Elden Ring Has Been Designed to Reduce Player Stress - Without Reducing Enemy Difficulty
A new gameplay overview of Elden Ring has revealed FromSoftware's focus on making sure players aren't overly stressed while playing the game – but seemingly without reducing the difficulty you'd expect from Souls game enemies.
Speaking during Taipei Game Show, producer Yasuhiro Kitao repeatedly explained how elements of the game had been tooled to reduce player stress – in effect making the game difficult in the right places, but gentler in how you reach them.
"With the game's world being so large, that can produce real depth and breadth of enjoyment, but it can also lead to unnecessary stress for some players," explained Kitao. "The dev team has been very careful to avoid that where possible."
Interviewer Misuzu Araki replied: "With battle already being fairly difficult, I can understand wanting to reduce stress elsewhere." Kitao agreed: "Yes, especially as the enemies are so strong."
With that in mind, it seems Elden Ring's enemies and bosses will be as tough as you'd hope/fear from a new game from the Dark Souls developer, but Kitao made clear that a number of changes have been made to how you get to them.
Elden Ring's new ability to summon and ride a horse, for example has been touted as a major part of that focus. "Horses provide a stress-free method of traveling across the long distances the player needs to travel in the game," explained Kitao. He continued that your horse's ability to travel up air currents was also a part of that thinking: "That system was introduced as a means of quickly and enjoyably moving vertically upward in order to explore those higher areas."
On the theme of getting around Elden Ring's huge map, Kitao also explained that fast travel to locations you've already visited was introduced as a way of
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