Category: Elden Ring

Difficulty as Narrative Design – The Emotions That Might Happen When You Fight Sans

I’ve had some stuff on the brain lately, in regards to difficulty’s place in design, which is what tends to happen when you play Elden Ring for so many hours straight. I’ve also been replaying Toby Fox’s Deltarune with a friend, another game that uses difficulty in interesting ways. I’ve had this thought for a while, to do a write up about how difficulty can be, and is, deployed in design to affect the greater experience. This article contains major spoilers for Undertale and mild spoilers for FromSoftware’s Elden Ring.

To be unambiguous here – difficulty is a very nuanced and at times personal subject in design that touches on a host of other things such as game balance, technical depth, general play enjoyment, and of course accessibility. These are very complex subjects that deserve their own discussions. What I’m specifically focusing on in this article is how difficulty can be deployed with purpose, and often has more relevance to the overall design than is often attributed to it, as a simple measure of player competence for the purposes of challenge. I wanted to look at an example of a game where difficulty is an intimate part of its narrative design, where the reactions it illicit is very much a product of how difficulty is utilized.

The idea that difficulty in gameplay can be a narrative tool should be fairly straightforward to grasp when looking at a couple of examples. In Elden Ring, all of your primary boss characters are demigods, children of gods, who once fought over the shards of the titular ring. The demigod Radahn fought his half-sister Malenia to a standstill. Radahn is oft touted as the strongest of all demigods – he holds the stars in stasis by his own power – he takes an entire platoon of elite soldiers in gameplay just to take down! This assertion that Radahn is the strongest remains more or less unchallenged for some time. There are harder bosses, but none that require so much backup to defeat, nor any nearly as hobbled with injury as poor Radahn.

There is a secret and hidden boss, however, another demigod called Malenia, who is still alive. When Radahn is found, Malenia’s power, the same power that has scarred the landscape around Radahn has left him ‘divested of his wits’, and fighting like a wild animal. Malenia, however, is more or less totally lucid, angrily awaiting the return of her missing twin brother and liege lord, Miquella. Malenia has never been in better form – there was nothing stopping her from taking Radahn’s shard of the Elden Ring and yet she did not, so clearly she has no interest in ruling. Indeed her dialogue reinforces the notion that she fought only for loyalty to her brother’s ambitions.

Two warrior women face each other in a lush cavern filled with white flowers. One has red hair and is in golden Valkyrie garb, with a sword. One is in a blue hood, with a spear. The Valkyrie ascends into the air and swings her sword with such ferocity it creates white-hot slashes of air in a blurring flurry around her. The blood-hooded woman runs and rolls around the attacks.
I can practically feel the hairs being shaved off the back of my neck.

Any who’ve fought Malenia will tell you, the idea that Radahn could stand a chance against Malenia in combat, is laughable. They could tell you entirely because of how demanding of a boss she is, how difficult she is tells you the entire story. There’s no possible way she left her encounter with Radahn in defeat, or even in a draw. Her swordsmanship is deadly and near insurmountable, and she hides an even greater power beyond that. She defeated him, and he was left without his senses. She must have left because her brother, the real aspirant to the Elden Ring, went missing. The player will know this intuitively, through experience. They lived it. They will feel it in their bones. Radahn could not have defeated Malenia, and the rest of the story follows. Without Miquella, there would be no reason to collect Radahn’s shard. If you’ve explored the world of Elden Ring thoroughly, this line of thinking is vindicated, as you’ll know Miquella underwent a sudden and shocking disappearance, followed by an extended and secretive absence.

A woman in a blue hood runs her spear through the chest of a taller woman with red hair and golden Valkyrie garb, the stabbed Valkyrie falls onto her back in a pool of blood as the spear is removed.
Difficulty is a marker of power in games, and examining power is essential in stories of conflict

If you’ll indulge me to invoke the first of two quotes from Bennett Foddy, designer of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, a notoriously difficult game.

“The act of climbing, in the digital world or in real life, has certain essential properties that give the game its flavor. No amount of forward progress is guaranteed; some cliffs are too sheer or too slippery. And the player is constantly, unremittingly in danger of falling and losing everything.” – Bennett Foddy

All that said, difficulty is not just a mechanical gameplay consideration. Like all aspects of a game, it is an essential part of the cumulative experience. I am of the opinion that if an obstacle within your narrative is meant to be threatening, formidable, out to kill our dear player character, then the player should get the sense that this force is threatening and formidable. To trivialize it, or deny the sensation that there is an opposing force trying to halt the player’s forward motion, is to render the narrative dishonest, and rob it of its power. If conflict is about power, than difficulty is one of the most genuine ways power can be communicated in an interactive system. This isn’t to say that every game needs extreme challenge, or even that every game with conflict is necessarily trying to create the aforementioned sense of opposing force. This is but one type of experience you might seek to create, a goal your art may aspire to. In fact, this is just one way to deploy difficulty as a mode of narrative design. That brings us to Undertale.

The skeleton Sans stands in a black void, above a battle UI overlay. He says "ready?" then suddenly unleashes a barrage of bones and laser beams to attack the player, represented by a red heart-shaped cursor.
“No.”

In Undertale, the story is persistent – and any runs of the game, even when reset, are remembered and color the experience of playing Undertale going forward in little ways. Death and resetting is diegetic, meaning the player character is literally dying and coming back to life at a previous point in time, within the game’s fiction. In this way failure is kind of inherently tied to the narrative. Undertale comes packaged with a few predefined paths to play that present themselves based on how the player tackles obstacles. Killing monsters casually as they come to confront you will result in one of several ‘neutral’ endings, in which the player’s human character escapes the world of monsters, which is left in varying states of disarray as a result. The ‘pacifist’ run will see the player avoiding lethal violence, and reaching out the hand of friendship to major characters to achieve the best world for everyone. The ‘no mercy’ run is the third and most obscure path, in which not only is lethal force deployed against all obstacles, lethal force is deployed against every potential obstacle, wiping out all monsters in the underground.

To do this, the player has to spend an inordinate amount of time trawling around for enemies to fight. Every single one needs to be killed for the No Mercy ending to hold true. This process is long, repetitive, somewhat dull, and even grueling at times. And yet, it remains an immensely popular way to play this already immensely popular game. There is a purpose to all this consternation, though. I think it pretty noncontroversial to say Undertale‘s ultimate message is one of nonviolence – that the best way to solve conflict is through open communication and a curious, empathic heart. The No Mercy run exists as a counterpoint to this message, to prove its efficacy. Killing everything in Undertale is a pain, frankly. It takes a lot of effort but not necessarily the kind of effort a player seeking challenge might be after. More of that exists along the less violent story routes. No, Undertale is instilling through the avenue of frustration that ‘the easy way out’ isn’t always easy, and while ‘the high road’ isn’t always easy either, it’s a heck of a lot more fun than willful cruelty, which is a continuous and conscious effort on the part of the abuser.

And yet, most playing through will persist. They have buy in, and as Undertale expects, most will be curious enough to want to know what happens next, not in spite of the frustration, but perhaps even because of it. One of Undertale‘s most infamous features is the normally comedic, friendly, and jovial character Sans, who is a bit of an internet meme. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but I think one of them has to be his sudden transformation into the game’s greatest and most stubborn challenge. The boss battle against Sans, with one other exception, is the only real challenge in the No Mercy run, with all other opposition crumpling like paper before the player. The player has not had a ramp up in difficulty in this point, and Sans comes out of the gate swinging with one of the most demanding gameplay experiences in modern popular interactive media. No punches pulled here, Sans is meant to be a brick wall of a boss, one that will have to be worn down with patience if it’s to be cleared at all.

Sans the skeleton stares you down from a black void with a battle UI overlay, as the player's heart-cursor, now blue, jumps across platforms littered with bones.
I have SO MUCH patience right now, you wouldn’t believe. Oh god the patience I have.

Fans of Undertale have such a personal relationship with it, and given its immense popularity that is quite impressive. The player at this point, is acting as an agent within the narrative, separate and apart from their controlled character, Frisk, who ambiguously is either mind-controlled by the player, or influenced by the player subtly to act or fight. Sans tries everything he can to appeal to the player to start over, to do anything but follow through on the path they’re on. He pleads, he appeals to humanity, he threatens, and he even cheats. After each failure, Sans comes up with some new unique dialogue with which to taunt and belittle you for trying. The player can come back as many times as they want to try again, so words and his ability to act as an immovable object are Sans’s only real forms of power over you. The ironclad stubbornness of this encounter, the unerring, unflinching confidence in its unreasonableness makes it feel real, like Sans is a thinking actor specifically trying to get under your skin, and make your goal unreachable, and that is what makes it feel personal.

Sans the skeleton says, "sounds strange, but before all this i was secretly hoping we could be friends. i always thought the anomaly was doing this cause they were unhappy. and when they got what they wanted, they would stop." He then fires a bevy of skull-shaped laser cannons at the player's red cursor.
Oh. Kind of makes me feel bad I’m trying so hard to kil- OH GOD LASERS

Sans isn’t trying to kill you – he knows that is beyond his power. He’s trying to wear you down, to frustrate you, to bore you, whatever it takes to make you give up on your killing spree, and maybe start over, or even give up. The story was very carefully set up to make this a legitimate way to cap off the narrative. In Undertale, the story is persistent – and any runs of the game, even when reset, are remembered and color the experience of playing Undertale going forward in little ways. In Undertale, giving up and starting over is a legitimate and designed-for chapter of the narrative.

The skeleton Sans sends an onslaught of bones and laser beams at the player's heart-shaped cursor, turned blue now. After a moment he sends the blue heart careening into a deadly maze of bones as it flies against its will to the right side of the screen.
What a reasonable amount of garbage that can instantly kill me, on the screen, all at once

Giving up can mean a new beginning, a world where the player is not a force for destruction and misery, but a force for change and friendship. Whenever I play Undertale, I love to play the part of the sinister player destroying the world and its inhabitants for callous entertainment (and in a way, I truly am that), but then our protagonist, Frisk, overtaken by sorrow after killing Sans, is able to wrestle back control and ease me into a more peaceful, and ultimately more fulfilling world. I’ll play a No Mercy run just up until I’ve killed Sans, and no further. I’ll then roleplay the regretful monster, the powerful demon whose lost everything, and has no more mountains to conquer. From there I return, back to the beginning of the game, anew with a desire to learn and try again. Undertale makes failure an avenue for learning and improving at the game yes, but also a potential narrative moment of fulfillment.

I love this scenario. It creates a full arc for me, as the will and intention of the player character Frisk, to go through. It’s a rich narrative that unfolds entirely through gameplay that I get to be a part of. That’s the real magic of difficulty in games for me, it’s something entirely unique to the medium, a level of interactivity other forms of art simply cannot achieve. Sans is blisteringly difficult, to the point that he may even feel antagonistic to the human behind the screen. But the game isn’t trying to punish you, nor look down on you, it’s trying to play with you. It is a game, after all. It is interactive theater, a stage show where you are the star. And maybe just maybe you’ll get something valuable out of the experience.

“Death and rebirth, trying and overcoming—we want that cycle to be enjoyable. In life, death is a horrible thing. In play, it can be something else.“-Hidetaka Miyazaki

You are meant to be along for this emotional ride through joy, through sorrow, through fear, through love, through distress, and yes, through frustration. It’s a frustrating thing to be denied passage, to face an opposing force that’ll do everything in it’s power to stop you. If the art is to be evocative, it may be necessary to instill that sense of frustration. I will deploy the second of two Bennett Foddy quotes, as I admire the way he puts it;

“What’s the feeling like? Are you stressed? I guess you don’t hate it if you got this far, feeling frustrated. It’s underrated. An orange, a sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel. That’s not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness. It’s coffee, it’s grapefruit, it’s licorice.” – Bennett Foddy

Sans the skeleton sleeps, standing up, in the center of a screen with a battle UI. A red heart-shaped cursor moves over to the UI button labeled "FIGHT". A slashing effect moves toward Sans, but he slides out of the way and begins to speak, but is cut off by a second attack, which leaves a violent gash across his chest.
Frustration and loss isn’t just a roadblock to joy and catharsis, it’s an essential part of the whole.

Frustration is not the opposite of fun. I think the runaway success of games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Undertale, games that very much use frustration as feature of their storytelling, are strong evidence of this. There are hosts of games that follow similar patterns. When you play and watch people play difficult games as much as I do, you begin to notice that not only is frustration not a deterrent to the fun for most, it often accompanies the highest highs of player’s positive emotional reactions. Art is not a vehicle for merely delivering joy and nothing else. Life is a rich tapestry of a variety of emotions, and if art is to speak truth, then I think it’s worth considering how best to accurately reflect that. I’ve been talking a lot about feelings and emotional reaction, and I can’t overstate how subjective such things can be. You’re walking a fine line when utilizing traditionally negative emotions such as frustration to tell a story. As I said before, difficulty is a very nuanced and complex topic and this is just one aspect of it, one feature of difficulty to consider when configuring the shape of the experience you want to create. Difficulty can be used to tell and legitimize interactive narrative in a very profound way. That said, not all games need to, and by no means should they, take the same shape. Knowing how best to achieve the goals of your design starts with understanding your goals, and understanding the tools at your disposal.

Sans the skeleton sleeps soundly, standing up, in the center of a screen with a battle UI overlay.

You have something called ‘determination.’ So as long as you hold on… so as long as you do what’s in your heart… I believe you can do the right thing…

The Evolving Boss Design of Elden Ring: Godrick The Grafted

Yes, yet another FromSoft post. In my defense, Elden Ring, 2022’s action RPG release, and FromSoftware’s foremost foray into the open world game format is impossibly large, and has proven just as impossible to keep out of my head. Boss battles, with their big climactic set pieces and heightened sense of challenge have always been FromSoft’s bread and butter when it comes to their contemporary era of action games. It seems these games are constantly pushing the envelope of how grotesquely deadly these big baddies can be. The opening boss battles of Elden Ring are a strong showing, coming in with all the bombast, shock, and awe that I’ve come to expect, but I did notice something – a subtle shift in the design for the likes of Margit The Fell Omen and the first major ‘chapter boss’, so to speak, Godrick The Grafted. This new design direction seems to carry forward with the rest of the bosses of the game, so I really wanted to talk about it.

In a castle courtyard, a huge man made of many limbs grotesquely frankenstein'd together swings his axe above his head, summoning gusts of wind upon which he rings up into the air, then slams his axe down on a thief, who dodges out of the way.

For those unfamiliar, combat in FromSoft RPGs generally can be broken down like this; The boss has a pool of attacks and moves from which they will select their action, reactive to the player character’s position relative to themselves. A dragon may swing its tail if the player is behind them, or breath fire if the player is standing at a distance, and such. In response, the player has a number of options including blocking with their shield, moving out of the way of the attack, or avoiding damage with the dodge roll maneuver, which gives the player a brief window of invincibility. The dodge roll is very very powerful, and potentially frees up a hand that would otherwise be occupied with a shield, so the player can two-hand a more powerful weapon, or offhand a second weapon. As such, the dodge roll is traditionally the player’s greatest tool of avoiding harm while they look for punishes, brief windows in which a boss cannot counterattack. These punishes happen when the end of a boss’s action animation precludes them from taking another action for a brief moment. The recoil of swinging a huge axe, for example.

Traditionally, FromSoft RPGs like Dark Souls and the like have a very powerful strategy when it comes to fighting bosses – getting behind them. Though even as far back as Demon’s Souls, many enemies were equipped with back-facing attacks meant to dissuade players from becoming too comfortable back there, the caveat was generally that these back-facing attacks were a lot more manageable than many of the front-facing ones, so circle strafing enemies remained a pretty dominant strategy in most situations, all the way up to Dark Souls 3, with some exceptions, but we’ll get to that.

When I first fought the major boss Godrick The Grafted I found myself failing and dying. A lot. To be expected of the infamously difficult FromSoft RPGs, right? Well sure, but Godrick is a very early game boss, so I had to rethink my approach. Surely the first major boss couldn’t be that difficult. Godrick’s fight is split into two phases, though both operate generally the same. He has a large pool of attack options, but I’ll mention some of the most common ones. First he has what I’ll call his basic attack combo, which he prefers to use on players that are standing medium-close to him, in front of him. It starts with a very slow axe swing to teach players to rely on their eyes for dodge cues, not just prediction, as aggressive predictions tend to result in early dodge rolls that are punished by such slow attacks. He’ll then follow up this axe swing with a series of swipes of his arms and axe, using a combo of variable length. If the player disengages, the combo stops at two attacks, but continues for up to four attacks if the player stays close.

In a castle courtyard, a huge man made of many limbs grotesquely frankenstein'd together brings his axe down on a thief, who ducks and dodges toward the arc of the axe swing, avoiding harm, but getting hit by the grotesque man's swinging arm, just as the thief is standing up.
The hitbox of this move is designed very specifically to catch players getting too close.

This attack presented a bit of a problem for my muscle memory. The dominant strategy of old in Dark Souls was to ‘dodge through’ enemy attacks. If you got the timing right, the invincibility of the dodge roll could carry you through the hitbox of an enemy sword swing, and the best way to do this would be to dodge into the arc of the swing, toward the direction it’s coming from. This minimizes the time your player character and the enemy hitbox intersect, making a successful dodge more likely. This results in a lot of getting behind enemies and proverbially hugging them up close. Try this on many of Godrick’s moves, however, and he’ll have a hasty response.

The better maneuver is to out-range Godrick, and dodge away from him as he attacks, dodging or moving toward him only to punish his openings, although these can be difficult to judge at first because he has so many followups. Remember how I said his basic attack has a variable length? Many many of Elden Ring‘s baddies have followups like that, contingencies to account for the different places the player might be standing to avoid harm, so sometimes what you think is a punishable opening on a boss is simply not.

In a castle courtyard, a huge man made of many limbs grotesquely frankenstein'd together wildly swings his axe at a thief, as the thief sprints away, out of his reach.
Dodging this attack with rolls is theoretically possible, but so high-risk as to be ill-advised

Godrick’s ‘big swing’ attack, as I like to call it, happens when he rears up his axe with both hands slowly, giving the player ample time to reposition themselves in response. This attack has five very large swings, some of which hit in nearly 360 degrees. They’re also very deadly, making standing up close to him equally as deadly. This attack is very punishable, but only at the end of its run. Godrick has a lot of attacks like this, such has his whirlwind, which not only nudges players away in a circle around him with a bit of damage, but is immediately followed by one of two attacks that very difficult to distinguish without the full picture, and dodging the wrong one could mean taking a big hit. A lot of Godrick’s and many Elden Ring enemies’ moves are like this. They are of variable length, and potentially can sweep the player up in a very long combo. It’s not that getting behind a boss is impossible, it’s just not very safe.

Another feature worth mentioning, is the stagger system, somewhat borrowed from Sekiro. All enemies have an invisible value that is diminished when they take a hit, but constantly regenerates over time. If this value hits a certain minimum, the enemy will stagger, and become open to a critical attack. Due to its nature, and the many variables that go into it, this value can be somewhat unpredictable, especially as it is not displayed anywhere, unlike in Sekiro. Previous FromSoft RPGs had systems like this, though they were less powerful, only allowing an extra hit or two when enemies stagger, rather than a chance for big damage. Since the exact moment a boss will stagger is so unpredictable, the best thing to do is to just keep up the pressure, to increase your likelihood of getting a stagger, which naturally makes Elden Ring combat more aggressive and high-tension.

In a castle courtyard, a huge man made of many limbs grotesquely frankenstein'd together leaps into the air riding on a whirlwind and slams his axe down, but his target, a thief, dodges out of the way, then stabs his exposed body several times, causing the hulking man to gush blood, and fall onto his knees.
Whenever a stagger does occur, it creates a rewarding moment of catharsis

Frequently, if you do manage to get behind Godrick he’ll roll out of the way, and quickly prepare another attack. This often results in taking a hit, and disrupts your ability to consistently damage Godrick, meaning you’re less likely to stagger him with this route.

In a castle courtyard, a huge man made of many limbs grotesquely frankenstein'd together rolls away from a thief as the thief positions himself behind the hulking man. As he finishes rolling, the man swings his arms at the thief.
Godrick is quick to respond to unfavorable positioning.

So what’s going on here? Why do the bosses in Elden Ring feel so different? I think I know. It seems to me that a major design goal for the bosses of Elden Ring ties into that verisimilitude I talked about when discussing Sekiro. FromSoft wanted fights in this game to feel more genuine, to reduce the friction between the gameplay and narrative of a life-and-death fight. In a real fight, you’d expect there to be a lot less dancing around opponents and a lot more squaring up, staring them down face-to-face, standing opposite one another as you trade blows. As such, everything about Godrick’s boss design makes him equipped to enforce that scenario. Getting behind him is dangerous, standing too close is dangerous, all defined by Godrick’s particularly designed behavior.

In a castle courtyard, a huge man made of many limbs grotesquely frankenstein'd together takes his own battle axe and slams it into his other arm, screaming all the while, before succeeding in cutting it off, the end of his arm landing bloodily in the foreground.
Extremely normal behavior.

Between a much broader repertoire of tools at his disposal for hitting players at any angle, the ability to quickly reposition himself, and a much more unpredictable, variable moveset that adapts in length and reach to player positions in real-time, fighting Godrick the old way is much less viable. When players have to rethink their approach, they’ll likely come to a similar conclusion I did; the safest place to fight Godrick is in front of him, at a decent distance, where they can see his attacks clearly, and where dodging is less likely to be a death sentence. Compare Godrick to an early boss from the first Dark Souls game.

A rotund demon in a crumbling ruin swings a mighty hammer at a thief, he dodges the swing and rolls behind the demon with ease. The demons stands there for a moment, then swings his hammer feebly in front of him, unable to reach the thief.
Godrick would have killed me three times by now.

Notice how completely unable the asylum demon is to respond to my parking behind his rump. The Asylum demon does have an attack that can reach behind him, but it is exceptionally easy to dodge, with a huge slow windup. Also, it’s only just the one. Outside of trying to butt-stomp the player, the asylum demon really has no options. He can’t reposition himself either. Godrick, on the other hand, can… slam the ground to create a large earthquake in a circle around him, quickly whip up a whirlwing that knocks nearby players way, jump into the air to reposition himself and attack simultaneously, roll away to a more advantageous position, initiate his 5-hit super combo, etc.

Sped-up footage of a thief continuously circling around a large demon, standing behind him as the demon fumbles to try and attack the thief, in an old dimly lit ruin.
Yep, it pretty much just goes like this.

The old way of fighting bosses in Dark Souls was, and still is, fun. Some of the most fun I’ve had in a video game, but FromSoft isn’t a developer to rest on their laurels. The evolution of their boss design seems to be working more and more to create a believable experience with a strong sense of weight and presence. Verisimilitude is a major priority, but not only that, there are a lot of important advantages to designing bosses this way. For one, the player will be able to admire and appreciate the art of the boss they are fighting a lot more from a nice, framed, middle-distance shot, than from standing between their legs (depending on the boss, and the player, I guess..). The clearer framing also makes reading enemy telegraphs a lot clearer and easier. If a player is rightfully standing behind a boss because it’s the safest approach, camera zoomed up way close, they might understandably become frustrated by attacks they cannot see, and won’t determine the reason, succeeding by their strategy in the end, but having less fun in the process. Since so many of a boss’s attacks are triggered by the player position, having the player spend so much time in an awkward position may result in them not even seeing the boss’s coolest most impressive attacks, diminishing the entire set piece.

It seems FromSoft has been working toward this goal of the ‘squared off, face-to-face’ boss battle as a default for a long time. As far back as Dark Souls 2, we saw evidence of this. It is very popular to complain about the enemies’ ability in that game to track the player’s position with their attacks, meaning the enemy’s entire model actively rotates to align itself with player position, making circle strafing a weaker strategy. This worked to an extent, but also was pretty transparently artificial. People really just don’t move that way, spinning on their heel to align the swinging of their arms in a way that defied physics, so much so that my friends and I had taken to calling the process the ‘ballerina twirl’. Bloodborne reduced the ballerina twirling quite a bit, making up for it by giving the player a tool which made squaring up with bosses a lot safer – an extremely powerful frontal parry. Since the player needed their enemies to attack them from the front to succeed in a parry, it became a much more desirable spot to stand. The backstab of Bloodborne, being so slow, also meant circling around was suitable for stealth, but less suitable for active combat. Dark Souls 3 introduced a lot of the standard for how attacks are shaped in these games; big sweeping things that sometimes make as much as 360 degrees around the boss a danger zone. That game also introduced a lot of the adaptability and variability of enemy move-sets that made them more equipped to react to players constantly trying to get behind them.

This new design direction seems to have culminated in Sekiro, which was developed alongside Elden Ring. In Sekiro, parrying is everything, so enemies had to constantly be positioning themselves and the player into a squared off position. A lot of strategies employed to accomplish this seem to have carried over to Elden Ring, adapted to account for the lack of a strong parry, of course. The behavior of Sekiro‘s largest bosses is rather reminiscent of Elden Ring bosses. I can’t say I dislike this new direction FromSoft is taking its boss design. Godrick is a fun and exciting challenge, and one I actually got to see visually in its full glory! Just while recording footage for this post, I was struck by how consistently beautiful and exciting the action looked in motion, so by my estimation the efforts to make fights in Elden Ring feel more genuine, worked.

A hunched, cloaked figure gently caresses the face of a skewered dragon carcass in a castle courtyard. A close up of the figure reveals a six fingered hand.

…And one day, we’ll return together …to our home, bathed in rays of gold…

Torrent of Elden Ring: Gaming’s Most Powerful Horse

My god, so that Elden Ring huh? Certainly has given me a lot to chew on. There are any number of topics I want to write about on that game eventually, from the new approach to boss design, to the integration of more summoned NPCs, the nuances of the tweaked melee combat, the expanded magic toolset, to how the open world has changed the way enemy encounters are designed. So I had to narrow it down, and I want to talk about one of the game’s most prominent new features and a major marketing point of the game – the presence of a horse and mounted combat.

I’ve wanted to, for a while now, do a write up on game design’s strange and somewhat hilarious history with mounted riding animals in a broader sense, but Elden Ring‘s local speedy boy Torrent has given me cause to talk about the ways Fromsoft has distinguished mounted combat and movement specifically. There are a lot of really cool design choices I’ve noticed that went into making Torrent a beast on the battlefield, with combat that feels as good as any of Fromsoft’s previous unmounted offerings. Here are just a few.

Don’t Forget, We’re Playing a Video Game

When I say ‘we’re playing a video game’ I don’t mean to say that player immersion and realism needs to go out the window. Kind of the opposite, actually. I feel like the tendency in some games is to put a lot of physics and terrain based restrictions on how player characters move. Maybe in the name of realism, maybe in the name of feeling cinematic, but often this approach leads to characters that control like tanks, ultimately creating more friction between the player and the experience, not less. My preference is to make the character controlling process as smooth as possible.

Torrent is a horse, and the design makes considerations to make his control feel more like a horse. He doesn’t stop on a dime. He’s got some acceleration and deceleration to him. He can’t turn on a dime, he needs space to swivel his rear around when you about face. Thing is, he doesn’t need that much space, and he doesn’t take that long to reach full speed or come to a stop. Torrent has movement limitations, but only barely enough to convince you he’s moving a like a horse. Fromsoft put the utmost priority into making sure he just moves smoothly, minimizing friction. Even given the very minor limitations placed on mounted movement to give the impression of riding a horse, enough to reinforce verisimilitude, these are somewhat circumvented by the presence of a double jump!

A warrior astride a horned horse leaps over brush and rocks as they ride across a field. To jump over a tree, the horse gains additional height with a spectral magic circle in midair.
Imagine animals actually being able to navigate their environment. Incredible.

Yes, the horse can double-jump, completely redirecting his momentum in midair, enhancing the length and height of his jump in the process. Torrent doesn’t turn as hard as the player can on foot, but he can totally reorient himself by jumping. This mechanic is in place for several very important reasons. First, Torrent is an exploration tool and Elden Ring is filled with very precarious drops and complex terrain geometry. Something a lot of other games featuring horses have stumbled on is how damn incompatible the mounts are with their own game world. Lots of video game horses can move fast, but can’t go anywhere. A glut of limitations on mounted movement can make it too specialized and niche, not versatile enough to be used often.

Torrent doesn’t feel like a second entity your player is fighting to control, but rather an extension of themselves. In that way Torrent is treated more like a vehicle. It’s a compromise, in that this perhaps distances the design from the realism of riding a horse, but for the design goals they were trying to meet, it makes a lot of sense. Those design goals being, that riding Torrent needs to serve as a distinct combat style that feels as seamless and satisfying as grounded combat, an extension of Elden Ring‘s primary gameplay mode.

A Horse Is Much Faster Than You

This is a weird one to see not fulfilled so many times. Part of what makes Torrent so successful as a mount is that he is just a lot more maneuverable than you, the human player. He’s a horse; he can move at like double your top speed. I’ve played an astounding number of games with mounts that don’t feel all that much faster than just walking. The double jump plays into this too. Torrent has horns as well, kind of giving him the impression of a mountain goat, which communicates his exquisite climbing ability. Mountains, cliffs, and ravines are common obstacles in Elden Ring‘s world of the Lands Between. Distinguishing Torrent with his much more robust set of movements for dealing with such obstacles proves his worth to the player, and was very important in cementing his place in the game.

Torrent Isn’t Made of Paper

For a number of reasons, video game horses are often not equipped for combat. Perhaps the game simply does not have a design for mounted combat. Perhaps the design does not account for a constant companion that would throw off the game’s design. Maybe they just thought it’d be awkward if you constantly had a horse following you, biting and kicking goblins. Whatever the reason, horses in games often wind up very weak. Ride them off a two-foot-high outcropping and they crumple like they’re made of paper mache. Get jumped by a dragon, and you’re never seeing that horse again.

First of all, Torrent can fall very very far without issue. He needs to navigate complex environments with a lot of versatility and if he was constantly dying from underneath the player, it just would not be workable. Torrent has knees of steel, and can bound off of cliffs with ease.

A warrior astride a horned horse jump off of a cliff from grassland into a shallow lake. The horse lands gracefully and harmlessly.
Oh no no NO NOT OFF THE CLIFF oh- oh never mind, we’re fine.

What’s more, Torrent is meant to be used in combat, and thus can take a hit or two. In fact, he’s quite a bit more sturdy than even the player. Riding Torrent is a very safe place to be, gameplay wise. He can even take hits for you, depending on the angle of attack. To counteract this big advantage, riding Torrent is given a specific risk. You can take a lot of hits, but if you are knocked off of Torrent, either by losing your balance, or if Torrent dies, you are sprawled onto the ground and left very vulnerable. Re-summoning Torrent will require taking a moment and possibly sacrificing some healing resources.

A warrior astride a horned horse pass in front of a gray dragon, which angrily bites at the duo, drawing blood. The horse stumbles, but quickly composes itself and rides on, warrior still in tow.
Good God this horse is built different.

We’re Just Not Bothering With The Idle Problem

This one is funny to me, but I respect it. If you’ve played a video game with a horse you’ve seen it. The world’s jankiest implementation of entity spawning known to man. I’ve legitimately played a AAA game where I’ve seen a horse pop into existence upon use of the ‘horse summon’ button. The problem is, what do you do with mounted animals when they’re idling, not being ridden? Do they just run off somewhere? What’s the visual of that? How is the horse summoned and where does it come from? Does the horse exist in real-time, meaning it stays where you leave it until you come to pick it up? Torrent kind of just… double-jumps over this problem entirely. When summoned, he appears underneath your player in an instant, and disappears just as instantly when dismissed. Sometimes, the realism of a thing isn’t worth the headache. Torrent works better if his presence is never in question, so it just isn’t.

The side-benefit of this is that Elden Ring can switch between its two combat modes, mounted and on-foot on the fly and seamlessly. Torrent is always available outdoors if you need him. You can even ride Torrent into battle and jump off for a cool dismounting attack.

In a shallow lake dotted with dead trees, a lone warrior whistles on her fingers, summoning a horse that phases out of spectral energy beneath her as she mounts up, and rides toward a large gray dragon in the distance.
Man, I love not even having to think about what stupid stuff Torrent’s Horse AI would get up to.

As Above So Below

This is a straightforward idea, but one that implies a lot of extra work in creating game assets. While mounted, the player is allowed to use basically any attack they can use while unmounted. Making the mounted combat feel seamless and parallel to unmounted combat was very important for Elden Ring, so a lot of extra animation and frame data was created to ensure the player’s preferred weapon and spells were available to them while mounted on Torrent as well.

Combat As a Spatial Problem

As I’ve said before, action combat is mostly all about relative spatial relationships between player and hazard. Where a player is standing when an enemy attacks determines if damage is dealt, etc. A friend of mine pointed out that video games are and have always been, very very good at mapping spatial problems, and with this in mind, real-time combat can often be boiled down to very elaborate spatial problem. Elden Ring‘s mounted combat leans hard into this concept. Normally, combat in Elden Ring and other action RPGs from Fromsoft centers majorly around the dodge roll mechanic, in which well timed button pressed can impart a moment of invincibility that can be used to circumvent damage regardless of positioning, although positioning remains important due to the invincibility window’s briefness.

Torrent does not have a dodge with invincibility frames, this seems to have been the main thrust of distinguishing mounted combat in Eldren Ring from its on-foot counterpart. There are other key differences, of course, but they all seem to revolve around this one major change. Having no iframes on Torrent changes the way one approaches combat immensely. ‘Rolling into’ attacks, so to speak, such that when a dodge roll ends, the enemy’s attack has already moved past the player’s position, is a fundamental strategy normally. But now, keeping your distance is a player’s best method for not getting hit. Since Torrent can’t dodge in the way the player can unmounted, dodging attacks becomes entirely a matter of positioning. In place of a dodge, Torrent has a dash which gives him a quick burst of speed, useful for getting player-seeking projectiles off your tail or outmaneuvering other mounted combatants. So you’re encouraged to always disengage after riding up to an enemy to hit them.

Dead serious, fighting this dragon is an all time great achievement of experiential design

The result of this simple change is that combat much more resembles a series of ride-bys where the player rides up to their foe, hits them quickly, then circles behind or gets out of their reach in some way. There’s a lot of two horses riding past each other in a sort of joust… kind of like how mounted combat actually works, or at least how one might imagine it works! There’s that verisimilitude again! Dang. By removing this seemingly essential tool, Fromsoft has reinforced a method of gameplay that resembles what they are trying to simulate, brilliant! When you can’t dodge with invincibility, you have to outmaneuver danger, and that means riding around and past enemies like you’re an actual mounted cavalry, you can’t just stand squared up to your foe and hit them without expecting to get hit back, and thus you are encourage to be constantly on the move, kind of like you’re on a riding animal. Dang. It just keeps fitting together, doesn’t it?

A warrior astride a horned horse gallop in the foreground as brush and trees rush by, a dragon in the background flies across the sky raining down fire narrowly outpaced by the mounted warrior and his companion.
No amount of rigid unresponsive tank controls would have made this moment feel more cinematic

So this is all well and good, but Elden Ring is an extremely three-dimensional game with a lot of danger happening, left, right, center, up, and down all the time. Torrent needed another tool to avoid damage. Dang, he already has one we’ve talked about, doesn’t he? The damn horse can double-jump. Torrent’s extreme level of vertical maneuverability makes awareness of enemy attacks even more essential, and some can be completely circumvented with well placed and timed jumps. Very little in this, or any video game feels as instantly exhilarating as jumping over a dragon’s flaming gullet, the camera pulled way out to capture the action. Forget harshly limited controls that make characters feel more ‘realistic’ or ‘cinematic’. No, good gameplay can do that just as well.

A warrior astride a horned horse runs up on a large gray dragon in a shallow lake as it begins to breath fire, the horse runs up a large rock and bounds into the air, over the dragon's head. The warrior skewers it with a spear, cutting off the fire breathe and felling the beast. The two ride out, then come to a stop as the words "GREAT ENEMY FELLED" appear.
WOW! Someone get this horse an apple and some sugar cubes.

So yeah. Elden Ring impresses on a number of fronts, but it’s easily got the best mounted combat I’ve ever played. Not that I’ve played a huge number of mounted combat games, but riding Torrent is just as engaging as fighting enemies on foot, which is kind of impressive. The riding in and out to swipe enemies in the side as I pass, jumping over dragons, and covering great distances as I bound over cliffs, it’s all very exciting. Rarely have I had just a smooth experience with mounted animals in games. Fighting that dragon? Almost indescribable how elated I was, to fight a dragon that felt like it had an appropriate sense of danger, scale, and gravitas. Couldn’t have done it without you Torrent, here’s to many more adventures in the Lands Between.

Torrent has chosen you. Treat him with respect…