Hidetaka Miyazaki On Closing The Loop With Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree sees players hopping back into the world of Elden Ring . Taking place in the Land of Shadows, players will uncover the story of Miquella as they face off against a new threat known as Messmer the Impaler. Closing the loop on the Elden Ring story, as Hidetaka Miyazaki has mentioned before, this is the one and only DLC for Elden Ring .

During the exclusive Summer Game Fest Play Days , and with the highly anticipated Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtress release on the horizon, CGMagazine was granted the rare opportunity to engage in a roundtable conversation with several outlets, including Malditos Nerds, CNET, and The Verge with the esteemed Game Designer, Hidetaka Miyazaki, who started working as a game designer for Bandai Namco for the Armored Core series, before gaining worldwide recognition for the Dark Souls and Bloodborne series of games.

The variable sizes of the DLCs for From Software games have ranged from the relatively small Ashes of Ariandel DLC from Dark Souls 3 to the pretty massive The Old Hunters from fan-favourite BloodBorne . So, as we approach the release of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree , something has been on everyone’s mind: just how big the area and story of the DLC would be.

“It would be hard to put an accurate number to it, but given the sort of open-world nature of the gameplay, I would say it’s about the same amount of volume as the Limgrave part of the base game to add on to that, I would say that there is probably slightly more content than that arc as well as the different types of events and sub-quests and multiple legacy dungeons you can experience as well,” said Hidetaka Miyazaki. “I would say without a doubt that compared to all the past DLC we’ve done for other games, it is by far the biggest in scale and volume.”

“There are a few different aesthetic components that comprise the DLC, and in terms of art, one is, of course, the Erdtree and the Realm of Shadow that it was hiding all along and how that is revealed.”

If there is one thing that stands out above the rest when it comes to environmental storytelling, it’s FromSoftware. Take, for example, the Ash Lake from Dark Souls , where it’s implied that the ground you’re walking on is just the leftover corpses of dragons from eons ago. None of this is explicitly stated, but between cutscenes, some general lore, and implications of the location, FromSoftware is just incredible at storytelling. So, it got me thinking about how aesthetics would play into the overarching narrative and how exactly the landmass and its biomes were created.

When asked about this, Miyazaki said, “There are a few different aesthetic components that comprise the DLC, and in terms of art, one is, of course, the Erdtree and the Realm of Shadow that it was hiding all along and how that is revealed. Another is in the original world setting. There is a sort of culture or a society of the Erdtree. But in addition, there are hints and easter eggs of ruins that predate a lot of that society and culture that you see. So uncovering and discovering that is a big part of what helps inform the art direction. This doesn’t have as much to do with the stage or world concept, but I think in Japanese, it is called the Shishimai or the dancing lion boss, which evokes a lot of that oriental culture that you can kind of see throughout the ruins.”

Beyond that, there was also the fact that the big driving force for early marketing of the base Elden Ring game was George R.R. Martin , who had written the lore for the world that FromSoftware built the story around. This begged the question: Was George R.R. Martin involved in the story and lore of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree , and to what extent?

Miyazaki cleared things up, “So just to make sure there’s no confusion among the audience and media. I want to reiterate that the story for the DLC is not that George R.R. Martin has comprised anything new or different from what he had contributed in the base game. If anything, the lore and mythology of the world that you see in Elden Ring, he even created the lore that covers the DLC. It’s just that we couldn’t put it in the original game. So, we are almost closing the loop in terms of his contribution in the form of DLC.”

Miyazaki had mentioned that his original hope was to have this DLC be part of the base game. So, to follow up, I wanted to find out just how early on in Elden Rings ‘ development the team realized that Miquellas’s story would be too large to fit into the base game.

“It became apparent that this wasn’t going to fit in the original game, which was really towards the latter half of development. And we realized, oh my gosh, there’s this whole other arm of lore that we have that just can’t be explored. So that’s when I made the decision. ‘Hey, this is where the primary story’s going, and beyond that, it will be DLC.’ Again, a lot of that wasn’t driven by user feedback as much as it was, ‘Hey, George R.R. Martin gave us all this great mythology to work with,’ you know how and when are we going to package this in a way that can be played in and experienced so it’s really about completing the Elden Ring story.”

When a new DLC is announced for any multiplayer game, it also brings up questions of compatibility between the two separate versions of the game, and while many were asked, I thought it would be best to compile them all into one longer answer. Among the questions was how Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree played between the two versions and whether the new weapon loadout would bring any sort of advantages over bosses in the base game and players who didn’t have access to them. Miyazaki explained how it would work:

“I would say we haven’t gone back with a whole base game to adjust and make tweaks to boss counters to accommodate the new class and new sets of weapons that are introduced in the DLC. With that said, the new weapon classes aren’t necessarily clearly better than the existing working classes, so I don’t think players are going to feel a drastic or insurmountable change and the difficulty occur just because they have access to these new weapons.”

He continued, “If anything, perhaps I think it’ll introduce new ways to encounter, navigate, and defeat these bosses that you couldn’t experience previously. So add a new dimension or layer to that gameplay and open up more possibilities. Some weapons might be better against certain bosses, perhaps, but that remains to be seen. So I wouldn’t say there isn’t any kind of extreme differentiating factor aside from there being more variety. Naturally, the increase in variety may lend itself to new strategies that people who don’t have the DLC may not be exposed to. Still, I would say that my desires are experienced in DLC, but barring that, I think the experience won’t be that jarring.”

Elden Ring had a lot of hype surrounding it before its release, whether it was the George R.R. Martin statements, the promise of a huge adventure, or just the fact that this was FromSoftware’s moment to really push out into the mainstream and hook players who wouldn’t normally play it. Miyazaki touched on starting the development of Shadow of the Erdtree while the base game was out there and hearing feedback from the general audience,

“Well, first off, we didn’t double down on things people hated or caused a lot of stress. So aside from that, however, the DLC, of course, given the timeline and when we were developing it naturally, we were exposed to a lot of user feedback during development, both good and bad. However, that was never the primary driver of game design or world-building decisions. Of course, we wanted to reflect on and improve upon what we established in the base game and create a better user experience. But at no point did that take the driver’s seat of our development, so it was more of a complimentary feedback loop to help improve and make the experience better.”

Since FromSoftware has come out and said that Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree , would be the first and only piece of DLC for Elden Ring , some people have been wondering what’s next from FromSoftware and what lessons they have taken from the development of Elden Ring to whatever comes next. While there is nothing concrete to report on what is next , Miyazaki was clear about what he thinks the lessons to take home were,

“ I don’t know if I would say it’s a direct influence, but one of the big learnings that I had through working on Elden Ring is the learning curve, the difficulty curve of the game itself, plus the amount of freedom that we give the players, the balance between the two is actually quite, important. And traditionally, we’ve always liked the higher difficulty curve type of games and experiences. But I think that nature in and of itself alienates a portion of the game-playing audience.”

He went on, “ Elden Ring succeeded in casting a wider net while keeping that core high learning curve. I’m not saying an open-world game or experience is necessarily the answer. Still, I think it’s the degrees of freedom and the amount of freedom that we give players that help balance or offset that difficulty curve and make the game more accessible and engaging for certain player demographics. So I think that that combination of freedom and difficulty will become a big hint, and whatever it is we do next.”

“I don’t know if I would say it’s a direct influence, but one of the big learnings that I had through working on Elden Ring is the learning curve, the difficulty curve of the game itself, plus the amount of freedom that we give the players, the balance between the two is actually quite, important.”

When our time came to a close, we were given one last question, and hats off to CNET for ending things on a high note by asking Miyazaki what his favourite FromSoftware game was, and the answer surprised everyone.

“Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne, but if I could expand it to all FromSoftware Games that I wasn’t involved with, Kingsfield 2 would be a good choice.”

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is out now . Sitting down with Hidetaka Miyazaki was an incredible opportunity to see how excited he was to talk to everyone about Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree . After talking about it with him, I am even more excited to see how Miquella’s story plays out.