But more than anything else, I was in near constant awe from the many absolutely jaw-dropping vistas by the sheer scope of an absolutely enormous world, by the frequently harrowing enemies and by the way in which Elden Ring nearly always found a way to reward my curiosity with either an interesting encounter, a valuable reward or something even greater.
FromSoftware takes the ball that the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild got rolling and runs with it, creating a fascinating and dense open world about freedom and exploration above all else.
While also somehow managing to seamlessly weave a full-on Dark Souls game into the middle of it, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Elden Ring ended up as one of the most unforgettable gaming experiences I've ever had.
To set the stage, all you know from the outset is that you play as a tarnish of no renown, blessed by grace and are compelled to make the journey to the lands between and become an Elden Lord.
What that actually means, how one might go about doing that and what the deal is with that giant glowing golden tree, are all things that you have to discover for yourself.
Like other FromSoftware games, the grand story is hard to fully digest on the first playthrough but it's a story that I nonetheless enjoyed trying to piece together for myself.
It ended up being the organic side stories that kept me most enthralled rather than the grand overarching plot that credits Game of Throne’s George R.R. Martin as its scenario writer.
FromSoftware smartly doesn't change much in its approach to these from the Souls games, Bloodborne or Sekiro. You'll just naturally meet characters as you explore and discover the world and become involved in their problems.
There are no exclamation point markers on the map, no waypoints to guide you to them and these characters don't always flag you down or initially want or need anything from you.
They're just people with their own agendas and goals, whose stories are impacted based on your own actions or inactions.
That was actually kind of refreshing in an open world as vast as this one and it was always exciting to see a familiar face pop up again later as I was eager to learn about what brought them to this new part of the world and how their journey had progressed.
The trade-off of course is that without any markers quest log or journal, it becomes very easy to forget about certain plot threads and accidentally leave them unresolved by the end.
That's a bummer and I've already felt regret about missing out on stories that some of my colleagues have had but for me it was worth it because even after 87 hours, I never once felt the open world fatigue that usually sets in when my brain gets overloaded by a map, absolutely full of unresolved side quest markers.
Besides any missed quests give me extra incentive to continue onto new game plus. Freedom is the word that every aspect of Elden Ring's design connects back to.
From the moment you set foot in Limgrave, the first of many interconnected regions of the lands between, you are completely free to go wherever you want and sure, that's far from a new concept in an open world game but the way it's handled here is truly extraordinary.
If you wanted to you could be an explorer and spend hours upon hours in just Limgrave, delving into every mini dungeon, fighting every boss, discovering every NPC and leveling yourself up to better prepare for what's next.
Alternatively, you could follow the light of grace, guiding you toward the main path and the first major dungeon or you could find a hidden path to a new region that's meant for higher levels and completely bypass the first major dungeon entirely.
Maybe even steal yourself a cool weapon early while you're there. Again, this is not unprecedented but a few things set Elden Ring apart from games like Skyrim that provide a similar openness.
For one Elden Ring doesn't scale enemy levels to your own at all so jumping into a later region means you're always dealing with stronger enemies, making the risk-reward prospect of doing so very real.
But perhaps more notably the way its different areas are connected makes finding these new ones more than a simple matter of choosing a direction and heading towards it.
Limgrave is designed very specifically with a main path in mind that takes you through Stormveil Castle and finding a way around that feels like you've truly discovered a hidden passage or alternate route, which is a super cool feeling not present in most open world games I've explored.
You also have more freedom in how you approach combat than any previous FromSoftware game, thanks to a bunch of familiar new systems that are used in interesting ways here.
You can crouch walk and use stealth to avoid detection or more easily sneak up for a backstab, you can fight on horseback, you can craft items on the fly, you can summon a huge variety of creatures to fight for you and most substantially, you can equip ashes of war to your weapons and completely change their affinity and skill.
The most important element of Elder Ring's philosophy though is the freedom to just walk away and do something else when you hit a wall.
Elden Ring is hard which is to be expected from a FromSoftware game but its difficulty surprised me even as a veteran of the Souls like genre.
I hit multiple points even all the way up to the moment I reached the very last boss, where I had unlocked paths to several bosses and simply could not make headway on any of them.
But even though i hit dead ends on those paths, there was always somewhere else I can go, a region I hadn't thoroughly explored, an NPC quest that I had set aside for later, a light of grace indicator that I had not yet followed.
There was never a point in Elden Ring where I was at a complete loss of what to do and every time I explored those other regions and followed those alternate paths, I would find new gear and items level up my stats or learn new spells or skills that would eventually give me the extra edge I needed to power through a boss that had given me problems.
It isn't just the promise of making my numbers go up that called me to turn over every stone on the map. The lands between is positively brimming with riches, intrigue and danger at every turn.
Much of what Elden Ring’s open world does well can be traced directly back to things that made Breath of The Wild stand out from the many open world games that came before it.
It's that same feeling of starting out in a world with little explicit guidance, finding something that piques your curiosity on your own, doing whatever it takes to get there and then being rewarded for that curiosity.
The big difference is that in Breath of The Wild I could usually predict what's gonna happen when I get to that orange glowy thing off in the distance. I'll do a puzzle, unearth a shrine, do another puzzle and probably get a cool temporary weapon in spirit orb.
That's not to take anything away from Breath of The Wild; it was awesome, but that pattern became somewhat routine by the end. In Elden Ring by contrast, very rarely did my predictions ever come true.
I'd head to a lake and all of a sudden get ambushed by a dragon. Follow a river expecting to collect some minor crafting materials, only to find a dungeon filled with enemies and traps.
Enter a cave and get jumped by little goblin men or take a seemingly unimposing elevator and find that just keeps going down further and further and further until, well, you'll have to get there yourself to find out.
Best of all, each of these little excursions reward your curiosity with something worthwhile.
That could be a new weapon, a new ash of war, a valuable consumable, a new creature for you to summon, a new spell or a new NPC to talk to there are so many valuable rewards available that I never felt disappointed by my prize regardless of the amount of effort it took.
But the thing that's most impressive about Elden Ring is that in between all of this brilliant open world design, there are a handful of legacy dungeons that still deliver those wide linear levels that Soul’s fans have come to expect.
These are gigantic castles, forts, manners, underground labyrinths and more that are packed with secret areas, challenging bosses and multiple paths that are linked by one-way shortcut doors.
If they were all strung together without being tied to an open world, they could probably exist on their own as Dark Souls 4. Bottom line, Elden Ring’s open world exploration is a new benchmark.
It's constantly exciting, rewarding and full of moments that made me go “Holyshit” in a host of different ways.
As far as combat goes Elden Ring is certainly closest to Dark Souls 3 when compared to other games and FromSoftware's library of action RPGs, characterized by weighty attacks, careful stamina management and a bit of a slower pace in games like Bloodborne and Sekiro.
The two big new additions are the ability to use a guard counter by blocking an attack with your shield and then immediately pressing the strong attack button to follow up with the crushing strike that can leave weaker enemies in a crumpled state, and a jump attack that gives melee wielders a new type of heavy attack that can also be used to stun enemies and leave them open for a critical hit.
They're both great additions that offer melee classes fun new tools but for the most part, FromSoftware has certainly adopted a “if it ain't broke, don't fix an approach”.
What really makes the combat and Elden Ring so good though, is its enemy design and variety.
Not only are a fair number of them horrifying, but some of these baddies are absolutely vicious, coming at you with wild swings and combos that seemingly go on forever and can hit from 10 feet away.
Others are more methodical and hide behind their shields to wait for the right opportunity to either parry you or catch you while you're winding up.
Others still are weak but can be huge threats when they ambush you with a grab that kills you in one hit.
Many are designed to punish those who just mash the dodge roll button without care which makes Elden Ring a very hard game but it's a good style of difficulty, one that's less about fast reaction speeds and twitch reflexes though those certainly help and more about learning adapting and finding the planted weaknesses in enemy attack patterns.
Deciphering those tells and acting upon each moment of opportunity, is a large part of why these games are so much fun. And then there are the bosses.
I don't want to spoil them but there are a handful that are some of the most visually and mechanically impressive from software has ever crafted.
It is no exaggeration to say that Elden Ring is FromSoftware's largest and most ambitious game yet and that ambition has more than paid off.
Even after 87 hours of blood sweat and tears that included some of the most challenging fights I've ever fought and innumerable surprises, there are still bosses I left on the table.
Secrets that I've yet to uncover, side quests i missed out on, tons of weapons spells and skills I've never used and this is all on top of PvP and cooperative play that I've barely been able to scratch the surface of.
Throughout it all while the fundamentals of combat haven't changed much from what we've seen before, the enormous variety of viciously designed enemies and the brutal but surmountable bosses have brought its battles to a new level.
Even with all the threads I didn't manage to toggle on my first playthrough, of which I'm sure there will be several, what I was treated to can easily be held among the best open world games I've ever played.
Like the Legend of Zelda Breath of The Wild before it, Elden Ring is one that we'll be looking back to as a game that moved the genre forward.
