HOT TAKE: Erden Ring would have been better as a not-open world game. Or basically...

HOT TAKE
BE WARNED
GAME WOULD BE BETTER IF IT WAS JUST ALL DESIGNED LIKE LEGACY DUNGEON

Literally just ride your horse from legacy dungeon to legacy dungeon (let's include Morne and Redmane for fairness) and you still have one of the best Souls games
The underground section is also pretty much bog-standard Souls
You could ignore every crypt, every Erdtree if you wanted to, and if you don't enjoy them, do so
Bafflingly mundane take, OP

LUKE WARM TAKE: I just wanted Elden Ring to be even more like Souls. Refined, focused, main emphasis on dungeons rather than empty open world shit. More variety in NG+ like DS2.

>Or basically, just make the game about 25 hrs long instead of 150
It is 25 hours on NG+ or different character playthroughs.

No. You get to keep the open world content of the upper part of Lingrave and Stormfront castle. And maybe a small subsection of Caleb. But that's it. Put in a smaller but tough castle in the southern part and that is your end game dungeon.

I liked Caelid, though, it's probably one of my favorite zones ever.
If anything I think the snow zones could probably be combined a bit, and upper and lower limgrave feel slightly redundant in some ways, liurnia just feels extremely drawn out and full of nothing in the middle and could be shrunk a fair bit while still being great.
I think you could just abridge a lot of sections while keeping what's meaningful and not really lose much, the game might shrink by about two zones worth I'd say but it would be more dense.

Honestly, it'd be nice if gelmir and volcano manor connected directly to liurnia or something instead, or just if there were slightly more zone interconnectivity so you could get to more places in a simpler way earlier on.

Yeah, I think it can get like that in some ways, but in others its going to be stuck as it is, a lot of things feel like they needed more time in the oven, but luckily it's stuff that can and might be actually changed like weapons and spells, numbers and other such things.

This is also annoying
Are people really not considering shit like the walk through the swamp up to Reya Lucaria 'Souls' just because it's outside?
The hills down into the spooky swamp, through a sunken town and up to the gates is great.
DeS, while great, was short as fuck because you just teleported

The only content that needs to be cut is the consecrated snowfield. That's it. All the dungeons and bosses from that place should just be part of the mountaintop of the giants, and the player should be allowed to beat the game after Morgott so Maliketh and Farum Azula are optional.

There. Now ADHD retards can beat the game in under 12 hours and RPG fans can still explore all the optional content they want.

Demons's Souls is a better game. It's the True GOAT.

I love the game and am having a lot of fun, but I'm 100 hours in and I don't think I'm past two thirds of the way through. A lot of dungeons and enemies are getting reused and it's very samey, great but samey. Like the other user said, you're likely incintivized to not do the side stuff on subsequent playthroughs. I just have to wonder what it adds at that point. That could have been cut to streamline and focus on the legacy dungeons, which are some of the best of all time.

>useless padding bosses that are way too easy to even be considered a boss
>linear copy pasted levels with very little memorable moments
Not really. Bloodborne is the best "linear" souls game.

Gamedevs don't have Yea Forums autism when they make games. They don't design a level and think "uhhh maybe the players will get ADHD and not want to play it on their 4th playthrough"

Room Temp Take: I miss DaS1's parry timings, and have for a decade

They should.
A lot of what makes older fromsoft games good is that aspect of going through things a second, third, fourth time being just as rewarding or still having something new to offer. Taking that out is removing something that was already good about these games.

They shouldn't. A souls game made by Yea Forums would be 5 hours long, all hallways, and only bosses that can be easily beat with a greatsword.

As it should be.

But I like a lot of the hidden paths in Elden Ring's dungeons, and how it encourages you to try jumping to various places outside regular rooms.
Except maybe that one jump in the Academy. That one is always sphincter clenching and something I didn't know was even doable at first.

I'd take a 50 hour elden ring that I engage with all the content in and enjoy just as much on my third or fifth playthrough over the 150 hour one we got that I think maybe 30 hours of which will ever be valuable to me ever again.
It's nice shock and awe and it's cool your first playthrough but I think depth is just as important.

Elden Ring is as long as you want it to be. You can beat it in 20 hours if you want, only hitting up specific areas and dungeons you care for.

I still don't get why you faggots want the content erased entirely when you can effectively do the same by ignoring it. I'd much prefer a game has a lot of optional content. Every player gets a different experience and I'll always have something new to discover when I inevitably replay it.

nah, im glad youre not in game design

Fortunately, this take is getting colder, as more and more people are realizing that open world design is nothing but a debuff.

Literally nothing you said, not even a single word, contradicted what the post you're replying to said. Impressive. The intellect of open world tards.

>when you can effectively do the same by ignoring it
Ignoring all side content? Or am I supposed to keep a wiki up so I can know in advance which content is worth a shit without wasting my time galloping past recycled enemies?

I think the problem is you have extreme autism and can't just enjoy a game without overanalyzing it. Most people just played the game and had fun, not even knowing which content is optional or not.

This is why we will never agree on this. Your brain is broken user.

The ultimate autism required to recognize you saw this exact same shrimp 13 times in the past 3 hours of gameplay lol

>Most people just played the game and had fun, not even knowing which content is optional or not.
Yeah, because, like with every single video game ever, around 20% of the people finished the game to begin with. And of the people that finished it, around 10% of which bothered doing anything beyond a perfunctory search of the world.

The open world shines when you skip it. It's marketing material. In other words: Bad design.

Elden Ring has a 7% platinum rate, which is higher than most games even outside of the souls series. It's easily the most completed game in the series so far, not sure where your dumb ass is getting that idea.

>when you can effectively do the same by ignoring it.
You aren't even reading my posts, are you?
I already do this, it's dreadful, I spend 90% of new runs running around on torrent picking up items I want and skipping enemies because there's fuckall point killing them, ignoring side content, ignoring half the legacy dungeons or trivializing them because I need them for a quest or because I want something after them, providing me almost nothing to replay but the endgame, it's fucking boring.
I don't want to skip half the game, I don't want to ignore the mobs, I like fighting them, but they're a colossal waste of time and it's hard not to see cutting all these things from my runs as some degree of optimization.
I want a game that the ideal/optimal path is actually playing through the game on some level, if I wanted a horse riding sim I would play something else. (torrent is totally a welcome addition, but he seems awkwardly implemented and it seems like the devs honestly felt self conscious about having him be a larger part of things or having the horse combat be more fully fledged, which just makes using it all the time even less fun)

I did not read your post. How does it feel knowing you typed it all out for nothing?

See how easy it is to ignore content you don't want to experience, retards?

based

At the end of the day, all the previous Soulslikes were fun to fully explore. Elden Ring? It isn't. To the point the average defender of the game has to do the "J-j-just skip it" spiel. Open world design is an embarrassment.

The only person you're demonstrating is a retard here is yourself.
I'm fine knowing the other guy and other people reading might read my post and actually take it in on some level, expressing my thoughts on something I like is nice.

At the end of the day your opinion is irrelevant. You are just one autist. Meanwhile a quarter of a million people are playing and loving Elden Ring in steam right now.

You lost. Open world chads one. All that remains is your cope.

I didn't read it either and I made the op. Ha ha.

>It's just your opinion
The most clear cut example there is of a concession on Yea Forums
I, of course, humbly accept it

>cut some of the betlst levels from the game and reduce the environmental diversity tenfold
Fuck no

some fat couldve been trimmed. but no, i dont want linear corridor games to come back, ever

An opinion is just words that don't matter. Sales and reviews matter. Get ready for a decade of Elden Ring sequels and DLC. I'll be enjoying that and your seethe.

There's an overwhelming and unnecessary amount of content that only serves to lower the quality of more polished content already within the game because, by reusing elements of said content and then recontextualizing them haphazardly, their importance is downplayed, and any impact is lessened. A matter of uniqueness goes a long in ensuring a piece of content has any presence in an individual's mind other than, 'it's just something to do.' Large game in hunting would be nothing sought after if everything was comparable in size, it would just be another behemoth among many.

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>Are people really not considering shit like the walk through the swamp up to Reya Lucaria 'Souls' just because it's outside?
Probably more because said walk constitutes finding 50 shrimps, 50 land octopuses, 30 crabs, all in the incredibly varied environment of a swamp with 40 identical archways, 80 identical obsidian pillars, 40 identical crystal formations and 18 identical circular temple with a woman statue inside, across miles and miles of swamp, with around 8 pieces of loot in the whole thing that aren't crafting shit or golden runes.

The thing you don't understand is that people like me actually like the game on some level, I just think it could use tweaking or abridging in some respects.
Less fat, a bit more thought and time put into certain things, I'm playing and enjoying the game alongside you I'm not some distant enemy who wants your game to fail, I just want it to be better.

I, on the other hand, would love if open world garbage failed, so we'd go back to proper design that wasn't padded shit that stretches thin the content worth doing.
However, I never had any illusions of it happening. It hasn't happened once in the past 3 decades. The open world cancer never stops spreading. And now that it started raping From Software's Soulslikes, it will not stop.

This. Also hope they continue with the setting and just do a different land "beyond the fog"

I think on some level the two will eventually be combined into the best of both, Elden Ring was an attempt at that, and I feel they only made it halfway.
I like the idea, but from still needs work on the execution, the flaws seem a bit obvious.
I still think with a lot of love and patching, and some dlc that hopefully focuses on fleshing what exists out more than adding new areas, that what we have will still be significantly better than dark souls 1-3 by the end of it all, but it has some glaring flaws for right now.

The reason everyone is still talking about is BECAUSE its so long.

Sorry, mate, but your naivety is showing.
When open world games start being made, they never get any smaller. Elden Ring 2 will only be bigger. Or, at worst, keep the same size.
And it's literally impossible to not design a game this size that isn't empty and/or excessively padded.

The path to the best possible Soulslikes was in perfecting the Dark Souls 1 formula, adding more non linearity to it, but still having it be dungeons with great vistas behind them. We will never get that.

What we have right now is already better than dark souls 1-3. Things like reusing enemies was present in all from games, and the mechanics themselves fix many of the age old problems the games have had, such as the overwhelming power of R1s compared to any other option and the lack of a viable defensive options outside of rolling. If elden ring was going to fix the issue of reused enemies, it qould have taken at least another year or two of development, which would have ticked off investors. They came as close to their ambitions as they could

I don't think anything exists which is categorically broken or can't be fixed or tuned to be good, there is a merit in the open world idea, I don't think it's just fundamentally broken.
Non linearity is exactly what an open world provides, I just think the content itself could be made more worth engaging with, and more deep for further playthroughs, rather than something you enjoy for one and dread/skip on another. I think part of the problem is 80% of the content is useless for any given build, there is no point in actually playing through the game on later runs, and there is so much area to cover that isn't being used for something meaningful that you spend 80% of your time running from enemies, I don't think any of these are fundamental problems with open world, they're all execution problems.

>What we have right now is already better than dark souls 1-3.
I agree with you on some levels, it is mechanically better in every way, but there is no point engaging with any of the content, and that's the star of the show here, or should be.
Also, I spend 90% of my time on torrent, yet he still feels like a burden/afterthought, why?

>I don't think anything exists which is categorically broken or can't be fixed or tuned to be good
They had 5+ years to fill this map with as much cool shit in at possible. The next game is gonna be even bigger and have around the same development time. I know that things should usually be nuanced, but open world is just genuinely a debuff genre compared to non open world games.

I think from are capable of seeing their mistakes and learning, why do you think otherwise?
They have given us good game after good game, they are consistent for a reason.

Why reduce the hours?

>I think from are capable of seeing their mistakes and learning, why do you think otherwise?
Because I don't think this is a mistake they made. I give them more credit than that, especially when looking on the genre's portfolio as a whole. I think this is a genuine limitation from the genre itself.

>but there is no point engaging with any of the content
Because there is content? There is no point in engaging any game, you play the game to play the game. Even if you didn't want to explore the world, you can just go down the fast track of limgrave->liurnia>leyndell-> end game and still complete it in reasonable time. If you don't want to play, simply don't play. You don't need the game to hold your hand
>Also, I spend 90% of my time on torrent, yet he still feels like a burden/afterthought, why?
'Burden'? I have no idea how he would be a burden to you? I suppose you could think that if you don't like the horse controls, but torrent far outstripes any other horse mechanic that I know of. Also, torrent was in no way an after thought, as weapons have specific movesets when your own him, certain actions have I-frames, reviving him mid-battle is a decision that requires a flask, and multiple fights are design with him in mind as a tool.

I don't care as long as they make a standard game like Bloodborne 2. If this is the future of souls then I'm not interested.

based