Press Play to Start: ‘Elden Ring’ shows the importance of innovation

Let me make this clear right from the beginning: This column will be about “Elden Ring.”

I know that some of you are probably tired of hearing about this game already, but please try to understand. Not only is it the most-watched category on Twitch, surpassing even “Just Chatting” by more than 100,000 viewers at the time of writing this column, it is also downright phenomenal according to almost every single gaming website out there.  

And by yours truly.

Since the game came out last Friday, it has dominated my waking hours in a way I never expected it to. If I’m not playing “Elden Ring,” I am watching streamers who are — sometimes simultaneously and across platforms. Usually, I would care about spoilers but this game is so vast that, if I didn’t spoil myself just a little, I might end up missing an entire area by mistake.

I am getting too ahead of myself. After all, what even is “Elden Ring”? Well, let me try and put it in simple terms. 

It is an open-world, role-playing game set in a fantasy world designed by FromSoftware, most famously known for developing the “Dark Souls” series. Much like in their other games, normal enemies in “Elden Ring” are ruthless and bosses can take hours to beat. Not only that, but checkpoints are sparse; leveling is tough and the story is so thin you can beat their games without knowing what anything meant. 

Suffice to say, this game won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Until this point, I too was one of the many people who simply couldn’t find myself getting into the game. As soon as I got to the first boss in all the other FromSoftware games and realized how unfair it felt, I simply gave up. Sure, I watched YouTubers play it, but I never thought to complete them myself.

That is until I saw people play “Elden Ring.” For some reason, the game felt extremely fun. Maybe it’s because an open-world suits hard video games more than a linear path does. After all, if an area is too hard, you can just move to another one. 

Or maybe it’s because, by not holding the player’s hands and letting them figure out the story by themselves, players are actively encouraged to explore this beautifully detailed world, picking up the scraps and forming conclusions on their own. 

Regardless, I found myself more enthralled and immersed in the “Elden Ring” universe than I have been for any other game. Yes, someone who previously hated playing games as hard as this is now a die-hard fan who will revisit FromSoftware’s older titles. Of course, I am not alone in this, as “Elden Ring” is the company’s best-selling game by a huge margin already. 

In other words, it has just drastically increased its player base without fundamentally changing the formula of its game.

Feels like the esports scene could learn a thing or two from this, right?

Yes, yes, I somewhat lied when I said this column would be about “Elden Ring.” But if you’re interested in the professional gaming sphere like I am, it’s almost impossible to not think about how it can emulate such earnest success. 

In previous columns, I have already discussed companies attempting to increase their audience, specifically Riot Games and its recent push in making “League of Legends” a household name. When compared to “Elden Ring’s” boom, however, all that bending-over-backward that Riot is doing feels extremely artificial. 

That’s not to say that their strategy is wrong. After all, they couldn’t just stop supporting “League of Legends” and release a “better” game the next year. Indeed, on the surface, it seems like making a “better” game the next time around is all that we can learn from this recent success. 

However, this is only partly right. 

“Elden Ring’s” success points toward a possible way to produce a better product: Instead of simply churning out the same game over and over with slight quality of life differences or steering the franchise in a completely different direction, think about the ideal experience players yearn for and find a way to make that work. 

While that sounds complicated, it’s a concept that can be boiled down to “What do players wish our game was like?”

Nintendo recently asked themselves the same question, releasing “Pokémon Legends: Arceus” and finally setting the Pokémon franchise into full 3D as people have desperately hoped for. Lo and behold, the lesson holds — “Pokémon Legend: Arceus” is the best-selling Pokémon game on the Nintendo Switch. 

Esports companies can learn from this dogma and improve their games using audience expectations. Sure it’s not a foolproof format, but depending on the game, it might be easier than expected. 

For example, if Riot intends on expanding “League of Legends” from a game to a cultural phenomenon, adding more tangible lore elements into the game and providing an easier learning experience for the people who join might help. 

And for those who don’t expect their games to reach over into audiences that aren’t gamers, such being the case of tactical shooters overall, simply adding a series of maps that revise angles or adding new weapons that provide balance might be enough to get your player base re-engaged and bring others who are already used to playing similar games.

“Innovation” is always a word that is thrown around, but FromSoftware proves it is a goal genuinely worth pursuing. Regardless of how comfortable you feel your game may be in the professional world, looking at your fans’ expectations and doing your best to provide a game that fits with their vision will help you way more than dumping thousands of dollars into your competitive scene. 

After all, even with all the insane market research that happens in the field, it doesn’t take a genius to understand that what gamers want the most is simply a fun game. 

Guilherme Guerreiro is a junior writing about esports. His column, “Press Start to Play,” runs every other Tuesday.