Lore reasons for repetition dont make the repetition acceptable. Especially in a game like ER where a lot of players wont piece together the lore reasons to why shit is the way it is. The fact remains that the player is doing the same areas with the same enemies and same puzzles and even same bosses everytime.Someone made an interesting comment regarding repetition-Andres Riquelme 17 hours ago
Repetition is good to really hammer down the underlying rules of the world:
-Memory stones are held in mage towers, and are locked with a magic riddle.
-Catacombs have ashes in the tree burial chamber, that is locked by the tree themed door, locked with a lever somewhere in the catacombs.
-Ruins have a hidden basement somewhere.
-Churches have sites of grace, sacred tears, and a talk with melina.
-Killing giant dragons and consuming their hearts give you their breaths.
-Evergoals, giant stone circles have powerful beings trapped inside.
-The moving mausoleums are stopped by destroying the souls trapped in the spiritual rocks.
-Deathbirds and Night cavalries only appear at night.
-Divine towers unlocks the powers of great runes.
-Minor erdtrees have tree avatars that hold crystals for your potions.
-Golden trees have golden seeds below them.
-Mining caves have smithing stones to look for in the walls. And caves are literally all over the place, both geographically, and thematically, when you enter a cave, you cannot predict what the heck you're getting into, and even sometimes, don't even know where you will end up.
The problem with repitition is that it gives you a sense of "i've seen this before", even if it isn't exactly the same. I'd say the real problem has nothing to do with content reuse or anything like that. Instead, the problem was that they failed (mostly) to capitalize on the best thing you can do once you create a pattern: BREAK IT. Break it hard leave them stumbled on the floor trying to figure out what the heck is going on.
Some examples:
(They do this one!) A basement ruin that has the entrance hidden with an illusion. But they could have also easily done that it doesn't lead to a basement, and instead to a cave, catacomb, whatever!
(They do this one!) A church that has enemies instead of a place to rest. Maybe an evergoal brings you to an unfamiliar place, or its a trap, or is a big skirmish instead of a boss battle. They could have done literally anything else and it would have surprised the players.
One of the divine towers could have a surprise boss battle in order to get the rune.
One of the rotting or fallen minor erdtrees could have an already dead boss, and you'll have to find the crystal hidden somewhere, or kill whatever killed the avatar. Because the pattern isn't broken enough times, or not at all, means that you don't ever expect anything different each time you find something familiar, and indeed it is.
But make enough "exceptions" to the rule, and suddenly when you enter a catacomb, you won't know if its just a "pull lever-> find door -> kill boss -> leave" catacomb, or a secret alternative path to reach the deeproot basin, a teleporting trap to the other side of the world, a ton of fake levers needing to find the right one, a huge riddle that needs to be solved instead of a lever, or even just plainly finding an npc instead of a boss at the end of the dungeon.
If they threw those curve balls, one at a limgrave catacomb, one at a caelid catacomb, and two in liurnia, when you enter a catacomb at the altus plateau, you would still feel like although it could be a normal ass catacomb, it also could be something you've never seen before... and that keeps the feeling of discovery to the very end!
Curious to hear what @CriticalGaming thinks of this
The post is correct in that there are a lot of things they COULD have done to help make it better but quite simply you could remove 30% of Elden Ring and it would be a better experience overall.
What bothers me is that ER gets praise for the exact shit that people give Ubisoft crap for. And people justify it because of the ER combat but the bottom line is ER has fucked up the Souls combat that most people love too. ER is a game that tried to be everything all at once and when you try and expand to include too many different audiences, you make something that falls short to all of them as well.
