Elden Ring players are flummoxed over FromSoftware boss Hidetaka Miyazaki’s tease that one final secret still exists within the two-year-old game.
Speaking to IGN last week, Miyazaki commented on the myriad twists and turns Elden Ring takes throughout its pieced-together story that demands players interpret items, landscapes, bosses, and beyond. This style of storytelling naturally leaves a lot to player investigation and interpretation, but despite more than two years of myriad fans analysing, Miyazaki said there’s still more to find.
He and his team at FromSoftware “are always surprised and delighted by how much the players do discover, and how much these communities work to uncover these secrets”, he said, before dropping the bombshell. “For me personally, there is a small element that I feel has not yet been discovered. So, whether that’s up to user interpretation or up to just further investigation and playing, that’s something I’m looking forward to.”
The famed director, who also led the likes of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, therefore didn’t give much away as to what this secret is, but those embedded in the world of Elden Ring don’t expect it to be a grand or revolutionary discovery.
“Obviously it’s more exciting to think there’s some grand treasure hunt we can embark on to find Elden Ring’s last secret, but I don’t imagine there’s any way we, or even FromSoftware, will ever conclusively know how much is left to find,” said YouTuber Zullie the Witch on X/Twitter.
Her contemporary Sekiro Dubi agreed, adding it’s something that may even require multiple languages to learn. “Like Zullie says in other tweets, I doubt Miyazaki is like, ‘They didn’t see I left a such and such in this or that armour’. Add the ingredient that he probably knows Elden Ring mostly in Japanese and some stuff might be lost in translation.”
Sleuths on Reddit discussed the possibilities too, with some suggesting a deep analysis of item positioning in the open world being necessary. “There is a lot of trickery in the environment that is not being remarked upon,” said Miirshroom. “Items are placed and the landscape crafted very deliberately.
“Probably untapped analysis potential. These are things that are invisible to data mining because there is no flag in the programming indicating that something notable has been found. It’s just use of careful observation.” Miirshroom offers a few examples but notes there are literally hundreds in Elden Ring.
The time of day could change things too, as noted by setfunctionzero. “There’s the whole encounter system at specific times of night,” they said. “Gurranq’s night roaring is one off the top of my head, but I recall one that only occurs at a specific time in the dead of night, so you have to spin the clock, travel to the place, and wait 22.5 minutes in real time, and at 3am in the Elden Ring universe.”
These fans will likely be eager to discover the secret before June 21, 2024, when Elden Ring’s expansion Shadow of the Erdtree arrives, a DLC larger than any released by FromSoftware previously. Hundreds, if not thousands, of new threads will be added to the game to connect and follow, burying, or perhaps bringing to light, this last secret even further.
In our 10/10 review of the base game, IGN said: “Elden Ring is a massive iteration on what FromSoftware began with the Souls series, bringing its relentlessly challenging combat to an incredible open world that gives us the freedom to choose our own path.”
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.