Hit Points, in case you haven’t come across it before, is an incredible free newsletter from friend of Eurogamer and former Edge editor Nathan Brown, delivering insight and commentary on the videogame industry. We’re delighted to be partnering with Nathan to provide a platform for some of his pieces, continuing with this from earlier this week on the most dreaded Souls enemy of them all – The Discourse. If you like what you’ve read, do head over and subscribe!
So after the hype, the praise and the widespread love, comes an inevitable note of backlash. T’was ever thus with the big games, wasn’t it, but it seems to be particularly inevitable when FromSoftware is involved. Ah, The Discourse. Always the toughest enemy in a Souls game.
This time, however, the conversation is not about difficulty, though having seen what awaits in Elden Ring’s later areas I am sure that discussion is in the post. Rather it is the user experience, or UX – an umbrella term for an ever-increasing number of things that are designed to ease the player into and through a game – that has borne the brunt of the umbrage.
I am referring primarily to this widely shared exchange between a group of developers, viewing Elden Ring and its lofty Metacritic score through the lens of their own work (one is a UX director for Ubisoft, another a quest designer for Guerrilla Games, the last a graphics programmer for Nixxes). It has, predictably, caused an unseemly pile-on, which as always misses the point entirely. This is not a question of jealousy or, as some dullards have seen it, a slur on Elden Ring and its players. Rather I think it is a sort of throwing of hands in the air, a wry what’s-the-point gesture; the kind of thing I do whenever Chris Donlan publishes something on Eurogamer. I also sense in it the recognition that the things that developers have been led to believe will spark better review scores and higher sales… don’t. Or at least aren’t as mandatory as the consensus would have them believe.
Needless to say, games should have good UX. They should be as approachable as possible for as wide an audience as possible. But a game being easier to understand for a less skilled or less experienced audience does not make it a better game; it does not turn a Metacritic 85 into a 97, or turn a three-million seller into one that does 20m. But they make it more likely to appeal to a larger number of people, which in theory raises its potential sales figures.