The first game in the series that made me question if there was a carbon monoxide leak somewhere in my house
Whenever people talk about how great Dark Souls’ level design is, they always seem to bring up the fact that the world is “interconnected”. Which is true. The world is interconnected. And for a while I kind of disliked that this was a point that people had to make because it seemed to me that they were simply amazed by the craft of it; that the only reason it was worth bringing up was because it’s crazy to imagine that the developers of the game, FromSoftware, and the GENIUS of Hidetaka Miyazaki could design and build such a convoluted and complex world. And that’s true too. It is a remarkable work of craftsmanship and it’s pretty insane imagining how much work and development time it took to make everything make sense and fit together in 3D space in an interesting and meaningful way – that a lot of studios that aim to make an open world game (or just any game where the player gets to kind of just run around) should learn from. Not because it’s hard to develop, or because it’s just impressive that the levels are connected like that. But because it’s really fun. See, I was kind of projecting when I said people only brought up Dark Souls’ interconnectedness because it was just kind of cool that it was like that. I brought it up because I thought that for a while. I knew there was more to the story, but it was a story I could never articulate. And honestly, I’m not sure if I can even now (but I’m going to try). I think it’s pretty boring to pretend you have all the answers to something, especially something as complex as a video game. It’s easy to simply say that something “feels good” or whatever, but it’s a lot more fun to admit that I don’t know what the fuck is going on, ever. All I know is that I played this game called Elden Ring a couple of months ago. It’s pretty fun, but the developers completely ripped off Dark Souls – which I’d be fine with if they understood what made that game so engaging in the first place. It’s like they cherry-picked elements of the series that they thought fans liked the most (or at least elements that fans yelled about the most for the better part of a decade), without realizing that those elements were really fragments of a greater will that was more than the sum of their parts.
Remember that one part in Elden Ring when you break through the illusory wall in Liurnia of the Lakes and run into the giant Iji who’s just hanging out on a rock? I love how he gives you this stark warning not to venture further to Caria Manor because there’s this super dangerous magical trap that will kill you. He even gives you this ‘back in my day’ speech where he tells you about the Raya Lucarian army that tried to invade and just killed themselves under the walls of the manor until there was a pile of piss and blood and shit and cum everywhere (oh shit! Prepare to Die!). Sadly, it turns out that this genocidal level threat is the most flaccid, inaccurate barrage of souls arrows this side of… the giant that tries to kill you with arrows at the beginning of Dark Souls 3. It’s like if they gave the lost hero a machine gun. And honestly, I’m not even mad (because that would be weird – imagine getting mad at a video game in 2022. Have you seen the shit that people get mad at on Twitter? Have you seen the shit that people say on Twitter? Gamers are so weird). It’s a little funny, but it’s mostly just boring to me. Like, what is the point of all of this? It’s like the game would rather let you roleplay evading a deadly trap rather than just give you a deadly trap. Meanwhile, in Demon Souls, the statue on the bridge in the Tower of Latria will kill you instantly! There is no warning. There is no guy that tries to make you piss your pants before you cross the bridge. You walk on the bridge. And then you die. Period. Call me a masochist, but this shit is fucking hilarious. It’s already funny by default because of the way your character just immediately falls over (shout out to 2009 animation) and how your health bar is instantly all orange. It’s also funny because it feels like Demon’s Souls just does not care about you. You either notice the – honestly quite concerning amount of corpses littering the bridge, or you don’t.
I don’t bring up this borderline juvenile comparison because I’m some sort of hardcore gamer that not only wants for myself to have a completely shitty time playing video games, but also for everyone else to have a shitty time – but because this death evokes an emotion. Fear. The sense that this world is indifferent to your existence. The sense that the world wasn’t built for you. When you die, when you fall off a plank and drift into the abyss or get sucked off by some tentacle jail doctor, it doesn’t feel like the game or the world is out to get you. It’s simply you that’s too weak to exist in the world. Demon’s Souls didn’t feel like a place built by designers, or optimized for player engagement, it just was. For me, that trap on the bridge at the bottom of the Tower of Latria didn’t feel like it was put there for any game design purpose I could think of, it just was. Getting past this trap on the bridge is one of the most insane things I’ve ever seen in a video game. Because of the way the arrow barrages are fired, you have to time your rolls with what feels like near frame-perfect accuracy so that you’re not hit by one barrage while your character is recovering from another. Mess up once and you’re instantly a corpse. The game does not care. You have to run all the way back and try again. Sometimes you’ll die on the first barrage. Other times you’ll be so fucking close but the idea of being that close to the end is terrifying so you accidentally end up killing yourself at the last second (I can attest to this, I am the choke artist). It is an emotional roller coaster. But that’s the point. To me, this trap feels like a trap that is genuinely supposed to end people’s lives. So when you do make it across, it feels… Well, I was going to say ‘amazing’ or ‘exciting’, (y’know, you feel a sense of pride and accomplishment or whatever) but it’s not that. It feels weird. It’s as if you’re taking one more step into the darkness. One more step on your journey into the unknown. The fear is still there, but there’s something else there too. Like you got just one win against this incredibly cruel and fucked up world. You weren’t supposed to make it across, but you did it anyway.
No seriously – you weren’t supposed to roll across the bridge 18 million times like that. What you can do instead of bashing your head against a wall for hours is just to turn around and explore the rest of the jail. You fumble around in the dark, climbing up staircases, getting keys, finding holes in the walls, fending off the weird tentacle doctors that want to give you top, there’s a guy that’s just screaming all throughout the night for no reason, you even meet this old woman that clearly is or used to be royalty, who tells you secrets and sells you some useful items. What doesn’t feel great is that the further you venture out, the further away you get from the lodestone (which are basically the bonfires of Demon’s Souls). It is palmsweatingly, hilariously terrifying fighting even the most basic enemies knowing that if you die, you have to make it all the way back through this hellscape to where you were before. But eventually, you drop down a ledge and all of a sudden you’re behind the statue. There’s a switch that turns it off. Now, I’m the last person on planet Earth you need to remind of the fantastic piece of game design FromSoftware pioneered called “this door cannot be opened from this side”. It is the bread and butter of at least 99% of all levels in all Souls games. Still though, call it Demon’s Souls favoritism, but it’s one thing to have a door that straight up does not let you open it until you run halfway around the map, it’s another to have a deathtrap that doubles as a shortcut that you can only use safely once you turn it off from behind – a shortcut that you can use right away if you’re insane enough. It feels organic. It’s clear why this path can only be accessed from one side. Though, why would this door stop me? Dude, just stick your hand through the gate. There’s also environmental storytelling at play here too. It feels rich. It feels full. Beyond realism – which I don’t really care about that much if I’m being real, and pretentious emotional journeys, and narrative design (which I care about deeply), it’s just fun. As a video game. You get to make a decision about what you want to do. Both options offer unique and interesting play experiences. They both let the player tell their own story, go on their own adventure. And that’s the thing with me. What is the point of the trap in Caria Manor?
Like the ruined halls of forgotten cities and the castles festooned with overgrowth in the worlds of the Souls series, its traps were once there for a reason. A reason lost to time.
This horizontal slice is a perfect encapsulation of what makes these games so enthralling to me. But I think it’s time I address one of the multiple elephants in the room surrounding the conversation around Dark Souls. These games are hard. Really hard. And the funny thing is, they’re getting harder. My tiny, underdeveloped 13-year-old mind could have never imagined, after beating Allant with my palms sweating and my heart beating hard and myself on the verge of throwing up, that I would have to face a guy like Orphan of Kos years later. Take any self-proclaimed “hardcore” (cringe) Souls game player in 2013 and put them up against that guy. I’m willing to bet they would have put that controller down and gotten a job like the rest of us within an hour of playing Bloodborne. The orphan, coming out of his mothers womb glistening and fully in adult form, wielding his own PLACENTA as a weapon, was not only fast – he was frenetic. Emphasis on frenetic. He would take chunks from his placenta, throw them at you and they would explode like bombs – then immediately use it as a whip to hit you as you’re coming out of a dash. I remember spending seven hours trying to beat him the first time I played The Old Hunters expansion. Seven hours! Of my life! (Seven hours of my life well spent). Now tell any psychopath dwelling in the shadows of his freshmen college dorm in 2017 like me, jumping for joy after beating the Orphan of Kos like they just got an internship at Goldman Sachs, that they would have to face the likes of Sister Friede, Slave Knight Gael, Sword Saint Isshin, Starscourge Radahn, and Malenia (who is the Blade of Miquella by the way!!!!). Not only would I have gone outside and socialized like a normal human being, I would have thrown my Playstation out of the window. Every time I played these games and fought these bosses, and stood against their cosmically unknowable moveset with an A.I. that honestly felt like it had finally crossed the singularity, I thought: wow, this is it, I will never finish this game, this is finally too hard. But then I did.
This isn’t some sick speech about how, “video games should be hard because it instills a sense of pride and accomplishment in the player”. I didn’t feel a sense of pride and accomplishment when Malenia was doing eighteen waterfowl dances on my rotting corpse. That’s not the point. FromSoftware is really good at playing this trick on the player where upon initially fighting some insanely powerful enemy, they feel like they’ll never be able to beat them. And that’s the point. You’re fighting corrupted legendary heroes and gods that fell to earth, that sense of despair is natural. Just like that sense of despair I felt doing my twelfth consecutive roll on the impassable bridge. But then you start to see things. Patterns emerge. Gaps appear in wild attacks that you never noticed before – and with your third eye just barely cracked open you manage to smack an eons old deity in the face. Some parts of the Souls series have always been about painting the picture of a world indifferent to your existence. Then it plays with those feelings by not necessarily giving the player power but by showing them the power that was probably always there (just with an RPG point system thrown in the mix too). This theme was definitely at least part of the zeitgeist that was Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls from 2009 all the way until… whenever these games started to become insanely popular. People were mad, sure, but I also think a lot of people were just really enamored by that fresh feeling. And it wasn’t just in fights against bosses or journeys through the games’ hellish environments. It was also in its non-diegetic mechanics. When my friends and I played Demon’s Souls in 2013 (fake fan), we were working ourselves into fevers trying to figure out how the upgrade system worked, what hidden properties stats had, or what the hell world tendency did or how it worked. Why on Earth can you not get the Dragon Bone Smasher if you die to Dragon God even once? It all felt so cruel. (“Dragon God”. What an amazing name. So dumb and so confident). The series’ difficulty is there for a reason, and one of the things that I – and honestly most people that have spent even five minutes on the internet – can’t help but ask is, should Souls games have an easy mode?
It’s easy to say no. After all, its themes require the game to be difficult. However, like any work of art, I believe that it’s up to the person consuming it to make of it what they will. Especially if it’s a video game. Yes, the author is dead. The game developer is dead, and so is FromSoftware and Hidetaka Miyazaki. If you want to make it so that Maliketh has three HP and stops jumping around like a jackrabbit all the time, I fully support that, and the game should support that too. Doubly-especially if you’re disabled in any way. I think it’s incredibly cruel and idiotic that some people desire these features because of this reason and other people in this dogshit community have the gall to say “play another game then”, “stop asking people to PANDER to you”, or heaven forbid – the phrase that makes my skin crawl in this context, “git gud”. It makes me cringe to think that some people bring up what I just brought up as justification to prevent accessibility features from being in a video game instead of as a way to celebrate the thoughtfulness of its developers. It makes me scratch my head so vigorously I start bleeding when people advocate for this knowing full well that it doesn’t even remotely, tangentially affect their play experience or their life in any way. When you think about their insane position from where I’m standing, it’s not hard to see why a lot of people do the things they do in the world. However, we live in a society. Because of the forces of capitalism, even if FromSoftware sees things the way I see them, if they believe that by some unknowable metric people will have a less enjoyable time playing their games if there was an easy mode, that it would affect the play experience in too negative a way, they might be lead to believe that those who did play in this way might negatively affect review scores and sales. Especially journalists and game reviewers. Imagine if a prolific YouTube content creator did this. Imagine if fucking Angry Joe decided that he wanted to play Sekiro on easy mode, had a terrible time, then told his millions of viewers the game was shit. I’m not going to pretend that FromSoftware would be even remotely affected by a YouTuber’s review of their game, but there are studies that suggest aggregate reviews from critics do at least somewhat influence a game’s sales. A dark part of me can’t see FromSoftware spending resources adding accessibility features like that. Although I wish they would. Some of my favorite developers, like Arkane Studios, make games with a ton of them (like Deathloop, and it’s better for it).
On a cultural level it feels like a not small number of people are obsessed with the difficulty of the series without understanding the reason why it’s there in the first place. And sometimes, it feels like even the developers are obsessed with it. Elden Ring was the first game in the series that made me think there was a carbon monoxide leak somewhere in my house. How could I not be in a haze after waiting for what felt like six hours for Morgott to finally unleash his charged up overhead swing. How could I not have shortness of breath after watching Malenia instantly delete my health bar, which by the way, covered half my screen, with one effortless thrust. Morgott is a fun example for me personally because of how insane some of his moves are. On a basic level, you have his 1 million hit combo where you’ll roll through his first swing, immediately get hit by the second because it will hit you as soon as you lose your i-frames, then as you try to roll away he’ll follow you with another ridiculous flurry of attacks. That’s not even that bad. What’s actually crazy is that delayed attack of his. This move has been in the series for a while. I first noticed it in Dark Souls 3 with Pontiff Sulyvahn and it disquieted me. He delayed his attack so that I would dodge when I thought he was going to swing; then, because of my mistimed roll… he hit me.
This has layers to it. There is something really wrong here. Although it wasn’t something that I noticed at the time. Maybe I’m reading into this way, way too much, but to me, from a narrative standpoint, the roll is sort of a desperation move. What kind of normal human being would do a fucking front flip just to dodge a person’s sword swing? Well, that’s the thing, you’re not fighting people. You’re fighting monsters and demigods that turn walls into Bisquick. You’re not operating under normal circumstances, you’re Berserk-man and if you get hit once by these ground-shaking blows from these reality bending enemies, all the bones in your body will be turned to dust. The mechanics support this. Unless you spec your character a certain way, try to block an attack from these beings and your stamina will disappear instantly, along with whatever health your shield couldn’t save. That was the picture that was painted in my mind when I first played Demon’s Souls. I mean, the first boss of the entirety of the Souls series is like this. Try blocking against Vanguard. On some starting classes, he will wipe out the entirety of your stamina bar and your health bar. The game gives you a tool that’s either explicitly or implicitly implied that you can use this to survive, then on the first boss of the game, presents you with a situation where it straight up provides no benefit whatsoever. Why? It’s so mean! (It’s also fucking hilarious). On not a small amount of occasions, you simply have to roll out of the way – or die. These blows are just too powerful for your tiny Tarnished body to withstand. However, it seems to me that in some ways your desperation move is also a wild card against the gods. It’s difficult, and often terrifying at first, but you can dodge almost every ability, spell, and space-time continuum ending assault that these deities possess. But you have to take the plunge and try it. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there is definitely something to be said about how games in general sometimes (although, I guess it’s actions games specifically in this case) have the ability to show you power that was always there, that you have to dig deep to find, rather than just have you get stronger by arbitrarily putting points into a skill tree or something – I’m not hating on skill trees, I LOVE skill trees, I love leveling up and putting points into stuff and unlocking stuff on a psychoactive level. But it is interesting how you intrinsically gain skill; nothing changes in the game, the only thing that changes is you. Everyone that plays these games for the first time goes through this arc. And it’s honestly amazing. But that’s not why I’m bringing it up. I know this is a reach…(and I swear I’m not trying to sound smart, I really don’t care about that, I just want to air my shit out ya feel me?) but to me, a part of the reason why this feels so good – aside from what I just talked about – is that it feels like you’re cheating. These gigantoid blows are meant for the gods. It’s hard, but you’re standing toe to toe with these beings in a way that’s incomprehensible to them. And they’re not equipped to deal with that. They fight the way they’ve always fought: enormous and proud and beautiful – and then they die. I know it sounds like a reach but it’s not. This is the fiction that I’ve always believed. To me, it was and is a part of the secret sauce of this whole gameplay loop that was so engaging to me.
Obviously, people got really good at rolling. I mean, there are probably people on twitch.tv right now doing no hit runs on Elden Ring. No. Hits. That’s just what happens when a game is played, especially when a specific “strategy” is played in a game, long enough. It becomes normal. Take any eSports game like a MOBA or a fighting game (I know how annoyed some people get when you say “fighting game” and “eSports” in the same sentence but it’s just an example!). Countless tech exists that used to be so high level only the best players could perform them that now is a requirement if you want to play competitively at all. For the League of Legends players just see Lee-Sin’s ward hop. I know. I thought the same thing. So, FromSoftware – because they probably couldn’t conceive of players being able to play through their entire game without getting hit in 2011 – thought: wow, they’re getting really good at this, we should give enemies abilities that make it way harder for them to roll properly. It makes sense; it’s the logical next step for a studio that wants their experiences to be crushingly difficult. Isn’t it kind of ridiculous that a player can just mash ‘Roll’ to get through all of the encounters, anyway? So, they made it so that Morgott waits in an attack stance for periods of up to five seconds before he goes for a swing. It’s not even that he’s in a drawing stance like a cool samurai – he is blatantly in full blown swing mode trying to fake you out. And that’s the part that gets me. He knows. He knows you want to roll and he’s exploiting that. Obviously, he doesn’t know anything, he’s not real. But it’s the fact that my mind was even led there that’s funny to me. It’s like there’s a layer of fiction that was completely stripped away by FromSoftware when they added mechanics like this. How does he know? “How does he know what?”, you ask. How does he know that I like to roll? Are there other people running around rolling like me? Was he warned? Was there a company wide email marked ‘Urgent’ that told the Dark Souls Boss Association to watch out for a little guy rolling everywhere? What is happening? This can’t be a normal thing that these people do. I mean, if he was fighting anyone else like this he’d get stabbed in the stomach instantly. He’s only doing this because we’re not in the Lands Between, we’re in a video game where the primary way I avoid attacks is by using i-frames in a roll. He’s waiting for my i-frames to run out like we’re in PvP. Thus, the fabric of reality breaks. When bosses read your inputs after a bread and butter four hit combo because they know they’re vulnerable and hit you with a secret fifth option when you go in for a hit, my suspension of disbelief hasn’t been broken, it has turned to dust. Malenia is no longer The Blade of Miquella, she is FromSoftware’s computer puppet woman. She is in constant communication with the designers to specifically fuck me over. And honestly, I’m not even mad. Imagine getting mad at a video game in 2022. It’s a little funny, but it’s mostly just boring to me. Like, what is the point of all this?
This is where the game’s encounter design crossed the line into something that exists just to be hard. If I wanted something hard… wow there’s a lot of places I could take this sentence but let’s just say that if I wanted something hard I’d just play The Impossible Game. There’s a lot more I could complain about from this perspective. Like how every fight that isn’t copy pasted from a dungeon battle is the same thematically. They’re all The Most Important Battle. They’re all big moments and they all have second phases where they become stronger and the music is really exciting and I’m just like why? Give me some sad piano music. Give me a story. Paint an emotion on the canvas of your game besides hype. Because: is it really a Souls game if you’re not fighting some old guy in the rain while sad piano music plays? (download the bloodborne psx demake and support the developers at patreon.com/lwmedia).
At some point, probably after Malenia grabbed me by the neck for the fifteenth time and added me to her collection of Tarnished kabobs, my brain broke and I did something I’ve never done on a first playthrough in the series. I summoned. And I didn’t care. I summoned Jesus of Nazareth and Malenia’s tiny clone and we cheesed the shit out of her in a corner until she died. I summoned for the Fire Giant. I summoned for Sir Gideon Ofnir (The All-Knowing!!!!). I summoned for Godfrey and Horah Loux. I summoned for Radagon of the Golden Order. I summoned for Elden Beast. And I had good fun doing it. Summoning these people from the looney bin was hilarious. It was genuinely interesting watching this story unfold, especially in the places where I took my character during my first playthrough. Multiplayer was fun too, although I’ve always been terrible at it if I’m not cheesing. And exploring the world was probably the most fun of all. This is what I’m thinking when I say that these games could have an easy mode. If this is what hard means, I don’t want it. There’s so much more to the Souls series that to reduce them to being hard (Prepare to Die!) is a little sad. (I’m not saying you’re sad. I’m saying it makes me sad). I read this book a couple of years ago called You Died, by Keza MacDonald and Jason Killingsworth – two games journalists. It’s a fantastic read if you haven’t played these titles before and want a generally holistic understanding of what fans love about them so much; or if you are a fan and want some fresh new perspectives from others.
To me, the best open world games offer an exploration experience that not only provides freedom, but allows you to tell a story. To take you to places and situations in its world that make you feel like you’re on an adventure. I have never played a game – that offers any level of freedom – do this as fantastically as Elden Ring. I make that distinction because it’s one thing for a linear, story driven AAA experience like Uncharted 4 to lead the player into a labyrinthine set piece or a stunning underground city in the last act of it’s narrative, it’s another to let the player stumble upon it organically. I’m not going to lie. I got to Caria Manor pretty late in the game. I thought I was going to end up fighting Lunar Princess Ranni so I wanted to hold off until I was ready. When I was, I was pleasantly surprised to just… be able to have a conversation with her. (As much of a conversation as you can have in these games). Because at this point I had wordlessly killed so many people in these stupid fucking Lands Between that I really wanted to talk to one of these demigods and learn about something. Anything. Just give me a crumb of story! (I got more than a crumb). Her quest to help her ascend to godhood is pretty interesting (and surprisingly character driven too). It was easily one of my favorite parts of Elden Ring, which is an opinion I know for a fact I do not share alone. Journeying to the Siofra River Well with Blaidd to find the lost treasure of Nokron becomes a dead end, so you talk to Sellen, who tells you that Ranni’s fate is forever at a standstill because the stars in the sky no longer turn; Blaidd tells you that this guy named General Radahn off to the southeast literally seized the stars and stopped them from moving permanently. At this point I was hooked because, like Caria Manor, I was holding off on fighting Radahn until I was ready. Look, I heard about the crimes this man perpetrated on Twitter, okay? I heard about the nerfs, then the subsequent un-nerfs. I was afraid. To this day, I’m still scarred from the wild blows the Orphan unleashed on me with no regard for human life. But I thought it was cool because now I had a reason to go to Redmane Castle other than, “I need to in order to beat the game”. (You don’t). Mind you, I had already been there on a previous playthrough, hours before you’re supposed to be there, and had to contend with the myriad freaks of nature that lurk it’s halls. So, I was genuinely shocked to discover that there wasn’t a soul to be found. Only solemn chanting. The Festival of War is this whole event in honor of Radahn, who lost his mind fighting Malenia on the beaches of Caelid. He is still out there – feasting upon corpses, friend and foe alike, howling at the sky. This legendary hero, who harnessed the power of gravity, in his lunacy, is still holding at bay the force of the galaxy. How fucking badass is that? To wit: I have a soft spot for legendary heroes gone mad – Artorias (of the abyss, how insane of a title IS that) is just sick, Ludwig is pretty high up there too; if you haven’t noticed, they are kind of a staple of the series now. Starscourge Radahn, what with all you learn about him through item descriptions and dialogue, is probably the most interesting of them all. He has a really unique silhouette too (usually the legendary hero trope is reserved for the skinny cool guy, but honestly, the best cool guy to me is the guy that’s absolutely yoked out of his mind). He’s huge. And he’s on a tiny horse. He uses anti-gravity to make himself lighter so his horse can carry him because he loves it so much. It’s amazing. It’s all the characterization you need in a game like this. I think it’s supposed to be a little funny watching him go beast mode on that tiny creature but if I’m being real – it actually looks really cool. (that sounds horrific after I’ve read it back in my head). Easily one of the best bosses in, not just Elden Ring, but the Souls series. When you defeat him, the stars turn once again in probably the most fantastic cutscene I’ve ever seen in these games, and one of them blows a hole in the Earth! This wild adventure doesn’t stop here. It makes a hole in Limgrave that you can go inside of that takes you to the lost city of Nokron. Fighting the mimic tear was genuinely fun and I got to see how ridiculous my build was after dying to it ten times. And exploring the Eternal City itself was great. There are so many moments like this in Elden Ring. One of my favorites is how you come to obtain the Frenzied Flame. It’s insane. You find this random well in the ruins of the capital and it takes you through a labyrinth of a sewer, you take a lift down what feels like a mile to the bottom, then you fight a demon. I thought this whole segment existed as a level for this ‘area boss’, but he was so hard I couldn’t beat him. At this point in the game I had devised a build that allowed me to cheese almost any enemy in the game: I could infect enemies with scarlet rot (which does so much damage it feels like a hate crime), I could bleed them for a percentage of their health (perfect for enemies with large health pools, which is every boss in the game after Leyndell), or I could straight up burn them (throw a fireball at an erdtree avatar and see what happens). This thing was immune to everything! I had to just… be good at the game, which isn’t my strong suit. He was so hard that when I beat him I had entered a trance; much like the trance that I enter occasionally when I write these essays. The music was oddly calming, and I just knew when he was going to swing that big polearm of his that could reach halfway across the room in an instant. I learned how to dodge his bizarrely arcing bloodflame toss with ease. This boss was the perfect counter against me, but I was winning hard. It disquieted me. Only now as I’m writing this do I wonder if I should have tried just a little bit harder to beat Malenia without summoning. Was she really that unfair? Could I have learned to avoid her waterfowl dance, that seemed impossible to deal with, the same way I learned to avoid this thing’s mile-long polearm swipe, that also seemed impossible to deal with? Did I rob myself of that sweet juice that makes these games so great? No, absolutely not. That fight was fucking bullshit (I know I could have beaten it alone, the question is, should I have? Whether it took ten days or ten years, I would have beaten her solo. But do I really want to spend ten years of my life playing these stupid fucking video games?). Anyway, when you kill it, there’s a hidden wall behind the altar! You’ve already spent hours going deeper and deeper under the capital and just when you think you’ve hit the bottom it goes further down! And there are dead bodies everywhere, people who look like they died very unnatural deaths. They are victims of the Frenzied Flame. I don’t think at this point when I played the first time that I had every encountered these enemies before. It felt like I was still uncovering critical parts of the story and it’s world literally a hundred hours into Elden Ring. This isn’t something worth mentioning because it’s “lot’s of content” or “hundreds of hours of gameplay” or some insane metric that some people like to valuate video games by. I don’t care about that. I don’t care if Elden Ring is twenty hours or two hundred hours. This moment just genuinely gave texture to the narrative and it’s setting in a way that was really compelling. And the music… To me it feels like every song in this game is this grand orchestral piece that’s supposed to make you really excited and feel like this is The Most Important Battle and then there’s this sad song that’s just a violin (or whatever it is). And you feel that. Like me, you might not know at first that you’re in a mass grave made up of a people that have been subjugated and locked in a tomb by the Golden Order, but you feel that. You keep going down until you reach a giant catacomb. You take off all of your clothes. (which is insane. I saw a message that suggested I take off all my clothes before a giant flaming door and genuinely had the thought that this game wanted me to fight a boss naked for some insane reason that I was about to be acquainted with and laughed for five minutes straight). You commune with the Frenzied Flame – and it’s another cool moment in Elden Ring’s list of cool moments. But it’s not over yet! Because you can find another hidden wall in a secluding corner of room, and it gives way to a massive subterranean cavern with what looks like the roots of the Erdtree, or the rotten remains of another tree that used to grow in the Lands Between. This keeps going too. You find Godwyn’s horrific fishman corpse and fight a electric dragon in a dreamworld that used to be his pet. Also, did I mention that demon that you fight earlier is actually one of the demigods that possesses a shard of the Elden Ring? But that wasn’t actually Mohg that was his clone or something and if you want to actually claim his great rune you have to soak a rag in the blood of a maiden that you can only get to by teleporting through a wormhole which gets you summoned to an underground temple, where he emerges from the blood of Miquella of the Haligtree’s corpse (or maybe he’s not a corpse?) because apparently Mohg’s obsessed with him and wants him to become the next empyrean or something with him as the Elden Lord. I mean, what is even happening? His fight is insane too, he grows wings and he starts stabbing this thing called the Formless Mother over and over again for some reason. It just doesn’t stop!
This is Elden Ring’s bread and butter. It presents you with these insane adventures to go on. It presents you with myriad secrets to uncover in the most inscrutable ways. And despite the fact that when you go on Steam’s achievements list to see how many other people also found this obscenely well hidden place or plotline you found and discover that almost everyone else found this too and that you’re not special, it still feels like your own personal story – probably because the game allows you to stumble upon these things completely organically (or as organically as game design allows). When I think about it, Ranni’s ending felt like a sidequest. And that’s a good thing. All Elden Ring tells you to do is to become Elden Lord; how you do this is up to you. However, giving the player the choice isn’t what makes this aspect of the game so great – it’s the fact that a lot of the time, those choices aren’t even presented to you. To find the Lunar Princess, you have to venture to a secluded area of the map, that doesn’t look that promising, and climb up a random tower. That’s not even that bad. To find the Subterranean Shunning Grounds, the catacombs, and the massive gaping pit under the capital – as well as progress with the frenzied flame storyline, you have to jump down a well. And it’s not one of those big wells – there’s a lot of big things in Elden Ring; this is a regular thing. A tiny, Mom and Pop, watering hole to feed the pigs, well. (wait, what do even use a well for? lol). FromSoftware has always had huge bazonkers when it came to crafting a world you wouldn’t see considerable pieces of, but this is just crazy. There is too much content that results from jumping down this well. They either respect players enough to find these places on their own, or they’re genuinely okay with having only a small fraction of them see them. Considering at the time of completion, after burning through all that divides and distinguishes, only 4% of players on Steam achieved this ending, it might be the latter. However, there’s a couple of sort of funny caveats to this: now that number is up to 12.7% at the time of writing this, and I thought I played the game late as hell. I played Elden Ring in May! Statistically speaking, I was in the first fourth of players to complete the game in this way (so it makes me feel a little bit better for playing it so late, clearly I wasn’t (don’t believe everything you see on the internet (that’s where all the losers are))). Then again, 32.4% of players beat Clone Mohg, which means a third of players made it to the bottom of the sewers, which means they found that random well. Then again, only 34.0% of players beat Malenia, so I’m not sure why I’m even looking at Steam Global Gameplay Stats as any indication of anything. What I’m trying to say is that FromSoftware has displayed a not so surprising level of elegance crafting the game’s world. I mean, there are multiple ways to get to Altus Plateau, imagine if there were multiple ways to get to Anor Londo! I didn’t even realize this until my second playthrough where I – absolutely determined to explore every part of Liurnia until my brain melted – stumbled across this dungeon nestled in a dark corner of the map that, surprise, is actually a whole segment of the game where you get to scale a cliffside on a face of the Altus Plateau and emerge right next to the capital city. I love this part. You slowly climb higher and higher, with an inkling of an idea where you’re probably going, until that inkling becomes a screaming conclusion that yes, you’re actually going to make it to the top this way. You don’t even need the dectus medallion. It’s an alternate route. However, it’s not an alternate route in the sense that you get to “skip content”; there’s no cause for celebration in the fact that you don’t have to go to Dragonbarrow to grab the other half of the dectus medallion, getting analed by flying vampires in an abandoned fort, when climbing the ruin strewn precipice of the capital is just as challenging – there are just as many vampires on the cliffside, and some of them in a kind of frightening twist of evolution can cast magic now. (And that’s forgetting the giant salamander that I had to run around in circles around a fucking pillar for twenty minutes chucking throwing knives at it to kill). By the way, this isn’t a complaint, this was genuinely hilarious. Since we’re playing a video game, I’d much rather have an alternate path to a location provide some semblance of gameplay instead of it being a shortcut. Parts of Elden Ring’s map becomes textured in this way. It’s a juicy choice, but having to discover this path for yourself is what makes it a genuinely fun exploration experience. You get to uncover the world and find new secrets. When those secrets are uncovered it feels like you’re the only one that found them. That’s what really makes this genre fun for me. It’s your story. And I’m not alone in thinking this way. Contrary to triple A design philosophy, people don’t actually enjoy being told what to do in an open world. When a game relies on quest markers and objectives to guide the player to its content, what’s the point of it’s openness?
I’ve never seen a game so fast and loose with it’s content as Elden Ring is; hour 100 will throw a new giant underground lake in your face. And that’s just great. However, I’d be committing perjury if I didn’t mention that half the time I played Elden Ring felt like I was having a lobotomy done to me in real time. (I was simultaneously having an existential crisis whilst feeling the sensation that my brain was being deactivated by nerve agent). I probably wouldn’t have noticed if, like many members of young straight male video game likers in 2022, I wasn’t obsessed with big, long, Berserk-reference swords. I’m talking colossal swords. My favorite big sword in the series is probably the Dragon Bone Smasher from Demon’s Souls. Although, I also really like the Crypt Blacksword from Dark Souls 2. Mainly because it looks like a popsicle stick, but also because the designers were on one when they were making the game and made it so that you could infuse this sword with dark damage, when it already had innate dark damage and dark damage scaling on it, and then buff it with a dark magic spell. I continued the tradition in Elden Ring with the Grafted Blade Greatsword, which is a special weapon. The thing with special weapons is that they use a different upgrade material than standard ones. You only need ten somber smithing stones to fully upgrade them. Which is great because I like to turn my brain off during the first playthrough. I only want to worry about five things over my character: strength, vigor, endurance, weapon upgrades, and fashion. This was a mistake. 70 hours into the game genuinely broke me. You can only press R1 so many times before you start hearing that stupid clanging noise in your dreams. I mean, holy shit, why do these swords sound like that? It’s unironically worse than the ‘clang’ from Berserk (2017). You really start to notice the inelegance of it all; why does my character swing it around like a bat. Why do they walk around with it like they just walked out of Home Depot with wood for their deck? Be more like Guts, or the Dark Knight job class from Final Fantasy XIV: drag that thing around a little. Just try to look a little cool. And dear god, all the jumping attacks, rolling attacks, and light attacks, over and over again. I could not take it any more. It wasn’t just the sword though. More importantly, I started to notice how empty the world was.
See, when you play a build like I did, there isn’t really anything for you to do out there in the Lands Between once you have all of your upgrade materials (which happens pretty early on all things considered). Look at the world with even an ounce of scrutiny and you start to realize that the world is really one big flat open plain with actual levels sprinkled around in the corners. This is the best part of Elden Ring. Stormveil Castle has some of the most interesting and labyrinthine level geometry this side of The Gutter from Dark Souls 2. It’s actually insane. The weird ways you traverse the windy and maze like hallways, streets, and staircases of the Undead Burg are even more ridiculous because of the verticality of these areas. You can jump! You can climb up rafters and fences and random ass cracks in the wall and go places where it feels like you shouldn’t be able to get to, which is very much in the spirit of exploration that I love so much about this series. At one point I fell into a hole that I couldn’t see the bottom of and there was this weird huge face thing? During that moment I was genuinely exited to find out how to get down there. (Now, I know that that was Godwyn, but why was it down there? I’m not really good at this lore stuff so maybe someone can help me out here). Other than those secluded areas of the world though, what is there? You can ride around on Torrent for all of eternity in the lakes of Liurnia like I did and not find anything. Think about it. What actually populates that part of the map other than levels? There’s the church where you meet Varré, there’s the Four Belfries (cool area), the rocks where the dragon with the key you need to get into Raya Lucaria, the Albinauric Village where you get one half of the Halligtree secret medallion, and that might actually be it. Maybe that’s enough for you. But for me, I can’t help but start seeing a world that just acts as a level select menu when you want to actually play Elden Ring. When I tried to see it as anything else, all that happened was Torrent and I aimlessly wandering the wasteland for tens of hours looking for something, anything to do. Sometimes I’d find an upgrade material that I didn’t need. Sometimes I’d find cave that only led to a dead end with a boss I’d already fought for the 30th time. Other times, all I’d find is a tiny room containing a chest with an item I didn’t need.
This is the part that gets me. It’s actually kind of scary. FromSoftware has gamified it’s world into a cartoon character that a five-year-old would draw. I unironically thought the proteins in my brain were denaturing. This is half of the game. I’m not even mad, it’s just funny to me (imagine getting mad at – you get the idea). The Lands Between is filled to the brim with shit. Queen Marika doesn’t need Horah Loux and his gang of Tarnished to repair the Elden Ring, she needs the fucking sewer men to clean the (wow I am so unfunny). The empty, barren space between levels exists for you to collect things. And maybe that’s what was intended. Maybe people like that. I kind of hate it. When I first started playing, Elden Ring actually managed to trick me into thinking that these copy/paste caves were real content. But there’s only so many crystal trios and glint stone spells that can be thrown in your face before you realize that what you’re doing serves zero purpose. There are a hundred of these dungeons in the game. The first couple of times you do this is fine, but multiply this by a hundred and you have officially given me NyQuil. I’m curious: is this the “best open world game ever made”? It’s hard not to compare this game to Breath of the Wild (you did it first not me!), with it’s shrines that seems to serve a similar purpose. With these shrines though, their usefulness is evident even if you went into every single one of them and discovered that they were empty. The game presents you with a variety of challenges that are deeply baked into the games systems just to be able to walk through the door. Breath of the Wild asks you to scale mile-high mountains and clear an island full of goblins with nothing but your fists and your wits. Or navigate wind currents, or feel your way through a giant labyrinth, or fight a dragon in mid-air. Half the fun happens outside of them. Although it’s a really juvenile comparison, when I look at Elden Ring’s “open world” in this light, I wonder: why is this even in the game? Even if we drop the dungeons into the memory hole, there are other parts of it’s open world design that just do not work. During my first playthrough, I went to Caelid right after being Margit. (Yes, I saw the gorgeous, sweeping vistas of Liurnia and immediately turned around. We are not the same). I cut my way through to the south of the map so I could face Radahn, and got curved by a knight, whose name escapes me, telling me in so many words that it’s too early in the game for you to be here, dude. I was fine with this. It was only after I had cut through my third boss like I was cutting flan that I realized I over-leveled. This ruined the game for me. (and that’s not even mentioning that in my second playthrough I went to Caelid after the capital, which is when I thought the game wanted me to go there. I melted Radahn like butter. Starscourge Radahn? More like Starscrooge Radahn. I can’t describe how unfun it is to try and guess when this game wants you to see its content. It would genuinely be more interesting as a linear experience). What is the point of an open world that punishes you for treating it like one? It’s clear that it’s intended for you to beat Godrick, then Rennala, and with your requisite two great runes walk on over to Leyndell (to induce Morgott into vomiting all over the thrones, stained by his curse). If Lands Between is a level select menu, can I – at the bare-minimum – select what level I want to play? The bar is currently in hell. At this exact moment, I’d much rather have a game with level scaling. (which isn’t even a bad thing, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a really fun game. There are other ways of giving the player that feeling of getting stronger. and if you think there aren’t ways of making enemies more challenging while scaling their stats with the player, maybe you’re just not thinking hard enough). At one point, I asked myself: isn’t this kind of like getting the Gravelord Sword in Dark Souls? The only difference is that I don’t accidentally run past eighteen skeletons that can kill me instantly, jump down the equivalent of fifteen flights of stairs in the form of cliffs, sit in a coffin for five minutes as a mysterious creature slowly creeps towards me out of the darkness, all so I can barter with a skeleton that only accepts eyeballs as payment.
I really hate being negative when talking about video games, it makes me kind of depressed. It’s like, there are real issues in the world that I’m already mad about, and video games are supposed to be fun, so I try to fill my prose with shitty jokes and light heartedness, but sometimes I just feel like an asshole. Elden Ring is a good game, and I have a lot of fun with it, and there’s value in it’s open world. My only wish it that it would illicit any kind of emotion, at all, out of me. I can’t help but think about Dark Souls, whose world was so tiny and compressed, yet made me feel like I was really exploring a world – and that’s on the most basic levels. For example, you can’t warp between bonfires until you’re halfway through the game. Wherever you decide to venture out to, you’re kind of stuck there. If you’re all the way at the bottom of Lordran, in Blighttown, and you decide you needed to get something in Firelink Shrine, or upgrade your weapon in the undead parish, you can’t just teleport back there. You’d have to make the climb all the way back to the top – which isn’t easy, especially if it’s your first time playing the game. Or even worse, if you’re at the bottom of the great hollow, you legitimately would have to climb up every branch to make it back up. It’s actually really fucked up when you think about it. Why would the developers do this? How can they be so cruel? There’s a couple of shortcuts around this though, some of them likely intentional, others not. You can buy a repair kit and a weapon upgrade kit from Andre before you head off, and that way, whenever your weapon or armor breaks or you have enough titanite to upgrade something, you can do it at a bonfire instead. Also, you’re not necessarily stuck down in wherever you’re stuck down: just remember not to light the bonfire and bring a homeward bone with you. When you’re done with what you’re doing, activate the homeward bone and it’ll take you to the last bonfire you rested at. You can do some slimy shit with this if you know what you’re doing. You can fucking go all the way to Blighttown, kill Quelaag, ring the Bell of Awakening, then instantly teleport back to Firelink Shrine (that’s an extreme example though). I think that stuff’s really fun. The world gains texture in this way. It’s no longer a place that contains levels for you to go to. It’s something that the player has to navigate and contend with, which is great. You have to prepare and bring tools and use consumable items. I’d imagine some people probably complain about systems like weapon degradation, because what’s the point? Isn’t it just a roadblock? Isn’t it just busy work to make the player feel like they’re doing something when they’re really not? I used to think that, but now I don’t really see the difference between putting a boss in front of me and putting systems like weapon durability and no warping in front of me. It’s all friction, and it’s all tasteful. It’s just that one is more about making combat fun and difficult, and the other is about making exploration fun and difficult.
There are other things too, though. There’s no map. When you’re in the Depths or you’re in the forest, you can’t just look at a map to figure out where you are. In a lot of cases, you’re just lost. Maybe this is just me – although I really doubt that it is – I like being lost. To me, it’s another element that is the secret sauce of exploration in Dark Souls – or any of the games. But I don’t really know why. It’s one of those background feelings that I can only talk about by explaining what it isn’t rather that what it is. In Elden Ring, most of the time I don’t feel like I’m exploring a world. I always know where I am, and any time I don’t I can just open up the map and then there I am. Only a handful of times is this not the case. In the Subterranean Shunning Grounds you are literally under the Earth. A topographical map isn’t going to tell you shit about where you are. I love that. It was one of the only times I felt lost in the game, and it was exciting. It was like I wasn’t supposed to be there or something. There’s also the times where the game holds off on you getting the map for the area. That’s fun too. Yet, no matter where I am, as long as I’m not in a dungeon (which always terminates in a copy paste boss battle that I know will be accompanied by a warp thingamajig), I can teleport to wherever I want. Oops. Then I remember this isn’t a world that I’m supposed to explore, it’s a level select menu. Isn’t that why Torrent is there? So I can get from point A to point B as painlessly as possible? I like that Dark Souls doesn’t care about whether or not I might feel pain exploring it’s world, because it’s not really ever that painful? It’s just fun to me. Getting lost is fun. It’s interconnectedness just adds to this. When you find out you can get to Blighttown by way of New Londo instead of through the Undead Burg and the Depths, it’s like. . . I don’t know – like you discovered new territory, a new way to navigate the world. And like the best moments in Elden Ring, both options offer unique and interesting play experiences. I mean, holy shit. You have to get a key in an area that seems almost pointless to go to, then use it to unlock the most unassuming door in the most random location in the game, then fight your way through a sewer with a dragon that has a mouth for a stomach. Or consume a transient curse to become cursed because it’s the only way to can hit the ghosts that will kill you. It’s great. And Dark Souls’ interconnectedness is punctuated by it’s friction. When you find a new way to get back to Firelink Shrine, it means something to you because of how hard it is to get back by backtracking.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s not great that I’m comparing Elden Ring to a game that came out ten years ago. We don’t need more of the same thing. If you want the old stuff you can just play that. What I’m really doing is complaining about all the things that Elden Ring isn’t – which is kind of stupid. I want weird things. Give me a game where all you have is a grappling hook, a compass, a rangefinder, and an empty map that you have to chart on your own to figure out where you are. And put a map maker in there too, let people make their own shit in an endless stream of content. And give it asynchronous multiplayer too, I don’t know in what way, but that’s always cool. It’s a good thing that this game is trying new things. Although rather than being new things, they’re just old things that are new things in the series. I’m not entirely sure why people are saying that this game changed open world games forever when it’s honestly just the same thing that we’ve been seeing in open world games forever. Which is fine! I just wish they wouldn’t say that. It’s kind of weird. You’re weirding me out right now. I really hate making these childish comparisons, but if you want to play a genuinely amazing open world game, I don’t know, play Outer Wilds. I say this without irony, and I’m not trying to be cool by thinking a new and different indie game is “better” than a triple A title by FromSoftware. I just genuinely wish Outer Wilds sold twelve million copies. I wish more people knew about that game (a lot of people already do, but I literally want 20 million people to play that game), because it actually will change open world games forever, because it actually does interesting things with what you can do with an exploration experience. But that’s not going to happen just yet. Because what people really want to do, right now (including me), is go into the same dungeon for the fifth time in a row to kill some lifeless, storyless boss that’s down there for no reason, so they can collect another spell they don’t even need. Thanks for reading.
– zak
Slickaria! 