~1.5 months in, how much do you think Horizon: Forbidden West's performance was impacted by its proximity to Elden Ring?

[enpleinjour]

I think it had an impact, how big or if it will be long lasting I don’t know but Elden Ring is just too good and the “difficulty”definitely didn’t have an impact on sales imo because I know a lot of people who are a bit more casual and only buy sports games and COD every year but are hooked on Elden Ring , I feel like it’s one of those generation defining open world games like Skyrim and Witcher 3.

That Mat Piscatella tweet describes me perfectly haha, I have barely played anything else since Elden Ring launched and I’ll be right there day one if there’s ever DLC for it, as for Horizon so far I just don’t think they’re that great and both launched around much better games, only that this time that much better game is also available on PlayStation, I bought HZD at launch and honestly didn’t get into it, I played it for around 10 hours the first few days and kept going back to see if I’d end up getting into it but never could, lost all interest and the trailer for FW didn’t excite me at all, they’re pretty games though.

Elden Ring's biggest draw is it being a AAA open world RPG, one with outstanding critical reception. AAA open world RPGs are incredibly rare in the gaming industry and take 5-6 years to make. Witcher, C2077, Skyrim, Fallout, and now Elden Ring. The audience for these games is massive, 20-40M, but making a good one on time is incredibly difficult.

If you look at the release dates, Skyrim (2011), Fallout 4 (2015), Witcher 3 (2015), C2077 (2020), Elden Ring (2022), Starfield (2022). The next Skyrim/Witcher is likely 2025-6+, Elden Ring and another BGS game is likely at least 3 years away as well. So you have a massive audience of 20-40M who go across 4-6 year gaps of not having a big AAA open world RPG to play.

The open world adventure RPG lite genre has benefited hugely from this gap. AC, Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, Spiderman, Breath of the Wild, RDR2, Watch Dogs etc. The lines are honestly blurry for many so I would not be surprised if many RPG enthusiasts also consider Horizon and AC as RPGs to play and Spiderman fans get interested in how C2077 plays.

I think Elden Ring is FROM software's most unbalanced and artificial game to date. After the mid game, the game looses a lot of creativity, has really bad design choices for enemy encounters where most enemies can kill you in 1 -2 hits and relies on the player having to exploit bad AI or broken builds. It is their hardest game to date without a doubt due to how unfair it is (enemies frequently have infinite stamina, poise, 5-6 hit combos, immunity to nearly everything), and I am really curious in the completion percentages.

 

[NediarPT88]

It is their hardest game to date without a doubt due to how unfair it is

Thought it was the easiest by far thanks to the spirit summons mechanic. Enemies do hit very hard near the end of the game.

Regarding completion rate, I checked a few days ago on PS4 and the last boss before the final boss was at 24.3%. Someone on Era also shared that it was at 27.8% on PS5. I just checked and it's at 32.2% on PC.

Horizon Forbidden West was at 29.3% on PS4 ftr, no clue about PS5.

 

[Papaupa]

Elden Ring's biggest draw is it being a AAA open world RPG, one with outstanding critical reception. AAA open world RPGs are incredibly rare in the gaming industry and take 5-6 years to make. Witcher, C2077, Skyrim, Fallout, and now Elden Ring. The audience for these games is massive, 20-40M, but making a good one on time is incredibly difficult.

If you look at the release dates, Skyrim (2011), Fallout 4 (2015), Witcher 3 (2015), C2077 (2020), Elden Ring (2022), Starfield (2022). The next Skyrim/Witcher is likely 2025-6+, Elden Ring and another BGS game is likely at least 3 years away as well. So you have a massive audience of 20-40M who go across 4-6 year gaps of not having a big AAA open world RPG to play.

The open world adventure RPG lite genre has benefited hugely from this gap. AC, Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, Spiderman, Breath of the Wild, RDR2, Watch Dogs etc. The lines are honestly blurry for many so I would not be surprised if many RPG enthusiasts also consider Horizon and AC as RPGs to play and Spiderman fans get interested in how C2077 plays.

I think Elden Ring is FROM software's most unbalanced and artificial game to date. After the mid game, the game looses a lot of creativity, has really bad design choices for enemy encounters where most enemies can kill you in 1 -2 hits and relies on the player having to exploit bad AI or broken builds. It is their hardest game to date without a doubt due to how unfair it is (enemies frequently have infinite stamina, poise, 5-6 hit combos, immunity to nearly everything), and I am really curious in the completion percentages.

I disagree with the bolded for the most part but that's because I took my time and put a lot of points in vigor before heading into the late game areas, I also had a mage build with good defense (not a squishy mage like many people play as) and the darkmoon greatsword so I thought it was a good challenge, hard but not really unfair but a certain very late game boss and the two final main story bosses were very very tough compared to the rest, still an amazing game and completion rates are actually quite good on Xbox, the achievement for the boss before the final two have a 17.90% unlock rate right now and growing, it was much lower when I beat the game, although it might be higher on Xbox Series compared to the Xbox One but since Xbox's ecosystem is combined between Xbox One and Xbox Series for most games there's no way to tell right now since the whole thing is combined, some early bosses a few weeks after launch had like a 20% to 28% unlocked rate and now are over 50% so it's going to get even higher in a few weeks, the game is still the 4th most played Xbox game and has been for weeks so clearly a lot of people are playing this game every day, I honestly haven't seen something like it for a single player game in a very long time.

Thought it was the easiest by far thanks to the spirit summons mechanic. Enemies do hit very hard near the end of the game.

Regarding completion rate, I checked a few days ago on PS4 and the last boss before the final boss was at 24.3%. Someone on Era also shared that it was at 27.8% on PS5. I just checked and it's at 32.2% on PC.

Horizon Forbidden West was at 29.3% on PS4 ftr, no clue about PS5.

So on Xbox Series is at 17.90% but Xbox Series and Xbox One ecosystem is combined unless there are different versions for the game I believer so I'm sure the unlocked rate on Xbox Series alone is much higher than the Xbox One, I was actually shocked to see very high unlocked % on hidden bosses so it's clear there's a lot of interest for this game and people are playing and discovering it's secrets, Fromsoft did an amazing job.

 

[TheSilentWombat]

I think there is an interesting way to look at Horizon vs. Elden Ring in terms of Twitch viewership which can maybe demonstrate some of the ideas being discussed in this thread.



This is the average daily viewership graph for Horizon around 2 weeks after launch and what you will notice is right when Elden Ring launches around the 24/25 of February there is a notable decline in viewership for the game which hasn't really recovered since. Average viewership goes from 25 to 12 to 6 thousand during the launch of Elden Ring. This drop is even more severe if you look at peak viewership which goes from 42 to 11 thousand when Elden Ring launches, and these days viewership is now in the hundreds.



Compare this to the same data for Elden Ring and you can see that the game maintains a much higher level of viewership over time and is still tracking high on Twitch even now with 10s of thousands of views a couple of months after launch. Now, I don't think that this comparison is totally fair since Elden Ring is such a massive success and primed for this sort of Twitch viewership, but it does show how suffocating its success can be when there are other games on Twitch looking for attention in a very similar genre.



I also think it's interesting when looking at similar data for Ghost of Tsushima, which I would consider a somewhat comparable game. You can see that viewership is far more stable and is maintained at a higher level for much longer. While GOT did peak higher at launch than Horizon, it also maintained a much larger proportion of its viewers after launch as well, in part because it wasn't facing as much competition. So at the very least when looking at the viewership statistics on Twitch I do think there is a pretty clear indication that Elden Ring took some spotlight away from Horizon and that the game got overshadowed by it. I don't think this would directly translate into sales but I do think it reflects the ideas being discussed in this thread, namely that Elden Ring overshadowed Horizon and took away attention from it, which may have impacted its sales after launch as people instead desired to play Elden Ring instead.

 

[enpleinjour]

Thought it was the easiest by far thanks to the spirit summons mechanic. Enemies do hit very hard near the end of the game.

Regarding completion rate, I checked a few days ago on PS4 and the last boss before the final boss was at 24.3%. Someone on Era also shared that it was at 27.8% on PS5. I just checked and it's at 32.2% on PC.

Horizon Forbidden West was at 29.3% on PS4 ftr, no clue about PS5.

I disagree with the bolded for the most part but that's because I took my time and put a lot of points in vigor before heading into the late game areas, I also had a mage build with good defense (not a squishy mage like many people play as) and the darkmoon greatsword so I thought it was a good challenge, hard but not really unfair but a certain very late game boss and the two final main story bosses were very very tough compared to the rest

That's what I mean by exploiting the AI. The AI is absolutely not programmed to handle more than 1 enemy. Boss fights become very trivial when aggro just goes back and forth. As you mention, there are summons that can single-handedly destroy bosses, even end game bosses. Or you have certain ash of wars or spells that can kill bosses under a minute.

In accordance to this extreme power, FROM decided to give bosses hyper aggressive movesets with little window to attack and unfair amounts of damage. There are bosses/enemies that do 1000HP with one attack, one shotting anyone who does not have 30 Vig, and two shotting every single player with ease. This has never happened before in a FROM game.

Its clear there is a serious balancing/design issue. They have already released 4 patches, one boss being altered twice already. Again something unheard of with a FROM game.

We need a bit more time to gauge completion rates since its a big game and people are still buying it handily. Iirc previous Souls game had a 50% completion rate.

 

[Leica]

That's what I mean by exploiting the AI. The AI is absolutely not programmed to handle more than 1 enemy. Boss fights become very trivial when aggro just goes back and forth. As you mention, there are summons that can single-handedly destroy bosses, even end game bosses. Or you have certain ash of wars or spells that can kill bosses under a minute.

In accordance to this extreme power, FROM decided to give bosses hyper aggressive movesets with little window to attack and unfair amounts of damage. There are bosses/enemies that do 1000HP with one attack, one shotting anyone who does not have 30 Vig, and two shotting every single player with ease. This has never happened before in a FROM game.

Its clear there is a serious balancing/design issue. They have already released 4 patches, one boss being altered twice already. Again something unheard of with a FROM game.

We need a bit more time to gauge completion rates since its a big game and people are still buying it handily. Iirc previous Souls game had a 50% completion rate.

To the bolded part: it's not unheard of and has precedence. They've just become (somewhat) better at communicating it and it gets more spotlight because the game has a bigger audience. (IE much more active datamining that shows changes you otherwise likely wouldn't be aware existed.)

If the completion percentages of ER come somewhat close to that of DS1/2/3/BB/Sekiro it's already quite a feat because it's an enormous game, the supposed difficulty spike or the part where the game gets "worse" is like 2 Dark Souls 3's worth of gametime far into the game and won't really affect sales or word of mouth in any perceivable way either.

Overall I'm not sure if this thread really is the place to air all your grievances with the game though, especially if they're mostly subjective things that don't seem to have much of an impact on sales anyways.

 

[NediarPT88]

That's what I mean by exploiting the AI. The AI is absolutely not programmed to handle more than 1 enemy. Boss fights become very trivial when aggro just goes back and forth. As you mention, there are summons that can single-handedly destroy bosses, even end game bosses. Or you have certain ash of wars or spells that can kill bosses under a minute.

In accordance to this extreme power, FROM decided to give bosses hyper aggressive movesets with little window to attack and unfair amounts of damage. There are bosses/enemies that do 1000HP with one attack, one shotting anyone who does not have 30 Vig, and two shotting every single player with ease. This has never happened before in a FROM game.

Its clear there is a serious balancing/design issue. They have already released 4 patches, one boss being altered twice already. Again something unheard of with a FROM game.

I agree in that point, but I guess this is the problem of having so much build variety. Also this way people who aren't that good at this type of game can at least have some solutions in case they get stuck. They did say Elden Ring would be their most accessible game yet and they did make a significant effort in that regard.

Games like Bloodborne and Sekiro were much easier to balance in comparison.

Iirc previous Souls game had a 50% completion rate.

When I checked a bunch of completion rates very few games had that kind of percentage (God of War and Spider-Man were around 50, TLOU2 was close to 60, these were the exceptions). Most of them were between 20-40.

50% seems too high for a From game but idk.

Looking at Steam, in Dark Souls 3 for example Lothric Prince is at 39,3%. In Sekiro Isshin is at 32,3%.

We'll have a better idea where Elden Ring lands in some time, it's a massive game.

 

[Bad Contestant]

I beat the game yesterday on Xbox and selected the Ranni ending. It was at 9.7% at the time. Unsure of the Elden Lord option.

 

[NediarPT88]

I beat the game yesterday on Xbox and selected the Ranni ending. It was at 9.7% at the time. Unsure of the Elden Lord option.

Endings are useless to track this stuff since there are multiple and players can get a different one in repeated playthroughs (so even if you put all of them together the percentage won't be reliable), which is why the best indicator is the last mandatory boss fight before the ending.

 

[Jorge]

Uhmmm shouldn't it be between 5 million + now? Don't know if it works like this, but DL 2 sold about 5 million right? Current NPD reports puts HFW above DL2.

I suppose those are not bad numbers even if Elden ring effected it's launch.

 

[NediarPT88]

Uhmmm shouldn't it be between 5 million + now? Don't know if it works like this, but DL 2 sold about 5 million right? Current NPD reports puts HFW above DL2.

No digital sales for DL2.

Also since NPD is just US it doesn't really give the full picture.

 

[Blue Monty]

Uhmmm shouldn't it be between 5 million + now? Don't know if it works like this, but DL 2 sold about 5 million right? Current NPD reports puts HFW above DL2.

5M WW , you cant take the results of DL2 vs HFW in US and make them global, especially when DL has a huge following in Europe PC fanbase which we have no numbers.

 

[Jorge]

Ooooooh right guys I always forgot NPD is just US. Thanks!!