Before he owned videogames growing up, FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki loved tabletop RPGs and their source books full of quests and monsters. It’s not hard to see that passion reflected in any of the games he’s designed at FromSoftware, but Elden Ring particularly so: Its sprawling map echoes the kinds I loved to pore over and draw myself (poorly) as a kid, from Lord of the Rings’ Middle-earth to Warcraft’s Azeroth. Elden Ring also seems to directly connect back to the RPGs of the ’80s with its skeleton-filled catacombs, like tabletop-style dungeons ripped straight from the pages of an AD&D campaign… Read more.