WWhy exactly do you become addicted to a video game that is difficult to access, hardly holds your hand, in which you feel like you haven’t made any progress after hours – and in which you are constantly butchered? You ask yourself these and other questions when you play “Elden Ring”, which without exaggeration can be described as THE game of the hour. It’s raining top ratings in almost all specialist magazines, and it’s already being cited as one of the best games ever.
Elden Ring is an action role-playing game that, like the Dark Souls series, was developed by the Japanese studio From Software. Lead developer of Elden Ring is Hidetaka Miyazaki, who also designed Dark Souls. Hidetaka Miyazaki is a fan of author George RR Martin and his book series Game of Thrones. For Elden Ring, that’s how Martin designed the mythology and lore – and that’s how the game feels. The player is thrown into a dark world where danger lurks everywhere. As in Dark Souls, the level of difficulty has it all. Most fights, especially those against bosses, can only be mastered by studying the opponent’s movement sequences and attacks in countless attempts – and dying again and again until you have figured out your tactics.
Elden Ring is an open-world Dark Souls game, which makes things even easier. While in Dark Souls you had to master most of the fights again after each death, in Elden Ring you can often choose which battles you go into – and which ones you avoid on a large scale. It is now also possible to gradually defeat a camp of opponents or to lure out smaller groups.
This makes it much easier to collect runes that can be used to level up your character. There are different classes to choose from. The warrior is quite strong from the start, but not very agile. On the other side is the beggar, who is released into the world half-naked and rather weak.
Relief almost feels like cheating
In the fight against monsters, spirits can now be called for support, for example wolves. Early in the game, the player gets the opportunity to summon a horse that can be used to explore the open world. The opponents can also be fought from the steed, which in some situations is a relief compared to Dark Souls – and with the other changes through the open game world almost feels like cheating. Defeated opponents usually give you useful equipment. You rarely have to buy them yourself.
Elden Ring is set in the Between Lands, a short time after the Elden Ring was destroyed and scattered into six parts in the world. Players assume the role of a tainted one. The Tainted belong to a people who long ago lost the grace of the Elden Ring and the Earth Tree, and with it the Light. They were banished from the Between Lands prior to the Ring’s destruction and recalled after the Ring’s shattering. So we set out to find and defeat Queen Marika’s offspring of demigods. Each of these demigods possesses a shard of the ring and has been corrupted by it. The ultimate goal for players is to collect all the shards and become an Elden Lord.
Before the release of Elden Ring, producer Yasuhiro Kitao stated that the game can be completed in about 30 hours. So, well, since some bosses alone can take two to three hours of tries and deaths, that’s a very optimistic estimate. Even after countless hours, you often have the feeling that you are only scratching the surface.
Despite its simplifications compared to Dark Souls, the game is simply too difficult to progress quickly. Miyazaki has now spoken out and more or less apologized for the level of difficulty – with restrictions: “I just want as many players as possible to experience the joy that comes from overcoming the difficulties,” he explains the style his work.
As in the genre pioneer Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the map of the world has to be explored little by little, until then one is guided by the architectural differences in the landscape. This has become extremely beautiful, although it is dark. In addition to wide meadows, you descend into caves and dungeons, villages and castles are conquered.
The architecture is the optical bargaining chip of the game, technically it’s not entirely fresh, when it rains or when too much is happening on the screen, the performance sometimes goes downhill. The fact that there is more in the new generation of consoles was recently made clear with Horizon: Forbidden West.
Through the open world you often stumble into areas where you haven’t lost anything yet. It’s easy to notice that you die even faster than usual. That’s also a reason why you sometimes have to piece together the exact connections of the story yourself. You get information from the denizens of the world, but in the end you have to make sense of it yourself.
Conclusion on Elden Ring
Elden Ring draws you in immediately. The console has already been turned off in frustration two or three times, only to try again after all. Because the “Game of Thrones”-like background story and this gloomy world is too tempting. While the game is more beginner-friendly than Dark Souls, it takes a few hours to fully settle in. This game’s reward system works so differently than other major games that it takes some getting used to. Anyone who masters this frustration potential gets one of the most impressive open-world role-playing games ever.
Elden Ring was released on February 25th for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.