Elden Ring’s open world offers a thrilling adventure but loses its charm in subsequent playthroughs due to repetitive exploration.
Losing access to fast travel points in New Game Plus can make traveling between points tedious and detract from the experience.
NG+ in Elden Ring offers chances to upgrade weapons, fight bosses again, experiment with builds, but open-world design can hinder quick access.

Elden Ring has been hailed by many as FromSoftware’s best game to date, and for good reason. The open-world format is a surprisingly good fit for the classic Soulslike formula, and FromSoftware did a great job of nestling Elden Ring‘s complex lore and sprawling combat sandbox within such a vast, non-linear game world. At the same time, there are aspects of Elden Ring that make it arguably weaker than some of the studio’s other big projects, and a potential sequel should take steps to address these shortcomings.

In some ways, Elden Ring‘s greatest strength can be its biggest weakness. The game’s open world is one of the best the medium has ever produced, providing a feeling of true adventure, intrigue, and mystery through ingenious level design and art direction. Sheer size helps as well, as it’s common for players to feel like the game is constantly unfolding, revealing more and more of itself in exciting, awe-inspiring ways. Having said all that, these strengths only apply to the first playthrough of Elden Ring, as its ability to evoke amazement through its open world diminishes in subsequent runs.

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Elden Ring’s Open World Can Be a Hindrance During New Game Plus

Losing Access to Sites of Grace When Restarting Elden Ring Is a Big Blow

The first journey through Elden Ring‘s mysterious and hostile world can be magical, characterized by constant surprise and a subversion of expectations. Naturally, this feeling isn’t as strong on a second or third playthrough, as it hinges so much on surprise and organic, free-form exploration. In virtually any game, exploration and open-world discovery are among the least satisfying gameplay elements during new playthroughs, which is one of the most common criticisms of the open-world trend.

There are over 300 Sites of Grace in Elden Ring‘s base game, a list that has been expanded with the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC. When a player starts NG+, they lose access to all the Sites of Grace that they have encountered, effectively losing their fast travel footholds. Regaining them requires manual rediscovery, and since there are hundreds of these fast travel points, this process can quickly become tedious. This is different from other FromSoftware games, which are more linear and concise, which means that traveling between different points of interest during new game plus doesn’t drag down the experience as much as in Elden Ring.

Elden Ring’s New Game Plus Would Be Better with Fast-Travel Intact

There are a number of reasons to start a new game plus run in Elden Ring, the most obvious being:

Upgrading more weapons, as some upgrade materials are finite and only get refreshed in NG+
Fighting bosses for a second time
Experimenting with new builds
Leveling up, as runes earned increases with each NG+ cycle
Playing through missed quests or obtaining a different ending

Once a player has made their way through Elden Ring‘s main campaign, they may be interested in facing the game’s biggest challenges for a second time, perhaps with a new build or some sort of modifier, like the addition or removal of a spirit ash. This is a common practice in Soulslike games with NG+, and Elden Ring is no different, but the open-world format means that players need to jump through a good deal of less-than-interesting hoops to get to the good bits.

For instance, if a player wanted to fight Malenia for a second time, they would need to get both halves of the Secret Medallion, make their way through the Consecrated Snowfield, and work through Miquella’s Haligtree to do it. Since these steps are designed around open-world exploration, they can feel less like experiencing fun moments for a second time, and more like going through the motions just to get to the enjoyable parts. Build experimentation and re-challenging tough bosses are the biggest reasons to engage with Elden Ring‘s NG+ feature, and the inability to fast travel gets in their way.