The scope of the game world of Elden Ring is not even realized by many players. Even MeinMMO author Tarek Zehrer, who usually scours every corner, missed one of the largest dungeons in two playthroughs.
Spoiler warning: Unfortunately, spoilers cannot be avoided for all topics relating to Elden Ring. The article describes how to get to the dungeon and what to expect. If you want to find a way on your own, you shouldn’t read further here. But now let’s get started.
During the main story of Elden Ring, you have to traverse a total of 6 legacy dungeons and defeat a major boss at the end.
One of them is the House of Volcano, where you have to fight Lord Rykard. In my two playthroughs, I found it suspiciously easy how quickly I reached him.
In conversation with my colleague Marko Jevtic, I realized: I accidentally skipped the entire dungeon of House of Volcano each time.
I thought from the first playthrough: This can’t be all of it
This is how I reached the boss so far: In the first 2 playthroughs, I always entered the House of Volcano through one route.
- It led through the main entrance after I made a long detour around Mount Gelmir.
- There awaited me “Sersei with the Mountain,” I mean Lady Taneth with her bodyguard. She took me into the House of Volcano and gave orders to eliminate other afflicted ones. A total of three.
- Although you have to go to one of the endgame areas for the third quest, the Giants’ Summit. But the way I played Elden Ring, I ended up there quite naturally.
You can see the path on the map of Elden Ring that I got from the Royal Capital Lyndell. You don’t even need to enter it.
After completing this quest, I was directly let through to the boss Rykard. I thought from the first playthrough: This can’t be all of it, there must be a whole dungeon.
I quickly searched the entire area, studied the map in detail, and realized: Yes, there were some areas on the map that I had not yet entered. I just had no idea how to get there.
I rode around in all possible areas, looked for possible secret paths, dismantled all the furniture in House of Volcano. Nothing.
No secret door, no hidden path, no clue. So I gave up. In the second playthrough, the same thing started again, I searched and searched, but again no success. It quickly became clear: The game DOES NOT want me to find the way. It hides it from me.
Then the community found a special, secret door in House of Volcano, and although it has nothing to do with the dungeon, thanks to this discovery, I finally found it.
The way to the dungeon was right in front of my nose the whole time (hidden)
This is how it worked: Ultimately, I became aware of the actual path thanks to the video about the secret door. Because the path to this door also leads to the dungeon. This secret passage is actually located in the chamber that was handed to me by Lady Taneth with a key when I accepted the quest.
There lies a corpse, not far from a wall. At the very least, that should have made me skeptical, but it didn’t. What was that corpse doing there? It didn’t even have an item with it. But somehow I didn’t find that odd. Maybe it was just an old occupant of the room, I thought.
Normally, I dash like a fool constantly paranoid over the map, searching for loot and secrets. Here, however, I assumed there were no hidden walls.
In House of Volcano, you cannot use weapons… which meant I couldn’t hit walls. My means for everything. But the video showed me: I could simply have rolled through the secret passage. The dodge roll finally opened the way for me after over 200 hours of Elden Ring and 2 playthroughs.
By the way: There is even a third way that starts from a completely different dungeon. You can check it out here in the linked video. If you don’t want spoilers, simply don’t click on it.
Elden Ring cleverly hides the way to one of the largest dungeons, and that’s how it should be
My conclusion: You don’t just have to hit walls in Elden Ring anymore, but also roll against them. That’s my new mantra.
But all jokes aside.
The mere fact that Elden Ring cleverly hides the “actual” path to one of the largest dungeons so “well” excites me.
This way, I can look forward to completing a virtually brand new dungeon in my third playthrough. It’s one of the many things I appreciate about the open world of Elden Ring. In my opinion, it’s currently the best among all open-world games.
And that’s not the only example. Even though I took a lot of time and put in a lot of effort in my first playthrough to experience as many puzzles, places, secrets, and loot as possible, it is currently simply impossible to grasp Elden Ring in its entirety.
In my second playthrough, I still found NPCs and locations, as well as dungeons, that I actually overlooked during my first journey.
Even in my now third playthrough, I recently stumbled upon another undiscovered character. Additionally, there are still open questlines and endings.
Have you had similar experiences? Or are you not as blind as I am? Feel free to share your experiences with us. I myself am certainly curious about what else this game has hidden from us.
Players are already speculating about DLCs. A Twitch streamer recently found hints of a possible DLC area in Elden Ring.
