Elden Ring

currently 70h in and almost finish the game now and I could say this game is kinda over-rated, got bored after around 40h, kinda get grindy after that 40h mark

 

Finally finished it. Wow I felt like I was just running all the time trying to catch the Elden Beast. It took forever to down it.

 

Would be interesting to see how many people actually completed it, and how many just bought it due to hype, and was like "screw this sh1t".

 

its only steam but

75% of players killed Margit, which is more than I expected.

 

Is that the first boss, or ?

 

First main boss yeah

 

so.. Steam states 40 hours in, it felt like 140 for me. im not enjoying this game and i had a really bad experience with how they implanted a lot of stuff.

didn't finish the game, i guess im somewhere in the middle, the game have some major flaws.. some systems are tedious as frack, some parts are just.. i am done. that's it.

while i adore Dark Souls 3 and finished it several times, i did not like ER. i can't even score it and i won't return to it. guess im in a minority with this title.

this was a better purchase than Andromeda but still a huge let-down for me. happens i guess.

 

Well, it's a survey done by japanese magazine on japanese readers so it's pretty obvious that PS is vastly dominant. I wouldn't really expect those figures to transfer anyhow outside Japan. I mean i'd still expect PS4 to be a larger percentage than PS5 but overall PS as a platform wouldn't have such a vast majority.

 

I loved the game mostly, I felt the end game became a bit of a drag but I also think this game highlights areas of self discipline.
I mean I got so hooked on it, I'll do a full day's work, rest then start the game 21:00 and wouldn't finish until 2:00 in the morning...I had to be up for 7 for work. Rinse and repeat and I started to feel crap, moan at the game for dieing but really it was my fault for playing at stupid times half a sleep.

I would have enjoyed it a lot more had I played my sessions at weekends at a normal time. It's been a long time since I got this hooked on a game. It's very hard to balance when you got work, chores and other things to do. I wonder if that could be where some of the negativity comes from for playing too long sessions.

 

About a week ago I finally finished my first playthrough.

Had a good break, and wasn't really thinking of going back to the game until some DLC would drop. However, I found a mod on Nexus that made me go back, at least out of curiosity.

It's a Randomizer, but not just for Items; it works on Enemies, too (and that's the important part, for me; if it had just been items alone I wouldn't have tried it).

Specifically, this mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/eldenring/mods/428

Here's an example of what I ran into at the very start (after the first death):



Thankfully, it couldn't get through that small opening and I cheesed it with a lot of patience (let it attack thin air, dodge back, hit once; rinse and repeat, took about 2 mins).

Here, more screenshots in case more are curious: https://imgur.com/a/8FZE9uI

Things of note:

- Merchants can have their items randomized (I had that, first merchant at the Church of Elleh sold Demi-Human Ashes among other things).
- I had the first Tree Sentinel replaced by another boss, pretty scary to see that in Limgrave.
- The first dragon encounter at the lake is an ancient dragon boss instead (can't recall the name, I think it's the one that drops from the sky early on in Farum Azula, using red lightning attacks).
- All boss encounters (in actual boss areas) have been randomized in my game so far (it's all across the whole game like this).
- You can find key items very early on, or very powerful items / weapons / gear.
- Encountered an Omen Killer in the Siofra River zone.

Positives of Randomizing stuff:

+ Unpredictable gameplay, you don't know what you'll run into at any given point; makes a new playthrough completely fresh and feels like a legit first playthrough again (with the sole exception of the maps themselves of course)
+ Not for everyone (could be a negative) but since it's randomized you can encounter very powerful enemies early on, or very weak bosses (or the other way around). To me it's a plus since it's somewhat evenly mixed up, it still feels somewhat balanced, funny enough.
+ You can find very powerful items early on (not guaranteed though), so if it does happen any would-be "too powerful" enemies early on can be fought easier that way.
+ The amount of Runes we get from powerful enemies in Limgrave don't exactly allow you to get to Level 100 with easy grinding. It's still balanced enough that you won't bother to kill when you realize they don't always give that much (or as much as you thought they would because they're in Limgrave and normally are found in later zones). It all helps balancing things out a bit.
+ Merchant item randomization can also help finding very useful stuff early on (but Rune prices are well done for the most part, you won't buy everything for cheap early, you do need a good amount of Runes for some stuff nonetheless)

Anything from regular 'weak' enemies you'd normally expect to see on some Limgrave beach like a crab only to be replaced by a Cealid rot dog - to opening treasure chests and finding a crap or a very good item - to running into a mini boss in some unexpected corner in a random arse place in the open or in some normal camp... to me it makes the game feel like Diablo to some degree. How enemy types change everywhere and items are shuffled and replaced all across the game really makes the game feel new to me. I love it.

It can be very difficult on occasion though. There's some VERY high early difficulty spikes if you run into something like a Marionette soldier and a rot Knight guarding a camp, or - like it is the case in my game right now - running into some ancient Dragon at the first Limgrave lake. I actually had to simply avoid some fights entirely. But I also found pretty good items by around Level 20 or so. I actually found an Omen Killer Cleaver at around Level 16, had to wait until I got my Strength to 23 to use it though, but now it's carrying me to most places I had to avoid prior.

It's amazing really, love it. I always loved randomizers for my favorite games. I wish they'd happen more often.

Now I'm not sure if my current randomized playthrough is something I want to push until the end, again. It's still a colossal game anyway and even though I'm having a lot of fun I think I'll just stop after I'm done with Limgrave and Godrick's castle, maybe have a peak look in Cealid but that will be it, I think. My first playthrough is still too recent I think, still a bit burnt by it.

 

the bosses are the weakest part of the game some are epic but they all too skewed to cheese or ranged or get gud you dont get curb stompy melee wise till very high rune levels. think maxed can one shot every boss and face tank the entire game. but a mage or cheese run can do that early on some bosses.



especially low level melee will feel like a chore, mid level after a ton of grind it starts to open up, and still grinding away. ;p the world and lore is where the game shines might give the randomizer a go after i grind up some more levels wonder what the randomizer might do to those spots?

 

I finally had the courage to buy the PC version of Elden Ring yesterday expecting it to at least run better after several patches than the much-criticised launch version which Digital Foundry covered in depth.

To my surprise, the game runs very well on my ageing i7-4770K and new RTX 3080 setup without any of the constant stuttering that Digital Foundry reported in their videos. There are framerate "hiccups" from time to time but they were fairly rare for the 5 hours or so I played it last night. I am playing at 1440p on max settings and the game seems to hold 60 fps for about 99% of the time, only dropping below that while traversing the open world and, even then, G-SYNC helps makes these dips less noticeable and keeps the game feeling smooth to play. All good stuff.

One oddity though which I noticed while using the RTSS overlay is that this game is seemingly so undemanding on my GPU that the clock speeds for the core and memory actually drop to the low-power values, especially while exploring indoor locations where there is less strain on the graphics card to render far into the distance like outdoor areas. I saw the core drop to 600-800 MHz and the memory drop from 10 GHz to 5 GHz and even lower. The annoying thing about this is that these clock drops coincide with framerate drops to 57-59 fps (this game is capped at 60 fps, unfortunately). I tried forcing Prefer max performance in the NVIDIA control panel profile for the game but it doesn't seem to work properly and the game still drops clock speeds.

Is there any way to get this game to run with full clock speeds on the RTX 3080? I'm sure that this would fix the framerate drops as the game is hardly pushing the CPU at all and GPU is also very low. I cannot say that I am really surprised as visually this game looks very similar to Dark Souls III etc as it uses the same engine.

 

https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Bellum+Church

This area will make a GPU, and by extension, the user, sad. Performance is difficult around that area. 3080 at 1440p will be fine of course but 4K, not so happy.

Actually while running at 4K/60 OK most of the time overall a better GPU than 3080 is needed to lock things down.

I'm legit scared of next-gen TDP reports, though. *sigh*

edit

The game has been fine to play through since 1.04.1 in my experience. I didn't notice any glaring problems from shader compilation or whatever.

edit 2

Some areas are pushing the CPU to 40% and Elden Ring likes single core perf. Using the mod to remove the frame rate cap and running the game at 1080p I was surprised how little headroom was left on my 5600.

The GPU clock thing I don't know how to solve, sorry.

 

Sorry for double post but something that bothers me about this game is how this performs on console vs similar PC GPUs.

During the same scene, a 1080 Ti easily handles this at 1440p, whereas the Series X perf is crippled and performance mode bottoms out at like 1512p. Not much of a difference!

 

I bought elden ring recently, still pretty early but I have to say I haven't experienced a single stutter in the open world even when riding.

Playing at 1440p and the GPU isn't really taxed at all. CPU usage seems pretty modest too.

 

Yeah things have been OK for a while TBH. Stuttering was never that intrusive in my opinion given the reputation it had for being disastrous to the experience.

CPU requirements aren't high but CPU doesn't scale very well, much like the performance in the game generally. My 5600 isn't being used very well here.