Overestimating Overviews of Overworlds

A look back at the hyper-triumphant reception of Elden Ring's overworld

Elden Ring, since February of 2022, has summoned a storm of hyperbolic praise which is quite beyond my experiences with it, leaving me at once mystified and unconvinced. A great deal of this praise obviously, and admittedly, constitutes the so-called hype machine; so, I will be engaging the stupidest and predominant examples of criticism.

For years, it’s been clear that various journalistic and critical outlets for videogames are united in doling out fairly equivalent, readymade praise if the game in question possesses a certain level of “polish”, “spectacle”, and “content.” For myself, the most hyperbolic of these praises for Elden Ring tend to concern its overworld’s level design. Here are just a few of the article and video titles concerning this:

Looking at this bundle of salivating congratulations, I can only squint, and ask: “Really? … I mean, really?”

All of these declarations and evaluations — all of them — hinge, with great dependence, upon the detail of what Elden Ring chooses to signal and what not to signal, relative to quests or points of interest (note, though, that Elden Ring does have map-markers for the locations of characters and sites).

That is to say, the identification of world design herein largely does not involve the level design at all, but rather complementary, indicative abstractions.

Consider these quotes now from several relevant articles/videos:

While most open world games crowd the player with chores, directions, and blaring side-missions, Elden Ring remains aloof. It’s a game that invites me to go where I will.

Elden Ring is a masterclass of design for an open world. It’s not full of icons or waypoint markers telling you where to go next, but it still fills the world to the brim with things to do, rather than just making it a set dressing to look at pretty vistas.

…completing an open-world game can quickly become a chore with the overwhelming number of activities to accomplish. Maps can soon become overrun with mystery icons or consistently distract players from their current goal with other missions nearby.

It is common to be bombarded with things to do, UI tooltips to read, and constantly going to the various submenus to see what to do next.

If the “revolution” here hinges upon the matter of UI and HUD technicalities, I am sorry to say that Elden Ring has… well, not done very much — in part because this absent, or quiet, signaling has been the standard for the relevant games within FromSoftware’s library for years now.

On a certain level, these hyperbolic claims of “revolution” (a word long deprived of all legitimate power from its overuse within every single domain of product advertisement), of an antitheticality so tremendous that it retroactively spoils everything prior to Elden Ring, are amusing, for they suggest a medium so deprived and mean in its vision, and an audience so simple-minded, that a handful of adjustments (mostly omissive) bring about the most miraculous thing made by human hands.

If this is the case, I would posit that videogames exist in a creative state more dire than any exhausted criticism of the “open world” genre would dare to admit. So, while I disagree with all of these self-styled critics and content-makers about the quality of Elden Ring, I would — I, suppose, amusedly — agree with the implication which they have unintentionally let loose. Videogames do suffer, more and more every year, from an incredible constriction of imagination and design possibilities.

Anyway — Elden Ring has not, actually, done very much to reinvent its chosen genre. The assertion that it has “[ignored] twenty years of open-world design” is so stunningly, evidently false that it is amazing such a byline could even be chosen to garner incredulous clicks. Elden Ring’s overworld is straight up some of the most open-world design I’ve ever seen, being overall defined by broad extents of non-specific, trees-and-rocks stretches, occasionally split up by vertical sections, dotted by typologies — catacombs, rises, ruin chambers, caves, forts, churches — which quickly become predictable, as it concerns their basic, building-block constitution, and constantly alerting you to the “lootability” of its land’s natural resources.

These constant alerts of “lootability” are destructive to the explorative sensibility, for they create an explicit hierarchy of zones which are “desirable”, or “useful”, as set against zones which are “useless”, or “pointless.” If Elden Ring supposedly succeeds because of a number of tactful omissions, it falters here by its inclusion of something which certainly will lead many players around according to an obsessive-compulsive thread, and which diminishes any presence of place the landscape has.

Any player’s sense of danger within the wilderness can be, usually, instantly disassembled by mounting the horse and galloping away. There are very few threats which are not trivialized by this maneuver. Does this option, perhaps, illustrate Elden Ring’s generosities with regard to options? Sure, in a certain sense. But it does also mean that to commit to a dangerous situation upon the overworld, without recourse to self-preservation, is really a kind of self-handicapping decision.

This is to say little about how easy fast-travel is, or how many sites of safety and checkpoints can be found, to a point of staggering, map-smothering abundance. To experience any sense of danger when, say, stumbling upon a company of knights, one must stoop to their level, as it were, and stay there. These are some of Elden Ring’s weak so-called quality-of-life concessions to “open world” design: offering an overworld so large, yet so non-threatening, that exploring it initially is like a chill-out session on the twenty-seventh playthrough of another game.

Elden Ring, then, pretty damn well adheres to dominant ideas of what “open world” design means. That its gating or signaling may be less enforced than some other exploration-based game does not necessitate a triumphal chorus.

Just as we’ve had to endure ten years of an insistence that the most remarkable thing about Dark Souls is that it is “Tough but Fair” — as if FromSoftware invented or perfected balanced, challenge-based gameplay in 2011 — , it looks like we will now have to endure years of an insistence that Elden Ring invented or perfected — I don’t know, what? a big world without stacked notification texts and explicitly telegraphed quest structure? Given that the typical rundown of “traditional open-world games” includes series such as The Elder Scrolls, how are titles like Morrowind being forgotten?

There is a strange sort of self-imposed amnesia to this excitement — an amnesia I detected when, prior to and upon Elden Ring’s release, comparisons to Breath of the Wild (2017) were made eagerly, but without a word concerning Dragon’s Dogma (2012). A mere difference of five years rendered a substantial parallel, apparently, inconceivable. The hype machine necessitates the dimmest retrospective vision.

What does set the landscape apart is that there are no populous towns or cities; that, as I have described before, vistas have a diorama-like visual/situational quality, wherein “everything is dedicatedly laid out”; and that boundaries are generally indicated and enforced by sheer deadly drops. Yet, again, these aspects, with varied application, have been a commonality of landscapes in, for example, the Dark Souls series. Why their inclusion here should be especially surprising or amazing isn’t obvious, although the landmarking can be helpful for proceeding, with a generalized sense of purposeful navigation, without constant reference to the map.

This loops back around to the point that the other virtues enumerated among the aforementioned articles and videos — that “you don’t matter” (incorrect; as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, at least regarding the Dark Souls trilogy, the player is a principle-organizing avatar of the anima mundi; the closest analog for Dark Souls 3’s protagonist is one who has assumed the bodhisattva path), that there is “organic learning”, that there is a commitment to “letting the player breathe” — are well-established traits of Miyazaki and company’s projects. It is fine to notice, to mention, these traits! But their move to an “open world” context does does not suddenly make them novel or daring by virtue of some superiority of genre.

Here, I’m compelled to reiterate the conclusions from my last article about Elden Ring:

I strongly believe that responsible critical interest herein will behoove future explorations of why Elden Ring may be receiving extra-special attention for its “open world” when, for example, Dark Souls was really a type of “open world” game too — a type more particularly suited to the strengths of FromSoftware’s creative vision and still rare to find among 3D videogames (especially during a playthrough with the Master Key item, which allows access to most locked doors). Between all of these highly positive reviews, I detect the dreary sentiment that, now that FromSoftware has “finally” paired certain design trademarks with a more recognizably “open world” format, it has achieved an ultimate formulation of potential — a formulation that just happens to coincide with, as I wrote before, “a demand for Maximum Content.”

Something about Elden Ring’s designation as an “open world” game has prompted people to reach for the most frothy-mouthed praise, to stumble over one another to be the first to, loudest of all, exclaim how EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT NOW! But — my gosh, guys, it’s not. Normally, I find myself in the place of asking people to adopt a position of greater critical complexity or open-mindedness, yet here I find myself pushing against a bevy of overestimations. When I state that Elden Ring strikes me as having a pretty standard overworld design, marked by several good-to-excellent dedicated Souls-like gauntlets, I am saying what feels outright banal in its obviousness.

The fact that FromSoftware’s transition to overworld design feels so matter-of-course is for me precisely what makes it unremarkable, and why the claim that it has “[ignored] twenty years of open-world design” is so ridiculous. It is, so to speak, exactly what I would expect, given all of the limitations this kind of scope tends to impose upon level design and its subsidiary aspects; and that is why it’s so unexciting.