Elden Ring

I’ve been playing a lot of Elden Ring since its release and I think I’m finally ready to write up a formal review of the game. While I still haven’t done absolutely everything, (the game is big) I’ve gone through the game multiple times and experimented quite a bit on fresh characters. This review is going to reference past Souls games a lot when talking about how certain mechanics or concepts work. So first, let’s go through all the things Elden Ring does well.

World Design/Level Design

I’m grouping these two design aspects together for a specific reason. One of Elden Rings great achievements is truly weaving together the overall layout of the world and its levels together. I’ve talked in the past about how Dark Souls (and most games) have these elements mostly separated. Dark Souls 1 has a mostly single instanced world. Where you can travel to most of it on foot naturally. But each section of the game is still typically a set level that you complete like a traditional linear game. When you’re going through the Undead Burg, you’re going through the Undead Burg. Sure, you can take an early exit to go through a transition area (Dark Wood Basin) if you want to skip the normal progression, but that’s about the extent of it. It’s the same thing with the Valley of the Drakes. It’s less of a realized location, and more of an area made solely to connect other levels. And as you progress through the game, those optional side paths become less and less common. Sen’s Fortress and beyond, you progress through the level until you complete it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I actually tend to prefer linear games. But it seems kind of a waste to create a large, mostly single instanced world, only to have set, linear levels inside of it. Let's look at an early example in Elden Ring. Flying Dragon Agheel is an early game boss. How early? Well, you can run to him in like a minute once you get out of the tutorial. After you beat him, what would you do next? Well, the map looks like this. 

You could head north into a mine to get upgrade materials. You could head west to see if there are any friendly NPCs at that church. You could investigate the ruins to the south. Or you could go north east and explore up the shallow river. And all of these are valid choices with unique outcomes. This boss is just there. Don’t get me wrong, this can cause problems. Sometimes Agheel will fly up a mountain like an idiot and the fight will get stupid. But I find the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses here. FromSoftware games have always had a certain amount of jank. But what people overlook when it comes to jank is that it often comes along with complexity. Not to knock a game like the Witcher 3, but it’s a lot easier to make polished combat encounters when the combat is a lot more shallow. Elden Ring offers a good combat system, with interesting RPG aspects, in a truly open world with multiplayer mechanics as the cherry on top. With this many complex moving parts, things are going to go wrong sometimes. I’m actually gobsmacked how things in Elden Ring hold up so well in most cases. This is the first time FromSoftware has made a game in this style and to this scale. I can just randomly invade another player in this giant world and fight another human. I can travel miles and miles around this sprawless open space and do whatever I want. It’s incredible. The other aspect of the world is Legacy Dungeons. 

I’m probably in the minority here, but I’m not a huge fan of Elden Rings Legacy Dungeons. It’s even in the name “Legacy'' Dungeon. They feel out of place to me in this otherwise vast, open world. I don’t hate them. They are kind of incredible in how intricate and large they are in a game of this size. But I tend to find them kind of boring in comparison to the rest of the game. I’m more okay with them in end game zones, as you need to enforce challenges as the player reaches the end of the game. But I found Stormveil Castle dull, even on my first playthrough. Finding multiple shortcuts connecting to parts of a dungeon I’ve already been in felt really played out. And so small in comparison to what the rest of the game does. Conversely, I found the Mini Dungeons to be pretty fun. Unlike the Legacy Dungeons, they are quick and to the point. As the name would imply, they are like these bite sized challenge zones. The bosses inside are usually nothing mind-blowing, but that’s kind of the point. These little zones usually have some useful upgrade materials or some new weapon or spell that you can quickly get while progressing your character a bit.

RPG Mechanics and Leveling

I have been fairly critical of the RPG mechanics in the various Souls games over the years. In the past I’ve talked about how the games have a mountain of various numbers on the status screen, but very little of that translates into meaningful game play distinction. If I’m playing Dark Souls 1 and on one playthrough I use a Black Knight Halberd, then on my next playthrough I use a Reinforced Club on a Soul Level 1 character, the biggest change will be how fast the bosses die. I won’t actually be playing the game that differently. I’ll probably even be using the same rings on both characters. (More on those ring choices later) And it’s not that different from game to game. If I’m playing Dark Souls 3 I might pick the Exiled Greatsword or the Sellsword Twinblades, both really powerful weapons, one is “strength” and one is “dex” but what really changes? In this example I’ll have more openings to attack with the dex choice, but that’s about it. On my first playthrough of Elden Ring I made a quality build (leaning towards strength) with the Great Epee. My second playthrough was a dex build with dual katanas. I naturally started playing the game very differently on my second character. On my first playthrough I was mostly going for big staggers by doing fully charged R2s and relying a lot on powerful weapon skills to get the most out of my big punish opportunities. On my second character I was going for long L1 strings to build up my bleed procs, I basically didn’t use skills because I found that they didn't synergize well while dual wielding. This is only scratching the surface and I’m already making choices that both affect my character progression and playstyle. Since then I’ve been experimenting with more interesting characters and I’m looking into specific build synergies with different talismans, different skills or spells. In the Souls games, I rarely did that, and it was often long after release when I was more scratching the bottom of the barrel, instead of being legitimately interested in those options. That highlights another design change in Elden Ring that these games have severely needed for a long time. Interesting RPG choices. Until now, most Souls RPG stuff has been really bland. Back to that Dark Souls 1 example, what were those rings I’d probably use on both builds? The Ring of Favor and Protection and Havel's Ring. What do these rings give me? More HP, more Stamina and more Equip Load. I’m simply getting stat increases. Not only that, but these stats are typical, you can also raise them by leveling up. So not only are these base stats, but it’s redundant. You level up to raise the numbers, you equip the ring to raise the number. There isn’t anything really unique or interesting going on here. A very simple talisman I’ve recently decided to use in Elden Ring is the Claw Talisman. It gives a substantial damage increase to jumping attacks. While making a hard hitting strength build I started leaning more and more to jumping attacks because they are a great way to cover distance with a strong attack that's still relatively quick, on a build that normally struggles to do that. And with a hard hitting build, a big damage increase is really vital. So this talisman is a perfect fit for this build. This is far better than a ring that just gives you more strength or just gives you more damage. Simply adding a requirement, such as needing to jump, makes it more useful for certain builds than others, and gives the player something to think about. And this is one of the more simple examples. This stuff isn’t particularly hard to do and it’s good to see FromSoftware going in this direction.

Another big change in Elden Ring is how leveling and enemy scaling works. Most people noticed this when they started dying if they neglected Vigor. This small change to enemy scaling has a huge impact on player behavior and how they go about making builds. A low Vigor character is now truly a glass cannon, and deciding to play that way is going to require that player to either have a specific playstyle or use some specialized gear. This makes those player choices a lot more meaningful and ultimately creates more interesting build choices. A good RPG system needs to give the player tough choices, otherwise the decisions you make don’t really matter. Investing a lot into Vigor is going to reduce your potential damage. But that’s the sacrifice you need to make if you don’t want to alter your playstyle. That’s what a build is supposed to be. 

Storytelling, Lore and Characters

I already talked a lot about this in an earlier editorial here, so I won’t go over this too much. The basic gist is that Elden Ring has a lot more meaningful character interactions between the player and NPCs in the world than the past games. Not only does this give the player a lot more direct, connected information about their objectives and the world around them, but they can more easily understand these other characters. Elden Ring also takes more time to flesh out certain factions and ideas. This is most likely due to how long Elden Ring was in development for and how big the game is. The type of places that would have only been referenced as other, far away nations in item descriptions are now oftentimes fully explorable areas. This makes the world feel a lot more real and your journey through it a lot more immersive.

Enemy Design

The bosses in Elden Ring are just out of control. FromSoft really flexed their creative muscle here to create some of the most unique and distinct boss fights the Souls series have ever seen. Similar to the change in enemy damage, the bosses having extreme and different designs means they will be best fought with different tactics and builds. This once again incentivizes players to explore the game and find different tools for different bosses. Further pushing the RPG elements. But beyond that, it gives the bosses a lot more flare and personality. Radahn is this larger than life character and his boss fight highlights that. Malenia has the power of Rot and represents decay; her life-draining attacks not only give her boss battle a unique challenge to overcome but it fits her character. The other side of the coin is how regular enemies are handled. A lot of regular enemies are actually pretty easy to deal with. This is a good course correction after Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 lost sight of how basic level design and regular enemies should be used. In the last few Souls games, players naturally started just running past enemies. The regular enemies don’t give much, if any, reward for defeating them, and the risk of fighting them was high. So it just made sense to avoid them. Elden Ring made a lot of changes to fix these issues. For one, in the open world killing a group or a big enemy gives you some flasks back. Secondly, harder enemies have counter tactics that simply require the player to use another tool. Dogs and flying enemies can be a menace, but shields make them much more manageable. Thirdly, by the time the game does start throwing some really dangerous enemies at you, it’s past the midpoint, where the game expects you to have some trump cards up your sleeve. And Elden Ring offers many trump cards to the player as long as they explore and develop their character.

Sound Design

This might be the most overlooked aspect of Elden Ring so far, but FromSoft really knocked it out the park with sound and music. One of the most impressive and new things here is how ambient music is used in environments. When traversing the open world, the way the ambience creeps up slowly as an enemy aggros you and the way it slides back down after you defeat them or escape adds so much character to the world in such an effectively subtle way. It’s the type of thing you don’t even notice while it’s happening but your brain does. Boss themes are also a lot more varied. I’m a sucker for big booming choirs in boss themes, but by the time of Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 they really started getting overused. If you don’t believe me, listen to Vordt's theme from Dark Souls 3. That could be final boss music, why is it being used for an early game boss? Elden Rings’ boss themes reminds me more of Demon’s Souls OST where a lot of tracks are conveying specific characterization of that particular boss as opposed to it just trying to sell the tension of a boss fight.

Controls

Another big improvement Elden Ring brought to Souls games is fixing some long-standing control issues. Jumping in Souls was bad and it was never mapped well. Either being tied to the circle button or placed on L3. Now jumping has its own button and it's a fun and relevant tool. Both in exploring and in combat. Its effect on combat is more supplementary than core. Jumping attacks are a great way to close the distance while still hitting with something hard. Jumping can also be used to avoid specific attacks like ground slam area of effect moves. It doesn’t revolutionize Souls combat, but it’s just enough of an added ingredient to give the game its own distinct style and feel. With Jump being mapped to a face button, two handing had to be moved. Two handing is now done by holding the triangle button, then pressing the attack button of the arm you want to two hand on. (L1 or R1) While this takes some getting used to, it’s a nice added benefit that being able to two hand either side quickly is a nice change. And the two hand option being pushed down the priority of controls makes sense; some builds/players don’t even use two hands, so jumping should be more prioritized in Elden Ring.

The Negative

I’ve talked a lot about what Elden Ring does well, so now it’s time to talk about what it does badly. No game is perfect and as of now here are my gripes with the game.

New Game Plus And Replayability

While the new approach to leveling and enemy scaling is great, it’s great on a regular playthrough. Once you get to new game plus, things start to deteriorate and the problems of old Souls games start creeping in. If you’ve built a strong and competent character while going through regular game, the early to mid game of new game plus is an absolute joke. Things will barely hurt you and you’ll be killing bosses in no time. This is how FromSoft has typically balanced early new game plus, and my only assumption is that they don’t want players to get stuck once they switch over. So they make the early scaling of new game plus very forgiving. In Elden Ring I find this especially unnecessary, it’s an open world game with tons of different things to do, even if a player barely scraped by with an underpowered character, it's hard to imagine someone getting soft-locked. One nice change though is that your map carries over from regular game to new game plus. So you can see where all the landmarks are and you have all your map pieces. But that’s probably the only positive here. Like past games, Elden Ring takes all your key items away. All those Bell Bearings? Gone. I don’t even really understand the point of that. All it does is encourage players to stay in regular game as long as possible to fill out your character. What does that accomplish? If new game plus isn’t going to be anything special, if the scaling is going to be very lax, why these restrictions? I would go in the opposite direction to at least make new game plus fun. Why not let my graces carry over? So I can instantly warp to any place I’ve already been to and refight all these cool bosses? If the player already beat the game, what’s the harm? The game being really big, with no way to quickly re-fight certain bosses does hurt the game's replayability a bit and this would basically solve that issue. And it wouldn’t require much effort for Fromsoft.

Can I Check My Map Please?

This might seem like a specific nitpick in a review like this but it’s really a big problem with the game. Why can’t I check my map if I’m aggroed by an enemy? I understand that I can’t warp to a grace in that situation, but why can’t I even look at my map? The game already has a mechanic in place where graces are not warpable while looking at the map, so why not do that? There is nothing more annoying than wanting to check your map so you can head to a certain direction, but not being able to because a random bug is flying nearby. Or an enemy that I rode past on my horse thirty seconds ago that’s on the other side of a wall is still agrroed so I’m mashing the map button while riding ahead.

Outdated Multiplayer Mechanics

I’ve already mentioned how it’s really amazing that this is a fully featured multiplayer game. With co-op, player versus player all while being in this large open world. Unfortunately the multiplayer mechanics and how you go about using them is still essentially the Demon’s Souls system. Where you use a certain item to invade, or a different item to place down a sign that someone else interacts with to bring you into their game. I think these were fine, in 2009 but the clunkiness of these methods has been showing itself for a while. If From wants more people to freely use the multiplayer, (Which Miyazaki has said many times that they do) they need to overhaul the online systems. What they added to invasions is a step in the right direction. As the invader you get placed decently close to your targets, and your compass leads you in the general direction of them. But the multiplayer needs a serious rework from the core. Why require items in the first place? Why even have summon signs, especially in a giant open world game? If these things can be streamlined, then a lot more people will naturally use the multiplayer components.

Crafting

Funnily enough I don’t hate the crafting system. I was expecting it to be much worse than it turned out to be, but unfortunately it’s still not great. This might sound strange but I think one of the best things about it is that they didn’t try to force it onto the player. On a casual playthrough you don’t need to stress about the crafting at all. If you’re doing something more specific, like focusing on multiplayer, or doing some sort of challenge run, then it has more of a place. I think this is actually the right way to go about it. Oftentimes a game will try to make the crafting mandatory by integrating it with core mechanics, in an attempt to justify the system. That usually just makes it end up feeling really annoying and tedious. Elden Rings crafting system still has other pitfalls though. For one, it’s really bloated. There are tons of things that you can craft, but so much of it is redundant. There's like a million arrows and bolts you can craft for example. The problem with this is that something really powerful can easily get lost in the shuffle. Because there are some really helpful things in there, the sleep pots for example. But I would assume very few people will find that organically. Locking every specific crafting item behind key items is another hurdle that really doesn’t feel necessary. Ultimately a crafting system could have a place in a game like this, but it needs a lot more refinement.

Performance Issues

Unfortunately I can’t speak about the performance issues in too great a detail. I’ve been playing the PS5 version and I haven’t had any significant issues. The open world will have some pop in on certain textures when riding around on the horse, but outside of that the game runs fine, especially for a Fromsoftware game. But I can’t dismiss the issues that exist on all the other platforms. The stuttering on the PC version is just not acceptable and the framerate on other consoles is also far below what should be tolerated. And the fact that From still hasn’t done more to optimize the game since release is not a good sign. So even though these problems haven’t really affected my enjoyment of the game, I didn’t want to leave it out of the review. As these issues need to be addressed.

Evaluation

All in all, Elden Ring is just incredible. Most of its flaws are not core or significant issues. Or are things that can easily be fixed with some tweaks or optimizations. On the positive side of things the game has raised the bar. I’ve been mostly comparing Elden Ring to past Souls games in this review, that’s largely because Elden Ring is ultimately an evolution of that franchise. But when I say Elden Ring has raised the bar, I don’t just mean Souls games, but games in general. The open world in this game is far richer, distinct and detailed than anything I’ve seen before. All the while having far more in depth combat, multiplayer mechanics and RPG systems intertwined on top of it. FromSoftware has created a large, immersive, and game play rich open world. Something countless games have tried to achieve for the last 15 years or so, but in my humble opinion, have never really come close to realizing. And while doing so, nothing was sacrificed along the way. The game's consistency in enemy design and level design is somehow better than what they’ve done before. It frankly doesn’t make sense, it breaks some kind of game design law I’m sure. From also rethought a lot of long standing concepts, such as the RPG systems, progression systems and the world building, and the game is better for it. On the other side of the five years of Elden Rings development, a masterpiece was created.

-MajinSweet