We don’t know when Elden Ring is coming out, but now we know, at least, that there’s a real game to go along with the stylish announcement trailer. A very brief snippet of leaked footage from an upcoming Elden Ring trailer has given us our first look at the title’s gameplay — albeit without any hint of when the game might come out.
The latest information comes from Video Games Chronicle, in which journalist Andy Robinson describes a leaked Elden Ring video, containing gameplay footage from the upcoming FromSoftware RPG. For legal reasons, he could not show any of the trailer — and, for similar legal reasons, we won’t embed it here — but snippets from the video have now spread across social media.
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In the Elden Ring trailer, we hear some ominous narration about the titular Elden Ring, although we still don’t know exactly what said ring is. More importantly, we see our first glimpse of the game’s combat. A fantasy warrior fights foes, including humanoid enemies and a gigantic fire-breathing dragon, with melee weapons and magic spells, both on foot and from horseback.
While the on-foot combat looks very similar to FromSoftware’s own Dark Souls series, we’ve never seen the company tackle mounted combat before. Based on the video snippet, it seems like mounted combat will be an option in wide, open areas. The levels in Dark Souls tended to be a bit more narrow and self-contained.
Whether we can glean anything else from the trailer is debatable. The finished state of the video suggests that Bandai Namco is getting ready to show something off soon, but Microsoft denied that Elden Ring would occupy a place at the company’s upcoming March 23 showcase.
The Elden Ring trailer could still come up as part of a different event, or as a surprise announcement on its own. But for the moment, there’s no hard evidence that we’ll see the trailer in an official capacity within a given timeframe.
There’s also no word of a release date for the elusive game. When Bandai Namco first announced Elden Ring at E3 2019, fans suspected that it might make for an excellent PS5/Xbox Series X launch title. Now the console launches have come and gone, and the initial trailer is still the only official word we’ve heard on the game.
Fans have good reason to be intrigued by Elden Ring, at any rate. It’s a collaboration between Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki and fantasy author George R.R. Martin. (Fans have pointed out that this is not the first Martin project to stall after initial excitement; we’ve been waiting for “The Winds of Winter” for ten years and counting.)
In any case, Elden Ring is definitely more than just a pre-rendered cinematic. If you’re excited to see the game in any substantial capacity, however, you’ll have to keep waiting.
