Elden Ring

UI Design / UX Research

An in depth dive into the line between difficulty and accessibility in video games. Done using quantitative and qualitative methods in order to come to a conclusion.

UX Case Study | The Line Between Difficulty and Accessibility

Preface

Elden Ring is a game revered for its grand storytelling and enemy design that challenges the player in a rigorous yet rewarding way. Players feel continuously challenged to defeat the enemy they are facing and enjoy the arduous difficulty level. Although the game is considered difficult on an enemy design level, the game also challenges the player to be mindful of long-running questlines of a 100+ hour campaign. Players may experience such challenges and stop playing, even if the solution can be solved with another accessibility view. This study aims to see what people think about the difficulty level of the game Elden Ring and how adding certain accommodating features, in this case, a questline tracker, would affect the overall opinion on the difficulty and accessibility of the popular open-world game.

To gather a baseline, players who have many hours in Elden Ring were gathered and asked a series of questions ranging from difficulty level to their opinion on adding a quest tracker to the game. As we can tell from these charts, players who have a combined total of over 100 hours in the game agree that the game is challenging, but also do not prefer to have the choice of a difficulty option.

Why Don’t Players Want a Difficulty Option, and How Can This Be Fixed?

This question can be answered by looking at the history of games created by the publisher FromSoftware. FromSoftware's games have been made to be difficult. Titles from the Dark Souls series, as well as other games including Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and even Elden Ring, have been made so that players feel a rite of passage when beating a difficult boss, or conquering some large castle that they have stumbled on. Players like to be challenged. Although players enjoy this style of gameplay, there have been some common issues that have been made evident by online forums, and this study.

This data shows that although a majority of players do not want a difficulty option, we are able to see an accessibility problem. Throughout the game, NPCs offer questlines but do not have an indicator of where to find them throughout the game. It is expected of the player to find the next location with the little dialogue offered by the NPC. Although this may not seem like an issue at first, when implemented without any reinforcement of dialogue, players may easily forget or remember the previous line of dialogue. When looking at the graph, we can see that players often forget the NPC's location or dialogue entry.

After considering the possibilities, I created wireframes and mockups of two different options to be added to the game in order to fix this problem. Below are wireframes of quest journal and quest indicator screens in order to improve player visibility of certain areas. These have the main goal of making it more obvious of where the NPC is on the screen which can be commonly overlooked, and a quest tracker system where it reminds the player of the dialogue exchanged, and a button which reveals a highlighted area indicating the next location of that NPC.

The included user flow template shows my aim to bring a third way that Elden Ring can be enjoyed, rather than abiding by the socially agreed upon difficulty setting by the gaming community.

User Feedback & MockUps

Participants were given a series of hypothetical questions regarding the addition of a quest-tracking system in Elden Ring. Participants were first asked if they believed adding this system would remove the core aspects of a FromSoftware game, therefore, making it too easy of a game to complete. This answer would indicate if players would feel positive about this addition to the game. Results showed that a majority of players would not mind this addition, and may prefer adding this to the overall experience.

To keep the feeling of an intense difficulty level of FromSoftware games, when participants were asked to imagine their opinion on this feature in the game, they were also asked to imagine if the feature would be toggleable, therefore, enabling players who want to keep a difficult experience able to do so, while either newer players may choose to enable that feature. It is worth mentioning that mockups were also created and viewed simultaneously to answer these questions which are included below.

Mockups were created inline with the wireframes previously sketched. The main priority in creating said mockups were to fit the Elden Ring theme so that participants may feel immersed in the mockup as if it were the actual game. The mockups designed are included below.

Non Elden Ring Players Results & Conclusions

Elden Ring players had favorable opinions towards these designs, but in order to get an equal opinion across the gaming community, players who have never attempted playing Elden Ring or any FromSoftware game were also asked a similar series of questions. Participants were questioned on their favorability of tracking systems in open-world video games, and if the given mock ups would be helpful to them if they ever started a playthrough of their own for Elden Ring.

When I first had the idea to start this study, I wanted to find where the line between difficult and accessibility meet, and what creates the sharp divide between the two game mechanics. It makes me joyful that players are able to find a game which challenges them and rewards them in a way they find satisfying, but I also strive to see a game where every one is accommodated regarding their tastes in games. As my study shows, adding a feature such as a quest tracker, as well as a quest indicator, would positively impact the community, and would not negatively impact the long time players of FromSoftware games.

My plan for the future is to one day make this a mod and release it to the public to create a better user experience for those who would like to start playing Elden Ring, but might feel adverse to long questlines. I wish to make user experience flawless in games, and my games user research case studies will continue to improve so that these ideas may be implemented into a popular media piece in the future.