Elden Ring

• 1. Introduction

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  Elden Ring, a 2022 action role-playing game from the Japanese developer FromSoftware, sold 13.4 million copies in its first five weeks alone. It was the fastest-selling game Bandai Namco had ever published, the second-bestselling game of 2022 in the United States, and eventually the recipient of over 300 Game of the Year awards. None of those facts explain why. What they cannot tell you is why players who bounced off every other game in FromSoftware's catalog found themselves compelled to keep going here. What they cannot tell you is what it took to get an American fantasy novelist named George R. R. Martin to co-author a video game. And they cannot tell you how the director Hidetaka Miyazaki, a man who came up through games famous for punishing difficulty, decided that the answer to that difficulty was not to make things easier but to make the world bigger. Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Unlikely Collaboration

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  George R. R. Martin is the creator of A Song of Ice and Fire, the fantasy-novel series that became the television series Game of Thrones. Hidetaka Miyazaki, as an admitted fan of Martin's work, approached him to provide the worldbuilding for Elden Ring. The proposal Miyazaki put to Martin was unusual: design the entire backstory, the mythology, the history of a fictional landmass called the Lands Between, but leave the actual in-game narrative to the FromSoftware team. Some staff from Game of Thrones also assisted with the game's development.

  Miyazaki compared the arrangement to using a dungeon master's handbook in a tabletop role-playing game. Martin was handed creative freedom to write about events that occurred before the main story begins, events the player would never witness directly but would feel everywhere. This suited FromSoftware's house style: the developers wanted players to piece the story together themselves through flavor text and optional conversations with non-player characters. Miyazaki said he chose to give Martin control over the backstory specifically because FromSoftware's method of storytelling placed restrictions on writers, and he wanted to free Martin from those constraints.

  Martin's contributions did not satisfy every critic. Mitchell Saltzman of IGN said the side-stories rather than any grand overarching plot kept him engaged, while Aoife Wilson of Eurogamer called Martin's heavy inclusion in the marketing baffling given how unclear his actual contributions were to the overall narrative. Kyle Orland of Ars Technica described the storytelling as characteristically sparse and cryptic, differing from what Martin's fans would expect. Chris Carter of Destructoid called the story low key but said it was better-told than those of previous FromSoftware games. The gap between Martin's literary reputation and the story players encountered became one of the game's defining conversations.

• 3. Building the Open World

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  Production on Elden Ring began in early 2017, following the release of The Ringed City, a piece of downloadable content for Dark Souls III. Miyazaki had a specific mechanical goal: he wanted an open-world game, something the studio had not attempted before. Previous FromSoftware games were built around narrow dungeons, and the designer felt that a grander environmental scale would add freedom and depth to how players explored.

  Elden Ring was developed at the same time as Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, which Miyazaki also directed. The studio used a co-director structure in which each project had a dedicated staff member acting as director through its first development stages, with Miyazaki providing direction on mechanics, art, and music after that. Yui Tanimura, who had previously directed Dark Souls II and co-directed Dark Souls III, served as co-director for Elden Ring.

  Miyazaki named Shadow of the Colossus, The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher 3, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as design influences. For the game's story he credited the tabletop role-playing game RuneQuest and the novels The Lord of the Rings and The Eternal Champion as inspirations. The design team concentrated on environmental scale, role-playing, and storytelling as their main elements. They credited scale with creating a sense of diversity across the Lands Between, and the game's world required the construction of several explorable structures that the team then joined together. The score was composed by Tsukasa Saitoh, Shoi Miyazawa, Tai Tomisawa, Yuka Kitamura, and Yoshimi Kudo.

• 4. A World of Shattered Order

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  The Lands Between was once governed by an immortal queen named Marika, who served as keeper of the Elden Ring, a powerful force that manifested as the physical concept of order. Marika shattered the Elden Ring and disappeared; her demigod children then went to war over the broken pieces in an event called the Shattering. Each demigod holds a shard known as a Great Rune, and each shard corrupts its holder with power.

  The player enters this world as a Tarnished, one of a group of exiles summoned back to the Lands Between after the Shattering. Early in the journey, the Tarnished encounters a character named Melina, who offers to act as the character's Maiden in exchange for being escorted to the Erdtree, the home of the Elden Ring. Melina grants the Tarnished the ability to turn runes into strength and gives them the steed Torrent. She later leads the Tarnished to the Roundtable Hold, a gathering place for others on the same mission, where a figure called the Two Fingers instructs them to collect Great Runes from the demigods and bring them to the Erdtree.

  Six different endings can be achieved depending on the choices made across the entire game. The Tarnished can become the Elden Lord, allow the Elden Ring to be destroyed by a character named Ranni the Witch, or use a force called the Frenzied Flame to destroy the Lands Between entirely. The expansion Shadow of the Erdtree, released on the 20th of June 2024, follows the Tarnished into a separate realm called the Land of Shadow in pursuit of one of Marika's demigod children, Miquella, who orchestrated his own abduction to enter that realm.

• 5. Difficulty, Accessibility, and Torrent

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  FromSoftware's Dark Souls series had built a reputation around difficulty, a reputation the studio wore as a point of identity. Elden Ring was designed as a mechanical evolution of Dark Souls, but Miyazaki hoped the open world would produce a more accessible experience than the studio's earlier games without softening the core challenge. The specific mechanism he used was space: if a threat was too hard, a player could simply go somewhere else, build up experience, and return later.

  Torrent, the player character's steed, was central to this idea. Reviewers praised Torrent and the fast travel system as large improvements toward making the game easier to explore. The placement of checkpoints called sites of grace was praised for its contribution to the game's approachability. Tamoor Hussain of GameSpot called the Lands Between the most expansive of FromSoftware's settings, and named exploration and discovery as the game's main appeal.

  Reviewers drew frequent comparisons between the game's exploration and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which Miyazaki had named as a direct design influence. Some reviewers considered Elden Ring the most accessible entry in FromSoftware's catalog of challenging games. Others criticized the lack of formal easy modes. Shortly after release, players discovered a glitch called the zip glitch, which allows a player to warp across the map; the game has been completed in under five minutes using it.

• 6. Reception and a Record-Breaking Run

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  Elden Ring was first revealed at E3 2019 in June of that year. A vulnerability in Bandai Namco's servers had allowed some information about the game to leak online before the reveal. After the announcement, no further material appeared until a trailer was shown in June 2021. A closed beta run by Bandai Namco followed in November 2021. The full release was originally scheduled for the 21st of January 2022 before being postponed to the 25th of February.

  The launch was not technically smooth. Players complained about insufficient frame rates on the Windows version, an issue that reviewers also documented, and Bandai Namco addressed some problems through software patches. Despite those complaints, the review aggregator Metacritic recorded universal acclaim. The review aggregator OpenCritic assessed that 98 percent of critics recommended the game.