Elden Ring has a huge open world allowing players to explore freely and level up before facing the main story challenges. Its size is made even more clear after getting through the game's first bottleneck point at Stormveil Castle, when the map then reveals an even bigger game world. Elden Ring’s world design has been praised for guiding players to its more interesting areas with very little direction outside the map, and as it turns out, even this may not be entirely necessary.
There are multiple elements to Elden Ring’s map, which first appears blank and clouded in a dense fog. Players can remove the fog by exploring areas which reveals a plain brown map underneath. The brown map only shows three things: the outline of the land, the main roads running through each area, and a small icon revealing where the detailed map for that area can be found.
Reddit user indiebryan recently posted an embarrassed admittance of playing through a chunk of Elden Ring without realizing that detailed maps existed in game. This is something not many players will have seen as the game tries its best to funnel players towards the first map piece in Limgrave. Upon discovering this first detailed map most players next response to reaching a new unexplored area will be to make a b-line straight for the next map piece.
The fact that indiebryan was able to get all the way to Liurnia before noticing the map fragments is a testament to how well-designed the landscape of Elden Ring is, and how it guides players towards where they need to go. It is clear from the sites of grace on the map that the Reddit user had explored Limgrave West and the eastern cliffs of Liurnia thoroughly. The player even discovered the Siofra River Well and completed Castle Morne on the Weeping Peninsula.
The Doom-like region of Caelid is also clear of fog, but no sites of grace have been activated there. This leads only to speculation about the players quick blind ride through the terrifying higher-level area. Players in the comments of indiebryan’s post wonder how someone could use a map which only features one icon, and never follow where it leads. While others say the player was far enough into Elden Ring that it's a shame that they didn't go the rest of the game without ever getting a detailed map.
Elden Ring has received a lot of praise for its open world design and how it never hand-holds the player too much. Perhaps the next step for truly exploration focused open world games would be not having an in-game map, in a throwback to older games when players used to draw their own directions on scraps of paper.
Elden Ring is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
