All hail Elden Ring’s ever-growing map
One of Elden Ring’s most polarizing features is its willingness to withhold information. While it’s less arcane than earlier FromSoftware titles like Dark Souls, the game constantly hands you items, quests, and mechanics with very little explanation. But after 130 hours and counting in the Lands Between, I’m in love with how well it sometimes deploys that obscurity. And there’s no better example than Elden Ring’s map, which has transcended a simple open-world convention to become one of my very favorite pieces of the game.
If you’re still in the early areas of Elden Ring, you might want to skip this post because I’m going to talk about a mechanic that relies on mystery. But if you’ve played a bit of the game, you might know what I’m talking about. Elden Ring’s map offers a constant give-and-take of showing players new spaces to explore, then pulling back a curtain to more places that they didn’t even realize could exist. It withholds information only to reveal it in a way that’s delightful, satisfying, and entirely in keeping with the world’s vast scope. It’s not just an interface element — it’s a meta-game in its own right.
Elden Ring’s opening map (arguably the first meaningfully included in a FromSoftware title) features the basic elements you can find in many games. There’s a square with exposed terrain around where the player starts, icons marking fast-travel points and special locations like tombs, and fog in the places you haven’t yet explored. By default, it includes very little detail, but you can find map fragments that overlay it with stylized depictions of forests, buildings, and caverns that you might want to explore.
Most importantly, the map looks large by many games’ standards, but not that large. It’s
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