Soulslike Evolution: From Dark Souls to Elden Ring's Open-World Mastery

Dark Souls (2011) proved that punishing difficulty could sell millions of copies, and hundreds of studios spent the next decade trying to copy it. Most missed the actual formula: difficulty married to fairness, where every death teaches something rather than just costing progress. Elden Ring (2022) took that formula and rebuilt it around an open world, letting players skip a boss that's beating them and come back later, stronger. The result sold over 28.6 million copies by September 2024, according to FromSoftware, making it the studio's best-selling game ever. This piece traces how that formula evolved, why it works psychologically, and what it changed about how "hard" games get made.

Where the formula started: Demon's Souls and the birth of a genre

FromSoftware's Demon's Souls, directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki and released in Japan in February 2009, is where the template actually begins. It was a PlayStation 3 exclusive, published by Sony's Japan Studio in the West through Atlus, and it didn't sell in blockbuster numbers at launch. What it did was establish nearly every mechanical pillar the genre still runs on: death has a cost (you drop your currency at the spot you died and must return to reclaim it), checkpoints are sparse and meaningful, and multiplayer is woven directly into a single-player world rather than bolted on as a separate mode.

Dark Souls, released in September 2011, is the game that made the formula famous. It sold 2.37 million copies in its early sales window, according to figures FromSoftware's executive director Eiichi Nakajima disclosed at a Japanese investor conference, with roughly 692,000 of those units coming from the DLC-inclusive Prepare to Die Edition. That's a modest number by today's standards, but it was enough to prove the appetite existed, and it gave the format a name that stuck across the industry: "soulslike."

The entire Dark Souls series had shipped more than 27 million copies by May 2020 and crossed 40 million by 2024, according to FromSoftware's own sales disclosures — meaning Elden Ring alone has now outsold the whole trilogy that inspired it.

The Dark Souls template, mechanic by mechanic

Dark Souls didn't invent difficulty in games. Games had been hard since the arcade era, when difficulty was often just a coin-op business model designed to burn through quarters. What Dark Souls did differently was build difficulty around a small, coherent set of systems that all reinforce each other.

System	What it does	Why it matters
Bonfires (checkpoints)	Rest points that heal the player and respawn enemies	Creates a rhythm of risk (explore) and safety (rest), never both at once
Stamina bar	Every action — attack, dodge, block, sprint — drains a shared resource	Forces prioritization; you can't spam everything, so combat becomes a budget
Estus Flask	Limited healing charges, refilled only at bonfires	Turns healing into a strategic decision, not a safety net
Souls/currency loss on death	Dying drops your currency at the death location; dying again before recovery deletes it	Converts every fight into a stakes-bearing decision, not a freebie retry
Telegraphed enemy attacks	Bosses wind up visibly before striking	Makes death legible — you can identify what you did wrong
Online invasions and cooperation	Other players can be summoned to help or invade to fight you	Adds unpredictability without requiring matchmaking lobbies

None of these mechanics is individually radical. Stamina bars existed in earlier action-RPGs; checkpoint systems existed since the 1980s. What made Dark Souls distinct was refusing to soften any of them. There's no difficulty slider, no "story mode," no pause during combat. The game commits fully to one difficulty curve and trusts the player to meet it, and the telegraphing (attacks that are readable if you're paying attention) is what keeps that commitment from tipping into cheapness.

What does "fair difficulty" actually mean in a soulslike?

Fair difficulty means every death is explainable by player error, not by hidden information or randomness the player couldn't have anticipated. Attacks are telegraphed with visible wind-ups, hitboxes generally match what's on screen, and healing resources are always available if managed well. When a death feels fair, players blame themselves and try again; when it feels cheap, they quit.

The genre explosion — and why most imitators fell short

After Dark Souls became a cult hit and then a mainstream one with Dark Souls II (2014) and Dark Souls III (2016, which shipped over 10 million copies), the label "soulslike" turned into a marketing shorthand. Studios advertised games as "Dark Souls but in space" or "Dark Souls but with guns," and the quality spread wildly. Some, like Team Ninja's Nioh series or Sifu from Sloclap, found their own identity inside the framework. Many others simply borrowed the surface-level punishment — hard enemies, sparse checkpoints — without the telegraphing and fairness underneath, and players noticed the difference immediately.

The lesson buried in that decade of imitation is that difficulty alone was never the draw. Plenty of games are hard in ways nobody enjoys: obscure resource management, unreadable hitboxes, one-shot deaths from off-screen enemies. What Dark Souls sold wasn't suffering, it was legible suffering, the kind you can learn from. That distinction is the entire reason the genre survived market saturation instead of burning out as a fad.

Bloodborne and Sekiro: FromSoftware breaking its own rules

FromSoftware's two most interesting genre experiments both came from deliberately removing pieces of the Dark Souls formula rather than adding to it.

Bloodborne (2015), a PlayStation 4 exclusive, replaced the shield-and-patience playstyle of Dark Souls with an aggressive "regain" mechanic: hitting an enemy back shortly after taking damage recovers some of the health you just lost. That single change rewired the entire combat philosophy from defensive to aggressive. Bloodborne sold over 2 million copies and is frequently cited by critics as FromSoftware's tightest combat design, even without the mainstream sales numbers Dark Souls III or Elden Ring later achieved.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019) went further and cut features many assumed were mandatory to the genre. No multiplayer. No character build customization in the traditional RPG sense — you play one character, one weapon philosophy, built entirely around a posture-and-parry system rather than stamina-draining dodges. Sekiro sold 2 million copies within its first ten days, reached 5 million by mid-2020, and crossed 10 million lifetime units by late 2023, according to FromSoftware's own sales press release. It also won Game of the Year at The Game Awards in 2019, proving the "soulslike" label could stretch to something that barely resembled a traditional RPG anymore.

Sekiro sparked one of gaming's most contentious accessibility debates in 2019, when disabled players and advocacy groups like AbleGamers argued that its lack of difficulty options excluded players for whom the parry-timing demands were a physical barrier, not just a skill gap — a debate FromSoftware never directly addressed but that reshaped how later studios discussed difficulty settings publicly.

Elden Ring's innovation: taking the linear formula open-world

Released on February 25, 2022, and co-developed with fantasy author George R.R. Martin for the setting's foundational lore, Elden Ring is the point where the soulslike formula stopped being a niche curiosity and became one of the best-selling games of the decade. FromSoftware confirmed sales of over 28.6 million copies by September 2024, and later reporting put the figure past 30 million units by April 2025, with the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion separately crossing 10 million copies sold by mid-2025.

The core design change is structural, not cosmetic. Dark Souls is an interconnected, mostly linear world where progression gates are largely mandatory: to reach the next area, you generally have to beat the boss guarding it. Elden Ring's Lands Between is a genuinely open map. A player can walk past an intimidating boss, explore three other regions, gain levels and better gear, and come back to that same boss twenty hours later as a completely different character. Nothing about the boss changed; the player did.

That single structural shift solves the biggest complaint lodged against soulslikes for a decade: the "difficulty wall" that stops progress entirely until a specific skill threshold is cleared. Elden Ring keeps the wall but removes its exclusivity — you can climb it with skill, or you can walk around it and come back with a taller ladder.

How does Elden Ring stay difficult if you can just avoid bosses?

Difficulty in Elden Ring is distributed rather than gated. Individual encounters — especially late-game bosses like Malenia or the final boss, the Elden Beast — remain some of the hardest fights FromSoftware has designed, with aggressive movesets and large health pools. What changed is that reaching those fights unprepared is now optional; the challenge moved from "can you beat this required gate" to "how much challenge do you choose to keep."

Where players felt the difference: agency over the whole build

Elden Ring's flexibility isn't limited to boss order. The game lets players respec their character's stat allocation after a certain point in the story, something Dark Souls never allowed at all — a build mistake in Dark Souls was often permanent. Weapon upgrade paths are more numerous and can be swapped between without losing prior investment. Summoning NPC allies (Spirit Ashes) into boss fights is available from the opening hours, not locked behind late-game unlocks. None of this is mandatory. A player who wants the old-school experience can ignore every one of these tools and get something close to Dark Souls' harder, more rigid structure.

That's the part of Elden Ring's design philosophy that game director Hidetaka Miyazaki articulated most directly at GDC 2023: the studio's goal was never to lower the difficulty ceiling, only to widen the number of paths a player could take to reach it. "If you want to struggle, you can. If you want to trivialize difficulty, you can," Miyazaki said, describing the design as built around respecting player agency rather than a single prescribed difficulty curve.

Where it goes wrong: the Elden Beast and the limits of open design

Elden Ring's own final boss became the clearest counterexample to its accessibility argument. The Elden Beast has an enormous health pool, an oversized hitbox that makes camera tracking difficult, and attack patterns that many players and critics described as less readable than the rest of the game's boss roster. Online discussion around the fight was sharply split: some players considered it a fitting, difficult capstone; others called it the game's worst-designed encounter, arguing it broke the telegraphing rules the rest of Elden Ring follows so carefully.

The counterargument, and the reason the criticism never became a dealbreaker for the game's reputation, is that the open-world systems built around the fight still applied. A player stuck on the Elden Beast could grind levels, farm better gear, bring stronger Spirit Ashes, or simply take a break and come back later — the same escape valve available for every other boss in the game. Even a boss many considered poorly tuned didn't create the kind of hard progression wall that would have stopped Dark Souls players a decade earlier.

Parrying, posture, and the genre's skill ceiling

Across every soulslike FromSoftware has made, parrying (timing a block or deflect to interrupt an enemy attack and open them up for a critical hit) remains the highest execution ceiling in the genre. In Dark Souls, a successful parry into a riposte can end a fight in seconds that would otherwise take minutes of careful dodging. In Sekiro, the entire combat system is built around deflection rather than dodging, turning what was an optional advanced technique in Dark Souls into the primary combat verb.

The risk-reward balance is what keeps parrying from becoming mandatory. A missed parry in Dark Souls typically means taking a full, unblocked hit — often a severe punishment. That risk is exactly what makes successful parries feel earned rather than automatic, and it's a clean example of the "fair but unforgiving" design philosophy running through the entire genre.

Estus, healing economy, and why limited resources create tension

The Estus Flask system — a set number of healing charges, replenished only by resting at a bonfire — looks simple on paper but does a lot of design work. It converts every encounter into a resource-management puzzle layered on top of the combat itself. Do you heal now, mid-fight, accepting the vulnerability window that comes with the animation, or do you push through and save flasks for what's ahead? Elden Ring expanded this system slightly, letting players allocate flask charges between healing and a magic-restoring variant, but the core tension — healing is finite and healing takes time you don't always have — stayed intact.

Boss design as the genre's real signature

If there's one element every FromSoftware soulslike shares regardless of how much else changes, it's boss encounter design. Each major boss functions almost like a mini rule-set: a distinct moveset, often a distinct arena with its own hazards, and frequently a second phase that changes the fight's rhythm entirely partway through. Bosses like Ornstein and Smough (Dark Souls), Ludwig the Accursed (Bloodborne), Sword Saint Isshin (Sekiro), and Malenia (Elden Ring) are discussed in gaming communities the way memorable film villains are discussed elsewhere — not just as obstacles but as authored experiences.

The community that sustains the genre

Soulslike games generate unusually durable communities relative to their difficulty and niche framing. Several distinct subcultures have formed around them:

• Challenge runners who impose additional restrictions on themselves — no armor, no leveling, no hits taken — turning an already hard game into a personal skill benchmark.
• Speedrunners who exploit sequence breaks and movement glitches to complete games in a fraction of the intended time, with active leaderboards on platforms like speedrun.com that see records broken regularly.
• Lore communities built around the genre's environmental storytelling — item descriptions, ruined architecture, and character dialogue fragments substitute for cutscene-heavy exposition, and YouTube creators like the lore channel VaatiVidya built large audiences purely analyzing Dark Souls' scattered narrative.
• PvP communities organized around the invasion system, including informal honor codes for one-on-one duels that exist entirely outside any rule the game itself enforces.

That density of community activity is a big part of why the genre outlasted the "hard game" fad cycles that came before it. A game that's merely difficult gets finished and shelved. A game with layered systems worth theorizing about, speedrunning, and dueling in keeps people engaged for years after release.

PvP and the invasion system's messier side

Online invasions — where another player can enter your world uninvited and try to kill you — are one of the more contested parts of the formula. "Ganking," where a host summons multiple cooperative allies to overwhelm a lone invader, is a frequent point of tension in community discussion, as is "twinking," where a high-level, heavily optimized character invades low-level areas where opponents have little chance of winning. Neither practice breaks any rule the game enforces; both are considered poor etiquette by large parts of the community, which has developed its own informal codes — duel arenas, gesture-based invitations to one-on-one fights, and Discord communities dedicated to fair PvP — none of which FromSoftware built directly into the games.

Accessibility options: the tension that never fully resolved

The 2019 Sekiro accessibility debate didn't produce a settled answer, and it's worth being precise about what advocates were actually asking for. The core argument, made by outlets like AbleGamers, wasn't that Sekiro should get an "easy mode" that guts its identity. It was that options like adjustable timing windows, alternative input methods, or a slower game speed could exist as opt-in settings that don't affect players who never touch them — points that FromSoftware has never publicly addressed in detail. Later FromSoftware releases, including Elden Ring, added some quality-of-life accommodations (colorblind filters, remappable controls, subtitle sizing) but stopped short of the kind of granular difficulty options advocates specifically requested. The debate remains unresolved industry-wide, and it resurfaces with nearly every new high-profile soulslike release.

Market comparison: how the genre's commercial scale changed

Game	Release	Lifetime Sales (as of most recent disclosure)	Notable Distinction
Demon's Souls	2009	Modest, PS3-exclusive at launch	Established the core formula
Dark Souls	2011	2.37 million (early figure)	Coined the "soulslike" label
Bloodborne	2015	2+ million	PS4-exclusive; regain-based aggressive combat
Dark Souls III	2016	10+ million	Franchise mainstreaming
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice	2019	10+ million (by late 2023)	2019 Game of the Year; parry-only combat
Elden Ring	2022	28.6+ million (Sept. 2024); 30 million+ (April 2025)	Open-world redesign; 2022 Game of the Year

Table: Sales figures are FromSoftware's own disclosures where available, supplemented by trade press reporting for interim milestones.

Elden Ring's trajectory is the clearest evidence that the open-world redesign, not just brand recognition, drove its unprecedented commercial reach. It sold more copies in roughly two years than the entire original Dark Souls trilogy combined sold over its first decade, according to FromSoftware's own disclosed figures for both franchises.

What people get wrong about soulslike difficulty

The most common misconception is that soulslikes are hard to punish players, as if difficulty were a gatekeeping mechanism designed to exclude casual audiences. That's backward. Difficulty in these games exists to create stakes: because dying costs you something (progress, currency, position), every encounter becomes consequential in a way low-stakes games rarely achieve. A boss you can't lose to doesn't feel like a victory when you beat it. Soulslike difficulty is calibrated specifically to make winning feel earned, and the entire system of telegraphed attacks, checkpoints, and healing economy is built to keep that difficulty feeling fair rather than arbitrary.

A second misconception, specific to Elden Ring, is that its accessibility features "solved" difficulty or made the game easy. That's also not accurate. Elden Ring's Spirit Ashes, respec options, and open exploration are opt-in tools, not automatic difficulty reductions. A player determined to experience Elden Ring at something close to Dark Souls' rigidity can self-impose the old restrictions — no summons, minimal leveling, strict boss order — and the game accommodates that just as readily as it accommodates a more casual approach. What changed isn't the ceiling of difficulty available; it's the number of legitimate ways to approach that ceiling.

A third, subtler misconception is that "soulslike" and "hard game" are synonyms. Plenty of very hard games exist outside this genre — bullet-hell shmups, fighting game execution barriers, roguelike permadeath runs — without borrowing any soulslike mechanics. What defines the genre isn't raw difficulty but the specific combination of stamina economy, checkpoint-based rest-and-risk rhythm, and consequence-bearing death. Difficulty is a byproduct of that system, not the system itself.

The takeaway

Dark Souls didn't succeed because it was hard. It succeeded because its difficulty was legible, its checkpoints created rhythm, and every death taught the player something specific to fix. Elden Ring took that same core system and rebuilt the surrounding structure so that difficulty became optional in its sequencing without becoming optional in its substance. That's a harder design problem than either building a strictly linear hard game or building a strictly easy open world, and Elden Ring's sales figures suggest FromSoftware solved it well enough to bring a niche formula to a mainstream audience without diluting what made it distinct in the first place.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Should I play Elden Ring or Dark Souls first? A: Elden Ring is the more approachable starting point for most players. Its open-world structure lets you walk away from a boss that's beating you, its respec system forgives early build mistakes, and its combat and menus are more modern than Dark Souls' decade-old interface. Starting with Dark Souls can be rewarding but often frustrates newcomers with mandatory boss gates and less forgiving controls.

Q: What makes Elden Ring fair when some bosses seem overpowered? A: Fairness in FromSoftware's design comes from telegraphed attacks (you can learn and react to wind-ups), consistent hitboxes, and always-available healing and leveling options. Exceptions exist — the Elden Beast is widely cited as less telegraphed than the rest of the roster — but the surrounding open-world systems (leveling, gear, summons) mean even an unfair-feeling fight rarely creates a true progress wall.

Q: Is Elden Ring harder than Dark Souls? A: It depends on what you measure. Individual Elden Ring bosses are often more mechanically aggressive than Dark Souls bosses. But because Elden Ring lets you overlevel, summon help, and skip encounters, its overall difficulty curve is more flexible and, for most players, less punishing across a full playthrough than Dark Souls' linear, mostly mandatory progression.

Q: What does "soulslike" actually mean as a genre label? A: A soulslike is a game built around a specific combination of mechanics that originated with FromSoftware's Demon's Souls (2009) and Dark Souls (2011): a stamina-limited combat economy, sparse checkpoints that respawn enemies, meaningful death consequences, and telegraphed, pattern-based boss encounters. The term describes a design philosophy, not just a difficulty level.

Q: Did FromSoftware invent difficult games? A: No. Difficult games predate FromSoftware by decades, going back to arcade titles designed to consume coins. What FromSoftware did, starting with Demon's Souls in 2009, was combine difficulty with legible fairness and consequence-bearing systems in a way that made hard games commercially viable again for a mainstream console audience.

Q: Why did Sekiro remove multiplayer and RPG-style leveling from the soulslike formula? A: Sekiro's director wanted combat built entirely around a posture-and-parry system rather than stat-based builds, so removing customizable leveling kept every player facing the same mechanical challenge. Removing multiplayer eliminated the invasion and cooperation systems that don't fit a single fixed protagonist and combat style, letting the game commit fully to precision swordplay instead.

Q: What is the "regain" mechanic in Bloodborne, and why does it matter? A: Regain lets players recover a portion of health lost from a recent hit by attacking quickly afterward, rather than only through Estus-style healing items. It rewards aggression over the more cautious, shield-based playstyle Dark Souls encourages, which is why Bloodborne is often described as the more offense-oriented entry in FromSoftware's catalog.

Q: Is the Sekiro accessibility debate still relevant to newer soulslikes? A: Yes. It resurfaces with nearly every high-profile soulslike release, including Elden Ring, because FromSoftware has never adopted the granular accessibility options (adjustable timing windows, alternative inputs) that advocacy groups like AbleGamers specifically requested in 2019. The studio has added general quality-of-life features, such as colorblind filters, without addressing the core execution-difficulty request.

Q: How much more did Elden Ring sell compared to the original Dark Souls? A: Elden Ring had sold more than 28.6 million copies by September 2024 and passed 30 million by April 2025, according to FromSoftware's disclosures. The original 2011 Dark Souls sold roughly 2.37 million copies in its early reporting window, meaning Elden Ring's individual sales figure now exceeds Dark Souls' original numbers by more than tenfold.

Q: What is a "difficulty wall" in game design, and how did Elden Ring change it? A: A difficulty wall is a mandatory obstacle, usually a boss, that blocks all further progress until the player clears it, regardless of preparation level. Dark Souls relies heavily on these walls. Elden Ring's open world removes most of them by making boss order optional, letting players build up strength elsewhere before returning, without removing the difficulty of the encounters themselves.

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