Alright, so, I have a lot of thoughts about the fact that they're trying to adapt Elden Ring into a film, and all of them can be boiled down into this being an insanely bad idea in some ways. Admittedly, it is amusing that they're trying, since they're seeing the relatively high sales numbers and thinking that will put butts in seats. However, there's intrinsic problems with things such as narrative structuring, which will reveal at least one serious structural weakness.
For the record, I am writing this in April 2026, and the film has had some leaked photos (the costuming looks relatively accurate, such as the Leyndell Knights and the Dung Eater). The film is supposed to come out in March 2028.
So...
Any way I can slice it, I foresee this ending poorly, but I should explain for people unfamiliar with a lot of the story structuring. After all, a lot of people who play Soulslikes miss most of the story and require other people to explain and theorize for them, and people who haven't played these games would be quite surprised by some of the structural issues.
Okay, so some groundwork to explaining some of this... Soulslikes (a game style named after games like Demons Souls and Dark Souls, and are mechanically designed a certain way) have a gimmick with how they tell their story. Instead of cutscenes or direct readable files or clear in-game dialogue, as is typical in most other games, most of the story is told through vague and mysterious dialogue, and in-game descriptions on items. While there are cutscenes and can be in-game texts, the cutscenes tend to be more about spectacle than about the actual narrative. The texts tend to be truncated (as opposed to the naturalistic texts like in Alone in the Dark or Resident Evil which are used to lend an air of verisimilitude, that people live in this world and communicate normally).
The idea behind the structure according to the guy who developed it, Hidetaka Miyazaki, was to mimic his experience when he was a child and not fluent in English, of trying to read a story but not being able to know precisely what is going on, so filling in the blanks of the narrative with one's imagination. This isn't unexpected- that's how someone who's either illiterate or not fully literate navigates an unfamiliar text beyond their capability.
This has spawned a cottage industry of player-interpreters (often called loretubers, portmanteau of lore and youtuber) who explain to the audience what the narrative is actually about. This is a rather dubious thing, since a story that the audience cannot navigate by design is a bad story. This isn't a case of a lack of literacy, where someone who reads like a 5th grader thinks Lovecraft's prose is incomprehensible because he writes at a 10th-12th grade level. It's not a case of the audience lacking the skills to interpret the work. It's a case of the work itself not having enough information and just vaguely gesturing at a grab-bag of details in hopes that you fill everything in that the writer couldn't be bothered to fill in.
This is a bad way to tell a story. To tell a story like that means that the story itself is missing its throughline and much of its connective tissue in favor of some of the superficial details. This isn't like someone who isn't fully literate reading a complete text and the reader is missing those things (but could perhaps find them if they read more carefully or came back when they've improved), it is a partial text, a half-text. It isn't the usual example of a narrative gap (no work can or should explain literally everything because there needs to be some breathing room), because it isn't breathing room. The gaps fill out more of the space than the actual text, which are vaguely connected strands by virtue of being presented together.
Now... there are specific issues with how it's implemented, too. Some of it is related to order of presentation and other things like that, some of it is how certain things are hidden away. (For example, items have descriptions, but item drop rates are often comically small, so trying to get information requires farming enemies for what they drop, which is just bad design. Even with all the item find-boosting things in the game, that only ticks things up a few percentage points.)
Then there's also the more general structural problems. The reason that everyone can just get through the game without understanding what's going on is because it's remarkably shallow by RPG standards. New Vegas this is not. Soulslikes overwhelmingly prioritize combat over any other method of engaging in the game, so you just become a murderhobo. You cut down everything placed in front of you because everything placed in front of you is either going to gut you this second, or will gut you in the future when they go full monster, or else they die when their quest is done (and their quest being done often involves ruining their lives).
However, I'll save some of the other specifics for another time. There's a lot of flaws in respect to Elden Ring as a game itself, but that's not necessarily relevant to this particular point about a film adaptation being a mistake.
(I also don't think people crowing on about such games having good "environmental storytelling" actually know what they're talking about. They missed something quite key to Elden Ring in an over two year span, and everyone who pointed out the environmental storytelling implying something very particular and different from the general interpretation was called a pedophile.)
Simple (at least with regard to the actual story)! Either the story is actually good, and thus proves that all of this hide the plot in item description shit is an active hindrance to telling a good story, or the story is actually super basic or weak and the thing that was hiding it was the audience filling in something quite interesting in its place. Either way, that means that the story and/or its method is bad.
If the film's story is bad or mediocre, then the thing that people were invested in was the experience more directly of playing the game. Note that this does not mean the story was better in the game.
Part of this also ties into investment issues. People were invested in the story because they were playing the game. It's an experience to them, of entering a world with all sorts of landmarks and weird characters and often either playing with their friends or comparing notes with their friends after a play session. This isn't inherently bad, video games are a medium based on interaction, but this also makes conveying certain things difficult in certain kinds of games, and in the adaptation of the medium.
On top of that, they're adapting the Tarnished's adventure (you can tell by virtue of having the Dung Eater, who's only relevant after the Tarnished start being called back to the Lands Between).
This is inherently going to cause problems for two reasons.
First, most of the more interesting things in the world have already happened. This is kind of a broader problem with Elden Ring- we're coming across the corpses of functionally dead worlds, where most of the really interesting conflicts have already happened, and we're just cleaning up the aftermath to create a new age that will necessarily pale in comparison by virtue of all the grander elements being wiped away in the bloodshed.
Second, the interactivity was part of why the game is interesting. Different people have different strategies and paths through the game, and explore different parts of the map in different orders and at different speeds. So focusing on the Tarnished (who is a blank vessel for the player to project onto) doesn't work. The player Tarnished has no real characterization, they are interchangeable, and this means that the story is inherently hobbled at the outset. I suppose they could give the Tarnished a personality and motivation, but this will necessarily jar against the fans' view of the story.
And I do have to question if they're going to try to deal with all the hanging plot threads or not. The game didn't, and that had much more time to do so, while a film has to be much more focused. They're going to have to cut a massive amount of the work itself to fit it into a two hour or so run time.
I think George RR Martin is a primadonna and that there's going to be a falling out with the director, Alex Garland. The recurring pattern with him is that he gets involved with something, this gets produced, it has to deal with various limitations, GRRM throws a tantrum over those changes due to limitations, and starts badmouthing the other person or leaving them to be torn apart by the fanbase for somehow messing up his vision.
Now, this has happened with Game of Thrones, where he wanted the show to adapt Feast and Dance for three years while he tried to write the books, disregarding how television actually works in the process and its limitations. He's worded things in ambiguous ways where it's clear he's implying that the problem was the other writers and them trying to "rush" things (instead of himself for not finishing the work he promised to finish and forcing them to do it based on his outline). People tore the showrunners David Beinholf and DB Weiss (D&D) apart for a lot of problems which, in hindsight, are clearly from Martin.
My suspicion with Shadow of the Erdtree being delayed like it was and the mess of the story (and its dependence on the mythology he wrote, but that mythology is something the audience lacks), is that he threw a tantrum about story changes. But FromSoftware and Miyazaki changed it to align more with Martin because, unlike HBO, they are small enough to not be able to tell him to kick rocks. Then Miyazaki proceeded to get flack for it from the people paying attention to the narrative. The DLC feels disjointed as hell, and it's also much more thematically like Martin's other works, including the imagery he tends to crib from other writers. The thing that made it click for me was Lindsay Ellis's autopsy about the end of Game of Thrones (which she attributes to D&D and gives Martin the benefit of the doubt) also apply to SotE and how it recontextualizes the rest of Elden Ring, which makes me think it's a Martin thing instead. He's the common denominator. (While I think the Soulslike story structure is dumb, Miyazaki's other works have some different implications and trends.)
Then there was the tantrum with House of the Dragon and Ryan Condal. Martin wrote (then deleted, speculated by some to be from legal pressure) an unprofessional piece titled "Beware the Butterflies," in which he lambasts the show's changes and arguing about a butterfly effect from removing a minor character who does nothing for literal years. Now, this is rather rich given his own retconning within his works and their much broader ramifications, but he was throwing a tantrum over the tension inherent to these bigger projects. No matter how grand your story is, there's things like budgetary limitations in adaptations. (And that's before getting into the issue of how Fire and Blood is basically an outline with multiple reasonings for the same events happening, so a lot of it will necessarily change in adaptation.)
We're in a honeymoon phase right now with Dunk and Egg's adaptation (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms), but I do think opinions will sour soon enough. Especially once they start adapting unwritten works, and Summerhall is either going to result in a backlash akin to Game of Thrones with people blaming the other writers... or it will finally hit people that this is all Martin. That it was always Martin who was a nihilist, despite claiming he isn't.
What I think is likely, based on the pattern, is that the initial rush will be full of praise and how Garland truly gets Elden Ring. (Garland, for the record, is no Uwe Boll. He played through Elden Ring eight times and really does like the game!) Then the cracks will start to form because of things like the inherent logistical limitations of the medium. Elden Ring's budget may be over 100 million dollars, but there's still limits. Film and television are inherently limited by things like budgets, unlike a book. There's limits on how many people you can hire, how many sets and costumes can be made, how long you have to create the thing, and so on. But, as Condal pointed out in his response over the whole situation with House of the Dragon, it's like Martin refused to accept that fact.
The thing that's especially galling is that Martin wrote for television for years, chafed at the restrictions, and wrote the first books of A Song of Ice and Fire in response to those limitations. But then he sold off the rights to it to HBO and is constantly getting involved in these kinds of visual media projects, rather than write. It's a refusal to accept the limitations of the medium he prefers in favor of trying to crowbar things in due to his current status.
In conclusion, I suppose my point is that it's going to reveal the artifice of Elden Ring's story and it may be partially sabotaged by one of its producers because of his ego.
Neocities
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