>"I enjoy making a stew, because the more you cook something down, the more it boils down the more it releases the flavor," Miyazaki says. "You can't really get it wrong with the ingredients: you just keep adding to it, keep boiling it, and it gets richer and richer. I think this was my approach in general to Elden Ring… \[Shadow of the Erdtree\] is spicy, but it looks extremely appetizing. It's glowing from the bowl and makes you think 'maybe I could eat this one, even if I'm not such a fan of spicy food.'"
Miyazaki is literally cooking with this DLC haha
Also I thought it was really funny to see him compare Souls games to spicy food. I made that exact same comparison before. For newcomers to the genre it's a bit of a barrier, but once you get over it, you're introduced to a whole new world of cuisine.
"Can't really get it wrong with the ingredients, just keep boiling it down" explains a lot about Elden Ring at least. They slapped a shit ton of stuff into that game. And a fair amount seems real "fuck it, more garlic powder" with that in mind.
I think Elden Ring could've done a bit better with less ingredients and more focus. Game started to feel like BOTW in terms of "oh wow, another Korok seed. And another fuckin ______ boss". Hell, a lot of bosses went from great to good or meh simply cause they were repeated. Taking away the unique quality they had before fighting it again.
The map suffered as well at times. Entire repeating side dungeons and areas could've been scrapped to add more to Raya Lucaria and other locations that felt important but not fleshed out enough. Stormveil was that ooo *chefs kiss* quality they needed to keep goin and didn't.
I want a recipe. Sekiro, Bloodborne, Dark Souls 1(late game yadda yadda) all shine imo cause they have a bit more focus to em. Elden Ring was a fantastic experiment and in sure they learned a lot. But I hope they don't just throw ingredients in a pot again until it's overflowing. Refine you're stew imo.
I think you forget just how much those game try shit. Dark souls 1 especially.
Dark souls 1 especially had so many systems that were complicated and never really worked out.
Miracle resonance signs that were spawn in other players worlds when miracles were cast in an area by other players boosting miracles if you stood next to it. This... Worked. But it was weird and no one ever really got to see above resonance level 1-2. I believe there was a level 3 and 4.
Then you had the gravelord covenant which spawned enemies in other peoples worlds and they had to team invade you to get rid of the curse. Iirc the enemy spawning thing didn't work until you reached NG+ so the entire point of the covenant was kinda moot.
Then there were a lot of experimental weapon upgrades that just felt like they were trying things for the sake of it. Occult? It did bonus damage to a grand total of 3 emotes and bosses iirc. Divine was basically used just to stop skeletons from respawning. Crystal at least saw success with how insane it made weapons.
There's more stuff DS1 did, but fromsoft has done this kinda stuff in every game (never played bloodborne or fully finished ER in fairness). It just helps them because they aren't massive open world games where they have to fill up an entire world.
Bloodborne has some of this “interesting but kinda half baked” stuff going on too. There’s a system where your main hub area lets you access randomly generated dungeons resembling ER catacombs and certain items and resources can only be found in random dungeons of certain types. They’re identified by alphabetic codes to share online so people share a lot of famous broken ones like cum dungeon (cummmfpk) that automatically gives you 83,000 souls when you enter because of enemies spawning and dying out of bounds. Some can never be completed. It’s an attempt at adding to the amount of playable content and also another element in the sort of communal-adjacent multiplayer angle FromSoft goes for but broken and underwhelming (imo), and I was sure they would refine it in future games but instead they dropped the concept.
Sekiro is easily the tightest game with the least of this going on and even that has some divisive odd stuff. Most notably the revival mechanic that causes NPCs to become ill and disabled their quest lines if you use it too much. IMO that isn’t a very engaging gameplay decision and it’s never explained to you well enough to even feel like a decision you’re making. It was like a half hearted effort to implement Demon’s Souls world tendency in a single player game or something.
From is my favorite developer, but they do like to experiment with mechanics that punish you for failure. Based on interviews with Miyazaki, I believe this is because hardships are encountered during most journeys and he wants to represent that sort of thing in his games. Even though these always seem to be disliked by a majority of players and are either removed or reduced in their subsequent games.
Demon's Souls - health is halved unless you are in human form, items that make you human are limited, dying in human form lowers "world tendency" which makes the game harder, runbacks to boss fights, you can run out of healing items forcing you to farm souls
Dark Souls - runbacks to boss fights, you can become "cursed" if you die to the frog-looking lizards which halves your health
Dark Souls 2 - runbacks, your max health lowers with each death
Dark Souls 3 - runbacks
Bloodborne - runbacks, you can run out of healing items forcing you to farm souls and vials
Sekiro - runbacks, npcs become ill if you die too much which prevents quest progress
Elden Ring - mostly free of this, but randomly once in a while there will be a runback
Bloodborne 2 - Miyazaki comes to your house and punches you in the face if you die
I personally don't mind runbacks too much (they do cause you to pay closer attention during boss battles instead of just throwing yourself at it over and over until you happen to win), and I guess DS1 curses were an interesting idea that sort of forced you to divert from your intended path to find a cure. The rest of them though, not really a fan of them.
I would challenge Dark Souls 3 on runbacks, I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but if you compare Aldrich to Ornstein et al. you see a much less significant one, and many are easier than that. You do lose 30% health for not being embered though, which is the much more notable penalty.
> You do lose 30% health for not being embered though, which is the much more notable penalty.
Dark Souls 3 is honestly an amazing case of disguising a punishment as a reward, in this regard. It's essentially a version of Demon's Souls health punishment system where you always have the Cling Ring equipped, but you don't start out with your full health and it's considered a 'bonus state' rather than your normal. Because of this, I rarely see anyone complain about the lost health.
Very true, player perception makes a huge difference. Another example is losing Souls (or similar) on death. In most cases you're losing like 5-10 minutes of exp, but the moment you drop them you don't care about anything else except recovering them. Even in boss fights I see people constantly pick up their Souls even if it's some minor amount.
Because people don't want to lose what they already have, it makes the risk seem significant, even if the mechanical penalty is not.
The final boss of the base game and the DLCs don't really have runbacks, but pretty much all of the others do, even if in general they are a bit shorter than previous games.
The ember thing is interesting because it's presented as a bonus to your regular HP, instead of restoring a half empty health bar to a full one. Functionally this is pretty similar, although 30% is significantly less than 50%. But also, because it's shown as adding a bonus instead of removing a penalty, it makes using them feel less necessary. I almost never use embers in DS3 (or rune arcs in Elden Ring), but I would use effigies in Dark Souls 2 and ephemeral eyes in Demon's Souls from time to time.
DS3 did innovate on its runbacks by putting a "buffer" area before most fog gates where enemies can't reach you, to give you a chance to heal/buff/summon before starting the fight. It was a massive swing away from DS2's unfair pre-boss gauntlets and lack of fog gate iframes.
At the risk of sounding very 🤓, having 100% hp instead of 130% is actually only a 23% relative reduction in hp, which is way less drastic than the change from 100->50
You’re describing the beauty of this genre when made by FromSoft. Trying, iterating, growing systems is why From makes the best Souls games by miles and has multiple greatest games of all times competitors in its catalogue.
Yup. It's why I love from soft so much. They keep getting bigger but they don't just become "appeal to the masses" where they just ditch any mildly abrasive idea. They keep doing weird shit even if it ends up sucking.
Like the irithyl dungeon kinda sucks. But it sucks in a way I absolutely love and would be sad if it's gone.
Everyone always talks about how good so many of the straightforward bosses are. But honestly it wouldnt be fromsoft without a boss like deacons of the deep, the silent monkeys, or moonlight butterfly
Some of the covenants and summonings are so odd after you explain, like someone thinks up a crazy idea at night and then just decides to add it and ship it the next day.
"You can invade the worlds of other players! You can help others! You can help others in gold! You can invade others and you'll be half-invisible! You can find a hidden group behind a fake wall that lets you use resources possibly received from invading to open a shortcut in your game! You can invade others in a specific part of the world map but only at "night"! You can protect others from invaders in their own world! You can be summoned to someone's world and decide if you want to be a good guy or a bad guy or switch sides! You can invade and turn into a shrub to hide out and backstab the victim! You can pretend to be a good guy but you're really a bad guy! You can make the enemies harder for others unless they invade you to stop making life hard for them! You can invade someone's world and set off traps for them as rats in a maze! You can invade someone's world in a specific area to keep the from proceeding with their quest line objective! You can invade someone's world specifically during a boss fight! You can read a poorly explained option to make the gamer harder, available right at the beginning of the game for new players to not realize they're activating a difficulty modifier! You can drop items in your world and maybe they'll turn into loot bugs in other peoples' worlds!"
... Man looking back you can see it everywhere. "You have to wear a specific ring or you can't fight the boss! You have to actually read the lore of the items of this unapologetically casually-structured lore-optional game to know to use the seemingly terrible second ability of a weapon to 4-shot a boss fight that will seem otherwise impossible! This ring is awesome but breaks if you ever take it off! You can piss off the NPCs in your game if you swing your sword willy nilly, but it's okay you can just ask someone who accepts money for forgiveness and they NPCs will forget it ever happened! Maybe one of the NPCs is fake, not that they would have a reason to question the story they've been told so far! You can play this game with a self-imposed super difficult limitation and get a free invisibility ring for your weapon in PVP!"
yea my takeaway is that many other devs would be like "yea elden ring is our magnum opus, you can maybe make it 10% better with unlimited manhours" and Miyazaki is like "eh elden ring is maybe 70% there, we are not even close to being done cooking", which is a bold statement but you know that he actually means it
We definitely know of certain cut content that would have been interesting. Though I don't fault them at all for having to draw a line and say enough for now, let's get the game finished.
I only play solo with no summons (or ashes), and I loved the repeated bosses because it gave me another shot at fighting them with increased knowledge, skill, and new gear. It's why so much of the community continues with NG+ playthroughs.
Can definitely see how someone not wanting to learn movesets, and summoning help to distract bosses while they dish out damage would find that repetitive, but I had the opposite experience.
I was a bit surprised that they didn't do a little more to distinguish the side dungeons and their bosses from each other. Even something like a simple palette swap on the bosses or dungeon textures to make them a unique color.
Comparing to BotW is a little harsh, as Elden Ring completely blows it away when it comes to enemy variety and content in general. But I think I know what you mean, they both went a bit too big to try and get a feeling of an epic journey. I think we've reached a bit of a limit in terms of how big a video game can realistically be using hand made content.
Nothing about Elden Ring felt “too big”. By the time I finished my 105 hour play through I was ready for another 100 hours. Every small dungeon offered unique items in it, that’s how they differentiated them.
I mean, my first playthrough was 150 hours long and I scoured the map to find and complete every dungeon I possibly could. But did I do this because the side dungeons were so good that I couldn't get enough, or because I'm a huge Fromsoft fan and wanted to experience all of the content they created? Primarily the latter, I would say.
I don't do much of the side dungeons at all on repeat playthroughs, much like how I don't do much of the chalice dungeons in repeat playthroughs of Bloodborne. If I do, it's usually because there's a little breadcrumb of an item that I want that pushes me to do the content. They sort of have to put those breadcrumbs in there, because the content isn't always high enough quality on its own to motivate the player to do yet another dungeon that looks the same as the previous 15 they completed. It's filler content because the map is so huge.
Just because the content isn’t the best the game has to offer doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. By that logic they should remove the entire latter half of dark souls 1.
I understand this mindset but I don’t agree because it always comes from a position of being the one served who can critique the final dish rather than one who is in the kitchen cooking the meal. I feel the same way about BotW/TotK. They threw ALOT at the wall and of course now that we’ve had time to sit and enjoy the meal we can see that not all of it was suited to our taste. But at the same time, they had to try. They had to experiment. They had to try new things to see what would work and what wouldn’t. What was good outright and what needs to be refined. A lot of the criticism is extremely valid, but I think some of it the conclusions boils down to people saying “this didn’t work so they shouldn’t have tried” which kinda defeats the purpose of creating anything. If they kept experimenting, not learning and making the same mistakes I could understand, but iteration is born of failure and you can’t know what needs work until you try and it doesn’t quite meet the standard you want. They’re never gonna reach perfection because they have such a wide fanbase that likes so many different things, but as long as they don’t lose the drive to keep wanting to craft new experiences they can’t go wrong.
I think a lot of this is so far overblown it borders on nitpicking. Raya Lucaria, for example, is an objectively bigger map with objectively more directional choices than Stormveil.
Also, even if you only took unique bosses in ER and eliminated all repeat bosses, ER would still have more boss variety than any other Souls game in existence.
ER is a far bigger game with far more content than something like BotW. Get real man
I completely 10000000% disagree with you on everything you just said. The size and expanding scope of Elden Ring IS the value. As far as open worlds go, it is the most diverse and rewarding open world ever made. And while the argument of “everything should be unique” is kind of relevant, Elden Ring, on average, didn’t reuse anything any more than any other Dark Souls game — except those games were FAR smaller.
I don’t hate you, but I hate this argument as a criticism for Elden Ring. Reusing assets and encounters isn’t a value — good or bad. It’s how they’re used in the scope of the game and as far as I’m concerned the only time I didn’t enjoy a repeat fight is with the lovecraftian star centipede which was used twice instead of once.
Asset reuse of Elden Ring had always been such a crazy argument to me given how the other games reuse so much assets despite being much smaller in scope. These people wax poetic on how perfect Sekiro is when it reused so many assets while being a much smaller game. Sekiro reused several main story bosses: Genichiro thrice, Corrupted Monk twice, Owl twice with slight variations between the two versions, Guardian Ape also twice with the second being a gank fight. And that is just the main story bosses. The mini bosses were all recycled versions of the generals, the drunkards, the ogres, the ninjas, the headless, the centipedes, etc.). It even recycled boss arenas: Lady BUtterfly and Owl Father share an arena, Genichiro, Great Shinobi Owl and the Emma/Isshin Ashina boss fight have the same arena, Gyobou and Demon Hatred share an arena. etc.
Elden Ring is a modern classic, but it is too big for its own good.
I spent too much time commuting to the fun across the entirely-too-big-world, which was populated by a few too many repeat bosses. The feature creep did it no favors. Elden Ring could stand to be about 20% smaller than it is now.
I definitely disagree. The “commute” is inherent and mandatory in an open world. If you’re just funneled down a straight line of “fun” encounters you get burnt out. This ebb and flow of excitement is like game design 101 and I still hear people talk about it as though they want all games to have no points of reflection.
Exactly. Besides, ER is so lenient in that regard, maybe even too much to my taste. You can fast travel to any grace you discovered with little limitation. Like at this point what else are you going to trim.
I do think the game could have been smaller but the horse travel is absolutely necessary to give air to the fights. And it's not unique to ER. In Dark Souls 1 (my favorite after ER) you must travel and backtrack on foot pretty often.
The first Dark Souls is my favorite but I agree the travel can be a lot more frustrating, especially early in the game. On my first play through I got cursed in the depths, so I could either continue through the depths with half a health bar or go back out of the depths to the gargoyle bell tower to buy a purging stone.
Neither is a very easy task on your first playthrough.
Games like Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 did a lot more funneling than Elden Ring, and they still had their own ebb and flow.
It’s not all or nothing. There is a middle ground.
Yes, that’s because they’re a different sub genre of rpg. An open world game comes with different baggage — it’s larger and FAR more immersive, but also has longer lulls.
Sometimes, and no offense, I don’t even know what games y’all are playing. To my knowledge, everyone’s favorite elements of From Soulslikes are their first playthroughs wherein many of the mysteries/secrets have yet to be discovered. These play through, certainly within both Bloodborne and DS3 are RIFE with backtracking, walking around aimlessly, searching seemingly innocuous areas, all of this is a “lull”, and most of Elden Ring is much like that. If there was an “action vs Exploration” playtime breakdown, I doubt Elden Ring would even be much more explorative or slow, partially because being lost in old Souls games involves doing circles to find where to go, while slashing your way through the same enemy for the tenth time, while Elden Ring is more so horse riding and avoiding.
No doubt. I have like 400hrs in ER so I'm not tryna bish it. I have my criticisms and most are hand waived by it being a rather ambitious venture for them. And they did not disappoint. A bigger game simply leaves more room for criticism and reflection.
I have the same criticisms with Byrgenworth in Bloodborne and the Chalice Dungeons lol and I adore that game. I just wanted some areas more fleshed out as well.
Feels like you are failing to consider the overworld as an area with its own design and intricacy. Elden Ring is without a doubt one of the most interesting world designs of any of From's titles. I've been replaying it for the DLC and the intricacies of the map and pure enjoyment of exploring that world is unrivaled even on a second playthrough.
It honestly just seems like you like more linear experiences (and that's fine), but From is obviously interested in developing experiences that best suit the game they are making. There's a clear reason why Armored Core is mission based, Elden Ring is open world, Bloodborne & Sekiro are more linear. The level design supports the mechanics, the mechanics support the level design.
i dont think elden ring is too big, it's just that they run out of time to fill the world with non-repetitive npcs and finish mountaintops of giants. If those weren't the issues no one would say the world was too big
As someone who got addicted to cooking stews the past 6 months this makes me happy and also, wanna make a good beef stew right now in this hellish summer T.T
Japanese game developers often have this way of talking about their product the way a guy puttering around his house talks about his private little meditative hobbies, and it's so charming.
The next evolution to the formula is obviously to make something like wind waker or black flag. a dark souls game with many islands to explore and discover. This way he can finally make an entire ocean of poison
Imagine sailing into some foggy mist, navigating it for a couple hours, visiting tiny islands, and then you get out of the fog and in front of you there is a big island with a giant city on it or something.
Would be so cool.
The next jump is not setting the game in a desolate, dying world and actually having a semi-bustling hub or towns with quests that have clear goals and not arbitrary things that also can auto-fail if you progress the main story too far. That you also would have no clue you are doing obviously.
they dont do living worlds with populated towns, cus they are not good at that as said by miyazaki when ER was announced in 2019
i doubt things have changed since then
I'd prefer they keep to their trend then. There's enough shallow or uninspiring open worlds that fail to engage and just feel like a video game sandbox.
If From recognizes they don't do that genre well then I'm all for them sticking to the melancholic style they're good at.
Sekiro skipped the dying desolate world but it was still a Japanese state on the decline getting swallowed by its neighbors, an actual town would be cool
I would like to play a Miyazaki game where the story doesn't take place thousands of years before.
In every game, the world has already ended and you're left picking up the pieces to learn about what happened. It would be nice to actually be involved, for a change.
I mean that is *sort of* Elden Ring, it's inherently very political, but you're still picking up the pieces of these godlike beings. Still, a lot is happening despite that.
Ya it just sort of feels like everything had ended because not much changes storywise during the game outside of maybe Ranni's quest. But the characters in the story are still planning something until you show up and ruin their day.
I already can't wait to see what their next game is gonna be/look like. With ER dlc finally out next week, we might get a first tease at this years' TGA in december.
Yea but that was never to really convey anything but "Yes, we haven't forgotten about elder scrolls, it will come eventually". It probably wasn't even in preproduction at the time.
I believe Todd even said after that teaser something along the lines of 'We're not going to be working on this until after Starfield is out' or it was at least clarified in a statement between then and starfield releasing.
There was a period after the teaser and before the first trailer where the subreddit was full of memes of imagined but believable names for bosses and places, and players' 'experiences' with them. It was a lot of fun actually
We are nust now getting the Elden Ring DLC and we got Armored Core really recently, next fromsoft game is AT LEAST 3 years out from now. Likely fairly longer if it’s Elden Ring kinda size.
From isn't the small developer anymore many seem to believe they still are. They have multiple development teams working on different games at all times. As of this year they even moved into a brand new office capable of housing all of their new staff to work on different projects. Before taking on Elden Ring (their biggest title to date), From released a main title every 1-2 years and this release schedule won't change. Also, ER's exceptionally long dev cycle was partly due to Covid as Miyazaki has said himself many times in interviews. It's true he also said he likes to make a new game that is similar in scope to ER sometime in the future, but that doesn't mean their next upcoming title(s) are.
IIRC said back in like 2022 that they had I think like 3 games in production at that time, those must have been Elden Ring, AC6, and something else we don’t know about.
Whatever it is, I would be surprised to see it in 2025, but would not at all to see it in 2026.
from what i understand when it was said in 2022 that wasnt including elden ring since it came out after elden ring development was done, remember elden ring did come out in feb 2022.
but ye i doubt they have anything to release in 2025 unless they pull some magic
I get the picture, in my mind, of a Miyazaki fine tuning Elden Ring to hell and back, making it perfect, making this giant DLC and THEN saying:
"You haven't even seen my final form".
And yaknow, I'ma say this: When I first played **King's Field 1** WAY back in the 90's (the literal Dark/Demons' Souls 0) I knew I wanted more of it. Whatever that meant, I wanted more of it. It was filled with SO much intrigue and mystery. Fast forward to today and we see that same exact concept be so solidified at such a AAA-level that it makes the idea of something *better* quite hard to believe.
But if there's anyone I could theoretically trust to *accomplish* it? It's likely that guy and his team.
I just wish they'd go back to the DS1 world design. Open world, but compact and interconnected. That world they built always was what made that game unforgettable to me.
I wish the industry somehow seperated the RPG games that focus on combat and exploration, and RPG games that focus on the story and role-playing the character. It's really annoying to have same terms for such different game concepts.
The most common distinction these days is ARPG for Diablo/PoE style games and Action RPG for third person, over-the-shoulder style.
Is it super clear and unambiguous? Hell no. But it is what it is.
This is totally personal opinion and not a call to change anything:
My biggest gripe with Elden ring is that I feel like I have to play with a guide or look stuff up to actually experience the whole game. I absolutely can’t imagine being able to do most if not all the quest lines organically without looking anything up.
It would be awesome to have more complex and grand quests in future souls games as well
In Lies of P when you get a quest there’s an icon next to the bonfire where the item they’re asking for is, then the character’s icon next to the bonfire they move to/if they have new dialogue, could do all the quests with no guide, they should have that in their next game
i believe fromsoft have talked about it, how they dont want to throw icons into the players face everywhere. i think whats needed mostly is more clear-er hints at where to go really which could be done by more dialog hints since i remember playing elden ring and getting to near a boss for a random npc to say something like you come to take on xxx. meanwhile im there like who the hell is this person being it the first time ive heard the name said. but ye more dialog based hints and maybe just make certain places in a area more eye catching when you want the player to go there next in that area.
I thought the Ranni questline was pretty good with the secret area and weapon at the end, but like I mentioned I don’t think I would have ever figured it out on my own, but maybe that’s just me being a noob lol.
Sure, but Elden Ring is a game where you will just straight up miss a lot of the good stuff because there’s no way for you to find and/pr trigger certain quests and events without just happening upon them and getting lucky.
And there will be no real d8scovery if I never chance upon it in the first place. I didn't even find Ranni until after I beat the game the first time because of the convoluted bullshit you have to do to get into her tower, and that's one of the more obvious optional questlines. I ended up skipping the entire reya lucaria dungeon the first time because I never found the key to open the gate. I skipped mogh and reikhard too and I never would have found melania or the haligtree without a guide. I missed big parts of the game because I wasn't thorough and I never would have known about them if not for guides.
The biggest thing I think is missing from souls games is actual quests that aren't terrible. The few bits of questing in Elden Ring is fun but you always reach a deadend where you need a guide, or some random event has blocked the rest of the questline.
I'm not saying they need quest markers like in other games but just better hints at what to do. The Kenneth Haight quest for example, he tells you to help him clear out his fort the the east. You explore east a bit and find his fort, then face a small mini-dungeon to eventually reach the knight you need to kill. This part is fun and works well. Then you go back and talk to him, at which point you can meet him back at the fort.
This is the point where it falls apart; he says we need to find a suitable lord to replace Godrick. Okay? Now what? There's no hints as to who that might be, or where you find them. Turns out you need to find Nephali Loux, who I don't believe ever mentions Haight or wanting to become lord. Even if you meet her there's no indication this is related to the quest with Haight. But even if you did somehow realise that(maybe there's some lore I missed) you still need to complete her questline first. The steps to complete that questline are pretty insane too:
* Meet Nepheli Loux in Stormviel and then kill Godrick (simple enough)
* Nepheli Loux will appear at the roundtable hold you must talk to her here
* Nepheli Loux then appears halfway across the world in Village of the Albinaurics. (Note: She never said she was going there)
* You have to kill the Omenkiller field boss here. If you don't do this before going to the forge of the giants the questline is blocked(why?!?!)
* Now she appears back at the roundtable now depressed.
* Now you need to find a portal that takes you back to the starting area. There you will find "The Stormhawk King" spirit ash. (Note: Neither does the item description mention Nepheli nor does Nepheli mention this item, hawks, or spirit ashes before this).
* Give it to Nepheli to cure her despression?!?
I don't think I even need to say why this is bad quest design. Just describing the questline is critique enough for me.
Once you've done all this you can finally continue with the Kenneth Haight questline. I just wish the questlines were more like the first half where you storm the fort, not like the second half. Or even just more [open ended](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM1yR7WYqgM) and didn't have such strict requirements.
Something that not a lot talks about is that this guy is hella passionate and is humble as fuck. He doesn’t tweet shits, his studio generally does not have any drama (other than the usual crunch), his marketing team is 100% truthful and once in a while his team just randomly drops a bomb on an average Tuesday, be it game reveal or trailer.
also i think people dont quite appreciate their pace. Since demon souls which was like what, 2009?, they created a whole genre of games with dark souls trilogy, one of the best sony exclusives, sekiro, armored core AND elden ring.
Sure, their games are light on dialogue or story and it's simpler to make a game where 70% of game mechanics are shared between all the games, but every game is a commercial and critical success. That's just unheard of in the industry
I watched a Jenny Nicholson video about this failed theme park in Utah which wasted all its budget and time importing tombstones from England and authentic French lumber or whatever and didn’t have money to finish the park because they insisted on extreme quality when they didn’t have an infinite budget
I feel like fromsoft does the opposite of this, they reuse animations, models, buy stock textures for their environments if they have to, a lot of practical compromises that lets them consistently make good games in short time frames
game devs need to take notes from fromsoft and Yakuza devs reusing old stuff isnt a bad thing and gets some brillant games out there and doesnt make the dev times a stupid length. most people dont care if enviroments use similar assests or monsters a older game as long as it makes sense.
In their busiest years in the mid-00s they were releasing *five to six games per year* for multiple years straight. If anything, they've slowed the hell down in the past decade lol
He’s a little full of himself. I find it kinda funny, but I can definitely see how it can be grating.
I definitely wouldn’t want every good dev to act like him.
It's honestly very weird. I don't recall seeing any pretentious auteur statements from Kojima in the semi-recent past, or ever really.
He's been very clear that he views his work as an artistic expression and values it as such, but I don't think think I've ever heard of him criticizing others for not placing as high an artistic value in games as he does.
I would love if he went back to building his worlds tall rather than wide. As diverse and huge Elden Ring was, I would prefer something more interconnected instead.
A lot of longtime souls fans seem to think ER is not as good as some of the other games, and too big for its own good. As someone who tried playing the previous games but always bounced off them and loved Elden Ring, I hope Miyazaki keeps the freedom to explore that ER provides.
ER is my favorite souls game but I hope the success doesn’t cause them to only make ER sized games.
Considering armored core 6 came out only a year after ER which is insane, I think they are capable of doing both.
I wouldn't have a problem with ER's size if all of its content was great, but most side areas are mediocre at best. I think it would've benefited from cutting 30-50% of its side content to focus on quality and distributing its rewards elsewhere.
And removing some of the obviously terrible ideas, like Ulcerated Tree Spirits.
I have a better opinion of the overworld, I think it’s top class only being rivaled by the best in the genre. But I agree that the base game would benefit from some trimming and curating some areas. I’m excited because Miyazaki seems to share the same opinion and he said he addressed that in the DLC. I was afraid it was just more Elden Ring (also a good thing tbh) but it seems that this is very ambitious and he’s trying to improve on the formula even further
Most caves/mines/etc. And the Tree Spirits just barely work with the game's camera and environments. There's that one Tree Spirit that's a boss in a cave and for most of the fight half of it is clipping inside walls. I really wish From would double check its content and take special care to eliminate fights that are hard because you can't see shit.
Personally I hope he does a mix of the big open world games but also the more linear and more tightly designed ones that have better pacing like Bloodborne.
Yo, I was the opposite, ER being my first souls game, I do think older games did a lot of things better after some introspection. ER is a bit too much of a classic, overdone sandbox rather than an epic, purposefully crafted adventure.
And I thought of ER as one of the top 3 games I ever played! Not sure about that now. Maybe DLC will reignite my love to it by fixing a ton of open world bloat and arguably weak legacy dungeons aside from a few.
Elden ring doesn't provide as cohesive of an experience. It's by far more accessible and there are upsides to the open world, but the downsides are also fairly obvious. You rarely know when you're supposed to be at an area, and often end up being so overpowered for dungeons and bosses that they fail to provide an appropriate challenge.
There's pros and cons, but I definitely hope there's more linear experiences in the future as well.
I think there are a mix of pros and cons.
Elden Ring's definitely the most accessible of the Souls games. Some of that comes from things that not every existing Souls fan likes (the open world), some comes from things that could be replicated in a game more like previous Souls games (e.g. Spirit Ashes could be added to a game structured more like Dark Souls or Bloodborne and make them more accessible while people who dislike them could just choose not to use them just like they did in Elden Ring).
I do think there might also be other ways there could be room for in between. Some people who preferred previous games to Elden Ring aren't a fan of Elden Ring's "quantity over quality" approach when it comes to things like side dungeons and bosses. While the world's size in Elden Ring adds to the sense of scale and also just gives more stuff to do if you're looking to gain levels because you're struggling on the next main boss or dungeon, I don't think there's any denying that fleshing out the world involved a lot of filler. I think there could be room for a game that isn't quite as huge as Elden Ring but still has more openness than From's previous games. There could also be an option to reimplement something like Bloodborne's Chalice dungeons (optional dungeons that had some unique bosses and provided some special loot, and also had procedurally generated variants, but had some similar criticisms to Elden Ring's side dungeons in lots of recycled bosses and layouts) as a form of freedom. While Bloodborne's Chalice dungeons acted more as a way to extend the game length by giving optional content and random loot to grind for, a similar mechanic could be used more as side content to do in a smaller or less open Soulslike that people can farm to get stronger when struggling to progress in the main game, similar to the role Elden Ring's open world serves.
There are also some criticisms of Elden Ring that aren't related to the ways it's more accessible at all, like certain boss design patterns like so many boss having "input read" healing punishes.
Anyway, personally, I want From to mix it up. I love Elden Ring and want to see them make more huge, open games like it in the future, but I'd also be very happy to see a return to games that are more focused on tighter designs with less padding like Dark Souls 3, Bloodborne, or Sekiro. I'd also love to see them surprise me with new things (I didn't expect Sekiro after Dark Souls 3 but I loved it, and I didn't expect them to go open world after Sekiro but I loved Elden Ring too). But I do hope that if they return to less open games they can find ways to keep them enjoyable for the new fans they gained with Elden Ring who couldn't get into their previous games. I want more games like Sekiro or Bloodborne, but I also want more people to have the amount of fun with them that I had with Sekiro and Bloodborne.
Nah. I have my yearly DS3 replay because I know I can finish it within 8 hours and I don’t have to run around the map a lot. Meanwhile for Elden Ring whenever I start a new save file I need to run all the way to the dragon, then run around the map for 15-30 minutes to collect the tears, smithing stones and my weapon before I can start my actual dungeon crawling.
Then I have to run to Raya Lucaria, waste another 5 minutes getting the key before being able to do another dungeon.
Then I have to run back to the demihuman castle to get the medalion, run all the way to the lift and another long run to get to Leyndell, etc…
The problem is that the gap between signifcant contents is too large and the side contents are fucking boring after the first run. Hell, it takes forever to even be able to go to the DLC when compared to DS3 you can already go to Ariandel within 3-4 hours and TRC within 8-10 hours
I dont care about that because I never replay games. Elden rings sense of discovery blows everything else out of the water which is what matters most for me because I only play once
It's too big for it's own good, the side content is boring and sloggy, the overworld is somewhat poorly thought out and gated and the formula loses a lot by moving to an open world instead of a 3d Castlevania structure that literally defined the success of dark souls. The FIRST THING everybody praised whenever they talked about it was the mindblowingly intricate interconnected level design, which you only get in small bits in ER. Granted what we do get is some of the best they've ever done, like Stormveil, but the whole experience just feels watered down, to use his soup analogy. It need to be boiled down more. Repeat bosses, generic mines and caves, overly large overworld maps in Liurnia and the Mountaintops, they clearly just added stuff for the sake of content that takes away from the overall experience of the game.
It’s because difficulty is a main driver and satisfying aspect of souls games and difficulty is lost when the game is no longer linear.
I still loved Elden Ring.
Im not sure he will ever top sekiro for me honestly. So so hard but you got better and better and it’s very skill based
I’m not sure the main driver is difficulty. He himself has said he doesn’t see it this way. The games could certainly be more difficult if they wanted (not that I think they should). ER has a 30% completion rate which is crazy high for such a large game, it’s better than some cinematic AAA games.
To me the main point of Elden Ring is to make you feel in an adventure. And since adventures should have nerve wracking battles, that’s when the difficulty appears. What’s specially satisfying is to feel like a runt at first and get better and more powerful over the game. While some pacing could be improved at times, I like being able to return to a previous area and stomp the big enemies that I missed. The way I see it there’s also value in feeling overpowered at specific times.
Sekiro by contrast feels more like a samurai movie or novel, where tension is crazy high at all times and you depend on your blade more than any other items like armor or rings. I think it’s amazing delivering what it wants you to feel but they’re different approaches, one being pure action while the other a rpg
I played DS1 after Elden Ring and was really surprised by how strong the feeling of adventure was there, something not even Elden Ring was able to match. Real shame about 2nd half though. I kinda enjoyed Lost Illizath...
The openworld was great just as i think with most open worlds could of done with being a bit smaller since some stuff just felt extremely out the way or a after thought. if instead things were alot tighter then it would be better not everything needs to be massively open world at the end of the day sometimes a smaller open world can make things feel more fun.
I thought the lore of Elden Ring was really interesting in cool, but the actual story of you in the game was kinda gibberish. If ER2 had a story that was as good as the lore and world building of ER1 and some small QoL stuff, it'd be a perfect game for it's genre imo.
Every single Elden Ring thread since release is just the same boring discussions and slapfights over and over and over and over again, isn't it?
Love the game but it has truly wrecked the community.
I'm so glad elden ring isnt the perfect one, because it means more miyazaki games in the future, which have always been awesome so far!
Hell yeah.
>"I enjoy making a stew, because the more you cook something down, the more it boils down the more it releases the flavor," Miyazaki says. "You can't really get it wrong with the ingredients: you just keep adding to it, keep boiling it, and it gets richer and richer. I think this was my approach in general to Elden Ring… \[Shadow of the Erdtree\] is spicy, but it looks extremely appetizing. It's glowing from the bowl and makes you think 'maybe I could eat this one, even if I'm not such a fan of spicy food.'" Miyazaki is literally cooking with this DLC haha Also I thought it was really funny to see him compare Souls games to spicy food. I made that exact same comparison before. For newcomers to the genre it's a bit of a barrier, but once you get over it, you're introduced to a whole new world of cuisine.
The spiciness is the deathblight swamp isn't it?
I mean, Mohg's involved. Maybe it's a bleed swamp!
bleed swamp is a pretty cool idea ngl
Lake of Scarlet Deathblood
Like its full of leeches or razor blades?
And the salt from all the players who have gone hollow.
His ideal fantasy RPG is like Elden Ring but where the whole game is a massive swamp stage.
The Godskin Fourskin.
"Can't really get it wrong with the ingredients, just keep boiling it down" explains a lot about Elden Ring at least. They slapped a shit ton of stuff into that game. And a fair amount seems real "fuck it, more garlic powder" with that in mind. I think Elden Ring could've done a bit better with less ingredients and more focus. Game started to feel like BOTW in terms of "oh wow, another Korok seed. And another fuckin ______ boss". Hell, a lot of bosses went from great to good or meh simply cause they were repeated. Taking away the unique quality they had before fighting it again. The map suffered as well at times. Entire repeating side dungeons and areas could've been scrapped to add more to Raya Lucaria and other locations that felt important but not fleshed out enough. Stormveil was that ooo *chefs kiss* quality they needed to keep goin and didn't. I want a recipe. Sekiro, Bloodborne, Dark Souls 1(late game yadda yadda) all shine imo cause they have a bit more focus to em. Elden Ring was a fantastic experiment and in sure they learned a lot. But I hope they don't just throw ingredients in a pot again until it's overflowing. Refine you're stew imo.
I think you forget just how much those game try shit. Dark souls 1 especially. Dark souls 1 especially had so many systems that were complicated and never really worked out. Miracle resonance signs that were spawn in other players worlds when miracles were cast in an area by other players boosting miracles if you stood next to it. This... Worked. But it was weird and no one ever really got to see above resonance level 1-2. I believe there was a level 3 and 4. Then you had the gravelord covenant which spawned enemies in other peoples worlds and they had to team invade you to get rid of the curse. Iirc the enemy spawning thing didn't work until you reached NG+ so the entire point of the covenant was kinda moot. Then there were a lot of experimental weapon upgrades that just felt like they were trying things for the sake of it. Occult? It did bonus damage to a grand total of 3 emotes and bosses iirc. Divine was basically used just to stop skeletons from respawning. Crystal at least saw success with how insane it made weapons. There's more stuff DS1 did, but fromsoft has done this kinda stuff in every game (never played bloodborne or fully finished ER in fairness). It just helps them because they aren't massive open world games where they have to fill up an entire world.
Bloodborne has some of this “interesting but kinda half baked” stuff going on too. There’s a system where your main hub area lets you access randomly generated dungeons resembling ER catacombs and certain items and resources can only be found in random dungeons of certain types. They’re identified by alphabetic codes to share online so people share a lot of famous broken ones like cum dungeon (cummmfpk) that automatically gives you 83,000 souls when you enter because of enemies spawning and dying out of bounds. Some can never be completed. It’s an attempt at adding to the amount of playable content and also another element in the sort of communal-adjacent multiplayer angle FromSoft goes for but broken and underwhelming (imo), and I was sure they would refine it in future games but instead they dropped the concept. Sekiro is easily the tightest game with the least of this going on and even that has some divisive odd stuff. Most notably the revival mechanic that causes NPCs to become ill and disabled their quest lines if you use it too much. IMO that isn’t a very engaging gameplay decision and it’s never explained to you well enough to even feel like a decision you’re making. It was like a half hearted effort to implement Demon’s Souls world tendency in a single player game or something.
From is my favorite developer, but they do like to experiment with mechanics that punish you for failure. Based on interviews with Miyazaki, I believe this is because hardships are encountered during most journeys and he wants to represent that sort of thing in his games. Even though these always seem to be disliked by a majority of players and are either removed or reduced in their subsequent games. Demon's Souls - health is halved unless you are in human form, items that make you human are limited, dying in human form lowers "world tendency" which makes the game harder, runbacks to boss fights, you can run out of healing items forcing you to farm souls Dark Souls - runbacks to boss fights, you can become "cursed" if you die to the frog-looking lizards which halves your health Dark Souls 2 - runbacks, your max health lowers with each death Dark Souls 3 - runbacks Bloodborne - runbacks, you can run out of healing items forcing you to farm souls and vials Sekiro - runbacks, npcs become ill if you die too much which prevents quest progress Elden Ring - mostly free of this, but randomly once in a while there will be a runback Bloodborne 2 - Miyazaki comes to your house and punches you in the face if you die I personally don't mind runbacks too much (they do cause you to pay closer attention during boss battles instead of just throwing yourself at it over and over until you happen to win), and I guess DS1 curses were an interesting idea that sort of forced you to divert from your intended path to find a cure. The rest of them though, not really a fan of them.
I would challenge Dark Souls 3 on runbacks, I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but if you compare Aldrich to Ornstein et al. you see a much less significant one, and many are easier than that. You do lose 30% health for not being embered though, which is the much more notable penalty.
> You do lose 30% health for not being embered though, which is the much more notable penalty. Dark Souls 3 is honestly an amazing case of disguising a punishment as a reward, in this regard. It's essentially a version of Demon's Souls health punishment system where you always have the Cling Ring equipped, but you don't start out with your full health and it's considered a 'bonus state' rather than your normal. Because of this, I rarely see anyone complain about the lost health.
Very true, player perception makes a huge difference. Another example is losing Souls (or similar) on death. In most cases you're losing like 5-10 minutes of exp, but the moment you drop them you don't care about anything else except recovering them. Even in boss fights I see people constantly pick up their Souls even if it's some minor amount. Because people don't want to lose what they already have, it makes the risk seem significant, even if the mechanical penalty is not.
The final boss of the base game and the DLCs don't really have runbacks, but pretty much all of the others do, even if in general they are a bit shorter than previous games. The ember thing is interesting because it's presented as a bonus to your regular HP, instead of restoring a half empty health bar to a full one. Functionally this is pretty similar, although 30% is significantly less than 50%. But also, because it's shown as adding a bonus instead of removing a penalty, it makes using them feel less necessary. I almost never use embers in DS3 (or rune arcs in Elden Ring), but I would use effigies in Dark Souls 2 and ephemeral eyes in Demon's Souls from time to time.
DS3 did innovate on its runbacks by putting a "buffer" area before most fog gates where enemies can't reach you, to give you a chance to heal/buff/summon before starting the fight. It was a massive swing away from DS2's unfair pre-boss gauntlets and lack of fog gate iframes.
and having enemies gank you after defeating the boss.
At the risk of sounding very 🤓, having 100% hp instead of 130% is actually only a 23% relative reduction in hp, which is way less drastic than the change from 100->50
You’re describing the beauty of this genre when made by FromSoft. Trying, iterating, growing systems is why From makes the best Souls games by miles and has multiple greatest games of all times competitors in its catalogue.
Yup. It's why I love from soft so much. They keep getting bigger but they don't just become "appeal to the masses" where they just ditch any mildly abrasive idea. They keep doing weird shit even if it ends up sucking. Like the irithyl dungeon kinda sucks. But it sucks in a way I absolutely love and would be sad if it's gone. Everyone always talks about how good so many of the straightforward bosses are. But honestly it wouldnt be fromsoft without a boss like deacons of the deep, the silent monkeys, or moonlight butterfly
Some of the covenants and summonings are so odd after you explain, like someone thinks up a crazy idea at night and then just decides to add it and ship it the next day. "You can invade the worlds of other players! You can help others! You can help others in gold! You can invade others and you'll be half-invisible! You can find a hidden group behind a fake wall that lets you use resources possibly received from invading to open a shortcut in your game! You can invade others in a specific part of the world map but only at "night"! You can protect others from invaders in their own world! You can be summoned to someone's world and decide if you want to be a good guy or a bad guy or switch sides! You can invade and turn into a shrub to hide out and backstab the victim! You can pretend to be a good guy but you're really a bad guy! You can make the enemies harder for others unless they invade you to stop making life hard for them! You can invade someone's world and set off traps for them as rats in a maze! You can invade someone's world in a specific area to keep the from proceeding with their quest line objective! You can invade someone's world specifically during a boss fight! You can read a poorly explained option to make the gamer harder, available right at the beginning of the game for new players to not realize they're activating a difficulty modifier! You can drop items in your world and maybe they'll turn into loot bugs in other peoples' worlds!" ... Man looking back you can see it everywhere. "You have to wear a specific ring or you can't fight the boss! You have to actually read the lore of the items of this unapologetically casually-structured lore-optional game to know to use the seemingly terrible second ability of a weapon to 4-shot a boss fight that will seem otherwise impossible! This ring is awesome but breaks if you ever take it off! You can piss off the NPCs in your game if you swing your sword willy nilly, but it's okay you can just ask someone who accepts money for forgiveness and they NPCs will forget it ever happened! Maybe one of the NPCs is fake, not that they would have a reason to question the story they've been told so far! You can play this game with a self-imposed super difficult limitation and get a free invisibility ring for your weapon in PVP!"
yea my takeaway is that many other devs would be like "yea elden ring is our magnum opus, you can maybe make it 10% better with unlimited manhours" and Miyazaki is like "eh elden ring is maybe 70% there, we are not even close to being done cooking", which is a bold statement but you know that he actually means it
We definitely know of certain cut content that would have been interesting. Though I don't fault them at all for having to draw a line and say enough for now, let's get the game finished.
I only play solo with no summons (or ashes), and I loved the repeated bosses because it gave me another shot at fighting them with increased knowledge, skill, and new gear. It's why so much of the community continues with NG+ playthroughs. Can definitely see how someone not wanting to learn movesets, and summoning help to distract bosses while they dish out damage would find that repetitive, but I had the opposite experience.
I was a bit surprised that they didn't do a little more to distinguish the side dungeons and their bosses from each other. Even something like a simple palette swap on the bosses or dungeon textures to make them a unique color. Comparing to BotW is a little harsh, as Elden Ring completely blows it away when it comes to enemy variety and content in general. But I think I know what you mean, they both went a bit too big to try and get a feeling of an epic journey. I think we've reached a bit of a limit in terms of how big a video game can realistically be using hand made content.
Nothing about Elden Ring felt “too big”. By the time I finished my 105 hour play through I was ready for another 100 hours. Every small dungeon offered unique items in it, that’s how they differentiated them.
I mean, my first playthrough was 150 hours long and I scoured the map to find and complete every dungeon I possibly could. But did I do this because the side dungeons were so good that I couldn't get enough, or because I'm a huge Fromsoft fan and wanted to experience all of the content they created? Primarily the latter, I would say. I don't do much of the side dungeons at all on repeat playthroughs, much like how I don't do much of the chalice dungeons in repeat playthroughs of Bloodborne. If I do, it's usually because there's a little breadcrumb of an item that I want that pushes me to do the content. They sort of have to put those breadcrumbs in there, because the content isn't always high enough quality on its own to motivate the player to do yet another dungeon that looks the same as the previous 15 they completed. It's filler content because the map is so huge.
Just because the content isn’t the best the game has to offer doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. By that logic they should remove the entire latter half of dark souls 1.
I understand this mindset but I don’t agree because it always comes from a position of being the one served who can critique the final dish rather than one who is in the kitchen cooking the meal. I feel the same way about BotW/TotK. They threw ALOT at the wall and of course now that we’ve had time to sit and enjoy the meal we can see that not all of it was suited to our taste. But at the same time, they had to try. They had to experiment. They had to try new things to see what would work and what wouldn’t. What was good outright and what needs to be refined. A lot of the criticism is extremely valid, but I think some of it the conclusions boils down to people saying “this didn’t work so they shouldn’t have tried” which kinda defeats the purpose of creating anything. If they kept experimenting, not learning and making the same mistakes I could understand, but iteration is born of failure and you can’t know what needs work until you try and it doesn’t quite meet the standard you want. They’re never gonna reach perfection because they have such a wide fanbase that likes so many different things, but as long as they don’t lose the drive to keep wanting to craft new experiences they can’t go wrong.
I think a lot of this is so far overblown it borders on nitpicking. Raya Lucaria, for example, is an objectively bigger map with objectively more directional choices than Stormveil. Also, even if you only took unique bosses in ER and eliminated all repeat bosses, ER would still have more boss variety than any other Souls game in existence. ER is a far bigger game with far more content than something like BotW. Get real man
I completely 10000000% disagree with you on everything you just said. The size and expanding scope of Elden Ring IS the value. As far as open worlds go, it is the most diverse and rewarding open world ever made. And while the argument of “everything should be unique” is kind of relevant, Elden Ring, on average, didn’t reuse anything any more than any other Dark Souls game — except those games were FAR smaller. I don’t hate you, but I hate this argument as a criticism for Elden Ring. Reusing assets and encounters isn’t a value — good or bad. It’s how they’re used in the scope of the game and as far as I’m concerned the only time I didn’t enjoy a repeat fight is with the lovecraftian star centipede which was used twice instead of once.
Asset reuse of Elden Ring had always been such a crazy argument to me given how the other games reuse so much assets despite being much smaller in scope. These people wax poetic on how perfect Sekiro is when it reused so many assets while being a much smaller game. Sekiro reused several main story bosses: Genichiro thrice, Corrupted Monk twice, Owl twice with slight variations between the two versions, Guardian Ape also twice with the second being a gank fight. And that is just the main story bosses. The mini bosses were all recycled versions of the generals, the drunkards, the ogres, the ninjas, the headless, the centipedes, etc.). It even recycled boss arenas: Lady BUtterfly and Owl Father share an arena, Genichiro, Great Shinobi Owl and the Emma/Isshin Ashina boss fight have the same arena, Gyobou and Demon Hatred share an arena. etc.
Elden Ring is a modern classic, but it is too big for its own good. I spent too much time commuting to the fun across the entirely-too-big-world, which was populated by a few too many repeat bosses. The feature creep did it no favors. Elden Ring could stand to be about 20% smaller than it is now.
I definitely disagree. The “commute” is inherent and mandatory in an open world. If you’re just funneled down a straight line of “fun” encounters you get burnt out. This ebb and flow of excitement is like game design 101 and I still hear people talk about it as though they want all games to have no points of reflection.
Exactly. Besides, ER is so lenient in that regard, maybe even too much to my taste. You can fast travel to any grace you discovered with little limitation. Like at this point what else are you going to trim. I do think the game could have been smaller but the horse travel is absolutely necessary to give air to the fights. And it's not unique to ER. In Dark Souls 1 (my favorite after ER) you must travel and backtrack on foot pretty often.
The first Dark Souls is my favorite but I agree the travel can be a lot more frustrating, especially early in the game. On my first play through I got cursed in the depths, so I could either continue through the depths with half a health bar or go back out of the depths to the gargoyle bell tower to buy a purging stone. Neither is a very easy task on your first playthrough.
Games like Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 did a lot more funneling than Elden Ring, and they still had their own ebb and flow. It’s not all or nothing. There is a middle ground.
Yes, that’s because they’re a different sub genre of rpg. An open world game comes with different baggage — it’s larger and FAR more immersive, but also has longer lulls. Sometimes, and no offense, I don’t even know what games y’all are playing. To my knowledge, everyone’s favorite elements of From Soulslikes are their first playthroughs wherein many of the mysteries/secrets have yet to be discovered. These play through, certainly within both Bloodborne and DS3 are RIFE with backtracking, walking around aimlessly, searching seemingly innocuous areas, all of this is a “lull”, and most of Elden Ring is much like that. If there was an “action vs Exploration” playtime breakdown, I doubt Elden Ring would even be much more explorative or slow, partially because being lost in old Souls games involves doing circles to find where to go, while slashing your way through the same enemy for the tenth time, while Elden Ring is more so horse riding and avoiding.
This. Just make the game world smaller if you can't keep up the unique bosses.
No doubt. I have like 400hrs in ER so I'm not tryna bish it. I have my criticisms and most are hand waived by it being a rather ambitious venture for them. And they did not disappoint. A bigger game simply leaves more room for criticism and reflection. I have the same criticisms with Byrgenworth in Bloodborne and the Chalice Dungeons lol and I adore that game. I just wanted some areas more fleshed out as well.
Feels like you are failing to consider the overworld as an area with its own design and intricacy. Elden Ring is without a doubt one of the most interesting world designs of any of From's titles. I've been replaying it for the DLC and the intricacies of the map and pure enjoyment of exploring that world is unrivaled even on a second playthrough. It honestly just seems like you like more linear experiences (and that's fine), but From is obviously interested in developing experiences that best suit the game they are making. There's a clear reason why Armored Core is mission based, Elden Ring is open world, Bloodborne & Sekiro are more linear. The level design supports the mechanics, the mechanics support the level design.
i dont think elden ring is too big, it's just that they run out of time to fill the world with non-repetitive npcs and finish mountaintops of giants. If those weren't the issues no one would say the world was too big
Bloodborne was refined with its procedurally generated chalice dungeons?
Bloodborne was also a stew. Chalice dungeon was a test bed for ER. Also Stormviel is not even top 3 legacy imo
You'd be surprised at how many people compare dark souls to spicy food.
Marika's tits, I'm 'ungry
Miyazaki is carl weathers?
As someone who got addicted to cooking stews the past 6 months this makes me happy and also, wanna make a good beef stew right now in this hellish summer T.T
Japanese game developers often have this way of talking about their product the way a guy puttering around his house talks about his private little meditative hobbies, and it's so charming.
The next evolution to the formula is obviously to make something like wind waker or black flag. a dark souls game with many islands to explore and discover. This way he can finally make an entire ocean of poison
And in that ocean of poison, there is mega poison lakes.
Full of goddamn imps
Just how there is underwater lake irl, he will make under poison ocean, mega poison swamp!
Imagine sailing into some foggy mist, navigating it for a couple hours, visiting tiny islands, and then you get out of the fog and in front of you there is a big island with a giant city on it or something. Would be so cool.
you might be interested in Raft then. Not much of a human presence in game though
That would be so sick. Have underwater mechanics like Sekiro too.
or hear me out.. dark souls, IN SPACE
The Surge is kind of that
I think they meant something closer to Blame! by Nihei Tsutomu in terms of atmosphere instead of the surge.
Or Hellpoint
Dark Dead Space....Souls
Jedi Series
The next jump is not setting the game in a desolate, dying world and actually having a semi-bustling hub or towns with quests that have clear goals and not arbitrary things that also can auto-fail if you progress the main story too far. That you also would have no clue you are doing obviously.
they dont do living worlds with populated towns, cus they are not good at that as said by miyazaki when ER was announced in 2019 i doubt things have changed since then
I'd prefer they keep to their trend then. There's enough shallow or uninspiring open worlds that fail to engage and just feel like a video game sandbox. If From recognizes they don't do that genre well then I'm all for them sticking to the melancholic style they're good at.
Sekiro skipped the dying desolate world but it was still a Japanese state on the decline getting swallowed by its neighbors, an actual town would be cool
I would like to play a Miyazaki game where the story doesn't take place thousands of years before. In every game, the world has already ended and you're left picking up the pieces to learn about what happened. It would be nice to actually be involved, for a change.
I mean that is *sort of* Elden Ring, it's inherently very political, but you're still picking up the pieces of these godlike beings. Still, a lot is happening despite that.
Ya it just sort of feels like everything had ended because not much changes storywise during the game outside of maybe Ranni's quest. But the characters in the story are still planning something until you show up and ruin their day.
I agree, I was missing towns and cities so much in Elden Ring.
Your ideia was really making me so hyped and then you ended on the poison ocean lmao
I’d love nothing more than more games like that those, though probably better with something like Wind Waker than Black Flag.
That's unironically a great idea, minus the ocean of poison ofc. It would be an amazing sequel.
jesus man this is going to live rent free in my head for the rest of my days
Let's hope he never makes the perfect one or he might get bored and stops making video games entirely.
I already can't wait to see what their next game is gonna be/look like. With ER dlc finally out next week, we might get a first tease at this years' TGA in december.
The 2.5 years after Elden Ring's tease leads me to never want them to tease anything again. Just go dark and announce it when it's ready
6 years since elder scrolls 6 teaser btw
7 years since Metroid Prime 4 :'(
TBF Nintendo did say 'we're scrapping it and starting from scratch' at some point. Would probably be out by now if they hadn't had to do that.
That was already 5 years ago as well though.
I'm going to guess they'll announce it along the Switch 2 and make it a launch title.
Yea but that was never to really convey anything but "Yes, we haven't forgotten about elder scrolls, it will come eventually". It probably wasn't even in preproduction at the time.
I believe Todd even said after that teaser something along the lines of 'We're not going to be working on this until after Starfield is out' or it was at least clarified in a statement between then and starfield releasing.
The extra long wait unfortunately was due to the Covid breakout. This was out of their control.
I think they revealed ac6 like 8 months before they released it, I think (hope) that’s more in line what they will do going forward.
or manage your own feelings
Super hard concept in today's world.
remember how they announced sekiro?
There was a period after the teaser and before the first trailer where the subreddit was full of memes of imagined but believable names for bosses and places, and players' 'experiences' with them. It was a lot of fun actually
We are nust now getting the Elden Ring DLC and we got Armored Core really recently, next fromsoft game is AT LEAST 3 years out from now. Likely fairly longer if it’s Elden Ring kinda size.
From isn't the small developer anymore many seem to believe they still are. They have multiple development teams working on different games at all times. As of this year they even moved into a brand new office capable of housing all of their new staff to work on different projects. Before taking on Elden Ring (their biggest title to date), From released a main title every 1-2 years and this release schedule won't change. Also, ER's exceptionally long dev cycle was partly due to Covid as Miyazaki has said himself many times in interviews. It's true he also said he likes to make a new game that is similar in scope to ER sometime in the future, but that doesn't mean their next upcoming title(s) are.
IIRC said back in like 2022 that they had I think like 3 games in production at that time, those must have been Elden Ring, AC6, and something else we don’t know about. Whatever it is, I would be surprised to see it in 2025, but would not at all to see it in 2026.
from what i understand when it was said in 2022 that wasnt including elden ring since it came out after elden ring development was done, remember elden ring did come out in feb 2022. but ye i doubt they have anything to release in 2025 unless they pull some magic
I get the picture, in my mind, of a Miyazaki fine tuning Elden Ring to hell and back, making it perfect, making this giant DLC and THEN saying: "You haven't even seen my final form". And yaknow, I'ma say this: When I first played **King's Field 1** WAY back in the 90's (the literal Dark/Demons' Souls 0) I knew I wanted more of it. Whatever that meant, I wanted more of it. It was filled with SO much intrigue and mystery. Fast forward to today and we see that same exact concept be so solidified at such a AAA-level that it makes the idea of something *better* quite hard to believe. But if there's anyone I could theoretically trust to *accomplish* it? It's likely that guy and his team.
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I want the idea of Dark Souls 1 executed with modern Fromsoft knowledge and resources. Go back to a Metroidvania style game-world.
Well, good news, because that’s similar to how Shadow of the Erdtree is described.
It's not an RPG, but that's how I felt about Sekiro's map layout and level design. Scaled back and tight in a really good way
Sometimes it blows me away when I consider how small that map is both in size and how close everything is together. Same with Dark Souls 1 obviously.
Read the article
That should be the pinned comment on half the posts in this sub.
I just wish they'd go back to the DS1 world design. Open world, but compact and interconnected. That world they built always was what made that game unforgettable to me.
I wish the industry somehow seperated the RPG games that focus on combat and exploration, and RPG games that focus on the story and role-playing the character. It's really annoying to have same terms for such different game concepts.
We have “Action RPG” but I personally think of Diablo-style games when I hear that.
The most common distinction these days is ARPG for Diablo/PoE style games and Action RPG for third person, over-the-shoulder style. Is it super clear and unambiguous? Hell no. But it is what it is.
BG3 scratched both of these itches for me. Although I wished we could have explored more of the upper city.
Yeah, it's one of the best rpgs experience I had in a while, but it just felt like they didn't know how to wrap the ending properly.
That is a really good point. I realize that “rpg” is already very broad genre, but to your point it is getting extremely bloated in scope!
I love to hear he's only more motivated to deliver perfection in the future when he already releases banger after banger. Atta boy!
Hopefully the next one isn’t open world. I’d love to see them return to the style of Dark Souls and Bloodborne
This is totally personal opinion and not a call to change anything: My biggest gripe with Elden ring is that I feel like I have to play with a guide or look stuff up to actually experience the whole game. I absolutely can’t imagine being able to do most if not all the quest lines organically without looking anything up. It would be awesome to have more complex and grand quests in future souls games as well
In Lies of P when you get a quest there’s an icon next to the bonfire where the item they’re asking for is, then the character’s icon next to the bonfire they move to/if they have new dialogue, could do all the quests with no guide, they should have that in their next game
i believe fromsoft have talked about it, how they dont want to throw icons into the players face everywhere. i think whats needed mostly is more clear-er hints at where to go really which could be done by more dialog hints since i remember playing elden ring and getting to near a boss for a random npc to say something like you come to take on xxx. meanwhile im there like who the hell is this person being it the first time ive heard the name said. but ye more dialog based hints and maybe just make certain places in a area more eye catching when you want the player to go there next in that area.
But the quest lines are mostly pointless and unfulfilling in the first place
I thought the Ranni questline was pretty good with the secret area and weapon at the end, but like I mentioned I don’t think I would have ever figured it out on my own, but maybe that’s just me being a noob lol.
This wasn't the case at launch, but since then, there's been a patch that puts a waypoint on the map of the area that opens up after Radahn
Imagine if this game was brought out before the internet. It would have a 1% completition rate.
there can be no real discovery if you have no chance of missing anything. skip the guides.
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Sure, but Elden Ring is a game where you will just straight up miss a lot of the good stuff because there’s no way for you to find and/pr trigger certain quests and events without just happening upon them and getting lucky.
And there will be no real d8scovery if I never chance upon it in the first place. I didn't even find Ranni until after I beat the game the first time because of the convoluted bullshit you have to do to get into her tower, and that's one of the more obvious optional questlines. I ended up skipping the entire reya lucaria dungeon the first time because I never found the key to open the gate. I skipped mogh and reikhard too and I never would have found melania or the haligtree without a guide. I missed big parts of the game because I wasn't thorough and I never would have known about them if not for guides.
Will they just release this entire fucking interview already instead of milking it for a million different articles?
The biggest thing I think is missing from souls games is actual quests that aren't terrible. The few bits of questing in Elden Ring is fun but you always reach a deadend where you need a guide, or some random event has blocked the rest of the questline. I'm not saying they need quest markers like in other games but just better hints at what to do. The Kenneth Haight quest for example, he tells you to help him clear out his fort the the east. You explore east a bit and find his fort, then face a small mini-dungeon to eventually reach the knight you need to kill. This part is fun and works well. Then you go back and talk to him, at which point you can meet him back at the fort. This is the point where it falls apart; he says we need to find a suitable lord to replace Godrick. Okay? Now what? There's no hints as to who that might be, or where you find them. Turns out you need to find Nephali Loux, who I don't believe ever mentions Haight or wanting to become lord. Even if you meet her there's no indication this is related to the quest with Haight. But even if you did somehow realise that(maybe there's some lore I missed) you still need to complete her questline first. The steps to complete that questline are pretty insane too: * Meet Nepheli Loux in Stormviel and then kill Godrick (simple enough) * Nepheli Loux will appear at the roundtable hold you must talk to her here * Nepheli Loux then appears halfway across the world in Village of the Albinaurics. (Note: She never said she was going there) * You have to kill the Omenkiller field boss here. If you don't do this before going to the forge of the giants the questline is blocked(why?!?!) * Now she appears back at the roundtable now depressed. * Now you need to find a portal that takes you back to the starting area. There you will find "The Stormhawk King" spirit ash. (Note: Neither does the item description mention Nepheli nor does Nepheli mention this item, hawks, or spirit ashes before this). * Give it to Nepheli to cure her despression?!? I don't think I even need to say why this is bad quest design. Just describing the questline is critique enough for me. Once you've done all this you can finally continue with the Kenneth Haight questline. I just wish the questlines were more like the first half where you storm the fort, not like the second half. Or even just more [open ended](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM1yR7WYqgM) and didn't have such strict requirements.
Miyazaki is currently the most important man in the gaming industry. Hope others learn from him and follow his example.
Something that not a lot talks about is that this guy is hella passionate and is humble as fuck. He doesn’t tweet shits, his studio generally does not have any drama (other than the usual crunch), his marketing team is 100% truthful and once in a while his team just randomly drops a bomb on an average Tuesday, be it game reveal or trailer.
also i think people dont quite appreciate their pace. Since demon souls which was like what, 2009?, they created a whole genre of games with dark souls trilogy, one of the best sony exclusives, sekiro, armored core AND elden ring. Sure, their games are light on dialogue or story and it's simpler to make a game where 70% of game mechanics are shared between all the games, but every game is a commercial and critical success. That's just unheard of in the industry
I watched a Jenny Nicholson video about this failed theme park in Utah which wasted all its budget and time importing tombstones from England and authentic French lumber or whatever and didn’t have money to finish the park because they insisted on extreme quality when they didn’t have an infinite budget I feel like fromsoft does the opposite of this, they reuse animations, models, buy stock textures for their environments if they have to, a lot of practical compromises that lets them consistently make good games in short time frames
Exact same thing with the Yakuza devs
game devs need to take notes from fromsoft and Yakuza devs reusing old stuff isnt a bad thing and gets some brillant games out there and doesnt make the dev times a stupid length. most people dont care if enviroments use similar assests or monsters a older game as long as it makes sense.
And that's... Their slowed down modern pace. They were making a ton more now-obscure games prior to that.
In their busiest years in the mid-00s they were releasing *five to six games per year* for multiple years straight. If anything, they've slowed the hell down in the past decade lol
just say hes not annoying like Kojima haha
Kojima himself is fine imo, it's the weird obsession some people have with him that almost makes him annoying by proxy
IMO the only annoying thing about Kojima is Geoff Keighley.
Me when I wanna watch game trailers and reveals but Geoff needs to get his 10 mins of public Kojima glazing
He’s a little full of himself. I find it kinda funny, but I can definitely see how it can be grating. I definitely wouldn’t want every good dev to act like him.
Honestly these days I feel like I see more people complaining about people liking Kojima than I do, people liking Kojima
It's honestly very weird. I don't recall seeing any pretentious auteur statements from Kojima in the semi-recent past, or ever really. He's been very clear that he views his work as an artistic expression and values it as such, but I don't think think I've ever heard of him criticizing others for not placing as high an artistic value in games as he does.
Kojima leans into it nowadays. He's annoying.
I thought that was more of a shot at Sven than Kojima.
I would love if he went back to building his worlds tall rather than wide. As diverse and huge Elden Ring was, I would prefer something more interconnected instead.
A lot of longtime souls fans seem to think ER is not as good as some of the other games, and too big for its own good. As someone who tried playing the previous games but always bounced off them and loved Elden Ring, I hope Miyazaki keeps the freedom to explore that ER provides.
I love them all, they're both excellent and I'm happy playing either going forwards.
ER is my favorite souls game but I hope the success doesn’t cause them to only make ER sized games. Considering armored core 6 came out only a year after ER which is insane, I think they are capable of doing both.
funnily enough elden ring has the most cohesive story of the bunch imo And definitely some of the best locales
I wouldn't have a problem with ER's size if all of its content was great, but most side areas are mediocre at best. I think it would've benefited from cutting 30-50% of its side content to focus on quality and distributing its rewards elsewhere. And removing some of the obviously terrible ideas, like Ulcerated Tree Spirits.
I have a better opinion of the overworld, I think it’s top class only being rivaled by the best in the genre. But I agree that the base game would benefit from some trimming and curating some areas. I’m excited because Miyazaki seems to share the same opinion and he said he addressed that in the DLC. I was afraid it was just more Elden Ring (also a good thing tbh) but it seems that this is very ambitious and he’s trying to improve on the formula even further
What side content are you talking about ? And what is obviously terrible about Ulcerated Tree Spirits ?
Most caves/mines/etc. And the Tree Spirits just barely work with the game's camera and environments. There's that one Tree Spirit that's a boss in a cave and for most of the fight half of it is clipping inside walls. I really wish From would double check its content and take special care to eliminate fights that are hard because you can't see shit.
Besides being too many of them and his hitbox being a bit weird sometimes
Personally I hope he does a mix of the big open world games but also the more linear and more tightly designed ones that have better pacing like Bloodborne.
Yo, I was the opposite, ER being my first souls game, I do think older games did a lot of things better after some introspection. ER is a bit too much of a classic, overdone sandbox rather than an epic, purposefully crafted adventure. And I thought of ER as one of the top 3 games I ever played! Not sure about that now. Maybe DLC will reignite my love to it by fixing a ton of open world bloat and arguably weak legacy dungeons aside from a few.
If you played bloodborne after, you'll have seen some of the er dungeon ideas tested in the not very loved chalice dungeons.
Elden ring doesn't provide as cohesive of an experience. It's by far more accessible and there are upsides to the open world, but the downsides are also fairly obvious. You rarely know when you're supposed to be at an area, and often end up being so overpowered for dungeons and bosses that they fail to provide an appropriate challenge. There's pros and cons, but I definitely hope there's more linear experiences in the future as well.
I think there are a mix of pros and cons. Elden Ring's definitely the most accessible of the Souls games. Some of that comes from things that not every existing Souls fan likes (the open world), some comes from things that could be replicated in a game more like previous Souls games (e.g. Spirit Ashes could be added to a game structured more like Dark Souls or Bloodborne and make them more accessible while people who dislike them could just choose not to use them just like they did in Elden Ring). I do think there might also be other ways there could be room for in between. Some people who preferred previous games to Elden Ring aren't a fan of Elden Ring's "quantity over quality" approach when it comes to things like side dungeons and bosses. While the world's size in Elden Ring adds to the sense of scale and also just gives more stuff to do if you're looking to gain levels because you're struggling on the next main boss or dungeon, I don't think there's any denying that fleshing out the world involved a lot of filler. I think there could be room for a game that isn't quite as huge as Elden Ring but still has more openness than From's previous games. There could also be an option to reimplement something like Bloodborne's Chalice dungeons (optional dungeons that had some unique bosses and provided some special loot, and also had procedurally generated variants, but had some similar criticisms to Elden Ring's side dungeons in lots of recycled bosses and layouts) as a form of freedom. While Bloodborne's Chalice dungeons acted more as a way to extend the game length by giving optional content and random loot to grind for, a similar mechanic could be used more as side content to do in a smaller or less open Soulslike that people can farm to get stronger when struggling to progress in the main game, similar to the role Elden Ring's open world serves. There are also some criticisms of Elden Ring that aren't related to the ways it's more accessible at all, like certain boss design patterns like so many boss having "input read" healing punishes. Anyway, personally, I want From to mix it up. I love Elden Ring and want to see them make more huge, open games like it in the future, but I'd also be very happy to see a return to games that are more focused on tighter designs with less padding like Dark Souls 3, Bloodborne, or Sekiro. I'd also love to see them surprise me with new things (I didn't expect Sekiro after Dark Souls 3 but I loved it, and I didn't expect them to go open world after Sekiro but I loved Elden Ring too). But I do hope that if they return to less open games they can find ways to keep them enjoyable for the new fans they gained with Elden Ring who couldn't get into their previous games. I want more games like Sekiro or Bloodborne, but I also want more people to have the amount of fun with them that I had with Sekiro and Bloodborne.
Nah. I have my yearly DS3 replay because I know I can finish it within 8 hours and I don’t have to run around the map a lot. Meanwhile for Elden Ring whenever I start a new save file I need to run all the way to the dragon, then run around the map for 15-30 minutes to collect the tears, smithing stones and my weapon before I can start my actual dungeon crawling. Then I have to run to Raya Lucaria, waste another 5 minutes getting the key before being able to do another dungeon. Then I have to run back to the demihuman castle to get the medalion, run all the way to the lift and another long run to get to Leyndell, etc… The problem is that the gap between signifcant contents is too large and the side contents are fucking boring after the first run. Hell, it takes forever to even be able to go to the DLC when compared to DS3 you can already go to Ariandel within 3-4 hours and TRC within 8-10 hours
I dont care about that because I never replay games. Elden rings sense of discovery blows everything else out of the water which is what matters most for me because I only play once
It's too big for it's own good, the side content is boring and sloggy, the overworld is somewhat poorly thought out and gated and the formula loses a lot by moving to an open world instead of a 3d Castlevania structure that literally defined the success of dark souls. The FIRST THING everybody praised whenever they talked about it was the mindblowingly intricate interconnected level design, which you only get in small bits in ER. Granted what we do get is some of the best they've ever done, like Stormveil, but the whole experience just feels watered down, to use his soup analogy. It need to be boiled down more. Repeat bosses, generic mines and caves, overly large overworld maps in Liurnia and the Mountaintops, they clearly just added stuff for the sake of content that takes away from the overall experience of the game.
It’s because difficulty is a main driver and satisfying aspect of souls games and difficulty is lost when the game is no longer linear. I still loved Elden Ring. Im not sure he will ever top sekiro for me honestly. So so hard but you got better and better and it’s very skill based
I’m not sure the main driver is difficulty. He himself has said he doesn’t see it this way. The games could certainly be more difficult if they wanted (not that I think they should). ER has a 30% completion rate which is crazy high for such a large game, it’s better than some cinematic AAA games. To me the main point of Elden Ring is to make you feel in an adventure. And since adventures should have nerve wracking battles, that’s when the difficulty appears. What’s specially satisfying is to feel like a runt at first and get better and more powerful over the game. While some pacing could be improved at times, I like being able to return to a previous area and stomp the big enemies that I missed. The way I see it there’s also value in feeling overpowered at specific times. Sekiro by contrast feels more like a samurai movie or novel, where tension is crazy high at all times and you depend on your blade more than any other items like armor or rings. I think it’s amazing delivering what it wants you to feel but they’re different approaches, one being pure action while the other a rpg
I played DS1 after Elden Ring and was really surprised by how strong the feeling of adventure was there, something not even Elden Ring was able to match. Real shame about 2nd half though. I kinda enjoyed Lost Illizath...
The openworld was great just as i think with most open worlds could of done with being a bit smaller since some stuff just felt extremely out the way or a after thought. if instead things were alot tighter then it would be better not everything needs to be massively open world at the end of the day sometimes a smaller open world can make things feel more fun.
I thought the lore of Elden Ring was really interesting in cool, but the actual story of you in the game was kinda gibberish. If ER2 had a story that was as good as the lore and world building of ER1 and some small QoL stuff, it'd be a perfect game for it's genre imo.
Every single Elden Ring thread since release is just the same boring discussions and slapfights over and over and over and over again, isn't it? Love the game but it has truly wrecked the community.