Elden Ring has Bloodborne’s facial deformation sliders hidden in its character creator
This is why you fear the old blood.
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FromSoftware’s games have been using the same basic foundation for the character creator since Demon’s Souls. Each entry makes minor tweaks to how it functions, and one of the biggest changes was the addition of facial deformation in Bloodborne. This was not accessible by the player: it was there so that NPC characters could be created whose faces showed the toll of repeated blood infusion.
If you haven’t played Bloodborne, no spoilers, but it turns out that the wonder blood of Yharnam maybe ain’t all that.
The feature remained in Dark Souls 3 (which was released after Bloodborne) and has now been found inElden Ringby longtime Souls expert and dataminer ZullieTheWitch. As you can see below, this thing basically lets you create Shrek in seconds.
Unless you’re Zullie, you can’t access this in Elden Ring—yet. The fact it’s already in there however means that it’s likely to be unlocked via mods soon enough, then we can all run around gurning at Margit.
It’s only fair to point out that Elden Ring’s character creation system is by far the most full-featured, and can produce a huge variety of looks. Indeed, one of the things I admire about the studio’s approach to character creation is that it’s quite difficult, without going to the extremes, to make a character that doesn’t feel like they fit in the world.
Nevertheless, Zullie’s discovery does show that character creation here is, whatever the improvements, still the same (perfectly good) system underneath. And hey, anything that vaguely resembles some aspect of Bloodborne on PC will always get my blood pumping.
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Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as “[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike.”
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