Elden Ring's open world 'took a lot more effort' than previous Souls games
With Elden Ring just a few weeks away, it's entering that time when the fervor of the Souls faithful could perhaps be tinged with just a little bit of anxiety. Because at the same time as the prospect of Dark Souls expanding into an open world setting is tantalizing, isn't it also terrifying? Do those rolling fields conceal dungeons as intricate and distinctive as Dark Souls' Lordran or Dark Souls 3's Lothric? Can this open world still retain that sense of verticality—the kind of glorious contrasts like those between the sky-stabbing spires of Anor Londo and the bowels of Blighttown?
As if sensing that our faith is being tested, Edge Magazine has released an interview with Elden Ring creator Hidetaka Miyazaki. In it, he reveals how FromSoftware tackled its first truly open world game, and the challenges of merging this with the Souls formula.
In the interview, Miyazaki admitted that the reason Elden Ring was previously delayed was at least partly to do with the rigors of open world design. «The level of freedom that we wanted to ultimately achieve in Elden Ring exceeded what we were initially planning for,» he told Edge. «This [complexity] gradually built up, and the time needed to debug and QA in particular took a lot more effort.»
The open world presented pacing challenges that the team wasn't used to. Where Dark Souls was often tight and claustrophobic, pushing us into a constant state of twitchy alertness, the open world of Elden Ring will inevitably offer some quieter moments. «There are a lot of areas in which we’ve had to use trial and error since creating the Dark Souls series, iterating on those mechanics and formulas, expanding on them in this new sense of scale,» said Miyazaki. «A lot of it was related to the
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