Elden Ring Set a High Bar for Future Open-World Games

gamerant.com:

In a lot of players’ minds, Elden Ring has already won Game of the Year for this year, the next, and so forth. This year has featured a lot of impactful games and there are still more to come that may dethrone Elden Ring from that spot, but as it stands, fans are still engrossed and enthralled by Elden Ring months after its release.

Now that there is some distance between it and its release, the reasons why it has made such an impact can be cross-examined. Being an open-world action-RPG, Elden Ring on paper is not the first of its genre. But in terms of what it does to elevate open-world games and how it adapts its popular Souls formula into an open-world, the bar has been set exceedingly high for any developers working on future open-world games.

Elden Ring Player Sees New Enemy Attack After 300 Hours of Playtime

Elden Ring answers the question, “What if Dark Souls had an open-world?” But it is also much more comprehensive than that. FromSoftware is known for its phenomenal world-building in Demon’s Souls, the Dark Souls trilogy, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Building from what makes those games special for Souls fans, Elden Ring expands FromSoftware’s traditionally linear and intimate level designs into an open world that still manages to resemble those level designs. In an open-world game, the most important feature is ensuring that exploration and the content that saturates it is satisfying, particularly with the least amount of hand-holding or restriction.

Of course, the term “open-world” suggests that players may freely roam, and nonlinearity is paramount to having that experience satisfied. Certain areas or bosses are required in order to progress into other areas and biomes in Elden Ring, but players