Elden Ring

Overview

The Lands Between are a ruin with a golden tree at the center. Queen Marika, keeper of the Elden Ring, has shattered it and vanished, and her demigod children have torn one another apart over the fragments. Into this wreckage come the Tarnished, exiles called back from beyond the mists to repair the Ring and become Elden Lord. One of them is the player.

Elden Ring, developed by FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment on February 25, 2022, took the severe combat and oblique storytelling of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls and set it in an open world, with a spectral horse, a sky full of distant landmarks and almost no instructions. Its director was Hidetaka Miyazaki; its ancient mythology was written by George R. R. Martin, author of A Song of Ice and Fire. It sold 13.4 million copies in its first five weeks and 30 million by April 2025, won more than 300 Game of the Year awards, and turned the Soulslikes from a demanding niche into a mainstream genre.

Origins

After Dark Souls III (2016) and its final expansion, The Ringed City, Miyazaki wanted to build something larger: a mechanical evolution of Dark Souls in an open world, where the freedom to wander would add depth to exploration rather than replace the tight, interlocking level design his studio was known for. Production began in early 2017, alongside Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, with the studio using a co-director structure so that Miyazaki could oversee both. Yui Tanimura, director of Dark Souls II, served as co-director.

Miyazaki had long admired Martin's fiction and hoped his involvement would give the world a more accessible foundation. FromSoftware's approach to story, told through item descriptions, architecture and fragmentary conversations, left little room for a conventional writer, so the two divided the work. Martin was given free rein over the deep past: the gods, the demigods and the wars that happened before the game begins. Miyazaki wrote the in-game narrative on top of it, comparing Martin's material to a dungeon master's handbook for a tabletop roleplaying game. Among his influences Miyazaki named Chaosium's RuneQuest, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories, and, for design, Shadow of the Colossus, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the Elder Scrolls games and The Witcher 3.

The game was revealed at E3 in June 2019, then went almost silent for two years while fans waited for any news at all. A trailer in June 2021 set a January 2022 date, a closed network test ran in November 2021, and the release slipped by five weeks to February 25, 2022.

How it plays

The player builds a character from a starting class and sets out from Limgrave, a region of grassland and ruined churches, toward castles, swamps, a rot-blighted wasteland called Caelid, a magic academy, snowfields and a city beneath the Erdtree. Six main regions are ruled by demigods who serve as the great bosses; between them lie catacombs, caves, mines and ruins, each with its own guardian and reward. Torrent, a spectral steed, makes the distances manageable and allows fights on horseback.

Combat is the Souls model with more tools. Weapons carry "Ashes of War," removable skills that can be swapped between them. Spirit Ashes let players summon ghostly allies. Stealth, jumping and mounted combat add options, and a crafting system makes arrows, pots and remedies from gathered materials. Death drops every rune the character carries (runes are both currency and experience), and dying again before recovering them loses them for good. Sites of Grace act as checkpoints and fast-travel points. The generous checkpoints, the horse and above all the freedom to turn away from a boss that is too hard and come back stronger made Elden Ring the most forgiving of FromSoftware's games, even though it offered no difficulty setting. Players could also leave summon signs for cooperative play or invade one another's worlds.

The story is told in fragments. A maiden named Melina offers to guide the Tarnished to the Erdtree; the Roundtable Hold gathers rival champions; questlines for characters such as the witch Ranni lead to secret endings. Six endings are possible, from restoring an Age of Order to letting the Frenzied Flame consume the world.

Reception & impact

Elden Ring received "universal acclaim," with Metacritic scores of 96 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Reviewers praised the open world above all, the way every horizon promised something and every cave held a reward, and many compared its sense of discovery with Breath of the Wild. Criticism focused on technical performance, especially frame-rate problems in the Windows version at launch, and on cryptic menus. Some noted that the story rarely sounded like Martin, which, given how he and Miyazaki had divided the work, was the intent.

It was the best-selling game in several regions in February and March 2022, the fastest-selling game in Bandai Namco's history, and the second-best-selling game of 2022 in the United States. Its awards were comprehensive: Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2022 (along with Best Game Direction, Best Art Direction and Best Role Playing Game), the D.I.C.E. Awards, the Game Developers Choice Awards, the Golden Joystick Awards and the Japan Game Awards, plus BAFTA Games Awards for Multiplayer and Original Property. At the D.I.C.E. Awards alone it took five prizes, including Role-Playing Game of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction, and in Germany it won the Deutscher Computerspielpreis for Best International Game. In May 2023 it won the Nebula Award for Best Game Writing. A glitch that lets characters zip across the map made it a fixture of the speedrunning community.

Legacy

FromSoftware announced an expansion in February 2023. Shadow of the Erdtree, released on June 21, 2024, sent the Tarnished into the Land of Shadow in pursuit of the demigod Miquella. Miyazaki called it the largest expansion the studio had made and described it as the end of Elden Ring's story. It added a separate progression system based on Scadutree Fragments and a final boss so demanding that FromSoftware later adjusted it. It sold five million copies in three days and ten million by July 2025, won Best Game Expansion at the 2024 Golden Joystick Awards, and was nominated for Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2024, the first expansion to receive that nomination after the organizers confirmed that DLC was eligible.

The world kept spreading. Elden Ring Nightreign, a three-player cooperative Roguelikes spin-off directed by Junya Ishizaki and set in a shifting version of Limgrave, launched on May 30, 2025, and sold five million copies by July. A Nintendo Switch 2 version, Elden Ring Tarnished Edition, followed on August 28, 2026. In May 2025 A24 and Bandai Namco announced a live-action film written and directed by Alex Garland, with Martin among the producers, scheduled for 2028. Beyond FromSoftware, Elden Ring reset expectations for what an open world could be: a place without quest markers, where the player's own curiosity was the map. It stands with Baldur's Gate 3 as one of the two landmark fantasy role-playing games of the 2020s.

Did you know?

The game's in-game messages, left by players on the ground to help or trick one another, made the phrase "try finger, but hole" an internet meme in the game's first weeks, a sign of how the community's shared voice became part of the world.