Elden Ring’s open world makes it more accessible to new players, so how does Crouching Dragon do it without it?

Anyone who has played, or even knows, elder ring Will tell you that its open world plays a big part in making it easier for new players to pick up. The linear design of FromSoftware’s previous games meant that your progression was always predetermined by the designer.

No matter how long you put off a tough boss fight or an area full of traps, you know that if you want to see the next thing, you need to get back there and eventually make it through. Instead, Elden Ring lets you use your own device. So much so that players inadvertently overwhelm their characters with exploration and turn the boss fights they’ve been avoiding into a piece of cake.

The blueprint was inspired in part by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and you can imagine any developer building a future open-world game on these same principles.

But linear and mission-based games don’t have the luxury of building a sprawling, interconnected world that takes 100+ hours to explore–and intentionally give players more options.

Most games tend to stick to their own lines rather than tackle such a challenging design problem.but Crouching Dragon: Fallen Dynasty – a new game from Nioh and Ninja Gaiden veteran Team Ninja – offers a clever and effective solution to this accessibility and design problem.

Crouching Dragon is very much like the Nioh sequel in terms of structure and overall level design: it feels like working within the constraints of the PS3 era, where you can load up quests, complete objectives, earn rewards, and watch events that advance the narrative. cutscenes.

No matter how late or early you get into the game, this rigid structure will always dictate how you play. Team Ninja probably didn’t have the resources or the know-how to create a seamless open world, so they focused their efforts on making the most of what they had and ended up developing a unique blueprint for a different type of game. Not even the spiritual forerunner Nioh.

From a purely numbers standpoint, many see Elden Ring’s open world as a way to beat themselves up, to get better at whatever they’ve been holding on to, or to acquire new weapons/abilities that can provide similar effects. Crouching Dragon’s answer is to get players excited about exploring its linear levels, just like they did in The Lands Between.

However, this can be tricky to achieve as the amount of content is far from sufficient. Enter: Banner, Crouching Dragon’s way of making it worth your while to scan every inch of every mission. There are two types: Battle Flags and Marking Flags – each of which plays a vital role and feeds back into the goals of this design.

Larger and more imposing are the battle flags, which are often less common than the smaller, harder-to-find marker flags. In each mission in Crouching Dragon, you have a ranking system independent of your own character level. It’s called morale, and it’s a fluctuating rating of your power compared to other enemies in that quest.

Mini-bosses — and larger, scarier enemies — have morale levels significantly higher than yours, while regular enemies are only a level or two above it. The more enemies you defeat, the higher your morale level will be. The bigger the gap between you and them, the bigger the boost.

This makes it trivial to start imposing and challenging enemies the higher your level. It also motivates you to hunt down equally tougher enemies if you want to get a huge boost and think you can manage that risk.

So where did the logo come from? As you fight more and more enemies, you’re bound to wear down your healing items and generally wear them worse. Planting a battle banner restores the use of your healing items, refills your health, and acts as a checkpoint after you die–as fuel for your adventures.

and Who are you Nearly dead, but that’s where marker flags come in. The more flags you find, the higher your morale level will be. You usually lose levels when you die, or when you fail to dodge/deflect an enemy’s heavy hit. You can remove a major death penalty by raising your bottom line to something close to or matching your max morale level.

The fact that you can continue to farm enemies and beat the mission’s maximum morale level makes the final boss fight much easier. Crouching Dragon achieves this subtly in every mission, quietly motivating you to keep exploring, and frankly, an approach worthy of more games to learn – a perfect mix of mechanics and incentives that will keep even the grumpiest Players will also become more eager to explore.