The game that shouldn't exist – how Elden Ring has so much content

Some games impress with sheer scale, and others are hard to believe exist at all. Especially when a player with 30 years of gaming under his belt catches himself thinking that building what he's seeing would take thousands of developers, a bottomless budget, and a couple of extra decades.

That's the semi-serious question one player posted on Reddit. He's playing Elden Ring for the first time, and it's also his first soulslike. What finally floored him was Volcano Manor.

Instead of accepting Lady Tanith's offer to meet her lord, he poked around a secret corridor expecting a few dingy cellars and a minor boss. He found an entire prison town:

I opened the doors to Prison Town and was just like, no. No, this is impossible.

Exploring it took him 2–3 hours, and the cherry on top was realizing he could have skipped all of it. Had he said yes to Tanith, he would have been teleported straight to the grace outside the God-Devouring Serpent arena.

Commenters quickly confirmed that this scenario is very real. One admitted to missing the manor entirely on a blind run by taking the lift straight to the capital, ending up skipping around 40% of the game.

The big secret turns out to be far more mundane than magic. The Grey Demon has been roaming through the studio games since Demon's Souls, the Erdtree Avatar looks suspiciously like a Stray Demon with beams, the Horned Warriors from the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion borrow the look of Gundyr from Dark Souls 3, and the rats were lifted straight from the first Dark Souls with refreshed textures.

Even the combat is built from proven parts. The core comes from Demon's Souls, weapon skills grew out of the weapon arts in Dark Souls 3, and dual wielding got a polish after Dark Souls 2.

Add to that nearly five years of development between the release of Dark Souls 3 in 2016 and Elden Ring in February 2022. The seams still show, though. Mountaintop of the Giants and the Consecrated Snowfield feel much emptier than the early zones, and the Japanese game industry isn't exactly known for treating its employees kindly.