Elden Ring‘s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is right around the corner, and there has been immense hype surrounding the expansion’s release. Right from finding more details in the base game to dissecting the trailers, the community is doing it all to be ready for the big release.
With FromSoftware’s main focus being exploration in Elden Ring, it’s no surprise the game has many more options to help players than its previous installations. One of these features is the Stakes of Marika, which FromSoftware has carefully crafted to deal with the “stressful” aspects of traversing in The Lands Between.
Stakes of Marika Feature Was Carefully Developed to Reduce Stress in Elden Ring
Over the years, we’ve seen significant changes in the Elden Ring. One of these was the introduction of Stakes of Marika in 2021. This feature is an additional checkpoint system to the main Sites of Grace found in The Lands Between. However, unlike Sites of Grace, Stakes of Marika only offers a few choices for your primary checkpoint.
The Stakes of Marika brings a simple way for players to respawn right next to where they met their end to quickly jump back into the action. It’s a smart system for players to save their Runes without making a difficult run to them from a Site of Grace.
With the implementation of such features, it’s clear that Hidetaka Miyazaki and his team want to make Elden Ring a title that doesn’t frustrate players for basic things. In 2021, FromSoftware’s Yasuhiro Kitao elaborated on the team’s approach to the Stakes of Marika system and how they don’t want to traverse through The Lands Between to be a chore.
As we built out the open world, we realized we wanted to alleviate player frustration as much as possible with these large distances involved. We have our existing corpse run system carried over from previous games, but we didn’t want that to be a frustrating or stressful aspect for the player to have to run all the way across the map to collect their experience points.
As FromSoftware developed Elden Ring’s open world, they quickly realized that they didn’t want to stress players out by making them travel large distances.
So one thing we did was, in an area with a high level of challenge, we’ve placed these retry points — that’s still a tentative name — and if the player finds that, they’ll have the option when they die of respawning from the retry point or the last checkpoint.
The developers crafted a system that introduced retry points to address the traversing challenges of the Elden Ring. This system allowed players to respawn from the retry point or their last checkpoint and was eventually dubbed the Stakes of Marika.
Elden Ring’s Upcoming DLC is Already on Sale Before Release
June is finally here, which means Elden Ring‘s first and only DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, is approaching. The upcoming expansion is undoubtedly one of the most hyped ones, and players are ready to dive into the next chapter of Elden Ring’s story. Fortunately, the upcoming expansion is having a huge sale to make the Shadow of the Erdtree more affordable for Elden Ring players.
Right now, on Fanatical, players can get an incredible discount on Shadow of the Erdtree, which makes the Standard version drop from $39.99 USD to $35.19 and the Premium version from $49.99 to $43.99. Players who pre-order either version will get multiple in-game bonuses, such as Ring of Miquella. The Premium version will include the DLC’s Original Soundtrack and Digital Arkbook.
