Elden Ring, you’re doing it wrong!

Online games news Tedious Retro Gamer, 09-03-2022
Online Games Bay

Elden Ring premiered recently to pretty much universal acclaim - critics and users seem to love the concept, the outlook, the formula, the experience. And someone should tell FromSoftware they’re doing it wrong! And someone has...

In recent years almost each and every premiere of big title was disappointing - Anthem, Cyberpunk 2077, Battlefield 2042, eFootball, GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition, LawBreakers, Fallout 76 and many, many more. So when Elden Ring was announced to premiere in March 2022 a lot of people were anxious to see how Dark Souls game would look like as a open world experience, but at the same time a lot of people were afraid it’s gonna be another disappointment.

Yes, there were some performance issues, there were some technical problems, but overall the game had one of the best openings in recent memory - average score according to Metacritic between 94 and 96%, almost 1 million concurrent players on Steam, but it is hard to find someone, who would complain about Elden Ring or demand refund. Come on, FromSoftware you’re doing it wrong!

Where’s the drama? Where are the controversies? Where are buggy releases? Where are idiotic excuses from management? It’s not how you should publish a new game in this times! And thank god someone spoke loudly and proudly about it! The game developers from other companies, like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Sony took to Twitter to tell the world the whole truth - Elden Ring is a complete disaster, but people just don’t realize that!

(short pause for the depth of that idiocy to sink in)

Yes, when you take a look at the Twitter accounts of current and former EA, Ubisoft and Sony developers you can learn that the user experience is completely wrong in Elden Ring, the menu and interface design is completely wrong, the PC performance is a disaster, the world design is wrong, quests design is wrong... And the weirdest thing about it is they are for real! People, who publish for years completely uninspired clones of the same game (like Assassins Creed series, recent Far Cry games) criticize Elden Ring for... not following their footsteps, I guess.

I could comment that in many ways, but I see no point. For years players were complaining that Ubisoft just sells them clones of the same game and each time they delivered the same half-backed product filled with same pointless side-quests, same overused formulas and same monotonous gameplay, but now at least we know why. Because everybody else were doing the same thing. And players? They were playing the greatest games ever, but just didn’t realize how great those games actually were.

Well, I guess someone has some growing up to do, now that Elden Ring has opened, hopefully, a new chapter in open world games development.

28-03-2022