The reader argues that there would not be Elden Ring clones from major publishers, but it may help them not to chase trends.
Elden Ring is now officially 1 year old. Somehow they announced their DLC three days after the anniversary, but that seems to be par for the course lately, due to the lackluster way publishers handle their ads. However, I’m not here to talk about the loss of “showmanship” in video games, but about the Elden Ring itself, whose unexpected success has led to… absolutely nothing.
It’s only been a year, but so far there’s been no indication that any publisher has seen the success of Elden Ring and thought they should copy it. Within months of Fortnite becoming an instant hit, it was clear that every publisher under the sun was going to have a stab at making a battle royal of their own. They soon learned that it wasn’t as easy as all that, but their attempts to replicate its success actually helped cement Fortnite’s status as a classic game.
With the Elden Ring, however, there was no attempt to do anything like that, and I would expect it never will. I’ll use as a point of comparison The Legend Of Zelda, a franchise that’s been in operation for 37 years and includes at least three games that were considered the best of all time and yet had almost no impact on the wider gaming world.
You might say it’s too early to expect the Elden Ring to be cloned, or even to be announced. But after going on for four decades, how many Zelda clones do there have? a bunch. How many major commercial or critical hits? no one. Breath Of The Wild has had the biggest impact, as the makers of recent open-world games have clearly played the least, but none of the games they’ve made have taken anything but the broadest inspiration from it.
I suspect it would be the same for Elden Ring and for the same reason: these games are hard to make. It far exceeds video game standards, it exists in the kind of classic bubble that exists outside the rest of the gaming industry. There are others in a similar situation. The Last Of Us, for example, is another game that garners constant praise and high sales yet there’s almost nothing else quite like it.
The somewhat lower budget A Plague Tale games are relatively similar and the first was quite successful but even this did not convince other publishers that they could or would like to do the same.
The video game industry is more plagiarism than you think and less plagiarism. Yes, there are an infinite number of open-world games, online shooters, and garbage cans to play for free, but that’s either because they’re cheap to make or they’re such a well-known commodity that you can at least somewhat vouch for sales. If you throw enough in there, wisdom says, the couple are bound to be at least successful. This has basically been Ubisoft’s entire business plan for the last 10 years or so.
Not only does the Elden Ring take a lot of time and money to achieve, the people available to achieve it are few and far between. Dark Souls has already made it acceptable for games to be harder than they used to be, but since the Elden Ring is a bit easier, that’s not something that’s really going to sway anyone who steps forward.
I’m not saying this with any real criticism, it’s not like EA or Activision can just call a staffing agency and hire a dozen Hidetaka Miyazaki employees at any given moment, but what I think it underscores is that every company should be looking to do one or two things more or less Really good, rather than just chasing trends and being 3rd or 4th best ever.
You actually see this with the big publishers’ top games: EA has FIFA, Activision has Call Of Duty, Take-Two has GTA. Nobody does these games as well as they do and they justifiably dominate that market, even if I personally don’t put them in the bubble classics with Elden Ring and The Last Of Us. They never seem to realize that they have to pursue this same idea with everything they create.
Being the best at whatever you do can be harder, and requires more experimentation at first, but the biggest games are always the most creative too. Call Of Duty may not look that way now but it did when it first came out, and the same for GTA and the rest.
The Elden Ring won’t have any huge impact on gaming simply because it’s hard to imitate, but if it inspires publishers to try and carve out their own niche as well, rather than copying someone else’s, it might have a more positive effect on you. to imagine.
By Reader Crombie
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