Elden Ring thoughts

Elden Ring critique after about 40 hours.

It's hard to praise this game much besides the addition of the open world. In many regards, it's no different than the other souls games, particularly Dark Souls 3, in a lot of things which I will detail below.

I do like the open world, and it's a lot larger than I had anticipated. There's a lot to find, and the variety in a lot of the areas is pretty nice. The ability to spawn closer to boss rooms is nicer too, although some of the positions are still a little questionable.

Now to the criticism of the game of which is a lot of my criticisms with the other Souls game to, and what they've failed to improve upon or simply not tried to whatsoever.

- First up, animations.
Expecting new animations these days has become a meme, like "You expect new animations ever 2 years?! LOL", but for this game it has been almost 11 years since Dark Souls 1. Is it too much to ask to expect *some* new animations by this point? Some bosses have the same exact animations as certain bosses from Dark Souls 1. I've already seen bosses with movesets from the Capra Demon, and also the Asylum Demon. It isn't too much to ask that at least all the bosses have completely new animations, when analyzing their moves is literally a part of the experience itself, being an action game. If it is, maybe just have less bosses instead of throwing in copy/paste bosses and put more care into a smaller pool of bosses? This brings me to the next point.

- Too many reused bosses.
Why are there so many reused bosses in this game? It kind of defeats the point of an open world when half the cave dungeons are reused rooms, with a lot also containing reused bosses. Effectively, the cave dungeons are simply worse chalice dungeons with a larger traveling distance, and no replayability. I hate to admit it, but fromsoft somehow found a way to make the chalice dungeons even worse.

Same thing on the World Map, not only do we have reused bosses in dungeons but also on the world map, too? Just have less bosses. You don't need to throw bosses everywhere haphazardly. Going onto the next point.

- Why does every cave need a boss?
It's sad that there are very few places in the game, largely dungeons, where it is just a large area to explore and find something cool. Going into these caves or mines, it's almost an expectation that you're going to fight a boss, instead of it being a surprise of "Oh, there's a boss here!", this again gives me the sense that these are simply worse chalice dungeons. Again feeding into the point above, if you're going to place so many bosses that they have to be reused so ridiculously just have less bosses in the first place.

- Ornstein backdash. Why do so many bosses in this game have this? Enemies doing 5+ hit combos with no window of attack inbetween only to end it with an ornstein backdash that creates a massive distance between you and them over and over isn't good design. A lot of these enemies also simply don't need it, as there's already a very small window of opportunity for retaliation as it is. Just patch this out, it's bad.

- Boss room size making no sense.
Why do boss rooms and their size make absolutely no sense in this game most of the time? For some bosses, like the Mimic Tear or Ancestral Spirit you have enormous rooms... rooms far larger than you'll ever need in those fights. Yet for other bosses, like the Tree Spirit in the dungeon located very close to the tutorial area, which is a massive boss that has many attacks that can cover the entirety of that room... the room is almost half the size of the previously named two. This game has some of the most nonsensical design decisions when it comes to where some bosses are placed.

- Hit detection on some enemies is off. There's just a lot of very weird detection in general in this game.
I've had multiple weapons swing directly through rats and dogs, multiple times. To the point where I consider these two some of the most dangerous enemies in the game now just because I'm not confident my weapon is even going to hit them all the time. Same thing for certain enemies... and I've had sword slashes go directly through my character from them multiple times when it clearly should've hit.

- Lock-On in this game is broken and needs tweaking. It's awful, this problem didn't exist in Dark Souls 1 or Bloodborne. I've been playing Bloodborne for the past month coming upto Elden Ring and I've never had issues with lock-on a single time in that session. I've had issues in Elden Ring multiple times, it's Dark Souls 2 levels of bad.

See here for an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxWenmBLI6o

I may update this as I play onwards.

Overall, I think the game is a good attempt at making an Open World Souls game... but there is a LOT that needs improving. A lot of care and attention seems to have gone into the lore and the world design, but this has clearly caused some neglect in other areas, mainly the side content, where a lot of it feels redundant and frankly kind of defeats the point of having the open world to begin with. Also in the boss design, where it feels like a flat out lack of care just has gone into developing the bosses.

I am still enjoying this game a lot, however these are my thoughts after my playtime so far.