Design Analysis: Elden Ring's weapon upgrade economy
Author: Ian Wilson
In Elden Ring you collect many different weapons throughout the game which are designed for different builds and play styles within those builds. For example you could choose a strength focused build and use a great shield and great sword or you could use a smaller shield and sword to get use of the medium roll. These would both be served by similar character stats mainly focusing on strength, endurance and vigor. So it should be possible to adjust between the two as you play based on your preferences at any given time however there are some factors that prevent this working smoothly. To get stronger throughout the game there are two mechanics for melee weapon users. You can level up and increase your base strength and dexterity stats using the default currency runes. You can also upgrade the weapons directly by visiting a smith and spending smithing stones of increasing levels (it also has a small rune cost).
This system has various consequences that effect the way players choose which weapons to use throughout the game. I'm going to dive into the smithing economy, discuss how it reaches out and effects the way that players interact with the game as a whole and what different options From Soft could have gone with to have achieve different results.
In the game the designers chose to limit the number of smithing stones you get to a relatively small number compared to the amount of available weapons you find as you progress (even when considering only the weapons that players have the stats to use). The consequence of this is that players have to carefully select the weapons they want to use and focus on upgrading those to ensure they have weapons strong enough to deal with different enemies. There are some nice benefits to making players think about what weapons to commit to. It can help strengthen the sense of character that players have; alongside the stat build they are putting together they also need to select a set of weapons that their character is adept with. This is great for a RPG where role playing and player led storytelling is very important to the way that players view themselves and their interactions with the game world. In addition to this encouraging players to stick with a specific weapon set will make them spend the time needed to master the associated play style which will make later more difficult encounters easier for them to manage. There is however some downsides to the current approach; players will find it difficult to swap to new weapons as the sunk cost in their old weapons can become quite large especially as the game progresses. What this means is that they will find it difficult to try out different ways of playing the game. When they want to experiment with new weapons they will find they do significantly less damage which will make it very difficult for them to assess if the weapon is better for them as their old weapon will always perform better. This leaves them with only one option if they want to properly test this new weapon; they will have to dump a bunch of resources into upgrading it. This of course brings the risk that they won't enjoy using the weapon and then will lose the opportunity to upgrade their old weapon or another new one. From Soft's design philosophy across their recent games often leans into this idea of having players make choices without understanding the consequences and then leaving them to deal with the outcome. In this case though I would argue that it doesn't provide many interesting results and so maybe the game would be better served by making adjustments to the system that let players experience the game with more variety throughout their time with it.
There are a couple mechanisms that From Soft have put into the game to attempt to mitigate this issue but they fall short of solving the problem and instead only serve to reduce the severity of it. As players get deeper into the game they will find bells which can be given to an NPC to unlock the ability to purchase smithing stones. There are two problems here, the first is that they are relatively expensive meaning players will need to grind to upgrade new weapons. The second and more important is they are a few tiers below the current max level of smithing stone you have collected meaning you can upgrade all your weapons a bit but there will still be the problem where some weapons will be upgraded much more than others. The second mechanism that From Soft uses to mitigate this is the introduction of a second type of smithing stone, the somber smithing stones, all this does is allow players to upgrade a few more weapons which require the use of these stones instead.
So what can be done to solve this issue? There are a few solutions to the problem each with some trade-offs. The easiest path would be to just remove weapon upgrading then you can happily swap weapons whenever you want. The problem with this is that it would remove a key way of balancing the game. By softly limiting the amount you can level up by only giving you limited number of stones it prevents the player from getting way too strong from a fight. Another option would be to provide significantly more smithing stones to the player throughout the game. This definitely could work but as the player can do a lot of stuff out of order it would mean players would get too powerful probably without intending to or could quite easily cheese the game by running through dungeons just to collect some smithing stones.
I think the best way to improve the system and solve the above problems would be to make the upgrades get hard locked at certain points. This would be done by requiring the player get an item which would be locked behind important bosses and give it to the smith to be able to upgrade their weapons further. The benefit here is that players would get a chance to upgrade a few of their weapons to the same level before hitting the boss and opening up the ability to upgrade them further. They would then have had time to experiment with various weapons and would be able to pick which ones to upgrade further beyond this point. The trade-off is that it would remove an avenue for players to self balance the game and adjust the challenge to their own skill level. Overall From Soft has done a good job with the system and with some minor tweaks they could minimise the problems currently in the game, allowing more player freedom and choice of how they play at any given time.