Since Elden Ring’s meteoric entrance into the pantheon of soulslikes, many players have grown very fond of the very new and fresh open-world approach to the genre. Miyazaki himself said that ER is as close to his dream soulslike as he could wish it to be. It felt like a new direction for future soulslikes to come and felt similarly revolutionary as Breath of the Wild did for Zelda.
The open world didn’t come with only positives, however. Repeat bosses and assets, dungeons weren’t as diverse as one hoped them to be, the rewards for exploring some of them felt very situational and niche-y at best and outright useless at their worst. Some say the game is only ever good for a first blind playthrough and that the open world stands in their way of getting to “the fun part™” of the game.
After almost four years of the game existing, a, objectively speaking, very strong DLC, and a spin-off with Nightreign, how do you guys feel about open worlds in soulslikes? I understand this is not the first or only soulslike to feature an open world - I don’t have any examples at hand off the dome - but ER is definitely the open world soulslike.
Is it something you’d like to see featured in future soulslikes? Are you over it? Very keen on hearing your thoughts since I can’t really make up my mind either :)
Yes, this is pretty much where I’m at and have been since the beginning. I played ER on release and had a blast exploring the world at that time before the wikis were even filled out, where everyone was discovering the game collectively and people on forums/group chats were constantly finding new stuff. However, after finishing it I have had no desire to go back. And after the dust had settled I also came away from it with the feeling that the best parts of the game - the legacy dungeons - were the places where ER stopped being ER and played like DS4 instead.
If the entire game was like Stormveil Castle I’d probably have done a second playthrough already.