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Some Elden Ring devs had “concerns” about its open world style, which the DLC will make “denser and richer"Shadow Of The Erdtree will be a more “seamless” and “diverse” creation
Shadow Of The Erdtree will be a more “seamless” and “diverse” creation
Image credit:Bandai Namco
Image credit:Bandai Namco
From Software president Hidetaka Miyazaki has acknowledged that members of theDark Soulsstudio had misgivings aboutElden Ring’s shift to a full-blownopen worldformat, 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, thisisthe 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 toldIGNin an interview following the reveal of the firstShadow Of The Erdtreetrailer, which I’vewritten 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.”
Image credit:Bandai Namco
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 (andBloodborne,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 fascinating to discover for being less obvious.
Aside from introducing fresh challenges, includinganother Malenia-grade bossfight and a poison swamp, Shadow Of The Erdtree will develop Elden Ring’s approach to open worlding, with “denser and richer level design” which brings the game’s various field areas and dungeon types together “a little more seamlessly,” as Miyazaki has elsewhere explained toEurogamer. “There of course will be large open areas, there of course will be legacy dungeons, but we’ve also experimented with something a little more in-between these as well to bring a more diverse gameplay experience,” he told the site.
In the chat with IGN, Miyazaki also spoke up forDark Souls 2, perhaps the most divisive game in the trilogy - but also, perhaps, a particular influence on Elden Ring for giving you a range of directions to head in from the offing. “In regards to Dark Souls 2, I actually personally think this was a really great project for us, and I think without it, we wouldn’t have had a lot of the connections and a lot of the ideas that went forward and carried the rest of the series,” Miyazaki said, dramatically adding that “there’s really no way of telling how or if the series would have continued the way it did without Dark Souls 2.”
