It started with a save game…
Playing a video game is a deeply personal experience.
Unlike other mediums, you’re in control of what happens.
While we always bring something of ourselves to books, movies or albums, the core text never changes.
Not until I saw a message on Twitter asking for help withElden Ring.
They’d accidentally killed an NPC that they very much did not want to kill and were quite distraught.
They shared that save with their partner and didn’t want to potentially ruin the game for them.
Now, this wasn’t the first time I’d played a game on someone else’s save.
It was a very different experience though.
After a bit of wrangling involving a save-file importer, I jumped into Sellen’s world.
It made sense to tackle the easy stuff.
This wasn’t the case for Sellen and their partner.
They’d even found the Siofra River.
They may not have been the mightiest warriors, but they sure were great explorers!
Running around the map, our different experiences became even more obvious.
Back in Limgrave, there were spots that I hadn’t even discovered on my first playthrough.
I spent a couple of hours just wandering about, seeing the game through another player’s eyes.
Very little is explicitly stated, it all has to be pieced together.
Of course, all this detective work was only half the job.
Now I had to follow in their footsteps as closely as possible.
Armed with a hefty document of screenshots and shopping lists, I started a new game.
Instead, the tricky bit was avoiding doing things I shouldn’t.
Preventing over-levelling the character wasn’t too hard.
Reaching some of the more distant Sites of Grace without visiting any of the intervening waypoints was quite demanding.
I had to keep referring back to my map screenshots and make some truly epic journeys.
Hardest of all was knowing which items not to pick up.
My goal was to make the save file feel like Sellen’s, not give them an unwanted leg-up.
moment as I thought I’d accidentally grabbed something I shouldn’t have.
In the end, I only made one mistaken acquisition, a mostly inconsequential Ash of War.
I would never have dreamed of running around and just seeing the sights to the extent that they had.
