I always considered the first Dark Souls to be an "open world" game in all the ways that matter. The world is interconnected, coherent, and surprisingly functional. Almost every location in the game is walkable from almost any other location, and every distant landmark is an actual place that you can go, which usually has a big, scary monster waiting to show you the "YOU DIED" screen for the thousandth time.
As such, I didn't really expect that a transition to an actual open world would in Elden Ring would really make all that much difference -- either positive or negative. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro already felt open and exploratory despite being a series of linear corridor crawls cleverly interconnected into a tight helix. So I didn't expect Elden Ring to really feel all that much more open or exploratory. Further, all of From Software's games are also designed from the ground-up with a play-at-your-own pace paradigm of story delivery -- in that From's games are more about doling out "lore" in piecemeal rather than about a linear narrative with a clear-cut beginning, middle, and end. So I wasn't terribly worried that a transition to an open world structure would break any narrative flow or the sense of stakes for the character, as it does in so many other open world games.
From Soft's brand of player-driven lore discovery is well-suited to an open world format.
What I didn't expect though, is how the open world would dramatically improve both the accessibility and the challenge of the game.
Elevating the genre
Having transitioned to a more traditional open world design, Elden Ring does suffer from some of the same problems that plague the sub-genre. Assets, enemies, bosses, traps, and so forth are all re-used throughout the map, and many of the dungeons look like they were pulled straight out of Bloodborne's Chalice Dungeon generator. Each region of the map will assuredly have at least one mine tunnel full of upgrade stones. It will have at least one crypt dungeon (usually with a Burial Tree Watchdog boss that looks like a cat statue). It will have at least one set of ruins with a boss waiting in the basement. And they'll all have a minor Erdtree with an Erdtree Avatar (or similar) boss.
That being said, I haven't come across any of these dungeons that feels to me like it was just haphazardly thrown together. Each dungeon has its enemies, traps, and setpieces thoughtfully arranged to test various gameplay skills and the player's power of observation and thoroughness of exploration. Each one also has a unique piece of loot offered as a reward for defeating it -- usually a weapon, talisman, or spirit ash. Unlike, say, Skyrim, which just rewards all of its dungeons with disposable weapon or piece of armor that is level-scaled and arbitrarily magical, each dungeon in Elden Ring rewards a unique item that conveys a piece of lore. Early in the game, almost all of this loot is something that will be useful to most builds, which really helps to encourage the player to continue exploring these mini-dungeons. And later, even if the item isn't useful for a build, it might still reveal valuable lore.
Bosses are frequently re-used, but none of the dungeons feels haphazardly thrown together.
The sheer volume of places to go and things to do might seem overwhelming, but it's also a huge boon to new or struggling players. They have plenty of options for alternative challenges to try, which vary in difficulty. Getting stuck on the main quest path, or in a particularly nasty optional dungeon is easily alleviated by simply wandering off in another direction -- any other direction -- and trying something new that might be a bit easier to conquer, or which might provide loot that is useful in the places where you are struggling. Or you can just wander around the overworld and grind.
A lot of these dungeons can also start to feel tedious and unnecessary. I can go through entire dungeons, beat a boss, and still not have acquired enough runes to gain a single character level. On the one hand, this is frustrating, and some of these dungeons feel like a waste of time for a mid-to-high-level character. On the other hand, the increased desire to hold onto these runes means I'm more inclined to run away from a fight that I'm not equipped to handle, which forces me to engage more with that open world by trying to find another boss or another dungeon that is more my level, rather than continuously bash my head against the same boss wall over and over again.
If you get stuck on a boss, explore somewhere else.
Players are much more free to follow your own path through the game. In fact, From included plenty of opportunities for sequence-breaking for particularly inquisitive and observant players. Dungeons and bosses that seem like a mandatory bottleneck for progress can sometimes be skipped entirely. And honestly, it's not even all that hard to find these bypasses, since they are often out in plain view for anybody who bothers to deviate off the main path at all.
And this process of exploration really does provide a sense of genuine discovery in ways that most other open world games fail to deliver. The full scope of the map is hidden to the player at the start, so reaching the crest of a hill and finding an entire continent that wasn't on your map a moment ago is genuinely surprising and awe-inspiring. The fact that every notable point of interest is not immediately marked by climbing a tower or finding a checkpoint really facilitates a sense of exploration and adventure. It really feels like there's always going to be something new and interesting over every hill, around every corner, and within every dungeon.
This combination of From's trademark visual artistry, non-linear player-driven narrative, genuine exploration that changes the scope and scale of the world, valuable loot, opportunities for finding secrets and bypassing obstacles, and the addictive "one-more-try" hack-and-slash action combine to make the map of the Lands Between feel worth exploring in ways so many other open world games fail.
The player is responsible for marking your own points of interest.
Helping hands and hooves
The inclusion of the spirit horse and a variety of summonable spirit creatures also gives players of all skill levels more opportunity to custom-tailor the game's challenge to your particular skill level and liking. Need a little bit extra help on a tough boss, but don't want to summon some rando human player who might just beat the boss for you and rob you of your sense of achievement? Well, now you can summon your own personal ghost bodyguard, or a pack of ghost wolves, or a small army of ghost soldiers instead! And this is on top of being able to summon NPC characters for certain boss fights.
Summoned spirits will take some of the pressure off of you, while also dealing a little bit of extra damage to the boss. In fact, spirit summons don't even increase the HP of a boss the way that summoned players and NPC characters do. This could easily have resulted in spirit summons feeling overpowered and broken, but they aren't so strong that I ever felt like they were doing all the work for me, like having Solaire summoned for the Bell Gargoyles fight in Dark Souls. For most of the harder boss fights, my summoned spirits rarely made it far into the second phase of the boss fight (assuming I summoned the spirit at the start of the fight). I think spirit ashes are a good addition, and I love the wide variety of spirits available. No matter what your particular character build is, there is likely a spirit ash somewhere that will either compliment your build's strengths, or supplement its weaknesses.
Spirits are a middle-ground between solo-ing a boss and resorting to multiplayer.
Spirit Ash summons are also a great feature for extending the longevity of Elden Ring. Even after the servers go offline and multiplayer is no longer available at all, players will still have the option to summon these spirit ashes against tough bosses, even if that boss does not have an NPC summon available.
If you do need that extra bit of help from jolly cooperation, that option is available to you as well, and is easier and more flexible than ever. It isn't as much of a crutch as it used to be because there are so many other options for the player: options for where to go, options for spirits to summon, options for build types, and so forth. This means that there aren't quite as many players who are looking for player summons, which means that sometimes it can take a while for a host to actually activate my summon sign. But even this is offset to some degree by a new ability to have summon signs percolate outward to other nearby locations or dungeons, so that even if you don't get summoned for the specific boss you want to fight, you can still reliably get summoned somewhere without having to keep teleporting around the map looking for an active co-op spot within your level range. The summon sign now automatically does that for you!
And of course, jolly-cooperation and PvP are still present and more accessible than ever.
Even the PvP invasion system has been softened to something more similar to Bloodborne, in which a host can only be invaded once that host has already summoned another player as a cooperator. That is, you only risk invasion from another player if you deliberately activate multiplayer. This might seem unfair to invaders, since they are always outnumbered. But they also have the ability to leave their own "duelist" summon signs, which allow them to be summoned by willing PvPers for a one-on-one duel for what should be a more fair and engaging fight. Yes, this system does remove a lot of the tension that comes from the possibility of being invaded at any time, but it ensures that PvP sessions are more balanced and fair by allowing the host to set the conditions in which PvP is allowed to happen.
In short, Elden Ring feels (to me) like a complete 180° reversal from Sekiro, which stripped out all the multiplayer options, stripped out weapon variety and character build variety, and which featured a stealth system that (in my opinion) taught the player how to play the game wrong.
Elden Ring feels like the inverse of Sekiro in that it adds lots of new accessibility features.
Elden Ring has more accessibility features, but retains the brutal and unforgiving challenge, and the sense of accomplishment against overwhelming odds that fans and critics have come to love about From's games. More so, Elden Ring's stealth mechanics do not feel as counter to the game's core design as the stealth of Sekiro does. One of the inescapable consequences of an open world design is the ability of the player to avoid conflict, or flee from it. That wasn't really an option in Sekiro, since the levels were always working really hard to funnel the player into bottleneck encounters which players cannot sneak past and must fight their way through. Avoiding undesirable conflict entirely is an option now for Elden Ring! And the stealth enables that.
Stealth is more integral.
No, Elden Ring won't let you perform a stealth kill on a boss, so you can't stealth backstab your way through the entire game. That being said, some of the more traditional dungeons have optional paths that allow the player to avoid or escape certain conflicts, or approach them from a different angle that might give the player an advantage. It's one of the lessons that From learned from Sekiro that has translated well into Elden Ring.
The addition of the horse and the jump button allow the levels to be more open and more vertical than in most previous From Software games, but the lack of a grappling hook means they won't be quite as vertical as Sekiro.
The horse itself is also an accessibility feature. Fighting from horseback is one way to dramatically reduce the difficulty of many encounters out in the open world. Running back and forth on horseback, making jousting runs against enemies can actually feel very cheesy, and I'm not sure how much FromSoft intended for player to fight from horseback.
Many enemies and bosses have long reach and large area of effect attacks that are difficult (or maybe even impossible) to escape on foot. A lot of bosses also have annoying "whirlwind" attacks that have very little wind-up, and which can often stun lock the player. The wide range and lack of an obvious attack tell makes these attacks almost impossible to escape if you're fighting at melee range on foot. The only way I've found to fight these bosses without taking damage from these "whirlwind" attacks is to rush in, hit them once, and then back off to safety. It's perhaps the most boring and tedious way to fight. This leads me to believe that these bosses and enemies are designed to be fought on horseback.
Some bosses seem designed to be fought from horseback.
For example, one of the harder bosses is Commander O'Neil. He isn't terribly hard to fight directly. His attacks are well telegraphed and relatively easy to dodge. However, he summons his own spirit army that can easily overwhelm the player, and he has a massive AoE attack that stuns the player and inflicts the rot ailment.
But after many failed attempts at dueling him, I noticed that if I wasn't summoning a human cooperator, the game would let me use my horse in the arena. Further, the arena itself was not closed off with a fog wall, so I could lure O'Neil out of his arena in order to separate him from his spirit mob. At that point, the fight actually became easy. It was long, and kind of tedious, but it was easy. So did From deliberately allow the use of the horse, and leave the arena unbounded because they wanted the player to use the horse for this fight?
On the cheesier end of the spectrum are the Erdtree Avatars. I was able to avoid these bosses' big, AoE attacks and cheese them to death by simply running circles around the tree on horseback. The tree is actually big enough that the boss would de-aggro on the opposite side of the tree, and I could run around the other side and do a hit and run attack on his back without him doing a thing about it.
But then there's fights like Margit the Fell-Omen and Godrick the Grafted, who are both fought in an enclosed arena in which the horse cannot be summoned. They also have annoying whirlwind attacks that I've found almost impossible to escape on foot. They also have fire attacks with very long range that cover half the arena. These fight seems like they would be much easier if I had the speed of the horse to allow me to escape these AoE attacks, but I don't.
Many bosses have quick-hitting attacks with massive range, which are difficult to escape on foot.
But those early game fights pale in comparison to the final boss of the game, which is fought in a massive, open arena. The boss itself is a large monster that is able to fly and teleport and fire incredibly-accurate projectile attacks from long range. Yet this boss has to be fought on foot, and more than half the fight is just spent chasing it across the arena. How is the horse not summonable for this fight?! It seems tailor-made for horseback!
So which is it FromSoft? Are these cheesy AoE attacks intended to pressure the player to fight on horseback? Or are they just cheap tricks to kill the player and make the game harder than it needs to be?
It's also unfortunate that, despite being such an integral part of navigating the overworld, there are no upgrades for the horse. You can't spend runes to level up the horse's HP or stamina. There's no consumables that temporarily buff its defense or improve its run speed. You can't equip it with armor or other accessories. Its appearance cannot be customized at all. You can feed the horse berries to restore its HP, and I think there's one talisman that buffs your attack power when on horseback, but that's it.
Back to sword and shield combat!
Speaking of things that are cheesy, each new From Software game introduces new enemy types that contend for the title of "most annoying enemy in the series", and Elden Ring is no exception. I think the most annoying enemies for me are flying enemies, especially the stormhawks in Stormveil Castle and a few other places. I get that the jump allows levels to be more vertical, so From wants players to be more aware of attacks from above and below, but flying enemies are still just obnoxious to fight. From's games have always struggled with camera issues and targeting issues against enemies at elevation, and there aren't really any new mechanics or refinements that fix this.
Flying enemies are a pain to track and hit.
These enemies don't feel like they're testing any particular game mechanic or combat skill; they feel like they are just here to distract the player and get some cheap hits or kills in while the player fights against the camera. They often move too fast to be hit with bows, thrown weapons, or most spells. My own melee weapons often go right underneath them without hitting. And they often swoop around in circles, spinning the camera around, making it hard for me to keep my bearings, and sometimes even making me dizzy.
Compare this to some other enemies that can fall into the category of feeling "cheap". Certain enemies have attacks with little-to-no windup, that can't be parried, and which can't be interrupted. This might seem unfair (and in some cases, it is), but I think these particular attacks are trying to punish players who naked roll and try to encourage the player to use shields. Even if these attacks are difficult to avoid or interrupt, most of them can be blocked, and any attack that can be blocked can be followed by a new Guard Counter move. These seemingly unfair attacks seem intended to teach the player to hold your ground, block, and follow up with a Guard Counter to trade blows.
Guard Counters can be effective against some of these flying enemies too, but they are still un-reliable, as it's still a crap shoot whether my weapon connects with the counter attack, or if it swipes underneath the enemy and whiffs entirely.
Guard counters offer most of the benefits of a parry,
without any of the risk.
The Guard Counter makes shields (especially large shields) much more useful and viable, and thus making the game more accessible. It basically does, for shields, what poise did for heavy armor in the jump from Demon's Souls to Dark Souls. The Guard Counter removes the risk of mis-timing the parry and taking full damage, and it can often trigger a stagger or riposte opportunity against enemies with low poise or posture. Guard Counters do not provide invincibility frames the way that a parry does, so there is a risk of being hit during your counter swing (either by the enemy that attacked you, or by another enemy). But against most humanoid enemy, hitting your shield will stagger them, which should open them up for an easy counter attack. Honestly, I'm not sure why a player should even bother with parrying against most humanoid enemies, since the Guard Counter is usually just as effective, but without any of the risk.
Guard Counter might also be a necessary fall-back option for players who attach an Ash of War to a shield. Doing so will remove the default parry ability from the shield, leaving the Guard Counter as an alternative way to still have access to a sort of parry. Personally, I think it would have been better if the parry had just been assigned to tapping the block button just before an enemy attack hits. This sort of parry is common in a lot of other action games, and it works just fine. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work in a FromSoft Souls-like. This would free up the left trigger for other functions, such as a shield bash attack, kick, weapon art, or so forth.
Elden Ring also seems to have a variation of Sekiro's "Posture" meter for enemies and bosses (instead of the traditional stamina that is used by the player character). However, unlike Sekiro, this posture meter is never visible to the player, so I have no idea how close I might be to breaking an enemy's posture. Sometimes, this encourages me to be more aggressive than I might otherwise be, as I want to try to break the enemy's posture with relentless attacks. Other times, not knowing if I'm close to breaking posture makes me just not bother with trying, and causes me to back off and play more conservatively.
I don't really care for the Ash of War system. For one thing, I hate that the kick function was removed and relegated to an Ash of War. More generally, I dislike that I can't apply attribute modifiers, elemental damage, or status effects onto a weapon without also replacing its built-in weapon skill. Maybe I prefer that weapon skill? Maybe I want a "heavy" halberd with the spinning slash weapon skill? Or maybe I want a poison Morning Star that still allows me to kick and break an enemy's guard? But I can't. Even if I want to apply a poison Ash of War to my halberd, I don't get the poison effect unless I also apply the poison stat scaling. I can't create a "heavy poison halberd" that scales on strength but still applies poison damage on hit.
Ashes of war allow weapon abilities and attributes to be hot-swapped.
Sadistic finale
All of what I said about Elden Ring being accessible and allowing lots of player expression starts to fade away towards the end of the game. The first 2/3 of the game are great, for the most part. But in the final third or so, some of From and Miyazaki's worst habits start to rear their ugly head, and Elden Ring becomes an absolutely unforgiving slog. New players who get hooked by the accessibility of the early game will run into a steep wall of difficulty in the later stages.
Late in the game, players have much less margin for error with many boss fights, as a single hit from some bosses can drain most (if not all) of the player's health. By the time a player gets to the end game, bosses are dealing thousands of points of damage with a single attack, which is usually more than enough to kill a leveled player in a single hit or two. These spikes in difficulty also exists with earlier bosses, but those early bosses are intended to act as a brick wall that encourages the player to explore more of the world, discover more of its secrets, and hopefully gain levels, weapons, and spells along the way. That isn't the case with the late-game bosses. Even after having completed most dungeons and power-leveling my character well over level 100, these late-game bosses still provide virtually no margin of error and can kill me in a single hit. To put this into perspective, I usually would beat older FromSoft games around level 80 or 90 (with less than 30 points in the HP stat), but my main Elden Ring character was over level 130 (with over 50 points in Vigor) and still struggling to survive a single attack from these late bosses.
Towering bosses have attacks that are difficult to read, and which can insta-kill a high-level character.
These late-game encounters start to feel like the worst encounters in Sekiro, in which a single mistake or 2 is enough to kill me and send me back to a checkpoint. Except in Sekiro, the whole game is designed around playing with a minimal margin of error. Every attack in Sekiro can be blocked and parried, and bosses similarly can be killed in 2 or 3 hits if their posture is broken.
That isn't the case with Elden Ring. The bosses here can be giant, towering monstrosities that are hard to read due to the tight and low angle of the camera, and they have large insta-kill area of effect attacks with little wind up or warning. At this point in the game, Spirit Ash summons become pointless, and even player summons aren't always very helpful because all it takes is the host being hit by one of these attacks, and the whole co-op session is over. The host is best served to just hang back in some of these boss fights and let the summoned spirits do all the work for you (if they can survive long enough to do so), so that you don't risk taking an insta-kill combo and ruining the session for everybody. And that's assuming that you can even find a suitable co-op partner to begin with, since the higher level-requirements means that seasoned cooperators might be too low a level to be summonable by a host who has been grinding and power-leveling to try to stay competitive with the outrageous damage output of bosses.
Even normal enemies and mini-bosses become devastatingly damaging in the late game. Going through Farum Azula, I felt like the beastman enemies were pretty well-balanced for my high-level character. But they aren't the only enemies that I encountered. This level is also loaded with armored knights, full-size dragons, and multiple dreaded Crucible Knights -- not to mention some more of the annoying flying stormhawk birds. Aside from the beastmen and the stormhawks, every other enemy in this level could have had its attack power reduced by a third, and its health halved, and they would still be challenging, especially with a character under level 100.
There's still so much of the game that I haven't finished.
All this means that at the point in the game in which I was at maximum enjoyment, and was ready for the game to end on a high note, Elden Ring just keeps going and becomes oppressively hard. It wore me out and ground me down, and for the first time with a true Souls-like, I got to a point where I just wanted to the game to be over. Even though some of the best levels and spectacle are at the end, I was exhausted by the game, and the brutal encounters and one-hit-kill bosses made me not want to continue playing.
So I didn't. I would shelve Elden Ring for a few weeks, or a month. I'd play something else, then come back to Elden Ring later. That's why it took me 7 1/2 months to complete a first playthrough and finally review the damn game.
And there's still so much that I still haven't done! I gave up on finishing Miquela's Haligtree and never even had a chance to fight Melania. I noped out of the northern plateau of Caelid and never got around to going back. I never did the Volcano Manor. I never figured out how to get to the plateau above the Albinauric village. I'm pretty sure there's still a bunch of underground stuff that I haven't seen. I played a primarily melee build, and so have barely scratched the surface of magic. But I just don't really feel motivated to play again and try any of that stuff, in large part because it would just take too long, and Elden Ring is retreading so much ground from Dark Souls and Bloodborne that very little of it feels all that fresh. Put simply, Elden Ring is great, but it's just too damn big for its own good.