Eldon Ring keep going. It’s arguably the most impressive thing about it: it’s one of the densest open-world games around, but it manages to deliver that richness without feeling like opening the map would trigger an overwhelming wave of stress-inducing icons. It has been carefully crafted.
What’s most impressive isn’t its size, though. For me, the most incredible elements of Elden Ring are how subtly it reuses content, how successful it is to repeatedly put the same thing in front of you, and how the game never changes despite a lot of copy and paste work old.
Assets need to be reused, it’s just a truth of modern game development. Everything you see in the game – world geometry, enemies, equipment – is expensive. When building an Elden Ring-sized game, there is little choice but to reuse a lot of stuff. The success or failure of a game is often determined by the feeling of reuse. If it lands with the end user in a way that can be forgiven and forgotten – if there is one.
In Elden Ring, similar little elements are scattered around the world. Almost every hut with merchants, NPCs, or loot is one of two or three designs, like The Lands Between has a great big IKEA that offers these ramshackle buildings in flat packs. The more basic optional side dungeons are divided into one of several different archetypes – catacombs, caverns, and mining tunnels. Each of these is roughly the same geographic location, with subtle differences depending on your area—but you never really notice enough to really care.
In a sense, it works in part because it’s often contextualized around the world. All churches in the Elden Ring are identical in design, and the Sacred Tears upgrade is usually found in the same place in each church. But while they’re all the same, the devs have crept into the world editor and tweaked each of the base templates slightly, things like crafting materials and general detritus around the church are slightly different in each area, helping Sell it as not an area copied from elsewhere, but with something embedded in the game world area where it was found.
The previously mentioned sideline dungeons are probably the biggest culprit in the game feeling the same. The catacombs, in particular, were constructed from boxy rooms in a modular fashion. In a dungeon, content reuse becomes more apparent, as the room that normally has three guillotine bench blades as a danger has been repurposed to have just one blade – but the markings on the walls and floor of the other two blades are still there. The level designer just shut down two dangers. That’s fair, really – but I’m noticing this because it’s one of those times I’ve been actively and mentally aware of content reuse.
It’s pretty good to only really notice one instance in a hundred hours, right? Like, of course I noticed something like enemies with subtle changes, or dragons in the game, they all have the same broad movement setup, but each has a different elemental affinity (one might breathe fire, the other kind of frost, another kind of rot, etc.) – but none were so prominent as to take me out of the experience.
As with things like this, it’s hard to articulate or even pinpoint exactly what in the world makes this kind of content reuse work. But if I have to put my finger on something, it’s balance.
Yes, a lot is reused in the world of Elden Ring – but turn the camera a few degrees in any direction from those reused churches or wherever you have and you’ll always see something beautiful, impressive, Completely custom built or piece geometry in the distance. Sure, you can go there. It’s not just a cute skybox in the distance: it’s a real world. It’s all tangible. And a lot of it is so full of bespoke beauty and horror that when you do see something a little too familiar, it’s easier to forgive.
Few games truly embody this feeling – but Elden Ring is one of them. Given that this is FromSoftware’s first open world, this is a remarkable achievement. When I started my third save, this time on the console, I didn’t care that I had seen the world before. It still feels fresh somehow, which is unbelievable.