What to play after Elden Ring
Elden Ring is doing several things at once, and people who loved it rarely loved it for the same reason. Some stayed for the combat and the slow accumulation of skill. Some stayed because it was the first open world in years that refused to mark anything on the map. Some stayed for the build depth, and some for a story told almost entirely in item descriptions.
So "what next" has no single answer. These are five games, each picking up a different thread — find the one that matches what actually kept you playing.
- 1Hades
If it was the combat and the death loop. Hades takes the same bargain — you will fail, you will get better, failure is the content — and compresses it from eighty hours into twenty-minute runs. It also does the thing Elden Ring does not: every death advances the story, so the grind is never narratively wasted. The closest emotional match on this list, in a fraction of the time.
- 2Baldur's Gate III
If it was the builds, and the sense that the world was reacting to you. Baldur's Gate 3 goes further than Elden Ring on both — almost anything you try has been anticipated, and the game carries on regardless of who you killed or lost. The trade is that it explains itself constantly, which after Elden Ring can feel like being talked down to for the first ten hours.
- 3Divinity: Original Sin 2
If what you liked was breaking the rules. Divinity: Original Sin 2 is the best systems-improvisation RPG there is — the elemental interactions combine in ways the designers clearly did not plan for, and it lets you win with all of them. Much less atmospheric than Elden Ring, far more generous about letting a stupid idea work.
- 4The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
If it was the wandering. Skyrim is gentler in every respect and nowhere near as deliberate, but it is still the best game about seeing something on a ridge and going to look at it. Expect to carry the exploration and not the combat — the fighting has aged badly, and there is no Skyrim equivalent of a boss that takes you a week.
- 5Disco Elysium
If it was the story told in fragments. Disco Elysium has no combat at all, which makes it the strangest recommendation here, but it takes the thing Elden Ring does with item descriptions — a world you assemble from pieces nobody explains — and builds an entire game out of it. The best-written game on this list by a wide margin.
