Elden Ring adds horseback riding to help cross an open world "more vast" than Dark Souls

In an E3 2019 interview with IGN, Dark Souls director and From Software president Hidetaka Miyazaki shared a bit more on what we can expect from the studio's new game Elden Ring. As expected, Elden Ring is a third-person action-RPG with combat and systems "heavily based on Dark Souls," according to Miyazaki. But compared to From's previous games, Elden Ring's fantasy setting is considerably larger and more open.

"With a more open and vast environment, the way combat plays out becomes fundamentally different," Miyazaki said, adding that Elden Ring's more open environments also lead to different combat scenarios. One of the more interesting scenarios mentioned is horseback riding. It's unclear whether you can actually fight while riding a horse, but you can at least ride them around, and that's already more horse content than From's other games - which, ironically, are notoriously covered in horse corpses.

Elden Ring is leaning more into seamless open-world design - whereas Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro's environments are technically connected but also highly insular - but it won't integrate some open-world staples like towns and NPCs. "Creating a new type of game is a big challenge for us," Miyazaki told IGN. "If we would add towns on top of that, it would become a bit too much, so we decided to create an open-world style game focused on what we are best at."

For my money, From Software is best at environmental storytelling, tight combat, and fantasy instilled with a sense of looming dread. From what we've heard and seen thus far, it sounds like Elden Ring is chock-full of all three, with a more ambitious world on top.

Curiously, the "overarching mythos" of Elden Ring was written by Game of Thrones author George RR Martin. Head here for more on all the E3 2019 games.