5 Elden Ring Mistakes FromSoft’s New Soulslike Can’t Repeat

Elden Ring is a staggeringly impressive and ambitious feat as FromSoftware’s first open-world Soulslike game. How FromSoftware tackled the open-world action-RPG formula is commendable, given that it tasked itself with preserving the same niche, intricate Soulslike flavor, yet Elden Ring’s accessibility and wonder as a Soulslike game are bogged down by an immense amount of friction on subsequent playthroughs.

Four years, a massive expansion, and a multiplayer-centric roguelike spin-off later, Elden Ring is not an infallible titan that can’t be toppled or bested by a new Soulslike game. If FromSoftware develops a new open-world Soulslike game, there are a lot of lessons it can learn from the glaring mistakes it’s made with Elden Ring and all of its classic, linear Soulslike games.

5

Sacrificing Replayability For Bloat

Elden Ring has 100s of hours of replayability, depending on whether players are striving for 100% completion, pursuing various quests and endings, or replaying on NG+ with different builds or classes. Of course, after players have gone and done everything they can in Elden Ring and rolled credits, it may be incredibly daunting to begin a new playthrough, knowing that they’ll have to do everything all over once more.

Elden Ring can obviously be beaten at a blisteringly quick pace if players are familiar with speedrun strats and have a good memory of where to go (and when) for the most efficient routing. Otherwise, players could be looking at another ~60-hour playthrough due to how long it can take to progress through the main story and complete the requirements to unlock different endings.

For instance, getting back to the Land of Shadow in Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree expansion is a humongous chore that requires players to first unlock access to Mohgwyn Palace in Siofra River and slay Mohg, Lord of Blood. This makes replaying Elden Ring to go and fight, say, Midra, Lord of Frenzied Flame, or Messmer the Impaler/Base Serpent Messmer, an arduous undertaking that casual players must be willing to spend countless hours on.

4

Gank/Recycled Bosses

A massive part of said bloat is Elden Ring’s recycled enemies/bosses, as well as gank bosses (for the uninitiated, ‘gank’ refers to when players must fight two or more bosses simultaneously). Examples of Elden Ring’s greatest gank boss offenders include the notorious Godskin Duo (Godskin Apostle and Godskin Noble) in Crumbling Farum Azula and Valiant Gargoyles in Siofra Aqueduct.

Not all gank bosses are inherently terrible. Still, like any boss that has a ton of ads for players to concern themselves with while attempting to whittle away at the health bar of the actual boss, it’s usually an agonizing experience where players are battling the camera more than the bosses themselves, and players are left praying that they can kite one away while the other goes AFK and respects the 1v1.

In general, though, Elden Ring arguably has some of the worst FromSoftware Soulslike bosses, which makes having to fight them multiple times or get outnumbered by them doubly tedious. A reduced scale in the open world would probably disincentivize having hundreds of bosses and result in a catalog of bosses that are far more refined, but that’s not all that Elden Ring’s size tarnishes.

3

Jeopardizing Level Design For Scale

Elden Ring’s open world is unmistakably beautiful and scenic. Sadly, its level design—a big part of what’s so beloved about FromSoftware’s previous Soulslike games—is fairly unmemorable. Unlike more linear Soulslike games, which basically go from one winding labyrinth to another and present new environmental puzzles for players to solve, most of Elden Ring’s level designs boil down to sweeping glades, lakes, swamps, and subterranea, with few interiors, claustrophobic or otherwise, that are anything other than visually stunning.

For example, Elden Ring’s Raya Lucaria Academy leaves a lot to be desired once players finally gain entry and explore it, and many Catacombs and Caves blur together indistinguishably. If Elden Ring had been substantially smaller, FromSoftware might not have felt compelled to stuff the Lands Between to the gills and ultimately have a lot of that content be underwhelming.

2

Antiquated Side Quest Progression

Obscurity, as well as a general sense of being lost or not being sure which NPC to turn to, isn’t necessarily great quest design regardless, but it’s generally more forgivable in Soulslike games like Dark Souls or Bloodborne because they’re so linear already, meaning players will often inevitably find where they need to go or interact with an NPC whom they need to talk to. It’s far easier to stomach exhausting every NPC’s lines of dialogue when there are far fewer NPCs to converse with and regions to traverse, whereas obtuse quest instructions that players must interpret correctly of their own accord are less permissible in a game as gargantuan as Elden Ring.

At the end of the day, this is what urges players to explicitly seek out guides and forums online in order to determine what to do because there are insufficient context clues, and players may understandably be worried that the wrong dialogue choice or the wrong action in any arbitrary encounter will stick them with a ‘bad’ ending. The action-adventure game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is maybe the best that FromSoftware’s approach to Soulslike questline design has come thus far, though it still has a long way to go.

The fanbase’s in-game interactions via meme-worthy, asynchronous messages and online discussions about Elden Ring lore are full of charm and whimsy, and some players do take comfort in knowing that they’ll be able to simply look up questlines, NPCs, and endings that they didn’t get on their first playthrough so that they won’t miss out on them by refusing to embrace the community and everything it’s discovered as time goes on.

Lies of P’s side quests have the right idea. Many of them are fetch quests, to be fair, but it’s a relief to have item icons or NPC portraits represented on the Stargazer menu that lists available fast-travel points in each region/chapter and informs players where something or someone is, without them having to backtrack aimlessly. Fortunately, Elden Ring labeling NPCs on its illustrative map and Elden Ring Nightreign’s annotating its own respective map with Remembrance quest markers demonstrate that it might finally be learning this lesson.

1

No Seamless Co-op

If nothing else, Elden Ring Nightreign is proof that FromSoftware’s fanbase community has been desperate for dedicated co-op in a Soulslike game for decades. FromSoftware’s co-op and PvP systems have always been a little bit convoluted, especially when they’re slightly different from game to game, and some players may not be patient enough to learn about Elden Ring’s Summoning Pools, Tarnished Furled Fingers, Duelist’s Furled Fingers, and Furlcalling Finger Remedies. Overall, there are too many ‘seams,’ as it were.

Seamless co-op, then, would allow players to participate in jolly cooperation with others throughout the whole game, not only for an upcoming or nearby boss fight. Elden Ring’s seamless co-op mods are great in the meantime, but it’d be fantastic to have seamless co-op be an official feature so that players are no longer disconnected and sent back to their respective game worlds alone once they die or defeat a boss.

Perhaps Elden Ring Nightreign’s three-player squad gameplay and The Duskbloods’ eight-player PvPvE gameplay are our first tastes of FromSoftware truly embracing multiplayer and testing official seamless co-op. However, it’s unknown if FromSoftware would ever include gameplay like this in a genuine, tried-and-true Soulslike game like Elden Ring.

Systems

Released

February 25, 2022

ESRB

M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence

Developer(s)

From Software

Publisher(s)

Bandai Namco Entertainment, From Software

Engine

Proprietary