Elden Ring: You only get to see everything with New Game Plus

Elden Ring is also designed for many playthroughs.

In a month we can finally play Elden Ring – if there isn’t a spontaneous postponement. That shouldn’t be the case, however, because as producer Yasuhiro Kitao announced in an interview at Taipei Game Show, the action role-playing game has already reached gold status and is now in production.

In the same context, Kitao also announced how much game time we should allow for Elden Ring, that there will be diverging story arcs again and how New Game Plus will work in FromSoftware’s new game.

Elden Ring has the typical structure of a FromSoftware game

This is how long you will need for one pass: Thanks to Souls legend Hidetaka Miyazaki, we already know that Elden Ring will take us around 30 to 40 hours – this has now been confirmed by Yasuhiro Kitao, who expects around 30 hours of gameplay. However, this is a quick run through of the main story. This makes the title not much longer than other games from the studio.

In the open world of Elden Ring, however, “dozens of hours of gameplay” still await us, which we can spend on side quests, exploration of the game world and optional dungeons. Thanks to the open world, these side jobs are probably more extensive than in a Dark Souls, which is relatively linear.

You can watch the interview here:

link to YouTube content

If you want to see everything, you need several playthroughs: According to Kitao, getting to 100 percent in the first playthrough is “technically impossible”. However, this does not mean that content is artificially withheld. Thoroughly exploring the world of Elden Ring is “very close” to seeing it all. However, there will again be storylines where you have to choose a path at certain points. The New Game Plus mode is ideal for this.

This is how New Game Plus works

When it comes to New Game Plus, Elden Ring is based on the Dark Souls series. After the end of the game, you can start a new run with your character, in which you can take your stats and equipment with you. Only items for game progress are removed from the inventory. To balance your advantage, the opponents will also be significantly stronger than in the first playthrough.

There will probably also be some new or improved items in NG+ mode. Kitao did not reveal whether we would also see new bosses or even areas.

Check out the Elden Ring story trailer for a glimpse of the main story:

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Elden Ring – Story Trailer brings back powerful memories of epic Lord of the Rings battles

Other recent Elden Ring news:

Elden Ring is going to be bigger than other From Software games

The scope of Elden Ring and the amount of promised content also affects the size of the game file. At over 44GB, the title outshines all of the studio’s previous games – even with DLCs. Still, for an open-world game, the download isn’t overly huge and falls far short of other AAA highlights like Horizon Forbidden West.

Elden Ring will be released on February 25, 2022 for PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. The preload starts two days earlier, on February 23rd.

How many playthroughs of Elden Ring do you plan?