Good afternoon everyone. The Elden Ring gameplay trailers aroused my concerns – I didn’t understand at all how openworld could be linked with Miyazaki’s corporate style. The location that was shown looked empty and nondescript; it was unclear how key plot points would be implemented, whether there would be towers and outposts. I don’t like open worlds in the form in which they are now actively exploited. All these clearing of outposts, hubs where you need to talk for an hour with all the characters collecting quests, towers for opening key points on the map. More or less, I am fascinated by assassins (even though I buy them after 2-3 games) and rdr/gta. Why, I’ll explain below when it comes to this. Thank God all this is the bare minimum in Elden Ring.
Quite often I came across the opinion that the open world in the game is not needed and is simply bad. To decide whether it will suit you, it is important to understand what you generally expect from an open world game. Do you want to be inundated with plot and plot-related content, quests and NPCs?? Then this isn’t your story at all. The world of Elden Ring about exploration and reward. They just throw you into it and go wherever you want. We looked around – there was some kind of statue on a cliff, there was a ruined temple, a castle was visible in the distance, and a tower loomed on the horizon. Go wherever you want and there will probably be an interesting reward waiting for you, and along the way you will meet a bunch of other interesting places, dungeons, bosses or NPCs. The main incentive here is to level up and search for weapons/armor in order to defeat the next serious enemy. And this goodness is scattered around the world in bulk, for all occasions. Can’t defeat an enemy in a poisonous swamp? Take a walk in other places for now, you will probably come across equipment and talismans with resistance to poison. Or a book of recipes for creating pills that increase this type of resistance. There is something similar for all types of damage and each enemy has a weakness that can be found and defeated “correctly”. But you don’t have to win “correctly”, because there are always options – you can pour all your pumping points (fortunately, the game allows you to redistribute them, but not indefinitely) into strength and health, put on a thicker shield and armor, take a heavier weapon and take the battle head-on. Or you can throw everything into witchcraft and cover the boss with a swarm of flies that cause bleeding while keeping your distance. You can pump up your agility, take a couple of light katanas or daggers and circle around the boss, picking at the windows between attacks. In general, you understand – there are a huge number of options and the game allows you to choose your playing style. You just need to explore, level up and look for useful things. And personally, I think that a battle reward that will help in further progress is the best incentive for research. For this reason, I also like assassins – there, too, research is rewarded with interesting goodies. And for the same reason I got bored with RDR2 – there is a cool open world that there is absolutely no reason to explore. This game has a lot of advantages that make you want to play it, but the open world there is simply boring. The very first comparison that came to my mind after a couple of hours of playing Elden Ring, and which seems the most accurate after 120 hours, is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Remember how you glance at the map from the plateau and think where to go now?? And at the same time I’m sure that there will be some interesting thing there? While I was going there, I was distracted first by one thing, then by another, and after a couple of days I opened a map in a completely different direction and forgot that I was going to go to a specific place? It’s absolutely the same in Elden. I once actually discovered a new location, saved it with a bonfire, went to kill the boss in another place and just forgot about it. And this is a huge location, behind which is another large location, behind which is another secret location (which you see from the very beginning of the game, but you don’t know how to get there – that’s why I remembered about it, desperate to find the entrance there, I went to the guides), a couple of bosses, quest characters. Yes, the open world in the game is huge and your eyes naturally run wild, you want to explore everything at once.
But in addition to the open world, https://roaring21casino.co.uk/login/ the game also contains large story locations, in the spirit of previous parts. The local capital or a giant tree, for example, are huge dungeons with the usual shortcuts, secret places, traps and ambushes. When you come to such plot places, the game becomes the usual dark souls and these are often huge locations – I played from 2 to 5 hours a day, spending several days on them.
Probably the only question I have is about the characters’ quest lines. Quests in these games did not lend themselves to any logic before, but it was at least theoretically possible to comb the locations after the bosses and find the necessary characters (although even so you are unlikely to find the dlc in the first DS), here the chances are reduced to a minimum – the desired character could be sitting behind a stone, behind a lava lake in a long-cleared location and you would never go there again. But fortunately, you can forget about quests in this game, even though they give good rewards. For those who are not in the know, the quests in the game are presented as abstractly as possible. You meet a character and he tells you something like: “I was too weak, I need to strengthen myself and then we will meet again”. Well, purely theoretically, given that this character is a clay pot, you can guess that he plans to harden himself with fire (although personally this never occurred to me and I thought that “hardening” is a metaphor and that battle is implied) and yes, there is a volcano location in the game, but it is huge and under no circumstances can you know in which exact place it will be located. And it’s good if you haven’t passed this volcano before, and now you’re methodically combing it, looking into every corner. But if you completed it before, then you have practically no chance of finding the character. You don’t have any markers on the map and no quest log. You just have to remember what you were told, and that could have been 50 in-game hours ago and two weeks in real time. I usually do this – when the ending is already obvious in the game, I comb the locations and look into the guides. There is a map and finding unexplored places has become a little easier.
In the end, some basics for those who don’t even know what kind of Miyazaki is this, that there are your Dark Souls and Elden Ring. The main and most important layer of gameplay is the combat system, everything else is built around it. There are three main branches of leveling up in the game: this is a slow enforcer who takes hits on the shield and painfully hits the “window” between the boss’s combos; a frail dodger who, evading blows, rolls somersaults behind the enemy’s back and carries a series of blows; a magician who picks apart the enemy from a distance with minimal losses.
These are three main “branches”, but a huge number of varieties flow from them. I put the word branches in quotation marks because as such the game does not have specific directions and restrictions for your build. Nobody bothers you to create a dodger with two heavy two-handers or a strongman with magic, an archer or a “witcher” with buffs. It’s just that these three areas are the most obvious and most likely when playing for the first time you will download some of these, at least until the middle of the game. And then there will be the realization that it would be nice for the magician to have a magic katana and he would need to pump up levels 10 in dexterity. And then you find a second katana for bleeding and you think that two katanas with statuses are cool and you should add another 15 levels into witchcraft. And now you have already forgotten about magic and are cutting the boss with a trickster with two katanas, while the gameplay has changed radically. After all, this is not a game like Assassin’s Creed: Valgalla, where you rush into the crowd, press two buttons and everyone around you falls and you absorb the damage like a sponge. Here the duel is a dance in which one mistake can cost you progress in the last hour of the game, and most likely you will be in a terrible mood when you lose 200,000 of the currency accumulated by sweat and nerves. So that you understand, this is enough just to level up a couple of levels in the later stages of the game; for ordinary mobs you get from 1 to 3 thousand, and for bosses from 10 to 120 thousand. To accumulate so much you need to play with maximum concentration, but one missed blow can be fatal, removing your entire HP bar. So you will have to either memorize the enemy’s motion set, or react quickly to their actions. Yes, gameplay can change dramatically depending on leveling up.
To summarize, I want to say that the game pleasantly surprised me, because I got much more than I expected. Usually I completed dark souls in the region of 60-70 hours and I was always sad when the game ended. I love these games and wish there were more of them. Elden Ring is even more than I dared to dream of – the game has grown both in breadth and depth. It has become larger, more complex, more beautiful and more interesting. I passionately recommend it to everyone who is tired of the same type of open worlds and who wants a challenge.