The World Design of Elden Ring

Deep in the forest of Mistwood, there's an unassuming stone building. Inside is an elevator that goes down. And down. And down. And down further still, until it finally hits the bottom, revealing a secret, underground city with an impossible night sky. It's one of those moments that makes you ask... wait, how big is this game? The answer: pretty damn big. FromSoftware has always made epic adventures that cover a lot of ground, but in Elden Ring, the studio has been more ambitious than ever.

The twisty, interconnected worlds of Dark Souls and Bloodborne are microscopic when compared to the monster open world of The Lands Between. This humongous continent will take you from the deepest depths to the highest mountain and the map just seems to get bigger, and bigger. So, what's it like to actually explore this giant fantasy kingdom? And how did going open world change the Soulsborne formula? Well, I'm Mark Brown, and this is the world design of Elden Ring.

Let's start with a recap. Our goal at the beginning of the game is to explore The Lands Between and find our way to the Leyndell Royal Capital. However, the front door stays locked until we‘ve got a handful of great runes - which we can collect by toppling key boss monsters within the surrounding regions. So, the game begins in Limgrave - a lush, woodland region, pockmarked by ruins and underground caves. Up on the hill we'll find Stormveil Castle - the game's first "legacy dungeon" - aka "a bit of Dark Souls stuck into the open world".

And at the end we can beat up Godrick the Grafted to get the first Great Rune. Godrick's throne room backs on to Liurnia of the Lakes, a foggy swamp land that surrounds The Academy of Raya Lucaria: legacy dungeon number two. We'll need a Glintstone Key to get inside, and then we can lay the smackdown on Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon, for another Great Rune. The Academy's rear leads to Bellum Highway, and the Grand Lift of Dectus which is... not operational. We'll need two halves of a medallion to make it work.

One is back in Limgrave, in Fort Haight. And the other is in Limgrave's neighbouring land, Caelid... a nightmare hell hole with a blood red sky, poisonous swamps, and desolate ruins. A bit like England, really. Plus, it's the stomping grounds of another Great Rune holder, General Radahn. With the Dectus Medallion sellotaped back together, we can take the elevator up to the Altus Plateau - an autumnal highland with a golden sky, and, finally, the entrance to Leyndell.

However, before we head inside, we can swing a left and scale up Mt. Gelmir. Here we'll find another legacy dungeon, Volcano Manor, and can wreck another Rune Holder, Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy. We can now head back to the Plateau, enter the biggest legacy dungeon of them all - the staggeringly massive Leyndell Royal Capital, and face down Morgott, The Omen King. So that's the layout of The Lands Between thus far: we've got Limgrave, Caelid, Liurnia of the Lakes, Altus Plateau, and Mt. Gelmir. All of them, bar Caelid, have a legacy dungeon to fight our way through. And all of them bar the Altus Plateau have a great rune holder to beat up.

Now unlike, say, Hyrule in Zelda: Breath of the Wild, or Skyrim in, well, Skyrim, these areas don't all border each other in single giant landmass. Instead, they lead from one to the next, like so. Which means you can't go from Limgrave to Mt. Gelmir without first trekking through Liurnia and the Altus Plateau. This dot-to-dot world layout is just one way that Elden Ring is constructed to help players navigate this world. To stop them from getting lost or overwhelmed.

There's also the way NPCs suggest the way to go. The way the first vista in Liurnia of the Lakes neatly frames Raya Lucaria in the centre of your screen. And the way certain sites of grace have a wispy golden line that points you in the right direction. FromSoftware's creative director Hidetaka Miyazaki says these were put in to help out players who felt stressed by the game's open design, and just wanted to know where to go. But he also says that refusing to follow the guidance is supposed to feel, in of itself, like a choice.

Because, despite Elden Ring having more order and structure than some other open worlds, this is definitely not a linear game.

For one, you can often reach areas in an alternative way, and bypass bosses in the process. So, while Stormveil Castle quite naturally leads on to Liurnia of the Lakes, there's actually a semi-secret path that circumvents the castle, and goes around Godrick. Caelid is on the border of Limgrave, so you can just wander in at any time. Though, you might face some... resistance. More on that in a bit. And you don't actually need the Dectus Medallion to reach the Altus Plateau. There's a hidden path through the ruin-strewn precipice that skips the lift and routes around Rennala. Or, you can get eaten by this one specific baddy in Raya Lucaria, and get burped back out in Volcano Manor.

NPC quests can also open up other avenues. So, typically, Radahn's festival is inaccessible until we've touched at least one site of grace on the Altus Plateau. But doing Ranni's quest can grant us earlier access. Fia's quest lets us enter Leyndell without fighting the Draconic Tree Sentinel roaming around outside. And doing a quest for Varré will grant us access to Mohgwyn Palace, so we can fight a surprise fifth great rune holder, Mohg, Lord of Blood.

All of this means that pretty much everything up to the front door of the Leyndell Royal Capital can be tackled how you see fit, and all of the areas, legacy dungeons, and bosses in these zones can be done in whatever order you like. Or, not at all, as the case may be. Getting into Leyndell actually only requires you to hold two Great Runes, out of a possible five. That means Godrick, Renalla, Radahn, Rykard, and Mohg can each be skipped, as long as you've beaten two of their mates.

And so if we look at the achievements on Steam, we'll see that while 50% of Elden Ring players made it to the Leyndell Capital, only 43% lifted the great rune from Rykard in Volcano Manor, and just 38% defeated Mohg. But, I mean, this is a game with over 150 bosses... and you only need to fight 12 of them to see the credits. You don't even need to fight the chick from all the trailers! Then again, FromSoft has never worried too much about players missing content - they know full well that it just makes it so much better for those who do stumble across this stuff.

And that certainly carries over into exploring the individual areas. Set out on your trusty spectral steed and you might discover underground catacombs, crumbling ruins, mages' towers, dusty mining tunnels, and ailing villages. There are also mini dungeons, like Castle Morne, Caria Manor, and the Shaded Castle. Oh, and there's even a pretty massive underground. That includes Siofra River beneath Limgrave, Ainsel River below Liurnia, and if we kill Radahn, a star will literally fall out of the sky and punch a hole through Limgrave's surface - revealing a secret path to Nokron, Eternal City.

And there's always something exciting to discover around each corner. Whether that's some handy loot, an NPC quest, a surprise boss fight in the field, or something else to give you pause. You won't soon forget the time you saw a titanic stone turtle with a building on its back, or the time you opened this unassuming chest, only to be knocked out and woken up in a mining tunnel in central Caelid. But, unlike most open world games, these points of interest aren't exhaustively catalogued for you. There are no question marks on your map, no towers to climb, no quest logs to follow, no checklists to check off.

Instead, you're left to explore by following your curiosity, and that innate sense of intrigue about what's over the next hill. Like Breath of the Wild - and Miyazaki has listed Zelda as an influence on Elden Ring - you mainly explore by scanning the horizon for interesting landmarks and structures. And so by trusting that the player will want to explore, and being okay with the fact that huge amounts of stuff will be missed in the process, Elden Ring allows for a more organic style of exploration, and a true sense of discovery.

You’re actually investigating a world - not just cleaning up a messy map filled with activities. So, the Soulsborne games have always had a lot of freedom in how you tackle things. They've always had optional bosses and non-compulsory zones, to make your playthrough unique. And they've always offered a sense of mystery and discovery about what's around the next corner. But in going open world, Elden Ring can really capitalise on that experience - on that grand fantasy of going on an epic adventure.

In fact, Miyazaki has said that Elden Ring is pretty close to the dream game he's been trying to make since, well, Demon's Souls - "the open world enriches this ideal experience I'm trying to achieve," he says. But, that being said... I think there are other ways that the open world actually diminishes the Souls experience. Where the size and scope of the world - and the way you consume it - doesn't gel so nicely with what has come before.

So, for starters... most of the Souls games have been more or less linear in how you approach them. At least when compared to an open world like Elden Ring. And so in those games, the player tends to level up their character in line with each new area, providing a pretty consistent level of challenge throughout the game. But an open world is a very different story. Each area in Elden Ring has a predetermined level of difficulty - dictated by the power of the enemies and bosses in each zone. Something you'll know all too well if you wandered, early on, from Limgrave into Caelid and got bodied by basic enemies who hit like a freight train.

And this static set-up can have some negative effects on how you tackle the game. For one, this does ultimately constrain the game's sense of freedom. Like, if we take those five key bosses. And if we rank them by the number of runes they drop - a pretty representative guide to their relative strength - we'll see that while they can indeed be fought in any order, the game certainly does seem to suggest one for you. Luckily, in practice, it's not too egregious. The different enemy levels aren’t so spiky as to make out-of-order progress impossible. And because it's only a soft gate, you can absolutely - say - sneak into these dangerous zones early on, scoop up a few handy items, and then fast travel back to safety.

Plus, having some bits with ridiculously overpowered bosses can actually add to that adventurous feeling. This makes the world feel dangerous, menacing, and inhospitable. And it provides a goal to come back to when you've got more power. I mean, typically in a Souls game, if you can't beat a boss you just have to... try again until you do it. "Git gud scrub", and all that silly billy nonsense. But with Elden Ring you can pop a marker on your map and explore elsewhere. Maybe find a better weapon, level up a few times, improve your armour, power up your health flask, get some more friends to summon, and then come back and show that boss who's boss.

But... you might find that you've actually explored too much, and are now over levelled. You can find yourself heading back to a boss, hoping for a fair fight - only to find that you can now knock him out with little more than a fart and a light shove. This makes the world feel far less menacing, it can spoil the satisfaction of certain boss encounters, and it makes going back to earlier areas kinda boring. Ultimately, Elden Ring puts the onus on the player to, essentially, balance the game themselves. To make sure they're always at the perfect level to keep the game at a satisfying level of challenge. Except, without ever telling you what level the enemies actually are, like you might see in other games.

And, look - other games have found ways to keep enemies challenging, even if you do things out of order or come back to an early zone later on in the game. RPGs like Skyrim and Assassin's Creed use a level scaling system to make certain enemies beef up in tandem with your own personal power growth. Likewise, in Breath of the Wild, after you kill a certain number of enemies, more powerful baddies will be dropped into Hyrule to keep you on your toes.

And in Hollow Knight, the first area - The Forgotten Crossroads - later transforms into The Infected Crossroads, and is now filled with more difficult enemies and new obstacles. And FromSoft itself has experimented with ways to change a game's world in relation to the player's actions and progress - like the cryptic karma system of world tendency in Demon's Souls, the way your level of Insight changes the land of Bloodborne, and how enemies can stop spawning in Dark Souls 2 if you kill them too often, to prohibit grinding.

In this instance, though, Elden Ring has doggedly stuck to the same-old Soulsborne formula - despite completely changing the way you explore its world. Now, sure, you can certainly find ways that From has changed the formula to better fit an open world - like the addition of a map and the introduction of a horse, having a dedicated jump button, and offering infinite stamina when you're not in combat. But when it comes to something as fundamental as enemy balancing, I reckon more could have been done to suit this supersized world layout.

The first time you discover a catacomb in Elden Ring is a really cool experience. Here's an underground area with living gargoyles, fire-breathing totem poles, and ghostly flowers. There's an imposing stone door, locked up tight, and you'll need to find a lever to make it budge. Inside is some terrifying boss monster, and a handy reward. But then you'll find another catacomb. And another. Stormfoot Catacombs, Murkwater Catacombs, Deathtouched Catacombs, Impaler's Catacombs. And so on. And much like the shrines in Breath of the Wild... while each one has its own gimmick or puzzle, they do feel remarkably similar.

This is another example of how Elden Ring suffers as a result of going open world - the sheer amount of reused content. Elsewhere, there are multiple tunnels with miners digging out smithing stones. Loads of ruins, each with a secret basement. Every mage's tower has a memory stone. Every church has a sacred tear. Every Erdtree Avatar has a crystal tear. Plus, iconic, zone-specific enemies start to show up again later on in the game. Those bonkers walking mausoleums reappear. And even the bosses repeat. You might first fight this spooky weirdo, the Godskin Apostle, in the Divine Tower of Caelid. But then he shows up again in the windmill village on Altus Plateau, and again in a cave later in the game, and again as a mandatory boss in a later legacy dungeon.

Now, to be fair, it's not like previous Souls games are completely immune to copy-and-paste content. And Elden Ring has better variety in its loot and enemies than, basically any other game of this scale. But this level of repetition really hurts the game's sense of mystery and discovery - which I praised so highly a minute ago. Because as soon as you start to see the patterns and formulas that make up a world, the artifice is shattered, and the game is revealed. A catacomb is not a mysterious archaeological find but a formulaic chunk of video game. It becomes predictable, familiar, content.

Perhaps FromSoft simply bit off more than it could chew. Because, going back to our recap... well, the game certainly ain't over once we reach the centre of Leyndell. In fact, we’re only about half way through the game at this point. So, with Morgott dead we can take a quick hike through the Forbidden Lands, and then it's up the Grand Lift of Rold to reach the Mountaintops of the Giants. This is... technically another open world zone, like Limgrave or Caelid. But your path is a lot more constrained, and there's a lot less to explore here. If we go by the number of sites of grace, the Mountaintops of the Giants has half as many as Liurnia of the Lakes, simply because there are fewer catacombs, graves, and other interesting landmarks to find.

Okay, so there is one big thing to discover. With another medallion - one half can be found on the Mountaintops, and the other's back in Liurnia - we can ride Rold to another, secret stop: the Consecrated Snowfields. Here we'll find a teleporter to Mohg's palace, and a hidden path to Miquella's Haligtree - another legacy dungeon, and headquarters of Malenia, Blade of Miquella. Have fun with her. So, it's cool that the game still has significant secrets to find in this late game zone. But, beyond this, the game really closes in.

After toppling the Fire Giant, and setting this lady on fire for some reason - sorry, I'm bad at following the stories in these games - we can pop to the last legacy dungeon - Crumbling Farum Azula. At the end of this, we can then thrash Maliketh, The Black Blade, and we're back to Leyndell for a conveyer belt queue of big boss bastards: Sir Gideon Ofnir; Godfrey, First Elden Lord; Radagon of the Golden Order; and the Elden Beast. Phew!

So Elden Ring's extremely freeform first half folds in for a much more linear and constrained second half. There's less to explore, we're given far less freedom in how we tackle things, and we're back to just beating our head against the wall in order to fight these bosses. Now it's only natural for an open game to pinch in tight at some point - but that's either right at the very end, or perhaps a mid-game moment before the game opens back up again. Elden Ring, instead, feels more like a funnel, where half the game is an open world adventure, and the other half is... well, it's just Dark Souls. Which is... you know, still better than most games.

When Miyazaki was asked why Elden Ring has such a massive landmass, he said that he wanted to give players a “sense of adventure”. That giant world was essential to delivering the fantasy of being able to hop on a horse, and freely explore a complete continent of titanic boss monsters, secret dungeons, and towering mountains. And, in many ways - and especially at the beginning of the adventure - Elden Ring absolutely delivers on Miyazaki's goal.

You can see it in the way players get near total freedom in how they roam the Lands Between. In the way only a tiny amount of content is mandatory, so every play-through is unique. And how From eschews typical open world design, to make exploration more organic. But there are other ways that going open world actually hampered the Soulsborne experience. Static enemy levels don't work so well when you give the player complete freedom to explore - and From did nothing to address this.

And that oversized ambition forced From to repeat and reuse content - which makes every subsequent discovery feel less special. And it may be the reason why the end game ends up feeling rather rushed and restrictive. Thanks very much for watching. If you're still jonesing for Souls-like stuff, then check out this video for a look at the world design of Lordran: the twisty world of Dark Souls 1. Until next time, see ya.