Once you reach out and touch grace at three separate sites, and then rest at the third, you'll be visited by Melina, who offers to play the part of a Finger Maiden - stop laughing back there - beings who serve the Two Fingers and offer guidance and aid to the Tarnished. Right from the start of the game, you can fast travel freely between most Sites of Grace out in the open world simply by selecting them from your map - because, in a first from a Soulslike game, Elden Ring has a map. The first thing you'll likely want to do though is visit a Site of Grace - Elden Ring's equivalent of bonfires, which as per tradition you'll want to activate whenever you can. When you start Elden Ring and make your way through the (optional) tutorial cave, you'll hoist some heavy doors open and find yourself in the open world of Limgrave - and from here, you can go pretty much wherever you like.
Release date is February 2th for PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One and Xbox Series S/X Availability: Closed beta running November 12th-15th.For my time with the game, I concentrated on and completed pretty much all of the content with three of the builds I've already mentioned - the Enchanted Knight, the Bloody Wolf, and the Prophet.
My best advice though would be, if you can, to try out a few different builds and see how they change your approach to Elden Ring.
However, if you want to make full use of an amazingly ostentatious spell that you can learn by completing a few challenges, you'll want to make sure you have a character with high faith stats. Each of the beta's five presets actually come with decent equipment, so there are no wrong choices - whichever one players accessing the network test this weekend decide to go for, it's really about what preferred play style they're keen to get a feel for.īloody Wolf is a great choice for those staunchly attached to their melee builds, but it's worth saying that enchanted knight is an incredibly strong all-rounder, with a 100% physical damage reduction shield, beautiful armour and some unique spells.
For the purposes of the demo, there are five character presets to choose from, though of course there'll be an extensive character creator in the main game. It's fair to say I played it a lot - for just short of 23 hours, in fact - and I think I've scoured pretty much every inch of West Limgrave, the starting area for the game.
And let me tell you, it is a generous helping of early game Elden Ring. Ahead of the Elden Ring Closed Network Test - or beta by any other name - we were lucky enough to get early access to the build for a few days.