At risk of sounding boomer-y, these days big budget games are too samey, too formulaic. Every studio seems to be sharing one cookie cutter to make their games fit in with the rest.
There are some lessons the games industry needs to learn from Elden Ring, and I’m here to talk about them.
LESSON 1
Your horse (or car) should be fun to use!
Torrent, the Elden Ring horse, appears instantly when you need him. One button and you’re zooming around the Lands Between. Why don’t other games do this?
I’m mainly complaining about Breath of the Wild here, the horse in that game is useless because it doesn’t follow you anywhere and can’t be magically spawned in whenever I need it, meaning I did a lot of walking in that game when I could have been gaily zipping about.
This system is present in some other games, Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 have good examples of vehicle summoning systems in their games with Roach appearing naturally from behind the camera and your cars auto-driving to your location in Cyberpunk.
And, frankly, if Cyberpunk can manage it then your game can manage it.
Lesson 2
Reward the players with cool shit!
There’s something to reward the player for thinking intelligently around every corner in Elden Ring. It’s not even normally an item. Sometimes it’s a beautiful view of the landscape, or a better view of an upcoming area, or a cool fight you didn’t expect. I cannot begin to describe how many ruins, caves, houses, forests, swamps, sewers, alleyways, and dungeons I’ve explored in games just to be rewarded with nothing. Or, worse than nothing, something completely uninspired.
But I want that cool shit; I want to see things I never would, discover artifacts I wasn’t supposed to, unleash a beast from its eternal slumber!
I want to explore Elden Ring’s every nook and cranny because it has earned my trust.
I wish more games could.
LESSON 3
Let your players use their brain!
When stuck in Elden Ring there are usually a few options ahead. You can go elsewhere with intent to come back later, you can plough on ahead and hope you get to the right place, or you can try to figure out what the next step is.
Figuring out the next step can be confusing, but there are enough clues around the world which allow the player the possibility of figuring it out.
This is in direct comparison to the bog-standard ‘quest log and objective marker’ structure of games such as modern Fallouts, Rockstar games, and the Horizon series. Each of these say they want the player to discover things themselves, but then will slap down a big glowing marker telling you where the next Cool Thing™ is.
FromSoft teaches us that this is completely redundant.
LESSON 4
Clean up the HUD!
So much of the HUD (heads up display) in Elden Ring is deliberate, much like the rest of the game’s systems. I don’t believe the same can be said for many other AAA titles of late, however.
Usually the HUD just feels like an afterthought, a lazy way of helping testers find the next Cool Thing™ causing a bunch of distracting crap to litter the screen. Elden Ring’s HUD comes and goes only as it’s needed, giving the player breathing space between encounters.
Elden Ring also doesn’t use the same old tricks as other games such as radial quest markers that never leave the screen, and the game aims to have as little text on the screen as necessary where others happily display entire quest chains just in case you care.
Well, Fallout 76, I don’t. Now please stop telling me about the 15 ‘miscellaneous’ quests that I’m ignoring.
IMAGES: FromSoftware – Elden Ring; u/gamboozino
