Elden Ring's good enough PC gamers will forgive almost anything
Y'know, Elden Ring gets away with a lot... | Sad times: The big Shadow of the Erdtree Elden Ring patch is still tarnished with micro-stutter. And it's not always that micro | Elden Ring's big patch is causing big problems for Steam Deck players
Created for ignoble.experiment@arconati.us | Web Version
Sometimes you can get away with things because you're just so damned good. Elden Ring is a case in point. It's become one of the biggest games on PC, and justifiably so: it's an outstanding game. It knows exactly what it is, reminds gamers exactly what a game is, and does it with a style all its own. It's just soulsy enough for the dedicated Souls fans, and yet open and accessible enough for the people like me—those who really, really, wanted to play Sekiro—to actually have fun in the world without immediately bouncing off before actually getting it.
And that level of excellence means you can get away with a lot. It means you can still be a top PC game despite having an utterly incongruous 60 fps performance cap, despite having no support for ultrawide monitors, and despite being resolutely opposed to keyboard and mouse control. Of course, all of these things can be dealt with by a dedicated PC gamer. You can git gud at the keeb and mouse way of things despite it obviously being created purely for the pad gamer, and you can mod it to remove the cap and widescreen limitations… you may just be punished.
But it can also mean you can get away with just straight-up poor performance. Micro stutter has been an issue with Elden Ring for some players for a long time—though some people sailed through the Lands Between with ne'er a hitch—and it was hoped the big new Shadow of the Erdtree patch accompanying the new DLC's launch might fix that.
Nick's analysis proves it has absolutely not done that, but the experience of other people on the team has also been affected, too. With some who previously had no issue, brute forcing their way through any performance hangups with the GPU equivalent of muscle cars, are now seeing common frame rate drops. Drops significant enough that they equal in-game death.
Not to mention what's happened to the poor folk playing on Steam Deck. Still, it is a great game, and a stunning expansion. But it just wouldn't be PC gaming if there wasn't something shoddy going on.
If you're a long-term player of Elden Ring, you may well have been one of those PC gamers who has suffered from micro-stuttering—very brief but large drops in frame rate—throughout. All kinds of solutions have been bandied around the interwebs for it but none have truly nixed the issue. With the long-awaited expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree, and a massive 20GB patch to the base game, you may have been hoping that FromSoftware has done something about it—but I'm afraid you're out of luck.
The big Elden Ring patch that dropped today ahead of the Shadow of the Erdtree launch does a lot of good things—you can finally change the map key!—but it's causing some headaches for Steam Deck users. "A Steam Deck related issue has been identified and a hotfix is being worked on," FromSoft said. "Leaving your Steam Deck inactive for more than five minutes may stop the game from accepting inputs."
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