Back in my day, « legacy dungeons » were the whole package, grumble grumble.
I had a grand old time with Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree—and part of that was because my hours spent trotting around on Torrent were cut back considerably by its quainter scope.
Shadow of the Erdtree is, as you might have heard, a dense game. It’s still open world, and it’s definitely bigger than Miyazaki said it’d be, but regardless.
Its legacy dungeons flow into each other, stacked vertically like a multi-layered cake filled with razor blades (also, there is a guy on a boar utterly destroying your birthday party). Its jawbreaker layers are filled with fortresses, caves, goals, and spooky horror movie forests. It doesn’t actually take long at all to get from one dungeon to the next, and most of your time is spent spelunking, rather than charging over open fields and half-drowned lakes.
To clarify: I know the DLC does have a handful of zones that are vast and full of nothin’. Namely, the beach to the south, the finger ruins, and a secret underground nightmare I’d rather not spoil.
To me, these places exist more as set dressing—and, save for the utterly gorgeous Shaman Village, I didn’t exactly like ’em anyway. Most of Elden Ring’s zones trade blows with these empty areas in terms of scope—however, they’re pin-pricked with points of interest and mini dungeons, and even if they weren’t, Erdtree has less of them.
Give me a moment to dig up my gamer CV—you’re welcome to imagine me blowing dust off it as you wait. I’ve played Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 2, a little bit of Dark Souls 3, as well as Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. For most of those games, I’ve at least done a couple of playthroughs. But when I finally finished all my goals on Elden Ring after 90-odd hours, I put my controller down, closed the game, and basically didn’t open it again until Shadow of the Erdtree came out.
Still, Erdtree made me hungry for more Elden Ring. I started anew with a specific build in mind, booted my new save up as John Sekiro the samurai, dunked on the Soldier of Godrick, took a step out into the wide, gorgeous world of Limgrave, and proceeded to go mentally blank for 20 minutes. When I came to, I was staring at an interactive map on a wiki somewhere, wondering just where the hell I should go. Ah, I thought. This is why it took so long.Memory, all alone in the grace-light
In previous FromSoftware games, the slow, creeping pace of your first playthrough equip you to tear through the whole thing on subsequent runs. I haven’t touched the first Dark Souls in ages, but if you put me in front of a controller I’m reasonably confident I could schmoove through the Undead Burg in 30 minutes—an hour, tops.
I don’t feel anywhere near as confident running around Elden Ring. I mean, sure, I miraculously killed the Tree Sentinel in three tries, and its legacy dungeons look very familiar. But in terms of where all those vital bell bearings and talismans are, the map’s just so big that I’m downright lost without a wiki.
