Four years after release, Elden Ring still gets people talking about how good it looks. That's not nothing, especially when games like Crimson Desert are raising the bar for raw visual fidelity. So what's the secret?
Akira "Akiman" Yasuda, the Capcom veteran best known for designing Street Fighter's iconic character roster, thinks he has the answer. And it's a more thoughtful take than you might expect from a tweet.
What Akiman actually said
Akiman responded to a visual comparison between Elden Ring and Crimson Desert on X earlier this week. The post, translated by Automaton, cuts straight to the point: "Normally, as the level of fidelity increases, the viewer is left with less and less room to supplement what they're seeing with their imagination. However, the graphics in Elden Ring are designed with careful control over the level of fidelity at each turn, in a way that ensures the viewer's imagination is constantly stimulated to the fullest."
He also specifically calls out FromSoftware's use of atmospheric perspective, a classical art technique where distant objects lose contrast, detail, and color saturation to create the illusion of depth. Painters have used it for centuries. FromSoftware just applied it to a video game world.
His conclusion: "This is what it means to be good at art."
That's high praise from someone who spent years shaping the visual identity of Street Fighter II.
The fidelity paradox
Here's the thing most players miss when debating graphics: higher resolution doesn't automatically mean more visually engaging. Akiman's point is that when every surface is rendered in exhaustive detail, your brain stops filling in gaps. The world starts to feel complete, finished, almost inert.
Elden Ring does the opposite. The Lands Between is deliberately hazy at distance, with ruins half-swallowed by fog and structures that suggest scale rather than spell it out. Your brain does the rest. That partially-visible tower on the horizon feels more imposing than it would if every brick were sharp.
Crimson Desert, for what it's worth, is genuinely impressive on a technical level. Pearl Abyss built something that pushes current hardware hard. But Akiman's argument isn't that Crimson Desert looks bad. It's that raw fidelity and artistic impact aren't the same measurement.
Why FromSoftware keeps winning this argument
This isn't the first time Elden Ring's art direction has been held up as a case study. The game shipped in early 2022 and still gets cited in conversations about visual design precisely because FromSoftware's approach ages differently than photorealistic games. Titles chasing maximum fidelity can start to look dated within a console generation. Art direction that engages the imagination tends to hold up longer.
The key here is intentionality. Akiman isn't saying Elden Ring has bad graphics that somehow look good. He's saying every visual decision, from the density of fog to the softening of far-away geometry, was made with the viewer's perception in mind. That's a design philosophy, not a technical limitation.
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Atmospheric perspective is a technique dating back to Renaissance painting, where distant objects appear lighter, bluer, and less detailed to simulate how air scatters light. FromSoftware applies this principle across Elden Ring's open world to create a sense of scale that pure polygon counts can't replicate.
With Elden Ring Tarnished Edition heading to Nintendo Switch 2, this conversation has some practical weight. A recent hands-on noted the port runs well but shows "lightly choppy visuals" in places. If Akiman's analysis holds, the question isn't just whether the Switch 2 can hit a target resolution. It's whether the atmospheric effects that make the Lands Between feel alive survive the hardware downgrade intact.
For more on what's coming to the action RPG space this year, browse the latest gaming news and reviews to stay across new releases and updates. You'll also want to check out the guides section if you're heading back into the Lands Between for the first time or the fifth. Make sure to check out more:
