Elden Ring Is Dark Souls, Sekiro, & Bloodborne All At Once

The highly anticipated release of Elden Ring draws steadily closer, and the wait has been eased by an extended sampling of its gameplay. Elden Ring has been promoted as essentially a more expansive version of Dark Souls, and while that remains true, the gameplay preview shows that the game is a culmination of all its predecessors. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice have all seemingly had a fair amount of influence on Elden Ring‘s design.

Elden Ring was first announced over two years ago with a reveal trailer at E3 2019. An extended period of promotional silence followed for over a year, with only tidbits of information pointing to Elden Ring essentially being Dark Souls in an open world setting. Aesthetically, Elden Ring‘s reveal trailer matched the description, but developer FromSoftware has a history experimenting with its own signature action-RPG combat, so more in depth comparisons would have to wait.

Now a few months out from the expected release in February, the new Elden Ring gameplay preview has solidified the Dark Souls comparisons, though FromSoftware’s other notable works – Bloodborne and Sekiro – have clearly had an influence on development. The mystique around Elden Ring during its protracted radio silence following announcement certainly contributed to the excitement, but there’s a feeling that Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro have built up to this, with Elden Ring as something of a showcase for what FromSoftware has learned in development over the last decade.

Dark Souls’ Influence On Elden Ring

The most immediately obvious influence that Dark Souls has on Elden Ring is still the game’s general aesthetic. It could be said that Elden Ring is just the latest product to use FromSoftware’s brand of dark fantasy that began with Demon’s Souls, but the wide reaching and influential success of the Dark Souls series gave the developers three games to hone that visual style. The playable area in Elden Ring already appears to be much larger than that in any of the Dark Souls games, but clips of the Tarnished overlooking vistas in the Lands Between brings to mind the first Dark Souls – of looking up from the groves of Darkroot Garden and being able to see where the Taurus Demon was fought in the Undead Burg. The architecture has the same monstrous, medieval look, with the towering walls of Stormveil Castle looming like those of Lothric Castle is Dark Souls 3.

Aside from its aesthetic influences, Elden Ring also looks to inherit the equip-able item variety of Dark Souls. Bloodborne utilizes a similar method of character building, but Dark Souls has far more variety in weaponry and armor. Elden Ring looks to adopt the wide range of swords, axes, spears, bows, plate mails, chain mails, robes, leather jerkins, bracers, and boots, magic wands and staves, shields, helmets, and hoods that have given rise to an exceptional number of character builds in Dark Souls. There appears to be a greater emphasis than ever on player agency, and Elden Ring‘s array of weapons and clothes definitely contribute to the idea of it being Dark Souls with an open world.

Bloodborne’s Influence On Elden Ring

Elden Ring may have inherited the medieval items from Dark Souls, but the combat itself looks similar to Bloodborne‘s. Bloodborne is matched (or potentially even surpassed) in the pace of its combat by Sekiro, but the latter’s posture and parry system put it in a league of its own. Dark Souls 3 has similarly quick combat as well, but Elden Ring seems to have a dynamism in its fighting akin to Bloodborne‘s transformable weapons and dodging. This is noticeable in the gameplay preview’s fight against Godrick the Golden, demigod of Stormveil Castle. Reddit user WeebMaster09 isolated a particular, diagonal dodge maneuver reminiscent of Bloodborne‘s side-steps. The gameplay preview also shows the player swapping between weapons frequently in the middle of battle. It’s not quite the same as Bloodborne‘s trick weapons, but the Elden Ring preview narrator mentions that “a variety of unique weapon attacks can also be interchanged between weapons.”

The dominant aesthetic, especially in regards to Elden Ring‘s world, comes from Dark Souls, but some of the enemy design embraces Bloodborne‘s body horror. Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 have all sorts of strange beasts, but Bloodborne truly began FromSoftware’s inclusion of grotesque and monstrous enemies and bosses. Elden Ring‘s Godrick the Golden, with numerous limbs grafted onto his body, brings to mind Bloodborne‘s The One Reborn, an absolutely horrifying amalgamation of corpses. The storyline of the Lands Between’s demigods becoming warped by the power of the fragmented Elden Ring parallels the various methods used by the denizens of Yharnam to ascend to godhood.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice’s Influence On Elden Ring

When it comes to the Soulsborne sub-genre, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a bit of an outlier. Without the RPG mechanics of its predecessors, Sekiro is an action game through and through. Elden Ring looks to move back toward the action-RPG territory of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, but it’s inherited traversal mechanics from Sekiro. Jumping in Dark Souls and Bloodborne is rather clunky, and Elden Ring appears to have inherited the single-input jump mechanic of Sekiro. Stealth will also be a featured in Elden Ring, something pioneered in the FromSoftware catalogue by Sekiro. Instead of facing a whole mob of enemies or kiting them one by one, Elden Ring will let players whittle down opposing forces much like Sekiro did.

Elden Ring also seems to have taken cues from Sekiro‘s level design, not shying away from verticality. Elden Ring‘s jumping will essentially give players platforming opportunities, and let them explore more freely than in Dark Souls or Bloodborne, as evidenced by a clip in the gameplay preview of the player jumping to a small ledge on a tower in Stormveil Castle. Just like in Sekiro, Elden Ring appears to have little to no fall damage, so the high cliffs throughout the Lands Between shouldn’t pose much of a problem. Combining stealth with the world’s verticality will likely have a significant impact on how players approach the game’s multi-layered dungeons. Elden Ring has its own identity, as all FromSoftware games do, but the individual influences of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro are evident in the grand picture.

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