While it carries a new name and mythos, FromSoftware’s Elden Ring very overtly succeeds the Dark Souls series in its core gameplay mechanics, with much of its combat resembling that of Dark Souls III in particular. Dark Souls III felt like it drew some of its aggressive disposition from Bloodborne, a developmental detour that followed the original Dark Souls differently to its named sequel, Dark Souls II. Dark Souls was, itself, a clear successor to Demon’s Souls, albeit with a different name and mythos to accompany its new publisher. And going back further, Demon’s Souls drew some degree of inspiration from the studio’s debut series, King’s Field, but I can’t speak very confidently about any of those. This is to say nothing of the many games that FromSoftware released in the interim between King’s Field IV and Demon’s Souls, or even the projects developed alongside those I’ve mentioned.

Demon’s Souls’ moment-to-moment gameplay clearly provided the foundation for Elden Ring’s: between the two is a heritage of heavy “light” attacks and heavier “heavy” attacks; of spending your remaining stamina on a desperate roll or one more swing; of trying not to die on the way back to your prior death’s bloodstain; of deciding whether to put your currency towards another level or a cooler sword; of navigating crushingly tight corridors and oppressively open squares; of minding the narrow walkway at your feet and the monsters that may drop from above; of tricks, traps, ambushes, backstabs, shortcuts, checkpoints and poisonous swamps. Whether by these similarities or by movesets, enemy archetypes and characters that are either directly copied or somehow subverted, playing any one game in this lineage grants immediate familiarity with the rest. Likely catering to their dedicated audience, FromSoftware often expect and embrace this idea. After all, Bloodborne’s subversion of the “Patches” character would mean little to someone who hasn’t played the game’s predecessors, despite their worlds being wholly separate.

However, each iteration in this ancestry carries some changes over its predecessor, most often in the approach to world structure. Demon’s Souls featured a disconnected hub, “the Nexus,” from which you can teleport to the few checkpoints you’ve unlocked, which sparsely punctuate dense areas along a handful of tracks that are wholly detached from one another. Then, the first half of Dark Souls features the interconnected world structure of a Metroid game. Key items lead you through and around packed zones, separated only by doors and boss fights, with occasional checkpoints throughout and one practical hub holding a handful of direct connections. Its second half has you teleporting to checkpoints at the corners of the world, to extend outwards in new linear branches before teleporting back. Next, Dark Souls II features a central hub directly connected to a number of branches outwards, with more numerous checkpoints and immediate teleportation between any of them, largely resembling the second half of its predecessor. Bloodborne returns to a detached hub, the “Hunter’s Dream,” where you can teleport to and from any of the checkpoints in a largely interconnected world, with varying levels of density and linearity throughout. Checkpoints are slightly more abundant than in the first Dark Souls, as every boss now creates one upon death, to allow for safe return to the hub. Dark Souls III features another detached hub and another case of free teleportation between checkpoints, which have roughly the same placement pattern as those of Bloodborne. Its areas are usually dense and occasionally branching, but most often linear, as if Demon’s Souls’ tracks connected to one another.

Aside from having another completely detached hub, Elden Ring features the biggest shift in structure: denser areas (resembling those of Dark Souls III) occupy small parts of what is otherwise the world structure of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild; an extremely large, sparse, open world that’s segmented by chasms, caverns and cliffs, challenging the player to reach sections of land whose surfaces are often obscured. Checkpoints are used as guiding landmarks and are relatively more plentiful than ever, this time with free teleportation to any from nearly anywhere, with extras provided just outside boss fights and tougher enemy encounters.

Owing to its extra openness, there are countless routes (and slight variations thereof) with which to traverse the world of Elden Ring, and FromSoftware evidently tried to funnel players along more directed paths. Core objectives are typically near or within larger landmarks, and places of interest are highlighted by roads, checkpoints, geological differences, smaller landmarks and enemy patrols. Similarly to Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule, reaching any opening in Elden Ring’s Lands Between means seeing a number of potential destinations and deciding whither to go next. However, many who’ve played any of the aforementioned FromSoftware games know that the obvious locations aren’t nearly the whole story—this lineage of games is filled with secrets, ranging from hidden consumable items to entirely missable zones, complete with unique environments, enemies and bosses. Obviously, these wouldn’t be secrets if the game gave them the same signposting as the rest of the game, but I believe their presence holds consequences in the case of Elden Ring.

In a game like Castlevania, checking for secrets usually entails swinging Simon’s whip at every vaguely suspicious wall you pass, as long as it’s clearly within your reach. These diversions usually take seconds (if that), owing to overt constraints around the game’s linearity, two-dimensionality and interactivity, and the answer as to whether you’ve found a secret is immediate: did you break the block when you hit it? In Demon’s Souls, searching for secrets is clearly more complicated. As well as being three-dimensional, the game’s areas are often dense, variably lit and visually complex, filled with objects of numerous degrees of interactivity. Areas also loop back on themselves, lead to dead-ends and feature a mechanic that’s unique to Demon’s Souls: you can clamber up an arbitrary selection of waist-high ledges, allowing you to reach some areas that can’t be seen without intentional camera adjustment. While Demon’s Souls had “illusory walls,” they were marked with a shader that made them oscillate as you approached, which was removed in Dark Souls—without guidance, you had to attack any walls that seemed somehow suspicious, despite them looking identical to their surroundings. In a notorious example in that game, the second of two consecutive illusory walls is the entrance to one of its most interesting areas. This approach remained, and was even subverted in Dark Souls II, in which players have to press the interact button on suspicious walls rather than attacking them. My sympathies go to the people who spent that game attacking walls and assuming that the mechanic had been removed.

While knowledge of illusory walls asks the player to attack suspicious structures that they come across, many of the secrets in these games are intentionally placed out of the way. Whether they require dropping onto barely visible platforms, walking across invisible bridges, triggering an otherwise useless gesture in a specific spot or just looking around the corner past a doorway, the general idea is that finding every secret yourself takes a lot of effort. This was already the case prior to Elden Ring, and its denser areas feature a lot of the same approaches as its predecessors. However, the secret hunt extends to the open world, where the equivalent of checking an interior’s corners is taking regular detours into the background that’d be considered a vapid waste of time in older games. Anyone who reached the game’s expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, had to have explored a fully-fledged area whose portal entrance is hidden past a dip around a random mound in a snowfield.

I really do love secrets and surprises, and had a great time seeking them out in many of the games I’ve mentioned, but it’s a practical issue that FromSoftware engendered a playstyle of checking every corner and stopping to hit every wall that’s slightly reminiscent of a doorway in Elden Ring, a game that I believe is already too large. They even further encouraged this behaviour by providing smaller rewards within every detour that doesn’t have a larger one, creating an expectation that every space on the map holds something. Furthermore, the studio’s level designers have increasingly leant-into placing enemy ambushes around corners, an uncommon trick in the earlier games that’s a staple of Elden Ring’s dungeons. This has resulted in the expectation that every door holds the chance of an ambush, and thus engendered standing still in every entryway in case of danger. Frequently stopping and—as described earlier—intentionally running in the wrong direction does a lot of harm to the game’s general pacing. Plus, the behaviour feels at odds with the protagonist’s goal of somehow saving the world they inhabit, let alone their actively urgent objectives involving other characters.

Perhaps my issues with the pacing really stem from a feeling of disappointment, as the expectation of every detour potentially containing a special encounter is most often met with the reality of either reused assets or items that merely fill inventory slots. Reminiscent of Bloodborne’s “Chalice Dungeons,” several of Elden Ring’s nooks are home to extremely similar gaols, tombs and mines, filled with familiar enemies and usually capped-off with a reused boss fight that hands-out a predictable reward. The surprises aren’t able to be truly surprising, likely because of the ridiculous scope of the game, and so they just feel like (very unnecessary) filler. It’s as if Elden Ring’s world design involved filling-in a map, rather than making one that fitted the team’s ideas.

Another issue with the game’s structure is its effect on challenge. Over the course of their releases, FromSoftware have created an expectation that combat encounters will be punishing; that, whether fighting bosses or regular enemies, making a small number of consecutive mistakes will probably result in death. Really, this trust in the will and competence of players is one of the main appeals of these games. Nevertheless, some bosses and enemies are just more lethal than others, whether due to a specific behavioural difference or just their damage output. That’s an expectation that’s been memetically enforced, as each FromSoftware game seems to have a couple of particularly notorious encounters, whose names permeate the Internet’s collective consciousness for a while. When combined with the ever-increasing intensity of boss fights (which I spoke about in a prior post), there’s a general expectation that any encounter could be the one that everyone’s struggling with; that any boss could be an intentional difficulty spike.

The real problem arises from a combination of two more factors: a player could have taken a wide variety of routes to reach any one boss, and Elden Ring continues to use the character levelling system of its predecessors. This means that bosses can be reached with effectively any character level and stat distribution, on top of a variety of equipment upgraded to varying degrees. Although this allows players to take any loss as an indication that they need to come back later (or resort to grinding), giving them control over the level of challenge, the actual result is a lack of developer control over the game’s difficulty curve. It’s possible to move directly from a boss that stood no chance to one that seems insurmountable, and potentially unclear as to whether that’s the intention. I’m sure that there’s a wide variety in players’ behavioural responses to the assumption that a boss is supposed to be stubborn (I personally keep retrying with slight equipment tweaks, to see which of my tools get me the furthest), but the expectation itself seems to clash with the lack of possible tuning of the game’s difficulty. Besides, if the player decides it’s best to leave before completing an enormous detour (likely after exhaustive exploration to find it in the first place), that isn’t going to be very satisfying.

Personally, I believe that FromSoftware should more actively move away from their lineage, beyond slight adjustments to the same mechanical foundation, although it’d certainly require a great deal more work than what’s likely coming. Generally, Elden Ring is very good, but the playstyle that it often encourages just wasn’t fun to me, and so much of that game felt entirely familiar. Clearing players’ expectations both forces a change in their behaviour and allows for a greater chance to truly surprise them. With so many similar games in their portfolio, surprise is currently one of the studio’s greatest weaknesses. Maybe Elden Ring: Nightreign will afford them the gap for a cleaner slate…?

Originally written via very light notes on 15/7/24, a short while after having beaten the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion. Converted into some actual substance on 2/1/25, and slightly tweaked and posted on 3/1/25.