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'Elden Ring' Is A Sequel To Dark Souls, Says George R. R. Martin

Imogen Donovan

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'Elden Ring' Is A Sequel To Dark Souls, Says George R. R. Martin

Featured Image Credit: FromSoftware

Novelist George R. R. Martin, who contributed to the bewitchingly beautiful Elden Ring, has revealed the connection between this game and the Souls series.

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The author, who earned fame for writing the exceptionally successful epic fantasy series A Song Of Ice And Fire in the early 1990s, was approached by Hidetaka Miyazaki about creating the foundations of the game's world. Miyazaki already counts himself as a fan of Martin's writing, so the collaboration was a dream come true. Nevertheless, Martin hasn't written the story that the players will follow throughout the expansive open world - he's provided the mythos within which the plot pulls from. Miyazaki drew a comparison to a "dungeon master's handbook in a tabletop RPG," rather than a playwright sorting actors and sets onto a stage. Furthermore, some of the staff who worked on Game Of Thrones, the television adaptation of Martin's series of books, helped out with the development of Elden Ring. Let's hope they weren't the ones working on the eight season, eh? Oh ho ho ho. What a jester I am.

I'm not convinced that everyone is over the utter glory of the Elden Ring trailer shown in the Summer Game Fest last week. Let's give it another watch and see if we don't get goosebumps, just to be sure.

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Elden Ring is certainly sharing some DNA with Dark Souls, and the new trailer doubled down on these connections and then some. The combat, the enemies, the armour, the magic and the weapons all look like they've been lifted from the series, albeit with a lick of paint. Now, in an interview with WTTW, Martin has expanded upon the anchors that tie the two titles together. "I've played some video games," replied the novelist when asked about what it is like writing for a game versus writing for A Song Of Ice And Fire. "I'm not a big video gamer. But the game is called the Elden Ring and it's a sequel to a game that came out a few years ago called Dark Souls and it came out of Japan." Voila. Elden Ring is the successor (in some shape or form) to Dark Souls.

"My work on it was actually done years ago: these games they're like movies, they take a long time to develop," continued Martin. "Basically they wanted a world created to set the game in, they wanted world building as a big factor in fantasy and science fiction. You're not really not talking about the characters and the plot, but the setting is almost as important as everything else: Tolkien's Middle Earth, Robert E Howard's Hyborean age, the Foundation universe of Isaac Asimov...."

Consequently, Martin hasn't been overly involved in the present state of Elden Ring, but he has been privy to how the team has taken his concepts and transformed them into characters and creatures. "I worked up, you know, a fairly detailed background for them, and then they took it from there so really it's been several years since I've last seen them," added Martin. "But they would come in periodically and show me some monsters they'd designed, or the latest special effects, or the cool things, but the game has been very slowly developing and it's coming out in January I believe so I'll be as excited as everyone else to see it."

Topics: News, Elden Ring, Game of Thrones

Imogen Donovan
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