Case Study 35.2: Elden Ring — When a Souls-Like Becomes Open World

In February 2022, FromSoftware released Elden Ring. The development had been public since its announcement at E3 2019, and the hype cycle was the hottest the studio had ever ridden. Hidetaka Miyazaki's direction, George R. R. Martin's worldbuilding contribution, and a shift to open-world structure had fans and skeptics alike uncertain what the result would be. Nobody — including, probably, the team at FromSoft — expected what happened next.

Elden Ring sold 13.4 million copies in its first month. By the release of the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion in 2024, the total was over 25 million, making it the best-selling game in FromSoftware's history by a factor of three and one of the best-selling AAA games of the decade. It won Game of the Year at the 2022 Game Awards. It was, by any reasonable commercial and critical measure, a phenomenon.

But this case study is not about commercial success. It is about genre. Specifically: how do you take a genre as punishingly specific as "Souls-like" — defined by linearly-routed level design, deliberate combat pacing, stamina-based risk management, and hand-authored difficulty curves — and translate it into open-world structure without destroying what made the genre work?

FromSoft's answer is a masterclass in genre-preserving evolution. Understanding exactly what they kept and what they changed is a case study every designer working in a mature genre should internalize.

What the Souls Genre Was Before Elden Ring

By 2022, "Souls-like" had a fairly established design DNA, fixed across Demon's Souls (2009), Dark Souls (2011), Dark Souls II (2014), Bloodborne (2015), Dark Souls III (2016), and Sekiro (2019).

• Combat: Stamina-based, with weighted commitment windows. Every attack is a choice you cannot un-commit from. Dodging (or parrying) is the primary defensive verb. Poise and hyperarmor govern trades.
• World: Interconnected but linear. The Dark Souls world was a single complex knot of paths, shortcuts, and vertical connections — but there was a recommended order, and deviating was punished with difficulty spikes.
• Progression: Kill enemies for Souls (or whatever the currency was called per game). Souls are spent to level up stats. Dying drops your accumulated souls; you have one chance to retrieve them.
• Checkpoints: Bonfires (or equivalents) that restore flasks, respawn enemies, let you level up, and serve as fast-travel nodes (usually only after some unlock).
• Storytelling: Cryptic, environmental, delivered through item descriptions, NPC dialogue that required repeat visits, and inference from level layout. No handholding.
• Difficulty: Notoriously hard. The genre's brand was "tough but fair." Bosses are endurance tests. Progression often requires retrying boss fights fifty-plus times.

These are the genre's contracts. Players who buy a Souls-like expect every item on this list to be honored.

The question Elden Ring had to answer: which of these translate to open world, and which would be destroyed by the translation?

What Open World Usually Does to Design

Open-world design, as of 2022, had a very different DNA. The Witcher 3, Skyrim, Breath of the Wild, Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Zero Dawn — these games had established a shape:

• Massive navigable maps with quest markers and waypoints.
• Fast travel from near the start.
• Level scaling or permissive exploration (you can go anywhere; enemies scale, or you can flee).
• Side content distributed evenly across the map.
• Generous autosaves and checkpoints.
• Accessible narrative with clear marker-driven progression.
• Difficulty tuned downward to accommodate sprawl.

These are the conventions that have made open-world games the dominant AAA form. They are also, almost perfectly, the opposite of Souls-like conventions on nearly every dimension.

If Elden Ring had simply adopted the open-world conventions of its peers, it would have destroyed its genre. Quest markers would have killed the sense of discovery that Souls-fans live for. Level scaling would have destroyed the "punch up, retreat from stronger" dynamic. Permissive exploration would have nullified the difficulty curve that defines the brand. Many studios in the same position would have made exactly this mistake. FromSoft did not.

What FromSoft Kept (Genre-Preserving)

Combat identity, completely unchanged. Stamina bars, weighted commitments, dodge-focused defense, poise, hyperarmor — all identical to Dark Souls III. A veteran Souls player could transfer muscle memory to Elden Ring immediately. The combat is not softened or simplified for the open-world audience.

Bonfire-equivalent checkpoints. Sites of Grace function exactly like bonfires. They restore flasks, respawn enemies, allow leveling, and serve as fast-travel nodes. The naming is different; the mechanics are identical.

Souls-on-death. Die, drop your Runes (currency), get one chance to retrieve them. Die again while retrieving and they are gone. The loop is untouched.

Cryptic storytelling. Item descriptions carry lore. NPCs give partial information that requires inference. The overall narrative is fragmentary and requires players to piece it together. Hidden NPC quests trigger on obscure conditions (talking to character X, returning to location Y at the right time). Elden Ring's Ranni questline is one of the most convoluted questlines in gaming and is never marked on the map. Classic FromSoft.

Legacy Dungeons as hand-authored Souls-shaped spaces. This is the single most important genre-preserving design choice in the game. Scattered across the open world are six major "Legacy Dungeons" (Stormveil Castle, Raya Lucaria Academy, Leyndell, Haligtree, etc.) and several smaller ones that are, structurally, Dark Souls levels. Interconnected vertical space. Shortcuts that loop back to the entrance. Hidden passages. Multiple boss encounters. Environmental storytelling. Each Legacy Dungeon is its own mini-Dark Souls, preserving the studio's traditional mastery of curated space.

Boss fights as endurance tests. Elden Ring has more than 150 bosses. Many of them are reused, but the tentpole bosses — Margit, Godrick, Rennala, Radahn, Morgott, Godfrey, Malenia — are punishingly difficult in exactly the way Souls-fans expect. Malenia, Blade of Miquella, is widely considered one of the hardest bosses FromSoft has ever made.

No quest markers on the map. The map shows landmarks and sites of grace, but it does not tell you where the quests are. You find them by exploring.

What FromSoft Changed (Genre-Expanding)

Torrent, the spirit steed. The open world is massive; traversal on foot would have been tedious. FromSoft introduced Torrent, a mount who can be summoned almost anywhere in the open world (but not in Legacy Dungeons). Torrent turns vast traversal into an enjoyable verb rather than a chore, and double-jump-plus-glide mechanics create a distinct movement language from the Souls-standard on-foot kit.

Sites of Grace as fast-travel from the start. In earlier Souls games, fast travel was gated. In Elden Ring you can fast-travel between any activated Site of Grace from almost the beginning, and you can fast-travel directly from the open world (not from inside dungeons). This concession to open-world quality-of-life did not destroy the genre; it made the scale manageable.

Permissive map structure. Unlike previous Souls games, Elden Ring lets you go in many directions from the starting area. The recommended path exists, but the map does not enforce it with hard walls. A player who stumbles into the wrong area will be crushed — but they can retreat, go elsewhere, and come back later. The game teaches you to read the environment's threat level rather than to wait to be told where to go.

Guidance through environmental affordance rather than waypoints. Instead of quest markers, Elden Ring guides you with dramatic landmarks. A glowing golden tree on the horizon pulls you toward Leyndell. A flicker of grace (a golden wisp of light emanating from sites) points toward the intended next area. These are Breath of the Wild-style affordances, but in FromSoft's aesthetic register.

Map fragments. The map of each region is blank until you find the map fragment in that region. This gives exploration a discovery mechanic that integrates the open world into the Souls-tradition of earning your information.

Summons (Spirit Ashes). Elden Ring added a summonable-NPC system that lets players bring AI allies into boss fights. This is the game's single biggest concession to accessibility — it lowers the effective difficulty of tough fights for players who are struggling. Veteran Souls players often ignore the system. Newer players rely on it. The design lets both coexist without softening the base combat.

The Delicate Balance

What makes Elden Ring a masterclass is the discipline of which changes were made. Look at the list above: every change serves the open-world translation specifically. Torrent solves traversal. Fast travel solves scale. Permissive map structure solves the monotony of linear corridors at open-world scope. Map fragments preserve the discovery loop while accommodating the scale. Spirit Ashes address the accessibility tension that open-world genre audiences expect.

What was not changed: combat identity, checkpoint logic, death-penalty loop, storytelling approach, boss difficulty, and the overall refusal to hold the player's hand. These are the genre's load-bearing features. Remove any of them and the game would not have felt like a Souls-like. Keep all of them and the game can expand structurally without genre betrayal.

The designers understood the difference between structural genre features (level shape, pacing, world scope) and identity genre features (combat grammar, risk loop, storytelling posture). Structural features can be changed to serve new purposes; identity features must be preserved or the genre tag becomes false.

Lessons for Designers

Lesson one: know the difference between structural and identity features of your genre. If you are working in an established genre and you want to evolve it, you have to classify every convention. Which ones define the genre's feel (identity) and which ones define the genre's shape (structure)? Shape can change. Feel cannot — not without breaking the contract.

Lesson two: if you are going to scale a genre up, every scaling change should serve a specific problem. Elden Ring's concessions were not random. Each addition (Torrent, early fast travel, map fragments, Spirit Ashes) fixed a specific pain point that open-world scope creates. No convenience was added gratuitously.

Lesson three: resist the pressure to soften difficulty for the bigger audience. The commercial argument for making Elden Ring easier than previous Souls games was strong. The argument for Spirit Ashes as a difficulty valve instead of lowering base difficulty was stronger, and FromSoft took it. The genre's core brand — "this is hard, and beating it means something" — was preserved. 25 million copies sold without diluting the brand is the ultimate vindication.

Lesson four: genre preservation and genre expansion are compatible. It was fashionable in the 2010s to assume that opening a game up meant streamlining it. Elden Ring proved the opposite: the audience for cryptic, difficult, punishing games is much bigger than the industry had assumed. FromSoft served the existing Souls audience while pulling in millions of new players who had been curious but intimidated. Both audiences got the same game.

Lesson five: the legacy dungeon is the hedge. FromSoft did not fully commit to open-world design; they embedded their traditional strength — hand-authored interconnected linear space — inside the open world. Each Legacy Dungeon is a self-contained Dark Souls experience. When the open-world sections start to feel thin, a Legacy Dungeon returns the player to the studio's peak craft. This structural hedge — keep your old strength while experimenting with a new one — is a pattern worth borrowing.

Elden Ring is the evidence that mature genres can evolve. The Souls genre was eleven years old when Elden Ring launched. It could have ossified into self-parody; many aging genres do. Instead, FromSoft identified exactly which conventions were expendable, which were load-bearing, and which were the brand. They changed the first, kept the second, doubled down on the third. The result is a 25-million-seller and a map of how to evolve a genre without betraying it.

For the designer working in any established genre — Metroidvania, Soulslike, roguelite, tactics RPG — the lesson is the same. Know your contract. Know which parts of it are structural and which are identity. Change structure freely. Touch identity with extreme care. When the scale of the game demands new conventions, invent them in service of the old promises, not against them.

That is how a genre survives.

Counter-Example: When a Genre Refuses to Evolve

To appreciate what Elden Ring did, consider the counter-example. The classical RTS genre — Command & Conquer, StarCraft, Age of Empires, Warcraft III — was commercially dominant in the 1990s and early 2000s, and then cratered. Why?

Several reasons, but one is structural: the genre's tentpole designers refused to change the conventions that had aged badly. APM-as-skill-ceiling (actions per minute) meant the genre became the province of the top 1% of competitive players who could execute 300+ APM. The onboarding curve — base-building, economy management, unit micro — required hours of tutorial before a new player could play a real match. Matches were 30-60 minutes long and often lopsided, rewarding dedication over enjoyment. When the MOBA arrived in 2008-2010 and offered RTS-flavored teamfights without the macro overhead, the RTS audience bled into it. StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm (2013) was the last major commercial peak; since then the genre has survived only in niches and revivals (Age of Empires IV, Age of Mythology: Retold) that explicitly target nostalgia rather than modernize the form.

The RTS could have evolved. It could have kept its identity (asymmetric factions, resource-collection rhythms, strategic macro) while changing its structure (shorter match lengths, softer APM ceilings, cooperative PvE alternatives, asynchronous play). Some studios tried (Northgard, They Are Billions, the SpellForce series), and they carved niches — but nobody at the scale of FromSoft for Souls-likes said "what if we kept the genre's identity but changed its structural conventions to serve a bigger audience?"

Elden Ring is the RTS's counter-example. It is what happens when a genre's stewards ask the hard question — which conventions are the brand, and which are just how we have always done it? — and commit to the answer. The result is 25 million copies sold, a revitalized genre, and a roadmap for other aging categories to study.

Lessons for the Working Designer

The Elden Ring case study is most useful to you if you are doing one of three things: working in a mature established genre, translating a genre you know into a new structural form, or working on a sequel where evolution is expected but genre betrayal is fatal. In each case, the discipline of distinguishing structural from identity features — and of adding new conventions only in service of new problems — is the craft to study. It is not enough to love your genre. You have to understand its contract with the audience clearly enough to know what you can change, what you must keep, and why.

FromSoft did this work. The 25 million-seller is the receipt.