this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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Hot take, smithing stones and souls should drop with twice the rate to make experimentation easier. I played blind on my first playthrough and managed to miss the Bell Bearing for Smithing Stones 1 & 2. It really hindered my experimentation, knowing there would be some grinding when I found a cool weapon late game or realized a boss took +%100 damage from some weird spellbomb or grease.
Game needs a lot of medium-sized tweaks to really be excellent. Right now it's good but it's flawed and doesn't actually utilize open-world mechanics much beyond saying people could do things even though the game design is slanted against it.
Elden Ring is the only open world game I've actually enjoyed exploring. Why do you say the game design is slanted against it?
One example is how the Souls mechanics of the corpse run/death stain doesn't really mean or improve anything in an open world. It makes sense in the more linear Souls games because you're usually progressing in a single stage linearly and there's a push-pull/risk-reward mechanic of how far into a new area you want to push before you retreat to a bonfire to heal and having to risk losing more souls father away into a new area harmonizes with that kind of level design. In Elden Ring, particularly in the overworld at least, you can just hop on Torrent and grab it easily. There's no tension.
The overworld is also cluttered with repeated dungeons and bosses and fixed item placement that makes exploring on a second playthrough basically useless, you might as well just use your memory or a guide to speed through to whatever item you want. If the items and bosses in those repeated dungeons were randomized there'd always be a reason to go down one, but how it is now it's great for most of the first playthrough but the open world closes up pretty tightly after you realize once cool-as-fuck bosses repeat again and again and it's more rewarding to look up what item you'd want to do a STR/INT build than hope you chance upon one in aimless exploration, especially when the bosses are generally so hard and rigid that experimentation is punished.