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Wednesday, March 02, 2022
Old Man Ring - Part 4
While I will continue to play Elden Ring some more, I will stop blogging daily about it. Not sure if there will be a part 5 of this series at all, but it won't be tomorrow. In this last past I will talk about the elephant in the room, the reason why user reviews for Elden Ring are less positive than critics reviews: Technical game performance.
I followed about a dozen different pieces of advice to change various settings in Windows, with the display drivers, and inside the game. But Elden Ring is still stuttering on my Nvidia Geforce RTX 2070, which is not a bad graphics card. Actually it feels as if the problem doesn't have anything to do with the graphics card at all, rather the game in random intervals freezes for a second or two, and then plays the events of those 2 seconds in fast forward. As you can't really control your character that way, you probably die if that happens while you were in a boss fight, or running towards a cliff. I'd call it "lag", but then I am playing offline, so the term wouldn't be correct either. In any case, I am just one of many people who are having problem with the technical performance of Elden Ring, and in a game which is all about microsecond reaction time, stuttering is very bad.
There is probably going to be a patch that improves stuttering in the foreseeable future. However, while we are at it, it has to be said that Elden Ring simply is programmed rather badly. Once you use cheat modes and are less worried about battling monsters, you realize that you spend a lot of time battling the user interface, which is godawful. Just look at the very simple and fundamental operation of quitting the game: The number of operations and the time it takes to do this in Elden Ring is staggering. You can't just press ESC a couple of times and be out.
I have the impression that in a game this dark and gloomy, which is all about punishing the player, the players think that the lack of UI quality of life features is just part of the design philosophy. But me, coming at Elden Ring with a background of MMORPGs, not souls games, I notice how much worse Elden Ring is with regards to controls in comparison. Also, Elden Ring isn't very friendly to new players, because it refuses to explain how the game works. The tutorial is just covering some basics, and for example never explained to me how to sprint or sprint-jump. I constantly find items of which I have no idea what they do in the game. And finding out whether the new weapon you just found is better or worse than the weapon you have is very difficult if you haven't played the previous games, because there is a page full of rather meaningless stats and you don't know which ones are important.
Don't get me wrong, Elden Ring certainly has its good side, and some entertaining potential, even for me as a slow old man. But sorry, the current Metacritic score of 97 is just overhyped. For a game to have such a score, it would have to be technically excellent and user-friendly, which Elden Ring certainly isn't.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:07 AM Permanent Link
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I agree with pretty much everything you said here. The UI for these games is bad. It's not new player friendly at all.
The weapon stats are also misleading because of how the scaling and damage types work so you can run into situations where you think a weapon should be better because it has higher numbers but it actually does less damage when you use it.
Fromsoftware's games have so many things you just either need to know from previous experience or be willing to look up if you really want to min max your character.
The review score stuff is always nonsense because scores are so subjective. I'm someone who loves these games and gets a lot of enjoyment out of them. So for me yes Eldenring is a 10/10 so far because it is the best version of these games. It basically took all the best bits from their other games and smashed them into one and added an open world. But I totally understand why new players especially or people who aren't as into the games as me would rate it lower. Just for the UI and technical issues it probably deserves to get dinged in most scores.
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The weapon stats are also misleading because of how the scaling and damage types work so you can run into situations where you think a weapon should be better because it has higher numbers but it actually does less damage when you use it.
Fromsoftware's games have so many things you just either need to know from previous experience or be willing to look up if you really want to min max your character.
The review score stuff is always nonsense because scores are so subjective. I'm someone who loves these games and gets a lot of enjoyment out of them. So for me yes Eldenring is a 10/10 so far because it is the best version of these games. It basically took all the best bits from their other games and smashed them into one and added an open world. But I totally understand why new players especially or people who aren't as into the games as me would rate it lower. Just for the UI and technical issues it probably deserves to get dinged in most scores.
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