I’m not the first person to say that Elden Ring is a good game, and I’m definitely not the first to say that a From Software game has good worldbuilding. While the Souls series is known best for its challenging nature, the more dedicated subsect of freaks and geeks who love these games just a little *too* much (me) love them for the stories they tell. I would categorise this type of appreciation for From Software’s output as abnormal because, as is well documented at this point, their games are insanely obtuse.

Dark Souls  has earned a reputation for being tricky to fully engage with on a narrative level if you don’t know what to look for in terms of clues. Much, if not most, of the world’s backstory is exposited through item descriptions, of all things! Bosses are regularly voiceless and rarely give you any hints as to resolving this impossible jigsaw of a plot, so you’re often reliant on environmental details to give even the slightest framework to even begin dissecting the game’s intricacies. Many people have lauded this approach to storytelling, some even calling it revolutionary for the medium of games. Indeed, it lends a certain unique atmosphere to the game that I find quite compelling. Dark Souls left an impression on me personally because of how in the dark I was on much of the events occurring before or around me. As such, I felt quite lonely as I traversed the many abandoned streets and hallways of Lordran, with bloodthirsty, soulless husks and indescribable abominations as my only company.

However, what I can confidently declare after beating the game and returning to it many times is this: I barely comprehended any of the actual worldbuilding on display here. I was blind to whatever story the game was trying to communicate because it delivers that information in the least intuitive way I can think of. Obviously, the game is not necessarily worse off because of this – I still had a great time with it – it strikes me as a shame that the developers spent all this time working on this tale of a once mighty kingdom, fallen into ruin as its ancient king refuses to let his reign end in peace, only to have most of it fly completely over the average player’s head. I’m aware that there will be some who would disagree with me in seeing this as a flaw, and indeed I felt like I was a little bit crazy for thinking this way in the time since I beat Dark Souls.

That being said, I think the DLC area for that game, Artorias of the Abyss, showed signs of improvement in this regard. Your Chosen Undead is thrust into the past to witness the downfall of the neighbouring kingdom of Oolacile and save the princess who is captured and held within it. The familiar framing of a ‘Save the Princess’ storyline, paired with the limited scope inherent to DLC content, allows From Software to execute the lessons learned from making the base game to improve on its particulars. Naturally, the level design and boss fights are better than ever, but what feels more engaging as well is the storytelling; not in the sense that Artorias of the Abyss is more blatant in its exposition, but rather it allows the player to create insights of their own through what is presented right in front of them, and not simply what two sentences were posthumously attached to whatever pair of tapdancing shoes you find in the corner of a bog somewhere. Instead, you get much more of a sense that the NPCs present in this place are actually attached to their surroundings in some way. You talk to a mushroom lady who gives you your quest, a weird guy in a top hat who seems to have been teleported to this place just like you, a blind giant whittling away at some wood who claims to be friends with the knight Artorias, and a woman with braided hair kneeling over a grave who you can hand Artorias’s soul to upon defeating him.

There might be others – it’s been a while and I don’t quite remember – but these few characters alone feel so much more active in the world than the base game’s characters ever did, bar a few notable exceptions (looking at you Lautrec you asshole). I love Solaire, Siegward, Andre, and the others as much as the next masochist, but they often felt like extensions to the overall problem I have with Dark Souls; their presence feels a little, for lack of a better term, hollow. Almost all of them, with very few exceptions, end up victims to this dying world. They either go insane or are betrayed or worse, and all the while it rarely feels like it was ever within their control. The characters lack agency in a way that feels like a consequence of the world itself refusing them that agency, and ultimately I think that’s the point. Dark Souls is a bitterly depressing game most of the time. It can be an overwhelmingly hopeful and funny one at times as well, but for the most part you are wandering a doomed wasteland with barely a friendly face to find comfort in. Artorias of the Abyss, on the other hand, allows it’s characters that agency, if only a little, and that makes all the difference in creating a more convincing world, and one the player actually feels compelled to help save.

It’s not a bad thing that the base game is this way – Dark Souls 2 achieves something very similar with its approach to NPCs – but why I don’t think this quite works in Dark Souls’s favour is because the game is clearly also deeply enamoured with its worldbuilding as well. This is evident in the decision to allow players a choice at the end of the game: relink the First Flame and continue the Age of Fire again, or walk away, thus plunging the world into an Age of Dark, ending the cycle once and for all. It’s a really interesting dilemma made more intriguing by knowing what caused this world to be as it is now. Unfortunately, as I said prior, Dark Souls doesn’t do the work to communicate that necessary backstory to make the final choice compelling in the first place. You basically have to do external homework to understand why the endings of this game are cool, and that might be someone else’s bag for sure, but I personally find it a little frustrating.

However, simply explaining the story in detail would remove some of the magic from that game, would it not? You would, to a certain extent, lose that incredible sense of lonely aimlessness that makes the feeling of playing Dark Souls so unique, and that shouldn’t be sacrificed either. Art is always subjective, of course, but what makes Dark Souls so timeless is its ability to create a unique experience for each of its players. Everybody has a different story of playing this game, be it build variety, exploration methods, what was difficult and what was easy, and so on. It’s still fun watching people play Dark Souls for the first time because observing the way they choose to navigate the game’s many challenges is fascinating. Everybody has their preferences, and everyone looks at a challenge differently, and as such playing this game can often be a deeply personal experience. In a sense, this is also what makes the hands-off storytelling style of Dark Souls really cool. As a player, you can choose to engage with the narrative as much as you like, and the openendedness of the game’s world design means you’ll inevitably only experience a small part of the full picture. As a result, people often have different ways of interpreting the text, and that exchange of ideas is what makes the Souls community so fun to be involved with (when they’re not being, and I say this with the most derogatory tone possible, Gamers). However, as I’ve said multiple times now, I think the game makes the player work way too hard to find those interesting bits of worldbuilding that would have made an already cool experience even more engaging.

These games have improved in this regard over the decade since the release of the original Dark Souls, but From Software’s storytelling prowess comes out in full force with the release of Elden Ring. I think the aspect of this game’s storytelling I love the most is how organic it feels to experience. It still has those ol’ reliable item descriptions for the subhuman weirdos who like that kind of thing (I am one of these weirdos don’t yell at me) but far more often than not, it’s the characters within the world who deliver the exposition necessary to gain and grasp of the Lands Between and all its disparate factors. I realise that I’m making it sound like Elden Ring revolutionised video games by boldly allowing characters to tell you stuff, a thing no other game has surely ever done before in all of gaming history. Sarcasm aside, what makes Elden Ring use of dialogue as exposition feel so fresh and innovative is the way its delivery is greatly informed by the hands-off approach to worldbuilding of From Software’s past.

What differentiates Dark Souls from other action games of its kind is, among other things, the level of expression afforded to the player. Granted, you aren’t choosing between lines of dialogue – there’s not a single ‘sarcastic’ prompt to be seen here – but in a mechanical sense your character is permitted to be crafted in very unique ways. Your choice of weapon or your preferred set of armour, and then the combination of those two elements, helps in creating an adventure unique to you. If you wish for Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, King of all Godkind, to have his canonical shit pushed in by an ape with a giant wooden club, then that’s entirely within your toolset.

Another way you are able to characterise your Chosen Undead is through the game’s covenant system. Dark Souls includes a number of covenants with whom the player can ally, in exchange for certain benefits, such as access to new spells, or items, and so on. It’s a pretty cool mechanic but what makes it doubly interesting is how each covenant is propelled by a philosophy that is unique to them. For example, the Warrior of Sunlight covenant is all about jolly cooperation, by lending your strength to other players in the form of summoning, while the Darkwraith covenant, reversely, allows you to invade the worlds of other players and hunt them down for souls. There are other covenants which serve for particular narrative purposes, like the Chaos Servant covenant which involves pledging allegiance to a Daughter of Chaos, the Gravelord Servant covenant serves Nito, and the Princess Guard protects Gwynevere. These all provide mechanical benefits and tying their inclusion into the lore is pretty cool, but the potential of such a system does not extend much further. You can unlock some side content and affect the fates of certain NPCs by pursuing these covenants, but as far as the main story goes in Dark Souls, you receive a binary choice between two endings, no matter what actions you take throughout the game. It ultimately can’t help but feel a little meaningless in the grand scheme of the game.

Elden Ring takes this concept of covenants and factions and dials up their significance in some deeply effective ways. Of course, this is not the first From Software game to do this – Dark Souls 3 had a similar system – but never before has pursuing a covenant’s questline felt so inseparable from the main plot. There are a number of endings one can experience in Elden Ring with varying degrees of difference between them, but all of them feel different enough as a consequence of your actions throughout the game that those hours spent engaging with the game’s side content feels significant. An issue I have with Dark Souls’s covenants is their existence in-universe feels almost comically unnecessary. Almost all of them exist in the aftermath of the end of the world, far beyond any reality where they bear any importance to the fate of the world around them. They all serve gods and monsters which are dying, dead, or destined to die soon, most likely by the player’s own hand. It’s like your character is simply LARPing as someone who might have been important once upon a time, and it’s a little depressing. This manages to create the feeling of empty aimlessness that defines the atmosphere of that game, and that’s really cool, but I prefer the more active participation present in Elden Ring.

Elden Ring is similar to Dark Souls in that the world has also fallen to near irreparable ruin. The world and all its institutions have decided crumbled into dust, and all that remains is a scattering of disparate factions clawing hopelessly at any semblance of power, and likely to attack you on sight as a result. Very few people in The Lands Between are still altogether there, and indeed, it feels like all is lost. However, the arrival of the player character and the promise of a new Elden Lord in them opens the door to something new, and that is what Elden Ring is about. Your objective is to become the Elden Lord, but the lord of what? You can seize the throne and claim ownership over the aforementioned dying world, or you can meet the various factions operating within the Lands, and learn about their perspectives. Becoming Elden Lord means deciding for everybody what the future ought to hold, and as such the different endings reflect what you wish the world to be, after upwards of 100 hours exploring its many cracks and crevices. The character expression present in Dark Souls continues here in the form of fashion and fighting styles, but Elden Ring manages to go a step beyond that and entrusts the player with assigning their character an ideology to go with it. The game more or less demands that you engage with its many ideological facets, in order to create the version of The Lands Between that feels right to you; the ultimate fruit of your labours, entirely of your own making.

I don’t wish to dissect the various philosophies of this game here, because doing so would double the length of this already lengthy article. Suffice it to say that the game presents its ideas with a level of nuance and careful consideration that I would typically only expect from full-blown story-driven RPGs, but in the format of a decidedly gameplay-heavy Soulslike, and that’s an incredible achievement in my eyes. I’m certainly not the first person to sing Elden Ring’s praises, but the extent to which it fulfils so many roles whilst being one single game is unbelievable. This game is a remarkable culmination of a decade in formula refinement, and while I would be comfortable with From Software putting this style of game to bed and moving onto other projects, I would love to see how they can continue perfecting this format in the future.