Welcome to Limgrave, a mysterious and otherworldly realm where the landscape is rich and varied. As you explore, you’ll build out a hex-based map of your surroundings, with unique locations to visit, resources to gather, NPC’s to interact with, and enemies to fight. Your progress is tracked by a narrative story that provides objectives as well as guidance on how to achieve them – and, depending on your decisions, alternative side-quests and emergent narrative to experience, too.

Elden Ring is a big box cooperative fantasy campaign game, where each session is playable in 90-120 minutes and core box campaigns will span 30-40 hours, increasing to 90 hours with the expansions. Diceless and with strong elements of deck-building, combat is both deadly and personal. As your Tarnished character levels up, you must carefully build your attack and effect decks to best optimize with your equipment.

Although exploration takes place on the zoomed-out hex map, each player has their own dedicated quest book on which combat encounters will take place face-to-face. Because combat takes place in your individual quest book, your encounters also won’t disrupt play for everyone else. After making the three actions in your turn — and enduring any enemy attacks — your combat will pause while the other Tarnished continue exploring the overworld, with combat resuming once your turn comes back around.

When your party locates a dungeon, your quest books will be joined together, allowing you to take on bosses together on a much larger stage while still being up close and personal. But boss encounters aren’t the only time you’ll fight side by side. If one of your fellow Tarnished is in trouble, there are also ways to join their personal combat book and lend a hand — or a sword.