In the two years since its initial 2022 release, FromSoftware’s Elden Ring has gone on to achieve critical acclaim amongst gamers and industry professionals alike, cementing itself as one of the studio’s crowning achievements, and one of their most popular games.
What many fans of the game might be less aware of are the games Elden Ring is built on, prior releases spanning back years. Games such as ‘Demons’ Souls’, ‘Dark Souls’, and so many more, each contributing to a formula so potent that it created an entirely new ‘soulslike’ subgenre.
Elden Ring is an incredible achievement, and with the release of ‘Elden Ring Nightreign’ just around the corner it’s important to look back on the FromSoftware games that paved the way, and how their impact can still be felt even now.
King’s Field
Released in Japan in 1994 for the PlayStation 1, the first ‘King’s Field’ game marks the beginning of what would eventually become the Souls series. It was also FromSoftware’s first title, and it certainly shows.
At the time of its release, King’s Field’s reception was mixed, with some reviewers claiming it was “painfully slow and lacking in any particular innovation’ while others viewed it more positively, saying it was a ‘roleplaying game of epic proportions.’
Even as far back as this, hints of more modern FromSoftware titles can be seen.
For one, players can experiment with their equipment. There are a variety of weapons, spells, armours and trinkets they can equip, all of which can be useful depending on the situation. And, as players defeat enemies and gain experience, they’ll automatically level up, increasing their character’s stats.
Of course, even at the time, these mechanics weren’t unique to King’s Field. No, perhaps the most stand-out quality of the original King’s Field, one found in FromSoftware’s games even today, is the atmosphere.
King’s Field is admittedly quite a slow, at times sluggish game with visibly dated graphics, it possesses a cultivated atmosphere that fits its dark and dreary tone. It’s slow, yes, but it feels methodical, each hallway and room taking time to work through. This, just like later games in the series, is a hallmark of FromSoftware’s design.
Later King’s Field games
The later King’s Field games, of which there are three more for a total of four, each share this sense of a cultivated atmosphere. They also iterate on one another, implementing improvements and design changes from game to game, each one striving to be better than the previous. In a sense, this too is an integral aspect of the FromSoftware formula.
By the time King’s Field 4 releases in 2001, a lot of the early pieces are in place. There’s a focus on exploration and discovery, on interconnected level design, and on challenging encounters be they enemies or traps. And while FromSoftware would continue to release new games after this, it wouldn’t be until much later that they produced a spiritual successor to the King’s Field series.
Released in 2009, that successor was ‘Demons’ Souls’.
Demons’ Souls
It’s in Demons’ Souls that a lot of the pieces for later games would come together. Here, as well as everything that was built up in King’s Field, they started to make strides towards improving the combat. Up until this point, the combat that had been shown in King’s Field was slow, methodical and at times ‘clunky’.
With Demons’ Souls, that changes dramatically. Combat becomes a new focus, one developed from slow and lumbering into something more complex and nuanced. The first-person perspective of the past is gone and replaced with a pulled back, third-person camera allowing for greater awareness.
It also allows the player to more readily view their character, which is another aspect to change from King’s Field to Demons’ Souls. A greater emphasis is placed on player choice, allowing them to level up the stats of their character as they see fit and specialise into one style of play or another.
And then there are the bosses. A by-now infamous staple of the Souls formula, the boss fights of Demons’ Souls are where a lot of that infamy was first gained. There had been boss fights in the King’s Field games before this, but none that were presented in quite the same way.
All of these things, though they have been iterated on since Demons’ Souls was released, are present in modern FromSoftware games in one form or another. Of the games in the series, Demons’ Souls is unquestionably the game that had the greatest impact on design.
Dark Souls
What followed was ‘Dark Souls’, released in 2011. And while Demons’ Souls performed well, outstripping FromSoftware’s expectations by a considerable margin, it’s with the release of Dark Souls that FromSoftware begins to appear on the radars of more and more players.
In terms of how Dark Souls differs from its predecessor, a lot of what was present in Demons’ Souls can be found here, but with small tweaks and changes. Overall, it’s a similarly challenging but smoother experience.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the two is how both games are structured. For Demons’ Souls, there are five separate ‘worlds’ that can be taken on in any order, each one wonderfully designed but self-contained. As for Dark Souls, the entire game is one big, interconnected experience filled with clever shortcuts to assist with traversal.
In a sense, Dark Souls’ world design takes the singular, self-contained levels of its predecessor and puts them together, mixing and refining ideas in by-now classic FromSoftware style.
From here, FromSoftware continues to develop new games, and while the release of ‘Dark Souls 2’ in 2012 is at times more of a stumble than a step forward, it continues to innovate and try new things all the same. Some ideas are better, such as being able to teleport between checkpoints from the beginning of the game. Other ideas, like a reduction to max health every time the player died (In a game that expects the player to die) less so.
Bloodborne and later
It’s at this point that FromSoftware really hit their stride, ‘Bloodborne’ in 2015, ‘Dark Souls 3’ a year later, and then ‘Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice’ in 2019. Each of these three games, while similar in certain ways, are wildly and creatively very different experiences.
Bloodborne takes the established formula and pushes it towards more speed and greater aggression, more so than any of the titles to come before it. Players are rewarded more readily for taking risks, responding quickly, and making use of newly introduced mechanics like firearm parries and regaining lost health by immediately attacking.
Bloodborne is also very different tonally, taking place in a dark, Victorian-gothic setting completely set apart from others in the series, as opposed to the more medieval worlds of King’s Field, Demons’ Souls and Dark Souls.
Dark Souls 3 uses lessons learned from Bloodborne about speed and aggression and applies them to the typically more sedate Dark Souls setting, creating something roughly in-between the two. Combat is faster, and the addition of weapon-arts adds a new layer of complexity.
As the third installment in the series, Dark Souls 3 continues the story set out in earlier games and sees the return of a few fan-favourites. Characters, themes and even pieces of equipment all make a return.
The world is expansive, varied and while mostly linear, there are opportunities to veer from the main path and explore new areas. Like Dark Souls 2, the player can teleport from the very beginning, allowing for a self-determined sense of exploration.
And Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, perhaps the most unusual of the three games released in this period. A completely stand-alone game like Bloodborne, Sekiro sets itself even further apart with how it presents both its combat and its main character.
In all games before Sekiro, players have been able to customise their character to a relatively high degree. In Sekiro, this isn’t the case, and for the first time in the series players will inhabit a named character with a set weapon, though there are a selection of ‘prosthetic weapons’ that function similarly to spells from other games.
Elden Ring
After Sekiro comes Elden Ring, pulling many of the pieces that were developed over the course of many games and years. There are mechanics, systems, and design choices present in Elden Ring because of the legacy inherited from earlier titles. Teleporting from the beginning of the game, weapon arts, a more aggressive style of combat, and countless more besides.
Perhaps the most important of these, as opposed to any specific game mechanic or system, is FromSoftware’s willingness to innovate and try new things. Unlike any other game in the series, Elden Ring’s world is completely open. Players can go almost anywhere right from the beginning, giving them the freedom to choose their own direction. It’s an incredible achievement, and with Elden Ring: Night Reign just around the corner, FromSoftware is almost certain to deliver something new.
