Some games sell millions of copies and fade. Others stick around in the conversation long after the hype dies down. Elden Ring is the latter. FromSoftware released it in February 2022, made in collaboration with George R.R. Martin, and it managed to do something rare: it actually lived up to the expectations people had built up for it. Two years on, people are still talking about it, still recommending it, and still arguing about it online. That doesn't happen by accident.
A World That Doesn't Hold Your Hand
Most open-world games don't trust you. There's a marker for every objective, a pop-up for every mechanic, and an NPC ready to redirect you if you wander too far from the intended path. Elden Ring doesn't do any of that. You drop into the Lands Between and it's entirely up to you to figure out what to do with it.
The first time you climb a hill and the whole of Limgrave opens up in front of you, with ruins in the distance and no arrow telling you where to go, there's a specific feeling that's hard to describe. You just want to go and see what's over there. Not because the game told you to, but because you're actually curious. That sounds simple, but most games never manage it.
Part of what makes the world work is how varied it is. The starting area is green and relatively open. Move further in and you're walking through crumbling castle towns, descending into underground lakes lit by bioluminescent plants, picking your way through swamps that will actively poison you every few seconds. Each area has its own atmosphere and its own set of surprises. The world never runs out of things to show you, which is why so many people end up putting 80 or 100 hours into it without really noticing.
FromSoftware had done versions of this approach in Dark Souls and Bloodborne, but those were tighter, more corridor-like worlds. Elden Ring was the real test of whether it worked at a much bigger scale. It does.
Is It Actually That Hard?
The difficulty question comes up every time someone talks about Elden Ring, so it's worth addressing properly. Yes, the game is hard. Bosses will kill you. A lot. Some enemies are placed in ways that feel almost deliberately cruel, especially early on when you're still learning how everything works.
But here's the thing people often miss: Elden Ring is actually more forgiving than FromSoftware's older games, not less. The open world is the safety valve. If a boss is beating you senseless, you can just leave. Go somewhere else entirely. Find better gear, level up a few times, come back with a different approach and probably a better weapon. The game never forces you into a corner before you're ready. It just doesn't bother explaining that you're allowed to walk away.
This is a meaningful distinction. In Dark Souls, if you hit a wall, you had to find a way through that specific wall. In Elden Ring, you can go around it, come back when you're stronger, and often find that the encounter that was destroying you an hour ago is now manageable. The difficulty is real but it's navigable, and that's a different experience from what the reputation suggests.
On PC there are mods that reduce enemy aggression or add an outright easier mode for players who want them. Consoles don't have that option, but even without it, the game gives you more ways to work around trouble than most people realise on a first playthrough.
The Margit Moment
The first big boss in the game is Margit the Fell Omen, and his placement is one of the best decisions FromSoftware made with the whole game. He shows up earlier than you expect, hits harder than anything you've faced before, and specifically punishes the kind of impatient button-mashing that works fine in most other action games.
He's not there to be an obstacle. He's there to teach you how to play. Each time he kills you, he's showing you something specific: watch for the dagger he produces out of nowhere, don't get greedy after the hammer swing, slow down and wait for your moment. Players who try to fight him the way they'd fight an enemy in another game will die repeatedly. Players who learn to read what he's doing will start making real progress.
When you finally beat him, the feeling is earned because the skill that got you there is genuinely earned. You actually got better at something. That feedback loop is what people mean when they say Elden Ring clicks after a while. Once you're in it, the challenge stops feeling like punishment and starts feeling like the point.
The Build Variety
One thing that keeps people playing Elden Ring long after finishing it is how differently it plays depending on how you build your character. A strength build swinging a colossal greatsword is a completely different experience from a dexterity build moving fast and fishing for critical hits, which is completely different again from an intelligence build casting spells from a safe distance while enemies try to close the gap.
The game has enough variety here that many players complete it multiple times just to see how other approaches feel. Some builds feel almost broken in the best way possible. Some are deliberately making things harder for themselves. The community has spent years finding combinations that the developers probably didn't expect, and Elden Ring is generally fine with all of it.
Shadow of the Erdtree
The DLC released in 2024 and it's substantial. The Realm of Shadow is a new landmass that rivals the base game in size and is arguably even more densely packed. New weapon types, new boss encounters, new areas that go in directions the main game didn't. It gave people who had already finished everything a proper reason to come back, and for players who hadn't started yet it made an already large game even larger.
It also made clear that FromSoftware isn't treating Elden Ring as something they've moved on from, which probably means more is coming at some point.
The Bigger Picture
Elden Ring won Game of the Year at The Game Awards in 2022 and sold over 25 million copies in its first two years. That's a remarkable number for a game with no map markers, no quest tracker, and a story told almost entirely through item descriptions and things you notice in the environment if you're paying attention.
What it showed is that players will engage with something genuinely challenging and figure things out for themselves, as long as the world is interesting enough to make the effort worthwhile. That's not a new idea, but Elden Ring proved it at a scale nobody had quite managed before. Studios are going to be thinking about that for a long time.
