Elden Ring Preview: Dark Souls Meets Breath of the Wild

FromSoftware’s Elden Ring, at first glance, it looks like a kind of Super Dark souls, a spiritual continuation of that action RPG series in a vast and vaguely familiar fantasy world of sword and wizardry. But the developer of staunchly challenging games like Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is trying something grander with Elden Ringhuge open world.

This is such a massive fantasy land that it requires an in-game map, something that previous FromSoftware games have never offered. Players have had to memorize the worlds of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Axe exploring their dungeons and castles repeatedly, building those maps inside their brains. But in Elden Ring‘s the Lands Between, the landmass in the game, will be able to place markers on a map and receive guidance on where to go next.

As players venture through the densely populated Midlands, they will come across dungeons, giant castles, and the occasional dragon that shoots out of the sky to attack them. “We want Lands Between to be full of threats and discoveries,” FromSoftware producer Yasuhiro Kitao said in a video presentation with Polygon, who described the game’s big map as “not just great for being great.” In that video presentation, FromSoftware showed various scenarios: winter plains, an autumn forest, a flooded city, and a rotting swampy land.

Kitao said that the dungeons players will find in the Lands Between fields will have variety: There are caves, graveyards, and catacombs, and they are handcrafted, not procedurally generated like the Chalice Dungeons in Bloodborne. But players can find some familiarity in those dungeons, with traps, gadgets, torch-lit tunnels, treasures, and minibosses scattered everywhere.

Players, known as Tarnished in Elden Ring, you will also meet terrible monsters and enemy soldiers. There are great and majestic ashen dragons and knights in armor. There are strange enemies, some with a dozen arms to wield weapons, some with snake bodies. In one fight, a large hawk with swords stuck to its claws pecked and slashed at the player, while also throwing barrels of gunpowder at him.

Tarnished will have a variety of combat techniques at his disposal to deal with the threats in Lands Between: sword combat, archery, magic spells, stealth, and arrows that will put enemies to sleep.

Like the Dark Souls games, players can also request help. They can summon their Spirit Steed, a horse-like creature that will aid them on the journey and when mounted combat is warranted. Players can also summon other players, up to two at a time, to assist them in cooperative multiplayer. Different is the option to summon AI-controlled allies of other types. Kitao described “tank defenders” and “assault types”, and even a small crowd of friendly monsters, which can be summoned from the ashes of the deceased. While he didn’t offer much detail, it appears that the creatures you kill Elden Ring they can offer their help in the afterlife as consumable and disposable allies.

Even moving through the world of Elden Ring is different. In addition to the aforementioned Spirit Steed, which can jump twice through ravines and launch 100 feet into the air with the help of mystical jump pads, players can… jump. Similar to how the wolf of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice moved through his world, Elden Ring Players will be able to jump and jump without fear of damage from falls in the environment. Traversing some areas, such as ruined castles or rocky terrain, seems to require generous jumps.

In one section of the game, known as Stormwind Castle, we saw Tarnished approach the front doors, only to be greeted by a friendly character who told them that going through the front door was a bad idea. It offered a second safer route. But the player chose the hard way, opened the doors for them and was immediately greeted, with a volley of arrows. Going back to follow the easier and more tortuous path, we were shown that it required a lot of jumping, sneaking, and battles with armed but ill-prepared guards. There was also a giant troll: if the player had chosen the direct and more difficult path, it would have been a head-to-head fight. On this secret path, he was stealthily lowered with a dream arrow and left to rest.

In another section, the player approached a caravan containing treasures under cover of night. They scuttled through the tall grass to hide, shot a dream arrow at a guard and finished him off with their sword. The other guards, now alerted, were sent out with a curved sword and magical abilities imbued in that weapon. It was a short job and the treasure was quickly earned. More guards were dispatched summoning a quartet of red-eyed ghosts with their ashes. It was a battle unlike anything I’d ever seen in a FromSoftware game: the player, five ghostly creatures, and half a dozen soldiers, all fighting at once.

Core combat will likely be familiar to Dark Souls players (slow and calculating), but FromSoftware is also borrowing from the faster-paced elements of Bloodborne and Axe. Players can run out of the damage path and lower an enemy’s stance to deal critical damage, not entirely guaranteed death from a fatal blow of AxeBut deadly all the same, Kitao said.

There will be other familiar elements from previous FromSoftware games – fast travel through Elden Ringthe equivalent of bonfires (Places of Lost Light); a young maiden who will help them level up and learn new skills (her name is Melina); a central world where friends and allies will gather together in the field; and fragmented narration that will allow the player to interpret the events and history of this world. It will also be, in the FromSoftware tradition, a challenging game. The developer can encapsulate that better in their own description of Elden Ring: “A good old-fashioned role-playing game.”

Elden Ring arrives on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X on January 21, 2022.