Fixes for Elden Ring's Steam Deck issues should be released next week
Elden (stutte)Ring.
Valve believes it will have a fix for Elden Ring's "heavy stutter during background streaming" on Steam Deck next week.
Although there's no firm release date pinned down just yet, players keen to try sooner rather than later can try the Proton release now "on the bleeding-edge branch of Experimental", according to Valve coder, Pierre-Loup Griffais.
Elden Ring publisher Bandai Namco acknowledged various performance problems with the game shortly after its release, particularly with its PC build. As Eurogamer reported earlier this week, Elden Ring currently sits with a "mixed" Steam user rating despite its widespread critical acclaim, and many negative reviews note the game's current visual stutters on PC.
This was also picked up by Digital Foundry, which listed this visual stutter among a number of issues it had uncovered during an early appraisal of the game with the 1.02 patch applied.
"The graphics team has been hard at work on optimising Elden Ring for Steam Deck," Griffais tweeted.
"Fixes for heavy stutter during background streaming of assets will be available in a Proton release next week, but are available to test now on the bleeding-edge branch of Experimental."
While, like this commenter, you might have thought the issues were related to the game itself given it's happening on PC, too, Griffais says "it is, but [it's] still possible to optimise/mitigate in the various driver layers".
Though Aoife admits "George R.R Martin's heavy inclusion in the marketing for the game remains rather baffling", in her Essential Eurogamer Elden Ring review, she wrote: "Elden Ring remains a glorious game, one that established fans are going to savour for some time to come, and one that may just welcome new fans into the FromSoft fold.
"Sumptuous visual design, dark and detailed lore and a vast-but-intricate open world are reason enough to venture out into the Lands Between. Add to that FromSoftware's unforgiving and unforgettable gameplay loop and this is something truly special."
Elden Ring creator Hidetaka Miyazaki has said that the challenge of From Software's game is "not something [the studio is] willing to abandon", even though he himself "dies a lot" in games.