Elden Ring

What it is

Elden Ring takes FromSoftware's Dark Souls combat and puts it in an open world for the first time, developed with world-building input from novelist George R. R. Martin. There are no quest markers and no objective checklist — the map itself, and what's visible from any given hilltop, is the game's only guidance system.

The Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, released in June 2024, adds an entire second region — the Land of Shadow — built to the same density and scale as the base map, with a fully separate talisman, weapon and boss roster.

Exploration without a checklist

The base game's defining trick is that almost any direction a player walks pays off within a few minutes — a cave, a ruin, an NPC questline fragment — without the game ever flagging it on a map. That design has been widely credited as resetting expectations for what an open world can withhold rather than hand to the player.

Shadow of the Erdtree repeats the trick at a smaller but denser scale, and critics were broadly aligned that it matches or exceeds the base game's exploration density despite covering less physical area.

Still the benchmark for what an open world can withhold, DLC included.

Where the difficulty debate lives

Four years on, Elden Ring's late-game and DLC boss design remains the most consistently debated part of the package. A number of encounters — particularly in Shadow of the Erdtree — were widely reported to lean on fast, hard-to-read attack strings that reward memorization and input-reading more than the earlier game's boss roster did.

FromSoftware has not added a difficulty option, consistent with the rest of its catalog, which keeps this a genre-wide conversation rather than something specific to a patch or setting.