Elden Ring - Review | How good is the open world, really?

Elden Ring is the latest "Soulsborne" style of action-role-playing-game by developer FromSoftware, who launched this sub-genre back in 2009 with Demon's Souls on the PS3. The emphasis of this series, which includes the Dark Souls trilogy and the PS4-exclusive Bloodborne, has always been about traversing assorted levels while trying to survive against difficult hazards and enemy encounters so you can defeat the level's boss, with a combat system that relies on learning to read enemy behaviors so you can know when to safely attack, dodge, or heal, and managing a limited stamina gauge while performing various types of attacks and defensive maneuvers. The series also incorporates RPG elements with a leveling system that has you increasing different stats of your choosing as you gain experience from defeated enemies, as well as choosing specific weaponry, spells, jewelry, and items that contribute to your own desired build and playstyle, which you find by exploring levels for optional side paths and hidden secrets, in some cases even completing NPC quest lines. All-the-while, the action-based gameplay is wrapped up with a wealth of deep lore and indirect storytelling, with item descriptions and dialogue that hint only vaguely at narrative concepts you're meant to piece together through your own interpretive reasoning and deduction. 

While some people may get a lot out of this style of storytelling and world-building, I would guess that for the vast majority of people out there, the real appeal of the Souls formula, and by extension Elden Ring, is simply the fun combat system and all the satisfying challenge it presents each time you're able to clear a level and defeat the boss waiting for you at the end. Elden Ring follows these Souls-like elements to a T, so much so that you could almost call it Dark Souls 4, or Demon's Souls 6, if you will, despite it technically being its own unique property. It's basically the exact same game, just with some of the names of things being changed -- for example, "souls" are now "runes," "bonfires" are now "sites of grace," "Firelink Shrine" is now the "Roundtable Hold" and so on, while other series staples like Patches the Hyena and the Moonlight Greatsword and leaving messages and bloodstains on the floor for other players to see, are all back again, as usual. 

As the latest installment in this long-running series, Elden Ring naturally represents the highest level of refinement and evolution to all of the core mechanics, with several new features like jumping, crouching, spell charging, spirit summons, guard counters, and more -- but the big change that it brings to the equation is shifting the world design from a more "Metroidvania-style" of linearly-structured levels with a beginning, middle, and end that progressively branch out from the starting hub and connect back to each other in different areas, into a true open-world format with massive landscapes that you can explore in all 360-degrees, in virtually any order you want. The open-world IS the defining characteristic of Elden Ring -- it's the thing that sets it apart from other Soulsborne games, and Elden Ring's execution of the open world format is commonly heralded as being among the best ever created. So if you're going to play Elden Ring at all, it's either because you're interested in the Souls formula and want to play the latest rendition of that experience, or it's because you're specifically looking for a good open-world gameplay experience.

So you take the core mechanics of the Soulsborne formula, which are of course fundamentally satisfying all on their own, and apply that to an exquisite, top-tier open-world map, and that should translate into a truly phenomenal game experience, right? That would certainly seem to be the case judging by the overwhelmingly positive reviews it's accumulated, many of which are perfect (or at least near-perfect) scores. It's hard to deny that critical acclaim because the game does hold a lot of successful merit for representing such a strong culmination of the Soulsborne mechanics to this point and for also having a genuinely compelling, high-quality open-world design, but there's a part of me that feels like the open world actually does a disservice to the core appeal that I usually like about the Souls series, and that the open world itself really isn't as good as it could've been. Make no mistake: I like Elden Ring -- it's a good game, it's absolutely worth playing, and it's worth your money -- I just don't think it's always worth your TIME, and I certainly don't think it's a perfect 10/10 masterpiece like the media crowned it on release.

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Please note that this review is going to be a little more critical than your typical hype train praise-a-thon, but I'm not here to grind an axe against Elden Ring -- I'm just sharing honest thoughts and observations that I had for a game that I enjoyed enough to sink over 270 hours into across multiple characters and for which I wound up getting 100% of the achievements. I'm going to be praising the game quite a lot, in fact, but my goal as always is just to be comprehensive and fair with all of my considerations. I should also mention that I've played all the previous Soulsborne games in order as they were coming out, starting with the original Demon's Souls, but with the sole exception of playing Bloodborne after Dark Souls 3, because I didn't have a PS4 at the time. I've enjoyed every one of them, some more than others of course, so I'm naturally predisposed to liking Elden Ring just by default, while also having certain expectations from the previous games to uphold. I am somewhat biased in that regard, so take that into consideration. This review is merely meant to reflect my own experiences with the game, which will naturally vary from person to person, but I hope you will appreciate my own perspective on things.

I'm no stranger to open-world games -- in fact many of my favorite games of all time are open world -- but I've shied away from most of the popular, mainstream entries because experience has taught me to expect shallow and repetitive gameplay loops with an over-reliance on hand-holding elements and level-scaling systems, which I find actively unappealing not just in open world games, but all games in general. Typically, open world games magnify these issues even more by virtue of their massive scale which forces you to contend with more repeated instances of these things that I find so problematic, over a much longer playtime. Elden Ring famously bucks many of these popular open-world trends by not bombarding you with icons and mini-maps that forcibly telegraph all of its major content to you, instead creating an interesting map that should be fun to explore on its own without the need for hand-holding systems guiding you to all of its points of interest, and by never scaling enemies or loot drops to your level so that you can create your own sense of difficulty by how you choose to explore and progress through the world. The fact that there will often be a unique reward for you to find in every corner of the map, from weapons to spells and spirit ashes and more, also adds to the satisfying feeling of exploration in this game versus many other typical open worlds.

The actual world design may be Elden Ring's strongest asset, since the landscapes themselves are simply awe-inspiring with allowing you to see vast distances towards the horizon, and with so many notable landmarks visibly sticking out from the environments pretty much everywhere you look. It does a good job in that way of highlighting meaningful points of interest and making them just visually compelling on their own, since it's pretty easy to feel a strong sense of curiosity as to what that thing is and what you'll encounter when you get there. Then the journey to actually reach that location is more interesting than just simply holding down the forward key for a minute until you get there, since there will often be cliffs and ravines obstructing your path, thus requiring you to find more circuitous routes and actually engage with the terrain in a meaningful way to figure out how to actually reach your destination. This is especially true of areas like the Uld Palace Ruins, where the map screen is intentionally vague about showing all the complexities of the terrain, so that you have to really look around and internalize the layout of these pathways to navigate from one area to the next.

Whereas many other open world games emphasize just the destination itself, with pretty much all the space in-between major landmarks being deliberately empty space that you're meant to ignore and skip en route to reaching your destination, Elden Ring puts a little more emphasis on the journey itself since it takes more actual exploration and deterministic effort to get there. It is not just a simple, straightforward process of "see something, and then immediately go there." In many cases, you'll see something in the distance and then run into several interesting-looking points of interest along the way, which can easily distract you from your intended destination and create a far less linear, sequential feeling of just going directly from point to point on the map, since you'll likely be circling around different areas in all different directions just exploring everything and keeping track of where you have and have not been. Regardless of whatever practical rewards or tangible experiences will be waiting for you at your destination, there is a lot of joy and pure entertainment value to be had just from the simple act of traversing this world and seeing all it presents.

All the different vertical levels also create lots of literal depth to this world. There are areas in the world with multiple tiers to explore as different levels literally overlap one another, such as this area in Liurnia with an above-ground plateau and an entire cave system and village underneath it. There's even an entire series of underground areas that you access via long elevator shafts, where you have to shift the map screen to a whole different layer to navigate, many of them with their own variety of vertical levels, such as a typical ground-floor level and then an entirely different level on the high rooftops and bridges above it. Areas that are placed literally right next to each other can effectively be separated by huge distances due to the steep cliffs that require a more specific route to traverse, so there are a lot more instances where you see an alluring area that you physically cannot get to until some time later on when you finally find a connecting path -- which in some cases may even be restricted until you've progressed through a character's quest line, or else until you've explored some other, seemingly unrelated area that manages to surprisingly loop back into another area you'd been exploring previously. 

Instead of everything being on a generally flat plane, where everything kind of disappears in the distance towards the horizon, such that you can really only see and interact with your immediate surroundings, Elden Ring gives you the chance to see lots of different areas from different from vertical angles and horizontal orientations, with the actual landscapes visually changing depending on your specific vantage point. The hidden paintings really exemplify this effect, with them depicting a very specific image that you have to find somewhere in the environment by first figuring out what specific location the image is actually depicting, and then deciphering where that image is being viewed from, since the same location -- like a tree seen through the arches of a bridge, or a castle sitting atop a high cliff -- will look different depending on where you're looking at it from. This really showcases the constructed quality of this world design to me, when these locations are easily recognizable and you're able to use surrounding context clues to navigate to a very specific location in the world through just your own observational deduction. Some other open world games, I feel, lack enough distinguishing characteristics and unique landscapes, with many areas often feeling so generic with repetitive copy/pasted assets that it would be virtually impossible to find a specific location without a quest marker explicitly leading you to the exact spot, and yet Elden Ring's world is distinct enough that you can solve these "puzzles" if we want to call them that, all on your own. Elden Ring is not unique in this regard, mind you -- this exact mechanism was already used before in Breath of the Wild, for instance, quite successfully I might add -- but it does speak to the high quality design of Elden Ring's open world that everywhere feels unique and that you CAN navigate the world just by using the actual layouts and notable landmarks as reference points without needing to rely on a mini-map or waypoint markers for everything. 

That's not to say that Elden Ring doesn't have map markers and other guidance systems, because it most certainly does. Contrary to what you might think based on popular memes depicting what it would be like if it were made by Ubisoft, Elden Ring does in fact use a lot of these types of hand-holding measures -- they're just more immersive, usually by virtue of being a function within the world itself as opposed to a tacked-on interface system (although the game does still resort to that on occasion). For example, interactive plants and items are visually marked by giving them bright, contrasting colors along with a subtle glow, so you can easily tell at a passing glance which plants can be collected and which are purely there for scenery without needing to mark them with an immersion-breaking icon. It's a very clean, sleek, natural sort of design that I really appreciate. The classic beam of light that marks other types of items is less natural, of course (although to me, it always looked like souls escaping from the corpses of defeated enemies), but it's relatively subtle and blends well with the graphic design of the world and all the other in-game systems. That's true as well for user-placed waypoint markers, which place a beacon of light in the world that you can see from great distances away, so it's possible to navigate by focusing on the real beacon instead of relying on the compass icon on the heads-up display. 

There are also multiple ways that the game will direct your attention to specific content in the surrounding areas in the same way that quest arrows or compass icons would, but it happens through actual in-game objects: pointing statues will literally point a direct line to a catacomb; spectral lanterns will literally leave a dotted line on the ground to a cave entrance; many areas will often have literal trails of player messages guiding you to hidden locations; sites of grace leave trailing streams of light that point you in the direction of the main quest or other major bits of content. More subtle environmental designs accomplish the same thing by showing literal dirt trails in the ground, or putting glowing light sources near corners or hidden areas to grab your attention. These are all preferable solutions to the typical Ubisoft-style design by virtue of being diegetic and usually requiring you to find something and interact with it, first, before its hidden information is revealed, but there are times when the game utilizes three or four of these mechanisms in combination for a single thing, making it blatantly obvious and practically beating you over the head to suggest that there's a supposed "secret" over here to explore. In that regard, Elden Ring is actually WAY more overt about telegraphing content to players, as compared to some of my favorite open-world games that tend to be much more restrained and subtle.

For instance, the map screen just straight up tells you: "Here's a tunnel entrance, here's a minor erdtree, here's a set of ruins, here's a church of Marika, here's a mage tower, here's a fortress, here's an evergaol, here's a swamp, here's a small forest, here's a gazebo, here's a little island, here's an enemy encampment, here's a suspicious little pathway that terminates in a dead end where you can bet your life there will be something of interest if you go all the way to the end, and so on." It may not have literal icons pasted onto it to show you where meaningful bits of content are, but the highly detailed illustrations do effectively the same thing and more by not only indicating that there is something to explore, but also what exactly it is. With that, exploration really can be a dumbed-down process of "see something on the map, mark it with a waypoint, and then follow an icon on your compass until you get there," if you choose to play that way. By default, you don't get to see any of these illustrations until you find a map fragment, but even these are telegraphed with marked icons showing you exactly where to go to unlock the full map, making them pretty similar in both concept and practice to the dreaded map towers and notice boards from other games. In fairness, the map doesn't doesn't reveal every little secret as there are still plenty of hidden areas that can only be discovered through shrewd observation with the naked eye, but I still feel like it goes overboard with revealing too much information about the world, to the point that I actually had more fun exploring by deliberately avoiding picking up those map fragments so I could explore the world entirely on my own without being tempted to look at the map screen. Although, frankly, the world is so big that it's almost necessary to have just as a point of reference.

The sheer scale of everything does a good job as well of making the world seem genuinely massive, with your character but a tiny speck against this giant backdrop. There are times, even, when it evokes similar feelings as playing Shadow of the Colossus just with how big some of the things around you actually are. This is thematically appropriate for these games, of course, since their stories usually emphasize your character being an utterly insignificant pawn in the grand scheme of things, both in terms of the scope of the world as well as the goings on of all the far more important characters. These games have always used towering capital cities and majestic vistas to illustrate this, but Elden Ring being open world allows it to expand on these familiar concepts even further with even bigger vistas and an even stronger sense of relative scale since every location exists in an absolute state that you can see in a different scale depending on your distance away from it. This aspect works better when you have the freedom to move in all 360-degrees around it, knowing that what you're seeing in the distance is the actual, real location itself and not just an artificial facade that's been matted into the background like was typically the case in previous Souls games. Even though you could often see different levels represented somewhere in the distance to create some overarching concept of geography and relative positioning, I think there was always a lingering sense that what you're seeing isn't the actual, real location itself, and that this was typical video game level design trickery at work, seeing as the actual levels you could explore were far more restrictive in only letting you see but a tiny slice of that area in person. With Elden Ring, I get a much more stronger feeling like this world could actually be a real place because it just feels so much more immersive to have that persistent freedom to go where you want and to see everything as it actually exists from any possible vantage point.

The map screen sells this expansive feel in a pretty unique way, too, by not showing the full scale of the world right away. A lot of games opt to spoil the size of the world in one big reveal, usually after completing some sort of tutorial area, as if to say "You thought THAT was big? Here's the full map," where you realize that the starting area was just 5% of the total world and you have a LOT more game in store for you. That's an effective technique to be sure, but it does mean you only ever get that one fleeting moment of impressive revelation before the realization sets in that the rest of the game is going to be a rote matter of just checking areas off the map until you've explored everything. For some people, that can actually be overwhelming to be presented with such a large map screen right off the bat, with so many possible directions to go at the start while sensing just how much time it's going to take to explore everywhere. Elden Ring instead opts to restrict the physical dimensions of the map screen to show only currently-revealed locations, with hard borders that suggest this might be the entire extent of the world, and then progressively expands the edges of the map screen every time you reach a new area. This has the benefit of presenting the world in more manageable doses so you don't feel so overwhelmed, while also making the world seem to get literally bigger and bigger the more you play. It's genuinely shocking in some instances when you think you've got the size of the world figured out and you go down your first elevator to reveal an entire second layer to the map screen, or when you go through a teleporter and wind up in some remote unexplored region that suddenly pans the camera out to double the size of the map screen with your little arrow on the opposite side of where you once were. On more than one occasion, I felt pretty certain "this must be as big as it gets" and then later revealed yet another new region that expanded the map even further. The game just keeps subverting expectations in that way, which keeps the exploration feeling fresh and exciting pretty much the whole way through.

I also appreciate that Elden Ring, despite being open world, still has some of that Souls-like structure to it. Each region functions as its own self-contained area with solid borders around it, complete with its own unique visual theme, lore, and backstory, and even sometimes completely unique enemies therein, so the map retains that classic feel of these being individual levels from Dark Souls, or the different "Worlds" from Demon's Souls. With the transitions from area to area often being funneled into more specific choke points -- like how accessing the Weeping Peninsula requires you to cross a fortified bridge, or how accessing Liurnia requires that you either fight your way through Stormveil castle or run along the ruined cliffs to the side of the castle -- it really does feel reminiscent of exploring the world in Dark Souls, based on the specific level sequences you have to clear to reach a new environment, especially once you see the environments transition to a new scene and get the large title card drop for the new area.

The game initially drops you into the middle of a relatively large, open space, but the full map actually has something of a "U" shape to it where the main path through the game is along a sequential route going clockwise around the map, starting in Limgrave, then moving into Lirunia, and then up to the Altus Plateau, then into the capital city of Leyndell, and then up into the Mountaintops of the Giants, each of which is progressively more difficult than the last. This I feel helps to give you a meaningful sense of direction and progression as you move through the world, versus just wandering around aimlessly for no real purpose, since there's a definite endpoint in the capital city you're trying to reach and a whole series of obstacles you have to work your way through to reach your final destination, while the tougher enemies in each region provide a measurement against which to judge to character's progression. But by the same token, it's not completely linear, either -- each area offers a lot of open-ended freedom for exploration, and there are numerous opportunities along the way to branch out into other regions, with places like the Weeping Peninsula, Caelid, Mt Gelmir, or any of the underground areas, including the sub-levels beneath the capital city. Numerous shortcuts will also bypass entire sections of the map allowing you to reach other areas seemingly out of the intended order.

This is fun, because you're not necessarily FORCED to do "World 1, Level 1" first. There's heavy incentive to, however, since enemies you fight anywhere outside of Limgrave will likely be too difficult for you to fight right away. In fact, the game straight up tells you that your first objective should be to enter Stormveil castle, but the first boss you have to beat to even enter the castle is incredibly difficult for low-level characters, especially if you're playing for your first time, which is the game effectively telling you "this is the path forward in the game, but don't necessarily follow this path -- go off and explore in other directions, first, and then come back later." You could still go straight to Stormveil if you really want, but you could also clear out the starting area of Limgrave to start with, and then go south to the Weeping Peninsula for extra leveling opportunities before facing Stormveil. Or you could skip Limgrave and Stormveil entirely and go straight to Liurnia, or take a shortcut to the Dragonbarrow in Caelid and work your way backward to Limgrave sneaking past enemies and grabbing whatever loot you can along the way. Or maybe you'll find the elevator down to the Siofra or Ainsel river and focus on clearing out the underground areas instead. This is potentially fun for replay value as well, either during New Game Plus or on a brand new character, since you have almost complete freedom to go anywhere in the world right off the bat, with the major exception of the capital city and the lands beyond it, to do whatever content and grab whatever items and upgrades you want, first, if you know what you're doing and can handle the challenge. This offers a nice change of pace from something like Dark Souls 3 which was overly linear about forcing you to go through each of its areas in a specific order every time you play the game, with far fewer opportunities to branch out into optional side paths or do any clever sequence-breaking, so I wholeheartedly welcome this increased freedom in Elden Ring. 

There is still an intended route through the game, however, based on general level ranges of enemies within each area, which means that despite the great opportunity for non-linear sequence-breaking a new player may still feel railroaded into following a particular sequence of exploration. And if you're someone who's thorough about how you explore the world, with doing everything possible in an area before moving onto the area's main dungeon or onto the next area altogether, then you'll likely find yourself becoming more and more over-leveled as you advance through the game, because even if you're following the intended path I don't think the game is really banking on the average player doing EVERYTHING along that path. This is where some of my problems with the open-world start to creep in, because I find that its far more open structure leads to more erratic balancing issues where you're far more likely to run into things that are either much too difficult for you to face at your current level, or that have become much too easy due to your current level.

Traditionally I enjoy that wider range of difficulty in open world RPGs, because it lends a greater feeling of purpose to the leveling system when you have the opportunity to lose against difficult enemies that will require a higher level to defeat, thus giving you concrete goals to work towards in your progression; and then it also makes leveling up feel like it's had a real impact when you're finally able to face those once-impossible enemies, or once you reach a point that you can easily breeze past enemies that have now become much weaker than you. However, the Souls games aren't strictly RPGs; they're ACTION-RPGs, and a lot of the core satisfaction from this series has always been its challenging combat system where enemies and bosses are meant to be difficult, but still beatable. There's a sweet spot there, in other words, that relies on your character being within a specific level range for each enemy and each area, which the previous games were able to control for much better by virtue of having more linear level designs with more sequential progression from area to area. Although they did occasionally throw difficult enemies into the middle of random levels that you were expected to come back to later, and it was still possible to become over-leveled for some areas depending on the order you completed optional side areas, those games were able to maintain a much more consistent challenge level throughout the full game because they always had a concrete grasp of what areas you could have explored previously and what possible power level your character could have attained for each and every encounter.

With a massive open world game like Elden Ring, they have a lot less control over those variables, so the potential is far greater for the player to be outside of that intended sweet spot for any given encounter up until you reach the end-game. In my case, at least, I found it a lot harder to find that ideal sweet spot where things were challenging, but still beatable. The only times when it felt like I was close to that intended sweet spot were in the very beginning around Limgrave and the Weeping Peninsula, and then near the end in all the snowy regions past Leyndell. That makes sense to me given that those are the two areas when the game has the most definite understanding of your character's potential power level, since they know that Limgrave and the Weeping Peninsula will almost certainly be the first areas you explore, and the snowy areas are basically the end-game after all the different branches of exploration have funneled down into a single path, so they can set enemy stats to assume the player has either minimum or maximum experience for each of those points, at the beginning and the end of the game. Pretty much all the stuff in-between those two points can be done in a bunch of different orders, however, and how MUCH of it you do will also have a major impact on your power level which the designers can't always accommodate for -- that's where all the potential for things being randomly too hard or too easy comes into play. 

Quite simply, I spent A LOT more time in the early stages running into enemies or entire areas that just seemed way too difficult, and because of the open-world nature it was insanely easy to just place a marker on the map and come back to it later once I'd leveled up (although that didn't stop me from brute forcing my way through a few of them, just to see if I could). And then usually, by the time I remembered to go back, I'd become over-leveled and the enemy had become a complete push-over, which I found to be more anticlimactic than fun.

Before long, it seemed like everything I was encountering was going down surprisingly easy, with a minimal amount of effort. I beat most bosses in only one to three tries, in large part I think due to simply having higher-than-expected stats by virtue of being thorough with exploration and completing all the available content, while also being pretty efficient with my build and rarely ever losing runes upon dying. That meant I wasn't being punished very heavily for my mistakes, and could get through most boss encounters with at most just a basic familiarity of that particular fight. In many cases, I never really figured the boss out at all, I just accidentally face-tanked it and was able to trade hits while out-damaging and out-healing it. I rarely ever had to "Git Gud" in other words, which defeats the whole point of the gameplay as far as what I enjoy about these games. For me, the satisfaction in defeating bosses comes from the process of learning their moves and figuring out the best response to every action, internalizing the specific mechanics for each fight and developing a sense of mastery over the boss, where success is a reflection of your personal skill level against this particular boss and not just your character's stats. It's such a great feeling, like you've truly beaten the game, when things start clicking and you're able to flawlessly dance around the enemy's attacks while feeling confident in knowing exactly what to expect and executing the controls to perfection. 

That's a feeling I didn't get much in Elden Ring when I was easily defeating most bosses with little to no effort or understanding on my part -- and it's not like I went out of my way deliberately grinding runes or intentionally sequence-breaking the intended route to get late-game bonuses earlier, or anything exploitive like that; I just played the same way I do with all of these Souls games in being as thorough as possible exploring every area as I came to it. In my case, I suspect that made the game too easy by making me over-leveled and over-prepared for the majority of the game's content.

In the game's defense, the difficulty level is something that you have some degree of control over, with lots of different ways to make the game easier or harder depending on what resources you use or how you choose to build your character. If you want the game to be easier, then you can summon AI-controlled familiars, NPC allies, and other live players to assist you; or you could farm materials to craft a bunch of consumable items that will grant all kinds of different bonuses; in addition to basic strategies like grinding runes to intentionally over-level your character. You can even use special items against certain bosses to temporarily stun them, or parry special attacks, or negate some other type of negative effect. If you want the game to be harder, then you just don't do any of that. I actually avoided all these things on my first playthrough specifically because I wanted the game to offer a satisfying challenge, and still felt like most of the game was much too easy. At that point, the only other thing I could've done to restore some of the challenge would've been to deliberately handicap myself by just not spending all the runes or smithing stones or sacred tears or golden seeds or upgraded amulets that I was finding in order to keep my power level a little more limited.

That's not an ideal solution to me, because then you're diminishing a lot of the practical reward for exploration which in turn makes exploration less satisfying, and then it also diminishes the feeling of growth and progression which is the whole point of the RPG-style leveling system. Fixing the difficulty in this way would therefore seemingly result in making other aspects of the game that I also enjoy worse, and I don't find it satisfying to pick my poison between what aspects I'm going to sacrifice to help improve another. I'm also not certain that this is practical advice for a first time playthrough, because you don't really know how easy or hard any given area or boss encounter will be unless you're looking at a guide ahead of time to know what level to be at for each area and planning a very specific route through the game -- which then spoils the sense of discovery and progression altogether if you're just going to look things up and follow a specific script the whole time, instead of just experiencing the game organically. 

Ideally, the game would be perfectly balanced across all these different aspects and not require the player to compromise their own interests or balance the difficulty themselves. I realize it's incredibly hard to strike that perfect balance in an open-world game without resorting to level-scaling loot and enemies to the player's level, which I absolutely abhor so I'm by no means advocating for level-scaling systems, but this just seems like an inherent trade-off of an open-world design, which was never really an issue in the previous more-linear Souls games. And mind you, I'm not claiming to be a tryhard expert who's looking to beat the game as a level 1 character with zero upgrades, or that I'm even necessarily that good at the game; I just find that bosses are more satisfying to beat when it takes around 6-12 tries to beat them, and I beat most bosses in Elden Ring in only 1-3 tries in large part due to what I believe was simply my character's stats being better than the bosses'. 

To be fair, I do think the balance is pretty good overall, with having reasonable level ranges for each area and a few appropriate difficulty ramps -- it's not like the entire game ever became pathetically easy or anything, and I never experienced any difficulty walls that I couldn't overcome at an appropriate time or level -- but it's just one of those things that I think the other Souls games did better with hitting that perfect sweet spot of being challenging but still beatable, on a more consistent basis, at least in terms of how I like to play these games as a thorough explorer and completionist. For anyone who has a different approach to these games -- say, if you're someone who's not compelled to explore everywhere and do everything possible in one playthrough, or if you're not trying to be efficient with maximizing your build at every step of the playthrough, or if you're just not as familiar with the Souls formula and thus don't have that already ingrained instinct for what to expect or how the more nuanced mechanics work --then I would imagine you may not have as much of an issue with the large middle section of the game feeling too easy, but then I would suppose you might also experience a pretty steep difficulty wall when entering the snowy regions in the end-game which could possibly sour the experience in a similar way. I'm only theorizing on this point of course -- I can only speak from my own experience, where I felt like only the first 25% and last 25% of the game offered that satisfying level of challenge that I come to expect from Souls games, with just a sprinkling of moments throughout the middle 50% which I felt was largely too easy and unsatisfying. 

The issue for me isn't just about the raw difficulty, however, as I find that the open world formula doesn't work as well in the context of the Soulsborne combat system and the core appeal I usually get from these games. 

To me the Souls games work best when they're using tight level designs with deliberate enemy placements to create unique situations with lots of tense decision-making thanks to a persistent degree of risk-versus-reward. The ultimate goal of every level is always to make it to the next checkpoint (be that unlocking a shortcut or reaching the next bonfire) so that you can eventually beat the boss at the end, but you often run into situations where you're carrying a lot of souls and don't want to risk dying and potentially losing them, but also don't want to backtrack to the bonfire because then you're losing progress you've made in the level and would then have to go through it all over again. So when you come to a fork in the road there's that extra compulsion of "which one will get me to the next checkpoint" or "which one will let me clear the most content before I reach the next checkpoint," and deciding when you come to a difficult-looking enemy whether you'll choose to engage it at all and risk dying, or take the safer route to avoid it and hope you can remember how to get back here later. Sometimes you even find a bonfire while carrying a ton of souls and are just like "I could rest there and spend these souls, but do I even want to do that because it's going to reset the level? Maybe I'll keep exploring for a while and see if I can do it safely and come back here after I backtrack to clear this other area I passed earlier." Then, when you die, getting back to your bloodstain is often a challenge in and of itself because the levels are usually so tight with hard choke points and difficult enemies obstructing your path, adding genuine risk of a second death and losing all of your hard-earned souls if you aren't doubly careful.

The actual level designs likewise are more satisfying to me when they have an active element in just keeping track of so many different routes and branching pathways and looking out for weird-looking hidden paths and taking one-way paths that prevent you from backtracking, which are all just really crunchy decisions to have to process and retain in your memory when exploring a level. That's of course in addition to the way the level designs themselves combine with the enemy placements to create fun, challenging situations to overcome that feel unlike anything you've done elsewhere in the game, even when fighting similar types of enemies. Consider the infamous Silver Knight greatbow archers in Anor Londo of Dark Souls 1 where you're running along the rooftops and going across those narrow buttresses, or the whole Capra Demon fight where you're basically having a knife fight with three enemies while trapped in a closet with them -- those are relatively simple fights, but they're made unique and interesting because of the level design, not so much the enemies themselves. 

These are all sorts of deeper feelings and mechanical levels of engagement that I just don't get from Elden Ring's open world, which seems far less actively demanding to explore than typical Souls-style level design. Most of the time I found myself just passively checking the map for notable areas in my vicinity, and then sequentially moving from one to another clearing them out like I was going down a checklist. And with the free-roaming, "come and go as you please" nature of the open world, it sometimes feels like just aimlessly wandering around until everything around you is complete, with little to no tension to experience as you navigate from place to place.

There are Sites of Grace all over the place that you can freely fast-travel between from the beginning of the game, so you're never far away from a checkpoint to refresh your healing flasks or spend accumulated souls whenever you want, and with the much more spacious, open level designs and the inclusion of a horse that you can freely use to race past enemies with zero risk, it's incredibly easy to get back to where you just were any time you want to warp back to a Grace to recuperate, or if you die and need to get back to your bloodstain. They even put all-new Stakes of Marika as respawn points outside of major locations where they anticipate a lot of deaths. And if you come to a difficult enemy, it's super easy to run away from it if it starts getting the better of you, and you can mark it on the map to easily come back to it at a later time without having to replay half the level since they're usually just sitting out in the open a short ride away from any given Grace. You even get a free flask refill from defeating groups of enemies in the open world, so there's even less of that rising tension to coincide with your dwindling supplies since it's so much easier to maintain your flasks for longer periods of time.

Most of the environments are so open that there's little integration of the combat system with the level design, with just tons of pointless "trash mob" enemies littering the map that aren't fun to fight or satisfying to kill, to the point that I would just run past so many of them to make a beeline for the loot and get out because I'd gotten sick of killing these same enemies in similar environments for no purpose over and over and over again. That applies to even bigger, more notable enemies like the giant trolls or colossal statues where I'm just like "okay whatever, I'm skipping this tedious fight." That's a stark contrast to my mindset when I play the other Souls games, where I'm usually compelled to kill every single enemy so that I can explore the levels in safety to find all the hidden routes and secrets, with each defeated enemy also contributing to that psychological satisfaction that I get from 100%'ing the level as I work my way through it towards reaching the boss. In the open world of Elden Ring, many of the enemies just feel like tedious filler content and thus don't really contribute to the fun satisfaction of the combat system as far as I'm concerned.

Making matters worse is just how much content is blatantly recycled just to fill out space. The world is MASSIVE and there is a TON of content crammed into the map -- you could easily spend well over 100 hours doing everything possible in one playthrough (I myself spent 136 and probably still missed a lot of stuff) -- but unfortunately it doesn't always feel like time well spent because you see so many environmental setpieces and enemy types repeated ad nauseam. The first time you see a field boss like the Death Rite Bird, which only comes out at night and ambushes you around certain locations, it's pretty fun and exciting, but then once you see that same night bird again for the second, third, fourth, or even fifth time it becomes a little bit lame and somewhat boring. Yeah, technically there's usually some mechanical twist to keep it from being literally the same boss fight just copy/pasted into a new location, like giving it different types of elemental attacks, but they're still fundamentally the same fight. 

And it's not just that one boss, either, it's TONS of them like Erdtree avatars, bell bearing hunters, ulcerated tree spirits, magma wyrms, burial watchdogs, tibia mariners, night cavalry, crucible knights, demihuman queens, valiant gargoyles, tree sentinels, crystallians, dragons, and just so -- many -- more -- that all appear three, five, or as many as eight different times in the game. Even major main-quest story bosses get repeated, with you first fighting Godrick the Grafted as the climax to likely your very first dungeon in Stormveil castle, and then later finding.... Godefroy.... in some random evergaol somewhere, who's the exact same fight but with tweaked stats and no second phase. Or fighting Astel the Naturalborn of the Void as the climax to one of the most epic and exciting questlines that's ever been in a Soulsborne game, and then later finding.... Astel, Stars of Darkness in some random mineshaft somewhere, this time seemingly the exact same boss but with different stats. Margitt, Loretta, Mohg, and Godfrey, are all likewise major bosses that get repeated in some fashion or another, usually by having you fight some weird lesser version before encountering the real thing, thereby spoiling the main fight a little bit by making it feel less unique and special when you've already kind of fought that exact same boss previously. 

There are supposedly 238 bosses in Elden Ring -- an absolutely staggering number -- and yet, there are only eight or so truly unique bosses that aren't repeated in some fashion. Now, that statistic is somewhat misleading because there are a lot more than eight TYPES of boss fights; if you count the first time you encounter a particular boss type as unique and then disregard all the repeated instances, you get something like 40+ different types of bosses in Elden Ring, which I believe is more than we've ever had in a Soulsborne game. So that in an of itself is actually quite impressive and deserves notable praise. The problem is that, while there may technically be a lot of "unique" boss types, the variety still feels heavily diluted by shamelessly repeating so many boss types over and over and over again, to the point that the lines between them start blurring together with the repetition becoming more notable than the distinguishing variety.

In fairness, there is some benefit to having repeated bosses like this. I for one have sometimes lamented in past Souls games that certain bosses were always just a one-off encounter, because they were fun and I just wanted the opportunity to fight them again without having to start a whole new playthrough. In some ways, it also felt a little unfulfilling to spend a bunch of time developing a particular mastery for a certain boss, and then never having the opportunity to reinforce that skill later in the same playthrough. So I've always thought it would be neat to have a sort of "boss rush" mode where you could fight certain bosses again from a menu somewhere, and seeing repeat bosses in Elden Ring kind of gives you a similar opportunity. I suppose there's also merit in being able to test your skills and your character's stats by replaying the same boss later in the game, as perhaps a way to show how much you've improved, but I'm not sure how informative that really is in practical terms since the bosses all have different stats for their repeat appearances as well. And I guess there's also the argument that with the world being as big as it is, it's understandable that they would reuse bosses to fill out space, but that just says to me that the world itself is too big for its own good if they're having to repeat so many bosses.

But of course, it's not just a matter of the bosses being repeated a bunch, but also level design features cropping up time and time again. You find the same crumbling ruins everywhere you go, in virtually every region of the map, and every one of them is sure to have a hidden basement somewhere with a treasure chest, sometimes even a boss guarding it. It's fun the first first few times you encounter one of these, but after a short while it becomes formulaic and predictable, thereby turning exploration of these ruins into a rote process of just checking it off the list to completion as you go through each of the 24 marked ruins in the game. Then you've got a bunch of fortresses with a tower that are all usually pretty similar, the same above-ground cemetery plots everywhere that you can loot a bunch of runes from the coffins, minor erdtrees with an avatar guarding flask of wondrous physick upgrades, churches where you can find sacred tears to improve the amount of health restored by healing flasks, evergaols where you get teleported into a zoned-off boss arena, "puzzle towers" (if you even want to call them puzzles) where you have to find the three spirit guardians or accomplish whatever other task to unlock it, and so on, all appearing in multiple repeated instances all over the map.

The so-called "minor dungeons" are the worst offender, being basically like chalice dungeons carried over from Bloodborne as a bunch of remixed dungeons based on the same cookie-cutter templates. You've got numerous caves, catacombs, mines, and graves, and they're all basically the exact same as one another since they all follow their own little formula that just gets rehashed over and over again with slight variations. For example, pretty much all of the catacombs present you with the locked door to the boss chamber near the entrance and then have you work your way through assorted traps fighting a bunch of the same imps or skeletons or whatever other repeated enemy has been populated into this dungeon, picking up gloveworts along the way to upgrade your spirit ashes as you search for a lever to unlock the boss chamber, then backtrack to the entrance to fight the boss which is usually a copy/pasted variant of something you've already fought numerous times previously, after which you'll usually be rewarded with a new spirit ash summon. It's pretty much the same for every single one, of which there are about 16 total. As with the above-ground ruins, after you've done two or three of these you'll have seen most of what the remaining catacombs have to offer, making the majority of them feel like a chore to complete.

Obviously, you don't have to fight every single boss, and you don't have to explore every single thing on the map, and you don't have to complete every single minor dungeon. So if any of that stuff starts feeling stale and repetitive you can certainly opt out of a lot of it. That's not really a viable option for someone like me, however, who feels compelled to explore everywhere and do everything possible so that I know I'm experiencing the game to its fullest -- as an avid explorer and completionist, it's not a switch I can just turn off and suddenly stop caring about doing the things I like doing. And even though it's easy to look back and say in retrospect that "Yeah, I probably shouldn't have spent as much time messing with all that stuff as I did," you can't really know in the moment whether something is worth skipping or not until you've seen it to its conclusion to know what reward lies in wait at the very end, or what kind of subjective experience it will yield. After all, there's plenty of fun content mixed in that's absolutely worth experiencing, but you won't have the chance to discover much of it if you give up searching for it, so you sort of NEED to be exploring everything if you want to experience the best that the game has to offer.

For example, some of the minor dungeons introduce really clever twists on the standard formula that make them genuinely exciting, like by emphasizing timed platforming and environmental hazards, or by making you activate light seals and lure enemies there to make them vulnerable to damage, or adding teleporters that you have to keep track of where each one leads, or apparently distorting your sense of time and space by putting you through repetitive loops of similar-looking-but-technically different rooms as you try to discern the correct way forward, or other such things. For as bored as I grew of all the standard dungeons, these ones were really fun and I was glad to have experienced them -- I just had to trudge through a lot of more boring ones to find them. Out in the overworld, you could likewise randomly stumble into an NPC somewhere that leads to a fun quest, or any innocuous enemy encampment could have some interesting bit of lore and environmental storytelling going on that makes it memorable, or one of the "puzzle towers" might do something really unconventional that surprises you, or you might run into a novel encounter that isn't repeated elsewhere in the world (even if it's been repeated from another game), or there might be fun enemy encounters that work with the level design to create unique and challenging scenarios.

Besides that, any random place or enemy could have an incredibly useful item for your build, whether that be a good weapon, a fun weapon art, a powerful amulet, a special piece of armor, a valuable upgrade material, or something else, so there's always a degree of incentive to persevere through something that might seem dull and tedious in hopes of getting a worthwhile reward for your efforts. Although that can be a double-edged sword that makes the repetitive tedium feel like a complete waste of time when a generic experience is met with a worthless reward that doesn't help your build, which actually happens quite a lot in Elden Ring. That's something I rarely ever felt was an issue in the previous Soulsbornes, because with the levels being generally pretty linear it meant that if nothing else you were at least usually making progress towards the end of the level and thus progress towards beating the game. And when you encountered a useless item that didn't help your build, it was at least usually along that main path through the level so it wasn't taking you hugely out of your way and thus didn't feel like a waste of time. In Elden Ring, you might spend 15-20 minutes at a time in a minor dungeon or some other area with no unique experiences and no worthwhile reward and no feeling of actual progress towards beating the game, which can really add up over the full game to a lot of time feeling not well spent. Even if you choose to ignore a lot of this stuff and just focus on following the main path through the world, the open-world still forces you to spend a lot of time on horseback just running across the map to your next objective.

And for an open-world game, I do find that Elden Ring lacks a little bit of variety that I feel would help sustain the core gameplay loop through such a massive world and long running time. There's not a lot you can actually do in the open world besides collecting crafting components, killing enemies, and just exploring the environments themselves. The most variety you get beyond that limited scope is with very light puzzle solving, occasional platforming, and maybe listening to NPCs, but these are relatively simple and happen so sporadically that they're more of the exception to the rule. Other open world games do all of same stuff, too, but they tend to have more stuff going on so that the experience doesn't get to feel so repetitive, or to make those different aspects feel more fleshed out.

A game like Breath of the Wild, for instance, has far more elaborate puzzles and riddles to solve, both in the overworld and in the various shrines; more ways to move around the world with the free climbing system, paraglider, shield surfing, and sand seal skiing; survival elements with different environments requiring certain gear or crafting recipes in order to explore them at all; more populated areas where you can interact with NPCs a little more directly; more secrets and quest events that aren't strictly about combat; lots of creative ways you can use physics to manipulate the environment or defeat enemies with emergent gameplay; and so on. Other types of open-world games have more variety to them as well, with things like lock-picking and hacking mini-games, horse races, archery contests, picking meaningful dialogue options, managing faction reputation, using skill checks to solve various problems, building settlements with more elaborate crafting systems, more prominent quests and storytelling, and so on. That, I feel, gives you more Things to Do™ in the open world if there's something you don't enjoy, and more ways to keep things from getting too stagnant. With Elden Ring, if you start getting burnt out from just killing the same types of enemies and bosses over and over again, there really isn't much else to break up that monotony, short of going to a different location to kill different types of enemies, or completely changing your build to kill the same types of enemies a little differently. 

For me, the core gameplay loop of Elden Ring got stale in a way that I'd never experienced in the previous Souls games, which I believe to be largely because of the open-world format, and because the game is just too long and bloated. The other Soulsbornes are much more concentrated games that focus more directly on the things I've always liked about these games -- the combat system, and exploring complex levels. The open world of Elden Ring, while extremely impressive in many regards, doesn't offer the same freedoms or gameplay variety to really appeal to me as a pure open-world experience, and it actively dilutes the core appeal of the Soulsborne formula as far as I'm concerned. Meanwhile, the other Soulsbornes didn't waste your time with so much repetitive filler, while keeping the experience more consistently fresh by always putting you in new environments where you'll face new enemies, obstacles, and challenges. They were long enough to allow for a thorough deep-dive into their worlds while not being so long that they outstayed their welcome. I enjoyed every one of those games and always came away feeling fully sated by the experience, even when I was being relatively critical of some of the ones I didn't like as much. Elden Ring, in contrast, is the only Soulsborne game that I wanted to be over long before reaching the end.

Sure, the open world is a fun diversion for a while, and it serves as a welcome change to freshen up the formula that had become a little stale by the time of Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, so I really genuinely enjoyed the open world during the early stages in Limgrave and the Weeping Peninsula. I think it helps, too, that those are some of the most dense environments of the entire game, with the most concentrated distribution of points of interest and the most amount of NPCs and such to find -- not to mention, it being the first area of the game means everything is fresh and exciting, and it's one of the points when the challenge felt the most substantial for me, so there was that extra degree of motivation to explore so that I could get stronger. But by the time I got to Liurnia I was starting to feel bored with it -- the lake itself is entirely flat and things are more spread out, so exploration felt like a shallow process of just making a beeline to each interesting-looking thing on the map, one after the other, and then the two plateaus on the side felt thematically similar to all the stuff I'd just explored in Limgrave. Then I got into the Altus Plateau, which once again felt pretty similar to the vibes of Limgrave, just with more yellow foliage, and with many of the same enemy types I'd already fought in the preceding areas. Caelid was a fun diversion, with it being so visually distinct from typical Souls environments, and I liked the more structured exploration of Mt Gelmir and all the underground areas.

But after completing every single area leading up to the major choke point in Leyndell, I was starting to feel burnt out and was ready for the game to end. And then the map expanded once again to reveal that I had a whole 'nother 25-33% of the game left to do, between the Mountaintops of the Giants, the Consecrated Snowfield, the Haligtree, Mohgwyn Palace, and the Crumbling Farum Azula -- most of which wound up being pretty lame in and of themselves, or else felt like yet more similar rehashes of places I'd already explored previously. The snowy areas represent a new type of environment, which is nice, but the density of content takes a sharp plummet with lots more large, open, relatively empty space, and not as many unique and worthwhile things to discover in those areas due to generally less interesting level design, hardly any NPCs or quests, and a whole bunch of repetitive filler content that's just been pasted over from the preceding areas. There are hardly any new enemies to fight at all past Leyndell, and all of the open world regions continue recycling the same content features as before like ruined fortresses and magic towers and night birds and above-ground cemetery plots and so on and so on. By that point, I was also just running out of there being much worthwhile loot to find that would actually contribute to my specific build, since I was close to maxing my main weapon in upgrades and soon maxed out my golden seeds and sacred tears, leaving little of practical value for me to discover to reward my efforts. Finding yet more golden seeds long after maxing my flasks began to feel like a straight up insult.

The more dungeon-like environments fared a little better for me because they have more meaningful exploration, more challenging level designs, and at least some kind of interesting boss to fight, but even places like Mohgwyn's Palace and the Ashen remains of Leyndell wound up being pretty bland as actual levels due to being a mostly linear path (in the case of Mohgwyn's Palace) or pretty much a barren, empty wasteland through an area I'd technically already explored (for the ashen remains of Leyndell). For me, that left only the Haligtree and the Crumbling Farum Azula as areas I actually enjoyed past Leyndell, and that's almost exclusively because they're more of the traditional "legacy dungeon" style of level design that I enjoy about the Souls games. They both suffer from the same repeated enemies, however, so their overall quality level is still significantly reduced compared to earlier legacy dungeons, while the Haligtree level itself feels like a thematic rehash of similar environments we'd already seen in the Deeproot Depths and Leyndell, previously. Then the finale doesn't really have a proper "final dungeon" as it's basically just a bunch of boss fights back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back, making the actual ending to the game feel rushed and somewhat anticlimactic. 

So the entire end-game sequence from the Mountaintops of the Giants to the end was a huge slog to get through because I was already burnt-out from open-world fatigue, and then became further exasperated by this sequence being so long while also having such a noticeable drop in quality compared to what came before. If Elden Ring had ended after Leyndell, I would've been much more favorable towards the game overall, but the mere existence of all the areas post Leyndell tarnish the game for me by ending the game on such a lengthy, protracted low note.

The times when I enjoyed Elden Ring the most were when it was directly mimicking the more traditional level designs of the more linear Soulsborne games. All of the so-called "legacy dungeons" are great, for example, for all of the reasons I described earlier about having more crunchy decision-making with regards to choosing and keeping track of various pathways without the benefit of a map telegraphing everything for you (since the map screen itself is typically all but useless in these dungeons), plus all the tension associated with the risk-versus-reward of trying to beat the level (or at least make it to the next checkpoint) without dying. Stormveil is probably the single best "castle" level of any Soulsborne game, offering some of the most depth and complexity with all of its interconnected paths, shortcuts, and hidden branches. I especially love how you have two different ways to approach the entire level, such as going straight through the front door and fighting everything head-on as would be intended in a normal level, or sneaking in through back and doing the whole level backwards, essentially, since that provides a radically different gameplay experience while also giving you the chance to experience the exact same content from an entirely different perspective on a repeat playthrough. I also really like the Academy of Raya Lucaria for its fun magical theming, its dynamic progression through different types of environments, and all the instances of running along rooftops, which I always enjoy in these games, when they use more unconventional surfaces as floors. And then Leyndell is just absolutely massive with its large surface area and an entire underground section below the city, making it feel the most like an actual capital city of any cities depicted in any other Soulsborne game. 

I also really liked all of the underground areas -- again, because that's when the levels felt more like traditional Souls levels, where there's a definite beginning, middle, and end with a more concrete goal to achieve of working your way to the end to beat the boss, so that you can branch out to other levels to continue forward in sequence. I love the way some of these levels intertwine and loop back on themselves, for example with the Siofra River, Ancestral Woods, Aquaduct, and Nokron all being different regions of the same map that you can see from different vantage points and access from different stages of the game. It's pretty cool to explore the lower area and then later find yourself way above looking down on the familiar area, and seeing how the two actually connect to each other. Having to search for obelisks to light up so that you can unlock the Hallowhorn Grounds is another neat feature that gives you an extra objective to complete in this region, besides just killing enemies or wandering around aimlessly. The Lake of Rot is pretty sparse on content, but it's one of the only old-school "poison swamp" type levels where you actually have to contend with the damage over time since you can't use the horse here, and I like the concept of raising the various platforms to make a safe path across the lake. The Deeproot Depths is likewise a lot of fun with all of its roots forming narrow pathways that require extra careful precision to avoid falling to your death as you navigate around obstacles and avoid enemy attacks while not having a lot of room to move. 

It also helps that many of these underground areas are directly part of a few different NPC questlines, which provide extra narrative context for why you're exploring these levels since you're typically trying to get to a particular location to accomplish a particular goal. Ranni's whole quest-line, for example, may be the most fun I've ever had in a Soulsborne game, ever, which made levels like the Lake of Rot or Grand Cloister, which might ordinarily be pretty boring to complete on their own, fun and memorable because of their involvement with that quest.

In fact, I found the NPC quests in Elden Ring a lot better than what I remember from previous Soulsborne games. Traditionally, I've never really cared for the NPC quests in these games because they were always needlessly obtuse, often times being virtually impossible to know where to go next and what order to do things in, while being incredibly easy to miss some crucial step that would break the entire questline and prevent you from actually finishing it. There's still some of that going on in Elden Ring, but I noticed a lot more instances where characters would actually tell you something about where they were going next, or drop really strong hints about something in the area you should investigate, so you had at least some idea about where to go next to advance the quest. Sometimes they would flat-out tell you an exact location, or even put a GPS marker on your map. For some of the characters who move around, they generally seem to follow the natural path you might go through an area when exploring it for the first time, so it's a little more feasible for you to stumble into them randomly. And from what I can tell, if you do happen to miss something or do certain things out of order, you just wind up skipping parts of it and moving onto the next stage instead of canceling the entire questline. As a result, I found the NPC quests a lot easier to follow in Elden Ring without needing to consult a guide at every step.

But of course, they still retain elements of that signature FromSoftware obtuseness, to the point that you still kind of need a guide if you want to stand a reasonable chance of finishing even the majority of them. Every now and then you're expected to do something really specific that you might not ever think to do, or an NPC might randomly go back to a completed area that you would never have any reason to revisit, or the place you need to go is really obscure and hard to find, or you might have to do something completely unrelated with another NPC in a different area to unlock progress with another character, or there might be absolutely zero indication of what might need to be done to trigger the next stage of a given quest, or you might do things in a weird order that prevents progress with no clue as to why, or an entire quest might get canceled because of something you did elsewhere before you even knew what to do in the original quest. Some of these quest interactions between characters are so convoluted that you need to consult a literal flow chart to keep track of what conditions prevent or enable progress in another quest. And because of the sheer size of the world, it makes it exponentially harder to figure out where to go or what to do next in situations where the game doesn't give you a clear indication, because there's just so much possible ground to cover and so many other possible compounding factors from other quest interactions.

This is where a quest log would really come in handy -- obviously the precedent of these games is to have no quest log, but you could argue that it was easier to get away without one in those games because they were much smaller with far fewer characters. If you didn't know where to find a certain character, there were only so many places they could possibly be and it was much more feasible to do a sweep through each level looking for them. But with Elden Ring going open-world it feels much more necessary if only for the sake of keeping track of the various bits of information you've already unlocked. It's really easy in this game to meet someone, have them tell you something that doesn't make much sense to you in the moment, and then have them disappear for dozens of hours or never repeat that important line of dialogue, to the point that you forget what it was they were talking about or who they even are by the time you eventually run into them again. While I wouldn't want to have GPS-style quest arrows telling you exactly where to go at all times, because actually discovering these things on your own is supposed to be part of the appeal of these quests, I would really like to at least have a log that keeps track of what characters you've met and what they've said to you so that you can at least have something to reference later, or to help remind you what it was they were doing the last time you spoke to them. I mean, the game already keeps track of their last known location so it's not a stretch to add that kind of information in a quest journal somewhere.

Still, the actual content of these quests is usually pretty interesting, easily ranking among my favorites of the entire Soulsborne catalogue. Ranni's quest line is so good that it feels like it could've been the main quest of the game -- it's so involved with so many different NPCs and unlocking several really exotic areas that are a blast to explore, while also delving into some of the backstory in a more practical, hands-on sort of way. I love meeting up with Blaidd in a bunch of different areas and developing a camraderie with him, I love how multiple quest threads come together for the Festival of Radahn where you join up with several NPCs to fight in what is such an epic battle that it could've been the final boss and was easily the high point of the entire game for me, and I love how it permanently changes the map by destroying part of the world, and then I love going into all the weird underground areas and discovering long lost civilizations. Diallos' quest, in comparison, is a much simpler ordeal with simply finding him in about four different locations and just listening to him tell his story, but I absolutely loved his character arc as he goes from having delusions of grandeur regarding his own nobility and capability, to realizing his own shortcomings, and eventually finding fulfillment being a humble servant to others. Other characters like Alexander, Millicent, and Rya are all charming people that I just wanted to help accomplish their goals, so it was a pleasant surprise any time I ran into them somewhere. 

The thing I appreciate most about Elden Ring, however, is just all the refinement and evolution to the core mechanics. I was a big fan of Weapon Arts in Dark Souls 3 for adding extra active abilities that melee fighters could use, so it's good to see them again in Elden Ring, now called Ashes of War, but they took it one step further by making them interchangeable in the same way Blood Gems were in Bloodborne. That applies to weapon infusions as well, which change the type of damage you deal and what stats your weapon scales with. This goes a long way in allowing more flexibility in build variety since you can swap them out at any Grace Site to mix up your gameplay, which you might do for strategic purposes depending on what you're fighting, or if you're just getting bored with a particular skill and want to try something different.

This is especially important because Elden Ring still suffers from the same classic problem of having limitations on the number of upgrade stones that you can find, and with them being permanently consumed it means that you can typically only have two or maybe three regular weapons upgraded to whatever your "max" might be at any given time; that can make you feel "stuck" using one weapon for long stretches of the game since you likely won't have enough stones to upgrade a new weapon as far as one that you've already used all of your high-end stones on. This has always bugged me somewhat with the other games, but with Elden Ring being so much bigger and longer it feels like even more of a potential problem this time around. I know I at least was paranoid about using stones on other weapons until I'd unlocked the ability to buy an infinite amount, because I didn't want to "waste" them on something that turned out to be not as effective or as fun as I thought it would be, bearing in mind that you can't really assess a weapon properly until it's upgraded, so I tended to stick with just one or two weapons for most of the game. While I think Elden Ring could've benefitted a lot from allowing more flexibility with the upgrade system -- like, say, by allowing you to spend runes removing upgrade stones from a weapon so that you could then apply them to another -- having the ability to swap out Ashes of War is at least a decent compromise in giving you the chance to do SOMETHING to mix up your gameplay without having to invest a bunch of stones into a whole new weapon. 

That actual ashes are pretty fun, too, with lots of different options to allow for different playstyles and builds. There are several different buffs that you can use, special types of melee attacks, area of effect strikes, dodges, and even magic spells -- that latter one is particularly nice, since it gives players who ordinarily wouldn't invest into magic-related stats the ability to cast at least some kind of magic that seemingly scales with the weapon's damage so it's actually useful to you. 

Magic itself has never really appealed to me in these games because I always found it pretty boring to just hang back at a safe distance pressing R1 and letting the lock-on system do all the work for me, as compared to a pure melee fighter which is much more actively engaging with having to time all of your attacks and dodges with a higher degree of risk-versus-reward. But I actually found magic pretty enjoyable in Elden Ring thanks to there being some notable improvements this time. For one, there's just so much more variety in the spells you can cast, so there's a lot more opportunity to find spells that you find entertaining, but there's also newfound functionality with the ability to charge spells for a stronger effect, while some spells can be chain-casted to allow for faster combos, which makes it much more fluid versus the previous games where you always had to stop and restart the full animation for every single cast. Personally, I really enjoyed the variety of magic melee spells, although I did find it difficult to justify an exclusively magic-melee playstyle since it's much more limited than just being a regular melee fighter, since regular weapon attacks combo better and aren't limited by a fixed mana supply. 

Spirit Ashes are a new addition that give players yet one more thing to potentially spend your mana on, and these function as AI-controlled monster or NPC allies that you can summon to assist you in certain areas of the game. These things don't really appeal to me because I've always been the type of player to prefer the challenge of playing solo, since many bosses typically aren't smart enough to handle more than one target at a time, but I suppose it's a nice option for offline players who need some assistance every now and again. I'm not one to turn my nose up at extra customization options for gameplay variety so they're a welcome addition as far as I'm concerned, even though I rarely ever bothered with them and found it pretty disappointing any time a minor dungeon or boss gave me one as a supposed reward. Though for what it's worth, I'm not sure they're balanced or implemented in the game very well, seeing as there are 64 spirit ashes in total and yet it seems like most people tend to gravitate to the same three or four options, with the Mimic Tear being particularly popular since it copies your exact character, and costs health to summon instead of mana. I mean seriously, I struggled HARD against Malenia, who's widely regarded as the most difficult boss of the entire game, if not the whole Soulsborne franchise, and then she became a complete and utter joke once I summoned a Mimic Tear.

Where FromSoft really dropped the ball in terms of features is online play for things like covenants and invasions. I don't consider myself a hardcore PVP'er, but I've always liked the concept of invasions just because of the dynamic excitement that brings to the ordinary gameplay; however, they've been getting progressively worse and non-existent the longer the series has gone on, with Elden Ring now being the ultimate disappointment in this front. By default, you cannot be invaded as a solo player, and if you summon cooperative players then you are practically guaranteed to be invaded; as an invader, you pretty much only ever match against groups of players where you're at such a heavy disadvantage that, to me, it's not even worth bothering to try. As a solo player, you CAN open yourself to invasions if you use the Taunter's Tongue, but that depends on you even finding that item at all, and it offers zero cooldown period between invasions, with no real benefit like opening yourself to invasions USED to offer in previous games by giving you a full health bar, or opening up another ring slot, or kindling bonfires for extra bonuses. So as a solo player, your options are basically 1) never be invaded, ever, or 2) be invaded all the time, when there really should be a happy medium somewhere between those two extremes where you CAN be invaded, but sporadically and at unexpected times. 

Making matters worse is there are no longer any covenants to incentivize PVP or to provide thematic context for specific areas and actions. This is where I usually found myself getting most involved with the online multiplayer stuff, because they gave you extra interactions with NPCs, and practical rewards for fulfilling the objectives of the covenant. Even if I didn't necessarily care about the PVP stuff or the covenant's story, I might still get involved with it just for the sake of the rewards, but it was always fun to play around with them for at least a little bit. Plus, I just liked how they added that extra degree of structured purpose to the PVP, where there's some greater goal besides just fighting other players for the fun of it, since factions like the Forest Hunters, Bell Keepers, or Aldrich Faitfhful were trying to defend their turf from other players. As a solo player, I actually found it really fun trying to get through these "gank zones" on my own. Other covenants like the Rat King were actually really creative with you summoning other players to YOUR world and being able to set traps around the environment and use the mobs in your level against them, as were the Spears of the Church who were a literal boss fight against other players. 

While Elden Ring does still have colosseums where you can go to fight other players, I just don't find those very appealing since the fun of the multiplayer, for me, is specifically about the way it's integrated within the main campaign. I like the idea of a single-player game where other players can randomly be enemies you face within the regular level, and I like the unpredictability and excitement that comes from not knowing when you're going to be invaded, and all the dynamic situations that creates depending on WHEN you're invaded and the behavior of the invader. As an invader, I prefer the idea of hunting another player through the level and using whatever means necessary to beat them, as opposed to having an honorable duel against players who specifically signed up to fight someone. With Elden Ring, there's just no good way for me to engage with the multiplayer in a way that I enjoy, and so for me the online multiplayer was practically non-existent, since what little of it did exist was completely unappealing to me. Sure, there are plenty of NPC invasions, and the Volcano Manor is kind of similar to a covenant, but with them all being offline functions against NPCs it isn't really the same thing.

The final thing I want to note about Elden Ring, and it's a fairly important one, is that there have been a lot of new features and good quality of life improvements to the core systems, which collectively make this the most sophisticated and best feeling game of the entire series. With crouching and hiding in grass, there's now a quasi stealth system that actually kind of works, and gives you extra options for how to approach situations, while other things like guard counters with shields and improved dual-wielding movesets are a neat addition that add onto existing playstyles in fun new ways. The Flask of Wondrous Physick is a great new tool for giving you a one-time buff that you can fully customize to your liking, and change on the fly at any Grace Site, or it could serve as just an extra healing flask if you really want it to. I love what this thing does for further customizing builds and playstyles. That's of course in addition to other features I've already covered, like the interchangeable ashes of war, spirit ashes, spell charging, chain casting, and so on.

The sheer fact that there's now a dedicated jump button, after 13 years of either no jump, or that awkward sprint-and-double-tap-the-dodge-button-to-do-an-imprecise-bunny-hop-long-jump-into-a-tuck-and-roll is enough to lift Elden Ring leaps and bound above all the previous Soulsborne. It's amazing how much freedom, control, and utility it adds to the gameplay that's been sorely lacking for all this time, while also allowing for more sophisticated platforming when it comes to exploration and level design. Then we've got a bunch of new control features like how the "action" button is now multi-functional with controlling weapon stances when combined with the shoulders, or accessing a pouch for quick-use items when used with the directional pad, which I absolutely LOVE for being able to access certain items instantly, without having to cycle through a dozen options on the D-Pad and while removing some of the clutter from that item list.

Newly added in a patch is a highly useful "Recent Items" tab that sorts your inventory based on what you've picked up most recently, while also marking new items in your inventory that have not previously been inspected. I find this absolutely essential for enhancing the pace of gameplay, because it's always bothered me in previous games having to stop what I'm doing and cycle through a bunch of tabs and scrolling lists to find the item I just picked up to read what it is, which is especially problematic if you didn't pay enough attention to the symbol or illustration to know what tab to start looking in. In fact, I was just as annoyed by this when playing Elden Ring a year ago before that patch rolled out. That to me has always been a core reason that I've found the indirect, obfuscated storytelling of these games so difficult to appreciate, because it just completely killed the flow of the gameplay to try to read item descriptions, and then if you waited until after you reached a checkpoint or something it was easy to forget what all you had picked up along the way. Now, those items are all right there when you bring up the inventory, so it's much, much less of a hassle just keeping track of things in your inventory, and makes it a lot easier to actually take the time reading all the descriptions.

On a related note, I found the storytelling a little more enjoyable overall this time. I don't know how much of this is due to personal taste, or just me paying more attention to it (possibly because of the benefits of the "recent items" tab making it literally more convenient to do so), but I found it a lot easier to follow at least the basics of this game's story and lore. I really appreciated how Gideon would just straight up tell you about each of the major characters at each stage of the game when they become relevant, and would even repeat himself if prompted so you could refresh your memory a little later, and how Melina would stop to offer backstory at appropriate stages as you advanced closer towards the capital. These are things I really don't remember the other games doing so explicitly, although my memory isn't great about those games when it comes to the storytelling because, frankly, it's never been something I cared to dive into. Other characters likewise seemed to be a little more direct and clear about what they're saying so that it was easier for me to understand on the spot and then assign more significant meaning to it later, while things like the characters giving concrete directions and hints about what to do next in their quests helped a lot with being able to finish more of them naturally, without needing to consult a guide at every step of the way. 

I do wish the endings could've been a little more satisfying, however. In the grand scheme of things they're about par for the course for these games so it's not really a big deal, but with Elden Ring being so much more epic in scale it would've been nice to see the endings fleshed out a little more elaborately than just a vague suggestion of some future, told in a mere two sentences. Obviously there are far deeper implications than that, which you'll intuitively understand what's at stake if you've been following the lore and character quests, but it does feel anticlimactic for the actual cutscene to be so abrupt while not actually depicting anything that it foretells. It's worse when you consider that four of the game's six endings are the exact same cutscene, just with a different visual depiction of the environment and a different name to describe the coming Age. For that reason, I found the Age of Stars and Lord of the Frenzied Flame to be the best endings just because they were actually unique, but it also helps that I found their story outcomes the most thematically satisfying. It was to my benefit that those were the first endings I triggered, but I think the other endings are definitely a let-down.

With all of that being said, I still think Elden Ring is a fun, solid game that's absolutely worth playing. However, it's really more of a middle-of-the-road Soulsborne to me; it does a lot to improve on the core gameplay mechanics of this series, and the open world in particular offers a really novel twist on everything that manages to make the experience feel fresh and exciting, at least for the first major chunk of the game, but eventually the world itself starts to feel stretched a little too big, with too much repetitive filler, and with a final 25-33% that feels noticeably worse than everything that came before it. Most of all, I just find that the shift to the open world dilutes the core appeal of these games, at least in terms of what's always made them appealing to me, by significantly reducing the tension from combat and exploration any time you're out in the open world. I for one found the legacy dungeons and underground areas far more entertaining because they allowed me to spend more of my time directly engaging with the combat system, and I found the exploration and combat a lot more engaging in these smaller areas with more complex level design versus all the expansive, open areas from the overworld. 

The net effect of this is that my enjoyment of the game got steadily worse the longer I played it, largely because I became burnt out from open-world fatigue; it's the only Soulsborne game I've ever felt this burnt-out on, and it's the only one I ever wanted to be over long before it actually was. 

For my money, Dark Souls 1 still remains the sweet spot for world design (at least in concept) with its branching pathways giving you plenty of opportunities for non-linear exploration and a stronger feeling of tension thanks to your persistent presence within the world, with having to explore everywhere on foot and survive before unlocking the ability to fast-travel. That game has its share of issues and shortcomings of course, and so I would ultimately rate Elden Ring as the superior game, but I would've preferred a Dark Souls 1-style world design, just expanded into bigger areas, some more open environments, and more branching connections to make it more of a semi-open world versus a true open world. 

Still, there are so many new features, quality of life improvements, and just all-around polish that make Elden Ring the most refined evolution of the entire series, and therefore the one that just FEELS the best to actually play. That's not even to mention the fact it has plenty of really good, high quality content to experience, and so it's probably the one I'll gravitate towards replaying years down the line whenever I want to scratch that Soulsborne itch. But unlike other Soulsborne games that I've enjoyed replaying in their entirety, I would be way more selective about how much content I actually engage with, and would be skipping a lot of things on repeat playthroughs of Elden Ring. And that's kind of why I'm not so high on this game overall compared to some of the others that I feel are more consistently good and deliver on the things I like about this series with greater concentration.