With Elden Ring finally on the horizon, we’ve put together a list of 5 things we’d love to see in FromSoftware and George R.R. Martin’s fantasy epic.
Elden Ring fans finally got the full reveal they’ve been pining over for years during the Summer Game Fest opening showcase at E3 2021. The substantial in-engine trailer gave us a sneak peek at what we can expect from Elden Ring when it launches on January 21, 2022. There were a whole bunch of gameplay features we could glean from the Elden Ring trailer that lined up with initial rumors about the game. These include a huge, explorable open world and horseback riding, as well as huge boss encounters and a return to FromSoftware’s signature style of calculated melee combat. Elden Ring’s already looking great, then, but what more can developer FromSoftware do to truly elevate it above and beyond its previous works, such as the already stellar Dark Souls series, Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice? The following five suggestions from us could definitely accomplish that. Hear us out on this one. We’re not saying Elden Ring should be an easier game than its predecessors. Instead, something more akin to a dynamic difficulty adjustment system could really benefit the open world nature of the game, and would actually draw a similarity to one of FromSoftware’s earlier titles. Demon’s Souls, all the way back in 2009, featured a pseudo dynamic difficulty system baked into the game. Known as world tendency, this controversial system made the game harder the more the player died, and rewarded them for skilled play. If that sounds player hostile, that’s because it kind of was. We’d love to see a similar system in Elden Ring, though perhaps one that isn’t quite so antagonistic. It would be cool to see skilled players rewarded with more challenging enemy spawns and better reward drops as a result. On the other hand, struggling players could be granted a temporary reprieve with lesser spawns at the cost of less substantial rewards. Alternatively, a smartly integrated hard mode option (a bit like Dark Souls 2’s Covenant of Champions) might well satiate players looking to really push Elden Ring’s difficulty to its limits. It’s no secret that the Souls series, in particular, has had issues with balancing its various forms of magic.
