Elden Ring’s secret weapon is cloth

When you boot up Shadow of the Erdtree for the first time, make sure you appreciate Elden Ring’s unsung hero: cloth.

FromSoftware has long been the master of dynamic cloth physics. That is, cloth that doesn’t follow a pre-set animation, but instead moves procedurally, based on an in-game physics engine.

It sounds simple, but it’s genuinely really hard to do.

But FromSoftware has been doing it for years, and Elden Ring is just the latest and greatest manifestation of the studio’s cloth obsession. Elden Ring’s cloth isn’t just technically impressive, though. It communicates vital information about the world, and the characters that populate it.

Take Mohg, for example.

He’s a messy boy who loves drama — and he’s dressed for it. The cape that he’s flung over his shoulders is a sumptuous red velvet, with a gold tassel fringe.

“It’s very, quite literally in my opinion, theatrical,” visual artist Faith Schaffer pointed out in an interview. “It’s your classic red curtain with gold fringe.”

Mohg is the shunned child of the royal lineage, but instead of accepting a life in the sewers, he’s convinced himself he’s going to create his own dynasty. That plan somehow involves dressing like an absolute pimp and kidnapping his stepbrother. But really, he has one of the most baroque outfits in the game, which reads as extreme compensation for the royal treatment he was denied. He is putting on a show.

And FromSoftware always goes the extra mile when it creates dynamic cloth. The Godskin Duo are, yeah, wearing flesh. It looks disgusting, clammy, and blobby. It would be gross under any circumstances. But this flesh-cloth has its own physics parameters that cause it to flop and wobble.

It’s a great example of how good FromSoftware is at using uniquely tuned physics to create distinct movement. If they had copied and pasted the same physics parameters they used for a velvet shawl or cotton cloak, it would still be distressing. But they went the extra mile and tuned the dangly bits of the robe to move with a distinct, cartilaginous wobble.

To learn more about how FromSoftware’s cloth contributes to the incredible worldbuilding of Elden Ring, check out the video above! And make sure you subscribe to Polygon on YouTube to keep up with all our latest.