Coming to Terms with Elden Ring and Open Worlds

I’ve crossed a bridge of military ballistas and swordsmen to immediately find a woman requesting me to find her father at the southern castle and ask for his leave. The southern castle used to be their home, but since the shattering of the Elden Ring has been overthrown by the castle’s enslaved misbegotten. I recognize that the game is positioning me as the assistant to the misbegotten’s oppressors, and then slice through them to go find the king. There is no other choice, really. It’s just another dungeon of content for me to fight through.

I am accustomed to the form of design in the genre. Run around, kill a camp of enemies, and gain some form of experience or loot from completion. It’s why I don’t come back to open world games.

To me, open worlds signify a game that doesn’t care about providing meaningful engagement for the player, but something that provides a form of spectacle of images at play that is repeatable in order to fill hundreds of hours. These worlds are created to emulate real world spaces, but never engage with them in a way that could problematize the player’s actions, signify history about the area represented, or the development process of the company which created it.

There are plenty of Ubisoft titles that represent this, with Far Cry 6 and Watch Dogs: Legion among the most recent. But the oversight and flattened engagement stretches across the genre, recently exemplified by the Horizon series, which utilizes native aesthetics to populate its world, and Pokemon Legends: Arceus cutesy-fying the colonizers’ history of Hokkaido to adhere to a “more natural” landscape.

This is one of the goals of corporate videogame development: to not challenge the player’s agency or ideals, but to create a smooth, immersive, computational environment that is seemingly infinite. It is because of this complete awe-striking mass that the ludo-ecosystem obfuscates the code, the labor which created it, and even ourselves as it begins to normalize not playing for the sense of value, but playing for the sake of something empty. Something that does not bring us anything, aside from endless completion, endless tick boxes to check, and a clouded sense of play and work.

This is why Estaban Fajardo notes that No Man’s Sky created the mass hype that it did. It convinced players that the dream of the infinite world game had become real.

You don’t just play an open world, you live in it. There isn’t just one game inside anymore, there are many of them. Only now it all plays the same, and it’s all handed to you without a tinge of challenging your ego. Beyond the horizon lies another valley full of camps for your protagonist to destroy, and another 20 hours of the same buttons being pressed. Worlds which flatten identities into easy to consume stereotypes, which never allow for anything less than a poor attempt at a systemic spectacle, which chase the images of the worlds that came before them. The worst that could happen is that you grow bored, or at worst, become aware that the food served at the buffet has a mediocre flavor that all tastes the same.

March 3, 20 hours, Mistwood

I am wandering through Mistwood as I attempt to procrastinate the boss of Raya Lucaria. I could have come here before, but I notice that I just kind of miss a lot of wandering through the Lands Between. Head straight one way, and then I have missed plenty of other areas paralleling the path I walked. When I look at the map now, I don’t feel tired so much as simply overwhelmed with choices. Typically I expect many pointers on the maps telling me what to do, or some notion of where I need to be. But right now I’m just not strong enough to be where I need to be. All the points of grace directing me to the next important narrative space lead me to a dead end that I cannot surpass. So I go where there is only empty space on my map.

By this point, I have stopped running around new areas with my horse Torrent, and begun wandering by foot, to make sure I catch everything. As I have learned, the spaces in Elden Ring don’t all just appear for you. They want you to trudge around, and feel the corners of each cliffside, ruin, and valley. I walk under a ruin to find a group of soldiers, which I begin to fight. Then, almost immediately upon engaging, a man starts shouting for me. “Hello? Is Anybody there? Someone who might be interested in rescuing the great Kenneth Haight?”

It takes me by surprise, in a comical way. The amount of people who talk to you in Elden Ring are few when compared to the men and monsters that jump to attack. Plus, being in the midst of six foot soldiers fighting me and having a man with a high pitched voice and bourgeoisie tone of speech felt absurd. After killing the soldiers, I find the voice to belong to a king who asks me to save his castle to the south. I keep it in mind as I continue to wander.

Along the way, I also find a sleeping bear which I sneak past without waking to steal treasure and a minor erdtree surrounded by little resource beetles. Each way I go I find something that better develops the world. Next to the tree, I stumble upon an elevator that takes me down for what feels like a full minute. There I find a world underneath filled with stars.

At this point I realize that I’m enjoying this open world more than I initially believed I would and that it continues to impress me. However, I’m not really sure how it happened. Elden Ring isn’t a breakaway from the genre. It is still an open world game tasking the player with an imperial journey across its landscape. As I trek across the Lands Between, there really isn’t too deep of a logic behind why I am taking down every enemy in my path, aside from “everyone in this world has lost their minds and wants me dead; I hope they give me cool stuff.”

However, by building Elden Ring off of the foundations of prior Soulsborne games, the logic of exploring the open world is more enthralling than any other open world I have explored before. When I walk around the world, I don’t feel that the only option I have in playing is to head towards the direction of indicators, with some little side events on the way. Walking around Elden Ring feels like a world that I want to learn more about, not just in the lore or narrative sense. When I discover a cavity in the side of a mountain, I don’t just go in because I know it will bring me a lot of loot or runes. I just want to see another part of this world that isn’t known to me yet. Why did I stumble into these catacombs that lie at the most northern part of the beach shore, and who is inside?

It’s not that other games don’t provoke these questions, but the amount of detail in each space that still leaves an amount of ambiguity provokes my imagination about what has happened.

Along with this, the logic of Soulsborne combat has bled into the way that spaces are traversed in the game. Not only will I run through an area multiple times because I have died, creating a more intimate connection to it. But because the game does not make all of the points of interest in the world apparent, there are many times I will run through an area multiple times just because I want to explore it again. That’s one of the aspects I find to be most unique about Elden Ring, is that even when there is a stretching world ahead of me I am enticed with walking around spaces I have previously explored. These spaces feel like deep texts spatialized that I just enjoy thinking about as I move through them.

None of these elements are really new ideas. The entirety of From Software’s Souls/Sekiro/Bloodborne line of games has thrived on creating dense spaces as texts for players to think through. The combat has only evolved to become smoother and less interesting than the challenging clunk bucket it was before (I say that affectionately). When it’s all applied to an open world it creates a new way for these landscapes to be explored.

March 9, 35 hours, Atlus Plateau

I don’t remember where it was, but after walking through a teleportation gate I arrive in a windmill village on the Atlus Plateau. I walk around groups of dancing corpses and walk out to the cliffside to look at the ocean. For the first time in the game I see nothing in the distance. No islands that tease me to find a way to walk across the water. No looming structures that provoke the possibilities of magic bridges or underground passages. There is nothing except a shadowy gray. I have hit the boundary—the edge of the world.

I turn around, and an entirely unexplored part of the world lies ahead of me. I pull out my map, and once again I am greeted by unknown gray surrounding all of my location. Even though I know what lies ahead will be something incredible, I find myself slightly exhausted all the same.