Why Elden Ring is Unreviewable
Embodying the issues with modern review practices, the problems with Elden Ring discourse go deeper than the numbers
Elden Ring is, unambiguously, the greatest game of all time.
At least, it was for a few seconds.
After a few more reviews started pouring in, Elden Ring drifted down to the number 5 spot, before settling into a comfortable 96/100 on Metacritic, where it stays now at the time of writing. So, according to the numbers, Elden Ring has been mathematically proven to be, at the very least, one of the Greatest Games of All Time (TM). Right?
As I was scrolling through my Twitter feed, seeing post after post praising the game, I was certainly beginning to feel that way. It seemed everybody I knew was either loving Elden Ring, or eagerly awaiting the moment they could start playing (and loving) Elden Ring.
FromSoftware, best known for games like Bloodborne and the Dark Souls series, slowly built on and refined their idiosyncratic style throughout the 2010s, eventually forging a widely-recognized new subgenre of action games. “Soulslike” games are traditionally known for their punishing difficulty, intense resource-management, frequent deaths, and settings draped in decay and melancholia.
They are acknowledged, even by fans, as not for everyone. Nonetheless, they were very well-reviewed, with Dark Souls 3 sitting at 89% on Metacritic, and Bloodborne at 92%. In looking at the reviews for Elden Ring, however, it seemed like Hidetaka Miyazaki and the crew at FromSoftware had taken things to a whole new level.
I am not immune to the allure of hype, and, like a seagull seeing an exposed container of french fries, when I see a collection of shiny golden placards with “10/10” on them, I lose my god-damned mind. I love diving into reviews, hearing hot takes and unpopular opinions, but in covering Elden Ring, some common themes started popping up.
EGM’s reviewer, at the time of publication, didn’t beat the game. Neither did the reviewer from PureXbox. Same story with reviewers from PlaystationCountry, GamingNexus, and GamingBible, all of whom rewarded the game with rare 10/10 scores, publishing their reviews on February 23rd, which was the day the review embargo lifted and two days before Elden Ring would be released to the public.
This isn’t a condemnation of the reviewers insofar as it is a condemnation of the system which forces them to churn out content at an unsustainable rate. This is a problem with most online content publication, but when coupled with the pressure publications face for publishing reviews, the issues are only magnified.
According to Christopher Groux in The Inverse, publications were given, on average, a week to review Elden Ring. When we consider that it takes roughly 50–120 hours to beat Elden Ring, and a full time job in the US is 40 hours a week, and it can take many, many hours to think through, plan out, and compose a review well… it doesn’t take a brain genius to figure out where the issue might lie here.
This issue is compounded by the fact that many reviewers are not compensated for the time it takes to complete the game, especially as freelancers, and other, salaried journalists may be called upon to put in an 80-hour workweek when review time comes to get the product ready.
Even if the reviewer decides to put in the crunch time, with the preponderance of “day one” patches it’s likely that that they are dealing with a game that is, in various ways, unfinished. It’s become commonplace to see early reviews for many games mentioning significant technical issues that the developer has assured them will be ironed out in a day one patch. Elden Ring was no different, with various reviewers mentioning poor frame rate, visual glitches, and frame stuttering that FromSoftware assured them would be fixed in a day one patch.
So, if you’re being assigned to review Elden Ring, what are your options? You could stay up night after night beelining to the end credits to say you’ve completed it before dragging your exhausted, shambling, Soulslike-frame over to the computer to start typing out a review.
Doing that, however, risks engaging with the game in a way so alien to how the average player will experience it that it may damage the quality of your review. Not to mention that humans have limits, and, contrary to what Twitter may want you to think, games journalists are people too. The quality of your writing will, shockingly, take a dip if you can’t keep your eyes open and haven’t seen the sun in 6 days.
Some publications seek to resolve this problem by releasing “Reviews-in-Progress”, articles that are released when the embargo is lifted to capitalize on the initial interest while being updated over time. This choice doesn’t come without drawbacks, owing to an important reality of the publishing industry: Market Pressure.
As an example of how quickly online engagement drops after a game’s release, let’s take a look at Lost Ark, the uber-popular online MMO from Smilegate RPG and Tripod Studio, which, after its release on February 11th, experienced a precipitous drop in online interest.
After two weeks, interest in Lost Ark declined by 50%, after three weeks, 75%. Now, to be fair, Lost Ark has Elden Ring to contend with, but even though Elden Ring is still managing to maintain interest a month after release, no king rules forever. As FromSoftware games are eager to remind us, decay is inevitable, and when it comes to running a successful game publication capitalizing on that hype cycle is critical.
And capitalize they have, with publications like Kotaku running over fifty articles on Elden Ring in the month since its release, and I, like the greedy little content piglet I am, have read most of them. They’re not the only ones taking advantage of the hype cycle, it’s a necessity of the business, and review scores are a part of it.
Review scores are more popular than ever, with online reviews being a key part of how the vast majority of consumers make purchase decisions. It’s an unfortunate fact of social science that humans gravitate towards very positive and very negative reviews when making a decision, and considering that reviews are often the most popular articles that a publication will run relating to a game, initial impact is very important to establishing and maintaining traffic.
These incentive structures are even more complicated in the video game space, as over the years many companies have been caught trying to tie developer pay to Metacritic review scores. The most infamous example of this being the bonuses promised to Fallout: New Vegas developers should their game earn an 85 or above on Metacritic, only for the final score to rest at 84%.
This practice is becoming less popular, with workers at CD Projekt Red successfully campaigning their parent company to uncouple their bonuses from review scores for Cyberpunk 2077, which wound up being quite the prescient choice.
It’s become a common online refrain amongst the Real Gamers (TM) of the internet to accuse journalists of extreme bias for giving positive reviews to “bad” games to preserve the income of their industry friends. This is a tired stereotype that finds its roots in the bad-faith misogynist underpinnings of the “Gamergate” controversy, a movement which alleged that “SJW lib journalists” were subdued by corporate capture and cronyism, a poorly-supported accusation used to provide cover for targeted harassment campaigns against women and POC working in games journalism.
The truth is, if journalism is biased towards anything, it’s biased towards unavoidable burnout, forced unpaid overtime, and quantity over quality output under harsh deadlines. This is a problem that is faced by journalists and media outlets across the board but, as with many issues, is further compounded by the under-unionized, under-protected nature of the video game media space.
If these stressors are present with any aspect of games journalism, they’re felt doubly with reviews, and when you account for the unique culture surrounding Elden Ring and FromSoftware games? Well, it becomes a nightmare.
The predominate meme surrounding FromSoftware games is “Git Gud”, an intentional misspelling of “get good” that serves as the built-in online response to any criticism leveled against FromSoftware games. Boss too difficult? Git Gud at fighting. Wish there were more accessibility options? Git Gud at Googling the mechanics. Confused about the narrative and wishing for some more direction? Git Gud at watching hours of lore breakdown videos made by fans to help flesh out what’s going on.
This difficulty forms the largest barrier to entry, but to fans of the series, that’s entirely the point. The inaccessibility is like the bitterness in dark chocolate, it’s the complexity and depth that makes the whole affair satisfying. When this viewpoint is at its most healthy the Soulslike community is adept at discussing and examining themes left mostly unexplored in the rest of the gaming space.
Discussions of subtle worldbuilding, restraint in storytelling, veneration of challenge and difficulty, the joy of overcoming adversity, the beauty and tragedy of impermanence; these are all core topics of discussion in the Soulslike fandom, topics that, Soulslike fans argue, are too often ignored in other online gaming spaces. When it’s at its best, no community does it better.
When the community is at its worst? Well…
People can be rough. Despite the game being rendered essentially unplayable for many PC gamers due to performance issues, much of the discourse surrounding criticism of Elden Ring is met with legions of “Git Guds”, a response whose internal circular logic encapsulates how frustrating trying to criticize a FromSoftware game is.
FromSoftware games are great, in part, because they are confusing, strange, difficult, and iconoclastic. Their jank often adds to their charm. Just because some jank is intended, however, doesn’t mean that the jank should be immune to criticism.
Sure, the shimmering blue hues of the Liurnia of the Lakes region in Elden Ring hide dozens of secrets that are exciting to uncover particularly because of their obtuseness. But if a player were to desire more ways to uncover what happened at the Rose Church, why it now stands as a burbling mess of Scarlet Rot and decay, would they be wrong for wanting that?
Soulslike games all come with tradeoffs, and Elden Ring is no exception. The world of Elden Ring feels ancient, confusing, and stuck in a perpetual state of rot that refuses to finish the job. The argument in favor of its restrained style of storytelling reveals is that knowing less is the point. To maintain the ancient, unknowable atmosphere of the setting a player should feel encouraged to piece together the situation from the environment itself. You, like everything else in the world, are starving and dehydrated, and the constant denial of full satisfaction, of full knowing, is what keeps things interesting.
But does that mean that a player would be wrong for thinking it would be a more fun balance if they got a little more information? Just because a choice FromSoftware made was deliberate, does that also mean that it was perfect for the game?
FromSoftware games challenge you to accept things as they are, to accept that the world is unfair, strange, and incomprehensible, and the only way you’re going to get through it is to accept what has been presented to you and keep going anyway. It’s fine, and maybe necessary, to adopt this mindset when you’re the Chosen Undead, or the Bearer of the Curse, or the Ashen One, or the Slayer of Demons, or the Hunter, or the Tarnished, but when you’re Danny, Tweeter of Tweets? Or Jessica, Writer of 8-hour-long Video Essays?
Dark Souls Brain (TM) is great at helping us slay Artorias, the Abysswalker in the Oolacile Township. It’s very bad at talking to human beings on the planet Earth, or processing good-faith criticism and imagining what design changes might be worthwhile to explore in future video games. Dark Souls Brain views every criticism as self-refuting, a foolish attempt to make sense of an oppressive and unpleasant experience when the oppressiveness and unpleasantness is the point.
It’s a mindset that FromSoftware would certainly discourage, and the proof is in Elden Ring itself. Filled with bold design departures from previous games, you can jump, ride a horse like a speeding bullet, do a horsey double jump, customize weapons like never before, summon any one of dozens of companions, be hugged by mommy, turn into a full moon fetus before blasting your enemy’s face off, and so much more.
Imagine the response to a Dark Souls fan saying, in 2011, “This game is cool, but it’d be a lot better if I could double jump on a horsey while summoning a ghost jellyfish to help me defeat a little spermatazoic spirit snail.”
I bet the response wouldn’t be, “Good point, that does sound better!”, but the thing is, it is better. FromSoftware has thrived on innovation while staying true to its design philosophy, and Elden Ring is the proof of that.
If you sat down to write a review of a niche thing that you loved, but you knew most people wouldn’t enjoy, how would you approach it? Would you write from the perspective of a fan, encouraging the reader to join the fandom you love so much? Would you try to write as neutrally as possible, try to account for your biases and tastes, and try to consider multiple perspectives? What is the purpose of a review?
A review is, in a sense, a story of an experience, or a narrative estimation of someone’s likely experience. Like any story, it can have wildly different perspectives and goals, and there’s no one right way to tell it. This is all complicated by the omnipresence of review scores, a topic on which I’m hardly the only critic.
Is a zero to ten scale meant to represent a scale on which an average game is a five, and anything above that is above-average? Or is a five meant to represent indifference, a state of neither loving or hating a game overall? Does a ten represent a game that is “perfect”, or merely that the reviewer can’t imagine having a better time than they actually had with the game? Does a ten mean a game that is the best of the current field, or does it mean it’s a game without flaws?
Some sites, like GamerHorizon, eschew decimal increments for clarity, others, like PCGamer, prefer a percentile score out of one hundred with clearly delineated meanings, while some, like GamesRadar, grade on a five-star scale. All of these systems are, in a sense, a compromise. They serve as a tacit acknowledgement that art can’t be easily quantified and labeled, but also that my seagull brain sure would like it if they could, and I feel compelled to click on any article making the insane claim that a piece of art has achieved objectifiable perfection.
That compulsion is especially strong for a game like Elden Ring, the latest in a long line of games that are notoriously not for everyone, because if something that oppressively unenjoyable earned a perfect score, well, what must that game look like?
Well, it may just be that Elden Ring is the game that finally breaks review systems, the scores of which have already been demonstratively inflated in recent years in great part due to the market demands of the attention economy.
This is coupled by the fact that, when it comes to who is assigned to review a game like Elden Ring, the choice is hardly random. As Christopher Groux wrote in Inverse regarding the Elden Ring review assignment, “Every outlet is different, but many editors would be reluctant to assign a time-consuming review — an additional commitment of several dozen hours — to someone who doesn’t want to play that game.”
So, what are we to make of a situation where that massive 96% score on Metacritic is predominately composed of exhausted FromSoftware fans forced to play the latest game from one of their favorite studios in a way that ensures they’ll be able to meet the deadlines of their jobs? If we imagine a 10/10 review being released for a book that was only half finished, or a film that was only half-watched, we’d likely be less accepting, but the toxic demands of the game industry’s hype cycle are so well-known at this point that readers seems resigned to the reality.
When we combine the demands of the industry, the built-in issues with reviews, the mammoth scope of Elden Ring, and the uniquely disordered discourse surrounding FromSoftware games as a whole, we get a perfect storm of problems that exposes nearly every weak point in the modern games journalism industry as a hole. In the framework of the industry, Elden Ring truly is unreviewable; it has to be.
For that to change, the industry would have to change, and there are people fighting to make that happen. Kotaku, which doesn’t publish review scores, also has a strong internal union which recently mobilized against its owners to win more equitable contracts for its workers. Others like PCGamer and GameSpot are pushing to normalize reviews-in-progress, a reasonable compromise between journalistic best-practices and immediate content demands that, while not benefiting from the flashy boost given by an immediate score, helps the outlet to remain in the conversation during the chaotic hype cycle.
Great reviews and dissections of the mammoth, gorgeous, wonderfully flawed game that is Elden Ring will come, but it’s likely that the people who make that content will have to finish and digest the game first. They’ll have to take their time to consider what they want their review to do, what they want to talk about, what parts of the game most call to them.
As for me, this is the first FromSoftware game I’ve been able to enjoy, and it’s been a great time. I’m three demigods down, I can turn into a moon now, it’s awesome. To state my overall opinion on it this soon, however, when I understand so little about it and the surrounding culture and traditions of FromSoftware games, would be the height of recklessness.
At least, that was what I thought until I saw this tweet from DigitalTrends Gaming Section Lead Giovanni Colantonio:
So, yeah, I’m feeling a 7.5 on Elden Ring.
