It can be being hailed as the greatest games ever, however if you don’t yet know your Margit from the Elden, here’s a guide to enable you to get roaming the Lands Between like a pro

Elden Ring features a Metacritic rating of 97%. If you type its name into Twitter you’ll be flooded with praise and anecdotes from players who may have already spent many hours immersed in their arcane world. But what exactly would it be? What makes people obsessed with it? And should you join them – or possibly it too difficult?

So what is Elden Ring?

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

So what can I actually do?

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

There’s so much to learn which you get constantly wanting to discuss it and compare experiences

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

What’s so competent over it?

A number of people have declared that Elden Ring is the thing that The Legend of Zelda: Breath from the Wild can be if it hated you. That’s a very good analysis. It’s a vast game with beautiful and various landscapes, a terrifying menagerie of monsters, with an incredibly deep levelling up system that rewards experimentation and personalisation. Director Hidetaka Miyazaki is a game-design genius who thinks deeply about games and how they function. Almost always there is room for player interpretation, and also the plotting is subordinate to interactivity. There are many circumstances to see in the world that you find yourself constantly planning to discuss it and compare experiences. I never really understood this using the Dark Souls trilogy but I have it now. With FromSoftware titles, you’re not just purchasing a game, you’re joining a residential district – most of the fun from the game is exactly what happens away from it.

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