In the purest possible way, I have mixed feelings about Elden Ring. It’s one of the most impressive games I’ve ever played, and let the records show that it was quite handily my favourite game of 2022. On the other hand, it frankly became a bit of a pain in the ass in its latter stages, when it went on for one or two massive world-chunks too long. In a world as sensorially and mechanically challenging as this, I was simply exhausted by the end, and began to wonder whether the 50-or-so-hour length of the Dark Souls games was more appropriate for what a Souls experience should be, rather than the 130-odd hours it took me to beat Elden Ring.
Conveniently, Elden Ring’s DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, is more likely to resemble the length of a Dark Souls game than it is the Elden Ring base game, which gets me thinking that there are other traditional ‘Soulsy’ traits that the DLC could draw upon. There are, after all, way more differences between Elden Ring and Dark Souls than just length, and even if you think that the newer game has by most measures improved upon the venerable Souls trilogy, there are still elements from the latter that could really shake things up in an Elden Ring DLC.
For a start, Elden Ring’s open world design made the game feel differently paced to Dark Souls. For example, there are several key bosses in Elden Ring who most players will almost certainly bounce off of the first time you confront them (Margit, your first Godskin Apostle fight, to name a couple). The idea behind this is to encourage you to embrace the freedom of the world, head off in whatever direction you fancy, then come back when you’re stronger. That was rarely an option in Dark Souls; while you could theoretically sequence-break it a bit, you’d have to push through some serious difficulty spikes to do so.
And yes, the immense freedom of Elden Ring’s world is a big part of its charm, but there’s something to be said for Dark Souls, which is meticulously laid out in such a way that when you get to a given boss, you’re actually meant to fight them at that point in the game. Sure, it may take you a bunch of attempts, but you rarely found yourself banging your head against a battle that the game doesn’t really want you to win at that point (though of course, with enough skill or attrition, you can). Each level, each boss, each encounter was tight and deliberate, slowly pushing you through its labyrinthine tangle of keeps, decrepit townships, and dungeons.
This approach to bosses is intertwined with many other distinctively ‘Dark Souls’ traits that are less pronounced or entirely absent in Elden Ring. The most notable of these is the non-teleporting Bonfire (or Site of Grace, in Elden Ring Speak), which meant that you couldn’t just bounce off to different parts of the game world when you were struggling with a particular boss or area. It made your expeditions from Firelink Shrine feel much more perilous and fraught with danger. Elden Ring does that a little bit with some of its dungeons, but those dungeons are so short that you barely start feeling that sense of being ‘far from home’ before it’s all over.
If the Elden Ring DLC were to take away fast travel (at least in its Legacy Dungeons), then it’d recover a bit of that ‘Dark Souls’ feeling. Playing Dark Souls today is a little rough for various mechanical reasons that I’ve written about before, but design-wise it’s still a magnificent beast, with its tight, interweaving world layout and pacing arguably unrivalled by any other FromSoft game. While I’d love to see a remake of Dark Souls one day, I think I’d be equally satisfied by seeing some of that densely designed Souls magic in an Elden Ring DLC.
FromSoft have proved they can do ‘open-world Souls’ now, and there are no doubt some folks who see going back to the ‘old way’ a bit like a backwards step, but there are still elements in Dark Souls that make for a viable alternative to Elden Ring’s sprawl. Instead of the DLC just offering an inevitably smaller open world than its base game, with a few Legacy Dungeons sprinkled in, why not make the Legacy Dungeons the focus, and having them leading into other Dungeons, weaving back in on each other, and daring to really make the player feel ‘lost’ in the world again?
A bit of me wonders if Elden Ring is a little too mainstream for such bold design choices these days (even Dark Souls’ own sequels added the convenience of fast travel for players). But hey, DLC is a great time for experimentation, and I for one would love to see all the flash and mechanical smoothness of Elden Ring merge with that old-school Souls fast-travel-free linearity.