I frankly didn't enjoy elden ring.
I faced a big cat deamon and died about 100x in a row. Someone told me that I shouldn't be facing it early so I went a different path and defeated the next 3 bosses without dying once...
Why a friend had to tell me that and not the game I don't know. Just seems like bad design when you can be forced into a near unwinnable fight by going left instead of right. Either way the difficulty seems very arbitrary, enemies are either easy or impossible (and seem to skip the fun but challenging stage entirely).
Freedom of choice and taking initiative is a huge theme in
Elden Ring. This subject presents itself in not just the narrative, but also through the player's actual physical progression through the game. No one forced you to fight the cat demon, that was your choice alone. It was not a prerequisite for advancing further in the game, and you could have easily bypassed it (you eventually did) instead of taking a difficult fight while grossly under-leveled.
This is actually good game design. The game didn't hold your hand, and it didn't "give you the answer". The idea to divert your course around the enemy came from a human player, and not the game's script. Instead of spelling everything out for players, it forces them to think critically and actually spend a little bit of brain power on problem solving.
Most games have a very linear and formulaic difficulty scaling. The enemies, gameplay, puzzles, etc. get increasingly more difficult with each progressing region/level you enter, with challenges balanced to match with the player's level of development. There is also usually a pretty obvious path forward that the player is clearly intended to take.
Elden Ring doesn't exactly play by this trope. There are loads of fights that are easily accessible within the first hour that the player is
not ready for. And this is okay. It forces the player to navigate through the world with survival and readiness in mind, and creates some genuinely fun surprises. Also, the path is purposefully vague at times, which forces the player to go full explorer mode, and stabbing blindly into a vast unfamiliar landscape can be a lot of fun.
In this way, Mount&Blade is quite similar to Elden Ring. All of the strongest opponents are present in the world from the moment the game starts. It's up to the player if they want to take on a King's war party or high level bandits directly in the beginning -a fight which they will probably lose due to a lack of combat skills, equipment, party size, and/or if the player is new. But the choice is entirely up to them, and they have the liberty to engage or not engage in battle if they want to.
In addition, a great example of 'games holding your hand' vs. 'letting the player learn and develop on their own' is playing as a merchant in
Warband vs.
Bannerlord.
Bannerlord took all the fun out of playing as a trader/merchant, with a braindead easy menu of what goods you can buy/sell at a profit and exactly where to sell them. This menu is present at every city and it pretty much just turns the game into a spreadsheet reading and clicking simulator. There is no discovery, no detective work, and no catharsis from finally figuring out a profitable economic process.
Playing as a trader in
Warband however, required much more effort and inputs, but in the end it felt infinitely more satisfying. In
Warband, you had to first understand how the in-game economy worked, and then find out which regions produced which raw materials, and what cities produced these raw materials into finished products. This was done by actually walking around settlements and talking to people, asking about their village/city to find out what the settlement produced.
There were no menus to tell you this. Once this was established, you had to find out where shortages and surpluses existed. To do this, you could either ask a city's guild master about trade and he would tell what shortages they were experiencing, or, you could compare what products said city produced and whether or not the nearby villages produced the raw materials needed for the city's finished product. If the raw materials needed weren't produced locally, then there was usually a shortage and thus great demand for them.
An actual example of this would be the Khergit city of Halmar, which produces tools. Tools require raw iron, but none of the nearby villages produce iron. Thus, iron needs to be imported from elsewhere, and the Halmar merchants will pay a great deal of denars for it. Iron is produced most abundantly and cheaply in the villages around the Vaegir city of Curaw (and sold at discount in Curaw itself). The player merchant character would then go to these villages and buy up all the iron, which sold at around 90-110 denars. The player merchant then goes to Halmar, which will usually start buying raw iron at around 311 denars. 90 > 311 denars is a
huge leap in price, and makes for an incredibly efficient trade transaction for the player.
It's not as simple as just looking at a cheatsheet menu, but after all the hard work that goes into it, it feels much more earned and adds to the level of fun.
