Gaming
'Elden Ring' isn't coming for at least another year, leak claims
And April 2022 is just the earliest we could see it.
Elden Ring, the world-shaking collab between George R.R. Martin and Hidetaka Miyazaki, is still deep in development mode, according to a leaked Kadokawa Corporation financial report. Kadokawa is the parent company of FromSoftware, the much-anticipated game’s developer.
The report, which was first spotted by sleuths over at DSOG, says FromSoftware isn’t anticipating Elden Ring to be released before April 2022. That’s not to say we’ll even have the game a year from now — that’s just the bare minimum time FromSoftware is imagining it’ll take to polish it.
It’s been three years since Elden Ring was first announced at Microsoft’s E3 press conference — long enough ago that developers said it would launch on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, seeing as the Series X and the PS5 hadn’t even been publicized yet. We’ve learned little about the title since then — save for a few seconds of leaked trailer footage — but the team behind the game is enough to keep us excited.
Details are… scarce — Besides the game’s title (which, granted, is enough on its own to give off dark fantasy vibes), we know very little about Elden Ring. Most notable is that the game is a collaboration between one of gaming’s most-loved directors and one of fantasy’s most-loved authors. Miyazaki is best known for the Souls series; the dark, medieval adventure is really his child.
George R.R. Martin, creator of the Game of Thrones universe, is composing the Elden Ring narrative. He has free range of the game’s world-building and backstory. A few other staff writers from the Game of Thrones TV series are assisting with the game’s writing.
As for the game itself, Miyazaki has called it a “natural evolution” of the Souls series, with similar elements like the ability to create your own protagonist. The game will be much more of an open world than most Souls games, though, and will feature dungeon-like ruins instead of towns with NPCs.
Leak leak leak — Up until now, we’ve seen approximately seven seconds of Elden Ring gameplay, thanks to a leaked trailer from back in March. This weekend another six seconds of the game leaked via Reddit and… well… it gives us approximately zero new information. So that’s now a total of 13 seconds we’ve seen — and beyond the fact that there will be horses and dark, domed buildings, we still know nothing at all.
There’s some hope that Bandai Namco’s expected presence at this year’s E3 conference means we’ll likely hear more about Elden Ring (maybe even a full trailer, if we’re lucky). Either way, fans will need to curb their enthusiasm and practice radical patience if they want the Elden Ring team to create the best possible product.
