Even after Elden Ring was first revealed at E3 2019, virtually nothing concrete was known about it from a gameplay standpoint. The announcement trailer introduced a handful of key characters, but its famous line, “I doubt you could even imagine it,” was hilariously apt. From a handful of interviews director Hidetaka Miyazaki did at the time, a common joke arose which painted Elden Ring as “big Dark Souls.” While the idea was surely perpetuated with some facetiousness, big Dark Souls wasn’t an inaccurate description of what was known about the game a truly open-world rendition of the dark fantasy RPGs that had propelled FromSoftware to prominence via the Dark Souls trilogy.