Elden Ring’s expansive world of the Lands Between will soon be small enough to set atop your table.
Steamforged Games, the company behind the board game adaptions of Dark Souls, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Resident Evil, announced that it’s working on an Elden Ring board game through Kickstarter.
The game will let one to four players “embark on a huge and varied adventure, visiting iconic locations and crossing paths with familiar enemies and characters,” while offering dice-free combat between bosses and minor foes.
Mat Hart, the co-founder and chief creative officer at Steamforged, explains that “fans should expect a dark, richly-realized tabletop world of mystery and peril, with satisfying combat and rewarding exploration.” Steamforged says it will release more details about the game as it gets closer to launch.
Things look promising if the Margit miniature pictured above indicates what to expect regarding the game’s artwork. First, Steamforged managed to capture the Fell Omen in all his glory, a feat the company also achieved with the miniatures in some of its other adaptions, like the hunters and machines included in Horizon Zero Dawn: The Board Game.
We still don’t know when Steamforged will launch the game’s Kickstarter campaign, but if you’re interested, you can follow its Kickstarter page and sign up to get notifications when it’s ready. The campaign has over 8,700 followers at this time of writing.
Elden Ring is a 2022 action role-playing contest created by FromSoftware and broadcasted by Bandai Namco Entertainment. It was staged by Hidetaka Miyazaki, with worldbuilding supplied by the fantasy writer George R. R. Martin. It was released for Windows, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S on February 25.
In Elden Ring, players regulate a customizable player character on a trip to repair the Elden Ring and evolve as the new Elden Lord. The game is delivered through a third-person perspective, with players willingly roaming its interactive open world. Gameplay components include combat using various horseback riding, weapons, magic spells, and crafting.
FromSoftware desired to create an open-world game with gameplay comparable to their existing Dark Souls series, planning Elden Ring to act as an evolution of Dark Souls. Miyazaki marveled at Martin’s work and expected his contributions would produce a more affordable narrative than FromSoftware’s earlier games.
Elden Ring acquired critical acclaim for its open-world, gameplay systems, and setting, with criticism of technical performance problems on PC upon release. By July 2022, the game had marketed more than 16.6 million copies.
According to review aggregator Metacritic, Elden Ring received “universal acclaim” and ranks as the fourth highest-reviewed game on OpenCritic. On Twitch, it attracted almost 900,000 viewers within 24 hours of release, earning it the third-largest debut on the podium after Lost Ark and Cyberpunk 2077.
The game’s open-world setting received acclaim, with reviewers praising the exploration mechanics. Tamoor Hussain of GameSpot praised the Lands Between as the most expansive of FromSoftware’s settings, calling exploration and discovery the game’s main appeal. Mitchell Saltzman of IGN praised the game for rewarding investigation on every map aspect.
Simon Parkin of The Guardian named the game’s environments “intriguing and inventive.” The open landscape delivered opportunities to discover and test multiple challenges.
Exploration attracted many promising comparisons to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game circumstances were also commended for their artistic designs, with reviewers positively rating their performance in an open setting and enjoying the creations of linear dungeons.