Elden Ring is one of the largest games in FromSoftware’s library; its size and scale are unlike anything their fans have ever seen before. The same can be said about 2016’s Batman: Arkham Knight. Besides that, these games are on two very different shores. One of them is a full-fledged action game, while the other is a soulslike role-playing game with hard-as-nails enemies to defeat.
Both of these titles were incredibly successful, and they would be remembered by their fans for a very long time. But some suggest that there are things that these games could learn from each other. For instance, some fans suggest FromSoftware could have learned a few things from Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Knight to make it much better.
Should FromSoftware have excluded crafting from Elden Ring?
The Dark Souls franchise is pretty successful, and a whole community is dedicated to keeping this trilogy alive. The biggest example of this is the recent Archthrones mod for Dark Souls 3 that launched back in March.
This new expansion added a bunch of new content to this already vast game. Fans are overjoyed, without a doubt. But this fantastic series has one small drawback: the developers place the vendors after every few areas.
This means if players run out of necessary items like arrows and such, depending on their location, the journey back to a vendor can be a pain. And every Dark Souls fan knows how important arrows are in these games.
Elden Ring is even larger than those games; it has numerous dungeons, castles to explore, and even more bosses to defeat. Imagine a player is exploring a dungeon, and they cannot fast-travel from that location to a vendor, and they run out of arrows. How do they get themselves out of this tough situation?
They craft themselves some arrows; yes, Elden Ring allows players to craft items on the spot when they need anything. It’s a very helpful feature that comes in handy when gamers have no other way to go.
However, some suggest that Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team at FromSoftware could have done better by not having this feature. Given how redundant it is players could buy arrows from vendors.
Batman: Arkham Knight’s game director, Sefton Hill, suggested that they would rather not add features to their game that players would not use. He had suggested that they only cared about adding stuff that felt organic and proved useful.
“You look at Arkham City; that was us going to a more open world approach with Batman free to move everywhere. We’re not going to add in a feature because we want to do a tick in the box; we want to do it right. And that meant integrating it into every core system of the game, even into the combat and puzzle solving.”
And yet they added the Batmobile to Batman: Arkham Knight; while the vehicle seemed fun to drive, it felt like a forced addition. Not because it was useless, but because they felt the need to tick the box, which said they needed a bunch of Batmobile-specific features in Arkham Knight.
Hidetaka Miyazaki, on the other hand, could learn from Rocksteady to be a bit more open-minded with their game engines. Their games can look much better, but only if they make it to Unreal Engine 4 or 5. Their age-old in-house engine is keeping them in the last generation.
Fans should get ready to be Batman yet again!
Fans of The Dark Knight would be glad to know that WB Games has recently announced a brand new Batman Arkham game called Batman: Arkham Shadow. This would be a VR game released specifically for Meta Quest 3. Its announcement trailer is dark and gritty enough to hype the fans.
It shows a dark and dirty corner of Gotham City. All of a sudden, Batman lands on that street and is surrounded by numerous rats. Then he uses a smoke bomb and vanishes out of sight. It might not be a representation of its real visuals, but it looked exciting enough.
The only problem is that Batman is not alive in the Arkham universe of games. He had blown up himself and Alfred alongside Wayne Manor at the end of Arkham Knight. The game would be showcased during the summer game fest in June; maybe fans would get more answers then.
