What’s the deal with Elden Ring?

No, seriously, what’s the deal? Remember when all we had of this was an enigmatic little teaser that From seemed uncharacteristically tight-lipped about? Remember when that carried on for so long we thought it was potentially vaporware? And then suddenly the game came out? It’s funny; it felt like I waited a long time, but all things considered, announcement to release really was much breezier than you’d typically anticipate for a game with that much hype behind it. But for all the talking that’d been done about it before it hit store shelves, and the discourse that naturally followed, I can’t help but feel that even with DLC on the way, the air surrounding Elden Ring has been strangely… Quiet. Like there just wasn’t as much to say about it as some of From’s other more famous (or infamous) offerings. That’s obviously just my own perception, and I’m sure I can attribute it to the fact that I’ve made a pointed effort of avoiding conversations about it. Probably because I wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable looks of confusion when I said I just wasn’t especially smitten with it.

As to how I could end up spending 200 hours in it regardless: Elden Ring’s open-world design and designated Loot Caves prey upon the part of my mind that loves to comb vast tracts of land for baubles and blades. Indeed, my fondest memories of the game were of arriving in a new area and diving into whatever caught my eye first. I’d work my way down or up to whatever boss was waiting for me, spend some time trying (and eventually succeeding) to kick its ass and then walk away whistling with whatever new weapon or spell I’d yanked out of the box behind it. “Always something new” was very much the thought on my mind as I explored the Lands Between, and it did an excellent job of scratching the itch that TES: Oblivion awakened in me all those years ago. So many secrets, so little time. Of course, there are some things that From just does well, and that holds true here. The proper “dungeons” here are broadly well designed and places like the Haligtree or Raya Lucaria impressed in style and scale. I warmed to a good few of the characters quickly (Blaidd, Millicent, Alexander, D, etc…) and my only complaint is that I didn’t get to see more of them – and sometimes I could have if not for reasons. The story does inspire intrigue in the beginning and the potential it had isn’t hard to see. While a bit janky at times, I did like riding to and fro on my trusty magic steed and hopping from place to place with my shiny new jump button. The platforming was very hit-and-miss but I appreciated the extra dimension it added to the combat. My first impression of Elden Ring did a solid job of holding up to the lofty expectations built around it, but as the hours wore on the cracks started to become a bit too obvious for me to ignore.

While I would readily agree that the traversal, visual direction and overall game-feel are generally better than what a lot of the other players in this arena are doing, I would also never deny that the game is suffering a bit of an identity crisis. The attempt to apply the design sensibilities of the Souls series to this popular contemporary template falls apart where the compact and deliberate world design was propping everything else up. Locales such as Lordran were constructed top-to-bottom with a certain experience in mind. Even when you could take more than one path, you were pretty much guaranteed to see and hear enough along the way that you felt like the journey was worth your time, and you were often rewarded for following the breadcrumb trails being left out for you. You could arguably say the same for Elden Ring, but when a developer that is typically counting on you to stumble into your next thread adds NPC markers to the map after overwhelming pressure from the playerbase, something is very obviously amiss. You’re egged on to do things any way you want and whenever you want, but at some point you are going to wave a few too many invisible flags and end up consigning a storyline or two unto the void. Not unique to Elden Ring whatsoever, no matter what you might dare to compare it to, but I still couldn’t help but feel a bit cheated when I was off having a merry old time only to realize I had run the timer on some piece of intrigue I had set aside for later. That feeling was always in the back of my head, breeding hesitation when proceeding to my next objective, keeping me unsure of what the further-reaching consequences of my actions might be. If you’re going to make a game three times the length of the ones you usually put out, there’s wisdom in not instilling a sense of fear that one might have to do the whole thing over again just to tick off a handful of checkboxes.

This quarreling of concepts seems to have infected the gameplay itself in ways that I was never fully able to reconcile with. Combat in From’s games has been engaging in a slow but unmistakable war of escalation with itself, consistently increasing the speed and visual flair while not moving away from the very deliberate back-and-forth at its core. This seemed to have reached its final form in Dark Souls III and Bloodborne, which incentivized more aggressive playstyles while still leaving room for other strategies. One might assume that in being another successor to the lineage Demon’s Souls began, Elden Ring would largely pull from those books for inspiration. Instead, it feels the chosen reference was Sekiro, or perhaps something like Devil May Cry. That would be fine if the core gameplay systems had also changed to match, but even with all of the fancy new tricks and godlike powers afforded to your Tarnished, you overall still feel like a Dark Souls character. Some of the bigger engagements felt lopsided, being lengthy, multi-part affairs and featuring bosses with movesets that were high in flash but low in readability or engagement. Yes, you look very cool as you rest upon that pillar and rain sword beams down onto my head. Would you kindly come back down so we can resume our dance where you take ten swings and I take one? At their most extreme, fights felt like they were absolutely begging to be cheesed, as the alternative would be to play by rules that were very obviously written without your enjoyment in mind. How do you deal with a tracking, seconds-long, area-of-effect flurry of blades that can potentially undo several minutes of progress even if you survive it? The short answer is you don’t. The longer answer is you can after a significant amount of labbing and dying, and by the time you arrive at that conclusion you’ll realize that you had perfected the other 95% of the fight long ago. Almost every major boss in the game suffers from this flaw to some degree, up to and including the perverted retread of OG Dark Soul’s iconic 2v1 (I still can’t forgive Dark Souls II for doing much the same, but at least the Throne Bros. aren’t as much of a pain in the ass as the Godskin Duo). There’s no denying that the action onscreen is exciting to watch, but I can’t say in good faith that it was always thrilling to play.

The narrative is one that I didn’t care much for in the end, and I know I didn’t because I can’t remember enough about it to articulate the finer specifics of why. Much was made of Big George Double-R’s involvement in the game and I remember feeling a deep apprehension when it was first announced. I was not well-familiar with his work (still ain’t), but I probably would have been a bit concerned about a collaboration with just about any writer of note. Fromsoft stories are a very love-it-or-leave-it kind of deal and I wasn’t sure they’d work for just about anybody if you tried to introduce a “star chef” to the kitchen. I can’t place any blame on it, though, because aside from a few of his well-known trademarks I can’t actually tell you where his input stops and where From’s begins. Nonetheless, what is here is a story that is just as nebulous and enigmatic as those in previous From works but decidedly lacks purpose. I never felt much of a desire to theorize or question what was happening around me because there’s simply so much of it going in so many different directions. Tons of players on the stage who are all reading from pages that feel like they were ripped from different scripts. The one thing that seems to unite everybody is the motivator of “become Elden Lord”, but the game never successfully convinced me that it was a goal worth pursuing. I didn’t have enough investment in the realm or its inhabitants. The characters I had any affection for tended to have disappointingly short questlines that almost universally ended with some sort of tragedy. Not shocking given Elden Ring’s pedigree, but perhaps a bit more painful given how much harder I needed to work just to arrive there. I think this aspect of the game would have benefitted greatly from a narrower view and an ounce of thoughtful direction. What’s here just doesn’t grab me the way I was repeatedly told it would.

And yes, some builds are inherently better than others and some abilities were clearly not playtested for balance and the perennial PvP loop gets to feels a bit rote when every third opponent is running Rivers of Blood, to say nothing of the shaky netcode or whatever I’m supposed to blame for my sessions constantly getting dropped, but I can overlook all of that because I’ve become comfortable with (or desensitized to) it. Big Swings ™ have seldom been the most viable route to go and so I powered through with my fancy greatsword not for spite of the challenge but for the love of it. Even still, I was always acutely aware that the game shot me in the foot with the starting gun and I wasn’t making my life any easier by insisting upon using both legs. Maybe I was only managing one or two bonks per minute, but I had the last laugh when I finally managed to stagger the latest cartwheeling asshole and lay them out with a satisfying animation and sound effect. Was it worth it? Probably not. But I’m a wizard of principles and I refuse to let poor boss design get in the way of my fun. Biggest complaint I can give in this regard is that a game of this size still refuses to give you unlimited respecs, and if the point of doing so is to compel me to hop into new game plus, I assure you that there are better ways to accomplish that.

I think my overall ambivalence towards Elden Ring was cemented right as I reached the end of the game, an achievement that was 120 or so hours in the making. The “penultimate” fight is one that genuinely entertained me – one with minimal gimmicks, easy-to-parse mechanics and a phase change that elicited a thumbs-up rather than an eyeroll. Tied in with how it actually made good use of that jump button, it kind of felt like perhaps everything was coming together right at the finish line. That feeling stuck with me just about until the moment the “final” boss was immediately followed up by yet another damage-sponge lore-tumor that very clearly emphasized spectacle over intentional design. I felt a tad put upon as I chose my desired ending and watched the credits roll, but also strangely relieved. It’s that increasingly-familiar kind of relief that springs from realizing that the worst of my troubles have ended. It just so happens that those troubles were hounding me throughout my entire experience.

When all is said and done, I enjoyed Elden Ring and booted it up plenty of times even after my first run had ended. However, it feels like Fromsoft has taken one step too far outside of their comfort zone, here. A company that I think was historically held in high regard for being unapologetically “themselves” despite industry trends has decidedly done a bit of trend-chasing. Given the formula used is one that has essentially fostered a full-blown subgenre of its own, the end result feels like a game that is familiar in a very uncomfortable way. It’s like when your dad shaves. Yeah, it’s obviously still him, but without those whiskers framing his face he just looks… Wrong. Elden Ring is Dark Souls cleaned up for date night and it lost some charm in the process. It still avoids a lot of the pitfalls of today's AAA environment, and it's not a bad game by any means, but it's not the revolution I think many people were expecting it to be. It is, by its very nature, less than revolutionary.