So apparently Elden Ring is set to shatter sales charts and people from Ubi, Guerrilla, and Blizzard have taken to social media to tell people they are wrong for liking it.
Anybody know stuff about it?
Anyone have opinions about it?
Anyone have opinions Why Elden Ring is doing so good?
George RR, big marketing, and from has reputation for not making crap games.
I don’t know if GRRM is that big of a factor. I don’t really see him mentioned now (he was more prominent in earlier marketing material) and so far, the story is “typical” Dark Souls stuff, with some terms renamed.
From games sell increasingly well and this is viewed as an evolution of their formula, like “the next big thing” from them.
Elden Ring, imho, is a very impressive game. I love it.
After Sekiro I’m very reserved when it comes to From Software.
Actually if Sekiro never happened I could buy Elden Ring in pre-sales.
Elden ring is very much a return form for them, remind me mechanically mostly a dark souls two, which I actually like the house.
but the exploration is fantastic, and they’ve made it more accessible without cheapening The experience.
Performance is certainly an issue, especially on my PS4, but I’m having so much fun it hardly matters.
But the networking is leagues better than ds3, which was the absolute worst in the franchise.
my only issue, which I’m certain will only be my issue, is it does the whole modern RPG thing and use us the same tropes but gives it obfuscation.
they don’t call it a knight, they call it a vagabond.
They don’t call it a mage, they call it an Astronomer.
They don’t call it a barbarian, they call it a hero.
they don’t call it a ranger, they call it a samurai.
these are all the same damn thing, just given random names that confuses players.
I am so sick of this Trend in games.
I am not. The parallels are not 100%, I think it would do more of a disservice to the game to call the samurai a ranger.
A little creativity in naming is welcome IMO, at least in a game where world building is a big part of it.
And that’s fine, I can appreciate that one of you and I’m sure you can appreciate mine. I just personally don’t see a problem with some tropes.
and honestly, I’m just complaining that I have to Google what the class names actually are.
It’s a minor inconvenience at best.
But, as trends go I’m sure this is going to swing back The other way then people will start naming things traditional names again.
I preorder games so rarely, I don’t even remember what the last game before Elden Ring was that I preordered. I made my choice after having seen how much of the game they’ve let youtubers and streamers with plenty of Dark Souls experience play ahead of release, and those people all said it’s great. If that isn’t a ballsy statement of confidence by fromsoftware and respect for their fanbase, I don’t know what is. Imho it’s the best in the Dark Souls Series so far. So why wouldn’t it break sales records? I’m glad it does.
I think the thing here is that traditionally souls like games have been mostly niche, popular, but mostly niche. And now this game is posed to be one of the greatest selling games of all time.
usually only games with mass appeal get those sort of sales.
And one would think that the difficulty alone would restrict accessibility.
Maybe “Demon Souls” only, and even this is hard to call a niche game.
Every other souls game made by From Software was a hit.
If GRR endorsed my game I’d expect to sell at least 1000% more copies, regardless of whatever other efforts went into the endeavor.
Many hundreds of thousands or even millions know that name and will follow it who otherwise wouldn’t know anything about souls franchise.
I guess I should write to him. Anybody have his email?
Yeah, it was a hit like evil dead was a hit.
this would be like if evil dead 2 made as much as the avengers endgame.
Demon’s Souls was a cult hit and then with every other title they have increased their audience. Between Demon’s Souls and Elden Ring there are 5 other games.
And From Software might sell something like 5% more 
Sometimes genuinely good games sell genuinely well. Once I’m done with the pair of games I’m playing (Enderal and Sleeping Dogs), I’ll probably be grabbing it. And I rarely, if ever, buy games new these days.
@spiney199 i got to say, I did not expect Sleeping Dogs to be your jam.
Totally off-topic, but I’ll play anything and everything I feel as if it’ll be worth my time.
Sleeping Dog’s has proven to be a great game with a unique locale/theme to it. Honestly the more pertinent question is why it took me until 2021/22 to get around to playing it.
On topic, I certainly wouldn’t call the Souls series a niche genre, considering how many millions of copies have been sold. Certainly not mainstream, but not far off the track. Demon’s Soul’s (remember both words have the apostrophe!) was definitely rough around the edges but From Software honed their edge pretty quickly.
I don’t know anyone who bought Elden Ring because of GRR Martin’s involvement. Everyone who I know that got Elden Ring had played at least one other Fromsoftware game before. Imagine someone who never played a soulslike getting Elden Ring because they liked Game of Thrones, they’d be pretty frustrated with the game I bet. DS3 alone sold over 10 millions, that’s a lot of potential customers. When you consider that most of those probably also played another Fromsoftware game before, they will have liked DS3, because they knew what they’re getting themselves into and wanted more of it. And now there’s a new Fromsoftware game and it’s pretty much universally agreed upon that it’s fantastic and there wasn’t a single “red flag” before release. Fromsoftware is also pretty popular because they don’t indulge in western AAA tropes like microtransactions etc… Seems pretty logical that a lot of those DS3/Sekiro/Bloodborne fans now buy Elden Ring. Being clearly the best at something has always been a good strategy. It is easy to conceptualize Fromsoftware as being the best at making soulslikes. Who is the best at making Ubisoft-style generic AAA open world games (definitely not Ubisoft)? It’s harder to answer because there are so many and they are so similar. People pick those more based on theme or franchise I bet, and all the big franchises in that realm are so long running that people are getting sick of yet another Assassins Creed or Far Cry or whatever. Soulslikes also have much better replay value than those games, because they have a higher skill ceiling and are more focused on a satisfying core gameplay loop than cheap skinner box tactics and cutscene-heavy narratives.
So basically the success of Elden Ring is earned and deserved and no one else could just reproduce it in the same genre, because of the reputation FS built for themselves over the years. Even if someone came along and actually made a better game, and had the marketing budget to make sure people know about it, I don’t think they could beat the sales of Elden Ring, because people have accepted Fromsoftware as “the best” at making these games, and that counts for a lot.
It’s targeting a specific audience who are otherwise underserved, and isn’t worried about being disliked outside of its niche. So it gets strong negative reactions from plenty of people, but that doesn’t matter because it gets a strong positive reaction from the people it cares about.
Also, the competition among “games which are actually hard” is pretty thin, so when they finally come out with their next game From Software get most of the pie from that market segment to themselves.
On the other hand, Ubisoft tries to make their games hit the widest audience possible. As a result they make stuff that regularly feels heavily watered down despite being technically quite impressive. Mechanically I think their games have got worse over the past few years. They have great technical implementation and often fantastic ideas, but they don’t fully commit to any of it, resulting in samey feeling digital theme parks rather than games that you can lose.
Plus, they compete in markets where the competition is pretty thick. So even though they’re one of the top dogs they’re fighting to get an even split of that pie.
Those are at least a part of why a game like Elden Ring can punch seemingly above its weight.
“Niche” does not necessarily mean “small”, it means “specific”. You can have a large niche.