Elden Ring Succeeds by Ignoring 20 Years of Open-World Design

Nintendo's open-world is the only open-world I liked.

I can't get immersed in GTA's open world because I'm just a random going on a killing spree for 15 minutes then shut the game down.

I hated Skyrim, the world is big but empty. There is nothing particular about the landscape that makes me want to "go there". Most of the time, I discovered areas because I was going in straight lines.

Zelda on the other hand, I was like "oh wow, a mountain split in two, I wanna see it". The landscape view makes you want to see what's going on and act as a map ("oh so the gemini mountain is on my right, I must be at XXX"). You're on top of a tower, look at the volcano, and you're like "what is that thing moving on the horizon". Same thing for pretty much all divine beasts.

The other nice thing about BOTW's open world is the map. You don't need it. In The Witcher 3 you have a GPS that tells you where to go. When people tells you to go somewhere in this Zelda, you ask people, you look at the road signs, and you go there. This makes the world much more realistic and less empty because you need to interact with it.

To go to the Goron village, you have many ways of doing it, stockpile a huge amount of food to heal while you burn, or go around and talk to people to find the potion. If you choose to stockpile food, you need to hunt, to cook, and to interact with the world once again.

The world is part of the game play, unlike many other open world games where the world is just the scenery where the game play take place.

Breath of the wild is a game full of secrets. Things are there and they need to be found.

Many other open world games are not. They’re full of missions. Because the ui is so informative, you actually get rapid confirmation that there is nothing.

A lot of missions start at a hub and make you go to a place and then come back. That’s how that portion of the world gets used. Botw doesn’t do this much. Most content that you find is immediately relevant there because that place is interesting in itself.

Lastly, you don’t have a dearth of dialogue to get through things. Dialogue is fine and all but side quests are conceptually very stupid and the writing is inevitably tiresome. It breaks immersion when someone needs you to collect maguffins again.

I can appreciate the detailed environments and characters, the deep lore, RPG aspects, and probably the best combat mechanics and hitbox detection in the industry.

What turns me off is that the entire gameplay loop consists of boss rushes and fighting lower level enemies, just so you can gather loot, level up and fight more enemies and more difficult bosses. It all feels very one dimensional, and before ER introduced the open world aspect, very linear.

I suppose most games can be boiled down to their essence like this and sound boring, but in a game like Fallout 4, BoTW or Skyrim there's much more to do than just combat, crafting, leveling up and exploring. There's a quest system, cooking, companions, horses (the one in ER seems just for traversal?), challenges, complex NPC interactions, branching storylines, etc. They offer a much richer experience than any Soulsborne title I've played or seen.

My impression before ER is that all Soulsborne titles are essentially minor improvements on the same formula, with a lore and environment swap. ER introduces the open world aspect, but ultimately keeps the one dimensional gameplay loop.

I'd love to be proven wrong, and get the appeal of these games, so please correct anything I'm mistaken about above. I don't even have a problem with the difficulty curve if the game would give me reasons to keep playing and git gud. It's just that it doesn't, so the high difficulty is frustrating enough to stop playing.