Elden Ring and The Ecstacy of the Esoteric
I’ve been playing a lot of Elden Ring lately. It released two Fridays ago and I’m estimating I’ve played it for nearly 20 hours. This means I’ve killed exactly one major boss, a villain named Margit whom I simply never stumbled upon until randomly deciding to enter Stormveil Castle after 20 hours of adventuring south of that point on the map of the Lands Between. I’d actually killed many world bosses and bosses in caves and such up to that point and had reached level 30 before ever stepping foot into Stormveil Castle.
Throughout my adventure, I’d found a lot of idiosyncrasies in the design of the game, some of which I had familiarity with from dipping my toe in the Dark Souls pool over the years. I’d played Demon’s Souls quite a bit back on PS3 and then Dark Souls Remastered and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (though neither all the way through), so I knew to expect a relatively minimalist surface UI and menus with seriffed text containing a laundry list of inscrutable statistics and poorly explained functions.
So of course, as I casually noticed these things, the Internet was blowing up with people completely losing their minds arguing about “poor design” and “git good” and “l2p” and “UI/UX” and such. The arguments seemed to be between people who think the “complex” and “minimalist” (and, ugh, “Japanese”) nature of the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) is good and people who think the “obtuse” and “poor design” of the UI and UX is bad.
I used sneer quotes because people on both sides of this argument choose words that align with their personal views of whether, essentially, this all amounts to “good” or “bad”. I don’t really care to litigate that argument one way or the other because ultimately, whether it’s “good” or “bad” is largely subjective. Rather, I’m much more interested in thinking about why there are people who think of these elements are good or bad and why those people end up hardening their positions and going tribal based on, frankly, a relatively benign personal preference.
Esoteric Game Design
As people cart out their buzzword of choice (today’s word is, without a doubt, “obtuse,” a word so mishandled and overused that at this point it has lost almost all meaning besides “thing that I do not think is easy to understand and which is therefore bad”), the one I choose to focus on here is “esoteric”. Basically, to call something “esoteric” is to describe it as intentionally designed to be understood only by people with specialized knowledge or interest. Typically, when something is described as “esoteric,” it is thought of as overwrought or inscrutable but also intriguing and, to some small percentage of people, worth understanding.
Many games are esoteric in their design. I’d say Fez is one of the most esoteric games in recent memory. Fez gained notoriety because of its esoteric design, in fact. It contained its own symbology that could be solved and translated to English. It contained inscrutable puzzles that the online community worked together to solve, revealing ways of progressing that were not immediately apparent on the surface. Fez isn’t the best playing game in the world—I’d call it a passable platformer at best—but the esoteric design is so intriguing that the player can certainly get sucked in trying to figure out what’s going on with it.
Older games were often inscrutable by their very nature. Essentially, there was limited space to explain how to play or what to do in games early on, so there were conventions established and, along with instruction manuals, players were left to figure out how to play based on how the game was designed. The best designed games taught players how to play them but also left some amount of “secret” mechanics to them.
Super Mario Bros. famously trains players to go from left to right, to avoid touching the enemies, to jump on them, to hit blocks to get powerups, and to collect coins. It also unexpectedly allows Mario to run on top of the very top line of blocks where the UI with the score and lives is listed in order to reach hidden Warp Zones that take the player much deeper into the game.
Mortal Kombat these days is known for being as ostentatious as it is gory, but when the original game came out in arcades in the 90s, the infamous “FINISH HIM” was almost mythical. Some older kid would be playing and when “FINISH HIM” popped up, he’d work some joystick magic, hit a few buttons, and suddenly Kano would rip out his opponent’s heart and a voice would loudly pronounce “FATALITY” while blood-dripping text came up on screen. Smaller kids would beg that person for the forbidden knowledge of how to do the Fatality. The commands were often etched right into the wood of the arcade machine or written on the side in black Sharpie.
All this is to say that video games have a very long history of esoteric design, and modern games are no exception. For game designers, creating an esoteric game became increasingly challenging as the Internet evolved and become ubiquitous. Where before players would learn by word-of-mouth and “secrets” could be relatively simple, esoteric design has become more and more about a mythos of difficulty that comes with complex systems and intentional choices to underexplain mechanics.
The Monster Hunter Approach
In thinking about modern approaches to esoteric game design, there are directly esoteric games like Fez and then there are obliquely esoteric games that try to straddle the line between mass appeal and a perception of specialized niche. I admit to being biased because I’m a big fan of this series, but Monster Hunter stands out to me as a major gaming franchise from a relatively big game developer that tries to perform this latter feat to arguably moderate (and probably increasing) success.
Monster Hunter is, on the surface, a straightforward action role-playing game. But one of the first things you’ll hear if you watch a video of people new to the series jump into one of the games is confusion about how everything works. Example: When you use an item, your character goes into an animation of taking the item out, consuming it, putting it away and possibly flexing afterwards all while being completely defenseless to any attack the giant monster they are fighting might unleash. If you want to swap items, historically it involved holding a shoulder button and using action buttons to scroll through a bar of items—the same action buttons you’d use to dodge or attack. (This finally changed with Monster Hunter World, the tenth game in the series, adding a radial menu, which requires holding a shoulder button and using the analog stick controlling the camera, which is very slightly less awkward but still quite awkward!)
These control quirks are just the tip of the iceberg with Monster Hunter. We can get into the Affinity stat and what it means. We can get into deflection and sharpness. We can discuss the way status effects have changed generation-by-generation. If we really want to get into the weeds, we can go through motion values and listed weapon strength and damage-per-second. To the uninitiated, this all sounds like gobbledygook and, frankly, that’s the point.
Because not only is Monster Hunter a fun game because you’re a little person with a huge sword fighting a giant kaiju and actually winning, but it’s fun because all this stuff makes it extremely esoteric. And learning all these vagaries, this specialized knowledge, makes the “hardcore” Monster Hunter player feel like part of an exclusive club of people who had the interest and took the time to actually learn it all.
The Illusion of Impenetrability
And so it is with From Software’s Dark Souls games (and all their related titles including Demon’s Souls, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and now Elden Ring). The “discourse” (ugh) around Elden Ring right now boils down to the value of its esoteric design. Some people think there’s value in the specialized knowledge required to really learn how to play this game while others don’t, and that’s really all there is to it. They’ll dress these arguments up to be about “UI/UX design” or “time wasting” or “expertise” or “hardcore gaming” or “accessibility” (more on accessibility in a moment because I think there is legitimate criticism there, but some people use it as a bludgeon) but mostly it’s really about whether the specific player thinks its fun to be part of the in-group with specialized knowledge of Souls games or not.
To me, no specific element of Elden Ring'‘s esoteric design emphasizes this quite like the map button. To open the map, you press one button. To close the map, you press a different button. This has tripped me up probably fifty times in my twenty hours playing the game. Many people in the “bad UI/UX design” side of the argument point to it as a baffling choice. But the people on the side of specialized knowledge, the hardcore Souls fanboys who would die before letting even the mildest criticism of their beloved series slide, defend the choice by saying, “but it makes sense because unfurling a map and rolling a map back up are two different, opposing actions, so of course you wouldn’t use the same button.” Ingenious explanation, honestly. Complete nonsense, but also ingenious!
Ultimately, the whole map thing is just a design choice and something for players to get used to. It’s a nit pick. There are other design choices that are more esoteric than just minor UX design choices, such as the decision not to give players information about the amount of damage a given spell will do or about what type of resistances certain enemies will have against various damage types or what types of attacks they’ll do. Elden Ring has a system where you purchase little notes about specific enemy types and the notes just say something (hopefully) meaningful about them. Many other games will give you tons of information to these points to inform your decisions and essentially reveal the inner mechanical workings of the game. But by leaving this stuff unspoken, it means figuring it out will take research and knowledge sharing and experience and memory. And people love the meta puzzle of these games, figuring all that type of stuff out. Similar to that, there are parts of the game that will only be accessed by doing very specific series of actions guided only by inscrutable clues (if anything at all). These are all conscious choices to make the game more esoteric.
Some people describe these type of design as “impenetrable” or (ugh) “obtuse”. But that’s all really an illusion. In this day and age, this all gets digested by an online community within hours and all of it is figured out and put on the Internet so really, anyone can find out how to access those inscrutable quests and zones, anyone can find out what the strongest spell or weapon is, and anyone can find out the strengths and weaknesses of any enemy pretty quickly without it being written in the game text. It’s an illusion of impenetrability. It’s a façade meant to give the appearance of the esoteric.
The False Idols of Difficulty and Inaccessibility
Probably the hardest criticism to dismiss about Elden Ring specifically is one about accessibility because therein lies the hard truth about video games, which is that they’re not for everyone. And yet, I always fall on the side of accessibility because I believe as a person with disability that people with disabilities should have a fair shot to at least enjoy a game even if it means the game is altered slightly to enable them to play it. But even on that level, there’s no agreement about how accessible Elden Ring is. I just saw an article in Fanbyte yesterday by Grant Stoner called “For the Physically Disabled, Elden Ring is the Most Accessible Souls Game Yet”. Grant states he has Spinal Muscular Atrophy type II in his article, which limits his control options significantly when playing games. But then I saw a tweet by Steve Saylor, an accessibility advocate with blindness, about the lack of accessibility preventing him from being able to enjoy the game, and that’s a shame.
I have to wonder just how much of this is because of the toxic “Souls fanboys” and how much of their intolerance is due to tribalism around valuing the esoteric nature of the Souls series of games.
I think it suffices to say that whether the game is accessible is personal. For some people with certain disabilities, it will be accessible. For others it will not. I have peripheral neuropathy and anemia from a genetic disease and this game with no pause button is not the most accessible for me, either. (Actually apparently there is a way to pause Elden Ring by opening the “menu explanation” within the menu, which is kind of funny.) I can’t stop and shake out my hands and give myself time to recover if I’m in the middle of a stressful situation in the game. It makes it more difficult for me than it would be for someone who doesn’t have these physical conditions.
I don’t think that it’s necessary for this game to be lacking a pause button at all. The argument some people trot out in favor of lacking a pause button is that a pause button would enable players to relieve emotional tension during a tough battle and that would not match the creator’s vision for how you’re supposed to feel when in a tense fight. While that’s possibly true, I think pausing is a personal choice and my hands going numb isn’t due to tension, it’s due to the genetic condition I was born with not allowing my extremities enough blood to function normally.
If you talk to someone who knows games well about the Souls series of games, the first thing that probably pops in their mind is, “Those are HARD games!” And they can be difficult just from an action RPG perspective because the enemies do a lot of damage, the timing windows are short and require precision, and the information is limited so you have to do research and work to prepare. They can also be inaccessible for a variety of reasons and this adds to the perception of difficulty. But “difficulty” is also something that’s easy to adjust in a game like this by altering enemy damage output, enemy health bars, player damage resistence, enemy aggro range, et cetera. It’s a choice by the designers not to enable difficulty levels.
People vehemently defend the difficulty and inaccessibility of these games because they mistakenly think it makes them and their in-group of people who love these games stronger and better. It certainly feels strong to have a victory in one of these games. But ultimately those are personal victories and someone else doing it at a lower difficulty level or having a functional pause button or using cheats doesn’t actually take away from the personal “achievement”. They feel they need to defend these design choices because they feel the design choices reflect on them personally, so they’re defending themselves.
Aside: Someone might read the above and think, “He’s just saying that because he’s bad at these games.” Let me just clarify: I am good at these games. If you said that to yourself, I’m probably better than you at these games. I mentioned Margit earlier, the first major boss that seems to be a blockage for a lot of people playing this game. I beat him first try without even knowing the fight against him was coming up and without any research into what type of attacks he does, how to beat him, et cetera. I had literally never seen the fight against him before or read up on him at all. He was easy for me. Took me about 90 seconds to destroy him. First try. No research. Did you do that? No? Thought not. So my opinion here is not colored by having difficulty with these games myself—if anything, I think the difficulty discourse around them generally is overblown and I’ve never found any of them particularly difficult. But that’s neither here nor there and, if anything, it should only bolster my position that inaccessibility and difficulty are illusory.
Reject Tribalism, Respect Nerding Out
But why defend this kind of thing at all? I don’t think someone deploying this argument about “emotional tension” is arguing in bad faith. I think they genuinely want to believe that. But it doesn’t really give a good reason for no pause button—for able-bodied people, pausing would presumably be a choice and they could choose not to use it. Same for difficulty sliders and so forth.
I think games with esoteric design especially cater themselves towards appealing to human tribalism. When you learn all that specialized knowledge of the game, it’s like you’re in a special club exclusively for people who both cared enough and took the time to learn the minutiae. And in order to justify the time and energy you put into becoming one of the elite-level hardcore academic experts of Elden Ring (or Monster Hunter or any other esoteric game), you might feel like you need to defend it. And for some people, that means defending every part of it and losing any semblance of objective criticism like, for example, that a pause button might indeed be contrary to the creator of the game’s artistic vision but that it might be worth including it for people with physical disabilities who really have no choice in the matter.
I believe this relates back to the “Souls fanboy” thing as well, and may speak to why some fans become so toxic in their defense of their chosen game. It’s embodied in the “git gud” culture around a lot of games that’s really just a flippant dismissal of legitimate criticism. When someone says this, what they’re saying is: “To be in this group, you have to pass this test—since you failed, you’re not one of us, and therefore you’re not allowed a say in the matter.”
But this attitude sucks. There’s no need for that type of tribalism. Your “in-group” doesn’t have some especially valued skill, you just like this game a lot and are pretty good at it. I get feeling cool about that—I’m very good at video games generally and usually play on the hardest difficulty and feel cool when I pull off achievements at that level. But to take that to extreme where you say, “therefore, people who aren’t as good as me shouldn’t be allowed a way of enjoying it” is just deeply immature.
Esoteric games reward people who spend the time and effort to learn the specialized knowledge required. You can nerd out with like-minded people talking for hours about the minutiae of the game. I’ve loved doing this with Monster Hunter and Yakuza and so many other games. I’ve been enjoying dipping my toe into it with Elden Ring as well, my first time really feeling connected to a Souls game. When esoteric design works, it can yield this kind of positive impact. I wish some players had the self-awareness to cherish that—to recognize that games can have inscrutable depths, unusual design, even (dare I say it) obtuse UI elements that challenge the status quo and enable fun discussions and feelings of triumph without excluding people due to inaccessibility or mindlessly discussing faux “difficulty” as if it provides value beyond the individual experience of playing the game.
