Elden Ring Nightreign is a combination of everything I hate about modern gaming.
So everyone loves Elden Ring Nightreign, but after less than a minute of actually being in a match, Elden Ring Nightreign is everything wrong with modern gaming added into one game. It's not only everything wrong with modern gaming but how every single developer both major publishers, major developers, and indie developers are constantly making these same games with these same few genres or mechanics. Open world, procedural generation, and multiplayer matches are the most popular things to push into games.
Elden Ring's original release, took Dark Souls and then pushed in an open world. I myself "liked' Elden Ring, but at the same time I was frustrated playing it because of the emplty aimless open world with almost nothing in between everything. Enemies few and far between, locations few and far between, and only when you spent wasting an absurd amount of time would you find each of these individual caverns, ruins, etc, that were the best part about the game. It was like they took Dark Souls, they added a shitty open world, and then allowed you to experience broken up pieces of Dark Souls dungeons in random areas throughout the game. Granted it is more content that even Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne have combined, but it's all in between massive amounts of an empty ridiculous padded out open world and let's say you die while exploring, you don't know where you ended exploring so now you have to spend even more time reexploring the open world to make sure you're hitting all of these dungeons.
So it's pretty clear how I think modern open world has ruined games by just pushing this in for the sake of these games to be open world, and to me I think Elden Ring is still a 7/10, which a 7/10 is a very good game. Another issue with modern gaming and I won't go into detail on this as it's a completely different issue altogether is reviewers have essentially brainwashed everyone into thinking 7/10 is mediocre, 8/10 is good, 9/10 is great and there anything less is bad where I use the entire scale, 5/10 is a decent game, 4/10 is mediocre and then everything above is different variations of good, scores like 9/10 and 10/10 should be near impossible to achieve unless they are really just that good.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is a game I'd rate 5/10. Combat is great, storyline is great, but everything in between is the worst, it's a game where once again, open world ruins the experience, the games entire modern day progression ruins the game. It's not just the mini games that are forced and a literal shit that someone burned onto a Bluray, the entire progression through these large open maps just to get to your main story events, the amount of padding within these main story events, the game having the absolute worst dungeons I've experienced in an RPG lately, etc. Everything about Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is incredibly padded out and it to an absurd degree and that's not even if you decide to try and experience the open world content, the absolute padding absurdity is unbelievably bad.
Midgar on Final Fantasy 7 Remake was expanded, sure, some will say it is padded, I didn't feel it like that. It was a 20-30 hour experience in total though completing nearly everything but the last VR which is only available on hard mode. Yeah..... well, after you leave Midgar in FF7 on PS1, the rest of disc one is, what? It's four hours? And Rebirth with almost 100% of everything complete but the Chocobo Racing side quest is 130 hours on dynamic? So what's actually padded out here? A game that is a little more than five times the length with expanded content that feels enjoyable to play, or a game that is more than 30 times the length in which people will actively argue to ignore the content if you don't like it in order to defend just how bad the entirety of this game is.
I've played Ghost of Tsushima, Ghostwire Tokyo, Fenyx Rising, etc, etc, etc, etc, and these games are less about playing video games but exploring these massive padded open worlds to get to where you need to go. Hold x direction through 10-20 minutes of nothingness. It's like being in kindergarten all over again and getting a participation trophy for just being at some event. You're too stupid to make a hand turkey but here's your trophy.
An overly long explanation to point out the one genre of games, and yes, open world should be considered a sub genre as it usually effects the enjoyment of the game.
The second genre of games is not roguelike, it's not Shiren, it's not Chocobo Dungeon, etc. The second genre is "Prodcurally Generated Games." This genre of games is mis represented and called roguelikes, they're not, because roguelikes are a very specific kind of procedural generation games and have been until around 2008 when some asshole created a game called Binding of Isaac and called his game a roguelike to basically give him his own genre. He basically pushed his game into that genre of titles because "procedural generation" was the only thing they had in common, and ever since then games that are called procedural generation by the cesspool of humanity throw every into this new cesspool of gaming that they refer to inproperly as roguelike.
So these "roguelikes" and try to think of my saying this word as the most sarcastic way possible, take a series of aspects of design and incorporate all of these into a generally generic designed level and blend this together for the sake of longevity, this longevity is because odds are they make the game too stupidly difficult that you will die with a mechanic that allows you to grow more powerful each run, so that 40 hours later after you waste hundreds of runs and have gained double or triple your HP, have gained several times the damage you initially started with, etc, you can finally beat a run, a run of an entire game that realistically could have been beaten over the weekend if it wasn't padded as fuck.
And that's what procedurally generated bullshit is, padding, lots and lots of padding, and it's not even done in a way roguelikes, true classic roguelikes are done, games that are done like a overhead dungeon crawler, a genre of TRPG before the TRPG genre as we know it even existed outside of your turn based D&D stlye games or Ultima on PC.
Which then leads me to multiplayer which has turned into often times doing these short repetitive runs on the same maps over and over and over again. No longer is the average co op game you playing through a platformer, shooter, puzzle game, etc, with a friend, now it's a pvp mode on a few maps over and over and over again. Overwatch had like what, two maps for a long period of time? Dead by Daylight is just repeating the same thing with procedural changes in the map in a short pvp experience where the player who's the killer must defeat all the allies. There are so many games that have such little amounts of content that the goal is to drip feed actual content with a heavily monetized game to get people to just buy useless content and spend thousands of hours, but as someone who grew up playing games the past 40 years... well, not quite, almost, I'll sometimes play these games but I want more content in games I want more variety in games, I don't want just the same repetitious aspect of the game padding things out endless.
Elden Ring Nightreign is the accumulation, the abomination of all of the worst things in modern gaming all rolled into one, and the modern gamers love it. First off there's the "influencers." It's in the influencers best interest who make $10k+ per stream to make sure this game is hyped and beloved by the fans. Regardless if they prefer traditional Dark Souls or Elden Ring, this is the new hype, they will shower praise about this game and shill this game because it means money. It is literally a tool for you to watch them play games and it's these online and procedural games that influencers make more money than anything else, because your modern gamers, instead of just playing games, for some stupid reason will just watch these people play the same game for eight hours a day and even more stupid, give them money to watch them play a game.
It's not just the games, it's the people that help make these games popular, the people who will shill these games as they benefit from these games, the average gamer who is pretty much a mind controlled drone, and the publishers themselves obviously, everything has accumulated into modern day gaming becoming all about how to profit off of games rather than games being good.
Now this is all just generalization as there are games that are good but it's so few and far between now days and it takes so much effort, time, and money to actually find truly great games because of how popular and profitable it is for open world, procedural, and this asymettrical multiplayer.
But this is exactly what Elden Ring Nightreign is. It's procedural open world where every single 40 minute match is you progressing with a team of three people that you are required to work together and communicate with to level up enough and acquire enough good item that are randomized of course, to play through and defeat three different bosses across three different days in an endless cycle which Bandai Namco states there will be no microtransactions but I guarantee you that cosmetic monetization will be released a week after launch like every other game. Tekken 8 had no monetization either, and look what they did in less than a month after release.
Elden Ring Nightreign is an amalgamation of all of the worst aspects in gaming. In less than a minute of starting my first run I pretty much hated the experience. I didn't even finish my first run because I only started it near the end of the second session and servers shut down just before the end of day two. I will of course put forth more effort into playing it as I always give games a chance.
Now, while I give all games a reasonable chance to change my opinion, I have no expectation that my opinion will change, infact pretty certain of it. Even if I decided right now to never touch the game again and delete the beta, ignore the full release and every glowing review which is pretty much going to happen now days as Youtube reviewrs are the worst sort of shills, so desperate to make money from Youtube that they either won't say anything negative or if they do sprinkle it up with the most bullshit of sugar coating(I'm looking at you Happy Console Gamer and your "my disappointing games lists.") Or Happy Console Gamer's 10/10 PS5, Switch, etc, game lists. I'm using him as an example, but it's not like the person, this is something across the vast majority of Youtubers where they provide glowing reviews and even if they're not, they gloss over their criticism so it doesn't effect the free codes or free swag that they're getting. It also doesn't effect their viewship as they're not being negative towards games that these people may really like, also these same channels provide the bare minimum of depth about the games mechanics. Again, this is "most" Youtubers and not "all" Youtubers. As you have the few and far between like Angry Joe Show, The Electric Underground, etc, that actually gives critique and criticism. While everyone and their grandmother was circle jerking to Resident Evil 4 Remake, The Electric Underground points out how it's not a very good game and it's just another shooter with a Resident Evil 4 coat of paint because that's really all it is, I'd recommend watching his channel. Great in depth reviews.
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