Elden Ring
A Tarnished warrior must traverse the Lands Between — a vast open world of ancient ruins, underground catacombs, and soaring castles — to mend the shattered Elden Ring and become the new Elden Lord. The game was developed in collaboration with fantasy novelist George R.R. Martin, who designed the deep mythological history of the world. Unlike previous FromSoftware games, a fully open overworld lets players choose their own path through the challenge structure.
Elden Ring successfully transplanted the punishing, mastery-based design philosophy of the Souls series into a massive open world, becoming one of the best-selling and highest-reviewed games of its generation. It proved that the "niche hardcore" Souls audience had grown into a mainstream player base large enough to support blockbuster commercial ambitions without design compromises. Its collaborative world-building with George R.R. Martin drew attention from mainstream literary culture.
Released in 2022 as FromSoftware's most ambitious project, Elden Ring entered a gaming landscape dominated by open-world titles from Ubisoft and Rockstar that had been criticized for prioritizing scale over depth. Its success validated a player-respecting, mystery-first design philosophy as a commercially viable alternative to the waypoint-driven, content-abundant style of contemporary open-world design.
Ubiquitous broadband internet shifted the medium from solo play to massive persistent social worlds, creating entirely new genres and business models. The MMORPG, the competitive shooter ladder, and eventually the live-service model all emerged from this transformation of games into always-online social spaces.
The iPhone brought gaming to billions of people who had never owned a dedicated gaming device, expanding the industry's addressable market by an order of magnitude. Free-to-play monetization models, originally developed for mobile, eventually transformed the economics of PC and console gaming as well.