(Big spoiler warning, as discussing exploration for this game is to examine its locations, and the most significant element of exploration is the element of surprise, which this game provides in abundance, so if you plan on playing this ever in the future, you can stop here.)
One of the most successful games released after the pandemic was, “unsurprisingly”, FromSoftware’s Elden Ring. It is fascinating to study FromSoftware’s trajectory since the release of Demon’s Souls in 2009. Demon’s Souls had a rudimentary yet novel implementation of game mechanics, world and level design, narration, exploration, character interaction, RPG elements, a staggering difficulty curve, and an exquisite melee combat system, which are now famously, or rather infamously, known as the Soulsborne genre. Any game that implements a similar framework is referred to as a Soulslike game, essentially creating two subgenres in the gaming world. FromSoftware’s repertoire between Demon’s Souls and Elden Ring includes Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro, with each game iterating upon the same framework while applying its unique theme and settings to it. Among which Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Sekiro are cited as some of the greatest video games of all time. Additionally, Dark Souls has been crowned the Ultimate Game of All Time by the voting public of the Golden Joystick Awards. With each entry into the repertoire, these games have garnered an unparalleled notoriety due to the unforgiving nature of the Soulsborne formula towards the players compared to their general popular contemporaries. The cultural impact of these games cannot be overstated at the slightest because after persevering through the brutal difficulty, intensely oppressive and bleak environment and nightmarish enemies to battle (Bloodborne’s entirety is in a nightmare realm), players have actively being vocal about how these games have helped them battle depression (including me) leading to the popular phrase “Don’t you dare go hollow” (going hollow is a mechanic in Dark Souls series where every undead fears that they will one day lose their will to exist) which embodies the sentiment of facing life, like these games, with an unrelenting will (Naturally these are my comfort games). This has led to countless articles, blogs, and YouTube channels scrutinising the nature of these games and their impact on players’ psyches. The fragmented narrative format led to online communities theorising and filling in the gaps using NPC dialogues and item descriptions, coupled with awe-inspiring but distorted spatial dimensions in their world and level design; many YouTube channels are also dedicated to the same. It has also sparked a discussion about the difficulty of these games, specifically how adding a difficulty modifier lessens their value and how the uncompromising design aligns thematically and mechanically, rather than being exclusionary. All these dissections led some scholars to theorise that the series’ themes, difficulty, and mechanics, or video games in general, could be expressing modernist values. Developers around the world are developing Soulslike games, which in recent years have been increasingly ubiquitous (extending even to the Metroidvania style games, Hollow Knight and Nine Sols). All of this has culminated in Elden Ring selling 30 million copies by April 2025, since its release in March 2022, and its DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, selling more than 10 million copies since its release in June 2024; hence, the word “unsurprisingly”.
Historically, Soulsborne games had a fairly linear level design, with branching optional paths interspersed throughout. Here is the blueprint of what you will do in these games: explore the area for better loot, engage in combat with mob enemies, increase your level and your weapons’ level in the process, and by the time you reach the final boss, you are decently levelled with appropriate loot to take it down. The idea of difficulty is to keep the player constrained within a level until they prove that they are skilled enough and levelled up enough to enter the next dungeon by defeating the final boss of the current one. That way, you are encouraged to engage with the mechanics of the game, and you find yourself thoroughly exploring the levels for loot that may benefit you in the boss fights to come. Elden Ring, in a holistic sense, is a Soulsborne game that incorporates all its cardinal mechanics; however, the transition to an open world necessitates a higher degree of player freedom, which was missing in the older games. So, the choice of going open-world in Elden Ring has already raised questions about exploration, player freedom, and difficulty.
This is what the creator of the Soulsborne genre, Mr Hidetaka Miyazaki, said in his interview with Sony Interactive Entertainment.
What were your biggest lessons learned in making a sprawling open world game?
There were two major challenges we faced developing Elden Ring. The first was expanding upon the level of freedom. More so than our previous games, Elden Ring has a vast world with an open overworld, so we were faced with the ordeal of how we maintain our gameplay style while offering a renewed sense of openness. So with elements like balancing the player’s exploration alongside boss fights, the order of progression that players go through the game, and the progression of the events themselves throughout the map–trying to expand on player freedom while balancing all of this was a significant challenge. But we learned many great lessons attempting to achieve this.
Another challenge making an open world game is the tempo and pacing of the player’s progression, essentially trying to balance how the player paces themselves as they explore this vast open-ended map and how that factors into the scope of freedom and progression they provide. So we also learned some valuable lessons while making adjustments in that regard.
Let’s see how it’s done in Elden Ring. You wake up as tarnished, complete the tutorial, and as you enter the open world, you are greeted by this Mise-en-scène.
FromSoftware’s level designs are a feast to the senses, the intricacies within them are always awe-inspiring, the boss designs are second to none, they have also always had a story of conveying the beauty and the ugliness of death and decay and the combined spectacle and the sense of adventure spawned from all of this is something entirely unfathomable. There is a sense of wonder here which can only be described as “Game Wonder”, and the ritual of evoking this wonder has been highly prevalent in FromSoftware’s games due to their unwavering commitment to their artistic vision. In this single frame of entering the open world, you can see your first main goal (the castle on the top left), an NPC, a field boss and the massive golden tree, which provides life to this world, immediately introducing you to the blueprint of what’s to come. You can choose to first engage with the field boss, rush to the castle or interact with the NPC (which most players will do). But you can also choose to ignore the starting area and go east to Caelid, go north to Liurnia of the Lakes or further north to the biggest legacy dungeon (a nomenclature adapted for dungeons in Elden Ring, which are akin to singular levels in previous games) of the game, Leyndell. However, the constraint to progress further is that the players must defeat two Demi-Gods or Shardbearers. Now, if you choose to engage with the field boss, you will be demolished; if you choose to enter the castle, you will be demolished; if you choose to leave the starting area and explore any other sections of the map, you will be demolished. So, you must first thoroughly explore the open sections of the world filled with caves, catacombs, ruins and enemy camps to collect loot and upgrade materials and level yourself up, which will aid you in not getting demolished. Even though you have the freedom to practically go anywhere you want, the constraint of difficulty is applied, resembling that of the older games. So, the answer to balancing the illusion of providing a sense of freedom, from the last post, points to “Difficulty curve” or simply “Difficulty” being that tool, achieved through “Constraints” and “Goals”, two of the six “Indirect Control” methods in The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. Although I argued that this illusion is achieved as a means of balancing storytelling with player freedom, in the Soulsborne games, the narrative is fragmented, essentially conveyed through item descriptions, NPC dialogues, and level design. Hence, the balance for these games, as Miyazaki said, lies between the player’s pace of progression and the freedom.
Since the older games had a fairly linear design, the developers could maintain a constant difficulty curve throughout the games’ runtime. The additional degree of freedom due to the open-world nature complicates things, amounting to guesswork from both the players’ side and the developers’ side. For example, in my case, starting at Limegrave, I immediately decided to go south to the Weeping Peninsula, which was supposed to be 15-20 levels above my current one. I naively accepted the crushing difficulty I was facing, thinking that the difficulty had been stepped up a notch, as it’s a new entry in the Soulsborne genre. After finishing that area, I came back to Limegrave and realised I was grossly over-levelled, cruised through the area, I was aptly levelled for Stormveil Castle and Liurnia of the Lakes, where I found my second elevator to the underworld (yes there is another world underneath the main one), completed what I could there and proceeded to Altus Plateau then Mount Gelmir then Volcano Manor and finally Lyndell Capital and Shunning Grounds beneath it. Since Caelid, which is immediately accessible, was a hellish landscape of rot, shrouded in every essence in shades of red and black from the sky above to the land below, I ignored it until I finished Leyndell. When I came back, as intimidating as its setting was, it turned out to be a cakewalk for me. So the suggested approach, as per the difficulty by the developers, was
This was my route
This constant oscillation between being over-levelled and under-levelled was slightly frustrating, but the freedom to do it was nonetheless refreshing, and then things took a turn for the worse after the second act. The second act ends after defeating the final boss of the Leyndell Capital, and you proceed to the Mountain top of the Gaints. As all varieties of players are funnelled through this section, moving forward, the difficulty spike is very abrupt. The game becomes so punishing that all the exploration and levelling up done before this renders them meaningless. You are supposed to be at least level 100 with a vigour of level 50-60 to survive here and still die in two strikes from a mob enemy. You even have the freedom just to kill two shardbearers and access this area. Suppose you kill the Stormveil Castle and Raya Lucria shardbearers. In that case, you are still only level 60 with a vigour of 30-40, and if you decide to proceed here, you won’t be welcomed at all. And the difficulty keeps on increasing as you proceed further north to the Consecrated Snowfields, and finally, the Haligtree, an optional legacy dungeon ending with the most challenging boss fight in the Soulsborne genre, so much so that this boss fight became the straw that broke the camel’s back in the discussion of difficulty—a debate which was entirely in favour of FromSoftware. Since the difficulty in the boss fights is a topic of its own, and not much contributes to the topic of exploration, I will refrain from going down that rabbit hole. To mitigate these shortcomings, FormSoftware provided us with some tools, introduced in Elden Ring, which proved highly divisive within the Souls community. However, the Souls community has become one of the most toxic gaming communities, gatekeeping new players and confronting even old players by waving the “Git Gud” banner and arguing that using the tools provided by the developer to slightly alleviate the difficulty for beating these games isn’t considered a true accomplishment. I disagree with that argument. I have personally encouraged two of my closest friends to complete these games using any or all of the provided tools, as these games are truly once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Some of my most enjoyable and memorable gaming moments were spent exploring these games and defeating the bosses together.
There are still topics to be explored, including the enormity of this world and how it works in favour and detriment to this game, quest design, as well as loot and build variety. Additionally, I will expound on the effective nature of the provided tools in exploration and share my thoughts on the DLC. Since this post has been ongoing for longer than I expected, I will continue the discussion in the next one.
References
Tyrer, B. (2021, November 25). Dark Souls crowned Ultimate Game of All Time at Golden Joystick Awards. GamesRadar+. https://www.gamesradar.com/dark-souls-is-your-ultimate-game-of-all-time-at-the-golden-joystick-awards/
Can a Video Game Express Modernist Values? | Los Angeles Review of Books. (2020, October 31). Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/can-a-video-game-express-modernist-values/
Turi, T. (2022, March 4). An interview with FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki. PlayStation.Blog. https://blog.playstation.com/2022/01/28/an-interview-with-fromsoftwares-hidetaka-miyazki/
Game Wonder: on FromSoftware’s “Bloodborne” and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark” | Los Angeles Review of Books. (2023, February 11). Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/game-wonder-on-fromsoftwares-bloodborne-and-h-p-lovecrafts-the-haunter-of-the-dark/
Image Sources in order
[Saltinnee14](Sunday, May 26, 2024) my favorite elden ring screenshot. https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/1d1buys/my_favorite_elden_ring_screenshot/
Papadopoulos, J. (2022b, February 17). New beautiful screenshots released for Elden Ring. DSOGaming. https://www.dsogaming.com/screenshot-news/new-beautiful-screenshots-released-for-elden-ring/#gid=1&pid=2
Screenshot from Gameplay
[AnantNPradhan](Thursday, March 21, 2024) Some of my favourite Elden Ring screenshots, https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianGaming/comments/1bkq81y/some_of_my_favourite_elden_ring_screenshots/
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