With Shadow of the Erdtree, Elden Ring is a classic and I hope they never make another one

Do you remember when Elden Ring was first announced? That beautiful moment back during E3 2019, when FromSoftware — at that point riding the high of Dark Souls’ and Bloodborne’s acclaim — presented a fresh spin on its signature hardcore fantasy RPG formula. It was like Dark Souls, but not quite. A new world, with a new spin. That moment before we were able to jump into this new adventure was truly special, and it’s a feeling I’d quite like to experience again. And again, and again.

Fast forward to today and not only have we been able to play Elden Ring, but its major expansion in Shadow of the Erdtree. If you’re like me, you’ve gorged yourself on the new lore, and experimented like a mad scientist with new weapons and talismans. Elden Ring is a hit. There’s no way around it. But rather than return back to The Lands Between and capitalize on its absurd popularity, I’d rather FromSoftware go back to the kitchen and cook up something new once again.

I will conceed that there are exciting avenues that FromSoftware could walk down with a hypothetical Elden Ring 2. The narrative team has done a great job of teasing the world beyond the shores of Limgrave, and if one leaves the plain entirely, they’ll find a whole cosmic stage production of competing forces that are undoubtedly intriguing. The Formless Mother, the sealed god of Scarlet Rot. The very stars themselves have ambition and motives, their path through the sky being a march towards celestial fate. Seeing more of these figures, — as well as the destiny of The Lands Between long after Marika’s Golden Order — is tantalizing, but ultimately unnecessary.

Not solely because it may steal some of the shine from the player’s choice of new order during Elden Ring’s ending, forcing each towards a single starting point from which a new game must start, but also because so much of Elden Ring’s appeal stems from a tight pack of notable characters. Marika’s kin, mostly dead by the conclusion of the game, are such a significant part of what makes the game special. Caelid is dope, and not only due to its rad dungeons, boss fights, and vistas. It’s cool because it’s seeped in a very personal lore. The battle between Radahn and Malenia, their forces fighting on amidst the devastation, and the player’s role in uncovering the truth behind such events.

If you depart from this setting — not just the land itself but the time — you separate from the juice that makes Elden Ring so rich and sweet. You’d need a whole new cast, a fresh narrative on a similar scale, new background tales of war and betrayal. And if you’re going so far as to do that, you may as well pack up camp and set up somewhere totally new.

And with that move, FromSoftware is able to do something it’s excellent at. Improving, evolving. Taking ideas from previous games and taking them to weird and interesting places. Look at the Smithscript weapons in Shadow of the Erdtree and the various hand-to-hand weapons and Spirit Ashes they’ve included. Take a step back in the past for more macro examples – blowing up the mostly linear Soulslike format into an vast open world that rewards exploration better than most games I can think of. Creating Solaire-level NPC questlines not just once, but multiple times. Never has a FromSoftware game been such a feast.

It’s these jumps in quality that keep FromSoftware in such high regard in my books. The ability to pull a Bloodborne or Sekiro out of its hat, to bring out action RPGs that keep surprising both new players and long-time FromSoftware fans. Sure, these leaps do take place between sequels. We saw it with Dark Souls 2, and the climactic (if a bit fan-serviceable) Dark Souls 3. But, these gameplay improvements seem to feel more substantive, more celabratory, when engulfed in the golden wrapping paper a totally new IP provides.

Perhaps this opinion found its home in my lore-strucken heart. I do love booting up a new Souls game and trying to figure everything out, trying to put the pieces together before big VaatiVidya or some other master of the scrolls descends down onto my YouTube homepage with a two-hour video. I like new frontiers, and I’m quite a big fan of FromSoftware’s approach to game design. It’s my taste for these two that has me hungry for courageous new adventures in rich new worlds.