By Marika Long Betrayed

It...doesn't. Take all the Fantasy Babble of Dark Souls III, remove your pre-existing understanding of the metaphysics (The First Flame and the Undead), so that the player doesnt even understand what the Elden Ring is (as opposed to the First Flame which was explained in literally the first minute of the opening cutscene of the first game). Then have the plot largely explained through NPCs that essentially spawn randomly throughout the map, with basically no rhyme or reason for their subsequent locations, OR through item descriptions, but since its open world it is REALLY easy to miss items so this method is even more unreliable than in Dark Souls. And all that is only if you are interested in the plot. For the combat, just copy Dark Souls III wholesale, but make the map 'open world' as if Dark Souls II and III were not largely open world already. Realize thats a lot of walking, so add a horse, realize the horse allows you to dodge too much combat, so add a lot of enemies that spawn/are invisible to counteract the horse, but it doesnt really work. Realize that allowing you to tackle the bosses in whatever order allows for easy minmaxing, and you cant have your game be easy, so you just multiply the enemies health by 5x and damage by 1.5x per region by the official canon order of the regions. It is remarkably grindy compared to its predecessors, while being even more obtuse with its lore. Dark Souls III could get away with all the fantasy babble because it had two previous games that spoke more literally about the lore, thus you had a foundation to bounce the babble off of.