In dungeons or in front of a boss’s door, you can summon an ally to help you. This feature has been on the license for a long time, but no one could guess the circumstances that led to the genesis of its creation. In an interview conducted by The New Yorkera few days after the release of Elden Ring, Hidetaka Miyazaki explained what conditioned him to create this in-game multiplayer feature.
A car breakdown story
Indeed, Miyazaki explains that during a problem with his car on a hill in the middle of winter, while he was looking for help, a group of individuals came to meet him to help him. He didn’t know them from Eve or Adam, but the latter came to help him to push his car to the top of this hill to then disappear after the task was accomplished.
This personal experience therefore conditioned him in this idea that the Souls should have this function of invocation when the need for help begins to be felt. Much like this group of individuals, players can arrive when the player needs them, and they leave once the fight is over.
On Elden Ring, this functionality could very well not have seen the light of day, but the developers saw fit that it would be beneficial for all players to leave this function, because it would have hindered the aspect of “freedom” introduced in this new opus.
The spirit summoning system was also introduced with Elden Ring, and it still maintains this same philosophy: you summon an ally who will assist you during a difficult passage, such as a camp full of enemies or a boss, then he disappears once his work is done. The advantage in this case is that this system is available even without the online mode, or many years from now when the game’s community has declined and help from other players has become too scarce.