Let Me Rant about Elden Ring a Minute
(hashtag humor, hashtag for the lulz)
OK so here's a problem I have with Elden Ring. There are many, but this is one.
The game acts like there's zero infrastructure, but every single thing that happens implies there is.
How else can the plot actually happen? It functions by way of the Tarnished doing Something Or Other and then going somewhere else -- which the Tarnished does, usually, by way of warping faster than light speed across the planet using tiny golden bonfires. And yet, when I get where I'm going, they already know [character] is dead, or that [character] has abdicated power, or whatever the hell. How is this news traveling across the land? No one ever goes anywhere. The merchants never move. Most npcs don't, or when they do, it's disastrous and they're not stopping at every village on the way to gossip.
Also there aren't villages. No one is growing any food. But let's set that aside for now.
Let's consider Sellen, my favorite sassy magical aunt. Obvious spoilers from this point forward.
So she just lives under a horrible plant, right? And you barge into her house and she adopts you as her Less Sassy Niece. And then you find her in a dungeon across the fucking universe.
How did she get there? Are you telling me her old bosses from the academy found her, dug her out of her Plant Basement Crypt without blowing it all to hell, and then dragged her against her will across the universe and stapled her to a wall?
HOW? Imagine going from point A to point B in Elden Ring on foot, because you do not at this time have the blessing of grace or whatever. You will be assailed by dogs, bears, idiots holding torches, assholes with giant horses, npcs trying to test your mettle, thunder, lightning, hail, whatever.
Let's go further. Let's say you are in a party of a couple dozen loyal soldiers, with several magicians, trying to move this prisoner from the middle of nowhere to further away but also the middle of nowhere.
Don't tell me those big badass npcs are proof against the hordes of the wilderness. You don't have any outposts or supply lines. What's your biggest predator?
Tarnished.
How do Tarnished people get their runes and equipment? What do they spend all day doing? It's not just me, the Main Character of the World of Elden Ring for Some Reason. There are other Tarnished. You're telling me you could get Sellen, an angry and dangerous magician, into a prison cell while the sky is raining down assholes with hammers and rapiers? They are coming for your shirt. They want your boss's stupid stone helmet. You are 1/164 of a level and they are so close. There is no chance in hell you are surviving this trip intact.
And yet she gets there. She gets stapled. How?