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Which was the better open world game: Elden Ring or Breath of the Wild?
- Thread starter Rurouni
- Start date
How about being fun to play and fun to discover, botw fails the discovery part
The physics system is seriously what makes "which is better" comparison so pointless to me.
It's just what vastly differentiates the two imo. Elden Ring doesn't have it and doesn't need to have it by any means because it does what it does very well, but at the same time it's what makes BotW so unique and special still to this day.
So beyond just enemy variety and dungeon integration (where ER is king), the games just become too different to compare imo.
You can argue that it's somewhat hyperbolic and an exaggeration to imply that literally no one cares, which obviously isn't true. But I think the direction of this thread and really the fact that said systems have been largely absent from most discussions surrounding this game says all that really needs to be said.
If most people felt like it was truly a meaningful part of the experience then it would be brought up more, clearly that isn't the case considering where this argument started. Why is that? and if it's categorically untrue then why do multiple people in this thread agree with my statement and why has no one been able to refute it beyond "No you're wrong because...?"
I didn't even say the game is bad or that the systems are bad, just that the game doesn't give you any meaningful reason to use them, so yeah, they're going to be ignored. Somehow this is a contentious issue that requires multiple pages of defense but no actual examples as to why that isn't true?
This is a pretty clearly nonsensical argument that is moving goalposts and avoiding the overall point being made.
What is an incentive? here's the definition: a thing that motivates or encourages one to do something.
Incentivizing the player to engage in one type of behavior over another is a core pillar of game design. Death coming quick and easy to the player is an incentive for the player to "git gud" so they can avoid death and stop losing their runes. Doing more damage is an incentive for you to spend those runes on stats, items and gear are an incentive for you to explore so that you'll do more damage and die less.
It literally has nothing to do with whether or not something has practical use, not to mention the fact that playing games at all has several practical uses, such as honing a number of skills in different departments depending on the game not to mention the mental benefits of engaging with entertainment in your down time.
Yes, clearly because what you said wasn't "Elden Ring is missing the puzzle element" and what I responded with wasn't "That's not true and there are puzzles and some of them have more interesting and engaging design than the majority of puzzles in BOTW". No what I actually said was that ER overall has more puzzles and depth than BOTW. You're right.
The game has like 15 enemies and the majority of them are pushovers, you're rarely ever overpowered by anything in this game. Maybe Lynels and the sentinels but that's pretty much it, the latter of which have pretty obvious and easily exploitable weak points which again circles back around to my core point. Why would you go through the effort to freeze a sentinel and throw it off a cliff when you can just shoot at its eye. Let alone for any common enemy less than that and even if you do manage to do so, depending on the time of day or point at which you're in the cycle of the game there's a good chance of something quickly respawning anyway. So you've now taken more time to accomplish a goal that could've been accomplished with less effort for...what?
Finding a unique way to solve a shrine does not make the already pretty basic shrines any more interesting, you're not rewarded with a better item because you used your brain and the games systems, you don't unlock literally anything else. So your unique way of solving said shrine can either trivialize the shrine, which to some people is itself the reward or you can go through extra time and effort to receive the same exact mediocre reward you would've gotten otherwise.
Riveting game design.
Whether or not players cheese ER bosses without engaging with them first has nothing to do with what I said, nor did I even dispute that. ER itself has nothing to do with the point I've made and is only being brought up at all because "B-B-B-But what about Elden Ring!" as if I've proclaimed that the game is perfect and propped it up at BOTW's expense. It's literally irrelevant to my argument and you're trying to argue against a point I never made because you still don't understand the point I've made.
So I'm not going to bother continuing this line of discussion further. I think my point has been made pretty clearly considering that other people in this thread seem to be able to read and agree with what I wrote without resorting to nonsensical whataboutism, so I don't really think that there's anything else that needs to be said.
This might not be relevant to the specific open world conversation, but anecdotally speaking I think one of the most visceral reactions (if not one of the only ones) I've had to any boss in Elden Ring so far was when I fought Godrick and I somehow managed to prevent him from ever entering his second phase. I'd died that attempt and never managed to replicate it, pretty sure it's a bug since I'd seen one or two people mention something similar happened to them, but when it happened I couldn't help but think that I somehow "outsmarted" the game. It gave me flashbacks to how Sif in Dark Souls became "weaker" instead of transitioning to a stronger phase, and I also thought about that one Matthewmatosis vid where he sang the praises of Micolash in Bloodborne because it was an example of a boss that behaved differently than what most Souls bosses are known to.
I hope when Elden Ring 2 happens, From find ways to make bosses have more experimental designs and interactions that can be taken advantage of. I'm also not the biggest fan of how the designs have devolved into dodging extensive overpowered super combos with nebulous timings, and it's a shame since they definitely have a history of being able to do some clever things with their bosses and Elden Ring has at least some shades of it. Rennala had a somewhat novel design (even if she has her own share of big issues) while I found the Crystalians to be a really funny design. With their current combat mechanics though, I find less appeal in what's become the template for their bosses and encounters.
On the contrary. The world felt like hiking up the same slopes to find the same sights and sounds. There are more ways to climb that hill, but its still a very boring looking hill covered in questionable textures and decorated by trinkets.
The one with engaging and challenging combat, no weapon durability, a horse that can double jump, no random loot and legacy dungeons that are not a husk of their former iterations.
Well yeah, everything here is largely an opinion. Some things are observable though, like limited enemy variety and unnaturally repeating vegetation.
Whether or not that takes away from a sense of wonder is up to you.
It's crazy (and ironic) how next gen BotW still feels despite being 5 years old (and on PS3/360 level hardware) thanks to all its wonderful systems working in tandem, and how old hat Elden Ring's gameplay feels in comparison--how disappointingly STATIC its world is--, despite being available on more modern, cutting edge hardware, leagues ahead of what the Switch can do (and that's without going into the random stutters).
If you think the shrines are basic id love to see what you consider an actual good puzzle in an open world game.
Not all shrines are great, but some shrines are actually genius examples of game design. I thought they were incredible.
Some shrines are fine, but none of them feel like part of the world. You're given a fairly long loading screen into an instanced blue zone like its a bonus stage.
Hyrule Castle is the high point and BOTW2 having a bunch of that kind of thing would elevate it far above the first game.
So you open up with "yeah it's subjective" and close with "but it's actually objective". Ok.
Elden Ring is definitely the better world and the better overall game. BotW relied on shrines way too much for underground variety, and the biggest area where it just didn't work was in enemy variety and overworld activities. Way too many same goblin camps with chests.
Elden Ring has so much more variety in its open world, and it absolutely wipes BotW in terms of enemy variety and interesting weapon variety and play styles.
The interactivity with BotW was interesting with the various physics and things, but that is the only area where BotW is supreme.
Boss variety in BotW was mostly the same skin on 4 dungeon bosses with different movesets. Elden Ring has insane boss variety.
Elden Ring is a legit 10/10.
BotW is a 9/10, imo.
Elden Ring has so much more variety in its open world, and it absolutely wipes BotW in terms of enemy variety and interesting weapon variety and play styles.
The interactivity with BotW was interesting with the various physics and things, but that is the only area where BotW is supreme.
Boss variety in BotW was mostly the same skin on 4 dungeon bosses with different movesets. Elden Ring has insane boss variety.
Elden Ring is a legit 10/10.
BotW is a 9/10, imo.
But then there's also gliding and shield surfing with the sand seal variation. At any given moment, there a more options and systems at play purely for movement And traversal—it's not a guarantee any one person will like some or all of them, but they're objectively more developed than traversal on ER where if you don't like running around or riding Torrent, that's all there is.
I like riding around jankilly hopping up trees and cliffs on Torrent, but it mostly feels like it's trivialising swathes of the map. While mere traversal doesn't need to be difficult, it's mostly not even engaging.Torrent barely feels like a horse/creature, just a vehicle, and one often unburdened by physics or consequence.
If it weren't for the copious amount of unique enemies and environments, merely moving through that world would be a drag, whereas BotW (which still has a bunch of stuff in it) can make even an "empty" space interesting on account of its weather, physics, climbable surfaces, etc. paths aren't needed to get to where the player wants to go like what's needed in ER.
Both are very good and excel at what they're trying to do, easily my top two open world games, literally just got the platinum for ER, my first platinum and was entirely on accident lol, but I'd personally give it to BotW. Elden Ring's open world isn't quite as "open", feels almost more like 5 open worlds tied together at specific points than 1 big connected one, not a bad thing necessarily, and I get why they did it, but I still find BotW more open and fun to explore and uses the open world concept better by being truly open, to the point of immediately fighting the final boss if you want.
Both have a pretty comparable level of world design creating curiosity in the player but that's only half of the picture when exploring an open world for me, the other half being the actual act of exploring and moving around, which BotW is much better at and makes it infinitely replayable to me, regardless of reward, in a way Elden Ring just isn't. BotW does have issues with giving out a lot of the same reward, but Elden Ring has its own reward issues where as you get further in the game and more committed to one build, 90% of the rewards you get are pretty useless to you.
It's really going to come down to what you want out of an open world game, as they each have different things they do better than the other, obviously Elden Ring beats Zelda in stuff like combat, but I generally like open world games for exploration which I do think Zelda does better.
Both have a pretty comparable level of world design creating curiosity in the player but that's only half of the picture when exploring an open world for me, the other half being the actual act of exploring and moving around, which BotW is much better at and makes it infinitely replayable to me, regardless of reward, in a way Elden Ring just isn't. BotW does have issues with giving out a lot of the same reward, but Elden Ring has its own reward issues where as you get further in the game and more committed to one build, 90% of the rewards you get are pretty useless to you.
It's really going to come down to what you want out of an open world game, as they each have different things they do better than the other, obviously Elden Ring beats Zelda in stuff like combat, but I generally like open world games for exploration which I do think Zelda does better.
For my personal tastes, an open world game should deliver on the open world and in that respect it's BOTW and it's not even close. They finally achieved Miyamoto's ultimate goal for the Zelda franchise which was always about communicating his experiences of exploring the natural landscapes of his hometown as a child. Zelda's DNA has always been rooted in trying to foster and encourage interest in nature. I would play BOTW with no combat whatsoever.
As a mechanical game, it's Elden Ring. I loath the 'Find a tower and clear icons' style of Open-World so this is exactly what I'm looking for in an open-world even if I think their open-world had a lot of problems and room for improvement for something in that style.
As a mechanical game, it's Elden Ring. I loath the 'Find a tower and clear icons' style of Open-World so this is exactly what I'm looking for in an open-world even if I think their open-world had a lot of problems and room for improvement for something in that style.
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My issue with BOTW is none of this shit was worth doing. It was much easier and faster to just kill the mobs with throwaway 4hit weapon #6533 than to bother setting up creative ways to kill them.It's crazy (and ironic) how next gen BotW still feels despite being 5 years old (and on PS3/360 level hardware) thanks to all its wonderful systems working in tandem, and how old hat Elden Ring's gameplay feels in comparison--how disappointingly STATIC its world is--, despite being available on more modern, cutting edge hardware, leagues ahead of what the Switch can do (and that's without going into the random stutters).
For me Elden Ring's design language completely falls apart when it comes to the questing
Elden Ring really is just exploring for more stuff to kill, and more stuff to help you kill better. You have to love Souls combat from step zero because boy iis there A LOT of it on deck.
There are many games I'd put Elden Ring above as an adventure/action-RPG, but just in the "open-world" category? It probably doesn't make my top 5. The lack of interactivity with the world cements that.
I also think the side quest design completely falls apart, as the NPCs just are or aren't in certain places and you just don't know without checking a wiki to make sure you complete their quests.
Elden Ring really is just exploring for more stuff to kill, and more stuff to help you kill better. You have to love Souls combat from step zero because boy iis there A LOT of it on deck.
There are many games I'd put Elden Ring above as an adventure/action-RPG, but just in the "open-world" category? It probably doesn't make my top 5. The lack of interactivity with the world cements that.
I also think the side quest design completely falls apart, as the NPCs just are or aren't in certain places and you just don't know without checking a wiki to make sure you complete their quests.
Well I just disagree. What you are saying is just the complete opposite of my experience playing it. I had a blast discovering the map!
They're both amazing 10/10, best games to come out in recent years and no other games even come close to touching them imo.
Zelda is the winner though. Elden Ring is still just a (extremely good) open world Dark Souls with the main differences being that you can summon NPCs to make stuff easier and Torrent.
Botw was such a departure from what they had been doing with Zelda for so long and they fucking nailed it and put every other open world game to shame.
Still surprised at how many of those shitty open world Ubisoft like games we still get.
Zelda is the winner though. Elden Ring is still just a (extremely good) open world Dark Souls with the main differences being that you can summon NPCs to make stuff easier and Torrent.
Botw was such a departure from what they had been doing with Zelda for so long and they fucking nailed it and put every other open world game to shame.
Still surprised at how many of those shitty open world Ubisoft like games we still get.
Yep, moments like first time spotting Vah Naboris lumbering across the desert from a distance once you get to the top of a climb, or first happening upon one of the spirit dragons lifting up out of the ground or flying around a mountaintop, or seeing one of the mazes, or the plateau where you do the town building quest, these all still stand out a lot in my mind years after playing. In terms of landmarks and the way they're presented against the surrounding environment is an area BOTW excels at. I don't really get that in most of ER's regions save for certain vistas like Liurnia. A lot of it blends together, especially in places like Caelid or Limgrave, and especially in the late game open areas. There's no doubt pretty areas and moments like seeing Nokron for the first time is a highlight, I just feel BOTW has more interesting exploration moments, and just because I don't get unique items from the exploration doesn't detract from the experience. Outer Wilds doesn't give you loot and its one of the best exploration focused games ever made.
Also I think some really downplay the amount of design work that goes into the puzzle shrines, each puzzle is unique and despite the copy paste template for their look those puzzles aren't repeated from what I recall. Compare that to ER's "puzzles" and even those involve killing lol, see the towers with finding the turtles.
ER is an amazing game but its doing a single thing very well (the combat and build flexibility) spread across an open world template, and while the lack of hand holding and figuring things out yourself is commendable in a sea of checklist and waypoint cluttered open world maps, after a certain amount of hours it still has a lot of copy pasted content which is inevitable in this genre, especially in a map as big as ER's.
What keeps ER feeling fresh throughout is the encounters, the coop, experimenting with different builds, items, summons, the density of options for combat is practically overwhelming. That's the chief reason its held my attention for so long. I still prefer BOTW's open world in terms of pure exploration and discovery, landmarks, geographical features etc.
This gets repeated a lot and its not true 90% of the time. It may be easier to just wack the mobs until the health bar is gone, but the world of BotW sets up traps for mobs on its own, and making use of them clears encounters faster a lot of the time.
Thats what happens when there's no difficulty that forces you to use creative ways to kill them
Difficulty is so important for games that have any combat
Shield Surfing is cool, but its yet another thing that drains item durability. Later in the game its no big deal but they really shouldn't have had that.
Seal surfing was neat that one time I used it lol. I think you're underselling the appeal of being able to move around fast in large areas and that's why Torrent being instantly summonable and having a double jump is such a great tool. BOTW does verticality well but moving around any kind of path or plain just takes so long.
This is good, actually. They have agency and their own stories that are easily missed instead of being strictly a gameplay mechanic. This has always been an interesting part of From's games, and why there are 6 different endings. Deliberately not being able to easily see everything is a different appeal.
Elden Ring is a dungeon crawler with an open world, it isn't meant to be varied in terms of different gameplay ideas like BotW is. The variety it.has comes in different ways, like builds, weapons, abilities, enemy types, dungeon designs, area designs, boss designs, etc...
That isn't a downside, and it says a lot that a game that is so simplistic in its core gameplay is winning this pole by such a large margin against another GOAT contender.
That isn't a downside, and it says a lot that a game that is so simplistic in its core gameplay is winning this pole by such a large margin against another GOAT contender.
Some of you really can't help trying to put down other games when propping up others, huh. Love my 70 hours put on elden ring, but this is tiring.
On topic, liked botw more i think. Elden ring has way more variety on the moment to moment due to the variety in fights, but the sheer fun of just walking around and going places to see what its like was better for me in botw. Elden ring sometime feels like big semi-linked biomes, while botw i felt i could go anywhere i wanted from the start, like it was competely interconnected.
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On topic, liked botw more i think. Elden ring has way more variety on the moment to moment due to the variety in fights, but the sheer fun of just walking around and going places to see what its like was better for me in botw. Elden ring sometime feels like big semi-linked biomes, while botw i felt i could go anywhere i wanted from the start, like it was competely interconnected.
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Honestly, one could say the same thing for any fight on the outside in elden ring. Why bother trying to put a cool fight when one can just do a drive by slash on torrent?
BOTW mainly cause you interact with the world and the hill-y design really is great for explorability.
Climbing really helps with it not to mention the entire chemistry system of it all. I went back to BOTW after playing 60+ hours of Elden Ring (still ways off from finishing) and the magic of it is still there.
I'm constantly floored by the art direction and scale of Elden Ring though but open world goes to BOTW
Climbing really helps with it not to mention the entire chemistry system of it all. I went back to BOTW after playing 60+ hours of Elden Ring (still ways off from finishing) and the magic of it is still there.
I'm constantly floored by the art direction and scale of Elden Ring though but open world goes to BOTW
Discovery is not fun when you spend a lot of time trying to get to a specific point only to discover korok seed #75
Eventually you realize early on if explore anymore you know what your going to find
This is a really big leap of a conclusion to draw since BOTW's systems are like what's consistently so praised about it. This isn't some niche game we're talking about here, it's a game that's been played by millions and five years later we're still getting viral videos about the things you can do in the game. One of the most common memes anytime the game comes back into conversation is how people say "I didn't know you could do this". Gamespot alone have consistently been putting out discovery compilation vids that get really popular traction every time.
If you don't find incentive to engage with those systems then that's totally fair. Breath of the Wild is the kind of game where you get more out of it the more you're willing to engage with its stated design goals, vibe and mechanics. If you're the type of person who needs constantly fresh incentives to commit to new things or prefer more tailored options, then cool; the game probably won't be for you. Other, more action oriented games might get around these things by doing style meters and such, maybe there's a way BOTW2 can improve upon this part to encourage more creative approaches. But there's no basis in reality to claim that people aren't bringing them up "enough". If anything I'm surprised the original poster felt they don't get enough credit because beyond its complete commitment to the open-air structure, those mechanics are the main thing that continue to set BOTW apart from its peers. At the end of the day people talk about them and engage with them because they're fun and well considered within the design of the world and their encounters. If they weren't fun to begin with, then whatever incentive they could possibly append to encourage it more are of value less than that.
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Elden Ring is not "one note" at all.
As above, it has variety in spades. Builds, weapons, spells, ashes, incantations, spirit summons, PvP, co-op, tonnes of unique areas, lots of different enemies, varied boss encounters, etc...
There is nothing "one note" about it, that's honestly a little ridiculous.
Elden Ring for me and it's not very close. And i loved BOTW but I think there came a point where you had to put it on a pedestal as an open world experience I just never had it on. Elden Ring is as good at justifying being an open world game as any I've ever played.
BotW undermined itself by giving the player too many weapon slots which allowed for hoarding. The weapon durability system would have been less of an issue if players were actually forced to interact with it more, not less, because that would then require them to use other means when engaging with combat. Even just the starting 8 slots was too many after the Plateau as weapon quality jumped big time once you explored just a little bit. Combat in the opening hours of BotW is fantastic because it can be frantic and crazy as your shitty twig or rusty sword or club breaks and you have to scramble to find something to attack enemies with. Figuring out the best ways to use the runes and environment to deal with them instead. But as you progress you not only find better weapons that kill faster, last longer, but you also are able to blow up your inventory so you can carry a shit ton of them. Easily allowing you to hoard those really nice weapons for when you really need them, but then you never actually use them as the game throws good enough weapons at you constantly to keep you going.
I think most people would have less anxiety of weapons breaking if they actually had to deal with it more in an actually pressing manner and not in "ohh no that cool looking weapon I really like is going to break and I'll have to use one of the other dozen bland ones I have in my pack," and were thus less inclined or able to become attached or comfortable in their inventory. Link too comfortably is able to carry around an absolutely massive arsenal of weapons.
It's one of the reason the Master Trials are so fun and challenging because they were designed around extremely limited resources that players have to be very precise with to get the very most out of each weapon to complete the trials. You can't just rely on the weapons each trial gives you, you have to come up with other ways of killing enemies as you'll never have enough hits with the weapons you get to deal with all of them.
There's a lot of ways they can improve it beyond that too. Giving players more agency in obtaining the weapons they like would be useful. Introducing a crafting system of a kind that let players combine excess weapons together, and with other items, to create better ones would certainly help. All the extra weapons that drop at the end of fights would actually be useful and players who really like a certain type of weapon would have some means of obtaining it beyond luck or going to specific spawn points.
I mean the combat variety is insane yeah, but those posters were arguing that the game is pretty much solely about combat. And all of those things you list are part of the combat system.
Sorry, but it's still ridiculous to make that claim when that combat has such a huge amount of variety.
Also exploration is a huge aspect of the game.
BotW has a lot of balance issues I hope are touched up in the sequel.
The infinite weapon slots like you listed, Revali's Gale trivializing tons of traversal etc.
I do agree that some of the best parts of the game were where you had limited resources like the plateau and Eventide. I hope there are more sections like that in the sequel. The emergent survival-like gameplay really shines in them.
ALL of that is combat. And it's ALL you can do in this BIG world. That's it. Yawn.
Another thing that is a point in BOTW favor for me is that since most of the shrines were not combat shrines, i always had fun finding a new one i missed on previous paths. In elden ring when i found catacombs i missed in limgrave when i was way, way more level than at the start, they became a snorefest when i murdered everything inside in seconds. Through i'm sure that for some ppl that would not be a negative, it was for me.
I don't think they're arguing that it doesn't, just that if you don't like the combat there's not much else to engage with
Utterly ridiculous to say 'just combat" when exolorarion is just as big a part of the game and the combat is so massively varied.
The salt some of you seem to have is couding you a bit.
Explore for what? More combat? Items that aid me in combat? Exactly.
Big, jaw dropping underground cavern with stars. "Well, it's time to kill more shit!"
It is still utterly ridiculous to say "one note, nothing but combat" when the combat is so varied. Sorry. It really should be obvious why.