"Elden Ring" , is my first time playing a FromSoft game. I am a 57 year old, who has been playing video games, since their inception, and "Elden Ring" is quite possibly my favorite game of all time. I look forward to any opportunity to play, more than any game that I've ever played. Bravo, FromSoft! Bravo!
Iam old myself, 48 , been playing games as well for a very long time and this is by far one of the best game i played since everquest 1 back in 1999. Glad i bought it! Iam 150hrs in and iam not even half way trough 😅 I like collecting and discovering stuff, this game is massive and complete...when was the last timed you played a fully complete game without the dev divising it in 4 to sell it to you in pieces for profit. I just love it 👌
Highly recommended Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. It's a very different experience, even though it shares a lot of DNA with other FromSoft games. Dozens of us think it's their best game. Dozens!
The best explanation I’ve heard was from a tiny podcast : “game executives are going to think the way to get Elden Ring success is to make it open-world and really hard but the real reason is that they made a whole game”
while making a “whole game” in a time and age when companies keep selling crumbs for the price of a whole loaf may be refreshing, i think what makes elden ring successful is that it does 3 things exceptionally well: abandons the idea of hand holding, allows for full creativity of play style, and offers both a fulfilling single, AND multiplayer experience at the same time, instead of sacrificing one for the other. this formula tho comes from a long line if FromSoft games that have all come together to contribute to Elden Ring’s success (not to mention a huge ass marketing budget lol)
@@C_The_Guy Personally I always wished darksouls had more in game explanations of just... how things work. Like no one understanding poise, or the bull goat ring lying to you, or the axe talisman being misleading (people think warcry's "charging attacks" are boosted because it has the word "charged" in it ect) Literally never once is it explained how dr is calculated, hell, they don't show you how danage works. If you want to actually understand a from game you need the wiki and in my eyes that's bad design. I do agree though that not teaching you combo's or flooding you with markers or any such thing is refreshing, npc quests are hell as always though. without a wiki my friend stumbled into... 2? out of the 20+ npc questlines, just giving the players a notebook to have quest details might be nice? All in all though, very solid. I'd also argue multiplayer is ass, invasions are the literal worst they've ever been in the whole franchise. Ashes and co-op trash boss difficulty ( 30+ tried on Horah Loux before summoning in Nepheli because it follows her lore, literally first tried the boss) And just the pvp strats, you can be really scummy with things like blood hound step, stars of ruin, or rivers of blood. not to say Eldenring isn't an amazing game. I now have twice the hours I spent in all of darksouls in the game now, just that I don't think it does your points exceptionally well. It does them decently at best. I think your second point is the most true, ashes of war, weapons, spells, combine to have a nearly infinitely creative play style, and just... the sheer quantity and quality of game are what made it so massively successful in my eyes.
@@lordderppington4694 actually sometime you don’t need to know how it works to use it. Just like car driver don’t need to know how to fix the car to run it. I’m fine with look up guide because that’s basically what I so every time I play anything new. I think the point is they let a lot untold just so some people could enjoy discovering. Like putting lots of lore on item descriptions. Few months laters you will see people interpret lore like a historian. Part of it help grow the community as well since one can’t discover everything so fast they will results communicating.
@@fishyfinthing8854 and it works great for the lore. But the spear talisman, says it does bonus damage on thrust counter attacks, in the past things like rolling and guard breaking count, the item though says it only works when the enemy is in the attack animation though, you could go a whole playthrough not figuring out if it's working or not, radagons gives 30 dex for the purposes of casting, the dex cap for cast speed is 70, you could put that on, overcap on dex, and it could be useless the whole time. THE ROAR MEDALION says it works on breath attacks, it does not. You could put together an entire dragon build, and have it not do the damage it should the whole game. You kinda need the wiki to explain how these things work, hell I know some people who don't even understand how damage works and *are* using the wiki. I guess you could just throw random shit on your char and walk through and have a bad time. But running a dex weapon on a str build, (because unlevelled they both had a d scaling and you weren't willing to dump all your stones into the weapon before finding out) with talismans that do nothing for your character and whatever cobled together armor pieces you found, isn't gonna be very fun, isn't gonna feel impactful, and isn't good game design.
Best Comment ever! Thoroughly agree I'm tired of buying games where you have to be hand held and present you with "PAY TO WIN" premise I am glad these western developers are complaining because they know their stuff is only out to suck money from their players
Whenever I watch Elden Ring clips and gameplay it feels like I am watching a scene from a movie, I have my eyes focused on the character and not at the multitude of add-ons like compasses or maps or whatnot scattered on the UI. It actually feels so refreshing to watch a clean or at least a minimalist UI of Elden Ring
Yes it has only graphics everything else in that game is poorly designed and shit. Its just a game ppl its fanboys are acting like something is accomplished or its a good game while most of Playstation players that bought this masterpiece of shit tryna get a refund
Elden Ring wasn't just a game developed over 5 years but also the culmination of more than a decades of experience in refining the system over multiple games. It a damn good game.
Yep. While making many good points, this video is just a sloppy mess of bad takes. Obviously, the most prominent one was "Western developers are so angry"? It was a handful of devs. Then the one about Japanese devs feeling the pressure to emulate western design, when the reality is that GREED is being the predominant factor. Sony has stated that they want to make more money therefore they are adopting more live services, etc etc. This has nothing to do with Japanese devs trying to emulate garbage like AssCreed, or whatnot. This video has zero evidence to back up any of its claims, outside of what its common knowledge.
And even after Elden Ring, I doubt FromSoft would consider it their "magnum opus". I doubt their fans would consider it their "magnum opus". Maybe some, but not most. They could still refine their craft even further and make an even better game.
Seeing the sheer success of Elden Ring makes me happy. In a world where soulless money dictates everything in western games it’s so refreshing to see a game absolutely crush the sales without micro transactions and a company that cares
I'm a Western game dev and I think a more accurate title would be "Why Western Game Executives Are So Angry About Elden Ring's Success". All of the devs I've talked to who have played Elden Ring love the fact that it's doing so well and are obsessed with the game design, including myself. Just like BotW I hope this continues to set a great example for open world games. It gives us more ammo when we go into meetings with execs to pitch why our games don't need tons of extra shit tacked onto them.
@@albinoredpanda3868 Tbf I'd honestly agree with the quest design. My Friend played through blind, finished 2 npc quests out of the what? 20+? could we have like... a notebook maybe?
@@bluemenkranz_2953 if I start playing genshin today Will I be able to play the events? Will I be able to experience the past event stories? Get my hands on the event specific items of past events? Can I take a break from the game for like 3 weeks and not miss any story content? Can I enjoy the game while not banging my head over rolling for artifect substat and get def or def% everytime? Can I not feel dead inside farming everyday, do my daily commissions and think about is there anything else I can do in this game?
@@doragonmeido Ikr A game that nearly forces you to play it everyday to get the good shit it has in store... can be good, actually, but I don't got time for that. Gacha games, man. Games for people who don't have a job.
I am Japanese and have been a game designer for a Japanese game developer company (not FromSoftware) for about 20 years now. However, even Japanese game designers cannot help but envy FromSoftware's development style and the values and track record that allow them to maintain a certain auteuristic quality despite being commercial. The subject of this video says "Western game developers," but I feel that it is a kind of pathology that hovers over the game industry all over the world, regardless of East or West. It seems to me that FromSoftware is special in that they have so much faith in the player's "will to finish the game". On the other hand, many other development sites try to avoid game design that relies on the player's effort, curiosity, or observational skills. In other words, the type of game that leads you to a Disneyland-like hand-holding, such as the one mentioned in this video. They lead players to their next destination with annoyingly glowing icons, which everyone is tired of seeing nowadays. It is a cynical reality that this specification, originally born from good intentions, has become a detriment to the gameplay itself. But as Eldenring proves, players are inherently active when it comes to the fascinating world, mysterious story, and something they want to get their hands on in the first place. A game design that is always being led by the hand by a guide dog, despite the open world represented by the Assassin's Creed franchise, is a contradiction in the first place, and game designers are not so incompetent as to not notice this. However, on the other hand, the values of the management side, which seeks only "understandability" from a commercial standpoint, tend to take precedence in the industry. I can't help but feel that there are many major companies that should all realize this sooner, but have yet to do so.
@@solidblock221 In short, you can consider Eldenring's courageous decision not to attach importance to gamers like you to be one of the reasons for its great success. In other words, from now on you will continue to be ignored by FromSoftware games, so feel free to live your life avoiding FromSoftware's masterpieces.
Yessss I could say the same for Arcane - the animated series from League of Legends. It seems the producers from Arcane just let the artists do the work, so they made art. I think it's very similar to what I understood you said about Elden Ring: the developers did the work, so they made a beautiful and great game. Could we call it art also?
The question that Devs who say ER's success is unearned need to consider is, "why is the average Elden Ring player's play time so much higher than ours?" Initially they could have claimed the success was due to an out-of-control hype train and George RR Martin name recognition, but if that's all it was players would have stopped playing by now. The fact the average ER player has well over 100 hours in the game and has reached level 100++ means players really enjoy it and don't want to stop playing. When was the last time you could say that about an Ubi-Clone?
Western devs have their hands tied. They get told what to make from corporate, while in FROMsoft Hidetaka Miyazaki calls all the shots and can make whatever game he darn well pleases and the investors just let the man work.
both people in the replies missed the point, the devs are the ones complaining about elden ring, not about corporate locking them in a path they complained about the wrong thing instead of the thing that is actually limiting them
@LOU ALEX then why are they complaining about elden ring, just dont say anything at that point if its not the problem Im aware they cant complain about their employer or possible future employers online i doubt ubisoft is breathing down their developers necks telling them to complain about elden ring because it may inspire change in development lmao
im at 250hours and havent even beaten it yet... itll be sad to finally see that last train of bosses. right now im trying to beat malenia before gideon fucks off to become a boss.. not going well
I didn't know ER was a dark souls game. I didn't even know GRRM helped make it. A friend said he might buy it so I was like whatever and bought it. Now it's one of my favorite games.
@Deadpoppin FromSoft don't fill their game with microtransactions unlike most other devs is the simplified version. They may be just as money-hungry, but they're less in-your-face about it
I liked how Elden Ring was a complete game, that was not loaded with micro transactions or bugs, had so much hidden content and secrets to find which really made it feel special and gave it some depth and it also gave you the freedom to do whatever you wanted so it wasnt totally linear which gave people the option to play the game how they want and make it more or less challenging depending on play style, character build and even the pace at which you push into the later areas in the game. I also love how for a game where you need to be able to parry and dodge you were able to actually see what is going on around you where a lot of other games these days have so many flashy moves with explosions and particles effects you cant tell up from down let alone see an incoming attack you need to dodge. The only real thing i wished they would change as a ps5 player would be the ability to play seemless coop.
@@edozzz12- Precisely. And many of the non game-breaking bugs were immediately worked on in the following weeks/months of release. Pick up the game now and you’d be hard press to find a single bug, let alone one that completely breaks or detracts from an otherwise immersive and enjoyable experience. Similar to Larian Studios working hard to address major issues. Respect the game, respect the player, profit.
I'm predicting a super jaded and almost "this is what you asked for" level of game design coming from the west in the next few years... they are gonna miss the point and think putting in less effort into quest design and stuff equates to eldend rings less oppressive take on quest design, before the devs hit the Internet to say "I don't get it"
And tbh elden ring does alot of things wrong game design wise. It’s not a bad idea to “copy” elden ring. But it’s best to iterate and improve upon the design
honestly, the most important facts, on why Elden Ring is designed the way it is, are: - From Software is more interested in building mythology than on satisfying completionists, maximizing profits (they still want profits, but dropping a few pennies / yen on the floor is OK) - Bandi-Namco is willing to let it's development studios to thrive on their own merits, and make money from sales as opposed to online transactions
I'd say it's more that bamco knowns on what game to dumb transactions on or not. You'll see them throwing heaps and heaps of optional stuff on anime games and such to appeal to that community, but leave bigger projects alone because they know it'll make enough money on its own. (That said that only includes very few of their games, the majority still get dumped in the mtx hellscape lmao)
@@Phyllion- you are absolutely right, they know where to put as many microtransactions as they can and where they need to back off. We can then compare it to Square Enix and see what an incompetent mega corpo is.
not suprising when you see that bandi has a heavy hand in the casino industry. walk into any casino and youll find a LOT of the machines are by bandi-namico.
Especially your second point rings home when you consider they are aswell publishing the Super Robot Wars series, wich is kinda Niche Games, mostly 2D, but still has sales in the millions and the last few releases even had English text.
@@Phyllion- or in some cases given little money for development which gets stuck in a long process of making the game. Case in point being Digimon Survive which hadn't received any news for years until now. Another one is not giving an option to preorder the game, so far on Steam.
Elden Ring and The Sinking City have an interesting take to map, by having the player set their own markers, it makes the sense of discovery more visceral, and the ability to miss something adds to the discovery.
I want to play that but it’s still pretty expensive for the Ps5 version. There’s some weird legal things with the next gen version and the pre version. Like different companies own each it’s odd
Also, it helps that in elden ring, there is always something interesting to run into. The level of detail and effort they made to make the open world surprise you over and over and over is something we should protect at all costs. A lot of open world games are boring going from point A to B with markers everywhere of the same lame quests or camps or material pick ups. Yes there is a lot to do but is it fun? Probably not. Elden ring happens to let you do whatever you want and no matter where you go, its always interesting no matter what. On top of that, they happen to just drop massive locations on you out of no where many times, gives you a sense of wonder. I still think about the times I first discovered siofra river or Nokron, mind blowing
Not just that, Elden Ring's map actually helps you. Say you're stuck on the edge of the cliff and jumping down would certainly kill you. You can just look up the map to see how you can safely get down. The terrain of the map gives you the topography of the world itself. And its so easy to read too. Like, if you see something standing out in the map (like, say, something that looks vaguely like a ruins or something), there is most certainly something there. Perhaps not a whole dungeon or whatever, but there's *something* that's worth checking out there. And ofc, en route you're gonna get distracted and sidetracked by everything in the world. And I love that.
Outward completely removed player location in a map. I found it enjoyable to actually misread landmarks on a map and stumble upon cool stuff (it was a wendigo that killed me).
I remember the first open world rpgs where you're totally alone to discover dungeons, plot points, areas and no idea where the story will continue. Loved it, today i hate quest markers and glowing arrows telling me what to do.
Western devs are intimidated because this is a product that actually has passion, effort, and feedback behind it. Something most Western developers have been lacking for years.
I dont agree at all honestly. To say "western devs" have no passion effort and ignore feedback is literally feigning ignorance. You look stupid by saying that. There is plenty of games that come out as just passion projects, The amount of effort it even takes to make a game takes years of commitment and dedication. And feedback ? have you even heard of no mans sky? A lot of the arguments endy has are just blantly ignorant and untrue. I agree there is a ton of games that hold your hand. But elden ring isnt the first and only game thats ever been made that dosent hold your hand. Im sorry but it isnt just "western dev'' problem this is a problem with games as a whole. And personally i think elden ring isnt that fun after the 2nd or 3rd playthrough youve seen 90% of the shit you wanna see or youve seen it in a video. Its a game based on one time experiences. Which are just that. One time experiences. That dragon that flew down and started a fight? yea you know thats there every single time after that. Its boring and bland after the first 2 play throughs. You know whats going to happen therefore it isnt any different than having a quest marker. You in your mind set that marker because you know where to go . I think elden ring is great. But only the first time around.
Its not so much that its lacking, its mainly that they're not allowed to use passion and creativity in the first place. Because its a "financial risk" to the publishers and shareholders. From a business standpoint its much more profitable to go with whats statistically sells rather than take a chance at something either doing very well or flopping. Thats what's killing the industry, video game industry's success will also be its failure.
It’s none of those things. Western Games have made games a mass media through accessibility, FromSoftware’s philosophy is contrary to that. I would say western devs are much more intimidated by Nintendo.
Also part of the dev hate is them breaking their own perception of good and bad. When breath of the Wild came out, many devs went with 'that wouldn't work on a grander game' 'most mechanics are not feasible with story telling' and whatever, then comes Elden Ring with the same formula but tackling those point and they don't have more arguments than cherry pick.
I assume you're referring to that review that claimed it's "basic storytelling" to have the golden knight (Tree Sentinel) be a good guy and the ugly skeevy looking dude (Varre) to be the baddie? Or am I misunderstanding and you just meant they are being hypocrites in their criticisms?
@@kevinclark6934 One developer on Horizon Zero Dawn was very vocal about both of these games. You can search it, it was in the main twit stream, I won't search for something more than a month all. Also, probably Horizon devs were the more piss, given that they timed with both of these releases, and in both times they went lower that the counterpart.
@@mlucasl maybe they should learn their lesson and not time their releases with games that have an even bigger fan base and bigger expectations than horizon…
Elden ring made me feel like a kid again, and it made alot of adults feel like a kid again with its massive exploration, difficulty and how it doesn't hold your hand like the games of old. Elden ring hit a feeling that I'd thought I'd never feel again, Thank you Fromsoft 🙏
You should play Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Metroid Dread too. Their are still great games being made, but you won't find them from the EA's, Activisions, and Ubi Softs of the world.
Why elden ring is good: -feels complete -no hand-holding -no dumb quest log with 2000 different things to do -no useless npc interactions with unnecessary lengthy dialogue -no micro-transaction -challenging and rewarding -highly detailed, and made with love -worth every penny It's that easy
@@polarisnorth4875 I wouldn’t say desperately, it’s a simple preference. I personally cannot stand having a quest log with a list of all the secondary quests and a detailed explanation of exactly what I have to do and where I have to go. You don’t even pay attention anymore to the npc dialogue and I find it super non-immersive. But I see what you mean, it’s hard to keep track of all the on-going quests especially when you haven’t played the game in a while and you wanna get back into it.
I love elden ring, and I believe elden rings success stems from the fact that 80% of its optional content, secret items and costumes would be dlc in all those western made games.
Its crazy how many areas are there. And they all felt unique. Like, I didn't feel it became boring. As soon as I found a new area I would just keep going even tho I went past my bed time. Lol.
"all those western made games" ????? Like come on mate.. you mean a few handpicked triple A money grab titles. this isn't about eastern game philosophy being better. Elden Ring is an outlier there. BY FAR !! And come on western games slap too! Cruelty Squad, Dwarf Fortress, even Minecraft have no DLCs and are filled to the brim with content !! ... i really dont understand tf you mean.
i heard this from somewere, "They had the balls to put their heart and soul into someting, and make it optional, that confidence makes you want to keep searching for everything" and honestly, that is so true. the required bits are so amazing that the optional bits become things you genuinly want to see.
I used to watch streamers who had never picked up a hard game like Dark Souls before try Elden Ring, fall in love with it, then have it take control of their channel for a month because they refused to just beeline to the end. They wanted to do as much as they could before ending the story, and then went and did it all over again because why the hell not lmao
@@mikehurt3290 I can agree with that, granted I have almost completed everything that is to know about jedi fallen order, and as such I don't have much to do, but still, it is a good beginner souls like imo
No it is not. A good game with terrible physics, bad ui, repetitive and uninspired challenges, based simply on unbalanced difficulty that is not related to skill, but patten recognition, is not good. It is cheap, and dated. Games were made like this decades ago and they were moved away from because aduiences weren't interested. The only reason they work now is that it has been so long since then that people think it is fresh, instead of rehashed 80's and 90's style gaing with modern graphics. Also the MOST BORING thing I have played in years. Beat it twice and just can't find a reason to pick it up again.
@@astro1000000 I dont know what your problem is. Maybe you’re just a mindless hater. Maybe you are salty this game is getting more attention then something else. Maybe you just bandwagon against everything popular. I’m convinced you haven’t really played the game since all the points you made are completely braindead and you haven’t made a single point only someone who played the game would make.
@@astro1000000 Look I respect your opinion and can see where your arguments comes from, but if a game you said was extremelly boring managed to make you beat it not only one, but TWO times then it might be onto something
I've played a ton of games where combat largely consists of button mashing overpowered weapons and abilities. Being forced to perform elden ring's very demanding combat mechanics without any prior explanation is truly challenging and rewarding. Elden Ring is the game I needed but didn't know I needed.
I'm feeling the same thing with Sekiro. The only western game that even remotely challenges you in combat is the Witcher... but I could be mistaken because I haven't touched it in a while.
"Whoah, it's Antifa Simulator 4, again! At least it isn't edgy, because edge is violence." [goes back to shooting people in the face, but it's fine because they're the "right kind" in the bluehair's tiny mind]
One of my favorite moments in Elden Ring is when I discovered Deeproot dephts by accident while doing Ranni's quest. I thought I was on the right path, but I didn't need to go there. And the gargoyles were so hard to beat! Still, I didn't regret a single second finding about a whole new area by accident. Or that time I found a traped chest and ended up in Caelid. I thought I was in some hellish dimension, but it's actually right next to Limgrave. Elden Ring is one of the games where getting lost might be even more fun than finding your way
that's basically how I've been playing it. go in one direction until I find something too annoying/frustrating, then just pick a different direction. i haven't looked up too many guides yet, though I probably will eventually.
I think the biggest problem nowadays is companies try to cater to everyone. A franchise needs to be able to identify it's main fanbase and cater to them. If anyone else happens to like the game that's an added bonus. And that's what From always did. They know their main audience well, they know they love the challenge and the struggle. Elden Ring had all the key aspects of a soulslike game, yet managed to add new things into it, to make it feel more fresh without being distruptive.
Bang on the money about companies trying to cater to everyone. One of the main issues that drove me away from Assassin's Creed was Ubishit's constant releases of barebone generic games with 0 substance that (for some reason) are enticing to the more general audience
Yeah, that's the reason I'm probably never playing a zelda game again, I've never been more disappointed in a game than I was with botw... just feels like a big empty oper world game without much content in it and the content in botw is very unrewarding
@@Dhieen idk man, fromsoft games always had easy mode, that was multiplayer. But you have option to use it or not. Solo it is still one of the hardest games out there.
@@b3at2 Japanese games never fell off Elden Ring is litteraly a Japanese game what are you on about what west is pissed about is that they poisened their own waters like with micro transactions, feeding off gamers and not bringing the product I am looking at you Blizzard & EA... I wont mention how big of money milkers some games became but you know what I am referening to.... Its sickening, CD project Red is at least trying to fix their own mess but what do you know those are the guys from EU... Listen US take fucking notes already. The guy said it perfectly we need innovation there is nothing new about your games just quantity over quality... And it pisses gamers off... there are lot of games that are legit shit show and fiesta and the more bad games come out the more angry gamers are thats it
@@NeoNikki23 I dont want all games to be like elden ring. I think we should let fromsoft do their thing and that be it. the story telling is trash… the story is trash.. the world is beautiful… though the movement is robotic and stiff , its serviceable. The fact that the game was a massive hit means nothing to me as call of duty sells millions and millions of copies and i refuse to play it. yes , japanese devs fell off compared to back in the day with playstation 1 and 2 …. ever since then its been western devs making the block busters. from software is an anomaly… i think the nerds just like them because nerds like to get punished in games lmao
@@b3at2 nah little bitch like you feeding their pocket so our devs won't ever improve. I don't care about Japanese or Western devs. I just want better games. Not as hard as ER but not as easy and not boring like the latest modern games. Zelda was very enjoyable and frankly I liked more than ER but once every 3-4 years a game like ER is very much appreciated.
One of my favorite moments playing Elden Ring is when I realized that caves were drawn into the map, i immediately started going over every inch of the map and marking caves I missed
Churches and ruins, too. You can almost immediately tell where the next church is by studying the shapes of the buildings. And ruins are usually marked by multiple, small structures.
The only bad thing about the map is that it's not that accurate. They have been working on it, but there's still parts where it looks like a path but there's not
im building a large space-sim/worldsim game which is heavily rooted in maths/acedemic theory, like a barotrauma but with 4x strategy world factions, and very intelligent Ai for agents
It was so refreshing to play a game that EVERYONE was clamoring about, skills and secret ash summons were detailed by word of mouth, it felt like being in a school yard with the other kids seeing if babalities in Mortal Kombat were a real thing or not!!! 👍🏿👍🏿
Oh boy, I loved being part of the "pioneers" exploring the game, finding out new things and exchanging with others about our findings. Sadly my game frequently crashed and one time my whole gamesave was nullified and i had to start anew... which marked the end of that great time for me :/
at the end of the day elden ring and games like it are formulaic garbage that appeals to those with no taste or discrimination. i'd rather play swat 3's spritual successor ready or not and similar games that doesn't appeal to every single mindless consoomer
The reason Elden Ring was well received is because it's a complete game, the worst thing that can happen to someone is buying a game only to find out that the devs cut corners & decided to use dlc as cash grab. 83.5 hrs into Elden Ring & all achievements unlocked, i am pretty sure there are areas yet to be discovered.
@Beek Hock in da Hos let people make their own fun. He clearly enjoyed the game in his own way. Don’t hate on someone just because they have different preferences or do something different than you do.
I found Elden Ring quite refreshing. I had great doubts if the "Souls" formula would work in an open world environment. How wrong I was, it works like a charm. What I absolutely love about Elden Ring is its architecture. When you step out from the starting area you immediately get a glimpse of things to come. A giant castle in the background, vast open lands, an area to explore. No quest markers, just go explore, look what you want to explore, the whole world is open to you. I recently finished Valhalla with all extra content apart from the master's trials and the roguelite part. I spent 250 hours into the game but what I hate most about it os its permanent desire to tell you "HEY LOOK! THERE'S A QUEST NEARBY!" and when you go there other quests and places pop up. In the end the map is full of quests and yellow and white spots to explore, it's just too much. Some more hidden events like the Excalibur sword are way more interesting but in the end you have to face the truth "the way is the reward, not the sword itself". Weapons you earn for solving a series of puzzles are just not worth it. I ended up using my axe from the beginning until the late game, then I switched to Thor's hammer. I didn't use any more weapons because I didn't feel it was necessary. In the end I made the platinum trophy on Valhalla but somehow it didn't feel "good". Didn't feel like a reward, I was more feeling kind of exhausted for all those things you had to do in order to get it. So yeah I hope Elden Ring's dlc will be good.I expect a lot and as sources say it'll be released early 2024 after the release of the next Armored Core.
Miyazaki's management style is also much different than in western studios. He calls it "total direction". Basically there's no middle management structure, he works directly with the individual artists and programmers etc.
I think you might be on to something there. The disproportionate influence of "managers" is a problem in all aspects of the western world, not just in videogame production. Western games are clearly directed by a committee of management types who prioritize safety over creativity.
So it's like a dictatorship? I thought we all agreed after WWII that democratically chosen ideas are better than fascists controlling everything without anyone allowed to tell them "no"
Talented people united under a singular vision. Something that God of War Ragnarok was sorely lacking with Balrog stepping away. There was zero tonal cohesion to the game. It felt like it was designed by 6 different focus groups, stitched together, and released like a Hollywood blockbuster. I was really disappointed because I think the tone of the God of War games were really unique, and to see it watered down to safe and generic writing was really sad.
@@huntersnider7961 I actually really enjoyed Ragnarok. My only real complaint is that the final battle felt rushed, but I can forgive that because everything else was great. What ruined the game for you?
I'm in my 30's. Elden Ring makes me feel like I am playing the adult version of Zelda. Not in a direct parallel. It's missing some puzzle solving aspects but has others. The main thing it gets right for me is creating this massive world which I can get lost in.
I feel like elden ring missed an opportunity with the mini dungeons and puzzles they have a lot of the mi I dungeons spread around and some that mess with your sense of location by stacking the same level dungeon layout above and below the initial entrance, personally they should have utilized the teleporting chest more in dungeons of maybe a key that is dungeon unique like a link to the past
I feel like a lot of western executives (especially those who have never played a video game in their lives) have adopted a very bad interpretation of "Work smarter, not harder" towards video game development. Micro transactions, loot boxes, and incomplete on arrival products are essentially the result of them trying to get maximum profit while putting in minimum effort.
Yep, that is why they resent their existing consumer base who are expecting them to deliver consistent high quality products who aren’t afraid to voice their discontent and criticize them for failing to live up to their demanded standards. That is why they are trying to disingenuously appeal to pseudo-woke politics they clearly (outside some artists) don’t really believe so they can try to bully their costumers into buying their crap. Or alternatively futilely attempt to cultivate a new consumer base amongst virtue signaling morons who they hope will buy their lame garbage irrespective of quality and won’t hold them accountable when they find out the product sucks ass. Essentially it’s the toxic inverse of good classical business philosophy. Where you as an entrepreneur are supposed to be receptive to the needs/wants of your prospective clients or customers and try to meet them (within reasonable ability to be obtained) and tailoring your product to best suit those standards. Their approach however has been to try to act like the damn mafia, within the context of a publicly regulated open consumer market where they have no such ability to operate in the shadows in so unethical a fashion. They want to bully, browbeat, intimidate, threaten, and con their way to success. And as a consequence they keep getting predictably bitch slapped back to reality and reminded their fake tough guy act doesn’t work in a legitimate marketplace. Thus the consistently dwindling returns they receive for their purposefully minimal efforts by said market.
@@ryeb Popular simply due to how accessible they are and not for their quality. Middle class people working 9 hours a day might not be able to afford a good PC rig or have the time and energy to invest into a $70 AAA game, but they are more than happy to chip in $10 now and then to a casual mobile game they can play on the fly with friends. Master pieces like Elden Ring are too few and far between to satisfy everyone's constant need for *some* kind of entertainment on demand, casual mobile games cater to those better.
The only thing i wish it had was like a notepad to tell me where i left off on random questlines. Cause when i get on after a couple days, i have no memory of what im supposed to do next to progress it
a notepad, and the ability to write NOTES on the map markers, and maybe a few more icons for the markers! its not the worst issue, as i can just use a notes app on my phone, but still better to have it in the game!
Despite the games huge success and clearly breaking the current conventions for how western developers feel open world games need to be designed, I'm honestly a little sceptical that they'll learn the correct lesson from this. Its more likely that they'll either double down on their current approach or will make a half assed attempt to integrate some of the design elements that made Elden Ring successful but fail in the execution, at least more often than not.
the issue is that big studios don't wanna take risks with there games they simply look to turn a profit right there and then without a bit of care for reputation. There are tns of people with amazing and creative ideas but get shot down because there "risky" (bassicly why I only play indie games now lmao)
Arguably, all the cookie cutter western rpgs are just as important in Elden Rings success. We tend to overlook failure as an important experience in crafting great games, and I believe it will be from the ashes of the poor copy cats that the next truely great game will emerge. Let's not bemoan the developers who will cash in on this success, but cheer them on and enjoy the victories and and underperformances that the industry will produce on the long path to greatness.
As a AAA gamedev, it's been sad to see how our product's design has become more and more focus-tester based over the years. God forbid the focustester gets confused or doesn't know what to do next. I remember being a kid, spending countless hours of wandering around in games not knowing what to do next. Finally figuring it out was a big event for the family. Internet kinda ruins that, but lots of people can avoid spoilers. Remember puzzles? Games that weren't puzzle-games used to be enjoyable puzzles.
Yep, I can imagine, what you are telling us. I played Dungeon Master: Chaos strikes back and I had have to find out even a combinations for spells and everything, because not all was same with the basic game. Sadly with modern Battlefields and other fast pace, immediate reward games kids are teached to be easyly satisfied, easyly bored.
Yeah a big thing people forget was getting stuck at a spot in a game you love, trying so hard to figure out where to go or what to do, and then being very satisfied for having figured it out and able to continue the experience. People want everything no further than an arm's reach away and it takes away from the actual time spent with the experience and letting it get absorbed into the mind, and causing the player to meet it halfway. Today so many games are built around players spending all their time in them, and the more ambitious a game usually the less you actually want to spend the time in it. When a smaller product is oozing style and character as well as quality, it is usually confined to restrictions, which in turn causes the player to want more, and become more interested in the world, and as a result *wanting* more.
@@finalbreath15I believe there should be an option you may choose the hard way without any tips and pointers OR go the easy more comfortable way without them. I remember myself as a kid. I had lots of problems at school, I was bullied, so games and books were the only things that helped to escape the reality. And I remember that sometimes I just didn't have a temper to understand what to do next, I got furious and wanted to crash everything:) but now everything's fine and I miss the games where you need to use your brain and not just a double click over and over again to achieve the goal.
Elden Ring is so good because it feels good to have a game with very little marketing BS when it came out and just lets you enjoy it in its entirety. Kinda takes you back to the good ol PS2 era
PS2 era was great. Made me love games. New games where exciting because I was expecting a lot of gameplay and story - nowadays I expect bugs, game crashes, lootboxes, monetization, games that were made to be selled not to be played... 🤮
I didn’t care for elden ring . Really liked dark souls series though. Didn’t care for the addition of the map , a lot of copy paste bosses. But I can understand why people liked it
@@qqqpq many bosses are reused more than 12 times. Even main bosses are reskined and recycled several times. All dubgeons and catacombs and bosses inside them are C&P 10x over. Why do people refuse to acknowledge how lazy and rushed the game is. How the open world is empty and frivolous. How the story is just demons souls 2009 again yet they claim its a new game, a fresh start and yet all we have is outdated graphics, gameplay and lazy design choices. Somehow gets 10/10 because most games nowadays are shit.
Elden Ring is unlike any game I’ve ever played, yet so familiar feels like a games game that challenges you and rewards you, just feels so good and fun to play I love it, the difference is the game is made with love ❤️
After playing Elden Ring, I finally realized what I had been missing from games for so long. It truly invokes that childlike wonder that I first experienced with games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI. Back then, the worlds felt massive, explorable, and believable. I would look forward to coming home from school to beat Magus' Castle, or survive in The World Of Ruin. for nearly 20 years I had mostly forgotten that feeling until I played Elden Ring. I am 36, and I was talking to co-workers both much older and younger than me about the game, we were all sharing our own unique experiences. None of our playthroughs were the same, but the incredible thing is that we were all playing it, and equally enthralled. We would share advice back and forth, challenge each other to beat bosses, and discover nuances of the game that the others never even knew about. It was like being on the playground once again talking our friends about the Secret Worlds in Super Mario World. This game has easily cemented itself in my top 5 favorite games of all time, 3 months after release and I still look forward to playing it. I still find secrets. But most importantly, I genuinely care about seeing more of The Lands Between.
Agreed, I grew up playing all the old Bioware games like KotOR and Baldur's Gate. Since then this is the only game that has come close to breaking past those games in my favorites list.
@@that1gayghost im surprised you didnt play Morrowind. in my oppinion its still the best Elder Scrolls game and far better than the Kotor series. BG2 is my all time fave, followed by System Shock 2 and Morrowind
I think we are generally coming to a “shift” in what is “good” game design. The same happened every time there was a breakthrough with games, say the overwhelming amount of platformers that no one remembers because they were just a retexture of basically the same thing. Then someone went and broke that concept by doing something new and evolving the formula. This is also happening now with Breath Of The Wild or Elden Ring, just that the changes are so many cause of the humongous scale of the titles. This if course throws many devs, that had the “rules” for game design drilled into them for years, for a loop as Elden ring breaks most of those.
Did you see the Gotham Knights gameplay demo? The moment I saw the quest markers I was like "Damn... Elden Ring spoiled me..." Because of ER, all the miniscule things that I usually dismiss in games is now glaring right back at me and I can't ignore them anymore.
@@buggart Yep, saw it and went "aaah... dammit". Same with Dying Light 2, I couldn't bring myself to play it more because I just got bombarded with "do this, do that, go there, collect this". It felt like being forced to choose, instead of doing something of my own free will. I'm trained as a digital Artist for Games but also had some insight into the game design courses at my uni. And many of the Teachers there were very against "Souls like" ideas. In their mind Games need to be easy and lead the player in a direction, they don't want games to challenge you as a player out of fear it will tell them something about themselves (I suck, I struggle with hardship, I don't like it when it isn't easy etc.). I just hope there'll be a shift in that philosphy because many AAA titles could be so much more than just a mind numbing experience you walk through.
@@lefunghi6151 It's because the teachers are teaching what sounds appealing to the masses. That's the reason why idle games are so popular right now. People don't really care about the gameplay, all they really care about is that they are at the top of the leaderboards, not because of skill but because of luck and the amount of money they wasted on said games.
I sort of disagree. The thing is: the SOULS series and their core design philosophy has existed for more than a DECADE. Elden Ring merely expanded on their world building and some freedoms. But overall, it's still basically DARK SOULS. If anything, it just shows how much more idiotic these designers can be when people don't realize that these are NOT good game design, but rather good SOULS game design. Because good game design exists in the context of the type of game you are trying to make, it's stupid to even tout most things as "good game design" in general. There are only a few universal ones like traditional control schemes (moving with a control stick rather than the buttons, or changing it to FTGH movement instead of WASD movement). For example, a big debate on Elden Ring is the lack of quest markers. It makes sense in a souls-like game, but not in many others: removing such a thing in a game like FFXIV or WoW would be devastating and annoying. Elden Ring's exploration is designed to be investigative(given clues, piecing together information, puzzle solving in the environment), but others are more about vistas(sight-seeing) and/or platforming(aka, exploring as a byproduct of the player's movement gameplay). When developers try the same thing for a game that is not actually designed around that, it's going to suck hard and that's a fact. The hallmark of FromSoft's great game design is not that they are trying to make a good game, but a good DARK SOULS (or equivalent). There's a huge difference. I MUST ADD: A lot of sentiment also comes from the fact that we have been bombarded with games that feature hand-holding to a severe degree: that's not to say it is inherently bad to have (after all, that is how it ended up in so many games), but obviously having too many of the same things everywhere gets tiring and "boring".
"When a literal dragon can drop out of nowhere" That dude landed directly on top of me and crushed me flat. I had absolutely zero chance. I went into that area all cocky because I just saw another campfire and I was like hey free loot. 10/10
@Flare skyrim is meh. I've played skyrim for hundreds of hours but only because of mods, that game is repetitive. Killing alduin was nothing special. Beautiful world with interesting races and characters but boring quests and battles.
@@formless3791 Well i had 100hours on skyrim in 2011 when it came out, no mods, and Alduin is only the main quest. Skyrim is HUGE en a lot of hidden content like elden ring. You can even be a f*ing vampire or werewolf, and done correctly you can control it.
Elden Ring made me relive the feeling of exploring and exchanging information about the game with my friend who was playing at his house... My best decision was to pre-order and play at launch. There was no information on the internet, so you had to scramble to figure everything out... Incredible game. You see the care they put in there, even though it's not that graphically complex. You are always rewarded for exploring this world, which you do without noticing, as the lands in between are beautiful and interesting.
Elden Ring was made with passion by talented devs. We used to see that a lot in gaming. Decisions made by businessmen kind of ruined that. Look at what Blizzard used to be versus what they are now. They used to make next level iconic games. Now it's just remasters 1/4 of the quality of the original, microtransactions, terrible gameplay, no creativity, and just wastes of time not even worth touching. It's kind of why games like Hollow Knight and and Subnautica are so incredible made by 3 people pooling together pocket lint and nickels while $100M games are flopping.
@John Grigg no as bad cyberpunk was, it was just buggy and underdelivered, it was not w0k3 zensorship and spitting in the face of fans by perverting everything the IP stands for
One thing with Elden ring that I don’t think gets talked about enough is the way it just naturally gets people discussing it because of the fact that there’s absolutely no set way to go from the beginning to the end. With other games that I share with friends they would ask me if I had done certain side quests, and most of the time the answer would either be “yeah I did that side quest inbetween these 2 main quests” or “nah I haven’t done it yet, but I know where the quest marker is for it so I can do it whenever”, with Elden Ring tho it’s more like “hey did you do this quest?” “What?! I had no idea that’s even a thing, where did you find that?”. There’s always things that either I’ve found that they haven’t, or they’ve found that I haven’t and that feels so refreshing.
Around 80% of Elden Ring is completely unnecessary to be played through. Hell, BotW is almost 100% unnecessary to be played through. That's what makes carving out your own path so fun. You will almost always pick up on stuff you missed 20 hours ago on your previous playthrough.
Yeah, chennels that explain lore are always happy when a fromsoft game comes out where you have to spend 200 plus hours to barely figure what is even happening.
This annoys me the most about modern games. Why do they have to tell you where to go? After Cyberpunk 1.6 it is still not possible to disable the quest marker. I know how much effort goes into concept art, level design and graphics. And then players stare only at a minimap and a questmarker? Why? I disabled those for Witcher 3 (and minimap for CP2077) and it got so much more immersive. Same thing for Skyrim to get that old Morrowind feeling of being in a different world. Put questmarkers in your game and it will "feel" like every other game.
@@observant6953 It depends on the game, honestly. Plenty of narrative heavy semi--open games are better served that way to provide guidance, although I agree that HUD elements that simply tell you where to go (Assassin's Creed really made this mainstream imo) are best left in the dust, something like quest logs/journals are nice to have in adventure games like Baldurs Gate. In other instances it's largely because people are significantly more time poor these days, the average 20-30 year old works way more hours on average than their parents/grandparents did.
I think we should also consider that From Software has maintained it's reputation for creating wonderful gaming experiences and have rightfully earned the favor of gamers. They have perfected their craft and deserve all of the praise they have been getting.
@@pineapple8934 DS2 is one of the "worse" titles from From Soft but it's still a solid and good experience. I get bored easily and still played through DS2 around 12 times. But obviously DS1, DS3 and Elden Ring are superior.
@@xkroaxx yes, it's a good game, but I wouldn't dare call it a masterpiece, for me it's a solid 7.5/10 experience (I assume you're talking about vannila ds2.)
Recently I was playing a game and it felt like im just in a simulator and that's the same feel i get from most of the games. There's no "escapism into the new world" feel that i used to get from playing. Which is why I have so much respect for the developers of Elden Ring to put so much effort into maling the game as it brings back that joy of playing games
100% agree except for one point. You said we don’t need more open world games. I think we don’t need more games to shoehorn in open world elements. If the game is designed around the concept of an open world i’m all for it but if it’s open world to just be open world then I agree it should just be a tighter experience
I mean I would have to say my fav kinda level design is what Dark Souls is. It’s not open world, it’s just layered and interconnected. It’s way more compelling than run in a straight line.
@@EndymionTv Agree, it feels like that’s what they were trying to do with the underground in Elden Ring, obviously the Legacy dungeons as well, but the underground is the most successful way they’ve implemented the dark souls 1 feel to the open world
@@oliverwilliam6931 eh I don’t necessarily agree. I think the tightness of the linear level design of dark souls bloodborne and sekiro make them amazing. If a game is open world just to be open world and it doesn’t really have any reason being open world then it usually sucks. I mean my favorite game is GOW 2018 and that game isn’t fully open world, more like semi open wolrd
@@oliverwilliam6931 "Open World" is one of the most bloated genres out there, filled to the brim with awful, samey and boring titles. There is such a thing as a good open world game but I'd say without exaggeration that at least 95% of them are the same filler garbage.
As a "Western" game developer, I totally agree. Elden Ring is brilliant. Let's not forget Bioshock had a literal arrow pointing you where to go. I think developers took bioshock's themes to heart all those years back.
@@EndymionTv Yea, great video. I subscribed :) I made Blades Away. Currently prototyping a mash up of PvP and Roguelike elements in a 2D game about bees murdering each other... also working on some bizarre GPT3 stuff which will likely never see the light of day, but it's super fun!
But Bioshock had Rapture and some amazing themes. If you evolve , experiement and deliver everyone will play. The thing is most of these western devs think handholding and giving the players incentive is important. When the basic human tendency is to discover , and grow on their own.
It's just different strokes for different frames of mind. Some days you want the arrow, some days you don't. Neither style is wrong, they're just different. People are acting like Elden Ring is the first game like this... but From's been doing the same thing with the same quest design since Dark Souls, which was PLENTY popular, and it didn't make people stop playing other kinds of games, this wont either. People are capable of enjoying more than one style of quest design, that's all this proves, and its something we already knew, today it's just hip to point it out for no good reason except that one game developer made the mistake of getting buthurt that people could like quest designs divergent from the ones they make and didn't understand the concept of liking two things.
you as dev should move to other company that is according your way of work. Don't blame the bosses cause they are the ones who are paying you the salary, so you are part of the problem
the thing about "not holding the player's hand" is what made terraria and minecraft so successful in the first place, like terraria for example that gives you pieces of information but you don't really know how to use it. Or the boss progression that you don't really know what to kill first, and that is absolutely great! It does make the player a bit lost, but it also makes the player very curious and interested in the game. It's not like ARK where you really have no idea on how to do things and how to advance and where to go, because it's so big you get lost and get bored too.
I can understand why western devs are mad. But what did they expect? When you flood the system with live services, then the one game that doesn't supply said service is gona get major attention. This game just happened to come from a reputable studio with a reputable history. The best for this studio was bound to happen
The best has been happening since Bloodborne then dark souls 3 happened then sekiro and now Elden ring you've got 3 games before Elden ring of from software getting and delivering the best
This made me realize why I loved Hollow Knight so much. While you do get the Endgame quest marks at some point the rest of the game is just pure exploring with no quest marks or hand-holding. The game is a true Wonder of Mystery and Exploration.
Another thing to point out is that hollow knight has a world building that is both structured and logical instead of the illogical repeat of cliche areas like a snow area, magma area that are near each other in which you need to turn off your brain to enjoy the game and hollow knight instead actually crafts the kingdom of hollownest into a believable once functioning kingdom brought to ruin with the areas of hollownest
As a westerner and longtime soulsborne fan, I have to express how much I loathe western game design while mentioning my excitement at seeing Fromsoft finally being worthy of no longer being called niche. (Sorry for the rant, but I need to vent) For years I felt that western games would continue to be stereotypical first-person shooters with stereotypical T-shirt wearing everyman protagonists with five-o-clock shadow facial hair while having a stereotypically overcomplicated plot that says very little with hardly any change or development along the way, and I still strongly believe that won't change. But then here comes Elden Ring with fantastical and mystical elements to not only the story and gameplay, but also the aesthetics and setting! I finally get to once again have a sense of wonder and a real challenge that was missing in AAA video games for God knows how long!
Agreed! But look at it from the dev's perspective; why work/hire amazing artistic people to create a more spiritually charged experience, when like 90%of people who buy will not notice. Now, we definitely notice with from software, because their games are less toys with art and more art with toys: it's togetherness and cohesiveness comes first. Why do any of that tho, they can just fake it. Humanity is too good at commoditization and manipulation via fomo at this point. Remember, most people think dark souls (and all abstract art or just abstraction in general) is just a bunch of moody random shit and doesn't mean anything. Let that sink in...lol
western games do have all the things that elden ring does. TW3, Baldur's Gate 3, DOS:2, Pillars of Eternity 1+2, amongst so many others. if you look only at the big and popular stuff you're going to see the trends. that's like complaining about superhero movies and then not going to watch a Von Trier film.
The fact that I went to ng+ when elden ring came out, and started a new playthrough recently and am still finding completely new areas i’ve never been too speaks levels to the amount of content
I believe that the reason why Elden ring stands out is that you actually want to stay in an area and do everything there, you will retry the same useless boss 30 times and you’ll still come back after. The problem with most western games is that the do the same thing except they force you to stay in an area or force you to kill a boss to move on. It makes you lose the sense of it actually being you playing the game and not following the imaginary line of some developer. Elden ring gives you true freedom on how to play
True! It's like you got Isekaid, have to live there and discover crap on your own. The only quest marker were for the main story and that was vague as hell. Once I srarred playing I kept going and just explored everything because it peaked your curiosity.
Stands out even in the Japanese market, why do believe this a West vs orient thing? the same would happen if you take any big hit from the west... I don't want every single game turns in a damn from software clone, what is wrong with you guys??? I pretty much don't enjoy Ubisoft games since AC3, I just stop pay for their damn games, stop trying every single be like the game you like.
I love open world games, or at least i did before Elden Ring. I thought the quest markers made things snappy and when other games didnt have those it was hard to complete a quest correctly. Then I found Rya the Scout. She told to find an abandoned house and get back her necklace. I searched for 20 minutes max, going north to find this house snd couldn't. Figured I'd need a map and tried to find one but to no avail. Then on my fifth exploration of the general area, i go to a place I didnt normally go towards. Then out of the corner of my eye I see a strange building. I think to myself, is it a ruin?. I turn towards it and realize it's a house. In my head it feels like i found the golden egg at easter. I think to myself. "I found it! I found it! I cant believe I found it." That feeling has never happened in a ubisoft stlye of open world game where you just follow the quest marker and do whatecer the instructions tell you. I had never been so happy to find something in any game. Maybe surprised or content but nothing ever made me race towards it to find out what is was. Elden Ring did that. And I'm glad it did. More games should give you a feeling like that.
elden ring doesn't just tell you where to go or how to defeat a boss so finally completing a quest and defeating a boss feels so much more rewarding than in most other games
Something old RPG/open-world games used to like morrowind I am glad elden ring proved that those kind of old game design is not outdated just because it's old
The "quest" design in Elden Ring is absolutely abysmal. One of the worst systems I've ever seen in a long while. The game is great fun, but don't pretend like there aren't glaring issues, especially with the quests.
I'm gonna take a moment to say that it's probably not the devs who are angry, but the senior executives who tried to increase profits by shoving thousands of micro transactions into games, and yet didn't overtake a game which refuses to integrate the pay to win mechanics that they pioneered.
@@ninjahattori7576 Most of them are PC, indie devs. And the sort of indie dev that gets pissed off if you don't like their "masterpieces". Real recognizes real, almost all senior devs respect powerhouses of game design like Nintendo R&D, FromSoftware, modern Capcom, Square Enix on their big hitters, Monolithsoft, and many, many more. D-List indie devs and senior execs dislike the Japanese game design philosophy of making whole games that, at their core, are fun to play and not money-milking machines or hit-you-on-the-head pseudo-political commentary trash.
I'm 37. This game reminded me of playing games in the 90s, when you really felt like you were exploring a new world and felt genuinely curious about what you'd discover. Well done on describing how they achieved this feeling for the player.
What game was open world in the 90s ? Games in the 90s all hold your hands… and don’t tell me it’s final fantasy,, that’s game is full of statistics, numbers, bar graphs, flashy color in screen creating a big mess on the hud that you take turns fighting on a trail.
I didn't say "open world". I don't remember the titles, because I was just a kid and they weren't well known PC titles. I can't even seem to find them on google, but I remember the feeling they gave me and that's what my comment was about.@@ujayet
@@ujayet For me, a couple examples were Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, & Jurassic Park (for SNES). The latter was isometric view & open world. Though there were areas locked off by certain progression order, it was up to the player to find those boundaries, & find the solutions. In-between were vast areas with memorable mini-biomes & distinct dinosaurs, mazes, & first-person building exploration (which I ended up having to map on paper to make sure I've searched every room). Making choices of weapons/ammo to pick up was reactive strategy depending on what threats are around, & sometimes there's tight management needed. And optional achievements like collecting all the overworld raptor eggs was a great sense of accomplishment (even if the game itself doesn't give you a trophy & cake or anything, hehe). That game is so underrated, but to me was one of the most exciting, challenging, & sprawling journeys I'd experienced in gaming for many many years. (If anyone wants to try it, do NOT get the original version 1.0. Look for Revision A, or 1.1. There's an unfortunate game-breaking bug that can cut your journey short near end-game on the boat. Was lucky to have the revised release as a kid... but when we lost the cartridge & I bought a replacement as an adult, I was gutted when I discovered the difference the hard way!)
I am Senior Programmer in a Western European AAA studio. I like Elden Ring and I think game designers and top managers have a lot to learn about what players actually like to play. I admire every good game's success and I'm never angry when some other (even competitor) game has more success than mine I've been working on for couple of years. I'm only occasionally upset about decisions big bosses do to ruin something I gave my soul, time and enormous effort. I believe that's the way how most regular game developers (programmers, artists, designers and their direct leads) feel. TL;DR - People have to distinguish developers, studio bosses and publishers
@@hoelio what would you expect a regular developer to do? Change the work or leave the whole industry? That how it works now, game industry is driven by big bad corporations. Unfortunatelly I'm not so talented or creative to make a successful indie game and I need money for living, so it is what it is. My point was that I'm not angry about Elden Ring's success, neither do my colleagues, there was no guilt involved whatsoever
I'm not blaming you for anything, but saying: "it's the big companies that decide" isn't an excuse. You always have a choice. You may not be the cause of the problem, but (if you are working for some scumbag company like Activision or Ubisoft) you are a part of it.
One thing that doesn't get brought up a lot is the sense of community this game brought with it. During my first playthrough I would call and text friends to ask about certain quests and how to complete them, we would talk about where to find new weapons and armor, and we all had different experiences with the game. That's a huge reason the game was so successful.
What you said reminds me of games I played growing up. Had to ask friends who already beat the games or discovered something I didn’t how they went about certain quests, bosses, etc. Never knew how valuable and interesting that social aspect of gaming was till it was gone with modern gamed
For sure. I remember my first time playing a From game, Dark Souls 3, and how I basically had 10 tabs of the wiki and the reddit open at all times to help me get through it. Some might consider that a negative, but it made me engage with the community. When everything isn't neatly explained for babies, it encourages discussion and teamwork
I was into this game for a solid month and completely agreed with the community comment. Then I realized you have to go to the community because you just couldn't figure out the game any other way. I tried so hard to get through this game but eventually just gave up when I realized I was 80 hours in and still had no clue what I was doing
the real big reason elden ring's open world works so well isn't just that it doesn't handhold, but literally every single thing you can stumble upon feels worthwhile and good. you're not following an objective marker to get a slightly upgraded piece of gear that *might* raise your DPS by 0.2%, you can legit stumble upon one of the best weapons in the game within two hours of creating your character. fromsoft wins because they designed a game that doesn't give a shit if players sequence break.
AI think it's open world is great because of it's size and detail and access to the map. It's not one of the open worlds like cyberpunk where half the map is inaccessible desert areas or giant buildings you can't go through at all.
I think Elden Ring's combat and equipment design (as with Dark Souls') really helps with this too. It really opens the door for being able to create all this cool loot throughout the game, special unique weapons and armor that actually feel different and interesting, and which are almost never direct "upgrades". You can just keep upgrading your starter weapon if you want, and you can even customize it with skills, but you can also find really unique boss themed weapons that each have their own uses and movesets. They are really fun, but aren't at all needed to progress if you don't want to use them.
Man this hits so hard after seeing suicide squad ruining the legacy that batman Arkham series made for itself within six years and got ruined after nine bloody years of the last main installment which is Arkham Knight. Man I wish I died before the release of that shi*t called suicide squad game.
The lack of hand holding in elden ring in regards to map I think is part of why I pissed myself with excitement when I went down a well and was like WTF THERES A WHOLE SOCIETY DOWN HERE. And it also sometimes punishes you for exploration when you wind up somewhere under leveled so it feels like there's at least a dangerous element to the world. The amount of times I discovered a new place in elden ring and was surprised at this vast place sitting there almost undetectable, was more times than I've experienced in any other game even breath of the wild. But if the map had given it away and I hadn't stumbled upon these places it would've made it all bland and way less of a fun moment.
Without i guide i would miss a whole area or few key weapons and spells. To open questbook you need to alttab and open your own excel. To have a hint on what to do next to progress a quest you need to: backtrack whole map walking top to bottom like a roomba) or Open online wiki
As a new player, the thing I’ve loved most about Elden Ring so far is that I feel like I can just do whatever I want. This journey of discovery and challenge has been my best gaming experience in years.
And that si just the thing everyones game experience was different with elden ring when I first got it my very first cinematic boss was radhan befor I ever met margit simply because i didnt get the graces guidence was mostly on just the map. If it was a AAA everyone would have the same route to margit and probly get the same weapons along the way
What's great in Elden Ring for me: -excelent atmospheric gaming experience and challenging dificulty -complete game for a single player -huge, high lore open world -serious, gritty fantasy story -great replay value: different character builds/tons of hidden secrets
I wish there were great games like this made for people like me whos most intense gaming experience is playing minecraft on easy and even then i play on peaceful most of the time. Im just really bad at games but i still really enjoy them. i want to experience dark souls but i cant even pass the tutorial boss lmao
@@inluvwithgoths Yeah, especially with how you can respec so many times in your first playthrough. It really depends on how much time you put into your first playthrough. For me it was about 150 hours then did mp getting to about 210. I tried to do a 2nd run and it is kind of boring besides the bosses. Wish you could just go back and do the bosses as a replay feature.
This is a ridiculous thing to claim. Three years ago there were tons of videos about Asian game devs quaking in their boots because they admitted they were years behind western game devs. They just couldn’t compete with RDR2 or God of War. They were in awe. Nobody gives AF whether a game is Western or not. A good game is a good game. Sometimes the best latest game is Western and sometimes it isn’t. Who cares?
I remember my first western game that I would count as open world/rpg, and it was Asheron's Call, an MMO. I remember wandering around not knowing what to do, just exploring. Quests would show up as scraps of paper at times, sometimes books, sometimes NPCs would tell me some rumor. The was no quest log, no markers, just clues that require you to figure out what that one rock near a cliff is supposed to be. Sometimes you would run in to other players on the same quest and you would team up and figure it out together. Many years later it still one of my fondest gaming experiences.
This sounds a lot like what WoW was in its early years. There was a minimap sure, but mostly it was cosmetic, quest points did not show up on it. You had to actually go and find the NPC. You needed to ask friends and guildmates how and where to do certain things. Dungeons we difficult mostly because people didn't really know what they were doing. You needed to walk everywhere to try and find anything, especially when you ran into a quest desert. Sometimes you were at level in a zone, ran out of quests then there would be a mob level spike. Oh well guess you either die or find a new route. The world felt massive because it actually encouraged you to explore. Then Wrath happened and the entire questing/leveling progression system changed. Pretty much the soul of the game died there, only reason Wrath was so successful was because of some great raid design and the culmination of a storyline that was like 20 years in the making.
Which is weird since Fallout 3 was wildly successful. Then, you have quasi-open-world games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. A good game is a good game. That simple
For the old school like me, this was Morrowind. You were just travelling and discovering stuff, no quest marks which told you were to go, just general direction. You could look for a correct cave for an hour.
I was kinda thinking the same thing. It's like I want to love this game, but I'm someone that devotes time to a game to get everything, and I'm in the middle of two games already.
@@Thelaretus yeah, it's a long game with alot of lore to collect. I've played the second one briefly, but if it's like the off shoot bloodborne, I'm gunna need a year or two.
I played elder scrolls arena. I haven’t enjoyed games much over the past few decades because of the hand holding. Haven’t played games in a long while but am thinking of purchasing Elden ring.
I had never even thought of how all the cool weapons and armor aren’t locked behind a FromSoft Store, another reason why i’m having a hard time going back to other games than the Souls series lmao
I just finished forbidden west. I can say after my 140 hour Elden Ring binge it felt very reminiscent of every other western rug ive grown to hate, due to the sheer bloat of the game and its millions of map markers. Although after finishing it its quite an incredible game underneath all of that bloat...I appreciate all the weapons and arbors are earned in game aswel. Horizon and Ghost of Tsushima are I think the only two western open world rpgs that ive truly appreciated...the rest I can't stomach lol
Just a comment, Elden Ring has sold shy of fourteen-million copies, give or take a couple thousand. Making it the best-selling game from a Japanese company that isn't named Nintendo. Bandai was only expecting to sell about five million copies at around this point, and they're about to double their expectations. Just as a comparison, the entire Dark Souls trilogy, from the original launch on the 360/PS3 in 2011 to the DS 3 Remastered in 2017 (or 2018), just reached 30-million copies recently. If that alone doesn't show that people are hungry for these games, then I don't know what will.
why the hell is it so hard to find ppl to play with online if it has so many players. I put my sign down for help, or sometimes try to help others and it takes ages to sync with ppl :(
@@theguitargod12 my multilayer didnt work for like the first 2 weeks lol rip. barely works now. game in general dope asf, its just... wish there was a better way of doing multi-player
The issue with western game devs is that everything has to be as accessible as possible to reach a wider audience for more profit, which in essence isn’t a bad thing but it does lead to staleness and everything feeling the same year after year. Devs kinda just scratch the surface on 50 different game mechanics to please the masses instead of deep diving a handful to make it a unique experience. If you continue to play it safe every single year, you can’t be surprised when something else becomes more successful
Accessibility doesn't mean making tons of shallow mechanics. Accessibility means communicating how to use a few deep mechanics while also making it so you can complete the game even if you can't engage with the full system.
@@angeldude101 This. As a souls vet I can confidently say Elden Ring is actually the most accessible of the games. While it's probably the hardest if you try to learn it like the old games, it gives you way too many options to cheese things if you don't want to master the mechanics. And yet these are done with relatively few options that tie into what you'd be using if you were to play "normally" anyway, so if a new player were to go back and try something harder they'd still be able to adapt faster.
Ubisoft games in nutshell.. Watch Dogs, Far Cry (From 4 to later games), and Assassin's Creed (From Origins to later games) are fun to play at beginning but they get so boring pretty quick because the repetitiveness and doing same thing over and over with less creativity, not to mention the story in those games (Except FC4) is mediocre at best, and adding more salt to the wound there almost nothing changed from the sequels either.
It's not just the games, same goes for movies as well. They essentially try to make a movie that will please basically everyone. Instead of sticking to their genre and their audience. Corporations listen executives and typically those executives have business degrees, psychological degrees, societal sciences,etc This... is a problem, stock owners think that these people know what they are doing but they don't. They have no clue on how to make a movie/games. They think that making the experience be like a tour or mixing as many genres as possible is a good thing, and it really isn't.
What I liked about Elden Ring is after you finished the game, you will still like to replay it, and do your own "what ifs". There are still a lot of rooms to explore. Unlike other games after finishing the whole game you just walk out and done or restart but never have the urge to complete it again. In Elden Ring you still have this excitement of fighting the whole bosses again, try new weapons, change combat styles and try different endings. Plus pvp is just an icing on top.
The character design is just so cool in Souls games. Art design/direction in Japanese games are just awesome. Some of the bosses in the Resident Evil series are my favorite.
Id say this is actually my biggest gripe about the game, because of the open world, and the numerous dungeons with reskin enemies/bosses, and lackluster rewards for engaging said enemies, I think ER's replay value is pretty crap compared to other fromsoft games.
Though I haven't finished Elden Ring, it stays rent free in my mind! It gave me such a sense of accomplishment when I found and slayed the monster keeping the mage npc locked, and when I was low on health but had to, carefully, fall onto wall ledges to to escape the mining caves/tunnels 🥰
The west was making games with similar design concepts as Elden Ring up to the early 2000s. Then something changed, and that something is probably money, which is what makes me skeptical Elden Ring is going to influence anything in the west, because the same big publishers that changed how western games were to be made aren't going to allow anything to reverse course.
I honestly think that Japanese games will dominate. Unless you think Western consumers don't care. Then maybe Japanese games will mostly just stay in Japan. As a Western gamer, I've been playing a ton of Japanese games that are extremely obscured and niche. Games like Shenmue 1 and 2 were niche. No one played it, and gamers who grew up on it, who then became youtubers brought it to light. Guys like Dunkey and many others are the cause of that. Now a lot of people know what Shenmue is. (on a side note, Shenmue III isn't satisfying at all, quite disappointing). There are so many Japanese games with awesome concepts that I love. Games like Way of the Samurai, Onimusha, Yakuza, Bushido Blade, Kengo Master of Bushido, and Suikoden (and thousands more) are all great games but are extremely niche. If what you say is true, then perhaps the state of game will only get worse. To be quite honest, I've been extremely turned off by games in the last 12 years. I've probably played about 15 games in the last 12 years because i couldn't find anything to play that was fun or satisfying.
It wasn't money, it was ego. They got a big head and decided that since it was their decisions that players liked, that they could decide what players liked. The proof is their incessant claims that it's the *players* who are the problem and at fault for lower sales and stuff. From Software didn't do that, they just put in what the players wanted and the players bought huge numbers of their products, so they made a ton of money. The same can be seen in Jedi: Fallen Order, which EA had blatantly made to try and prove their normal model was right *against* the players (they even went so far as to talk about removing features normal to games and rub it in everyone's faces as if it was going to convince players they were right like Blizzard thought about Classic) and were shocked and somewhat angry that it became a huge hit. Remember, pride is worth any amount of money to people suffering from hubris.
@@artydean9892 way ahead of its time bro. Same with so many other games like Xenogears. Nier and many other games have Xenogears and Tetsuya Takahashi to thank for that. FFVII is the biggest example of taking the concepts from Xenogears and making a beautiful story out of it. They literally took all the major plot points and concepts from xenogears script back in 1995. Not even joking. So many Japanese games do great concepts and goes unnoticed. All the time. Of course for my American counterpart, look at Fallout New Vegas and Obisidian. That game before 2016 when it started getting a lot of love for making a proper rpg in the 21st century, went unnoticed too. Japanese people love making deep and articulate games, but the lack of love and hate they get is universal, Japanese or American.
Elden ring has a curious way of keeping players spending time in their world. They actually rely on talented, original and passionate good product in order to make the consumer play their game. This is so groundbreaking, somebody should let Activision know about this method!
Activision knows about it well, but why would they give up the low effort, free money, when ppl keep buying their trash content anyway? And its not just Activision. Most companies do it. Ppl need to stop buying trash to send a message. The same applies to the trash hollywood or netflix content that gets released in the past few years. Just stop giving them any money. Period.
@@Justathought81 The platinum trophy is just a way to get you to grind through a whole lot of terrible, repetitive, monotonous game space to feel you got value, when really you just wore your controller out a little closer to needing a replacement
@@Justathought81 Assuming you're not being sarcastic, a platinum trophy is only worth getting if you actually enjoy playing the game and want to fully master it like that. Otherwise you're just wasting your time.
Old head gamer here turning 42 in a few weeks. What I loved about Elden Ring is that they took the amount of marketing crap to a minimum before and after its launch. The overall experience takes me back to the days of PS2 in the early 2000s when games would offer their own kind of immersion without relying on "realistic" aesthetics.
This is absolutely a huge part of why the game was so impactful for me as well. Compared to the scale of the finished product, the amount of marketing for the game was resoundingly (and refreshingly) minimal. They "undersold" it and just let the final version and subsequent word of mouth do the talking.
Elden Ring takes the lack of hand-holding multiple steps further, though I think it strays too far from the sweet spot. Quest logs and lists for objectives are boring, but a sequential journal that updates whenever you progress would have been great. The difficulty in the questing comes from deciphering riddles, not having to try and remember all of the people you're helping, or to consult a guide on what step you're on. There are PLENTY of ways to prematurely end quest lines, so I think having a Morrowind style vague journal wouldn't be too bad if it's just something you can use to remember what you've done with an NPC.
They marketed the ever living fuck out of this game, no idea what you're talking about. They literally had influencers playing and streaming it for months before it actually released.
@@jameson7276 we had radio silence for how many years? They released a teaser then crawled back into nothingness as the community hollowed making up completely random lore
I've replayed Elden Ring twice, each time managing to find so many new bosses, and then I go to watch other youtubers play the game and end up finding more bosses or quests I ended up missing. They put a lot of work into this game, which is something western companies refuse to do because they want to put as little effort as possible for as much profit as they can manage. For example, Activision knows there will be millions of idiots who will buy the next COD game even though it is literally no different to the last one, and so they know they don't need to put any effort in. Many games aren't even released as complete, instead being sold as alphas or betas and worked on for decades, all the while draining people's wallets of cash on microtransactions. It has affected many once-great game studios and has led to most years being rather uneventful for gaming.
FromSoftware has been a jewel hidden from many for the last 30 years. Starting with hits like, Armored Core and Demon Souls many years later, they have shown time and time again that they are not the BEST out there, but they definitely have their soul still intact when you play their games. Not poisoned by Western distributors. I can't even see them ever going in that route and may be one of the last old studios that have not bended the knee to greed. Hats off to FromSoftware for showing us what true creativity looks like, what real wonders devs, designers, and producers can make when not held at gun point by strict deadlines and the need to operate in a service model.
I loved For Answer. Couldn't figure out what made it so good vs. the other ones Then I got into DaS, played DeS, found out that it was the same people.
Blizzard used to be like that. Had a soul, didn’t bend, made great games. All there games were least 9.0s and a smashing success. They would take genres and make the best versions of them. But then they tossed blizzard north which is where most of there good stuff came from and merged with activision. Now they just milk whatever they can from there older franchises and have become more of the same. Overwatch was a different change of pace at least
Remnant: From The Ashes was a great example of a Western Dev (Gunfire) not only going the From Software formula right, but innovating and iterating on it with their own compelling lore and a laser focus on fun multiplayer coop. The sequel to that game is an absolute 100% first day buy for me.
That game is low key fun and deserves more attention. I will say the overall world/boss/enemy design lacks variety and richness that From games have. Also I felt the bosses abused throwing in little distractor enemies all the time to the point it was aggravating. Still, good game.
Yeah remnants is fun if you're playing multi, soloing some of the super gank bosses will have you pulling your hair out. So boss design isn't on par, with say, sekiro, but it's still fun
@@redgarlicbred6228 I found my "Jolly Cooperation" experience in Remnant. I've played it on all three platforms (two of which give it away for free) and almost all the rados I've been paired with have been super friendly, making the bleak world that much more bearable. I would also argue that gank bosses are more bearable when you have a automatic weapon or a shotgun with a ton of mana. Yes, the bosses aren't as refined as the Souls games (noting even close to Artorias or Pontiff), but they got a lot right first try.
Opening that trap box that takes you to a mine in Caelid..was one of the most terrifying and wonderful experiences in gaming..the game gives 2 fs about you..that powerless feeling is actually key to pushing me forward..to want to get better
@@coyotebones1131 I remember watching and trying to help my brother get out of there when it happened. Ironically we went deeper in thing up meant out and were dumbfounded when the exit was literally right there.
Okay try that but figuring out how to get the horse, I did this on my first day went Dragon Burnt Ruins, cleared out the rats after getting mauled many times over. Opened the trap chest was in Caelid's crystal mines. No horse, level 7 at the time with the bleed dagger from the bloody finger I accidentally ran into while exploring. Secllia was a death trap on foot the terrfying as hell t-rex looking dogs, the giant crows, it was like hell on Earth getting through that place haha.
Elden Ring works because it puts the FULL power in the players hands. There is no limit to what you can do or where you can go WHEN and HOW you want to go there. Every step, every enemy defeated, every boss conquered FEELS like such an accomplishment. You truly feel like YOU earned every step you took. This was my first FromSoft game and the level of frustration, and achievement i felt while playing this game was / is like no other game ive ever played in the last 25 years. IT brought back the sense of exploration and joy i hadnt felt since i was a kid. Cant wait for the next release from them.
I love, love Elden Ring's lore and the way you have to search and theorize about it. It really makes theorizing feel accessible, and from a writing standpoint the lore is incredible imo. Such a huge inspiration for writing. Didn't even fall into the trap of lacking emotion for me, which is common for games, I literally got teary when reading about miquella, or radahn's defeat at malenia and vice versa, or the carian family, etc very emotional like a full, propery high fanasty story.
Ive just unlocked the snow area, 1st playthrough Do they just tell u about the lore like u said about miquella, or do u have to go out of ur way to find it or somthing?
@@SpeedyPoison774 the game only gives you bits of information throughout and it can be kinda difficult to put together. Pay attention to item descriptions and read lore online
One of my favorite things about Elden Ring is the amount of replayability it has. You spend so much time exploring every nook and cranny on your first playthrough, and yet when you go through again, you're still finding things you missed. The difficulty also plays a massive part. It takes time and practice to beat the bosses in this game, and doing it a second, or third time makes the bosses you once found incredibly difficult a walk in the park. You can also diversify your build in hundreds of different ways, using different styles of combat, different weapons, and different paths through the game. I will definitely be revisiting this game for years to come
It’s probably the least replayable souls game. Bosses are super rng with meaty health bars and one shot mechanics or they’re a cakewalk that make replaying the game pretty much the same except you have to still dump like 30 to 40 hours whereas games like bb, ds3, or sekiro you can actively see yourself mastering each encounter little by little until you can basically beat everything without a sweat. Don’t get me wrong elden ring is worth 2 or 3 playthroughs with the amount of quests and secret areas and its masterpiece but the difficulty of the boss stems from your build and not your skill or mastery of their move set and yours.
@@logannewberry5788 I do agree with you that bosses are either ridiculously powerful or weak but you can argue that’s the cost of an incredibly large open world with serious effort put into it. That’s why I don’t compare Elden Ring to other soul games, it isn’t a finite path that’s had far more time dedicated to balancing.
@@ecci0261 no I definitely understand that. I do think it’s possible in theory though if they made a sequel to bump the boss quality up but I don’t see them doing that. Overall the exploration and densely packed open world make the game truly amazing first time around but there’s not much reason to replay once you’ve seen it all.
@Abi for me, the bosses (main ones) are the best in this game although i havent played bloodbourne or ds2, could be wrong. their skillsets are fun to look at visually, the theme they have is cool, every main boss is interesting, beating them was satisfying and their arent many bosses where i feel like it was bullshit (except for the godskin duo which is ornstein and smough wallmart edition). sure there are shitty reskin bosses but i can forgive them since most of the reskins tend to have a new gimmick to them and its an open world. the open world was really detailed too. there were plenty of cool weapons and mobs, unique areas and plenty of scattered lore to go through. the randomness of a boss suddenly appearing in your screen also adds to it too. I still remember going to that one place where you get to fight astel. it was beautiful
@Abi ahh dang, you were this close to facing Maliketh(one of my favorite bosses). Fighting Godfrey was really hype too. Fire giant can be really annoying with it's rolls and large HP but atleast you beat it
FromSoft has mastered the “show, don’t tell” aspect of storytelling. The lack of cutscenes and allowing you to create your own ending really is freedom to the player and thus gives the player more power. I think the best equivalent to this game would be Detroit: Become Human. Although I do not like the mechanics of the game (GIVE ME CONTROL OF THE FUCKING CAMERA!!!!) it doesn’t show you what you should do, but allows you to create the game in a way you want to. Granted it’s almost like every scene is a cut scene but it works for the game. It’s like reading a novel. Yeah, that’s it. I want my game to feel like reading a novel rather than being a slave to the task master (shout out to “would you kindly”). Don’t give me markers of interest, let me find them myself. Edit: seeing a lot of comments about not having quest logs and having to write things down. That’s a good thing. It’s a dnd format of storytelling. When you get into a dnd world, you know nothing about it and have to interact with the npcs to get information about it. Instead of interacting with npcs in Elden Ring, you go to written lore outside and inside the game. It’s no different from reading a book and understanding why Gandalf was gone for so long because the movie didn’t cover it well enough. Sorry y’all don’t like putting in work to learn about lore instead of it being given to you in cutscenes. But if you don’t care about the lore, guess what, the game doesn’t take away player control. You can either dive into the lore or just play the game.
The assassins creed color objective thing is really crazy when you think about it. Like yeah I definitely know something is here. I remember finding the dual blades in Elden Ring. I had no idea and I did a backflip cuz I was so happy
The ubisoft open world is to RPGs as call of duty was to first person shooters in the late 2000s - early 2010s. COD back in the day was so wildly successful that it created a box of "drab colored, war fps" that strangled creative design, as studios were too afraid to step out of that box for fear of losing mainstream appeal. Ubisoft has done the exact same thing with their "activate the tower to reveal the map, thousand collectables, attack the outpost" open worlds. Its become the template that most studios follow. However, much like how destiny challenged and broke the fps box back in 2014, leading to an outpouring of creative ideas in the genre, I believe Elden Ring is gonna shatter the ubisoft open world box.
Breath of the Wild was the game that did it first though ... and I'm not saying it because I'm a fanboy or something, I actually love Elden Ring even more than Botw, but it's just a fact that Botw was the first important open world game that broke the western design norms
@@notspacekeeper I remember having Medal of Honor Frontline as a kid, to this day I wonder how they got away with just straight off ripping scenes from Saving Private Ryan and A Bridge Too Far
Unfortunately, Destiny itself created the "looter-shooter box" and you get crap like outriders, anthem, and the like churned out constantly. As long as "money for the shareholders (aka money lizard people) is the goal, studios will be hesitant to try new ideas because a single failure in the eyes of said lizards could spell the death of an entire studio. When "breaking even" became a dirty word, creativity died.
@O K they don't.... they're just really well fleshed out games that have great replay value, sure Skyrim could've been more fleshed out if they weren't rushing for that rare 11/11/11 release date but we have mods and waiting over a decade now for Elder Scrolls 6 so hopefully they've put a lot of effort in
One of the reasons I love Ghost of Tsushima was the lack of a questpoint. It was just wind that disappeared off your screen after a few seconds, and you could enjoy the scenery without barreling towards the marker
@@seymourpant Yes but the multiplayer more than made up for that. If we could get a sequel standalone in the vein of tsushimas multiplayer i would love that.
@@seymourpantI don’t think “set in feudal Japan” is enough to quantify “like Sekiro”. It was much more like RDR2 or The Witcher 3 than it is Sekiro. Ghost and Sekiro are entirely different from each other as far as narrative, gameplay, and genre. All of these games are phenomenal regardless.
my first run of elden ring took me 80 hours to complete due to how full, open and ambigous the world is, I must have discorvered every nook and cranny in that game on my first run and i never once felt hopelessly lost or bored trying to find something to do or discover.
I literally just started playing and already I can tell that Elden Ring has the love and care from a AAA studio like indie devs for their games. And that it came out as a finished product, the one thing AAA western studios fear. Edit : There is so much more than I ever anticipated holy shit I’ve beaten the game twice already. Second play through I realized that THE ENTIRE REGION of Caelid is OPTIONAL. Great game I give it a 10/Western Game Dev tears.
Kingdom Come Deliverance on Hardcore is such a trip. You don't get directions on your compass, and you don't get a player icon on the map, so you literally have to orient yourself by looking around and at the map for landmarks and think about directions and plot your own path, many times a longer one that is more easily followed.
If I were to make an adjustment to Elden Ring's quests it'd be to have some sort of journal-type system that writes down important information from certain NPC's after talking to them so you can quickly re-look at the info they give you after they leave. The game already does it sometimes with the "notes" and I don't think it'd kill the sense of discovery too much to just have a little more of those red markers for certain quests. I don't know how anyone does some of these quests without guides in its current state.
The reason the quests are the way they are is because the game expects you not to just run through a side quest but instead wants you to just run into people. It's not supposed to feel like a quest that is only moving forward because you interact with it and instead is a case of another character going on a journey and you just so happen to run into them. In other words you're not supposed to running through a checklist.
@@vocalcalibration8033 It's still a weak system that they eventually had to fix to by adding npc markers on the map. NPC quests should've been self contained in a local area when you meet them or given better guides to where they are next. The world of Elden Ring is still a video game world where you're less likely to revisit old places without a reason so quests like the blind maiden and alexander lost their values and literally became what you mentioned as something players forced to move forward, looking up guides for where to go next and forcefully created that checklist you're talking about. If it's a journey, there really shouldn't be in any sort of backtracking or running in circle. They should be moving forward just like you but that's clearly not the case and just made their storylines more procedural than enjoying.
@@vocalcalibration8033 The thing is, many of them already DO give hints to where they go next. I'm just saying it'd be nice if you got a note or something that at least reminded you of what they already said that you could look at later. Just so you don't have to either take your own notes, or more likely, look up a guide since you weren't paying close attention the first time because you were in the middle of something else when you meet them before.
That's exactly what Deus Ex (2000) did. You could also edit those notes or add new ones. The notes are in the section with a quest journal - primary and secondary goals are listed there, but they don't micro manage your every action, instead giving you just an end goal. The only references you have are pieces of information you can get by exploring the levels and sometimes images that get sent to you directly - those being static schematics, maps etc. that you have to analyze by yourself. No way markers etc. This game is an immersive sim that lets you complete your objectives in multiple ways but it's kinda ruined by the prequels
I think From's quest design is working as intended but it's made worthless by the fact anything you want to know about a game, you can google. The idea is that you come across an NPC, quest, secret, etc etc and you discuss it with your buddies and the player base establish an Intel network of sorts to piece the game together. You even get guided by other players in game if you pay attention to the markings they leave on the ground. The major problem tho is rhat all that is sidestepped because you'll just follow a guide anyway
Throughout the entire game, Elden Ring feels like a meticulous hand carefully crafted every moment of the game. The quality never dips from start to finish, and the game rarely breaks the player immersion.
I think that part of the problem is that, in modern society we try to optimize everything to the point where we tend to create a “formula” for everything, whether that be a standard or template etc. Generally this would be something along the lines of “what creates or makes for a good song, movie or video game”… and if this process is repeatable, it then becomes a standard way of doing things, it becomes “formulaic”. This is then repeated to point where every song sounds the same and every game plays the same. Essentially we know what to expect from the game and how it will play before we have actually even played it! The most successful video games seem to be the ones that break or at least in someway challenge the “standard way of doing things” by “subverting our expectations”!
It is not a problem, but rather a fact of how things evolve to be as a game company or any other company grows. Stability becomes more and more important and risk-taking decisions and behaviors will be reduced. Investors seeks stability. Retired people do not put all their money in high risk stocks and risk losing their lifesavings anymore. Mcdonalds will not do a big revamp to its menu. Apple will not suddenly make big changes to their products. This happens the same way across all industries and in life. It is down to those who are young or smaller companies to take big risks that break the mold.
Something related to that is the tendency of players to optimise the fun out of games if given the opportunity to do so. Hence why games like the long dark make such strong use of status meters, and forcing you to take a hit to one of your meters to stop another from killing you, forcing the players into uncomfortable situations. Similarly, in elden ring you can often end up in situations where you're very low on health but just have to push through the area in the hopes of finding a site of grace
That's because Ubisoft mistakenly got thought of as a "pioneer" when all they did was contribute to the downfall of western games with their bland, unremarkable, handholding formulaic bullshit that Assassin's Creed and Far Cry forced onto other studios. Vacuous open worlds with next to nothing in them.
I’ve never played a fromsoft game, was discouraged by the “Dark Souls” difficulty culture, and have only played competitive fps games for 5 years. Yet, Elden ring is the best videogame I have ever played. It reminds me of when I would think to myself, “how would I make a videogame that I actually like and differs from the current formulaic/dry market. It is a masterpiece and I’m glad it challenges what we think as a “good videogame”
I started exactly like you, and then I started falling more and more in love with the game because of its beauty/horror, sharp gameplay and the lore that begs to be explored since they aren't throwing it down our throats. I couldn't stand the open world watchtower collectathon anymore, and Elden Ring just surprised me so much, I haven't felt that way in a game since the first time I played Skyrim, which is a game that changed the open world in the industry since its release. I think ER has a good chance to be a big step in the right direction if the western devs take inspiration from it.
and now I bet... that difficulty culture was a lie. Basically mainstream media, full of game dev shills, who keep spouting that dark souls is hard, when it isn't. The hand holding is the biggest thing, and game dev's are scared of it. They think game is hard because it doesn't hand hold you, so don't play the game because its hard. Play our game, we hand hold. I been saying for years. The souls games are not hard. They just don't handhold you. That doesn't make it hard, it just shows you that your not a good gamer. That doesn't mean you can't become a good gamer, just that you currently are not a good gamer. Playing souls games, actually make you a better gamer. As cringe as that sounds, but its fact. Game dev's dont want you to be a good gamer, they want you to think you are good by playing their hand hold game. That is why mainstream media keeps shoving that "difficulty culture" down ppls throat, about souls games.
@@yummychips_ I laugh every time some modern "gamer" thinks they are good at games because they play Dark Souls. One of my earliest addictions on the NES was Ghost n' Goblins. I wasn't even in my teens yet.
This is why, for the past 7 or so years, I've mostly stuck to playing indie games. On average they feel more complete, even if a bit wonky at times. But they try new things and blend concepts together that I haven't experience before. Even if I don't stick with those games, I've happy to have experienced what they bring to the table and where other games and grow from there.
@@ezioauditore5616 I don't think it's just because the companies are releasing open world, but because they don't change it in any way. Take Saints row, Watch Dogs Legion or other newer open world games. They have almost no replayability and are just boring after some time, because it's the same few missions over and over again. Just look at the newer Ubisoft games and you'll see how much has "changed" over the years. Of course, you can see Elden Ring the same way, but it gives you A LOT more options and ways to beat it, you can even just skip difficult bosses and choose easier ones.
Elden Ring is not hated by an "entire continent of game developers". It's hated by a select few AAA game developers. Most AA, Indie, and even AAA game developers love it, but the internet likes to be angry so they only focused on the opinions of a few random people on twitter.
"Elden Ring" , is my first time playing a FromSoft game. I am a 57 year old, who has been playing video games, since their inception, and "Elden Ring" is quite possibly my favorite game of all time. I look forward to any opportunity to play, more than any game that I've ever played. Bravo, FromSoft! Bravo!
Older gamer here too. 49. My wife is even playing with over 50hrs! And she doesn’t really play games. This title has certainly done something right.
PRAISE THE SUN
@@landoncube769 \[T]/
Iam old myself, 48 , been playing games as well for a very long time and this is by far one of the best game i played since everquest 1 back in 1999.
Glad i bought it!
Iam 150hrs in and iam not even half way trough 😅
I like collecting and discovering stuff, this game is massive and complete...when was the last timed you played a fully complete game without the dev divising it in 4 to sell it to you in pieces for profit.
I just love it 👌
Highly recommended Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. It's a very different experience, even though it shares a lot of DNA with other FromSoft games.
Dozens of us think it's their best game. Dozens!
The best explanation I’ve heard was from a tiny podcast : “game executives are going to think the way to get Elden Ring success is to make it open-world and really hard but the real reason is that they made a whole game”
while making a “whole game” in a time and age when companies keep selling crumbs for the price of a whole loaf may be refreshing, i think what makes elden ring successful is that it does 3 things exceptionally well:
abandons the idea of hand holding, allows for full creativity of play style, and offers both a fulfilling single, AND multiplayer experience at the same time, instead of sacrificing one for the other.
this formula tho comes from a long line if FromSoft games that have all come together to contribute to Elden Ring’s success (not to mention a huge ass marketing budget lol)
@@C_The_Guy Personally I always wished darksouls had more in game explanations of just... how things work. Like no one understanding poise, or the bull goat ring lying to you, or the axe talisman being misleading (people think warcry's "charging attacks" are boosted because it has the word "charged" in it ect) Literally never once is it explained how dr is calculated, hell, they don't show you how danage works. If you want to actually understand a from game you need the wiki and in my eyes that's bad design. I do agree though that not teaching you combo's or flooding you with markers or any such thing is refreshing, npc quests are hell as always though. without a wiki my friend stumbled into... 2? out of the 20+ npc questlines, just giving the players a notebook to have quest details might be nice? All in all though, very solid. I'd also argue multiplayer is ass, invasions are the literal worst they've ever been in the whole franchise. Ashes and co-op trash boss difficulty ( 30+ tried on Horah Loux before summoning in Nepheli because it follows her lore, literally first tried the boss) And just the pvp strats, you can be really scummy with things like blood hound step, stars of ruin, or rivers of blood. not to say Eldenring isn't an amazing game. I now have twice the hours I spent in all of darksouls in the game now, just that I don't think it does your points exceptionally well. It does them decently at best. I think your second point is the most true, ashes of war, weapons, spells, combine to have a nearly infinitely creative play style, and just... the sheer quantity and quality of game are what made it so massively successful in my eyes.
Good world design is confident that it will make the player want to explore rather than hold the player’s hand and force them in a direction
@@lordderppington4694 actually sometime you don’t need to know how it works to use it. Just like car driver don’t need to know how to fix the car to run it.
I’m fine with look up guide because that’s basically what I so every time I play anything new. I think the point is they let a lot untold just so some people could enjoy discovering. Like putting lots of lore on item descriptions. Few months laters you will see people interpret lore like a historian. Part of it help grow the community as well since one can’t discover everything so fast they will results communicating.
@@fishyfinthing8854 and it works great for the lore. But the spear talisman, says it does bonus damage on thrust counter attacks, in the past things like rolling and guard breaking count, the item though says it only works when the enemy is in the attack animation though, you could go a whole playthrough not figuring out if it's working or not, radagons gives 30 dex for the purposes of casting, the dex cap for cast speed is 70, you could put that on, overcap on dex, and it could be useless the whole time. THE ROAR MEDALION says it works on breath attacks, it does not. You could put together an entire dragon build, and have it not do the damage it should the whole game. You kinda need the wiki to explain how these things work, hell I know some people who don't even understand how damage works and *are* using the wiki. I guess you could just throw random shit on your char and walk through and have a bad time. But running a dex weapon on a str build, (because unlevelled they both had a d scaling and you weren't willing to dump all your stones into the weapon before finding out) with talismans that do nothing for your character and whatever cobled together armor pieces you found, isn't gonna be very fun, isn't gonna feel impactful, and isn't good game design.
Elden Ring is great to me because
- It is a complete game
- Playable offline
- No monetization
- No hand holding
- shrimp
It is old school then?
Best Comment ever! Thoroughly agree I'm tired of buying games where you have to be hand held and present you with "PAY TO WIN" premise I am glad these western developers are complaining because they know their stuff is only out to suck money from their players
- British
- waifu
Whenever I watch Elden Ring clips and gameplay it feels like I am watching a scene from a movie, I have my eyes focused on the character and not at the multitude of add-ons like compasses or maps or whatnot scattered on the UI. It actually feels so refreshing to watch a clean or at least a minimalist UI of Elden Ring
Well said
My OLED appreciates it too
Yes it has only graphics everything else in that game is poorly designed and shit. Its just a game ppl its fanboys are acting like something is accomplished or its a good game while most of Playstation players that bought this masterpiece of shit tryna get a refund
@@cemalcenkzh 🤦♂️ 🤡
@@cemalcenkzhL+ratio
Elden Ring wasn't just a game developed over 5 years but also the culmination of more than a decades of experience in refining the system over multiple games. It a damn good game.
Yep. While making many good points, this video is just a sloppy mess of bad takes. Obviously, the most prominent one was "Western developers are so angry"? It was a handful of devs. Then the one about Japanese devs feeling the pressure to emulate western design, when the reality is that GREED is being the predominant factor. Sony has stated that they want to make more money therefore they are adopting more live services, etc etc. This has nothing to do with Japanese devs trying to emulate garbage like AssCreed, or whatnot.
This video has zero evidence to back up any of its claims, outside of what its common knowledge.
I wanted to say that!
And even after Elden Ring, I doubt FromSoft would consider it their "magnum opus". I doubt their fans would consider it their "magnum opus". Maybe some, but not most. They could still refine their craft even further and make an even better game.
It’s a masterwork for sure
No not rly , if u play their other they did bosses and dounges much better , and ofc balance .
Seeing the sheer success of Elden Ring makes me happy. In a world where soulless money dictates everything in western games it’s so refreshing to see a game absolutely crush the sales without micro transactions and a company that cares
Very different kind of game but Final Fantasy 14 does this in the mmo market too, becuase the devs care and don't mistreat the customers.
Real shame that it's so mediocre though
@@cluntbaby9735 in what way?
@@jarvis6253 it just more the same dark souls form them it is nothing new
I mean... the fact that FromSoftware have taste doesn't mean that there isn't soulless money involved. It's a big company $60 AAA game, after all.
I'm a Western game dev and I think a more accurate title would be "Why Western Game Executives Are So Angry About Elden Ring's Success". All of the devs I've talked to who have played Elden Ring love the fact that it's doing so well and are obsessed with the game design, including myself. Just like BotW I hope this continues to set a great example for open world games. It gives us more ammo when we go into meetings with execs to pitch why our games don't need tons of extra shit tacked onto them.
@@albinoredpanda3868 Tbf I'd honestly agree with the quest design. My Friend played through blind, finished 2 npc quests out of the what? 20+? could we have like... a notebook maybe?
try genshin impact its better than botw and elden ring
@@bluemenkranz_2953 Perish
@@bluemenkranz_2953 if I start playing genshin today
Will I be able to play the events? Will I be able to experience the past event stories? Get my hands on the event specific items of past events? Can I take a break from the game for like 3 weeks and not miss any story content? Can I enjoy the game while not banging my head over rolling for artifect substat and get def or def% everytime? Can I not feel dead inside farming everyday, do my daily commissions and think about is there anything else I can do in this game?
@@doragonmeido Ikr
A game that nearly forces you to play it everyday to get the good shit it has in store... can be good, actually, but I don't got time for that.
Gacha games, man. Games for people who don't have a job.
I am Japanese and have been a game designer for a Japanese game developer company (not FromSoftware) for about 20 years now.
However, even Japanese game designers cannot help but envy FromSoftware's development style and the values and track record that allow them to maintain a certain auteuristic quality despite being commercial.
The subject of this video says "Western game developers," but I feel that it is a kind of pathology that hovers over the game industry all over the world, regardless of East or West.
It seems to me that FromSoftware is special in that they have so much faith in the player's "will to finish the game".
On the other hand, many other development sites try to avoid game design that relies on the player's effort, curiosity, or observational skills.
In other words, the type of game that leads you to a Disneyland-like hand-holding, such as the one mentioned in this video.
They lead players to their next destination with annoyingly glowing icons, which everyone is tired of seeing nowadays.
It is a cynical reality that this specification, originally born from good intentions, has become a detriment to the gameplay itself.
But as Eldenring proves, players are inherently active when it comes to the fascinating world, mysterious story, and something they want to get their hands on in the first place.
A game design that is always being led by the hand by a guide dog, despite the open world represented by the Assassin's Creed franchise, is a contradiction in the first place, and game designers are not so incompetent as to not notice this.
However, on the other hand, the values of the management side, which seeks only "understandability" from a commercial standpoint, tend to take precedence in the industry.
I can't help but feel that there are many major companies that should all realize this sooner, but have yet to do so.
envy ? like copy pasting from previus games? XD
I totally disagree I hated elden ring quest markers some players don't have hundreds of hours to play I love to know where I'm going
@@solidblock221 In short, you can consider Eldenring's courageous decision not to attach importance to gamers like you to be one of the reasons for its great success.
In other words, from now on you will continue to be ignored by FromSoftware games, so feel free to live your life avoiding FromSoftware's masterpieces.
@@NekoNekoKainushi I really hope elden ring won't the the game industry standard balder gates 3 is the best. Game I ever played
@@solidblock221standards and gameplay UI are two different things
Yessss
I could say the same for Arcane - the animated series from League of Legends. It seems the producers from Arcane just let the artists do the work, so they made art. I think it's very similar to what I understood you said about Elden Ring: the developers did the work, so they made a beautiful and great game. Could we call it art also?
Anything that makes you feel something is art in my opinion 🤷🏻♂️🤙🏼
Anything that comes out of a mind is art
@@EndymionTv i hitted my tumb with a hammer today, very intense art
@@Marco-hb4pt it's a painful art
shut up
The question that Devs who say ER's success is unearned need to consider is, "why is the average Elden Ring player's play time so much higher than ours?" Initially they could have claimed the success was due to an out-of-control hype train and George RR Martin name recognition, but if that's all it was players would have stopped playing by now. The fact the average ER player has well over 100 hours in the game and has reached level 100++ means players really enjoy it and don't want to stop playing. When was the last time you could say that about an Ubi-Clone?
Western devs have their hands tied. They get told what to make from corporate, while in FROMsoft Hidetaka Miyazaki calls all the shots and can make whatever game he darn well pleases and the investors just let the man work.
both people in the replies missed the point, the devs are the ones complaining about elden ring, not about corporate locking them in a path
they complained about the wrong thing instead of the thing that is actually limiting them
@LOU ALEX then why are they complaining about elden ring, just dont say anything at that point if its not the problem
Im aware they cant complain about their employer or possible future employers online
i doubt ubisoft is breathing down their developers necks telling them to complain about elden ring because it may inspire change in development lmao
im at 250hours and havent even beaten it yet... itll be sad to finally see that last train of bosses. right now im trying to beat malenia before gideon fucks off to become a boss..
not going well
I didn't know ER was a dark souls game. I didn't even know GRRM helped make it. A friend said he might buy it so I was like whatever and bought it. Now it's one of my favorite games.
Elden Ring is a game, not a business. That’s why we love it.
That’s explain why other company are upset .
@Deadpoppin Only difference is it's fromsoft want your money , unlike others company who want your time (yes I'm talking about you blizzard)
@Deadpoppin let’s just say fromsoft are good when it come to not fuck with their clients
@Deadpoppin FromSoft don't fill their game with microtransactions unlike most other devs is the simplified version. They may be just as money-hungry, but they're less in-your-face about it
@Deadpoppinare you angry at a game developer for making money from its games? Do you want elden ring to be free?
I liked how Elden Ring was a complete game, that was not loaded with micro transactions or bugs, had so much hidden content and secrets to find which really made it feel special and gave it some depth and it also gave you the freedom to do whatever you wanted so it wasnt totally linear which gave people the option to play the game how they want and make it more or less challenging depending on play style, character build and even the pace at which you push into the later areas in the game. I also love how for a game where you need to be able to parry and dodge you were able to actually see what is going on around you where a lot of other games these days have so many flashy moves with explosions and particles effects you cant tell up from down let alone see an incoming attack you need to dodge. The only real thing i wished they would change as a ps5 player would be the ability to play seemless coop.
Just Buy pc only for seamless coop, did the Same thing and it was the best gaming time ive ever had
Elden Ring had so many bugs but not game breaking.
@@edozzz12- Precisely. And many of the non game-breaking bugs were immediately worked on in the following weeks/months of release.
Pick up the game now and you’d be hard press to find a single bug, let alone one that completely breaks or detracts from an otherwise immersive and enjoyable experience.
Similar to Larian Studios working hard to address major issues. Respect the game, respect the player, profit.
I'm predicting a super jaded and almost "this is what you asked for" level of game design coming from the west in the next few years... they are gonna miss the point and think putting in less effort into quest design and stuff equates to eldend rings less oppressive take on quest design, before the devs hit the Internet to say "I don't get it"
Spot on.
Then the Western market will collapse, as it did in the 80s.
guess we have to drill the message into their head even further then
And tbh elden ring does alot of things wrong game design wise.
It’s not a bad idea to “copy” elden ring.
But it’s best to iterate and improve upon the design
@@AkaiKnight like what exactly
honestly, the most important facts, on why Elden Ring is designed the way it is, are:
- From Software is more interested in building mythology than on satisfying completionists, maximizing profits (they still want profits, but dropping a few pennies / yen on the floor is OK)
- Bandi-Namco is willing to let it's development studios to thrive on their own merits, and make money from sales as opposed to online transactions
I'd say it's more that bamco knowns on what game to dumb transactions on or not. You'll see them throwing heaps and heaps of optional stuff on anime games and such to appeal to that community, but leave bigger projects alone because they know it'll make enough money on its own. (That said that only includes very few of their games, the majority still get dumped in the mtx hellscape lmao)
@@Phyllion- you are absolutely right, they know where to put as many microtransactions as they can and where they need to back off. We can then compare it to Square Enix and see what an incompetent mega corpo is.
not suprising when you see that bandi has a heavy hand in the casino industry. walk into any casino and youll find a LOT of the machines are by bandi-namico.
Especially your second point rings home when you consider they are aswell publishing the Super Robot Wars series, wich is kinda Niche Games, mostly 2D, but still has sales in the millions and the last few releases even had English text.
@@Phyllion- or in some cases given little money for development which gets stuck in a long process of making the game. Case in point being Digimon Survive which hadn't received any news for years until now.
Another one is not giving an option to preorder the game, so far on Steam.
Elden Ring and The Sinking City have an interesting take to map, by having the player set their own markers, it makes the sense of discovery more visceral, and the ability to miss something adds to the discovery.
I want to play that but it’s still pretty expensive for the Ps5 version. There’s some weird legal things with the next gen version and the pre version. Like different companies own each it’s odd
Also, it helps that in elden ring, there is always something interesting to run into. The level of detail and effort they made to make the open world surprise you over and over and over is something we should protect at all costs. A lot of open world games are boring going from point A to B with markers everywhere of the same lame quests or camps or material pick ups. Yes there is a lot to do but is it fun? Probably not. Elden ring happens to let you do whatever you want and no matter where you go, its always interesting no matter what. On top of that, they happen to just drop massive locations on you out of no where many times, gives you a sense of wonder. I still think about the times I first discovered siofra river or Nokron, mind blowing
Not just that, Elden Ring's map actually helps you. Say you're stuck on the edge of the cliff and jumping down would certainly kill you. You can just look up the map to see how you can safely get down. The terrain of the map gives you the topography of the world itself. And its so easy to read too. Like, if you see something standing out in the map (like, say, something that looks vaguely like a ruins or something), there is most certainly something there. Perhaps not a whole dungeon or whatever, but there's *something* that's worth checking out there. And ofc, en route you're gonna get distracted and sidetracked by everything in the world. And I love that.
Outward completely removed player location in a map. I found it enjoyable to actually misread landmarks on a map and stumble upon cool stuff (it was a wendigo that killed me).
If you want another map-less, self mapping games. I recommend subnautica and outer wilds
I remember the first open world rpgs where you're totally alone to discover dungeons, plot points, areas and no idea where the story will continue. Loved it, today i hate quest markers and glowing arrows telling me what to do.
Until you take a break from it and come back forgetting where you are at and what to do and have to go find a guide. No thanks
@@Verglaceskill issue
@@Verglace make sure to take a break at key points that you will instantly remember
figure it out yourself? Use your brain?@@Verglace
No fun in that. AC Valhalla is beautiful game, graphics wise but what make me play it is settlement building only lol
Western devs are intimidated because this is a product that actually has passion, effort, and feedback behind it. Something most Western developers have been lacking for years.
I dont agree at all honestly. To say "western devs" have no passion effort and ignore feedback is literally feigning ignorance. You look stupid by saying that. There is plenty of games that come out as just passion projects, The amount of effort it even takes to make a game takes years of commitment and dedication. And feedback ? have you even heard of no mans sky? A lot of the arguments endy has are just blantly ignorant and untrue. I agree there is a ton of games that hold your hand. But elden ring isnt the first and only game thats ever been made that dosent hold your hand. Im sorry but it isnt just "western dev'' problem this is a problem with games as a whole. And personally i think elden ring isnt that fun after the 2nd or 3rd playthrough youve seen 90% of the shit you wanna see or youve seen it in a video. Its a game based on one time experiences. Which are just that. One time experiences. That dragon that flew down and started a fight? yea you know thats there every single time after that. Its boring and bland after the first 2 play throughs. You know whats going to happen therefore it isnt any different than having a quest marker. You in your mind set that marker because you know where to go . I think elden ring is great. But only the first time around.
Its not so much that its lacking, its mainly that they're not allowed to use passion and creativity in the first place. Because its a "financial risk" to the publishers and shareholders. From a business standpoint its much more profitable to go with whats statistically sells rather than take a chance at something either doing very well or flopping. Thats what's killing the industry, video game industry's success will also be its failure.
Same goes for Hollywood
and it is cheaper than all triple A titles with considerably larger content..
It’s none of those things. Western Games have made games a mass media through accessibility, FromSoftware’s philosophy is contrary to that. I would say western devs are much more intimidated by Nintendo.
Also part of the dev hate is them breaking their own perception of good and bad. When breath of the Wild came out, many devs went with 'that wouldn't work on a grander game' 'most mechanics are not feasible with story telling' and whatever, then comes Elden Ring with the same formula but tackling those point and they don't have more arguments than cherry pick.
I assume you're referring to that review that claimed it's "basic storytelling" to have the golden knight (Tree Sentinel) be a good guy and the ugly skeevy looking dude (Varre) to be the baddie? Or am I misunderstanding and you just meant they are being hypocrites in their criticisms?
who are these "many devs"? Can you cite them? Do you even actually know them?
@@kevinclark6934 social media exists
@@kevinclark6934 One developer on Horizon Zero Dawn was very vocal about both of these games. You can search it, it was in the main twit stream, I won't search for something more than a month all. Also, probably Horizon devs were the more piss, given that they timed with both of these releases, and in both times they went lower that the counterpart.
@@mlucasl maybe they should learn their lesson and not time their releases with games that have an even bigger fan base and bigger expectations than horizon…
Elden ring made me feel like a kid again, and it made alot of adults feel like a kid again with its massive exploration, difficulty and how it doesn't hold your hand like the games of old. Elden ring hit a feeling that I'd thought I'd never feel again, Thank you Fromsoft 🙏
Exactly! It reminds me of TES3 Morrowind actually.
Big Ocarina of Time vibes
You should play Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Metroid Dread too. Their are still great games being made, but you won't find them from the EA's, Activisions, and Ubi Softs of the world.
It's literally a rehashed Dark souls 1,2&3.
@@chudchadanstud Yeah, it's literally unplayable.
Why elden ring is good:
-feels complete
-no hand-holding
-no dumb quest log with 2000 different things to do
-no useless npc interactions with unnecessary lengthy dialogue
-no micro-transaction
-challenging and rewarding
-highly detailed, and made with love
-worth every penny
It's that easy
It desperately needs a quest log tbh.
@@polarisnorth4875 I wouldn’t say desperately, it’s a simple preference. I personally cannot stand having a quest log with a list of all the secondary quests and a detailed explanation of exactly what I have to do and where I have to go. You don’t even pay attention anymore to the npc dialogue and I find it super non-immersive.
But I see what you mean, it’s hard to keep track of all the on-going quests especially when you haven’t played the game in a while and you wanna get back into it.
I love elden ring, and I believe elden rings success stems from the fact that 80% of its optional content, secret items and costumes would be dlc in all those western made games.
Or a straight up microtransaction.
Its crazy how many areas are there. And they all felt unique. Like, I didn't feel it became boring. As soon as I found a new area I would just keep going even tho I went past my bed time. Lol.
Eastern games started the obsession with microtransactions lol
"all those western made games" ?????
Like come on mate..
you mean a few handpicked triple A money grab titles.
this isn't about eastern game philosophy being better. Elden Ring is an outlier there. BY FAR !!
And come on western games slap too! Cruelty Squad, Dwarf Fortress, even Minecraft have no DLCs and are filled to the brim with content !!
...
i really dont understand tf you mean.
i heard this from somewere,
"They had the balls to put their heart and soul into someting, and make it optional, that confidence makes you want to keep searching for everything"
and honestly, that is so true. the required bits are so amazing that the optional bits become things you genuinly want to see.
I used to watch streamers who had never picked up a hard game like Dark Souls before try Elden Ring, fall in love with it, then have it take control of their channel for a month because they refused to just beeline to the end. They wanted to do as much as they could before ending the story, and then went and did it all over again because why the hell not lmao
Sounds like botw
Preach!!!
Stars War Jedi Fallen Order is like that too, the game is huge with a bunch of optional exploration that make the game more fun and feel more alive
@@mikehurt3290 I can agree with that, granted I have almost completed everything that is to know about jedi fallen order, and as such I don't have much to do, but still, it is a good beginner souls like imo
Elden Ring is the perfect example of “Make a good game that fosters good will and the people will follow it religiously”
From Software in a nutshell
No it is not. A good game with terrible physics, bad ui, repetitive and uninspired challenges, based simply on unbalanced difficulty that is not related to skill, but patten recognition, is not good. It is cheap, and dated. Games were made like this decades ago and they were moved away from because aduiences weren't interested. The only reason they work now is that it has been so long since then that people think it is fresh, instead of rehashed 80's and 90's style gaing with modern graphics. Also the MOST BORING thing I have played in years. Beat it twice and just can't find a reason to pick it up again.
@@astro1000000 I dont know what your problem is. Maybe you’re just a mindless hater. Maybe you are salty this game is getting more attention then something else. Maybe you just bandwagon against everything popular. I’m convinced you haven’t really played the game since all the points you made are completely braindead and you haven’t made a single point only someone who played the game would make.
@@astro1000000 Look I respect your opinion and can see where your arguments comes from, but if a game you said was extremelly boring managed to make you beat it not only one, but TWO times then it might be onto something
@@astro1000000 Most boring game you've played in years. Yet you beat it twice?
I've played a ton of games where combat largely consists of button mashing overpowered weapons and abilities. Being forced to perform elden ring's very demanding combat mechanics without any prior explanation is truly challenging and rewarding.
Elden Ring is the game I needed but didn't know I needed.
I'm feeling the same thing with Sekiro. The only western game that even remotely challenges you in combat is the Witcher... but I could be mistaken because I haven't touched it in a while.
"Whoah, it's Antifa Simulator 4, again! At least it isn't edgy, because edge is violence." [goes back to shooting people in the face, but it's fine because they're the "right kind" in the bluehair's tiny mind]
@@dislikebutton4981 Sekiro's combat was mind blowing
One of my favorite moments in Elden Ring is when I discovered Deeproot dephts by accident while doing Ranni's quest. I thought I was on the right path, but I didn't need to go there. And the gargoyles were so hard to beat! Still, I didn't regret a single second finding about a whole new area by accident.
Or that time I found a traped chest and ended up in Caelid. I thought I was in some hellish dimension, but it's actually right next to Limgrave.
Elden Ring is one of the games where getting lost might be even more fun than finding your way
That traped chest was the first chest I opened in game and was like oh no. Gravity spells, aliens, I'm in space! D:
I mean, Caelid *is* a hellish dimension
that's basically how I've been playing it. go in one direction until I find something too annoying/frustrating, then just pick a different direction. i haven't looked up too many guides yet, though I probably will eventually.
My favourite moment was finding out Elden Ring is out.
I haven't played it yet
@@DZ-1987 bruhh
I think the biggest problem nowadays is companies try to cater to everyone. A franchise needs to be able to identify it's main fanbase and cater to them. If anyone else happens to like the game that's an added bonus. And that's what From always did. They know their main audience well, they know they love the challenge and the struggle. Elden Ring had all the key aspects of a soulslike game, yet managed to add new things into it, to make it feel more fresh without being distruptive.
But elden ring is not that hard, there are alot of options to help you: spirit ashes, multiplayer, upgrading your weapon, objects, etc
Bang on the money about companies trying to cater to everyone. One of the main issues that drove me away from Assassin's Creed was Ubishit's constant releases of barebone generic games with 0 substance that (for some reason) are enticing to the more general audience
@@Dhieen Most people feel that way. But that's not the point.
Yeah, that's the reason I'm probably never playing a zelda game again, I've never been more disappointed in a game than I was with botw... just feels like a big empty oper world game without much content in it and the content in botw is very unrewarding
@@Dhieen idk man, fromsoft games always had easy mode, that was multiplayer. But you have option to use it or not. Solo it is still one of the hardest games out there.
Western devs are trying to make a product, Japanese devs are trying to build their reputation and curate a long term catalog of art
Japanese games fell off a long time ago. Elden's ring is an anomaly, and I still didn't finish it.
@@b3at2 Japanese games never fell off Elden Ring is litteraly a Japanese game what are you on about what west is pissed about is that they poisened their own waters like with micro transactions, feeding off gamers and not bringing the product I am looking at you Blizzard & EA... I wont mention how big of money milkers some games became but you know what I am referening to.... Its sickening, CD project Red is at least trying to fix their own mess but what do you know those are the guys from EU... Listen US take fucking notes already. The guy said it perfectly we need innovation there is nothing new about your games just quantity over quality... And it pisses gamers off... there are lot of games that are legit shit show and fiesta and the more bad games come out the more angry gamers are thats it
@@NeoNikki23 I dont want all games to be like elden ring. I think we should let fromsoft do their thing and that be it. the story telling is trash… the story is trash.. the world is beautiful… though the movement is robotic and stiff , its serviceable. The fact that the game was a massive hit means nothing to me as call of duty sells millions and millions of copies and i refuse to play it. yes , japanese devs fell off compared to back in the day with playstation 1 and 2 …. ever since then its been western devs making the block busters. from software is an anomaly… i think the nerds just like them because nerds like to get punished in games lmao
@@b3at2 nah little bitch like you feeding their pocket so our devs won't ever improve.
I don't care about Japanese or Western devs. I just want better games. Not as hard as ER but not as easy and not boring like the latest modern games.
Zelda was very enjoyable and frankly I liked more than ER but once every 3-4 years a game like ER is very much appreciated.
@@NeoNikki23 looks like you didn't know about Square Enix. Also, Nintendo milking gamers really hard too.
I’m a western developer and I loved the game. I hope to reach that kind of level before I die
good luck
Now thats the spirit! 💪
Best luck for you and your team mate!! 💪
I believe in you!
One day at a time!
You will!
One of my favorite moments playing Elden Ring is when I realized that caves were drawn into the map, i immediately started going over every inch of the map and marking caves I missed
Churches and ruins, too. You can almost immediately tell where the next church is by studying the shapes of the buildings. And ruins are usually marked by multiple, small structures.
The only bad thing about the map is that it's not that accurate. They have been working on it, but there's still parts where it looks like a path but there's not
im building a large space-sim/worldsim game which is heavily rooted in maths/acedemic theory, like a barotrauma but with 4x strategy world factions, and very intelligent Ai for agents
its gonna take a while for release though, but i sure hate AAA industry and i want to fill the gaps that AAA leaves while eating out of their own ass
@@Colonies_Dev ok?
It was so refreshing to play a game that EVERYONE was clamoring about, skills and secret ash summons were detailed by word of mouth, it felt like being in a school yard with the other kids seeing if babalities in Mortal Kombat were a real thing or not!!! 👍🏿👍🏿
Oh boy, I loved being part of the "pioneers" exploring the game, finding out new things and exchanging with others about our findings.
Sadly my game frequently crashed and one time my whole gamesave was nullified and i had to start anew... which marked the end of that great time for me :/
at the end of the day elden ring and games like it are formulaic garbage that appeals to those with no taste or discrimination. i'd rather play swat 3's spritual successor ready or not and similar games that doesn't appeal to every single mindless consoomer
@@cagneybillingsley2165 yeah im so quirked up not like the other guys I swear.
Imagine being elitist about Video games
@@cagneybillingsley2165 because gun games aren't the most basic formulaic garbage ever riiiiiight
@@cagneybillingsley2165 i feel like you are a troll ain't no way you are real
The reason Elden Ring was well received is because it's a complete game, the worst thing that can happen to someone is buying a game only to find out that the devs cut corners & decided to use dlc as cash grab. 83.5 hrs into Elden Ring & all achievements unlocked, i am pretty sure there are areas yet to be discovered.
80???? Mannn I’m over 100 in and feel like I’ve seen at most 60%
You beat the game three time while getting all other achievements in just 83 hour?
@Beek Hock in da Hos let people make their own fun. He clearly enjoyed the game in his own way. Don’t hate on someone just because they have different preferences or do something different than you do.
@Beek Hock in da Hos you can say their isn’t but you called him “pretty sad” lol, which is a prime example of hating on how he enjoys the game lol.
With all achievements, you should have found everything.
I found Elden Ring quite refreshing. I had great doubts if the "Souls" formula would work in an open world environment. How wrong I was, it works like a charm.
What I absolutely love about Elden Ring is its architecture. When you step out from the starting area you immediately get a glimpse of things to come. A giant castle in the background, vast open lands, an area to explore. No quest markers, just go explore, look what you want to explore, the whole world is open to you.
I recently finished Valhalla with all extra content apart from the master's trials and the roguelite part. I spent 250 hours into the game but what I hate most about it os its permanent desire to tell you "HEY LOOK! THERE'S A QUEST NEARBY!" and when you go there other quests and places pop up. In the end the map is full of quests and yellow and white spots to explore, it's just too much.
Some more hidden events like the Excalibur sword are way more interesting but in the end you have to face the truth "the way is the reward, not the sword itself". Weapons you earn for solving a series of puzzles are just not worth it. I ended up using my axe from the beginning until the late game, then I switched to Thor's hammer. I didn't use any more weapons because I didn't feel it was necessary.
In the end I made the platinum trophy on Valhalla but somehow it didn't feel "good". Didn't feel like a reward, I was more feeling kind of exhausted for all those things you had to do in order to get it.
So yeah I hope Elden Ring's dlc will be good.I expect a lot and as sources say it'll be released early 2024 after the release of the next Armored Core.
Miyazaki's management style is also much different than in western studios. He calls it "total direction". Basically there's no middle management structure, he works directly with the individual artists and programmers etc.
Isnt that how it should be?
I think you might be on to something there. The disproportionate influence of "managers" is a problem in all aspects of the western world, not just in videogame production. Western games are clearly directed by a committee of management types who prioritize safety over creativity.
So it's like a dictatorship? I thought we all agreed after WWII that democratically chosen ideas are better than fascists controlling everything without anyone allowed to tell them "no"
Talented people united under a singular vision. Something that God of War Ragnarok was sorely lacking with Balrog stepping away. There was zero tonal cohesion to the game. It felt like it was designed by 6 different focus groups, stitched together, and released like a Hollywood blockbuster. I was really disappointed because I think the tone of the God of War games were really unique, and to see it watered down to safe and generic writing was really sad.
@@huntersnider7961 I actually really enjoyed Ragnarok. My only real complaint is that the final battle felt rushed, but I can forgive that because everything else was great. What ruined the game for you?
I'm in my 30's. Elden Ring makes me feel like I am playing the adult version of Zelda. Not in a direct parallel. It's missing some puzzle solving aspects but has others. The main thing it gets right for me is creating this massive world which I can get lost in.
Yup, adult as in complex story elements and gameplay experience, not genital modification like Cybergunk
I feel like elden ring missed an opportunity with the mini dungeons and puzzles they have a lot of the mi I dungeons spread around and some that mess with your sense of location by stacking the same level dungeon layout above and below the initial entrance, personally they should have utilized the teleporting chest more in dungeons of maybe a key that is dungeon unique like a link to the past
There are some catacombs and hero's graves that are proper puzzle rooms. You just gotta find them. They're optional of course but they're in the game.
Yeah walking past gravesites and skeletons rising from the ground gave me massive Ocarina of Time night time vibes. Definitely a good comparison
nah zelda got friendly towns and npc this one are just huge battle arena openworld the only safe place is the bonfire
I feel like a lot of western executives (especially those who have never played a video game in their lives) have adopted a very bad interpretation of "Work smarter, not harder" towards video game development. Micro transactions, loot boxes, and incomplete on arrival products are essentially the result of them trying to get maximum profit while putting in minimum effort.
They need to increase their ceo bonus
Yep, that is why they resent their existing consumer base who are expecting them to deliver consistent high quality products who aren’t afraid to voice their discontent and criticize them for failing to live up to their demanded standards. That is why they are trying to disingenuously appeal to pseudo-woke politics they clearly (outside some artists) don’t really believe so they can try to bully their costumers into buying their crap. Or alternatively futilely attempt to cultivate a new consumer base amongst virtue signaling morons who they hope will buy their lame garbage irrespective of quality and won’t hold them accountable when they find out the product sucks ass.
Essentially it’s the toxic inverse of good classical business philosophy.
Where you as an entrepreneur are supposed to be receptive to the needs/wants of your prospective clients or customers and try to meet them (within reasonable ability to be obtained) and tailoring your product to best suit those standards.
Their approach however has been to try to act like the damn mafia, within the context of a publicly regulated open consumer market where they have no such ability to operate in the shadows in so unethical a fashion. They want to bully, browbeat, intimidate, threaten, and con their way to success. And as a consequence they keep getting predictably bitch slapped back to reality and reminded their fake tough guy act doesn’t work in a legitimate marketplace. Thus the consistently dwindling returns they receive for their purposefully minimal efforts by said market.
the most popular games in asian territories are mobile phone games with tons of that stuff though.
Oh wow I couldn't have put it better myself!
@@ryeb Popular simply due to how accessible they are and not for their quality.
Middle class people working 9 hours a day might not be able to afford a good PC rig or have the time and energy to invest into a $70 AAA game, but they are more than happy to chip in $10 now and then to a casual mobile game they can play on the fly with friends.
Master pieces like Elden Ring are too few and far between to satisfy everyone's constant need for *some* kind of entertainment on demand, casual mobile games cater to those better.
The only thing i wish it had was like a notepad to tell me where i left off on random questlines. Cause when i get on after a couple days, i have no memory of what im supposed to do next to progress it
a notepad, and the ability to write NOTES on the map markers, and maybe a few more icons for the markers!
its not the worst issue, as i can just use a notes app on my phone, but still better to have it in the game!
Despite the games huge success and clearly breaking the current conventions for how western developers feel open world games need to be designed, I'm honestly a little sceptical that they'll learn the correct lesson from this. Its more likely that they'll either double down on their current approach or will make a half assed attempt to integrate some of the design elements that made Elden Ring successful but fail in the execution, at least more often than not.
the issue is that big studios don't wanna take risks with there games they simply look to turn a profit right there and then without a bit of care for reputation. There are tns of people with amazing and creative ideas but get shot down because there "risky" (bassicly why I only play indie games now lmao)
Arguably, all the cookie cutter western rpgs are just as important in Elden Rings success. We tend to overlook failure as an important experience in crafting great games, and I believe it will be from the ashes of the poor copy cats that the next truely great game will emerge. Let's not bemoan the developers who will cash in on this success, but cheer them on and enjoy the victories and and underperformances that the industry will produce on the long path to greatness.
I agree with the op
@@matthewvink4065 their* games. "then and there". they're* risky. basically*.
@@Ce1113 truly*
As a AAA gamedev, it's been sad to see how our product's design has become more and more focus-tester based over the years. God forbid the focustester gets confused or doesn't know what to do next. I remember being a kid, spending countless hours of wandering around in games not knowing what to do next. Finally figuring it out was a big event for the family. Internet kinda ruins that, but lots of people can avoid spoilers. Remember puzzles? Games that weren't puzzle-games used to be enjoyable puzzles.
What games have you done? I would love to talk to people who make the biggest games
Yep, I can imagine, what you are telling us. I played Dungeon Master: Chaos strikes back and I had have to find out even a combinations for spells and everything, because not all was same with the basic game. Sadly with modern Battlefields and other fast pace, immediate reward games kids are teached to be easyly satisfied, easyly bored.
@ENDIMYONtv he obviously won't say, he won't risk his job (that or he is lying). In any case, have some common sense.
Yeah a big thing people forget was getting stuck at a spot in a game you love, trying so hard to figure out where to go or what to do, and then being very satisfied for having figured it out and able to continue the experience. People want everything no further than an arm's reach away and it takes away from the actual time spent with the experience and letting it get absorbed into the mind, and causing the player to meet it halfway. Today so many games are built around players spending all their time in them, and the more ambitious a game usually the less you actually want to spend the time in it. When a smaller product is oozing style and character as well as quality, it is usually confined to restrictions, which in turn causes the player to want more, and become more interested in the world, and as a result *wanting* more.
@@finalbreath15I believe there should be an option you may choose the hard way without any tips and pointers OR go the easy more comfortable way without them.
I remember myself as a kid. I had lots of problems at school, I was bullied, so games and books were the only things that helped to escape the reality. And I remember that sometimes I just didn't have a temper to understand what to do next, I got furious and wanted to crash everything:) but now everything's fine and I miss the games where you need to use your brain and not just a double click over and over again to achieve the goal.
Elden Ring is so good because it feels good to have a game with very little marketing BS when it came out and just lets you enjoy it in its entirety. Kinda takes you back to the good ol PS2 era
PS2 era was amazing.
PS2 era was great. Made me love games. New games where exciting because I was expecting a lot of gameplay and story - nowadays I expect bugs, game crashes, lootboxes, monetization, games that were made to be selled not to be played... 🤮
I didn’t care for elden ring . Really liked dark souls series though. Didn’t care for the addition of the map , a lot of copy paste bosses.
But I can understand why people liked it
@@redshift912 exactly, sheeple refuse to acknowledge this.
@@qqqpq many bosses are reused more than 12 times. Even main bosses are reskined and recycled several times. All dubgeons and catacombs and bosses inside them are C&P 10x over. Why do people refuse to acknowledge how lazy and rushed the game is. How the open world is empty and frivolous. How the story is just demons souls 2009 again yet they claim its a new game, a fresh start and yet all we have is outdated graphics, gameplay and lazy design choices. Somehow gets 10/10 because most games nowadays are shit.
Elden Ring is unlike any game I’ve ever played, yet so familiar feels like a games game that challenges you and rewards you, just feels so good and fun to play I love it, the difference is the game is made with love ❤️
After playing Elden Ring, I finally realized what I had been missing from games for so long. It truly invokes that childlike wonder that I first experienced with games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI. Back then, the worlds felt massive, explorable, and believable. I would look forward to coming home from school to beat Magus' Castle, or survive in The World Of Ruin. for nearly 20 years I had mostly forgotten that feeling until I played Elden Ring. I am 36, and I was talking to co-workers both much older and younger than me about the game, we were all sharing our own unique experiences. None of our playthroughs were the same, but the incredible thing is that we were all playing it, and equally enthralled. We would share advice back and forth, challenge each other to beat bosses, and discover nuances of the game that the others never even knew about. It was like being on the playground once again talking our friends about the Secret Worlds in Super Mario World.
This game has easily cemented itself in my top 5 favorite games of all time, 3 months after release and I still look forward to playing it. I still find secrets. But most importantly, I genuinely care about seeing more of The Lands Between.
Agreed, I grew up playing all the old Bioware games like KotOR and Baldur's Gate. Since then this is the only game that has come close to breaking past those games in my favorites list.
@@that1gayghost im surprised you didnt play Morrowind. in my oppinion its still the best Elder Scrolls game and far better than the Kotor series. BG2 is my all time fave, followed by System Shock 2 and Morrowind
Was it your first time to play a souls game? Highly recommend checking out the others like the original dark souls etc.
ok boomer
@@ricsouza5011 cringe
I think we are generally coming to a “shift” in what is “good” game design. The same happened every time there was a breakthrough with games, say the overwhelming amount of platformers that no one remembers because they were just a retexture of basically the same thing. Then someone went and broke that concept by doing something new and evolving the formula.
This is also happening now with Breath Of The Wild or Elden Ring, just that the changes are so many cause of the humongous scale of the titles.
This if course throws many devs, that had the “rules” for game design drilled into them for years, for a loop as Elden ring breaks most of those.
Did you see the Gotham Knights gameplay demo? The moment I saw the quest markers I was like "Damn... Elden Ring spoiled me..."
Because of ER, all the miniscule things that I usually dismiss in games is now glaring right back at me and I can't ignore them anymore.
@@buggart Yep, saw it and went "aaah... dammit". Same with Dying Light 2, I couldn't bring myself to play it more because I just got bombarded with "do this, do that, go there, collect this". It felt like being forced to choose, instead of doing something of my own free will.
I'm trained as a digital Artist for Games but also had some insight into the game design courses at my uni. And many of the Teachers there were very against "Souls like" ideas. In their mind Games need to be easy and lead the player in a direction, they don't want games to challenge you as a player out of fear it will tell them something about themselves (I suck, I struggle with hardship, I don't like it when it isn't easy etc.).
I just hope there'll be a shift in that philosphy because many AAA titles could be so much more than just a mind numbing experience you walk through.
@@lefunghi6151 It's because the teachers are teaching what sounds appealing to the masses.
That's the reason why idle games are so popular right now. People don't really care about the gameplay, all they really care about is that they are at the top of the leaderboards, not because of skill but because of luck and the amount of money they wasted on said games.
I sort of disagree.
The thing is: the SOULS series and their core design philosophy has existed for more than a DECADE.
Elden Ring merely expanded on their world building and some freedoms. But overall, it's still basically DARK SOULS.
If anything, it just shows how much more idiotic these designers can be when people don't realize that these are NOT good game design, but rather good SOULS game design.
Because good game design exists in the context of the type of game you are trying to make, it's stupid to even tout most things as "good game design" in general. There are only a few universal ones like traditional control schemes (moving with a control stick rather than the buttons, or changing it to FTGH movement instead of WASD movement).
For example, a big debate on Elden Ring is the lack of quest markers. It makes sense in a souls-like game, but not in many others: removing such a thing in a game like FFXIV or WoW would be devastating and annoying. Elden Ring's exploration is designed to be investigative(given clues, piecing together information, puzzle solving in the environment), but others are more about vistas(sight-seeing) and/or platforming(aka, exploring as a byproduct of the player's movement gameplay).
When developers try the same thing for a game that is not actually designed around that, it's going to suck hard and that's a fact.
The hallmark of FromSoft's great game design is not that they are trying to make a good game, but a good DARK SOULS (or equivalent). There's a huge difference.
I MUST ADD: A lot of sentiment also comes from the fact that we have been bombarded with games that feature hand-holding to a severe degree: that's not to say it is inherently bad to have (after all, that is how it ended up in so many games), but obviously having too many of the same things everywhere gets tiring and "boring".
did you see halo infinite? or any other major game that isnt doom or a souls game that has released recently?
"When a literal dragon can drop out of nowhere" That dude landed directly on top of me and crushed me flat. I had absolutely zero chance. I went into that area all cocky because I just saw another campfire and I was like hey free loot. 10/10
Same lol, i feel like every single new player has done it
@Flare he did?
@Flare skyrim is meh. I've played skyrim for hundreds of hours but only because of mods, that game is repetitive. Killing alduin was nothing special. Beautiful world with interesting races and characters but boring quests and battles.
@@formless3791 Well i had 100hours on skyrim in 2011 when it came out, no mods, and Alduin is only the main quest. Skyrim is HUGE en a lot of hidden content like elden ring. You can even be a f*ing vampire or werewolf, and done correctly you can control it.
Whatever, Skyrim combat and quests are booooooriiing.
Elden Ring made me relive the feeling of exploring and exchanging information about the game with my friend who was playing at his house...
My best decision was to pre-order and play at launch. There was no information on the internet, so you had to scramble to figure everything out... Incredible game.
You see the care they put in there, even though it's not that graphically complex. You are always rewarded for exploring this world, which you do without noticing, as the lands in between are beautiful and interesting.
Elden Ring was made with passion by talented devs. We used to see that a lot in gaming. Decisions made by businessmen kind of ruined that. Look at what Blizzard used to be versus what they are now. They used to make next level iconic games. Now it's just remasters 1/4 of the quality of the original, microtransactions, terrible gameplay, no creativity, and just wastes of time not even worth touching. It's kind of why games like Hollow Knight and and Subnautica are so incredible made by 3 people pooling together pocket lint and nickels while $100M games are flopping.
once upon a time blizzard could do no wrong. then.... well..... yeah... its all bout money now, so sad
Diablo Immortal.
'nough said
@@ngotemna8875 "Diablo Immoral" - there i corrected it for you.
@@aka-47k You're right, sorry for the typo :(
@John Grigg no as bad cyberpunk was, it was just buggy and underdelivered, it was not w0k3 zensorship and spitting in the face of fans by perverting everything the IP stands for
One thing with Elden ring that I don’t think gets talked about enough is the way it just naturally gets people discussing it because of the fact that there’s absolutely no set way to go from the beginning to the end. With other games that I share with friends they would ask me if I had done certain side quests, and most of the time the answer would either be “yeah I did that side quest inbetween these 2 main quests” or “nah I haven’t done it yet, but I know where the quest marker is for it so I can do it whenever”, with Elden Ring tho it’s more like “hey did you do this quest?” “What?! I had no idea that’s even a thing, where did you find that?”. There’s always things that either I’ve found that they haven’t, or they’ve found that I haven’t and that feels so refreshing.
Around 80% of Elden Ring is completely unnecessary to be played through.
Hell, BotW is almost 100% unnecessary to be played through.
That's what makes carving out your own path so fun. You will almost always pick up on stuff you missed 20 hours ago on your previous playthrough.
Yeah, chennels that explain lore are always happy when a fromsoft game comes out where you have to spend 200 plus hours to barely figure what is even happening.
This annoys me the most about modern games. Why do they have to tell you where to go? After Cyberpunk 1.6 it is still not possible to disable the quest marker. I know how much effort goes into concept art, level design and graphics. And then players stare only at a minimap and a questmarker? Why? I disabled those for Witcher 3 (and minimap for CP2077) and it got so much more immersive. Same thing for Skyrim to get that old Morrowind feeling of being in a different world. Put questmarkers in your game and it will "feel" like every other game.
@@observant6953 It depends on the game, honestly. Plenty of narrative heavy semi--open games are better served that way to provide guidance, although I agree that HUD elements that simply tell you where to go (Assassin's Creed really made this mainstream imo) are best left in the dust, something like quest logs/journals are nice to have in adventure games like Baldurs Gate.
In other instances it's largely because people are significantly more time poor these days, the average 20-30 year old works way more hours on average than their parents/grandparents did.
brings me back to the old Gameboy days, where without a game guide, friends need to share info to help each other out.
I think we should also consider that From Software has maintained it's reputation for creating wonderful gaming experiences and have rightfully earned the favor of gamers. They have perfected their craft and deserve all of the praise they have been getting.
5 word essay just to mention "Culmination", Skill up much?
100%. From has dropped nothing but masterpieces since 2009
@@sickrandy2946 ehh maybe except for ds2 imo
@@pineapple8934 DS2 is one of the "worse" titles from From Soft but it's still a solid and good experience. I get bored easily and still played through DS2 around 12 times. But obviously DS1, DS3 and Elden Ring are superior.
@@xkroaxx yes, it's a good game, but I wouldn't dare call it a masterpiece, for me it's a solid 7.5/10 experience (I assume you're talking about vannila ds2.)
Recently I was playing a game and it felt like im just in a simulator and that's the same feel i get from most of the games. There's no "escapism into the new world" feel that i used to get from playing. Which is why I have so much respect for the developers of Elden Ring to put so much effort into maling the game as it brings back that joy of playing games
100% agree except for one point. You said we don’t need more open world games. I think we don’t need more games to shoehorn in open world elements. If the game is designed around the concept of an open world i’m all for it but if it’s open world to just be open world then I agree it should just be a tighter experience
I mean I would have to say my fav kinda level design is what Dark Souls is. It’s not open world, it’s just layered and interconnected. It’s way more compelling than run in a straight line.
@@EndymionTv Agree, it feels like that’s what they were trying to do with the underground in Elden Ring, obviously the Legacy dungeons as well, but the underground is the most successful way they’ve implemented the dark souls 1 feel to the open world
open world games are the best games to play out there
@@oliverwilliam6931 eh I don’t necessarily agree. I think the tightness of the linear level design of dark souls bloodborne and sekiro make them amazing. If a game is open world just to be open world and it doesn’t really have any reason being open world then it usually sucks. I mean my favorite game is GOW 2018 and that game isn’t fully open world, more like semi open wolrd
@@oliverwilliam6931 "Open World" is one of the most bloated genres out there, filled to the brim with awful, samey and boring titles. There is such a thing as a good open world game but I'd say without exaggeration that at least 95% of them are the same filler garbage.
As a "Western" game developer, I totally agree. Elden Ring is brilliant. Let's not forget Bioshock had a literal arrow pointing you where to go. I think developers took bioshock's themes to heart all those years back.
Nice, what game are ya making? Would love to know & thanks for watching 🤘🏻🔥
@@EndymionTv Yea, great video. I subscribed :)
I made Blades Away.
Currently prototyping a mash up of PvP and Roguelike elements in a 2D game about bees murdering each other... also working on some bizarre GPT3 stuff which will likely never see the light of day, but it's super fun!
But Bioshock had Rapture and some amazing themes.
If you evolve , experiement and deliver everyone will play.
The thing is most of these western devs think handholding and giving the players incentive is important.
When the basic human tendency is to discover , and grow on their own.
I turned off that damn arrow lol
It's just different strokes for different frames of mind. Some days you want the arrow, some days you don't. Neither style is wrong, they're just different. People are acting like Elden Ring is the first game like this... but From's been doing the same thing with the same quest design since Dark Souls, which was PLENTY popular, and it didn't make people stop playing other kinds of games, this wont either. People are capable of enjoying more than one style of quest design, that's all this proves, and its something we already knew, today it's just hip to point it out for no good reason except that one game developer made the mistake of getting buthurt that people could like quest designs divergent from the ones they make and didn't understand the concept of liking two things.
Don't blame the devs. Blame the dev's bosses and publishers who want profits over quality.
you as dev should move to other company that is according your way of work. Don't blame the bosses cause they are the ones who are paying you the salary, so you are part of the problem
@@alexdesfase "just move to another company" is just about the same as telling a homeless person to "just buy a house"
@@alexdesfase when context matters, you should think what you're sending here first
@@alexdesfase look i dont want to be that guy but the way you said that makes you look like a spoiled brat
but profits is power for a true american
the thing about "not holding the player's hand" is what made terraria and minecraft so successful in the first place, like terraria for example that gives you pieces of information but you don't really know how to use it. Or the boss progression that you don't really know what to kill first, and that is absolutely great! It does make the player a bit lost, but it also makes the player very curious and interested in the game. It's not like ARK where you really have no idea on how to do things and how to advance and where to go, because it's so big you get lost and get bored too.
I can understand why western devs are mad. But what did they expect? When you flood the system with live services, then the one game that doesn't supply said service is gona get major attention. This game just happened to come from a reputable studio with a reputable history. The best for this studio was bound to happen
The best has been happening since Bloodborne then dark souls 3 happened then sekiro and now Elden ring you've got 3 games before Elden ring of from software getting and delivering the best
Meanwhile paradox: it’s not incomplete… it just has several expansions to make it more complete then when it started…
Its almost like they hate it, because it give them a bad reputation as hack frauds obsessed with money.
@@travelerfromontario8127 core dev team hasn't had a dud in decades
@@Michael-bn1oi they've never had a dud I've played their original games they're damn good.
This made me realize why I loved Hollow Knight so much. While you do get the Endgame quest marks at some point the rest of the game is just pure exploring with no quest marks or hand-holding. The game is a true Wonder of Mystery and Exploration.
Ayy this guy gets it
Another thing to point out is that hollow knight has a world building that is both structured and logical instead of the illogical repeat of cliche areas like a snow area, magma area that are near each other in which you need to turn off your brain to enjoy the game and hollow knight instead actually crafts the kingdom of hollownest into a believable once functioning kingdom brought to ruin with the areas of hollownest
That's always how the metroidvania genre works
As a westerner and longtime soulsborne fan, I have to express how much I loathe western game design while mentioning my excitement at seeing Fromsoft finally being worthy of no longer being called niche.
(Sorry for the rant, but I need to vent)
For years I felt that western games would continue to be stereotypical first-person shooters with stereotypical T-shirt wearing everyman protagonists with five-o-clock shadow facial hair while having a stereotypically overcomplicated plot that says very little with hardly any change or development along the way, and I still strongly believe that won't change.
But then here comes Elden Ring with fantastical and mystical elements to not only the story and gameplay, but also the aesthetics and setting! I finally get to once again have a sense of wonder and a real challenge that was missing in AAA video games for God knows how long!
Agreed!
But look at it from the dev's perspective; why work/hire amazing artistic people to create a more spiritually charged experience, when like 90%of people who buy will not notice.
Now, we definitely notice with from software, because their games are less toys with art and more art with toys: it's togetherness and cohesiveness comes first.
Why do any of that tho, they can just fake it. Humanity is too good at commoditization and manipulation via fomo at this point.
Remember, most people think dark souls (and all abstract art or just abstraction in general) is just a bunch of moody random shit and doesn't mean anything. Let that sink in...lol
western games do have all the things that elden ring does. TW3, Baldur's Gate 3, DOS:2, Pillars of Eternity 1+2, amongst so many others. if you look only at the big and popular stuff you're going to see the trends. that's like complaining about superhero movies and then not going to watch a Von Trier film.
The fact that I went to ng+ when elden ring came out, and started a new playthrough recently and am still finding completely new areas i’ve never been too speaks levels to the amount of content
I believe that the reason why Elden ring stands out is that you actually want to stay in an area and do everything there, you will retry the same useless boss 30 times and you’ll still come back after. The problem with most western games is that the do the same thing except they force you to stay in an area or force you to kill a boss to move on. It makes you lose the sense of it actually being you playing the game and not following the imaginary line of some developer. Elden ring gives you true freedom on how to play
If Ragnarok wins GOTY, I'll bust.
This!!!
True! It's like you got Isekaid, have to live there and discover crap on your own. The only quest marker were for the main story and that was vague as hell. Once I srarred playing I kept going and just explored everything because it peaked your curiosity.
@@Anti-Alphabet_Mafia A nut or a gasket?
Stands out even in the Japanese market, why do believe this a West vs orient thing? the same would happen if you take any big hit from the west... I don't want every single game turns in a damn from software clone, what is wrong with you guys??? I pretty much don't enjoy Ubisoft games since AC3, I just stop pay for their damn games, stop trying every single be like the game you like.
I love open world games, or at least i did before Elden Ring. I thought the quest markers made things snappy and when other games didnt have those it was hard to complete a quest correctly.
Then I found Rya the Scout. She told to find an abandoned house and get back her necklace. I searched for 20 minutes max, going north to find this house snd couldn't. Figured I'd need a map and tried to find one but to no avail.
Then on my fifth exploration of the general area, i go to a place I didnt normally go towards. Then out of the corner of my eye I see a strange building. I think to myself, is it a ruin?. I turn towards it and realize it's a house.
In my head it feels like i found the golden egg at easter. I think to myself.
"I found it! I found it! I cant believe I found it."
That feeling has never happened in a ubisoft stlye of open world game where you just follow the quest marker and do whatecer the instructions tell you. I had never been so happy to find something in any game. Maybe surprised or content but nothing ever made me race towards it to find out what is was.
Elden Ring did that. And I'm glad it did. More games should give you a feeling like that.
elden ring doesn't just tell you where to go or how to defeat a boss so finally completing a quest and defeating a boss feels so much more rewarding than in most other games
Something old RPG/open-world games used to like morrowind
I am glad elden ring proved that those kind of old game design is not outdated just because it's old
Marika's tits, you must be 'ungry!
@@venera_7 The quests in this game are the complete opposite of rewarding. They are tedious and poorly designed.
The "quest" design in Elden Ring is absolutely abysmal. One of the worst systems I've ever seen in a long while.
The game is great fun, but don't pretend like there aren't glaring issues, especially with the quests.
I'm gonna take a moment to say that it's probably not the devs who are angry, but the senior executives who tried to increase profits by shoving thousands of micro transactions into games, and yet didn't overtake a game which refuses to integrate the pay to win mechanics that they pioneered.
Exactly was going to comment something similar, a lot of these devs play and love from software games.
uhh ALL the famous tweet thread mentioned are devs
@@ninjahattori7576 Most of them are PC, indie devs. And the sort of indie dev that gets pissed off if you don't like their "masterpieces".
Real recognizes real, almost all senior devs respect powerhouses of game design like Nintendo R&D, FromSoftware, modern Capcom, Square Enix on their big hitters, Monolithsoft, and many, many more.
D-List indie devs and senior execs dislike the Japanese game design philosophy of making whole games that, at their core, are fun to play and not money-milking machines or hit-you-on-the-head pseudo-political commentary trash.
fair
@@andremrh7690 Another video on youtbe that covered this was showing Ubisoft Devs
I'm 37. This game reminded me of playing games in the 90s, when you really felt like you were exploring a new world and felt genuinely curious about what you'd discover. Well done on describing how they achieved this feeling for the player.
What game was open world in the 90s ? Games in the 90s all hold your hands… and don’t tell me it’s final fantasy,, that’s game is full of statistics, numbers, bar graphs, flashy color in screen creating a big mess on the hud that you take turns fighting on a trail.
I didn't say "open world". I don't remember the titles, because I was just a kid and they weren't well known PC titles. I can't even seem to find them on google, but I remember the feeling they gave me and that's what my comment was about.@@ujayet
@@ujayet For me, a couple examples were Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, & Jurassic Park (for SNES). The latter was isometric view & open world. Though there were areas locked off by certain progression order, it was up to the player to find those boundaries, & find the solutions. In-between were vast areas with memorable mini-biomes & distinct dinosaurs, mazes, & first-person building exploration (which I ended up having to map on paper to make sure I've searched every room). Making choices of weapons/ammo to pick up was reactive strategy depending on what threats are around, & sometimes there's tight management needed. And optional achievements like collecting all the overworld raptor eggs was a great sense of accomplishment (even if the game itself doesn't give you a trophy & cake or anything, hehe). That game is so underrated, but to me was one of the most exciting, challenging, & sprawling journeys I'd experienced in gaming for many many years.
(If anyone wants to try it, do NOT get the original version 1.0. Look for Revision A, or 1.1. There's an unfortunate game-breaking bug that can cut your journey short near end-game on the boat. Was lucky to have the revised release as a kid... but when we lost the cartridge & I bought a replacement as an adult, I was gutted when I discovered the difference the hard way!)
I am Senior Programmer in a Western European AAA studio. I like Elden Ring and I think game designers and top managers have a lot to learn about what players actually like to play. I admire every good game's success and I'm never angry when some other (even competitor) game has more success than mine I've been working on for couple of years. I'm only occasionally upset about decisions big bosses do to ruin something I gave my soul, time and enormous effort. I believe that's the way how most regular game developers (programmers, artists, designers and their direct leads) feel.
TL;DR - People have to distinguish developers, studio bosses and publishers
Just because you didn't make the decision doesn't mean you're free of guilt
@@hoelio what would you expect a regular developer to do? Change the work or leave the whole industry? That how it works now, game industry is driven by big bad corporations. Unfortunatelly I'm not so talented or creative to make a successful indie game and I need money for living, so it is what it is.
My point was that I'm not angry about Elden Ring's success, neither do my colleagues, there was no guilt involved whatsoever
I'm not blaming you for anything, but saying: "it's the big companies that decide" isn't an excuse. You always have a choice. You may not be the cause of the problem, but (if you are working for some scumbag company like Activision or Ubisoft) you are a part of it.
@@hoelio Thanks for saying nothing
@@NimaSimba eh no problem, you too my dude
One thing that doesn't get brought up a lot is the sense of community this game brought with it. During my first playthrough I would call and text friends to ask about certain quests and how to complete them, we would talk about where to find new weapons and armor, and we all had different experiences with the game. That's a huge reason the game was so successful.
What you said reminds me of games I played growing up. Had to ask friends who already beat the games or discovered something I didn’t how they went about certain quests, bosses, etc. Never knew how valuable and interesting that social aspect of gaming was till it was gone with modern gamed
This is what Miyazaki wanted. That's what makes talking about this game with friends that much more special
For sure. I remember my first time playing a From game, Dark Souls 3, and how I basically had 10 tabs of the wiki and the reddit open at all times to help me get through it. Some might consider that a negative, but it made me engage with the community. When everything isn't neatly explained for babies, it encourages discussion and teamwork
I was into this game for a solid month and completely agreed with the community comment. Then I realized you have to go to the community because you just couldn't figure out the game any other way. I tried so hard to get through this game but eventually just gave up when I realized I was 80 hours in and still had no clue what I was doing
No. That's completely irrelevant to it. Most people played alone
the real big reason elden ring's open world works so well isn't just that it doesn't handhold, but literally every single thing you can stumble upon feels worthwhile and good. you're not following an objective marker to get a slightly upgraded piece of gear that *might* raise your DPS by 0.2%, you can legit stumble upon one of the best weapons in the game within two hours of creating your character. fromsoft wins because they designed a game that doesn't give a shit if players sequence break.
AI think it's open world is great because of it's size and detail and access to the map. It's not one of the open worlds like cyberpunk where half the map is inaccessible desert areas or giant buildings you can't go through at all.
i agree. i have watched so many videos and on all of these maps i am seeing ZERO wasted space. it's incredible
I think Elden Ring's combat and equipment design (as with Dark Souls') really helps with this too. It really opens the door for being able to create all this cool loot throughout the game, special unique weapons and armor that actually feel different and interesting, and which are almost never direct "upgrades". You can just keep upgrading your starter weapon if you want, and you can even customize it with skills, but you can also find really unique boss themed weapons that each have their own uses and movesets. They are really fun, but aren't at all needed to progress if you don't want to use them.
Man this hits so hard after seeing suicide squad ruining the legacy that batman Arkham series made for itself within six years and got ruined after nine bloody years of the last main installment which is Arkham Knight. Man I wish I died before the release of that shi*t called suicide squad game.
The lack of hand holding in elden ring in regards to map I think is part of why I pissed myself with excitement when I went down a well and was like WTF THERES A WHOLE SOCIETY DOWN HERE. And it also sometimes punishes you for exploration when you wind up somewhere under leveled so it feels like there's at least a dangerous element to the world. The amount of times I discovered a new place in elden ring and was surprised at this vast place sitting there almost undetectable, was more times than I've experienced in any other game even breath of the wild. But if the map had given it away and I hadn't stumbled upon these places it would've made it all bland and way less of a fun moment.
Without i guide i would miss a whole area or few key weapons and spells. To open questbook you need to alttab and open your own excel. To have a hint on what to do next to progress a quest you need to: backtrack whole map walking top to bottom like a roomba) or
Open online wiki
Can we all agree that was hand downs the best experience in the game or at least the best elevator ever.
@Aredyn absolutely. Usually elevators might take you to a cubicle sized hidden area with an item. Not a parallel world.
The time when I first encountered the zone of the Siofra River 🤯🤯🤯
@@LipSyncLover I went down that crater after radahn's fight expecting a fairly elaborate cave, not nokron the eternal fkin CITY
As a new player, the thing I’ve loved most about Elden Ring so far is that I feel like I can just do whatever I want. This journey of discovery and challenge has been my best gaming experience in years.
And that si just the thing everyones game experience was different with elden ring when I first got it my very first cinematic boss was radhan befor I ever met margit simply because i didnt get the graces guidence was mostly on just the map. If it was a AAA everyone would have the same route to margit and probly get the same weapons along the way
It's great to not get a pop up with "Go to this place" every 5 minutes
What's great in Elden Ring for me:
-excelent atmospheric gaming experience and challenging dificulty
-complete game for a single player
-huge, high lore open world
-serious, gritty fantasy story
-great replay value: different character builds/tons of hidden secrets
I wish there were great games like this made for people like me whos most intense gaming experience is playing minecraft on easy and even then i play on peaceful most of the time. Im just really bad at games but i still really enjoy them. i want to experience dark souls but i cant even pass the tutorial boss lmao
@@n4ttyyy wtf
@@n4ttyyy look up tutorials, you can do it!
unfortunately the replay value isn’t very good. even with the different builds it gets boring quickly.
@@inluvwithgoths Yeah, especially with how you can respec so many times in your first playthrough. It really depends on how much time you put into your first playthrough. For me it was about 150 hours then did mp getting to about 210. I tried to do a 2nd run and it is kind of boring besides the bosses. Wish you could just go back and do the bosses as a replay feature.
This is a ridiculous thing to claim. Three years ago there were tons of videos about Asian game devs quaking in their boots because they admitted they were years behind western game devs. They just couldn’t compete with RDR2 or God of War. They were in awe.
Nobody gives AF whether a game is Western or not. A good game is a good game. Sometimes the best latest game is Western and sometimes it isn’t. Who cares?
I remember my first western game that I would count as open world/rpg, and it was Asheron's Call, an MMO. I remember wandering around not knowing what to do, just exploring. Quests would show up as scraps of paper at times, sometimes books, sometimes NPCs would tell me some rumor. The was no quest log, no markers, just clues that require you to figure out what that one rock near a cliff is supposed to be. Sometimes you would run in to other players on the same quest and you would team up and figure it out together. Many years later it still one of my fondest gaming experiences.
Same for me with Morrowind. Then the games just got worse, and the worse they got, the more popular they became.
This sounds a lot like what WoW was in its early years. There was a minimap sure, but mostly it was cosmetic, quest points did not show up on it. You had to actually go and find the NPC. You needed to ask friends and guildmates how and where to do certain things. Dungeons we difficult mostly because people didn't really know what they were doing. You needed to walk everywhere to try and find anything, especially when you ran into a quest desert. Sometimes you were at level in a zone, ran out of quests then there would be a mob level spike. Oh well guess you either die or find a new route. The world felt massive because it actually encouraged you to explore. Then Wrath happened and the entire questing/leveling progression system changed. Pretty much the soul of the game died there, only reason Wrath was so successful was because of some great raid design and the culmination of a storyline that was like 20 years in the making.
@@westonlewis379 I vaguely remember the pre-wrath days, wandering in to felwood without any warnings as a lowbie was certainly a memory.
wow that sounds awesome.... I've never heard of that game, but I can imagine how fun that was
Which is weird since Fallout 3 was wildly successful. Then, you have quasi-open-world games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. A good game is a good game. That simple
For the old school like me, this was Morrowind. You were just travelling and discovering stuff, no quest marks which told you were to go, just general direction. You could look for a correct cave for an hour.
Elder scrolls 3 is a classic!
I was kinda thinking the same thing. It's like I want to love this game, but I'm someone that devotes time to a game to get everything, and I'm in the middle of two games already.
@@justinbencosme5893 Do it in your time. Elden Ring isn't going away.
@@Thelaretus yeah, it's a long game with alot of lore to collect. I've played the second one briefly, but if it's like the off shoot bloodborne, I'm gunna need a year or two.
I played elder scrolls arena. I haven’t enjoyed games much over the past few decades because of the hand holding. Haven’t played games in a long while but am thinking of purchasing Elden ring.
I had never even thought of how all the cool weapons and armor aren’t locked behind a FromSoft Store, another reason why i’m having a hard time going back to other games than the Souls series lmao
I just finished forbidden west. I can say after my 140 hour Elden Ring binge it felt very reminiscent of every other western rug ive grown to hate, due to the sheer bloat of the game and its millions of map markers. Although after finishing it its quite an incredible game underneath all of that bloat...I appreciate all the weapons and arbors are earned in game aswel. Horizon and Ghost of Tsushima are I think the only two western open world rpgs that ive truly appreciated...the rest I can't stomach lol
If EA or Ubisoft made Elden Ring, there would be a micro transaction to purchase Swordstone Keys.
If you want to look cool or silly, you just do quest, explore and kill npc
@@Davidchhoun and the talisman pouch will be on the lootbox with 1% chance. And the wretch class will be locked behind paywall.
Love to hear your take on FPS. I think that's a genre that western devs have mastered but constantly re hash.
Just a comment, Elden Ring has sold shy of fourteen-million copies, give or take a couple thousand. Making it the best-selling game from a Japanese company that isn't named Nintendo. Bandai was only expecting to sell about five million copies at around this point, and they're about to double their expectations.
Just as a comparison, the entire Dark Souls trilogy, from the original launch on the 360/PS3 in 2011 to the DS 3 Remastered in 2017 (or 2018), just reached 30-million copies recently.
If that alone doesn't show that people are hungry for these games, then I don't know what will.
why the hell is it so hard to find ppl to play with online if it has so many players. I put my sign down for help, or sometimes try to help others and it takes ages to sync with ppl :(
@@youafan259 Usually just means you're over-level or under-level around that area.
@@youafan259 because as much praise as we give them. Their net code is 100% dog shit and is overwhelmed with how many people are online.
@@theguitargod12 my multilayer didnt work for like the first 2 weeks lol rip. barely works now. game in general dope asf, its just... wish there was a better way of doing multi-player
Elden ring still sold less than a mess called Cyberpunk 2077... imagine that
The issue with western game devs is that everything has to be as accessible as possible to reach a wider audience for more profit, which in essence isn’t a bad thing but it does lead to staleness and everything feeling the same year after year. Devs kinda just scratch the surface on 50 different game mechanics to please the masses instead of deep diving a handful to make it a unique experience. If you continue to play it safe every single year, you can’t be surprised when something else becomes more successful
Accessibility doesn't mean making tons of shallow mechanics. Accessibility means communicating how to use a few deep mechanics while also making it so you can complete the game even if you can't engage with the full system.
Appealing to the lowest common denominator for profit isn't accessibility. It's ruining games in the name of greed.
@@angeldude101 This. As a souls vet I can confidently say Elden Ring is actually the most accessible of the games. While it's probably the hardest if you try to learn it like the old games, it gives you way too many options to cheese things if you don't want to master the mechanics. And yet these are done with relatively few options that tie into what you'd be using if you were to play "normally" anyway, so if a new player were to go back and try something harder they'd still be able to adapt faster.
Ubisoft games in nutshell..
Watch Dogs, Far Cry (From 4 to later games), and Assassin's Creed (From Origins to later games) are fun to play at beginning but they get so boring pretty quick because the repetitiveness and doing same thing over and over with less creativity, not to mention the story in those games (Except FC4) is mediocre at best, and adding more salt to the wound there almost nothing changed from the sequels either.
It's not just the games, same goes for movies as well.
They essentially try to make a movie that will please basically everyone. Instead of sticking to their genre and their audience.
Corporations listen executives and typically those executives have business degrees, psychological degrees, societal sciences,etc
This... is a problem, stock owners think that these people know what they are doing but they don't. They have no clue on how to make a movie/games. They think that making the experience be like a tour or mixing as many genres as possible is a good thing, and it really isn't.
What I liked about Elden Ring is after you finished the game, you will still like to replay it, and do your own "what ifs". There are still a lot of rooms to explore. Unlike other games after finishing the whole game you just walk out and done or restart but never have the urge to complete it again. In Elden Ring you still have this excitement of fighting the whole bosses again, try new weapons, change combat styles and try different endings. Plus pvp is just an icing on top.
I played DS3 for 5 years before the else ring release. The elden ring I played 1200h already. It could be player another 5years in pvp
Not only that, you basically remember so many of the fights depending on which boss was tough or easy as well as their back story.
The character design is just so cool in Souls games.
Art design/direction in Japanese games are just awesome.
Some of the bosses in the Resident Evil series are my favorite.
Id say this is actually my biggest gripe about the game, because of the open world, and the numerous dungeons with reskin enemies/bosses, and lackluster rewards for engaging said enemies, I think ER's replay value is pretty crap compared to other fromsoft games.
@@Phurzt minority opinion and reskins are designed that way with story or lore involved.
Though I haven't finished Elden Ring, it stays rent free in my mind! It gave me such a sense of accomplishment when I found and slayed the monster keeping the mage npc locked, and when I was low on health but had to, carefully, fall onto wall ledges to to escape the mining caves/tunnels 🥰
The west was making games with similar design concepts as Elden Ring up to the early 2000s.
Then something changed, and that something is probably money, which is what makes me skeptical Elden Ring is going to influence anything in the west, because the same big publishers that changed how western games were to be made aren't going to allow anything to reverse course.
I honestly think that Japanese games will dominate. Unless you think Western consumers don't care. Then maybe Japanese games will mostly just stay in Japan.
As a Western gamer, I've been playing a ton of Japanese games that are extremely obscured and niche. Games like Shenmue 1 and 2 were niche. No one played it, and gamers who grew up on it, who then became youtubers brought it to light. Guys like Dunkey and many others are the cause of that. Now a lot of people know what Shenmue is. (on a side note, Shenmue III isn't satisfying at all, quite disappointing).
There are so many Japanese games with awesome concepts that I love. Games like Way of the Samurai, Onimusha, Yakuza, Bushido Blade, Kengo Master of Bushido, and Suikoden (and thousands more) are all great games but are extremely niche.
If what you say is true, then perhaps the state of game will only get worse.
To be quite honest, I've been extremely turned off by games in the last 12 years. I've probably played about 15 games in the last 12 years because i couldn't find anything to play that was fun or satisfying.
Indeed! I think about all the good points about Elden Ring in this video and Morrowind comes to mind (as an example)
@@daoyang223 Onimusha was way ahead of its time
It wasn't money, it was ego. They got a big head and decided that since it was their decisions that players liked, that they could decide what players liked. The proof is their incessant claims that it's the *players* who are the problem and at fault for lower sales and stuff. From Software didn't do that, they just put in what the players wanted and the players bought huge numbers of their products, so they made a ton of money.
The same can be seen in Jedi: Fallen Order, which EA had blatantly made to try and prove their normal model was right *against* the players (they even went so far as to talk about removing features normal to games and rub it in everyone's faces as if it was going to convince players they were right like Blizzard thought about Classic) and were shocked and somewhat angry that it became a huge hit.
Remember, pride is worth any amount of money to people suffering from hubris.
@@artydean9892 way ahead of its time bro. Same with so many other games like Xenogears. Nier and many other games have Xenogears and Tetsuya Takahashi to thank for that.
FFVII is the biggest example of taking the concepts from Xenogears and making a beautiful story out of it. They literally took all the major plot points and concepts from xenogears script back in 1995. Not even joking.
So many Japanese games do great concepts and goes unnoticed. All the time. Of course for my American counterpart, look at Fallout New Vegas and Obisidian. That game before 2016 when it started getting a lot of love for making a proper rpg in the 21st century, went unnoticed too.
Japanese people love making deep and articulate games, but the lack of love and hate they get is universal, Japanese or American.
Elden ring has a curious way of keeping players spending time in their world. They actually rely on talented, original and passionate good product in order to make the consumer play their game. This is so groundbreaking, somebody should let Activision know about this method!
Activision knows about it well, but why would they give up the low effort, free money, when ppl keep buying their trash content anyway? And its not just Activision. Most companies do it. Ppl need to stop buying trash to send a message. The same applies to the trash hollywood or netflix content that gets released in the past few years. Just stop giving them any money. Period.
@@romancervek1218 what about the platinum trophy tho
@@Justathought81 The platinum trophy is just a way to get you to grind through a whole lot of terrible, repetitive, monotonous game space to feel you got value, when really you just wore your controller out a little closer to needing a replacement
@@Justathought81 Assuming you're not being sarcastic, a platinum trophy is only worth getting if you actually enjoy playing the game and want to fully master it like that. Otherwise you're just wasting your time.
@@jimshotfirst4887 I was just fn around, just its mentioned a few times in the video.
Old head gamer here turning 42 in a few weeks. What I loved about Elden Ring is that they took the amount of marketing crap to a minimum before and after its launch. The overall experience takes me back to the days of PS2 in the early 2000s when games would offer their own kind of immersion without relying on "realistic" aesthetics.
This is absolutely a huge part of why the game was so impactful for me as well. Compared to the scale of the finished product, the amount of marketing for the game was resoundingly (and refreshingly) minimal. They "undersold" it and just let the final version and subsequent word of mouth do the talking.
Elden Ring takes the lack of hand-holding multiple steps further, though I think it strays too far from the sweet spot. Quest logs and lists for objectives are boring, but a sequential journal that updates whenever you progress would have been great. The difficulty in the questing comes from deciphering riddles, not having to try and remember all of the people you're helping, or to consult a guide on what step you're on. There are PLENTY of ways to prematurely end quest lines, so I think having a Morrowind style vague journal wouldn't be too bad if it's just something you can use to remember what you've done with an NPC.
@@roberthartley6699 Heck, an ingame notepad would work too.
They marketed the ever living fuck out of this game, no idea what you're talking about. They literally had influencers playing and streaming it for months before it actually released.
@@jameson7276 we had radio silence for how many years? They released a teaser then crawled back into nothingness as the community hollowed making up completely random lore
I've replayed Elden Ring twice, each time managing to find so many new bosses, and then I go to watch other youtubers play the game and end up finding more bosses or quests I ended up missing. They put a lot of work into this game, which is something western companies refuse to do because they want to put as little effort as possible for as much profit as they can manage. For example, Activision knows there will be millions of idiots who will buy the next COD game even though it is literally no different to the last one, and so they know they don't need to put any effort in. Many games aren't even released as complete, instead being sold as alphas or betas and worked on for decades, all the while draining people's wallets of cash on microtransactions. It has affected many once-great game studios and has led to most years being rather uneventful for gaming.
Grass?
FromSoftware has been a jewel hidden from many for the last 30 years. Starting with hits like, Armored Core and Demon Souls many years later, they have shown time and time again that they are not the BEST out there, but they definitely have their soul still intact when you play their games. Not poisoned by Western distributors. I can't even see them ever going in that route and may be one of the last old studios that have not bended the knee to greed. Hats off to FromSoftware for showing us what true creativity looks like, what real wonders devs, designers, and producers can make when not held at gun point by strict deadlines and the need to operate in a service model.
I loved For Answer. Couldn't figure out what made it so good vs. the other ones
Then I got into DaS, played DeS, found out that it was the same people.
Feels good to see them get rewarded big for it.
Blizzard used to be like that. Had a soul, didn’t bend, made great games. All there games were least 9.0s and a smashing success. They would take genres and make the best versions of them. But then they tossed blizzard north which is where most of there good stuff came from and merged with activision. Now they just milk whatever they can from there older franchises and have become more of the same. Overwatch was a different change of pace at least
@@Morendie91
Everything that could go wrong went wrong for them
and a hidden jewel from this hidden jewel is "Deracine" ; ) try it if you have the opportunity ( which is, VR headset )
Remnant: From The Ashes was a great example of a Western Dev (Gunfire) not only going the From Software formula right, but innovating and iterating on it with their own compelling lore and a laser focus on fun multiplayer coop. The sequel to that game is an absolute 100% first day buy for me.
That game is low key fun and deserves more attention. I will say the overall world/boss/enemy design lacks variety and richness that From games have. Also I felt the bosses abused throwing in little distractor enemies all the time to the point it was aggravating. Still, good game.
Praise the Gun!
Yeah remnants is fun if you're playing multi, soloing some of the super gank bosses will have you pulling your hair out. So boss design isn't on par, with say, sekiro, but it's still fun
@@redgarlicbred6228 I found my "Jolly Cooperation" experience in Remnant. I've played it on all three platforms (two of which give it away for free) and almost all the rados I've been paired with have been super friendly, making the bleak world that much more bearable.
I would also argue that gank bosses are more bearable when you have a automatic weapon or a shotgun with a ton of mana. Yes, the bosses aren't as refined as the Souls games (noting even close to Artorias or Pontiff), but they got a lot right first try.
Sequel? do you mean a future sequel or Chronos? never played the Chronos prequel myself
Opening that trap box that takes you to a mine in Caelid..was one of the most terrifying and wonderful experiences in gaming..the game gives 2 fs about you..that powerless feeling is actually key to pushing me forward..to want to get better
Ya I loved that too
@@coyotebones1131 I remember watching and trying to help my brother get out of there when it happened. Ironically we went deeper in thing up meant out and were dumbfounded when the exit was literally right there.
Getting kidnapped to Volcano Manor was even more terrifying…
Okay try that but figuring out how to get the horse, I did this on my first day went Dragon Burnt Ruins, cleared out the rats after getting mauled many times over. Opened the trap chest was in Caelid's crystal mines. No horse, level 7 at the time with the bleed dagger from the bloody finger I accidentally ran into while exploring. Secllia was a death trap on foot the terrfying as hell t-rex looking dogs, the giant crows, it was like hell on Earth getting through that place haha.
I died like ten times trying to escape that mine.
That feeling when I finally found the exit… love it.
Elden Ring works because it puts the FULL power in the players hands. There is no limit to what you can do or where you can go WHEN and HOW you want to go there. Every step, every enemy defeated, every boss conquered FEELS like such an accomplishment. You truly feel like YOU earned every step you took.
This was my first FromSoft game and the level of frustration, and achievement i felt while playing this game was / is like no other game ive ever played in the last 25 years. IT brought back the sense of exploration and joy i hadnt felt since i was a kid. Cant wait for the next release from them.
I love, love Elden Ring's lore and the way you have to search and theorize about it. It really makes theorizing feel accessible, and from a writing standpoint the lore is incredible imo. Such a huge inspiration for writing. Didn't even fall into the trap of lacking emotion for me, which is common for games, I literally got teary when reading about miquella, or radahn's defeat at malenia and vice versa, or the carian family, etc very emotional like a full, propery high fanasty story.
Yeah I love it too glad you enjoy it
Ive just unlocked the snow area, 1st playthrough
Do they just tell u about the lore like u said about miquella, or do u have to go out of ur way to find it or somthing?
I love the lore too but crying over it?
@@SpeedyPoison774 the game only gives you bits of information throughout and it can be kinda difficult to put together. Pay attention to item descriptions and read lore online
So true...for me the most emotional moment in Elden Ring was when Melina burned the Erdtree...
One of my favorite things about Elden Ring is the amount of replayability it has. You spend so much time exploring every nook and cranny on your first playthrough, and yet when you go through again, you're still finding things you missed. The difficulty also plays a massive part. It takes time and practice to beat the bosses in this game, and doing it a second, or third time makes the bosses you once found incredibly difficult a walk in the park. You can also diversify your build in hundreds of different ways, using different styles of combat, different weapons, and different paths through the game. I will definitely be revisiting this game for years to come
It’s probably the least replayable souls game. Bosses are super rng with meaty health bars and one shot mechanics or they’re a cakewalk that make replaying the game pretty much the same except you have to still dump like 30 to 40 hours whereas games like bb, ds3, or sekiro you can actively see yourself mastering each encounter little by little until you can basically beat everything without a sweat. Don’t get me wrong elden ring is worth 2 or 3 playthroughs with the amount of quests and secret areas and its masterpiece but the difficulty of the boss stems from your build and not your skill or mastery of their move set and yours.
@@logannewberry5788 I do agree with you that bosses are either ridiculously powerful or weak but you can argue that’s the cost of an incredibly large open world with serious effort put into it. That’s why I don’t compare Elden Ring to other soul games, it isn’t a finite path that’s had far more time dedicated to balancing.
@@ecci0261 no I definitely understand that. I do think it’s possible in theory though if they made a sequel to bump the boss quality up but I don’t see them doing that. Overall the exploration and densely packed open world make the game truly amazing first time around but there’s not much reason to replay once you’ve seen it all.
@Abi for me, the bosses (main ones) are the best in this game although i havent played bloodbourne or ds2, could be wrong. their skillsets are fun to look at visually, the theme they have is cool, every main boss is interesting, beating them was satisfying and their arent many bosses where i feel like it was bullshit (except for the godskin duo which is ornstein and smough wallmart edition). sure there are shitty reskin bosses but i can forgive them since most of the reskins tend to have a new gimmick to them and its an open world. the open world was really detailed too. there were plenty of cool weapons and mobs, unique areas and plenty of scattered lore to go through. the randomness of a boss suddenly appearing in your screen also adds to it too. I still remember going to that one place where you get to fight astel. it was beautiful
@Abi ahh dang, you were this close to facing Maliketh(one of my favorite bosses). Fighting Godfrey was really hype too. Fire giant can be really annoying with it's rolls and large HP but atleast you beat it
FromSoft has mastered the “show, don’t tell” aspect of storytelling. The lack of cutscenes and allowing you to create your own ending really is freedom to the player and thus gives the player more power. I think the best equivalent to this game would be Detroit: Become Human. Although I do not like the mechanics of the game (GIVE ME CONTROL OF THE FUCKING CAMERA!!!!) it doesn’t show you what you should do, but allows you to create the game in a way you want to. Granted it’s almost like every scene is a cut scene but it works for the game. It’s like reading a novel. Yeah, that’s it. I want my game to feel like reading a novel rather than being a slave to the task master (shout out to “would you kindly”). Don’t give me markers of interest, let me find them myself.
Edit: seeing a lot of comments about not having quest logs and having to write things down. That’s a good thing. It’s a dnd format of storytelling. When you get into a dnd world, you know nothing about it and have to interact with the npcs to get information about it. Instead of interacting with npcs in Elden Ring, you go to written lore outside and inside the game. It’s no different from reading a book and understanding why Gandalf was gone for so long because the movie didn’t cover it well enough. Sorry y’all don’t like putting in work to learn about lore instead of it being given to you in cutscenes. But if you don’t care about the lore, guess what, the game doesn’t take away player control. You can either dive into the lore or just play the game.
It's a form of Soft World Building. Where they just gives you bits and pieces of the lore and you just put things together or speculate.
Tbh I don't care about any of that. I just want hard awesome bosses.
did you ever play any RPG ? This type of game exist stop only playing the ubisoft game.
@@trezayngounder558 and that’s fine fromsoftware is like if you don’t care about lore? Here’s what you want. It’s all about options baby.
@@ni9274 Alot of RPSs rely on screen text as if they're cutscenes. You don't have to engage with little to nothing in Elden Ring.
The assassins creed color objective thing is really crazy when you think about it. Like yeah I definitely know something is here.
I remember finding the dual blades in Elden Ring. I had no idea and I did a backflip cuz I was so happy
The ubisoft open world is to RPGs as call of duty was to first person shooters in the late 2000s - early 2010s. COD back in the day was so wildly successful that it created a box of "drab colored, war fps" that strangled creative design, as studios were too afraid to step out of that box for fear of losing mainstream appeal. Ubisoft has done the exact same thing with their "activate the tower to reveal the map, thousand collectables, attack the outpost" open worlds. Its become the template that most studios follow. However, much like how destiny challenged and broke the fps box back in 2014, leading to an outpouring of creative ideas in the genre, I believe Elden Ring is gonna shatter the ubisoft open world box.
Pinnacle of that era: the dreadful, cynical attempts to reboot Medal of Honor.
Now we're in the "Overwatch" era of shooters instead lol
Breath of the Wild was the game that did it first though ... and I'm not saying it because I'm a fanboy or something, I actually love Elden Ring even more than Botw, but it's just a fact that Botw was the first important open world game that broke the western design norms
@@notspacekeeper I remember having Medal of Honor Frontline as a kid, to this day I wonder how they got away with just straight off ripping scenes from Saving Private Ryan and A Bridge Too Far
Unfortunately, Destiny itself created the "looter-shooter box" and you get crap like outriders, anthem, and the like churned out constantly. As long as "money for the shareholders (aka money lizard people) is the goal, studios will be hesitant to try new ideas because a single failure in the eyes of said lizards could spell the death of an entire studio. When "breaking even" became a dirty word, creativity died.
I'm 110 hours into Elden Ring and I havent been this happy to play a game since Doom Eternal and Skyrim before it.
how do skyrim and elden ring compare?
@O K they don't.... they're just really well fleshed out games that have great replay value, sure Skyrim could've been more fleshed out if they weren't rushing for that rare 11/11/11 release date but we have mods and waiting over a decade now for Elder Scrolls 6 so hopefully they've put a lot of effort in
One of the reasons I love Ghost of Tsushima was the lack of a questpoint. It was just wind that disappeared off your screen after a few seconds, and you could enjoy the scenery without barreling towards the marker
That game was still a bit of a collectathon. It was like sekiro but worse in most ways
@@seymourpant Yes but the multiplayer more than made up for that. If we could get a sequel standalone in the vein of tsushimas multiplayer i would love that.
@@Samdemanable right
One of the best samurai games ever made, I really hope we get a sequel the combat system was too good
@@seymourpantI don’t think “set in feudal Japan” is enough to quantify “like Sekiro”. It was much more like RDR2 or The Witcher 3 than it is Sekiro. Ghost and Sekiro are entirely different from each other as far as narrative, gameplay, and genre. All of these games are phenomenal regardless.
my first run of elden ring took me 80 hours to complete due to how full, open and ambigous the world is, I must have discorvered every nook and cranny in that game on my first run and i never once felt hopelessly lost or bored trying to find something to do or discover.
I literally just started playing and already I can tell that Elden Ring has the love and care from a AAA studio like indie devs for their games. And that it came out as a finished product, the one thing AAA western studios fear.
Edit : There is so much more than I ever anticipated holy shit I’ve beaten the game twice already.
Second play through I realized that THE ENTIRE REGION of Caelid is OPTIONAL. Great game I give it a 10/Western Game Dev tears.
Kingdom Come Deliverance on Hardcore is such a trip. You don't get directions on your compass, and you don't get a player icon on the map, so you literally have to orient yourself by looking around and at the map for landmarks and think about directions and plot your own path, many times a longer one that is more easily followed.
Kingdom Come is a Czech game. That's roughly in the middle between USA and Japan.
@@M0butuIt is as Western game…
@@Dr.Sometimes It's not an American game. You feel that from start to finish.
The storytelling, the humour, the dialogue, the gameplay...
Kingdom come deliverance was an absolutely fantastic game.
@M0butu yeah but Europe is still in the west. The west refers more to a concept than one specific country
If I were to make an adjustment to Elden Ring's quests it'd be to have some sort of journal-type system that writes down important information from certain NPC's after talking to them so you can quickly re-look at the info they give you after they leave. The game already does it sometimes with the "notes" and I don't think it'd kill the sense of discovery too much to just have a little more of those red markers for certain quests. I don't know how anyone does some of these quests without guides in its current state.
The reason the quests are the way they are is because the game expects you not to just run through a side quest but instead wants you to just run into people. It's not supposed to feel like a quest that is only moving forward because you interact with it and instead is a case of another character going on a journey and you just so happen to run into them. In other words you're not supposed to running through a checklist.
@@vocalcalibration8033 It's still a weak system that they eventually had to fix to by adding npc markers on the map. NPC quests should've been self contained in a local area when you meet them or given better guides to where they are next. The world of Elden Ring is still a video game world where you're less likely to revisit old places without a reason so quests like the blind maiden and alexander lost their values and literally became what you mentioned as something players forced to move forward, looking up guides for where to go next and forcefully created that checklist you're talking about. If it's a journey, there really shouldn't be in any sort of backtracking or running in circle. They should be moving forward just like you but that's clearly not the case and just made their storylines more procedural than enjoying.
@@vocalcalibration8033 The thing is, many of them already DO give hints to where they go next. I'm just saying it'd be nice if you got a note or something that at least reminded you of what they already said that you could look at later. Just so you don't have to either take your own notes, or more likely, look up a guide since you weren't paying close attention the first time because you were in the middle of something else when you meet them before.
That's exactly what Deus Ex (2000) did. You could also edit those notes or add new ones. The notes are in the section with a quest journal - primary and secondary goals are listed there, but they don't micro manage your every action, instead giving you just an end goal. The only references you have are pieces of information you can get by exploring the levels and sometimes images that get sent to you directly - those being static schematics, maps etc. that you have to analyze by yourself. No way markers etc. This game is an immersive sim that lets you complete your objectives in multiple ways but it's kinda ruined by the prequels
I think From's quest design is working as intended but it's made worthless by the fact anything you want to know about a game, you can google. The idea is that you come across an NPC, quest, secret, etc etc and you discuss it with your buddies and the player base establish an Intel network of sorts to piece the game together. You even get guided by other players in game if you pay attention to the markings they leave on the ground. The major problem tho is rhat all that is sidestepped because you'll just follow a guide anyway
Throughout the entire game, Elden Ring feels like a meticulous hand carefully crafted every moment of the game. The quality never dips from start to finish, and the game rarely breaks the player immersion.
I think that part of the problem is that, in modern society we try to optimize everything to the point where we tend to create a “formula” for everything, whether that be a standard or template etc. Generally this would be something along the lines of “what creates or makes for a good song, movie or video game”… and if this process is repeatable, it then becomes a standard way of doing things, it becomes “formulaic”.
This is then repeated to point where every song sounds the same and every game plays the same. Essentially we know what to expect from the game and how it will play before we have actually even played it!
The most successful video games seem to be the ones that break or at least in someway challenge the “standard way of doing things” by “subverting our expectations”!
Also western decline with gay sex and negros
It is not a problem, but rather a fact of how things evolve to be as a game company or any other company grows. Stability becomes more and more important and risk-taking decisions and behaviors will be reduced. Investors seeks stability. Retired people do not put all their money in high risk stocks and risk losing their lifesavings anymore. Mcdonalds will not do a big revamp to its menu. Apple will not suddenly make big changes to their products. This happens the same way across all industries and in life. It is down to those who are young or smaller companies to take big risks that break the mold.
well said
Something related to that is the tendency of players to optimise the fun out of games if given the opportunity to do so. Hence why games like the long dark make such strong use of status meters, and forcing you to take a hit to one of your meters to stop another from killing you, forcing the players into uncomfortable situations.
Similarly, in elden ring you can often end up in situations where you're very low on health but just have to push through the area in the hopes of finding a site of grace
That's because Ubisoft mistakenly got thought of as a "pioneer" when all they did was contribute to the downfall of western games with their bland, unremarkable, handholding formulaic bullshit that Assassin's Creed and Far Cry forced onto other studios. Vacuous open worlds with next to nothing in them.
I’ve never played a fromsoft game, was discouraged by the “Dark Souls” difficulty culture, and have only played competitive fps games for 5 years. Yet, Elden ring is the best videogame I have ever played.
It reminds me of when I would think to myself, “how would I make a videogame that I actually like and differs from the current formulaic/dry market.
It is a masterpiece and I’m glad it challenges what we think as a “good videogame”
I started exactly like you, and then I started falling more and more in love with the game because of its beauty/horror, sharp gameplay and the lore that begs to be explored since they aren't throwing it down our throats. I couldn't stand the open world watchtower collectathon anymore, and Elden Ring just surprised me so much, I haven't felt that way in a game since the first time I played Skyrim, which is a game that changed the open world in the industry since its release. I think ER has a good chance to be a big step in the right direction if the western devs take inspiration from it.
and now I bet... that difficulty culture was a lie. Basically mainstream media, full of game dev shills, who keep spouting that dark souls is hard, when it isn't. The hand holding is the biggest thing, and game dev's are scared of it. They think game is hard because it doesn't hand hold you, so don't play the game because its hard. Play our game, we hand hold.
I been saying for years. The souls games are not hard. They just don't handhold you. That doesn't make it hard, it just shows you that your not a good gamer. That doesn't mean you can't become a good gamer, just that you currently are not a good gamer. Playing souls games, actually make you a better gamer. As cringe as that sounds, but its fact. Game dev's dont want you to be a good gamer, they want you to think you are good by playing their hand hold game. That is why mainstream media keeps shoving that "difficulty culture" down ppls throat, about souls games.
Wait until you play Bloodborne
@@yummychips_ I laugh every time some modern "gamer" thinks they are good at games because they play Dark Souls. One of my earliest addictions on the NES was Ghost n' Goblins. I wasn't even in my teens yet.
@@irvingdelahoz9390 i wanted to say that, you beat me to the punch 😂
This is why, for the past 7 or so years, I've mostly stuck to playing indie games. On average they feel more complete, even if a bit wonky at times. But they try new things and blend concepts together that I haven't experience before. Even if I don't stick with those games, I've happy to have experienced what they bring to the table and where other games and grow from there.
Indie games is the new triple A
too much open world that makes me sick
@@ezioauditore5616 I don't think it's just because the companies are releasing open world, but because they don't change it in any way. Take Saints row, Watch Dogs Legion or other newer open world games. They have almost no replayability and are just boring after some time, because it's the same few missions over and over again. Just look at the newer Ubisoft games and you'll see how much has "changed" over the years. Of course, you can see Elden Ring the same way, but it gives you A LOT more options and ways to beat it, you can even just skip difficult bosses and choose easier ones.
@@Cloakner the thing about open world are distance traveled and loading times, both are not fun
Yeah indie games went hard
Hollow knight, Celeste, enter the gungeon, the binding of isaac, Terraria, risk of rain 2
Elden Ring is not hated by an "entire continent of game developers". It's hated by a select few AAA game developers. Most AA, Indie, and even AAA game developers love it, but the internet likes to be angry so they only focused on the opinions of a few random people on twitter.