A group of developers who have previously worked on some of the most monumental open world games of the past 15 years are trying to make their next more like Elden Ring (opens in new tab). FromSoftware’s unique action RPGs have had a strong hold on the gaming industry since 2011’s Dark Souls, but Elden Ring’s huge success is the start of a new wave of projects inspired by its stunningly creative open-world design.
Jeff Gardiner, who previously worked as a producer on Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Fallout: 76, told PC Gamer that Elden Ring was a “huge inspiration” for his new game Wyrdsong, which was announced at Gamescom last week. He said he wasn’t initially interested in FromSoftware’s Souls games, but eventually came to realize that it’s not a series about punishing the player, but about rewarding patience.
Any longtime Souls fan knows what Gardiner means. The Souls series (including Bloodborne and Sekiro) are difficult games. Skirmishes with the weakest enemies can send your skinned corpse back to a checkpoint for the tiniest mistakes; the deliberate combat requires you to respect every encounter, no matter how easy it looks at first. But they’re also games where that hostility diminishes the longer you play, and the design ethos starts to take shape. All the puzzle pieces are there, you just need to take the time to learn how they fit together.
FromSoftware’s games are built on a fundamental principle that all their marketing and their questionably hostile fans can’t articulate: they want you to finish them.
Elden Ring is the new Skyrim, the go-to fantasy playground par excellence.
Elden Ring is the clearest refinement of that core principle and the most approachable Souls game because its open world structure allows the developer to help you learn the language the series has spoken for the past 13 years. From your first step into The Lands Between you have so many sides to deal with in the world, with your character, with the story and with your approach to combat; you get the space to learn the game in the most comfortable way for you. This has always been Souls’ underlying premise, but Elden Ring’s scale and its gradual difficulty make it more readable than ever before.
Elden Ring is the new Skyrim, the go-to fantasy playground par excellence. You are a small character in a big world where you encounter a bunch of gods and monsters who think you shouldn’t be there. Despite gaming’s obsession with selling skins and battle passes right now, Elden Ring is a game that only wants you to pay attention and share that experience with others online. Obviously Elden Ring owes Skyrim for cultivating the framework for this particular kind of fantasy epic and the unbridled desire it cultivated for open-world games that let you go off leash – it wouldn’t have hit the same way without it. Skyrim to blaze that path.
But now it’s FromSoftware’s turn to take the lead.
Our Pathetic Future
It’s been clear for years that FromSoftware’s games aren’t just a “niche”, but even still Skyrim seems to be the more “mainstream”, widely popular game. But Elden Ring is really Skyrim Big: Bethesda’s RPG has sold 20 million copies in the first two years of its life, while Elden Ring is already at 17 million after six months. It took The Witcher 3 about a year (opens in new tab) 10 million copies to sell. With this kind of success, Elden Ring and FromSoftware’s overall creative blueprint will be a great source of inspiration for many game designers in the future, whether they strive to literally imitate the systems or design open worlds that step back and let you find your way through it.
Souls games, and Elden Ring in particular, depend on spaces designed to grab your attention. They are carefully crafted to draw you in some direction, whether it is safe or not. Tough enemies, valuable items and stunning vistas lie hidden in the game world waiting for you to find. Quest objectives and markers do not exist in the context of a Souls game; you set each target and chase it until something intercepts you.
Everything else that is so endearing about Souls games trickles down from there. They are games that cannot be burdened by endless experience bars, talent trees, or the many other ways modern RPGs want to remind you that you are gaining strength and progressing in the game. Souls games are full of stats and upgrades, but the order and speed at which you build up power depends entirely on your path through the game. Previous open world games like Skyrim, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, and even Genshin Impact enclose entire areas of tough enemies or scale up their difficulty as you level up to maintain a challenge.
The extremely player-driven experience of Elden Ring is something that open world games have lost.
Parts of Elden Ring also vary in difficulty, but it largely depends on the type of character you’ve built. An early game spellcaster can dash through Stormveil Castle where a greatsword bearer can’t, but in Raya Lucaria, where the wizard enemies cling to aggressive melee attackers, the sword user will come out on top. This open approach, with almost no restrictions, is why people have been able to beat Elden Ring with one hand (opens in new tab) or in less than four minutes (opens in new tab).
That extremely player-driven experience is something open-world games have lost, as publishers found it much easier to mutate them into service games where you’re given a lot of the direction. The modern open world game isn’t an adventure, it’s a treadmill. Open world games sprinkle handy skills and stunning armor just beyond your reach. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey requires you to repeatedly invest points in a talent tree to completely take out an enemy with a surprise attack from the shadows, a technique you’d think would be mastered by a character in a hit man series.
Even Halo Infinite won’t let you repeatedly use its best tool, the Grappleshot, until you upgrade it. Open world games hold back their strongest parts until you earn them, replacing the thrill of entering into well-designed systems with the anticipation of possibly to do that. Dying Light 2 this year is another great example (opens in new tab). Open world games are all about being dazzled by a restaurant menu, picking out what to order and waiting – sometimes 20-30 hours – for the meal to arrive.
Elden Ring reminds us that people are naturally curious and you can design a game to nurture such a simple motivation and then do almost anything with it. Open world games don’t have to follow all the NPCs you’ve talked to; if they are interesting, you remember them. Combat encounters don’t have to be mindless friction before stronger enemies emerge; each fight can test your familiarity with the battle rhythm and offer clever players ways to undermine it. And their worlds don’t have to explain themselves only through dialogue and journal entries: characters and environment design can also fill the world.
Elden Ring will hopefully inspire designers to have more moments where you stumble into the devastatingly powerful Sword of Night and Flame instead of spending a hundred hours on something of similar power at the end of a skill tree. Open world games would benefit from giving you the space to influence the world beyond the constraints of where the tried and true path takes you. Even the mighty Sword of Night and Flame wasn’t an easy fix for Elden Ring’s toughest boss. The thoughtful open-world design allows you to have fun discovering something that feels like you shouldn’t have it yet, and incorporate that into the broader construction of the game.
Even as Elden Ring’s influence makes its way into some of the inevitable sequels and remakes that get the green light every year, one big success could convince publishers that trading purely familiar features isn’t the only way to get people’s attention. – that we are all ready to break out of our routines and learn something new, even if we don’t know it.
Oh, Elden Ring
Once you’ve spent enough time in a FromSoftware game, it ruins everything else. This is why Souls fans are annoyed by their love for the developer’s games. All my friends have come to accept that I will never stop talking about how prescient Dark Souls 2’s Dull Ember item description (opens in new tab) is – if you know it, you know it. More than 17 million people have bought Elden Ring, with a whopping 50% PC players (opens in new tab) until halfway through the game. And even if you didn’t get that far, all the discussions and memes surrounding the release have helped unravel what FromSoftware’s persistent fans have been drooling over for years. Finally it feels like everyone is on the same page.
FromSoftware has broadened the genre that created it and sent it to culture beyond gaming.
Right now, gaming and popular media in general are inundated with remakes, remasters and retreads (opens in new tab). Elden Ring itself may be a recontextualization of what FromSoftware has been doing since Demon’s Souls (which takes from games like Zelda (opens in new tab)), and inevitably it will spawn a number of derivative works. But it’s an invitation – perhaps a challenge – for other creators to push a little harder, dream a little bigger.
FromSoftware has broadened the genre that created it and sent it to culture beyond gaming. Its impact on social media, especially TikTok (opens in new tab) and YouTube (opens in new tab), is etched in the memories of many more people than Dark Souls ever was. Elden Ring is not just a great game (opens in new tab); it’s a moment in pop culture that caught the attention of millions of people, people who want to play more of these types of games and maybe start making things out of it.
The games that follow Elden Ring will continue their advocacy of creating worlds to be unraveled, where dream logic and characterization aren’t spelled out in a quest log, and where the developer’s imaginations mingle with yours.
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