Towards the end of the Elden Ring gameplay trailer, we see a character wearing what appears to be the Faraam Armor from Dark Souls. That encounter doesn’t look like one I’m going to be looking forward to. Only it seems to be spewing fire everything. Now, I could be imagining things, but this item that’s sitting on top of the returned Smough head (see above). The Lordvessel was an item featured in Dark Souls and allowed players to warp into other areas once they collected the required items. The armor is the same and brought with him another Dark Souls reference. When I saw his character model, there was no denying it was him. Now it looks like Smough is jumping ship and is making an appearance in Elden Ring. Since then, the two have made appearances in the other Dark Souls games in one shape or another. Both bosses came at the player simultaneously, and it was easily one of the most frustrating bouts in the entire game.
One of the first major encounters in the original Dark Souls was against Ornstein and Smough. That said, let’s check out those references and how they connect to the Dark Souls universe. Doing so, I’ve seen several references to the Dark Souls series, though I suspect there’s more that I’ve missed. That said, being the Dark Souls nut that I am, I’ve been going over this gameplay trailer non-stop. Sure, he didn’t come out and say, “Hey, this is Dark Souls 4” but it feels like it is from what we’ve seen. And given everything we’ve seen with Elden Ring (so far), it looks like this is basically a spiritual successor to the series. The head honcho of the series, Hidetaka Miyazaki, did mention prior that he wanted to do a game that approached Dark Souls in a different light. While I thought that most of what we saw was very similar to Fromsoftware’s Dark Souls series, I suppose there’s a reason for that. Yesterday, Bandai Namco and Fromsoftware made me a very happy person by finally showing off some gameplay from the upcoming title, Elden Ring.