Castles lead to magic colleges that are adjacent to active volcanoes that border toxic swamps that all stand beneath a towering, hulking semi-sentient tree. "Hamstrung by the technology constraints of the time, Drangleic feels more jarring than the others, sure, but I'd now argue it's closer to the Lands Between than anything else in FromSoftware's back catalog."īut what about Elden Ring? If anything, its overworld design proves there's merit in incongruity. In practice, this is why Dark Souls 2's areas don't always seem to fit together, why the march between areas feels shorter than it ought to be, and why it's at all possible to take an elevator at the top of a bloody mountain and wind up inside a castle perched on top of a volcano. In doing so, Dark Souls gives the illusion of being an open-world game when it's not which is something Dark Souls 2's flatter, more spread-out layout struggles to mask.
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First launched on the PS3 in 2011, the game's desire to eschew loading screens means each location is loaded around the player – using a clever sleight of hand that goes unnoticed while moving upwards towards the summit of Sen's Fortress, and downwards towards the bowels of Blighttown alike. The thing is, while Dark Souls deserves every plaudit it has received for its seemingly seamless interconnected world over the years, one of the main reasons its locations are stacked on top of one another in the first place is due to technical constraints. So much so that after 300+ hours roving the Lands Between, I'm now convinced Dark Souls 2 might not have been as far off the money as I once thought. And yet, this same use of parallel, incongruous world design is one of Elden Ring's greatest joys. Compared to Dark Souls' masterful use of vertical interconnectedness, Dark Souls 2's horizontal sprawl can feel flat in more ways than one.
You climb mountains to reach floating, lava-filled valleys distances between areas don't line up as they appear on the horizon key locations are plain missing when viewed from the world's highest vantage points weather shifts dramatically at the opposite end of short tunnels – it's all a bit of a jumbled mess. I've certainly said it myself: Dark Souls 2 is a great game trapped inside a map that makes no sense. At the foot of that table, more often than not, sits Dark Souls 2.
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Since the game's launch last year, the Lands Between has been heralded as a wonder of world-building, one of the most sophisticated and expansive sandboxes we've ever seen, and, to quote our Elden Ring review, a landscape that's "palpably full of life, giving it an optimistic energy no Soulsborne game has had so far." It's a matter of opinion, but when we think of level design standards in the wider pre-Elden Ring Soulsborne series, Dark Souls often sits atop the pyramid, with Bloodborne a close second, Sekiro likely in third, and Demon's Souls – a game now pushing 14 years of age – second-to-last.
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