Elden ring is better than any souls game. Not only its full open world, but the graphics and details is way better, and its the most beautiful open world I've ever seen, graphics are even better than forbidden west and that's saying a lot, Elden Ring is the only game so far that looks current gen to me on ps5, and I have also a PC with better specs than the PS5.

The design of the world, the fast loadings, the graphics, art style, pace, enemies, imagination, sense of exploration and wonder, everything is just right. Before this one, my favourite was demon souls remake, I just cant understand how they improve the graphics while making it full open world now, that's a big achievement for Elden ring.

Lets not even talk the older souls like bloodborne that just look absolutely horrible, it didn't even get a ps4 pro update and its not open world, its not even 60fps which is critical on a game of this type.

Elden Ring in HDR, especially when the rain is falling, is a sight to behold, most beautiful game I've ever seen after 32 years of gaming, after hundreds of games.

I really do not understand your comment about elden ring being far from perfect, if this is far from perfect then no game ever made is even close to being great.

Surely perfect is impossible to achieve, nothing can ever be perfect, but this is the closest I've ever see.

I also do not understand what you mean with the souls experience, this has the souls experience, its just open world but the rest is the same, you get the same blocking with a shield and counters and difficulty and each enemy being different, its all souls here, did you actually played Elden Ring or are you just commenting after watching some videos?

In my opinion breath of the wild and Elden Ring are the 2 best games of the past 15 years, maybe even the 2 best games in the history of videogames. Elden Ring slightly wins just because of the graphics and performance/loadings.

It is funny, how after the success of BOTW, games started to copy elements of the game, yet missed the mark on what made it great. They copied the ability to climb everywhere or the glider or stuff like this, even visual stuff. But all this was not getting to the core of what made BOTW great and different. Elden Ring is as I feel the first game taking the rigth lessons from BOTW, yet it didn't copy climbing or gliders or visuals. But the basic idea of subtly guiding the player *without* taking away the incentive to explore is retained by Elden Ring. The guidance in BOTW was Hyrule castle and the divine beasts, all visible from afar. Similarly in ER you always can see the Erdtree. ER does add another layer to this, with the guidance of grace, which gives you a basic idea, but no exact goal. Guidance of Grace is guiding the player to their goal, but it still demands exploration, as it doesn't tell what to look for and how far away. Yet if you found it, you always will know that this is what the guidance was pointing to. The exploration aside the main path is reinforced, as on your first guidance you have the Tree Sentinel as a block and later on that path Margit. These are clearly guiding the player towards exploring besides the main path. Well, that is unless you are one of the players trying to bash their heads in these enemies.

So when I say far from perfect - I could go on about open world RPGs that are to come in some not so distant future with some sort of AI acting as GMs (one is already being made by some of the original creators of TES II: Daggerfall),

I personally thought the biggest value of BOTW was the physics in game.

This might be slightly unrelated, but I recently started playing Wildermyth and while the game has flaws (some tedious stuff), the way story templates are weaved together to create a unique story each time you play is pretty cool. I wish a bigger team with more resources would take notes and bring that to a bigger scale. I think this way of creating unique stories would match well with an open world game, yet this wasn't something a team the size of the Wildermyth creators could pull off.

Honestly, I find ER's graphics to be, technically speaking, nowhere near the top - lucky for me, I don't give a rats arse about that, what I care for is beautiful art, which ER is full of. Actually, I find From's games to be a perfect example of what matters when you're budget restricted, and that is great level design, art and gameplay, even if they still have stiff animations from a decade ago.

Yes, I've played and finished ER, I logged somewhere around 165+ hours (plus one frozen shoulder as a result of it). For me, Souls experience was always about exploration and terrific level design (with serviceable combat that doesn't; get in the way of it) - ER has both, but IMO, actual Souls have a lot more of those intricate levels where you suddenly realize "oh, so this leads to there again". I liked ER a lot, I just felt it was missing a bit more of that, although it had some fantastic "levels" - this is what I’ve meant by THE Souls experience, and why I would take any Souls over ER for exactly that.

As for the open world aspect, I find it to be great - a lot of people were doubting Souls could be transitioned well to open world, I was always very certain that it would translate very well, even before there was any mention of ER, given that there were some old games that had great topographical design that Souls would fit perfectly in. But the thing is, with such a marvellous topography in ER, I couldn't shake off the constant feeling that, while I'm enjoying the hell out of the game, I'm missing it being a full-fledged RPG. I had to remind myself, it's Souls, and that they specifically said when they announced ER that it would be too much of a design step up from Souls for them to make right away a game that has towns and other common RPG stuff, but I still had this longing for THAT game.

So when I say far from perfect - I could go on about open world RPGs that are to come in some not so distant future with some sort of AI acting as GMs (one is already being made by some of the original creators of TES II: Daggerfall), or what potential From Software's open world game can be in the future (which will, IMO, easily overshadow ER), or just stick to flaws in ER as open world Souls - but I won't do any of that, since it would take too long. All in all, ER is a phenomenal game, great transition to open world structure and spectacular design success for From Software - hopefully it won't be too long before next Souls, whatever it is, comes out.

There's not going to be a metroid prime this year.

I agree 100%.  Graphically ER was disappointing.  On the ps5 it had significant pop in and tons of stutter, especially during invasions.  Forbidden West looks and run far better.

Souls is my second favorite series, second only to Zelda.

Souls 3>BB>Demon>Souls>Elden>Souls 2

Fully realize my opinion will be unpopular, but I thought ER was competing strongly with Souls 2 for worst in the series.