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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/RemnantEvil on 2024-01-31 08:28:23.
Elden Ring is a 2022 action role-playing game by FromSoftware, famous for their “Soulsborne” series of games that began with Demon’s Souls and continued through the Dark Souls trilogy, Bloodborne (hence the portmanteau), and Sekiro. Outside of a loose lore connection between the Dark Souls games, the games are all standalone experiences and, while Easter eggs are common, you really don’t need to have played any to play any other.
Among the shared elements, there are probably three that highlight the range of Easter eggs. One is the “common element”, for instance, many of the games feature a “crestfallen” character right near the start of the game, who will give the player an item and express their own state of despair. Another is the reference character – many of the games feature a character named Patches, whose presence does not seem to indicate any shared continuity, but he simply shows up in a lot of games with a similar appearance and mannerisms. And lastly, the reference item – the most famous being the Moonlight Greatsword, which appears in every game, even as far back as King’s Field, the Demon’s Souls predecessor.
I will assume a base level of knowledge about video games – leveling up, etc. – but there are a few specifics to the Soulsborne game that are story relevant.
The grind is real.
Soulsbornes use a type of currency that varies in name, but since Demon’s Souls popularized the term “souls”, many players keep the language through later games, even if the terminology changes. (Elden Ring uses “runes” in place of souls.)
Souls are your currency for literally everything. To level up, you rest at a bonfire and spend the required amount of souls to move up to the next level in whatever attribute you choose. Want the sword being sold by a merchant? Souls. Want to upgrade it later? Souls. (And some materials too… which you can buy with souls.)
Where do souls come from? You can find them around the world in chests and such, but mainly kills. The smaller and weaker foes naturally give few, bosses give the most, with maybe 120 from a basic undead soldier and as many as 10,000 from a boss. And as you level up, it progressively costs more to level each time, so each advancement means a higher cost to continue improving.
I believe each game has been beaten as “soul level one”, i.e. a player can complete the game without leveling up their character at all. (Gear does not count.) The misnomer that you have to “get good” at Dark Souls is just a community meme; you can actually beat the game without getting good, you just have to get strong by climbing progressively higher steps to compensate for lack of ability with increased character attributes. There’s one area of the game where you can venture out, kill four unique enemies, then return to the bonfire, and each trip nets you about 10,000 souls – early on, enough for four or five levels.
There are several quirks that complicate souls. One is that if you die, you leave all the souls you’ve collected at the place you died. In the case of a boss arena, yeah, that means you have to go back in there to get them, and you won’t usually be able to leave unless you’ve killed the boss. Secondly, when you die, you return to the last bonfire you rested at. This further complicates things as it also repopulates the area with any enemies that had died (which occurs any time you rest at the bonfire, hence why the above souls farming circuit is possible). To get your souls back, you may be risking an encounter with whatever killed you in the first place. Running is a viable strategy, but you are balancing the heightened risk of being killed on the way with the greater reward of avoiding fights.
And lastly, if you die before you retrieve your souls, they are lost forever. This makes the time after defeating a boss, when your cup overfloweth with souls, potentially the riskiest, as you have to get somewhere safe to spend those souls.
Though there’s variation in the games, this is the core premise of the currency system, and it’s true to Elden Ring.
Help a brother out.
An unusual aspect of Soulsborne titles, that would gradually be sanded down over time, was the lack of clarity about many things, but particularly multiplayer. Rather than being a menu item you select, multiplayer is actioned through the game world itself. The clearest example of what it’s like is in Dark Souls, so I’ll use that again to demonstrate.
At a certain point in Dark Souls, a character will give you an item called the White Sign Soapstone. With this, you can enable yourself to be summoned by another player into their world (in the lore, it’s treated as kind of parallel universes, sort of) by using the soapstone to write a little sign on the ground. If another player finds your sign, they can click it to summon you, and you’ll appear as a white phantom – you can die, of course, so not a real apparition – to help them clear an area up until and including a boss.
There are some quirks to this system:
- There are servers but you’ll be on a server without knowing which, and you’ll gradually cycle over time. What this means is, if you want to play with a friend, good luck – you need to put your sign down somewhere obscure so other players won’t summon you, and then you’ll need to wait until your friend cycles to the same server as you and your sign appears for them.
- Even if your friend does summon you, there is no in-game chat. A common solution was to use a phone or a messenger app to open a separate voice channel, but the game itself lacked one. Players could gesture in the game from a selection of motions, such as pointing, and could throw little blocks that would say a word, like “Thank you!” The developers were so strict about this, you could not use Xbox Live’s chat function at all. If you tried to use private chat, it would kick you back to the main menu – even if the person you were speaking to wasn’t even playing Dark Souls!
- Health was not shared, but only when the host consumed one of the limited health items could the phantom be healed. This was quickly lost in sequels, however, allowing both to heal independently. (There were other ways for the phantom to heal, such as spells, but the core healing dynamic was a flask that refilled at bonfires, and it was deactivated in multiplayer for the phantom.)
- The player and phantom could not leave a prescribed zone within which they were summoned until the boss was defeated.
- Once the boss was defeated, the player could not summon anyone in that zone. The player could, however, be summoned themselves as many times as necessary by as many different people as wanted them. As soon as the boss was dead, the phantom would return to their world.
To give you a scenario to demonstrate this, I was playing with a friend back in the day. We were on Xbox, so we called each other on the phone and set it for speaker. I would place my sign around a corner where there was no reason for other players to wander, in a location called the Undead Parish. My friend would go there and wait until the sign appeared, sometimes use a bonfire (rest location) which would reset the area, repopulating any dead non-boss enemies, and potentially moving him to the same server as me. When my sign finally appeared, I was summoned, but I could not leave the Undead Parish, nor could he. If we were successful, we would have fought our way through the building to the boss battle on the roof, vanquished them, and then I would immediately disappear and return to my own world with the rewards of the battle.
If we chose to play through the game together, I would then have to summon him so that the boss that was still on that roof in my world could be fought. Then we would together move on to the next area, lay our summon signs, and continue.
This obtuse system, which has had variations over the course of the series, was a deliberate design decision. Basically everything from point 1 to point 5 was intended to steer people away from just playing the game with their friends, and towards working with complete strangers with whom communication was limited.
The series lead designer Hidetaka Miyazaki told this anecdote about why he wanted the game to play like this:
“The origin of that idea is actually due to a personal experience where a car suddenly stopped on a hillside after some heavy snow and started to slip. The car following me also got stuck, and then the one behind it spontaneously bumped into it and started pushing it up the hill… That’s it! That’s how everyone can get home! Then it was my turn and everyone started pushing my car up the hill, and I managed to get home safely.”
“But I couldn’t stop the car to say thanks to the people who gave me a shove. I’d have just got stuck again if I’d stopped. On the way back home I wondered whether the last person in the line had made it home, and thought that I would probably never meet the people who had helped me. I thought that maybe if we’d met in another place we’d become friends, or maybe we’d just fight…”
“You could probably call it a connection of mutual assistance between transient people. Oddly, that incident will probably linger in my heart for a long time. Simply because it’s fleeting, I think it stays with you a lot longer… like the cherry blossoms we Japanese love so much.”
To push this “mutual assistance between tran…
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