Ex-Starfield lead looks at the open-world game boom and says "you can see Dark Souls and Elden Ring being a secondary trend: let's make third-person action combat really hard"

If you've ever wondered why, every few years, lots of games start having similar mechanics, Starfield's lead designer, Will Shen, has some answers for you.

Like any artistic medium, video games have trends. They're slower to catch on to new ideas than films or paintings because development takes half a dozen years, but the trends are easy to spot once you start looking.

In an interview with Kiwi Talkz, Shen explains: "All of a sudden, games like Skyrim and other open-world games really hit their stride with enough content to get past the tipping point where you can almost play it forever. That became the big trend that hit the games industry. You can see Dark Souls and Elden Ring being a secondary trend: let's make third-person action combat really hard." 

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The Soulslike boom has been big, with games like Stellar Blade, Nine Sols, and Lies of P taking inspiration from the tough combat. These games can also get away with being shorter because we'll all spend hours facing the same strong foes over and over again.

Shen mentions another trend: "Everything became survival crafting because Minecraft became super popular." I think of games like Horizon Zero Dawn, Dragon's Dogma 2, and even Elden Ring, which all have gathering and crafting mechanics. Horizon's was far more necessary and felt baked into the plot, but Elden Ring's you can take or leave.

Crimson Desert looks like it'll combine tough Soulslike combat with crafting mechanics, and I'm very excited for it to come out. So even though trends can make games seem similar, if done well, they can elevate the open-world genre.

While you wait for the next big trend to emerge (my money's on couch co-op making a comeback), check out all the video game release dates for 2025 and beyond.