The biggest AAA gaming launch of 2022, Elden Ring is massive title by Japanese developer FromSoftware. Many critics and gamers viewed it as the best game of the year.

Incredibly ambitious in its sweep, steeped in Medieval might and plenty of grandeur, it’s a sprawling adventure with 100s of hours of gameplay.

It’s also absurdly difficult. That’s a contentious talking point, one for later in this piece, as for now we’ll dive on in to celebrate the game that is.

Hoick Up Your Medieval Trousers, For Here is Elden Ring

Believe it or not, Game of Thrones legend George R. R. Martin provided worldbuilding guidance for Elden Ring.

Inspirations for the story include Lord of the Rings (obviously), with dollops of RuneQuest and The Eternal Champion thrown in, too.

The title launched in February 2022 and is available on PC, PS4/5, and Xbox One/Series X/S.

There’s a massive plot to go with this one, which is very dramatic. A voice actor really goes all out for the emotes in the opening FMV, full credit to the guy for effort.

The plot can be summarised as you, the player, heading off out on a quest to repair the Elden Ring and rise to the position of the new Elden Lord.

You get to customise your player pre-game start, then you launch yourself into it… and brace yourself, as this thing is not easy.

FromSoftware is famous for its brutally difficult Dark Souls series, which punishes players aggressively. This is the same for Elden Ring, with a similar gameplay structure based on exploration.

There’s little “handholding” (as many gamers describe the process of a game teaching you the ropes), in the sense you’re dumped into the game and left to get on with it.

That can be seen very well done in the likes of Nintendo’s Tears of the Kingdom (2023), which we think strikes a perfect balance of accessibility and difficulty.

For Elden Ring, you must read/watch some beginner’s guides before starting to get a grasp of what’s ahead, otherwise your frustration with it will go off the charts almost immediately.

It is punishingly difficult and progress is very slow going.

Ideally, you need to level up for the first 20-30 hours whilst exploring Elden Ring’s lush world. This way you can tackle an early boss, who’ll otherwise kill you in one hit.

That does happen a lot, though, as you explore caves and the like. You’ll just be slaughtered—death is inevitable. And constant. And it can get very annoying.

The press hailed Elden Ring as game of the year back in 2022, although the difficulty was criticised by some publications.

Now, some gamers will love the challenge and the dedication required to master the vast open world experience.

We saw one player comment how he spent weeks, and over 30 attempts, on one boss to eventually defeat it. As he described, afterward he felt a tremendous amount of satisfaction and how it was all worthwhile.

And this is the type of thing he’s on about.

Elden Ring is just a question of whether you want to commit yourself to that or not. As the game demands all of your time and you’ll need to thump in much grinding to start making progress.

For us, we gave it a good whirl and enjoyed our time with it. But that was between bouts of frustration and exasperation.

At its worst, the game is very irritating. As you explore, you’ll suddenly get whacked by some monster, die, and then go through the whole lengthy reloading process so you can resume your adventure.

This means that constant need to grind and level up is ever-present.

It’s a process standard for many RPGs and one we did enjoy with Elden Ring. We do think it’s a great game… a lot of the time. But the constant dead ends did frustrate more than enthrall us.

Now, we’re not interested in any of this “git gud” True Gamer stuff doing the rounds (more on that further below). For us, as busy adults with limited spare time, indulging in a vast marathon of endless punishment and frustration was not what we wanted to be doing.

We put a big chunk of time into it and can see Elden Ring’s many brilliant moments, which are unfortunately mixed in with that relentless, punishing, remorseless difficulty setting.

If you do want to indulge in that then Elden Ring is for you! As it’s a sprawling, vast, and impressively atmospheric adventure.

Just one where you really do need to understand what you’re letting yourself in for before you begin. Best of luck to you, Tarnished one!

Elden’s Rings POUNDING Soundtrack

https://youtu.be/WXpwqpWLeiw?si=-HNRUqmpohbE8AFP

The original score for Elden Ring was a collaborative effort between multiple composers. These were Tsukasa Saitoh, Shoi Miyazawa, Tai Tomisawa, Yuka Kitamura, and Yoshimi Kudo.

The score has 67 pieces, with a suitably orchestral sweep to proceedings.

It’s all very forlorn, on the whole, but extremely accomplished. Yet we find it just a bit disappointing.

Our main beef with it is it takes the tried and tested Lord of the Rings route. The result is we feel it’s fairly predictable as scores go—lots of choir chanting and pulse-pounding rushes.

https://youtu.be/rD-4hwrme7I?si=05c462gVxabgMicN

The score has two modes—either forlorn quiet bits or DUN DUN DUN drama moments. Basically because you spend all your time either exploring or being destroyed by enemies.

It suits the game’s purpose, yet a bit of variation would have been welcome. We mean, compare it to Bethesda’s outing from 2011.

That’s Jeremy Soule’s outstanding work on Skyrim, from the same genre of open world games and in a Medieval style setting. Yet his score is phenomenal, varied, and relentless in its brilliance.

We can’t help feel Elden Ring’s music is disappointingly unmemorable.

The Video Game Difficulty Debate

It may seem idiotic for non-gamers (that’s because it is idiotic), but there’s a sect of players who class themselves as “True Gamers”. And a big bunch of them have convinced themselves a True Gamer plays video games on the highest difficulty setting.

This is because, as they believe, it means they’re superior to everyone else. And anyone playing on easy mode isn’t following some, apparently, tactic rule of how to play video games in their purest form.

Now, we give full credit to FromSoftware Inc. for the effort it put into Elden Ring and the immersive world it created.

But we’ve read many reviews online from players who abandoned the title. All of them exasperated by its default, sky-high difficult setting.

We can point to many other developers who’ve offered accessibility for their games. We had many issues with Death Stranding, but it’s incredibly fair with its difficulty range offering choices from very easy to very hard.

We also look at the excellent FPS indie game Dusk, whose developer David Szymanski responded to one True Gamer online this way.

My cousin, who introduced me to Doom and jumpstarted my love of retro FPS, has MS and can only play games with one hand. He was able to complete Dusk on accessible using an MMO mouse.

If your heart is “shattered” by Dusk’s difficulty options that’s your problem pic.twitter.com/Rz3sOR1MnA

— David Szymanski (@DUSKdev) November 9, 2021

The video game difficulty debate is often just about a bunch of elitists with a superiority complex using their video game playing preferences to prop up their egos.

Seeing people boasting about their prowess online, and getting furious with people stating Elden Ring is too difficult, then actively mocking these people, is just a little bit on the childish side.

Elden Ring does undermine itself by not offering better accessibility to different types of players. Not many developers take such a full on approach. All FromSoftware had to do is offer these options at the start of Elden Ring:

• Easy
• Normal
• Hard

The decision to have such a high difficulty setting we can only view as obstinate, not least as it cuts so many people off from playing the game and just enjoying it.

And on a final note, playing a game on a high difficulty setting isn’t a marker of personal brilliance and superiority. However you want to play a game, do whatever suits you best and let everyone bask in the glory of it all.