It’s the big game everyone’s talking about! So I guess I’ll talk about it too!

My experience with the Souls series is a bit scattered. I rented Demon’s Souls on PS3 (yeah renting was still a bit of a thing back then), found it okay but didn’t fully get what was up with it at the time, didn’t end up getting too far into it during my rental. Played a good portion of Dark Souls 1 but not 2 and 3. Enjoyed it decently. Got Bloodborne at launch, really liked that one a lot. Got Sekiro at launch, it is my favorite of the series. And, finally, got Elden Ring at launch, after not being… particularly hyped for it.

The reviews kinda blow my mind because, while Souls games do review very well, this was getting 10/10 scores all over the place, and no game deserves a 10/10… So I was approaching this game with a lot of skepticism. Games that get this kind of hype (from shitty game journo reviewers) tend to get it very… unwarrantedly? Is that a word? Especially when it’s Souls, which is a series that game journo types tend to complain about for extremely stupid reasons, such as them being “too hard” (and trying to make that into an accessibility issue… which it isn’t, game difficulty is never an accessibility issue and anyone who says otherwise is either stupid or lying).

So let’s go and see if this is the good shit or if the scores are dumb!

Developer: FromSoftware
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Release date: February 25th, 2022
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox Series X/S (PC version played)
Genre: Dark Souls

Review

I have no idea what’s going on here story-wise. Maybe if you really dig into the lore there’s something there. You play as a somehow-revived person called a Tarnished, who will quest to find the Elden Ring and… I dunno. Do something. It’s not very explained. The Elden Ring is in the Eldtree. There’s barely any actual plot here. It’s clearly some post-apocalyptic world of sorts, but it’s not clear what your objective really is, even by the time you finish the game. And considering most of the endings are the same with slightly different colors (with 2 exceptions)…that’s also not very helpful. Can’t say I found any of the story to be interesting, but I’m not super into FromSoftware’s general storytelling in most Souls games. Donkey Kong in the arcades has an objectively better-told story than Elden Ring.

On the graphic side of things, as long as you don’t zoom into anything, the game generally looks pretty great. Some specific areas are amazing, like seeing Leyndell from a higher viewpoint. A lot of areas have their own atmosphere, from the blood-tinged wastelands of Caelid, the stormy snowy mountain, the greenery of the starting area, the beautiful underground area that I forget the name of, the magical foggy swamp, and various other places. They’re all pretty much different kinds of wastelands though, with mostly wild violent inhabitants that don’t…. produce anything. That’s something that’s not really talked about so I guess you don’t need to care that a world where no one does anything still somehow functions. The world is not only extremely varied but also quite big. In a way not quite as big as you may think while playing through the game, but I’ll talk about the open world concept a bit later since that’s gameplay. Enemies are designed pretty well from a gameplay perspective, as you can pretty much tell what kind of attacks and such they’ll do just from looking at them (except for Ulcerated Tree Spirits I guess, those are dumb jumbles of senseless garbage). They might not all be super interesting to look at (a bunch of them are just regular people wearing armor), but at least they make sense. Not that there aren’t some cool enemies here and there, there are plenty of dragons and there’s Astel if you do the questline that leads to him and there are giants and weird decomposing animals that are probably just cut enemies from Bloodborne. And then there are the weird statue cat things that look awful.

Gameplay-wise I’ll start with the stuff that is the same as other Souls games.

You start the game by building a character. There are different character classes, each with different starting stats, levels, and equipment. You also start with an item of your choice from a selection, I’m sure some of those are important. Physical changes to the character (face and stuff) do not affect gameplay, but you can do it for fun, there are a lot of options. Character building is a bit of an ongoing thing of course since you can change your look not just as far as body customization, but with the different armors, you find. Which is actually a point against the character creation since armor just hides everything you spent your time creating at the start. Eh. It’s there, have fun with it if you like.

Combat is copy-pasted from Dark Souls, mostly. Of course, there are better jump attack options since there’s a dedicated jump button (similar to Sekiro), but otherwise, you know what you’re getting. You can block, which obviously works better with a shield. Some shields can parry attacks, though the timing is rather strict and enemies in Souls do like having really funky attacks that never come out when you expect them. Parrying is a strong option though, as it stuns enemies (bosses tend to require multiple parries before getting stunned), allowing for a badass stab attack that does a lot of damage. You can dodge, either with a backstep or dodge rolls or just plain running. Dodging is a set distance (based on weight/load, if you’re heavy your dodge really ends up not being as good… though it does have its uses apparently), so you do need to really take range into account when going in for an attack or avoiding an attack. Enemies tend to not react much to your attacks, though it depends. Smaller enemies will generally get interrupted by your strong attacks, some especially weak enemies might even get interrupted by normal attacks, but bigger enemies will generally not, though there may be specific parts of their attack/movements patterns where they will, and strong charged attacks may have a better chance at interrupting.

A big option in battle is magic, which I have not experimented with but have seen how amazing those can be. Special attacks can also be wildly powerful, I’ve seen that in the first sub-30 minutes speedrun. If you’re a big dumb like me and didn’t use either, your FP will be used once per battle to use Spirit Ashes to summon allies, basically spirit versions of enemies you fight, that will instead support you. The main use of these isn’t quite for those summons to deal damage, but rather to take some of the enemy’s aggro so you can get hits in easier. Of course, you can play co-op for a similar effect, but I played fully offline so I saw none of that. Probably the best Spirit Ash you can find is for the Mimic Tear, which actually cost HP to summon rather than FP… not gonna spoil it but it’s very powerful, as it can actually deal lots of damage. It especially helps if you’re running a bleed-focused build.

My main complaint about the combat is largely the reason Souls works as it does in the first place, and as such, it kind of isn’t a complaint. In a non-souls game, enemies would have patterns of sorts, and you’d find moments where you can attack them and such. Here… enemies are basically constantly attacking, especially bosses. What annoys me about that is that it can be really tough to get out of a bad situation (enemies are so relentless that even being able to run away to heal is frequently complicated), getting hit once is frequently a death sentence if you’re hit during a combo or something. Some attacks are very heavily telegraphed, while some aren’t at all and you just kinda have to know it’s coming, and some of the attack timings are totally fucked… but it’s all by design. You get hit so you start panic dodging? The enemy’s follow-up attack may be designed specifically to hit you in-between panic dodges. And you can mitigate this “problem” with Spirit Ashes, or by just learning the mechanics more. Any real complaints? Yeah, the camera is ASS. If an enemy gets you close to a wall or a corner, you’re fucked.

Killing enemies gives you runes. You can use those to level up. There are a bunch of stats you can level up, but each level increases the rune cost of the next level. They all have fairly straightforward uses. Some weapons scale their damage based on stats (like, bows scale to dex, certain melee weapons scale to strength or dex), some equipment will be weaker if you don’t have the correct stats, spells will require the correct magic stat (there’s like 4 magic stats I think), vigor gives you defense and HP, endurance allows you to carry more weight which is super useful (and also gives you more stamina so you can dodge and attack and block more often). If you die you lose your current runes (very annoying when you happen to have enough to level but fail to get to a Grace (this game’s version of bonfires)),  but if you get back to the spot you died you can get the lost runes back (there’s a few cases where I was getting less than I had at first, not sure why that happened). The other main way to get stronger is to power up your weapons at the blacksmith, who requires smithing stones of different levels, and a couple of runes. And finally, later down the line, you unlock Spirit Tuning, which enables you to power up Spirit Ashes using specific types of flowers and some runes.

What sets this apart from other Souls games is the open world. While other Souls games seem semi-open, they’re more like metroidvanias with multiple paths, and you unlock shortcuts between sections for faster travel as you progress. Here, it’s a big world. Open worlds are very hard to make well, and as such almost no game has an open world that’s actually worthwhile. How about Elden Ring? I think it’s one of the better examples, but even a good open world still has massive issues… Namely, despite having a huge map with just a shitload of things in it… it could do with being, like, half as big. There’s just a bit too much of just literally horsing around the map not actually interacting with the gameplay mechanics. This is always a big problem with open world games, and Elden Ring doesn’t avoid it. This isn’t particularly helped by the fact that you can absolutely avoid every non-boss enemy in the game, so the kinda boring traveling

But enough of the bad, let’s talk about the good… and there’s a lot, surprisingly. One of the other big problems that this game actually avoids is the map covered in icons with things to pick up, that all aren’t interesting to do (Ghost of Tsushima was particularly guilty of that problem, with every icon on the map being garbage content that is little more than pressing X in front of a thing). This game? It avoids that issue pretty much entirely. The map? It has almost no icons except specific landmarks you actually found, the main ones being Graces (which, again, are like bonfires… and also fast travel points). There’s also gonna be telescopes, certain ruins, and minor erdtrees, but mostly, the map is empty. There’s drawing on it that may actually be things (like Evergaol locations are mostly pretty obvious on the map, as are some of the caves). The map is actually pretty cool because you can put your own waypoints on it, and that’s mostly what it will serve. Looking at how it’s drawn may give you hints as to where there may be interesting spots, but that’s about it. Discovering things in the world is about following the Graces (some of them literally point you in the direction of story or sidequest progression) or just… looking around and finding stuff. Despite my previous complaint about the world being too big, it’s still fairly densely packed.

What can you find around the world? Well, there’s minibosses all over the damn place, there are Evergaols which are also minibosses, there are ruins which will have some hidden treasure, there are divine towers where you bring great runes you get from bosses to revive their powers, there are these little towers with puzzles to open them that might also have good stuff, there are catacombs and caves which are basically mini-dungeons that function more like normal Souls areas, there are pickups all over the place like Golden Seeds to get more potions or just general items for crafting and upgrading, there are churches which will always have a Grace and Sacred Tears to improve potion effectiveness, houses with NPCs, merchants… and more. And some areas of the game are more closed-off and also function more like a regular Souls game, like some of the castles… What’s really cool overall is that every interesting spot like minibosses, caves, catacombs, ruins, they all actually reward you for finding and beating them. You’re gonna find armor pieces, weapons, spells of different types, important materials for upgrades, and runes from beating boss/miniboss fights. A reward might not specifically be something you’ll be happy about every time, but you never know when you’ll find a new main spell or weapon… maybe not, but maybe. I think it’s cool that there’s a legitimate reason to actually do all the side shit. I mean, you notice a catacomb, why not go in and see if there’s something good?

Because of the game being open-world and allowing you to explore a lot, this means there’s less grinding (even though it’s totally still a thing if you want), and fewer “I’ve been stuck on this boss for 10 years” moments. While skill is obviously useful to have and knowing the basics of how enemies act in general and how you’re meant to be dodging and blocking and such, a lot of enemies can totally end up basically being “if you’re strong enough you’ll kill me by basically just mashing”. If a boss is wrecking you, well, the game is open world, just go somewhere else, maybe do optional stuff, get new weapons, level up, power up weapons, find new summoning ashes, power those up, get new armor, beat different bosses… By the time you get back to the boss that gave you trouble, you’ll probably wreck them. While this is something you can kinda do in other souls games, grinding for souls/blood echos/runes and powering up, here it’s a bit more interesting because you’re not just killing the same things over and over for souls, you actually do more meaningful content.

There are no difficult bosses because you can always get much stronger before fighting them. Maybe you’ll find a weapon that you’re more comfortable with. Maybe you’ll find a broken-ass spell if you’re going the magic route like the Kamehameha beam that just wrecks everything. Maybe you’ll get enough runes for a couple of strength levels and just be stronger for your next attempt. Maybe you’ll find the Mimic Tear and no longer have any challenge left (kinda, some bosses are still a bit tough but it makes things so much easier). You can be a tryhard and bash your head against the brick wall bosses, or you can… do other stuff, get stronger, and win. This game kinda lets you play it like you want to. If you want the bosses to be hard, you can totally do that, of course. Elden Ring is on the “pretty easy” side of things mostly because you can git gud very easily, but if you don’t want it to be hard, go for it.

I think the funnest thing about this game is that you can play it however you want. Maybe you’re a big dumb like me that does nothing but dodge rolling and hitting things with swords. There’s a bunch of different weapon types so maybe you prefer hammers over swords. Maybe you’re a bit more about focusing on defense to so you learn the timing for parries, which stun enemies to get them some crits in (I gave up on parries very early, I find the timing to be funky as shit and bosses end up requiring several parries in a row before being stunned.. but if you git gud that’s totally a valid strategy).  Maybe you’re all about magic and just fucking up everything’s shit from afar. Maybe you’re just good at the game and destroy everything with a big ax while only wearing underwear. There are lots of ways to play.

Honestly, there’s a bunch of little things I didn’t mention, but there’s a weird amount of gameplay mechanics at play here. Like The Flask of Wondrous Physic, or the horse (which you can somewhat “Skyrim Horse” with and get to places early), or bells, or how side questing works (it kinda doesn’t, but it kinda does… take notes is the only thing I can say… also there are some incomplete quest lines because lol). Heck, speaking of sidequests, I barely did any of them. I have not even SEEN Rogier, I just see him all over the place in streams and videos though. You don’t “need” to do any of that stuff, though some endings are tied to sidequests.

PC Performance

I did note at the top of this review that I played this on PC, and certainly, you must have heard that the PC version has issues. This is always a bit of a weird thing to talk about because every PC is a little bit different. My 3700X CPU and 3060 Ti GPU ran the game fine. This isn’t top-level hardware (previous-gen Ryzen CPU, pretty good GPU but there are several better ones in the 30-series), but it IS very good nonetheless. I was running it at 1440p, every graphical setting on high except for grass which I put on medium for literally no reason (I hadn’t even gotten into the game yet, I changed that before creating my character). I had occasional stutters (and some areas had more trouble than others), some of which didn’t affect the framerate according to MSI Afterburner, some that did. It would occasionally come down to ~54fps, and I’ve seen it drop to ~40fps once or twice. Generally, I was pegged at 60fps though. The longer I ran the game the less often the stutters happened, so there’s gotta be some weird loading issues that contribute to the stutters. THAT said… capped at 60fps, really? Why? For most of the playthrough, GPU and CPU usage didn’t go above for the most part60% (and generally stayed in the 45-55% range), so obviously I should have been able to easily go higher than 60fps if it weren’t for the cap.

Other than the very occasional stutters, the only other issue I’ve had was loading. Generally, it was fine, largely because the game doesn’t go into load screens very often (unless you’re dying a lot), and when it does it’s only 2-5 seconds long… except one time where the load bar just stopped going up and the game stopped loading. No idea why. The loading times were very random, sometimes they were shorter, sometimes they were longer, it only stopped loading the one time.

Overall it ran fine. There are some optimization issues here because modern devs are idiots who develop their games for console first then port up for PC (it should be the other way around, obviously). This is pretty clear because most of the textures don’t look like anything a PS4 couldn’t handle and some of the effects they use (like what they do for fur/hair on some enemies) is taken straight from previous games and look awful if you zoom in (which the game occasionally does in cutscenes). But overall this wasn’t nearly as bad as I’ve heard, for me. Your mileage may vary. They do definitely gotta dump that shitty anti-cheat DRM garbo though, I assume that’s causing at least some of the issues (and a guy is going around hacking peoples’ inventories to get them banned, to prove that the anti-cheat is worthless… yay for playing offline), and start optimizing this a bunch so you can run it at an actual framerate.

Completely random side note, if you follow Bitwit on youtube you may know this from one of his latest videos, but if you have RGB software on your PC, make sure it didn’t install the Patriot M.2 software alongside it. If it did, uninstall that (unless you’re actually using a Patriot M.2 drive, probably). If you’ve been having weird issues with your PC (may it be weird stuttering, software freezing, or even crashes), that might be the culprit. This actually fixed issues I was having not only with Elden Ring but also other games recently. Gigabyte just bundles that Patriot M.2 software with its RGB Fusion software, without telling you it’s gonna do that, and that causes performance issues for the whole PC (and it’s not just Gigabyte, some other companies also do that… it’s for weird compatibility issues with Patriot M.2 drive, I assume, but why install it if the person doesn’t have a Patriot M.2 drive?).

Overall

Elden Ring is pretty good. I’d put it around the level of basically any other Souls game, they’re all very similar in my experience other than Sekiro. Speaking of, I still put this below Sekiro, but yeah, it’s good stuff. It is a bit easier than other Souls games, but it’s largely because of the large open world and the ability to just go do what you want elsewhere, get stronger, and then come back and just win easily against the boss you were previously stuck against. While skill IS important, most bosses become partly stat checks rather than pure skill checks.

The big differentiating feature here is the open world. Open world is a very difficult thing for games to do well. One of the very few kinda-good examples of an open world is Breath of the Wild, but it maintains some of the problems every other open world has. How about Elden Ring? Well… I’d put it around the same level as Breath of the Wild. The lack of baked-in waypoints on the map is actually great so exploration is more natural, it’s MASSIVE but it still has pretty okay content density. It still has issues like being TOO big and, thus, having a lot of time being wasted just running around not actually playing the game, but I do like the world itself. There are rewards for exploring such as finding minibosses, finding catacombs, and finding caves, and those finds have their own rewards such as finding magic, finding ashes, and finding weapons and armor. It doesn’t completely fail as far as the open world which is very rare.

If I had any big issues here, it would be the lack of a very minimal journal feature. I’d keep it very vague, but just have a note that you do, indeed, have side-quests ongoing. No need for major descriptions or waypoints or anything like that, just a note of “this guy asked for help” would be more than enough. Also, for main quest progress, there are a few times where there’s literally no direction other than remembering if you went down a certain path or not. Most of the time the game does actually point you in the direction you need to go, but there are a couple of cases where it doesn’t quite do so and the map, as good as it is, isn’t quite helpful. And the camera needs to suck less, of course.

This game gets a good recommendation from me, pretty obviously. I mean, everyone’s talking about it, it’s getting massive scores everywhere, yeah you probably are already checking it out. The 10/10 scores are not warranted (10/10 is an impossible score), but I can see why it’s getting a positive response and I largely agree with it. I’d recommend Sekiro before Elden Ring, but this is definitely worth your time.

Now PLEASE FromSoftware, make a new game. Dark Souls is fine, but I’m sure you can make something different for once. Maybe bring back Lost Kingdoms.