Elden Ring receives "mixed" rating from Steam users, as PC performance backlash begins
Tarnished.
Steam users have given the critically-acclaimed Elden Ring a decidedly more cautious response, with thousands of negative reviews within the game's first 24 hours.
Elden Ring currently sits on a "mixed" rating on Steam, with 14k positive reviews but 9.5k negative. Many fans list the game's PC performance as their chief bugbear.
FromSoftware's eagerly-awaited new Soulsbourne game launched last night to huge player peaks on Steam and Twitch, following years of hype and anticipation.
"Struggling to maintain 60FPS/1080p on a 3080, massive stuttering and drops to the mid 20s, crashed 4 times within 2 hours of game time, 60 FPS cap, and no ultrawide support," wrote one fan, who had played seven hours so far.
"It's as frustrating as it is plain sad to think that the team felt comfortable releasing the franchise's magnum opus in the sorry state that it's in," another fan, with more than six hours clocked up, said. "Yes the stutters / slowdowns people were so worried about during pre-release still exist and it's exclusively a software issue rather than lacking specs."
"I dont recommend you buy until a patch comes out to fix these micro-stutters," wrote a fan with nine hours played. "They are pretty rough and impossible to ignore and it seems no matter what graphics settings you got them on they happen. The game itself is amazing but these stuttering and FPS problems make it a nightmare to try and play."
"Elden Ring? More like stuttering," quipped another.
Other critical reviews complained of frequent crashes and poor controller support.
Yesterday, the Digital Foundry team reported in with first impressions of Elden Ring (with the game's current 1.02 patch installed).
"Elden Ring is From Software's first foray into low-level APIs on PC and the game uses DirectX 12. As we have seen in other DX12 titles, there can be severe and distracting frame-time stuttering issues," Digital Foundry wrote.
"First there are stutters of up to 250 milliseconds in length when new effects, enemies, and areas appear on screen. These types of stutter lessen as the play experience goes on and enemies, areas, and effects are revisited by the player. A second and more pervasive stutter appears to be tied to loading new game areas - when traversing the terrain, moving from one area to the next can cause minor one-off frame drops a few times a minute, or at worst, tumbling frame-time issues that drop the frame-rate from a steady 60 into the 40s.
"Variable refresh rate monitors using G-Sync or Freesync help alleviate a level of the distracting nature of some of these issues, but leaning on the technology is not a good situation in light of how the console versions do not suffer from these stutters. Other issues to note are the lack of ultrawide screen support, no support for frame-rates above 60fps, and unintuitive graphical options that lack visible scaling."
Earlier this week, Eurogamer awarded Elden Ring a rare Essential accolade, after playing the game on PlayStation 5. "Grandiose, mysterious, but now a touch more welcoming, Elden Ring tweaks the FromSoft formula to open up its world," Aoife wrote in Eurogamer's Elden Ring review.