*This article is compiled from IGN JP related content, unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.
From the beginning of the announcement to the day after the release, every time "Eldon's Ring of Law" is released, it will immediately trigger a heated discussion. Even though a few weeks have passed since the official release, the game, which was widely praised by the media long before the official release, is still hot. There are many reasons for this "Eldon's Ring of Law" boom, but I think the most critical reason is that the game adopts a similar "open world" design. Although the game was born out of the equally critically acclaimed Dark Souls series, it built on an open-ended map design that thrilled players whenever a teaser video showed a new expansive scene.
An open-world version derived from a popular IP series alone can spark a huge discussion. Even just adding a broader scene map to your favorite game series is enough to impress players.
The core of the open world design is to seamlessly connect multiple expansive scenes into a huge world, in order to achieve a high degree of freedom of exploration experience, and at the same time to create a complete world that fully satisfies the curiosity of players. Because of this, map size and freedom will be the focus of open-world games.
A few days before the official release of "Eldon's Ring of Law", this work had become a hot topic because the PS5 version scored a high score of 97 on the foreign mainstream media rating website (Metacritic). This score is not only on par with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilderness (hereinafter referred to as "Breath of the Wilderness"), but both are also widely discussed for the launch of the "open world version of the popular game series". In fact, "Eldon's Ring of Law" has been compared with "Breath of the Wilderness" long before the foreign mainstream media ratings are released, and the same score makes the two appear more evenly matched in the showdown of "who is the ideal open world game".
But the author perceives a sense of discord from this contrast. Because although the term "open world" inevitably leads people to compare the two, the design concepts of the two open worlds are actually completely different.
What I need to clarify here is that it is very normal to compare the two to some extent, and this article has no intention of criticizing this comparison. It's just that in my opinion, it is difficult for the two to be compared under the same standard. Therefore, this article will focus on the differences between the two, introducing the advantages of the two and their original design.
Two completely different "open worlds"
Breath of the Wilderness (left) released in 2017 and Eldon's Law Ring in 2022 (right)
The evaluation of the vast majority of the "Legend of Zelda" series can be said to be based on praise, and the reason why "Breath of the Wilderness" has become the top scorer in the series is inseparable from its bold innovation in the "open world" design approach.
One of breaths of the wilderness's innovations in open-world design is to connect the vast world of Hellaru into a single whole with a unified set of physical laws. For example, when the player lights a barrel and pushes it down a slope, the turf will also catch fire, and the spreading fire will be extinguished by the rain. For example, if the player uses a power-up to put time to rest and hits a rock at that point, the rock will fly far away due to the impact when the passage of time returns to normal. At this point, if you touch the explosive barrel again, the rock will cause a huge explosion under the action of the impact force. Therefore, in the world of Breath of the Wilderness, the interacting things and phenomena will constantly create new things and phenomena. The development team called this "multiplication play".
As the core of the Gameplay experience in this game, "multiplication gameplay" also reflects the interactive design idea in terms of character movement. Taking the movement between the high and low drops in this game as an example, players can freely climb the "high wall" that is considered insurmountable in many games, and they can also jump down from the "cliff" and glide freely in the air.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilderness (2017)
This "multiplication play" connects all the elements of movement, combat, puzzles, etc., while stimulating the player's curiosity and making people willing to put it into action. Born out of a reverse thinking about the traditional linear gameplay of the Zelda Legends series, the concept allows players to act as they wish, giving players real freedom. As a result, even players other than loyal fans of the series have received great reviews for this open-world game.
Breath of the Wilderness's approach to the set was named "OPEN AIR" by the development team. Screenshot from Breath of the Wilderness (2017)
The Eldon Ring of Law has won praise from players for doing the opposite. Because the "open scene" pursued by "Eldon's Law Ring" and the high-freedom "open atmosphere" in "Breath of the Wilderness" are completely different in terms of design concept.
As mentioned above, the design concept of Breath of the Wilderness is "multiplicative play", while the "Adden Ring" is filled with "additive play". This design line is actually consistent with previous Dark Souls series and previous Zelda Legends series before Breath of the Wild.
In additive gameplay, there are few designs like Breath of the Wild that interact with each other, and specific elements usually exist only to serve the design of specific organs. The development team will imagine the solution of the mechanism in advance and strictly control it, so that the gameplay itself remains at a high level. In addition, additive design also needs to carefully guide the player to experience the content, so the player is a passive play to a certain extent.
However, in general, "Eldon's Circle of Law" has successfully created an experience for players to exert subjective initiative through alternating rotations of linear gameplay and non-linear gameplay.
Eldon's Ring of Law (2022)
Players who have penetrated deep into the vast junction will face countless branches in the game. In stark contrast to Breath of the Wilderness, the high-low design in Eldon's Ring of Law actually cuts the seemingly open scene into a complex "labyrinth". Freely explorable open scenes such as grasslands and wilderness can only be counted as a "road" at best, and once the player has chosen the direction of the branch to go forward, the next thing to complete is a complete set of linear processes.
The process of choosing a branch is itself a non-linear experience, but when the player follows the chosen route, it transforms into a linear experience. At the end of this route, mazes such as "castles" or "caves" that use addition to build a rich linear experience are often waiting for players. In other words, the overall idea of the game can be seen as branching out in the "giant maze (the scene itself)", following the "route (prairie or road)" to the end, into the "relatively small maze (castles, caves, and other geo-cells)".
Although the scenes of "Eldon's Ring of Law" have rich branches and large scale, I feel that all the branching routes are actually carefully designed for the player experience. In essence, the game scene of this game is to further broaden the "connection path" between the linear scenes in the Dark Souls series, increase the "branching", reach the scale of the open world game, and finally seamlessly connect all the elements.
In terms of design itself, Breath of the Wild brings innovation to the open world, while Eldon's Ring of Law doesn't, and it could even be said that the latter simply used traditional techniques to make the game bigger. But the development team dared to use the most troublesome classic creative methods to create a large-scale game, and the degree of completion was not lost to previous works, which personally felt was precisely the reason why the open-world game "Eldon's Circle of Law" won praise.
Although the term "open world" is inherently appealing to players, it drives them crazy. However, both are open-world games and belong to different types of games.
Breath of the Wild is an "action-adventure game" that focuses more on exploring adventure elements such as puzzle solving, and the focus is not on growth elements and cool skills. Eldon's Ring of Law is the opposite, focusing more on RPG elements such as growth factors, equipment matching, and rich enemy types than exploration and puzzle solving. For both, the open world is only a means to achieve the goal, and the difference in game types makes the difference between the two.
If you compare the two from this perspective, you may be able to see the elements that Breath of the Wilderness has and the Eldon's Ring of Law is missing, and in the same way, you can find out what the Order of the Wild has and the Breath of the Wilderness is missing.
Eldon's Ring of Laws with addition and Breath of the Wilderness with multiplication
At the 2017 TGA Awards, IGN staff asked the Breath of the Wild development team why players can't pet dogs in Breath of the Wild? At that time, The answer of Hideki Fujibayashi was that "Breath of the Wild allows players to accomplish many things by combining limited actions, so that they can do anything freely." But if you put the petting action into the game, it will become an element that exists only to touch the dog, and it is difficult to use in other scenes." In other words, there is no interaction between the petting action and other elements that exist only to touch the dog, which exactly violates the design concept of the game's "multiplication style of play", so it is not actually installed in the game. In addition to touching the dog, you can also feel this "multiplication" concept strongly from other aspects of Breath of the Wilderness.
After playing Breath of the Wilderness for a long time, you will find that the same enemies are fighting around. Players in the game mainly face three kinds of enemies: Pokeblin, Moliblin, and Lizard Warrior, as well as some exclusive enemies that haunt specific areas. Even counting the different attribute variants of the above enemies, there are still very few types of enemies in this game. In addition, this game is full of boss monsters with the same name, and the number of types is countless. This design allows enemy characters to take various actions according to different situations, so that players can enjoy different gaming experiences when encountering the same enemy characters in different regions.
However, it's undeniable that too repetitive enemy characters are likely to break players' expectations before playing Breath of the Wild — enjoying the rich and varied scenery of Hellaru in an open world.
In this regard, the types of enemies in Eldon's Ring of Law can be said to be very numerous. Of course, given the unparalleled scale of the game, it is inevitable that the same enemy characters will appear repeatedly, but the number of types is still far more than that of Breath of the Wild, and the game has carefully configured exclusive enemies for specific areas. Not to mention the boss monster that exists as the selling point of this game, the richness of its changes is simply dizzying.
On the other hand, the author believes that the super-large-scale additive design of "Eldon's Law Ring" also plays a role in the richness of the scene and the design of the background. This is especially evident in "buildings", where both the quality and quantity of the buildings far exceed Breath of the Wilderness.
There are countless buildings in the Eldon Ring of Law that rival the Breath of the Wilderness and Hellaroo City. Some of these buildings require key props to access, while others are inaccessible due to mechanical failures, making them mysterious. When players progress through the game and meet the relevant conditions to solve the corresponding puzzles, they will get an unparalleled sense of pleasure, which is difficult to experience in Breath of the Wilderness. And these "mysterious places that cannot be entered for a while" are also very suitable for the open-ended scene design adopted in this game, giving players the space to freely decide the order of the strategy.
In this sense, Eldon's Ring of Law is a little better at creating a freshness to explore the world, and no matter where the player goes, the environment the character is in will always feel refreshed.
But don't forget that Breath of the Wild has created gameplay based on a multiplicative design that "produces infinite branches based on differences in a single condition alone". As long as there is an explosive barrel near the enemy's stronghold, the player can derive countless strategy options: use the time to freeze the enemy and use the explosive barrel to catch the enemy; ignite the grass to detonate the explosive barrel and use the updraft generated by it; hang the explosive barrel on the balloon and use the wind to airdrop it to the enemy's area...
In Eldon's Ring of Law, players have only two options for encountering a barrel of explosives: "avoid" or "lure the enemy closer and detonate". So The Eldon Ring of Dynamite is not so much a prop that players can use in battle as a trap designed for players.
The diversity of Eldon's Battle often manifests itself in the pre-battle preparation phase, such as how to assign attribute points, what skills to learn, and what weapons and items to use to take down enemies. Since players can gradually grasp the action mode and characteristics of the enemy through repeated deaths, it is the key to prepare for the enemy in advance to create a battle advantage. Of course, the player's operation skills are also very important.
In contrast, Breath of the Wild unlocks almost all of the skills (The Silca Slate ability) for players in the early stages, and all players need to consider is how to use them flexibly in battle. Of course, there are also weapons, equipment, HP, energy slots and other cultivation elements in this game, but weapons are very easy to damage, so it is not uncommon to use local materials. So breath of the wilderness battle focuses more on the chemistry between "the situation" and "what the player thinks in his head".
The same is true when exploring scenes and mazes. Although the Eldon Ring of Law scene provides a large number of branches for players to choose from, the player's strategy flow on each branch route remains under the control of the development team. Unless the player exploits a bug in the game or a design flaw to break through this control, they will have to follow the path that the development team has prepared in advance. In Breath of the Wild, both the sights you see and the player's clever thoughts can all give rise to new possibilities. In the vast scene designed by the development team, there are elements scattered with each other that can be interacted with each other, and the player is completely free to decide how to use these elements to open up the way forward. Labyrinths such as "Temple" and "Divine Beast" that serve as puzzle-solving elements in this game also have many strategies outside the standard solution.
This gameplay that allows you to create endless possibilities without having to prepare for it is exactly what Eldon's Ring of Law is missing.
The use of time stagnant time to accumulate energy for the iron box, to achieve the operation of grasping the iron box and flying high into the air. Screenshot from Breath of the Wilderness (2017)
If Breath of the Wilderness is a game of multiplication, then The Ring of Eldon is a work of addition. Although both are "super highly acclaimed open-world games", the original design and the final appearance are very different.