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Well, who saw this one coming eh? There has barely been a whiff of an ‘easy mode’ debate with Elden Ring, with FromSoftware’s brand clearly established and everyone involved on either side knowing what to expect. Accessibility has still been discussed, as has the UX/UI (both in incredibly toxic ways), but the main talking point has been the maps. Elden Ring is Dark Souls, open world-style, and it takes cues from Breath of the Wild’s worldbuilding and FromSoft’s usual obtuse methods of player assistance by providing few map markers, no quest arrows, and very little push to go in one direction in particular. The joy of Elden Ring, if you can ride the difficulty and arcane menus, is in the exploration, and the game gives you total freedom here. It’s a distinct change from Ubisoft games that scatter the map with icons wherever you go, but to get the best of both worlds, you just make the icons optional, right? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
First of all, it’s worth pointing out that Ubisoft is not the only one to make games like this. In fact, while we’ve complained about the maps becoming oversaturated in recent years, this foundation of open-world development has been incredibly successful over the past decade, with many teams copying Ubisoft’s simple but effective methodology. It’s easy to mock Ubisoft, as the many Elden Ring memes show, but Ubisoft has been top of its class in this department for a long time. The only issue is it might have overstayed its welcome, and with Ubisoft unlikely to change a formula that works and seemingly hell-bent on just making the same game but bigger, plus with many other studios copying Ubi’s homework, the admiration the studio might have garnered for transforming the open world genre has turned to bitterness as its philosophies now hold the genre back. Of course, there’s all the abuse allegations too, but let’s not pretend gamers care about that. It’s the map shit.
You cannot just take the map markers off Assassin’s Creed and have it turn into Elden Ring. Assassin’s Creed (which I’ll use as a catch-all for ‘every open world game with lots of icons’) was built to have icons. It was not designed to have players unearth hidden depths wherever they go, it was designed to have them specifically head to point A, then point B, then point C - with the added bonus of scooping up collectibles and optional skirmishes along the way to give you a serotonin boost, XP points, and to make the game feel longer, and therefore more valuable. It’s still very regimented, as you will discover if you decide to clear out too many markers before doing the story. Gatekeeping, whether through equipment upgrades, locked areas, or in some cases an actual gate being kept, is a core building block of games like Assassin’s Creed. You can explore a little, if you want, but only if you explore these specific areas we have highlighted.
Elden Ring (and Breath of the Wild) are designed to encourage you to go anywhere. It’s not just a regular game with the map markers removed, the game has been topographically designed for freedom of exploration. Valhalla, the closest any of the ‘icon games’ have gotten to this feeling, is a series of mostly empty fields and rivers with hub cities strategically dotted around the map. Valhalla doesn’t want you to explore, it wants you to think you can explore by providing you with an empty patch of grass in between two places that actually matter. It’s not an open world, it’s a vivarium.
What Elden Ring does so well is provide you with options. Yes, there is a way to go (Margit is the first boss, for example), but it doesn’t matter all that much if you don’t do it. It certainly doesn’t matter when you do it. Assassin’s Creed offers this illusion at times, but you need to play the game a certain way. You might be able to wander off and do some collectibles over in another direction for a bit, but fairly soon you will run out of road and find yourself funneled back in exactly the way the game wants you to go.
For the record, I don’t have a major issue with the Assassin’s Creed game design. In terms of AC specifically (and let’s throw Far Cry in there), scope is quickly becoming an issue and the games have grown too large and too empty, but I don’t mind climbing towers to clear the map to see how many feathers I need to collect. Spider-Man follows those exact conventions, but because traversal is such a blast, and because the map is relatively small and self-contained, it never grows old in the way the bloated Valhalla or Far Cry 6 did.
But there is a middle-ground. We all turn our nose up at the idea of games holding our hands too much, but one of the top search terms for ‘Elden Ring’ is ‘Did Dark Souls make Elden Ring’. Our top performing articles ever since Elden Ring launched have consistently been Elden Ring guides, beating out guides for all other games along with my fantastic [Editor’s Note: Debatable] opinion pieces. The truth is we want help. If they let us turn the icons off, most of us wouldn’t anyway, let alone the fact it wouldn’t work from a design point of view. Elden Ring is perfect for some, but for others it’s too hands-off. Likewise, Assassin’s Creed games always sell well, but also come with the baggage of players complaining of the needlessly overstuffed length and formulaic collectible design.
Red Dead Redemption 2 seems like the best compromise between the two philosophies. Obviously every studio cannot copy Rockstar’s world-building as easily as it can Ubisoft’s icon-overload, but it’s still worth examining. RDR2 uses map markers for quests and highlights quest-related areas with shaded circles that encourage you to explore a specific area. Doodles of animals also denote biomes, while you as the player can mark an X wherever you like if you have a specific destination in mind. There are certain side quests which will not trigger until you have completed main quests, but the map is there to explore whenever you like. The game guides you through a specific route, but it also gives you total space to roam however you like. Much more than that, it’s worth roaming. Much like in Elden Ring, you will find new areas, new stories, and new characters off the beaten track.
Ubisoft seems to have gotten a lot of blowback from the Elden Ring launch, which is especially strange when you consider we’ve been buying and mostly enjoying Ubi’s games for over a decade. Even if they haven’t had Ubisoft on the label, most modern open-world games are Ubisoft games, at least in philosophy. It’s time now for a new iteration of these games, but it’s not as easy as taking the icons off.
