FromSoftware’s hotly-anticipated open-world action RPG Elden Ring will take around 30 hours to complete, the game’s producer has said.
Speaking at Taipei Game Show 2022 (as spotted by VGC), Elden Ring producer Yasuhiro Kitao said that “the idea is that the main route should be able to be completed within around 30 hours”. However, Kitao also noted that this would “differ significantly” from player to player.
Players who were hoping to pour hundreds of hours into Elden Ring, fear not – the emphasis seems to be very much on only the “main route” through the game’s story – which boasts a mythology and background created by George R. R. Martin – taking approximately 30 hours though. Kitao notes that Elden Ring also features numerous dungeons to explore and that while “fundamentally, none of them need to be explored in order to clear the game”, he expects that “players should have many hours of fun exploring them.”
Kitao also discusses the sheer size of Elden Ring’s world, the first “open field” game FromSoftware has made. The producer says “the world in the game is far grander” than the developer’s previous games such as Dark Souls and Bloodborne, and that “we haven’t measured it in terms of square kilometres or anything, but we can definitively state that it is significantly larger than anything we’ve made before.”
Elden Ring’s differences in character development and customisation compared to its predecessors was also discussed, with Kitao saying “it is possible to raise your character’s abilities in all areas, so that they may eventually master the sword, the bow, heavy weaponry, and magic.” Although Kitao himself prefered using the straight sword in Dark Souls and the saw cleaver in Bloodborne, he says he felt Elden Ring “allowed for a much wider range of different play styles”.
This latest round of discussion of video game completion times comes in the wake of some controversy over the upcoming zombie game Dying Light 2. On January 9, developer Techland boasted that it would take 500 hours to “fully complete” the game, prompting considerable backlash on social media. Just two days later, the studio was forced to clarify that it would only take 20 hours to complete the main story.
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Elden Ring is set for release on February 25, launching on Xbox Series X, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, and PC.
In other news, PlatinumGames has announced a February release date for its retro-inspired arcade shooter Sol Cresta, while modders have given open-world survival sim Valheim the one thing it was missing – pet dogs.