There's a lot you can point to in size of Elden Ring's map in square footage, but the actual land formations and artificial structures themselves.

I recently jumped back into an early Elden Ring save, mainly to get my co-op fix ahead of Elden Ring Nightreign, and since I'm in no rush to see all the game has to offer this time around, I've found myself really taking in the sights. It's a gorgeous game, that much is obvious, but it very smartly uses excessively large landmarks to dictate your exploration and provide a constant sense of grandeur. I tend to think of Elden Ring as a pioneer in a new school of open-world games (alongside The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild), and there's so much subtlety in its visual language that I think it's made me overlook the more overt aspects of its exploratory design.

Everything In Elden Ring Is Huge, But You Get Used To It

"I See Thee, Little Tarnished"

One of the experiences that I think remains in the collective consciousness regarding Elden Ring is that first elevator ride down to Siofra River. It's absurdly long, taking over a minute to reach the bottom, but it serves as such an important memory because it redefined the possibilities in Elden Ring. Seeing an unimaginably large cavern open up under a sky of false, purple stars was the first glimpse through the looking glass.

It's overwhelming and exciting at first, but quickly becomes commonplace; when everything is big, nothing is big. The view overlooking Liurnia of the Lakes is stunning, but the image of the Academy of Raya Lucaria towering over the region has diminishing returns after Stormveil did the same to Limgrave – so on and so forth for Leyndell on the Altus Plateau.

I'm convinced that Elden Ring's greatest trick is making you forget about how big everything is.

I think another element that ends up distracting you is Elden Ring's in-game map, which is a genuinely interesting tool to interact with. It isn't overrun with icons, but if you examine it closely, the entrances to mining tunnels have a distinct look, the ruins of churches can be spotted, and you can even see where tombstones stick out horizontally from cliff faces, offering a route to climb down. When I first played Elden Ring, I'd examine the map and plot my course with markers.

Death Stranding is another game that similarly benefits from scrutinizing the in-game map, since markers plot a delivery route you can follow when the map is closed.

This is almost like putting blinders on, though, and it probably gave me a kind of tunnel vision in my first playthrough, where I didn't want to miss anything. I certainly stopped and enjoyed the nice views, but looking back, I wonder if I really appreciated the sheer scale of Elden Ring's environments all the way through. Sure, I marveled at the entrance to Siofra River, but did I do the same at Ancient Dragon Gransax's corpse in Leyndell, or did I just climb all over it looking for loot?

Elden Ring Knows That It's Cool When Things Are Incredibly Tall

Who Could Blame A Tarnished For Feeling Inadequate?

My hindsight is almost beside the point, though, because I'm convinced that Elden Ring's greatest trick is making you forget about how big everything is. You don't need to stop and stare up at the Academy of Raya Lucaria going, "Wow, that's big," for the world design to fulfill its intended purpose. Elden Ring is a game that wants you to feel important, while simultaneously reminding you that you're insignificant.

You play as a Tarnished from a far-off land, guided by the Grace of Queen Marika herself to ascend the throne as Elden Lord, but you're also barely even a blip on the radars of Elden Ring's Outer Gods, beings practically beyond mortal comprehension. However, even as a lowly Tarnished – as Godrick would put it – you're on an adventure that's veritably mind-bending in its scale and ambition. FromSoftware seems to know that this requires an equally huge playground (but again, not in square footage).

I recently found myself in the Church of Vows, chatting with Miriel, aka Elden Ring's beloved Turtle Pope, listening to his of the courtship and subsequent split between Radagon and Rennala. The church is located on the direct line between the Erdtree to the east and the Academy of Raya Lucaria to the west, signifying the marital bond between the Golden Order and the Carian royals. It's much closer to the academy, yet the Erdtree is still colossal in comparison (take what narrative symbolism you will from that).

A while later, though, I'd made my way down from the East Raya Lucaria Gate, trudging through the water when I became enveloped in fog. Through the darkness to the east wasn't the Erdtree, but the sheer cliff next to me obscuring it. Practically the only other thing visible through the fog was the Academy of Raya Lucaria, absolutely dominating the surrounding environment. Hours later I was hundreds of feet up on the school grounds, and through the magical miasma that envelopes it, you can't see the ground, but you can still see the Erdtree.

The size of the game world in relation to the player character has been an unsung facet of FromSoftware's game design for a long time.

The visual storytelling is incredible, but I think what often gets compartmentalized about Elden Ring is how everything being so impossibly big is exactly what makes it so cool to explore. I struggle to even think of comparisons in other games that aren't products of FromSoftware. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom comes close (clearly an inheritor of BOTW's world design); the sequence climbing up to the Wind Temple, and the first time you dive into the Depths provide a similar perspective shift to the elevator ride down to Siofra River.

Elden Ring Plays With Scale In A Way That's Easy To Miss

An Important Evolution In FromSoftware's Game Design

Elden Ring's intense sense of scale can be subtle too. A valid criticism of the game is how frequently it reuses bosses, with only slight alterations, for its many mini-dungeons. I don't think the same can be said about the mini-dungeons themselves, though. By the time you've thoroughly explored Limgrave, you've seen most of the templates: mining shafts, caves, catacombs, ruins, etc.

Liurnia throws a wrench in it, and suddenly caves can have giant crystals in them. Similar iterations are found throughout the rest of the game, but more importantly, the delves get deeper and more complex, and it's all essentially optional content. While doubling back to explore all the side paths so you don't miss any loot, it's really easy to overlook the fact that a place like Raya Lucaria Crystal Tunnel is massive. It's not the most obvious because it doesn't dominate the skyline like the game's most prominent landmarks, but just like the long elevator ride to Siofra River, there's a latent grandeur in climbing all the way down to the boss.

This design is almost the antithesis to the making of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)'s "Clean House" mission, which uses real-world housing measurements to create a claustrophobic atmosphere. Houses in video games are usually much larger relative to real life.

This effect is even amplified in a handful of dungeons that are open-ended. The Ruin-Strewn Precipice leads to the Altus Plateau, Lakeside Crystal cave spits you out at the Slumbering Wolf's Shack, and in the excellent Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, the Dragon's Pit opens the way to Jagged Peak. It's easy to get distracted in Elden Ring, taking on bosses, looking for loot, following NPC questlines, or engaging with multiplayer, and not realize how frequently you're traveling hundreds of vertical feet.

The size of the game world in relation to the player character has been an unsung facet of FromSoftware's game design for a long time. Dark Souls' first entry remains my favorite largely because Lordran is so intricately stacked on top of itself, but the whole trilogy (and Demon's Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro) does a great job ively building drama by dwarfing the Chosen Undead, the Bearer of the Curse, and the Ashen One. Elden Ring then transitioning this to an open world, where perspective can't be so easily manipulated, is a real triumph in its design.

It's easy to see how the Erdtree, by far the largest object in the Lands Between, affects the game's atmosphere, but even in places where the Erdtree is out of sight, Elden Ring is committed to making the Tarnished feel small; even the ants are colossal. Many RPGs that are firmly within the fantasy genre still adhere to some semblance of realism – perhaps "believability" is a better word – in their game worlds: the eponymous Skyrim has some verisimilitude, much of the Living Lands in Avowed isn't especially outlandish.

Stormveil Castle is almost comically big until you see how tall Margit and Godrick are; the Academy of Raya Lucaria is bafflingly far above the flood plains of Liurnia; Mohgwyn Palace appears celestial on its perch above Siofra River; the chains you scramble across to the Forge of the Giants look like they should crumble under their own weight. Elden Ring is chiefly preoccupied with immersing you in a world that looks incredibly cool because its combined parts are unbelievably massive, and it accomplishes that so effectively that the very scale which makes the game so fun and interesting tends to fade into the background.