Elden Ring: How Long to Beat It

Elden Ring: how long to beat depends entirely on which of three questions you are actually asking, because the numbers people quote measure very different runs of the same game.

Here they are up front, and the rest of this page explains why they are so far apart.

What you are doing	Roughly
Main story, direct route	30-45 hours
Story plus the side content most people do	~70 hours
Everything, across multiple saves	130-135+ hours
Shadow of the Erdtree on top	+25-40 hours

The main story

FromSoftware itself put the main story at around 30 hours before release. Player-reported data skews higher — averaging closer to 45 — because the open world keeps pulling you off the direct route to the next demigod.

Both numbers are honest. Thirty hours is what the game is if you treat the map markers as a to-do list and ride past everything else. Forty-five is what happens when you stop at the first catacomb you see, which almost everybody does.

To hit the low end deliberately you would be skipping Caelid entirely, ignoring most of the Altus Plateau's optional dungeons, and using a build you already know works.

A fuller playthrough

Add the major side quests, the legacy dungeons you would otherwise skip and a handful of optional bosses, and expect roughly 70 hours. This is the number most people mean when they say they finished the game properly rather than rushed it.

What that 70 hours typically includes:

• All six main legacy dungeons rather than the four you strictly need.
• Ranni's questline, which is long, easy to break, and the reason a lot of people reload an old save.
• Enough optional field bosses to keep your level roughly matched to the region.
• A meaningful amount of exploration in Caelid, the Consecrated Snowfield and the underground rivers, none of which the story requires.

Completionist

Chasing every ending variant, every NPC questline and every corner of the map pushes the total past 130-135 hours. Multiple playthroughs are baked into that figure, because some content is mutually exclusive on a single save — you cannot finish every NPC's story in one run no matter how carefully you play.

If you are going for the platinum or the full achievement list, the hard blockers are:

• Three endings minimum, which means at least two New Game Plus cycles or careful save management before the final boss.
• Every legendary weapon, spell and talisman, several of which sit behind questlines that can be failed permanently.
• Every Great Rune, including the optional demigods most players skip.

Shadow of the Erdtree

The expansion is its own commitment. A focused run through it lands somewhere around 25 hours; exploring the Land of Shadow properly, finding the Scadutree Fragments and clearing the optional bosses pushes it past 40.

It also has a hard entry requirement: you need to have beaten Starscourge Radahn and Mohg, Lord of Blood before you can reach it, which for a lot of players means an extra detour on top of the base-game number.

Why your run will differ

Exploration matters far more than skill. Elden Ring hides most of its content off the critical path, so a direct run and a curious one can differ by 40 hours or more — while genre experience typically shifts the total by only a few hours either way.

The things that actually move the number:

• Whether you look things up. Ranni's questline, the route to the Haligtree and the Volcano Manor invasions are all things players either find on their own over many hours or follow a guide through in one.
• How much you re-fight bosses. A boss that takes one player three attempts takes another thirty, and the big ones run 8-15 minutes per attempt.
• Whether you summon. Spirit Ashes and co-op both shorten fights substantially, and the game does nothing to discourage either.
• Build churn. Respeccing is cheap after Rennala, but rebuilding around a new weapon means farming the smithing stones to upgrade it.

How long before it opens up

If the question behind the search is "how long until this gets good", the answer is shorter than the totals suggest. Limgrave and Stormveil Castle run 6-10 hours, and by the end of them you have the horse, a viable build, and the full run of the map. Very little of the game is front-loaded tutorial.

Is it worth the time

For most players the 70-hour number is the honest one to plan around — that is a complete playthrough with the parts worth seeing, without the bookkeeping a 100-percent run turns into. The completionist figure is a separate hobby rather than a longer version of the same one.