I didn’t really care for Elden Ring. I’m saying that upfront so you can disregard my opinions on gaming in perpetuity. I haven’t gotten on with a lot of Soulslikes (or actual Souls games), so that’s not really a surprise. I’ll hold my hands up and say part of it is the difficulty and the patience required to enjoy them, but I play other hard or methodical games and don’t feel nearly as much strain.
There’s just a stumbling block. For a lot of people, Elden Ring was the game that got them over it – not so in my case. You’d think then that the recent comments that The Intergalactic Heretic was inspired by Elden Ring would bother me, but instead, it only makes me more excited. In fact, I suspect more and more games will be inspired by Elden Ring from now on, and that’s a very positive thing.
Elden Ring Moved The Needle On Player Freedom
As of September 2024, the last time we got an update, Elden Ring had sold 28.6 million copies. That’s a mammoth amount, more than any individual The Last of Us game, although the series overall has sold 37 million. When a game sells close to 30 million, sweeps Game of the Year awards, and redefines its niche genre while also breaking it out of said niche, people take notice. People who don’t play many video games played Elden Ring, and that means a lot of people are going to say ‘we’re like Elden Ring!’ just to get people to notice.
However, this isn’t just marketing. There are fundamental parts of Elden Ring that feel unique to it, and I expect these will become more prevalent as games look for new ways to innovate. This is what innovation has always meant in any industry, after all – see how someone else has innovated, then copy it.
Elden Ring gives you the freedom to explore off the critical path, letting you approach challenges in whatever order you want, from whatever direction, allowing you to discover ways the game connects to itself in unexpected and unintended ways, while also making the world feel alive without your direct interaction with it.
This sense of freedom and exploration, using its scope instead of gatekeeping it, is what we can expect from games over the next five or six years. You could probably put Breath of the Wild in this category too, the game that offers the clearest inspiration to Elden Ring beyond FromSoftware’s own Dark Souls games, and really you could swap most of the uses of Elden Ring in this article for Breath of the Wild and it would still make sense. Both offer a sense of trust and player freedom that the industry is caught between two minds on.
Some games, most recently Dragon Age: The Veilguard, fear alienating players and thus flatten the lore and consequences of choices to ensure your hand is always held. Others, like ER and BOTW (and you can add Baldur’s Gate 3 in there too) have placed a lot of trust in what the players can do, and thus give them a playground to figure out solutions the developers had never even thought of, but offered as a possibility anyway because the world is so rich. The former games, which take no risks, feel safer. But the evidence shows that games with more trust pay off in hearts, minds, and most crucially, sales.
Naughty Dog Needs The Elden Ring Evolution
Obviously, there’s a little bit of survivorship bias. While you could keep listing games that trust players to engage with them on a deeper level (Disco Elysium is another obvious example), many games ambitiously seek to offer true freedom and then either get cancelled for taking too long or being too expensive, or have their interesting parts condensed into simpler mechanics that test well in focus groups. Risks remain risky even if some games win the jackpot.
Still, there are now enough examples that players enjoy the freedom games like Elden Ring afford them, and I expect more major games will include a version of it. Maybe not as layered, or as thematically rich, or as cohesively connected as Elden Ring, but at least brave enough to try. With The Intergalactic Heretic, that’s a particularly interesting premise.
The Last of Us and Uncharted are both extremely cinematic series. Though they have open spaces (Seattle in TLOU2 being the first that comes to mind), they are linear experiences with clear chapters. The Intergalactic Heretic, channeling Akira, with the diegetic music of the Pet Shop Boys, and casting Hollywood actors like Tati Gabrielle and Kumail Nanjiani, seemed to be doing the same thing, only in space. An injection of Elden Ring’s freedom would make for an interesting change. How does it mesh with Naughty Dog’s signature, well-polished style? How might the much broader setting of outer space interact with this freedom? These are the sorts of questions an Elden Ring inspiration throws your way, and they make The Intergalactic Heretic a much more intriguing prospect.
- Publisher(s)
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Sony Interactive Entertainment