Elden Ring

Elden Ring is FromSoftware's fantasy action-RPG, released in February 2022 to become the studio's most commercially successful game by a wide margin, selling over 25 million copies and winning Game of the Year at nearly every major awards show that year. Directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, the architect of the Dark Souls series, Bloodborne, and Sekiro, Elden Ring marks FromSoftware's first fully open-world project, built around a shared mythology co-created with fantasy author George R.R. Martin, whose work on the backstory and world history gives the game's fractured, elliptical lore a denser sense of history than any of the studio's previous titles. The game is set in the Lands Between, a realm shattered after the Elden Ring itself was broken and its guardian, Queen Marika, vanished, plunging the land into a war among her demigod children — each of whom now holds a fragment of the Ring's power, called a Great Rune. Players take on the role of a Tarnished, an exile called back to the Lands Between by the shattering, tasked with collecting these Great Runes by defeating each demigod in turn and eventually restoring the Elden Ring to become Elden Lord. As with all of Miyazaki's Souls-lineage games, the story is told obliquely — through cryptic item descriptions, environmental details, and NPC questlines that are easy to miss entirely — rewarding players who piece together the history of the world through careful exploration rather than explicit exposition. Combat retains the deliberate, high-stakes rhythm the Souls series is known for: careful stamina management, precise dodge timing, and punishing enemies that can kill an underleveled or careless player in just a few hits, but Elden Ring's open world restructures the traditionally linear Souls formula into something far more flexible. Players can approach the map's regions in almost any order, using the game's new mounted combat (astride the spectral steed Torrent), a wide array of spells, incantations, summonable spirit ashes, and stealth options to work around difficult encounters rather than being forced through a single fixed gauntlet. This open structure, combined with the game's legendarily difficult but always "fair" boss encounters — bosses that can typically be beaten through pattern recognition and preparation rather than pure grinding — has made Elden Ring a touchstone for discussions about game difficulty and design across the entire industry since its release. The Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, released in 2024, added an entirely new realm called the Land of Shadow, roughly the size of a full Souls game on its own, along with new weapons, spells, and some of the most difficult boss encounters FromSoftware has ever designed, requiring players to grind an entirely separate leveling system (Scadutree Fragments) specific to the expansion's content. A separate spinoff, Elden Ring Nightreign, reimagines the core combat and exploration systems into a roguelike, session-based multiplayer structure, showing FromSoftware's willingness to experiment with the IP beyond its core single-player RPG format. Technically, Elden Ring runs on FromSoftware's proprietary engine and, notably for a studio historically associated with rough PC ports, launched with a considerably more polished PC version than earlier Souls games, though it remains capped at 60 frames per second without community-made mods to unlock higher frame rates. Its relatively modest official hardware requirements — a legacy of FromSoftware's console-first development approach — mean the game runs comfortably even on mid-range hardware from several years ago, a rarity among modern AAA open-world releases, and one of the reasons it has remained a fixture in Steam's most-played charts years after launch.

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