Some Elden Ring devs had "concerns" about its open world style, which the DLC will make "denser and richer"

rockpapershotgun.com:

From Software president Hidetaka Miyazaki has acknowledged that members of the Dark Souls studio had misgivings about Elden Ring's shift to a full-blown open world format, while qualifying that Elden Ring's vision for an open world was never "traditional". Rather, Elden Ring is an "open world" game in the same way that Dark Souls is a "hard" game, Miyazaki feels. Confused? Well, this is the godfather of the notoriously unforthcoming Souls series we're talking about. I've never interviewed the guy, but I suspect he composes his responses using the game's soapstone messaging system.

"It would be a lie to say there was no concern about that from any of the dev team," Miyazaki told IGN in an interview following the reveal of the first Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree trailer, which I've written up here. "But what I want to stress is that we didn't set out with the goal to make an open world game in the traditional sense." He commented that his approach to open world design is similar to his philosophy on game difficulty. "We don't set out to create a difficult game. We set out to create a challenging game. And in order to achieve that, we need there to be threats and dangers, and we need there to be unknowns."

Miyazaki added that "we need this breadth of freedom - this high degree of freedom in how you approach this adventure, and in order to have adventure, in order to have discoveries, again, you need to have some unknowns. And for it to be a discovery, it needs to feel like it's an unknown, feel like it's there to be discovered."

I'm covering these quotes because I myself am not a huge enjoyer of Elden Ring's open world format. I think enthusiasm for it rests on the false idea that the Souls games (and Bloodborne, whose much-demanded PC port has never seemed further away) are "linear", whereas they reward exploration in all sorts of ways, and the secret routes and areas they contain are all the more enjoyable to discover for being less obvious.

By contrast, a