Hidetaka Miyazaki, Elden Ring's director, at The Game Awards 2022. Photo Zion Grassl, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Elden Ring
What it took directly
- statedElden Ring took from George R. R. Martin's mythos, written for the game's world"It was a wonderful source of stimulus for me and the development staff. Elden Ring’s world was constructed using this mythos and stimulus as a base." Hidetaka Miyazaki, director, to Sam Wilkinson, Xbox Wire (June 2019)
- statedThe Martin collaboration took from Eiichi Nakajima, FromSoftware's executive business director, who wrote to Martin expecting a no"Me being such a known fan of Mr. Martin caused our executive business director Eiichi Nakajima to reach out to him with the expectation that we would get turned down." Hidetaka Miyazaki, to Xbox Wire (2019)
- statedElden Ring's demigod heroes (Godfrey among them) took from the dramatic heroes Martin wrote for an age long before the game"when he wrote the mythos, we asked him to create these dramatic heroes of this ancient mythos that takes place before the events of the game." Hidetaka Miyazaki, to Jason Killingsworth, GamesRadar+ (2022)
- statedElden Ring's parent-and-child stories took from the issues Martin dealt with in his mythos"A lot of the motifs that came from this and drove my creative thinking behind these elements in the game were connections between people, including parent-and-child relationships. A lot of the issues that Mr Martin dealt with in his writing provided these motifs for the game itself," Hidetaka Miyazaki, to GamesRadar+ (2022)
What it learned to do
- statedElden Ring's map learned from FromSoftware's boss-first design: the bosses were placed before the map was drawn around them"Our first step when designing the map was to decide where the bosses would appear, especially the important ones" Hidetaka Miyazaki, to Xbox Wire Japan (translated by Ryan Dinsdale, IGN, May 2022)
- statedHidetaka Miyazaki (as an open-world designer) learned from The Elder Scrolls series, The Witcher 3 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild"but I’ve personally played a lot of open world games that are considered classics of the genre, and I’ve been influenced by all of them." Hidetaka Miyazaki, to Xbox Wire Japan (IGN, 2022). He is careful to say this influenced him, not that Elden Ring took from any particular game
- statedMartin's writing for Elden Ring learned from FromSoftware's view that game storytelling restricts a writer, so he wrote the world's distant past instead"By having him write about a time the player isn’t directly involved in, he is free to unleash his creativity in the way he likes." Hidetaka Miyazaki, to Esra Krabbe, IGN (June 2019)
The tradition it sits in
- statedElden Ring comes from Dark Souls"I think that Elden Ring is a more natural evolution of Dark Souls." Hidetaka Miyazaki, to IGN (2019)
- statedElden Ring comes from The Lord of the Rings, Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion novels and the tabletop role-playing game RuneQuest"There have been a lot of different works that influenced the creative process in various ways – The Lord Of The Rings, The Eternal Champion series of novels by Michael Moorcock, aspects of tabletop RPGs such as RuneQuest, etc." Hidetaka Miyazaki, to GamesRadar+ (2022). In the same interview he says the Elden Ring itself has no direct link to Tolkien's One Ring
- statedElden Ring's fragmentary storytelling comes from FromSoftware's habit of leaving the world for players to interpret"In From fashion, the story is told in fragments, and we haven’t changed our principle of providing a world and narrative that the player can interpret for themselves," Yasuhiro Kitao, FromSoftware (quoted by Matt Kim, IGN, August 2021)
- documentedMartin's mythos for Elden Ring comes from the dungeon master's handbook of a tabletop role-playing game"Miyazaki compared the mythology that Martin wrote for Elden Ring to that of the dungeon master’s handbook in a tabletop RPG." Esra Krabbe, IGN (2019), paraphrasing Miyazaki's comparison
- inferredElden Ring's character drama comes from A Song of Ice and Fire's people vying for power"Given that Martin’s most famous work involves complicated character dynamics and the way people interact with each other while vying for power, this makes sense." inferred — IGN's Matt Kim reasons this from Martin's best-known work; neither Martin nor Miyazaki is quoted saying it
Where the whole form comes from
- documentedDark Souls (Miyazaki's earlier series) comes from British fantasy literature"In the past, you've mentioned British fantasy literature being a touchstone for Dark Souls" Jason Killingsworth, GamesRadar+ (2022), restating what Miyazaki has said in past interviews
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