The StunLock

FromSoftware is getting older, and it’s having some difficulty allocating its resources and skill into areas that the faithful would prefer.

Elden Ring is a game that showcases far more technical ability on the part of the developer’s skill than it does artistic merit. That is to say that the myriad of bosses and open world enemies a player can come across are all designed with the kind of flair that shows off an artist’s, a programmer’s, and an audio designer’s technical ability in their craft more than it ultimately shows the kind of artistic vision one can find in Dark Souls 1

The reasoning for this can only be speculated on, but, ultimately, Elden Ring was designed from the ground up to use a wide design for the sole purpose of creating more game instead of better game. This doesn’t mean Elden Ring isn’t good, but it does mean that when the developers were fleshing out an area in the Lands Between, they had a workload awaiting them afterward that exceeded any ask that had come before in the studio’s history.

Naturally, this can lead to corner cutting or, more simply, a game with less overall quality.

What, Why, Whose to Blame?

The what is the growing pain itself: FromSoftware has gotten so good at its craft that the biggest challenge for the studio, now, is allocating its resources in the right distribution of development as opposed to throwing all of the eggs into the baskets of quantity and boss fights.

The why is a matter of age. FromSoftware has enjoyed a series of successful games that were known for their obscure design and, given their history of experimentation, decided to use Elden Ring as an experiment of technical quality across a wider world. “Why is Elden Ring?” is a question that can be answered by anyone who knows what it’s like to show off mastery of one particular skill for its own sake.

Finding out whose to blame is a little more tricky. If Elden Ring had been poorly received by the general audience it appealed to, it still would have come out exactly the way it was baked given FromSoftware’s passion for its pieces, so saying that the gaming community with its rapid-fire “10/10″s is at fault is a little disingenuous.

That said, it’s also the case that Elden Ring wasn’t made to make FromSoftware poorer. It was designed as a wide, open world game with tons of repeated content to sell to an audience that had already proved to suck down anything described as open world so, as though to contradict that last point about the gaming community not being blameable, it should be noted that the gaming community having low artistic standards for the games they often come across is culpable to some moderate extent.

To make things easier, it can be said that FromSoftware is still the best in class at making souls-like games (which is not a given these days). Because of this, they want to create titles (and DLC) that pushes the envelope of what we can expect from them. Unfortunately, they currently seem to think that the only envelope their fans care about is the one with “difficulty” written on it.

Where o’ where that artistic soul of the trilogy went, we may never know. But at the moment, FromSoftware appears to only have glimmers of that grit hiding among its product by way of tradition and not requirement. Hopefully, they can turn that trend around as they mature into this decade.