Elden Ring, the long-awaited new game from Dark Souls developer FromSoftware, has finally come out of hiding. Publisher Bandai Namco gave fans a new look at the epic fantasy role-playing game during Thursday’s Summer Game Fest Kickoff Live stream.
The new trailer for Elden Ring showed gameplay for the first time, gameplay that will look very familiar to fans of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. We also got a release date: Jan. 21, 2022.
The last time we heard anything about Elden Ring was in June 2019, when Bandai Namco and FromSoftware officially revealed the game. Elden Ring was pitched at that year’s E3 as FromSoftware’s “largest game to-date,” and is said to be set in a “sprawling realm steeped in a rich and bloody history” crafted by Dark Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki and Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin.
Miyazaki has said that Elden Ring will be “full of things that we weren’t able to do in the Dark Souls series.” The game will focus “more heavily on RPG elements,” Miyazaki said in an interview from 2019, and “will include a wide variety of weapons, magic, and ways to engage enemies, that make it possible to provide users with a style of gameplay and strategy that suits them.”
FromSoftware fans have since been wracked with Elden Ring-information withdrawal, leading the community to fill the void with its own, self-created lore.
Elden Ring is coming to PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
