Would Elden Ring be better or worse if it were linear?

[Tazor]

We have a paradox.

People praise Elden Ring for the freedom it offers, basically calling it "open world Dark Souls".

But at the same time the people say their favourite parts of the game were the linear legacy dungeons. Not the evergaols, caves, erdtrees or catacombs.

Imagine Elden Ring WITHOUT the open world and with TWICE the legacy dungeons. Each one of the new legacy dungeons having the same level of detail and uniqueness to them. No horse, no caves, no catacombs, no reused bosses, no vast world.

Or let's go the other way around. Imagine Elden Ring WITHOUT the legacy dungeons and with TWICE the open world content. No Leyndell, no Stormveil, no Volcano Manor. Twice the caves, catacombs and world size.

Would that make for a better or worse game in your eyes?

[Tao314zdin]

It is all down to details really IMO. In general I like the world-map structure and the way it is interconnected in multiple ways.

However:

From PVE-perspective: NPCs are integrated in a very inflexible manner that is prone to a lot of skipped interactions (or even items) and situations where dialogs do not reflect the state of the game or even contradict it.

From multiplayer-perspective: the blockage of dungeon and some areas passages in MP does not do any good for the experience. Torrent could have been usable to some capacity in MP (for example by being disabled if player takes damage from another player who is in <10m distance, reactivation would happen upon being >1m out of combat with another player).

If those above would be fixed I would say the open world is just outright better. Otherwise pros and cons.

[Bobr]

The open world is too open imo.

It feels like half the game is just riding the horse from one are to another to go pick up items.

I never played dark souls 1, but most people seem to agree that its very condensed open world was the best for exploration since you were constantly finding shortcuts and you had to actually learn where everything is in the world, instead of just looking at a map and teleporting around.

Idk tho cause I loved the linear nature of dark souls 3 since you could run through everything really quickly to make a new character for pvp.

If they just shrunk the elden ring map by like half I feel it would be the perfect mix of both ds1 and ds3.

[vamirez]

Same thread, different day? Ok, let's rant:

Ah, I see you cherrypicked answers from your last thread to build up your theory for this one. The argument you try to make here doesn't work. You couldn't exchange less open world for more legacy dungeons on a 1-to-1 basis - development doesn't work that way. And when someone says "I liked Leyndell best" doesn't mean that all of a sudden Limgrave is bad or not needed in the game. And again the "reused bosses". You need to get over the fact that fifteen Erdtree Avatars are allowed to guard things in the whole world.

This leads into that whole uniqueness stuff again... If the world the big locations are set in would be "unique" everywhere it would be a ridiculous themepark. It needs to be consistent to be more believable. Just imagine each lesser Erdtree would be guarded by some random named creature for no reason. And this is just one example. And I will never understand how fighting an avatar or whatever for two minutes like every 8-10 hours is a problem. In most games you do the exact same crap all the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time.

Trying to turn this thought experiment around doesn't work either. You could do that with almost every game in existence and ppl would rightfully answer: Duh?

Edit: The fact that the guy above immediately got three awards demonstrates that this whole endless topic is like a therapy session for the open world traumatized. If you ride the horse for hours this means you aren't even engaging with the content. And then he goes on about how it was cool in DS3 that you could avoid the content. Lolz...

[an entire Roman legion]

it's just a different approach to an established gameplay-loop. wich is fine, games need to try out new things you know...

[Tazor]

Originally posted by Bobr:

The open world is too open imo.

It feels like half the game is just riding the horse from one are to another to go pick up items.

I never played dark souls 1, but most people seem to agree that its very condensed open world was the best for exploration since you were constantly finding shortcuts and you had to actually learn where everything is in the world, instead of just looking at a map and teleporting around.

Idk tho cause I loved the linear nature of dark souls 3 since you could run through everything really quickly to make a new character for pvp.

If they just shrunk the elden ring map by like half I feel it would be the perfect mix of both ds1 and ds3.

Dark Souls 1 had a lot of verticality in its map design. If you look at the entire map in a 3D editor you can see it. That was my favorite map of all the Souls games. Dark Souls 3 was a lot more "level based" if that makes sense.

While I didn't ride my horse around for hours at at a time while picking up all the items I see and ignoring enemies, I am aware that is the current META. Especially for levelling up your flask and making the difficulty a joke.

[vamirez]

Originally posted by Tazor:

While I didn't ride my horse around for hours at at a time while picking up all the items I see and ignoring enemies, I am aware that is the current META. Especially for levelling up your flask and making the difficulty a joke.

This speaks for you - at least you did the content I assume.

[Bobr]

Originally posted by Tazor:

Originally posted by Bobr:

The open world is too open imo.

It feels like half the game is just riding the horse from one are to another to go pick up items.

I never played dark souls 1, but most people seem to agree that its very condensed open world was the best for exploration since you were constantly finding shortcuts and you had to actually learn where everything is in the world, instead of just looking at a map and teleporting around.

Idk tho cause I loved the linear nature of dark souls 3 since you could run through everything really quickly to make a new character for pvp.

If they just shrunk the elden ring map by like half I feel it would be the perfect mix of both ds1 and ds3.

Dark Souls 1 had a lot of verticality in its map design. If you look at the entire map in a 3D editor you can see it. That was my favorite map of all the Souls games. Dark Souls 3 was a lot more "level based" if that makes sense.

While I didn't ride my horse around for hours at at a time while picking up all the items I see and ignoring enemies, I am aware that is the current META. Especially for levelling up your flask and making the difficulty a joke.

Its not even a matter of trying to over level my character with late game weapons and buffs. Just trying to actually get anywhere is a chore. Wanna go to the academy? Gotta ride your horse all the way around to the side to get a key, and then back again. There's no reason to fight anything since they basic mob AI is boring and has like 2 attacks for most enemies, and even if they were fun to fight, they die in 1-2 hits and drop like 5 runes. Either that or they're incredibly tanky while also dropping barely any runes.

Does anyone actually stop and get off their horse to fight every group of wandering undead or lobsters that show up in limgrave and liurnia? Am I missing something? Are they actually a super fun fight?

[cernodan]

I like to explore to my heart's content and find hidden things. This applies to every game with a huge world, where the joy and wonder of discovery are only present the first time.
After that, you tend to optimize and streamline the crap out of the game, because you know everything and seen everything.

[Mr_Blank]

I don’t know but I’m leaning towards no

[zero]

can people not prefer the linear moments while also enjoying the open world aspect of it?

does the open world aspect have to be the most enjoyed part of the game for it to matter?

the open world aspect plays a large part in what makes this game great, its a lot of free exploration and doing content in the order you want, while also having the excellent mini dungeons the old games are known for, both things play a part in making this game good.

[Norm Macdonald's Ghost]

Originally posted by Tazor:

We have a paradox.

People praise Elden Ring for the freedom it offers, basically calling it "open world Dark Souls".

But at the same time the people say their favourite parts of the game were the linear legacy dungeons...

People say Miller Lite tastes great. Other people say it's less filling. I fear, if we continue to explore these unsolvable paradoxes, the universe will explode. Please, stop it. Think of the children.

[Yard-Dog®]

If it were linear, it would take away from its charm for me personally. I don’t like my potential curiosities to be set forth for me in a destined path. Elden Ring was on the money with its execution for me.

[Zephyr]

The game by all standards is very good. For my feeling it is too much, though. With limited playing time and the ambition to explore most (if not everything) it is a 6 months project at least. I finished Dark Souls 1 in something like 50 hours I believe, in Elden Ring it is already about 110 hours and I just killed Radahn and playing Nokron now. Afterwards it is Altus plateau and the other regions left. The game is simply gorgeous at times (often, in fact), but suffers a little from unnecessary bloat with "repeated" dungeons/bosses. It did not need to be that large and could still have been as good, that is my opinion.

Upgrading weapons seems to be a little mediocre (skill scaling) and standard enemies give relatively few "souls". This is all needed to control player progression at least a little better by game design and it is necessiated by the non-linear open world.

On the other hand transferring "souls games" to the open world game design was a logical step. It is the desired games style by a larger audience and I guess in this respect (bringing "Souls" to many people) Elden Ring was a great success. Personally I would have enjoyed a linear and smaller game just the same I think.

Overall the game truly is great and small criticism like this just underscores the quality I think.

[SVΛ]

Originally posted by Tao314zdin:

It is all down to details really IMO. In general I like the world-map structure and the way it is interconnected in multiple ways.

However:

From PVE-perspective: NPCs are integrated in a very inflexible manner that is prone to a lot of skipped interactions (or even items) and situations where dialogs do not reflect the state of the game or even contradict it.

From multiplayer-perspective: the blockage of dungeon and some areas passages in MP does not do any good for the experience. Torrent could have been usable to some capacity in MP (for example by being disabled if player takes damage from another player who is in <10m distance, reactivation would happen upon being >1m out of combat with another player).

If those above would be fixed I would say the open world is just outright better. Otherwise pros and cons.

I feel with you on the first point. After finding out about some of my missed interactions, I tried my best to make sure that a friend didn't, which ultimately limited a lot of exploration early on. Being paranoid about entering an area and triggering a missable/skip is not a good feeling.

Your point regarding MP is exactly the reason why a friend and I played Seamless for their first run. As much as we love and crave invasions, it initially was not worth having to run everywhere and make constant connects/disconnects. I really wish Elden Ring embraced the open world aspect to multiplayer and just made cooperation seamless. I don't care for the shared progress, but at least let us use the whole map and all the tools as our playground.

They could have just made the spectral steeds disappear only when a hostile entity invades, but your solution is much more elegant. They could have also embraced horseback pvp and add in a wind stream mechanic to catch up like in Mario Kart to make it so players can't just run away indefinitely from each other.