| HN Mirror

I really don't get this recommendation.

Elden Ring is a good but drastically differently designed game. It is very unlike The Elder Scrolls by all accounts. Well, all they share in common is basic RPG elements, but that's about it.

First and foremost, there's barely anything to interact with except for attacking things. Morrowind would be a boring disaster of a game if it'd be just the never-ending flocks of Cliff Racers to cut through between a few cutscenes where the key plot points are explained.

Elden Ring has extremely limited non-hostile NPCs. They're essentially static fixtures, best they can do is switch between a few cyclic animations (like those merchants). I felt genuinely disappointed by how they had to cheat around this limitation to make Millicent just stand. But okay, I get it, no one's gonna fall at me from the sky, fine. Still, the quality of NPCs is subpar. Dialogues are so scarce and limited, they make Mass Effect's chatwheel feel as if Commander Shepard is a master orator.

Then, some reviewers brag about the lore and I found it extremely shallow, just the basic worldbuilding. There are like about 50 characters and their stories, plus some fairly weakly explained core concepts about the world order - but not much else. Elden Ring's world has no casual history, it's not a world where anyone had ever lived despite the prologue bragging otherwise. Over the half of ruins are just some meaningless assets - either just some walls or some constructs with faux doors and windows, an attempt to make it look like it is some post-apocalyptic world in shambles, but you need to exercise a fairly strong suspension of disbelief to make it feel so. Shacks and towers make it a bit more believable, but they're just... locations where someone had possible lived. Absolute best you'd get is some tools of the past occupant, and that's an exception, not a rule. Even the large and architecturally well-designed areas (so-called legacy dungeons) don't tell their stories - e.g. the Stormveil Castle is huge, but it barely has any history - just a gallery of untold potential stories, missed opportunities. It's a stark contrast from, let's say, ELEX or Horizon or Fallout, where every other building you can walk in (and you can walk into most of them) has some casual story to it, traces and echoes of the people who had lived there before the catastrophe, told either in notes or environmental cues.

Maybe this is misdirected critique - I get it, game designers might have wanted an alien world (not too alien though, just some medieval fantasy, still closely tied to human cultures), gnostic, unexplained and mystical, where most things just are and logic may not even apply. Symbols and decorations instead of writing and narration, inverbal cues opposed to verbal ones. But that's how exactly it's very unlike TES (which has both!) and why I don't think it's a good recommendation.

And there are games with alien worlds that also prioritize form, style and artistry over actual meaning, yet they don't give up on the meaning but make player assimilate it. Discarding an opportunity to enrich the lore by talking about it is just... weird. Like author is trying to cover up that all that lore is shallow and they haven't really thought it up beyond the surface. Just compare the lengths Disco Elysium's writers explore their anthropic-but-alien world - such as concept of The Pale (sure, that's a very different kind of a game). Pardon the pun but all that Greater Will stuff just pales in comparison. And there's also an example of Pathologic, or if you're up for an extreme weirdness - Vangers (a Jabberwocky of video games).

And lastly, people praise Elden Ring (and Souls-like) for having an open world without auto-leveling, so the content is "gated" by your skill (or level). But that was basically the norm for a long while, in a lot of games. Remember Gothic - it had all of that, but was on entirely another level of game design, despite being over 20 years old. I'm really, really looking for the upcoming remaster.

So, comparing various aspects of Elden Ring to various games that have similar aspects I can say it's definitely not a masterpiece. Just an above-average game - well, it surely got some love and even though neither aspect is stellar they're not awfully poor either (I just don't want to search for negative examples how bad things can be, hah). Except maybe for combat. Though idk what someone with extensive arcade fighting game experience would say - I'm really not an expert on those, so I'd leave this aspect unexplored.

Pardon my rant. I'm just disappointed in Elden Ring because it was not what I hoped it would be, misguided by all the hype (marketing). I'm really trying to squeeze out most of its worldbuilding, story and quests - the very stuff I've so highly praised games like Morrowind for - but constantly getting disappointed. I can guarantee it - it's not about that.