In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Hidetaka Miyazaki revealed that he had imposed on the famous writer George RR Martin of the fundamental limits for the creation of the narrative universe of Elden Ring.
For the uninitiated, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire collaborated with FromSoftware to build the foundation of the Elden Ring story. However, in doing so he had to follow very specific “guidelines”. According to Miyazaki’s words, Martin would have created the story of the game world, its key characters and mythology, including the destruction of the Ancestral Ring that sets the events of Elden Ring in motion. From then on, it’s all from the sack of FromSoftware, due to the precise direction the studio wanted to take.
“In our games, history must always be at the service of the player’s experience,” says Miyazaki. “If Martin had written the history of the game, I would have worried why we should have moved away from this philosophy. I wanted him to be able to write freely and not feel held back by some dark mechanics that may need to change during development. ”
FromSoftware’s approach to its games usually sees the player catapulted into a world in ruins after a cataclysmic event, such as the destruction of the Ancestral Ring that caused the “Disruption”, without great explanation. It is up to him, if he wishes, to go in search of the truth, uniting the clues hidden among the cryptic lines of dialogue of the NPCs, the descriptions of the objects and so on. Which often leads to answers that can be interpreted in different ways, thus giving great room for imagination.
“The power of imagination is important to me,” continues Miyazaki. “Providing space for user interpretation creates a sense of communication with the audience and, of course, communication between community users. This is something that I love to see happen with our games and that has continued to influence my work.”
As evidence that George RR Martin limited himself to modeling only the narrative base of Elden Ring, Miyazaki said in another interview that the writer would be “shocked” to see how FromSoftware transformed some of the key characters he made.
