Holism: Riding Horseback through Elden Ring

There was a time, way back in the 2010s, where the thing to do was to go “open world.” The open world genre – a action game set in a sprawling, picturesque landscape – was huge, and it dominated video game culture. After a point, a tacit belief formed amongst players and critics that it was the ideal endpoint for most genres, that every action game should aspire to those large, endless settings. It was a limited perspective, and in a way a problematic one because open worlds aren’t one size fits all. Most tropes, series, and genres need to change, potentially a lot, to adapt to them.

Although the trend and genre have both shrunk a bit in recent years – which is good; the games are often bloated and encourage crunch culture in the worst way – the dream remains. Plenty of studios still dip their toes into open worlds. The most recent is FromSoftware with Elden Ring, which came out in late February. It’s firmly in the company’s line of challenging, inscrutable, and baroque games, the most famous being Dark Souls. While Dark Souls was shocking and opaque and slowly went from cult classic to regular classic, Elden Ring had prestige long before its release. It even scored a big celebrity guest, with George R.R. Martin crafting part of the lore.

Amongst the press and fans, Elden Ring is and was largely treated as “Open World Dark Souls,” which isn’t inaccurate. The gameplay loop, where killing enemies earns you an all-purpose currency (souls in Souls, runes in Ring) that you drop in a satchel when you die, is still there. So is the multiplayer that lets you help or attack other players, as well as the control setup and basic gameplay. And it’s got its own dark, intimidating, and graphically sumptuous setting in the undead Lands Between. But what’s important is the nature of that world: a large, contiguous continent riddled with ruins, castles, and wide fields. Ergo, “Open World Dark Souls,” which is an exciting proposition.

See that thing way over there? You can die there. Actually, you almost certainly will.

However, there are problems with this from the start. For one thing, Dark Souls and its ilk have tightly built worlds that expand and twist to perfection. The first Dark Souls is more like an exploration action (or “Metroidvania”) game than anything, and all of FromSoft’s games in this mold emphasize expert pacing. But open world games risk throwing out pacing entirely by their nature. They profess a true openness; they’re expected to allow unlimited freedom and side content to facilitate that even if most of them don’t. Not every kind of action game is suited for this, and Souls games are amongst them.

The impressively, extremely nonlinear Elden Ring handles the pacing and content, at least, by sticking a ton of optional areas across the Lands Between. Each catacomb or cavern is harder than the level of difficulty outside, but you choose to enter it out of curiosity and not because it’s the next area. There are also plot-important sites that act as choke points on the map – for most players, their first will be towering Stormveil Castle, which has the first two main bosses and the first major goal – and those are easier to spot and reach. They’re much bigger. This allows a gentle guidance towards the critical path, aided by how the safe spaces literally give you directions via bands of light. And it’s somewhat blunt, but the series’ patented high difficulty actually helps direct you, too. Death is omnipresent, but since enemies are still stronger or weaker in each region, you can mentally map which places are more suited for your current abilities.

The free movement’s a bigger problem, though, and it comes with the very controls and mechanics of Souls games. Characters move slowly and deliberately, with a constant weight behind their actions. The controls let you keep your thumbs on the movement and control sticks as much as possible, since every move can be your last. It’s a fantastic system, but it’s one built for navigating tight corridors, ominous arenas, and perilous spires. Again, all of those are in Elden Ring, but they’re only connected to each other by a collection of cliffs, fields, wetlands, and wastes. And whenever Souls had one of those, it was always claustrophobic and cloistered. Dark Souls’ Darkroot Garden or Bloodborne’s Forbidden Woods are both huge forests, but they have only a token few exits. When you want to leave a forest in an open world game, you need to be able to simply… leave, in any direction you wish. It demands a lightness in your step, not something for which that deliberate movement is suited.

Standard FromSoftware combat, circa Dark Souls III.

The game does a few things to help this. You can warp to safe spaces wherever you are on the map, and not just between spaces like previous FromSoft games (though this is restricted a bit indoors, setting up underground lairs as the dungeons to its Zelda-esque overworld). It also has the kinds of environments fans of the studio are used to, from ominous castles to towns both dead and dying. That’s also true in the outdoor spaces, hence the abundance of crypts and poisonous swamps. But the game has one truly great solution, one that manages to casually upend FromSoftware’s entire standard.

Early on in Elden Ring, your character, the Tarnished, gets access to a horse – a ghost horse, named Torrent, and with inexplicable bovine horns. At a basic level, Torrent is a way for you to move quickly about the increasingly mammoth world. This isn’t exactly a side option; the game is built to account for players who regularly ride. The path to Stormveil Castle, your first major step forward, is inaccessible without the steed; you’ll almost certainly be overrun by a phalanx of guards, violent attack wolves, and a rotting troll. But riding through it on your horse, leaping over stakes and running past knights, is a piece of cake. It’s a complete shake-up from how these games normally play, which places value on the honorable one-on-one fight.

Movement-wise, Torrent is fantastic. Their double jump – and shockingly, this game’s ghost horse has a double jump – is one of the best I’ve used in some time, and it never gets less helpful or surreal. You can leap over a crowd of knights surrounding you, run through fields of ballista bolts, or even perform equine parkour atop towns and giant tree roots. Their speed has a wonderful sense of momentum, letting you go from place to place with energy and ease (and thus staving off the desire to rely on fast travel). And the dynamic and fast way you interact with the creature – you can summon them while moving and keep your momentum or send them away as you leap off them – feels great. Shockingly great.

What’s more shocking is how the horse’s presence upends the standards of combat in these games. The almost universal rule in Dark Souls and FromSoft’s other productions is that almost every enemy is larger, heavier, and faster than you. You’re smaller and weaker, so fighting turns into these dramatic sessions of darting away, baiting your foes, and hitting them when you know you’re safe. This is how it works in Elden Ring when you’re on foot; it’s how it works when you fight indoor bosses like Godrick the Grafted. But on your horse, suddenly, the roles are reversed: you’re the one who’s nimbler, taller, and more threatening. Running down regular enemies (who are as dangerous as they are in any Souls game) is exciting and somewhat cathartic. You can also use your healing items while moving, and it won’t slow you down a bit, which is wild from a studio that makes healing a potential gamble during each fight.

Naturally, that dynamic can’t hold for a game like this, so we get new enemies. While notably giant and grotesque monsters are a staple for the company, they’re a bit different here. Outside, you’re all but required to fight these foes on horseback. This is most common against a surprisingly large number of largely optional bosses who are designed with Torrent in mind, like dragons or black knights, but it includes normal enemies. Giant, malformed ravens and dogs dot the apocalyptic wasteland of the Caelid region, and they’re fast enough to catch up to Torrent – which means they’re able to more than run down anyone on foot. Eldritch masses of tentacles on the beach and huge, poison spewing flowers in the woods are best fought on a beast that can jump away from their attacks. Naturally, you have mounted foes as well, and the best strategy is to knock them off their partner first. And one particularly memorable boss flips the script by reimagining what a “traditional” Souls boss fight would be like with you on horseback but painfully vulnerable. It’s in all of these fights that you tend to miss the momentary invincibility of your dodgerolls, as Torrent utterly lacks i-frames – the greatest, fairest tradeoff for all that speed and poise.

The Tree Sentinel is the very first boss you can face, and well before you get access to Torrent. It’s very hard and heartily encourages a jousting match.

On that note, Torrent has their own health bar. When you’re attacked, some blows will only hit your steed, and they can take damage from high falls. You can replenish their health by feeding them raisins you’ve crafted, use a healing flask or rest at a safe spot if they lose all of it, but it’s more common to suffer an attack that just knocks you right off. And if that happens, you can just call the horse back while running from whoever hit you, gallop away to heal, and ride back into the fray. It’s more for creating an idea that Torrent is an actual creature, not just a tool you literally call from the ether.

A more regular challenge? Hordes. It’s very easy to find yourself beset by a clan of wolves or an encampment of soldiers, the latter of whom always seem to have a hornblower to signal his comrades. This is something FromSoft did in Bloodborne. That game routinely used groups of enemies to speed up the tempo of the slower, more conservative Dark Souls (which wove back into Dark Souls III and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice). The hordes here are larger, though, and they feel more threatening – probably because the open world lets them surround you from all sides. Facing them is scary, and while facing them on horseback doesn’t kill that feeling – they can easily gang up on you – it becomes thrilling in a way you don’t get from these games. You’re faster and nimbler than them, but it doesn’t keep their attacks from being painful and yours from missing entirely. Learning how to fight atop an animal has its own learning curve. So this source of empowerment has its own challenges, even if it’s almost always smarter and safer to be on the horse if you can. Which, conversely, makes interiors more intimidating since they block Torrent from entering; it’s also part of what makes them more traditional Souls-style environments.

There’s one other element to Torrent, which comes from the desire of the best open world games to let players approach locations from multiple directions. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (which appears to have influenced this game in several key ways), for example, allowed players to climb almost every surface and explore the world in any direction. Ring doesn’t have climbing, because it doesn’t need to and also can’t. Letting its weighty, slow character become a nimble mountaineer would be hard, weird, and awkward. But it needs options for scaling vertical spaces, which tend to be the hardest places to explore in games. So in the name of verticality, Torrent has the impressive and rather shocking ability to make context sensitive high jumps. Some areas have a circle of wind on the ground, and jumping in it while on Torrent hurtles you upwards, usually to get to the top of a cliff. It’s not a controlled jump, either, as you can adjust your movement.

It’s an exceptionally cool thing to see, and just as cool a thing to do. Really, the “Spiritspring jump” is a very blunt feature. It’s a shortcut to let you climb some of the game’s deepest ravines or solve environmental puzzles. It’s far less elegant than anything else related to Torrent, but it doesn’t need to be. It exists to help players, which is itself an extension of the horse as a whole. Because Elden Ring needed to provide comforts like it. Reconstructing the snaking pathways of Dark Souls into a space as large as the Lands Between required being a bit “nicer” to players. Features of accessibility were needed, because the “main” path isn’t the one every player – or most – will take. For all of the notoriety of the studio’s approach to difficulty, every FromSoft game since Demon’s Souls has made concessions to accessibility, but these ones are more dramatic than balancing weapon degradation or providing clearer information.

It’s not like the game isn’t tough. The boss – the major ones, especially – are as hard as ever. Grinding for runes is even easier, by contrast, and level caps are more generous, but you’re also expected to be higher level most of the time. Status effects are less brutal, but the classic trick to stave them off by rolling your way through poison or scarlet rot only hastens it. You can respec your stats, so naturally it’s even harder to make a build that does well by both melee and magic. And while it is great at nudging you in certain directions, it’s still a nonlinear open world game, with all of the obtuseness that can give.

Even something like the difficulty of each area can be a challenge. According to the game’s fanmade Fextralife page (spoilers for the world map and its locations therein), it’s best that you explore the Caelid region only after hitting Level 60. But because it’s literally right next to the first region, Limgrave, I charted most of it between my 20’s and 30’s. I prefer to explore first when I play open world games, so I’ve spent much of the game mapping regions far above my abilities. I stay away from enemies with too much health, hit those who don’t, and only later go after the bosses. You can’t do that in Dark Souls because the progression is so controlled (and outwardly linear in Dark Souls II and III). But you can here, which has led me to spend most of my time discovering the world at slightly to absurdly low levels. I can handle it because the bosses in these games are much harder for me than regular combat, so avoiding them lets me handle the difficulty spike – or be dumbly ignorant of it entirely – but pulling that off wouldn’t be possible without Torrent. The speed, power, and poise they give you is central. I can turn away from or engage in conflicts with unbelievable facility.

Avoiding battalions of guards, salvos from catapults, and the grotesque “Pumpkin Men.” Picking and choosing when to stay away from a giant rider with a giant sword. Dynamically running away from boss fights in the overworld. These experiences aren’t just atypical of Souls games; they’re outright opposed to them. And they didn’t “need” to go this far. The game already blocks your horse from entering most buildings; it could’ve simply kicked you off the moment you triggered an enemy (that’s how invasions by NPCs or other players work). Fighting atop Torrent could’ve also been tweaked to be even more dangerous, and the energetic and free movement could’ve been significantly constrained. But those options weren’t used, because it turns out that “Open World Dark Souls” needed to be a lot more than an open world Dark Souls. It needed to be its own game, and the best version of that meant doing things differently. Riding on that horse across a beautiful land is Elden Ring in microcosm: doing something antithetical to the ethos of FromSoftware, just in a way that makes it fit perfectly.