Elden Ring’s map has been quietly changing with every patch

by techlowdown · 17 May 2022

Elden Ring has received a handful of patches since its release at the end of February. Developer FromSoftware made a number of improvements to the game’s performance, fixed a few bugs, and rebalanced a whole host of skills and weapons in an attempt to tone down the most obviously overpowered options.

As with many Japanese developers, FromSoft is guilty of making tweaks that do not get mentioned in patch notes. Players are left to discover and document those on their own in an attempt to keep track of what actually changes from one patch to another.

Those changes are usually relevant, which is why players tend to look for them. But some go entirely unnoticed – unless you’re an eagle-eyed modder. YouTuber Illusory Wall, who made a career out of digging deep into FromSoftware’s games to discover cut content, clip through boundaries and track hidden changes, has put out a video about a particular unlisted change you may not even think to check for.

That being the game’s beautiful world map. In their video below, Illusory Wall – with help from other community members – shows how the map of each of Elden Ring’s major regions has changed since the game’s release. FromSoft has evidently been cleaning up the map to retrace areas, and improve the accuracy of its representation of the game’s physical world.

This also extends to the illustrated map pick-ups players acquire to dispel the fog of war. The majority of changes are benign, and appear to have been made to get rid of areas that no longer exist in the world, or add locations that weren’t previously represented on the map.

The YouTuber speculates that certain sections of the map were the result of procedural generation, which is why the developer had to go back and update them with what actually got added later. Some of the removed landmasses and such, however, could indicate that FromSoft initially had a plan for them but ended up removing them because it ran out of time.

This is quite common for the developer, as many have discovered cut content, as well as removed mechanics in most of the studio’s games. It’s likely FromSoft updated the world itself in subsequent patches for its other games, but since Elden Ring is the first to include a world map in that way, there’s effectively a record of those changes.