"HoYoverse's new game swaps Breath of the Wild for Elden Ring — and it's a smarter bet than it looks"

Gamescom's Opening Night Live opened with a surprise from a studio that rarely does surprises: HoYoverse, the company behind Genshin Impact, unveiled Nodus Fall, an original cooperative action-RPG set in a world where "divine authority has crumbled." Players take on the role of "Weavers" who band together to bring down mythic beings — and the trailer wastes no time making the inspiration obvious, with a dragon and a phoenix lording over the land, a giant titan with its head on fire, a hulking figure punching an anvil, and sweeping environments designed to make players feel very small. The headline take is easy: this is HoYoverse's Elden Ring.

The more interesting read is the pattern behind it. HoYoverse has built a multibillion-dollar empire on a repeatable formula: take a beloved single-player fantasy and bolt a social, live-service layer on top. Genshin Impact took Breath of the Wild's open-world exploration and paired it with gacha mechanics and co-op events. Nodus Fall now takes Elden Ring's dark-fantasy atmosphere and makes cooperative play the entire point. That isn't imitation for its own sake — it's a strategy of shipping familiar fantasy, made persistent and social.

Making co-op the core is arguably the smartest single decision in the reveal. Elden Ring's multiplayer is famously clunky — fragmented summoning, awkward progression, no clean way to explore a shattered world with friends. Building a game where cooperation is the default removes that friction entirely, and it gives HoYoverse's enormous existing player base a direct reason to carry over. Soulslike fans who wanted to explore the Lands Between with a party now get a game designed for exactly that, wrapped in the polished free-to-play infrastructure HoYoverse already operates at scale.

The tension to watch is difficulty. Soulslike challenge sits uneasily next to HoYoverse's famously broad, casual-leaning audience, so the interesting question isn't whether Nodus Fall looks like Elden Ring — it's how the studio softens the edges: adjustable challenge, a more forgiving support role for the "Weaver," or checkpoints that don't punish experimentation. The darker, grittier art direction also signals a deliberate push beyond the bright anime aesthetic Genshin made iconic, which quietly de-risks a company that has leaned heavily on a single franchise.

Whether it lands will come down to one high-wire act: being difficult enough to satisfy the Elden Ring crowd while staying welcoming enough for the tens of millions who know HoYoverse from Genshin. That's a genuinely hard thing to pull off — and the most interesting swing the studio has taken in years.

Further reading

• Kotaku — Genshin Impact studio trades Breath of the Wild for Elden Ring in its new action-RPG
• HoYoverse — official site