this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2026
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I think elden ring probably couldn't be told in a smaller scale level design.
You hear about massive spanning battlefields, wars with gods, etc. Could not be correctly portrayed with a more compact level design. And the vistas are gorgeous.
Open worlds benefit the game when exploration is the point.
Elden ring is really more linear than it is open world, so much content being locked behind certain progress milestones (and difficulty curve unless you're very good). You have no lasting impact on the game world, and the gameplay loop is heavily centered around dying and respawning at checkpoints. It has more in common with a Mario game than with, say, skyrim. Linking the "levels" together I guess has some aesthetic benefits, but honestly if you entered each area directly from the roundtable hold would the experience have been materially different?
Ehh, sort of? The main story is pretty linear but progress is very open ended, which you can say for almost every open world game, even minecraft.
Events you put into motion literally change geography(IE, killing radahn turns an entire area into a smoking crater.) Individual quest lines have varying levels of effect on the world ranging from affecting enemy spawns to changing the leadership of an entire region.
Yes, because something that happens in elden ring is that you start with the world map being really small, and then you keep uncovering new areas, making the map bigger, but you have no idea until you actually explore and are hit with how expansive an area that's just hiding behind a bridge is.
In the DLC that feeling is compounded with the pure verticality of the world, a small non-descript cave that you can easily miss without a guide leads you about a quarter of the DLC areas.
The exploration, and the feeling when you uncover a new area, wouldn't exist if you could just warp there from a hub.
Killing redahn unlocks a new level and his entire army continues to stand in the same places and respond to you exactly as they did before. That’s exactly what I'm talking about with linearity. "can be easily missed without a guide" also exactly what I'm talking about, there's generally one way of getting everywhere and when it's hard to find that it's very tempting to look it up or ask a friend, exploring is mostly frustrating.
To be clear I'm a fan of the game, but I have spent probably <10% of my playtime on unstructured exploration or side quests (if you can call 5 bits of loosely related dialog in fixed locations a side quest). Not everything has to be open world, and I probably would have had as much fun with ER if wasn't. The most sandboxy bit I would say is the multiplayer, which I wish they had made a bit more flexible, but I do find very funny.