‘I’m still in the process of making my ideal fantasy RPG,’ says FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki: ‘While Elden Ring is not quite it, it’s getting close’

Before he owned videogames growing up, FromSoftware president Hidetaka Miyazaki loved tabletop RPGs and their source books full of quests and monsters. It’s not hard to see that passion reflected in any of the games he’s designed at FromSoftware, but Elden Ring particularly so: Its sprawling map echoes the kinds I loved to pore over and draw myself (poorly) as a kid, from Lord of the Rings’ Middle-earth to Warcraft’s Azeroth. Elden Ring also seems to directly connect back to the RPGs of the ’80s with its skeleton-filled catacombs, like tabletop-style dungeons ripped straight from the pages of an AD&D campaign. 

“You might say that trying to capture the excitement of those old tabletop games and game books was one facet of making Elden Ring,” Miyazaki told me in a recent interview for expansion Shadow of the Erdtree. (You can read much more of it in our cover story, which is now live on the website).