The intertwining worlds of the Dark Souls series have become such a staple for the series that it has extended into the entire Soulslike genre. However, in FromSoftware's most recent title Elden Ring, the open field has made its world too large to be fully explorable without a comprehensive map to help players find locations and weapons like the Jar Cannon.
This new map is a welcomed addition to Elden Ring, as the game makes a solid step toward being more of an open-world title as opposed to following the contained design of older titles. That being said, the minimal communication of this map still leaves plenty to be desired when compared to other open-world games which previously defined the genre.
What Elden Ring's Map Shows Players
There is a lot that Elden Ring's map shows players, especially once they've learned how to interpret some of the markings that are scattered across the Lands Between. One example would be the various mines marked by red circles on the map, which show where players can get a large supply of the smithing stone upgrade materials, as well as the bell barrings that unlock these stones for sale. Players can also find where main roads will lead, and even the locations of undiscovered maps in darkened areas.
On top of the smaller things that players can see from the map, this also becomes the menu where Sites of Grace can be tracked and instantly warped to. It makes exploring new areas convenient, especially as locations like caves, ruins, and churches are marked onto the map when discovered. Alongside these conveniences, players are given the ability to mark their maps on their own, helping them find Elden Ring's merchants and revisit difficult areas that may have been too hard the first time around.
How Elden Ring Players Can Alter Their Own Map
The interactivity of the map in Elden Ring acts a lot like games such as Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with separate markers that can be placed at the player's discretion. Each marker has a different symbol, leaving it up to the player what they want each of these symbols to represent; from diamonds to skulls to treasure chests. With the ability to place up to a hundred of these markers, players are completely free to mark all the notable locations and best loot that Elden Ring has to offer, so they can return on their own.
This does act as somewhat of a double-edged sword, as it gives players an impressive amount of freedom, but also leaves the mapping of the most important locations completely up to them. Completing Elden Ring can take days, which leaves a staggering amount of content for players to track by themselves. The result is that human error can become a huge factor when it comes to maintaining the map, without knowing what is and isn't important ahead of time or forgetting what a specific marker might have meant.
What is Missing From Elden Ring's Open-World Map
There are a few major aspects missing from the map, including dedicated markers for merchants and indicators for advancing the various quests that can be picked up by NPCs. Not having quest markers is normal for FromSoftware titles, and some fans have already joked about what Elden Ring developed by Ubisoft might look like. However, a lack of guidance can make it easy to miss out on dozens of quest lines or lose track of important merchants as players progress.
This isn't to say that the map needs to have a hundred question marks to denote every point of interest before exploring an area. What could work in several cases would be a set of markers that are already used in quest lines such as the hunt requests in Elden Ring's Volcano Manor. In this case, little red circles mark the different areas players must travel to in order to hunt down NPC fights that lead to one of the key boss fights toward the end of the game.
Elden Ring Needs a Proper Quest Log
The biggest problem with the map is that, for everything it does show the player, there is a huge amount of content that it doesn't reveal even after being activated. What Elden Ring's quests are missing is a proper quest log that players can revisit after hours of exploration to see what they've run into and still need to complete. Interestingly, just like the quest location indicators for specific quest lines, Elden Ring already has a way of keeping track of side quests with the key item and info tabs in the inventory menu.
For players who haven't gone through to the end of the inventory menu, the info tab is where notes purchased from merchants and treasure maps like Elden Ring's paintings and "meeting place map" are held. Furthermore, key items like the Great Runes and Shabriri Grapes will inform the player where they need to go in order to complete the quests. So, there is already a precedent within the game for how to handle a proper quest log, but this is only utilized half the time.
The lack of direction leading players toward anything other than major bosses in Elden Ring lends itself to a sense of freedom that Soulslike games are familiar with. However, with that freedom comes the possibility for players to miss out on massive amounts of content hidden throughout the world. It's an odd choice considering how much effort went into filling Elden Ring with stuff, as one would think FromSoftware should have some way of laying all this content out for players to more naturally track across an interactive map.
Elden Ring is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.