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It is being hailed as among the greatest games of them all, however if you don’t yet know your Margit from a Elden, here’s a help guide get you roaming the Lands Between being a pro

Elden Ring has a Metacritic rating of 97%. If you type its name into Twitter you will end up flooded with praise and anecdotes from players who may have already spent many hours immersed in its arcane world. What exactly would it be? Why are people involved with it? And may you join them – or perhaps it too difficult?

So what is Elden Ring?

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

Exactly what do I really do?

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

There is a lot to find that you just find yourself constantly wanting to discuss it and compare experiences

As in classic tabletop role-playing games including Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer, your character includes a mass of stats for health, strength, intelligence and the like, and will collect and customise weapons and spells to further improve their combat skills. This inventory management element is much more complex than you’d see in, say, an Assassin’s Creed game: intricately defining your character and just what they’re wearing to your own specific type of play is a major obsession for fans of FromSoftware’s games. You’ll should also find out about concepts for example Super Armour, stance breaks, broken pots and critical hits, and also things called Ashes of War, which add special powers to your armaments. There’s a lot.

What’s so competent about this?

A lot of people have asserted Elden Ring is the thing that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will be if it hated you. That’s a great analysis. It is just a vast game with beautiful and diverse landscapes, a terrifying menagerie of monsters, with an incredibly deep levelling up system that rewards experimentation and personalisation. Director Hidetaka Miyazaki is really a game-design genius who thinks deeply about games and exactly how they function. There is always room for player interpretation, as well as the plotting is subordinate to interactivity. There are numerous things to see in the world that you can find yourself constantly planning to talk about it and compare experiences. Irrrve never really understood this together with the Dark Souls trilogy but I get it now. With FromSoftware titles, you’re not just investing in a game, you’re joining a residential area – most of the fun from the game is the thing that happens beyond it.

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