A GENUINELY OPEN WORLD

Open world games are a dime-a-dozen in 2022. It’s actually rare for a big budget action game to come in any other format, making rare anomalies like The Last of Us 2 and Doom Eternal very welcome treats indeed. Once a promise of freedom, the open world has become stale.

For all the merits of, say, Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry (noticing a pattern here?) their open worlds feel like nothing more than set dressing. Beyond the ocassional impulse to enter photo mode, a typical modern open world game doesn’t offer much more than just a huge expanse of traversable space, dotted with dozens of activities that are all pretty much identical. There’s a place for that style of game, but does every open world game need to feel the same way? Elden Ring thinks not, and would like a word, thanks.

The shift away from the Metroidvania-style level design of the Dark Souls games is a genuine cause for concern, but a couple of hours with Elden Ring immediately dismissed any misgivings I had about the format change. Not only that, but From Software has managed to do something that very few open world games have ever done: the studio has filled the map with so many unique encounters, so many tantalising reasons to explore, and such a dearth of identikit content-bucket style ‘missions’, that the Lands Between feels like a genuinely fascinating, eerie, and dangerous place to be. The recent Public Network Test offered up a fraction of the map, but I feel like I barely scratched the surface of what it has to offer after four hours of play across two sessions.

Dark Souls changed the modern RPG indelibly. With any luck, Elden Ring will change the modern open world with the same emphasis. This is genuine worldbuilding, not just a land full of waypoints and useless collectibles.

“THE SHIFT AWAY FROM THE METROIDVANIA-STYLE LEVEL DESIGN OF THE DARK SOULS GAMES IS A GENUINE CAUSE FOR CONCERN”