Ubisoft And Guerrilla Developers Ratioed Into Going Private After Complaining That 'Elden Ring' Is So Beloved

March 7th, 2022 - 2:09 PM EST by Adam Downer

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Elden ring ahmed salama tweet complaining about elden ring's rating.

It's only been out for 10 days, but FromSoftware's Elden Ring is quite literally shaking up the video game industry. On top of being widely acclaimed as a masterpiece by both fans and critics, it's also drawn the ire of game developers from other companies. Over the weekend, a screenshot featuring a Ubisoft developer, a Sony developer and a Guerrilla Games developer griping about the game's glowing reviews went viral.


The bitter trio in question is Ubisoft's UX director Ahmed Salama, Nixxes Software's Rebecca Fernandez O’Shea and Guerrilla Games' Blake Rebouche, the quest designer for Horizon Forbidden West. Each expressed a gripe via hot take with Elden Ring relevant to their field: Salama said the glowing reviews prove critics "don’t give a flaming poop about Game UX." O'Shea chimed in, "Nor PC graphics, stability and performance, apparently." Rebouche added, "Nor quest design, really."

For gamers, the screenshot was a Chef Kiss of irony. Salama, in particular, drew the brunt of the jokes. Elden Ring has a very bare-bones user interface, as there is oftentimes nothing on the screen except the player and game world. Players will have to press a button to make their items, weapons and health bar appear on the screen. By comparison, Ubisoft games are notorious for having what some call a "cluttered" interface, exemplified by some widely circulated meme demonstrating what Elden Ring might look like if Ubisoft made it.


Rebouche also attracted criticism for complaining about the game's quest design. The quests in Elden Ring, as they are in other FromSoft titles, are very obtuse, and the game does not guide the player into completing sidequests or finishing NPC storylines. By comparison, the Horizon games, such as Zero Dawn, are much more straightforward in instructing the player on what to do and where to go, which is generally the industry standard when it comes to sidequests. Horizon Forbidden West performed very respectfully on Metacritic, netting an 88/100, but few would argue that the game wasn't completely overshadowed by Elden Ring, released one week after.


On top of the pile-ons in the QRTs, many felt that the developers from competing studios throwing potshots at another developer's success were in poor taste.


Though it's only been out a week and the majority of its players aren't halfway done with the game, it's clear we won't see the end of Elden Ring discourse for a long time.

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Adam
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Adam Staff

in reply to hipnox

it's a bit like, say, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper and The Monkees were like "i see critics don't give a hoot about traditional song structure anymore (eye roll)." I also don't like the implied, "But I was told filling the screen with 400 overlays was peak UX!"

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RaccoonBL
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RaccoonBL

I'll be the first to defend the outrage here then even as someone who doesn't care about Elden Ring. Criticism is aboult analyzing faults using objective knowledge of the game to help illustrate your point. The purpose of which is then help the creator of the content to then improve on their work.

Just saying something sucks is not critism no matter where it comes from. For starters, how does one even improve from this information? Game UX and Quest design are bad? Then give examples, give reasons why they aren't as good as they could be, then suggest how to improve.

Without that, they really do just sound like they are whining about their game not being as popular. And it is especially bad since they are competing developers.

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