Elden Ring’s first inherited dungeon is Stormveil Castle

In a fifteen minute video we got to see about the upcoming Elden Ring, From Software showed the game’s first inherited dungeon, Stormveil Castle. Anyway, what is an inherited dungeon? These legacy dungeons are similar in scale and scope to areas that players may be familiar with in terms of Dark Souls dungeon areas and are not part of the open world that Elden Ring encompasses. Instead, these legacy dungeons have all the bits and pieces that players can expect from select dungeon games from From Software, including NPC interactions, looping levels, drop-down menus, likely elevators, and various pathways and secrets to find in the path to a great boss. or bosses behind a foggy door.

In this quick sample, we are informed that Stormveil Castle is the first dungeon, although players will not be limited to a certain inherited dungeon completion order in most cases. However, you can’t go to the final dungeon as immediately as you could in, say, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild. We don’t know the mechanism behind that and frankly I’d rather not know until the game launches, so I’m glad From isn’t talking about that at the moment.

In Stormveil Castle, the player is presented with a choice at the start through an NPC: head straight through the front door or take a longer side route. Breaking through the door involves charging head-on into a series of arrows and coming face-to-face with a gigantic troll, so the most seasoned veterans are likely to open the door, roll thirty times, and head towards the boss.

The side path is long and winding, going up narrow corridors and rickety planks, much like what you would see going up to Boletaria Castle or any of the other sides of Castillo de las Almas. Of course, archers and enemies seek to pull you out of precarious positions and bring you down. Along the way, we see a few other Souls dungeon design elements, like going down from positions to find secret rooms. One of these rooms contains treasures and what appears to be another From Software staple, the early game monster knight that is tougher than the other enemies around, complete with a shield and some light magic props. After that, our hero sees the same mini-boss giant troll creature that our headstrong warrior made, but by taking the side path this character can tackle the big problem from behind. With the troll unaware of our hero’s presence, the player uses a sleeping dart on him to defuse him and quickly dispatch him. Sleeping darts are a great way to disable an enemy and guarantee a critical hit (similar to a visceral attack in Bloodborne) on an enemy. Behind the troll is a fog gate, a classic indicator in From Software games that there is a boss area ahead.

A boss in Stormveil Castle

This boss is a massive multi-armed humanoid creature that players have seen in previous preview screenshots. The boss is surprisingly fast for being so large and wields multiple ax weapons. It was difficult to tell from the images whether or not there is a “warm-up” or transformation when the player damages the boss, but in some of the images it is easy to notice that one of the arms is actually a dragon head. something I’m not sure of was present at the beginning or happened in the middle of the battle as part of a phase transition. The dragon’s head arm naturally breathes fire and can grab the player and throw or kill them. The boss jumps all over the place, hits the ground, and is generally quite impressive to behold. The action is incredibly fluid, and this seems like a very strict From Software boss, expected for what is considered the first canonical dungeon crawl in the game. It is unknown if this is actually the final boss of this area or just one of the multiple bosses in Stormveil Castle.

The dungeon game was looking great, and I can’t wait to try and take the main entrance door when the Elden Ring arrives on January 21, 2022.

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