Mind you, Elden Ring Runes isn't the monster the game and it's predecessors have been being portrayed to be by ardent fans as well as detractors. The newopen-world system feels like an intentional decision from FromSoftware to provide an emulation to players who had a blast playing previous Souls games, most of which were more linear experiences in comparison to Elden Ring. When you get stuck on a boss during Dark Souls or Bloodborne, for example, usually meant smashing into an identical brick structure again and time until you finally came out bloody and bruised, whereas Elden Ring's Lands Between provide much more to see and do. A lot of time can be spent exploring the regions before the first major dungeon and its skill check of a boss. This includes collecting loot and gaining levels until you're able to reduce Godrick the Grafted to a heap of amputated limbs with little effort. You could even avoid the fortress entirely if concluded that you're done with his deceit, which is a good method to take when you're looking to see what the rest of the game has to offer.
In the core, the charm in Elden Ring is found not in its difficulty, but the tiny things you do in between the jaw-dropping boss fights. Explore every shadow-filled space and obscured by fog of the landscape in search of items you'll never use. It's about rotating your camera to see into corners and up over soaring slopes to find hidden dangers. It's about clambering into coffins which take you through underground waterfalls to caves that are long forgotten by time and that are inhabited by creatures of the elves out of the sky. It's about scaling the crags of a dying, huge dragon or the massive offshoots from a golden tree, both of which have so integrated themselves to the structures of a decaying capital city that long before your arrival they've become more architectural than biology.
Elden Ring manages to pull off the astonishing ability to make you feel small while still being able and able to effect tectonic shifts on the world around you.
If you are one of Tarnished the group that consists of "chosen" "undead" who return to the world of myth that is known to be the Lands Between long after an unidentified exile, Elden Ring puts you in the position of a visitor and vaccine. The shattering of the eponymous phenomenon known as Elden Ring. Elden Ring resulted in the deaths of demi-gods , as well as the demise of many great kingdoms, leaving a vast mess for players to clean up in various ways as you enter. Much like the more bleak locations of the previous Souls games in the Lands Between is a shadow of its former self, and those who remain to pick through the rubble pick through the rubble based on an urge to move instead of working together to put the pieces back together. It's not easy for the human race to live through Elden Ring Runes buy so much as it stumbles along with its eyes glued to the ground, unable to face the end of the world.