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 :)
On one hand, it mskes the world feel more obviously connected. On the other, I hate how small even the legacy dungeons are. I love invading; but invading is so fucking bad in ER compared to the other souls games primarily because you almost never end up in a dungeon where you can use all the monsters and traps to your advantsge. You end up outside in Limbgrave where there is fuck all to break up the host and their 2 phantoms. Or you end up invading in right as they are walking into the boss room.
All the space used to spread the dungeons apart could have been dungeons in and of themselves. The Shadow Realm is a better overall map than the Lands Between becsuse it kinda solves some of those problems by actually having monsters everywhere, POIs are more condensed, and it even manages to make finding a few of the zones challenging.