Elden Rings - Hands-off Previews
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With FromSoftware's upcoming open world action-RPG Elden Ring scheduled to go live on January 21, 2022, a number of media outlets recently got a chance to check out some 15 minutes of early Elden Ring gameplay. And as a result, you can now navigate yourselves to their impressions, and a few developer quotes, below:
IGN:
One of my takeaways from watching the open field gameplay was this feeling that you could encounter almost anything while exploring. In one section, the player approached a group of enemies gathered around a campfire, when all of a sudden, a gigantic Dragon swooped down in typical Souls fashion and took them all out in a single blow, which then prompted a massive boss fight. In another section there was a group of passive enemies walking along a trail escorting a giant carriage that could presumably be attacked and robbed of its contents, should you be skilled enough to survive the fight. In a different area, there was another carriage that was guarded, but this time by a large encampment of enemies that the player carefully snuck through without alerting the whole camp, even going as far as using a sleep arrow to silently pacify a guard.
"Building your character we hope will evoke a sense of the good old fashioned RPG genre," Kitao says. "Plus, with Elden ring you can enjoy testing the limits of your unique character in these new wide open spaces, as well as within the tighter, more confined and slower combat scenarios, where you're constantly judging the distance between yourself and the enemy, like you'd find in the likes of Dark Souls." Just like previous titles, it feels like players won't be confined to a set class and can adapt and adjust their character build as they go - an exercise that will be made all the easier with skills, but more on those in a little bit.
Everything we saw in the short video felt very Soulslike with a touch of Bloodborne and Sekiro sprinkles, but also crisp, clean, fluid, and fantastic. I try not to get excited about games until I’ve actually had hands-on with them, but I’m as optimistic as can be for From’s upcoming title and I cannot wait to see how it lands on January 21, 2022.
“We’ve always tried to make our games approachable and have interesting narratives, but the player has always been getting caught up in something preexisting, and been taken along for a ride,” Kitao says. “This time they have more agency, they have more ambition, and an overarching objective within that fantasy. We feel like this will be very different to our previous titles. Instead of just being a sick foreigner who has come to Yharnam, or an undead warrior who finds himself in a bleak landscape, the player has returned to the Lands Between as a ‘tarnished’ in search of the Elden Ring’s power, to uncover its mysteries. It’s a very simple premise but it helps to drive that mainline story.”
