The fervor over Hogwarts befuddles me. As a licensed property, I need to see a lot more to be interested. Reviewing the combined track record of PortKey Games and Avalanche Software shows a publisher who has only released mobile games, all of them bad except for one. And a developer that has released mostly bad games, with a few games in the mediocre to average range; nothing that has ever really stuck the landing in terms of critical or commercial acclaim. Excitement over licensed IP’s and other elements often gives me pause and forces me to hash some pointed critical questions in my mind before I settle on how I feel about a game in the zeitgeist and receiving universal approval. I have my own rubric of what I need to experience to ensure that I am not just going along with the crowd. And while today I open with thoughts that flummox me on everyone’s regard for the Hogwarts Legacy preview, I have been equally concerned over having a very measured take on my Elden Ring experience. [Sorry; needed to get the Hogwarts assessment off my chest 🙂]
The world has been gushing. And so I have been wanting to be very reserved, thoughtful, and introspective about what I have been feeling with regards to the latest effort from FromSoftware. I have always felt that the Souls games were niche. And that a large part of the dynamic of the support behind them has been fueled by the bravado of gamers who like to chest-thump and declare their superiority over other gamers. And so I have long held on to the notion of trying to discern any support for their value for credible critical commentary or fanaticism.
It’s taken about 8 to 10 hours of gameplay over three nights for me to square up on where the game sits in my consciousness here at the outset and where I will be going with it from here. I’ve found enough to hold onto here to keep me curious and encourage me to delve deeper. There is a theme of recurring re-work to do, given the respawn of enemies that From continues to hold on to in this iteration, which I find a kind of rearward looking, antiquated take on modern game design.
I was glad to see it go away in the early 2000s and have not been pleased to see FromSoftware bring it back. But there is rune-farming, levelling, the occasional loot-drop, and Torrent, all of which combine to make re-do’s a but more worthwhile, faster, and not as tedious. The addition of the Stakes of Marika make for a reduction in the old trudge back to a fight through a number of attrition funnels that the old games had.
I enjoy the geometry of the outdoor environments and the notion that elevation matters. You can use it to your tactical advantage, and, if a fight is approached foolishly, it can also work against you. I like that the do-loop of levelling has been tuned so that there are opportunities for you to feel powerful and not simply at the mercy of iFrames and stagger-based combat physics that impact you far more than they do the enemies. But within these first eight hours I have found ways through to actually feel the differential between my Wretch at level 1 and my Wretch at level 17 and many step-ups in between. The old games, I felt, made you feel ineffectual and powerless but for those gifted with The Dance, making average gamers often feeling clumsy and inelegant and then…well…dead.
But the single-most thing here is the provenance given over to the player in layering the open-world design on top of the SoulsBorne formula. It is not simply a matter of the additional locomotion provided by Torrent. A lot of gamers have described the ability to jet as one of the most positive aspects of this new spin on the Souls formula. I think that is very simplified view. I do not think that perpetually running away from enemies is a positive gaming experience, nor a very sophisticated one. And I do not think that Miyazaki’s design intent was that flat. Playing the cheekiness of managing the battle-space geometry to avoid aggro-ing enemies while dispatching ones of your choosing is the same, whether you are mounted or not, and so I do not think that labelling an Elden Ring advantage over past Souls games simply because “it’s open world” is a sufficient depth of scratch.
The real change that can be effected here is in changing your relationship with the game. For many, this is an RPG; I’m liking this term less and less with regards to CRPGs, because it has devolved into a descriptive label representing the presence of levelling and how you choose to progress down the skill-tree, and very little to do with actual role-playing or even how your class effects how you interact with the world, outside of combat.
Elden Ring is no exception and suffers from this weakness, too. For some it will be a Souls game. For others it will just be a 3rd person action-adventure game. For me, a map akin to the Elden Ring implementation becomes a strategic endeavor. One in which I choose to plan out how I traverse the map and chart a course of discovery, outside of any recommended path or notion of a mainline campaign. From Gatehouse Ruins in Limgrave, I have struck out East, seeking the edges from where (theoretically) the sun rises. I have both chosen and simply run into engagements along the way. I have deliberately sought out and hunted bear from the Artist’s Shack. I have seen tree ents trudging a carriage behind them, chains attached to the carriage through spikes driven through their chests, and despite their ginormous size, have spurred Torrent towards them, brandishing my sword and whispering “Thataway”. And I have spied enemies on the horizon that I have noted for later engagement. I’ve disregarded any feeling of accountability for the storyline (it is threadbare in its native presentation) and, most importantly, shifted my posture from one of fear to one of exploration and curiosity. And i have have not consulted a guide or a wiki.
I am sure the game will hammer me back into submission at some point and, sheerly by the weight of time, incentivize me to get back to the beaten path. But by then I hope to be well-travelled and Elden Ring-worldly and as such, to regard the coming adversity as simply another piece of the puzzle to be figured out. I think the challenge of Elden Ring in gamerverse uptake (because I do not believe that the sales numbers are representative of actual long-term player engagement and hypothesize that there is a cliff of fall-off after the 21 – 25 hour point of people who will not come back for a return engagement) is that there is a valley where this game sits most comfortability as an experience. There is a very basic panache where it will be attractive to hack and slashers who think that boss-battles are sophisticated and enjoy the accolades of defeating them. This an approach that in many ways truthfully does not feel more complicated than Pokemon, Monster Hunter, or Shadows of the Colossus. Then there is a high-functioning end where some will find a gamification in the many metas that there are in the game. Metas that in previous installments have been rigid, non-existent, or so Byzantine as to be almost invisible, and most pointedly only observable through intense investigation, trial and error, or seeking a guide. There is a swath of gamers in the middles, arguably the largest demographic of the gamer-population, for whom this game will still not be a fit. The game’s narrative that I’ve seen so far does not go that deep. I still think this is a Souls game first, and an open world game second. The world is not lived-in in a way that a Morrowind game is, and that will be a steep fall-off for many people seeking that kind of experience. I do not know that someone who loves the narrative of a God of War, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Spider-Man, or Horizon Zero Dawn – Forbidden West will like this game, unless they are decidedly on the lookout for a disparate experience.
While it has its open-world hooks into me, I still feel like Elden Ring is a murder-simulator. That sits on a holodeck rendition of the 9 circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno (the literary piece, not the game). People will need to consider that, I think, in order to determine if they will make it past the onboarding into the meat of the game. That jury is still out for me as I continue to trudge through my own Rembrandt of the experience.
Rounding Off Infinity 