Elden Ring creator Hidetaka Miyazaki says that while Elden Ring is his ideal vision of an open world, he won’t play it when it comes out.

In an interview with magazine EDGE, the creator of the Soulsborne genre talked at length about his goals when making the hotly-anticipated Elden Ring.

“I don’t want to put it in such grand terms as ‘this is the mark I wanted to leave on the industry’. Rather, if I was in the mood to play a game, or if I had an ideal game world, Elden Ring gets pretty close to that”, he says.

Miyazaki has never been shy about how he makes the punishing Souls games- they’re simply games that he would want to play. Previously, he mentioned that despite creating such horrors as Bed of Chaos and Blighttown, Miyazaki considers himself a masochist. The idea instead was just creating punishing gameplay that he would enjoy.

That said, despite making games for himself Miyazaki also said he won’t play Elden Ring when it comes out.

“You know, I probably won’t end up playing Elden Ring because it’s a game I’ve made myself. This is sort of my personal policy”, he says. “You wouldn’t get any of the unknowns that the fresh player is going to experience. Like I said before, it wouldn’t feel like playing”.

It makes sense- Miyazaki clearly places high value in the discovery portion of his games. As the person who literally put everything there, there’d be nothing new for him to discover.