I recently finished Elden Ring. 100 hours. Somewhere around a dozen or so hours in, standing in a field I had no business being in (yes, I'm looking at you Caelid), fighting something I had no business fighting, I realized something. This game violates almost every product principle I've been taught and yet, it's one of the best products ever made.
No onboarding tutorial. No quest log. No markers telling you where to go. No difficulty slider. The UI is cryptic. The story is scattered across item descriptions most players will never read. By every SaaS playbook metric, this product could be a case study in what NOT to do.
It sold over 30 million copies and has been cited by multiple top voices in the gaming industry as one of the BEST games ever made.
Anyone who knows me deeply knows that I've played a stupid amount of video games. I've played games that have better graphics, better combat mechanics, better storylines, better sound design, better everything than Elden Ring - but something really stuck with me about this game that I haven't been able to shake off.
So what's going on?
Less is more
In product, when we say "less is more" what we usually mean is "cut scope so we can ship faster". We probably want an MVP or a v1 out there to validate our hypotheses. FromSoftware means something completely different. They mean: remove everything that does the thinking for the player.
There's no quest log because they want you to remember. There's no map marker because they want you to explore. There's no tooltip explaining what Vigor does because they want you to figure it out. Every missing feature is a design decision. Every absence creates space for the player to fill with their own curiosity.
This is the opposite of how most tech products think. We optimize for reducing friction. We A/B test button colours and shapes to get a +2% CTR. We add tooltips, guided tours, empty states, and progress bars because we're terrified users will bounce.
Elden Ring dares to ask: what if friction is the product?
The Tree Sentinel
So you walk out of the tutorial cave - if you can even call it that. The world opens up, and right there, ten seconds in - there's a golden knight on horseback patrolling the path ahead - The Tree Sentinel. He WILL destroy you.
And that's the point.
The game never tells you to avoid him. There's no popup saying "recommended level: 20." or "DANGER!!". It just puts an impossibly hard enemy right in front of you and lets you figure out what to do. Most players charge in, die, respawn, charge in again because surely it was a fluke, die again, and then after repeatedly getting humbled, they make the single most important decision in the game: they go around.
That moment is FromSoftware teaching you the entire game without a single line of text. You don't have to fight everything you see. The world is open. Go explore. Find something you can handle. Get stronger, and THEN come back later and flatten the thing that killed you.
Most products would try to gate the user here. A "you're not ready yet" message. Maybe a friendly NPC saying "Come back when you're stronger, bestie!" Elden Ring trusts you to learn the lesson yourself, and because you learned it yourself, you never forget it.
Difficulty curve as a Retention mechanism
Here's the thing about Elden Ring's difficulty. It's not unfair. It's precise. Every enemy has a pattern. Every boss has a tell. The game gives you every tool you need to win. It just refuses to tell you which tool to use.
Funnily enough, this is probably the best onboarding I've ever seen, because it's so honest. The game says: you will die, you will learn, you will get better. This loop of failure and mastery is so satisfying that people sink 100+ hours into it voluntarily.
Compare this to most SaaS onboarding. We hold the user's hand through a checklist, celebrate fake milestones ("You've completed your profile!") with confetti flying everywhere. My brother in Christ - I filled in three fields? Elden Ring proves that if the core loop is genuinely rewarding, people will push through friction to get to it.
And then there's THE moment - you probably won't see it coming. After hours of getting destroyed by everything in the Lands Between, something clicks. You get a feel for the dodge roll iframes. The attack windows feel obvious. You stop panicking and start punishing. Suddenly YOU'RE the danger. That thing that killed you fifteen times? You walk through it without taking a hit.
That feeling is the product IMO - not the loot or the level up screen. The feeling that you earned something real because nobody handed it to you.
The real lesson: don't sand down your product until there's nothing left to feel. Make the hard parts worth it.
Environmental storytelling is underrated
Elden Ring barely talks to you. There are no cutscenes every five minutes. No narrator explaining the lore. Instead, the world tells the story. A giant corpse draped over a castle wall. A field of gravestones stretching to the horizon. A blind woman sitting alone in a church with nothing but a message: "offer grace." Everything is very meticulously and deliberately placed, but you need to work your way through to find the "why". Make no mistake, there is PLENTY of lore, you just need to work for it.
You piece it together yourself, or you don't - both are valid and thats the beauty of it.
I'll give you a personal example. I stumbled into Ranni's (one of the NPCs) questline almost by accident. Eventually you find a lift in the middle of nowhere that takes you down to Siofra River. And that lift ride - wow! It just keeps going. You're standing there for what feels like several minutes, watching the surface disappear above you, and it hits you just how far underground you're heading. Then you step out into this massive cavern with a sky full of stars that shouldn't exist. An entire world hidden beneath the world. And the craziest part? The whole thing is completely missable. There's no main or even side quest marker pointing you there. No "hey, you should check this out." I just found it because I was curious. It scratched an exploring itch I didn't even know I had. This sort of ballsy game design is not something you see often - creating such elaborate areas which a player could very easily miss in their entire playthrough.
This is environmental storytelling. No cutscene could have made me feel the depth of that underground the way that long ass lift did - and coming across it organically.
Here's an even wilder one. There's a turtle NPC in a church - Miriel. If you actually talk to him, he drops a pretty vague hint about a certain statue of Radagon in a place called Leyndell. You go there, do a specific gesture in front of it (if you manage to solve the vague clue), and the statue transforms into someone else entirely (trying to avoid spoilers for the uninitiated). This is arguably the biggest end game lore reveal which is hidden behind a random turtle NPC with a random gesture the game gives you a very subtle hint about. Just sitting there, and is accessible within just a few hours of playing the game.
I feel like this is something many products get wrong. We over-explain. We write onboarding copy that reads like a manual. We slap banners and modals on every new feature. A dozen tooltips and a Loom video just to explain a toggle. We're so afraid users won't "get it" that we strip away any chance of discovery.
I appreciate products that give you the space to discover. Spotify's Discover doesn't explain its algorithm. Apple ships products with no manual. Poki - a website which gets traffic over 180m hits per month has no onboarding, just a huge playground of games for you to discover. Trust the user and give the product/environment a chance to speak for itself.
The target user is defined and unapologetic
Of course this approach won't work for most products. FromSoftware doesn't build for everyone. They know their audience and more importantly, they know who ISN'T their audience. Hardcore, patient, curious players (with a slight dash of masochism) who want to earn their progress. I really appreciate how they don't compromise that vision to chase a broader market.
This is maybe the hardest lesson for PMs as it goes against our instincts. We're thinking of expanding TAM, chasing the next big growth wheel, catering for more user groups. Trying to better onboard the "casual" user, and that's probably the right thing to do! But Elden Ring and FromSoftware shows a different perspective - that the most beloved products often come from having a point of view and refusing to dilute it, and in fact doubling down on it.
Let me be clear - I personally think the game is super accessible, but on its own terms. Instead of adding an easy mode, they gave you an open world. Stuck on a boss? Go explore somewhere else. Level up. Come back stronger. The solution to difficulty is built into the design itself.
I thought this was such elegant product design.
Closing thoughts
I've spent my career building products in gaming and AI. I've shipped features to millions of users, run A/B tests, optimized funnels, and stared at dashboards. And the longer I do this, the more I think the best product lessons come from places we don't usually look.
Video games are products. They have users, retention curves, monetization strategies, and onboarding flows. But the best ones treat these things as consequences of great design, not goals in themselves.
Elden Ring didn't optimize for engagement. It optimized for an experience worth engaging with, and that made all the difference.
WARRA GAME 10/10 WOULD RECOMMEND.