“The fact that Elden Ring has 97 on Metacritic is proof that reviewers don’t care about the GUI. My life is a lie ”. So we read in a post that appeared on Twitter on March 3; Ahmed Salama, the former developer of Battlefield 2042 and now Ubisoft’s current UX Director, wrote it. And believe it or not, this comment has crossed my mind at least once for every session of my Hidetaka Miyazaki game.
On February 18, Horizon Forbidden West was released, and only a week later Elden Ring: the transition between the two open worlds could not have been more brutal and dramatic for those who, like myself, have spent (and are spending) dozens of hours on both. the titles.
The first, as written several times in the course of my review, is part of that Ubisoft open world trend that takes the player by the hand and guides him from the beginning to the end of the experience, so that the completion (and therefore the fruition) of any content is only a matter of perseverance.
The second, on the other hand, collects Miyazaki’s inheritance and makes the lack of information his strong point. There are not many other blockbusters with this setting on the market and the only vaguely approachable I think is Destiny, where the plot is literally extracted with pliers from a game world that says just the bare essentials, and which offers not a few secret contents ( which then translate into exotic weapons or catalysts for them).
As proof of this, I add the excellent Lorenzo Domenis and Michele Poggi, aka Lorenzo Divus and Sabaku no Maiku, creators who have become famous for explaining to their audience what the games themselves do not say. That is, the cryptic lore that, without their precious contribution, would be enjoyed (and understood) in a minimal part. A phenomenon that does not take place in the “friendly” open worlds mentioned above.
However, this editorial, written close to 100 hours on Elden Ring, was born out of a doubt: does a game so difficult make sense that most people don’t even get to the second boss? And beware, I am not referring to the difficulty but to the obstinate lack of information.
To find the key with which to open Raya Lucaria’s academy, I had to consult our complete guide to Elden Ring that the heroic Lorenzo has been updating and expanding for weeks, with commendable commitment. This is no small detail, because finding that object or not is vital in the continuation of the game.
The discourse does not change, on the contrary it gets worse, with the secondary missions: at the present state in which I am writing I do not quite understand where to find Nepheli who has just left the Table of Grace; it is not clear to me where to find the Eater to carry out his quest; I’m not sure what step I’m at in the Millicent quest and I don’t remember if I ever started the Fia mission. I know the quest only exists because I see it linked in our guide, but I may also have missed it altogether.
It is a very dated way of understanding video games, which takes me back to the days of the Commodore 64 and the Amiga, when not finishing the games was a common thing because often it was not clear what to do or where to go (and my English, from small, it was definitely lacking). That it was the case to make a minimum concession to modernity must have also understood dear Miyazaki, since in a patch after the launch he added (goodness of him) at least the position of the NPCs on the map.
However, this is very little compared to what could be done (and if you wanted to make the status icons more readable, nobody would mind). And the fact that an app like Shattered Ring has been released on iOS, to take into account the progress of users in the missions, is another alarm bell that a few more concessions to the “quality of life” could be done.
But the opposite is also true, as already written by Lorenzo, who has now become an accredited theorist of Elden Ring: it is thanks to his cryptic being, to the scarce information that the game gives, that an oral and written tradition has been created that , in the last six weeks, has caused the buzz around the bestseller of Bandai Namco to grow dramatically. I myself hadn’t called anyone since Returnal to discuss how to solve that certain mission, and this hasn’t happened with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or with Horizon Forbidden West: it will mean something, right?
“The idea of riding towards the horizon without the help of any indicator, without being faced with a golden and already tiled path to reach a predetermined destination, without the slightest idea of what is hidden in the depths of a castle or beyond a simple elevator, it has returned to the FromSoftware experience a flavor that very few works have been able to pass on over the years “.
So wrote Lorenzo in the article Elden Ring has rekindled the flame of adventure, only to add: the player in Elden Ring is like “an explorer who first of all sets foot in the confines of an ancient lost city, revealing the mysteries of ancient civilizations, […] like an archaeologist who for the first time crosses the threshold of an Egyptian pyramid “.
Elden Ring is a global success that has already sold 12 million copies, it will be said. Not only that: with 384 million hours active in the profiles tracked and up to 952,000 simultaneous players, on Stream it is the fifth video game in the history of the platform, as well as the first one is limited to analyzing only single-player titles.
Ergo the formula is winning and as Lorenzo always remembers in another article entitled Why Elden Ring is having so much success: a game design analysis, “Elden Ring does not end when you turn off the console but continues when you chat with friends , watch videos and follow each other live “.
Yet, despite subscribing to the analyzes of Lorenzo and other illustrious colleagues of mine, despite being almost 100 hours of gameplay and turning on the console as soon as I have two free minutes to continue the adventure, I don’t feel like genuflecting in front of the latest effort of Myazaki. Which is a beautiful game, probably this year’s GOTY (there are still eight months to go), but which could have been done better in some situations.
In the old days of print media, when there was no Internet and when you got stuck in a video game you had to send a letter to the editor and hope to be selected and then read the answer no earlier than the following month, the game would certainly already have it. given up. Today my perseverance of guides, YouTube videos and phone calls to friends is being rewarded by one of the most thrilling play experiences of recent years. But is it acceptable to have to crash so hard to enjoy a video game?
On the other hand: Would Elden Ring still be himself if he had a quest-log? Would he keep his charm intact if we had a marker on the map to show us where to find Millicent? The answer is obviously no. No, he wouldn’t be a Soluls, at least in our sense of this type of game. Yet I feel the need to reconnect with a phrase by Francesco Serino that appeared in one of his interesting analyzes of Elden Ring: “defeating the enemies, not the game”.
Here, I feel like overturning it to describe the feeling I often feel with Elden Ring: that of having to fight a lot against the imaginative enemies of the Interregnum but against the game itself, which seems reluctant to be fully enjoyed. And in the face of an audience and a criticism that has been peeling their hands for weeks by dint of applauding, I am almost doubting that the problem is not the game but myself.
Or not? Is there anyone else out there who thinks like me? If so, let me know below in the comments: I’ll definitely feel less alone.
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