Do you remember when Elden Ring was first announced? It was a beautiful moment during E3 2019, when FromSoftware was riding high on the acclaim of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, and it was a fresh take on its signature hardcore fantasy RPG formula. It was like Dark Souls, but not quite. A whole new world, with a whole new take. The moment before we could dive into this new adventure was truly special, and I’d love to experience that feeling again. Over and over again.
Fast forward to today, and we’re able to play not only Elden Ring, but also its major expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree. If you’re anything like me, you’ve been obsessed with the new lore, experimenting with new weapons and amulets like a mad scientist. Elden Ring was a huge success. There’s no way around it. But rather than go back to The Lands Between and capitalize on its ridiculous popularity, I’d rather FromSoftware get back in the kitchen and cook up something new once again.
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I’ll admit that FromSoftware could go down an exciting path with a hypothetical Elden Ring 2. The narrative team does a great job of depicting the world beyond the shores of Limgrave, and it’s undeniably fascinating to leave the plains entirely and find a whole cosmic arena filled with competing forces. The Invisible Mother, the sealed god of scarlet rot. The stars themselves have ambitions and motivations, and their paths through the sky are journeys toward celestial destinies. Seeing more of these characters—and the fate of The Lands Between, long after Marika’s Golden Order—would be palatable, but ultimately unnecessary.
Not just because it might steal the show from players choosing a new order at the end of Elden Ring, forcing every player to head toward a starting point where a new game must begin, but because a large part of Elden Ring’s appeal comes from a cast of famous characters. Marika’s relatives are mostly dead by the end of the game, and they’re a big part of what makes the game unique. Caelid is great, not just because it has cool dungeons, boss fights, and vistas. It’s cool because it’s permeated with very personal lore. The battle between Radahn and Malenia, their armies continuing to fight in the midst of destruction, and the role that players play in uncovering the truth behind these events.
If you step away from that setting—not just the land itself, but time—you’re stepping away from the essence of what makes Elden Ring so rich and sweet. You need an entirely new cast, an entirely new story of similar scale, and a new backstory of war and betrayal. If you’re going to do that, you might as well pack up and set up camp somewhere entirely new.
With this move, FromSoftware is able to do what it does best. Improve. Evolve. Take inspiration from previous games and take them to weird and interesting places. Look at the Smithscript weapons in Shadow of the Erdtree, and the various unarmed weapons and Spirit Ashes they included. Look back to find more macro examples – blasting the mostly linear Soulslike format into a vast open world that rewards exploration more than most games I can think of. Creating Solaire-level NPC questlines not once, but multiple times. FromSoftware’s games have never been more feast-savvy.
It’s these leaps in quality that make FromSoftware such a big fan of its. It’s able to unexpectedly deliver a Bloodborne or a Sekiro, delivering action-RPGs that continually surprise new players and longtime FromSoftware fans alike. These leaps do happen between sequels, of course. We saw it with Dark Souls II and the climactic (if a bit fan-panning) Dark Souls III. But when these gameplay improvements are wrapped in the golden wrapping paper provided by a brand new IP, it seems to feel more substantial and celebratory.
Maybe this view finds a home in my lore-obsessed heart. I do love booting up a new Souls game and trying to figure it all out, trying to put the pieces together before the big VaatiVidya or some other scroll guru shows up on my YouTube feed with a two-hour video. I love new territory, and I really like FromSoftware’s approach to game design. My taste for both games leaves me eager to brave new adventures in rich new worlds.
