Elden Ring is the upcoming collaboration between FromSoftware and George R.R. Martin that was officially revealed at E3 2019. There has only been a brief trailer of Elden Ring shown during Microsoft's conference at E3, which only contained cinematic footage, but the people at FromSoftware have slowly been revealing more information about the game in interviews.
Hidetaka Miyazaki directed such classic titles as Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and is currently working on Elden Ring. Miyazaki spoke to IGN during E3 2019, and he gave some details about Elden Ring and its connections to the other FromSoftware titles.
Miyazaki compared Elden Ring to Dark Souls in terms of its gameplay, but stated that it will be changed by the fact that it features large open environments, rather than the segmented rooms of the Dark Souls games.
“With a larger world, new systems and action mechanics inevitably become necessary,” he said. “In that sense, I think that Elden Ring is a more natural evolution of Dark Souls.”
The Dark Souls series (along with Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice) used areas that consisted of small rooms that were chained together through entranceways, which was partly a way of reducing load times in the earlier games (especially the original Dark Souls), but Elden Ring is going to change the nature of the Souls formula by adding huge environments.
“While the narrow and complex dungeons of our previous games were indeed interconnected, Elden Ring’s environments will be much more open and vast,” said Miyazaki. “The more extensive world will form the base of Elden Ring’s gameplay, and its mechanics are designed with that type of environment in mind.”
Games like Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice managed to alter the Dark Souls formula by fundamentally changing how combat worked. In Dark Souls, it was possible to absorb attacks using a shield, but Bloodborne encouraged the player to dodge and play offensively, while Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice encouraged patience and careful timing in order to parry the enemy's attacks. Elden Ring's open world and large environments mean that the player and the enemy have a much wider field of movement to use, which rarely happened in the Dark Souls series outside of boss arenas. It will be interesting to see how the move to an open world will change the Dark Souls formula.
Elden Ring is currently in development for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.