I'm Glad I'm Missing Out On The Elden Ring Hype

thegamer.com:

I promise I'm not wheezing down an oxygen tank full of copium while I write this, but I'm glad I'm not into Elden Ring. Hey, I admit it, I wanted to like FromSoftware's latest masterpiece. I stand by my view that a game as obtuse and uninviting, however compelling it may be for those enraptured by it, cannot be the greatest game of all time, and I'm still fearful for the future of the open-world genre I love, despite its increasing staleness. But Elden Ring is fresh, new, and everyone loves it. I don't, but I hardly matter. In a medium that frequently plays it safe, focus tests every pixel ad nauseum, and won't do anything that someone else hasn't made money by doing previously, it's refreshing to see a game that goes against the grain take off, even if it's leaving me on the runway.

I wrote something similar a while back about Breath of the Wild, another foundation-shifting game that wasn't on my frequency. I said that I hoped I'd hate Breath of the Wild 2, something many people seemed to get the wrong idea of from the headline alone - and who needs to read the whole article when the headline's right there? Since those people may well have done the same again, this may be pointless, but I'll briefly describe my point anyway. BOTW was not for me, yet I understood how important it was for Zelda, for Nintendo, and for gaming as a whole. Even though a sequel in the same vein will no doubt pass me by again, I'd rather it stuck to its Master Swords and built on that legacy than make a game completely different that I personally might enjoy. I can already see ripples of BOTW in games I enjoy, and they're better for it, so I want BOTW2 to make bigger, wider reaching ripples. Not every game needs to be made for me, and it's