Summary
Ever since the first Soulsborne in 2009, there has been a poison swamp. It’s a staple as much as any other mechanic—every game has to have an enormous, miserable marsh that riddles your body with toxins while you’re busy fighting tough enemies.
Following on from Demon’s Souls' aptly titled Swamp of Sorrow,Dark Soulscemented the poison swamp into the formula with Blighttown, and Dark Souls 3 upped the ante withtwogiant poison swamps back-to-back. ButElden Ringis the worst of them all. There are poison swamps, toxic swamps, and even scarlet rot swamps.Director Hidetaka Miyazaki confessed two years ago, “I can’t help myself”.
But withShadow of the Erdtreelaunching later today, Miyazaki is reflecting on just how many he crammed into the base game, admitting that maybe he went “a little too far”.
Shadow Of The Erdtree Has Another Poison Swamp, But It’s A Little Different
While Miyazaki admits that he went overboard on poison swamps in Elden Ring,we know Shadow of the Erdtree has one of its own, so he isn’t throwing the concept into the Abyss yet. But he is approaching it differently.
There are many ways to die.
“I’m trying to take some learnings from [the original Elden Ring],” Miyazaki said in an interview withCNET. “You can say the version that exists in the DLC applies a lot of those learnings. I’ve tailored it. In between it existing and not existing, with this version, let’s just say I attempt to imagine different ways I want to die as a player or be killed.
“So that expression of myself has been imparted into the poison swamp. So, not in the poison swamp itself - that’s been curbed - but in other parts of the gameplay, there are many ways to die.”
Elden Ring
WHERE TO PLAY
With worldbuilding from Game of Thrones scribe George R.R. Martin and developed by FromSoftware, Elden Ring is a masterpiece in what has become known as the ‘Soulslike’ genre of action role-playing games.
