Elden Ring

Miyazaki sized the world to a fantasy of adventure. Hidetaka Miyazaki said the huge landmass was there to give players a sense of adventure: riding a horse across a continent of giant bosses, secret dungeons and towering mountains.

He calls Elden Ring close to the dream game he has chased since Demon's Souls, saying "the open world enriches this ideal experience I'm trying to achieve." The Lands Between dwarfs the twisty, interconnected worlds of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, and keeps growing as you play.

Require only part of the goals so most content can be skipped. Entering Leyndell needs just two of the five Great Runes, and only 12 of over 150 bosses must be beaten to see the credits. On Steam, 50% of players reached Leyndell, 43% beat Rykard and 38% beat Mohg.

FromSoftware accepts that huge amounts of content get missed, because "it just makes it so much better for those who do stumble across this stuff." Little mandatory content means every playthrough differs.

Hidden routes and NPC quests let players bypass main bosses. A semi-secret path goes around Stormveil Castle and Godrick, and a hidden route reaches the Altus Plateau without the Dectus lift. Fia's quest skips the Draconic Tree Sentinel, and Varré's quest opens Mohgwyn Palace.

Ranni's quest opens Radahn's festival early, and one Raya Lucaria enemy swallows you and spits you out in Volcano Manor. Nearly everything up to Leyndell's front door can be tackled in any order.

Drop map markers and let landmarks on the horizon pull players. Elden Ring has no question marks, climbable towers or quest logs. As in Breath of the Wild, players scan the horizon for interesting structures and follow them.

The aim is a world you investigate rather than "cleaning up a messy map filled with activities."

Seed every corner with a surprise worth finding. Each area holds catacombs, ruins, mages' towers, mining tunnels and mini dungeons, plus underground realms like Siofra River, Ainsel River and Nokron.

A forest building hides an elevator to a secret underground city, killing Radahn drops a star that opens the path to Nokron, and one chest knocks you out so you wake in a Caelid mining tunnel.

Chain regions one to the next so a huge world stays navigable. Limgrave leads to Liurnia, then the Altus Plateau, then Mt. Gelmir; you cannot reach Mt. Gelmir without crossing the regions before it.

Skyrim and Breath of the Wild instead use one landmass where regions all border each other. Each region has a legacy dungeon and a key boss, which works as "a bit of Dark Souls" inside the open world.

Guide softly so that ignoring the guidance feels like a choice. NPCs suggest where to go, the first Liurnia vista frames Raya Lucaria in the centre of the screen, and some sites of grace show a golden line pointing the way.

Miyazaki added these aids for players stressed by open design, but "refusing to follow the guidance is supposed to feel, in of itself, like a choice."

Fixed zone difficulty quietly constrains the freedom to go anywhere. Each area has a set enemy and boss strength, so wandering from Limgrave into Caelid early means basic enemies hit like a freight train. Rune drops from the five key bosses suggest one ideal order.

The gating is soft: you can sneak into a dangerous zone, grab items and fast travel out. Earlier Souls games were linear, so enemy levels naturally matched each new area.

Overpowered bosses make the world menacing and give a goal to return to. Instead of retrying a too-strong boss until you win, you can mark it on the map, explore elsewhere, level up and come back with better gear or summoned friends.

Free roaming without scaling leaves players over-levelled. Explore too much and a boss you returned to for a fair fight falls with a light shove, and old areas turn boring. The game never shows enemy levels, so players must guess.

Skyrim and Assassin's Creed scale enemies with the player, Breath of the Wild adds stronger enemies after kills, and Hollow Knight turns the Forgotten Crossroads into the Infected Crossroads. FromSoft had tried world tendency in Demon's Souls, Insight in Bloodborne and despawning enemies in Dark Souls 2.

When exploration changes, rethink the systems built for the old structure. From added a map, a horse, a jump button and infinite out-of-combat stamina for the open world, but left Soulsborne enemy balancing untouched.

Mark Brown: "Elden Ring has doggedly stuck to the same-old Soulsborne formula - despite completely changing the way you explore its world."

Repeated templates turn mysterious discoveries into predictable content. Stormfoot, Murkwater, Deathtouched and Impaler's Catacombs each have a gimmick but feel alike; every mage's tower has a memory stone and every church a sacred tear. The Godskin Apostle is fought four times, once as a mandatory boss.

Miners and secret ruin basements also repeat, much like Breath of the Wild's shrines. Elden Ring still has better loot and enemy variety than almost any game its size, but "as soon as you start to see the patterns... the artifice is shattered."

The second half narrows into a linear queue of bosses. Mountaintops of the Giants has half as many sites of grace as Liurnia, and Leyndell is only about the halfway point. After Crumbling Farum Azula comes Maliketh, then Gideon, Godfrey, Radagon and the Elden Beast in a row.

Open games usually tighten only at the very end, or briefly mid-game before reopening; here half the game is open world and half "just Dark Souls." Brown suggests the ambition outgrew development, which may explain the rushed finish.

Even a constrained late game can hide a big secret. Joining two medallion halves, one in Liurnia and one on the Mountaintops, opens the Consecrated Snowfields, with a teleporter to Mohg's palace and a hidden path to Miquella's Haligtree and Malenia.