Game Design Snapshot 2: Elden Ring’s Stakes of Marika
While I do love big, important, core gameplay mechanics and features in video games, I also love the small systems that help stitch everything together. Today I’ll talk about one of those systems in Elden Ring: its ‘Stake of Marika’ system.
Elden Ring is an open world action RPG with tons of different encounters and dungeons throughout it. One of the game’s primary systems is its Sites of Grace (pictured below), which serve as small safe spots you can rest at to restore your resources, level up, and upgrade your character. You usually respawn at a Site of Grace after you die, so it serves as a sort of pseudo-checkpoint. You can teleport to any of the Sites of Grace you’ve visited before as well, so they’re also useful in getting around the world.
Added into the mix are the game’s ‘Stake of Marika’ statues (pictured at the top of the article), which essentially are dedicated checkpoints. If you die near a Stake of Marika, you’ll be provided with a menu option to either respawn at the nearby Stake, or respawn at the last Site of Grace you visited; you can’t teleport to a Stake via the world map like you can to a Site of Grace. If you leave the area the Stake of Marika is located in, you won’t be able to respawn from it; you can only use the Stake while you’re within its general vicinity.
Stakes of Marika aren’t as common as the Sites of Grace, which dot the entire map; Stakes typically appear in areas that provide some kind of unique, challenging encounter. Usually, these encounters are somewhat far away from a Site of Grace, like a boss fight at the end of a dungeon or a group of enemies tucked away in a hard-to-find area. In this way, Stakes of Marika provide a bit of tension when you die near one; you think, “Should I keep respawning at this Stake to try and win this fight, or forfeit my progress in the level and respawn at the Site of Grace to upgrade my character and/or explore somewhere else for a while?”
The Stakes of Marika apply a satisfying layer of tension to the mostly freeform exploration in Elden Ring’s open world. They give the game’s designers a bit more flexibility in designing encounters where a Site of Grace doesn’t feel completely justified, and they provide an interesting player experience in which you need to weigh your capability to slam against this hard encounter repeatedly versus your desire to recollect yourself and make some upgrades. I think it’s great, and that it represents a nice little wrinkle in the tapestry of Elden Ring’s design.
