How does roleplaying hold up when the spell breaks?
Elden Ring is a strange old game. On the one hand, it does everything in its power to make you feel like you’re at the centre of its delicately poised universe, blessed with the privilege of being a pioneer across these breathtaking worlds, your unique steps untangling the arcane mysteries within. On the other, it plays out with ghosts of other players wafting all around in ridiculous headgear, their bloodstained echoes falling comically off ledges to their deaths, their ubiquitous messages somehow finding a thousand different ways to obsess over the word ‘fingers’. In this way, offline and online Elden Ring feel like two entirely separate experiences, and as an experiment it’s worth logging out in order to appreciate the difference. We know some people who won’t even play the game online any more – but then these are the same ones who seek out anything that appears to actively exclude ‘multiplayer’ from its trail of bullet points.