It's a sentiment that I do largely agree with, (though as with any discourse, its inevitably also deployed in bad faith against completely reasonable criticism, especially wrt accessibility and the like, because we can't have nice things). At their best, prescriptive approaches to 'correct' design can be a useful baseline, particularly for those with less experience. At their worst they lead to stale homogoneity, a generation of designers who think that there is a right and a wrong way to do things, a nostalgia cycle writ large, crushed under the weight of mindless repetition (wait, that sounds like that Dark Souls thing!)
So it was odd to me to realise while playing the damn game that Elden Ring is, in many ways, a culmination of *exactly* that, of many of the interesting and unexpected parts of the world and game design being slowly whittled away.
Here's a slight tangent. The best area in Dark Souls 2 is also one of the most disliked ones: Shrine of Amana.(In fairness it was a nightmare at launch but was significantly nerfed into better shape with patches). Apart from being a stunning area, it has a number of interesting layered obstacles. First is the waist high water that slows player movement as they move through it, broken up by small islands and structures dotted around and dropping off into fatal depths of water if you stray too far. On top of this are several distinct enemy types. Weak caster types that fire gently homing bursts of magic, enemies that lurk just below the surface of the water waiting to ambush you, and several types of more basic melee types dotted around. So the challenge is pretty clear, right? Avoiding the ambushes, magic, and regular melee attacks is complicated predominantly by the slowing effect of the water and the risk of drowning if you don't watch your footing. The *most* important part of all this is that the game supports a bunch of different ways of dealing with these problems.
To nullify the casters you could equip a magic resistant shield, or enchant your existing shield with magic resistance. Or you could simply get the timing right and roll through their attacks. Or you could use the ample cover around the stage to block their attacks as get closer. Or you could use a bow or ranged magic to pick off the harder to reach enemies at a distance (hey maybe since half these enemies are standing in pools of water, lightning might be pretty good?). Or you could use some combination of all of these! As far as dealing with the water goes, lighting a torch goes a long way to solving some of your problems. The light makes it easier to see the lurking enemies below the surface and the plummeting drops into the deeper fatal water. There's a tradeoff though. A lit torch takes up one of your hands, meaning that hand won't be carrying a shield, bow, magic staff, or whatever. You'll have to not use them, or slightly awkawrdly juggle them around in your one free hand. As well as this, if you roll in water, your torch will go out. There are spots where you can relight your torch from a fire, or you can use a consumable item to light it anywhere, but its not an instant solution that clearly is just the right thing to do. The important thing is that you're not just running up and whacking things with a sword over and over, you're going on an *adventure*. A journey where you'll need your wits and not just your brawn.
Dark Souls 2 also less successfully tried to apply this to bosses. Its a sentiment that I appreciate, but one that didn't always work. The most successful is probably the fight against the lost sinner. At the end of her introduction she extinguishes the torches in her arena. The darkness reduces your lock on range, and means that many of her attacks will break your lockon as she vanishes into the darkness. Like the Shrine of Amana, you can carry a torch, with many of the same tradeoffs, or, if you explore the stage carefully, you can find a key that allows you to light two oil lamps and illuminate her arena. Less successful examples are Mytha the Baneful Queen and the Covetous Demon. In Mytha's stage you traverse the once lushious and now poisoned and broken Harvest Valley, then gradually ascend a windmill that is drawing up the poison from the earth and flooding it into Mytha's arena. The poison is a tough modifier but an interesting one. The poison will slowly heal her and damage you, putting a nasty timer on the fight, but one that can be beaten, especially with the use of lifegems to offset the poison effects. Or you shut down the windmill and stop the flow of poison enitirely. You do this by burning the blades of the windmill. The... metal blades of the windmill? It's bizarre and I don't know how anybody ever found it. They draw your attention to it slightly with enemy placement in the expanded Scholar version of the game, but its still not great.
Every boss in Elden Ring is fundamentally the same. You see a fog door, you walk through it, you hit them with your stick while they try to hit you with theirs until one of you dies. There are a tiny handful of wrinkles. You can buy an item in the early game that will stun two bosses briefly when used, (a mechanic already used in Bloodborne), the god devouring servant gives you a special weapon to use for the fight (now used in both Demon Souls, Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring, the latter two of which just give you the weapon, with no exploration or other actions required), and advancing certain questlines will allow you to summon more NPCs for the MMO style raid boss Radahn. Beyond that there is nothing, just an endless parade of increasingly long and elaborate animations and tells to memorise and dodge through for each and every boss. //Worse than that, I'm inrcreasingly convinced that one person at FromSoft is in charge of how fast the player moves and dodges, another is in charge of boss speed and combo length and that these two people despise each other and are locked in a constant arms race of ever increasing speed and complexity. More and more these bosses require the player watching the boss having fun for increasing amounts of time until the player actually gets to actively participate.//
This isn't inherently a problem, there are many genuinely great boss encounters, even in later FromSoft games, some of them are even in Elden Ring. The problem is that increasingly they stand alone, disconnected from the world with a narrow set of options for dealing with them, and that there's no contrast. Every fog gate in the game gives you exactly what you expect, every single time. In Demon Souls, the final boss true King Allant was a pathetic blob on the ground, barely able to attack you. The Old Hero was a blind boss, not able to track you unless you hit him or ran around and made noise. In Dark Souls 2, Vendrick was built up as the lord of the land, a mighty foe that you would have to conquer to take his place. Instead he was finally revealed as a shambling hollow with a shattered mind who wouldn't even fight you, a grim reminder of your own fate should you take his throne. To be clear I don't need every boss to be an anti-climax like Allant, Vendrick, or like Maiden of Astrea. I think all this is a very long winded way of saying that there's no contrast.
