Elden Ring

Elden Ring
Publication Information
Developer	FromSoftware
Publisher	Bandai Namco Entertainment
Director	Hidetaka Miyazaki
World Design	George R. R. Martin
Release Date	February 25, 2022 June 21, 2024 (Shadow of the Erdtree) August 28, 2026 (Tarnished Edition)
Genre	Action RPG, Open-World
Modes	Single-Player, Online Co-Op, PvP Invasions
Players	1 to 4
Rating	ESRB: M
Platform	PC, PS4, Xbox One PS5, Xbox Series X/S Nintendo Switch 2 (Tarnished Edition)
Game Information
Setting	The Lands Between
Protagonist	The Tarnished
Expansion	Shadow of the Erdtree
Spin-Off	Elden Ring Nightreign

Elden Ring is an open-world action role-playing game from FromSoftware, published by Bandai Namco Entertainment and released on 25 February 2022. Hidetaka Miyazaki directed it. George R. R. Martin wrote the mythology underneath it, given free rein over the backstory while the studio built the game on top.

You play the Tarnished, an exile called home to a broken kingdom to gather what is left of a shattered artefact and take a throne nobody is holding. There is no quest marker telling you where that starts. There is a horse, a sword, a map with most of its pieces missing, and a very large country that does not care whether you are ready.

The Lands Between

The Lands Between sit under the Erdtree, a golden colossus visible from most of the map and useful as a compass long before it is a destination. The realm was blessed by the Greater Will, and the various Outer Gods have their fingers in it too, which is the polite way of saying that most of what has gone wrong here was done on purpose by something enormous.

Queen Marika the Eternal ended her own Age of the Erdtree by shattering the Elden Ring, the law the world ran on. Its Great Runes scattered, her Demigod children picked them up, and every one of them was bent out of shape by what they took. The war that followed produced no winner and no new god, which left the Elden Lord throne empty and the world running on broken rules. Grace returns to the exiled Tarnished, and calls them back to finish it.

That is the whole plot handed to you in an opening cutscene, and then the game stops explaining. The rest is on item descriptions, on statues, on the way a ruin has been built over an older ruin.

Gameplay

Open world, and genuinely open. Regions, subregions and the huge hand-built legacy dungeons can mostly be taken in whatever order you can survive, with a handful gated behind quests and the final dungeon held back until the rest is done. Fog gates, hidden basements and whole underground regions sit under the map you think you have finished.

Torrent, your spectral steed, is summoned with the Spectral Steed Whistle and turns a long ride into a short one. He also double-jumps, which is how you reach half the places that look unreachable. Sites of Grace are the checkpoints: rest to refill flasks, respawn the enemies, warp across the map, restock your spells and Ashes of War, and rebalance the split between healing and mana.

If you have come from the Dark Souls games, the differences that matter:

• You can jump. A dedicated jump button, with jumping heavy attacks that break poise. Verticality is a real part of both traversal and combat now.
• Stealth is in. Crouch, break line of sight, open with a backstab.
• No durability. Weapons and armour never degrade and never need repair.
• Multiplayer is optional from the start. Turn it off and no invader can reach you. Leave it on and you can have two co-op summons and one hostile invader in your world at once.
• Invasions announce themselves. The sky reddens, the music turns, and Torrent is despawned and locked out for the duration.

Progression

Runes are currency and experience at the same time, which is the central tension of the whole game: everything you are carrying when you die is dropped where you died, and you get one attempt to walk back and pick it up. Spend them at a Site of Grace on levels, or spend them at a merchant, but spend them.

Levelling raises the eight attributes, and weapons scale off them by letter grade from E up to S. A weapon that scales C in Strength rewards a very different character from one that scales A in Dexterity or Intelligence, and the scaling shifts as you upgrade the weapon, so a piece of gear that looks mediocre at +0 can be a main hand at +25.

Ashes of War are the other half. Almost any weapon can have its skill replaced and its affinity changed, so the sword you like the look of can be rebuilt around the stats you actually levelled. Add spirit ashes for summoned help, talismans for passive effects, and armour weighted for poise against equip load, and the build space gets wide very quickly.

Shadow of the Erdtree

Shadow of the Erdtree arrived on 21 June 2024 and it is not small. It was the first piece of downloadable content ever nominated for a Game of the Year award.

Before Marika shattered the Elden Ring she sent her Demigod son on a crusade against the Land of the Tower, and veiled both the land and the war in a Realm of Shadow. Miquella the Kind went there afterwards, stripping away his flesh, his strength, his lineage and everything golden about himself on the way. The Tarnished follows that pilgrimage through country burned by Messmer the Impaler, into the secrets of the Scadutree and the making of a new god.

Getting in: defeat Starscourge Radahn and Mohg, Lord of Blood, then touch Miquella's withered hand at the Cocoon of the Empyrean inside the Mohgwyn Dynasty Mausoleum.

The Realm of Shadow runs on its own power curve. Scadutree Fragments scattered through the new land are consumed at a Site of Grace to raise your Scadutree Blessing, which lifts both the damage you deal and the damage you shrug off, and counts for nothing once you step back out. Exploration is the difficulty setting.

Editions

PS4 owners get a free upgrade to the PS5 version, and the Xbox release supports Smart Delivery across Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. The Tarnished Pack, first announced as exclusive to the Tarnished Edition, is also coming to PlayStation, Xbox and PC.

Elden Ring Nightreign is a separate release rather than an expansion: a standalone spin-off built around three-player co-op, survival and roguelike runs, with its own expansion in The Forsaken Hollows. It shares the world and almost none of the structure.