Discussion Thread – The 13th Annual Greatest Games Event

[Machina]

Veknoid_Outcast said:

the-pi-guy said:

8: Elden Ring:

I've really been trying to figure out my feelings on this game. There's a lot of things about Elden Ring that I think are amazing, but I feel like some enjoyable parts of the Souls series got lost with the open world, and certain things didn't get added in to make up for those things. But overall, I think I still have to place this game as my second favorite Souls like. There are some things that are amazingly well done. It does an amazing job with scale and discovery.

The combat is probably my second favorite by From, that I've played so far.

I feel similarly. I absolutely love Elden Ring, but I do think some of the strengths of the Souls formula are muted a bit by the open world.

Completely agree with you both. Some of that intense, carefully crafted level design is lost, and not entirely made up for with the various castles and dungeons in Elden Ring. I also felt like the game needed a firmer editor who was willing to say 'no, we can't re-use assets from regions x in region y, it takes away some of the mystique and impact of the open world we've created' or 'we need to change more about these catdog bosses if we're going to duplicate them half a dozen times'.

A lot of difficulty is lost too; there are so many things to go and do that it's easy to become over-leveled (and the game seems to be balanced around quite a low overall completion percentage). That's an advantage in a way, because if you get stuck with a certain boss you can go do half a dozen different things instead and then come back to it later, whereas in Souls games you'd basically either have to keep hitting your head against the wall until you broke through, or go grind areas you've already beaten. Weirdly I kind of prefer the Souls way...

Now I'm doing that thing where I poke holes in my favourite games ^^