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 :)
Depends. For me soulslikes are mostly derivative of metroidvanias and I tend to enjoy these games more in an interconnected map with a somewhat spiral and branching structure. Telling a story through map design is also easier this way, and roaming constraints are usually a better method of guiding a player through environmental storytelling than letting them climb and swim in a straight line from point A to point B. Elden Ring’s map is pretty cool, but it’s also, to my taste, bloated for the sake of it’s size. This is usually what happens with open world maps, the false notion that bigger is always better and in the end it’s either mostly empty or sprinkled with whatever takes the least effort. Can’t say not having an open world map has stopped From Software from doing some of this in their previous games though. 😅 I also feel happier playing on open world maps when the game has systemic design aspects for immersion and emergent gameplay. It’s nice to run around aimlessly enjoying the view but it gets boring soon and you wish for an option to teleport from key locations unless there are linked systems in place that make this playground a sandbox and therefore worthwhile to run around, do something new and see what happens.
So, in short, if a future soulslike has mechanically more in common with RDR2, Prey, Hitman or Metal Gear Solid 3 I’ll be less sceptical of an open world map being one of it’s key selling points. In fact, I’ll be so hyped I’ll be in pain.