One Way Elden Ring Evolves the Soulsborne Genre

 Not long ago, I was playing a lot of Dark Souls III. It's a great game, of course (though one I have, frustratingly, never beaten - though I wonder if I were willing to skip the end of the Ringed City that I would be able to take out the Soul of Cinder without too much controller-shattering) but, like a lot of these games, there's a sense sometimes that every choice is a profoundly important one.

For example, there are a lot of weapons in the game that you can only find one of. If you, then, want to put a weapon infusion on it - adding some special kind of damage and perhaps alternate stat scaling - you have to use a special item that is consumed. You can undo this with a Scriving Stone, but I believe the original crystal used for the infusion is spent.

Elden Ring takes the "weapon arts" of DSIII and makes them a bigger part of the game - allowing you to collect them and swap them in for various weapons and shields. But these have a couple huge improvements: first off, you can easily swap between them on a particular weapon. Next, the Ashes come with the option (though not the obligation) to change the scaling of your weapons. And that can also be swapped out easily at any site of lost grace.

As another example:

In DSIII, Embers are an item that allows you to enter the "Lord of Cinder" status condition - which significantly increases your max health and also opens you up to co-op (and invasions). Embers can sometimes, on rare occasion, drop off of enemies, but most are found in the world and don't respawn. While you can rack up a lot of these, there's a psychological effect you get with this sort of scarcity that makes it feel like a huge gamble to use it.

In Elden Ring, you can easily farm the Erdleaves you need to make the equivalent item, which allows you to see the summoning signs around boss rooms (maybe anywhere those curved crucifixes are?)

Essentially, it feels like, on a philosophical level, the game is more forgiving of experimentation, which I think is always a really good thing, especially in a tough game like this.

It appears that this even applies to Remembrances - supposedly if you get to the top of those giant walking mountains with the bells (featured in many a trailer) you can duplicate these "boss souls" so that you could potentially get both boss items in a single run. While my Int-based spellcaster is unlikely to use either of the strongly Strength-based items off of Godrick the Grafted, the items you can get from Rennala's Remembrance both appeal to me - a staff and a spell (the spell requires 70 Intelligence, though, which means I've got at least 30 levels before I can cast it).

I'm curious to see if the same is true for the "Rebirth" you can do after you hit a certain point in the game - this requires an item to hand over to the NPC who does it (no spoilers) but I wonder if those items are finite or farmable.