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You have a good point.
I imagine the author tried many of the older open world games of the previous generation, like Farcry 3, Assassin's Creed 2 games, and likely GTA4 and 5. They were incredibly novel for the time. Now we're at a point where open world games are a dime a dozen, and for good reason: they sell. They're easy to understand, simple to drop in and out of, and many of them now have multiplayer. Rather than aiming to make an immersive world to get caught up in, companies run them as live service games with a drip feed of content―essentially a big sandbox that I can mess around with my friends in. On the flip-side, Breath of the Wild is strictly single player, but it has a lot of fun systemic features that combine in interesting ways (weather, elements, physics, etc), making it feel like an experimental sandbox of its own. Elden Ring is basically a Souls game with two major innovations for the series: - Previous games had mostly linear progression. Elden Ring opens up the world to the player and gives them tools to explore without penalty from the start (fast travel, for example). - Outside of interiors, the player is afforded much more mobility because of their mount. They can outrun almost all overworld enemies, and do hit and run attacks (Interiors are traditional Souls challenges). These two points, combined with a generous allied NPC summon system, means that the player has a lot more options in how they want to approach the game. In previous Souls titles if you reach a boss you can't defeat, the game is over for you. Elden Ring is structured in a way where you can just go in a different direction, and warp back to that boss when you feel more confident. The environmental storytelling, cryptic NPC dialog, and multiplayer systems are nicely tuned to fit the different affordances Elden Ring provides, but they're not wildly different from previous Souls titles. |