How Elden Ring Runes along with other contemporary game titles take their game mechanics and justify their presence within the setting from the story itself.
At first glance, FromSoftware's newest release, Elden Ring, appears to embrace a gameplay design built on unrealistic fun, with fantastical features for example magic and monsters, resurrection, and gaming staples for example health bars or menus. A closer examination of Elden Ring's design, however, reveals many immersive features which make the game more enjoyable with realism - certainly not realism in terms of the laws of physics, but realistic consequences for several player actions and in-universe reasons for several game mechanics to existing.
There's an impact between realistic and immersive game titles, although the two categories can overlap. Classic early 2000s games like Half-Life 2 broke new ground with game engines that simulated Newtonian physics, although FPS in the era, like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, tried eliminating health bars in favor of the screen going red and bloodshot when player avatars were near death. These sorts of gameplay features, however, don't always succeed at immersing players within the game's world or allowing them to suspend their disbelief. Enter game titles like Elden Ring, a dark fantasy RPG with fantastical details, but consistent, solid world-building that grabs a player's interest.
Elden Ring, Sifu, & Hades Build Immersion With Justification For Respawning
Elden Ring's core gameplay loop of dying, reviving, and overcoming was initially produced in Demon's Souls, a 2009 action role-playing game helmed by creative director Hidetaka Miyazaki, then refined in FromSoftware's later, similar games, for example, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. The core narrative conceit of every Soulsborne game would be that the player characters, in-universe, cannot permanently die because of not being fully alive. The Slayer of Demons in Demon's Souls is really a lost soul certain to a space known as the Nexus. The Chosen Undead of Dark Souls is basically a zombie, as the slightly different Grace in Elden Ring revives a Tarnished once they remain a worthy candidate for that title of Elden Lord.
Games within the rogue-like genre have a similar method to Soulslike RPGs by providing in-game explanations for why characters revive while introducing new mechanics to make death feel real and letting players "fail forward." In the hack-and-slash rogue-like Hades, for example, death doesn't stick for that demigod Zagreus since they are already within the Greek Underworld; death in Hades forces players to begin their run once again, but additionally gives them the opportunity to level up and talk to colorful NPCs. The fighting game Sifu, in which the revenge-seeking martial artist main character is revived with a magical talisman, gives players an opportunity to upgrade skills after each death but ages the protagonist by 12 months after every defeat.
This narrative justification for why their characters don't stay dead, along with the lack of manual save features, makes Elden Ring along with other Soulsborne games stick out in an industry filled with games with quick-save functions and archived game states players can load to undo hasty decisions. Additionally, whenever a player dies in Elden Ring and respawns at their last checkpoint, all non-boss enemies within the area they explored return, and also the experience points they gathered should be retrieved where they fell in battle (or literally fell off a cliff). This makes death and defeat inside a playthrough of Elden Ring feel real and meaningful to players, whilst making growth and victory all of the sweeter.
Elden Ring & Old-School RPGs Convey Realism Through Tough-But-Fair Challenges
Besides creating permanent consequences for player character death or defeat (and semi-permanently killing friendly NPCs the ball player attacks in haste or accidentally), Elden Ring also creates immersion through its infamously challenging and punishing combat. The cinematic bosses of Elden Ring and it is Soulsborne predecessors will tear a Tarnished to bits if your player rushes in unprepared. Weak mob-style enemies won't attack individually, but happily gang on players and stun-lock these phone's death, while deficiencies in difficulty scaling mechanics as with Skyrim means players can stumble across enemies and bosses far beyond their current level.
None of those in-game obstacles make Elden Ring impossible to conquer; they are doing, however, penalize players who don't observe enemy attack patterns, focus on their surroundings, or take time to master key survival skills. This tough-but-fair method of game difficulty is comparable in many ways to the core design principles of Old School Revival Tabletop RPGs. This aesthetic of the roleplaying game design, which homages the guidelines and dungeon crawls of original edition Dungeons & Dragons, also eschews notions of gameplay balance in support of encouraging players to beat monsters and traps with cleverness and good sense.
Elden Ring & The Lord Of The Rings Build Immersion With Consistent World-Building
In his essay On Fairy Stories, the musings which formed the foundation of his fantasy genre-transforming The Lord Of The Rings franchise, J.R.R. Tolkien discusses how when story-makers craft a narrative, they invite readers to dwell inside a "secondary world" using their own laws and truths. If the laws and truths of the secondary world, fantasy or else, are consistent and well-described, readers and audiences won't have trouble believing in the story and it is characters. If this world-building is contradictory or liable to change with respect to the whims of their creator, though, the reader's feeling of belief is broken. In Tolkien's own words, "The spell is broken; the special moment, in other words, art, has failed."
For understandable reasons, the creative minds behind Elden Ring took many steps to make sure their dark fantasy RPG would not be seen as a rip-off of The Lord Of The Rings (almost as much as Tolkien took pains to differentiate his trilogy from Wagner's Ring Cycle). Still, thanks to the backstory bible of George R.R. Martin and also the imaginations of the FromSoftware design team, the open-world environment of Elden Ring is drenched inside a rich, internally consistent history that players can immerse themselves along with the same scholarly enthusiasm Tolkien fans do for LOTR.
Additionally, cheap elden ring runes rewards lore-hunting players by tying the sport's backstory to particular game mechanics - for example, mysterious Outer Gods such as the Formless Mother or Dark Moon are associated with damaging and useful status effects for example Bloodloss or Frostbite. By presenting a regular game world, one that is tied closely to the sport mechanics, Elden Ring achieves that immersion unmatched by many other contemporary game titles.
