Eh, that sense of largeness is more or less an illusion. While the map is big, it's mostly empty. So they add a summonable horse to get you from point A to point B whenever fast travel isn't possible. The game is literally puffed up to seem bigger than it actually is, content-wise. Even the underground map is more or less a way to make you think "Wow, this game is even bigger!" Only to later find out the underground parts aren't overlapping the entire map and barely 10% of it at that.
How much of those 320 hours was you literally running around on Torrent doing platforming or skipping past actual fights? I'd say a considerable chunk.
If the Marika stakes weren't in the game, you could easily tack on another 50 hours of you riding Torrent/running to the boss arena/door.
I also thought almost all the actual dungeons were rather small. Thats said, I actually LOVE the dungeons in Elden Ring. I wish there were plenty more.
Not knocking on the meat of the game here, it's excellent. And from an artistical standpoint, scaling up things gave From some interesting vistas and scenery for you to pause and take in. From also gave us plenty of mini-bosses and "mostly" unique bosses compared to previous games. But at the end of the day, is Elden Ring really THAT big? I'm leaning more towards no. Remove the horse, condense the map to Dark Souls 3 style and you'd have a slightly bigger Dark Souls 3 game.
I disagree...of course there were empty spaces on the map but overall compared to other games with huge maps it was filled with dungeons, catacombs, ruins etc...now you can say that you don't have to engage with everything which is fair but it was definitely not a vast empty land where you just ride on Torrent forever...I enjoyed walking around a lot as well...the game was massive in a good way but like the game itself you could choose to ignore a lot of things and just stick with the main story path...but in any open world game that's the last thing you want to do
exploration is the best part of an open world...I also didn't use a walkthrough for 90% of my first playthrough which is why it took me 300+ hours...the biggest negative for me was that it was huge but it had so many repeating bosses and most of the catacombs felt very same-y
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