Like the Erd Tree has five occurrences according to the wiki, not 17 lol.
Five is wrong. The wiki doesn't count the times they appear as regular ass enemies. It must only be counting bosses of which there are 5 "boss" versions 1 for each minor tree.
I get it, there’s a lot of copy/ paste that shouldn’t be excusable but when you think that even Dark Souls did it with Taurus Demon in a much smaller game, eh. There are always limits in time, budget, etc.
Yes Dark Souls was pinched by time and budget. But Elden Ring was not and the reason why the copy and paste is a problem for me is because there was no reason this game's world had to be so buttfucking big. The map could have been brought down a little bit and some of the copy paste removed. OR like I've said, instead of yet another cat statue boss, put a puzzle at the end instead or a trap chest that warps you around whatever.
Big for the sake of big, is just bad game design.
FROM stated from the beginning they had to limit themselves to what they excel at given it’s by far their most ambitious effort as it is.
Then why with the open world? Open worlds don't mean the scale was increased. If you look at all the levels you get in previous From games, I'd argue that Elden Ring has far less actual scale than previous titles. Because expanded a giant map, doesn't mean anything. One person indie devs can plot down a big ass map. Ubisoft shits out a huge open world map every year. Big maps are not special.
Elden ring has a lot of surface area but since so much of it is empty, how is that scale? Since so many of the caves, and catacombs are the fucking same, how is that scale? Previous games might not have had giant open worlds, but their levels were dense and tight when it came to the gameplay, which also helps the combat and the game over all from getting stale.
Now I'm going to quote Nick from the article because he looses me almost instantly.
" In recent years, many open-world games have gone for quantity over quality — big open worlds that are of course beautiful, but not really central to the gameplay itself. You run around, see pretty landmarks, fight some bad guys, collect some items, and then eventually get back to the main story path."
And in what way is Elden Ring not this exact thing?
" No space is unused in this world. If you see a point of interest, whether it’s ruins, a giant glowing tree, a cave, a castle, or even just a graveyard, it’s worth visiting — because literally everything ties back to the primary loop of becoming more powerful to take on the game’s hardest bosses and legacy dungeons."
And this is different from Assassin's Creed Odyssey how?
" It makes the act of exploring both fun and worth the player’s time, and it genuinely
feels like I’m exploring. "
Basically the game is different and better because the map markers are invisible. Essentially the arument boils down to "even though Elden Ring does the same fucking shit that every other open world in history does, Elden Ring is better because there are no map markers. No map markers make it feel like you are actually exploring instead of following a checklist" That's it. That's literally the only difference. And okay fair enough you enjoy the element of discovery not having markers brings to the table.That's great.
My problem is that the lack of map markers doesn't change the fact that everything within Elden Ring is the same shit. Look Nick even says this:
"
lden Ring is a masterclass of design for an open world. It’s not full of icons or waypoint markers telling you where to go next " Yes it does Nick! Look at your map when you finish the game. look at all the graces that point you in the direction you need to go. The only difference is that these markers are hidden until you find them. That's it, and the problem with not having guidence with anything is that you generally aren't finding anything, you are STUMBLING into stuff. A treasure hunt requires you to have knowledge of what you are hunting, otherwise you are just happening upon things which is a very different type of discovery.
Look the game's combat and difficulty are obviously engaging for people, myself included, it gets it's hooks into you even while it pisses you off. But with all the items that are broken, Npc's broken, builds that are broken, it feels to me that the scale was clearly too much for FromSoft and the big world was more than they could really chew.
