Elden ring walkthrough: what a game studio is actually producing when it ships one
Ask three developers what an elden ring walkthrough is and you get three working answers. A player sees a path through a 100 hour open world filled with legacy dungeons, demigod bosses, and side characters whose questlines can quietly end a run. A level designer sees a layering problem: a main story, two legacy dungeon clusters per major region, optional catacombs, and side content scattered across open fields. A producer sees a content schedule with hard lock dates, voice-over dependencies, and a patch window that can invalidate anything written a week before launch. The reason an elden ring walkthrough is worth treating as a game development artifact, not just a player document, is that the world itself was built in a way that resists a single canonical route. Open world traversal, optional bosses, and character quests that can be completed alongside each other or abandoned entirely, as described in IGN’s walkthrough hub for Elden Ring, all shape the way a walkthrough must be written, scoped, and updated.
This article is written for the developer, technical writer, or producer who has been asked to ship, or evaluate, a long-form walkthrough for a FromSoftware-style open world action RPG. It treats the walkthrough as a production deliverable, with the same concerns you would apply to a tutorial system, a design document, or a quest log. The aim is a guide that is accurate at launch, structurally stable across patches, and honest about the parts of the game it cannot fully document.
Why an elden ring walkthrough is harder to write than a linear Souls guide
Previous FromSoftware titles rewarded linear, sequential documentation. Elden Ring changed that contract, and any walkthrough that does not acknowledge the change will mislead players and frustrate the team maintaining it. A Dark Souls guide could assume that the player reached Anor Londo before entering the Catacombs, and the writer could describe one sequence with confidence. The same assumption breaks in Elden Ring, where a player can reach a late-game legacy dungeon after a single long ride across Limgrave and into a higher-level region, skipping the “intended” mid-game content along the way. The walkthrough has to respond to that freedom without collapsing into a list of every possible route.
- Open world traversal means there is no single correct order for visiting regions, and players can challenge legacy dungeons in different sequences.
- Character side quests are tied to NPCs met during travel, and many of them move between regions as the player progresses, which creates dependency chains that are easy to break.
- Quest outcomes can quietly close if the player advances too far in the wrong branch, so a walkthrough must flag risk points, not just steps.
- Optional content, including catacombs, mines, and roaming world bosses, scales the documentation surface well beyond a main path.
- Multiple endings are reachable depending on which character questlines the player follows, and only those questlines activate the ending triggers after the final boss, according to the verified IGN walkthrough structure.
Those five pressures are why a generic “follow the markers” walkthrough fails quickly. The guide has to communicate both a recommended route and the boundaries of player choice, which is a different writing problem than producing a clean step list for a hub-and-spoke level design.
Scoping the walkthrough before the first sentence is written
Before the writing team starts, a producer should freeze a scope document. Without it, the walkthrough will either balloon into a second wiki or be cut to a sales-pitch-level overview. The scope document only needs to answer a handful of questions, and the rest of the article depends on them being settled early. In practice this is a one-page memo: a list of questions, a default answer for each, and a signature line for the lead writer and the producer. The cost of writing the memo is small; the cost of skipping it is felt in every later chapter rewrite.
| Scope question | What it controls | Default for an open world RPG walkthrough |
|---|---|---|
| Is the main path a hard route or a region-by-region outline? | How the table of contents is structured | Region-by-region, with a recommended order inside each region |
| Which side quests are documented in full? | Research load and total length | Only quests that affect endings or unique rewards |
| What is the patch baseline? | How quickly the guide goes stale | Latest verified patch at the start of production |
| How are spoilers handled? | Sectioning, warnings, alt text | Tagged spoiler blocks after a content boundary |
| What is the level threshold policy? | Tone and difficulty framing | Report the level we tested at, never a “recommended level” the source does not state |
Two of these are worth calling out in more detail. Patch baseline matters because FromSoftware titles receive balance and behavior updates that can change enemy placement, item locations, or quest triggers. The walkthrough must name a version, and every strategy note should be tied to that version so future readers can tell whether the advice still applies. Spoiler policy matters because a walkthrough that gives away the outcome of a character in a section titled “early game exploration” is doing real harm to the reader’s choices; the verified IGN walkthrough hub is explicit that side quests can be abandoned or completed alongside each other, and a guide that ignores that fact will spoil endings for players who never wanted the information in the first place.
The structural skeleton: regions, legacy dungeons, and side content
Once scope is fixed, the structure usually settles into three layers, each with its own production cost. The example skeleton below is the kind of outline a producer would hand a writer before any prose exists. It is deliberately generic because each region of Elden Ring has its own quirks; a skeleton is a starting point, not a final layout.
- Region overview: setting, recommended entry level based on documentation, fast travel points, and a list of legacy dungeons, catacombs, and notable bosses.
- Legacy dungeon deep dive: entry path, room-by-room progression, key item locations, and boss strategy with documented attack patterns only.
- Character side quests: where each NPC is first met, where they move, what triggers their quest to fail, and what reward or ending hook the questline unlocks.
The trap is to treat the side quest layer as a list. The verified walkthrough structure is clear that side quests are exclusively tied to characters the player meets while traveling, and that some characters will help, lie, or turn hostile depending on what the player does. That is narrative, not a checklist, and the writing has to reflect that. A side quest section that reads like a shopping list of NPCs will not warn the player that a particular dialogue option at a particular location closes the quest permanently. That warning has to be in the prose, in the same paragraph as the trigger, and it has to be written by someone who has actually played through the consequence at least once on the current patch.
Writing decisions that determine whether the walkthrough is useful
There is a class of editorial decisions that do not show up in the outline but decide whether the final document is trusted. These are worth agreeing on before a single paragraph is drafted, ideally in the same memo as the scope document. The reason is that the decisions compound: a walkthrough that leads with the optimal path forces the new player to read two paragraphs of advanced routing before reaching the first safe step, and the writer will not notice the problem until the document is in review.
- Lead with the safe path before the optimal path, because the safe path is what a new player needs and the optimal path is what a returning player wants.
- Document the room, not the run, so a player who dies does not have to scroll past two paragraphs of combat advice to find the next doorway.
- Separate “you can do this now” from “you can do this at any point”, because the game lets the player choose either and the walkthrough should not pretend otherwise.
- Flag quest failure conditions in the same paragraph as the trigger, not in a separate appendix, so a reader cannot miss them.
- Use named locations and named characters only when the source confirms them, and never rename or smooth out an awkward official name.
The instinct to clean up names or simplify the world is exactly the kind of editorial polish that produces a confident, wrong walkthrough. The game has its own vocabulary and the guide should match it. If a legacy dungeon is named with a transliteration that the in-game UI supports, the walkthrough should reproduce it; if a side character has two names in different patches, the walkthrough should note both and explain when each applies.
Boss strategy as a separate editorial track
Boss strategy is the section that most often drifts away from the rest of the walkthrough, because the temptation is to write it like a forum post. The reason it needs its own editorial track is that boss strategy is also the section that is most exposed to patch changes: a single rebalance can move an attack’s wind-up by a few frames, and a previously correct “dodge late” note becomes a death sentence. The walkthrough team should treat boss strategy the way a QA team treats a regression test: each description is a hypothesis that has to be re-run whenever the build changes.
Two practical rules help. First, name the patch build in the strategy header so the reader can correlate the advice to the version they are playing. Second, separate confirmed behavior from community report. If a behavior has been observed in the team’s own playtest on the current patch, describe it as observed. If it has only been reported by the community, mark it as a community report and link to the source rather than asserting it as fact. The result is a strategy section that ages more honestly and that the team can update with a smaller blast radius when a new patch ships.
Walkthrough maintenance as a live service problem
Treat the walkthrough as a live service artifact, not a launch deliverable. The reasons are structural rather than emotional. A launch-only walkthrough is fine for a single-player game that never changes after release, but Elden Ring is a long-running title that receives balance and content updates, and the documentation has to track the game. The same logic applies to any open world action RPG with an active community: the players will find behaviors the team never documented, and the walkthrough has to absorb that information without losing its shape.
| Maintenance trigger | Why it matters | What needs to change in the walkthrough |
|---|---|---|
| Game patch rebalances a boss | Strategy sections become misleading | Update attack pattern descriptions and any documented timings |
| NPC location or dialogue changes | Side quest triggers shift or break | Rewrite the affected side quest section in place |
| New ending condition is discovered by the community | Reader expectations shift | Add a clearly dated community-sourced note, not a silent edit |
| Item location is corrected in a later patch | Maps and screenshots go stale | Re-capture and version-stamp the affected media |
| Legacy dungeon layout changes | Room-by-room progression is invalidated | Reset the dungeon section to the new verified layout |
None of this is unique to one game, but the open world design amplifies each of them. A linear dungeon can be re-documented in a few hours; a region with a legacy dungeon, several catacombs, a roaming boss, and three NPC questlines is a much larger rewrite. The producer should budget a maintenance window per patch and treat the walkthrough backlog the same way the engineering team treats a bug backlog: visible, prioritized, and pruned on a regular cadence. The walkthrough that goes silent for six months and then receives a giant unscheduled rewrite is the walkthrough that loses reader trust.
Working with playtesters and editors
Production roles matter more than the writing itself. A walkthrough written by a single author, however skilled, will accumulate blind spots that no internal review can catch, because the author already knows what the guide is supposed to say. The team should plan for at least three external playtesters per major region: one who has never played the game, one who has finished the game once, and one who is actively running a second playthrough on the current patch. Each role catches a different category of error, and the cost of the playtest is small compared to the cost of a documented boss that turns out to be undodgeable at the level the guide recommends.
Editors do more than copy. A walkthrough editor should track the patch baseline across every section, flag missing spoiler boundaries, and maintain a running list of assumptions the team has not yet verified. That list is the most useful internal artifact in the whole production, because it makes the gap between “what we wrote” and “what we know” visible to the producer. Without it, the guide will ship with a confident voice and a small set of unverified claims that the community will find within hours of publication.
Sourcing, attribution, and what to do when the source is silent
Attribution in a walkthrough is not academic citation, but the underlying discipline is the same. Every claim in the document should be traceable to one of three sources: a documented in-game observation by the team, an official patch note, or a community report that the team has chosen to surface. The walkthrough should not present a community report as if it were a confirmed mechanic, and it should not present a confirmed mechanic as if it were a community rumor. The reader is making real decisions based on the document, and the document has to be honest about how much it knows.
When the source is silent, the walkthrough has to say so. A legacy dungeon room that the team has not been able to verify on the current patch should be marked as unverified, not glossed over. A boss attack pattern that the team observed only twice should be described as preliminary, not asserted as canonical. The discipline is unglamorous and slightly awkward in print, but it is the only way a walkthrough can stay accurate as the game evolves.
How an elden ring walkthrough is actually published, versioned, and retired
Publication is the last step, not the first. The team should plan a versioning scheme before launch: a version string that appears at the top of the document, a changelog that lists what changed and when, and a retirement policy that says what happens when a future patch invalidates so much of the document that a rewrite is cheaper than a patch. Without a versioning scheme, the walkthrough becomes a single undated artifact that the reader has to interpret against their own patch, which is a poor reading experience and a worse production outcome.
The changelog is the part most teams skip, and it is the part readers use the most. A two-line entry that says “Updated boss strategy for patch 1.10” is more useful to a returning reader than the entire strategy section, because it tells them whether they need to re-read. The retirement policy is harder. A walkthrough is usually retired when a sequel or a major expansion makes the original document structurally obsolete; the team should write the new document from scratch, link to it from the retired page, and keep the retired page accessible so older search traffic still lands on something useful.
Frequently asked questions
What should an elden ring walkthrough actually cover?
It should cover the recommended path through each major region, every legacy dungeon in depth, the side quests that affect endings or grant unique rewards, and the boss strategies the writing team has verified against a specific patch. Optional content such as catacombs and roaming world bosses can be included but should be clearly marked as optional so a player is never forced to follow a checklist to reach the credits.
Is there a single correct route through the game?
No. The game is built so that legacy dungeons can be challenged in different orders and character questlines can be completed alongside each other or abandoned early. A good walkthrough gives a recommended order and clearly explains the choices the player is making at each step, rather than pretending there is only one path.
How does a walkthrough team handle side quests that can fail silently?
Document the failure conditions in the same paragraph as the quest step that triggers them, and use spoiler tags for everything past the failure point. The verified walkthrough structure explicitly warns that some characters can be killed or lost, so the guide should not describe an outcome as if it is guaranteed.
How often does an elden ring walkthrough need to be updated?
As often as the game receives patches that change enemy behavior, item placement, or NPC routing. At minimum, the guide should be re-read and re-tested after every major patch, and the patch baseline should be visible at the top of the document so readers know what version they are looking at.
What is the difference between a walkthrough and a wiki?
A walkthrough is a guided path with editorial decisions, recommended routes, and contextual advice. A wiki is a reference of every item, every NPC, and every location without guidance. The writing team should pick one and not blur the two, because mixing them produces a document that is too long to follow and too opinionated to be a reliable reference.
How do you write boss strategies without inventing attack patterns?
Only describe attacks and timings that the team has observed in a specific patch build, and name the patch in the strategy. If a behavior is reported by the community but not yet observed by the team, mark it as a community report rather than presenting it as a verified mechanic.
How should endings be documented?
Treat each ending as the result of a specific set of character quest decisions made before the final boss, and document the prerequisites only. Do not write the ending’s narrative outcome in detail before a clearly marked spoiler boundary, because many players want to choose their ending without knowing what it describes.
Can a single walkthrough serve both new and returning players?
It can, but only if the document is structured so that the safe path is always reachable first and the optional or advanced content is layered behind it. New players should never have to scroll past speedrun advice to find the first safe route through a dungeon.
What is the single biggest production risk for an elden ring walkthrough?
Scope creep. The world is large enough that a team can keep documenting optional content long after the main path is finished, and the resulting document becomes too long to maintain. The scope document written at the start of production is the only reliable defense.
Where should a walkthrough team start on day one?
With the scope document, the patch baseline, and the spoiler policy. The actual writing should not start until those three are signed off, because every later editorial decision depends on them.
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