We’ve recently got back into Elden Ring which we’ll maybe get to again this weekend. We’ve recently finished the Abyssal Woods with its boss at the end (really cool fight, first time I’ve managed an entire fight with parries) and are now exploring this green, verdant, lush, and jungle-like area in the top-left corner of the DLC’s map (don’t remember the name).
Apart from that, I kept playing Monster Hunter Rise for a while this week and gave the lance a try for the first time in probably 15 years of my playing Monster Hunter, and I must say: it’s a lot of fun. Felt a little nostalgic today, so I downloaded PPSSPP and Monster Hunter Freedom Unite and started a new character. It’s a lot different than I remembered it, and yet it felt a lot like visiting an old friend you’ve not seen for years.
Also transferred my old save data from the PSP:
Considering I had played the game for so long, I barely accomplished anything in it lol. A bunch of random armours and weapons, 0 actual builds with useful skills and whatnot. Simpler times 🤧
I’m not sure if I’ve made a post about this before but here goes. ER has had an enormous impact on the genre, the overall visibility of it, and pushed the boundaries of what a soulslike can look like nowadays. Between the liberty of the open world, the variety of possible builds as well as the very deep lore, there’s a lot to like about the game and for a good reason.
How much do you feel like ER will impact soulslikes to come? I’ve not felt a noticeable impact yet, but most soulslikes I’ve played either were in development only shortly after, I assume, or before ER dropped. I haven’t checked out newer ones outside Khazan or Lies of P yet. Have you felt a different in design yet? Because I feel like ER could very well be as, or close to, influential as Dark Souls was back when it came out.
I’m playing Valheim this weekend (and the next few weekends for sure) which has soulsy-style combat with parry, dodge, stamina… And an Open World! And crafting… But is it like Elden Ring? Not at all. Honestly, after playing souls games for more than a decade, just combat combat kill boss kill boss is not cutting it anymore for me. It’s fun, but too shallow sometimes? Elden Ring was kind of my hope that it would rekindle my flame for the genre, but it didn’t. It felt like dark souls with some AAA marketing words (open world! crafting!) slapped on top, and the open world just didn’t feel as rewarding or as open as Zelda BOTW (which for me stands as the golden standard of Open world games). Today I like games with souls combat but that have more than just “fight!” as the goal. The older I get, the more I prefer to build things rather than destroy/kill as an end goal. Ashen was a great souls-like to me because everything I did brought a little bit of life back to that bleak world, while in most souls the world is permanently bleak, and saving the world is an end goal that you don’t get to see yourself (same complaint I had with BOTW, you save the world, but don’t get to enjoy living in it, but at least on that it was remedied during TOTK where you can kind of see the world during its rebuilding). Back to Valheim though, I’d really like a more AAA RPG souls with the same kind of ideas: build your base, prepare yourself, fight enemies, kill bosses, progress you and the world. Enshrouded and Valheim are close, but are not really souls games.
Elden Ring was such a critical and commercial success that, yes, this is going to be a massive influence on future Souls and Soulslikes games (and other games).
What are those influences going to be? That’s a really interesting question. Here are my hopes:
- Open World/Interconnectedness: That you can simply go almost anywhere you want is such a big selling point of ER. Go high up, pick a point in the distance, and just go there. The other thing that this brings is the non-linear access to things. Every playthrough can be different. You can beeline to something for your build specifically. The lesson other games take from this doesn’t strictly have to be an expensive open world. You can achieve interconnectedness in many ways. For example, you could make more classic dungeons and simply make many different connections between them.
- Verticality (aka Jumping is fun): This has been missing for me when I’m playing other Souls(likes). Jumping in a fight is just such a fun movement option; you can dodge and then punish or gain more distance and so much more. But this also brings so much for environmental design in the dungeons and makes them far more fun to traverse.
- Expansive RPG mechanics/Build variety: Elden Ring has just so many unique options, which combine beautifully with each other and give so many different build opportunities. This point also combines perfectly with the first point since each build gives you a different reason to go to a different place in the game and experience the game in a different way.
I’m finishing up my first randomizer run of Elden Ring this weekend. It was lots of fun :) The toughest fight was in Messmer’s arena: first phase Gaius and second phase Midra.
For my second run I’m going to change some options in the enemy randomizer. I found it boring that Bosses only randomized in their category (Night Bosses only with Night Bosses etc.). I’m also doing my second playthrough at RL1; I’m not sure if I will even be able to complete it – it’s going to be heavily dependent on the seed – but it’s going to be boatloads of fun.
Elden Ring is absolutely guiding FromSoft’s development future.
Nightreign and Duskbloods are the first purely multiplayer games, which is their big takeaway from Elden Ring: people like to co-op.
They already know people are competitive from their invasion pvp mechanics.
For me, Elden Ring solidified that games have to explore other genres too. We’ve been seeing new strategy and turn based games gaining popularity, and part of that is simply the bar is set pretty high to stay above the saturation zone.
I don’t expect Elden Ring to have that big of an impact, personally. The main thing it contributed was an open world, everything else was pretty much just Dark Souls. And people have been making knockoff Dark Souls since the first one, pretty much.
Yes, an open world added on top of it was popular with a lot of people, but it’s way too expensive to really set a new standard I think. I think we might see some new titles imitate the aesthetic though, like palette and colour grading and all that. Like that Hoyoverse game that just got announced, Nodusfall.
Probably won’t play too much this weekend, but might put some more hours into Withering Realms. Still very similar thoughts as I had last week. If you still haven’t played Withering Rooms yet, this is your weekly reminder, I guess.
Lies of P felt much more like Bloodborne than Elden Ring fwiw.
I wouldn’t mind more ER-style soulslikes, but im sure its a massive undertaking to make something like that.
if I am playing anything its probably God Of War Chains of Olympus or Ghost of Sparta, been binging the series for laufey.
as for the question, I feel as though since Elden Ring was such a giant commercial and critical success, its only reasonable to follow the money and find the logical end point of Elden Rings success. Nightreign was a weird experiment and Duskbloods is locked to Switch 2 which is making it a harder sell then Elden Ring. Personally I would hope for bloodborne like stuff as I am basically craving more of the lovecraftian horror and fast paced combat of that game.
anyway some day I will return to souls games, but I got 5 more God of War games to go through yet
I don’t think we’re going to keep getting open-world souls games, even from other devs. The cultural climate at the time was everyone was pretty burnt out on open world games, seeing it as synonymous with ubislop.
I’ll be surprised if we don’t see things like ashes of war again. I guess it will depend on how hard From wants to go in on these MOBA-style player characters like we have in Duskbloods and Nightreign with set abilities.
I’ll be sad if we never have things like the phisic tonic again. Or if invasion gameplay will always have fogwalls
