As Elden Ring creeps toward release, more information is being shared with FromSoft's eager audience, including a private, digital, gameplay preview shown to a handful of games industry news outlets. Three weeks after the calendar turns to the new year, Elden Ring will finally arrive, and the dark fantasy RPG is set to continue a tradition that has brought consistent critical and commercial success to FromSoftware, even as it's poised to be the most expansive of the studio's games yet.
After Elden Ring's announcement in 2019, where it was revealed to be a collaboration between George R.R. Martin and Hidetaka Miyazaki, the 15 minute preview is the most thorough look at its gameplay so far. Elden Ring is FromSoftware's next title after 2019's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, though it will be a significant departure gameplay wise - at least within FromSoft's portfolio of Soulslike games. 2009's Demon's Souls was the beginning of the modern FromSoftware formula, though it was Dark Souls two years later that truly began the studio's rise to success. Dark Souls' two sequels brought minor gameplay changes and built on the dark fantasy setting, while Bloodborne and Sekiro created their own, tangential identities.
The last 12 years of FromSoftware games have curated a dedicated fanbase that looks to Elden Ring as an ambitious, open-world culmination of the developer's last six titles. Elden Ring's art style harkens back to Demon's Souls and the Dark Souls trilogy, but aspects of the other two games can be seen as well. Enemy and boss designs embrace Bloodborne's visceral body horror elements, while iterations on Sekiro's stealth system and vertical map design appear to have been implemented. While Elden Ring has been theoretically understood as "big Dark Souls" since its initial reveal, this most recent preview has shed some light on the studio's design philosophy for the game, one that promotes player freedom in a capacity unprecedented in FromSoftware games to date - at least outside of Armored Core.
Elden Ring's World Design
Elden Ring is set in a world known as the Lands Between, a name given by George R.R. Martin. The game takes place after the Lands Between have fallen from grace once bestowed upon the land by the eponymous Elden Ring. The powerful, still mysterious artifact was shattered, and its pieces taken by six demigods that now rule over the Lands Between, corrupted by its power. The territories of these six demigods combine to make Elden Ring's explorable area, one expected to be much larger than that of previous FromSoftware games.
The recent preview has helped shed light on what can be expected in each region, specifically in regards to just how varied the map will be. From Polygon:
“We want the Lands Between to be filled with threats and discoveries,” said FromSoftware producer Yasuhiro Kitao, in a video presentation with Polygon, who described the game’s large map as “not just big for the sake of being big.” In that video presentation, FromSoftware showcased diverse settings: wintry plains, an autumnal forest, a flooded city, and a decaying, swampy land.
GameSpot notes that while the Lands Between are massive, they're deliberately designed:
From Software wants you to always be drawn towards something of interest on the horizon and hopes that, along the way, you may accidentally stumble upon the unexpected. A lot like Breath of the Wild, the developer is counting on curiosity to be your guide instead of dozens of icons on a map.
GameSpot continues with a note on just how that curiosity might be rewarded:
Scattered throughout the overworld are dungeons that can be stumbled upon while exploring. These, in classic From Software fashion, are sometimes deadly detours that invite players to overcome traps, enemies hiding in dark corners, and the occasional boss in order to find treasures.
Such a large game world - combined with the notorious difficulty of FromSoftware games - leaves a daunting prospect, but IGN outlines how traversal has had some added mechanics to ease the stress:
[In] order to navigate across such a giant open field, you are able to summon a Spirit Steed, which can utilize special jump platforms to leap over cliffs, allowing for a ton of verticality in the open-world design. One big departure from previous Souls games (though one that makes sense with a world as massive as The Lands Between), is that you’ll now have access to a map. The map gets updated by finding map fragments throughout the world, and has the look of an actual illustrated parchment made by an actual cartographer who lives within The Lands Between. You can drop markers to note locations of tough enemies, NPCs, treasures, or dungeon entrances. As you’d expect, marked locations also place a beacon that’s easily visible in-game, allowing you to set your own waypoints when you’re looking for places to go next.
This map also brings a fast travel mechanic, which isn't necessarily new to FromSoftware's action RPGs, but one that appears to be expanded. Players will be able to fast travel from anywhere in the open world, though there are certain restrictions. Fast travel cannot be used in the midst of combat in order to escape danger, and fast travel is disabled in certain areas of the Lands Between, such as major dungeons.
Elden Ring's Legacy Dungeons
Wandering on a whim through a beautifully constructed FromSoftware world is appealing on its own, but at some point, players will have to retrieve those Elden Ring shards. For that, players will have to delve into what the developers are calling Elden Ring's Legacy Dungeons, so named because of their similarity in feel to the tightly designed levels of previous games. The preview contained a look at the game's first Legacy Dungeon, well summarized by IGN:
Legacy Dungeons are the main attraction of each of the six main areas of The Lands Between, and I got to see the first of them, Stormveil Castle. [...] What really stuck out to me more than anything else was how enticing exploration felt with all of the various paths that were left unexplored in my hands-off demonstration. [...] I was told that Legacy Dungeons were built with this kind of freedom in mind, and that they were designed to be complex and multi-layered.
Eurogamer also recognized the intricate design of the Legacy Dungeons, noting how they'll feel familiar to Dark Souls players:
Branching out from the open Overworld are much larger multi-tiered castles and other huge dungeon areas, which are perhaps more akin to what you find in the Dark Souls series. These colossal structures, once you dive in, will slowly unfold with more intricate, multi-layered level design, granting players larger and perhaps more thematic or unique challenges to overcome.
The emphasis on player freedom extends to the Legacy Dungeons as well. Polygon describes the entrance to "Stormwind Castle" [sic]:
We watched a Tarnished approach the entrance gates, only to be greeted by a friendly character who told them that going through the front door was a bad idea. He offered a second safer route. But the player opted for the hard path, had the gates open for them, and was immediately welcomed - with a volley of arrows. Doubling back to pursue the easier, circuitous path, we were shown that it required a lot of jumping, sneaking, and battles with armed but underprepared guards.
And, of course, the Legacy Dungeon is capped off with a boss fight, with Eurogamer explaining how Elden Ring's spirits might make the fight easier:
The player takes some time to summon a different Spirit to fight alongside them in this battle. [...] While this figure bears the brunt of the bosses' attacks, the player enchants their sword, as it's engulfed in blue light and then strikes the boss with a heavy attack while the summon is killed off.
Legacy Dungeons aren't the only place to find boss fights, though. Many articles written about the preview mention bosses and notable encounters happening in the open fields and smaller dungeons scattered around the Lands Between.
Elden Ring's Combat
Elden Ring is returning to the more varied combat of Dark Souls, rather than the parry-based, katana-dependent combat of Sekiro, though it does have some Sekiro-esque elements to its gameplay (including more vertical level design, stealth elements, and jumping). Players will be able to tailor their play style through whichever weapons and armor suits them before confronting the Lands Between's many foes. A wide array of enemies will be encountered in both the open world and the dungeons, with some notable examples outlined by Polygon:
There are big, majestic ashen dragons and armored knights. There are bizarre enemies, some with a dozen arms in which to wield weapons, some with snakelike bodies. In one fight, an oversized falcon with swords affixed to its talons pecked and sliced at the player, while also throwing powder kegs at him.
How to fight them is up to the player, according to Eurogamer:
In the gameplay we were shown - in which the HUD was always hidden - we saw two main builds. One specialised in sword combat and melee, and a spellcasting sorcerer in blue. From also floated the option of becoming a skilled archer that excels at long-range combat.
In addition to the aforementioned spirits, Eurogamer also assures readers that Elden Ring's online multiplayer will work in a similar capacity to previous FromSoft games:
Elden Ring features both asynchronous and direct multiplayer elements, and you're able to experience these within both the Overworld and the dungeons. From reckons that both the nuances of the asynchronous features and the direct multiplayer experience will feel fresh thanks to how different the gameplay is in Elden Ring.
Accessibility seems to be more of a focus on FromSoftware's part this time around. The co-op and the summonable spirits appear to give the player a large variety of ways to ease the difficulty. PvP remains largely a mystery, though, with no confirmation just yet if invasions will return.
Elden Ring's Story
The narratives of FromSoftware games have typically been difficult to piece together. NPCs speak cryptically, and cutscenes offer little more than the broadest of lore strokes. This has forced players to carefully observe enemies and environments, and peruse item descriptions in order to form a cohesive guess at what the game is about. While Elden Ring's story about the Tarnished appears to follow suit, The Verge has an insightful quote from producer Yasuhiro Kitao on how players will have more agency in the storytelling:
"We’ve always tried to make our games approachable and have interesting narratives, but the player has always been getting caught up in something preexisting, and been taken along for a ride,” Kitao says. “This time they have more agency, they have more ambition, and an overarching objective within that fantasy. We feel like this will be very different to our previous titles. Instead of just being a sick foreigner who has come to Yharnam, or an undead warrior who finds himself in a bleak landscape, the player has returned to the Lands Between as a ‘tarnished’ in search of the Elden Ring’s power, to uncover its mysteries. It’s a very simple premise but it helps to drive that mainline story."
GameSpot mirrors these sentiments, adding that side characters may play a larger role than in previous FromSoft games:
Characters have always been crucial to the narrative of the Soulsborne titles - you only have to look at the fandom around Solaire, Siegmeyer, Micolash, or Genichiro, among many others, to know how important they are to From Software's games and the people that play them. Elden Ring aims to double down on characters to address the fact that, for many, From Software's games have stories that are difficult to parse. By focusing on characters and the drama surrounding them, the narrative is painted in a much clearer way, establishing a strong baseline that anyone can enjoy.
Players have learned what to expect when it comes to FromSoftware games, but Elden Ring looks to be a refreshing take on the formula. From the previews, it seems that designing Elden Ring's open world drastically changed how the developers approached gameplay mechanics. The game is still months away from release, but it wouldn't be surprising to see more gameplay revealed before then.
Elden Ring is expected to arrive on PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/S on January 21, 2022.