From Software Elden Ring - From Software's new game with writing by GRRM

[randir14]

IS truth that this game will include blood magic?

Yes, one of the spells is an AOE that looks like bloody thorn covered branches surrounding the player. That was in the closed network test, there's probably more.

Review embargo is over now. Starting to see claims like "From's most vital game since Demons Souls" and "one of the best games I've ever played".

IGN 10/10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uav6zQKiMQ
Gamespot 10/10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4Q9130iMyA
Game Informer 10/10 https://www.gameinformer.com/review/elden-ring/absolutely-astonishing-adventure
Metacritic is currently 96 based on 22 reviews https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/elden-ring

 

[Lautreamont]

 

[Steezus]

lol @ reviews, but still a lot higher than I expected. PC is at 96 right now due to technical mishaps.

 

[Puukko]

Elden Ring truly is one of the video games of all time.

 

[Anonymous Wife Scholar]

Elden Ring truly is one of the video games of all time.

Thank you anon! You are a good anon!

 

[randir14]

Eurogamer: 'Essential'
Game Informer: 10
PCGamesN: 10
Fextralife: 9.5
The Guardian: 5/5
Kinda Funny: 5/5
VG247: 5/5
Easy Allies: 9.5
Press Start: 9.5
RPG Site: 9
IGN :10
Destructoid: 10
TheSixthAxis: 10
Gaming Nexus: 10
GamesRadar+: 5/5
VGC: 5/5
WindowsCentral: 5/5
Screenrant: 5/5
Wccftech: 10
Areajugones: 10
Hardcore Gamer: 5/5
Well Played: 10/10
Shacknews: 9
Videogamer: 9
GameCentral: 9
Inverse: 9

 

[Shrimp]

I went through some of the reviews and made quick searches for keywords such as performance, framerate, stutter etc. and an alarming number of the reviews did contain those words. The review by PC Gamer does mention that Namco claims the day 1 patch will fix it, but another reviewer claims they did not receive any response when they inquired about it.
Here are some of them:

However, the worst offender was the performance issues where there were frequent stutters in the game where everything would momentarily freeze and this could happen at any point from a heated boss fight where one hit could mean death to me simply sitting in the corner going through my inventory. I went through extensive troubleshooting with my actual professional grade skills and know-how and nothing came of it. I also recorded four hard crashes during my playthrough as well.

I reached out to the PR company for a response in regards to these technical issues and have not heard back from the development team.

While Elden Ring is a fantastic experience in terms of what’s been built here, it was completely at odds with these technical issues. We’re going to hold off to see if these issues are widespread before putting a final verdict on the game in terms of a numerical score. We experienced problems that were all over the place in terms of technical issues, our PC build crashed constantly. Loading screens were a crap shoot on whether the game was going to crash or not. There was a weird stuttering all over the game and one boss battle had numerous bugs that almost made us give up completely.

I played Elden Ring on a powerful PC with an i7 9700K and a 3080 Ti. The game can’t go over 60fps, like other From games. It ran about as well as I expected at 4K with everything maxed out, with the occasional drops in effects-heavy scenes. However, the game’s biggest performance hiccup is stuttering: they’re most certainly related to asset streaming because they tend to occur in the open world when you quickly turn one direction the game wasn’t expecting you to. Even on a Gen 3 NVMe SSD, these stutters could be clearly felt – and sometimes lasted for several seconds. It’s hard to say whether this will be improved, but as it currently stands, it’s going to get you killed now and then.

Where Elden Ring stumbles, however, is with its performance. This comes as no surprise. FromSoftware games have kind of always run poorly, but the developer has slowly improved on that front so their games can be somewhat serviceable. Elden Ring does come under this, but it absolutely has some bizarre performance quirks. I played the game on PC, where my main desktop has a Ryzen 7 2700X and a 1080 Ti, and the performance was…questionable. It mostly ran at 60fps, but it had a habit of dipping or hitching. I opted to mostly play it on my secondary computer which sports much beefier hardware, and these issues persisted, but to a much lesser degree. Their frequency was lessened, but not eliminated, which leads me to believe that there are still some underlying performance issues. To add to this, the game is wildly prone to texture pop-in. It’s not as bad as something like Pokemon Legends: Arceus, in fact it is quite easy to ignore, but these issues are there nonetheless. I also noted that the game’s performance would begin to degrade when being played over an extended period of time. A good example of this is where I had been playing for eight hours and an area I went into was not loading its texture properly, so I saved and reloaded, and was met with an infinite loading screen, requiring a full relaunch.

PC Gamer mentions that according to Namco the day 1 patch was not included in the test build and that it will supposedly fix the performance issues:

Instead Elden Ring carries forward a lot of the things you'd expect, including rough performance on PC. Over time, it tends to intermittently stutter and slow down for brief moments, especially as you're out in the open world. I never died to a hiccup in performance, but it made me pause and restart the game fairly often to fix the issue. (Bandai Namco claims the day one patch will fix this.) There's a 60 fps lock, high RAM requirement, and limited graphics settings (you won't find DLSS or granular options for anti-aliasing). I hoped for better options and performance from a developer that's released several games on PC at this point.

There's also this comment about the game's performance on lower-end graphics cards:

Asking for 12GB of system RAM remains weird to me, but if your PC isn’t quite up these standards, know that you have more wiggle room than such a high minimum spec would suggest. Admittedly, when I tested the GTX 1060 it was a 6GB version – not 3GB – and it was installed in my main test rig, which has a very much above-spec Intel Core i5-11600K and 16GB of RAM. But given this combination averaged 49fps at 1080p using the Maximum graphics preset, having less memory or an older GPU shouldn’t preclude you from clearing the 30fps mark at this resolution. Especially if you drop the quality: the High preset averageD 55fps, while Medium managed 59fps and Low pushed out a near-constant 60fps.

The 6GB GTX 1060 can even handle Elden Ring at 1440p, with performance averages ranging from 37fps at Maximum to 57fps on Low. And having a getter GPU isn’t entirely a waste: when I used an RTX 3070 in place of the GTX 1060, Elden Ring averaged a solid 60fps at 1440p and a perfectly playable 51fps at 4K. Again, that's on the Maximum preset.

 

[ferratilis]

Ban everyone who had doubts about Elden Ring being a masterpiece.

 

[Matador]

Let´s just mindlessly bless and glorify our Lord Miyazaki. We'll always have time to ask for his hunt and burn at the stake if he confirms himself as a false prophet.

 

[Steezus]

In regards to PC performance, Fextralife dude criticized it in his review (played without day 1 patch), but on his livestream he said it rarely dropped below 45 fps for him. Also just crashed two times in 100 hours for him and he can't think of a single bug.

edit: he also says the drops are frequent. Like every 30 seconds frequent. 0/10, shit game.

 

[Kruno]

Durante will fix it!

 

[Dishonoredbr]

Mid.

 

[deem]

OK, so 'consume product' outlets seem to like it. We won't hear non-brain-dead takes until we play it ourselves and discuss it here. Or until Matthewmatosis makes a video about it.

 

[Steezus]

Or until Matthewmatosis makes a video about it.

Yes, the mouthbreather who misinterprets and/or simply doesn't get the most surface level meanings of games and churns out hour long videos built on that misunderstanding, is clearly the one to look to for reviews.

 

[Brickfrog]

"Probably the easiest, most enticing way to describe the sheer scale of “Elden Ring" is to say it’s like receiving two to three new Dark Souls games in one.

I have played “Elden Ring” for more than 40 hours in the week since I was given the game in advance of the Feb. 23 review embargo. As I understand it, I’ve only scratched the surface of the game’s massive open world. In those first 40 hours, I am almost done exploring most of the first area, and am a bit more than halfway done with the second, sprawling lake region, which feels about as big as a Souls game by itself. After all that time, I genuinely do not know how many more regions there are in the game. I’ve explored large sections of the map, many of which have never been seen before in preview trailers and materials. Yet the game’s world continues to expand in impossible, unbelievable ways. The game’s borders limits are not something I can conceive at the moment."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/elden-ring-review/

The review contains some minor descriptions of areas so spoilers beware

 

[Falksi]

Gives a rating of 9.5/10 for a system he's not played.

 

[Mortmal]

And suddenly y'all are trusting game journos and review scores.

We dont , just cautiously optimistic , 10/10 all over the board means your system wont explode nor its completely unplayable.

 

[Kruno]

When is the DLC coming out?

Will the DLC revamp the catacombs to contain threats other than a few skeletons?

I hope they add more dungeons. There aren't enough dungeons in the game currently.

 

[Grimlorn]

Elden Ring truly is one of the video games of all time.

It's the Dark Souls of RPGs.

 

[Jinn]

Quotes like these from the PC Gamer review make me happy.

It's the scale of it that tricks you into thinking it's gentler at first. I spent hours prodding at the autumnal landscapes of Limgrave and Liurnia and didn't meaningfully raise my stats enough to withstand more than a swing from one of the two early major bosses...

This glacial progression makes some bosses, whether within one of Elden Ring's tough "Legacy" dungeons or out in the world, seem insurmountable without another player splitting the attention of the boss so that, for at least a moment, you can squeeze a hit in. Elden Ring remained hostile for the 60 hours I've put into it, making the trek through it occasionally frustrating and directionless...

One pocket of land might house undead soldiers who fall to pieces with a poof of magic, while another one might contain ruthless giants who can shrug off an axe cleaved into their side. I spent much of Elden Ring unsure of how strong my character was and where I could go...

If it's to be believed, our boys did their open world right, with possibly better actual RPG progression than any of the past games.

 

[Echo Mirage]

 

[Ryzer]

It's okay when games journos shill From soft games. You guys are worse than Reddit when it comes to them.

 

[Kruno]

Quotes like these from the PC Gamer review make me happy.

It's the scale of it that tricks you into thinking it's gentler at first. I spent hours prodding at the autumnal landscapes of Limgrave and Liurnia and didn't meaningfully raise my stats enough to withstand more than a swing from one of the two early major bosses...

This glacial progression makes some bosses, whether within one of Elden Ring's tough "Legacy" dungeons or out in the world, seem insurmountable without another player splitting the attention of the boss so that, for at least a moment, you can squeeze a hit in. Elden Ring remained hostile for the 60 hours I've put into it, making the trek through it occasionally frustrating and directionless...

One pocket of land might house undead soldiers who fall to pieces with a poof of magic, while another one might contain ruthless giants who can shrug off an axe cleaved into their side. I spent much of Elden Ring unsure of how strong my character was and where I could go...

If it's to believed, our boys did their open world right, with possibly better actual RPG progression than any of the past games.

THE AGE OF INCLINE COMETH!

 

[Steezus]

It's okay when games journos shill From soft games. You guys are worse than Reddit when it comes to them.

One of the last studios that consistently makes great games, releases a game that is great.

you gUizE arE sIppinG thE CooLaid

 

[Kruno]

It's okay when games journos shill From soft games. You guys are worse than Reddit when it comes to them.

One of the last studios that consistently makes great games, releases a game that is great.

you gUizE arE sIppinG thE CooLaid

of course we sip the coolaid, the miyazaki coolaid