But you could always run past enemies in Dark Souls, and it was a much more relevant gameplay pattern in those games that didn’t put a Stake of Marika right in front of the boss door. I think the open world adding nonlinearity to the Souls system was really elegant, since getting stuck on a boss meant you usually had something else interesting to do while improving your skills and/or grinding for stats. You still can bash your head into the boss over and over until you finally solve the skill issue, of course, and Stakes of Marika make that a lot less frustrating. But if you were in the situation in DS1-3 and decided “no, I want better numbers before I try again” you just had to go grind trash to level up and that’s it. At least the “go fuck off and farm souls” option in Elden Ring is fun when doing so is clearing minidungeons and evergaols and maybe seeing new loot.
I do 100% see where you’re coming from too. I just think that people shouldn’t include Elden Ring when listing trend-chasing games that lazily slap “it’s a big open wooooorld!” onto an existing linear franchise. Elden Ring’s systems were designed really well around the bigness and openness of its world, unlike something like Sonic Frontiers or any of the MMO-single-player UE5 stuff coming out of AAA studios. And they even had the decency to build a whole IP around this new, distinct gameplay formula instead of making it Dark Souls 4: This Is What Dark Souls Is Now.
Like, maybe you don’t like red wine, fair enough, but at least Elden Ring is serving the red wine alongside a steak instead of alongside a bowl of Lucky Charms or fettuccine Alfredo.
Unfortunately, “Elden-likes” will likely end up like 99% of “souls-likes” where all they do is copy the surface level stuff (“hard boss fights! Bonfires!”) instead of actually iterating on what made From’s games so well designed.
But you could always run past enemies in Dark Souls, and it was a much more relevant gameplay pattern in those games that didn’t put a Stake of Marika right in front of the boss door. I think the open world adding nonlinearity to the Souls system was really elegant, since getting stuck on a boss meant you usually had something else interesting to do while improving your skills and/or grinding for stats. You still can bash your head into the boss over and over until you finally solve the skill issue, of course, and Stakes of Marika make that a lot less frustrating. But if you were in the situation in DS1-3 and decided “no, I want better numbers before I try again” you just had to go grind trash to level up and that’s it. At least the “go fuck off and farm souls” option in Elden Ring is fun when doing so is clearing minidungeons and evergaols and maybe seeing new loot.
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I do 100% see where you’re coming from too. I just think that people shouldn’t include Elden Ring when listing trend-chasing games that lazily slap “it’s a big open wooooorld!” onto an existing linear franchise. Elden Ring’s systems were designed really well around the bigness and openness of its world, unlike something like Sonic Frontiers or any of the MMO-single-player UE5 stuff coming out of AAA studios. And they even had the decency to build a whole IP around this new, distinct gameplay formula instead of making it Dark Souls 4: This Is What Dark Souls Is Now.
Like, maybe you don’t like red wine, fair enough, but at least Elden Ring is serving the red wine alongside a steak instead of alongside a bowl of Lucky Charms or fettuccine Alfredo.
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Unfortunately, “Elden-likes” will likely end up like 99% of “souls-likes” where all they do is copy the surface level stuff (“hard boss fights! Bonfires!”) instead of actually iterating on what made From’s games so well designed.
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