Why Dark Souls world still outshines open world of Elden Ring

Getting into a series backward is a risky bet. Sometimes it ends with a thirteen-year-old game with muddy textures and stiff animations stealing all the joy from one of the most praised open worlds in gaming history.

That's basically what happened to one player on r/Eldenring, for whom Dark Souls became a second introduction to FromSoftware after Elden Ring.

He picked up the Nintendo Switch remaster two weeks ago, and things went sideways right from character creation: the music, the menu design, the heavy clank of armor, and the weight behind every roll all felt more convincing than any modern effects.

Then Lordran opened up, and suddenly the open world of the Lands Between started feeling a bit dull.

The explanation comes down to core design choices. In Dark Souls, fast travel only unlocks after the Lordvessel, roughly halfway through the game, so for the first half players have to hold the entire map in their heads.

Firelink Shrine doesn't work like a teleport hub – it's a junction that every path circles back to in the most unexpected ways, where a random elevator flips from "please be a shortcut or a bonfire" to the shock of realizing you're suddenly home again.

The real trick here is how the game plays with expectations. Players never know how big the world actually is, so every "this must be the lowest point" gets disproven by an even deeper descent, and every peak turns out not to be the top after all.

One commenter nailed exactly how this works:

I thought I was in the completely unknown and remote place then I open and door and right back to where I was 10 hours ago.

An open world is missing this trick by definition: you're promised a big world, you get a big world, and there's no surprise left in that.

FromSoftware's use of verticality doubled as punishment too. The climb down into Blighttown, with its poison swamps, scarce cures, and a boss you're forced to fight while already poisoned, ended in triumph – followed immediately by the realization that you'd have to climb all the way back up the same route unless you'd found the key to New Londo Ruins.

Lordran's closest heirs in Elden Ring are Stormveil Castle, Leyndell, and Shadow Keep from Shadow of the Erdtree, where the density of interconnected paths matches the series at its best.