Elden Ring's open world trusts the player to get lost — and sells 20 million

FromSoftware built its reputation on tightly controlled Souls games, where the studio knew precisely what a player would see, when they would see it, and how they would react. An open world that lets players go anywhere and do anything seemed to threaten that careful engineering — which is why Elden Ring, the studio's first true open world, was such a design gamble.

The answer was to make the open world serve the challenge rather than undermine it. Elden Ring's Sites of Grace offer soft golden trails of light toward main objectives, but there are no quest markers, no logs, and no instructions on where to go next. Instead the Lands Between rewards curiosity at every turn — hidden dungeons, lost cities, and regions that will happily kill an under-leveled visitor — and because there is always somewhere else to explore, players can leave an impossible boss and come back stronger on their own terms.

Released February 25, 2022, Elden Ring sold more than 20 million copies in under a year, with no major expansion yet announced, and was named GameSpot's Game of the Year for 2022. GameSpot's editorial framed the game's 'design by subtraction' as placing the responsibility of charting the journey in the hands of the player — proof that a genre-defining open world can be built on restraint instead of hand-holding.