Elden Ring's Lore Will Be Discovered by Interacting With Important NPCs

FromSoftware says that its approach to storytelling hasn’t changed with Elden Ring, but it may have expanded. Instead, during a recent preview event, the developers revealed that players will still interpret the lore on their own, but that this time clues can come from talking with the game’s many important NPCs rather than just from things like item text.

As FromSoftware explained during a Q&A, whereas in “Dark Souls, and maybe to a lesser extent Sekiro, you’d be picking up these pieces that talk about the world and allow the player to formulate an idea of the world itself and their place in it, they didn’t often talk to the characters and the people living in that world.”

This isn’t the case in Elden Ring. “With Elden Ring, we have a large number of NPCs and a lot of major players in the story,” FromSoft says.

And just as players picked up pieces of the lore through item text, “things like that are going [to come from] talking to those important NPCs and those important characters, and that way we feel the player is going to learn more about the drama, more about the history of the world,” through interacting and learning more about the many characters in Elden Ring.

The developers hope that this dialogue will help “formulate a more personal and dramatic image of the world.” In fact, FromSoft’s Yasuhiro Kitao goes so far as to say Elden Ring is a “multi-protagonist drama.” Kitao also said that director Hidetaka Miyazaki will be leading the in-game text and dialogue you’ll see in Elden Ring, based on the mythology laid down by collaborator George R.R. Martin.

In an interview with IGN earlier this year, Miyazaki explained how Martin helped create the world and inspired the characters and central drama. And while Martin says his contributions to Elden Ring were done “years ago.”

Either way, it seems that lore hunters obsessed over every detail in FromSoftware games will have to pay extra attention when speaking with the game’s NPCs if they want to uncover the secret of The Lands Between and Elden Ring.

Check out IGN’s Elden Ring preview for a better look at how dungeons will work in Elden Ring or read about how the new summoning mechanic is being designed to not interfere with the game’s difficulty.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's News Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

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