Kirun
Buzzfeed Editor
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For me, it really comes down to how E:33 handles side content and, more broadly, its sense of pacing. I don't even think the side content itself is the core problem. It's how and when it's presented. If more of it had been paced out gradually, I'd probably feel very differently. Instead, the game goes from having very little optional material to suddenly dumping everything, everywhere, all at once on the player. That kind of whiplash completely killed my sense of flow.
It also creates a weird difficulty inversion. By the time you reach A3, the "final" stretch of the game feels like a joke compared to a lot of the optional encounters you've already done. The main path loses any sense of escalation or payoff (gameplay wise) because you've already faced harder, more mechanically demanding content on the side. When your climax feels easier than your detours, something is fundamentally off.
And that's really the heart of it for me: pacing. That's why, to me, Elden Ring is the better game overall. Its pacing is almost untouchable. The way it spaces out challenge, discovery, optional content, and narrative beats feels deliberate in a way almost no game before or since has managed. You're never flooded, never starved, and never yanked out of the experience by a sudden content avalanche. The difficulty curve largely respects the player's progression, and the world unfolds at a pace that keeps curiosity, tension, and mastery in balance.
Plenty of games since have tried to emulate pieces of what Elden Ring does, but none of them have matched how cleanly it controls its rhythm. Pacing-wise, it absolutely shits all over everything that's come after it and honestly, maybe anything that's ever tried to play in that space at all.
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