Elden Ring Review - From Software's Answer to Zelda!

[The_Liquid_Laser]

ZyroXZ2 said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

I'm about 15 hours into Elden Ring.  It seems like a great game overall so far.  It very much feels like Dark Souls with a healthy amount of BotW mixed in.

I'm seen quite a few reviews mention stuff like resolution and frame rate, and not just for Elden Ring, but for most games in general.  Personally, I don't care at all about this stuff.  In fact, off the top of my head I can't think of even a single Switch game where the graphics bothered me.  That's how little I care about this stuff.  I can think of a PS4 game where the graphics bothered me: Spider-Man (and I know it isn't alone in this complaint I'm about to give).  Games that go for realistic graphics often have an uncanny valley problem.  Spider-Man and NYC look awesome, but when it's Peter and Mary Jane talking on the couch, yikes, they give me creepy vibes.  Anyway, to me Elden Ring looks gorgeous and I have no complaints about it on the looks dept.

One thing that did bother me.  I saw a video where someone snuck up on a dog and backstabbed it.  I think it's cool that you can do this to people, but dogs should hear you coming.  To me it ruins the immersion of the game, at least for a moment.  I wish more reviewers would talk about stuff like this instead of the old frame rate and resolution nonsense.  That's the stuff that I care about anyway.

Dulfite said:

That's the true next big leap forward I think. Not visuals, but ai intelligence in games. I want to see squirrels hide behind trees as they hear me coming, lighting strike closer to me when there aren't any tall trees or buildings around, humans hold their hands up to cover their mouth/nose after I just ran through a sewer. This will make games truly immersive and will make the whole resolution vs. framerate fanboy wars look like the joke they always were.

I don't want to derail my own thread too much into the AI thing (which I also discussed before), and while I agree, the reality is that the discussion happens multiple times throughout gaming history.

Example: remember the fish that swim away in CoD and everyone laughed and showed the fish swimming away in Super Mario 64?  People do talk about it, the issue is that the advancement of AI is moving very slowly in comparison to graphics technology.

AND the fact that if it does get too smart, it becomes a "problem" for the average human.  Reactions would be easy to program, sure (and you might be surprised at what little things you'll find in various other games in regards to AI "reactions", like trying to look up Ashley's skirt in RE4 in the original game), but that's less about AI and just more development time to program them if anything.

Yeah, I agree that it's mostly about development time.  I think that what bothered me most about the dogs is that they are in a camp with a bunch of guards.  Why do guards have dogs?  To prevent people from sneaking up on them.  So, the dog doesn't really fit its role in that situation.  There are other places where you can sneak up on a bunch of wolves or other animals, and while it's unrealistic, its doesn't jolt me out of the immersion as much.

So, it's part programming and part design.  If they aren't going to make the dogs hear better, then don't make a camp with guard dogs, because they'll do a terrible job guarding.  Or they can always go the other route and be unintentionally realistic, which is often a better choice.  In 2D Mario games you can always shoot fireballs underwater, and people just go with it.  They've done this in Elden Ring too.  The animals will sometimes roll away instead of running away from you.  Maybe they ran out of time to program a good run animation for some of these animals?  In the end the rolling is kind of funny, but it works better than if they just had a poorly animated animal running.