Elden Ring, My Frame Rate, and a Weekend I'm Not Getting Back

Okay so I was going to write something about all the corporate Russia pullouts this week — everybody suspending sales, Netflix pulling out, the whole cascade — but honestly every tech site on earth is already covering that hour by hour and I don't have anything to add that you haven't read three times already. So instead: Elden Ring.

I bought it the day it came out, which was the 25th, and I have now lost an embarrassing chunk of the last week and a half to it. Sixty bucks, and I'm not even mad about the price, which is rare for me because I complain about full-price games constantly. What I am mad about is my frame rate.

Here's the thing nobody tells you if you haven't played a FromSoftware game before: these guys have never once shipped a clean PC port. Not once. Dark Souls 1 on PC launched locked at 30fps and the community had to build an unofficial fix (DSfix, if you remember that saga) just to get it running properly. Eleven years later and Elden Ring does the exact same trick: hard capped at 60fps even if your rig could push way past that, and on top of the cap you get these ugly stutters every time the game has to compile a new shader or stream in a new area. It's not subtle. You're mid-fight with some horse general boss and the game just seizes for half a second while a texture loads. Cost me a death against Margit that I'm still bitter about, three separate attempts before I finally got him down, and at least one of those deaths was a stutter-induced hitbox thing that had nothing to do with my actual skill.

I ended up dropping down to a lower resolution just to smooth things out, which feels backwards on a system I built specifically to not have to do that. And yes I know there's a day one patch, and yes I installed it, and no it didn't fix the traversal stutter, it just fixed some of the worse frame pacing stuff. Digital Foundry did a whole breakdown on this if you want the technical version with actual frame time graphs instead of my anecdotal griping.

None of this stopped it from selling an absurd amount, by the way. It hit something like 900,000 concurrent players on Steam within a couple days of launch, which put it up there with the biggest single-player releases Steam has ever seen. So clearly the jank isn't stopping anybody, myself very much included. I just think it's funny that a studio can put out one of the most acclaimed open world games in years and still ship it with the exact same performance complaints as a decade ago. Some things don't change. Miyazaki could release the greatest game ever made wrapped in a broken exe file and it would still sell eight million copies in a month.

Small unrelated aside: the day one patch was something like 3.6GB on top of the base install, and my ISP decided that Friday night, prime download time, was the moment to throttle everything to a crawl. Forty minutes for a patch that should've taken six. I've complained about this exact provider on this blog before, back in like 2019, and nothing has improved. If anything it's worse now that everyone in the building is streaming something at 9pm on a weeknight.

Anyway. I'm at maybe twenty hours in, I have consulted zero guides on purpose because I want the full lost-and-confused experience, and I still haven't found whatever the game wants me to do with the giant statue thing outside Stormveil. My cat walked across my keyboard during a boss attempt on Tuesday and got me killed, which I'm choosing to blame entirely on her and not on my own reflexes. There's a lesson in there about closing the office door but I haven't learned it yet.

If you're on the fence about picking it up: the world design is genuinely something else, worth every bit of the hype, and the performance stuff is annoying but not a dealbreaker unless you're the type who can't stand a hitch in your frame times. I am apparently exactly that type of person and I'm still thirty hours deep by the time you read this, so take that assessment for what it's worth.