Highlights
- Elden Ring's success is attributed to its accessibility options that allowed casual gamers to engage with the challenging gameplay on a deeper level than previous Dark Souls games.
- The open-world format of Elden Ring was a gamble, but it paid off as the game's Lands Between offered rich exploration, hidden bosses, and powerful gear. FromSoftware should strive for the same high-quality world in future games.
- While Elden Ring excelled in combat with its impressive build variety and introduction of mounted combat, it fell short in terms of boss fights. The lack of structure and sense of achievement in boss encounters should be addressed in future installments.
For Japanese developer FromSoftware, Elden Ring represents the culmination of many year's worth of hard work and perseverance. Beginning with 2009's Demon's Souls, Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team created the Soulslike blueprint, which gradually evolved and grew in popularity with each iteration. From the Dark Souls trilogy to Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, FromSoftware has released a string of critically acclaimed games in the last decade. Despite all of this success though, the 2022 release of Elden Ring quickly proved to eclipse anything the developer had achieved before, winning Game of the Year and selling over 20 million copies to date, with many considering it among the greatest games of all time. With this in mind, FromSoftware will want to take some of the key learnings with it into its next project.
Elden Ring's success can be credited to a number of individual factors that came together perfectly to produce an action-rpg the likes of which had never really been seen before. Despite the genre already having a large following thanks to its brutal difficulty and rewarding combat, Elden Ring was able to penetrate the mainstream thanks to several accessibility options that, while stopping short of offering difficulty settings, allowed the more casual gamers to engage with it on a level that the Dark Souls games just don't cater for.
Elden Ring Sets a High Bar For Future FromSoftware Games
When word got out that Elden Ring would be an open-world game, many fans were skeptical about how the Soulslike formula would translate to this new setting. The semi-open-world format of the Dark Souls trilogy perfectly aligns with the sub-genre's strengths, and there were no guarantees that this switch in format would work. Any skepticism quickly disappeared as soon as the game launched, however, and fans discovered just how rewarding and engaging Elden Ring's Lands Between really are. Every corner of the map is packed with things to discover, hidden bosses to fight, and powerful gear to find. While there is no guarantee that the next game will feature a world of the same high quality, FromSoftware should absolutely strive for this, as it clearly makes the whole experience so much stronger.
The impressive build variety in Elden Ring ensures that various play styles are catered for. While this is nothing new for Souls fans, the introduction of mounted combat, as well as several other tweaks to the mechanics, ensured the game was as strong in the combat department as any of the previous titles. Any future installments should use Elden Ring as the blueprint when building the combat system.
FromSoftware's entire Souls series is known for its spectacular boss fights. In this particular department, however, arguably Elden Ring falls short when compared to some of the developer's other entries. The freedom players are given to explore the world in almost any order they like means that, depending on exactly when they encounter certain bosses, some of these fights can be almost trivial. The lack of structure to the boss encounters takes away some of the sense of achievement and reward that usually goes hand in hand with overcoming a particularly tough fight. Reintroducing some linearity, at least when it comes to the order in which the bosses are fought, should help elevate any future game's selection of bosses to new heights.
Whatever FromSoftware has in store for its fans next, Elden Ring has set a ridiculously high bar that may prove difficult to top, at least for a while. That being said, FromSoftware's track record shows that it consistently delivers on fan expectations, and there is no reason to believe this won't continue. With Elden Ring's DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, in development, fans will be hoping this isn't the only Souls project FromSoftware has up its sleeve for the future.
Elden Ring is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.