Cryptic Elden Ring Story Details Revealed

Those who’ve finally recovered from the reappearance of Elden Ring from Thursday’s Summer Game Fest presentation probably have gone looking for new details pertaining to the game now, and if you head to Bandai Namco’s site, you’ll find them. The publisher updated its site with some more talks of things like “The Golden Order” to hint at what players will be doing in the game beyond just slaying fantastical creatures like the ones we saw in the trailer.

If you’ve played a FromSoftware game before, however, you’ll know that there’s only so much you can discern from a synopsis since the details about the developer’s games are generally pretty cryptic and don’t make much sense until you play the game itself. That’s the case with Elden Ring, too, but at least players have something new to decipher before the game’s release.

The synopsis on the publisher’s site starts by calling players the “Tarnished” and saying they have to “brandish the power of the Elden Ring and become an Elden Lord in the Lands Between.” Those Lands Between are ruled by Queen Marika the Eternal, and the Elden Ring at the center of the story which is also “the source of the Erdtree, has been shattered.”

Some extra details make things even more confusing with talks of things like the “Greater Will,” but at least we have some familiar elements at play in the synopsis like the player being dead but not really dead similar to how things worked in Dark Souls.

“Marika’s offspring, demigods all, claimed the shards of the Elden Ring known as the Great Runes, and the mad taint of their newfound strength triggered a war: The Shattering. A war that meant abandonment by the Greater Will.

“And now the guidance of grace will be brought to the Tarnished who were spurned by the grace of gold and exiled from the Lands Between. Ye dead who yet live, your grace long lost, follow the path to the Lands Between beyond the foggy sea to stand before the Elden Ring.”

Those are a lot of words that don’t really bring us closer to understanding much about the game based on what was seen in the trailer, but we at least have some puzzle pieces to fit together later as more is revealed. Judging from FromSoftware’s past works and the fact that George R. R. Martin is on board for this game, it’ll probably be a dense story to unravel, so it’s likely not one player will even fully understand after the first playthrough.

Elden Ring is scheduled to release on January 21st.