Elden Ring is a massive game in scope and scale. Even after you’ve defeated the game’s vast quantity of bosses and made your way to the heart of the Erdtree, it’s time to choose your ending.
Naturally, Elden Ring has more than creator FromSoftware’s other games, with six possible endings to your time in the Lands Between.
Players who have the the DLC Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree take note – once you’ve finished the DLC and seen its ending, you can travel back into the Lands Between and finish off the first game to see one of its endings.
While the game will always culminate in the climactic boss rush in Leyndell and a showdown with the Elden Beast, what the player does in the run-up to the finale will determine which of the six endings they can obtain. Check out our guide to the endings and the steps to take to get each one in this handy Elden Ring endings guide.
There are three achievements for finishing Elden Ring, and you can get one of them, the Elden Lord achievement, for four different endings. Despite covering over half the possible endings, it’s not the most common game completion achievement, and only 36% of Steam players have snagged it.
This could be considered the ‘default’ ending, and it’s the ending players will get if they don’t do any sidequests or meet any extra requirements. In this, the player becomes the Elden Lord, maintaining the status quo as ordained by the Greater Will. The player mends the Elden Ring and brings order to the Lands Between.
You have used your runes to mend the Elden Ring, but to what end? Will the cycle start again with some new lowly tarnished looking to change fate? This ending leaves a lot of room for ‘what comes after’, much like the endings in Dark Souls where players choose to relight the first flame.
This is the ending that Fia, the Deathbed Companion, is looking to achieve. Naturally, this means players will need to finish Fia’s questline (and some of Ranni’s) to get this ending. In this ending, Fia severs the connection between Erdtree and the cycle of renewal present through the Lands Between. Those Who Live In Death can’t be persecuted if everyone’s the same kind of zombie.
Souls stop returning to the Erdtree, which dies as a result. It becomes a blackened, zombie tree, spreading Deathblight through the lands – but nobody cares because everyone lives on after death. ‘Duskborn’ refers to the rebirth into death faced the first time you ‘die’. A bleak ending indeed, and one that Fia is very clear about wanting to achieve. You brought it on yourself.
The Age of Order ending takes the status quo maintained by the player in the Age of Fracture and ramps it up to eleven. The Elden Lord creates a new Golden Order to rule over, with no chaos and no interference from those pesky Outer Gods or any silly free will. Sitting in diametric opposition to chaos, the Greater Will demands order.
While nothing seems wrong with this ending at first, it wouldn’t be very FromSoftware to have a ‘good’ ending. If you look deeper than the surface level, life under the Perfect Order of the Greater Will is repressive, with no freedom. It’s not a bad ending by any means, but it isn’t a cheerful one.
This is probably as close as Elden Ring gets to a ‘bad ending’ in the traditional sense. In the Blessing of Despair (and blessing seems like a strange word to be using here), the player works with the Loathsome Dungeater to take the curse he is afflicted with and apply it to reality itself by using it to mend the Elden Ring. Yuck.
Dung Eater has become so damaged and deranged by his curse that he has started to see it as a blessing he wants to share with the world. Souls can no longer return to the Erdtree, resulting in an age of despair and rot forever.
This is the absolute opposite of the Golden Order ending, where players eschew the Two Fingers and the Golden Order entirely, instead choosing to embrace the Three Fingers. No Gods, no masters, no order. The world is engulfed by flame and chaos. Judging by the clues gained along the way, everyone goes absolutely mad, too.
And to top it off, your constant companion throughout the game, no not Torrent, Melina, appears in the final cutscene to swear to chase the Lord of the Frenzied Flame (you) across the world to get vengeance and bring Destined Death upon you. At least you have ended the suffering of the Lands Between – you can’t suffer if you’ve been burned to dust, right?
It’s also the rarest ending, with just 29% of Steam players achieving the Lord of the Frenzied Flame ending achievement.
Despite involving one of the game’s longest questlines, The Age of Stars ending is the most common one, with 43% of Steam players seeing this ending. This is probably because it’s the ending associated with Ranni, everyone’s favorite blue wife.
Ranni is opposed to the status quo and refuses to let things continue as they are. She went so far as to kill her own body, inhabiting the various doll-like forms we see her in, so she was immune to control by the Greater Will. Being born an Empyrean meant she had no say in her destiny and had to become a possible replacement for Queen Marika.
Ushering in a new god, the Dark Moon, Ranni and the Tarnished player character rule together, with Ranni as queen and you as her Royal Consort. It’s not clear where you go exactly, because part of Ranni’s ethos is to be removed and apart from that which she is governing (she saw the direct intervention of the Golden Order as a failing). Some confusion has been caused by a localization and translation error in the final cutscene, explained in detail by Frontline Japan.
Featured image credit: Bandai Namco
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