Elden Ring - Review @ AOTF

[HiddenX]

Attack of the Fanboy checked out Elden Ring:

Elden Ring Review

Editor's Note on Elden Ring PC Version

It's a rare occurrence for us to withhold a numbered score on a game. Unfortunately, in doing this review for Elden Ring on PC we ran into a myriad of what seem to be technical issues. Since we couldn't isolate whether those issues were from the game itself or whether it would be indicative of the experience for players at large when the game released we decided to not score this game. 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. We're holding out hope that this was just our build, something in our game that was making these issues occur, because a game that is designed to be as difficult as these games are, the extra frustrations outweigh the general quality of the game itself. Now on to our review of Elden Ring.

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The Verdict

Elden Ring might be the best open world RPG in the last decade and right up there with Red Dead Redemption for peak of what we've seen from the open world genre itself. It's so, so good on the presentation front, the combat is spot on once again, the bosses, incredible and it continues to pull you deeper and deeper into the world as a good game should. It's going to give players 100+ hours just to see what the offline component has to offer. From Software upped the ante, surpassing even their best efforts that we saw with Sekiro Shadows Die Twice in terms of world building. Elden Ring is an absolute must-play game for 2022, but set aside some time and some patience.

More information.

 

[Luethar]

PC Controls

For me, I am a keyboard and mouse player on PC for these types of games. The laziness of the developers cannot be overstated. The PC Version, left the gamepad layout functional to the point where there is no key mapping to get to the overland map. If you want to exit a menu a simple Escape key doesn't work. You have to hit the keys as if you are still using a game pad. This makes the game so clunky to play, that I truly feel I wasted my money.

Otherwise, the game is beautiful, seamless, and looks like fun to play. I just cant get passed the gamepad layout.

Lue.

 

[JDR13]

For me, I am a keyboard and mouse player on PC for these types of games. The laziness of the developers cannot be overstated. The PC Version, left the gamepad layout functional to the point where there is no key mapping to get to the overland map. If you want to exit a menu a simple Escape key doesn't work. You have to hit the keys as if you are still using a game pad. This makes the game so clunky to play, that I truly feel I wasted my money.

Otherwise, the game is beautiful, seamless, and looks like fun to play. I just cant get passed the gamepad layout.

Lue.

Yeah, I was hitting every key on my keyboard trying to figure out how to back out of a menu. Having gamepad icons on the screen with no gamepad plugged is ridiculous. They could have at least tried to make it somewhat intuitive. Why would you assign "Q" to cancel a menu option when 99% of games use Esc? Then there's the performance issues as well.

I was pretty shocked tbh. This is their 5th or 6th PC port, so there's really no excuse for it being as bad as it is.

 

[SirJames]

Just get a controller.

 

[JDR13]

I have a DualShock 4 bluetoothed to my PC. I'll probably use that next time I fire it up.

Thing is, I shouldn't have to use a controller because of crappy M+K implementation. It should be because I want to. I wanted to try M+K first because I generally prefer that for most games.

 

[JFarrell71]

I have a DualShock 4 bluetoothed to my PC. I'll probably use that next time I fire it up.

Thing is, I shouldn't have to use a controller because of crappy M+K implementation. It should be because I want to. I wanted to try M+K first because I generally prefer that for most games.

I completely agree with you, and it's a bummer that Fromsoft hasn't prioritized making decent PC ports after all these years. Maybe getting 7x their high in concurrent Steam players for Elden Ring, along with the bad reports, will finally convince them.

Having said that, I can't imagine playing this particular game with M&K. The only bad thing about it is remapping is virtually nonexistent (you can technically remap, but there are no extra buttons so you're just swapping things around), but I think the analog movement/camera more than makes up for that.

 

[sakichop]

I played DS1-3 with M&K so It can be done but I'm not sure it's worth it. I spent probably at least an hour in 2 and 3 getting M&K just right and it was longer with DS1 as it was especially poor. It also required me to use my M&K software to change keys that couldn't be changed in game.

Maybe it's because I'm getting older and have less patience but I didn't want to deal with it in Elden Ring and just use my PS4 controller.

I thought about trying my PS5 controller but I don't think steam supports the haptic feedback anyway??

There's definitely some performance issues. I have a 3090, 5800x, 32 GB memory and nvme ssd and I was still getting the occasional freeze. It would freeze for a second and then seem like it would fast forward for a second after the freeze. It was very rare but it shouldn't happen on my setup.

On the plus side I haven't had one issue since switching to borderless window in about 5 hours of play. It has run flawlessly.

 

[JFarrell71]

I wonder if the same guy who did the PC fixes for the Dark Souls game will get around to Elden Ring. I can't remember his name, but he's well known in the community, and as I understand it, is the only reason Dark Souls 1 was even playable on PC.

 

[sakichop]

I wonder if the same guy who did the PC fixes for the Dark Souls game will get around to Elden Ring. I can't remember his name, but he's well known in the community, and as I understand it, is the only reason Dark Souls 1 was even playable on PC.

I believe you're talking about Durante. I used his DSfix mod for DS1. It was pretty much required if you wanted to use M&K.

 

[JFarrell71]

I believe you're talking about Durante. I used his DSfix mod for DS1. It was pretty much required if you wanted to use M&K.

Yes, that's the guy I was thinking of.

 

[fadedc]

Tried playing it on my pc, but it’s unplayable for me at the moment.

When I first booted it, the frame rate was awful and the screen was splotchy with black spots appearing. I lowered the settings which fixed the frame rate but not the splotches. I suffered through them until I get to the first trash mobs and they were invisible, the game didn’t draw them until I was literally touching them. At first I thought this was a game mechanic, that they were ghosts or something like that. But I quickly figured out it was just a graphical glitch.

Since these games are hard enough without invisible enemies, I quickly decided to wait for a performance update before trying again.

 

[JFarrell71]

Dang, @fadedc;, I haven't heard of any problems like that. I would troubleshoot and not put my hopes on a general update fixing whatever that is. Have you done the usual stuff like update graphics drivers?

 

[Gokyabgu]

Yeah, I was hitting every key on my keyboard trying to figure out how to back out of a menu. Having gamepad icons on the screen with no gamepad plugged is ridiculous. They could have at least tried to make it somewhat intuitive. Why would you assign "Q" to cancel a menu option when 99% of games use Esc? Then there's the performance issues as well.

I was pretty shocked tbh. This is their 5th or 6th PC port, so there's really no excuse for it being as bad as it is.

You are right about the keyboard layout. Even in a console native game like God of War, hitting I key opens the Inventory menu. Japanese games still insist to be keyboard unfriendly. As for button prompt there is a setting in the options menu, where you can change these prompts to keyboard. I hope this helps a bit.

 

[SirJames]

Tried playing it on my pc, but it’s unplayable for me at the moment.

When I first booted it, the frame rate was awful and the screen was splotchy with black spots appearing. I lowered the settings which fixed the frame rate but not the splotches. I suffered through them until I get to the first trash mobs and they were invisible, the game didn’t draw them until I was literally touching them. At first I thought this was a game mechanic, that they were ghosts or something like that. But I quickly figured out it was just a graphical glitch.

Since these games are hard enough without invisible enemies, I quickly decided to wait for a performance update before trying again.

I'd be willing to bet money that you need to update your videocard drivers.

 

[fadedc]

I'd be willing to bet money that you need to update your videocard drivers.

You would lose your money then, because that was the first thing I checked. They are all up to date. My machine is not old or cheap either.

I'll keep poking at it after work though. But the forums suggest that there are some serious rendering problems regardless of your graphics card/machine. Haven't read anything quite like my problem though.

 

[fadedc]

After googling Elden Rings invisible enemies, it appears that this is in fact a known problem, there are lots of articles and videos that address it. Unfortunately, while they may have titles like "how to fix the invisible enemies glitch" they mostly just give you all the generic advice you'd expect for addressing graphics problems and clearly don't have anything specifically for that. Still, I'll try going into Elden Rings advanced graphics options and turning everything down to minimum to see if that helps.

 

[Luethar]

The shame is I bought a PC version, I should be able to play it with mouse and keyboard. I cannot play with a game pad as I have an issue with my hand that keeps me from using it. So I wasted $60 on a game that is unplayable for me when I understood it to be a PC version and not a PC port. Those are two distinct things in my opinion!

Lue.

 

[fadedc]

Nothing seems to work to help fix the invisible enemies. There's a discussion about it on Steam with close to 1,000 posts and the consensus seems to be that it has something to do with lower FPS rates triggering a glitch in the program. But it happens even on higher ends machines, no consistent fix has been found to solve it, and the developers have not addressed or acknowledged the problem in any way yet.

I guess I should have remembered how awful the developers are at making PC games and gotten it for my console instead.

 

[johnnysd]

Just get a controller.

Smug BS semi-troll posts like this just piss me off. Many people do NOT want to play with a controller. I hate controllers.

That said despite idiotic things like not having I open the inventory or ESC like, you know, escape, the controls are not that bad on PC once you get used to them. They sort of hide a setting to turn on PC control labels instead of consoles.

Also I am still a bit confused why some people even with high end systems are reporting terrible performance. What do they have wrong in their configurations to cause the performance problems, or what specific things is the game incompatible with? I have seen no performance issues at all though I hate unnecessary 60 fps lock.

I think the game is OK. It's very odd. Did not play any of the previous iterations. Very foreign to me in so many game mechanics. I will stick with but I am not convinced for me that essentially dying through content is all that compelling.

 

[fadedc]

Finally figured out my Elden Ring problem, and it was a weird one. Apparently Elden Ring will try to use your computer's built in graphics card instead of the installed Nvidia card, or whatever you else you have. That's why performance was so awful. Trying to fix it through the Nvidia control panel doesn't work. Instead you have to go into windows graphics options and configure the Elden Ring ap to specifically only run with Nvidia.

Once I did that the performance problems went away completely, although once in awhile there is a brief pause.