Elden Ring brings me back to the era of game forums

digitaltrends.com:

With FromSoftware’s latest release, Elden Ring, more gamers than ever have been venturing to the world of Dark Souls (in everything but name). While the trial and tribulation-based gameplay hasn’t been for everyone in the past, Elden Ring quickly became a mainstream success, smashing the sales of previous Souls games in mere days. With so many people playing and countless stories about how each is approaching it, Elden Ring has unlocked memories of an olden time where gaming secrets were found via word of mouth and the name of the game was constant discovery.

Unlike past Souls titles, Elden Ring has taken a huge page from the book of open-world games — more specifically, a critically acclaimed hit you may have heard of called The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Like Zelda, Elden Ring throws players into its world and gives them free rein to play exactly the way they want. There is no set road and no rules of advancement besides going into different areas and defeating the main bosses, but the way you get to those objectives is entirely up to the individual player.

This gameplay philosophy gives every player a unique game identity, aside from their absurd custom characters. I recall a conversation I had with a friend where we talked about what we’d done so far in the game. He told me how he went under a lake and found some mystical area (which I still haven’t come across) and how he’d stormed Castle Stormveil and found a respawning zombie area to grind in. Basically, he’d been everywhere that the northwest of the map could offer.

Meanwhile I’d been going southeast, dealing with the likes of Castle Morne to find a pumpkin helmet, grinding levels by taking down a giant at the third church, and finding a turtle shell