements, waiting on DLC.
@matias in elden ring? cuz that would be be laughable , even elden rings mini bosses are quite a bit better than your average main bloodborne boss or even older games. crucible knight alone is better and more complex than blood starved beast and thats just a single mni boss from elden XD
I'm very glad it bettered your experience, I really am. But for others like me, it was extremely underwhelming to steamroll through unexplored areas when we were still looking for new challenges.
My favorite thing in elden ring is how places are framed to make the impact of first seeing it that much more magical, It's like putting a game inside of a painting. First time you see Raya lucaria is from Godricks or the side path of Stormveil, both show off the academy in center above the fog and trees below. Once you get to the academy and make it up the lift you see it up close and can tell just how massive and mystical it is. The lake of rot is another example, you can first find it by going through the underground and finding an over view of the whole red lake with a small castle off to the side but can't get to it, later in the game you end up at the shore of the lake with nothing but the lake, a grace, and two trees. From a gameplay perspective the over look could have just been the end of a dark cave with an item. They even made paintings in the game that give rewards for going to the matching place they were made, in most games you would be given a "X marks the spot" type mission where you just go to the X on your map or mini map, but elden ring rewards you for taking in the scenery.
Not scaling the power i think actually helped the open world design. Once you out level an area it becomes easier to explore while the potential to find your next favorite weapon, spell, or talisman remains the same, so it incentivizes back tracking and combing through areas. If every catacomb is exactly as hard it makes the repeated content feel even more samey and turns exploration into more of a chore as the desire to find cool stuff butts up against the annoyance of slower careful movement, more demanding resource management, and possibly more deaths, all efforts you could be spending on exploring forward instead of backward. Gaining levels over the content around you is also one of the few, vitally critical ways FROM lets a player control difficulty. I recall being vividly unhappy when world of warcraft started scaling zones to your level as it made going back to earlier zones in an expansion to collect resources or mop up leftover quests for reputation & gold into a massive pain compared to previous versions of the game. It also lost a sense of greater worldly progression, the Shire and Mordor should not feel comparably dangerous.
I think I have to agree with Mark entirely on this one. Open world games that don't scale monsters to my character end up feeling very, very boring to me late game, Elden Ring included. I want to play games to be challenged. When I wander up to an early game boss that I accidentally missed the first run through and just killed it in 2 hits, I feel like I was robbed of what was probably a well designed challenging experience had I found it when I was "supposed to". I also very much disagree with your take on this re: World of Warcraft. Having level scaling in an MMO allows the entire world to be more relevant. I actually have a reason to explore a zone gainfully even if I'm past it's level floor. This worked wonders in The Elder Scrolls Online too. I guess it comes down to why someone plays games. It sounds like you want a "power fantasy", while I want to experience a designer's well sculpted experience.
@@Roswend I think the other guys issue with this kind of design is that leveling up and getting stronger are superfluous if every enemy is going to just scale up to you. There is no meaningful difference between doing 10 damage to an enemy and killing it in 10 hits vs doing 100,000 and killing it in 10 hits. For really common enemy's like rats or goblins this is super noticeable and jarring. I think a better balance would be to only have important enemy's scale up with you, so that big bad boss from a early area isn't one shot by you just because you didn't know/forget that it existed in the first place and got way to powerful for it to stand a chance against you.
@@Roswend Elden Ring does allow for both, but to some extent. If you don't want to back-track into easier areas you could just stick to your path, finish the game, head into new game plus and fight challanging enemies in areas that are normally easier. From there you could take an entirely different approach and explore new things. Of course the problem here is that most players won't think about this when they first play it, but if that's what suits you, it is possible. I definitely do agree that level scaling enemies are just bad and lazy in an open world game as well. After spending hours upon hours getting new gear, upgrading it, leveling and getting new spells or ashes of war, I'd feel insulted if I were to struggle with a very casual enemy in an area near the beginning. Going through earlier zones while being higher level made me feel like my character was improving and getting stronger. Which in turn made enemies later on feel more stronger and natural. Overall I'd find it silly to go into these epic dangerous areas, beat the enemies but struggle to quickly kill a simple husk of a man picking flowers in the field.
Yeah, I think skyrim-style scaling wouldn't work here. However, Hollow Knight-style "this zone is now more dangerous for story reasons" could absolutely have worked, possibly with some story conceit to allow bosses to scale (e.g. claiming great runes makes the power of the others resonate more - so the rune holders get harder as you claim more). Given the general Dark Souls theme of cycles (admittedly not so much a thing in Elden Ring), having a game where the second half was mostly corrupted versions of the first half would be an interesting and thematic design choice (though would need a bit of care to not be *too* familiar on the second part)
I agree, that moment is when I knew Elden Ring is something special. The rush of dopamine I got from the constant unpredictability another moment is when I found the chest in limgrave that teleports you to caelid made me realize "wait the map is bigger?" and the map just keeps growing and growing and to think so many of these regions are optional is truly incredible.
@@fredydiaz144 Same. My dumbass decided to start as a Wretch, and then Vaati said the twinblades were in the Dragon Burnt Ruins, so I decided that I’d like to test them out. So that’s the story of how I ended up in the middle of Caelid 20 minutes after the game came out. Fun times.
Fantastic video, but level scaling was treated like it's a good thing when it isn't. Coming back to a familiar area over leveled gives you the reward of trouncing those enemies and giving you the feeling of having become more powerful. Scaling enemies with level makes it feel like leveling up means nothing and you haven't become stronger when you return to old areas.
He gave examples where enemies are added or areas get new threats, so not just scaling enemy stats. If you go back to an area where three enemies used to give you trouble, and now you can deal with six, each one being much easier, you'll still feel like you become more powerful. Simply scaling stats is kind of the "lazy" way to go about it, and I do agree it defeats the purpose - but the purpose still exists
The fact that you don't HAVE to fight a boss when you struggle and can instead explore elsewhere to get stronger is the single fact that caused me, a long-time fan of FromSoft games who never played a single one, actually feel confident enough to pick it up and play it.
@@lapelcelery42 Pretty well, I absolutely love the game and am currently moving towards the final few tidbits of it. While I would assume I'm very over-leveled by numbers alone, I feel, due to me just not being that good, at the perfect point where it's doable, but also very challenging and requiring caution. I was also surprised just by how integral player messages became to my experience, that's something I feel cannot be conveyed fully via just watching other people play the games. How helpful or silly other people's warnings and thoughts can be, and how good it feels to see your own warnings and tips get appraised.
@@backslash153 That's great. If it helps you move into the other games, Elden Ring has by far the worst boss fights and enemy balance. I worry that people will presume the other games are the same, and obviously they are to a large extent, but due to the resources spent on the open world, the combat is much fairer and the content much more streamlined in the other games. Elden Ring actually loses out on the polish of the others, so I'd be extremely curious to hear how someone who likes ER, and started with it, feels moving on to the older games.
Highly recommend you to try the other ones too after you've done with your playthrough of Elden Ring. You've basically ready to tackle them (minus Sekiro) as their combat system are just the same as ER.
I like the idea that the last half is more focused. Sounds like the best of both worlds and makes me more excited to finally tackle this game for real.
I finally started the first legacy dungeon after 20 hours of just exploring. I'm having so much more fun after this video showing how the game works. I was playing blind and was totally lost. It was fine before but being completely aimless and half confused was not ideal either. If I only would have known about the legacy dungeon and main objectives sooner I would have played with a bit more purpose.
I feel the same way, but i also feel like GMT is correct in that it's because of constraints and not a deliberate design choice. Don't get me wrong this game is as close to a 10/10 as you could get, but it really is held together with duct-tape and glue, and you don't have to look very carefully to see the cracks It's like the design team decided that instead of cutting content, they would just keep it in the game and make it optional instead, a "quantity over quality but still enough content of quality" approach
Repetition is good to really hammer down the underlying rules of the world: -Memory stones are held in mage towers, and are locked with a magic riddle. -Catacombs have ashes in the tree burial chamber, that is locked by the tree themed door, locked with a lever somewhere in the catacombs. -Ruins have a hidden basement somewhere. -Churches have sites of grace, sacred tears, and a talk with melina. -Killing giant dragons and consuming their hearts give you their breaths. -Evergoals, giant stone circles have powerful beings trapped inside. -The moving mausoleums are stopped by destroying the souls trapped in the spiritual rocks. -Deathbirds and Night cavalries only appear at night. -Divine towers unlocks the powers of great runes. -Minor erdtrees have tree avatars that hold crystals for your potions. -Golden trees have golden seeds below them. -Mining caves have smithing stones to look for in the walls. And caves are literally all over the place, both geographically, and thematically, when you enter a cave, you cannot predict what the heck you're getting into, and even sometimes, don't even know where you will end up. The problem with repitition is that it gives you a sense of "i've seen this before", even if it isn't exactly the same. I'd say the real problem has nothing to do with content reuse or anything like that. Instead, the problem was that they failed (mostly) to capitalize on the best thing you can do once you create a pattern: BREAK IT. Break it *hard* leave them stumbled on the floor trying to figure out what the heck is going on. Some examples: (They do this one!) A basement ruin that has the entrance hidden with an illusion. But they could have also easily done that it doesn't lead to a basement, and instead to a cave, catacomb, whatever! (They do this one!) A church that has enemies instead of a place to rest. Maybe an evergoal brings you to an unfamiliar place, or its a trap, or is a big skirmish instead of a boss battle. They could have done literally anything else and it would have surprised the players. One of the divine towers could have a surprise boss battle in order to get the rune. One of the rotting or fallen minor erdtrees could have an already dead boss, and you'll have to find the crystal hidden somewhere, or kill whatever killed the avatar. Because the pattern isn't broken enough times, or not at all, means that you don't ever expect anything different each time you find something familiar, and indeed it is. But make enough "exceptions" to the rule, and suddenly when you enter a catacomb, you won't know if its just a "pull lever-> find door -> kill boss -> leave" catacomb, or a secret alternative path to reach the deeproot basin, a teleporting trap to the other side of the world, a ton of fake levers needing to find the right one, a huge riddle that needs to be solved instead of a lever, or even just plainly finding an npc instead of a boss at the end of the dungeon. If they threw those curve balls, one at a limgrave catacomb, one at a caelid catacomb, and two in liurnia, when you enter a catacomb at the altus plateau, you would still feel like although it could be a normal ass catacomb, it also *could* ber something you've never seen before... and that keeps the feeling of discovery to the very end!
I completely agree. This would have gone a long way in keeping those reused assets feeling fresh and exciting. This is what good, constructive criticism looks like
@@-Lillies Good point. It would have been better if you'd fought the Godskin Apostle at the top though, as that is where you're used to getting your rune. Also, it makes more narrative sense to have him up there, as it would imply he is laying in wait to kill the next demigod that arrives at the tower.
This is an excellent comment. You built on points I've seen discussed in another video (you probably saw it to). Any time there was pattern breaking I was excited and reengaged. Kept things fresh without From having to create a ton of new assets.
Frankly, even going back to low level areas when you're overleveled for them can still be challenging if you stop concentrating and get careless. Get caught in a pack of wolves or a bunch of footsoldiers and you'll be knocked off torrent and flat on your back vulnerable in seconds. Miss that parry or try to strike at the wrong time and you get punished, concentrate on one guy too hard by a camp and you're asking to be pegged in the head by an arrow or spell, let a zombie grab you and you're out half your health
Ah yes. You should never get too cocky and careless in FromSoft games I also learned that the hard way. But still, I think they should add an enemy scaling option similar to newer AC Games. Although Elden Ring's enemies doesn't have levels they could easily program something that adds multipliers to enemy stats based on your rune level. I kinda made a mistake by always clearing out the main areas nearly completely before the main bosses. This resulted in me absolutely destroying Rennala, Radahn and Morgott on my first try even without summons. You could somewhat counterbalance this by leveling up other stats but it feels eeeehhhh... The only way Morgott was a decent challenge when I went in with +3 weapons on NG+. I especially liked Odyssey's option where you could set the game in a way that enemies are never weaker than you by more 4 levels but already strong enemies won't scale down to your level.
@@valentinvas6454: that's not really a "mistake". An easier boss fight is your "reward" for thorough exploration and preparation. Scaling enemies would be a huge mistake in Elden Ring, because the game doesn't have a traditional difficulty selection like other games. Being able to out-level the enemies is the only alternative less skilled players have for overcoming these challenges. Maybe a system where enemies scale based on the number of Great Runes the player has collected could work, but definitely not one where enemy level is tied directly to the player's rune level.
A clever thing Elden Ring does with its open world is how it makes your adventure through each zone feel different by varying the layout and changing up your route to the legacy dungeon. The main route through Limgrave is roughly shaped like a T, climbing up. Liurnia is a straight line or a trident. Caelid is a G going down. Mt Gelmir is a spiral. Altus is an F. Etc. And the way each zone interacts with its legacy dungeon, and how you approach and enter them, is different too. You could probably do a whole series on the different levels of world design in Elden Ring.
I remember discovering the game and kept thinking I was near the end and would finish it soon. It just kept on going and more areas kept being discovered, loved the game.
5:07 I had no idea that there's a lift that takes you to the Altus Plateau, I took the semi secret way on a whim and thought that that was the main way to do it all this time. It ended up being one of the most magical moments of my playthrough cause I had no idea the Altus Plateau was waiting for me at the end of that dungeon.
mroe proof the games level design is several magnitudes higher grade and more complex than dark souls 1. as a whole, ds1s shortcuts look cute in comparison to elden rings whole picture.
This is one of the few games that I wish I could play for the first time again. The sense of sheer childlike joy in discovery that I got from it is unparalleled. The only problem I have with it is that I played it so much that I feel like I need to take a break for at least a couple years before I forget some of it.
Dude, I had to take a break from GAMES after I finished my playthrough. Elden Ring sucked me completely dry for the two weeks I no-lifed it and an entire month after that.
That moment when I went down the well to siofra river is unforgettable. One of the best exploration moments in gaming. And the bosses are just incredible. I will never forget beating malenoa through only parries for the first time. Literally felt like I as a person levelled up.
Agreed. I have a plan to try it again in 2024-5 for that reason. Should be long enough that I'm not clear on anything but the biggest plot points. Still won't get a lot of the absolutely stellar first reveals of locations, but that should be okay. I can actually pay attention to the lore next time.
I, for one, felt that coming back to areas that I had trouble with before after exploring a different area and powering up a little bit, felt really satisfying. I understand maybe some scaling could have been done (where enemies are still less powerful than you are, but only to a certain maximum), but this didn't bother me too much in my playthrough: I think most bosses were challenging, regardless of my level (save maybe the Magma Wyrm). Breaking my head against the Twin Gargoyles and eventually giving up after about 20 tries, and then coming back to them after leveling up while exploring other areas to kick their asses felt fantastic. Still needed to focus and manage my health well, but it was great.
I honestly don't think the reuse of the catacombs are quite as bad as people tend to say. It feels like a refinement of what the Bloodborne chalice dungeons were attempting, and while I quite love the dungeons, the catacombs definitely do feel like a proper improvement on them. With such a massive and vast open world, you can quickly run into burn-out and fatigue where you start getting exhausted by the sheer amount of stuff you have as options, so these small mini-dungeons that are extremely focused on one specific relatively linear thing are really enjoyable. An aspect that is underappreciated is how their design instantly informs you of what you should visit them for. Catacombs are entirely dedicated to spirit summons, having new ashes to use, glovewort to upgrade them with, and occasionally deathroot for an NPC questline, and you always know you'll find imps and skeletons inside so prepare crystal darts to make the imps malfunction and Holy Order powers to keep the skeletons down for good. Tunnels are always going to be where you find smithing stones, stone miner bell bearing, and are full of important materials for magic-based arrows and consumables, obviously being full of miners and often having other magic related enemies like the Marionettes or crystal snails around, plus they are even neatly marked on your map with a red/orange marker with a black core so you can locate them easily. Lastly Caves are for gear, weapons, talismans, and other tools, having a much more varied list of enemy options, but usually involving either wild animals or status effects of some sort. You always know exactly what you are getting into, why you would want to investigate this area, and it lets you take a short break. I'd also highlight the Mountaintop catacombs/caves. They are really excellently designed, with the snailcaller's cave being such a blast with how it subverts your expectations and slows the game down, forcing you to sneak around through bushes because of the sheer overwhelming number of enemies, while the Mountaintop catacombs explicitly takes advantage of catacomb's similar designs and make the place feel like a never ending maze of endlessly looping corridors and pathways, with the solution to finding the lever really not being what'd you expect. So I really dont think they are nearly as bad as people tend to say. Yes Catacombs might be a bit repetative in design, but the only reason you would need to go in there is for ash upgrade materials. If you don't want to try other ashes, or don't need to upgrade an ash, there's no reason to force yourself through unless you want to play through it.
The catacombs/caves are not the same as the chalice dungeons. One is used to fill the core of the open world game with points of interest to not make the game's maps feel like an empty painting, the other is total side content that is seperate from the main game aside from lore. The criticisms towards Elden Ring are fully warranted, let's not pretend they arent as bad as people say, please. Here's hoping they end up fully updating ER to better meet the standards that Miyazaki was going for, Scholar of the First Sin style... Except, not at ALL like THAT abomination of a game. Good first attempt at an open world, but it is quite obvious to see where the game is lacking, and so, can be tuned to reach the level of *Masterpiece* without so much of the *Flawed*
There were definitely a few unique dungeons (like the one with the chariot) but most of them were rather boring and I stopped doing them when I saw them because they were just tedious and in the end would provide something I’d use once or never at all
@@romdog1818 This comment makes no sense, even having little secondary content bb, the CDs still feel mediocre because of how short the base game is, and yes, the catacombs of eldenring is also secondary content. It makes no sense to say that one is secondary and the other is not, remember that to complete the game you only need two runes and burn the tree, all the rest of the content is optional.
I also enjoyed the “repetition” because I knew what I could expect. If I was using spells and wanted another slot I could scan the horizon for a tower and know that’s where I could find what I’m looking for. If I saw a new minor erdtree I would head towards it wanting to find out what the new crystal tear would be. IMO that’s much better than it being totally random and different because then I never went “oh… well that was a waste of time because I’ll never use this.”
The other thing to keep in mind is that there are 18 Catacombs in the game. Even if you combine the 5 Hero's Graves with that (which have most of the same enemies and textures but different overall structure), that's 23 mini dungeons that look kinda the same. When other open worlds like Zelda have 120 shrines using the same assets and music, I'm really not upset about Elden Ring. They were pretty tactful with their reuse, and later dungeons still felt purposeful and surprising in their level design in a way that randomly generated areas like Bloodborne's Chalice Dungeons did not.
I always say this but having no knowledge or whatsoever of the existence of nokron before heading down the long ass elevator, the experience of discovering it by yourself was phenomenal. With the stars in the sky and mogh's palace in the background.
With how much people have been hyping this game up its nice to see a video discussing the problems a lot of us had with it. Even if something is good, criticism is still a valuable tool of analysis, and can help shape future iterations.
True. The game is stunning, and its non hand holding approach is refreshing after all those ubisoft open worlds. But it’s a fact that Elden ring is still a lot easier combatwise than the previous games in the series and that its exploration is more linear than the other open world games.
It’s infuriating to think about it. It’s a 10/10 game in the first 10 hours and then steadily just slips down and down and down. Limgrave is perfect game design and sooo tight but already at Liurnia you have seen pretty much all the game has to offer and from Altus onwards it’s basically just a grind through stronger versions of the same enemies. So much fun, wonder and excitement in the beginning and then it becomes still a good game but not an exciting one
@@minecraftotalwar 'But it’s a fact that Elden ring is still a lot easier combatwise than the previous games in the series and that its exploration is more linear than the other open world games.' explain
Doing ranni and fia's quests on launch day when me and my friends were all headless chickens was one of the best gaming experiences i've had, as well as finding the way to mohgs palace without doing varres quest.
I think the reuse of catacombs, mage towers, mines, etc are a double edged sword. I agree that the familiarity does diminish the feeling of mystery and discovery, but it allows for recognizable goals for players to follow. Looking on the map to try to find those orange circles that signify smithing stone mines so I could get upgrade materials made me feel smart, using my understanding of the game's world to make myself stronger.
Yeah sure, allowing the player to know what kinda rewards to expect is great, especially with so many possible builds, each of which will profit from different stuff. But all the catacümbs, for example, feel so samey, at least to me. You can expect gargoyles/skeletons, some tight corridors that all look the same, a lever to open the boss door, and maybe a few of those falling blade traps, or the flame spitting traps. And that's it, that's how 90% of these areas play out. There are some minor differences on top of that, but they're not enough and so I feel not like I've went through 20 different zones, but through 1 zone, 20 times.
To me, a lot of it depends on how much it "makes sense". The catacombs didn't bother me so much because they were all man-made and seemed built for the same purpose (having access to the Erdtree roots), but it was definitely immersion-breaking to realize that every single elevator shaft in every mine has a ledge and tunnel off to the left (especially in later mines when that tunnel would usually be blocked off, meaning that the ledges didn't even serve a purpose).
All good points, yet at the same time, there's something I appreciated about getting more familiar with certain "tilesets" like catacombs and mines. It was satisfying to feel my mastery increase; I came to recognize that, say, catacombs are a consistent source of glovewort and sometimes deathroot, a trip through a mine is great for upgrading weapons, etc. And I appreciated special twists that were used only once or twice, like having to slip under a platform that rises when you step on it, or navigate a maze of transporter chests. Elden Ring is my favorite FromSoft game so far!
It's almost like they did "open world with bits of Dark Souls" for the first half, and "Dark Souls with bits of open world" for the second. It's a great way to balance both ways. As for the "formulaic" stuff (catacombs, mines,...) I think it's a good idea to make it like that. As a player, you get a sense of what's inside and if it's good for you to go in. If you don't care about summoning ghosts, you can skip all the catacombs and be fine. If you need material X, you know roughly where to go. I was going to say that it's a bit jarring, but in the end where would you go to find ancient treasures in the real world? Not in a coal mine... :p It's silly but the more I think about it the more it makes sense. Specific "'treasures" will coalesce in same-y areas.
"s a player, you get a sense of what's inside and if it's good for you to go in" Exactly, the game establishes a set of rules in an easy form at first and then slowly expands on them with each successive dungeon. You'd think Mark would get that, considering it's a core concept for game design.
For me it was kind of hit or miss. The catacombs felt believable because it always seemed like there was a reason behind it, like they were all built around the same time by the same people for the same purpose, but it felt less believable that every mine shaft has the exact same ledge off to the left of every elevator, or that every random village would dig basements with the exact same layout.
I feel like narratively, the funnel makes sense because doors are meaningfully closing. The characters and cast around you all begin to meet with their ends, or realize the path they've been on might not be the one for them. Elden Ring is inherently about becoming Elden Lord, and the Highlander "there can be only one" feeling starts setting in, and other characters begin to see your character, not as just another Tarnished, but as a specific Tarnished, as a powerful one, a threat. Other Lord Claimants take note of you, some NPC's begin to refer to you as Lord, or imply you will become one if you keep it up. The endgame is a funnel because you're getting rid of the last remaining obstacles, and the great creation the Erdtree, is coming to its end. Roundtable Hold by the endgame literally lights itself aflame, and is mostly empty except for Hewg and Roderika (and Gideon but some good he is). I suppose what I mean to say here, is that the first half is finding the way you want to claim the throne, and the second half of the game is actually going forward and doing it. Mechanically this works well because you'll have a favored weapon type or kit, a spell set and strategy, and you'll have invested a good number of smithing stones into your favorite toys. Your statline will be closer to your ideal spread for your build, and as a player, you'll be ready. Finally, the other Tarnished around you change. At first, other Tarnished are like your coworkers or colleagues, or rivals on a similar scale. We go from a little group of the few remaining Tarnished who believe a Lord will arise, to the failed Lord Claimants who have come close, but not succeeded (Vyke and Bernahl), and we get the tools to finish what the Black Knives began, the Rune of Death so you can finish the job. The game from the beginning tells you that becoming Elden Lord is the goal, and many have tried but few succeeded, because they lost their guidance, gave up hope, and stopped. This is a pretty recurring motif in FromSoft games, but in Elden Ring it's done to epic fantasy rather than dark fantasy (as dark as Elden Ring can be, that's saying something). I also think FromSoft cares a bit less about showing you some bones of a game from time to time, and the catacombs all have interesting lore as to why they look the same, and it has to do with their common purpose. While the lore is hard to come by, there are usually few things that lack in-universe reasons for happening. That said I will say my issue for first time players is the brutal spike in difficulty after defeating Morgott. Mountaintops of the Giants has a literal gatekeeper boss in front of Rold that will flatten you if you're under-prepared, Mohgwyn Palace is dangerous even if you're endgame strong, and all the late game bosses are bosses my friends usually recommend being at least level 100 before even trying em. It's such a raw spike in challenge and in resources you need that it will bounce you right back to Liurnia or Leyndell to grind or search for more tools, which is good in some ways to make you explore more, but are exhausting from a player perspective.
Agree with everything here, but the last paragraph. Whilst there is a notable spike heading into the Mountaintops of the Giants, I think it works well as a level/skill check for the player. Players who've explored a lot will be able to handle it quite reasonably, and those who haven't will be incentivised to explore elsewhere first. It's a tool used throughout the game to encourage exploration and allow players to decide on their experience with the game in an organic way.
Id say the difficulty spike is more of a morgott issue than the endgame itself. Its not that the mountaintops and beyond bosses are that hard for endgame. At that point, from is expecting between 80 and like 140 level players, so they have to make the bosses not only a challenge since its the end of the game but also need to make their scaling strong to deal with people that have 50 percent of the map completef as wellas people with 100 percent of the map that spend 3 hours farming souls. They had to make it harder since i feel like id would have been much worse if the game was instead piss easy at the end. The thing is that morgott is suposed to be the gatekeeper to the harder content, but hes not. He has too little hp and dmg for what most people caracters are prepared at that point in the game.
I’ve had very few gaming experiences that compare to seeing the underground night sky in Elden Ring for the first time. I’m 32 and have played games since my SNES in the early 90s… Elden Ring gave me those deep joyous chills that I haven’t had since playing RDR2 for the first time.
Beside the elevator down to the Siofra River in Mistwood. One of the best moment of connectivity for me is when you are in the Capital shunning ground. You go down and down the captital to a forbidden area of an outer god. Then you find a hidden pathway lead to the Deeproot Depth. Usually people may have traveled there by using another method. Probably they all wander how is this place connected to the other as it was short of "teleportation". At the time when the Deeproot Depth text appear, all the height feel like they have a purpose. We don't just descend into this place then there is nothing else. Or the developer didn't just put this place in a random location on the map and let us teleport there. There is an entire area with a huge lore about the Erdtree burial practice and the dead demigod. And it also make sense for there is a teleport point from the Erdtree root straight to the Capital. The connectivity of the area isn't lost as a result of the open world, but was used to compliment and support the lore and world building. It just feel so good for me
Siofra River was my first time accidentally stumbling into Caelid, I had ran into some spoilers before I was able to get the game and knew to avoid going too far east at the start. I didn’t take that into account underground, needless to say I was scared shitless seeing I was in Caelid with a Rune Bear in view.
Excellent video. A few notes from a dedicated player: • While the endgame linearizes in some ways, it stays open in others. Miquella's Haligtree/Elphael, which take forever to get to, are simply.... spectacular. Jaw-dropping. And /very/ endgame. The sewers beneath Leyndell go deep, leading level by level all the way to another underground city/zone -- the Deeproot Depths, with the Nameless Eternal City. You also did not mention the enormity of Ainsel River, with late-game achievements like Nokstella, and the Lake of Rot. • Having played through the game twice, I can report that even in the late game, my eyes were popping from novelty. Crumbling Farum Azula, especially, was a "holy sh*t" moment. Not to mention, of course, the well-hidden boss Dragon Lord Placidusax, which takes you through one of the craziest cutscenes in Elden Ring.
Excellent comment! This actually shows useful knowledge of the game. Yeah, the game funnels in because you're actually close to become an Elden Lord and people want to stop you. But you still have a lot of options, which I think Mark over simplified. And yes, Farum Azula is still some of the best From Soft level design. No area in the Dark Souls sequels come close to that level of aesthetic and exploration.
@@JoeDower101 It's very reminiscent of those areas, but more fleshed out and less annoying with its enemies and their placement (in particular the spongy and ganky worms in DS3).
@@enman009 fleshed out maybe because we can now jump and the level design can incorporate light platforming and verticality. Less annoying enemy placement? Debatable, at least the snakemen don't throw blades with obscene accuracy and range.
@@JoeDower101 agree on that's debatable. I'm talking about the Giant Dragon fight and its thousand minions and the ones after the lever that enables the Nameless king fight. They're so close, have a lot of health and DS1 poise seems to be their power. At least the Farum beast throwing lightning and boomerangs are very predictable and easy. But yeah, jumping and keys truly expanded the exploration. It took me two playthroughs to explore everything and find Alexander in his final stage (not spoiling, but is great).
I agree that while it’s not perfect in its approach to the open world and that in the end it feels like it funnels you into one path, it’s still done very well especially for it being their first open world game.
I actually think enemy balancing is a positive for Elden Ring. It avoids telling you explicitly that there is a golden path you have to follow, but just as importantly it doesn't go to the other extreme of letting you go anywhere and do anything unimpeded. The game gives you friction and feedback. That, in turn, leads to interesting choices. When you meet Margit for the first time, you can take that (some combination of) three ways: run away to the weeping peninsula to level up, refuse to back down until you've mastered Margit's moveset, or get creative and find the secret way around to Liurnia. The numerical improvement, skill improvement, and lateral thinking playstyles are available for most challenges in the game and they are each balanced by having some things that are for them and some that aren't. The only real problem is when players aren't able to decide "this content isn't for me". If the numerical improvement players only fight Margit twice, and spend hours in the weeping peninsula between those attempts, and a skill improvement player spends hours fighting Margit umpteen times but skips the Weeping Peninsula, then both will be able to enjoy themselves fully on hours of content. The problem only emerges when the numerical improvement player doesn't realise that fighting Margit over and over again is content that wasn't designed for them or when the skill improvement player doesn't realise that the Weeping Peninsula is content that wasn't designed for them. I would say that From has less of an issue with balancing the game, and more of an issue with communicating to players that they are expected to skip or avoid content that isn't fun for them. It seems like From is butting against a kind of entitlement from players who aren't content with mountains of content designed for them because there's also some content designed for other people, as well as against completionism which encourages people to 100% a game even if that isn't fun to do and was never intended.
I think that the lack of messaging about what paths are for what kinds of players is an intentional design choice. People gravitate to From games partly because of the lack of hand-holding, and that carries over into Elden Ring in more than one way - and it manifests here as 'find your own fun'. If you aren't enjoying one aspect of the game, you can go and try to find something that you enjoy more elsewhere, and then breeze through the stuff you don't really like. From never catered to entitled gamers, and the community has definitely latched onto that with their endless refrain of 'git gud'. (Of course, Elden Ring is perhaps the most friendly From Soulslike to less-hardcore gamers with its expanded toolset to deal with difficulty spikes... but you still have to go hunting for those tools.)
Sorry but there's a difference between hand-holding and not telling you content is there that you might enjoy. I missed an entire evergaol boss until I modded the game to have the proper map markers for stuff. I didn't want to miss it, I just did despite spending hours looking at grass trying not to miss stuff. It's impossible to keep track of where you've checked in such a massive map that's very samey looking.
Getting to the deep root depths was mind blowing and one of my favorite moments in any form of media. I never could have possibly thought the game went that deep
Your videos are always great, but I felt the editing was especially slick in this one. The establishing shots must have taken quite a while to get, but they were absolutely worth it. Loved it.
Hard disagree on enemy balancing being an issue. Listing Assasin's creed's level scaling as an example of tackling that issue is especially ridiculous since the way AC does it is absolutely terrible. It completely ruins the immersion when you're supposedly the mightiest warrior in ancient Greek, but you're still having trouble with the most basic bandits or a random wild boar because they're buffed to always be the same level as you.
Yes. Alot (or maybe all really) of ER is designed around rather specific lore/story ideas too. There're reasons for various enemies/bosses to appear in certain places. Probably why in hindsight this "balancing issue" does not bother me as much as when it was new (understanding the world more). With a few exceptions, most enemies are where you EXPECT them to be. It actually adds to the immersion of the world for me, not the opposite (as this video claims). There's also the idea of a game being a power fantasy, and the concept of replayibility. In ER, if some areas or bosses are tough for you initially, is it really a bad design to be so over levelled eventually? It can make you feel like you progressed and whatnot. And even after a while, even if most things are trivial, then it simply becomes a matter of playstyle. There are hundreds of weapons, and countless spells (and other strange ways to play, lol) in this game. This also adds tremendously to the replayibility if you ask me. My initial playthrough I (like alot of ppl...) used abusive techniques to beat many bosses, and felt unsatisfied... Many months later I'm now itching to play the game again (probably come DLC) to try other (deliberately harder) methods of playing it. Especially after recent patches made many many things much more viable to use. I also think many people are putting too much emphasis on the idea that a souls like game should be difficult, and perhaps forget it's more about overcoming a challenge. And that ER is much more open and much more of an RPG than previous souls games. Hence why if you're over levelled, assuming you didn't abuse farming spots etc. too much, you should feel like you overcame something! You start as somebody who gets crushed by alot of things, to somebody that can slay anything in your path however you want. I think a game should be commended for getting this right. And ER gets it very right imo. Still though, it's very very hard to balance a game like this no doubt. IMO, considering the deliberate design of the world, and how massive it is, they did a great job overall. Maybe less repeat bosses and whatnot (those that have no real clear story or lore to them, lol) would've been better, but I personally liked playing this game enough (it's not purely a survival/combat game, half is about gawking at the scenery and wondering wtf is going on in this crazy world...) that I didn't care after a while. Solid video though overall. TBH, I think ER is too massive and complex of a game to be fully critiqued yet (as many comments here have indicated). I think most likely the real quality of this game will be revealed over the years, but we'll see... My only real issue I had with it was it was too big (and way denser than I realized too). And it was my problem. I should have taken 3-4 months to play it, instead of 3-4 weeks like most people...
I've seen this as slight against BotW too, like people complaining that at some point you can easily kill enemies that were once difficult, it's like, yeah that's the whole point of powering up and getting better at the game.
straight up. citing it as a point against the game because it "discourages exploring the open world" just seems so backwards to me. when i wandered into caelid for the first time and got shmacked after only having done the weeping peninsula i was like "hell yeah i want to explore this place i bet there's sick loot"
@@hprd2229 exemplary comment - personally I think the only two things were elden ring really failed were in making its armor sets as diverse as its weapon sets (The Ascended Mod of Elden Ring really does this incredibly well, imbuing every single equipment piece with varied and valuable 2ndary effects, resistance, bonuses, debuffs etc to really make theory crafting and actually caring about your armor loadouts matter, the way they did in Monster Hunter World. There is literally no point other than aesthetics and your stamina cap to vary your equipment in this game once you get a 'stronger' piece of armor. The 2nd area is of course that there a still a shit ton of things FromSoft needs to just not be lazy/douchey about and include instructions in the menu about - ie I shouldn't have had to look up on the internet how to set my potions and torrent to quickmenu, which two buttons I need to press to powerstance/double hand weapons, what the dang stats even mean, how different shields parrry/block differently and that you can't use your weapon ash of war til you disarm your shield. etc etc.
5:20 You can also use the teleporter chest at the Tower of Returning in the Weeping Peninsula to go to the Divine Bridge in the capital. While you are stuck up on the bridge until the elevator is raised, it is actually possible to be invaded and have the invader raise the elevator for you. My friend actually did this and beat Morgott without holding a single Great Rune.
i’ve played this game for hundreds of hours at this point through multiple play throughs, but last night i found for the first time, a catacomb in altus plateau filled with jar enemies and teleporting traps! it really makes me wonder how much i’ve missed!
That kind of stuff pissed me off until I modded the game to have it all on the map. I want to see and play the content. I don't want to play where's waldo with the content.
The game is just perfect in my eyes and what game can offer so much content and still make every minute feel unique? I’d say none! Part of enjoying a game, is learning its mechanics and getting better at them and also adapting to different challenges, or just running a different character. For me this game far exceeded my hopes and wishes and it sits happily, in my fromsoft collection.
@@officialshinky I would say no game is perfect. Yeah the dungeons could of felt a bit more unique but there were many unique dungeons. I think some of the dungeons feeling the same was deliberate, as while playing the player learns to go to mines to get components needed to upgrade their equipment, and the player learns to go to catacombs dungeons to get upgrades for their summoning spirts.
@@alexoelkers2292 there is simply WAY to much reused content in elden ring, they either need to scale their game down or develop it for longer so future games they make are better
@@officialshinky For me I don't think it was WAY too much... the dungeons that most people complain about feeling the same are the catacombs which are all pretty much optional dungeons. And they are all short enough that I didn't feel like they over stayed their welcome.
My favorite part about the way the game opens up for people who didn't look for the other half of the Dectus medallian is the dectus medallion is for all intents and purposes the worst way to progress to Altus Platau. If you're like me and didn't find the second half until I'd already hit Altus Plateau, you got there through the Ruin Strewn Precipice which is not only an actually fun and unique cave, but also hides a fair few rare smithing stones, a boss fight and an NPC invasion event where you invade the world of an NPC which rewards you with the best heavy armor set in the game (depending on your progress in the Volcano Manor), and come out just next to the lift itself. Or you could just go up the lift and miss all of this. Best part? You can just go straight there as soon as you leave the first step.
Elden Ring's open-world often trivializes challenges. For example, on the way to Caria Manor arrows rain down on you from the sky until you reach the door. In any other Souls game, I would have had to navigate a narrow passage while observing how the arrows worked, gotten used to their patterns, and made a few attempts to get past them. But in Elden Ring, having a fast horse on a wide playing field made the arrows easy to avoid. I got past them on my first try. The traditional Souls version of this challenge could be frustrating, but it also promoted a sense of familiarity through repetition and mastery. In Elden Ring, I often wondered why they even bothered putting some obstacles in. For the record, I think Elden Ring is an excellent game. Especially given how massive it is.
You found that pacing to be good? I mean, it's not the most terrible, surely not, but from the point on the game becomes linear you always think: "That's it, just one more area." And then: "Ok, not the final one. Maybe the next" and "Not this time. But the one after this region really has to be the end". In my opinion you could simply cut Farum Azula or even the whole Land of Giants. To this point the game and its story is long enough, although of course the gameplay is still fun.
@@Ambar42 laughably hard disagree on that buddy. discovering a new area after thinking the last one was the last was a fantastic feeling, faram azula being a much better designed end game area than any of their older games. land of the giants was ass though and wouldve prefered they scaled it all down into a dungeon before faram azula, maybe then they wouldnt have had to reuse so many enemies there.
@@flamingmanure Well, that's what I was talking about. But although Farum Azula looks great the same goes for this area because they reused many enemies, here, as well. All those generic dragons alone make it kind of annoying. But of course that's also a subjective thing.
@@Ambar42 i mean, it's an ancient dragon city, you'd expect alot of the same dragons there. The beastmen are already hinted in the first mini-cave you find after the church with kalè, you'd expect them to be there as well (they're annoying pieces of shits when they're together, i hate them).
I agree in part, but content and especially enemy repetition actually made me feel very accomplished in my pattern recognition and skill mastery, as formerly imposing enemies like Erdtree Avatars became enemies I could knock out in my sleep but still without being too easy. The later game catacombs, too, despite being "just more catacombs," also get much more puzzling and difficult in their dungeon design, though they repeat the specific trick of "surprise! this dungeon is actually comprised of two near-identical halves" too much. I also have one nitpick: when you say that "even bosses repeat" at 14:56, you show a clip of Esgar the Priest of Blood, when Esgar is a completely unique boss and one of the few pleasantly surprising NPC/Tarnished boss battles (Garris the Necromancer is the only other one to be a dungeon boss). It was certainly a surprise to fight Esgar beneath Leyndell and not just another damn Cemetery Shade!
Like most people said, not leveling the game with your character is a pro not a con; the only possible con is you arriving at a place over-leveled because you went to it too late in the game. Elden Ring actually has a great way to tackle this: Mountaintops of the Giants is a HUGE leap in difficulty. So right at the moment the game becomes more linear, it has a CLEAR difficulty line that it can control a little better from then on, and it's very very hard to get there over-leveled since the gap is so big. I thought this was an oversight when I got there but once I understood why they made that difficulty leap I actually thought it was pretty genius.
I realize most problems with level scaling are due to poor cohesion with the narrative, like if you just killed a dragon and you go back and still don't do much to a goblin, thats a huge disconnect, I feel I wouldn't mind it though if some new more powerful enemies showed up who's designs actually reflected their power
@@dragonicbladex7574 that's an idea. But then NG+ gets more boring since you won't be able to spank them bosses like they deserve 🤣 I dunno, the system seems pretty perfect imo
I feel like repetition in open world games are innevitable, no matter the studio working on it. The way FromSoftware tried to solve it was by introducing new ideas. Catacombs are very similair but I won't forget the one with looped hallways or the one with the flaming horsemachines. I personally think it's fine and it didn't ruin my urge of discovery.
Your analysis of the 2nd half is structurally sound, but in practice I just can't say it felt the way you are describing for me. The critical path certainly becomes linear, but I never felt a lack of other interesting threads I could be following (with level-appropriate challenges) at each step. The idea that one simply has to bang their head against the wall till they get by late game bosses I guess is true for people who are absolutely married to the critical path. I wonder how many people play that way.
Yeah, I don't mind that the 2nd half is so linear. Tired of losing to a boss over and over again? Go explore the world a bit and try again later, possibly better equipped. Maybe you even find some other optional boss you can beat instead. Or better yet, realise you've missed an entire optional area.
Love the video. I actually really enjoyed stumbling upon a lower level dungeon or boss that i missed and absolutely curb-stomping it. It's a nice change of pace for such a hard game.
I loved the catacombs and imo the consistent formula only made them better because it allowed them to play with expectations. Like the catacomb south of the eastern liurnia erdtree where you get all the way to the end and it's a dead end, just for you to find that the walls are illusions and the lever you were looking for was actually right next to the entrance. You have to set up expectations in order to subvert them
I'm a big fan of the "difficulty in games" debate, and what really struck me about the Elden Ring reception is just how many fans were cautious of ruining their experience by overleveling. Many of my favorite streamers regularly expressed concerns about this. To me this presents a unique conflict of interests which I didn't expect in a FROM Software game.
As a long time From fan I was already hyped for Elden Ring long before it released. But the first time it well and truly blew me away was the Mistwood elevator. Stumbled upon it by complete accident running away from a Rune Bear. Got curious because the Bear backed off and there was a glow at the door. Popped down the longest elevator ride in recent memory and boom - a whole new area with a totally new aesthetic, new map, new enemy types, new architecture... Seeing the false night and the upper ruins and readjusting the sheer scale of the game in my head was absolutely magical.
While I understand that static enemy difficulty can lead to issues where you become far over leveled for an area, I would say that I believe that's a good thing, rather than a bad thing. I hate games that scale enemies to your level because it more often than not creates a linear difficulty curve, or just a flat one. I hate it when I've been playing a game for hours, have been increasing my level and ability, only to return to an early game area for a quest or something and the enemies are just as tough as anywhere else. The feeling of growth and progression is absolutely neutered by enemy scaling. Plus, to the idea of "over leveling", I have always seen it as a reward. I managed to go into an area that is a higher level than me, and so I'm being told I should leave, but instead, I decide to work my way through it and get to the other side the victor. Now, when I go back onto the path I should have been, thanks to my hard work and efforts, I can smash the enemies here and feel like a real hero. I'm just not in the camp that thinks that every boss in a From Software title needs to be difficult for it to be a fun game. I played through Elden Ring without any kind of guide, and rather than doing stormvail castle, I went everywhere I possibly could before hand. I ended up completing most of Caelid prior to getting into stormvail, and this led Stormvail to being pretty easy. I beat Morgot and Godrick on my first try thanks to being way higher leveled than I should have been, and it was great. I felt like I earned an easy victory thanks to my previous hard work. I just don't think that enemy scaling is a good idea, at least not as it's used in most games. Maybe there's a system they could use that would make it feel good, but flattening out the difficulty curve seems like bad game design to me. To reach the peaks in player engagement, you need valleys.
100% agreed. I especially disagreed with the point in the video about how "static enemy levels don't work so well when you give the player complete freedom to explore" - With the enemy levels being specifically set by the designers, that gives you information which you can use to make meaningful choices. It's definitely not perfect, but it leads to your choices not only feeling meaningful, but actually BEING meaningful- there are tangible differences between areas. Contrast that to an alternative version where an algorithm determines enemy strength, and I imagine the game would feel much more flat.
@@aqua7734 Yeah, I think that player freedom is sometimes set as an ideal that is never wrong, but most games that are really good set specific player restrictions to make them more compelling. I know DOOM Eternal turned some players off due to it having a pretty strict play style, but if you could get into that style, it was one of the most exhilarating gaming experiences out there. I think Mark was right about everything except the enemy scaling and the way he phrased the issue with open world vs enemy level
I get what you are saying, but do leyndell and stormveil castle stand out to you as incredible parts of the game now? To me those were insanely good, easily some of the best parts of the game, but if it would've been a walk in the park it would feel forgetable to me. ESPECIALLY Leyndell since it was hard to even get a lay of the land and figure out where to go since I could die at every corner, without danger that place is completely different.
@@anima94 Actually, Stormvail is still more memorable to me than Liurnia, the snow plateau and the snow fields, even though I was either low or normal level for them. Again, my interest in a location has little to do with difficulty and everything to do with the layout, design, and atmosphere. I would recommend not expecting an easier time to be less memorable, because you can't know until you try it.
Wonderful video! I just installed Elden Ring again since it's been a few patches and the latest one was huge, and even though this will be maybe my third time through the game I am STILL finding areas I missed or noticing lore references and details. It is insane the amount of work that has gone into this game world
Great work as always with the video, but I definitely disagree with the implication that knowing what to expect from certain locations like mage towers, churches, and outdoor ruins is a bad thing. It feels very deliberate in that there is a general consistency with how to acquire important key items for upgrading your flask healing, spell slots, and so on while you're out exploring. The quickly learned rule of outdoor ruin sites pretty much always housing a basement somewhere is used by From to mess with your expectations later on, by hiding some of them beneath destructible wooden planks, or even illusory floors. I don't think these examples of repetition are missteps at all.
I agree. It's also nice to gain the knowledge of "I need to upgrade my X, so i need to find a Y-style location" and to be able to rely on that knowledge, while still having lots of interesting variations within said area.
elden ring and hollow knight are some of the only games where I keep thinking "im most of the way finished" only to reveal another massive part of the map. Its spot on to describe the original goal of the game is at first just reaching leyndel and getting to our favorite big tree, but then you get all the way there and yeah thats maybe half the game, not the ending
I actually enjoy how they reuse structures general layouts. I do enjoy exploring and finding new buildings or environments but having the occasional feeling of familiarity helps not only slightly boost my confidence in gameplay but it also boosts my desire to explore even more.
Interesting that you said that you were 50% done after defeating Morgott. I suppose you are, but it never felt that way to me, it is that funnelling effect, because after that there's getting the medallion, the Haligtree, the giant fight, Farum Azula, and then you're back in Leyndell to finish the game. Before that, there was a lot more exploration, maybe they realized that players would get bored of the exploration aspect at that point.
How much done so you think you are when you defeat Morgott? Because I have Killed Godrick, Radahn, Rennala and am making my way through Leyndell, so how much of the game am I done with(percentage wise)? Thanks
It's going to depend a lot on how much of the optional exploration you do in the first "half" - if you focus on progressing along the critical path until near the point of no return, then go out and explore everything you skipped past, you'll have a very different ratio than someone who stayed as far from the beaten path as possible until they'd done everything they could access.
definitely do morgott before rykard and mohg. Leyndell was one of my favourite parts and apparently it sucked for many people because they were totally overleveled
The repeated content was actually kind of nice, for me personally. Seeing a new catacomb was great, because I knew what to expect: 15-30 minutes of dodging traps, then fighting a boss, and then getting a nice reward at the end. The same with a lot of the repeated bosses: I know how to handle this one, let’s see how I can beat it with the new tricks I’ve learned. I think in an open world game this large, having repeated content (to a degree) is helpful, as it helps to manage expectations when coming across it, and providing a bit of familiarity to an otherwise alien world. Especially with how different each zone in Elden Ring is, to me this is a strength rather than a weakness.
Nah this is a flaw. This is the equivalent of saying i actually like eating dung, it’s just subjective. It isn’t. Repeated content is just cheap and easy. Just because you can see a bright side to it doesn’t make it good. Want to see how better you are at the game? Replay it. There is no need for the game to repeat itself on it’s own.
@@minecraftgravityguy of course it's cheap and easy, that's the point! Sometimes you need to know when to make something new and when to reuse content. It's inevitable in any game, specially in one of this scale to need to reuse resources. time and money are finite things, and gamers aren't exactly patient.
Besides, plenty of great games reuse content all the time. Majoras Mask is made mostly of reused assets from ocarina of time, and it's great. The game wouldn't be better for having all new models.
@@minecraftgravityguy I respectfully disagree with all of the points you’re making. If someone likes to eat dung and actually enjoys it - more power to them. Just because I don’t enjoy it, doesn’t mean they can’t find enjoyment in it. Just like how I enjoy the familiarity in the repeated content in Elden Ring doesn’t affect your experience of it. I urge you to find any game that doesn’t reuse content in one way or another. Games reuse content all over the place, from textures and animations to entire tile sets for dungeons. If this bothers you, that’s fair. We all have a different tolerance and value different things in our entertainment. Working on open world games myself, I find that I appreciate the way the tile sets and enemy designs are reused and how the dungeons themselves are used to fill in the world narratively, as a reward for exploration, and as content to momentarily break away from the open world.
You can't deny it hurts the replay value of the game though. It's usually exciting to fight a boss again on a new character and see how it will play different. But since you've already killed that boss 7 times in the first playthrough the thought of defeating it another 7 times on a new playthrough will kill a lot of the interest for it. What really made me dislike the repeat bosses was how they came back late in the game. Already I was a bit tired of the game repeating the same boss over and over and then they reappear somewhere in the Mountaintops of the giants for the umpteenth time with an enormous health pool and the ability to one hit kill me, even when my character is basically maxed out. Made it feel like my character was getting weaker instead of stronger when repeat bosses felt ridiculously powerful compared to the demi-gods I've defeated before.
I felt that the open world approach goes especially well with the Souls formula. Sometimes when I'm playing a new traditional Souls game I can get exhausted from always having to be on edge to make sure I don't get got. In Elden Ring you having the same moments of tension, but then also have plenty of moments running around the open world, beating easy enemies, collecting goodies and finding mini dungeons. I think you talked about this concept when analysing Celeste.
Elden Ring could be surprisingly relaxing sometimes. I think only Majula managed to give me that same feeling before. Dark Souls and Bloodborne worlds are too oppressive.
I can only speak for myself but for me, miyazaki ABSOLUTELY succeeded in giving me a sense of adventure, and that's the reason I ended up loving this game just so much. That said, everything you said here I agree to some extent. I'd like to put some focus on the use of the map in elden ring, I honestly think it's brilliant. It's a map you actually have to look at and read as a player in order to discover more stuff and chart a route. It really did feel like sitting down and planning a route while camping or sth like that.
I agree that recycled content can diminish how fresh each place feel. However, I argue that the layouts are varied enough to still feel like its own space. And some of them do interesting things within that recycled content. Like how Auriza Side Tomb has you teleport between two mirrored but distinct places. It tests your spacial awareness, and it's cool to use what you've learned from one area to find hidden walls and goodies in the other. I get that reusing assets is more distracting for some players than others, but I felt FromSoft did a good job of making interesting experiences within those restraints.
I agree. It helps you get a frame of reference for the style of content. Then FROM can twist your expectations. The mirror tomb really did throw me through a loop. But, I was immediately on guard when I noticed an item on the ground I already picked up.
I think the repetition of some enemies actually expanded my interest in the world. In almost all the cases where I found repeated enemy types in new locations I rarely thought “ugh more of these guys.” Most of the time I thought “why is *this* guy here? Is whatever faction he’s working for trying to find something in this location? Was he stranded long ago with no way to get out of here? For me it added an interesting layer of environmental story telling. And then some enemy types will have unique skills that other individuals of the same “enemy type.” For example the knights with the long feathered helmets. While they all share the same basic move set, there’s one atop Fort Haight who can slash at you with a blade of blood. And then there’s the Cuckoo knights in Liurnia, many of which have access to various sorceries. Or at Redmane castle there’s another who can wield fire. They do a surprisingly good job at making individual enemies feel unique, despite working with a limited pool.
Funnily enough, I feel like your two major criticisms of the game resolve one another somewhat. The fact that the game funnels in to a more focused experience for the final stretch makes it a lot harder to over-level yourself and throw off the difficulty curve. In fact, I think this approach to world design has actually addressed the problem of accessibility that's been discussed around fromsoft's games for years. The early game gives you absolute heaps of content while you're still acclimatising to the mechanics of the game; if you're struggling with any area in the early game it's quite easy to go somewhere else and beef yourself up a bit first (while also getting more practice in and getting better at the game). But then for the last stretch they reign in the openness of the world in order to deliver a more closely tailored experience for the finale.
great comment and very well said. THe game provides you with thousands of different potential paths and tools to be able to 'git gud' and then by the time you REALLY need to git gud in the spike in final difficulty you have the tools at your disposal and the hard yards put in to rise to the challenge
Exactly. Those two complaints pale considering how you can tackle things differently and the fact that the point of no return has a huge build up and focus. Also, the level scaling idea sounds as half baked as you can have it.
I can't even explain how incredible this game is. There is just absolutely nothing comparable, and I played pretty much every open world action adventure that is out there. And it's also just so mind blowing that they managed to create THE best and most interesting open world on their first attempt.
No they didn't. It's far more samey looking, far less fun to explore because so much stuff is too hidden to actually discover so you end up just running up and down the same field trying to make sure you don't miss anything actually cool. Good open world games have more varied worlds where you can walk for 30 seconds and you're in a whole different looking area, there's hints on the map where the cool stuff is so you don't have to stare at grass and rocks trying to find it, it's more smartly guided with main quests so you know which areas are in which difficulty order. Elden Ring tries to trick you into walking into overleveled areas to appear harder.
Every open world game reuses enemies, Elden ring still holds more variety than most open world games on bosses, dungeons, and other things like caves and catacombs than a game like Zelda BOTW, Finding a boss you fought before in early game doesn't always feel tiresome because it feels like the game is telling you "You fought this earlier as a boss, well now you should be strong enough to handle it like a regular enemy" You also often get different rewards for killing the same enemy in different areas (Godskin Apostole gives you it's weapon when you first encounter it, but it will give you it's full armor set when you kill it again later on) So it doesn't feel wasted, one thing I do kind of agree with is the game's problem with balancing early game enemies when you become too strong but that's a a problem on almost every RPG game not just Elden Ring. In the end Elden Ring still holds as one of the best open world games to date and deserves to be the game of the year 2022.
It has more variety because the world is completely barren and lifeless with NOTHING to do in it. It's a terrible open world experience and the worst souls game. It won game of the year because of how big it was, same reason stray couldn't win because of how small it was.
@@Digger-Nick Lmao sounds like your salty because GOW didn’t win, and I can’t tell you didn’t play it because you think there’s nothing to do in the world, there was so much to do that it was overwhelming in my first playthrough.
@@frogc. So much to do? You literally do nothing but brainlessly kill lobotomized enemies that don't even talk LMAO. 140 hours and I full cleared the entire map with every quest. You can also go directly to my steam and check. Hard cope bud
This is one of the few times I really disagree with your take. Specifically the funnel analysis, or the lack of scaling enemies levels. I think it served the game purposely and is it exactly what the game needed. By time I was going to the mountain tops of the giants I was around RL 140-150, my build felt cemented and powerful, boss fights were still tough, but I also felt strong, capable, and knowledgeable about my game plan to take on the big baddies. The "boss rush" at the end felt like the perfect match for where I was. Two legacy dungeons to run around, in crumbling farum azula and haligtree which were very unique and not reused assets, 7-10 end game bosses depending what you did or didn't do earlier, to test your build on. I was done exploring, I didnt want to explore anymore, I didn't NEED to explore any more for runes/materials/weapons/spells/items. I had settled on my weapons, my ashes, my summons, my spells, and I had all the levels I needed to make it work. I was looking for a culmination, a climax, the story I had been building for the last 150 hours. I thought the funneling, the focus, the game provided, and frankly the really balanced level progression, was spot on. I didn't feel overpowered, I didn't feel underpowered, I felt like I had an adventure and now it was time to bring it home. Had mountain tops and consecrated snowfield been as big as liurnia each, I think I would have been thoroughly burned out. The only asset I didn't like was the catacombs, I think the cardinalty of the tombs being locked to 90° and grey walls really emphasized the reuse aspect of the game, but ruins, caves, and tunnels all felt fun to explore each time. Probably bc I enjoyed the aesthetic more and by nature they were all much more organic in the flow of their designs, they twisted and turned, had verticality, but It wasn't so obvious as the catacombs due to the lack of cardinality..plus they we're yeileding items I cared about more, they never got old. Frankly I don't know how any company makes a game this large, without having some reused assets OR you entirely sacrifice some key aspect of design for example relying on a marker system to guide you instead of having really strong environmental world building, looking at you Ubisoft. Taking into account the idea of reused assets, every angle view, pathway, landmark, enemy placement(even if it was a reused asset) felt carefully curated to give you a great experience. Plus enemies of the same asset type in later areas, say a soldier or a knight etc, in many cases got more advanced move sets as the game went on, which definitely caught me off guard a few times. I also don't think this game is perfect, but I just don't think some of the points that you bring up here are things I would have considered negatives.
You absolutely should have a marker system hinting at where the content is. Looking at grass and rocks trying to make sure you don't miss some cave with a cool boss is terrible design. It's made for people that really believe they're in the game worlds they're in and are fine not experiencing full games.
@@albert2006xp I think we just disagree, a marker system would have taken any sense of adventure away. These games are heavily inspired by D&D, as stated by Miyazaki himself, you are supposed to just use your eyes and talk to NPCs to explore the world. You have a map with clearly defined boundaries and very clearly marked structures of interest. Utilize that to your advantage. This is a game where I am comfortable with missing things if I didn’t find it, but me and many others prayers are going to the utmost to make sure we don’t miss stuff, yet we almost invariably do and then you look it up and hit on the run back. This is a game built to a certain vision and I happen to love what it’s going for so I don’t want it to be compromised from how Miyazaki wants it. If that’s considered bad game design then, so be it. There’s other games that can do markers.
@@NibbleSnarph I literally stared at rocks, spending way too much in literal nowhere places trying to not miss stuff. I was hallucinating grass and rocks by that point. And I still missed like 7 bosses in the Limgrave + surroundings area pre-Margit. Then I just put on the mod to show things on map because it's just not acceptable to not give me any sort of in-game hint so that I don't at the very least miss any bosses. Want to talk about heavily inspired by D&D? Baldur's Gate 3. You don't get pointed to where to explore but the level is generally flat and easy to discern and find stuff in. Compact enough that it's not unreasonable not to mark things. The Elden Ring map is not that. There's a fall damage drop off every 2 meters of this way too large world and they hid some actual content like bosses with the fervor other developers hide easter egg secrets nobody but 3 people find then tell everyone else. Putting a boss behind a fake wall or jumping off an elevator somewhere... why? Just why? Miyazaki is high off his own arrogance and due to the game design psychologically making players feel like it's a huge challenge, their egos get tied to all the annoying features as if it's a badge of honor to play an offline mode game where you can't pause. There's nothing that takes away the sense of adventure. You just put on a fog of war (another thing the game needs) and explore it, discovering things. When you're right next to the thing, it appears on the map. If you miss stuff, there should be some point later like Ghost of Tsushima where all the fog in the area you just cleared gets lifted and you see what you missed. Imagine if in that game I would've had to psychotically run up and down the map trying to find the last fox shrine or something.
Real talk. The way enemies are scaled and the inconsistent difficulty spikes really killed my enjoyment of the game. It genuinely felt like every time I had the experience of "oh that thing looks cool! I'm gonna go explore it!", I'd be met with a fight I was woefully underprepared for. After getting the sh*t kicked out of me, I'd limp away feeling like I was being actively *punished* for exploring 'the wrong way'. And while I love the narrative of a grand, open-ended adventure that this game is trying to tell, the actual mechanics involved clashed so horridly that I couldn't bring myself to _want_ to explore anymore. It's like the game kept saying: "It's an open world! Explore however you'd like! 😉".... ...."But not like _that_ 😠"
Being overleveled was the most fun part for me. I didnt have to git gud, just grind a bit more. Going from being super fragile to killing gods with ease was so much fun and felt it happened at a good pace
Great content I'm new and really enjoying it so far. Have to say I had a different experience with the repetition of Catacombs, Ruins, Sacred Tears and Golden Seeds etc. As someone pretty new to the series (the Demon's Soul's remake was my first FromSoft game) and a player that really likes to take his time, not use guides and just figure things out on my own I found these little snippets of repetition to be helpful. A moment of clarity in a fugue of mystery. I knew what was expected of me and that felt like progress; especially in the way that I had to sometimes back back to an area after I'd levelled up with my new skills and weapons. I think what I'm trying to say is that the formulaic repetition feels like an intrinsic part of the design of the game's pacing to me. I'm presently 160 hours into my play-through. Having mopped up most of the catacombs, mini-bosses, NPC storylines and Evergaols. I've searched out and upgraded a mountain of equipment and weapon arts. Last night I reached level 130 and have only just made it through Leyndell and reached Castle Sol where I'm facing down another boss that I don't feel quite equipped to take on. Yet. This game has blown my mind. As a 2nd Gen gamer approaching his 50's. This feels like what video games were always meant to achieve. Other than the software performance issues, I haven't yet found anything I consider to be a negative aspect of game play. It is - almost perfect imo. I've realised that I don't really want to finish it. I very rarely re-play games. I'll miss that place when my journey there ends.
How do you personally quantify "good to explore"? I want a story rich game with interesting characters - Elden Ring doesn't provide much of this (it provides something else) so the game becomes a glorified "match 3" game with nothing to think about(I am exaggerating)
@@antont4974 sense of adventure for me is the big diferencial here. Not feeling like the game is telling you were to go or what to do with checkmarks all over the map. Discovery is true and genuine, same for story and characters, the game does not feed you information, you have to look for it and take your own conclusions away. Different strokes for different tastes. I never said that Elden ring is the best game ever made, just that I personally think it is.
@@Melkac breath of the wild is an empty tech demo of a “game” with shitty Ubisoft open world mechanics. You just got suckered in by the pretty colors and clever art direction. It’s not a good game and anything to the opposite effect is pure copium. There are literally only 11 unique enemy types, 3 overworld bosses, and 4 variations of the same boss for the dungeons. Then there are two bonus bosses, one in the DLC and then the Yiga clan leader. It is an empty shell of a game but Zelda fanboys will eat its ass until the world ends.
@@Senriam The physics and chemistry system alone make BotW more interesting and interactive than 95% of open world games. It seems to me that you just never bothered experimenting with all the tools at your disposal to realise how many creative ways there are to solve problems.
Do you plan on making a video about Outer Wilds? A boss keys, maybe, where the keys for all the locks are just knowledge. I was blown away with this masterpiece and would love to watch you talking about it
Playing Elden Ring made me recall Final Fantasy XV's world fondly. You're free to explore the entirety of Lucis until you get to the lighthouse and take the boat to Accordo. You can still hop back to Lucis all the while until you talk to Accordo's head of state and be railroaded by the plot for a while and barred from travelling to previous areas. During the railroaded, constrained period, your party's AI changes because (spoilers) one of your mates become blind, causing his skills to be locked, and another friend is pushed out of the train, making him absent until he is found. The ability to travel back to previous areas are barred from you until you "remove the obstacles" so to speak. It's the principle of contrast. Having linear, railroaded moments in an Open World game can prevent some exploration fatigue and also give time to some bit of storytelling
"You're actually investigating a world - not just cleaning a messy map filled with activities." Yes. Well said. This right here (including all the very simple logic behind it) would make any open world 100 times better. It is literally "a holy grail" and it is so simple, and everyone in the industry is afraid to do it beside Fromsoft.
This is the main reason I rarely finish all side quest and challenges. It just appears over whelming in my mind. But when you are out exploring and come across a side quest or challenge with out previous knowledge, it kinda feels like a reward and I'm more likely to complete it.
What? How is it a holy grail when it's a completely barren and lifeless experience of an open world... There is literally NOTHING to do. It lacks every element that makes open world games great
@@metatrix4251 Interactivity, quests, discovery, automation? Hell a plot that's actually coherent? You literally do nothing in Elden ring but mindlessly kill lobotomized enemies, its a terrible "open world" experience.
@@Digger-Nick Well, at this I won't do the mistake of trying to convince you that "you should like the game because.." because it is simply not a game for you. Any Fromsoftware fan would know that these amazing games are not for everyone. The story is cryptic, hidden in the aesthetics, between the lines and even then it stays misty and distant. I'd keep telling you why and how it is a holy grail because your question is "how is this the holy grail..." But I'm guessing that was a rhetorical question and you don't really wanna know the answer; you took a position rather than ask for perspective; I guess? Let me know if this discussion has already ended or if you wanna know the longer version answer to your question. :) Happy gaming, whatever games you like ! =D
i think the content repetition served to help players in the open world setting by knowing what to look for. once you find your first hidden room in the ruins you might come back to other ruins you visited, in my first play through it took me 2 or 3 ruins to start looking for basements. same thing with the miner tunnels, i know that’s where i can consistently find upgrade materials for my weapons instead of combing every chest
Great video. As much as I adored Elden Ring I agree with the points you've made, especially in regards to enemy scaling. That said, the one thing I'm surprised you didn't address in the video is FromSoft NPC quest design. While it's always been kind of ambiguous, the linear, gated areas of previous games made it (somewhat) easier to follow quests. With the open world, it's extremely easy to break or completely miss NPC quests. For my second playthrough I'm using a spreadsheet in order not to miss things and... I'm still breaking questlines accidentally. It's another major aspect that needs an overhaul to fit the open world.
No one design can satisfy everyone, nope, nada, and any design comes with certain tradeoffs as people here have commented on. But Elden Ring has done such fantastic job surely we can agree it is one of the best games of open world design paradigm. Therefore, any discussion of its flaws really falls onto personal preferences in my opinion.
I think its a little harsh to say the very late game is "rush" like sure its a little more linear but i think its okay Its end of the game so of course it was to be linear, its not a bad thing in my opinion and the boss was quite epic to conclude this game
@@paultapping9510 Thats what I was thinking, how can it be rushed if I put so many damn hours into the game. He complained the ending felt like funneled and linear but at the same time says it felt rushed. So if they extended the ending more wouldn't it of been even more linear, longer than it already is?
Great video! There's two things to consider regarding the endgame: - Narratively speaking (and yes, characters spell this out), after Malekith everyone is trying to stop you. You committed a cardinal sin (according to Melina) and unleashed Destined Death. At that point the narrative takes a stronger focus. -There's still plenty of options in the later half. Mountaintops can be fully completed before or after Snowfields, Elphael or Moghwing Palace (which is recommended as an endgame area) or even do Shunning Grounds at any time. And the fact that there's even an optional boss in Farum Azula shows the amount of options. Regarding balancing: it works well, and far better than level scaling or change of enemies (which would work kinda the same). It also has been stated that if you level vigor properly, use talismans and just don't play like it's Dark Souls 3 Part 2 (rollspams, r1 ad nauseam and omitting weapon arts), you won't be oneshotted.
Having revisited Elden Ring recently, I think that the ability to over-level is part of the game's broad appeal. If I had to play this game like a typical Souls game, I would have given up after just a few hours. But, the ability to explore the world, level up, and use the tools the game gives you to find loadouts that shred previously-insurmountable challenges is specifically why I've gladly put hundreds of hours into the game. Elden Ring is special because you can play it as a Souls-like, or you can get gud the other way and find ways to get powerful items and buffs early, and exploit the intricacies of the extremely deep equipment system. It encourages you to explore, to pay attention, to think about the fact that few conversations don't contain critical information. It has created an entire community of secret sharing the likes of which I haven't experienced since the days of OG Zelda back in elementary school (yes, I'm old). I think the other thing this push to explore does is invite players to think of ways to break the intended progression. The world smartly does this by rewarding you for getting too clever. Any time you think you're going to find a way to get out of bounds, or onto geometry that perhaps you shouldn't, you'll usually be met with an item to loot. Occasionally, this behavior will get you into high-level places pretty early. It's made a second playthrough from scratch oh-so-satisfying.
It's still incredible to me that, by 3:16, you have described, essentially an entire games worth of content. Like, that would have been an incredible game. But.... thing is..... you're not even halfway done with Elden Ring. lol. What a beautiful monster this thing is.
Mark's initial summary of the order of play had me going "what is he talking about?" Which speaks to just how flexible FromSoft has made this game. I've put 100 hours in and it's been a struggle at times for sure, but I took on Radahn (and beat him) without ever tackling Rennala, and I'm just now exploring the Academy and that sense of exploration and curiosity hasn't gone away yet. It's not great at storytelling in the traditional fashion (I'm not sure why I'm doing what I'm doing half the time) but it plays into that sense of adventure well (I'm enjoying it anyway).
I personally don't think it's a big deal that they reuse some enemies and dungeons. Making these AAA games are extremely time and resource consuming. Even studios like Rockstar make games with repetitive content. We can't expect them to design every dungeon with the level of innovation like It Takes Two. We already have an extremely polished and deep combat system, jaw-dropping bosses, epic music pieces, crazy world design, intriguing lore, etc. I'm already satisfied with the end product they produced. My only criticisms about Elden Ring are the enemy balancing mentioned in the video, and input lagging and queueing. But even with that, I believe it is a masterpiece that can be enjoyed by everyone. One thing that confuses me is people are trashing Elden Ring saying it's repetitive while praising GoW Ragnarok as GOTY. But looking at GoWR critically, it only has like three or four types of enemies in every realm, and it's just a reskin of the previous realm. Environment puzzles just slow down progression without adding anything new to the gameplay. The rest of the gameplay is just climbing, gank fighting, and finding the chest you missed. I like GoW 2018 much more, but only because of the shocking factor of the story.
Excellent video! I would love to see one if these exploring the world of Tunic. I just got the game and I've been blown away. I was expecting a simple Zelda-like, but it turned out to be a bonkers top-down Souls-like that feels incredible to explore and pick apart
Is Altus Plateau considered part of Leyndell Royal Capital? If so I assume then the Royal Capital is the Legacy Dungeon within it, makes it a pretty big region so that's fair
Hey! This video does cover the entirety of Elden Ring, but if you're worried about spoilers then the beginning of the video only discusses content up the end of Leyndell Royal Capital. Then, from 15:50 onwards, I discuss the final section of the game and show all of the end bosses.
yay!
Could you cover the different sections in the combat system video into their own separate parts of a mini series. I felt their wasn’t enough an explanation of each topic in that video
You missed how the maps take no effort to grab and the blank map even shows the road to follow to get them. So their no reason to not have a full map. Then all of the poi are either posted on the map at the end of liner paths, with hidden activities sites all along obvious wall. Coupled with no major activities being hidden in the actual open area, it takes almost no effort to actually find all the activities. And of course we hav our sparrow that can boost out of almost any problem we ever seen in the empty wilderness.
It’s a very safe open world that doesn’t ask much of you explore, just some pointless padding as you check the walls for the specific location of the activities.
Sadly though this dose make the world somewhat boring as it very predictable and safe. Your never really challenged when checking off the activities.
It less like an adventure and more like a grocery store. The isle have the general concept of what your looking for, but you still have to check each self in the are to see your target.
The lack of scaling was a plus not a minus.
GROUNDED VID WHEN
The fact that this was From Softwares first attempt at a true open world and it turned out this spectacular makes me incredibly excited for whatever they do next with this framework.
I completely agree It's like Nintendo with BotW. How can this two teams nailed the open world concept like this on their first try?
@@lmarcos21 And both are Japanese studios as well. It seems they just understand that the joy of exploration and discovery is what makes an open world worthwhile and not the amount of copy-pasted checklist content.
first darksoul is also kind of open world to me. but instead make the landscape horizontal like typical open world game, they choose vertical path. and we can traverse it at random direction. the interconnect is really good too. imagine you have all the subteranean dungeon in elden ring but they pack it below 1 or 2 castle. the castle itself is kind of castle above castle above castle lol. the sense of discovery is really good in 1st darksoul
@@lmarcos21 They had a decade worth of other open world games to look at and study though. You can tell in Breath of the Wild that Nintendo carefully looked at games like Assassin's Creed or Shadow of the Colossus, took what worked and subverted what they didn't like.
And with Elden Ring From Software clearly looked at what BotW did and put their own spin on that.
Even if the devs had never made a game like this before. These games didn't just spawn in a vacuum.
Witcher 3 was the same way. I think good teams trying open worlds offer better ideas than teams who have already done a lot of these types of games and fallen into patterns.
There are two sides to enemy balancing. On the one hand, it could perhaps get a little boring when you're overlevelled. However, that also makes for a very tangible sense of progression and makes you feel actively rewarded for all your struggles throughout the game; and feeling like a legitimate badass adventurer who earned it the hard way is a great power fantasy.
Exactly, not everything needs to be hard all the time. Things being easier can easily be framed as a reward for taking the time to explore.
I agree. It is something BOTW did well too, the sense of becoming powerful and your character making progress.
This is such a great point. If the only change is that enemies' damage and health scale along with you, it undermines a levelling system overall (and the power fantasy that comes with it), and can just increase the length of enemy encounters without adding to the depth of the encounter. I would prefer alternative solutions like he exemplified with BotW or Hollow Knight. I don't know if it has sense been patched, but I played Fallout 4 on release and by the end of the of my playthrough it took 3 mini-nuclear bombs to kill a single human enemy. At that point, I no longer had interest in playing because the combat encounters were too much of a timesink, and hadn't changed in mechanical challenge for the whole length of the game.
Treadmill difficulty like in Skyrim and Diablo games is more questionable in a lot of ways. Why shouldn't you eventually get so powerful you feel done with the game and go do something else?
Granted, I love Skyrim because the progression is made tangible in other ways, the combat is always easy and fun, and because it's funny to see a cave dwelling bandit wearing dragonbone armor when just a few weeks ago no one believed in dragons. But in most games I want to set myself some goals, achieve them, and then uninstall. I don't know why people ever talk about it being desirable that a game never ends, becomes addictive, always sets new shallow goals to chase. I was already motivated to buy the game, I don't need anything other than the core experience I signed up for.
Assassin's Creed Origins/Odyssey/Valhalla gets boring because you never feel powerful, since the enemies are always equally leveled or 2 levels above/below. I'd like to wreck some enemies with ease sometimes.
I actually love the fact that the game is very open at the start and more focused in the end. When I started playing I loved exploring and levelling but as the hours flew by I became more focused on progressing the story and killing the main bosses. The game accommodated this perfectly.
honestly, the funnel towards the end is one of my favourite design decisions from soft made for this game. it starts right around the point where thorough players (like me) start feeling open world fatigue. also, the difficulty in the subsequent areas force players who skimmed through the previous areas to double back and see what they missed so they can get powerful enough to face the end game bosses. however, the game has completely played its hand at this point so there are no major surprises along the way (except for haligtree) which, imo, is the reason why players find the last few areas to be less interesting than what came before.
(before reading this know I don't remember the names of the address so I will describe what they look like if I can)
That part where you said players who rushed have to go back and see what they missed... That's what happened to me. (I thought I did a decent amount of exploring, but apparently not enough.) And it's why I didn't finish the game. I beat all the first half bosses. Then I went up to that snowy area and I got really frustrated because it felt like I was at the start again. Normal enemies were brutalizing me. After several hours of making little to no progress I did some googling and found a game map with suggested player levels for each area. That snowy area l was trying to go through said I should be 25 levels higher than I was. I thought to myself how did I get all the way to beating all the bosses and I even felt over powered in the area with the yellowy fall colors, but now I'm supposed to grind out 25 levels? I tried to level up, after a while though you get diminishing returns and I just wasn't having fun anymore so I quit.
Same, I was feeling kind of burnt out from exploring too much by the time I got to the snow area.
I feel like those desigm elements borrow in a great and nostalgic way from the Pokemon games. The Endgame there led you through a difficult dungeon on to the League where you battle the best Trainers of the Region one after another. It was a great feeling
@@nothanks6549 I was in the same boat, except I guess I have more of a "souls player" mindset despite this being my first and only souls game
I got my ass kicked at the mountaintop of the giants, but I kept trying, kept pushing until I was successful
I was only about level 70-90ish, when most people recommend atleast level 100 but closer to level 125
I vowed not to use a guide other then small ones like a rune farm and not to summon other players (tho I did cave on godskin duo and summon someone)
I made my way to the final boss 30 levels under level, that's when I finally grinded runes and leveled up
I would agree if the area was actually satisfying, instead of being one of those Izalith esque areas they just poop out when they've run out of ideas. The final set of areas should have just been a short trek through the mountains to the Haligtree, which then takes you somehow to the Cauldron.
Exploring the lands between for the first time was the best experience in gaming I’ve ever had
It is one of the greatest things in gaming for sure
I was actually scared because I didn't know what to expect from game like this. You see, it was pretty sad to see lots of games dying and being bad, but I remembered: "bro, its FromSoft. Its their first open-world game? Yes, but it can't be that bad right? But why is it so small rn." And later on, I discovered the game was getting bigger and bigger and I was in awe. Didn't understand some haters, I really loved this game. The only problem is community being an arses sometimes :ddd
yess such an amazing experience
@@pandora8734 that's the beauty of it, as a vet of fromsoft game, i would say, the adrenaline that you get every time you enter new area on their game, i can't quite get that feeling in any other game
I thought It would be a medium size map, but everytime I explored the map kept getting bigger and bigger. Definitely one of my favorite videogame settings of all time.
I think that the “funneling” of the game that you mention is a great observation, but I also think it was a good decision on the part of FromSoft. As much as I loved the amazing scope of the early game and all of the options to explore, I felt like the narrowing the scope at the late game brought a sense of “ok, now it’s time to get to business and finish this.” The purpose became much clearer at that point in the game - especially after putting in 100+hours by the time I got to Maliketh. I honestly think I would have gotten fatigued if the late game was as just expansive as the early game. In fact, I think I was a bit fatigued already, so I went ahead and finished the game before exploring everything else. I’ll save that for another playthrough. As other commenters have noted, there are still several large late game areas that provide opportunities for exploration and discovery which I am excited to dig through myself, even if they’ve all been spoiled for me at this point.
I think From did a marvelous job with this game. The passion into building the world is evident. And the design is impeccable.
Take it from me, no matter how much RUclips tries to spoil things, there will always be something that makes you go "Oh shit... that's cool!", even in the late-game.
It reminds me a little of Final Fantasy XV's open first half and more traditional FF back half. Though Elden Ring does a better job of it.
I think the funneling was actually a good thing. Ludonaritvly, things start funneling when your character actually starts figuring out what they need/want to do.
Yah, I was really appreciative of the funneling. By the time I got to the Capital I was sort of spent on the whole exploring thing. I actually started craving a more linear experience anyways, and then it did just that. I think it did a good job at swapping the feel of the game from, explore around to ‘it game time. Complete your mission’
@@JanbluTheDerg This is very true. I saw plenty of Lore videos about Godwyn but when it came time to stand in front of him I found myself nervous, my gaming brain kept worrying he was gonna spring to life. It was a different experience, being in control vs just watching brief clips float by.
Narratively speaking the funneling makes sense given the events that lead you to head north from the Capital.
One thing that greatly affected my first playthrough was actual the fact that they didn't show the true size of the map. Every time I think "Ok surely they're out of stuff now" and then another segment of the map opens up, instead of knowing exactly how much land there is to explore. Really kept wanting to explore, see just how far the map streches (also getting to see the map massively expand whenever you teleport to some faraway spot with a chest was wild
It was also really smart how they only gradually expanded the actual scale of the map screen the more you explored. When you first start out Limgrave takes up almost the entire map screen but by the end it's probably less than 20%.
Giving players tastes of other areas (like teleporting us to Crumbling Farum Azula from the Four Belfries, or to the Divine Bridge from the Tower of Return) is really fun, yeah!
@@firefly5247 The only downside to that was that I feel as though it sometimes detracted from the „intended“ reveal. For example, entering Leyndell for the first time would have probably been more impactful if the chest hadn’t teleported me to it before.
@@amysteriousviewer3772 least you didn't get teleported to a cave with jizz shooting insects at low level.
@@whyareyouhere6274 Oh I did, don't you worry. That was actually the first teleporter trap I found.
I thought the first half of the world was huge. When I got past the elevator AND went underground, I was blown away
Like the first time, I've seen Blackreach in Skyrim.
@@st_420 Exactly, people talk like Blackreach in Skyrim doesn't exist LOL.
@@AmritZoad For real. The first time I finally got out of Blackreach I was thinking "holy crap I forgot there was another whole world outside"
Yeah, that was my thought too!
I also liked the fact, that the size of the map is restricted to the places you have been in the beginning. When I first played the game I thought it would be just Limgrave, then I discovered the teleporter chest to Caelid and thought "surely this has to be the endgame area" and thought it was just Limgrave, Liurnia and Caelid as endgame area, then I discovered Altus Plateau and thought "surely the Capital has to be the endgame area", then mountaintops of gigants, then Farum Azula...
One thing about the funneling is that most of it really starts once you've triggered the burning of the Tree, which is a cosmic point of no return for your character and the world. It makes sense for it to start funneling you HARD after that point--you've made a decision with insane consequences, and now everything demands you keep up with them.
It’s also nowhere near „half“ of the game. You’re like 90% done by that point.
@@GRE3NT yeah, like even if you wanna count the mountaintops as the 50 percent of the game hes refering, thats still really off. Sure it may have the same number of required bosses, but he himself said that there are 120 bosses and they sure as hell are not 120 of them in the mountaintops. Id say with mountaintops and haligtree thats like 25 percent through the game
I think the funneling was fine, too, but I hated how the wise dude offered to trade secret great runes, then was suddenly trying to kill me before I had a chance to get the runes to trade with him.
at this point in the game, i feel as though it has become obvious that you’re the only tarnished destined to become lord. you go from being “just another tarnished” to “THE tarnished”
@@IschiVezon They literally do that in every Souls game, though.
Minus the lame funneling of literally killing the fire giant and burning ghost bae, teleporting you to a floating castle because they couldn't think of a better way for you to get there, then teleporting you again after beating Maliketh because a majority of players wouldn't think to go back to the capital city at this point and then topping it off with a rush of 4 1/2 bosses.
yeah, I really like this static level enemies, like in Gothic. It feels really good to come back an be able to beat an enemy or to realize that you're now just strong enough to survive against 1 enemy of type x and then a little later you can survive against 2 etc.
also it feels great to overcome them by other means, like getting beaten up but then just sneaking around them or changing your tactics. Or in Gothic, going through all those powerful spell scrolls you were saving up for something and then finally use them.
also this can add another sense of direction like: I'm not strong enough to beat this enemy, I'll try something else.
moreover although in ER you become strong enough to 1hit most stuff, it still is dangerous, because the enemy damage stays relatively high compared to other games. so getting swarmed by weak enemies can still be deadly.
lastly: most scalling systems make the world feel stale. Everything is supposed to be challenging, but in the end nothing is or it's a constant challenge, which also gets exhausting.
That's why I think Bethesda screwed up from Elder Scrolls 4 on. No real sense of danger. Breath of the Wild also screwed up the other way around, in a sense that you can go anywhere, but enemies can be downright impossible to beat if your level is too low, regardless of your skills, because your weapons break after a few swings.
"most scalling systems make the world feel stale. Everything is supposed to be challenging, but in the end nothing is or it's a constant challenge, which also gets exhausting." - I completely agree. Scaling systems do more harm than good, mostly diminishing the player's journey as their gained strength becomes irrelevant anyway.
Scaled enemies keep the power creep in check.
Statically levelled enemies make early game more challenging and rewarding, but make the mid to late game an absolute cakewalk.
@@Digger-Nick If the endgame was an absolute cakewalk for you... kudos, that's more skill than "power creep" in a game where even maxed out vigor doesn't do all that much.
@@Digger-Nick I would say, it depends. There's different ways to keep power creep in check (balancing is hard, especially given vastly different skill ceilings).
But combination is always possible. You could have a generally static approach going from region to region but inside a certain margin there can be scaling. Like a region where enemies are scaled lvl 5-10 but after lvl 10 all those enemies stay at lvl 10. That would still give you the overpowered feeling, when coming back, but keeping the challenge engaging while you're in that specific region.
I love Uhl palace ruins. The statues at the ground, going underground through a well, foreshadowing the city, then after riding a random coffin, finally reaching the other side of wall. Epic
i feel like the tighter final act stopped the open world fatigue for me. i like freedom but sometimes being told what to do is good too. i 100% agree with the fact its kinda easy to get too overlevelled to have fun by virtue of its openness but that feels like a goal in itself for a lot of players. also runes being the sole currency makes players choose between levels and gear. new players can also easily have fun with crazy 'sub-optimal' builds and such with loads of runes to spend.
Figuring out rivers of blood comes to mind for myself😂 respecced to dex/arc so quick lol
This is exactly what i thought
I agree. And the difficult late bosses encouraged me to go back and explore previous areas to build up my character.
I had the opposite. Once I started getting funneled into a linear series of dungeons the whole game started to feel really tedious for me.
I agree on the aspect of the more linear final act, and I'll add in that I actually really enjoyed the repetition of the catacombs and mage towers. In a game that's so open world, it was nice to find the occasional thing that I *knew*. No great mystery or surprise, but a quick 5 minute romp where I knew the general, but not the specific. It occasionally let me ground myself, rewarding me for learning a stable mechanic, and then let me go back out into the open.
I'm sorry but static enemy levels are absolutely essential for this kind of open world design and I'm really glad FromSoft took this route, games like Oblivion have shown us that tying enemy levels to player level makes games dull and takes away that feeling of acomplishment of finally being able to explore a high level area, or going backtracking to a previously explored area only to now blast through every enemy with ease. I really hope FromSoft (and all other open-world rpgs) keep doing this, auto-leveling can still be done but it needs to be way more intricate than "all enemies are within your lvl range except for a few bosses".
Also, you can still tackle bosses after the capital in different order, that's how I did it and it even wasn't on purpose.
I wonder if an alternative to both would be to have a larger variety of leveled enemies in a section. Might make the world feel more believable since it looks like there is a real hierarchy/food chain in a given area.
Exactly my thought, how am I supposed to enjoy my increased damage output if every enemy gets their defenses buffed. Besides, the intricate combat of the souls games allows players to beat stronger enemies through skill alone
I think it is possible to combine the two designs. For example, if a mob has 2000 HP in current game, 1500 HP part can be fixed, and the other part(500 HP) can range from 0 to 1000 HP based on changes of the player's weapon level(or other stats), and finally range from 1500 to 2500 HP.
100% agree, I absoutely hate level scaling, compeltely defeats the point of levelling.
Level scaling is essential to making open world game open world. Elden ring is completely linear with it's awful upgrade mechanics, get that shit away from my Bethesda games that have actual quests and stories to tell.
The fact that I was able to grind levels to the point that I was "overleveled" allowed to enjoy more of the stylish places and cool bosses. It's my first from soft game, and I'm not really into difficult games. Still went all the way to journey 4 and got all the achievements, waiting on DLC.
If you enjoyed elden ring, I recommend you, you should try from softs other souls games!
play bloodborne its the easiest of the series
@@korax2050 Also sekiro. Play sekiro
@matias in elden ring? cuz that would be be laughable , even elden rings mini bosses are quite a bit better than your average main bloodborne boss or even older games. crucible knight alone is better and more complex than blood starved beast and thats just a single mni boss from elden XD
I'm very glad it bettered your experience, I really am. But for others like me, it was extremely underwhelming to steamroll through unexplored areas when we were still looking for new challenges.
My favorite thing in elden ring is how places are framed to make the impact of first seeing it that much more magical, It's like putting a game inside of a painting.
First time you see Raya lucaria is from Godricks or the side path of Stormveil, both show off the academy in center above the fog and trees below. Once you get to the academy and make it up the lift you see it up close and can tell just how massive and mystical it is.
The lake of rot is another example, you can first find it by going through the underground and finding an over view of the whole red lake with a small castle off to the side but can't get to it, later in the game you end up at the shore of the lake with nothing but the lake, a grace, and two trees. From a gameplay perspective the over look could have just been the end of a dark cave with an item.
They even made paintings in the game that give rewards for going to the matching place they were made, in most games you would be given a "X marks the spot" type mission where you just go to the X on your map or mini map, but elden ring rewards you for taking in the scenery.
I couldn't agree more. Perspective is everything in this game.
Not scaling the power i think actually helped the open world design. Once you out level an area it becomes easier to explore while the potential to find your next favorite weapon, spell, or talisman remains the same, so it incentivizes back tracking and combing through areas. If every catacomb is exactly as hard it makes the repeated content feel even more samey and turns exploration into more of a chore as the desire to find cool stuff butts up against the annoyance of slower careful movement, more demanding resource management, and possibly more deaths, all efforts you could be spending on exploring forward instead of backward. Gaining levels over the content around you is also one of the few, vitally critical ways FROM lets a player control difficulty.
I recall being vividly unhappy when world of warcraft started scaling zones to your level as it made going back to earlier zones in an expansion to collect resources or mop up leftover quests for reputation & gold into a massive pain compared to previous versions of the game. It also lost a sense of greater worldly progression, the Shire and Mordor should not feel comparably dangerous.
I think I have to agree with Mark entirely on this one. Open world games that don't scale monsters to my character end up feeling very, very boring to me late game, Elden Ring included. I want to play games to be challenged. When I wander up to an early game boss that I accidentally missed the first run through and just killed it in 2 hits, I feel like I was robbed of what was probably a well designed challenging experience had I found it when I was "supposed to".
I also very much disagree with your take on this re: World of Warcraft. Having level scaling in an MMO allows the entire world to be more relevant. I actually have a reason to explore a zone gainfully even if I'm past it's level floor. This worked wonders in The Elder Scrolls Online too.
I guess it comes down to why someone plays games. It sounds like you want a "power fantasy", while I want to experience a designer's well sculpted experience.
@@Roswend I think the other guys issue with this kind of design is that leveling up and getting stronger are superfluous if every enemy is going to just scale up to you.
There is no meaningful difference between doing 10 damage to an enemy and killing it in 10 hits vs doing 100,000 and killing it in 10 hits.
For really common enemy's like rats or goblins this is super noticeable and jarring. I think a better balance would be to only have important enemy's scale up with you, so that big bad boss from a early area isn't one shot by you just because you didn't know/forget that it existed in the first place and got way to powerful for it to stand a chance against you.
@@Roswend Elden Ring does allow for both, but to some extent. If you don't want to back-track into easier areas you could just stick to your path, finish the game, head into new game plus and fight challanging enemies in areas that are normally easier. From there you could take an entirely different approach and explore new things. Of course the problem here is that most players won't think about this when they first play it, but if that's what suits you, it is possible.
I definitely do agree that level scaling enemies are just bad and lazy in an open world game as well. After spending hours upon hours getting new gear, upgrading it, leveling and getting new spells or ashes of war, I'd feel insulted if I were to struggle with a very casual enemy in an area near the beginning. Going through earlier zones while being higher level made me feel like my character was improving and getting stronger. Which in turn made enemies later on feel more stronger and natural. Overall I'd find it silly to go into these epic dangerous areas, beat the enemies but struggle to quickly kill a simple husk of a man picking flowers in the field.
Yes but they could have done something like the comet crashing into Limgrave spawns a whole new type of enemies. Done that for each zone.
Yeah, I think skyrim-style scaling wouldn't work here. However, Hollow Knight-style "this zone is now more dangerous for story reasons" could absolutely have worked, possibly with some story conceit to allow bosses to scale (e.g. claiming great runes makes the power of the others resonate more - so the rune holders get harder as you claim more).
Given the general Dark Souls theme of cycles (admittedly not so much a thing in Elden Ring), having a game where the second half was mostly corrupted versions of the first half would be an interesting and thematic design choice (though would need a bit of care to not be *too* familiar on the second part)
Man, going down that well for the first time, just wow…
It’s one of those things that you just could never prepare for. Completely unexpected when I stumbled upon it.
Same
I agree, that moment is when I knew Elden Ring is something special. The rush of dopamine I got from the constant unpredictability another moment is when I found the chest in limgrave that teleports you to caelid made me realize "wait the map is bigger?" and the map just keeps growing and growing and to think so many of these regions are optional is truly incredible.
@@fredydiaz144 Same. My dumbass decided to start as a Wretch, and then Vaati said the twinblades were in the Dragon Burnt Ruins, so I decided that I’d like to test them out. So that’s the story of how I ended up in the middle of Caelid 20 minutes after the game came out. Fun times.
I was spoiled on it beforehand so it didn’t hit me as much as it probably should have :(
Still a really cool area though.
Fantastic video, but level scaling was treated like it's a good thing when it isn't. Coming back to a familiar area over leveled gives you the reward of trouncing those enemies and giving you the feeling of having become more powerful.
Scaling enemies with level makes it feel like leveling up means nothing and you haven't become stronger when you return to old areas.
Totally agree with this. What’s the point of the struggle you went through early on if you don’t come back stronger?
Instead of level scaling, just introduce new enemies within the replayed areas with good rewards.
He gave examples where enemies are added or areas get new threats, so not just scaling enemy stats. If you go back to an area where three enemies used to give you trouble, and now you can deal with six, each one being much easier, you'll still feel like you become more powerful.
Simply scaling stats is kind of the "lazy" way to go about it, and I do agree it defeats the purpose - but the purpose still exists
All I want is the ability to up the difficulty if I feel overleveled.
@@Gandwarf213 additionally, what's the point of leveling if everything just goes up along with you? Could've just not had levels to start with
The fact that you don't HAVE to fight a boss when you struggle and can instead explore elsewhere to get stronger is the single fact that caused me, a long-time fan of FromSoft games who never played a single one, actually feel confident enough to pick it up and play it.
And how is it going (or gone)?
@@lapelcelery42 Pretty well, I absolutely love the game and am currently moving towards the final few tidbits of it. While I would assume I'm very over-leveled by numbers alone, I feel, due to me just not being that good, at the perfect point where it's doable, but also very challenging and requiring caution.
I was also surprised just by how integral player messages became to my experience, that's something I feel cannot be conveyed fully via just watching other people play the games.
How helpful or silly other people's warnings and thoughts can be, and how good it feels to see your own warnings and tips get appraised.
@@backslash153 That's great. If it helps you move into the other games, Elden Ring has by far the worst boss fights and enemy balance. I worry that people will presume the other games are the same, and obviously they are to a large extent, but due to the resources spent on the open world, the combat is much fairer and the content much more streamlined in the other games. Elden Ring actually loses out on the polish of the others, so I'd be extremely curious to hear how someone who likes ER, and started with it, feels moving on to the older games.
Highly recommend you to try the other ones too after you've done with your playthrough of Elden Ring. You've basically ready to tackle them (minus Sekiro) as their combat system are just the same as ER.
That's how I stat-checked EVERY boss I've come across
Improvise, adapt, overcome
I like the idea that the last half is more focused. Sounds like the best of both worlds and makes me more excited to finally tackle this game for real.
I finally started the first legacy dungeon after 20 hours of just exploring. I'm having so much more fun after this video showing how the game works. I was playing blind and was totally lost.
It was fine before but being completely aimless and half confused was not ideal either. If I only would have known about the legacy dungeon and main objectives sooner I would have played with a bit more purpose.
I feel the same way, but i also feel like GMT is correct in that it's because of constraints and not a deliberate design choice.
Don't get me wrong this game is as close to a 10/10 as you could get, but it really is held together with duct-tape and glue, and you don't have to look very carefully to see the cracks
It's like the design team decided that instead of cutting content, they would just keep it in the game and make it optional instead, a "quantity over quality but still enough content of quality" approach
Repetition is good to really hammer down the underlying rules of the world:
-Memory stones are held in mage towers, and are locked with a magic riddle.
-Catacombs have ashes in the tree burial chamber, that is locked by the tree themed door, locked with a lever somewhere in the catacombs.
-Ruins have a hidden basement somewhere.
-Churches have sites of grace, sacred tears, and a talk with melina.
-Killing giant dragons and consuming their hearts give you their breaths.
-Evergoals, giant stone circles have powerful beings trapped inside.
-The moving mausoleums are stopped by destroying the souls trapped in the spiritual rocks.
-Deathbirds and Night cavalries only appear at night.
-Divine towers unlocks the powers of great runes.
-Minor erdtrees have tree avatars that hold crystals for your potions.
-Golden trees have golden seeds below them.
-Mining caves have smithing stones to look for in the walls.
And caves are literally all over the place, both geographically, and thematically, when you enter a cave, you cannot predict what the heck you're getting into, and even sometimes, don't even know where you will end up.
The problem with repitition is that it gives you a sense of "i've seen this before", even if it isn't exactly the same.
I'd say the real problem has nothing to do with content reuse or anything like that. Instead, the problem was that they failed (mostly) to capitalize on the best thing you can do once you create a pattern: BREAK IT. Break it *hard* leave them stumbled on the floor trying to figure out what the heck is going on. Some examples:
(They do this one!) A basement ruin that has the entrance hidden with an illusion. But they could have also easily done that it doesn't lead to a basement, and instead to a cave, catacomb, whatever!
(They do this one!) A church that has enemies instead of a place to rest.
Maybe an evergoal brings you to an unfamiliar place, or its a trap, or is a big skirmish instead of a boss battle. They could have done literally anything else and it would have surprised the players.
One of the divine towers could have a surprise boss battle in order to get the rune.
One of the rotting or fallen minor erdtrees could have an already dead boss, and you'll have to find the crystal hidden somewhere, or kill whatever killed the avatar.
Because the pattern isn't broken enough times, or not at all, means that you don't ever expect anything different each time you find something familiar, and indeed it is. But make enough "exceptions" to the rule, and suddenly when you enter a catacomb, you won't know if its just a "pull lever-> find door -> kill boss -> leave" catacomb, or a secret alternative path to reach the deeproot basin, a teleporting trap to the other side of the world, a ton of fake levers needing to find the right one, a huge riddle that needs to be solved instead of a lever, or even just plainly finding an npc instead of a boss at the end of the dungeon.
If they threw those curve balls, one at a limgrave catacomb, one at a caelid catacomb, and two in liurnia, when you enter a catacomb at the altus plateau, you would still feel like although it could be a normal ass catacomb, it also *could* ber something you've never seen before... and that keeps the feeling of discovery to the very end!
Pretty good comment 👌🏻
I completely agree. This would have gone a long way in keeping those reused assets feeling fresh and exciting. This is what good, constructive criticism looks like
I mean they sort of do the divine tower boss one in caelid with the tower going both up and down from the grace.
@@-Lillies Good point. It would have been better if you'd fought the Godskin Apostle at the top though, as that is where you're used to getting your rune. Also, it makes more narrative sense to have him up there, as it would imply he is laying in wait to kill the next demigod that arrives at the tower.
This is an excellent comment. You built on points I've seen discussed in another video (you probably saw it to). Any time there was pattern breaking I was excited and reengaged. Kept things fresh without From having to create a ton of new assets.
Frankly, even going back to low level areas when you're overleveled for them can still be challenging if you stop concentrating and get careless. Get caught in a pack of wolves or a bunch of footsoldiers and you'll be knocked off torrent and flat on your back vulnerable in seconds. Miss that parry or try to strike at the wrong time and you get punished, concentrate on one guy too hard by a camp and you're asking to be pegged in the head by an arrow or spell, let a zombie grab you and you're out half your health
Ah yes. You should never get too cocky and careless in FromSoft games I also learned that the hard way.
But still, I think they should add an enemy scaling option similar to newer AC Games. Although Elden Ring's enemies doesn't have levels they could easily program something that adds multipliers to enemy stats based on your rune level. I kinda made a mistake by always clearing out the main areas nearly completely before the main bosses. This resulted in me absolutely destroying Rennala, Radahn and Morgott on my first try even without summons. You could somewhat counterbalance this by leveling up other stats but it feels eeeehhhh... The only way Morgott was a decent challenge when I went in with +3 weapons on NG+.
I especially liked Odyssey's option where you could set the game in a way that enemies are never weaker than you by more 4 levels but already strong enemies won't scale down to your level.
@@valentinvas6454: that's not really a "mistake". An easier boss fight is your "reward" for thorough exploration and preparation.
Scaling enemies would be a huge mistake in Elden Ring, because the game doesn't have a traditional difficulty selection like other games. Being able to out-level the enemies is the only alternative less skilled players have for overcoming these challenges.
Maybe a system where enemies scale based on the number of Great Runes the player has collected could work, but definitely not one where enemy level is tied directly to the player's rune level.
@@EmeralBookwise That's why I wrote scaling "option" for those who want a bigger challenge.
@@valentinvas6454: There already is an option for people who want a bigger challenge... just don't level up.
@@EmeralBookwise If you don't level up you aren't able to use many many weapons and spells so it's not the same that way.
A clever thing Elden Ring does with its open world is how it makes your adventure through each zone feel different by varying the layout and changing up your route to the legacy dungeon.
The main route through Limgrave is roughly shaped like a T, climbing up. Liurnia is a straight line or a trident. Caelid is a G going down. Mt Gelmir is a spiral. Altus is an F. Etc.
And the way each zone interacts with its legacy dungeon, and how you approach and enter them, is different too.
You could probably do a whole series on the different levels of world design in Elden Ring.
I remember discovering the game and kept thinking I was near the end and would finish it soon. It just kept on going and more areas kept being discovered, loved the game.
5:07 I had no idea that there's a lift that takes you to the Altus Plateau, I took the semi secret way on a whim and thought that that was the main way to do it all this time. It ended up being one of the most magical moments of my playthrough cause I had no idea the Altus Plateau was waiting for me at the end of that dungeon.
mroe proof the games level design is several magnitudes higher grade and more complex than dark souls 1. as a whole, ds1s shortcuts look cute in comparison to elden rings whole picture.
You had no idea there was a lift that npcs tell you about?
Elden ring players are the dumbest in all of gaming
This is one of the few games that I wish I could play for the first time again. The sense of sheer childlike joy in discovery that I got from it is unparalleled.
The only problem I have with it is that I played it so much that I feel like I need to take a break for at least a couple years before I forget some of it.
there will be plenty of mods that will fullfill that for you
Dude, I had to take a break from GAMES after I finished my playthrough. Elden Ring sucked me completely dry for the two weeks I no-lifed it and an entire month after that.
Don't worry , Dlc should be out by next year and there'll be plenty of mods to mess around with.. if you're on pc , that is..
That moment when I went down the well to siofra river is unforgettable. One of the best exploration moments in gaming.
And the bosses are just incredible. I will never forget beating malenoa through only parries for the first time. Literally felt like I as a person levelled up.
Agreed. I have a plan to try it again in 2024-5 for that reason. Should be long enough that I'm not clear on anything but the biggest plot points. Still won't get a lot of the absolutely stellar first reveals of locations, but that should be okay. I can actually pay attention to the lore next time.
I, for one, felt that coming back to areas that I had trouble with before after exploring a different area and powering up a little bit, felt really satisfying. I understand maybe some scaling could have been done (where enemies are still less powerful than you are, but only to a certain maximum), but this didn't bother me too much in my playthrough: I think most bosses were challenging, regardless of my level (save maybe the Magma Wyrm). Breaking my head against the Twin Gargoyles and eventually giving up after about 20 tries, and then coming back to them after leveling up while exploring other areas to kick their asses felt fantastic. Still needed to focus and manage my health well, but it was great.
I honestly don't think the reuse of the catacombs are quite as bad as people tend to say. It feels like a refinement of what the Bloodborne chalice dungeons were attempting, and while I quite love the dungeons, the catacombs definitely do feel like a proper improvement on them. With such a massive and vast open world, you can quickly run into burn-out and fatigue where you start getting exhausted by the sheer amount of stuff you have as options, so these small mini-dungeons that are extremely focused on one specific relatively linear thing are really enjoyable.
An aspect that is underappreciated is how their design instantly informs you of what you should visit them for. Catacombs are entirely dedicated to spirit summons, having new ashes to use, glovewort to upgrade them with, and occasionally deathroot for an NPC questline, and you always know you'll find imps and skeletons inside so prepare crystal darts to make the imps malfunction and Holy Order powers to keep the skeletons down for good. Tunnels are always going to be where you find smithing stones, stone miner bell bearing, and are full of important materials for magic-based arrows and consumables, obviously being full of miners and often having other magic related enemies like the Marionettes or crystal snails around, plus they are even neatly marked on your map with a red/orange marker with a black core so you can locate them easily. Lastly Caves are for gear, weapons, talismans, and other tools, having a much more varied list of enemy options, but usually involving either wild animals or status effects of some sort. You always know exactly what you are getting into, why you would want to investigate this area, and it lets you take a short break.
I'd also highlight the Mountaintop catacombs/caves. They are really excellently designed, with the snailcaller's cave being such a blast with how it subverts your expectations and slows the game down, forcing you to sneak around through bushes because of the sheer overwhelming number of enemies, while the Mountaintop catacombs explicitly takes advantage of catacomb's similar designs and make the place feel like a never ending maze of endlessly looping corridors and pathways, with the solution to finding the lever really not being what'd you expect.
So I really dont think they are nearly as bad as people tend to say. Yes Catacombs might be a bit repetative in design, but the only reason you would need to go in there is for ash upgrade materials. If you don't want to try other ashes, or don't need to upgrade an ash, there's no reason to force yourself through unless you want to play through it.
The catacombs/caves are not the same as the chalice dungeons.
One is used to fill the core of the open world game with points of interest to not make the game's maps feel like an empty painting, the other is total side content that is seperate from the main game aside from lore.
The criticisms towards Elden Ring are fully warranted, let's not pretend they arent as bad as people say, please.
Here's hoping they end up fully updating ER to better meet the standards that Miyazaki was going for, Scholar of the First Sin style... Except, not at ALL like THAT abomination of a game.
Good first attempt at an open world, but it is quite obvious to see where the game is lacking, and so, can be tuned to reach the level of *Masterpiece* without so much of the *Flawed*
There were definitely a few unique dungeons (like the one with the chariot) but most of them were rather boring and I stopped doing them when I saw them because they were just tedious and in the end would provide something I’d use once or never at all
@@romdog1818 This comment makes no sense, even having little secondary content bb, the CDs still feel mediocre because of how short the base game is, and yes, the catacombs of eldenring is also secondary content. It makes no sense to say that one is secondary and the other is not, remember that to complete the game you only need two runes and burn the tree, all the rest of the content is optional.
I also enjoyed the “repetition” because I knew what I could expect. If I was using spells and wanted another slot I could scan the horizon for a tower and know that’s where I could find what I’m looking for. If I saw a new minor erdtree I would head towards it wanting to find out what the new crystal tear would be. IMO that’s much better than it being totally random and different because then I never went “oh… well that was a waste of time because I’ll never use this.”
The other thing to keep in mind is that there are 18 Catacombs in the game. Even if you combine the 5 Hero's Graves with that (which have most of the same enemies and textures but different overall structure), that's 23 mini dungeons that look kinda the same. When other open worlds like Zelda have 120 shrines using the same assets and music, I'm really not upset about Elden Ring. They were pretty tactful with their reuse, and later dungeons still felt purposeful and surprising in their level design in a way that randomly generated areas like Bloodborne's Chalice Dungeons did not.
I always say this but having no knowledge or whatsoever of the existence of nokron before heading down the long ass elevator, the experience of discovering it by yourself was phenomenal. With the stars in the sky and mogh's palace in the background.
With how much people have been hyping this game up its nice to see a video discussing the problems a lot of us had with it. Even if something is good, criticism is still a valuable tool of analysis, and can help shape future iterations.
True. The game is stunning, and its non hand holding approach is refreshing after all those ubisoft open worlds. But it’s a fact that Elden ring is still a lot easier combatwise than the previous games in the series and that its exploration is more linear than the other open world games.
It’s infuriating to think about it.
It’s a 10/10 game in the first 10 hours and then steadily just slips down and down and down.
Limgrave is perfect game design and sooo tight but already at Liurnia you have seen pretty much all the game has to offer and from Altus onwards it’s basically just a grind through stronger versions of the same enemies.
So much fun, wonder and excitement in the beginning and then it becomes still a good game but not an exciting one
@@minecraftotalwar 'But it’s a fact that Elden ring is still a lot easier combatwise than the previous games in the series and that its exploration is more linear than the other open world games.' explain
@@bingobongo1615 I felt the same thing with bloodborne ngl
@@MrGhostTheBigRoast watch the video
Doing ranni and fia's quests on launch day when me and my friends were all headless chickens was one of the best gaming experiences i've had, as well as finding the way to mohgs palace without doing varres quest.
I think the reuse of catacombs, mage towers, mines, etc are a double edged sword. I agree that the familiarity does diminish the feeling of mystery and discovery, but it allows for recognizable goals for players to follow. Looking on the map to try to find those orange circles that signify smithing stone mines so I could get upgrade materials made me feel smart, using my understanding of the game's world to make myself stronger.
Yeah sure, allowing the player to know what kinda rewards to expect is great, especially with so many possible builds, each of which will profit from different stuff.
But all the catacümbs, for example, feel so samey, at least to me. You can expect gargoyles/skeletons, some tight corridors that all look the same, a lever to open the boss door, and maybe a few of those falling blade traps, or the flame spitting traps. And that's it, that's how 90% of these areas play out. There are some minor differences on top of that, but they're not enough and so I feel not like I've went through 20 different zones, but through 1 zone, 20 times.
To me, a lot of it depends on how much it "makes sense". The catacombs didn't bother me so much because they were all man-made and seemed built for the same purpose (having access to the Erdtree roots), but it was definitely immersion-breaking to realize that every single elevator shaft in every mine has a ledge and tunnel off to the left (especially in later mines when that tunnel would usually be blocked off, meaning that the ledges didn't even serve a purpose).
All good points, yet at the same time, there's something I appreciated about getting more familiar with certain "tilesets" like catacombs and mines. It was satisfying to feel my mastery increase; I came to recognize that, say, catacombs are a consistent source of glovewort and sometimes deathroot, a trip through a mine is great for upgrading weapons, etc. And I appreciated special twists that were used only once or twice, like having to slip under a platform that rises when you step on it, or navigate a maze of transporter chests.
Elden Ring is my favorite FromSoft game so far!
I feel very lucky to have played Elden Ring
It's almost like they did "open world with bits of Dark Souls" for the first half, and "Dark Souls with bits of open world" for the second. It's a great way to balance both ways. As for the "formulaic" stuff (catacombs, mines,...) I think it's a good idea to make it like that. As a player, you get a sense of what's inside and if it's good for you to go in. If you don't care about summoning ghosts, you can skip all the catacombs and be fine. If you need material X, you know roughly where to go.
I was going to say that it's a bit jarring, but in the end where would you go to find ancient treasures in the real world? Not in a coal mine... :p
It's silly but the more I think about it the more it makes sense. Specific "'treasures" will coalesce in same-y areas.
"s a player, you get a sense of what's inside and if it's good for you to go in"
Exactly, the game establishes a set of rules in an easy form at first and then slowly expands on them with each successive dungeon. You'd think Mark would get that, considering it's a core concept for game design.
For me it was kind of hit or miss. The catacombs felt believable because it always seemed like there was a reason behind it, like they were all built around the same time by the same people for the same purpose, but it felt less believable that every mine shaft has the exact same ledge off to the left of every elevator, or that every random village would dig basements with the exact same layout.
I feel like narratively, the funnel makes sense because doors are meaningfully closing. The characters and cast around you all begin to meet with their ends, or realize the path they've been on might not be the one for them. Elden Ring is inherently about becoming Elden Lord, and the Highlander "there can be only one" feeling starts setting in, and other characters begin to see your character, not as just another Tarnished, but as a specific Tarnished, as a powerful one, a threat. Other Lord Claimants take note of you, some NPC's begin to refer to you as Lord, or imply you will become one if you keep it up. The endgame is a funnel because you're getting rid of the last remaining obstacles, and the great creation the Erdtree, is coming to its end. Roundtable Hold by the endgame literally lights itself aflame, and is mostly empty except for Hewg and Roderika (and Gideon but some good he is).
I suppose what I mean to say here, is that the first half is finding the way you want to claim the throne, and the second half of the game is actually going forward and doing it. Mechanically this works well because you'll have a favored weapon type or kit, a spell set and strategy, and you'll have invested a good number of smithing stones into your favorite toys. Your statline will be closer to your ideal spread for your build, and as a player, you'll be ready.
Finally, the other Tarnished around you change. At first, other Tarnished are like your coworkers or colleagues, or rivals on a similar scale. We go from a little group of the few remaining Tarnished who believe a Lord will arise, to the failed Lord Claimants who have come close, but not succeeded (Vyke and Bernahl), and we get the tools to finish what the Black Knives began, the Rune of Death so you can finish the job. The game from the beginning tells you that becoming Elden Lord is the goal, and many have tried but few succeeded, because they lost their guidance, gave up hope, and stopped. This is a pretty recurring motif in FromSoft games, but in Elden Ring it's done to epic fantasy rather than dark fantasy (as dark as Elden Ring can be, that's saying something).
I also think FromSoft cares a bit less about showing you some bones of a game from time to time, and the catacombs all have interesting lore as to why they look the same, and it has to do with their common purpose.
While the lore is hard to come by, there are usually few things that lack in-universe reasons for happening.
That said I will say my issue for first time players is the brutal spike in difficulty after defeating Morgott. Mountaintops of the Giants has a literal gatekeeper boss in front of Rold that will flatten you if you're under-prepared, Mohgwyn Palace is dangerous even if you're endgame strong, and all the late game bosses are bosses my friends usually recommend being at least level 100 before even trying em. It's such a raw spike in challenge and in resources you need that it will bounce you right back to Liurnia or Leyndell to grind or search for more tools, which is good in some ways to make you explore more, but are exhausting from a player perspective.
hmm, i felt like any unwinnable fight at that point could be skipped without consequence.
Agree with everything here, but the last paragraph. Whilst there is a notable spike heading into the Mountaintops of the Giants, I think it works well as a level/skill check for the player. Players who've explored a lot will be able to handle it quite reasonably, and those who haven't will be incentivised to explore elsewhere first. It's a tool used throughout the game to encourage exploration and allow players to decide on their experience with the game in an organic way.
I got wrecked by the Fire Giant and never beat it. I just can't deal with the camera angles :( (I still love the game tho, just restarted)
This may be the best comment here, very solid reasoning for the funnel point thematically.
Id say the difficulty spike is more of a morgott issue than the endgame itself. Its not that the mountaintops and beyond bosses are that hard for endgame. At that point, from is expecting between 80 and like 140 level players, so they have to make the bosses not only a challenge since its the end of the game but also need to make their scaling strong to deal with people that have 50 percent of the map completef as wellas people with 100 percent of the map that spend 3 hours farming souls. They had to make it harder since i feel like id would have been much worse if the game was instead piss easy at the end. The thing is that morgott is suposed to be the gatekeeper to the harder content, but hes not. He has too little hp and dmg for what most people caracters are prepared at that point in the game.
I’ve had very few gaming experiences that compare to seeing the underground night sky in Elden Ring for the first time. I’m 32 and have played games since my SNES in the early 90s… Elden Ring gave me those deep joyous chills that I haven’t had since playing RDR2 for the first time.
Same here, gaming since the Atari 2600.
same age, same experience. breathtaking
Beside the elevator down to the Siofra River in Mistwood. One of the best moment of connectivity for me is when you are in the Capital shunning ground. You go down and down the captital to a forbidden area of an outer god. Then you find a hidden pathway lead to the Deeproot Depth. Usually people may have traveled there by using another method. Probably they all wander how is this place connected to the other as it was short of "teleportation". At the time when the Deeproot Depth text appear, all the height feel like they have a purpose. We don't just descend into this place then there is nothing else. Or the developer didn't just put this place in a random location on the map and let us teleport there. There is an entire area with a huge lore about the Erdtree burial practice and the dead demigod. And it also make sense for there is a teleport point from the Erdtree root straight to the Capital. The connectivity of the area isn't lost as a result of the open world, but was used to compliment and support the lore and world building.
It just feel so good for me
Siofra River was my first time accidentally stumbling into Caelid, I had ran into some spoilers before I was able to get the game and knew to avoid going too far east at the start. I didn’t take that into account underground, needless to say I was scared shitless seeing I was in Caelid with a Rune Bear in view.
I entered the depths for the first time from below, I went into the coffin in Nokron and it took me up to the deeproot depths lol.
@@Slender_Man_186 🤣😂🤣 classic rune bear just wanted to prank you
Excellent video. A few notes from a dedicated player:
• While the endgame linearizes in some ways, it stays open in others. Miquella's Haligtree/Elphael, which take forever to get to, are simply.... spectacular. Jaw-dropping. And /very/ endgame. The sewers beneath Leyndell go deep, leading level by level all the way to another underground city/zone -- the Deeproot Depths, with the Nameless Eternal City. You also did not mention the enormity of Ainsel River, with late-game achievements like Nokstella, and the Lake of Rot.
• Having played through the game twice, I can report that even in the late game, my eyes were popping from novelty. Crumbling Farum Azula, especially, was a "holy sh*t" moment. Not to mention, of course, the well-hidden boss Dragon Lord Placidusax, which takes you through one of the craziest cutscenes in Elden Ring.
Excellent comment! This actually shows useful knowledge of the game. Yeah, the game funnels in because you're actually close to become an Elden Lord and people want to stop you. But you still have a lot of options, which I think Mark over simplified.
And yes, Farum Azula is still some of the best From Soft level design. No area in the Dark Souls sequels come close to that level of aesthetic and exploration.
@@enman009 Farum Azula reminded me a ton of the Dragon Shrine areas of DS2 and DS3, mostly the DS3 one.
@@JoeDower101 It's very reminiscent of those areas, but more fleshed out and less annoying with its enemies and their placement (in particular the spongy and ganky worms in DS3).
@@enman009 fleshed out maybe because we can now jump and the level design can incorporate light platforming and verticality. Less annoying enemy placement? Debatable, at least the snakemen don't throw blades with obscene accuracy and range.
@@JoeDower101 agree on that's debatable. I'm talking about the Giant Dragon fight and its thousand minions and the ones after the lever that enables the Nameless king fight. They're so close, have a lot of health and DS1 poise seems to be their power. At least the Farum beast throwing lightning and boomerangs are very predictable and easy.
But yeah, jumping and keys truly expanded the exploration. It took me two playthroughs to explore everything and find Alexander in his final stage (not spoiling, but is great).
I agree that while it’s not perfect in its approach to the open world and that in the end it feels like it funnels you into one path, it’s still done very well especially for it being their first open world game.
It doesn't funnel you until the end game, which makes sense.
I actually think enemy balancing is a positive for Elden Ring. It avoids telling you explicitly that there is a golden path you have to follow, but just as importantly it doesn't go to the other extreme of letting you go anywhere and do anything unimpeded. The game gives you friction and feedback. That, in turn, leads to interesting choices. When you meet Margit for the first time, you can take that (some combination of) three ways: run away to the weeping peninsula to level up, refuse to back down until you've mastered Margit's moveset, or get creative and find the secret way around to Liurnia. The numerical improvement, skill improvement, and lateral thinking playstyles are available for most challenges in the game and they are each balanced by having some things that are for them and some that aren't. The only real problem is when players aren't able to decide "this content isn't for me". If the numerical improvement players only fight Margit twice, and spend hours in the weeping peninsula between those attempts, and a skill improvement player spends hours fighting Margit umpteen times but skips the Weeping Peninsula, then both will be able to enjoy themselves fully on hours of content. The problem only emerges when the numerical improvement player doesn't realise that fighting Margit over and over again is content that wasn't designed for them or when the skill improvement player doesn't realise that the Weeping Peninsula is content that wasn't designed for them. I would say that From has less of an issue with balancing the game, and more of an issue with communicating to players that they are expected to skip or avoid content that isn't fun for them. It seems like From is butting against a kind of entitlement from players who aren't content with mountains of content designed for them because there's also some content designed for other people, as well as against completionism which encourages people to 100% a game even if that isn't fun to do and was never intended.
I think that the lack of messaging about what paths are for what kinds of players is an intentional design choice. People gravitate to From games partly because of the lack of hand-holding, and that carries over into Elden Ring in more than one way - and it manifests here as 'find your own fun'. If you aren't enjoying one aspect of the game, you can go and try to find something that you enjoy more elsewhere, and then breeze through the stuff you don't really like. From never catered to entitled gamers, and the community has definitely latched onto that with their endless refrain of 'git gud'. (Of course, Elden Ring is perhaps the most friendly From Soulslike to less-hardcore gamers with its expanded toolset to deal with difficulty spikes... but you still have to go hunting for those tools.)
It's a positive, sure, but it's a positive more than a negative.
Sorry but there's a difference between hand-holding and not telling you content is there that you might enjoy. I missed an entire evergaol boss until I modded the game to have the proper map markers for stuff. I didn't want to miss it, I just did despite spending hours looking at grass trying not to miss stuff. It's impossible to keep track of where you've checked in such a massive map that's very samey looking.
Getting to the deep root depths was mind blowing and one of my favorite moments in any form of media. I never could have possibly thought the game went that deep
Your videos are always great, but I felt the editing was especially slick in this one. The establishing shots must have taken quite a while to get, but they were absolutely worth it. Loved it.
Hard disagree on enemy balancing being an issue. Listing Assasin's creed's level scaling as an example of tackling that issue is especially ridiculous since the way AC does it is absolutely terrible. It completely ruins the immersion when you're supposedly the mightiest warrior in ancient Greek, but you're still having trouble with the most basic bandits or a random wild boar because they're buffed to always be the same level as you.
Yes. Alot (or maybe all really) of ER is designed around rather specific lore/story ideas too. There're reasons for various enemies/bosses to appear in certain places. Probably why in hindsight this "balancing issue" does not bother me as much as when it was new (understanding the world more). With a few exceptions, most enemies are where you EXPECT them to be. It actually adds to the immersion of the world for me, not the opposite (as this video claims).
There's also the idea of a game being a power fantasy, and the concept of replayibility. In ER, if some areas or bosses are tough for you initially, is it really a bad design to be so over levelled eventually? It can make you feel like you progressed and whatnot. And even after a while, even if most things are trivial, then it simply becomes a matter of playstyle. There are hundreds of weapons, and countless spells (and other strange ways to play, lol) in this game.
This also adds tremendously to the replayibility if you ask me. My initial playthrough I (like alot of ppl...) used abusive techniques to beat many bosses, and felt unsatisfied... Many months later I'm now itching to play the game again (probably come DLC) to try other (deliberately harder) methods of playing it. Especially after recent patches made many many things much more viable to use.
I also think many people are putting too much emphasis on the idea that a souls like game should be difficult, and perhaps forget it's more about overcoming a challenge. And that ER is much more open and much more of an RPG than previous souls games. Hence why if you're over levelled, assuming you didn't abuse farming spots etc. too much, you should feel like you overcame something! You start as somebody who gets crushed by alot of things, to somebody that can slay anything in your path however you want. I think a game should be commended for getting this right. And ER gets it very right imo.
Still though, it's very very hard to balance a game like this no doubt. IMO, considering the deliberate design of the world, and how massive it is, they did a great job overall. Maybe less repeat bosses and whatnot (those that have no real clear story or lore to them, lol) would've been better, but I personally liked playing this game enough (it's not purely a survival/combat game, half is about gawking at the scenery and wondering wtf is going on in this crazy world...) that I didn't care after a while.
Solid video though overall. TBH, I think ER is too massive and complex of a game to be fully critiqued yet (as many comments here have indicated). I think most likely the real quality of this game will be revealed over the years, but we'll see... My only real issue I had with it was it was too big (and way denser than I realized too). And it was my problem. I should have taken 3-4 months to play it, instead of 3-4 weeks like most people...
I've seen this as slight against BotW too, like people complaining that at some point you can easily kill enemies that were once difficult, it's like, yeah that's the whole point of powering up and getting better at the game.
straight up. citing it as a point against the game because it "discourages exploring the open world" just seems so backwards to me. when i wandered into caelid for the first time and got shmacked after only having done the weeping peninsula i was like "hell yeah i want to explore this place i bet there's sick loot"
@@hprd2229 exemplary comment - personally I think the only two things were elden ring really failed were in making its armor sets as diverse as its weapon sets (The Ascended Mod of Elden Ring really does this incredibly well, imbuing every single equipment piece with varied and valuable 2ndary effects, resistance, bonuses, debuffs etc to really make theory crafting and actually caring about your armor loadouts matter, the way they did in Monster Hunter World. There is literally no point other than aesthetics and your stamina cap to vary your equipment in this game once you get a 'stronger' piece of armor.
The 2nd area is of course that there a still a shit ton of things FromSoft needs to just not be lazy/douchey about and include instructions in the menu about - ie I shouldn't have had to look up on the internet how to set my potions and torrent to quickmenu, which two buttons I need to press to powerstance/double hand weapons, what the dang stats even mean, how different shields parrry/block differently and that you can't use your weapon ash of war til you disarm your shield. etc etc.
lol, have you played dark souls 3 or bloodborne for the first boss? if you think the enemy unbalancing means you have no brain to touch this game...
5:20 You can also use the teleporter chest at the Tower of Returning in the Weeping Peninsula to go to the Divine Bridge in the capital. While you are stuck up on the bridge until the elevator is raised, it is actually possible to be invaded and have the invader raise the elevator for you. My friend actually did this and beat Morgott without holding a single Great Rune.
i’ve played this game for hundreds of hours at this point through multiple play throughs, but last night i found for the first time, a catacomb in altus plateau filled with jar enemies and teleporting traps! it really makes me wonder how much i’ve missed!
Did you find the PT catacombs?
That kind of stuff pissed me off until I modded the game to have it all on the map. I want to see and play the content. I don't want to play where's waldo with the content.
The game is just perfect in my eyes and what game can offer so much content and still make every minute feel unique? I’d say none! Part of enjoying a game, is learning its mechanics and getting better at them and also adapting to different challenges, or just running a different character. For me this game far exceeded my hopes and wishes and it sits happily, in my fromsoft collection.
none of the dungeons feel unique
Perfect how? Content where??
The world is completely barren and lifeless, you do nothing but kill lobotomized enemies that don't even talk...
@@officialshinky I would say no game is perfect. Yeah the dungeons could of felt a bit more unique but there were many unique dungeons. I think some of the dungeons feeling the same was deliberate, as while playing the player learns to go to mines to get components needed to upgrade their equipment, and the player learns to go to catacombs dungeons to get upgrades for their summoning spirts.
@@alexoelkers2292 there is simply WAY to much reused content in elden ring, they either need to scale their game down or develop it for longer so future games they make are better
@@officialshinky For me I don't think it was WAY too much... the dungeons that most people complain about feeling the same are the catacombs which are all pretty much optional dungeons. And they are all short enough that I didn't feel like they over stayed their welcome.
My favorite part about the way the game opens up for people who didn't look for the other half of the Dectus medallian is the dectus medallion is for all intents and purposes the worst way to progress to Altus Platau. If you're like me and didn't find the second half until I'd already hit Altus Plateau, you got there through the Ruin Strewn Precipice which is not only an actually fun and unique cave, but also hides a fair few rare smithing stones, a boss fight and an NPC invasion event where you invade the world of an NPC which rewards you with the best heavy armor set in the game (depending on your progress in the Volcano Manor), and come out just next to the lift itself. Or you could just go up the lift and miss all of this.
Best part? You can just go straight there as soon as you leave the first step.
Elden Ring's open-world often trivializes challenges.
For example, on the way to Caria Manor arrows rain down on you from the sky until you reach the door. In any other Souls game, I would have had to navigate a narrow passage while observing how the arrows worked, gotten used to their patterns, and made a few attempts to get past them. But in Elden Ring, having a fast horse on a wide playing field made the arrows easy to avoid. I got past them on my first try.
The traditional Souls version of this challenge could be frustrating, but it also promoted a sense of familiarity through repetition and mastery. In Elden Ring, I often wondered why they even bothered putting some obstacles in.
For the record, I think Elden Ring is an excellent game. Especially given how massive it is.
The game being more linear at the end is a good thing. For pacing reasons.
You found that pacing to be good? I mean, it's not the most terrible, surely not, but from the point on the game becomes linear you always think: "That's it, just one more area." And then: "Ok, not the final one. Maybe the next" and "Not this time. But the one after this region really has to be the end". In my opinion you could simply cut Farum Azula or even the whole Land of Giants. To this point the game and its story is long enough, although of course the gameplay is still fun.
@@Ambar42 laughably hard disagree on that buddy. discovering a new area after thinking the last one was the last was a fantastic feeling, faram azula being a much better designed end game area than any of their older games. land of the giants was ass though and wouldve prefered they scaled it all down into a dungeon before faram azula, maybe then they wouldnt have had to reuse so many enemies there.
@@flamingmanure Well, that's what I was talking about. But although Farum Azula looks great the same goes for this area because they reused many enemies, here, as well. All those generic dragons alone make it kind of annoying. But of course that's also a subjective thing.
@@Ambar42 i mean, it's an ancient dragon city, you'd expect alot of the same dragons there. The beastmen are already hinted in the first mini-cave you find after the church with kalè, you'd expect them to be there as well (they're annoying pieces of shits when they're together, i hate them).
I agree in part, but content and especially enemy repetition actually made me feel very accomplished in my pattern recognition and skill mastery, as formerly imposing enemies like Erdtree Avatars became enemies I could knock out in my sleep but still without being too easy. The later game catacombs, too, despite being "just more catacombs," also get much more puzzling and difficult in their dungeon design, though they repeat the specific trick of "surprise! this dungeon is actually comprised of two near-identical halves" too much. I also have one nitpick: when you say that "even bosses repeat" at 14:56, you show a clip of Esgar the Priest of Blood, when Esgar is a completely unique boss and one of the few pleasantly surprising NPC/Tarnished boss battles (Garris the Necromancer is the only other one to be a dungeon boss). It was certainly a surprise to fight Esgar beneath Leyndell and not just another damn Cemetery Shade!
Like most people said, not leveling the game with your character is a pro not a con; the only possible con is you arriving at a place over-leveled because you went to it too late in the game. Elden Ring actually has a great way to tackle this: Mountaintops of the Giants is a HUGE leap in difficulty. So right at the moment the game becomes more linear, it has a CLEAR difficulty line that it can control a little better from then on, and it's very very hard to get there over-leveled since the gap is so big. I thought this was an oversight when I got there but once I understood why they made that difficulty leap I actually thought it was pretty genius.
I realize most problems with level scaling are due to poor cohesion with the narrative, like if you just killed a dragon and you go back and still don't do much to a goblin, thats a huge disconnect, I feel I wouldn't mind it though if some new more powerful enemies showed up who's designs actually reflected their power
Another solution I would be okay with is only scaling bosses since they're supposed to be strong narratively speaking, it wouldn't feel that off
@@dragonicbladex7574 that would make Lvl 1 runs trivial...
I like to go to boss fights a bit under leveled too, to yeah I wouldn't change a thing :)
@@fsecco true.. only start to scale them after the player surpasses their level then, I guess
@@dragonicbladex7574 that's an idea. But then NG+ gets more boring since you won't be able to spank them bosses like they deserve 🤣 I dunno, the system seems pretty perfect imo
I feel like repetition in open world games are innevitable, no matter the studio working on it. The way FromSoftware tried to solve it was by introducing new ideas. Catacombs are very similair but I won't forget the one with looped hallways or the one with the flaming horsemachines. I personally think it's fine and it didn't ruin my urge of discovery.
Your analysis of the 2nd half is structurally sound, but in practice I just can't say it felt the way you are describing for me. The critical path certainly becomes linear, but I never felt a lack of other interesting threads I could be following (with level-appropriate challenges) at each step. The idea that one simply has to bang their head against the wall till they get by late game bosses I guess is true for people who are absolutely married to the critical path. I wonder how many people play that way.
Yeah, I don't mind that the 2nd half is so linear. Tired of losing to a boss over and over again? Go explore the world a bit and try again later, possibly better equipped. Maybe you even find some other optional boss you can beat instead. Or better yet, realise you've missed an entire optional area.
Love the video.
I actually really enjoyed stumbling upon a lower level dungeon or boss that i missed and absolutely curb-stomping it. It's a nice change of pace for such a hard game.
I loved the catacombs and imo the consistent formula only made them better because it allowed them to play with expectations. Like the catacomb south of the eastern liurnia erdtree where you get all the way to the end and it's a dead end, just for you to find that the walls are illusions and the lever you were looking for was actually right next to the entrance. You have to set up expectations in order to subvert them
Exactly, I never thought it was as formulaic as people complained about. And I am someone that can get bored easily once I see the patterns.
I'm a big fan of the "difficulty in games" debate, and what really struck me about the Elden Ring reception is just how many fans were cautious of ruining their experience by overleveling. Many of my favorite streamers regularly expressed concerns about this. To me this presents a unique conflict of interests which I didn't expect in a FROM Software game.
As a long time From fan I was already hyped for Elden Ring long before it released. But the first time it well and truly blew me away was the Mistwood elevator. Stumbled upon it by complete accident running away from a Rune Bear. Got curious because the Bear backed off and there was a glow at the door. Popped down the longest elevator ride in recent memory and boom - a whole new area with a totally new aesthetic, new map, new enemy types, new architecture... Seeing the false night and the upper ruins and readjusting the sheer scale of the game in my head was absolutely magical.
my favorite moment in all of souls by far, could be in all my gaming years too.
@@flamingmanure The only game you played?
It's cool at first and then you realize that there is still nothing to do in the game and the effect wears off.
@@Digger-Nick Nothing to do? Bruh what game were you playing?
@@KulHadar You do nothing but kill lobotomized enemies that don't even talk... The world is completely hollow, barren and lifeless
While I understand that static enemy difficulty can lead to issues where you become far over leveled for an area, I would say that I believe that's a good thing, rather than a bad thing. I hate games that scale enemies to your level because it more often than not creates a linear difficulty curve, or just a flat one. I hate it when I've been playing a game for hours, have been increasing my level and ability, only to return to an early game area for a quest or something and the enemies are just as tough as anywhere else. The feeling of growth and progression is absolutely neutered by enemy scaling.
Plus, to the idea of "over leveling", I have always seen it as a reward. I managed to go into an area that is a higher level than me, and so I'm being told I should leave, but instead, I decide to work my way through it and get to the other side the victor. Now, when I go back onto the path I should have been, thanks to my hard work and efforts, I can smash the enemies here and feel like a real hero.
I'm just not in the camp that thinks that every boss in a From Software title needs to be difficult for it to be a fun game. I played through Elden Ring without any kind of guide, and rather than doing stormvail castle, I went everywhere I possibly could before hand. I ended up completing most of Caelid prior to getting into stormvail, and this led Stormvail to being pretty easy. I beat Morgot and Godrick on my first try thanks to being way higher leveled than I should have been, and it was great. I felt like I earned an easy victory thanks to my previous hard work.
I just don't think that enemy scaling is a good idea, at least not as it's used in most games. Maybe there's a system they could use that would make it feel good, but flattening out the difficulty curve seems like bad game design to me. To reach the peaks in player engagement, you need valleys.
100% agreed.
I especially disagreed with the point in the video about how "static enemy levels don't work so well when you give the player complete freedom to explore" - With the enemy levels being specifically set by the designers, that gives you information which you can use to make meaningful choices. It's definitely not perfect, but it leads to your choices not only feeling meaningful, but actually BEING meaningful- there are tangible differences between areas.
Contrast that to an alternative version where an algorithm determines enemy strength, and I imagine the game would feel much more flat.
@@aqua7734 Yeah, I think that player freedom is sometimes set as an ideal that is never wrong, but most games that are really good set specific player restrictions to make them more compelling. I know DOOM Eternal turned some players off due to it having a pretty strict play style, but if you could get into that style, it was one of the most exhilarating gaming experiences out there.
I think Mark was right about everything except the enemy scaling and the way he phrased the issue with open world vs enemy level
I get what you are saying, but do leyndell and stormveil castle stand out to you as incredible parts of the game now? To me those were insanely good, easily some of the best parts of the game, but if it would've been a walk in the park it would feel forgetable to me. ESPECIALLY Leyndell since it was hard to even get a lay of the land and figure out where to go since I could die at every corner, without danger that place is completely different.
@@anima94 Actually, Stormvail is still more memorable to me than Liurnia, the snow plateau and the snow fields, even though I was either low or normal level for them. Again, my interest in a location has little to do with difficulty and everything to do with the layout, design, and atmosphere. I would recommend not expecting an easier time to be less memorable, because you can't know until you try it.
Wonderful video! I just installed Elden Ring again since it's been a few patches and the latest one was huge, and even though this will be maybe my third time through the game I am STILL finding areas I missed or noticing lore references and details. It is insane the amount of work that has gone into this game world
Great work as always with the video, but I definitely disagree with the implication that knowing what to expect from certain locations like mage towers, churches, and outdoor ruins is a bad thing. It feels very deliberate in that there is a general consistency with how to acquire important key items for upgrading your flask healing, spell slots, and so on while you're out exploring. The quickly learned rule of outdoor ruin sites pretty much always housing a basement somewhere is used by From to mess with your expectations later on, by hiding some of them beneath destructible wooden planks, or even illusory floors. I don't think these examples of repetition are missteps at all.
I agree. It's also nice to gain the knowledge of "I need to upgrade my X, so i need to find a Y-style location" and to be able to rely on that knowledge, while still having lots of interesting variations within said area.
elden ring and hollow knight are some of the only games where I keep thinking "im most of the way finished" only to reveal another massive part of the map. Its spot on to describe the original goal of the game is at first just reaching leyndel and getting to our favorite big tree, but then you get all the way there and yeah thats maybe half the game, not the ending
I actually enjoy how they reuse structures general layouts. I do enjoy exploring and finding new buildings or environments but having the occasional feeling of familiarity helps not only slightly boost my confidence in gameplay but it also boosts my desire to explore even more.
Interesting that you said that you were 50% done after defeating Morgott. I suppose you are, but it never felt that way to me, it is that funnelling effect, because after that there's getting the medallion, the Haligtree, the giant fight, Farum Azula, and then you're back in Leyndell to finish the game. Before that, there was a lot more exploration, maybe they realized that players would get bored of the exploration aspect at that point.
How much done so you think you are when you defeat Morgott? Because I have Killed Godrick, Radahn, Rennala and am making my way through Leyndell, so how much of the game am I done with(percentage wise)? Thanks
@@TheMadGod Maybe 66% or 75% is what it feels like to me. In your position, I would seek out Mohg and Rykard next.
It's going to depend a lot on how much of the optional exploration you do in the first "half" - if you focus on progressing along the critical path until near the point of no return, then go out and explore everything you skipped past, you'll have a very different ratio than someone who stayed as far from the beaten path as possible until they'd done everything they could access.
definitely do morgott before rykard and mohg. Leyndell was one of my favourite parts and apparently it sucked for many people because they were totally overleveled
@@rmsgrey For the optional stuff, I have Nokron/Siofra, Ainsel and Weeping Peninsula
The repeated content was actually kind of nice, for me personally. Seeing a new catacomb was great, because I knew what to expect: 15-30 minutes of dodging traps, then fighting a boss, and then getting a nice reward at the end. The same with a lot of the repeated bosses: I know how to handle this one, let’s see how I can beat it with the new tricks I’ve learned.
I think in an open world game this large, having repeated content (to a degree) is helpful, as it helps to manage expectations when coming across it, and providing a bit of familiarity to an otherwise alien world. Especially with how different each zone in Elden Ring is, to me this is a strength rather than a weakness.
Nah this is a flaw. This is the equivalent of saying i actually like eating dung, it’s just subjective. It isn’t. Repeated content is just cheap and easy. Just because you can see a bright side to it doesn’t make it good. Want to see how better you are at the game? Replay it. There is no need for the game to repeat itself on it’s own.
@@minecraftgravityguy of course it's cheap and easy, that's the point! Sometimes you need to know when to make something new and when to reuse content. It's inevitable in any game, specially in one of this scale to need to reuse resources. time and money are finite things, and gamers aren't exactly patient.
Besides, plenty of great games reuse content all the time. Majoras Mask is made mostly of reused assets from ocarina of time, and it's great. The game wouldn't be better for having all new models.
@@minecraftgravityguy I respectfully disagree with all of the points you’re making. If someone likes to eat dung and actually enjoys it - more power to them. Just because I don’t enjoy it, doesn’t mean they can’t find enjoyment in it. Just like how I enjoy the familiarity in the repeated content in Elden Ring doesn’t affect your experience of it.
I urge you to find any game that doesn’t reuse content in one way or another. Games reuse content all over the place, from textures and animations to entire tile sets for dungeons. If this bothers you, that’s fair. We all have a different tolerance and value different things in our entertainment.
Working on open world games myself, I find that I appreciate the way the tile sets and enemy designs are reused and how the dungeons themselves are used to fill in the world narratively, as a reward for exploration, and as content to momentarily break away from the open world.
You can't deny it hurts the replay value of the game though. It's usually exciting to fight a boss again on a new character and see how it will play different. But since you've already killed that boss 7 times in the first playthrough the thought of defeating it another 7 times on a new playthrough will kill a lot of the interest for it.
What really made me dislike the repeat bosses was how they came back late in the game. Already I was a bit tired of the game repeating the same boss over and over and then they reappear somewhere in the Mountaintops of the giants for the umpteenth time with an enormous health pool and the ability to one hit kill me, even when my character is basically maxed out. Made it feel like my character was getting weaker instead of stronger when repeat bosses felt ridiculously powerful compared to the demi-gods I've defeated before.
I felt that the open world approach goes especially well with the Souls formula. Sometimes when I'm playing a new traditional Souls game I can get exhausted from always having to be on edge to make sure I don't get got. In Elden Ring you having the same moments of tension, but then also have plenty of moments running around the open world, beating easy enemies, collecting goodies and finding mini dungeons. I think you talked about this concept when analysing Celeste.
Elden Ring could be surprisingly relaxing sometimes. I think only Majula managed to give me that same feeling before. Dark Souls and Bloodborne worlds are too oppressive.
I can only speak for myself but for me, miyazaki ABSOLUTELY succeeded in giving me a sense of adventure, and that's the reason I ended up loving this game just so much.
That said, everything you said here I agree to some extent. I'd like to put some focus on the use of the map in elden ring, I honestly think it's brilliant. It's a map you actually have to look at and read as a player in order to discover more stuff and chart a route. It really did feel like sitting down and planning a route while camping or sth like that.
I agree that recycled content can diminish how fresh each place feel. However, I argue that the layouts are varied enough to still feel like its own space. And some of them do interesting things within that recycled content. Like how Auriza Side Tomb has you teleport between two mirrored but distinct places. It tests your spacial awareness, and it's cool to use what you've learned from one area to find hidden walls and goodies in the other.
I get that reusing assets is more distracting for some players than others, but I felt FromSoft did a good job of making interesting experiences within those restraints.
I agree. It helps you get a frame of reference for the style of content. Then FROM can twist your expectations. The mirror tomb really did throw me through a loop. But, I was immediately on guard when I noticed an item on the ground I already picked up.
I think the repetition of some enemies actually expanded my interest in the world. In almost all the cases where I found repeated enemy types in new locations I rarely thought “ugh more of these guys.” Most of the time I thought “why is *this* guy here? Is whatever faction he’s working for trying to find something in this location? Was he stranded long ago with no way to get out of here? For me it added an interesting layer of environmental story telling.
And then some enemy types will have unique skills that other individuals of the same “enemy type.” For example the knights with the long feathered helmets. While they all share the same basic move set, there’s one atop Fort Haight who can slash at you with a blade of blood. And then there’s the Cuckoo knights in Liurnia, many of which have access to various sorceries. Or at Redmane castle there’s another who can wield fire. They do a surprisingly good job at making individual enemies feel unique, despite working with a limited pool.
Funnily enough, I feel like your two major criticisms of the game resolve one another somewhat.
The fact that the game funnels in to a more focused experience for the final stretch makes it a lot harder to over-level yourself and throw off the difficulty curve. In fact, I think this approach to world design has actually addressed the problem of accessibility that's been discussed around fromsoft's games for years.
The early game gives you absolute heaps of content while you're still acclimatising to the mechanics of the game; if you're struggling with any area in the early game it's quite easy to go somewhere else and beef yourself up a bit first (while also getting more practice in and getting better at the game). But then for the last stretch they reign in the openness of the world in order to deliver a more closely tailored experience for the finale.
100% agree
great comment and very well said. THe game provides you with thousands of different potential paths and tools to be able to 'git gud' and then by the time you REALLY need to git gud in the spike in final difficulty you have the tools at your disposal and the hard yards put in to rise to the challenge
Exactly. Those two complaints pale considering how you can tackle things differently and the fact that the point of no return has a huge build up and focus. Also, the level scaling idea sounds as half baked as you can have it.
I can't even explain how incredible this game is. There is just absolutely nothing comparable, and I played pretty much every open world action adventure that is out there.
And it's also just so mind blowing that they managed to create THE best and most interesting open world on their first attempt.
No they didn't. It's far more samey looking, far less fun to explore because so much stuff is too hidden to actually discover so you end up just running up and down the same field trying to make sure you don't miss anything actually cool. Good open world games have more varied worlds where you can walk for 30 seconds and you're in a whole different looking area, there's hints on the map where the cool stuff is so you don't have to stare at grass and rocks trying to find it, it's more smartly guided with main quests so you know which areas are in which difficulty order. Elden Ring tries to trick you into walking into overleveled areas to appear harder.
Every open world game reuses enemies, Elden ring still holds more variety than most open world games on bosses, dungeons, and other things like caves and catacombs than a game like Zelda BOTW, Finding a boss you fought before in early game doesn't always feel tiresome because it feels like the game is telling you "You fought this earlier as a boss, well now you should be strong enough to handle it like a regular enemy" You also often get different rewards for killing the same enemy in different areas (Godskin Apostole gives you it's weapon when you first encounter it, but it will give you it's full armor set when you kill it again later on) So it doesn't feel wasted, one thing I do kind of agree with is the game's problem with balancing early game enemies when you become too strong but that's a a problem on almost every RPG game not just Elden Ring. In the end Elden Ring still holds as one of the best open world games to date and deserves to be the game of the year 2022.
It has more variety because the world is completely barren and lifeless with NOTHING to do in it.
It's a terrible open world experience and the worst souls game. It won game of the year because of how big it was, same reason stray couldn't win because of how small it was.
@@Digger-Nick Lmao sounds like your salty because GOW didn’t win, and I can’t tell you didn’t play it because you think there’s nothing to do in the world, there was so much to do that it was overwhelming in my first playthrough.
@@frogc. So much to do? You literally do nothing but brainlessly kill lobotomized enemies that don't even talk LMAO. 140 hours and I full cleared the entire map with every quest.
You can also go directly to my steam and check. Hard cope bud
@@Digger-NickOkay send me your steam
@@Digger-Nick Game was way better than any of the competitors in GOTY, I think you’re the one coping lmao.
This is one of the few times I really disagree with your take. Specifically the funnel analysis, or the lack of scaling enemies levels.
I think it served the game purposely and is it exactly what the game needed. By time I was going to the mountain tops of the giants I was around RL 140-150, my build felt cemented and powerful, boss fights were still tough, but I also felt strong, capable, and knowledgeable about my game plan to take on the big baddies. The "boss rush" at the end felt like the perfect match for where I was. Two legacy dungeons to run around, in crumbling farum azula and haligtree which were very unique and not reused assets, 7-10 end game bosses depending what you did or didn't do earlier, to test your build on.
I was done exploring, I didnt want to explore anymore, I didn't NEED to explore any more for runes/materials/weapons/spells/items. I had settled on my weapons, my ashes, my summons, my spells, and I had all the levels I needed to make it work. I was looking for a culmination, a climax, the story I had been building for the last 150 hours.
I thought the funneling, the focus, the game provided, and frankly the really balanced level progression, was spot on. I didn't feel overpowered, I didn't feel underpowered, I felt like I had an adventure and now it was time to bring it home.
Had mountain tops and consecrated snowfield been as big as liurnia each, I think I would have been thoroughly burned out.
The only asset I didn't like was the catacombs, I think the cardinalty of the tombs being locked to 90° and grey walls really emphasized the reuse aspect of the game, but ruins, caves, and tunnels all felt fun to explore each time. Probably bc I enjoyed the aesthetic more and by nature they were all much more organic in the flow of their designs, they twisted and turned, had verticality, but It wasn't so obvious as the catacombs due to the lack of cardinality..plus they we're yeileding items I cared about more, they never got old.
Frankly I don't know how any company makes a game this large, without having some reused assets OR you entirely sacrifice some key aspect of design for example relying on a marker system to guide you instead of having really strong environmental world building, looking at you Ubisoft. Taking into account the idea of reused assets, every angle view, pathway, landmark, enemy placement(even if it was a reused asset) felt carefully curated to give you a great experience. Plus enemies of the same asset type in later areas, say a soldier or a knight etc, in many cases got more advanced move sets as the game went on, which definitely caught me off guard a few times.
I also don't think this game is perfect, but I just don't think some of the points that you bring up here are things I would have considered negatives.
Nicely said!
@@HexarRF thanks!
You absolutely should have a marker system hinting at where the content is. Looking at grass and rocks trying to make sure you don't miss some cave with a cool boss is terrible design. It's made for people that really believe they're in the game worlds they're in and are fine not experiencing full games.
@@albert2006xp I think we just disagree, a marker system would have taken any sense of adventure away. These games are heavily inspired by D&D, as stated by Miyazaki himself, you are supposed to just use your eyes and talk to NPCs to explore the world. You have a map with clearly defined boundaries and very clearly marked structures of interest. Utilize that to your advantage.
This is a game where I am comfortable with missing things if I didn’t find it, but me and many others prayers are going to the utmost to make sure we don’t miss stuff, yet we almost invariably do and then you look it up and hit on the run back.
This is a game built to a certain vision and I happen to love what it’s going for so I don’t want it to be compromised from how Miyazaki wants it. If that’s considered bad game design then, so be it.
There’s other games that can do markers.
@@NibbleSnarph I literally stared at rocks, spending way too much in literal nowhere places trying to not miss stuff. I was hallucinating grass and rocks by that point. And I still missed like 7 bosses in the Limgrave + surroundings area pre-Margit. Then I just put on the mod to show things on map because it's just not acceptable to not give me any sort of in-game hint so that I don't at the very least miss any bosses.
Want to talk about heavily inspired by D&D? Baldur's Gate 3. You don't get pointed to where to explore but the level is generally flat and easy to discern and find stuff in. Compact enough that it's not unreasonable not to mark things. The Elden Ring map is not that. There's a fall damage drop off every 2 meters of this way too large world and they hid some actual content like bosses with the fervor other developers hide easter egg secrets nobody but 3 people find then tell everyone else. Putting a boss behind a fake wall or jumping off an elevator somewhere... why? Just why?
Miyazaki is high off his own arrogance and due to the game design psychologically making players feel like it's a huge challenge, their egos get tied to all the annoying features as if it's a badge of honor to play an offline mode game where you can't pause.
There's nothing that takes away the sense of adventure. You just put on a fog of war (another thing the game needs) and explore it, discovering things. When you're right next to the thing, it appears on the map. If you miss stuff, there should be some point later like Ghost of Tsushima where all the fog in the area you just cleared gets lifted and you see what you missed. Imagine if in that game I would've had to psychotically run up and down the map trying to find the last fox shrine or something.
Real talk.
The way enemies are scaled and the inconsistent difficulty spikes really killed my enjoyment of the game. It genuinely felt like every time I had the experience of "oh that thing looks cool! I'm gonna go explore it!", I'd be met with a fight I was woefully underprepared for. After getting the sh*t kicked out of me, I'd limp away feeling like I was being actively *punished* for exploring 'the wrong way'. And while I love the narrative of a grand, open-ended adventure that this game is trying to tell, the actual mechanics involved clashed so horridly that I couldn't bring myself to _want_ to explore anymore.
It's like the game kept saying:
"It's an open world! Explore however you'd like! 😉"....
...."But not like _that_ 😠"
Being overleveled was the most fun part for me. I didnt have to git gud, just grind a bit more. Going from being super fragile to killing gods with ease was so much fun and felt it happened at a good pace
15:43 I was waiting for the moment he would drop that exact term. “formulaic” is exactly what I had in mind
It does speak very well as a transition from what From has done to what they can do next. Really excited for the next one.
Great content I'm new and really enjoying it so far. Have to say I had a different experience with the repetition of Catacombs, Ruins, Sacred Tears and Golden Seeds etc.
As someone pretty new to the series (the Demon's Soul's remake was my first FromSoft game) and a player that really likes to take his time, not use guides and just figure things out on my own I found these little snippets of repetition to be helpful. A moment of clarity in a fugue of mystery. I knew what was expected of me and that felt like progress; especially in the way that I had to sometimes back back to an area after I'd levelled up with my new skills and weapons. I think what I'm trying to say is that the formulaic repetition feels like an intrinsic part of the design of the game's pacing to me.
I'm presently 160 hours into my play-through. Having mopped up most of the catacombs, mini-bosses, NPC storylines and Evergaols. I've searched out and upgraded a mountain of equipment and weapon arts. Last night I reached level 130 and have only just made it through Leyndell and reached Castle Sol where I'm facing down another boss that I don't feel quite equipped to take on. Yet.
This game has blown my mind. As a 2nd Gen gamer approaching his 50's. This feels like what video games were always meant to achieve. Other than the software performance issues, I haven't yet found anything I consider to be a negative aspect of game play.
It is - almost perfect imo.
I've realised that I don't really want to finish it. I very rarely re-play games. I'll miss that place when my journey there ends.
The top reason that this is in my opinion the best game ever created. No other world feels this good to explore.
Breath of the Wild wins easy.
How do you personally quantify "good to explore"? I want a story rich game with interesting characters - Elden Ring doesn't provide much of this (it provides something else) so the game becomes a glorified "match 3" game with nothing to think about(I am exaggerating)
@@antont4974 sense of adventure for me is the big diferencial here. Not feeling like the game is telling you were to go or what to do with checkmarks all over the map. Discovery is true and genuine, same for story and characters, the game does not feed you information, you have to look for it and take your own conclusions away.
Different strokes for different tastes. I never said that Elden ring is the best game ever made, just that I personally think it is.
@@Melkac breath of the wild is an empty tech demo of a “game” with shitty Ubisoft open world mechanics.
You just got suckered in by the pretty colors and clever art direction. It’s not a good game and anything to the opposite effect is pure copium.
There are literally only 11 unique enemy types, 3 overworld bosses, and 4 variations of the same boss for the dungeons. Then there are two bonus bosses, one in the DLC and then the Yiga clan leader.
It is an empty shell of a game but Zelda fanboys will eat its ass until the world ends.
@@Senriam The physics and chemistry system alone make BotW more interesting and interactive than 95% of open world games. It seems to me that you just never bothered experimenting with all the tools at your disposal to realise how many creative ways there are to solve problems.
I don't think "how big is this game?" I think "Am I supposed to be here right now?"
Lmao I literally beat the game--rolled credits and everything--and had no idea that Volcano Manner had a Great Rune boss. I love this game so much.
Do you plan on making a video about Outer Wilds? A boss keys, maybe, where the keys for all the locks are just knowledge. I was blown away with this masterpiece and would love to watch you talking about it
In all his videos, GMTK's accent never phased me, until I heard him say "Cata-koom" multiple times
Playing Elden Ring made me recall Final Fantasy XV's world fondly.
You're free to explore the entirety of Lucis until you get to the lighthouse and take the boat to Accordo. You can still hop back to Lucis all the while until you talk to Accordo's head of state and be railroaded by the plot for a while and barred from travelling to previous areas.
During the railroaded, constrained period, your party's AI changes because (spoilers) one of your mates become blind, causing his skills to be locked, and another friend is pushed out of the train, making him absent until he is found. The ability to travel back to previous areas are barred from you until you "remove the obstacles" so to speak.
It's the principle of contrast. Having linear, railroaded moments in an Open World game can prevent some exploration fatigue and also give time to some bit of storytelling
"You're actually investigating a world - not just cleaning a messy map filled with activities."
Yes.
Well said.
This right here (including all the very simple logic behind it) would make any open world 100 times better.
It is literally "a holy grail" and it is so simple, and everyone in the industry is afraid to do it beside Fromsoft.
This is the main reason I rarely finish all side quest and challenges. It just appears over whelming in my mind. But when you are out exploring and come across a side quest or challenge with out previous knowledge, it kinda feels like a reward and I'm more likely to complete it.
What? How is it a holy grail when it's a completely barren and lifeless experience of an open world... There is literally NOTHING to do.
It lacks every element that makes open world games great
@@Digger-Nick What exactly are you referring to when you speak of things that make an open world great?
@@metatrix4251 Interactivity, quests, discovery, automation? Hell a plot that's actually coherent?
You literally do nothing in Elden ring but mindlessly kill lobotomized enemies, its a terrible "open world" experience.
@@Digger-Nick
Well, at this I won't do the mistake of trying to convince you that "you should like the game because.." because it is simply not a game for you. Any Fromsoftware fan would know that these amazing games are not for everyone.
The story is cryptic, hidden in the aesthetics, between the lines and even then it stays misty and distant. I'd keep telling you why and how it is a holy grail because your question is "how is this the holy grail..."
But I'm guessing that was a rhetorical question and you don't really wanna know the answer; you took a position rather than ask for perspective; I guess?
Let me know if this discussion has already ended or if you wanna know the longer version answer to your question. :)
Happy gaming, whatever games you like ! =D
i think the content repetition served to help players in the open world setting by knowing what to look for. once you find your first hidden room in the ruins you might come back to other ruins you visited, in my first play through it took me 2 or 3 ruins to start looking for basements. same thing with the miner tunnels, i know that’s where i can consistently find upgrade materials for my weapons instead of combing every chest
the curiosity of this game, the way player investigate the world, is like The Talos Principle way of game play.
Great video. As much as I adored Elden Ring I agree with the points you've made, especially in regards to enemy scaling. That said, the one thing I'm surprised you didn't address in the video is FromSoft NPC quest design. While it's always been kind of ambiguous, the linear, gated areas of previous games made it (somewhat) easier to follow quests. With the open world, it's extremely easy to break or completely miss NPC quests. For my second playthrough I'm using a spreadsheet in order not to miss things and... I'm still breaking questlines accidentally. It's another major aspect that needs an overhaul to fit the open world.
No one design can satisfy everyone, nope, nada, and any design comes with certain tradeoffs as people here have commented on. But Elden Ring has done such fantastic job surely we can agree it is one of the best games of open world design paradigm. Therefore, any discussion of its flaws really falls onto personal preferences in my opinion.
I think its a little harsh to say the very late game is "rush" like sure its a little more linear but i think its okay Its end of the game so of course it was to be linear, its not a bad thing in my opinion and the boss was quite epic to conclude this game
at 500 hours into my first save file, I was really quite glad that the end game was a fairly straightforward boss rush!
@@paultapping9510 Thats what I was thinking, how can it be rushed if I put so many damn hours into the game. He complained the ending felt like funneled and linear but at the same time says it felt rushed. So if they extended the ending more wouldn't it of been even more linear, longer than it already is?
Great video! There's two things to consider regarding the endgame:
- Narratively speaking (and yes, characters spell this out), after Malekith everyone is trying to stop you. You committed a cardinal sin (according to Melina) and unleashed Destined Death. At that point the narrative takes a stronger focus.
-There's still plenty of options in the later half. Mountaintops can be fully completed before or after Snowfields, Elphael or Moghwing Palace (which is recommended as an endgame area) or even do Shunning Grounds at any time. And the fact that there's even an optional boss in Farum Azula shows the amount of options.
Regarding balancing: it works well, and far better than level scaling or change of enemies (which would work kinda the same). It also has been stated that if you level vigor properly, use talismans and just don't play like it's Dark Souls 3 Part 2 (rollspams, r1 ad nauseam and omitting weapon arts), you won't be oneshotted.
Having revisited Elden Ring recently, I think that the ability to over-level is part of the game's broad appeal. If I had to play this game like a typical Souls game, I would have given up after just a few hours. But, the ability to explore the world, level up, and use the tools the game gives you to find loadouts that shred previously-insurmountable challenges is specifically why I've gladly put hundreds of hours into the game. Elden Ring is special because you can play it as a Souls-like, or you can get gud the other way and find ways to get powerful items and buffs early, and exploit the intricacies of the extremely deep equipment system. It encourages you to explore, to pay attention, to think about the fact that few conversations don't contain critical information. It has created an entire community of secret sharing the likes of which I haven't experienced since the days of OG Zelda back in elementary school (yes, I'm old). I think the other thing this push to explore does is invite players to think of ways to break the intended progression. The world smartly does this by rewarding you for getting too clever. Any time you think you're going to find a way to get out of bounds, or onto geometry that perhaps you shouldn't, you'll usually be met with an item to loot. Occasionally, this behavior will get you into high-level places pretty early. It's made a second playthrough from scratch oh-so-satisfying.
Excellent analysis, I have the exact same thought about the game, but I couldn't express them in words exactly.
It's still incredible to me that, by 3:16, you have described, essentially an entire games worth of content. Like, that would have been an incredible game. But.... thing is..... you're not even halfway done with Elden Ring. lol. What a beautiful monster this thing is.
Mark's initial summary of the order of play had me going "what is he talking about?" Which speaks to just how flexible FromSoft has made this game. I've put 100 hours in and it's been a struggle at times for sure, but I took on Radahn (and beat him) without ever tackling Rennala, and I'm just now exploring the Academy and that sense of exploration and curiosity hasn't gone away yet. It's not great at storytelling in the traditional fashion (I'm not sure why I'm doing what I'm doing half the time) but it plays into that sense of adventure well (I'm enjoying it anyway).
I personally don't think it's a big deal that they reuse some enemies and dungeons. Making these AAA games are extremely time and resource consuming. Even studios like Rockstar make games with repetitive content. We can't expect them to design every dungeon with the level of innovation like It Takes Two. We already have an extremely polished and deep combat system, jaw-dropping bosses, epic music pieces, crazy world design, intriguing lore, etc. I'm already satisfied with the end product they produced.
My only criticisms about Elden Ring are the enemy balancing mentioned in the video, and input lagging and queueing. But even with that, I believe it is a masterpiece that can be enjoyed by everyone.
One thing that confuses me is people are trashing Elden Ring saying it's repetitive while praising GoW Ragnarok as GOTY. But looking at GoWR critically, it only has like three or four types of enemies in every realm, and it's just a reskin of the previous realm. Environment puzzles just slow down progression without adding anything new to the gameplay. The rest of the gameplay is just climbing, gank fighting, and finding the chest you missed. I like GoW 2018 much more, but only because of the shocking factor of the story.
Excellent video! I would love to see one if these exploring the world of Tunic. I just got the game and I've been blown away. I was expecting a simple Zelda-like, but it turned out to be a bonkers top-down Souls-like that feels incredible to explore and pick apart
I wish you could see the smile on my face right now, Mark. Thank you for making this video. Good on ya mate.
3:29 Correction: Morgott holds a great rune of his own, therefore all of these regions DO have a great rune holder to beat up.
Is Altus Plateau considered part of Leyndell Royal Capital? If so I assume then the Royal Capital is the Legacy Dungeon within it, makes it a pretty big region so that's fair