According to director Hidetaka Miyazaki, his newest project Elden Ring is an open-world style game with gameplay mechanics similar to the Dark Souls series.

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“Elden Ring is a third-person action RPG with a fantasy setting. Gameplay-wise, it’s heavily based on Dark Souls.” Miyazaki explained to IGN in an exclusive interview, referring to the series he is probably best known for.“However, that doesn’t mean that it plays out in the same way. With a more open and vast environment, the way combat plays out becomes fundamentally different.”Miyazaki explains that Elden Ring’s world naturally creates drastically different situations in battle, and creates new opportunities for exploration as well as storytelling.Other works by Miyazaki including Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice had interconnected maps in a Metroidvania style. While these can be regarded as open world games too, Miyazaki says that Elden Ring’s environments are much more vast and open.With a customizable character, the player will be able to traverse through the world on a horse and can find enemies while riding it.While Miyazaki acknowledges that he studied many open world games, he did not mention any particular titles. Rather than being too heavily inspired by a certain title, he attempted to create an open-world game only FromSoftware can make. That means that you are still fighting terrifying bosses, and will likely die a lot.According to Miyazaki, there will be no towns or cityscapes with NPCs to interact with in Elden Ring, but you can expect village ruins in a similar vein to his other titles.“Creating a new type of game is a big challenge for us. If we would add towns on top of that, it would become a bit too much, so we decided to create an open world style game focused on what we are best at.”An open world Soul-like game by FromSoftware sure has us excited.For much more Elden Ring directly from the creator, check our exclusive, full Elden Ring interview with Hidetaka Miyazaki

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