I consider Elden Ring the best game from Fromsoftware since the first Dark Souls. The ring has a very competent approach to the Soulsborne formula (Fu), from the first hours the influence of the predecessors can be seen: the skills from DS3 have been brought to mind, and indeed the combat system absorbs the best of the previous ones – the methodicality and high pace of battles became friends. Despite the almost complete lack of balance, playing fun with any build (even despite the fact that the abundance of spells and weapons requiring a pumping faith, the game inclines you to be a churchman – if not completely, then at least a third). The open world is filled with points of interest-different dungeons, ruins, some cool strong dude.
The approach to the visual design of the world and enemies is very loving and creative – yes, ass r. P. Martin came up with the universe for the game, but the world and the creatures inhabiting its creatures are still very different from the usual picture of medieval European fantasy. The tragedy that has absorbed the local Middle -earth, is competently visualized in a high context, so hotly loved by Miyazaki and its fans, even if everything that happens here is not possible from the first passages (at least for me, a person without the ability to concentrate attention) – the usual chip of the Fromovsky games.
Froms are full of laudatory comments in the direction of the Fromoma on the Web, so today we will criticize the guys – namely, we will discuss the problems of the game with narrative, which it simply does not come out for personal experience (or maybe you still do not really want to). These problems existed even with a demon Souls, flowing into each subsequent game and becoming more and more noticeable. Many fans of Miyazaki and his studio like to justify these problems with an author’s vision of a genius, which is to hide any details of history from the player, leaving him to think up everything on his own.
In fairness, the author’s vision in everything regarding design – including narrative – is really present, but he, as a whole, has a number of shortcomings. Specifically in Elden Ring, this author’s approach works much weaker – I want to consider the reasons for this in this text.
And who is the author?
I am quite limited in my perception – about everything that I absorb, I try to draw my own conclusions (although, due to limited education and problems with concentration, I do not always succeed). My first impression should always be my personal, unsuccessful other people’s gaze. For these reasons, the format of studying the Empages of Games through the vidos on YouTube is not suitable for me – because in fact it is a comparison (and often attracting my ears) of known facts by other people’s minds in theory, which are broadcasting to a wide audience.
Why did I suddenly decide to write about it? The fact is that the main source of information about the lore of the game is the vidos on YouTube. There is nothing wrong with the existence and success of this direction, on the contrary – thanks to such dude, making the vidos, drawing art and writing fan fictions, numerous game communities live. However, the fact that the channels on YouTube live and exist thanks to the analysis of the plots of Fromsoft games makes a lot of understanding about the topic that you and I, dear reader, today we will consider today.
The author’s approach to Miyazaki or "Understand yourself"
Elden Ring does not want to tell his story.
Some readers will say – “Dear, there is no story in the games of Fromoma!" – and will be wrong. They are, there are a lot of them and they are good! But to tell, and most importantly to show – we still do not read the book, but play the game – no one is in a hurry.
The scheme of acquaintance with the world of the game is standard – the player is thrown into a barrel with the exposition and … that’s all. Further, everything develops in one of the three scenarios:
Is the narrative element of the games of the FROMS as skill -dependent as the rest of the components of these games? Definitely.
Should he be like that? I will risk reply "no".
In order for the player to be emotionally involved in what is happening on the screen should contribute to this in this – to introduce him to the actors, enter into the course of what is happening in the world and explain the role he intended for him.
The game is trying to do this with the help of an introductory segment, which in comparison with predecessors looks very weak.
At first we are met by an introductory video, after which we wake up in some kind of church. After waking up, go fight the first boss, naturally get a kick and fall asleep again. After the second awakening, training begins and the game itself. In general, this is a fairly standard scheme and previous games used it well, setting a setting, denoting basic concepts and outlining the goals.
In the case of Elden, the ring comes out so that most of the information that is divided with the player in the context of the game world is useless for him at the time of recognition. This information should be submitted in a good way, overwhelmed on top of the base that is already known to the player-but Elden Ring chooses to just shove the disordered scraps of Laura to the player in the face. To understand how one is knitting with the other, not just play the game – you need to go to the wiki, open a dozen pages with dialogs, build a detective board from all available information.
Obviously, this method of https://bettingsitesnogamstop.co.uk/darts/ immersion in history has objective drawbacks – it breaks immersion and violates the pace of the game. Without sufficient immersion, there is no interest in the plot, and if the plot does not try to be interesting – why it?
In good games (especially in games based on narrative – such as Elden Ring), all the storytelling elements work together (often even in tandem with other elements of the game, for example with gameplay) for the experience living by the player was a single whole. This works not only for storytelling, by the way: if the soundtrack for Hotlami lay somewhere on Vicki, separately from gameplay, then the game would never have collected even half of its fan-bas.
Rotten shoes and other things
Now let’s talk about the traditional studio game method for submitting plot information – descriptions of objects in the game. For those who do not fumble: for many, many years, from the start of the play-resistant 3 and the demon Souls almost the only source of information in the games of the Fromoma were objects that could be found at the levels or buy from merchants. Having found a cut ear or a bottle of Sake, you could open a special page in the inventory and find out insider information about who, for example, drank in the caves and where the checkpoint can be attributed to a reward.
I have already mentioned above – for immersion in the world it is necessary to create the conditions for this. This is how, for example, conversations with internal characters, reading internal books and notes are pieces that are part of the world in which the player can take a direct part. Write in the main menu of Elden Ring “You are extinguished and you need to fix the ring” is not enough to immerse the player into what is happening – he must be instantly and accurately introduced into the course of the case, give the necessary briefing in the optimal volume, and divide all the information into pieces – partially submit it in dialogs, partially in the rollers and cades, partly in the description of the aytems or even on the locations.
More detailed information about the subjects found is, in general, it is good (especially if this information works for immersion, not only damage indicators, for example), but when in RPG with the open world Aitems become essentially the only, main source of plot information – this is very strange.
The most important problem of this approach to Elden Ring is that the information provided is too often divorced from what is happening in the game and its world, and the concepts, personalities and objects mentioned in these texts are rarely found anywhere, which is why they lose any possible connectedness and look like simple filler. Of course, these texts are almost always not always enough even to tell any small story, not to mention gathering everything in a holistic picture of the world of the game.
Socialization
Says quests, which are essentially one of the most important tools for presenting history to the player in the ring, rely on two sources of information: descriptions of the objects related to them and dialogs, which we will consider further.
A non -linear approach to the presentation of information is what distinguishes games from any other form of narrative art – literature for example, or cinema. This plays into the hands of both role -playing games and representatives of any other genres with an emphasis on narrative. Give the player the opportunity to independently show interest in the world of the game and what is happening in it is a good solution that finds its place in the formula "Souls" of games. The problem of the game dialogs is their content.
As I already mentioned, in order to successfully tell history, it is necessary to load the audience in what is happening. Different games reach this input in the course of business in their ways:
New Vegas for example gives introductory ones – before the start of the game, as well as before each plot DLC, the game shows the introductory videos that briefly explaining what is happening and give the player an understanding of what he is involved. In addition, almost all friendly NPCs willingly share information about the world, about what is happening in it, about the factions operating on its territory.
Disco Elysium, of course, jokes over the player and regularly recalls that under his control there is a policeman alcoholic, but in direct text, calls not to be shy about asking every person hearing questions-many people willingly answer the police questions, no matter how strange they are.
In Elden Ring, as I already mentioned, all the information is very fragmented and based on the context of what is happening in the world – the context in which it is in no hurry to immerse the player. Dialogues suffer from this. There are quite enough of them in the game – it is not necessary to fill up the player chatter from head to toe, but they must be substantial. Unfortunately, the content and connectedness (as, indeed, adequacy), they do not shine, which takes another valuable narrative instrument from the game.
The disadvantages of dialogs in the game have a very strong influence on the perception of the plot, up to the point that the player does not understand what exactly he is trying to achieve the game in the world and as a result, chooses the path, based on his aesthetic instinct. It is not without reason that the most popular ending of the game is the era of the stars – the path of Waifa.
"Gypsy suite"
Fromsoftware has its own approach to creating worlds. The device of space in their games works very well with the overall atmosphere of hopelessness and longing. For example, consider Dark Souls: Lords is a dead, lifeless edge that befell the fate of its inhabitants. The ruins of the kingdom are only a memory – both about its former greatness and his fall. There was not a single sane person left in this place-they all were cursed and went crazy, and the only friendly and not succumbing to the curse of the NPC are wanderers from other kingdoms, looking for something important for themselves in this dying place.
The world froze in anticipation of the player’s actions, nothing happens in it without your intervention. The transfer of this formula to the large locations of the Open-Vorld of the game was to be one of the most important FROMSOFTware tasks when creating a ring.
Elden Ring works well with the open world as part of its gameplay: the game has a horse riding, which also brings a lot to battles – now we can kill dragons in large open locations. Kraft makes it possible to get more consumables, which even more motivates to try them in passing. It is also important to mention the arsenal of weapons and armor, which has increased threefold compared to the first Dark Souls – not the best balance, unfortunately, makes most of these items useless, but today is not about the balance sheet. The essence is this: the more the player explores this world, the more gameplay opportunities and ways to interact with this world open before him.
If we consider the open world of Endenering from the position of narrative – everything is quite scarce here. In the traditions of classics, the world of the game stands in place – in this sense, Middle -earth is very reminiscent of a snowball or diorama. This chamberness works well in small and limited locations of the locations of Dark Souls, which, in addition, has a very steep levela design-almost all the locations are interconnected and between the local “hub”-the temple of fire, which in itself makes the world lively and more diverse.
In the ring, this approach only protrudes those shortcomings that previously hid a much smaller scale of the game and a competent approach to level design – the game is felt empty and linear, the player’s actions have no weight even for small pieces of the game world, not to mention more global consequences, and the stories told are more like a regular race, rather than something that happens with the player’s participation here and now.
If you compare the game with the theater production – the world of the ring is a giant scene, with very cool and beautiful scenery, which actors come to each other in fantastically beautiful images, tediously tell something incoherent in a perplexed public and hide behind the cululine.
The era of fault
As in any other narrative work, an important role in the history of Elden Ring plays its completion, presented in the game of one of the 6 endings to choose from (although 3 ends would be more correct, one of which has 4 different color “topics)”.
There is a fairly good tree of ways to develop history in the game – not large enough for traditional role -playing game, but the game does not go with the head in linearity – the player has a choice. However, there was no problem without any problems. The ideal RPG should gradually bring the player to one of the finals as history develops – to give more and more information (which, by the way, is not obliged to directly bow the player to one of the finals), the so -called food for thought.
For example, again, consider Dark Souls. There is no unequivocally good or unambiguous path in the game, although at first glance they may seem like that. This game masks deeper topics for black and white, and does not explain the true nature of the choice to the player who is not immersed in what is happening at a sufficient level. As history develops, the game gives more and more information about the world and the nature of the cataclysm in it. Based on all the information received from the beginning of the game to the end, it becomes possible to make a conscious choice in favor of one of the two endings.
Elden Ring chooses the same approach in his storitelling, but it seems that the game is trying to stupidly copy the success of the predecessor.
Dialogs are often the only source of information about the elections that are available to the player, and, as I have already noticed, they almost always lack specifics and clarity. In fact, the game pushes you to make a choice based on a couple of lines of dialogs and describing the quest object – by its name
No details, no clarification – only an interesting idea and a beautiful picture.
The ends themselves do not reward the player following the development of history, literally in any way – they do not give any new information about the world, they do not develop topics in any way, the key and turning point of which they should be. The player remains deprived of the consequences of his actions, because the information given in most endings is not enough even for the usual community of building theories. It is interesting to see the world after establishing the era of despair? Cool, the absolutely the same Katsen where the extinguished sits on the throne, only in a poop flower border and voiced by anyone else than your beloved hero – a vile shit!
At the end of the analysis, I would like to ask a rhetorical question:
If Elden Ring is a game about pvp, bosses and action – for which there is so much narrative trash in it? With the amount of information and the way of its presentation that we have, the player could independently come up with stories for all characters, objects and hostile creatures – nothing would have changed in the context of the story told. ENT and History of Elden Ring look like a disordered set of all ideas (including strangers – R.I.P miura), which Hidetak Miyazaki considered it cool-this is infinitely sad: firstly because Martin tried and issued a base in the form of an original and steep universe, which is killing mediocre storitelling, secondly because Miyazaki has a taste, and his ideas have a large, but lost potential somewhere, but lost somewhere.
Nevertheless, there is a hope that FromSoftware is not blinded by the success of their heritage and will continue to develop their formula, bringing more and more to video games – both in gameplay and in stories. Every day, the exit of Shadow of the Erdtree and I have very high hopes that this addition will develop not told and unheated stories will put an end to the history of the local Middle -earth.