Overview

For years, FromSoftware’s games taught players to observe carefully constructed spaces, memorize their traps and try again until what initially seemed insurmountable began to make sense. Elden Ring preserves that philosophy, but radically changes the scale of the playing field. This time, when a wall seems too high, there is often another answer: go somewhere else.

The Lands Between transforms the relationship between difficulty and exploration. A castle glimpsed in the distance can wait while you follow a side road, investigate a strange silhouette or discover that an almost invisible passage leads to an entire region you did not even know existed a few minutes earlier. The open world is therefore not simply a larger map grafted onto Dark Souls. It becomes a different way of organizing progression.

The player takes the role of a Tarnished called back to the Lands Between after the shattering of the Elden Ring and the war that set the demigods against one another for its fragments. From ruins and fortresses to underground areas and immense plains, the journey leads through a fragmented mythology whose foundations were partly conceived with George R. R. Martin, while Hidetaka Miyazaki and FromSoftware shaped the world, characters and narrative of the game.

Elden Ring remains deeply recognizable to anyone familiar with the studio: demanding combat, stamina management, repeated deaths, formidable bosses, indirect storytelling and item descriptions all remain part of its language. But the space surrounding those elements changes everything. Curiosity becomes almost as important as mastery of combat.

Key takeaways

  • The Souls formula meets the open world. Elden Ring retains the foundations of FromSoftware’s action RPGs while offering far greater freedom in the order of exploration and the way players progress.
  • Failure no longer always means immediately trying again. When facing an enemy that is too powerful, the player can explore another region, strengthen their character, find new equipment or discover a different strategy before returning.
  • The Lands Between is driven by curiosity rather than an accumulation of markers. A large part of exploration relies on observing the landscape, unexpected encounters and discovering places whose importance the game rarely reveals in advance.
  • Freedom also extends to combat. Weapons, magic, summons, skills, shields and different character builds allow obstacles to be approached in very different ways.
  • The change in scale has not erased FromSoftware’s identity. Beyond the vast plains are fortresses and dungeons built with a much denser and more vertical approach, closely related to the studio’s traditional level design.

PANACHES review

The great gamble of Elden Ring was never simply to create a bigger Dark Souls. Expanding such a precise formula could easily have diluted it. If every detour leads to an interchangeable activity and every additional kilometre simply adds more filler, the open world quickly becomes an administrative punishment.

FromSoftware takes almost the opposite approach. The Lands Between does not constantly explain why something deserves the player’s attention. A building rises beyond a cliff, a light appears in the distance, an elevator descends far deeper than expected: the reward often comes from simply wanting to know what is there. That trust in curiosity is probably one of the game’s greatest achievements.

Freedom also makes its demanding nature more flexible without removing the difficulty. Elden Ring can still be brutal, sometimes excessively so, but it offers more ways to respond to the problem. Changing weapons, summoning a spirit, adjusting equipment, exploring for several hours or simply returning later all become part of the learning process. The game remains difficult, but it less often imposes a single way of dealing with that difficulty.

That scale nevertheless comes at a price. The repetition of certain enemies and situations becomes more noticeable across such a vast adventure, while the balance of some encounters can vary greatly depending on the chosen route, the player’s level or their character build. The openness that creates some of the game’s finest moments is also what makes the experience less tightly controlled than in some of FromSoftware’s previous works.

But when its different dimensions align, Elden Ring achieves something rare: an open world where moving forward is not simply about completing objectives, but about trying to understand what lies beyond the horizon. The studio did not abandon its language to reach a broader audience. It gave that language more space.

Good to know

  • Elden Ring was released on February 25, 2022 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
  • FromSoftware officially defines it as an Action RPG and describes the Lands Between as a vast world made up of open areas and interconnected dungeons.
  • The game supports single-player as well as online multiplayer, with cooperative and competitive interactions.
  • Hidetaka Miyazaki directed the project. The universe also draws on a mythological history conceived with writer George R. R. Martin, before being developed by FromSoftware into the Lands Between as they appear in the game.
  • At The Game Awards 2022, Elden Ring won four awards: Game of the Year, Best Game Direction, Best Art Direction and Best Role Playing.
  • The game had surpassed 30 million units shipped and sold digitally worldwide by March 2025. Bandai Namco continued to communicate around that milestone in 2026.
  • The Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree expansion was released in June 2024 and introduces a new region while further developing part of the game’s mythology.
  • Elden Ring’s success has since expanded into a broader body of works, including Elden Ring Nightreign and a live-action film adaptation announced with A24.