Elden Ring Has Been Designed to Reduce Player Stress, Without Reducing Enemy Difficulty

A new gameplay overview of Elden Ring has revealed FromSoftware’s focus on making sure players aren’t overly stressed while playing the game – but seemingly without reducing the difficulty you’d expect from Souls game enemies.

Speaking during Taipei Game Show, producer Yasuhiro Kitao repeatedly explained how elements of the game had been tooled to reduce player stress – in effect making the game difficult in the right places, but gentler in how you reach them.

“With the game’s world being so large, that can produce real depth and breadth of enjoyment, but it can also lead to unnecessary stress for some players,” explained Kitao. “The dev team has been very careful to avoid that where possible.”

Interviewer Misuzu Araki replied: “With battle already being fairly difficult, I can understand wanting to reduce stress elsewhere.” Kitao agreed: “Yes, especially as the enemies are so strong.”

With that in mind, it seems Elden Ring’s enemies and bosses will be as tough as you’d hope/fear from a new game from the Dark Souls developer, but Kitao made clear that a number of changes have been made to how you get to them.

Elden Ring’s new ability to summon and ride a horse, for example has been touted as a major part of that focus. “Horses provide a stress-free method of traveling across the long distances the player needs to travel in the game,” explained Kitao. He continued that your horse’s ability to travel up air currents was also a part of that thinking: “That system was introduced as a means of quickly and enjoyably moving vertically upward in order to explore those higher areas.”

On the theme of getting around Elden Ring’s huge map, Kitao also explained that fast travel to locations you’ve already visited was introduced as a way of combating stress, and offering freedom to players. That freedom itself is a way of allowing the player a smoother journey through the world, allowing you to turn back from an area you might be finding to tough, try somewhere else, and return later on having leveled up your character. As an example, Kitao pointed out that the Stormveil area (and boss) from the game’s Network Test could be avoided completely in full game, or returned to much later.

In terms of regular enemies, Kitao said it was a major challenge to balance the map feeling too empty, or too full of encounters: “The challenge was to place enemies in a way that would keep players interested, but still provide them with a low-stress experience. This applies to item distribution too, as well as in-game events. Fine tuning these placements and timings has been ongoing until the very end.”

He also confirmed that in-game time of day or weather effects won’t alter enemy placements ‘significantly’ (although a “very small” number of enemy types will appear only at night): “Changing enemies for all times of day would create a kind of pressure on users to play the game at various different times,” explained Kitao. “We felt this was a stress our users could do without.”

Perhaps the biggest change to the established ‘rules’ of a Souls game comes in how the game deals with checkpointing in certain particularly difficult areas. As with previous games, players collect experience – now called ‘runes’ instead of ‘souls’ – that are dropped when they die, but can be collected again. However, the process of respawning can now be a little different:

“With the map being so vast, [traveling back to collect runes] can become an unwanted stress for the player,” said Kitao. “With that in mind, we have identified a number of difficult spots, places with lots of enemies or powerful foes, as points at which many players will die and need to re-attempt that challenge. The player is able to select the option of respawning very near the spot of their death for these locations. This kind of measure is another example of the team’s efforts to implement systems to mitigate player stress caused by the sheer magnitude of the game map.”

It’s clear, then, that Elden Ring will be a game that allows you to get to those difficult fights more smoothly than previous games, simply because of the sheer distances involved. It’s also going to let you choose what you want to play along the way a little more freely – with Kitao making clear that the game can be finished in 30 hours, but with dozens of hours of extra content to play on top of that.

The interview also revealed that the game has finally gone gold, and shouldn’t suffer any more delays to its February 25 release date – so you’ll get to experience all this new open world has to offer very soon.

Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].