Shadow Of The Erdtree’s Amazing Verticality Required A Better Map System To Make Sense

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A common complaint about the open-world segments of the base Elden Ring was that it felt too much like a sandbox. Most areas like Limgrave and the Altus Plateau were wide open spaces, only loosely connected to each other. To fix this, and make the game feel more interconnected, FromSoftware has added tons of verticality to the map of Shadow of the Erdtree.

The trade-off is that navigating through the Realm of Shadow is confusing.  Much of this is because the map that FromSoftware designed for the DLC simply doesn’t facilitate that style of gameplay. As a result, players often have no idea how to get to a certain area of the map, or how they go about unlocking certain map fragments. Exploring can feel quite messy, with many needing to use the wiki as a result. Here’s why.

The Map System Needed Multiple Layers

This is something that the base Elden Ring map already has. Players can choose to toggle the “underground” map, which is really useful when exploring Nokstella, and the other areas below the Lands Between. This makes it all the more confusing why something similar wasn’t implemented for Shadow of the Erdtree’s map. Instead, you have areas that are stacked on top of each other.

Players will often have no idea just what part of the map they’re standing on, just looking at the map alone. Often times, you’ll have tons of Sites of Grace all overlapping with one another. While they might look like they are super close, in reality, they are dozens of gameplay hours away from one another. Having a more detailed map system could really have made the experience of exploring these zones much more smoother.

Unlocking Map Fragments Can Be A Pain

In Elden Ring, players can unlock parts of their map by collecting a fragment. Even before a map is unlocked, the fragment’s location can still be seen. The only problem is that because there’s so much verticality involved in Shadow of the Erdtree, it’s impossible to know on just what layer of the zone the map fragment is located. The biggest offender, in this case, was the map fragment for the Ancient Ruins of Rauh.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/1drcw8d/where_the_f_is_this/

Players can easily explore this entire area without ever coming across the map fragment that unlocks this area. The reason behind that is that the fragment is locked in a ravine deep below the zone, which isn’t even accessible via the Ancient Ruins. So if you didn’t happen to go to that one spot to pick up the fragment, exploring through the ruins will be a huge pain.

This is a problem that extends to several other parts of the game too.  The map fragment for Jagged Peaks, the area where you fight Bayle, is located all the way down in Cerulean Coast. So if you don’t go to the coast first, you’ll have to trek your way to Bayle without a map to guide you. It’s a frustrating experience that feels like it could’ve easily been resolved before the DLC shipped out.

FromSoftware’s Map As A Whole Could Use Changes

Elden Ring is the first FromSoftware to feature a proper map. Even adding one felt like a huge change for the studio, based on what they did in the past. But it’s clear that there are still things that can be made to improve the current iteration. I’ve talked about multiple layers already, but there are other changes that can be made to ease navigation and help with exploration too.

all I want is a check mark next to completed dungeons on the map. is that so wrong?
byu/cartmicah3 inEldenring

For example, during my playthrough of Elden Ring, I often encountered a catacomb or cave that I simply didn’t feel like doing at the moment. But because of how large the world is, sometimes you just forget to do these. Having a checkmark that appears next to a dungeon which shows you’ve completed it would help players keep track of this.

While these changes won’t dramatically alter the experience, they can help to make exploring the Lands Between that much more fun. It’s unclear if FromSoftware plans on adding a map to its future Soulslike titles. But if it does, I’d love to see them implement the things they’ve learned from Elden Ring’s map system into it.