God damn.

I do not necessarily want to rehash everything about Elden Ring, as you probably have already heard loads about it. As of May 2023, Elden Ring has sold over 20.5 million copies, which made it the second best-selling game in all of 2022 (with Call of Duty taking the top spot). This is truly a stupendous achievement considering the type of game FromSoftware makes and where the Dark Souls series has come from. Although, yeah, this isn’t a Dark Souls game per se.

The overall formula has been shaken up quite a bit. Yeah, combat is still super tough, requiring patience, precise reflexes, and usually trial-and-error. Death still results in all your souls runes dropping on the floor and you possibly losing them if you die before picking them back up. You still level up in a deeply unsatisfying way, raising stats one at a time and getting vague bonuses on even vaguer secondary stats you will probably never actually use at any point in the game.

At the same time, the game feels entirely different. Dark Souls offered freedom of a sort once you got to the first main area, but nothing like Elden Ring. After unlocking three bonfires Sites of Grace, you get a double-jumping magical horse that you can call at a whim and even engage enemies while mounted. As a spellcaster, there is essentially zero downside for me to not be mounted 100% of the time. Your foes can knock you off the horse, but the mounted shenanigans fundamentally change how I approach open-world combat. I never felt comfortable just running past everything in Dark Souls, but here? Anything you actually engage is on purpose.

Amusingly, there are even pseudo-stealth mechanics at play. Clicking the left-stick (these games demand a controller IMO) will cause your character to crouch, and there’s even a tutorial screen about hiding in tall grass. Again, you could backstab mobs sometimes in Dark Souls, but it typically only occurred during combat after they missed an attack, or with certain mob pathing. Now, you can practically Solid Snake your way through many areas, up to and including firing arrows at walls to make enemies turn around and investigate the sound.

I also appreciate that combat feels a lot… tighter? And more gamey at the same time? Dodge rolling is super important as always, but unlike in Dark Souls, I actually saw several times where my character clearly was hit by a sword or whatever but I had i-frames and thus took no damage. Enemy attacks seem to be telegraphed a bit better, or at least it feels that way.

At the same time, some of the weaknesses of the Dark Souls series are amplified in Elden Ring.

I already mentioned leveling feeling unrewarding, but exploration (thus far) feels both encouraged and kinda punished. Caves act as Skyrim-esque mini-dungeons, filled with enemies and traps, with a mini-boss at the end. If you are successful, you are accumulating runes that you will need to spend to level up or upgrade your gear, lest you lose them. But the freeform exploration means you can never really tell where anything is, or what you are building towards. Do you spend resources upgrading your starting gear, to help you in the encounters to come? What if the very next chest or body holds a vastly superior item? What are the Intelligence requirements for spells you find soon? Where the hell even is the Sorcerer trainer?

These known unknowns are part of the “mystique” of Dark Souls and certainly would sell a lot of game guides back in the 90s, but it’s all part of the sort of design bullshit I hate. I don’t need to be optimizing for the endgame from level 1, but I do need to feel confident that the devs aren’t being obtuse on purpose. Can you miss crucial game mechanics (Ashes of War) for not fully exploring one of the beginning camps? Yes. Could you technically get by without using them? Yes. Can you complete the entire game just using Glintstone Pebble? Yes.

Would this lead to a richer, more fulfilling gaming experience? No.

It’s a fine line to walk, I get it. It’s also useless to complain about degrees of hand-holding in a FromSoftware title… although they clearly do give way more hints with the “lines of grace” on the map (or having a map at all). But I bring all this up because the end result is that I hit up the Wiki or Youtube to get one minor frustration answered and end up seeing “How to become OP in the first 15 minutes without fighting a single enemy.” Which, cool, good job constructing your game in such a way that it rewards technique and mastery in learning routes. But also, WTF, mate? I’m over here playing Elden Ring like a standard videogame with progression when I clearly should have been running past every mob just yoinking all the upgrades off the ground from horseback.

I dunno, man. The problem is: when does that stop? When do you start “playing the game” and actually tackling bosses? I encountered one open-world mini-boss recently and got clobbered, even on horseback. The typical Souls solution is to Git Gud and/or farm some more levels. I did the latter, but also spent an hour riding around and getting two additional flasks plus one flask upgrade before coming back. Beat that mini-boss and was rewarded with… crap I’ll probably never use. Not quite as bad in some RPGs wherein you can out-level gear rewards entirely, but certainly not at all on par with how powerful I had become to beat the boss. That’s certainly a unique sort of freedom, but I don’t exactly want to praise the freedom to make the game experience worse for myself.

We’ll have to see where things go from here. I’m 15 hours in, zero major bosses down, still dithering in basically the first map of the game. Will things improve? Will it get worse in new ways? Who knows. If I’m casting the same two spells another 30 hours from now though, I’ll be very disappointed.