this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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For me, it isn't even any of this stuff. It's almost totally that the games are too big and take too long to get any enjoyment. Most of the time spent playing the games isn't fun. It's just traveling and maybe collecting garbage that doesn't add anything to the enjoyment.
The old games were fun for every moment with the traversal. I don't think that can carry a newer game, because it isn't as unique anymore, but it was always more fun than riding a horse from point to point.
If they condensed the story and game down to tens of hours, I would consider it. I'm not going to play a typical Ubisoft game that takes hundreds. Even Elden Ring took me just about 100 and it was getting to the point of being too much, and it was far more interesting and fun.
Yep. Open world games usually feel like they can't have any blank spaces, and so they waste resources filling every inch with something, even if it's just a waste of time. You've always been able to run past enemies in FS games, but it took effort and you had to pay attention. The open world of ER wastes so many resources filling the open world, but also makes it trivial to not engage with. Even when there's a collectable you want, you just ride by on Torrent, grab it, and leave. You don't engage with it, but they expended time and money creating it.
The open world gives you a lot of distinct options, but do you really have more real ones than DS1? At the start of DS1 you have three paths (4 with the master key). In ER at the start you have three obvious paths (Stormveil, Weeping Peninsula, and Cailid) and one less obvious (going around Stormveil). I'd argue the paths of DS1 are far more interesting to engage with. The Catacombs are a design mistake though because it's so hard to get out of. The reward for that path is very interesting for a new start (and it's balanced for a new player, which is why Pinwheel becomes a joke at the mid-game when most people fight him), but getting out without the Lord Vessel is a huge challenge. It needs to have a TP or jump or something at the bottom to get back when you're done.
I agree woth everything you said but want to add that leaving big open spaces can be an effective design choice. Compare botw to totk and the ambiance changes drastically due to this.
But you could always run past enemies in Dark Souls, and it was a much more relevant gameplay pattern in those games that didn't put a Stake of Marika right in front of the boss door. I think the open world adding nonlinearity to the Souls system was really elegant, since getting stuck on a boss meant you usually had something else interesting to do while improving your skills and/or grinding for stats. You still can bash your head into the boss over and over until you finally solve the skill issue, of course, and Stakes of Marika make that a lot less frustrating. But if you were in the situation in DS1-3 and decided "no, I want better numbers before I try again" you just had to go grind trash to level up and that's it. At least the "go fuck off and farm souls" option in Elden Ring is fun when doing so is clearing minidungeons and evergaols and maybe seeing new loot.
I do 100% see where you're coming from too. I just think that people shouldn't include Elden Ring when listing trend-chasing games that lazily slap "it's a big open wooooorld!" onto an existing linear franchise. Elden Ring's systems were designed really well around the bigness and openness of its world, unlike something like Sonic Frontiers or any of the MMO-single-player UE5 stuff coming out of AAA studios. And they even had the decency to build a whole IP around this new, distinct gameplay formula instead of making it Dark Souls 4: This Is What Dark Souls Is Now.
Like, maybe you don't like red wine, fair enough, but at least Elden Ring is serving the red wine alongside a steak instead of alongside a bowl of Lucky Charms or fettuccine Alfredo.
Unfortunately, "Elden-likes" will likely end up like 99% of "souls-likes" where all they do is copy the surface level stuff ("hard boss fights! Bonfires!") instead of actually iterating on what made From's games so well designed.