Elden Ring

Funny enough though, I'm also still torn on the benefits of the open world design. As a psycho who loves Dark Souls 2, I really enjoy the warmer and more relaxed feeling of the environments and the exploration, and how it feels like you can take the game more at your own pace. The design of it is largely excellent. But as others have said, it does dilute the concentration of quality. It can feel a little weird to take a long path seemingly hidden for good reason, with a group of enemies crowding a body, only for the loot to be like, idk, some random shitty gloves

yeah i must admit at no point was i really like ‘oh this is so much better than just… having the levels right next to each other without the added fluff and empty space’, id literally rather just have the tight level design stacked on top of one another

After a while I've come to the same conclusion as you and AidanAlva, the benefits of the open world serve to help replayability better than any of the prior games thanks to how much more player agency it provides. And despite a lot of the optional content not having the same attention to detail as the linear games tend to have, it's still more content and it's still only optional.

Wrong.

I agree. I think it's te summons that make the game easy but if you play it without summons then this game probably has the hardest bunch of enemies and bosses with brutal vombos, super fast speeds that barely let you get a hit in and they hit really really hard. The late game enemies and bosses are extremely brutal.

Oh yeah in my experience the bosses were way harder in this one. Mohg before the blood nerf and Radahn pre-nuff were nuts.

Exactly. Bosses in this game are brutal. Especially in the late game.

radahn pre nerf probably took me the longest to beat out of any fromsoft boss next to midir lol like 2-3 hrs a piece. to this day i dread replaying this game because i have no idea how much easier he is now