Why Elden Ring is Important
by Knight Falcon
2019. A time when hope didn’t feel a fool’s sentiment despite the surreal vacuum of governance in the United States expanding like a fog across the country.1 There was still something beyond, a coin flip approaching at year’s end that would herald a further descent into madness, or some comforting return to “normalcy”. There were some bright spots though – our long national nightmare was over as HBO’s Game of Thrones finally concluded, World of Warcraft returned to us in the form of WoW Classic (something close to pure sullied by…everything at Activision Blizzard), Sekiro was released and oh yea:
Elden Ring was announced at that year’s E3.
The year closed with neither normalcy nor the anticipated chaos that was sold as its mutual counterpart. In few words, sound governance did not return to the United States, despite a more subdued tone from the country’s new chief. Instead, new uncertainty erupted in the now rote-to-speak-of-but-still-ongoing Covid19 pandemic. Whatever minimal promise 2019 had held was gone. Worse yet, From Software and Bandai Namco had gone dark, abandoning us to the abyss as the country continued to sag under the weight of conspiracy, and all the country’s faltering structures, both literally and figuratively were laid bare. There seemed to only be good news for people who love bad news – the bleak state of our public affairs amplifying all the personal struggles and emerging psychosis of our population as we grappled divisively on how to weather the pandemic. Alongside the surge of illness, the worst of us prospered, many fell into the widening cracks of healthcare and economic mobility, and that worsening wealth inequality drove and continues to drive speculative bubbles of cryptocurrencies and NFTs (and I know – if you own crypto, NFTs, or are a proponent of either, every mainstream news outlet gets the fine grain details of these things wrong, right? In any case, the sentiment is surely not misplaced given the prevalence of FOMO as an investing incentive and pitfall).
If this feels like I’ve lost the plot of “Why Elden Ring is Important” I can’t disagree. But, we live in a world where nothing is guaranteed – where institutions we once relied on (perhaps, if not certainly, naively) to give us the foundation to build families, to trust our fellow citizens, to regulate industry now seem to serve no purpose at all when they are not actively antagonizing us through their inaction. And the gaming world is no haven from these crumbling structures and inexcusable abuses of power from our most powerful, be it rampant abuse of staff through unfair labor practices2, sexual harassment, or the threat of aforementioned NFTs leeching into the already unscrupulous and downright unenjoyable microtransaction environment that has now become standard in gaming (less egregious from non-AAA developers and publishers). Let’s not even mention the terms cryptogaming and play to earn.
This disheartening environment sprawls and amasses momentum in the shadow of Elden Ring’s release, a beacon against the cascading undercurrent of depressing and demoralizing workings in the gaming industry despite a perhaps more exciting slate of releases starting in 2022 than in recent memory. And for the record, I’m a fanboy – I hardly care about most other games – but Elden Ring, by all accounts is From Software’s best game yet, and that is important.
Since releasing Demon’s Souls for the PS3 in 2009, From Software has not disappointed. Purists will decry the absence of mastermind and company president Hidetaka Miyazaki on Dark Souls 2, the sometimes overindulgent callbacks in Dark Souls 3, and all the technical shortcomings that seem to crop up in each release such as Bloodborne’s notorious 30 FPS (except maybe, in my humble opinion, 2019’s perfect and beautiful Sekiro, though even that was met with some mild dissent in its dismissal of equipment and customization ingrained in the well-worn soulsborne formula).
It’s rare, maybe even unheard of for a developer to run such a streak of releases that are just…good and exactly what they say they are. In this day and age, we often don’t get what we pay for. Even though we have not reached the promised date of February 25, 2022, there’s little reason to believe Elden Ring will not be what we want it to be. In the nearly three years since its official announcement, hype has built to levels of unreasonableness that perhaps fairly makes the game and its diehard fans the target of derision and disdain. In that light, maybe the game won’t live up to everyone’s expectations, but it will be hard to imagine anyone looking forward to it won’t enjoy it. After all, how could the creative lovechild of literary powerhouse George R.R. Martin and obsessive swampcrafter Hidetaka Miayazaki be bad?
The wait for news, images, anything about the game after its 2019 trailer was agonizing, made worse by the distressingly intertwined political, health, and economic failings of the country. It was enough to put a man in jail.
As much as this silence induced despair, it also provided a light – far off in the future, beyond a horizon and behind a mountain, across a sea and on another planet, but a light nonetheless. Elden Ring, amid the storm of shit making every other prospect seem bleak without end, provided something, without caveat, to look forward to.
I’ve made it this far without writing a word about the elephant in the room – that souls games are hard. This is true, and the reasons for their difficulty are well-documented, and best proven true by firsthand experience (if you know, you know). There is not much in gaming that rivals the swell and triumph of overcoming an obstacle in a soulsborne game (primarily those crafted by the progenitors of the genre themselves). Even better is the feeling of comfort in such a hostile world – to git gud. It’s not worth going on about this – it’s divisive, and I can understand how it might seem exclusionary, but at its core, it is a show of deference, respect, and an uplifting hand from the sympathetic great ones at From Software to their players. While the challenge is a vital organ to the soulsborne anatomy, it is only one aspect which comprises their greater whole. From Software is not afraid to get weird – to make their games with a story that is there but not there, to make a VR game set3 in a school in a land of fairies that must symbolize some greater role in their library, but seemingly doesn’t – the challenge of their soulsbornes is but one component to their mastery. Their unflinching commitment to this vision is what makes their games stand apart, even stacked up against other works worthy of praise, such as the recently released Horizon Forbidden West, 2018’s God of War 4, or The Last of Us series.
These titles – certainly not an exhaustive list – are laudable examples of the rising standards of storytelling and gameplay, but in many ways, from my vantage, have yet to distinguish gaming from reading a book or watching a movie outside of the inherent satisfaction and joy gamers get from holding a controller and making virtual things happen. I’m sure this statement will draw ire. These are rightfully beloved games4, and I don’t make the claim as a pejorative. From Software’s soulsborne games take an approach to their narrative crafting that is simply not something easily envisioned as another form of media.5 Critics deride this approach to narrative crafting as minimalist (not necessarily bad, to be fair), lazy or outright not good. This overlooks how innovative and uniquely suited to gaming the style of drip-fed, atmospheric storytelling truly is.
2015’s standalone Bloodborne is perhaps the high water mark in this regard, hiding a relatively tight story of interpersonal dramas, institutional corruption, and humanity’s place6 in the world beneath a Gothic Victorian aesthetic and labyrinthine distortion of something as straightforward as killing werewolves and alien gods. The beauty of Bloodborne is that you don’t need to understand what’s happening. Your character is you, without much more of an understanding of the world they’re in than you possess. No one is there to explain things to you – and if they do, it is often conflicted by another character’s explanation of the world. The games’ worlds don’t have to be understood – they just have to be survived.7
It is a reach to say From Software has looked at the state of the affairs since their meteoric rise in the gaming world and decided their works are playing a role in helping people through it (“YOU DIED”…but you have also returned to life, wiser and able to persevere in a world that doesn’t want you there). After all, they are not even an American company, and many (but not all) of the things I have discussed here are distinctly American sufferings. But as any creator is, I’m sure they are aware their unique approach to gamesmaking help people in ways more than mere perfunctory entertainment and content consumption.
Things don’t seem to be getting better. Covid19 is waning but not waning, everything is more expensive and getting more expensive, many Americans are cost-burdened by housing in a time of rising vulnerability, and yet another 21st century military conflict is being bandied about. Not to mention whatever personal strife each of us endures in the motion of our lives through this mire.
But it’s not all bad. Elden Ring is coming out this week, and it’ll occupy dozens, hundreds, thousands of hours of our lives, providing torment and triumph.
And all it costs is one less thing to look forward to.
1 And seeping across borders.
2 I lament the plausible notion that From Software crunched ahead of Elden Ring’s release despite its delays.
3 2018’s Deracine.
4 Except for those of us who have never seen a woman’s face up close
5 Except for maybe Sekiro, which shed many other trappings of its soulsbornes cousins, including the adoption of a more straightforward method of telling its story.
6 To be sure, Redgrave’s “Paleblood Hunt” does not provide a definitive interpretation of Bloodborne’s confusing and disjointed events, but it does connect details intuitively and form a clearer timeline and narrative than provided at first blush in the game.
7 Not to get too meta, but unfurling the games’ stories provide a satisfaction not unlike beating a boss or clearing an area. And marveling at the obscure mythos just beyond your understanding can be just as tingly a feeling.