By GARRETT BABB
Staff Writer
With an incredible drought of fresh new video games hitting the market and a long era of nothing but battle-royale knock off Fortnite games dominating the industry for the last few years, many people have been bored out of their minds for a new creative title to come out of the woodworks and show us something we’ve never seen before. But with FromSoft’s new open world RPG game “Elden Ring”, many people believe they’ve found their answer. Fromsoft (a japanese video game development company) has consistently brought in some of the greatest RPG titles in the 2000’s, winning countless awards with games such as “Sekiro:Shadows Die Twice” and “Dark Souls 3” which were revolutionary games with incredible story and depth that was almost impossible to replicate.
But after being relatively dormant after the release of Sekiro, FromSoft had been working on what many consider to be their largest and most ambitious project yet. “Elden Ring”, which took inspiration from Dark Souls and Sekiro alike, took the intense difficulty and combat systems and implemented them into a fresh new open-world environment. Previously to this, all of the “souls-like” games they had produced in the past had been mostly story driven with relatively linear progression structures throughout the games with limited amounts of diversion from where you can explore. But this game is said to be doing the opposite, throwing the player into an open world with nothing but freedom and possibilities for how they will tackle it.
But the new open-world aspect isn’t even the most exciting part, the development of the game was actually quite unique in its own right. All of the lore and story writing was done by the legendary George R.R Martin, who wrote all of the Game of Thrones books and has won many awards for his incredible storytelling and world-building. The way the game was created was by allowing George R.R. Martin wrote the entire story for the game, then built the game around that story and created mechanics and gameplay features that would coincide with it. This only excited players even more for the game’s release as FromSoft was already known for their incredible fantasy-style storytelling, so by teaming up with another legendary fantasy author to create a new game it is almost guaranteed that players will be served an incredible experience with Elden Ring.
So with all the exciting news out of the way I’m sure many of you are left with one question – When can I play? Well the game was scheduled to come out sometime in January of 2022, but it was recently stated that it will be held back for another month with the official release date as of today being February 25th, 2022. Until then we can do nothing but wait until more new information comes out and hope that this game really lives up to its hype on release day.