by Dr Taliesin Coward
The short, and superficial answer, can be had simply by searching the internet: it’s an Action Role Playing Game (aRPG), and specifically, a ‘soulslike’ – a sub-genre named after Dark Souls, the 2011 game made by the same developers and with which Elden Ring shares many gameplay mechanics. While it might be tempting to ask ‘what is a soulslike’ (and even more tempting to answer ‘a sub-genre of the aRPG class of games’), a more fruitful question may perhaps be: just what kind of game is Dark Souls? And the answer to that may just surprise you.
In order to answer that question, though, it’s first necessary to have a quick look at Role-Playing Games (RPGs), aRPGs, and, of course, Dark Souls.
RPGs in PC have a long history in PC gaming, often directly traceable back to Dungeons & Dragons. (Actually, even 1993’s Doom can be traced back to D&D, but I digress.) Typically, players will create a character, pick a class (cleric, barbarian, knight, rogue, etc...), and choose how that character will evolve and develop over the course of the game. Such games are usually structured to take full advantage of this, giving players the chance to respond to the various scenarios in character. For example, they might choose to play as a noble knight. Not only does this impact the choices the players are likely to make in their interactions (for example, siding with the foul Goblins would be decidedly out of character, though it may be a possibility), it also determines what skills the player will choose to develop. Taking our knight, for example, skills like pickpocketing may be completely irrelevant, while increasing one’s skill in wearing armour and wielding a sword could be top priority. It’s also common in such games for particular items to require the player to have leveled-up certain traits. That broad-sword, for example, may only be able to be used by a character with 30 strength, while that spell may need 40 or so intelligence to use (which my poor knight is distinctly lacking in, having put all his points into strength, endurance and vitality).
Not only do such restrictions force trade-offs and keep things consistent (stopping knights from suddenly turning into high-level wizards), they also give players different play-styles to experiment with. Baldur’s Gate 3, Star Was: Knights of the Old Republic, and Neverwinter Nights all are good examples of RPG games.
A prominent feature of such games is ‘leveling up’. That is, increasing the power of their character – for example, by increasing strength which might let them do more damage in combat, or intelligence, which might let them spot hidden items more easily. Not only can these add more gameplay options, they also give players a sense of progression. However, equally important is how players increase the level of their characters in RPGs. In such games, completing a quest, and killing foes typically awards players with experience points (or XP points). Once enough XP is accrued, the character ‘levels up’, giving the player the option to increase their character’s various traits by a set number of points.
Action-Role-Play-Games, or aRPGs, share many traits with the RPG genre, including character creation, leveling and so on, but with a greater emphasis on action (often non-stop, wall-to-wall combat) over player freedom and story. The Diablo series, Titan Quest and Victor Vran all fit neatly into this category. Yes, you may choose to play as a virtuous paladin or a raging barbarian, but the main result of such changes, in practical terms, is what tools you have at your disposal to pound your enemies into the ground.
So what about Dark Souls (and by extension Elden Ring)? Does it not fit into the aRPG category? Does it not have character creation, leveling up, a wealth of stats to manage and develop? Is not its focus primarily on action?
Well yes, and no. While it does have many of the same trappings as other games in the aRPG genre, there are some distinct differences, which in turn lead to some extremely different design decisions. And these differences revolve around just how Dark Souls and its successors handle player defeat, and the leveling-up of characters.
In most RPGs and aRPGs, the death of the player character is game over. That’s it. The end. In Dark Souls, however, death simply sees the player character respawn at the last visited safe-site, known as a Bonfire. Beyond being handy respawn points, activating these sites (either by choosing to rest at them, or by respawning at them) does several things: 1) it restores lost health points (HP) and refills any restorative flasks the player is carrying; 2) all enemies, excepting bosses, are brought back to life, and; 3) players can spend their accrued points to level up, increasing one ‘stat’ (such as strength, stamina, health and so on) per level, with the cost of new levels getting progressively higher.
Of critical importance is the fact that should the player character die before they can make it to a Bonfire, they drop all the points they were carrying. Players can get their points back, but only if they reach them without getting killed again. If the player character dies before recovering the points, they’re gone forever, replaced by a new set of dropped points, worth whatever the player was carrying up to their demise.
These factors combine to give Dark Souls, and Elden Ring a distinct structure. Unlike standard aRPGs and RPG games which funnel players through set paths, controlling the player’s level so that they are never faced with an overwhelming challenge (in some cases even going so far as to programme opponents to scale their power with that of the player character), Dark Souls and Elden Ring both delight in cheerfully steering their players face-first into a figurative brick wall. In Dark Souls, players are released from their cell, give the basic introduction, and then are squashed flat by a humongous hammer-wielding demon. In Elden Ring, the equivalent happens, but even faster.
While this teaches players that death and defeat is simply part of the game, it sets up what becomes a persistent, overarching game-play loop: the player will progress through the game until they run into a boss which is simply too powerful for them to beat. At this point (usually after being stomped on enough times to ascertain that it is impossible or extremely hard to beat the boss at their current level – that is, the problem is more statistics-based than skill-based), the player will venture back into the game world and explore some less threatening looking areas in the hope of finding better equipment, or getting enough XP that they can level up. In either case, they’re looking for a way to tip the odds in their favour. When the player feels they’re strong enough, they’ll return to the boss and have another go, repeating this loop as many times as needed. Once the boss is beaten, the entire loop starts again, and players will be allowed to progress until they run into the next brick wall.
Interestingly enough, there is another style of game, listed as a completely different genre, which has an almost identical loop: the roguelite (a termed coined in 2013 by Cellar Door Games for their game Rogue Legacy, itself a nod to the classic game Rogue). In this particular instance, roguelites like Everspace, Enter the Gungeon, Rogue Legacy 2, City of Brass, Hades, and Dead Cells.
On the face of it, these games and the likes of Dark Souls and Elden Ring seem to have little in common. All the above roguelites use randomized levels (excepting boss arenas). Death is permanent (called ‘permadeath’) and sends players right back to the start to do a new, randomized run with a new character/ship/body. As death is permanent, there is no character progression or leveling up.
Actually, that’s not strictly speaking true. In fact, the above (and fairly common) definition confuses the in-game fiction with the actual reality. Yes, with the original Rogue, death meant losing all progress and starting again. However, with these roguelites, with each run the player makes, they accrue points which can be spent after their defeat. Some of these unlock new weapons to discover in the next run. Others upgrade the player character granting better armour, a bigger fuel tank, better dodges or the like. While the game’s fiction may say these perks are being applied to a clone of the character, or time has been reset, or that they apply to the now-dead character’s descendants, it doesn’t change the fact that the real-world player is upgrading their ‘toy’ with better statistics or equipment in order to tip the odds in their favour – just like in Dark Souls.
As such, the basic loop of such roguelites is that players make progress until they run into a brick wall, at which point they will upgrade their character, find new equipment, and try again. Put like this, the similarities between these games, Dark Souls and Elden Ring is obvious. In fact, when looking at them on this level, the biggest difference between them is when players get to level up: in Dark Souls and Elden Ring, it’s before the player character has been killed; in the roguelite, it’s after. In fact, one could go so far as to say that Dark Souls and Elden Ring are simply roguelites that have been dressed up with RPG clothing and had the randomization removed.
While the connection seems obvious enough when pointed out, in reality it’s harder to spot, and I believe this is for two main reasons. On the one hand – directly related to Dark Souls’ RPG trappings – you have problems of classification. In coaching game designers, Will Wright (creator of The Sims) cautioned against pigeon-holing a game using a genre label, as it may lead to prospective buyers drawing only partially correct conclusions as to what to expect in the game. And I suspect something similar is happening here.
Dark Souls was, and still is, listed as being an aRPG. You can see the logic: it has RPG elements and a strong focus on action. However, that this classification missed the mark is shown by the fact that Dark Soul’s came as a nasty-enough shock to warrant having a whole new aRPG sub-genre – the soulslike – named after it. (Interestingly enough, it’s possible that the existence of the soulslike sub-genre could go part-way to explaining Elden Ring’s phenomenal success. People now have a better idea of what to expect from such a game.)
On the other hand, I suspect it’s a case of not being able to see the wood for the trees. Both Dark Souls and Elden Ring use RPG-style statistics, and equipment ‘gated’ by those stats (e.g. you need 40 strength to use that sword, or 60 intelligence to cast that spell), and the roguelites do not. The roguelites use procedural generation to randomize their levels, whilst Dark Souls and Elden Ring do not. None of these, however, changes the basic overarching game-play loop that all these games share, of progress → defeat → increasing strength → more progress. And it’s this loop, this challenge to the player, that makes all of these games so compelling. In fact, it was the very familiarity of Elden Ring’s experience which made me realize just where else I had seen this style of game, and not just from Dark Souls.
Interestingly enough, both of these factors explain in part why Elden Ring managed to sell over 12 million copies in 18 days, while Dark Souls took more than a year to sell 2 million copies. People didn’t know what to expect with Dark Souls, and those who were expecting a standard aRPG game got a nasty shock. It polarized players into those who loved it, and those who hated it. Skip forward 11 years, and not only is there a whole sub-genre warning players what to expect with Elden Ring, but there has also been a wealth of excellent roguelite games sharing a very similar overall game-play loop.
There have been multiple attempts to define soulslike games. However, such definitions tend to focus on specific gameplay elements or trappings, including things like respawning enemies, lonely atmosphere, difficult gameplay, precision combat and so on. To these definitions this essays submits its own contribution, via the answer to the question initially posed: just what sort of game is Elden Ring? Well, it’s a soulslike, which is to say it’s an action game, with RPG mechanics, built around the same compelling, overall game-play loop as the roguelite.
Bibliography
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Game Maker’s Toolkit, “Roguelikes, Persistency, and Progression” (29 Jan 2019), Youtube,
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