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I’m still not sure if I’ve played enough for a fair review, but at 24 hours I have to think I have the gist of it.
Elden Ring is Dark Souls in all but the names. Souls are now Runes. Bonfires are now sites of Grace. The Darksign is now a Return to Grace in your inventory. And so on and so forth. That’s not to say that there aren’t changes: you have a horse, for example. It can double jump (which I didn’t realize until the last hour or two of my play). Dual-wielding your weapon is now Y+RT+LT. But the biggest and most obvious change, of course, is that Elden Ring is an open world. Or, more open – since in many ways all the Souls games have been open worlds (except, perhaps, Demons Souls).
Elden Ring‘s open world is quite impressive, in some ways. The map kept opening up further and opening up further during my playtime, and I still have several areas I know exist but don’t know how to get to yet. All of them have been filled with a truly stunning number of enemy types, and it would likely take many minutes riding your horse to get from one end of the world to the other. Yet I can’t say that all this actually benefits the gameplay. Dark Souls‘ best points have always been the enemy and level design: I could talk about how much I love the reactive enemies in Dark Souls III for a very long time, and Dark Souls‘ labyrinthine interconnections are tied for my favorite game world (alongside Outer Wilds). Elden Ring breaks both of these in several almost unforgivable ways.
First: the open world. It may actually be too large. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the many and varied environments included, but rather that the content per logical game space is too low. Putting large stretches of nothing between points of interest plays precisely opposite to the strengths of their previous level design: there, you memorized where to pick up the Great Scythe in the Catacombs or which tower has the Chloranthy Ring almost without thinking about it. In the Lands Between, the area you cover is so vast that the same just can’t be done – even if the game has more than twice the interesting items to find, they’re spread across such an increased area that you end up with uninteresting ones most of the time. Over time, this lack of reason to explore (combined with a lack of gating, as with Quelaag and the Demon Ruins/Lost Izalith) sapped my desire to push forward or even fully explore any area.
Next, the enemy design. For the most part, enemies are still entertaining and challenging – it’s still FromSoftware after all – but there are three egregious exceptions. The first is tied to the open world, and is a problem that began even in Dark Souls III: you have very little incentive to fight most of the enemies. When you have a horse and significant territory to cover, why would you bother fighting the randomly placed (or obviously grid-placed in some areas) enemies (and even bosses without fog walls) when you will either never encounter them again or could get more souls by teleporting halfway across the world and staying close to a known site of Grace?
The remaining two issues deal with the enemy AI itself: attack windups and flying enemies. Attack windups have always been long and telegraphed in the Souls games – that’s part of what makes it tough but fair. In Elden Ring, however, many enemies have attack windups that are firmly incredulous: taking long enough that you forget they are even winding up an attack or are able to go through your entire stamina bar before it lands. I am not joking when I say that many bosses have windups in the 3-4 second range – a literal eternity in combat time. This makes it incredibly difficult to time dodges (which were nerfed from Dark Souls III‘s magic escape button) – but in an anxiety-inducing way, rather than a fun one.
The worst offender in enemy types comes in the form of flying enemies: hard to read because flapping wings cover most cues, impossible to hit because they simply fly up and away as you attack – and if you’re locked on, the camera will swing wildly as they swoop past, disorienting you. I don’t have much to say on this subject, but I will say I put two points into Intelligence because the only bow I’ve found (the Lands Between seems to be a bit stingy on the weapon drops) required it, just to deal with the few times I ran into eagles or bats.
My final round of complaints has to deal with technical issues. Because Elden Ring uses Easy Anti-Cheat, I was faced with the choice between playing online or having ultrawide resolutions with unlocked FPS. At first I tried to play without these amenities, but I quickly realized that giving up being told to attack every wall in sight (or, less flippantly, help during boss fights) was worth the vastly improved player experience of higher framerates and FOV. This should not have been a choice I needed to make.
I’ve done a lot of complaining in this review, I admit. And at its core, Elden Ring still has much of what there is to like about the previous Souls games. But I feel no particular desire to go back and play more, so to Tier Two it goes.