I didn't want to buy this yet. I wanted to wait until it was cheaper. In Australia, this thing is $90 and I just didn't want to spend that much on a game that wasn't Bethesda-made or Bioware-made. 😅 I know I can refund things before the 2-hour-mark if I don't like something, but still, it's nearly a hundred bucks.
But I have a couple of friends playing it, one of whom is constantly raving about its glory, and I've been seeing chat about it in various Discords I lurk in, and I've been seeing posts about it here on Hive, and and and... I succumbed! I bought it this morning! I downloaded it this morning! And I spent all day playing the damned thing!
And now I wish to become yet another person sharing my first impressions of this alleged masterpiece.
Unfortunately, my very first impressions of this game weren't so great. Mainly because this is a console port and controller seems to be the default option for the gameplay.
The first thing I do when I open any game is to dive into the settings and adjust things. Naturally, I did that with this. However, all of the back/next/accept/help/etc options were given in controller format and I had no idea what keys to press to modify things.
I actually had to google to find out how I could change the UI to be more appropriate for PC, but once I got that out of the way, I was able to adjust things with ease.
At last, with the settings and UI sorted, it was time to create my character.
I was a bit disappointed with the fact that each class is right there in front of you to select, but there is no information about each class. You can press a button to see their strengths and whatnot, but there is nothing that tells you about them.
Once again, I had to google to find out information.
I've had to alt-tab twice now, before even starting the game. That's awful.
After reading a website for all the details about the classes I can select, I decided to go with the Bandit. Apparently the Bandit is quick, agile, good at stealth, good with melee and bows, and also starts off with a high arcane stat which is apparently good for loot finding.
It sounded perfect for me! I was thinking of going more into a pure magical class, but this sounded more like my type of playstyle.
As always, I'm a massive fan of character customisation. And Elden Ring's character creator, while very, very reminiscent of TES: Oblivion's character creator, didn't disappoint.
When I compare it to Oblivion's character creator I mean that when you adjust the sliders for your character's face, everything else slides around too, as in the gif above sliding the one slider.
It was a bit irritating at first to get the hang of and there is massive ability to create the most fugliest player characters in existence, but I managed to create a somewhat decent person who didn't look like a caricature of an alien.
Not going to lie - I was 85 minutes into my play-time of this game, before actually even entering the game. 😂
But at last my character was acceptable and it was time to dive into this much-acclaimed game.
I can tell you, straight off the bat, that from the very moment actual gameplay started I began to experience the stuttering and framedrops that people have been complaining about.
I endeavoured to just endure it. Until, after leaving what I assume to be this tutorial area teaching you how to do a few things, I was attacking some animals for their small bones and feathers... not sure why; just in case I needed them...
...and the game crashed.
I decided to take advantage of that crash and investigate, to see if there were any player-made-fixes created while the developers were twiddling their thumbs.
My tech is way above spec so that's not an issue, plus, people with super high-end systems are complaining so it's not just me.
Unfortunately there are no Unofficial Patches created just yet so I had to do the typical things like expand my cache, make sure the program was running at high priority, making sure my nvidia graphics card was actually force-selected so the game wouldn't try to use the intel one, etc etc etc. At last it was time to open the game again, completely disable motion blur and depth of field, and see if all this stuff worked or not.
First of all, the game proceeded to admonish me for not quitting it properly when it, in fact, crashed. 🙄 I ridiculed that, a lot.
Anyway. My fixes didn't work.
Then I read a recommendation in the Discussions page. Turn the game offline. I'm not going to be playing with anyone and most of the messages left lying around are for lolz, so I don't care to read them anyway. 🤷♀ So I set it to offline mode, relaunched the game, and...
!!!~I'm pleased to announce that the moment I turned it "offline" I no longer suffered such immense frame drops and game freezing and horrible, horrible stuttering~!!!
I mean, I still get a couple, but not to the extent I was.
Now that the game was in a slightly more playable state, I could actually play the damned thing!
I found a strange person who turned out to be a vendor and proceeded to buy the crafting kit they recommended. I also grabbed a nomadic cookbook, just because. Turns out that was a good thing because the crafting kit alone doesn't allow you to craft arrows, but the nomadic cookbook does!
Hooray! Plenty of arrows! Especially considering I'm murdering every tiny creature I come across so I have plenty of feathers and bones to craft the things.
Because I'm an impatient bugger and have never played these types of games before, I couldn't work out how to level up so alt-tabbed, once again, to use Google to figure it out. Turns out I had to go to a specific "grace" to stop being maidenless and start getting some power.
So I did. And met a little lady named Melina. And at last I could spend runes on levelling up as well as at strange people's shops.
With that knowledge under my belt, I decided it was exploring time. Mostly so I could gather more materials required for crafting more arrows, haha.
I chose the Bandit to be a bow-and-arrow character, but I've been stabbing things this whole time because I ran out of arrows in the tutorial area. It was nice to at last have arrows again!
Also, I wanted to get enough runes to level up a teeny bit and also wanted to buy the other "cookbooks" too. They're probably available elsewhere, but being the type of person I am I want them now.
Although I'm enjoying the bow and arrows playstyle, I soon discovered that I actually preferred the art of sneaking in the bushes, waiting for enemies to turn their backs, and crit-stabbing them into a quick submission.
Might try and find dual daggers, if I can, alongside my bow. 😁
Unfortunately, trying to sneak up in big, bad enemies and stab them in the butt is most ineffective. 🤣
Honestly, at the moment I'm mostly enjoying this, although a part of me is wishing that I waited a couple more weeks for various patches to be implemented. The amount of times I've died not to challenging bosses or mechanics, but to frames dropping all the way to zero during combat... it grinds my gears.
These performance issues are absolutely ridiculous. People have shat on and review-bombed other games for less than this. Now thousands of people are experiencing horrible performance and optimisation with Elden Ring, yet it's lauded as the greatest masterpiece to hit their harddrives.
I'm sorry.
Just because George R R Martin has written an epic story in quite a graphically pleasing world doesn't mean this game should be rated so positively. There are issues, they need to be acknowledged, and they needed to be resolved.
I'm only at the very, very, very start of the game. And I'm so very optimistically positive that this will be something I'll love and enjoy so much, after all, I'm enjoying it despite this god-awful performance.
But, I can't recommend anyone actually spend $90 AUD on this until optimisation for PC is sorted out. It's truly unacceptable.
I'm going to keep powering through anyway because I have faith that it'll be fixed in the near future -- surely. It HAS to be fixed in the near future -- but I'm sure as hell going to be quite grumpy about it.
Until next time! ⚔️
All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, 