That Familiar Style

After holding an online launch event, Chen Xu and his team at Nebula Games gradually began development on Elden Ring.

Compared to the previous life's Elden Ring, aside from balancing certain values—such as the Moonlight Greatsword and Mimic Tear, those overpowered spirit ash companions—and fixing special bugs like using Rock Sling to kill bosses through Fog Gates, as well as more fully fleshing out side quests, the team's greatest effort went into the game's guidance system.

Exploration was the core of Souls-like games, but as FromSoftware's first Open World game in the previous life, Elden Ring still had many elements that had not been designed well.

For example, the item crafting system and the use of perfume bottles—many players might have cleared the game without ever understanding what those things were actually for.

Moreover, a large number of materials had to be gathered in the wilderness. The original intention was clearly to encourage players to explore the wilds through this.

But the rewards players received clearly gave them no desire to explore.

When they did explore, it was to find tunnels and dungeons hidden in corners of the map. As for simply searching the wilderness for materials, most players did not even bother looking.

On top of that, players had to specifically collect additional crafting manuals. This directly resulted in many players never touching item crafting or perfume bottles even after clearing New Game Plus, despite these two support systems being able to strengthen combat and make all kinds of weapon and Skill Allocation builds more powerful.

The most direct reason for this was that the gains and rewards did not feel equal to players.

On one hand, the game had specifically made it an integrated system, hoping players would engage with this gameplay content.

But on the other hand,