Elden Ring: The Open World FromSoftware Earned

The first thing Elden Ring does, once it lets go of your hand in Limgrave, is show you a castle. Stormveil sits up on its rock in the north-west, visible from most of the starting region, lit and enormous and obviously important. There is no marker on it. There is no quest in your log telling you to go there. There is a castle, and there is you, and the game has correctly calculated that this is sufficient.

FromSoftware and Bandai Namco shipped it on 25 February 2022 across five platforms, it sold in numbers that embarrassed the entire genre, and two years on the interesting question isn’t whether it’s good. It’s why this open world holds when so many don’t, given that it contains most of the same parts as the ones that don’t.

Navigation by sightline

Here is the design decision everything else hangs off. The map fills in when you find a stele and read it, and the map it gives you is a drawing — terrain, rivers, roads, the shape of things — with nothing on it that tells you what to do. Your objective marker is a shaft of golden light that leans in a direction from every Site of Grace, and you are free to ignore it forever, which most people do for the first twenty hours.

What replaces the checklist is your own eyes. You crest a hill on Torrent and there’s a cathedral in a swamp, or a ruined manor, or a shaft of light coming out of a well, and you go and look. The information that drives navigation lives in the world geometry rather than the UI layer, which means that the act of playing and the act of deciding what to play are the same act. The Ubisoft tower solved a real problem — how do I tell the player what’s out there — and it solved it by moving the world into a menu. FromSoftware solved it by building a skyline.

The mechanical consequence is that curiosity has an actual cost. Riding to that cathedral takes ninety seconds you could have spent elsewhere, you might die on arrival, and nothing promised you a reward. So the reward, when it comes, is yours in a way that a completed checklist item never is. That’s the loop. It’s very old and almost nobody runs it, because it requires the confidence to let players miss things — and Elden Ring lets you miss an enormous amount. Entire questlines, entire underground regions the size of a normal game’s map. Ranni’s line alone is missable by walking past a door.

Why the fear survives the freedom

The obvious risk in going open-world with a Souls game was that difficulty stops meaning anything when the player can walk away from any fight. FromSoftware’s answer is a rune economy that makes walking away expensive in the right way.

Die with runes on you, they drop where you fell. Die again on the way back, they’re gone. In a corridor game that’s a tense trip down a familiar hall. In an open world it’s a ride across hostile terrain, and the map is full of things that hit like a truck and are placed exactly where you’d want to gallop. The genius bit is Torrent’s double-jump and the spirit springs: you’re fast enough to escape almost anything, so death is nearly always a decision you made. The game gives you the exit and then watches you decline it.

Then there’s the Spirit Calling Bell. Summonable ashes are the difficulty slider FromSoftware refused to put in the options menu, and giving them to you inside the fiction — a bell, an item, a thing you upgrade with Grave Glovewort — is a better answer than a difficulty select, because it costs FP and it changes how the fight reads. Bring the Mimic Tear and a boss becomes a two-front problem it wasn’t designed for. That’s a legitimate solve. Nobody has to tick a box marked EASY, and the fight’s identity survives.

Where it fights itself

The padding is real and I’m not going to be polite about it. The Lands Between contains roughly a hundred and fifty catacombs, caves and mines, and a substantial share of them end in an Erdtree Avatar or an Ulcerated Tree Spirit you have already fought, in a room shaped like the last room, for a reward you’ll shard down for materials. The dragons are worse: after the third Flying Dragon you can read the entire encounter in two seconds.

This matters because the whole navigational thesis depends on the horizon keeping its promises. Every recycled Erdtree Avatar is a small withdrawal from the trust that makes you ride towards the next unexplained shape. By the Consecrated Snowfield, plenty of players have stopped detouring — which is the design defeating itself, and it happened because the map was sized by ambition instead of content.

The back third is also where the legacy dungeons start doing FromSoftware’s older, meaner thing — narrow, vertical, interlocking — and it’s a reminder that Miyazaki’s team still build the best enclosed spaces in the business. Stormveil Castle is a masterpiece of a level and it arrives in hour eight. Nothing in the open world beats it, and I think the studio knows.

The ancestor

The lineage everyone reaches for is Breath of the Wild, and the shared instinct is obvious: put a thing on a hill, let the player want it. The real ancestor runs further back, to the home-computer sandboxes that had no budget for markers and no room for a quest log. I’d point at Hunter, Activision’s Amiga game from 1991 — a free-roaming island, vehicles you could just get into, objectives given as descriptions rather than dots, and the expectation that you’d work out where things were by looking at them. It was crude and it was enormous and it navigated exactly the way Elden Ring does, thirty years earlier, because it had no other option.

Sightline navigation is what you build when you can’t build a marker system. FromSoftware went back to it deliberately, with a budget, which is a much harder decision than it sounds.

For the studio at its most compressed, see Sekiro, which does the opposite of everything here — one moveset, one rhythm, no build-crafting, no escape — and is arguably the better designed game. For the studio’s other 2023 answer to the same question of what a Souls game is once you take the sword away, there’s Armored Core VI. And if you want the open-world argument made in miniature by a much smaller team, Tunic hides its entire map in a manual and dares you to read it.

The verdict, argued

Elden Ring is the best argument in years that an open world can be a place rather than a delivery route, and it makes that argument with a hundred and fifty dungeons of evidence against it. Both things are true. The first thirty hours are the finest exploration design of the decade; the last twenty are a very good Souls game wearing an oversized coat.

What it earned, it earned by holding a line every other studio abandoned: it refuses to tell you where to go. That refusal is what makes the castle on the horizon mean anything, and it’s why people who bounced off Dark Souls three times finished this one. Being told was always the barrier.

It’s on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Series X|S and PC, and it runs best on PC with a frame cap you set yourself. Start as a Vagabond, ignore the golden light for as long as you can stand it, and go look at the castle.

Play next: Sekiro if you want FromSoftware with every fat trimmed off.

Spoilers below

The moment the design fully tips its hand is Leyndell.

You spend forty hours riding towards a golden tree that is visible from everywhere in the Lands Between — the single largest sightline in the game, the thing that has been telling you where north is since Limgrave. Then you reach the capital underneath it, fight your way to the base, and discover the tree is sealed behind thorns that no weapon touches. The navigational landmark that organised the entire map turns out to be a locked door.

What follows is the game’s best structural joke and its most divisive stretch. You go down — the Siofra and Deeproot depths, an entire second map hanging under the first — and then Leyndell burns, and you come back up to a version of the capital filled with ash where the geometry you learned is now a trap. The open world resolves into the closed one. Farum Azula is pure late-period FromSoftware corridor design, floating in the sky, and Torrent is useless there, which is the point. The horse gave you freedom for forty hours and then the game takes it back for the ending, because the ending is about arriving rather than choosing.

Malenia is the other tell. Waterfowl Dance is a three-part flurry that covers the arena and kills most builds outright, and there is a widespread view that it’s unfair. It isn’t quite — it’s dodgeable, the timings are published, thousands of people do it hitless — but it’s designed against the grain of everything the open world taught you. Open-world Elden Ring rewards preparation, level-scaling and bringing a bigger hammer. Malenia doesn’t care about your hammer. She’s a Sekiro boss wearing a Souls skin, sitting in an optional tower at the end of a missable region, and she’s there to remind you which studio you’re dealing with.

The endings, meanwhile, are the weakest thing in it. Four cutscenes and a Frenzied Flame variant, gated on questlines most players never touch, delivered as text. After two hundred hours of a world that spoke entirely in geometry, the finale speaks in paragraphs. The game that trusted your eyes for the whole ride ends by reading to you.