Will future open world games try to copy Elden Ring's success? If they do, it's not going to work.
In 2017, I was so hooked on Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild that I barely touched my gaming PC for a month. I thought I was tired of open world games—and of Zelda—but Breath of the Wild's freeform approach to exploration made me feel like an honest-to-god adventurer in a videogame for the first time in a decade. It sold 10 million copies in a year. Surely, I thought, Breath of the Wild was going to trigger a seismic shift in open world game design.
I think it's more likely the opposite is true. No one's going to copy Elden Ring's success because no one can.I could go on and on about the obvious ways Elden Ring differs from the open world games of Ubisoft or Bethesda or Rockstar—the lack of skins and paid level boosts, the absence of sidequest checklists and glowing waypoints telling you where to go next. The cryptic NPC dialogue, winding castle ramparts and hulking bosses. Blah blah. We all know the deal.
Elden Ring was not a phenomenon because of those design decisions. It was a phenomenon because it was the payoff to a decade-long underdog story. The experience of seeing Elden Ring become the triumphant, ultimate version of the game FromSoftware's been making and remaking was its own entertainment.
Designers couldn't stop gushing about its raw genius, and players were either inducted into the cult of Souls or pissed off that they found this game nobody would shut up about aggressively off-putting. But even the haters who got murdered by skeletons in the first 30 minutes of Dark Souls and yeeted the disc into a closet got caught up in the hype of Elden Ring. It was an event.
Those were things in Dark Souls, but they weren't Dark Souls, any more than some other boxing movie could be Rocky. Rocky is the inexplicable lump you get in your throat 30 seconds intoJAJAJAJA surrealista #PS4share pic.twitter.com/bkUhsvo1agDark Souls and Elden Ring’s flaws are, for the most part, idiosyncrasies that converts hold up as part of their charm, from
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