Elden Ring in the big test: A monumental action role-playing game in an open world that is second to none

This is an article from our content partner "PC Games". Here you can find the original article by author Stefan Wilhelm.

After the play sessions we've already had with From Software's new action role-playing game Elden Ring, we had quite a few ideas in mind to kick off the review. For example, you could call it From Software's greatest-hits album, but with a lot of new songs and remixes. It would also lend itself to comparison with Breath of the Wild or Skyrim, only in quite heavy and with much deeper combat system. And to pick up series veterans, you could say that Elden Ring feels about as magical as playing Dark Souls 1 again for the first time.

Now that we've spent over 80 hours fighting our way through the finished game, we realize that to aptly describe Elden Ring, it needs all of these comparisons because it's all of them at once. Time and again, the adventure has managed to surprise, motivate, and heavily excite even us old Souls hands. And although it also kicked us in the dust and cost us some nerves time and again, we still got up from the couch after each session with a grin a meter wide on our faces. And for that, besides the refined and still excellent Souls gameplay, the real star of Elden Ring is responsible: its open world, the in-between land.

The game sends you into a world for which not only series father Hidetaka Miyazaki, but this time also George R. R. Martin have dug into the dark corners of their minds. Since the disappearance of Queen Marika and the shattering of the Eldenring, demigods gone mad have been marauding through the interstice. Instead of noble lords and ladies, decay and madness now reign, and the world is sinking into chaos.

Heaven at first sight, hell at second glance

In order to appoint a new Elder Lord to restore order, the tainted are brought out of their graves. Among them is your self-created character. But don't worry, you have allies by your side, of course. Dazzling personalities, such as the "Deathbed Companion" or the "Abominable Manure Eater". But so that you don't declare yourself a hero right away, the first enemy you encounter will probably dismember you first. First death, then the tutorial, and with it the final certainty of which developer is at work here.

Elden Ring creates a refreshing contrast to its gloomy scenario the moment you enter the game world for the first time. You have a lush green forest landscape in front of you, goats roll happily in the grass, and the earth tree shines in the sky. All right, the crucified corpses that scream their guts out at night, deviant monsters and buildings sunk into the ground might dampen the vacation mood a bit.

But still, the in-between land is full of visually stunning environments that are hard to get enough of. The gaudy color scheme and the picturesque fantasy panoramas don't detract from the dense, morbid atmosphere, though; they actually enhance it. The fascination of the setting comes from its contrasts.

Architectural tour de force

However, it's not only the cryptically told story that will lure you into every corner of the world. The game also manages to awaken the explorer in you in other ways. Since your map is still empty when you reach a new area, you'll have to orient yourself by the country's architecture, geography and art design. And all of this has been impressively transformed by the developers. Everywhere you look, massive fortresses, towers and striking rock formations rise into the sky. And when it comes to high altitudes, deep valleys are naturally not far away, which is why the game world is also vertically expansive. Fortunately, the fall damage is merciful and your mount is equipped with a double jump. So you can and must take unorthodox routes from time to time.

The sense of discovery is further enhanced by the beautifully drawn map, which you gradually uncover with found fragments. It is just detailed enough to help you find your way around. However, only large places and rest areas are marked, and only after you've been there yourself. Everything else can be marked manually with markers. The map could have been sharper when zooming in, but it opens without delay.

Class and mass

The locations themselves are a pleasant balance of class and mass. You will recognize certain patterns at some point, such as most of the smaller dungeons that are reminiscent of the chalice dungeons from Bloodborne, you can always count on a similar boss enemy at the smaller earth trees, and in most of the larger ruins you will find a cellar with a treasure chest. Nevertheless, the variety of locations and scenarios is remarkably high, especially for a game of this size.

There are underground complexes, which often come with their own traps and mechanics, and sometimes even open up into completely new areas. Above the ground, you'll raid convoys guarded by armies of enemies or be attacked by open-world bosses while exploring. You'll also stumble upon run-down settlements, fortresses and mansions every now and then, often embellished with their own settings, stories and enemies.

Show, don't tell

Want an example? In Limgrave, the opening zone, you'll discover Castle Morne, where the servants have incited a bloody uprising. After learning the basic facts from an escaped woman, you seek out the castle without a quest log or map markers. You'll then get more story puzzle pieces through the great environment and character design. Proven strategies, then, that the developers have always used to tell their dark stories, and they work on both a large and small scale.

It's still the cryptic storytelling that you've come to expect from this kind of game, and you either like it or ignore it. You'll discover connections between the lines, through your own interpretation, or by studying item descriptions. Also the many strange characters you meet on your journey rarely speak plainly, as usual.

Besides several interesting locations, the game also manages to keep the big picture visually and thematically varied. From idyllic Limgrave you'll be transported to misty forests and river landscapes, later you'll explore rugged mountain ranges and ice worlds. The closer you get to the Earth Tree, the more monumental the environments become. The phenomenal art design of the intermediate land alone will give you a great feeling of progress.

Magical Moments

Elden Ring also likes to take you to areas where you haven't really lost anything yet. For example, you open an inconspicuous chest in the starting area, are enveloped by a cloud of smoke, and wake up in an apocalyptic hellscape the next moment. There are also one-way portals that you have to go through to see where they lead, and elevators that take you to gigantic underground cave networks. These are all not only great moments, this is also a return to old Souls level design principles, on a large scale. However, you're allowed to travel to any checkpoint you find at any time outside of battles and dungeons, so you're never really in danger of getting stuck anywhere.

You'll also be able to fast travel to your new, separate hub, the Round Table Fortress. As with the Fireband Shrine, Majula or the Nexus, important characters gather here to provide you with items and upgrades or hold side quests.

Now, showpieces and interesting scenarios alone are probably not enough to keep you interested for dozens of hours. And this is where Elden Ring's second main pillar comes into play. The challenging action RPG gameplay, where the basic framework of Dark Souls 3 has been expanded with a few features, and its progression mechanics are meaningfully connected to the game world.

If you've played the finale of the Souls trilogy, Elden Ring feels instantly familiar. Controls and gameplay are almost identical on foot. Elden Ring plays accordingly grippy and dynamic. The hit feedback is juicy, the hitboxes are top-notch, and so are the attack animations. However, your tainted character has a few new abilities up his sleeve. You can finally jump comfortably from a standing position, and a simple sneak system has also made it into the game. You'll use the jump not only to move around, but also frequently in combat: With fall attacks, you'll do more damage the longer you fall, and open up enemies to critical attacks.

If the invisible posture bar of an enemy is empty, he collapses defenseless for a short time. You'll achieve the same effect with the new defensive counter, which lets you strike back with increased posture damage after a block. The posture system is a subtle but successful method to lure you out of the defensive. After all, a defenseless enemy means not only free damage, but also valuable seconds to tip a healing potion if needed.Elden Ring has also spiced up archery with a subtle innovation: you can now casually fire the slingshots from the air or after a dodge roll.

Upgrade with four hooves

Your horse Stormwind is your most powerful new tool for movement and combat: You can cast spells, shoot, strike, and double jump over ground attacks while riding. Because the animal controls itself very directly, it doesn't take long for haphazard flailing to turn into jousting-like duels with enemies who also like to compete on horseback. The common folk can be sabered quite easily from horseback. But because you now have to watch out for two life bars and are as good as dead if you get thrown, mounted combat is also exciting and challenging. Not to mention boss opponents that have been specially designed around the horse and can cover large distances accordingly quickly.

Old acquaintances, new foes

But they are aggressive and fast anyway, the new and familiar enemies that Elden Ring throws at your feet. At the beginning you'll fight the usual enemy material, i.e. knights, zombies and annoying dogs. As the game progresses, however, the enemies become more and more grotesque and dangerous. There are land octopuses that eat their own tentacles, puppet soldiers with four arms and two bows, and dancing flower women that bite your arm and spit blood at you. The enemies are wonderfully creative and deviantly designed. They also make you sweat with nasty tricks and many attack patterns.

The game does its best to keep the recycling factor as low as possible. The Godrick soldiers, for example, appear in almost every zone as standard enemies, but later they can shoot spells and breathe fire. One type of skeleton was taken directly from Dark Souls, but the method to prevent them from reviving is different in Elden Ring. The most noticeable recycled enemies are the crabs, which From Software imported one-to-one from Dark Souls 3. Fortunately, this is the exception and not the rule.

Good reasons to bite the dust

The stars of a Souls-like game are of course the bosses, and Elden Ring has quite a few of them in store. The difference to previous titles is that the majority of them are now scattered all over the game world and are optional. If you want to march straight through to the end, you'll only defeat a handful of bosses. But if you explore everything, you'll face an estimated dozen in each zone of the world.

Estimate, because most of these bosses are more or less well hidden. While you can hardly get past the dragon Agheel, the tree guardian or Margit, the first progress brake, you have to find many others first. But you'll find them at every corner, because in most of the well-known places in the intermediate land you'll also find a chief moth. Now, of course, because of the sheer volume, not every boss fight can be as mature as, say, a main boss in the earlier games. You will also encounter some of them several times.

But the vast majority are challenging, well-designed and varied. The bosses present you with many and extensive attack chains to watch, learn and exploit. As in Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne, the fights are clearly trimmed to fast action, where reaction is just as important as the right equipment. The result is intense and often spectacularly staged duels, which are sometimes extended by a vertical level in Elden Ring thanks to the jump function and horse.

From Software has once again pulled out all the stops, especially with the mandatory bosses that await you in the large fortress complex of each zone. Godrick, the first main boss, already makes your steel ass go to the ground with its design, its attack patterns and its grandiose staging.

And without anticipating too much: Later in the game, Elden Ring sends you into some really wacky fights, in which the developers try out new mechanics and once again really overdo it. In a positive sense. Before we merge the game world and gameplay and explain where the game has succeeded in a particularly big throw, we also have a few minor gripes with Elden Ring.

Most of the glitches that the game allows itself are probably due to the engine and are nothing new for series veterans. For example, despite dramatically improved skin textures and hairstyles, the character editor is once again an inscrutable jumble of sliders. The somewhat uninspiring layout of the equipment and inventory menus has not changed either. In addition, it is annoying that capes and two-handed weapons tend to clip through your shield when you carry it on your back. Likewise, your character wanders through the dense vegetation in the game without responding much.

For the most part, Elden Ring hides its not-so-dewy graphics engine with superb art design and great lighting. Especially at night and in rainy weather, however, the game can look pretty dull and old. We also blame the elaborately designed and illuminated game world for the small but frequent frame rate drops that we noticed in the test. The full version runs significantly smoother than the network test, but From Software should still improve this. The performance is also decent on last-gen consoles, but you can only play at a maximum of 30 fps. If you have a special eye for vegetation that pops up, you will currently find it especially on large grassy areas.

The actual end boss

The most annoying leftover from the spiritual predecessors, however, is the partly still pretty lousy camera. With enemies that are larger than the frame, it once again has its difficulties. A problem that you'll probably notice more often in Elden Ring than before, because the game throws rows of gigantic enemies at you. Trolls, stone golems and dragons in all shapes and colors are well staged and impressive, but only as long as you can see them. Here the camera could have zoomed out a bit on foot, as it already does on horseback. Most of the time, the only thing that helps is to turn off the lock-on and hope for the best.

These flaws are noticeable and annoying, but they don't manage to distract from the game's greatest success: Elden Ring is excellent at weaving the familiar mechanics and progression systems of its predecessors with the new open world. Basically, you're dealing with the same substructure of free class development, weapon upgrades, and equipment hunting as in Dark Souls 3, for example.

Familiar, ingenious, mysterious

However, Elden Ring hides most of these components in all sorts of corners of its game world. You rarely buy new weapons from merchants, but get them after battles with special enemies or from treasure chests. The same goes for blacksmithing materials, which you'll collect mainly in mines, and for magic, whose teachers like to hide in inconspicuous caves. Also, if you want to equip additional spells, you won't level up a simple attribute anymore. Instead, you'll search for a special item, which is often accompanied by a small puzzle. You can also increase the slots for the rings, which are now called talismans, in this way. The weapon abilities known from Dark Souls 3 return, but this time they are interchangeable and also distributed all over the intermediate land.

All of this noticeably slows down the progression system, at least in the first run, and forces you to explore the game world extensively. And we already mentioned at the beginning that this exploration is a lot of fun simply because of the variety of locations, the many surprises and the superb art design. Elden Ring also manages to reward you for the most trips. The most effective way to do this is, of course, through the high difficulty level, because of which you'll want to take all the upgrades and currency you can get.

Conclusion

Even as a series veteran, it takes some time to get used to the new structure. But in return, the now fairly routine Souls formula feels almost as fresh, exciting and mysterious again as it did the first time around. And it would be a gross understatement to say that Elden Ring is full of secrets. Because you can always try your luck in dozens of locations, and because the open world gives you more tactical options, the Souls successor is also a bit more accessible for newcomers. The direct support systems have also been improved with a more comfortable co-op mode and NPC spirits that you can summon in large battles. However, you'll still need good nerves of steel, a certain level of responsiveness, and, even more than before, time and patience. But if you have all that, you'll find Elden Ring to be one of the best RPG and open-world experiences in a long time.

Pro

• Impressively designed game world with great artstyle and chic lighting
• Numerous secrets and diverse locations
• Exciting scenario with a dense atmosphere and many interesting characters
• Classically implemented progression system that invites you to explore extensively
• Great, intense battles with solid innovations
• Varied and superbly designed enemies and bosses
• Indestructibly motivating Souls gameplay with flexible class system and diverse weapons
• Huge scope

Contra

• Small but frequent frame rate drops and pop-in with vegetation
• Disturbing clipping errors on the game character
• Camera partly very unfavorable
• Some recycled enemies and bosses

Video games

Bandai Namco Elden Ring

PC, DE, IT, FR

13

Video games

Bandai Namco Elden Ring

Playstation, DE, FR, IT

29

Video games

Bandai Namco Elden ring

Xbox Series X, Xbox One X, DE, IT, FR

5