Let me guess. You have heard of ELDEN RING. You have heard it is amazing. And you have also heard it will chew you up, spit you out, and laugh while doing it. So you never bought it.
I am here, 101 hours deep, to tell you that second part is only half true. Yes, this game will knock you down. But it also hands you more tools to get back up than any other game FromSoftware has ever made. Over 30 million people have played it. They are not all gaming superheroes. Most of them are people like you, and a lot of them thought they could never handle a "Souls game" either.
This is my pitch for why 2026 is the year you finally give it a go.
What Even Is Elden Ring?
Quick primer for the uninitiated. ELDEN RING is a massive open-world action RPG from FromSoftware, the Dark Souls folks, released in February 2022 and published by Bandai Namco. The world was built with help from George R. R. Martin, yes that George R. R. Martin, and it shows. The Lands Between is a broken, beautiful, deeply weird fantasy realm full of demigods, dragons, talking pots, and a giant golden tree you can see from almost anywhere on the map.
You play as a Tarnished, an exile called back to repair the shattered Elden Ring and become Elden Lord. Or you can ignore all of that and go poke around a swamp for six hours. Both are valid. Both are the game.
It won Game of the Year in 2022, and it did not stop there. The Shadow of the Erdtree expansion arrived in 2024 and has since sold more than 10 million copies on its own, which is more than most full games ever manage.
The Difficulty Thing, Honestly
Let's not dance around it. Elden Ring does not have difficulty settings, bosses hit hard, and the game will not stop to explain itself. That reputation is earned, and I will not pretend otherwise.
But here is what the reputation leaves out: Elden Ring is the most flexible difficulty system FromSoftware ever built, it is just disguised as an open world. Stuck on a boss? Leave. Seriously, just leave. Ride your ghost horse somewhere else, find a cave, level up, discover a weapon that trivializes the fight, and come back an hour later feeling like a monster. In Dark Souls, a wall was a wall. In Elden Ring, a wall is a suggestion.
And then there are Spirit Ashes, summonable ghost buddies that fight alongside you. The famous Mimic Tear literally clones your character and lets the two of you gang up on bosses. Some purists call it cheating. Those people are wrong and also not having as much fun as you. The tools are in the game because the developers put them there. Use them.
You can also summon real humans for co-op on nearly every boss. My first Margit kill was a group effort, and I regret nothing.
Why It Hooked Me for 101 Hours
The thing nobody tells you about Elden Ring is that the difficulty is not the point. The discovery is the point.
This game respects your curiosity in a way almost nothing else does. There is no quest marker dragging you around by the nose. Instead, you see a glowing archway on a distant cliff and think, "what is that?" And when you get there, it is never nothing. It is a dungeon, a boss, a bizarre NPC with a quest that spans the entire game, or an elevator that descends for a full minute into an underground city with its own sky full of stars. I audibly gasped at that one. I do not gasp at video games.
My 101 hours were not grinding. They were a hundred little moments of "okay, one more ruin, then I will go to bed." A hundred tiny stories the game let me find instead of feeding me. That is the magic trick. Elden Ring makes you feel like an explorer, not a tourist on a guided tour.
And when you finally do beat that boss that stonewalled you for a night? There is no feeling in gaming like it. The lows make the highs taller. That is the deal, and it is a good deal.
Your First Five Hours: A Survival Kit
A few spoiler-free tips to smooth the on-ramp:
- Pick Vagabond or Samurai to start. Solid armor, good weapons, forgiving stats. Astrologer if you want to fling magic from a safe distance, which is a very legitimate strategy.
- Talk to everyone, Twice, or possibly five times. NPCs give hints, items, and quests, but only if you exhaust their dialogue.
- When you get Torrent, your spectral steed, the game opens up. If a fight feels unfair, ride away. Exploration is progression.
- Grab the Spirit Calling Bell early. A mysterious lady at the Church of Elleh hands it over at night. Do not skip this, it is your summon-buddies unlock.
- Levels are cheap early. A little farming near the start goes a long way. There is no shame in overleveling, there is only winning.
- It is okay to look things up. The community has spent four years mapping every inch of this game. Using a guide for a cryptic quest is not a moral failing.
There Has Never Been a Better Time to Start
Here is the 2026 angle. Elden Ring is not a finished story sitting on a shelf, it is an active universe that keeps growing.
The standalone co-op spinoff ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN launched in 2025 and blew past 5 million copies, pushing the whole franchise past 45 million units combined. Nightreign has been getting its own DLC expansion treatment too.
Meanwhile, the base game is getting the Tarnished Edition, a spruced-up version arriving on Nintendo Switch 2 on August 28, 2026, with new content like fresh weapons, armor, and Torrent skins confirmed for all platforms. Translation: FromSoftware is still actively feeding this game in 2026, four years after launch. Starting now means joining a living thing, not visiting a museum.
On the practical side: Elden Ring runs about $59.99 on Steam, with Shadow of the Erdtree at $39.99, and both go on sale regularly, so wishlist them and pounce. System requirements are reasonable by modern standards. A mid-range PC from the last five or six years with a GTX 1060 class card or better will run the base game fine. No monster rig required.
The Takeaway
Elden Ring's reputation as a gatekept hardcore experience is the biggest lie in gaming. It is a generous, gorgeous, endlessly surprising adventure that happens to also respect you enough to let you fail. The open world is the difficulty slider. The Spirit Ashes are the difficulty slider. Your curiosity is the difficulty slider.
If you have been circling this game for four years, wondering if you are "good enough," consider this your sign. You are. Buy it on the next sale, roll a Vagabond, and go touch the golden tree. Worst case, you bounce off and refund it. Best case, you find out why 30 million of us cannot shut up about it.
See you in the Lands Between, Tarnished.
Sources: Shacknews (30M sales), The Outerhaven (45M franchise sales), Screen Rant (2026 new content and Tarnished Edition), TweakTown (Nightreign DLC), Steambase (Steam pricing).
Written by Lonnon Jensen. Read more about the author.