I beat the video game Elden Ring over the weekend, and while I’m not here to discuss the specific lore of the game (there are other much more prepared and capable people doing that already), the way that Elden Ring tells its  stories is something I found interesting.  Elden Ring doesn’t tell its story in a traditional way, even for a video game.  It’s cut scenes are used more for cool moments than major plot points and when dialogue is delivered it’s often by characters with their own motivations or warped perspectives that mean the player can’t entirely trust what is being said (Except for the Turtle Pope, you can trust him).

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of story and world-building going on in Elden Ring.  In addition to what can be gleaned from dialogue a lot of the lore of the setting is delivered via the descriptions of the game’s plethora of items.  In this way, the game delivers on the history its Demigods, the wars fought in the past, just what the player is, and why that player must complete the acts the game demands.  However, much like the game’s namesake, the story is fragmented.  There are plenty of areas where not enough information is given to full decide what happened, leaving players to interpret the information, which has invariable led to multiple theories held by the players.

It’s this open-ended manner of storytelling that I find really fascinating.  I think it’s probably part of my engineering background/disposition but I like to have everything worked out.  It certainly makes doing my own world building fun and thorough but it has also occurred to me in the past that this kinda robs the magic from a fantasy setting.  If everything is governed by a well defined set of rules and history then all the magic and fantastical elements are really just different flavors of the laws of science, nature, and man which we deal with in the real world.  Elden Ring is a good example of scaling back from total definition, and given the amount of discussion the method has created within the game’s community I think it’s probably a good method to include to some extent in any fantasy world.  To the level of Elden Ring is maybe not always ideal but even with something like the Simarillion acting as the history book for his Middle-Earth setting, Tolkien had his only somewhat defined mysteries: Erdu, the fate of the Entwives, Tom Bombadil to name just a few.

It’s walking a line between giving a player/reader enough information for them to at least have a sense of what is going and what they are doing, but leaving enough unsaid to both not bound the creator and also give the player/reader room to project their own desires onto the story and world.  I think that builds interest, and even better investment from the player/reader, and it keeps them wanting to explore the setting.  Something I’d very much like to one day achieve with Illithiust.

Go forth and do good things,

Sean