Elden Ring: 200 Hours In And I’m Still Not Convinced It’s The Second Coming

NightPixel · 24/03/2026 · 15 min read

Elden Ring: 200 Hours In And I’m Still Not Convinced It’s The Second Coming

After hundreds of hours in Elden Ring, I'm still holding onto my skepticism, even though the hype surrounding its release suggested it was the second coming of RPGs. While FromSoftware makes undeniably great games, the sheer adoration for Elden Ring still leaves me wondering if it truly lives up to the divine praise it received.

I remember the launch night of Elden Ring. Everyone was hyped. My Discord was buzzing, Twitter was melting down, and the gaming sphere collectively decided this was *it*. The next masterpiece. The Messiah of open-world RPGs. Me? I sat there, sipping my overly strong Bulgarian coffee, a skeptical eyebrow raised so high it almost touched my hairline. I mean, FromSoft. They make good games, sure. *Really* good games. But a perfect game? Never seen one. Not in my 3000+ games, not in my six years QA’ing AAA titles. Still, curiosity got the better of me. Two hundred hours later, a full second playthrough done, and I've got thoughts. Strong ones. Let's dive into the Lands Between, shall we?

The Open World: A Beautiful, Empty Coffin

Everyone raved about the open world. "Seamless!" "Exploration!" "Freedom!" And yeah, initially, I was impressed. Limgrave is gorgeous, the vistas are breathtaking, and stumbling upon some hidden cave or NPC felt genuinely exciting for the first few hours. But then... it started to wear thin. Fast.

Here’s the thing about open worlds: they need *something* in them besides more of the same. Elden Ring's world, for all its beauty, often feels like a vast, empty coffin adorned with the same three types of catacombs, the same handful of mines, and the same handful of overworld bosses recycled until my eyes bled. When I was QA’ing games, if we tried to get away with this much copy-pasting, we’d have been laughed out of the studio. This isn’t "organic discovery"; it’s padding.

"The Lands Between isn’t an open world; it's a glorified loading screen between the actual good parts."

I found myself just summoning Torrent, galloping past hordes of identical enemies, ignoring the tenth minor dungeon that I *knew* would contain another identical talisman or weapon I’d never use. It honestly felt like a lot of the world was designed to burn through your time, not enhance your experience. Dark Souls’ linear yet intricate level design felt more interconnected and lived-in than this sprawling, desolate expanse. It's like they took the Dark Souls formula, stretched it thin, and hoped the sheer scale would distract you from the lack of genuine variety.

The Bosses: Some Banger Bangers, But A Lot Of Whiffers

Ah, the bosses. The true meat of any Soulsborne game. And Elden Ring delivers some absolute masterpieces. Radahn, Rykard, Godfrey, Malenia (more on her later)—these are generational fights. Epic, challenging, and visually spectacular. I remember the night I sat until 4 AM trying to beat Radahn the first time, my hands sweating, my controller barely clinging to life. That's the good stuff, the rush, the feeling of overcoming an insurmountable obstacle.

But then there's the other 70% of the bosses. The reskinned gargoyles, the endless crucible knights, the three hundred variations of a putrid avatar. It felt like they had maybe 20 unique boss designs and then just spread them out like jam on too much toast. And don't even get me started on the gank fights. Godskin Duo? An exercise in frustration, not skill. It felt cheap, like they couldn’t design a challenging encounter so they just threw two high-health enemies at you simultaneously. That’s not difficulty; that’s artificial friction. When I worked in QA, "artificial difficulty" was a dirty word, and Elden Ring embraces it like a long-lost brother.

"When I spend more time fighting the camera and enemy hitboxes than the actual boss, you've failed at basic game design."

And Malenia. Oh, Malenia. She's a masterpiece of frustration. Her Waterfowl Dance is probably the most controversial move in Souls history. If you don't know the exact pixel-perfect dodge timing or have the specific item to tank it, you're dead. Instantly. That’s not a challenge; that’s a memory test with an incredibly narrow pass window. It became less about learning her tells and more about praying she didn't cast that specific move at the wrong time. It made the fight less about skill and more about RNG. A truly great boss tests your mastery of the game's mechanics; Malenia feels like she tests your patience for repetitive trial and error.

The Difficulty Debate: Git Gud Just Got Lazier

Elden Ring is hard. No one disputes that. But *how* it's hard is where my beef lies. Dark Souls was hard, but it felt fair. Every death was a lesson, every enemy had a predictable moveset you could learn. Here? Sometimes it feels like they replaced intricate level design and enemy variety with just making everything hit harder, have more health, and move faster.

The Spirit Ashes are a prime example. They were supposed to make the game more accessible, right? Buff players who were struggling. But in practice, they often felt like a necessary crutch because bosses were tuned to be borderline unfair without them. If your game *requires* a specific mechanic to feel balanced, then that mechanic isn't an option; it's a design flaw that you're masking.

"Difficulty should be about skill ceiling, not about artificial walls. Elden Ring sometimes feels like it confused the two."

And the runbacks. Oh my god, the runbacks! Why, after all these years, do we still have bosses with utterly brutal runbacks? Malenia, Godskin Duo, Fire Giant. Dying to a boss is one thing; having to spend two minutes traversing empty corridors or fighting irrelevant trash mobs just to *try again* is soul-crushing. It wastes my time, and it burns my enthusiasm. It’s like they actively tried to make the experience less enjoyable. That's how you get people to rage quit, not to master the game.

The Community: Piss and Vinegar, as Expected

The Elden Ring community... well, it's a Souls community, isn't it? Full of passionate, dedicated players, and also a healthy dose of toxic gatekeepers. The "git gud" mentality is alive and well, often used to dismiss any legitimate criticism of the game's design choices. If you say something is unbalanced, you're just bad. If you say a boss is unfair, you need to "learn the patterns." It's exhausting.

I appreciate the help, the lore discussions, the hilarious memes. But the defensiveness, the refusal to admit that even a hallowed FromSoft game can have flaws, is baffling to me. I’ve been in game development. Nothing is perfect, and constructive criticism is literally how games improve. To shut it down with a tired meme? That’s not helping anyone.

"If you can’t criticize a game you love, you don’t love it; you worship it. And worship makes you blind."

The constant comparisons to other games, always touting Elden Ring as the definitive best, also gets old. It’s a great game, sure. But it’s not for everyone, and it has significant flaws that shouldn’t be ignored under a blanket of hyperbole. I miss the days when we could just talk about games, the good and the bad, without it turning into a tribal war.

Elden Ring vs. Dark Souls: Did We Lose Something?

This is where my hardcore gamer heart gets a little wistful. Elden Ring is big, it's ambitious, and it sold gangbusters. But in chasing that open-world trend, I feel like they sacrificed some of the tight, interconnected brilliance that made the original Dark Souls trilogy so special.

What Dark Souls did better (in my humble opinion):

Elden Ring brought some fantastic buffs, like the sheer scale and the incredible build variety, but it also introduced nerfs that, for me, weigh it down. It’s not a bad game. Far from it. It’s a *good* game. A *very* good game. But the "Game of the Decade"? "Perfect execution"? Nah, I don't buy it. It's a fantastic iteration, but not a flawless victory.

It’s like they took that signature FromSoft DNA and tried to make it play nice with an open-world formula. Sometimes it works brilliantly, sometimes it clashes harder than a heavy metal concert in a library. I respect the ambition, I truly do. But sometimes, less is more.

"Elden Ring is a magnificent beast, but it’s still untamed. Dark Souls was a precision instrument."

My Verdict After 200 Hours: A Flawed Gem

I spent 200 hours in the Lands Between. I beat it twice. I explored (mostly) everything, fought (almost) every boss, and died more times than I care to admit. And you know what? I enjoyed a significant chunk of it. The highs are incredibly high. The lore, as always, is dense and fascinating. The art direction is phenomenal. But the lows, the repetitive content, the artificial difficulty, the frustrating boss design choices, they chipped away at my enjoyment.

It's a huge, sprawling game that offers immense satisfaction when you overcome its biggest challenges. But it also falls victim to many of the same traps open-world games have been falling into for years: copy-pasted content, a sense of aimless wandering, and an over-reliance on sheer scale over refined design.

If you love Souls games, you'll probably adore Elden Ring. But don’t tell me it’s perfect, because it’s not. No game is. And acknowledging its imperfections doesn't diminish its greatness; it just makes our appreciation for it more honest. That’s what I think, deal with it.

🎮 NightPixel, signing off. See you in the next game.

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FAQ:

Q: "You just suck at the game, don't you? Git gud."

A: Haha, classic. Look, I’ve completed every Dark Souls game, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Demon’s Souls, some of them multiple times, with various builds, and often on NG+ cycles. I’ve beaten Malenia. I’ve fought my way through countless invasions. If my criticism stemmed from a lack of skill, I’d be rage-quitting after Limgrave, not after 200 hours and two playthroughs. My enjoyment of the combat and my ability to play the game effectively are separate from my critical assessment of its design choices. Difficulty doesn't equate to quality, and artificial difficulty without genuine challenge is just bad design.

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