Hello, welcome
to The Gemsbok. Today’s topic is Elden Ring, a 2022
game developed by FromSoftware. "RISE NOW, YE TARNISHED,
YE DEAD WHO YET LIVE. THE CALL OF LONG-LOST
GRACE SPEAKS TO US ALL." Elden Ring overflows generously with
quality, beauty, and entertainment. Despite its incredible boss and enemy variety,
it includes several of the best boss fights that are present in any game,
FromSoft or otherwise. Despite the staggering number of weapons,
weapon arts, shields, and magical abilities in the game, genuinely novel methods of attack and
defense are found from the start of the game to the end. And despite the immense size of its map, it
contains multiple individual areas, such as the Volcano Manor and Elphael, which stand
alongside earlier creations like the Painted World of Ariamis and the Boletarian Palace as some
of the best level design FromSoftware has ever done. But you don’t really
need me to tell you that. If you’ve encountered any review or other type
of media about Elden Ring since its release, then you already
know all of that. In setting out to write about the game, I wanted
to approach it from an angle that would be different from the thousand other responses
in existence, while also providing something valuable. There’s really no sense in me just
throwing my praise on the praise pile. So, instead of talking about Elden Ring’s
overwhelmingly large number of mechanical (and other) strengths, I’m going to dig into its
vanishingly small number of mechanical weaknesses. For reference, prior to making this video,
I played through the game three times with drastically different builds, racked up
well over a hundred hours of playtime, gathered 100% of the game’s achievements on
Steam, and (as far as I know) beat every single unique and repeated boss that
is present in the game. In the sections ahead, the discussion will
involve a healthy mix of elements carried forward from prior FromSoft games that worked
better there than here, issues carried forward from prior FromSoft games that should’ve been
improved long ago, and systems borrowed from other open-world games that FromSoft
did an imperfect job of implementing. The nature of this video is such that it requires
spoiling a large cross-section of content in Elden Ring, so you should only continue
watching after this section if you do not mind spoilers or you have
already played the game. "IT SEEMS MY WORRIES
WERE UNFOUNDED. TORRENT HAD YOUR MEASURE
FROM THE VERY START, WHEREAS I MERELY
PRETENDED." Torrent, the mount that can be used to accelerate
overworld navigation and engage in mounted combat, is a great place to start—because
the implementation of the spectral steed is a perfect metaphor for
the game as a whole. Torrent is overall a great creation that provides
a smooth experience, yet it nevertheless possesses several minor demerits that
are likely to annoy players. The first annoyance that the majority of players
will encounter with Torrent is the incredibly weird interaction between the
steed’s double jump and fall damage. The details of a double jump, from its straightforward
contradiction of the laws of physics to the additional freedom it grants characters when
exploring a gameworld, are by now universally understood by people
who play games. But Elden Ring tries to have a double jump,
and yet retain both a semblance of physical logic and a tight restriction on
how the game can be explored. The manifestation of this compromise is a steed
that can plummet through the air off a cliff, cancel all downward momentum with a magical mid-air hop
at the last second, and then receive the full force of the entire fall upon making contact with the
ground from the height of their little hop. It looks so genuinely wrong, so ludicrous,
so out-of-step with intuition about how either a fall works in reality or a double jump works
in a game, that when a player sees it for the first time they are likely
to think it is simply a bug. "HOW COULD SUCH A
THING COME TO BE? OH . . ." There are several far superior alternatives
that were available to FromSoft here: They could have made it so that the fall damage
hits the player as soon as the double jump is triggered, which would at least make some
kind of physical sense; they could have bit the bullet and allowed the player to cancel
fall damage this way, even if it meant that they could rush past areas in an unintended
direction; or they could have just removed the double jump, which (though convenient) doesn’t
seem to actually be necessary for any part of the game. The other annoyances of Torrent require
some context for mount mechanics. "I'D HEARD TELL OF A TARNISHED HURTLIN'
ABOUT ATOP A SPECTRAL STEED." There are two primary ways that a horse or
similar mount can be implemented in a game. One is as a realistic simulation of the creature
in question, meaning that mounted movement may be faster in a straight line, but slower
when turning; that the animal may not always behave exactly as instructed (at least until
fully tamed); that the animal has to be found at one or more fixed locations in the gameworld
in order to be used; and/or that the animal has its own pool of stats apart
from that of the player-character. A moderate example along those lines
would be the horses in Breath of the Wild. The other way is to simply use the horse or
mount as an extension of the player-character, meaning that all movements are faster or more
versatile when mounted; that the animal always responds predictably to the player’s controls;
that the animal can be summoned instantly and anywhere; and/or that the creature has no stats
of its own apart from those of the player-character. An example of this second type would
be just about any mount in Maplestory. For the most part, the spectral steed
of Elden Ring falls in the latter camp: it appears anywhere in the overworld at the
push of a button; it never disobeys an input; it can stop on a dime; it’s faster in every direction;
it introduces the franchise’s first true double jump; its double jump can be used to turn
instantaneously regardless of momentum; it shares the player-character’s stamina
pool; and reviving it when it is banished in combat requires
expending a crimson flask. But there are two exceptions to this categorization, which
are the causes of the two final topics to be covered here. The first of these exceptions is that
Torrent has its own pool of health. This leads to several problems, and just generally
creates a situation where receiving damage during mounted combat feels
inconsistent and hard to track. It’s inconsistent because whether the steed does or
doesn’t tank some of the incoming damage feels arbitrary. It’s hard to track because Torrent’s health
is expressed as a tiny bar near its head that only appears when it is
hit and when it is healed. And, arguably worse than either of those grievances,
the steed having its own health leads to there being two ways to be knocked off of
it: because the steed lost all of its HP, or because the player-character took enough posture
damage in a short period of time to be staggered. Often the difference between these is indiscernible, and the
second occurring usually coincides with the first occurring as well. So it is frequently unclear, when knocked down, whether
the steed can or can not be instantly re-summoned. The only way to check is to
attempt to summon the steed. If it can be summoned, no problem: it appears
and combat proceeds without a hitch. If it can’t, a menu prompt appears on the screen
to ask whether the player wants to spend a crimson flask to re-summon it,
and the prompt defaults to ‘no.’ The appearance of that menu prompt, say, when
attempting to evade attacks from a dragon, can be a bit of a problem . . . My ideal solution
to this would be for the steed to be invincible (it is spectral, after all) and to provide a flat
boost to the character's posture while mounted— yet to retain the system where being posture-broken
causes the player-character to fall off of it, and have re-summoning it after a forced dismount
always cost a crimson flask, now with no text prompt. The second of the galling exceptions to Torrent’s
status as a player upgrade rather than a horse sim is how Torrent handles
reversing directions. It’s an extremely minor complaint that
becomes a consistent annoyance near cliffs. Basically, the steed has two different animations for turning in
the opposite direction of its current one when on the ground. One of the animations has Torrent just sidle
around in place to reverse direction. The other has Torrent lurch forward and push
off from the ground to reverse direction. Since that second option can sometimes occur
when the steed is stationary, stepping up to a cliff while mounted (whether to pick up an item or to simply look
down) becomes unnecessarily nerve-wracking every time. The player’s options for turning around
become either gambling on turning and just hoping the horse won’t stray off the cliff,
or else unintuitively jumping forward off of the cliff in order to use the double-jump
to instantly reverse direction in mid-air. Given the rest of the steed’s non-simulation,
active-design control scheme—as well as the fact that it can not be instructed to step
backwards—the ‘step-forward-to-push-off’ variant of those turning animations should have been only
possible to receive when moving above a certain speed. And when stationary, it
should always turn in place. "THY DEEDS SHALL BE MET
WITH FAILURE, JUST AS I." I don’t have too much to say on this
topic, so it should be a fast section. The gist is that crafting is just as bad
here as it is in most open-world games. I understand that in such a large game, it
is convenient for developers to include a system like crafting in order to fill space
with interactive materials, add an extra class of drops for neutral fauna and minor enemies, and offer
a way of interacting with the world other than combat. But after experiencing the excellent cooking
system in Breath of the Wild, I at least hoped to see more flexible, intuitive versions of
crafting in open-world games from then on. Unfortunately, the system in Elden Ring is
neither better than nor even as good as that. Instead, it’s a rigid, boring list of largely
interchangeable consumable goods that can be produced by gathering specific
listed ingredient quantities. In the entirety of my initial hundred-hour
playthrough, although I found or purchased every crafting recipe I could, I only ever felt
compelled to craft a couple of poison cures. That left a huge list of things that seemed worse
or slower than any of the primary, non-craftable ways of buffing a character
and attacking enemies. Perhaps I’d feel different if I had
played as an archer, but as it stands I’d hardly notice if the entire system
was removed from the game. "I HOPE YOU UNDERSTAND
THE WEIGHT OF MY WORDS." The only thing I can really say in its favor
is that the steady stream of crafting materials can be sold to bolster the stingy availability
of runes from most early-game enemies. "JOIN THE SERPENT KING AS FAMILY.
TOGETHER, WE WILL DEVOUR THE VERY GODS!" The fighting in Elden Ring is accomplished
through the deepest implementation of Souls-style combat that FromSoft
have produced so far. Now, I personally believe that, as opposed
to Souls-style combat, Sekiro-style combat is more appropriate for the type of fast-paced
encounters that FromSoft have favored more and more over time; but I am also aware that
the system in Sekiro is controversial due to being far less flexible and less forgiving than Souls
combat, so their decision to revert is understandable. And while the attack actions in the earliest
Souls games hold up surprisingly well despite their relative simplicity, due to the remarkable
weight and realism of them—the increasingly rapid, increasingly weightless combat of Bloodborne,
Dark Souls III, and Elden Ring does suit the increasingly rapid, increasingly weightless
enemy and boss designs of those games. "THAT'S HOW I FELL IN LOVE WITH THE
SWORD, AND THE ARTS OF COMBAT." Indeed, when the player-character is on foot,
Elden Ring essentially sports the exact combat system from Dark Souls III, with
just a few notable differences. Those differences include, one, that the Dark
Souls III-style combat arts, now called 'ashes of war,' are no longer tied to specific weapons—making
individual offensive and defensive options more versatile and customizable; two, that
powerstancing returns from Dark Souls II as a buff to dual-wielding melee weapons; and,
three, that there is a tiny amount of Sekiro DNA spliced in through guard counters and
guard breaks, minor stealth elements, and the Flask of Wondrous Physick (which is essentially a better
version of the per-death buff limits introduced by Sekiro). Not all of that is entirely
positive, mind you. Guard counters in particular feel half-baked,
as they deal enormous damage to both health and posture, and so frequently work as a trivial
(almost automatic) alternative to parrying. And though stealth is present, the lack of
anything resembling Sekiro’s deathblow system means that using stealth to target a foe is
often a worse idea than it should be, as it simply initiates a combat encounter now involving
both the intended foe and anyone in the vicinity ignored for the
purpose of stealth. "I ALMOST FEEL SORRY FOR THE
CHAP, THE MORE I THINK OF IT." But both of those points are very minor in
comparison with the main points of this section: that the window for buffering inputs is still too wide, and
that it is still impossible to interrupt most buffered inputs. This requires some explanation. First,
put simply, what is input buffering? Input buffering is when a game remembers a
sequence of inputs provided during an animation, then queues up those inputs to
happen after the animation ends. So, if you press the heavy attack button while
already performing a heavy attack, then the game will remember the second input and
immediately follow the first heavy attack with a second (even if no buttons are pressed
after the first attack concludes). And similarly, if casting a big spell and
simultaneously hitting the roll button, a roll will follow the
conclusion of the cast. At this abstract level, this
system is theoretically solid. It allows players to plan out moves and fight
strategically, and avoids requiring frame-perfect button presses for
chaining maneuvers. But there are big problems with it, which should
by now be familiar to players of From’s games: it starts remembering inputs much too early in animations,
and it is generally impossible to jump the queue. That is, the buffered inputs can not be
interrupted or canceled, even before they begin. If you are in that heavy attack and have queued
up another, only to realize before the first hit ends that the enemy is going to attack
you, pressing the roll button will not cause a dodge to occur; the second
attack will still happen instead. If the player has time to change their mind
about what it would make sense to do next, then so does the
player-character. But the player’s idiotic in-game avatar will still rigidly
follow the queued input and get smacked in the face. A priority queue doesn’t make sense in a
game that doesn’t really have combo moves. "WHAT A SICK WAY
TO FIGHT, EH?" Being unable to interrupt the overzealous
input buffering after receiving new information is an issue that was present (and already
a source of complaints) in Demon’s Souls back in 2009, and has been carried forward into
every major FromSoftware release from then on. While it was an imperfection in Demon’s
Souls and Dark Souls, it wasn’t usually a big deal there due to the far slower pace
of combat encounters in those games. But the fact that this issue is still present in high-speed
games like Sekiro and Elden Ring is a huge problem. Reacting to something at a split second’s notice is frequently
the difference in such games between survival and death. In Elden Ring’s version of the Storm Ruler
fight, for instance, it’s possible to accidentally queue up two activations of the serpent-hunter’s
multi-swing, five-second weapon art, locking out control of the player-character long enough for
the boss to charge up and release a one-hit-kill attack. The result of all of this is that input buffering,
which should feel like a tool or even a convenience afforded to the player, instead feels like a
problem that the player has to work around. I’ve seen it claimed by a few people that its
current implementation is actually laudable, because it punishes spamming
buttons for upcoming actions. This is technically true, but it also punishes simply
pressing buttons calmly, whenever it is done in advance. The most prudent way of approaching the
situation is, unintuitively, to avoid thinking ahead. Trying to plan carefully and play strategically, which
is otherwise the best approach to progressing in a FromSoft title, is not an asset in a
combat system designed in this way. Just tapping attack and defense buttons one
at a time in order to completely avoid using the included input buffering system
is often the superior strategy. "WHAT IS IT? OH, DON'T
MIND ME. OFF YOU TROT. RIGHT OVER THERE. SEE THAT?
SOMETHING'S SHIMMERING. I SWEAR." The biggest, oldest problem of the open-world
genre is the challenge for developers to produce enough content to naturally and satisfactorily
fill a wide open gameworld. And it’s a problem that Elden Ring comes far closer to overcoming
than the majority of its genre peers. The sheer quantity of unique enemies, bosses,
weapons, spells, NPCs, and (to a lesser degree) areas is miraculous. It’s as clear as day that
an utterly absurd amount of work went into the content of this game. But FromSoft is nothing
if not ambitious, and despite the incredible variety of stuff in the game, they still
apparently created a world too big for it. Enemies, minibosses, and bosses (including
a big chunk of the primary story bosses) show up repeatedly in various iterations around
the map, often at the end of one of a number of similar caves, catacombs, or mines. Bosses show
up with remixed moves, in pairs instead of solo, in the company of regular enemies, simply with a subtle
change of name, or with no difference whatsoever. It’s hard to take seriously the complaints
that people used to have about fighting three versions of the Asylum Demon in the first
Dark Souls, now that FromSoftware have released a game with three or more instances
of most bosses in the game. "THEY'LL BE CURSED. ALONG
WITH THEIR CHILDREN, AND THEIR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN,
FOR ALL TIME TO COME . . ." And as for regular enemies, well, apparently crabs and
wolves are native inhabitants of every climate and landscape across all of the Lands Between. And there’s
something quietly disappointing about discovering enormous endgame areas like the Haligtree and
Elphael, only to realize that they don’t contain a single new enemy type. Further, as a different
kind of repetition, specific enemy designs from the Souls universe show up in Elden Ring
with many of their original animations intact. And this isn’t just limited to arguably justifiable
overlaps like rats, crabs, slugs, skeletons, and rotting dogs (all of which do return). Rather,
truly unique denizens of the Souls games also appear in Elden Ring, such as basilisks,
oversized wolf bosses that wield giant swords in their mouths, and variants of the serpent men from
Dark Souls and the thralls from Dark Souls III. They get a pass on Patches since his creation
precedes the Souls games, and I don’t really mind the serpent men and the thralls since a fair amount of
work was done to differentiate them. But otherwise this was pretty disappointing to see. Sif and the
basilisks are some of the most memorable entities in the Souls universe, and as a result they serve
as part of the identity of that universe. At some point, if it’s one’s own prior creations that one
is repeating, it no longer counts as ‘homage’ or spiritual succession. It’s just deadening
some of the uniqueness of the earlier work. And the mechanical repetitions from previous games do
not end at the enemies. We once again drop resources on death and must go reclaim them, and we once
again progress via an archstone-like checkpoint network, though a sloppier one than ever. And
as I explained earlier, the combat mechanics are almost all reused from Dark Souls III. Moreover, I
can’t be the only one who assumed that the company that made the dazzlingly original online system
of Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls would continue to impress with unusual forms of co-op and
competition over the years. Instead, they’ve produced increasingly conventional and more easily
ignored forms of the exact same online system ever since— not only repeating their approach to direct
multiplayer, but also to messages and bloodstains. "NOW HE GATHERS THE CORPSES OF
FORMER FRIENDS AND FOES ALIKE, GORGING ON THEM,
LIKE A DOG." But setting that tangent aside, here’s the
thing: even without any of the repetitions, whether from preceding titles or within its own
encounter list, Elden Ring would have more enemies and more bosses than any game they’ve ever
released. Elden Ring simply didn’t need so many repeats to feel large and alive. And I say this
as someone who generally doesn’t mind a bit of repetition where it makes sense in the world, as
with the Night’s Cavalry, the various dragons, and most of the regular enemies. As it stands, a first
playthrough of Elden Ring will take most players well over twice the length of time of a first
playthrough of any of FromSoft’s other games. Open-world or not, the game simply didn’t need
to have over 100 hours of content in a single playthrough, when employing such a huge amount of
recycling was one of the crucial strategies to get the number that high. There are some players
who will play practically nothing other than Elden Ring for the next few years, stringing one
playthrough into another. Those who love the game that much are almost unaffected by the duration
and repetition of it. The proposition of cutting the game down to better match the amount
of unique content it contains is primarily a suggestion for the benefit of those who will be
playing the game at most once per year, if not once ever (to experience the game as a work of
art before moving on to experience other works). And the idea that it can be finished much faster,
by speedrunners for instance, is irrelevant. Again, this point is not for the benefit of players
experienced with the game—but rather for players who are new to the game, particularly for those having
the intended experience of playing it through for the first time (as I did) without consulting
any external guides. With a tighter execution, such players would have a much higher chance
of seeing all or most of its content while retaining a sense of awe and wonder at the new things around
every corner. It’s odd to find myself saying this outside of a discussion of literature, but
it’s the thought that struck me during my seventh fight against a flailing tree spirit
boss: it feels like the work needed an editor. "ENSHA GOT RATHER AHEAD
OF HIMSELF, IT SEEMS. AS HIS MASTER, I'D LIKE
TO EXPRESS MY REGRET." This is another short section, as it’s an easy
thing to describe. Elden Ring is a game with a wide open map and mounted combat mechanics, yet
is simultaneously a game that tightly guards which enemies may go where. Enemies are still leashed to
intended locations or routes exactly as in prior games, meaning that it is frequently possible for
an enemy one is fighting to simply give up, return to neutral, and begin walking away—or, in a
worse scenario, for a boss or miniboss one is fighting to vanish and reappear at their spawn point.
Not only does the sudden return to neutrality tend to drop the challenge of a fight to zero, but
there’s nothing that kills the momentum and mood of a big fight quite like the opponent popping
out of existence to instantly respawn nearby. This issue is most likely present for technical
reasons, as performance could suffer if an enemy is drawn into a place that the developers did not
intend it to be (increasing the number of entities or assets in a particular area beyond some key
backend limit). But that is a fairly poor excuse under the circumstances. Elden Ring was created
from very early in its development specifically as an open-world game. Designing around this problem
more elegantly could and should have been a high priority for such a game, yet it wasn’t. Globally
restricting asset density to accommodate wider enemy roaming would’ve been the best solution.
But even a more blunt approach would’ve been fine; for instance, if other enemies, items, NPCs, and
even bits of the environment had to be temporarily despawned or culled in surrounding areas in order
to prevent active sentinels and dragons from often fading in and out of fights, then that
absolutely should’ve been done. "AND I'LL POP CLEAN
OUT. I'M SURE!" People playing as ranged attackers are most likely to encounter
the worst of this problem, due to the way that they are always trying to put distance between themselves
and their opponents. Thus, the already-powerful spellcasters of the Lands Between (who are buffed
relative to their counterparts in earlier games in terms of spellcasting speed, spellcasting damage,
variety of available tactics, and availability of spirit ashes to tank for them) find themselves in
an even stronger position than they already were, as so many enemies and minibosses lose interest
in pursuing them after a shockingly brief span of time. "TAKE WELL THE
LESSON, FRIEND. THAT'S HOW YOU END UP, WHEN
SEDUCED BY THOSE WHO LIVE IN DEATH." In a nutshell, spirit ashes are items which allow
the player to summon one or more instances of a particular miniboss or regular enemy type as
allies in certain combat situations (most often, during boss fights). It plays out sort of
like a Pokémon monster collection system, as it is possible to acquire most of the non-boss
combatants in the game for combat usage. And right off the bat, you may be tempted to think that
the complaint in this section is something other than what it actually is. This section is certainly not
about the mere notion that spirit ashes were added to the game. Anyone opposed out-of-hand
to players using them is simply applying a bias inherited from playing FromSoft’s earlier games.
And anyone complaining that some of the bosses near the end of the game are too hard is
likely a victim of this exact false equivalence. Spirit ashes aren’t simply a straightforward alternative
to NPC summoning here, as Elden Ring places a far heavier mechanical stress on them than summoning
has ever received previously—through the diversity of available ashes, the FP cost associated with
summoning them, and the accompanying 10-tiered upgrade system. It is my personal opinion that
anything with such an extensive upgrade system in a FromSoft game is a mechanic that most players are
intended to use, at least during their first playthrough. Analogous situations present in some of their
previous games are the ability to upgrade armor, the ability to kindle bonfires, and the
ability to farm consumable healing items. Where such things were available, the games featuring
them were generally balanced with them in mind. "GO ON. FINISH
THE JOB. TAKE THE COURSE YOU
DEEM MOST WORTHY." But here’s the thing: the notion that Elden Ring
is balanced around the inclusion of spirit ashes ends up being only a half-truth. Crowds of regular
enemies and multi-boss encounters are as prevalent here are they are in Dark Souls II, and
in that regard the sentiment seems accurate. But, with the exception of Radahn and a small
set of fights toward the very end of the game, practically all singular enemies and bosses
seem ill-suited to the presence of the spirits. The considerable mechanical stress I’ve detailed
until now in this section is somewhat misleading, as an old issue crops up and makes them
overpowered. The old issue in question is that boss and enemy aggro still seemingly works close
to how it does in Demon’s Souls: the opponent will simplemindedly focus most of their attacks on
whichever entity most recently attacked them. The combination of this with the lengthy string of
strikes involved in many boss attacks leads to a situation where lone bosses can be freely damaged
by the player-character for almost the entirety of a fight— simply by switching between waiting for a spirit
to attack the boss, and then dealing damage as soon as it has initiated an attack against the
spirit. Bosses do seem to sometimes randomize their targets or at least select by proximity, but
the most recent attacker remains a clear priority. Aside from that, it seems like the only attempt
at alleviating this problem was simply giving AoE attacks to bosses a bit more often. That was
a good decision under the circumstances, but the issue remains obvious and problematic regardless.
Ideally, bosses would either more frequently alternate who they’re fighting irrespective of who
is attacking them, or else would attack characters to an extent that is roughly proportional to the
amount of damage each character has dealt to them. An even better solution would be giving many
of the lone bosses, especially in the mid-game, the ability to respond to the player calling
a spirit by summoning a spirit of their own. But in any event, aggression that is primarily based
on ‘most recent hit’ is simply not complex enough to handle the number of entities a player
can introduce into an Elden Ring boss arena, even if they are playing offline. Though I’ve never
found this a particularly satisfying solution, at least summoning an NPC or another player for
co-op is balanced by boss health being increased. "THE DRAWING ROOM
LIES DOWN THE HALL. MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE.
BUT BE SURE TO EARN YOUR KEEP." Now, just before closing the book on this subject,
there is one other (very small) annoyance that the spirit ashes introduce into the game. When it is
possible to summon them, a small purple symbol appears on the lefthand side of the HUD. It’s
small; it’s clear; I have no complaints about the design of the symbol itself. The annoyance stems
from the fact that most scenarios in the overworld where spirits can be summoned are boss or miniboss
fights. The outcome of that state of affairs is that the summoning symbol ruins the surprise of nearly
all of the game’s otherwise unexpected boss encounters. When it appears, it’s likely that a major
enemy is nearby or is about to spawn. They could have solved this particular
problem by ditching the existing symbol, letting spirits be summoned once per
grace rest almost anywhere in the world, and then only displaying a symbol in the rare
situations where they can’t be summoned. "THE SHATTERING HAS
CAUSED US, ALL OF US, TO LOSE SIGHT OF
SOMETHING VERY DEAR." This is the last main section of the video
precisely because it’s something of a stretch to say that this is a problem with the mechanics
themselves. But basically, some of the core mechanics simply don’t make enough sense in the
world in which they’re placed. One of the things that initially drew me to FromSoftware’s games
was hearing about the way that every solitary detail— from the lore to the mechanics to seemingly minor
things like item placements—were considered with great care in Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls.
Upon playing those games myself, I found that the people who had described that aspect of the games
were, if anything, understating the situation. Typically, games at the scope of those two simply
do not have mechanical and logical coherence at the level that they do, nor do such games usually
enforce the consequences of player choices with such consistency and equanimity. The same
is true in Elden Ring . . . most of the time. But there are a lot of exceptions. NPCs
are a source of many such exceptions. "I HOPE YOU CAN
FORGIVE ME." To the game’s credit, many NPCs still naturalistically make
their own way around the gameworld without regard for the player’s wishes, and NPCs do not resurrect after
death. But areas in the game where fighting NPCs is simply made impossible are more numerous than
ever, and slain NPCs with stuff for sale now drop items that magically port their inventory into the shop
in the hub. Whether to help, hinder, or even kill each NPC used to be one of the most consequential
choices a player of a FromSoft game could make. Now, many of the most important NPCs are
just granted invincibility, and there’s actually an incentive to kill merchants (given that it’s
incredibly convenient to consolidate their shops). The most egregious instances of logical
circumstances, justifications, and consequences related to NPCs being removed, however,
relate to mid-game and late-game story events. On the minor side, none of the four primary
smiths and merchants in the Roundtable Hold are mechanically affected by the burning of the
erdtree. A distraught Roderika and an apparently dying Hewg carry on seamlessly performing
their duties for the remainder of the game, "DON'T WORRY, I
DON'T BLAME YOU. I'LL CONTINUE SPIRIT TUNING
JUST THE SAME AS BEFORE." and—after the rune of death is unbound—a
motionless, seemingly dead Finger Reader Enia continues to silently conduct business with the
player-character. On the major side, it makes absolutely no mechanical difference whatsoever whether
Melina is or is not accompanying the player-character. When she first leaves in Leyndell,
she tells them that she’s letting them keep both Torrent
and, somehow, "THE POWER TO TURN
RUNES INTO STRENGTH" which was her ability to raise the character’s level. The player-
character even retains both of those benefits if they make Melina their enemy by
inheriting the Frenzied Flame. "I WILL KILL YOU, AS SURE
AS NIGHT FOLLOWS DAY." Now, clearly, temporarily
removing the mount and the leveling system would be a pretty
wild mechanical change. Yes, it would make by far the most sense in the game’s universe, but
not doing so is obviously the safer choice. However, FromSoftware is a praiseworthy developer in
part because of their habitual insistence on making the sensical choice over the safe choice when choosing
mechanics. But even pursuing a safer design didn’t preclude them from assigning mechanical
importance to Melina. All that is required here is to make her mechanical importance be even remotely
analogous to her narrative importance. Just making leveling more expensive in her absence, or forcing
the player-character to either actively reclaim Torrent or find another steed, still could’ve
made Melina less of a non-entity in terms of gameplay from when she first grants
access to the Roundtable Hold onward. "I . . . HAVE TO ASCERTAIN FOR MYSELF,
THE REASON FOR WHICH I LIVE." Setting aside the NPCs, another aspect of the game that
includes many elements which are mechanically convenient but logically unjustified (reminiscent of the
work of a lesser dev team) is navigation. The ability to ‘fast travel’ between checkpoints, now
granted immediately and never substantially revoked, is not tied explicitly to any aspect of the lore in
the way it is in Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. Placing beacons on the map causes columns of light
to appear at those spots miles away in the world. And an infallible compass appears on the screen at
all times, pointing toward both beacons and lost runes. While I’m on the subject of the compass, just
a side note: sadly, the game offers no option to independently disable it. Players are forced
to choose between having it onscreen at almost all times and disabling the HUD entirely. As the
latter would involve giving up in-game access to seeing the status bars and equipment menus,
it’s not a realistic option. This means the distractingly accurate and frequently useless
compass is a practically unavoidable companion throughout the game. But back on topic, some
systems are beholden to deeply arbitrary rules. Torrent can not be ridden in buildings or caves,
but can be ridden inside of rises as well as in some deep underground zones. Fast travel is
unavailable in catacombs and after teleporter traps, but available in most caves and mines. Flying
enemies can be escaped by climbing ladders. Some non-phantom, non-summoned
bosses nevertheless appear out of thin air. It’s all capricious, ill-justified, and, to
borrow a phrase from my video on Sekiro, video gamey. Finally, armor choice is more
meaningless and less realistic than ever, because the higher level of a typical endgame
build moves nearly all of the character’s defense into their stats and their talismans, because
armor can not be improved by smithing, and because light and mid rolling are now almost mechanically
indistinguishable. In short, the mechanics of Elden Ring usually match the game—but it’s
less often that they match the depicted world. "INCIDENTALLY, DO YOU LIKE A GOOD
FESTIVAL, FROM TIME TO TIME? WELL, IT'S TRUE: THIS FORTRESS
HOUSES ONLY THE VANQUISHED. BUT WHEN THE STARS
ALIGN, WE CELEBRATE." Okay, so those are the primary mechanical issues
I encountered in Elden Ring. But here’s the thing: is there another open-world game in existence
that does all of these things better? No. There isn’t. There are games that do one
or some of these things better, but there is no single open-world game that improves on all of
them. The only one to get anywhere close is Breath of the Wild, but that game, as wonderful as it is,
does a drastically worse job than Elden Ring when it comes to the category of ‘abundant repetition.’
As it stands, Elden Ring is the best true open-world game that exists. It is the current
pinnacle of the genre. Like Breath of the Wild, it was developed by people that clearly know that
stepping back to let exploration and control by the player take center-stage is the greatest
virtue an open-world experience can possess. Yet unlike Breath of the Wild, Elden Ring also
has narrative details that sometimes capture my interest, a map bursting at the seams
with worthwhile experiences, and numerous individual zones or levels that measure up to the
standard set by its non-open-world predecessors. Hell, it contains two non-consecutive, completely
unrelated moments that felt just like discovering the Great Hollow and Ash Lake in Dark Souls—which
is a feeling of awe and surprise no other game in FromSoft’s catalogue has replicated even once,
let alone twice. With all that being said, however, something being the best of its genre doesn’t
mean that there is no room for improvement. Moreover, while the elements discussed in the
main sections of this video are the mechanical issues that stand out when I am playing Elden
Ring moment-to-moment, none of them directly address my main complaint about its mechanics.
This is because my main complaint is simply that, with the singular exception of a few of the boss
designs, the game is not mechanically original. Though admittedly fairly unique in some of its
settings and narrative details, its mechanics do not distinguish themselves as innovative or even
new. The small pool of noteworthy mechanics which were not present in a prior FromSoft release are
instead borrowed from other titles (especially other open worlds), and often not to the
game’s benefit. Now, Elden Ring is a noticeable refinement of many (though not all) of the systems
it incorporates. But for what an extraordinarily long game it is, it is remarkable that there
were just a scant few times when playing it that I felt like I was being given an experience I
hadn’t already had. At the time of their releases, both Demon’s Souls and Sekiro were among the
most mechanically inventive games ever created. In the PS3 era, big games were increasingly
moving in the direction of being self-completing, rigidly structured, and cinematic. Demon’s Souls’
bold emphasis on instead being challenging, loosely structured, and immersive was a stunning
and admirable intervention in the industry. 10 years later, Sekiro’s innovation was more
modest, interrupting not the trajectory of the entire industry but rather the trajectory of
From’s own releases. In terms of mechanics, it was a very welcome change of pace for the company,
as it finally felt like FromSoft was embracing all of the consequences of the action-heavy game
design they had been favoring since Bloodborne. It is a regrettable fact that, as detailed
in a prior video, Sekiro’s strengths— its wonderful originality in terms of gameplay and
setting—were coupled with a number of regressions toward intrusive AAA design clichés that the
company had until then avoided for many years. Elden Ring, again to its credit, is mostly free
from the abundance of small bits of unlikeable design (like full-screen item popups, invisible
walls, pausing the gameplay for all dialogue, and abundant text prompts) that plague Sekiro.
It’s a smoother overall experience than Sekiro, just as it’s a smoother experience than Bloodborne
and any Souls title. Elden Ring feels absolutely engrossing to play, and I enjoyed playing its
insanely huge amount of silky-smooth content a great deal. But it’s not new. And to some degree,
the unmatched reputation of their earlier releases rests precisely on the ways in which they offered something
spiky when everyone else was offering something smooth. Game developer Bennett Foddy has likened
the experience of playing Elden Ring to that of sitting down and eating an entire birthday cake.
Others have compared it to a FromSoftware theme park, with different zones resembling
different earlier works by the company. I take their points, but I
favor a different analogy. "CROSS THE FOG, TO
THE LANDS BETWEEN." To me, playing Elden
Ring is like listening to an entire four-hour greatest hits
collection of music by my favorite band. "A LONE WARRIOR WHO HAS
BRAVED THE BANEFUL FOG." It’s easy to sing along with it; I know all the words. It’s
got all their most popular tracks (and it’s got them in album versions, radio versions, and
sometimes also a third time as live versions). It even includes their covers of a few well-known
songs by other artists. But the greatest hits collection is missing the tight structure, pacing,
and originality of the individual albums; it doesn’t include some of the band’s best ‘deep cuts;’
it’s more than a desirable amount of the same style of music all at once; and after a while—even as
comfortable and consistently enjoyable to hear as it is at any given moment—listening to it just
leaves me wanting to hear them play a new song.
