FromSoftware’s 2022 RPG Elden Ring shares quite a bit of DNA with the Dark Souls series. While there are no overt references to the preceding franchise present in Elden Ring, the emphasis on high skill-cap melee combat, sprawling dark fantasy world, and intricate yet obfuscated lore borrow quite a bit from the trilogy for which the developer is primarily known. With that in mind, one Reddit user posits that even some of Elden Ring’s enemies bear direct similarities to those seen in the Dark Souls games.
In a post on the Elden Ring subreddit, Cheri474 likened the game’s notoriously tough-to-take-down Tree Sentinels to the giant guards patrolling Anor Londo in Dark Souls. Coincidentally, those enemies were referred to as Sentinels, and they seem to boast a connatural armor set and brandish large halberds not at all dissimilar to those wielded by the Tree Sentinels. The only major difference seems to be that one enemy type is fairly immobile while the other makes use of a mount.
Response to the post seems to be fairly mixed, with some pointing out similarities between the movesets and attack patterns of both enemies and others arguing that they only appear to be similar because they’re both humanoids. More interesting still are the comparisons linking the Tree Sentinels to Havel the Rock, a notorious hostel NPC found in Dark Souls, and to Gyoubu Oniwa, a notable equestrian boss from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. In fact, Gyoubu seems like a boss who could seamlessly fit into Elden Ring.
There’s also proof that the Tree Sentinels aren’t the only Elden Ring enemies that share a deep connection to the Dark Souls series. In a video uploaded by soulsborne YouTuber Zulie the Witch, it is discovered that an Erdtree Avatar was originally intended to serve as the first boss encounter instead of Elden Ring’s relentlessly creepy Grafted Scion. However, the Erdtree Avatar actually shares some of the animations originally used by the Asylum Demon in Dark Souls, and it could be that the developer wanted to avoid direct comparisons between the two. This lends credence to the idea that certain Elden Ring enemies were influenced by old Dark Souls designs.
Beyond that, some of Elden Ring’s enemies are recycled from earlier FromSoftware projects. The curse-inflicting Basilisks found primarily in the hard-to-reach Deeproot Depths area, for instance, were seen in the first and third Dark Souls installments. Elden Ring is a massive game, and it’s tough to fault the developers for borrowing from previous efforts to expedite the development process, but this also suggests that there’s more Dark Souls-influenced content hidden in Elden Ring to which players are not yet privy.
Elden Ring is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Zulie The Witch YouTube