Baldur's gate 3 is safe from top-down Elden Ring, a CRPG we can only imagine and see in these modded screenshots.

I can only imagine a game that does not exist that could compete with Baldur’s Gate 3. I can imagine how this gallery of Elden Ring screen shots would look from a top down perspective, as if these were environments in a spin-off CRPG.

Reddit user Fanica98 used a camera mod with the lowest possible FOV to zoom out and give Elden Ring’s world a pseudo isometric look. I've played around with camera tools, but I never thought to try and recreate this perspective. It's not easy to achieve.

Fanica98 commented that the game was "highly optimized" to show the player a lot of things they are not supposed to see. "I could barely get a single shot in Haligtree, and none in Volcano Manor or Academy."

I noticed it too. You can see how much of the game is lost when you pull the camera out of a cave. Many games do this in order to reduce the load on their engine. Fanica98 said that FromSoft also uses a thick layer of fog at the outer edges of the game world, which had to be disabled to see anything. This is why some of the screenshots look much clearer than when playing the game.

One of my favorite entrances is the Grand Cloister, which sits in the watermelon-red Lake of Rot. The rot looks almost like the surface of Mars from this distance. I want to click on its two statues and lead my little party into the game's worst enemies (if you know what you are doing).
Miriel (aka turtle pope) is located inside the Church of Vows. You know he would have some of most mind-blowing lore in the game, if Elden Ring was a CRPG, and let you actually talk to him for a bit. Fanica98 did an excellent job framing three large statues looking over the smaller one, where you absolve yourself of your sins. The details of the cracks and ivy growing along the stone walls are so squished that it gives this image a retro, pixel-y vibe. It makes me even more sad that this isn't an actual game.

Fanica98 treated Dark Souls 2 and Dark Souls 2 in the same way a few years back. Both look fantastic, but I believe the scale of Elden Ring lends better to the perspective change. You can see the effort that FromSoft put in to sculpting cliff faces and trees to draw your eyes toward its castles. One Photoshop edit is all it takes to fool me into thinking that the castles and ruins are real.

The full album has 60 images to help you dream of this perfect game. I'd take a video that imagines Elden Ring is a top-down rpg, like this surprisingly accurate Lego Dark Souls Rebricked.