The Problem With Elden Ring's Open World

As you said in a previous video, the game doesn't care if you miss questlines, you are not supposed to find everything.

Good game design keeps you coming back, like DS3 did for like 1000 hours over many characters. Then I played ER once and Inwas done, its not fun to replay that massive overworld. Bosses are cool, albiet the late game bosses do too much damage. That said I just like the focused boss rush that DS3 offers far more, great balanced bosses woth gear suiting what level of power you should have when you face them...

Yeah this is what is called bad game design.

My ass went INSANE trying to find the blaidd phantom in that tunnel before astel. i did the whole quest perfectly and it felt amazing that i was uncovering these secrets. but i pushed too far ahead and beat a boss early. now i have to know to go into a particular random tunnel to complete the quest or be locked out of the next area. I searched the whole map but had no idea where ranni wanted me to go. in the end i looked it up and felt like the game had played me.

Thats what is keeping me from playing ER: i'm really not in the mood for open worlds

the souls formula just doesn't work in an open world of this scale. That's why The previous souls game has such a unique identity. Elden Ring doesn't.. it always felt "soulless" to me.

That's why i'm not doing any quests besides the main one

game is definitely not a masterpiece it's such a fragmented pile of bullshit..some parts good other parts horrendous. it's a mixed bag experiment, i can't believe people hold this up as a masterpiece in any regard

This game would have just been better if it was just an interconnected world like the pass games the open world added nothing if anything it took away it's replayability to the ground while adding unnecessary padding.

The problem is actually the core design of the game with damage and health being tied to a certain level. You are never told if you are in the right area but just under leveled or you are in the wrong area so you should not just go farm experience until you can survive the area.

Honestly, all I wanted from this great game was an in-game notepad.

its a great game but there was a huge amount of bandwagon hype. The open world is one of these overhyped things.

there are other few issues with the open world design.
1- Over-levelling, if you explore the open world by clearing dungeons and so on, you will almost always be overlevelled against that areas boss. just imagine clearing every dungeon in limgrave before margrit. obviously you can stop at a certain level and go fight the boss but there is no organic transition between exploration > boss fight, you have to restrict yourself so u don't to "explore too much".

2- Re-used boss's. obviously this is almost inevitable in any game, but it's really bad in elden ring's case. Elden ring has 238 bosses, only EIGHT of them never repeat, for comparison, sekiro (tiny world compared to elden ring) also has 8.

3- The enemies in the open world might as well not exist. You have a horse that can outrun everyone, making exploration and looting the open world a low-risk activity which is very much not similar to the iconic dark souls dungeon-crawling style of exploration where you're always one ambush away from being cornered with only your sword to get you out of there.

4- pacing. the ratio of exploration/bosses just takes a nose dive after the fire giant, it becomes bosses back to back with minimal exploration in between. the last 3 bosses are QUITE LITTERALY back to back to back.

If they had retained the scale of elden ring but with DS1 level design, we would've had something beyond great. Still a great great game obviously

46 hours in, with second map open and feels really bored now because of exhaustion of exploring every inch of the map. The game design is very bad. DS3 is very well paced and by far a better game compared with ER.

I think the most easy solution is to have a journal tab.

The tab would give you information and hints on quests/NPCs but not give you a waypoint.

I will take a week break for work and life and then be completely lost on what I was meant to be doing for the quest.

And the NPCs either have disappeared or only speak their last line of dialogue that doesn't have any hint.

So I will have to look up a guide, which kinda sucks.

I hit ng+3 and there's still lots of quests I never even started.

If only sidequests were the only problem in elden ring...the game is full of issues

The biggest problem with ER's quests isn't a lack of objective markers, it's a lack of organic design. They're artificially obtuse in a way where you either have to get lucky with your routes, or follow a guide to not screw up their progress or miss NPCs. Gothic, Deus Ex, Morrowind, BOTW all had much more organic quests where following dialogue and environmental clues could lead you to a solution without handholding.

I wouldn't have a huge problem with missing questlines if it weren't for the fact of how large Elden Ring is. Like if I miss Bernahl's questline, well I guess I have to spend at least 15 hours to reach that point again (maybe longer or shorter, depends on skill and pace). I felt like it was easier with prior souls games to restart a run and reach the point you want because of how constrained it could be at times. More is not always better, and I think one main reason is because having more stuff usually means there's more stuff you have to wade through before you reach the point you want to be at. When this consists of fighting the same enemies over and over again, it's pretty easy for a game's replayability value to tank. Even with different builds, once you master an enemy's attack patterns then you're pretty much solid and can play on autopilot.

In the last 4 months play on all the Dark Souls games and enjoy them alot. I like Elden Ring but I don't love it because of the open world. I usually explore the game but with this game you have to explore every a little thing to find suff. Which can be tedious. I m following a walkthrough. If I wasn't would miss so much. That's how all Dark Soul game are but would miss so much more. If you all want to play one play through . I think I probably like Dark Soul 3 I like more because the action is more continuous.

Very good video; I'm still not sure if I ever will play Elden Ring because the open world seems dead and repetitive; But the way you described the secret way they expect you to play the game seems to create more life to open world because you get to find the NPCs and do stuff that adds more dialogue to the characters; But still, this is bad for players who know nothing of the secret way to play

The thing that argues against what you're saying is the fact that the grace guides you based on the main plots progression in the direction in which you should continue exploring. Not only is that executed within the game world it self via the "Grace dust trail " but even more so directly via the map of The lands between. Which in and of itself assists with Navigation opposed to the soulsborne series not having any visual tools that give the player a sense of direction

I love fromsoft, but after playing Elden Ring and then going back to ds1 and bloodborne, the open world feels unnecessary. My favorite areas in the game were the areas were you couldn't mount.

The issue , FSW places the npcs in areas to encourage you and drive home there is no real order of exploration. But how can we know that first time thru? A simple fix that preserves exploration is to hint the next location of each npc thru the last bit of dialogue. If the scope of the world is expanded the way ER is, I think the level of obscurity needs to be gauged accordingly to make it the equivalent of how it was in the linear Souls games. The issue is they are using the same level of obscurity, and it’s not balanced

Very well made argument and I have to say I agree. I am not someone that can really infer where to go next unless I just repeatedly get my arse handed to me enough to tell me it's probably not the intended rout. But I also know enemies are made to be progressively more difficult. So how do I separate the "too difficult for someone your level, and not intended" from the "only seems to dificult because you need to get used to new obstacles in this area?"

And being honest, without YOUR run through on the intended path, I would never have known the actual path you are supposed to take. It seems kind of convoluted for a natural progression, because one would think natural progression means to explore all of an area--not explore this part, but not this part, then go across the map and do this, but then go all the way back to do this part.

The game does a poor job of making the intended progression clear--so that the player can then make a conscious decision to ignore it if they wish. I do wish that Elden Ring made it more clear where the game intends you to go. That said, I am loving the just go out and explore playstyle, even if I am getting repeatedly punished for it.

Case in point: I didn't know milicent was a questline at all until I saw this. I thought she was just a random side quest, with a shitty reward because I actually did clear that weird village before doing Caelid and never thought I should go back.

I had this exact problem my first plauthrough. I went to Altus after Liurnia, and then right on the Gelmir, and by the time I beat the game I was like "huh, there wasn't very many NPCS outside the roundtable."

I’ve always expected to replay a souls game, and discover all I’ve missed. It doesn’t seem like the percentage of missable content is too high to be of concern. In fact, it’s to the game’s benefit that even thorough players will miss content.

Anyone who fully completed Diallos’ questline without a guide is a liar.

I’ll be honest, there is only a single questing I was able to actually complete naturally playing the game. And that was Alexander the Jar Warrior. (Not counting any other close characters questlines either). couldn’t have been more thorough. I played for over 200 hours my first play though.

That is way too missable. Vague is cool, but holy cow did it actually feel genuine impossible to complete a lot of this stuff without looking it up. That’s bad design. That being said- this is one of my favorite games of all time.

i dont even do the quests in any souls game unless it gives me something. i just hate the open world because of how empty it is

even the quests that happen within the same area sometimes make no sense in the way they're laid out.

The game wants you to play your play through,

The fact that I did Alexander's questline only looking up where the hell he went in Gelmir is an achievement of great pride to me. I don't know how the hell you're supposed to do questlines on your own. Literally every single questline is bordering on impossibility to complete without looking it up on the wiki. When I looked up the Jarburg questline, I spent half an hour figuring out how I was supposed to get there in the first place, because the map wasn't correct. I must've went back and forth from the grace to the end of jarburg about 10 times before it finally decided to progress at one point. Hyetta's quest was broken for me as well, finding her in future areas without meeting her in the past. The same thing happened to me in dark souls 3, where I'd sometimes not get to continue NPC quests because I wasn't playing online. From has this very intentionally contrived way of making npc quests. Which has its own appeal, but it's mostly a nuisance that I wish they would stop.

As a player who likes to find everything yea I punched them walls in dark souls 3 for the hidden areas. No internet. I felt put off by Elden Ring open worldness. I felt it's gonna take ages. Just felt off putting maybe one day I will play it. But honestly cba.

I'd even go a step further and say that because of the open world the standard opaque FromSoftware storytelling becomes even more impenetrable simply because there is so much important lore that's now so much more easy to miss. You can beat the game and never do anything with Ranni or Rykard's storylines, as an example. And so trying to have a strong idea of the big picture, what's going on, why, and what it all means becomes harder to pin down because of the open world structure.

I had to scroll through the entire Fata Morgana OST to find that track you magnificent fuck.

I went to Limgrave,Weeping, Caelid, Carian Castle, Nokron, Mt Gelmir, Academy, then Altus. I was able to do all NPC questlines besides the Shabri Grape Lady because of a old glitch. This was made much much easier once they added in NPC locations on the map. It's actually incredibly hard to miss side quests because they can actually just progress further themselves depending what you just did. Elden Ring is unique in the sense that every map has a easy or hard route. Just depends on your own awareness and thoroughness. Like Calid is certainly meant for a higher level player, right? But if you look at the game more closely that's not entirely true. If you're extremely unlucky you can get sucked into Caelid right away with the booby trapped portal chest. Which sends you to a mine that you cannot fast travel from. Again this can happen as one of your very first ruins you explored it's right next to the starting location. Then after you can escape the tunnel you're greeted with much less deadly enemies. I bet most people's first time out of the tunnel they immediately beat that General in the Swamp then eventually found Radahn as their second boss. Most people's playthroughs always have Radahn as their second boss or even their boss. Hell right after Stormveil you can just go straight to Altus and you still won't miss anything. This also isn't my first FromSoft game so I regularly revisited areas especially since the updates were adding in new items that weren't there week 1. So I found Millicent very easily.

on my third pkaythriugh and I've grown to hate the open world. so much so i went back to playing the other souls games. I pray the next souls game does not have an open world like this, or one at all for that matter

Thank you. For months I've been whining about how hard Millicent's questline is to follow. It's nice seeing someone else coming to the same conclusion

Man you really are a fanboy. NPC's in this game were all over the place. There was no natural place the game thought you were going to find them unless you calculate things on the behavior of the NPCs. Even then if you do one thing off beat while exploring, they're not at the next expect location you wish to find them because the game is random like that.

This game will only go down in history as great because people made it so, rather than the game itself making it so. This game is not Bloodborne. This game is not Sekiro. This game had tons of issues lots of people are willing to turn a blind eye to. But in the end everyone has their own opinion.

If this game does win game of the year, it won't be because of the game itself. It won't be like Sekiro. It will be outside BS that made it win game of the year. Or people folding under pressure not thinking clearly when evaluating a game. And more than anything this game will be praised and shitted on for years to come simply because unbalance opinions from gamers did not do the game justice in critique or classifications of all that must be observed.

This is the reason people say the quest design is awful, and that there should be a quest log. I think that's jumping the gun a lot. The issue with the quest design is the fact that it is open world, but very much so designed linearly. Dark Souls 1 has a better open world in this regard, I find. Let's say you're very thorough, very dilligent, and you miss nothing. If you go from Limgrave to the Weeping Penninsula to Stormveil, to Caelid, to Liurnia, to Altus, to Mt Gelmir, to the capital, you should find just about everything there is to find. Caelid after Stormveil is a little weird, ik, but you need to do caelid first for Alexander. If you play the game in that order, you won't miss a thing. However, if you put off caelid for later, you'll probably break Alexander's and Sellen's questlines, as well as probably Millicent's.

Honestly, a lot of issues with Elden Ring I feel come from the fact that From hasn't quite realized what an open world is. Multiplayer doesn't make sense, invasions barely make sense, the quest design punishes you for not playing in precisely the right route. It just all feels like they expect you to be playing this game like a series of linear levels you can tackle in any order, as opposed to a cohesive open world you can explore and tackle however you want.

I didn't find millicent on the hill cause she isn't in an obvious visible spot.

Any video with the Dark Reality OST is instantly watchable

I bet you listen to a lot of Sam Harris

false! biggest problem is the 10 million tree spirits and game to easy

I don’t want to be told where to go…but I don’t want to miss anything either.

It’s hard to balance, and I always miss stuff.