Two of 2023’s bestselling games, Elden Ring and Starfield, raise questions about what makes a game feel memorable, meaningful, and real.
Elden Ring and Starfield are massive open world role playing games (RPGs) that were supposed to represent the crowning achievements of their respective studios (FromSoftware and Bethesda). For many players the former was a spectacular success and the latter was a disappointing failure.
In Elden Ring you fight and die. Over and over again. It is set in a horrifically beautiful dark fantasy world and involves challenging, repetitive combat, with a focus on leveling up your character.
Starfield also involves combat, but integrates base creation, exploration, puzzles, and relationship development. In the game you join a group of space explorers looking for mysterious artifacts.
Elden Ring and Starfield are very different, but they both encourage players to explore massive and mysterious worlds. These games want to make you curious, and they try to get you to explore.
I love Bethesda games, particularly Fallout 3 and Skyrim. But, for me, Starfield fell short, while Elden Ring sparked the type of awe I felt playing Bethesda games growing up. Where does that sense of awe come from?
Several factors come to mind: the intense visual beauty of Elden Ring’s landscape, the unusual non-player character (NPC) and boss designs, the fact that moving through the landscape requires player creativity.
The more I think about it however, the more I realize the awe I experienced when playing Elden Ring stemmed from what isn’t in the game: surplus details, objects, and choices that get in the way of emotional impact.
Open world games take different approaches to the genre, but there’s been a definitive push over the last 20 years to create bigger maps, more player freedom/choice, and more “realistic” detail—in GTA 5 for example, running for a while will make you sweat. In Red Dead Redemption 2 the moon operates on accurate lunar cycles.
The inclusion of these types of details is often billed as a way to increase realism or as a way to increase player immersion. This line of thought makes sense—the more choice and detail a game has, the more a player will feel like they are actually in the world. Right?
While these details can contribute to a game’s emotional impact, they do not in and of themselves make a game feel more real. Many players, myself included, have intense, memorable, emotional experiences playing games with low quality graphics, limited player choice, or small maps.
While Elden Ring’s map is huge, it is a relatively sparse world. There are few NPCs. Cut scenes are limited, and story details are few and far between.
But I still remember, with vivid clarity, how intense my sense of relief was whenever I entered the roundtable hold in Elden Ring—one of the only “safe” spaces in the game where you cannot be attacked. The game is so brutal, that entering this space felt physically calming.
While I’ve never been chased by a living jar in the real-world, I have felt relief when entering welcoming and safe spaces. In this sense, the game experience felt real.
Elden Ring’s sparseness does not work for everyone—but, for me personally, fewer details made experiences more intense.
Starfield is filled with more stuff. You can pick up almost any object in Starfield—coffee cups, clip boards, pencils. Very few of the objects are useful, valuable, or interesting. You can talk to hundreds of NPCs, but a lot of the conversations aren’t meaningful or interesting.
There are lots of details in the real-world we don’t pay attention to (and for good reason). Humans have selective attention. We tune stuff out. But, when these details are transposed into a game world, it’s often unclear what exactly should be left behind, ignored, and forgotten. The result can be a lot of noise.
One response to this problem is to integrate even more detail—make all NPCs interesting, with fleshed-out routines and stories. Make all objects have a purpose. But I’m not sure this solves the problem.
For me, the differences between Elden Ring and Starfield offer are reminder that constraints can shape player experience and make it more meaningful. Games can feel emotionally “real” even if their worlds are not realistic. Bigger, more detailed worlds are not always better.
