The Elden Ring Weather Is More Important Than You Realized

One of the greatest experiences in gaming is learning more about them through organic means, as opposed to a game holding your hand and showing all of its cards as you progress through it. There's a certain kind of satisfaction that comes with discovering secret locations, Easter eggs, and mechanics that you can share with the rest of the fan community. And when it comes to recent video game releases, none are more rife with such secrets than "Elden Ring".

Because of the game's sprawling open world and its outright refusal to take it easy on you, many of the game's features and lore must be organically discovered by players through a combination of trial-and-error and community collaboration. And one of the coolest secrets contained in "Elden Ring" is that its dynamic weather system isn't just there for aesthetic purposes — as it turns out, it is an actual mechanic that may change how you fight.

The dynamic weather in "Elden Ring" is one of the game's most immersive elements. At any point during your playthrough, it could be either be a bright sunny day, or else raining cats and dogs. In most games, this would simply lead to an aesthetic change in the environment while offering little in the way of changes to gameplay, if any at all. 

But that's not the case in "Elden Ring." In The Lands Between, even the weather has an explicit effect on your gameplay — more specifically, the spells you cast. This discovery was posted to YouTube by Iron Pineapple and later to Reddit by user u/Light_Inc, blowing fans' minds with the revelation. One example of this phenomenon can occur when it's raining, at which point fire attacks will do less damage to enemies than they would in sunny conditions. In contrast, rainy conditions also provide a small boost to lightning attacks.

While a full list of effects the weather has on other spells and attacks has not yet been made and will certainly be the subject of much experimentation over the next several weeks, this observation will surely have an effect on the way some people play the game. If nothing else, it will certainly inspire players to reevaluate their approaches during rainy conditions.