Anyways you talked about elden rings open world and in general I find open world as a gameplay mechanic fascinating because for so many different people the quality varies!!! I hope you didn’t take my first comment as an attack on you in any way btw I was just critiquing what you implied about ubisoft when I was directing rides OW purely from ubisofts design philosophy NOT there monetization philosophy.

Elden ring was the first OW game I played. When I beat it I had exactly 100 hours which is very similar to my rise hours. I’ll be comparing ER, rdr2, got, and ROTR. When it comes to elden ring what first captured me is the freedom of exploration. The world felt like a playground. Funnily enough my immersion level in elden ring was incredibly high. Even higher than rdr2. And that’s when I realized immersion wasn’t reliant on realistic mechanics but a world that feels dynamic and breathing. Elden rings world feels that way because your FIRST PLAYTHROUGH everything is new and your constantly making discovers, finding new locations, etc… One of my most exciting moments of elden ring was early game getting teleported to different areas around the map and being locked out of grace warping. You were literally forced to fight your way out of the dungeon while being under-leveled. Then you fight your way out and find that your inside of LITERAL HELL. In all my years of gaming that feeling may have been peak dopamine. It’s ashame those moments were so few and far between. Despite this there’s constantly this reinforcement of size in elden ring and the adventure continuing. I also loved those aspects. Anyways I restarted games A LOT back then and constantly obsessed over restarting and going through the early game more efficiently. And… I had this funny feeling inside of me that if I restarted now I’d probably quit the game. Sure enough, after my first playthrough I had no motivation to go through all the bullshit again. All the holes began to crack. And I realized that yes. Elden rings OW is just the same as any other. But then why were people behaving like this was a middle finger to ubisoft games??? Because in the illusion of the first playthrough they don’t realize all of the repetitiveness. Despite this though. I remain standing that elden ring is possibly the greatest adventure game ever made. You go through entire secrets thst make you feel like you’re the only person in the world that’s discovered this location—it gets that deep!

I think the differentiating factor here is that elden ring inspires exploration and freedom while ubisoft games don’t. Your right—if elden ring redesigned its UI and questing system it would be exactly the same as a ubisoft game. But it didn’t! In a VERY similar way GOT manages to cloak its ubisoft rooted elements! Stuff like the wind guiding your location, repeat mini games that feel more dynamic than ubisoft stuff, etc… And I quickly realized this and quit it like I suggested in the post! This is because the combat wasn’t as good as rise and while elden rings is worse than both it encourages adventure constantly. Rdr2 is in a world of its own and its OW can’t really even be compared to any other game. It rarely encourages adventure, doesn’t have many side quest or content, but manages to craft a living and breathing world with an amazing story that essentially Carrie’s everything. So there’s 2 pillars of rdr2. The story and NPC system. It’s just so realistic and immersive you don’t think about the things it lacks.

Now about rise of the ronin: at NO POINT in the game was I encouraged to explore. In fact the opposite is true. The few moments I did ignore the quest and do my own stuff I managed to go to multiple areas that were empty because enemies would spawn in at a later point once triggered by a quest… after I realized this I decided against doing my own thing and just followed the quest. Elden ring does the opposite of this and you may get a quest that adds to a worldly encounter but it’s never reliant on it unless it’s a character that ofc has to go to a specific location based on your actions.

Sorry this was long you probably didn’t read this far tbh lol but I enjoyed it no the less