Elden Ring Trivia Quiz: From Tarnished to Elden Lord

Trivia Quizzes Video Games

The Lands Between were held together by the Elden Ring until someone broke it. Queen Marika's demigod children took the fragments, the Great Runes, and went to war with each other across territories that now sit in ruin, while the Erdtree still burns gold on the horizon above almost every region. The player arrives as a Tarnished, one of the exiles whose grace was withdrawn generations earlier and has now been restored, summoned back to collect what the demigods are holding and become Elden Lord. None of this is explained in order. The opening cinematic states the premise once, quickly, and everything afterwards has to be assembled from item descriptions, ruins and the few characters willing to talk.

FromSoftware released the game on 25 February 2022 through Bandai Namco, its first open world after two decades of building tightly interlocked castles and catacombs, with Hidetaka Miyazaki directing and George R. R. Martin writing the mythology of the age before the shattering rather than the script itself. It sold twelve million copies within three weeks and passed twenty million inside its first year. The Game Awards named it Game of the Year that December. Shadow of the Erdtree, the game's expansion, arrived in June 2024 and sold five million copies in three days, one of the fastest starts any piece of downloadable content has had.

What changed for this game is the scale. Earlier FromSoftware worlds folded back on themselves inside a single castle or city, and this one opens with a horse. Torrent, a spectral steed summoned anywhere outside the legacy dungeons, jumps a second time in mid air and rides the updrafts called spiritsprings up to ledges and ramparts, which leaves Limgrave, the flooded academy grounds of Liurnia, the rot fields of Caelid and the Altus Plateau crossable without a fixed route. Runes dropped by dead enemies work as both currency and experience, and they stay where the player fell until collected or lost for good on a second death. Sites of Grace replace bonfires and point, faintly, in a direction most people ignore for forty hours.

The difficulty is negotiated rather than fixed. Margit blocks the road to Stormveil Castle early enough to end most first attempts, and the usual answer is to ride away for ten hours and come back heavier. Malenia, Blade of Miquella, sits at the bottom of an optional area and heals on every blow she lands, including blocked ones. A player known as Let Me Solo Her began answering summon signs for that fight nearly naked with a pot worn on the head, killed her for thousands of strangers, and was eventually sent a real sword by the publisher. Messages left on the ground by other players warn about ambushes, lie about them, or point at a cliff edge and promise treasure.

The storytelling method stays consistent with what the studio has done since Demon's Souls. A weapon carries three sentences about the soldier who used it, a helmet explains a war that ended before the game began, and the connective work is left to the player and, in practice, to a community that has spent years arguing about it in public. Most of the major industry awards followed, and the game pulled a large number of people into a genre they had spent a decade avoiding. The answer key follows the last question.