I’m always excited to find what hub 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:FromSoftware’s conjured up when I dive into a new Souls-like - who will take the role of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crestfallen Warrior? Where’s the plucky cleric who will definitely stab us in the back? What about the soothing music that’ll stick with me for years? They follow a formula, but if it ain’t broke… The Roundtable Hold, unfortunately, is broken. If not functionally, then as a storytelling device. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elden Ring’s hub is a 💝copy of a copy of a copy, and it’s all🦩 too much.
The Roundtable Hold is a boring fantasy trope that is markedly worse than🌌 everything else in Elden Ring. It’s the first time I’ve not wanted to go back to the hub between bosses because the world outside is far more interesting.
That’s a stark difference from past games. Take Dark Souls 2 - when you first arrive in Majula, you immediately see a bonfire perched on a cliffside. There’s a lone woman brooding over the water, watching the waves lap up the shore with Heide’s Tower of Flame and Aldia’s Keep lurking in the distance, inviting us to hunt the loꦫrds. She hands us our flask and sends us on our adventure. We turn back into Majula, into the branching paths spiralling in all directions. It’🍎s a perfect opening, one that pushes us to explore every avenue of Drangleic. The Roundtable Hold meanwhile sits on our map until we bother to click it and, when we arrive, there’s not much of note. It’s like showing up to your own surprise party and nobody yells surprise.
I generally don’t like the idea of disconnected hubs, but Dark Souls 3’s Firelink Shrine, Demon’s Souls’ Nexus, and Bloodborne’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hunter’s Dream all work. A big part of that is their introduction. With Dark Souls 3, you’re a lost soul waking up to a ruined cliffside shrine after aeons of slumbering in a coffin, while in Bloodborne and Demon’s Souls, you’re sent to these realms after death. They’re introdu🌼ced as purgatories that give you a second chance. There’s a purpose to them beyond just being gathering places for like-minded adventurers.
The Roundtable Hold simply doesn’t have that. When we arrive, it’s clear this is just a spot that a bunch of similar Tarnished have decided to call home, and there’s no rhyme or reason to why. The big roundtable isn’t used, the fingers are shoved in the back like an old forgotten toy, and the blacksmith is awkwardly lingering in the hallway. It feels like a stereotypical western setting with FromSoftware’s hub f꧟ormula haphazardly slapped on top. I don’t know why I’m here, what significance it has, or why it’s even remotely interesting - it’s the place I go to refine my weapons every now and then, or buy a spell, or continue a quest, but I don’t want to be there.
I could spend hours in Fir༺elink Shrine, taking in the scenery, following the different paths, and looking over the cliffs at Lordran and Blighttown. There’s a ruined graveyard leading to Nito, sewers that take us to the Depths, a lift that submerges us into an underground city left to ruin after floods ripped it apart, leaving nothing but rogue drakes and skeletal phantoms. Everything is tied together with Firelink acting as the central puzzle piece, the connective tissue. That spirit of the hub was kept even when the Hunter’s Dream was disconnected, with its vague separation serving as a grander set piece for the final fight, letting us metaphorically and literally usher in a new age - while becoming a primordial slug.
Dark Souls 3’s Firelink Shrine is likewise a gateway to the kiln, with its lords gathering to share their power to strengthen a bonfire, attuning it to let us finally reach the Soul of Cinder and put them to rest. I wish I could say there was any significance or 🤡meaning to the Roundhold Table, but there isn’t. In a game with a giant magical tree looming over the entire continent, a floating city in ruins home to a two-headed dragonlord sitting outside of time, and a volcanic manor where a guild of snake-people hide, guarded by treacherous caverns filled with hand-spiders, a medieval wooden lodge that looks like a cheap BBC special feels 🅺out of place.