Horizon Forbidden West developers have fired shots at the Elden Ring team. They even criticized the game on its design publicly on Twitter… yikes. Let us know your thoughts on this!
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00:00 Intro
00:52 The Story – Well-Deserved Successes
03:14 The Conflict – Western Devs “Don’t Understand”?
07:43 The Redesign – Elden Ring With Western Devs?!
15:27 The Questing – The Design Within Open Worlds
24:37 The Template – Western Dev Feels Too Rigid!
31:05 The Formula – How Could It Be Varied More?
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I like Souls games because they keep me away from FOMO. I just follow my instinct and do what I want/can do, if I left something behind, I don't know about it, so there's no way I can care about it
Wait… THATS what Aloy looks like now!? Yeeeeah, I’m def skipping that one, don’t want to look at or play a she-man. 🤮
AAA game company's are too big and have massive ego issues. Gears of War 1 was made with 80 people and that game was so good. Then the rest of the series fell apart after that. I feel like small teams tend to be more hyper focused the game more better in terms of design and gameplay. Which bigger teams seem to forget they are game developers.
It feels bad when developers bash other developers. It's suppose to be a creative genre/medium
I think you are on the right track. But for me the difference was that I could do what I wanted in Elden Ring. But in Horasion I can not do 20 hours of side quests without feeling like I need to do main.
i always wondered why games like HZD and other similar titles just felt soul-less to me. this video sums it up nicely.
The problem with game UX as a design goal is that it creates "the best way" a game, and their is no best way. That kinda thinking like you said kills the soul of a game
"The game is better without a quest tracker" man i love that souls fanboy bs, can't criticize Elden Ring why so ever, or the fanboys get upset
One of the many fun moments of playing elden ring I had was the first time I ran into one of the bloodhound arenas and realizing there were arenas all over the map i had ran past earlier
Elden Ring's UI is completely fine, if you've ever played a souls game it feels right at home. I actually like how the UI hides itself too, you get an awesome display of this beautiful world they created, then it's just up to you how your journey happens. Lots of places reward you for simply exploring.
Elden ring does the best of the old and new open world games.
The world and design and ambiance (baldur's gate, planescape, witcher 3, mass effect, breath of the wild for example) and upgrades the thing that did the souls games so awesome and everyone loves it.
They've done what cyberpunk 2077 fail, respect they're promises and are showing what FINISHED (but they still had a bad pc start but they seem to quickly repaired That)
Are doing for the public.
Those devs are some idiots, the same shit was done with other games like skyrim,botw and such. Everyone knows it's such a better way to design a game.
Friendly reminder that when Horizon Zero Dawn went to PC in august 2020 (i played it on PC, amazing game) was unplayable for like 2 or 3 weeks, im talking negative fps and crash after crash.
They fixed it, amazing game, hopefully the second one comes early to PC.
If any Ubisoft dev actually thinks they are designing anything better in their game than in Elden Ring then they should just quit the video game industry. Elden Ring is not perfect, but Ubisoft has been trying and failing to copy Dark Souls combat for years and every game they make is an uninspired, money hungry, overly designed mess and you can see that in sales. Horizon is fine, but I hung out with my friend while he played it, and that game holds your hand so much its insulting.
OMG, everyone is just drunk on ELDEN JIZZ. I love the exploration and open world. Beyond that, it bores the shit outta me. 4.2 hours in, and I could give a damn about playing it more. Learn enemy attack pattern, dodge around for fucking forever, strike the opening or weakness, rinse and repeat until victory, and don't forget to farm your ass off for fucking runes. I did enjoy running around on the horse for a bit.
Old school ultima pulled that off in its quests. I miss just having a map and a world. I'll stick in my push pins, it's my map.
People want to play games more than they want to win games.
I just hope that developers like these don’t start to think that they can just make games the same way they’ve been making them minus the compass markers and expect them to be better. Elden Ring and Souls games in general are designed to present the player with corridors that lead to where they need to go while games like Horizon and Assassins Creed are actually open and the environments are too similar to each other to actually pull that off. They need to learn that Elden Ring doesn’t need a UI because its world is designed better
I feel like the take here is wrong from some of these devs. They're fine to point out flaws but some of this is very much subjective. Is it so ingrained in them that we need to have certain systems in a given genre to make it good that they don't see the value in doing it differently?
On that bit about quest design; That sounds an awful lot like a FromSoft classic thing. NPCs are not beholden to the player's motivations; They have their own stories, goals and plans, and if the player can be used as a pawn, they are not beyond using them. And if you do end up getting used? Either a new game or NG+, you will know what's up.
Jimmy is indeed leveling faster.
Fuck Jimmy and his speedleveling. Goddamn Jimmy.
I don't understand why people can't just like both games…. I like forbidden West alot but I haven't played elden ring yet. I do hope to do it someday. But like…. Come on children
It's simple and a message a lot of soulless AAA devs need to hear: More UX =/= Better UX
Ubisoft doesn't make games, they make interactive movies
I'm sure Elden Ring is great but I just do not care, is not the type a game I enjoy playing.
There is a reason I have seldom touched AAA games for almost a decade now. I think there are a substantial amount of would-be players waiting for AAA games to return to the notion of quality over quantity, or some semblance of originality. If not the for the kickstarter/low budget/indie scene, I'd have probably left gaming a long time ago now.
I get this feeling that the Ubisoft formula is built around "here's a cool location, look at all the things you can do, actually I'll show it all to you" whereas Elden Ring just went "here's a cool world" and refuses to elaborate.
It's nice, as then you know it's Elden Ring instead of "Far Cry 3, but with difficulty".
What is the thing that western developers don't get that Bellular can't say? Anyone able to decode it?
I was agreeing with you until you started talking crap about Forbidden West. I highly disagree about the part specifically when tracking stuff. I don't wanna spend hours running around the world on no information. I have little time to game, I can't have it wasted.
I hate how the devs are putting a bad name on a game I love horizon forbidden west is really good imo but they're just giving it a bad reputation
See video's about Elden Ring, 10 days later here comes Bellular waking up from a nap.
The biggest take away for me is the duality woven into freedom: you can't give players the ability to shape the world while also saving them from the consequences.
I would of wished that there was at least a journal so that you could check what the ncp's said before and it would all tell you their location
The thing that is weakly design in Elden Ring is the loot reward system. Anywhere you go you are guaranteed to find trash you will not care about one bit, unless you had a pre planned build and were following a guide to pick up all the necessary loot. Anytime I find a dungeon I know there's a 99% chance that the reward at the end is gonna be fully useless to me. But I do it anyway only for the sheer curiosity of the exploration and the stubborness of the self imposed challenge. The entire game lives and dies by these two things, and basically only these two things: the player's curiosity and stubbornness. Even critical lore awards like the greater runes are just awfully terrible and useless systems that don't come close to the satisfaction of actually discovering and traversing the path that leads to them.
G4: We ain't here to make videogame characters easy on the eyes for you!
Suffer and make characters as square as our opinions, and bad takes on the female anatomy .
Frosk :Make the character as flat as my experience in gaming! ZIPPER: that is right!
: seal clap :
The only thing I have to say: Shadow of the Colossus. Take notes.
lol as soon as elden ring come out one week after horizon, almost all people forgot about horizon game even exist lol
I feel like modern UI design has gotten almost masturbatory, in the sense that instead of trying to show information with clean minimal intrusion design, they push to show as much as they can with the fanciest looking UI elements…
Goes to show that simplistic game design done well is better than having more…
I know I am about to say something crazy but I love Elden Ring and Forbidden West. Please don't crucify me.
Bad example I feel. That dagger quest described for Elden Rings, as described, is absolutely abysmal. Just because it's not pre-masticated and gamified into oblivion like so many others games do, does not make it good. Removing the bad doesn't make something good.
If I play that type of quests I want the ability to dig deeper, by myself. To actually ask npc and hear their response on that subject, to go look for things, to try to pierce it together myself. It's fine if it's hard, it's fine if npc lie, but I would argue that Elden Rings, like all Souls games, is also over-gamified:
you can't talk to the npc beside a single prompt and a single blind choice. With over-cryptic dialogues that make little sense. It feels like a Mario game, do you take the door to the secret world or not. Nothing more than that. It's extremely artificial and manufactured.
To me, that totally break immersion and suspension of disbelief. What, I can't ask more of the first npc? I can't try to do anything but accept the blind bipolar choice the game designers put forth? I had orders (plural) more agency and depth in Ultima IV 30+ years ago.
Both games, as described, are really overly manufactured and gamified. But in two very different directions, that's all.
Yes, less is more and because it's rare Elden Rings has the shine and pretty dress of being less common (albeit, with half a dozen extremely similar games before it).
Still, that's not Ultima, or Morrowind, or Daggerfall, or Arcanum, or Planescape Torment. None of those games gamified their exploration, and none of those games hold your hand. Hell even outside rpg, I would put forth that from what you described, Subnautica did open world no hand holding better than Elden Rings.
I'm happy the game is so successful…… I just wish they'd stop toasting to their success and FUCKING PATCH PC!.