Behind the Pretty Frames: Elden Ring | Hacker News Reader

Behind the Pretty Frames: Elden Ring

mamoniem.com

116 pointsibobev114 comments

The game owns and article makes a great point. These games around about high resolution graphics and densely packed pixels. It's about the atmosphere, story, setting, your personal struggle against seemingly impossible odds.

The fact people care about graphic quality is pretty funny to me. Go play the latest FPS online loot shooter if you want "triple A" graphics.

The game is a masterpiece in it's own right. Its like taking a dark souls game and making it bigger and bigger. Then just when you thought you were nearing the end. Oops sorry you are only 30% done with the game!

I'm at 100 hours on PC , getting close to finishing. Some graphic stutters near release but since then i've had no issues at all. Medium level rig.

I wish elden ring was smaller. I thought the open world concept was very poorly executed. I didn’t know where to go at first so I explored pretty much the entire open world unable to do much other than run past everything. The remainder of the game was just teleporting around so the open world was irrelevant. The bosses were good. The legacy dungeons were good. But the open world was largely a one time early game tax to find flak upgrades. I felt frustrated that I was not clearly shown where level appropriate content was. I don’t mind the option of seeking inappropriate content, but it should have been more transparent.

I spent the game picking up herbs. Never used any.

I picked up loads of weapons, but couldn’t use any them effectively without respeccing or farming weapon upgrades.

I found very few of the mini dungeons organically and had to look up where to find them but they tended to be pretty dull and reuse the same bosses. The quests were equally inscrutable without a guide. Finding bosses that are just way too strong for you sucks.

Leyndell and onward aren’t really open world. They’re mostly just linear areas, which I liked more but I also suspected was mostly due to budget and scope cuts. I would have gladly traded the vast open world and mini dungeons for a few more well designed legacy dungeons and bosses.

I played with no summons and beat malenia with two whips and no skills for reference if it matters

Sounds like you would love the Dark Souls games. They're Elden Ring without open world, and all legacy dungeons.

I liked the first one. Sekiro was their best imo.

But elden ring’s design philosophy seemed to start with “what if we did dark souls but all doors and passages were open from the start?”

The answer is unsurprisingly that many players track awkward paths of hitting things too soon and too late.

If you’re going to have such significant character progression, linear games just make more sense. Breath of the wild gets away from it because link barely gets any stronger over the course of the game. Just a bit tankier.

Fighting bosses in elden ring and finding they’re drastically undertuned really ruins the point of playing a soulslike…

Having played some of the soulsborne games before I much prefer being able to go away and explore something else if I hit a hard boss or area. It keeps the game much more enjoyable and not feel as "grindy". You do have a point about hitting some things earlier or later than you should, but usually under-leveled players are not going to make much progress in the tougher areas anyway...

A larger problem is that the whole level system to all of these games is just kind of bad. It would be more fun if you just were appropriately leveled for each encounter and that was that. And each weapon were useable without needing to dedicate resources to it.

I prefer feeling confident that I’m at a good state to fight something and if I’m losing it’s just a skill issue to practice.

Farming in all souls games doesn’t actually net you that much, but it still feels like the easiest path forward at times. Elden ring is particularly weird with its scaling. Vigor gives much larger buffs to hp than people expect. Damage stats do much less.

>> It would be more fun if you just were appropriately leveled for each encounter

Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. That leveling system meant you never ran into anything beyond your level. But it also mean that in the late game you were constantly hounded by insanely powerful creatures randomly out on the road.

Worse yet, if your character build scaled poorly, end-game became a horrible slog. If it scaled well, end-game became a walk in the park.

Unfortunately, mods that de-leveled the open world were not very good. You had no idea if you were walking into an area you outleveled, or were outleveled by, and many early quests took you to incredibly high-level areas.

I think leveling systems are arguably the biggest mistake in gaming right now. By that, I specifically mean things that just power you up or down based on a single number (give or take a few numbers), which you can go up basically by just playing the game for longer. It gives the entire game a natural skew towards becoming easier over time, which, being backwards, then requires a large number of gyrations to overcome.

I don't think the solution is just to rip them out and then proceed forward. And there are still other bad designs, of course; a sibling comment cites Oblivion. (Although I would call that an example of one of the "gyrations" I refer to; having a leveling system but then trying to remove it by somehow mathematically cancelling it is just weird. Quite distinct from not starting with one in the first place.)

I would cite something like Bayonetta as a good example of what I mean, though by no means the only possibility. Especially as "RPGs" continue to move more and more in the direction of straight-up-action-game combat anyhow. You open up some weapons. You can double your health and the other resource (forget what it's called), and I'm not even sure I love that, but you can. But fights are not about whether you're level 34 and they're level 63. Difficult fights are difficult because they are difficult.

In some sense the biggest mistake in my mind is that it gives designers such an easy answer; just slap a leveling system on it. More thought would be nice.

I could also cite something like Slay the Spire. No "levels" in sight, but your character certainly becomes more powerful over time, and your play gets better. Skill acquisition, clever combinations of abilities and features, etc. So much better than just a number that goes up.

Borderlands 3 does this thing where enemies are scaled to your local client level. So like if I’m level 30 playing with a level 20 friend and he finds a level 22 enemy, for me it’ll be level 32.

Which certainly seems another step removed from logic.

As much as I have enjoyed Borderlands (2), it is one of the things that really triggered this thought it me. For whatever reason I encountered a high-level enemy about 5 levels above me in one of the DLCs, and I managed to trap it on the level geometry and kill it with about 80% of my ammo. And I realized just how silly this was.

The primary purpose of the leveling system in Borderlands, at least to my eyes, is to make it so you can't just pick up a gun on level one and use it the whole game, defeating the purpose of the main game loop to be forcing you to be constantly changing guns. OK, I get that purpose and in context it makes sense. But the leveling system is a really weird way to do it. I'd almost rather see guns decay instead. (Not do the whole "100% functional until they instantly and totally break"; we've got enough experiences with that to know how frustrating it is.) Decay is somewhat plausible though then you have to have the strength of will to reject repair mechanisms, which is still physically weird.

But I'm not really trying to propose all the solutions to all possible alternatives to leveling systems; I'm just saying "hey let's make the player and all the enemies 11% stronger every 30 minutes, except across a large set of dimensions impossible to ever keep scaled properly relative to each other in an exponential regime" is a silly thing.

You're looking for a completely different experience than soulsborne games seek to provide my guy. The effort makes the experience meaningful. It's just like WoW was meaningfully better before the abundance of fast travel options later added to the game, or the nerfs to leveling and item acquisition. It's not everyone's cup of tea but it's a strong, flavorful and relatively unadulterated cup of tea and we stan that.

I don't even like soulsborne games that much but I recognize the beauty and purity of the experience they provide. I'd rather be playing quake 3, but it's the same thing in a certain conceptual way.

The defining feature of souls likes is undoubtedly their fluid combat. Not the shitty numbers behind them. You could. Have just as good of an experience getting x level ups after beating a boss and that’s it.

Farming souls is stupid.

One thing that changed my view is to just stop caring about runes. Unless it's a significant amount, close to a level up, they aren't important. The other thing is to use your items. It's easy to hoard in a game like this but you shouldn't.

Yes. They don’t matter. In part because the game is very stingy with them. In another part because of you actually need a level up you’re going to get what you need much faster going to a nice farming spot and starting from scratch. In third part because they’re nothing compared to the value of weapon upgrades and flask upgrades.

The game is also just unintuitive when it comes to defensive stats. Putting lots of points into endurance to wear the biggest armor is nothing compared to boosting vigor. Armor mostly sucks tbh.

Honestly I haven't farmed in the game ever. I'm not sure why I would need to. I do agree that some things are not as intuitive though, like armor. Or that poise is what's important, because it is about knockback.

You will have to farm a bit in late game if you want to try out different equipment. Because due to yet another stupid leveling system, any gear that isn’t upgraded is worse than the shittiest club with upgrades. So if you want to try anything else in the end game you need to go farm runes to buy stones to upgrade your weapons. Not terribly slow, but annoying and it could have been avoided entirely.

I just try them out at later points. You can even respec.

I was able to max level maybe a dozen weapons for funsies without any grinding involved. Later in the game, Hero's Runes and similar are laying around like candy.

A key feature of the leveling system is that it allows somewhat for player controlled difficulty levels.

There is a wide range of skill levels of players, and what is "appropriately leveled" for one player might be trivial or impossibly hard for others.

Players level to the point where they can beat the bosses that they get stuck on.

In theory maybe. In practice not really. Leveling up does not make a huge difference. Leveling up weapons does. Leveling up flasks does too. The amount of time you need to spend to level up is a terrible trade off.

If you’re not good at the game, you can trivialize most encounters with the summons, or use multiplayer which adds a ton of luck to the outcome.

Actually farming runes is almost a trap for anything last stormveil.

I completely agree about the open world. The complete lack of breadcrumbs or anything to help you understand where to go made it a much worse experience for me, especially as my first souls game. The game even tells you to follow the Guidance of Grace, which leads you directly to Stormveil Castle, which you will be underleveled for.

I tried playing blind and ended up in Caelid (~lvl 60 area) instead of Weeping Peninsula. That's when I noped out and spent the rest of the game with my head buried in the wiki. I couldn't imagine trying to play these games without a wiki.

Everything else I enjoyed for the most part. The controls and hitboxes are a little janky, the platforming sections are total garbage (shoehorned into an old engine that never had it), but the open world execution was by far the worst aspect for me. At some point FromSoftware has to start catering to players new to the genre instead of forcing people to struggle and calling it part of the experience. With 12 mil in early sales I guarantee a bunch of players struggled with these aspects of the early game and dropped it altogether.

The first guy you meet outside the cave tells you to follow the guidance of grace. The graces around the main storyline literally point to the next grace or way to go. If you follow the road you'll get there.

I did get lost in the beginning because this is my first souls game and the only other game I've really played in the last 10 years is botw. But I've always have a good sense of where to go. The times I don't I explore and find something that leads me down a side quest. There's definitely lots of breadcrumbs imo. I mean if you're lost just look at the map and go towards a castle.

I think what could be better is to be able to revisit people and talk to them about quest lines. Or have a log. Other than that I'm having the complete opposite experience of you and I'm sure I've died 500+ times in my 50 hrs.

I found a lot of sidequest breadcrumbs. Then that was it and I never found the next breadcrumb again because they teleported to an unmarked location I had been to before and had no reason to go to; standing still and saying nothing.

> The first guy you meet outside the cave tells you to follow the guidance of grace. The graces around the main storyline literally point to the next grace or way to go. If you follow the road you'll get there.

That's kind of my point though, because, at the beginning of the game, going straight to Stormveil Castle is not the optimal path. The optimal path is to go through East Limgrave and then Weeping Peninsula to get some levels and some gear. Guidance of Grace leads you away from that. Pretty unintuitive for the very first waypoints of the game.

I agree with some of the critique here, but the lesson I took from the experience of following those first graces was "oh, I guess I'm going to need to be stronger to fight this guy, guess I'll go wander around and level up" - which I think is _exactly_ the lesson that the designers intended.

That's exactly what I did and I've been having a ton of fun. "Okay, I'm not ready for this person yet, but there's all these other things around me, let's go explore that and I should be leveled up and just better at the game/controls by the time I come back." This means absolutely no grinding. The game also taught me to not fight everyone and to focus on skills rather than runes. The game is unfair, so you have to be unfair back.

This is what I did too. And my point is that it took me throughout the entirety of Caelid and liurnia which was stupid as shit. Because the rate of progression was extremely slow, especially when you’re just running past things, and the only area that’s particularly appropriate up front is castle Morne which is not advertised.

I don’t think the game is unfair. It’s boss design is great. It’s the pacing that’s shit. Margit was an awesome fight.

> I don’t think the game is unfair

I disagree. It is very intentionally unfair. Two against one bosses where one has long range attacks and one is melee? One shot kills? Losing all your level progress when you die and being unable to retrieve them? This breaks a lot of the common game formulas. It forces you to just "get good" and think about your gameplay differently. But that's exactly what I like about the game. When you're getting you ass handed to you you often can't just come back at a higher level, but need to actually take new strategies. You can for the main questline but outside that you need to "get good"

There’s no one shot kills. If you get one shot it generally just means you don’t have enough vigor.

I’m not clear what you mean by outside the main quest line. The main quest line is the only noteworthy content. Everything can be done at a later level and probably will unless you’re using a guide to find everything in order. Malenia and mohg are outside the main quest line, technically I guess.

I’m 65 hours into this and only have a vague idea what the main quest line is. I see something on the map and run to it. It’s fun to explore and there is so much. I’ve met a lot of random people that want me to do stuff. My only want in the game is a log of who I’ve talked to and what they said.

It’s very easy to find random npcs. It’s incredibly difficult to find them again once they move. Some of them have natural points where you’re likely to encounter them progressing through the game normally, but only if you’ve already encountered all of their previous meeting points by that time.

I guess I don't take the attitude I need to find them again. If I do, great, if not, I still go over the next hill to see what's there. I find the open world exploration quite fun.

I unironically paid zero attention to Varre and accidentally tromped through and completed Weeping Peninsula without any instruction whatsoever. It just felt right. Very intuitive.

I think the cryptic nature of Soulsborne games don't work in Open World. Like some of the side quests are near-impossible to complete without a wiki (unless you get very lucky). For instance, some NPCs are like, "I'll see you around." And you have to find them at some random place in the world if you want to continue their quest.

In a more closed world like Dark Souls, I think the no-handholding of side quest can work. But in an open world, I would've liked a bit more hand holding.

> I felt frustrated that I was not clearly shown where level appropriate content was.

The map indicates the main path with glowy little directional markers all along it. Usually areas around the appropriate section of the main path are level appropriate, but there is much more to explore.

Yeah I’m gonna hard disagree there. The lines, and even the first NPC you meet, immediately lead you to storm veil castle which is a total trap. Margit is a very strong first boss, with unblockable chip damage and some fairly long and difficult to dodge combos. Heck he’s probably one of the hardest fights mechanically. The slow swings of the final boss are so much easier to avoid. If you follow the lines you will not get any flask upgrades either. And if you don’t go that way initially you could easily find yourself discovering another “main path” instead first.

Imo it was really just the one time tax of getting your flasks and weapon upgrades. The initial scaling of things was just… really bad. Weapon upgrades are too good for something that’s so uncontrolled game progression wise. Flasks get way too powerful very quickly, filling up more than your entire health bar with just one of many many charges. Health starts too low but then scales up stupidly fast.

These posts make me feel like an oldster. I got Elden Ring, but learned that you had to use a controller. Using a controller to play a 1st or 3rd person game feels so wrong to my M+K sensibilities. Maybe I just don't grok it, but using swivel sticks while simultaneously pressing buttons seems so clumsy and weird. I guess I could suffer through the learning curve, but instead, I'll just write off the games that are really designed for console.

I've been playing Elden Ring on M+KB, why do you think you have to use a controller? M+KB support was kinda garbage in the PC port of the original Dark Souls but even then it was still there.

I bought the first DS and never played it because it flat out required a controller. I bought a controller to use with ES because the game got so much hype. From what I have read, you can use M+KB with ES, but it is sub-optimal in a game that requires hyper optimal play.

M+KB is fine. The game does not require hyper optimal play by any means.

I definitely played Dark Souls 1 on PC ("Prepare to Die Edition") from start to finish and did not at that time own a controller. I have my AutoHotKey script around for it somewhere. It did not "flat out require" a controller.

I haven't bought Elden Ring yet (it has been a very busy year), but I was alarmed by your claim that you "have to" use a controller, but now that I learn you're just wrong about DS1, I can calm down and carry on.

Also, "requires hyper optimal play"? Are you kidding? Just because kids who've never played a hard game think Souls games are hard doesn't mean it's true.

I was surprised how Much Elden Ring didn’t feel punishing to me. I was expecting it to be much more unpleasant to die. For the most part I can shrug off runes and usually you spawn pretty close.

Seems a shame to get hung up on that one thing (I don't know anything about ER's KB/M support), but I understand. Being comfortable with your input method is pretty important. ER definitely stretches gamepad input to the limits. It's pretty often I do the infamous "claw grip"[1] to get access to both the right stick (camera control) and face buttons (actions). If you can get over the controller thing, or find the KB/M controls sufficient, I really recommend it. ER is definitely one of "those" generation-defining games that are really special.

[1] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-oLlVzXeXOU/maxresdefault.jpg

I claw grip when I am forced to both hold the right-most button and don't have the luxury of letting go of the camera stick, no matter the game. More pronounced in this series in particular because of the punishment of death.

Ugh, that hurts my wrists & hands just looking at it. Have you tried one of the Xbox Elite controllers? I've been using them for a number of years now and they're great. They do take a while to get used to, but they basically give you buttons you can use your middle & ring fingers on. They're remappable, but I've got mine setup for A, B, X & Y buttons, so my thumbs never have to leave the joysticks. I know the controllers aren't cheap, but they're worth it, in my opinion.

Every time I think about buying an Elite controller and its $180 price tag, I look at the perfectly good controller I've already got and say nahhhhh.

The style of gameplay just works much better with a controller. I would say the same thing about most melee oriented action games. Devil May Cry with a keyboard is horrible.

I couldn't disagree more. I've played tons of melee oriented action games with M+KB and the only time it gets annoying is when it is a bad console first port.

I didn't have any trouble completing the game and killing all of the extra bosses with mouse and keyboard. I could see how some of the horse parkour might be easier with a controller, but never felt like I needed it for fighting. I find the ability to turn much more quickly to be a huge advantage of the mouse over the controller.

Thanks for that! I'll rebuy it and give it a try with M+KB.

I'm fifty years old - surely a fellow oldster by now - and mouse+keyboard always feels incredibly awkward for any kind of fast action game. It's a matter of what you're used to; I've been doing most of my gaming on consoles since leaving my old Amiga for a Mac.

My husband used to be like you until they got into Nuclear Throne, now they're at home with a controller for games that work better that way. A twin-stick shooter is probably much better to learn a controller with than Elden Ring IMHO. Or a friendlier jumpy-adventurey-fighty game like Spyro or Sonic or Breath of the Wild that's built with the assumption they might be some kid's very first encounter with this style of game, and has appropriate amounts of training.

But really, there's only so much time in a life to play video games, and only so much time in a life for everything you enjoy doing. If don't wanna get used to a controller then, well, that's fine. You'd miss out on a ton of great games even if your day job was nothing but playing them.

I'm at 150 hours on PS4, and probably not anywhere near finishing. The only problem I've had is that sometimes the game freezes when I'm being summoned for co-op, and I end up having the reset the console.

That, and my cat hates sitting in my lap when I play Elden Ring. He can't get comfortable because I'm always on edge, expecting an ambush. He'd rather I played Final Fantasy XIV.

> That, and my cat hates sitting in my lap when I play Elden Ring.

Yeah, well, my 30kg golden retriever doesn't care what I'm playing, because when she gets on my lap -- and she does so frequently -- I can't do anything else ...

Any time I saw some pretty new vista in Elden Ring, I felt guilty that I wasn't appreciating it. My suspicion is that the FOV is fixed and small for balance reasons & this detracts from the landscape, making it hard to take it all in.

For example, the first reveal of Leyndell with the [spoiler] draped on the right of the screen would be more impressive if you could see more of the city to the left.

I often used the telescope from high vantage points to take in the view

The game I feel struggled most with this was FFXII - that camera was so bad, wanted you staring at the floor at all times.

I remember peeking up inside the airship station and noticing how detailed the ceiling was and what a waste the world had been because of a poor camera

The game also desperately needs widescreen monitor support-wpuld definitely help in admiring more of the landscape.

I also had issues with it, not so much for the fixed camera FOV, but because the weird momentum/camera mechanics (it always felt like it was pulling and shifting in non-linear ways I couldn't control) made me feel motion sick within a half hour of getting in game. Googling at that time, it seemed like a common enough issue that people had hacks or add-ons or workarounds to address it, but I ended up just returning it for a refund as I had less than the steam hours limit.

Reading the first few paragraphs (mainly the 25k descriptor copy and CBV creation calls) I really wonder if the game would perform better on PC if they had just gone with a traditional D3D11 renderer (assuming the team is more familiar with D3D11 than D3D12). At least it explains why the game stutters on my PC with a 2070RTX even at 1080p and medium graphics settings (so the performance problems are most likely not caused by too complex shaders).

Probably. It's funny that the game at least used to run better on Proton due to bad DX12 API usage workarounds implemented in the translation layer. Enabled mitigations can be tracked from https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/blob/maste...

Yeah, I laughed heartily at my Windows-bound friends as my shitbox 3400g iGPU linux machine put out a smoother experience than their Actual GPU'd rigs.

I stopped laughing when day-two (or so) patches resulted in most enemies turning invisible for me thanks to rendering pipeline priorities. 1.4 has fixed that, but I learned a lot about regulation.bin and the various things it controls. [0]

[0] https://www.nexusmods.com/eldenring/mods/109?tab=description

I've found my game stutters when game files become invalid. Revalidating through steam (apologies, don't remember the specific term) fixes the issue.

EDIT: I stand corrected, the more common stutter issue the article describes is different altogether.

I was confused when the game came out because I was running a GTX 970 and never had any stuttering issues with medium settings. Not sure why, but everyone I knew with a newer nicer card had the stuttering issues.

Is it going to be worth waiting for the pc port to finally get patched sufficiently, maybe with ultrawide, or should we just enjoy it now? I get the sense from digital foundry that if you're perceptive about performance problems then maybe it's worth waiting.

I suppose another option would be to just enjoy it on steam deck because that version already runs in a state that's closer to optimal.

https://github.com/gurrgur/er-patcher

Been playing ultrawide and 144hz for a while. Mostly offline, but haven't been banned online, either.

For general performance, the game is perfectly playable. It's capped at 60 fps, and there is still the occasional stutter (like, once an hour max for me). But if performance is what's been keeping you from picking up Elden Ring, I would say jump right in. The worst performance issues have been fixed, and it's easy to look past any other issues.

Regarding ultrawide: as far as I know, there's no official plan to add ultrawide support. So if you're waiting for ultrawide support, you may be waiting a long time.

My gear is better than the recommended specs. I have to turn off anti-cheating (i.e. https://www.nexusmods.com/eldenring/mods/90) to make it run smoothly, which disables online interaction.

Seems like it's down to luck whether EasyAntiCheat will wreck your performance or not.

I can run it at almost max settings without EAC, but even with minimum resolution and minimum everything else it runs like crap with EAC.

Flawless Widescreen and Special K can each do some of the things you’d really want from a top quality port, like ultra wide and >60FPS.

with a 12gb amd card and a 4ghz processor I can run the game at a pretty stable 2k/60fps with occasional dips to 50. It is a lot better than how it was at release.

It is probably worth it just to play it now, I think its the best game I have ever played.

Heck, I'm playing it on an 8 gig card (2070 super) and it runs fine at 2k/60fps (occasional drops to 40), and is flawless at 1080p or dropping settings to medium (which looks good nonetheless).

I'm playing it on a base PS4. It's still fine. Even locked at 30 FPS, it basically looks like Dark Souls 3 but with a world the size of BOTW.

Yea the pc patch will be released just after bloodborne next gen version. So never

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:194vKf...

This sounds like an awesome game. I wasted hours yesterday trying to get past the white screen of death so my son could play. We have worked through every "fix" documented online on several forums with no joy and still the game will not start. I believe it fails in the Easy Anti-Cheat at start-up.

I will get the machine in hand this afternoon at some point so I can personally troubleshoot the issues since doing the phone tech support thing for a couple of hours after midnight with someone who has already run through all the documented fixes can be frustrating (and funny) itself.

Idk if you're on Linux, but what worked for me with Linux+Nvidia was enabling CONFIG_SGI_GRU

Thanks for the reply.

Unfortunately this is a Win10box from MSI trying to run Elden Ring thru Steam. It exceeds the specs to run the game, everything is updated, etc but it hilariously white screens within seconds of starting the game. We have so far managed to optimize the thing to the point where the white screen that had taken 15-20 seconds now occurs in less than 5. Saves a lot of time when your crashes happen faster so you can move on to the next potential issue without losing those valuable seconds.

It's gonna be a real treat dinking around with this later since I only know the sequence of the troubleshooting that I walked him through so I may need to unwind some of the stuff he did before he broke down and asked for help.

I forgot to ask which distro you were using. I have been looking into dual booting his machine as an option and found that people report Elden Ring runs without the glitching you can get on Windows. Thanks

Thanks for the linux nudge. For anyone who is thinking about Elden Ring on Linux I was able to dual boot linux using Pop-OS! and install the Steam client, download the game and it played perfectly straight out of the box.

I borked the Windows installation in the process when I disabled Secure Boot, Fast Boot, and Intel RST. I'll work on repairing all that later.

I initially attempted installing Ubuntu since I have recently messed with that on another machine. I ran into the Intel RST problem and in the process of investigating that I discovered Pop-OS!. Reviews claimed it was quick to install, came with NVidia drivers (if you select that version on download), and was tuned for gaming.

I did install Pop-OS! to a separate SSD drive since they're cheap enough nowadays and, after finding the upgrade info for this machine, it was simple to install. I have it all running on an MSI Aegis 3 Plus with 1080Ti.

I have had an NZXT rig sitting in a box for months waiting be set up and this whole exercise was just what I needed to compel me to open it all up and set it up. It's still a Win10 box but I plan to dual boot it too.

Was going to try this game out based on reviews i was hearing and people swearing this is a “masterpiece” game but ive also read its unplayable in PC even with top of the line gaming rigs. How does a company do such a Poor job on a port like that?

Bugs in the anti-cheating software, who knows if it was enabled or not on the testers computers.

I was delaying my decision to play Elden Ring on PS5 due to numerous reports that it has pretty noticeable FPS drops, even in 'performance mode'. Finally decided to give it a chance and have zero regrets when it comes to it. Yes, it's far from perfect but good enough for me to not be annoyed with it. Times I have been upset because of FPS is close to 0, which is like 1000 times less than because of yet another death.

My point is, people talk about FPS drops, stutters, etc., but everyone has different tolerance to these things. So it's better to check it out yourself if this is the main reason holding you back. Make sure you can get a refund/sell the copy if you're unsatisfied.

Will likely play it again in my lifetime.

Unplayable is exaggerating it. There are frame pacing issues, and dips are common, no matter the hardware. (Possibly due to them binding 25000 resources at every single frame). It is perfectly playable on PC.

Playable maybe, but very painful. It said I was getting 60 down to 40 frames, but it always felt like it was running at 20fps. Im glad someone is investigating, its a good game held back by terrible optimization.

I've had almost no problems with the game. In about 110 hours of play time, it has crashed once, and had two minor slowups in game play. Both lasted a just a second or two. I'm very happy I took a chance on it.

I couldn't maintain 60fps in ER on a 12900H, 32gb DDR5, and a 3070ti no matter the graphics settings. It dropped to 40fps every two seconds and is unplayable. The input lag was astonishingly bad.

I'm still waiting for it to be patched.

For what it's worth I have 150 hours played already on a pretty old system - i5-3570K, 16GB RAM, 1070Ti. I have no idea what framerate I'm getting but I don't remember being bothered by the game's performance even once.

I suspect performance issues are uneven and affect some systems a lot more than others. I also suspect a lot of it comes down to expectations, I'm perfectly happy with my experience but others might consider it "unplayable"!

Edit: I also play offline usually, that might be a factor as well.

I'm running an i7700k and a GTX1070 on a rig that was built in 2016. It's fine. Not the most performant thing that's ever been run on my machine, but it's perfectly playable. I had some stuttering issues during the first week or two but have not had any significant problems for quite some time.

It’s very much playable on top of the line rigs. My 6900xt chews up and spits out its console level graphics at 4K60fps with no frame drops. I have about 250 hours in game.

The only time it stutters is during some cinematic cutscenes.

I'd say it's a "technically flawed masterpiece" ;) It's perfectly playable if you're not overly sensitive to microstuttering in some areas. And even with the stuttering one gets quickly used to it. I just was kinda shocked how smooth Sekiro feels compared to Elden Ring on the same machine when switching back. FromSoft PC ports were always a bit hit and miss (like many games coming out of Japan, I guess the PC platform doesn't get much attention there compared to some other parts of the world).

Elden Ring is playable all the way down to cards with 4 gigs of VRAM, it just won't be a solid 60 fps.

Japanese game companies have a history of treating PC users as second-class citizens. Fromsoft is no exception. Using KB&M on their first port of Dark Souls 1 back in 2012 was impossible because it was that broken; a mod had to be used to correct the problem (game plays better with a controller anyway but I digress). When they released it again in 2018 as "Remastered" they made a number of bizarre graphical decisions including wholly downgrading the lighting. And now Elden Ring with wildly varying performance across all cards, no uncapped FPS and no ultrawide support. I hope they actually listen this time seeing as how PC outsold both PS4/PS5. Not holding my breath though.

> Using KB&M on their first port of Dark Souls 1 back in 2012 was impossible because it was that broken

Also worth noting, Dark Souls didn't even launch on PC, it only got an unimpressive port (still capped at 30fps, with performance issues in Blighttown) a year later when fans petitioned for it

https://www.gamesradar.com/dark-souls-pc-petition-successful...

Played it on my laptop just fine with a 2080 RTX

Only unplayable in an /r/literallyUnplayable sense. Unless you are extremely bothered by the occasional minor issue, it is quite enjoyable.

I experience a rare frame stuttering and for a week after an update my character didn't have legs (which I found deeply amusing then sad when it was fixed).

I don't know if people are just spoiled by modern day 144hz+ gaming monitors or what, but the game is definitely playable on PC. I've completed around ten playthroughs on a 2020 MacBook Pro with a 1080Ti in an eGPU housing. Not exactly a top of the line gaming rig.

Maybe I just don't get bothered as much by the low framerate and occasional stuttering but people calling it "unplayable" seem a bit reactionary to me.

For more articles like this, check out https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/search?q=frame&res...

Unrelated, but related. Is Elden Ring a game of the year kind of game, game of a decade kind of game or game of a quarter century kind of game / GOAT?

I would and have said it's the best game I've ever played.

What makes it that good?

I think they just acknowledged what they were doing was making a video game. Like they weren't pretentious at all about it. There's not a bunch of long winded dialogue I don't care about. They didn't try to make it hyper-real. You don't need to pay attention to the stats on anything except for requirements. There isn't some narrow line of progression. With just a handful of exceptions, the loot is just openly available and not subject to luck, meaning grinding is almost entirely voluntary. It just feels like a game, a lot of other games feel like work. But I've also been playing FS games since Demon's Souls so maybe I put in the hard work already.

At least decade, and it definitely belongs in the conversation for all-time.

What makes it that good? I cant tell its more hype then reality.

I'm not a games review person so sorry if this comes across as clumsy. But they just made a really good video-game, you know? What really blows me away about it is how much of it there is. Yes, the world is big and full of interesting stuff, but other games have done that. What stands out here is the quantity and variety of mechanics. I'm still on my first playthrough and I'm doing a pure melee-focused build. There are dozens (hundreds?) of special skills that can be applied to hundreds of different weapons. Many weapons have their own special skills. Ditto all that for shields, and the armor you can equip. And since my character is melee-focused, I haven't even touched any of the huge amount of magic stuff that is in the game, nor ranged weapons, nor even most melee options that are better served by different stat progression choices. This is just a huge variety of playstyle approaches. I've been playing the game for three months and I'm looking forward to beating it so I can go back and try again from the start with a completely different approach.

And it has such a pure focus on gameplay. Other games try to be movies or HBO miniseries. There's story and lore in Elden Ring if you want to dig for it, but personally I don't care about that, I'm here to play a game. It respects your time by respawning you immediately outside boss doors when you die. If you enjoy the challenge, you can tackle bosses immediately when you come across them. Or if you're struggling, you can go do something else in the world and come back later after you've built up your skills and weapons, and have an easier time of it. There's loads of optional content to find, for people who want additional challenge.

It's just a really jaw-dropping, video-game experience that isn't trying to be something else. It's definitely a masterpiece video game.

Maybe GOTY but not decade or GOAT. In my opinion, it's being overrated right now.

As a whole it's a great game with many deep systems that work well together, but it's running on an old janky engine that needs updating. Controls and hitboxes are janky, inventory management from the dark ages, platforming is beyond shit and should have been left out of the game, and the graphics are about 5 years behind. A lot of stuff is straight up copy-pasted out of DS3.

Thanks - appreciate the honesty. As someone who doesn't play the genre I imagine it would feel like a big change and super interesting gamespace. Someone who plays inside the genre might not think it's that much of a change, is that an appropriate assessment?

100%. It's very familiar if you've played any souls games. I'm actually playing DS3 now, and I really wish I had played it before Elden Ring, because a lot of the concepts are the same, and it took me a while to grok Elden Ring.

Once you understand the systems of the game and how they work it gets a lot smoother. It's definitely a very unique genre.

It’s just dark souls with a big world. Probably GoTY but I don’t even think it’s from software’s best title

How does this play on the Steam Deck? I received mine recently and was thinking of giving that game a try.

Crazily, it plays better on the Steam Deck on than on many gaming PCs. Valve did some special optimizations for it specifically in the translation layer. Since all Steam Decks have the same hardware, they were also able to ship out precompiled shaders, avoiding all shader compilation related hitches.

Digital Foundry made a nice video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1HuX2_Hhss

No chance of an Apple Silicon port of Elden Ring is there? Looks like a really fun game...

Judging from the modus operandi of most Japanese game developers, I would give this a 0% chance of happening, unless you're planning to buy Bandai Namco and make them do it. Which because this is HN, for fun I looked up, is worth about 100 billion USD.

So that's why my 1600X was not good enough

My GTX 970 on medium was fine. This whole thing is a little confusing to me, why would my slower card be faster?

Certain advanced graphics features are enabled or utilized if you have a graphics card that supports them. Unfortunately, the implementation of some of those features was poorly ported or implemented, so you end up with performance issues.

Ironically, because the older cards can't support those features, they don't have the performance issues related to the bad implementations.

I meant the Ryzen CPU (is there a GPU with that name?), should have been more specific.

My GPU is a GTX 1080 and it was unenjoyable to me with that CPU, now I have a 12600KF and it runs pretty well.

The OP article shows quite well how CPU bound this game is.

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