Elden Ring is the spiritual successor to the original Dark Souls trilogy and takes heavy inspiration from the most recent soulsborne release Dark Soul 3. Elden Ring began development shortly after the last expansion pass of Dark Souls 3 in 2017 and has been in active development since. Due to critiques of the linear level design in the Soul’s series, Elden Ring took the total opposite approach of its predecessor and has gone full open world.

The creator of the Dark Souls trilogy, Hidetaka Miyazaki, decided that he had told all the stories he could in the Dark Souls continuity. Originally he didn’t want to make more than 1 Dark Souls game (which is technically the sequel to the PS3’s exclusive release Demon’s Souls). Miyazaki wasn’t around for the development of Dark Souls 2, at the time he was heading development on the popular PS4/5 exclusive game Bloodborne. He never intended to return to the development of the Soul’s series but after Fromsoft informed him that a 3rd game would be created regardless he once again took the position of lead developer. Dark Souls 2, while selling well, had alienated a lot of fans, most players claimed it hardly even felt like it came from the same series and lacked the fine polish that makes the Souls series feel fun and fair.

Minor controversy arose around the original reveal of Elden Ring, as it repurposed many animations from Dark Souls 3 and even Sekiro Shadows Die Twice, FromSoft’s ancient Japan adventure. Many fans criticized this and accused FromSoft of being lazy and taking shortcuts in development. Some fans were even displeased about how on a technical level Elden Ring didn’t look anywhere as good as the Demon Souls Remake done by BluePoint a year prior. While all valid and equal points, personally, I feel that for the most part the reused assets aren’t an issue and will make Elden Ring even better then it would be without them.

Elden Ring is a new landmark in open world game design, something on par with Nintendo's 2017 release, The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. While most open world games contain a set linear path and story, Elden Ring’s story is as dynamic as its world, with the player being able to traverse the world how they please and even being able to skip major boss fights. While most open world games have an empty, barren open world with the more impressive areas being hidden behind loading screens and story beats, in Elden Ring’s world, the player will be able to go from a sprawling open world to tightly designed dungeons seamlessly from the open world with no load screens.

It is thanks to the reused assets of FromSoft’s older games that Elden Ring can be so advanced in its world design and gameplay. FromSoft doesn’t have a problem with making fully new assets for their new game releases, 2019’s Sekiro did not have a single reused animation in the whole experience which makes sense, Sekiro was a samurai-inspired Japanese game. Having the protagonist fight and move like a European knight would make little sense. The gameplay of Sekiro also was completely different from the other Soul’s games while still being in the same genre as them.

Elden Ring’s gameplay will only benefit from the reused assets of past games. In their network test, players were able to explore the whole first area of the game, featuring brand new experiences made from scratch on top of the reused assets. It is thanks to the past Souls game’s assets that Elden Ring’s world could be as full and dense as it has shown itself to be. In the network test players were taken aback by the amount of content and features of the game. While other open world games have been accused of being nothing but empty time wasters, no part of Elden Ring’s world goes to waste. Around every corner there are deep dungeons with powerful bosses, loot, enemy camps, ruins, castles, and towns. All of these things use a mixture of old and new assets to make the world of the Elden Ring truly alive and bursting with fun and interesting content.

So the reusing of old game assets may make sense, but some players are still upset that the game is not as visually pleasing graphically as games like the Demon Souls Remake or Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2. This is a valid complaint, it is not outlandish for players to expect their new triple A games to be top of the line graphic wise, but for this game the more scaled back fidelity makes sense. Make no mistake, Elden Ring is still a beautiful game, with high detail textures, models, beautiful landscapes, and massive towering castles. But it simply isn’t as impressive as something as revolutionary as Demons Souls’s graphics.

Elden Ring could never be as advanced graphics wise as the Demon Souls Remake or even Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2. Demon Souls was a PS5 exclusive, and also a linear closed in experience which allowed for BluePoint to take advantage of new hardware and make the absolute most of the PS5’s next gen upgrades. Red Dead 2, while also open world like Elden Ring, employs a lot of tricks to make the game be able to run in its vast detailed open world, tricks that Elden Ring does not use. Read Dead breaks up its world using long fields, tall hills and thick trees. This helps break up the loading areas, but in turn also limits the density of the world. Red Dead is a mostly empty world besides a few areas and cities, and the game chugs performance occasionally, even when employing as many tricks as possible to maximize performance. So while the game is pretty, its world ended up being overall limited by its graphics.

Elden Ring is clearly another hit from FromSoftware, the network test put a lot of worries to rest about the overworld being barren and empty, the combat is flashy, and the playerbase have had an overall extremely fun experience with the limited alpha release. Elden Ring is not Dark Souls or even just a whole new beast like Sekiro was, it is a massive leap forwards in the video game industry.