The only thing that could even attempt to 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 this gallery of Elden Ring screenshots taken from a top-down perspective as if they were environments in a CRPG spin-off.
Reddit user Fanica98 zoomed way out with a camera mod at the lowest FOV possible to give Elden Ring's world a pseudo-isometric look. I've messed with camera tools before but I've never thought about trying to recreate this perspective. Apparently, it's a little fussy to achieve.
"The game is highly optimized under the hood to unload a significant amount of what the player is not supposed to see," Fanica98 explained in a comment, "to the point where I could barely get a shot in the Haligtree and none at all in the Academy or Volcano Manor."
- 3 hours with Elden Ring Nightreign helped me accept it's not the co-op FromSoft game I asked for, but damn fun in its own right
- Baldur's Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 show that the future of RPGs is in games way more ambitious, weird and unexpected than anything Bethesda and BioWare have to offer
I noticed this too. Pulling the camera outside of a cave or building you're in will reveal how much of the game disappears as soon as there's no way for you to see it. Plenty of games do this to lighten the load on the engine. Fanica98 also said FromSoft uses a thick blanket of fog on the outer edges of the world, which they had to disable to be able to see anything. That's why some of the shots look way clearer than they do while playing the game.
The entrance to the Grand Cloister sitting in the watermelon red Lake of Rot might be one of my favorites. From this far out, the rot almost looks like the surface of Mars. I want to click between its two statues to lead my little party inside and straight into the worst enemies in the game (if you know, you know).
Inside the Church of Vows sits Miriel, AKA turtle pope, and you know he'd have some of the most mind-blowing lore drops in the game if Elden Ring were a CRPG and actually let you talk to him for a while. Fanica98 did a great job framing the three large statues peering over the smaller one where you absolve your sins. The cracks and overgrown ivy crawling along the stone walls have all their details squished so much that it gives the image a pixel-y, retro vibe to make me even more sad this isn't a real game.
A few years ago, Fanica98 did the same treatment to Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2. Both of those look great, but I think the scale of Elden Ring lends itself better to the perspective shift. You can see how much effort FromSoft put into shaping cliff faces and treelines to lead your eye toward its castles and ruins. It's all one Photoshop edit away from fooling me into thinking it's real.
The full album of screenshots has 60 images for you to join me in dreaming of this perfect game. I'd even take a video edit that imagines Elden Ring as a top-down RPG, like this surprisingly accurate Lego version of Dark Souls called Dark Souls Re-bricked.
