Let the Flame Die: Elden Ring Can’t Resurrect the Souls Franchise
Souls used to be a challenge to convention; now it is convention
Something’s wrong in The Lands Between, and I’m not talking about the curse that’s brought down a kingdom.
It began a mere few hours in, when I found myself scaling the dilapidated steps of Stormveil, the first of Elden Ring’s castle “levels” — gruelling infiltrations of concealment, wayfinding and swordplay. As my first faltering steps echoed against the stone walls, I found myself nodding off to sleep — something that has never happened in my entire history with FromSoftware’s games. I’m tempted to say that this was my first indication that something was very wrong, but if I’m honest, something has been missing from the Souls games for some time now. Elden Ring is just the latest disappointment.
Could this be more of the same?
The Souls games have been trying and failing to captivate me since Dark Souls 2 began the cycle of diminishing returns. Even then, nearly ten years ago, I sensed a flatness, a repetition, a tendency for quantity over quality (five gargoyles, two dragonriders, three sentinels, a billion stupid skeletons). Najka is just Quelaag from the first game, with a search and replace of spider for scorpion, and so on. Dark Souls 2’s fatal flaw was that it was derivative at its core. It lacked the surprise and shock and creative brilliance of Demon’s and Dark Souls, the kind of world and enemy design that plunged my stomach into my toes and made me yelp in terror so loudly my boyfriend had to close the windows when I played so the neighbours wouldn’t think someone was being murdered.
Dark Souls 2 and 3 give you fast travel at the outset, a crime against the sublime interconnectedness and groundedness of Lordran. One of the many achievements of Dark Souls was how situated and embodied it felt. Combat was weighty, movement was cumbersome. When you swung your axe in a corridor it bounced off the wall. Every inch of the world felt real and alive, and it held together in a way other worlds didn’t. In comparison, Dark Souls 2 felt floaty and thin, and Dark Souls 3 was just more of the same. Both added a new element to the series: fanservice. Hey, you remember Ornstein! You remember Anor Londo! A little pat on the back, a cheap trick to please and delight. Remember when Souls games were indifferent to the player?
On the heel of too much sameness, it was disappointing to find yet another set of mechanics that I immediately recognised and understood. Elden Ring may not be a “Souls” game, but let’s be honest — it’s a Souls game. The core systems, HUD and interface are basically identical to Souls, not to mention the staples. Let’s check them off together now: famously punishing difficulty, body horror, sombre tone, eerily titled items (festering bloody finger, raw meat dumpling), obscure lore, themes of fallen grandeur. Granted, Elden Ring has one key difference — it’s a huge open world with a distinctly open world promise: pick a compass bearing and go, and if you hit a boss or an area that’s too hard, try a different direction before returning later down the line. Considering that Souls bosses can be daunting at best and (pun intended) soul-destroying at worst, the increased flexibility to tackle areas in the order of the player’s choosing is a welcome addition.
More concessions have been made to adapt the franchise to the open world setting — fast travel, a map, a horse that outruns pretty much any foe. This makes it very easy to turn around and leg it if you come across an enemy that’s too much of a match for you, or that you just can’t be bothered facing down. All quite unlike the Souls games, in which almost every area confronts you with paths full of enemies that you have no choice but to go through. Face me, the games seemed to be saying. Show me you’re a worthy opponent. The world design of the Souls games forced you to square off against adversaries head-on — a forced intimacy, a reluctant bond forged in the clash of metal. There was a nobility in that, a dignity. Look me in the eyes, warrior; you will not pass through here.
In Elden Ring’s open world, I am a galloping rump. That’s how the monster menagerie sees me, for the most part — a quickly receding set of buttocks and legs. As I hurtle through the flooded ruins of the Academy Town something hits my horse in the behind; I zig zag and don’t look back to find out what it was. Many of the enemies in Elden Ring boast excellent visual design, but I spend so much time leaving them in my dust I often don’t even end up getting to look at them properly. Enemy encounters in the open plains of The Lands Between feel strangely half-hearted, even cowardly, compared to those in the previous Souls games.
This is not to say that I want more unavoidable hostile encounters in Elden Ring — quite the opposite, actually. They work well in the closed castle levels (very reminiscent of classic Souls and by far my favourite sections), where enemy placement feels like a deliberate and meaningful part of the puzzle of figuring out how to survive, gain an advantage and press forward, where even sprinting through the tightly clustered baddies requires considerable skill. But with your speedy steed, enemies in the field are nothing more than a nuisance (with the exception of some epic boss fights). So why are they so…everywhere? It feels like an awkward middle ground, a concession to the Souls formula (unremittingly hostile world: check) in an open world genre where this design decision actively impedes the experience of exploration and adventure.
No adventure ahead, only flatness
There’s no denying that Elden Ring contains a truly huge open world, with no small amount of fantastical beauty. Even if you haven’t played it, you’ve seen the screenshots. Misty forests, sparkling with unexplored splendour. Fantasy landscapes lit up in otherworldly shades of blue and violet. Red skies and spectacular vistas that stretch to the distant horizon.
But an adventure game is not about admiring a world from far away. It’s about how that world feels when you get right up to it and push.
There are several ways to conjure adventure. One is with speed and spectacle (Sekiro’s hookshot, Uncharted’s dramatic set pieces) but I don’t think this is what Elden Ring is going for. Its combat is too derivative to feel audacious, too slow to feel breathtaking, and your horse’s movement speed isn’t exactly adrenaline-pumping. However, there is another way, and that is by creating a deep sense of connection with a place. Connection is all about up-closeness and communion, being able to stop and really breathe the land in. Slowness and texture are key — striking flint into fire in Breath of the Wild, perusing Miasmata’s map through dappled shadows, watching a gentle snowfall from the refuge of a cave in The Long Dark. Given that the previous Souls games are known for their rich detail and embodied slowness, harnessing this to create connection was Elden Ring’s best chance of making The Lands Between feel like more than just a series of postcards.
But this is a Souls-y game, you see, so it needs to be crawling with extremely hostile enemies — the presence of which hampered the enjoyment I was trying to derive from the game’s stunning landscapes. One time I walked up to a cliff edge to take in the amazing view and promptly got whacked over the side by some knuckle-head who sneaked up on me. If there’s a spot you want to stop and check out, too bad — there are a dozen enemies all around that will try and have a go at you as you do so. I want so badly to be able to explore, closely and carefully, to rinse every square inch of this grove or that lake, to reach out and touch grass (or is it grace?). But every close encounter with this mystical land requires that you first tediously clear out packs of boring enemies first, or risk getting surprise knifed in the face, and having to start again.
The alternative I felt pushed towards was this: propel my steed toward a glowing object as I dodge swinging clubs, and spam triangle as I go past, too distracted by avoiding danger to even notice what it was I just picked up. I got very good at reading messages on the ground in split-second bursts (“Watch out for scarlet ro-”) as I continued on my way at speed. I experienced The Lands Between in hurried snatches, the details blurring as I outran another pack of soldiers with spears. I wanted to feel like an explorer, coming face to face with an exciting new world. But I felt more like a surveyor — someone charting the land through a long-range lens, never able to close the distance. Elden Ring’s world has a faraway charm, but for the most part it doesn’t translate to the tense intimacy of a great Souls game, nor the tactile delight of a great adventure game.
There’s another important element of open world adventure games that Elden Ring lacks: variety. Yes, there are an abundance of location types — castles, forests, caverns — but because it’s Souls, every location is chock full of hostile people and creatures with nothing but bloodthirst in their eyes. This never felt jarring in the previous Souls titles, but somehow the sheer size of The Lands Between makes this relentless uniformity feel contrived. Castle Morne, for example, has just recently (you are told, by a fleeing maiden) been taken over by a riotous mob out for noble blood. This isn’t a world that has been corrupted for a thousand years; substantial parts of it were still ruled by regular people until very recently. And yet when you start the game, by some chance, almost every single thing in it is out to get you. Every castle, infested. Every ruin, overrun. No inch of ground remaining that doesn’t belong to the forces of darkness.
The Roundtable Hold is the one place of safety and community in the game, and it’s shoved into the corner of the map, only accessible via fast travel. Why couldn’t this location be integrated into the actual world? Is the devotion to the Souls™ brand that overwhelming that even one friendly location wasn’t permitted in this huge of a place? I would have much preferred the richness and storytelling possibility afforded by a more vibrant and varied world, one containing areas of every kind — danger, refuge, threat, resistance, loyalty, community, betrayal, kindness. I think many of my issues with Elden Ring could be solved if it limited its Souls influence to a few of those classic castle levels, and let its open world be something else entirely.
Interestingly, Elden Ring contains fragments of the much better adventure game it could have been. In Dominula, Windmill Village I find some old women gaily dancing among the flowers, and they don’t attack me as I pass through. My eyebrows raise and I sit up in my chair — is it finally time for something different? Then I knock over a crate or something and they hiss and charge me as I sigh and chop them all to bits. One environmental puzzle (light three towers) located in the town of Sellia felt like a lungful of fresh air after drowning in hours of sameness. I’m not saying Elden Ring needed to be a Zelda game, but the more hours I spent in its world, the more desperately I ached for some activities to do beyond “kill everything”.
Adventure lives in uncertainty and discovery — the feeling of approaching a new place, not knowing whether it will contain comfort or violence. It lives in the diversity of what you can do in that world — climb, ride, dive, glide, chase, carry, scan, converse, cook, collect, document, grow, build, craft, kill. But Elden Ring reduces its entire world to the tip of your sword. There’s no rich bounty of gameplay possibilities or ways I can choose to interact with The Lands Between (to many gamers, ‘killing things in different ways’ counts as gameplay variety, but that speaks more to how limited our gamer brains are when it comes to imagination). Wonder requires wondering. In Elden Ring, when I see something moving towards me in the middle distance, I don’t have to wonder — I just draw my weapon.
Elden Ring was never going to be able to recapture the Souls magic fully, but it could have been a great adventure game, had it been more willing to deviate from the Souls formula and embrace the possibilities of the open world genre. Instead, its supermassive size only exposes the flatness in its world — of both narrative and gameplay. This is especially disappointing considering who they brought on board to help write it.
New talent ahead but be wary of wasting it
When I heard that George R. R. Martin was on board for Elden Ring, I imagined the game that I hoped it would be — a true blending of Souls and Game of Thrones. Perhaps a fallen dark fantasy world à la Dark Souls, but something much more story-driven, with extensive dialogue and NPCs playing a more prominent role — deep and complex characters that you could journey with or otherwise be able to spend a lot of time with. I wanted conversation, characterisation, intimacy, kinship, politics, psychology — a game that felt like it had been written by a brilliant fantasy novelist.
What a disappointment it was to instead find a game whose dialogue was indistinguishable from every other Souls game. Your journey is a fundamentally lone one, so the potential for plentiful and captivating dialogue (exactly the thing that, you know, a professional wordsmith could bring to the table) is wasted. Like any other Souls title, NPCs are scarce, and they have a set few lines that they deliver in a mournful sigh. Some bosses are allowed a few exclamations along the lines of “I see you think you can beat me, well you won’t”. It felt bewilderingly safe, and I’m far from the only one to have noticed. Rather than being a fusion of two great creative minds — Miyazaki/Martin — I would never have guessed there was a new writer on board if I didn’t already know there was. It seems Martin was relegated to the task of writing background notes which, given how sparse the lore in the Souls games is, ends up being an extremely ethereal contribution at best. What a waste.
What if writing and dialogue were given a more prominent place in Elden Ring? Even Sekiro had slightly more fleshed-out characters, a tragic duel to the death with a father who’d betrayed the kingdom, dialogue that sounded like conversations between two actual people. What if the game, say, did a surprise Messenger-style flip half-way through where you brought the dead world to life and the first half was a very Souls-y game written by Miyazaki and the second half was a more character-centric adventure written by Martin? What if it did something wacky like world tendency? (I’ve been waiting for five Souls games now for something as ludicrous as world tendency to come back, something enormous and unexplained hidden in the heart of the game.) What if Elden Ring had done something, anything, to boldly forge a new and exciting identity in the FromSoftware canon, rather than being “basically Souls again, but bigger”?
Time for an ending
Elden Ring wants to have its raw meat dumpling and eat it too. It wants to be an open world adventure game, but it is so constrained by also being a Souls game that it falls short on both counts. It’s too derivative to capture the sense of strangeness and alienation that defined Souls, and too lacking in richness and possibility to put a sparkle in your eye the way an adventure game should. In my opinion, Elden Ring should have done much more to shed its Souls roots. After all, it’s technically not a “Souls game” — why did it have to be so goddamn similar to Souls? I find it ironic that blind loyalty to power is something the Souls narratives subtly reject, and yet FromSoftware have been so slavish in their loyalty to the Souls brand that they robbed Elden Ring of the ability to truly be its own thing. And the community have duly rewarded them for it. Well done Miyazaki, just keep giving us more of what we already know and love. Remember when the Souls games were indifferent to the player?
The irony doesn’t stop there. The Souls series was always about entropy, fallen majesty, the light of a world slowly fading with a whimper. There was a terrible beauty in the experience of stepping into that strangeness. And yet that wonder, too, has been fading for a while now. Dark Souls was about a world which had existed for too long, its lifespan unnaturally extended by the feeding of souls into the great flame. I can’t help but see something similar in the later Souls entries — particularly Dark Souls 2 and 3 (and now Elden Ring).
For ten years and counting, FromSoftware have been working their own kind of necromancy, a stretching of the same ideas (corruption, fallen splendour), tropes (raspy-voiced NPCs, helpful maidens) and environments (crumbling cathedral, poison swamp) thinner and thinner, until the spark of discovery and astonishment has all but died out. I appreciate that Elden Ring does all these things in a more grand and big-budget way than ever before, and refines many of the rough edges that plagued the earlier entries (notwithstanding the fact that we are still — even after six iterations — dealing with bullshit boss fights involving pointlessly repetitive gimmicks, how are you still doing this FromSoftware?). But ultimately, it’s just another video game sequel. It settles for giving the player more of what they’ve already done many times before, too afraid to take its own leap into the unknown — ironically, the very thing we loved the first installments for.
The ending of Dark Souls gives you a choice — sacrifice your soul and prolong the age of light, or extinguish the flame and let a new age of darkness arise. The Souls series’ own age of light is fading — and has been for a while now. No one seems to want to admit it, but the world grows weary, the people in it driven by the vague memory of better days, the monarchs feebly prolonging the status quo in a bid to hold on to their power. Perhaps, as long as we keep praising repetition and safeness, as long as we keep begging for more of the same, FromSoftware will continue feeding the fires of our devotion. But I say it’s long past time we extinguished the flame.
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