The only thing that could even compete with Baldur’s Gate 3 for me would be a game that doesn’t exist. But I can imagine what it would look like with a gallery of Elden Ring screenshots taken from the top down, as if they were environments from a CRPG spin-off.
Reddit user Fanica98 enlarged using the camera mod at the lowest possible field of view to give the world of Elden Ring a pseudo-isometric appearance. I’ve played around with camera tools before, but I’d never thought about recreating this perspective. Apparently this is a bit challenging to achieve.
“The game is highly optimized under the hood to offload much of what the player is not supposed to see,” Fanica98 explained in a comment, “to the point where I could barely get a shot at Haligtree and none at all at the Academy or Volcano Manor.”
I noticed that too. Pulling the camera outside of the cave or building you’re in will reveal how much of the game disappears as soon as you can’t see it. Many games do this to reduce the load on the engine. Fanica98 also said that FromTender uses a chunky layer of fog on the outer edges of the world, which they had to turn off to be able to see anything. Therefore, some shots look much clearer than during the game.
Entrance to Great Monastery sitting in the red watermelon Lake of Rot might be one of my favorites. From this distance, the rot looks almost like the surface of Mars. I want to click between his two statues to lead my little team inside and straight into the worst enemies in the game (if you know, you know).
Inside Church of weddings sits Miriel, AKA the turtle pope, and you know he’d have some of the most mind-blowing lore dumps in the game if Elden Ring was a CRPG and he actually let you talk to him for a while. Fanica98 did a great job framing three vast statues overlooking a smaller one where you forgive your sins. The cracks and overgrown ivy creeping along the stone walls have all the details so squashed together that it gives the image a pixelated retro feel, which makes me even sadder that this isn’t a real game.
A few years ago, Fanica98 performed the same procedure Dark Souls AND Dark Souls 2. They both look great, but I think Elden Ring’s scale better reflects the change in perspective. You can see how much effort FromTender put into shaping the cliff faces and tree lines to lead the eye towards the castles and ruins. All it takes is one edit in Photoshop to not fool me into thinking it’s true.
The full album screenshots contains 60 images so you can join me in dreaming about that perfect game. I’d even take a video montage that depicts Elden Ring as a top-down RPG, like this surprisingly precise Lego version of Dark Souls called Dark Souls bricked again.