Riding gallantly on horseback through broken lands on horseback. The ancient erd tree basks the landscape cascading across the ruined remains of great bastions and castles that once held revered warriors that served grand lords. A unitary power that once held the realm together has fallen, those once sworn to preside over the lands now usurp power as elden lords.
From Software’s newest entry into the soulsborne franchise Elden Ring, is both a familiar endeavor for many fans of the series, and yet presents enough disparities between itself and the previous games that cement its own identity as a separate entity all together.
Synonymous with the legacy and story beats of the Dark Souls trilogy, Elden Ring revolves itself around taking the role of a lowly intrepid tarnished or undead, exploring a broken forsaken land in order to re-establish order. Players can expect to explore the game’s world The Lands In Between, the first open world featured within a soulsborne title, which contains various dungeons, landmarks, bosses, secrets, and npcs to interact with; not excluding it’s diverse range of topography, including deserts, plains, rolling hills, scorched badlands, shallow lakes, grandiose castles, and other such land features.
This culmination of aspects indicative of other From Software games, invokes an oppressing atmosphere, accompanied by a gorgeous open world and many quality gameplay changes, that enhance the game’s experience. These consist of an all new crafting system based upon items collected in the world, a level of customization and freedom of class statistics unparalleled when compared to its predecessors, easily accessible cooperative play, a horse gifted to the player enticing them to traverse the varied landscape, and a copious amount of other alterations that make Elden Ring a more robust experience.
However integral to the infamous legacy of the soulsborne franchise, is its unrelenting challenge and difficulty curve that keeps players on their toes and striking foes with meticulous strategy. This aspect is no different with Elden Ring, as even the most unassuming of adversaries can have unpredictable move sets, yet this is ever present in the boss fights sprinkled throughout the open world. These antagonists will test players’ reflexes as well as their resolve to triumph over the insurmountable task.
Complimenting this difficulty are new systems regarding dungeons and bosses, known as the “legacy” versions of these locations or antagonists. The crucibles or dungeons of previous soulsborne games are dwarfed, by the sheer colossal size of Elden Ring’s ruins and castles, which prove to be extensive bastilles filled to the brim with innumerable components, including both legacy bosses, optional bosses, and innumerable rewards or items that will aid a player’s journey
Despite the amalgamation of all these rudimentary or intricate facets of gameplay consolidating to create the ideal interactive soulsborne experience, there are two glaring issues with Elden Ring that exist due to poor optimization. Players will often have latency or lag when playing cooperatively, which can cause damage to be negated from enemies, t-posing characters, glitching boss arenas, or damage inflicted on the player character when not telegraphed by an enemy. Along with this conundrum, an apparent problem occurs with the frames per second on older consoles with outdated graphics units. However From Software is currently addressing these dilemmas through consistent updates and tweaking the optimization on consoles, for more stable gameplay.
Elden Ring is game epitomized by its predecessors infamy of rewarding and yet arduous conflict, coincided with alterations that improve the gameplay and exploration experience within its totality. Returning fans of From Softwares other games, as well as new players aware of the game’s difficulty, will have an unabashedly stupendous time traversing The Lands In Between.
