Elden Ring is vast, intimidating, and worth the wait
The latest game from Dark Souls studio From Software is full of huge mysteries and satisfying, if brutal, battles
Games Reviews Elden Ring
When writing about a cult phenomenon, you have to ask yourself: Are you writing for everybody? Or for the cult?
It’s a question that dogs any attempt to objectively review Elden Ring, the latest game from Dark Souls creators From Software. For the last decade-plus, the Souls games (of which Elden Ring serves as the latest spiritual successor) have operated as a battleground in the ever-raging debate about difficulty in modern gaming, a seemingly irreconcilable split between those who deem these titles hard for their own perverse sake, and those who find fulfillment, maybe even beauty, in their devotion to carefully presented adversity.
Elden Ring takes strides to offer an olive branch to both camps. On the one hand, From has softened a few of its most notable cruelties with this latest spin on the Gothic action-RPG, introducing new mechanics that (optionally) take some of the sting out of the series’ legendarily complex and brutal boss fights. At the same time, the studio has doubled down on the feelings of being lost, helpless, and bewildered in an inherently hostile world—catnip to some players, and to others, a poison as repellant as any that infests the massive, tainted swamps that cover so much of the game’s setting, The Lands Between.
At the core of it all is the shift that marks Elden Ring as different from Dark Souls, Demon’s Souls, Bloodborne, or the rest of the From canon. We’re not talking here about the much-touted narrative contributions from author George R.R. Martin, whose influence on the game’s plot feels roughly as impactful as its influence on the text of this review. (Which is to say: Negligible.) Rather, it’s the addition of a massive overworld for players to explore and get lost in.
Instead of confining itself to previous games’ long series of haunted castles, evil mines, and demonic mansions—still present in abundance, mind you—Elden Ring allows players to run and ride across the damned countryside in a variant of the open-world gameplay pioneered by franchises like Grand Theft Auto and Assassin’s Creed. (There’s even a big map for you to ponder over, a first for a franchise that normally delights in leaving players to their own cartographic woes.)
It’s an awkward fit, at first, for a series that has made so much of its name on the creation of specific and deliberate haunted spaces. Players who’ve had each twist and turn of Dark Souls’ Undead Burg burnt into their memories, precious inches of ground reclaimed bit by bit from the zombie hordes, may recoil from long stretches of incident-free (if still resolutely beautiful) landscape. At its worst, Elden Ring’s open world design can lead to the feeling that a more traditional Souls game has been stretched out across a vast landscape, with nondescript smaller caves and dungeons dotted across the landscape as little more than filler.
The merits of the open world filter in more slowly. They’re there in the occasional jaw-dropping moment when you crest a hill and see the sheer scale of the blighted landscape laid out before you. They’re there in the pure freedom they allow the player to explore at their own pace and in their own direction. (Boss too hard? You’ve now got a near-infinite number of other directions to push at to try to find the power to defeat them.) And they’re there especially in the way they sharpen one of the key Souls tones: The sense of being alone in a dying world, something that’s never felt sharper than when so much of that decaying splendor has been brought to sickly and withered life.
The most obvious precedent (besides From’s own work) is Nintendo’s bestselling The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, which shares with Elden Ring an inherent dare: If you can see something out there on the horizon, you can probably get there and look at it (and maybe get killed by it) up close. Both games share an interest in exploration that’s paradoxically absent in the open-world genre as a whole, glutted as it is with games whose maps are crammed with “come look at this!” icons like so many highway billboards.
Again, it’s not perfect: Elden Ring’s is a less-directed experience, one that can, especially in the early going, feel meandering, more than thrilling or empowering. (The use of “Sites Of Grace” to direct you to your next objective is helpful, but you can still spend an hour conquering a minor dungeon only to walk away with nothing more than a spell you’ll never use, and a chunk of the game’s typically obtuse lore hidden away in the item description.) And the ability to avoid almost any enemy encountered in the larger world (racing past it on your faithful steed, Torrent) can rob the game of the careful encounter design that’s been a hallmark of so many of From’s greatest works.
When the open world gets too open, though, you can always venture into one of the larger dungeons that dot the countryside of The Lands Between, and which serve as more traditional “levels” for players to trek through. Here, Elden Ring plays far more like a traditional Souls game, albeit one with an increased focus on verticality and stealth. (Imported, presumably, from 2019's Sekiro, the odd child out in this unofficial “series.”) The focus shifts in these spaces to those things that have always been the divisive hallmarks of From’s design ethos: Ambushes, traps, and a thoughtful approach to combat that renders even the simplest of enemies a potential killer.
Cultists will feel right at home—these levels, which are sprawling, complex, and gorgeous, are as good as anything the company’s ever done. The larger question is whether newcomers, lured in by the freedom of the open world, will be willing to bend to accommodate a challenge like the first “official” boss, Margit The Fell Omen, a deliberate roadblock of a guardian armed with attack patterns so unrelenting and aggressive that even series veterans will sweat to master them.
The lesson, presumably, is to remind players how much power they can gather by backing out and returning to the open road, rather than rushing down the straight line toward their objectives. But the Souls games have always been most comfortable doing their teaching through torture, killing players over and over to beat a lesson into their heads. When it works, a sort of pleasant Stockholm Syndrome sets in, as the player internalizes the quirks of the game’s combat—the various movesets and character builds, the deeply intimidating wall of stats that greets you on the character screen, and the nuances of the game’s new stance-breaking posture system and mounted combat. When it fails (after, say, the 20th time Margit has smacked your head in with his big magic hammer), the results are as disastrous as they are dispiriting.
Again: From has made at least a few concessions here to ease the pain. After being absent from Sekiro, the studio has once again implemented online multiplayer, allowing you to invite friends (or random good Samaritans) to help take down a boss. They’ve also implemented a “spirit summoning” mechanic that allows you to do something similar with A.I. companions who can be strengthened throughout the game, alleviating even the need for an internet connection to get some life-preserving help. They’ve even added in mid-map checkpoints, typically placed near especially difficult encounters, that allow you to rush back to the fight and try again without having to endure long runs back to a boss’ door.
Will it be enough? Hard to say. Because ultimately, the key factor in whether Elden Ring connects for you isn’t going to be its combat. (There are lot of Souls games and Souls-likes that can fill that purpose these days, if that’s what you’re after.) No, Elden Ring will get under your skin depending on how well the inherent promise of the game, one that From has been pursuing for years now, lands for you: Here is a vast world, full of mystery, danger, beauty, and humor. (Humor! Eagles with knives strapped to their feet are just the start of some of the wonderfully goofy monster designs on display.) It will not give up its secrets easily. It will frustrate and daunt you when it can.
It is a beautiful place to get lost in.
39 Comments
So, as with pretty much any other Elden Ring article – if you enjoy Soulsbourne games and the masochism therein, this is for you. If not…“But the Souls games have always been most comfortable doing their teaching through torture, killing players over and over to beat a lesson into their heads.”
From what I played myself it’s a lot more forgiving. It gives you a lot of tools to mitigate the danger and give yourself space to breathe, plus you can avoid a lot of combat and create a wide variety of builds.In my own 6 hours with the preview, it felt like Skyrim where they don’t hold your hand and where the combat is actually good – which sounds like not much but turns out amazing in practice. It’s not going to be a purely explorative jaunt, but it’s not Bloodborne either, which has perhaps the least forgiving beginning out of all the From games barring Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the First Sin.
In a lot of ways, it’s both easier and harder – the increased freedom means you can get yourself into bad situations by pushing at the edges, but it also means you generally have ways to get stronger to alleviate the harder fights. If I found a particular boss especially brutal, is that because it’s actually hard, or because I took it on too soon?
(If we’re grading difficulty on “How easy is it to avoid getting hit while doing damage to the boss,” which is sort of the core Souls combat strategy, I’d say it lands somewhere a bit easier than Dark Souls 3, harder than Souls 1 or 2.)
The point I was trying to make here is that Elden Ring shares the basic From idea that killing the player, repeatedly, is part of the game’s intended design space. Some people hate that about this series. It embraces the failure state as part of the game itself, rather than something to be aggressively avoided, which is both part of the appeal, and a way it’s out of step with “modern” design principles.
Its why I love the series. Failure isn’t something to be avoided, its something that is inevitable, recoverable, and most importantly something to learn from.
Big difference. This game allows you to grind in more interesting ways. Its an open world, so it gives you choice to explore and level up. Other Soulsborne games allowed you to do the same but the options were much more limited.
We’re not talking here about the much-touted narrative contributions from author George R.R. Martin, whose influence on the game’s plot feels roughly as impactful as its influence on the text of this review. (Which is to say: Negligible.)Watching the trailers, I had wondered exactly what his influence was on the game. My suspicion is they hired him on as a “consultant”–just someone to suggest tweaks here and there, a voice to help develop nascent ideas–though perhaps his real role is as a fantasy-genre name-drop to attract a wider audience.
According to the team, Martin wrote much of the lore behind the world including the core concept and name, while Miyazaki and his team wrote the actual story and beats pertaining to the current state of the Lands Between. Considering that memos from Bandai Namco indicated that Elden Ring is supposed to be a franchise (perhaps a trilogy) and that From games always have time shenanigans, that might mean his contributions might be simultaneously more vast than expected and lighter when it pertains to this one game.Considering how well AV Club does its research, I’d rather trust their own words than what Hughes smugly assumes.
I’m sure Martin absolutely did that, but given that the backstory is functionally the same as every other Souls game – once there were gods, they screwed up and died, the world is boned now – I’d hesitate to say his work was hugely impactful. If, upon playing, you can find one story element that makes you say, “Thank god they got Martin for this, no one else could have managed,” I will issue a formal apology in this space.
So like…99% of a story? Im sure his work is in there somewhere.
I’m certain that while GRRM was the lore consultant, Nick Earls was the visual design consultant.John Carmack called. He wants his Quake II colour palette back.
3-5 pages of ideas, tops
3-5 pages? At Martin’s pace that’s like 5 years of work. They got a couple of sentences and an amusing doodle out of him, tops.
Seems like a giant missed opportunity. Why not go for something like the Shadow of Mordor or a Soul-ish game like Jedi Fallen Order and make some side story to the GRRM Ice and Fire Universe? Keep the ability to have the game hard as hell for the Soul’s fans, but like Jedi, offer more forgiving modes too. Nintendo eased up on Fire Emblem enabling you to turn off permadeath, and it’s now one of their biggest franchises. Right now, the FromSoft games are limited to masochists who brag about their accomplishments thinking the population as a whole cares. Adding some obscure storyline with Stark ancestors would get more people buying in.
I can appreciate the Souls game even if they’re not for me, but I think I had enough of relentlessly depressing difficulty with Returnal, and Horizon is taking up my allotted brainspace for an open world game right now. I bet I’ll attempt to visit this in the fall.
Can you pause this like Sekiro, or is it like the other Soulsborne games where you can only save and quit? I know early builds you couldn’t pause. Guessing no, cause co-op is a possibility, but it seems like they could activate it if you’re in offline mode!
There’s no pause, even in offline mode.
So those of us with, say, spouses or children – we’re pretty much screwed, right?
I wish there was a demo, I think this looks amazing but I’ve never played a FromSoftware game and would like to know where the difficulty falls in terms of enjoyment/ordeal for me before spending money on it.
Same here, I’ve watched plenty of gameplay videos but it’s impossible to get a feel for the combat and I only hear how it’s a unique combat system. I’ve played plenty of Witcher 3 and Ghost of Tsushima but I’m assuming it’s different from those
itll be fine just do it, if it gets frustrating just realize its a game and try a new route
I imagine you can find one of the earlier games for next to nothing now.
From what I’ve played (the early test) it takes a lot more from the Demon Souls/Dark Souls part of the series than Sekiro/Bloodborne so those games would likely be best. I’d suggest Dark Souls Remastered or Demon Souls PS5 version to get a feel for it. However, this is important FromSoftware games expect you to die, a lot. Its not just their moto its the underlying mechanic. Its learning by failure. If you dont like that feeling of failure FromSoftware games wont be for you, if you’re willing to put in the time though you’ll find a lot to love. This game also seems to be the most accessible of all the titles as an open world game you can grind easier than in other titles.PS: If you have a PS5 the PS Collection has Bloodborne for free.
Cannot wait to try it and to put it aside after a few hours after it makes me feel absolutely useless and realise that the effort required for that game is not something I find fun providing,
I will grab it on sale for PC and grab a mod that makes it easier probably. I don’t have the time in my life to beat a learning curve into me.
Is this the first time anyone else seems to be hearing this is out for Xbox as well? For some reason I could have swore this was a PS5 exclusive, then I heard there was a PC release and now Xbox too. Maybe its just that I kept hearing how people couldn’t wait to see the PS5 run it that I assumed it was exclusive. Honestly its probably my fault for not following the game closely since Souls-like games are not my bag
The only Playstation exclusive Souls related games are Bloodborne and Demon’s Souls (original flavor and remake). All of the others are on Xbox.
Many aspects of this game seem very appealing. But I suck at video games, and I also don’t have unlimited time and patience.Are there any games like this that aren’t so long, and so hard? Also – no endless missions to procure ingredients for potions or new gloves or whatever.
The Zelda series, maybe; or earlier Souls games like Dark Souls 1 and 2.
I’ll probably pick this up at a later date. The game having no 21:9 support turned me off of the PC version, and I’ve got Dying Light 2 and Horizon to swing between on PlayStation 5 for a decent while.
Does the game help you understand the distinction between areas that are too hard because you need to increase your stats and areas that are too hard because you need to keep practicing and get better? Is there a distinction?
I think the broadest possible answer to this would round down to “no”. The signaling that you’re under-statted for an area is basically “Go there, pick a fight, see if you can do much damage when you connect, or get killed in a single hit.” If you’re very good at avoiding hits, that gets a bit trickier to parse – and some areas have enemies that hit like trucks, but are relatively easy to avoid, so it can be a little nebulous. If you’re dying two seconds into every encounter, you definitely want to bail, though.
So, does magic suck this time, or not?This is the only real decider for me. I only want to play a magic-user, I don’t find the melee combat fun, but if it’s as insufferable as DS3 was I won’t be having a lot of fun there either.
I ran a Dex/Bleed build (viable, eventually!); I’m going to start a new playthrough focused on magic when I start streaming the game in a few days, because there’s lots of neat spells I haven’t touched at all.
Magic is super fun! (Although there’s one stretch of the game with Magic resistant entities that make melee unavoidable.)
I *strongly disliked* most of Souls, but this is *fantastic*.
I’m a huge Soulsborne fans, but I absolutely sucked at Sekiro. I felt like it was built for people who could beat something like Dark Souls without increasing a single level – essentially removing all stats, and relying almost entirely on player skiller. Which is fine, but stats are my saving grace in these games. So I rather hope this game doesn’t borrow too much from it.
I also think it’s worth noting that it’s not just combat that makes these games hard. It’s also oftentimes construct of the environment and the enemies within it. For example: walk through a near pitch-black tomb, while giant skeletons you can’t see shoot massive arrows at you, there are cliffs all around, and try to get past these other skeletons that drain all your health/stamina with a single attack and also you got to kill this Black Knight over here (and there’s a lantern to be found…but you have to swap it out from your shield).I’ll be with Horizon for a while so I might not pick this up for a few weeks yet. But I am curious to see how the long-term fan and critical response to it pans out.
It’s been a great week in gaming. Trending gaming posts in socials have basically been either “Elden Ring is so fucking good” and “Elden Ring will be out soon but I haven’t been able to stop playing Destiny 2 for the past 24 hours”, with some amazing Horizon Forbidden West gifs sprinkled in.
This game had the most toxic fan. Why this site covered this game.Clicks. Yeah i forgot about that
I thought Margit looked brutal from watching videos but he wasn’t that bad when I got to actually fight him. I might have been overprepared though (I was like level 29 or so)… And I did also summon three wolves and a sorcerer to help. And also I mayyy have looked up a tip online that helped a lot LOL but I won’t say what it is in case ppl are sensitive to spoilery stuff
You mention other open world games to compare, but not Skyrim?