An artist has reimagined Elden Ring as a Baldur's Gate-style top-down RPG and surprised themselves with how gorgeous the result is.
Over on Reddit, the artist going by fanica98 online shared some stunning examples of what Elden Ring might look like as a top-down RPG, and indeed, it's a thing of beauty. Despite Elden Ring's somewhat muted color palette, everything translates really gracefully from a bird's eye view. See for yourself:
Elden Ring reimagined in Top-Down perspective from r/Eldenring
"I loved doing this one, despite my love-hate relationship with the game," fanica98 said. "I was pleasantly surprised with the source material since Elden Ring is a vertical game and shines through its layered vistas. Nevertheless, the large and detailed map gave me a lot of room to work in."
Talking to GamesRadar+, the artist clarified that the screenshots are literally screenshots from Elden Ring; they aren't original art. In their words, it's just "some clever camera work and configuration in order to get isometric-like screenshots," along with some tweaks to the dynamic lighting settings. Setting up the pictures took about an hour each to ensure the angles were right and colors looked good, but since the artist took about 60 shots, the whole project was "approximately 5-7 hours of work."
You can an absolutely should check out the full album of top-down Elden Ring shots here, and if you like those, fanica98 also gave Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 similar treatments a couple of years back with equally stunning results. In our conversation, fanica98 told us the Dark Souls screens have some minor edits to brightness and contrast, "but the latest Elden Ring screenshots are entirely unedited and taken directly from the game."
