It is being hailed as one of the greatest games of all time, but if you don’t yet know your Margit from your Elden, here is a self-help guide to allow you to get roaming the Lands Between just like a pro

Elden Ring features a Metacritic rating of 97%. If you type its name into Twitter you will be flooded with praise and anecdotes from players who may have already spent much time immersed rolling around in its arcane world. What exactly is it? What makes people obsessive about it? And really should you join them – or perhaps it way too hard?

So what exactly is Elden Ring?

Elden Ring could be the latest game from veteran Japanese studio FromSoftware, the creators of the critically acclaimed Souls series, which began with 2009’s Demon’s Souls and continued with the Dark Souls trilogy. It’s an open-world role-playing adventure emerge a ravaged place known as the Lands Between, the place that the destruction of the titular artefact has resulted in wars and chaos. You play enthusiast tasked with restoring the ring and achieving ruler of a new kingdom.

What can I truly do?

If you’ve played a Witcher or Elder Scrolls game, you’ll get it pretty quickly. Essentially, you will be exploring a vast kingdom filled up with castles, caves and spooky dungeons, and fighting a menagerie of monsters from tiny imps to lumbering trolls and fire-breathing dragons. While achieving this, you will also meet non-player characters who provide you with challenging quests and, if you’re lucky, valuable rewards.

There’s so much to discover that you discover youself to be constantly planning to talk about it and compare experiences

As with classic tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer, your character carries a mass of stats for health, strength, intelligence and the like, and can collect and customise weapons and spells to enhance their combat skills. This inventory management element is more complex than you’d see in, say, an Assassin’s Creed game: intricately defining your character and just what they’re wearing for your own specific playing style is a major obsession for fans of FromSoftware’s games. You’ll also have to understand concepts like Super Armour, stance breaks, broken pots and significant hits, as well as things called Ashes of War, which add special powers for your armaments. There’s a lot.

What’s so good about it?

A lot of people have declared that Elden Ring is the thing that The Legend of Zelda: Breath with the Wild would be if it hated you. That’s an excellent analysis. It is a vast game with beautiful and diverse landscapes, a terrifying menagerie of monsters, plus an incredibly deep levelling up system that rewards experimentation and personalisation. Director Hidetaka Miyazaki is often a game-design genius who thinks deeply about games and the way they function. Almost always there is room for player interpretation, and the plotting is subordinate to interactivity. There are plenty of items to see in everyone around you that you are constantly attempting to talk about it and compare experiences. I never really understood this with the Dark Souls trilogy however get it now. With FromSoftware titles, you’re not only investing in a game, you’re joining a residential area – much of the fun from the game is what happens beyond it.

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