Since Elden Ring’s meteoric entrance into the pantheon of soulslikes, many players have grown very fond of the very new and fresh open-world approach to the genre. Miyazaki himself said that ER is as close to his dream soulslike as he could wish it to be. It felt like a new direction for future soulslikes to come and felt similarly revolutionary as Breath of the Wild did for Zelda.
The open world didn’t come with only positives, however. Repeat bosses and assets, dungeons weren’t as diverse as one hoped them to be, the rewards for exploring some of them felt very situational and niche-y at best and outright useless at their worst. Some say the game is only ever good for a first blind playthrough and that the open world stands in their way of getting to “the fun part™” of the game.
After almost four years of the game existing, a, objectively speaking, very strong DLC, and a spin-off with Nightreign, how do you guys feel about open worlds in soulslikes? I understand this is not the first or only soulslike to feature an open world - I don’t have any examples at hand off the dome - but ER is definitely the open world soulslike.
Is it something you’d like to see featured in future soulslikes? Are you over it? Very keen on hearing your thoughts since I can’t really make up my mind either :)
What I liked most about ER’s open world was that it meant you could go and do something else if you were getting frustrated with something, then come back a little stronger and a little better. The starting region being designed to teach you this lesson is clever, and I think overall it was a huge success in getting more people into the genre.
That being said, the more traditional “scripted” (if not linear) sections of the game are where it shines. I think they learned that lesson, as the expansion is more diverging and intertwined paths, rather than fields dotted with content.
As someone who was way out of practice at games like this when I picked up ER, I would almost certainly not have made it past Margit if I didn’t have the option to go prod at the edges of Caelid and carve up the Weeping Peninsula until I levelled up a bunch