George RR Martin is the author of Game of Thrones and supported the From Software team at Elden Ring by contributing mythology, legends and history to the dark fantasy world. In a recent interview he spoke about the collaboration.
An interesting slip of the tongue escaped him when he called Elden Ring a “Successor to Dark Souls”. Because according to game director Hidetaka Miyazaki, that’s only partly true. Elden Ring is somehow a Dark Souls 4 in spirit, but for the Game of Thrones author of all things, a conscious decision was made against a direct sequel.
Elden Ring is supposed to develop Dark Souls further
In our analysis of the gameplay trailer, we can already see that Elden Ring is similar to Dark Souls in many respects. The world is gloomy and crumbling, the fights are ruthless and are characterized by slow, powerful blows or disturbing opponent designs.
Over time, more information was added: Angled dungeons full of shortcuts are returning, as are beacon-style save points, the weapons skills from Dark Souls 3 or conjuration in co-op mode.
Many innovations such as the horse as a mount, a jump button or sneaking as an option cannot hide this.
According to Souls creator Miyazaki, Elden Ring should not only refurbish the familiar, but become the natural evolution of Dark Souls by bringing action, level design and world building together in a larger framework.
This is exactly where George RR Martin comes into play: Because the world is supposed to be so much bigger and deeper than in the previous role-playing games of the studio, you also need a denser and more extensive background cart that holds everything together like glue.
That’s why it’s still not called Dark Souls 4
A direct sequel to Dark Souls actually seems well suited for this. According to an interview with Miyazaki, however, they did not want to restrict the author by placing an existing universe in front of him:
“When George RR Martin joined the project, we wanted to prevent the world of Dark Souls from limiting him. It also allows us more freedom in our own ideas. We are not slavishly tied to the Dark Souls style, on the contrary: we are want to avoid orienting ourselves too much towards Dark Souls while we use our know-how to create a new dark fantasy world.”
The developer has already proven with Bloodborne and Sekiro that From Software can transfer its own strengths to other scenarios or spice them up with new concepts. The latter, for example, did without the endurance bar in order to make the sword duels faster and more dynamic.
In the case of Elden Ring, it will be exciting to see how the Dark Souls formula can be transferred to an open world. We at GameStar Plus provide an analysis of how this can be achieved.