Soulframe is Elden Ring meets Ghost of Tsushima as a “cozy” MMO

A hush falls at TennoCon 2023; a rarity given the sold-out occasion boasts 1000’s of attendees. Why, you ask? It’s fairly easy: Soulframe. Digital Extremes has given us our first actual deep dive into the upcoming MMORPG, which takes clear inspiration from 2022 Recreation of the Yr Elden Ring. It’s a shocking, high-fantasy world that could be a stark reminder of a number of the evils current in our personal world, and PCGamesN had the pleasure of sitting down with Soulframe‘s chief inventive officer, Steve Sinclair, at TennoCon 2023 to talk concerning the new recreation.

Nestled in Digital Extremes’ cozy streaming room amid myriad Warframe goodies and a rocking horse (that Warframe inventive director Rebecca Ford informs me used to speak), I ask Sinclair about Soulframe’s Elden Ring-esque aesthetic.

Fight options plenty of dodging and parrying, and whereas the ‘purified’ world appears to be like extra akin to one thing out of Fable, the warped, twisted iteration of Midrath that we’ll doubtless spend most of our time in definitely channels the moodiness of Elden Ring’s Lands Between.

Once I ask if Soulframe is straight impressed by the sport, Sinclair tells me “it’s inconceivable to keep away from it. Once we have been naming the sport, we have now this premise of the souls of our ancestors, after which we put f**king ‘souls’ within the identify.”

“When Elden Ring got here out, we have been simply beginning on Soulframe and clearly we, like each developer on the earth, checked out one another and went ‘oh shit.’ [Elden Ring] was simply so unbelievable when it comes to how the exploration felt and, for me, the non-linearity made it that, whenever you hit a wall, you simply go to a distinct place – which was refreshing. So yeah, we’re taking plenty of inspiration from it.”

Nevertheless, it’s not the one recreation that has impressed the Soulframe saga. “There are plenty of different influences there; nice melee fight video games like Ghost of Tsushima are large ones as properly. You’ll in all probability discover that the digital camera is a little more like Ghost, and fewer like Elden Ring.”

He does inform me, nevertheless, that there’s a “cozy” ingredient to the sport. Soulframe is a step away from the grimdark worlds of collection like Warhammer 40k, and Sinclair says he’s hoping to channel extra “Disney princesses” than blood, guts, and gore.

We see a little bit of that in the course of the menu sequence when your character has fallen asleep within the forest and accrued a slew of cute animals who’ve dozed off of their lap.

Once I ask who got here up with the thought of including mentioned cute sleeping critters, Sinclair tells me “that was Geoff [Crookes, creative director on Soulframe, formerly Warframe]. He’s the Disney princess – he doesn’t look it; properly, he does a bit.” Both approach, I’m very, very grateful for that alternative.

As somebody who liked the world of Elden Ring however struggled with the soulslike components, Soulframe is precisely what I would like and extra. I genuinely felt tears properly up in my eyes as we watched the Torment Stag boss struggle – that second cemented the truth that I need to play this recreation. The music, the aesthetic, and simply the entire which means behind Soulframe has sunk its claws into me, and it’s already skyrocketed in direction of the highest of my most-wanted video games.

Whereas we don’t know when the Soulframe release date is simply but, we do have an inventory of games like Dark Souls in case you fancy some FromSoft-style chaos. We even have an inventory of the best PC games on the market, and sure, Elden Ring is on there.