I preloaded Elden Ring on Wednesday night and then didn't touch it until Friday, because Thursday was Thursday and none of us got much done that day. You know the day I mean. I sat there with the game fully downloaded and ready to go and just... read the news instead, refreshing three different tabs like that was going to change anything. Weird week to have a hundred-gig open world game sitting on your hard drive.
Anyway. I did eventually start playing, Friday night, and I want to talk about that instead of the other thing, because everybody else on the internet is already covering the other thing and doing it better than I could.
So, Elden Ring. It came out February 25th, FromSoftware and Bandai Namco, with George R.R. Martin credited for the world-building (not the actual writing, from what I understand, more like he built the skeleton of the lore and then the FromSoft team ran off with it). Sixty bucks on Steam, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series and Xbox One. First thing I'll say: it's the first genuinely open-world Souls game and I have complicated feelings about that. Dark Souls games have always had this incredible sense of geography, where areas loop back on each other and a shortcut you unlock three hours in suddenly connects to something you saw at the very beginning. That trick doesn't really work the same way when you're on a horse galloping across a giant field. The Lands Between is gorgeous, genuinely, and there's a real joy in just riding Torrent (that's the horse, you get him almost immediately) toward some ruin on the horizon with zero idea what's in it. But I also spent forty minutes on Thursday night wandering around looking for a specific catacomb the game had clearly hinted at and just... never found it. Closed the laptop annoyed. Souls games have never held your hand, fine, that's the whole appeal, but there's a difference between "the game trusts you" and "the map is enormous and nothing is marked and good luck."
I died to the first major boss eleven times before I looked up a strategy, which is a personal record of restraint for me, actually, since normally I cave after three.
The thing I keep noticing is how quiet everything about the game's release ended up feeling, given how big a deal it is. Under a normal news week this would've eaten the whole tech and gaming internet for four or five straight days. It still did, some, but it's sharing space with everything else going on, and that's a strange thing to sit with as someone who writes about tech stuff on a blog for fun. Feels a little absurd typing up boss strategies against the backdrop of what's actually happening in the world right now. I'm doing it anyway because I think normal dumb hobbies are allowed to keep existing even during bad weeks, maybe especially during bad weeks, but I'm aware of the contrast.
One more small thing, buried by all of this, that I noticed and almost nobody I know has mentioned: Nvidia confirmed a few days back, February 23rd, that they'd had some kind of security incident, network access limited for a stretch, some employee credentials and internal data apparently accessed by whoever got in. In a normal week that's a real story on its own, a company that size getting into your GPU drivers and your gaming rigs having its internal systems poked at. This week it barely registered as a blip. Funny how that works. The same story dropped in July would've been the only thing anyone in my feeds talked about for three days.
I also almost bought a new graphics card this week to run Elden Ring at something better than the medium settings my aging 1660 Super is currently managing, took one look at current GPU prices, and closed the tab immediately. Still stupid out there. I'll live with 45 fps in Limgrave, it's fine, it's actually fine, I keep telling myself that.
Going back in tonight. There's apparently an entire legacy dungeon I walked straight past because I went the wrong way out of the first big lake area, which feels about right for how this game is designed. No hand-holding, no marker, just vibes and a horse. I'll take it, mostly. Ask me again in a week when I'm still stuck on whatever's past that dungeon.