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Elden Ring Industry Analysis

How Elden Ring Makes “Hard Mode” Work

After one of the most successful launches in history, Elden Ring has shown astounding success as an adventure game known for its absurdly brutal difficulty. Elden Ring has already sold over 12 million copies within a month after release. But when looking at competitors, Elden Ring seems to stand alone in its approach to adventure game design. Many players are asking the question, why is Elden Ring so difficult? And why don’t they offer an “easy mode” like other adventure games?

The Competition

There are seemingly endless examples of open-world games that hold the player’s hand throughout the journey. A recent example of this is Horizon Forbidden West, an adventure game that was released a full week before Elden Ring. While the launch of Horizon was dwarfed by that of Elden Ring’s, it was still able to take second place on the charts.

Horizon takes a much more traditional approach to adventure games, offering to hold the player’s hand throughout the game. Looking at the world map, Horizon chooses to guide the player with a simple look with every detail on display so the player can avoid danger or face challenges as they see fit. Elden Ring, however, chooses to use a very weathered world map that does not outline the majority of the encounters you will face during the game. Since it is harder to navigate and predict danger, players can often find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Elden Ring’s world map (left) compared to Horizon Forbidden West’s word map (right)

Building A Brand

There is no question that FromSoftware, the developer of Elden Ring, has done a great job developing a unique brand for their games. While not all of their games terrorize their players, notable titles such as the Dark Souls series, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, or Bloodborne, stand out as games suitable only for the bravest of gamers.

(Image from @DuncstarTV)

The difficulty of their games scratches an itch for a different type of gamer. While games like Horizon focus on task completion, Elden Ring focuses on presenting a challenge for its players to overcome. This change in direction is why Elden Ring players have become forgiving of the game’s lack of polish, where poor game design has become part of the challenge.

Effects on the Game

Ubisoft is a company known for creating easy open-world games. While titles such as Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs, or Far Cry can be challenging, these titles allow the player to lower the difficulty. It can feel as though the player is never free from an endless amount of guidance via waypoints, mini-maps, objectives, etc. With the success of Elden Ring, which features none of these options, the gaming community has backlashed against companies like Ubisoft for their lack of challenging gameplay.

“If Ubisoft Made Elden Ring” (Image via @DreamcastGuy)

Elden Ring has reminded gamers what it is like to be faced with a challenge and face it without easy solutions. While spending 12 hours grinding and improving your skills to defeat a single boss may seem ridiculous to casual players, this gameplay has allowed Elden Ring players to develop a sense of pride in their achievements that easy games fail to grasp.

While this sense of achievement allows players to feel a real sense of achievement, the level of difficulty also serves as a deterrent to casual gamers who don’t have the time or skill to overcome the challenges. Over time, this will likely result in organic filtering out of non-committed players. but it is safe to assume that the die-hard Elden Ring community will stay loyal to the brand for many years to come.

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Industry Analysis

How the PlayStation VR 2 Will Innovate the VR Landscape

The official PlayStation VR 2 product page is up, and there’s a lot to unpack. In some ways, Sony is playing catchup, and adapting their next VR product to the landscape of the market. In other ways, the PlayStation VR 2 will offer new innovations that users have yet to see from its competitors. 

Sony has finally made the switch from traditional lenses to Fresnel lenses. Fresnel lenses are already standard for VR headsets, but this change is significant for Sony’s product. PlayStation VR 1 featured traditional lenses with a smooth circular design. Fresnel lenses utilize short, clipped ridges that negate the warped light produced by smoother edges, and create a clearer resolution. On top of that, Fresnel lenses are lighter, cheaper, and more flexible.

Fresnel lens left, Traditional lens right

Despite being the more practical option, Fresnel lenses have their own flaws. They can sometimes produce an optical artifact known as God Rays. This is when light rays bounce off the ridges of the lens into unwanted directions. As a result, small shimmers of light appear in the peripheral of the user. There has yet to be a VR headset that corrects this light distortion… until now.

An example of God Rays on the Oculus Quest via Reddit

Sony seems to have invented a way to counteract this effect according to a recent patent filing. The tech giant claims that new innovations for the PlayStation VR 2 will combat God Rays by adding light-absorbing sections of each lens. These sections will be incorporated as a mask that covers the entire panel, or be built directly into the ridges themselves. If Sony succeeds with their new idea, other VR developers will likely look to play catchup and find their own workarounds. Fans have yet to see what the PlayStation VR 2 looks like, yet they can already expect a whole new experience upon its release. 

Notable upgrades include an increase in per-eye resolution from 960 x 1080 panels up to 2000 x 2040 4k. Users of the first PlayStation VR will be able to switch on the new one and immediately tell the difference. As it stands, the PlayStation VR 2 will have a higher resolution screen and wider field of view than its lead competitor, the Meta Quest 2. Sony has also confirmed that the new headsets will indeed have eye-tracking. This should make things interesting when Horizon Call of the Mountain makes its way to PlayStation VR.

There is zero news regarding the PlayStation VR 2 release date, though many have speculated it will arrive during the 2022 Holiday season.

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Industry Analysis

What is the Metaverse and Why Meta Invested $10 Billion Into It

Mark Zuckerberg is all-in on the metaverse! The tech moguls company, Meta, poured $10 billion into their metaverse last year alone. The money has gone to the development of their virtual world, which Zuckerberg hopes to expand for business and personal uses. The future of the metaverse could see users opting to live their lives through these virtual worlds as opposed to normal reality. To understand what this means, one would have to understand what the metaverse is, how it works in the present day, and the future that’s yet to be realized.

Firstly, the metaverse is not a singular place. There are multiple metaverses; some owned by large corporations like Meta, while others are operated independently. Independent metaverses are referred to as decentralized, and have their own unique virtual currencies associated with them. These currencies can be used to purchase things like land, digital assets, and other goods all within the virtual world. Ways of accessing a metaverse would depend on whether or not the world is decentralized; but a PC and VR headset are the most common ways to experience it.

As of now, Zuckerberg’s focus is creating virtual office spaces where people working from home can hold meetings as if they were in person. The COVID-19 pandemic brought us the rise of Zoom and opened the eyes of many companies in relation to the work-from-home model that many look to capitalize on. Meta is also designing virtual homes where users can host friends and socialize in the metaverse as they would in the real world. In 2021, the company opened a virtual reality world of avatars titled Horizon Worlds. Users can access the game via the company’s Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets; which have recently been rebranded as Meta Quest 2 VR headsets.

The almost aggressive rebranding of Meta’s IPs to include the Meta name is a pretty clear signal of what’s to come. The company recently announced that these 3D VR avatars will soon appear on their other apps like Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. The goal seems to be the rapid normalizing and implementation of metaverse activity into everyday life. Pretty soon, it won’t be a foreign concept for people to do their shopping, learning, and even traveling within a metaverse. However, the world has already seen not only the advantages of virtual living, but also the drawbacks that stand to only become more impactful.

The more of a reliance people gain towards metaverses, the more they are at the mercy of these virtual platforms. The metaverse is still in its infancy and there are a lot of unknowns regarding the future of the technology. Blockchain activity is constantly under fire for its perceived effects on the environment, and many who’ve put money into digital assets such as NFTs feel as if they have nothing to show for it in the end. A company like Meta was already able to require Facebook accounts for its VR headset users; and would wield a lot of power if the metaverse became a synonymous part of everyday living. In short, corporations already have leverage over their products and services, but the metaverse could possibly give them leverage over society’s everyday autonomy.

Just to be clear, there is a lot to be excited about as more and more of the virtual world is realized. Meta saw an 8% drop in profits during the final quarter of 2021; which can be chocked up to the $10 billion they’ve invested into their metaverse so far. With not only endless capital, but seemingly endless possibilities, Zuckerberg has the ability to produce something very special.