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Like a lot of people interested in video games, I have spent most of the past week rampaging across the Lands Between on a phantom horse, slaying trolls, exploring castles and being repeatedly stamped on by giant boss monsters. The critical consensus is that Elden Ring, a new open-world fantasy adventure from the makers of the Dark Souls series, might just be one of the greatest games ever made. It is extraordinarily beautiful to look at, it’s incredibly challenging and it encourages players to discover its secrets however they see fit. It is also horrible to interact with. Sometimes really horrible.
I’m not talking about the combat or the movement mechanics – that’s all fine. It’s tough but it’s fine. I’m talking about the interface: the menu systems, the button-mapping, the on-screen information display (or HUD), which all give players access to different facets of the game. They’re horribly designed. You need two different buttons to open and close the map. There are two different inventories – the main equipment inventory and a pouch – and they’re on different screens. Sometimes you pick up an object and it just disappears into your inventory, which works exactly like that drawer in the kitchen where you keep all the useful stuff you can never find again.
This isn’t how games are supposed to work. User interface design is a science that’s taken very seriously in the industry. At the Yorkshire Games festival last month, the user experience designer David Sheppard, once at Jaguar Land Rover but now at Ubisoft, gave a really interesting talk on how much thought goes into creating games that are seamlessly useful and understandable to the player. He talked about gestalt principles, semiotics, heuristic design – all the theories making games comprehensible and pleasurable to use that have guided design since the 1980s. Even if a game is meant to be hard, it shouldn’t be the menus and button layout that challenge the player – it should be what happens in the game world.
So how does Elden Ring get away with it? Certainly industry insiders are baffled. One forlorn user experience designer argued on Twitter that the almost perfect scores for the game made a mockery of his entire career. But the thing with Elden Ring, as with all the Souls titles before it, is that the metagame – the stuff that goes on around the actual on-screen action – is as important as the game itself. This is an arcane, esoteric universe where players must work together on discord channels and message boards to figure out the best courses of action. Just as scientists had to decode the Rosetta Stone to read hieroglyphic script, just as the Bletchley Park boffins had to crack the enigma code to interpret Nazi communications, players see mastering the very interface and controls of this game as part of the challenge.
FromSoftware, the maker of Elden Ring, has managed to build into its audience an almost masochistic mindset, and it has done this through the arcane play spaces it designs on screen. It has taught players that they will usually lose and that everything will be hard, and in this way, simply being able to navigate the menus becomes a badge of honour. In a world where big games seem obsessed with over-explaining every facet of the lore, experience and through line of each game, where players are endlessly spoon-fed by quest logs and helpful quest-givers, it is almost refreshing to be treated badly. Of course, it only works if the game in question is an idiosyncratic masterpiece. And in many, many ways it’s a beautiful thing that game developers now take intuitiveness and accessibility so seriously.
There is a tinge of cruelty in Elden Ring that is kind of avant-garde. Like the music of Laurie Anderson or Frank Zappa, or the art of Man Ray or Carl Andre, you have to fight just to understand what’s going on. I’ve put 100 hours into Elden Ring and I still get mad that you need a different button to close the map than you need to open it – it’s just so bad. The thing is, I’ll be moaning about it after 500 hours and 1,000 hours, but I’ll still be playing. Because it is wonderful. What does that tell us about art and rules? Nothing easy, that’s for sure.
What to play
If you want to experience a hard game with a really good user interface, I’m going to recommend Dead Space, the sci-fi horror spectacular from Electronic Arts. Set aboard an interplanetary mining ship that’s been invaded by killer aliens, it’s a tense and often terrifying action adventure that makes innovative use of a “diegetic” interface. In other words, all the health and ammo info, as well as other options, are displayed within the game itself, so they appear part of the world rather than abstract menus. It’s an incredibly immersive system that inspired a lot of other developers, especially in the VR space. You can either play the original 2008 game on Steam or hold off for the remake, which is set to arrive later this year.
What to read
The video-game industry is continuing to react to the war in Ukraine with its own sanctions against Russia. Electronic Arts is ceasing game sales and virtual currency bundles in Russia and Belarus, while Nintendo has put its eShop into maintenance mode in the territories. Epic Games is keeping Fortnite running in Russia but has ceased all e-commerce transactions around the game. It’s a swift set of measures from an industry that has often shied away from politics.
For something completely different, Christian Donlan at Eurogamer has written a fascinating piece on locks and lock-picking, common elements of action adventures. But how do all those safe-breaking mini-games compare to the real thing?
This week in the metaverse: Fortnite creator Epic Games has bought music-sharing site Bandcamp. But why? Here’s a clear-sighted piece of analysis from Brendan Sinclair at Gamesindustry.biz about the deal and what it means.
What to click
‘I just wanted to play Duck Hunt with my kids’: the man on a mission to bring back the light gun
Gran Turismo 7 review – the ultimate racing game is fresh and comfortingly familiar
Can a video game be as good for my marriage as family therapy? Not this one
Question block
I tweeted out for questions in the hour before the newsletter was due to be filed (sorry Keza, you knew what to expect when you handed this to me) and thankfully got some really interesting responses. I’m going to answer this one from Guy Bailey: “Does it matter if you never complete your favourite video game? #Fallout4 in my case.”
A resounding no from me! Video games should never become a chore. They are not something you have to finish in order to get everything you need from them. With an open-world game such as Fallout 4, the experience is more akin to highly applied tourism – you are visiting a landscape, enjoying sights, sounds and experiences that draw you in. If all you want to do is play with systems, if you want to bicycle the whole of Los Santos in GTA V or become a blacksmith in the Elder Scrolls, that’s just as valid as completing the main quests. Game-designer Sid Meier once famously defined a game as a series of interesting decisions – if this is the case, how you make those decisions is up to you. There is enough in our lives that demands completion – video games can ask for it, but you can refuse and simply make the decisions you’re interested in. Your time is precious – game-designers are happy for any of it that you share with them.
