Nodusfall: An Elden Ring clone or HoYoverse's strategic move?

The screen flashed with a white-winged warrior in a dead land. Three hours later, the global gaming community split into two camps. One camp pasted Nodusfall's character beside Elden Ring's Malenia and called HoYoverse a copycat. The other pointed at the most important detail in the official reveal: four-player co-op boss hunting. I remember watching a 400m race where two athletes came from the same lane. Their running posture looked alike, but only at the final turn could anyone tell who was truly controlling the rhythm and who was just imitating. Nodusfall is at that exact turn. HoYoverse, the Chinese company behind Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, just announced something completely different: Nodusfall. No vibrant anime style, no lovable gacha characters. Nodusfall chooses dark fantasy, realistic graphics, and a heavy atmosphere, with the key hook being four-player co-op boss hunts. Within one trailer, it became the center of the gaming world — but for a reason the company certainly did not want: players think it borrows too much from Elden Ring. This is the first time a company associated with live-service anime games is jumping into the premium action RPG segment, where FromSoftware has practically set the rules since Dark Souls. Elden Ring launched in 2026, won Game of the Year, sold over 20 million copies in its first year, and became both a commercial and artistic icon of the soulslike genre. When a Chinese giant declares it is making a realistic dark-fantasy game, comparison with FromSoftware's standard is inevitable. The more meaningful question is not whether Nodusfall looks like Elden Ring. It clearly does. The better question is what that resemblance says about HoYoverse's strategy, about the line between influence and imitation, and about how quickly we judge a new game over a few still frames. The gaming market follows a rule identical to sports: the greater the achievement, the more rivals try to attach themselves to your image. Elden Ring did not simply create a sales wave; it created a template. Developers worldwide began choosing difficult combat, sprawling world design, and gloomy atmospheres. Nobody calls them copycats. Yet when HoYoverse — nicknamed the money printer of gaming — does the same, prejudice awakens. Why? Because in many people's eyes, a gacha-anime studio has no right to stand beside FromSoftware. This is not truly a copyright issue; it is a pedigree issue. I walk into an archive as an archaeologist, and I leave as a storyteller. Every genre that shaped the industry started from inheritance. Dark Souls itself owes much to Kentaro Miura's Berserk. The ruined cathedrals, the oversized swords, the cursed worlds — all were present in Miura's work from the 1990s. Yet FromSoftware was not accused of plagiarizing Berserk because it transformed those influences into a unique language: meticulous roll timing, death as part of a loop, and narrative through fragments and hints. If Nodusfall wants to escape Elden Ring's shadow, it must do the same: create a rhythmic shift big enough to make players forget the first visual impression. The key lies in four-player co-op. Not every character with white wings is Elden Ring, just as not every long-stride runner is a 400m specialist. When a game is built for four players entering battle together, the combat rhythm changes completely. Elden Ring, despite its summoning feature, remains centered on a solo experience; every dodge, every damage decision, is a monologue between the player and the screen. If Nodusfall truly builds boss hunting as a four-part choir, it stands closer to Monster Hunter than to Elden Ring. That is a different race, on a different track. Fans are right to compare images. The white-winged character recalls Malenia, the silver-haired woman recalls Melina. But if we stop at vibes, we forget that dark fantasy is shared ground. Wings appear in the mythology of every civilization. Swords and ghosts have been the language of fantasy for decades. What makes a work original is not discarding all familiar images; it is placing them inside a new structure of movement. A documentary about 800m running cannot avoid footsteps, but if the director chooses a different camera angle and cuts to a new rhythm, audiences will see a story never told before. HoYoverse's story still has many unknowns. Will the studio dare to show a fifteen-minute live boss fight where four players truly need to coordinate against a monster with ever-changing attack patterns? If so, the Malenia debate will sink because viewers will be absorbed in something they have never seen in Elden Ring. If HoYoverse only shows more cinematic angles, gloomy forests, and slow sword swings, public pressure will multiply. This is the moment champions are born, not at announcement. One key detail many articles miss: HoYoverse is among the wealthiest game companies in the world. It has money to hire talent, technology to run servers, and massive player data from Genshin Impact and Honkai. But money and technology cannot buy trust from FromSoftware's community. A newly rich football club can spend big in the transfer market, but it still takes many seasons to convince supporters that it deserves the title. The suspicion toward HoYoverse does not come from programming ability; it comes from identity: can a company known for cute characters and gacha mechanics truly understand the depth of dark fantasy? The answer may lie in how Nodusfall handles character death. The pain rhythm in a soulslike resembles the stride of a long-distance runner; it cannot be faked. If HoYoverse only copies the surface, players will feel it from the first beat: the delay of a roll, the sound of a sword hitting a shield, the silence before a boss attack. In sports, GPS tracking does not lie. In games, the response of the controller is equally honest. Looking at East Asia, the Nodusfall debate is amplified by a larger backdrop: competition between the Chinese and Japanese gaming industries. Japan was once the master of action games, with FromSoftware and Capcom. China has shed the stereotype of a copying factory but is still trying to become a force with capital and ambition. When a Chinese company dares to enter a genre Japan dominates, the backlash comes not only from aesthetic rigor but also from the defensive psychology of an entire gaming culture. Lawyers will say game mechanics cannot be copyrighted; only specific expressions like character designs, art assets, or names can be infringing. A white-haired woman in a dark fantasy game does not give FromSoftware a strong case. But the court of public opinion does not follow the law; it follows emotion and images. Two images placed side by side on social media weigh more than any legal argument. That is why Nodusfall can be legally safe and still lose points in the public square. I have seen similar discussions in sports. A young athlete changes technique to resemble a hero, but the body soon betrays him: if the technique does not match his body structure, injury arrives. Nodusfall is changing HoYoverse's running technique. A developer used to retaining players through reward loops must now face a harder crowd: veterans who can spend hundreds of hours learning one boss's moves. They are not easily bribed by beautiful graphics. They need a real breathing rhythm. Do not misunderstand me: I am not defending HoYoverse. The biggest warning is its communication strategy. HoYoverse rarely shows real gameplay early; it tends to release spectacular CGI films and leaves fans to imagine. That approach works with gacha games, because players already believe in promises. But with Nodusfall, a premium title wagering on reputation, silence will be a disaster. Every day without gameplay lets Elden Ring comparison images sink deeper into public minds. Conversely, a smart contender will turn the media storm into opportunity. The Witcher 3 was compared to Skyrim, Genshin Impact was called a Zelda: Breath of the Wild clone. Yet those games succeeded because they soon showed what could not be found in their original inspiration. Genshin borrowed Zelda's open world but added an elemental system and a long-term service model, turning imitation into transformation. Nodusfall needs its own revision. Four-player co-op is the strongest candidate, but if it is not built into the core experience, it is only a gimmick. Imagine a contest where individual instinct must blend into collective rhythm. In esports, a team has five players, each with a role and position. Nodusfall, with four players hunting an enormous boss, could create something Elden Ring never touched: a symphony of four instruments improvising on one free score. The difficulty is designing a boss that forces all four to move as one body. If the boss is only a wall of health that four players hit, the game becomes boring. If the boss can split all four apart with wide-area attacks demanding precise coordination, Nodusfall will write its own page. In a larger picture, the habit of judging before trial is not new. Players increasingly make moral verdicts based on a few leaked images. That kills many promising ideas before they can breathe. A game is not just a collage of still images; it is movement, controller feeling, a racing heartbeat when the boss's health bar drains. Judging Nodusfall now is like judging a runner during warm-up, before he steps onto the track. The gaming market is loud, but I still want to listen to the silent running rhythm beneath the trailer. I want to know whether the developer has enough courage to step away from Elden Ring's shadow or will keep following the worn path. If Nodusfall presents a long gameplay sequence, cut to a new rhythm, with boss-kiting tactics and movement off the center stage, its late-blooming star can still shine. But if every promise remains in the promotional reel, HoYoverse will learn that in the high-end game world, no step of the race can lie. Every film frame has a breath. Nodusfall's trailer just began to breathe, and at the far end of the road, FromSoftware is still standing with Elden Ring as an unmovable milestone. Nodusfall chooses to sprint past that milestone with four pairs of feet beating one rhythm. Only when we see the real battle will we know whether they are running on the same track, or opening a new track where no one has ever set foot.