Elden Ring's map has been secretly changing without being noticed.

Elden Ring is secretly changing its map.

image credit: indianexpress.com

The in-game terrain of Elden Ring has been progressively evolving since the action RPG's release earlier this year, as Bandai Namco quietly changed the game without the players' knowledge.

 

YouTuber and FromSoftware fan Illusory Wall has chronicled the alterations to Elden Ring's map (thanks, VG247). They reveal in a recent video that the game's post-release upgrades have made multiple hidden cartographic adjustments, modifying the map to better portray the game's environment.

 

Each of Elden Ring's regions has been altered, with the tiniest changes eliminating roads, ruins, and other elements from the map that do not exist in the game. In other occasions, little unidentified blocks have vanished, maybe representing rocks or ruins that never made it into the final game.

 

There are also more significant modifications. Other sections have been updated for accuracy, and the game's original map had a couple of roads and bridges that would have better-connected areas of the early game. A moat and a ruined piece of Stormveil Castle's entrance, for example, were not initially visible in the landscape surrounding the castle.

 

Since the game's debut, several visual features have been added, such as better highlighting castle walls and more clearly outlining cliffs and roadways. Each area's iconography have also been drastically altered. The Limgrave and Caelid icons, for example, have been given more colour after being originally beige.

A well-kept secret

Since the game's debut in February, Bandai Namco has issued a number of patches for Elden Ring. Bosses have been rebalanced, stability flaws have been fixed, and spellcasters have been boosted, but no official patch notes have ever mentioned modifications to the game's terrain. Many gamers will have been completely unaware of the changes occurring beneath their characters' feet.

 

However, not all. The alterations weren't noticed by Illusory Wall alone; Reddit posts dating back to March mentioned the changes. However, their movie does a good job of documenting the changes and comparing the original and new maps.

 

Even if you didn't notice the modifications, they are unlikely to have had a significant impact on your game. The majority of the changes are minor quality-of-life improvements that were presumably implemented to make Elden Ring's map more readable. However, they provide an intriguing view into the brains of the FromSoftware team, as well as what the game's universe might have looked like at one point during production.