Elden Ring Trailer Breakdown (And Why Everyone Has Been Clamouring For it For Two Years)

On June 10th 2019 FromSoftware’s latest project Elden Ring was shown at Microsoft’s E3 conference and it lit the gaming world on fire.  Beyond the pre-existing excitement brought on by FromSoft and game director Hidetaka Miyazaki’s previous games, high fantasy writing royalty George R.R. Martin was also revealed to be involved, only further stoking the flames of hype. 

But two excruciatingly long years have passed and we heard nothing official.  There were whispers reverberating around forums claiming the game’s various supposed release points and showing times: a trailer at The Game Awards 2019?  A release in March 2020?  But all of it was just a never-ending cycle of speculation and rumours being passed around until fiction became fact and suddenly no one knew anything, everyone knew everything and the game was nothing short of a bit of a meme. 

Pictured: Elden Ring fans grasping at straws for the last two years.

Any Souls fans know how excruciating the summer of last year was. Every new event was greeted with - regardless of how relevant it seemed - the eternal question of... Is Elden Ring going to show up?  It all culminated at The Game Awards 2020, where insiders seemed hopeful of its appearance, only for hopes to be crushed on the eve of the show.  “There, I said it” Geoff Keighley ruefully remarked before Elden Ring won ‘Most Anticipated Game’ at the show with no trailer in tow. Geoff was shortly put into ‘Gamer Prison’ after.  

There was some light at the end of the tunnel as fragments of what we can presume to be an early or internal trailer seeped out onto the internet in March. However, that hope didn’t last long as Bandai Namco did nothing following the leak: no statement, no takedowns.  It felt as if the game didn’t exist anymore, like it was some shared hallucination that would never actually come out.  

Then a fortnight ago, resident FromSoftware leaker ‘omnipotent’ posted this image in a ResetEra speculation thread.  The eternal flame was lit again.  Voices started speaking up again - and speaking louder this time; it really felt like it was happening this time, and once again in the hands of Geoff Keighley at his Summer Games Fest Kickoff Show.  It seemed like a guarantee - with even Keighley joining the teasing - but after everything that had happened before, one couldn’t help but feel a cloud of doubt around the event.  

Then it happened, it actually happened.  Exactly two years from the moment we first saw the game we finally received a second trailer.  

And what a trailer it was!  An excellent mix of cinematics and gameplay, showing off a handful of the game’s vast landscapes and terrifying enemies.  There is a lot to unpack and talk about, so I thought it best to highlight five of the most exciting key points.

Lore and Motivations

Although there wasn’t a huge amount of explicit story content in the trailer, there are a few things we can piece together.  It seems as if the ‘Elden Ring’ (whatever that actually is) has been shattered, and with that unity has been lost and the world has descended into chaos.  The fragments of the shattered Elden Ring have been shared between several demi-god like figures who you - the tarnished - have to defeat to reunite the pieces and become the Elden Lord. 

Immediately, his concept seems not too dissimilar to the second half of Dark Souls - where the ‘chosen undead’ must collect the four Lordsouls to open up the path to the First Flame. This structure fits with leaks as it seems like it would match the framework of an open-world game perfectly just as the Lordsouls enhanced the interconnected world of Lordan.  While the end goal of reuniting the fragments with the freedom to do it in any order recalls the adaptability of the recent  Zelda games, while also dispelling any worries that FromSoft would be departing from their usual unguided narrative design.  

Of course, another huge appeal is the assurance that this game and its lore is ‘a new world created by Hidetaka Miyazaki & George R.R. Martin’ - a collaboration I thought I could only dream of and to be honest never did!  We have known of this since the initial trailer, but we can see hints of what this collaboration has resulted in during the trailer.  It can be assumed that GRRM has contributed more to the world-building side of things, and we can see common elements of his fiction like distinct groups within the world, faction banners and sigils.

The Open World

Everybody loves an open-world… right?  Ok, so maybe not as much these days and I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of open-world games have become very stale, acting more as a checklist of map markers where the world itself is populated by nothing more than a few ‘stale NPCs rigidly following loops’.  There are exceptions to the homogenous we expect from this genre.  The common theme between these memorable outliers like Breath of the Wild and Death Stranding is that they emphasise the exploration of the world more so than the ‘things’ in it, and it seems as if Elden Ring is going to follow in that trend.  

YEAR OF YGGDRASIL! LET GOOOOOO!

Previous FromSoftware games have never had quest logs or objective markers and the closest thing to a map has been Sekiro’s incredibly vague overworld scroll.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this trend continued in Elden Ring, forcing the player to become intimately familiar with their surroundings, using landmarks, like Yggdrasil, (that humongous golden tree) to get their bearings.  

One thing that quickly stood out within the trailer is how varied and vibrant the different landscapes and locales appeared.  Cliff-edged plains filled with decaying towers find themselves adjacent to mysterious dark green forests and luminous magical castles.  There is immediately a grand sense of scale in this world, enhanced when compared to the rather claustrophobic corridors and paths of the previous games.  The trailer is keen to point out that resting at bonfires (or something similar) remains a feature, but will these respites remain as static checkpoints or will From update the savepoints that are so tied to the identity of its games?  Will they offer more flexibility and adaptability to the player in an increasingly large and open ended world?

If you are going to have a large open world, typically you’ll need something quicker than just your legs to get around.  FromSoftware obviously has realised this, and for the first time in its history, the player has a mount of sorts to ride around the world. This animal can also seemingly do a bit more than your standard horse. In the trailer we see it do the leaps you would expect for an equestrian, but also appears to double jump up an entire cliff in one of the trailers biggest “holy shit” moments.  Is this the key to unlocking the world’s hard-to-reach areas beyond broken bridges and atop steep mountains?  Luckily it appears that the horse can be summoned and de-spawned at the player’s will, which may allow for an adaptability in combat and traversal to suit every encounter.

Build Variety

2019’s Sekiro: Shadow’s Die Twice saw a departure from the freedom of choice previously associated with the souls series, limiting the player to a single character, a single weapon and a single playstyle.  It was a bold choice - and a decision that turned some players unwilling to adapt away from the game - but in my eyes, it resulted in the best and most refined combat systems in any of the games.

I think I might need something better than the hand-axe I used for all the first Dark Souls.

I hope Elden Ring finds some balance between the two extremes: granting players the freedom of choice of earlier games paired with the precision and attention to hitboxes and movement seen in Sekiro.  Throughout the trailer, we see a number of weapons and combat styles being used, from heavy two-handed claymores to nimble, acrobatic curved swords.  Furthermore, it appears that enemies have a more natural movement cycle than previous Souls games, finding themselves roaming the map and encountering the player at different points of the world. 

Perhaps stealth systems and avoidance of enemies could become a more effective way to survive in the ever-decaying world of Elden Ring?.  There is also a strong emphasis on magic integrated with weapons and combat, implying that the player will have access to a wider variety of spells to be used on the fly, removing the necessity of strictly sticking to magic-based builds.

Bosses

Bosses are a huge part of these games - to the point where one could claim they are the main draw for many - and it looks as if Elden Ring is going to be no different.  There are about five boss-looking enemies in the trailer with a number of other tough and grotesque looking foes sprinkled in between. Standouts include a giant dragon that catches a lightning bolt, the wolf-like creature that is shrouded in armour, and the reappearance of the familiar red-haired knight with a detachable arm from the original trailer.  

Hey red-hair lady, how have you been doing? How long has it been?

Due to the open-world design of the game, I feel as if there is going to be less distinction between what is qualified as a boss and what is just a strong as hell enemy roaming the world.  Typically one would encounter the boss as the climax of an area after you have explored it all, but with a more open design are we more likely to see ‘bosses’ pop up out of nowhere in the world?  And furthermore, will we see further distinction - both in classification and in design - between ‘standard bosses’ and those who hold the fragments of the shattered Elden Ring?  The large enemy with the scorpion-like tail about mid-way through the trailer looks like a very traditional boss, but they could just be a force preventing you from entering the castle where the real boss resides - Sekiro mini-boss style.  Moreover, what will happen to boss runs and boss-bonfires when the world is as open as it is?   Maybe you carve your own path and checkpoints to suit your approach?  

The Climax of the SoulsBorne Genre

This isn’t really any one specific point per see, but a more general observation on the trailer as a whole and the impression it left.  I am not here to board the hype train and claim that a game we have seen a collective five minutes from is going to be the best game ever, but from what I have seen and read it really feels as if Elden Ring is the culmination of the series’ best features and ideas.  

Head empty, jumpy horse.

Dark Souls is done and Bloodborne doesn’t seem as if it is coming back, so why not package the best parts of all those games into one huge Elden Ring shaped creature?  While Dark Souls III felt like a greatest hits album, with every song asking ‘hey, you remember this don’t you?’ Elden Ring looks to be like an artist's cumulative work, combining all the best features of their previous efforts into a cohesive effort.  At the same time, somewhat contradictory to this, it also looks to be a big departure, seemingly leaving behind a lot of what has characterised some of the most defining games of the last ten years and striving for a new direction for the genre.  

Perhaps a good way to contextualise it is thinking about the jump between Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls: both are in essence of the same genus, but it was the latter that went on to inspire and define so much.  I wonder whether Elden Ring will have the same effect, pivoting what we now know to be a ‘SoulsBorne’ game or a ‘souls-like’ into something completely different.  I don’t doubt that Elden Ring will feel similar and possess many of the same systems as the other games in this lineage (and wider genre) but I am excited to see the new elements and deconstruction of ideas that may reshape games in the future.  

So that was my thoughts on the Elden Ring trailer. I could have written so much more but I am excited to see what this game continues to offer until its January 21st release date.  As painful as the two years of silence were, I truly believe that trailer was worth the excruciating wait - let's just hope it’s not all we see before that fabled day in January.