George R.R. Martin: Elden Ring is a sequel to Dark Souls

Author George R.R. Martin is hard at work writing the next book his Song of Ice and Fire series — he is, we promise — but a while back he also helped out FromSoftware create the mythology for its new dark fantasy video game Elden Ring.

“It’s a sequel to a video game that came out a few years ago called Dark Souls,” Martin recently told Chicago outlet WTTW. “My work on it was actually done years ago…Basically, the wanted a world created to set the game in, they wanted world-building as a big factor in fantasy and science fiction…The setting is almost as important as everything else…I worked up a fairly detailed background for them, and they took it from there, so it’s been several years since I’ve last seen them…I’ll be excited as anybody else to see it.”

It’s cool to know exactly what Martin did on the game — he developed the background mythology rather than wrote the plot — and it sounds like he may have given something away when he says that it’s a sequel to Dark Souls, the 2011 game that put FromSoftware on the map. Distinguished by its dark fantasy setting, rich lore and crushing difficulty, Dark Souls basically ushered in a whole new genre, one that From would expand upon in a couple of sequels, as well as other games like Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

Just looking at the trailer for Elden Ring, it does have a lot of aesthetic similarities with Dark Souls. Both are set in a medieval milieu, with dragons and swords and whatnot. The theme seem similar, too. In the Dark Souls games, you play as a character under the influence of the Darksign, a curse that traps humanity in a vicious cycle of death and resurrection. Likewise, in Elden Ring, you play as the Tarnished, who will fight and die “in an unending curse,” according to the trailer.

Dark Souls and Elden both take place in decaying lands

Elden Ring takes place in The Lands Between, which according to the official Twitter account bask “in the pure light of the Greater Will before the Shattering…Slivers of its blessing yet remain in hidden pockets where lost graces wait to be found.

This also sounds like the setting for Dark Souls, which is set in a world that has fallen far from its glory days. Whether the connections are merely thematic or if Elden Ring is literally a sequel we’ll find out when the game releases on January 21, 2022 for the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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h/t ScreenRant