"Eldon's Circle of Law" has been on sale for more than a week, but the popularity of this game has not diminished at all. We can expect that in the next month or even two months, the relevant content of this game will still be a hot topic of discussion in the game industry.
As the players' experience deepened, the topic of discussion on the Internet was no longer limited to "which class to choose stronger" or "where to get the spell catalyst", but there was more exchange about the plot; at the same time, the player's evaluation of the open world map and mission design in the game was no longer a good one, and many people began to argue whether the classic design ideas that lacked guidance were the shortcomings of the game.
Of course, players won't be the only ones who will have this discussion, and many industry developers will also express their opinions about Eldon's Law Ring. Recently, three developers from Ubisoft, Nixxes Software and Guerrilla Games were hung up.
Ahmed Salama, Ubisoft's director of user experience, said bluntly on his personal Twitter post:
Eldon's Circle of Law scored an average of 97 on Metacritic, which shows that game reviewers don't care about the user experience of the game at all. It was as if I had lived in vain all my life.
He explained his point in more detail in reply to another player:
Overall, the user experience of this game is too bad, it feels like the design of many places is very casual, and there is no testing at all...
Subsequently, Rebecca Fernandez O'Shea, a graphics programmer from Sony's first-party studio Nixxes Software, and Blake Rebouche, senior mission designer at Horizon West, followed up with Ahmed Salama's tweets, each saying that it seems that reviewers don't care much about the PC rendering, stability, level of optimization, and task design of Elden's Law Ring.
Perhaps the three of them just shared their views on "Eldon's Law Ring" from a personal standpoint, which is a routine analysis of the design ideas and presentation effects of their peers in the industry, but many players may not think so. The three developers immediately encountered a lot of ridicule and attacks, and most of the comments believed that they were just jealous of the success of "Eldon's Ring of Law", so they tried to discredit the game from all angles. At present, the twitter of all three people has been set to privacy.
It's worth noting that while the three developers each mentioned the shortcomings of Eldon's Ring of Law in different ways, almost all of the opposition comments focused on attacking Ubisoft's open world and map guidelines. There were even players who made an interesting picture called "If Ubisoft do the Elden's Ring of Law", which triggered a new round of troll carnival.
In the above picture, in order to play with the terrier, various elements are exaggerated to the extent of exaggeration. But quite a few players say that an intuitive list of items and a minimap is exactly what they need, and it would be nice to have a page that records side quests. For them, the current design of Eldon's Ring of Law is really not friendly enough.
In fact, some players and developers in China are also dissatisfied with the performance of "Eldon's Ring of Law", such as some people think that its large map is too empty, as if it is a semi-finished product:
Some people also feel that the traditional "Soul Series" design idea does not apply to the open world, and the guidance of too low a sense of existence can actually make people feel free, but adds more restrictions to the playing process, and also leads to the lack of game experience and fun:
Others think that instead of blindly exploring like this, worrying about whether you will miss any essential content and whether you will forget what NPCs mentioned before, it is better to have Ubisoft-style guidance. Because licking the map inch by inch is too time-consuming, and opening the interactive map on the Internet, The Eldon's Ring of Law is even more painful than Assassin's Creed.
Of course, there are also many players who like the way Eldon's Law Ring is guided, and think that this game is brilliant precisely because of this feature. However, I think this is probably a design idea that only Hidetaka Miyazaki will use, because he has used the preparation of many works in the series to cultivate players' ideas and habits for more than a decade, which is difficult for other manufacturers to reproduce.
As for whether Eldon's Ring of Law needs to adhere to the classic "Soul Series" guidance, and whether the introduction of a regular open-world game system will make this game better, it should continue to cause discussion among players and developers for a long time.