@mercy
I played all weekend without an issue. Friday night to Sunday, 20 hours, not one issue. The game is excellent! I think they really nailed it.
I think the low Steam reviews are just people reviewing their hardware. If you have a spicy 7800X3D rig, like
@JDR13 and myself, you won't have any issues. I've been running it in 4k ultra with FSR Quality and getting about 80fps average. Could turn off ray tracing stuff and that'll go up to 100. Playing with controller it feels fine even when it dips to 60fps in those 1% low situations.
If I had to find something to complain about it would be how the multiplayer doesn't seem to use any local region and most of the time I join someones game it's too laggy. That's if it connects at all. I'd say it failed to join half the time. Also, I got stuck in a bit of "umbral" scenery when the host went umbral and I was standing in it. Also, enemies seem to have trouble crossing shortcut bridges that the player has knocked down but that doesn't really bother me.
But, damn, it really is a great game if you can run it. I'd highly recommend it to souls-like fans provided they don't have a potato PC.
I remember the first time I played an Unreal Engine 3 game on my PC and it ran like shit and I cursed the engine and called it an unoptimized piece of shit but eventually hardware catches up. It is the next-gen engine and very taxing on the hardware. You could say that the improvement in graphics isn't worth the performance cost and I'd probably agree with you. My old GTX680 almost ran Dark Souls 3 perfectly and those graphics are fine. Elden Ring graphics are fine. But, you know, that's the way she goes.