Why Elden Ring Is So Satisfying to Explore || HOW ABOUT THIS GAME?

Thanks for watching! Here's an album of all the chapter art I made without text in case someone wants it for a desktop or whatever: imgur.com/a/LMjP52Q Backgrounds used to scare me but now the mixer brush in Photoshop is my best friend. HOPE YOU ENJOYED IT SEE YOU IN 2025 OR MAYBE SOONER (much, much sooner if you drop by one of my streams wink wink link in the description cough)

I love how from all of the dogs at the end, the only one who stayed the same was THE LOATHSOME DUNG EATER!

stopped watching after you called that thing a dog, it's clearly a giraffe

One system that I think is really great and actually pretty ingenious is the addition of the ashes of war, the fact that any plain boring weapon that'd usually be glanced over for something sparkly and unique can have whatever power you want adds so much to those weapons value and actually oft times makes them preferable to the sparkly ones. Plus the fact it gives non-magic users a reason to care about the Mana bar is super cool to me.

Yeah 10 seconds in and I already know this is worth the months of no videos. Thank ya Barry.

So, there's this game called Final Fantasy 1, and one of the design tricks it did was constantly making the world feel bigger. You start on a little landmass and then unlock a bridge, now the world is bigger. Then you get a ship, and the world is really big. Then you open up a passage out into the wider ocean and the world is REALLY big. Then you find an airship and the world is massive. Elden Ring does almost the same thing. Every time you think you've hit the end of where the map can take you, it unfolds with yet another new area, never letting you know where you might end up next. It's a brilliant system, and much more effective than just giving the player totally unrestricted access to the whole map and all the relevant information right off the bat. And really it's something cleverly designed games have been doing for a long time now, an example of how From combines modern game design with more classic principles.

i think the stake of marika is the best addition to elden ring for like a dozen reasons. not overloading the world with even more graces, but allowing you to skip plenty of boss run ups which have always plagued the series. they also subtly encourage you to keep pressing forward. if you teleport away to go do something else, youve gotta get back to the boss/stake to keep trying

The whole map thing is so accurate. I remember when I was exploring, heading north to see what was there, then suddenly realised how big the game world was. I'd seen the starting area, and thought that was the whole map. It was big but a little underwhelming. Then I got past Stormveil and into Liurnia, then northern Liurnia, and then it just kept going! I got to a corner, finally, and was simply shocked by how all that foggy empty space on the map... It wasn't empty space. I just couldn't see it yet. And now, having played into new game +2, I could almost navigate that gargantuan world without any map at all. Its that impressed into my mind, and I love it.

*Early Minor Spoilers* . . . . Barry’s discussion about the intuitive mapping system REALLY gets demonstrated when you accidentally open the trapped chests and get teleported across the map. The first time I got teleported to Caelid, I thought “oh wow the map is over twice as big as I thought!” and that alone made the hellhole worth enduring. But when I took the trapped chest to the capital? My mind couldn’t comprehend just how much game there was left to play. Brilliant stuff.

My favorite thing about the flask recharge system is that it incentivizes you to keep at least one blue flask, and thus to use more spells and Ashes of War. In DS3, if you swapped one of your estus flasks to blue, that meant one less heal, and that discouraged mana usage outside of spellcasters. In Elden Ring, now you have a theoretically infinite quantity of whichever flasks you bring. Not only can one blue flask be refilled multiple times, so can the red flasks you now have one less of, so by diversifying, you really only double how many flasks you could have in the long run. It's so clever, I love it.

One of my favorite odd design choices in Elden Ring is that every time you encounter some incomprehensible nightmare-horror you feel confident in your ability to kill it, and every time you encounter something mundane like a dog, lobster, bear, or crab... you should absolutely panic.

Barry finally left his house unlocked again

100% agree on how it's great when a game INCENTIVISES risk-taking. I've seen so many folks insist I am the problem when I say a game provides too many easy alternatives to a fight. To them, it seems like I'm stubbornly acting like optional difficulty settings are mandatory, when my point is that I don't enjoy ignoring chunks of the game to maintain the fun - I don't like essentially playing with a hand behind my back.

The thing I love most about Elden Ring's design changes was how much it addressed little bits of friction that people have complained about for years only to get shouted down by the "get gud" fandom. We got a map, we got shorter runbacks, we got a proper combat tutorial - so many little things to help de-obfuscate the game for newcomers. And look how little people miss the older implementations. Elden Ring can still feel plenty hostile like the old games, but it's much less of a chore when you're just getting acquainted.

Honestly, regarding the map starting off small then zooming out as you explore, I am genuinely convinced that mechanic is the most innovative and crucial immersion-focused mechanic that came out of Elden Ring. It is INCREDIBLY EASY to replicate in another game and basically just gives your game free immersion with how it keeps you guessing on how long your journey is actually going to take you. This is such a lovely feature that I wholeheartedly expect to see it in basically every major open-world AAA title to come for... probably the next decade, so long as those other AAA devs have been paying attention. However! Even more exciting! Is the application potential of this zooming-out-map-mystery-feature to be used in OTHER genres! Imagine a horror game that gives you a map, and then you think you're finally almost done the game as you start to explore into the furthest corners of the map, but then you get another map that shows you've only finished maybe 10% of what you're gonna need to do to get out of this hell hole. The desperation that could cause could be IMMENSE if pulled off right. It's such an interesting and naturally intuitive way to kind of lie to the player about the scope of their journey and then pull the rug out from under them as soon as they feel comfortable in this space that they've thoroughly explored. And being able to LIE to your players, through gameplay elements that they've come to trust from the conventions of decades of game design--that's something that gives a player a feeling that just can't be replicated by other media; it's what really makes games... games. Anyway, I'm getting rambly but it's just cuz I'm incredibly excited to see how indie devs and other AAA devs like Naughty Dog, for instance as they tend to be good at immersive systems, use this feature going forward. Thank you so much Barry for calling out that feature. I know every single one of my friends went "OH MY GOD THE MAP LIES" as soon as they got to the next zones, and it was a running theme among our friends that like "Dude, you don't even KNOW how much the map lies!" (a way of them telling me they were much further into the game than me lmao). It's seriously one of my favorite things about Elden Ring that sets it apart from any other game I've ever played.

YEEEES FINALLY ANOTHER EPISODE I love this show

I played Horizon Forbidden West when it came out, then I started playing Elden Ring when it came out the next week. Horizon is beautiful and its open world is impressive, but I got a lot more out of exploring Elden Ring's world, even though it's not as graphically advanced. I think part of it is that the art design and colors used in Elden Ring's world makes it more interesting to look at, but the lack of map or on-screen guidance that you mentioned is probably a factor as well. It made it so that each discovery was MY discovery, not something I was tour-guided into. Without getting spoilery, my absolute favorite discovery was when I stumbled upon my first BIG underground area. I didn't expect anything like that in the game. It really made me feel like this is a legitimate world with mysteries that I can go out and discover myself. Nothing was pointing me to it and telling me to go there, nor did I get any previous indication that anything like that area existed. It made the world so much bigger to me. It is possible for open-world games to be TOO big, of course, since that often means they're barren and uninteresting. However, the visual design and variety of Elden Ring's world coupled with the lack of on-screen guidance made me want the world to be bigger so I could keep discovering its mysteries.

Even when showing up for 30 seconds, Dan Jones' comedic timing is always impeccable

I go to a tower for a memory stone, I open the chest and there’s a message: “Unexpected surprise.” Something to that effect. I laughed for a while.

I love the final fight against two giant trees fused together to make a bicycle.