Bandai Namco Entertainment have announced that they are working to fix the performance issues currently plaguing FromSoftware’s Elden Ring.
RELATED: Critic Scores Give FromSoftware’s Elden Ring High Praise
In spite of high praise from critics, once Elden Ring ended up in the hand of players, many complained about the game’s performance, especially on PC.
On Metacritic, PC user scores are down to 5.7 out of 10 as of this time of writing, with scores for versions on other platforms ranging from mid 5s to mid 7s.
Many of the “Most Helpful” user reviews for Elden Ring on Metacritic also have a score of 3 or less, though even those giving it a higher score acknowledge its current performance flaws.
One user, ExplosiveDruid, gave the game an outright zero, writing, “Long time souls fan. I do enjoy the game itself, but as is, I cannot recommend purchasing it.”
“The game is known to have baked-in performance problems core to the engine itself; significant improvements are unlikely,” they continued, sharing a personally recorded video of their experience. “These affect consoles as well as PC, though PC seems to be seeing the most varied result, ranging from minor FPS drops to 10+ second stallouts regardless of settings or hardware.”
“Unfortunately these problems were known through pre-release and not addressed,” they concluded. “As is, this is a defective product. Buyers beware.”
Another user, Mortanius, asserted that “Elden Ring is in my opinion a 9/10 game if everything works as expected. But the game is extremely poorly optimized on PC, its not even funny anymore.”
“Its a Souls Game and you have to deal with constant frame drops,” they continued. “Unacceptable. Which makes me rate the game 6/10.”
“Thats not all,” Mortanius added before deducting two more points from their review. “-1 for: If we look at the history, FromSoftware games are well known for terrible PC ports, the company doesnt learn from its mistakes. -1 for: Devs/publishers knew very well about problems but still decided to ship it in such state.
“Final rating 4/10,” they concluded before throwing criticism at the glowing scores given to the game in early reviews. “Paid medias giving this 10/10 is a joke and I pity people who take their opinions seriously.”
In their zero-score review, Akkulader took issue with how “The developers have intentionally disabled the 21:9 / ultrawide support. If you want to bypass it with a hex fix, you have to play offline, otherwise the anti-cheat software kicks in.”
“It’s 2022, this is a 60€ full price AAA game. It’s really an unbelievable cheek!,” they exclaimed. “Also, even with the most modern hardware, there are frame drops and a 60FPS lock. Simply unbelievable!”
While Elden Ring currently sits at “Mostly Positive” on Steam reviews, with 74% of over 89,000 user reviews would recommend the game, many of those who disagree have specifically cited the game’s poor performance on their fully capable systems as a contributing factor to their low opinions of the title.
This performance frustration has been made worse by the fact that the game’s anti-cheat software is triggering when some fan fixes are implemented.
In light of these issues, publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment released a statement on February 25th titled “A message about some performance issues in ELDEN RING,” therein acknowledging, “We are currently experiencing some issues that are preventing the game from playing properly under some conditions. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and ask for your patience.”
Bandai Namco then shared a list of main issues that were being worked on, as well as some temporary workarounds with which players can use to resolve them prior to the release of the official fixes.
These included a patch in the near future for “the problem of the mouse being too sensitive in the PC version,” and “the problem of Easy Anti-Cheat failing to launch when the Steam account name includes a multi-byte character (e.g., kanji).”
“Regarding the phenomenon of frame rate and other performance-related issues during gameplay,” Bandai Namco explained, “We will be constantly working to improve the game so that it can be played comfortably on various PC environments and platforms.”
In addition, Bandai Namco recommended “For the PC version, updating your graphics card drivers to the latest version may significantly improve performance.”
“About the phenomenon of game data that does not save correctly in the PlayStation 5 version,” the publisher continued. “If the PS5 console is unexpectedly turned off while playing a game or in rest mode, saved data may not be saved correctly.”
Further, Bandai Namco asserted, “We are aware of the cause of this issue and are working on a patch to correct it, but until the patch is released, please save your game manually by exiting the game regularly.”
“Game data will be saved correctly,” they reassured, “if you quit the game by opening the system menu using the OPTION button and selecting ‘Quit Game,’ then press the HOME button to return to the PS5 home screen and quit the game application once.”
The publisher then concluded their statement by informing players, “We are also working on a few other bug fixes and performance improvements as needed. Please don’t hesitate to contact our support team if you encounter other issues.”
Along with Bandai Namco, FromSoftware, and fans, it appears that Valve has also been trying their hand at fixing the game’s performance issues – albeit for slightly different reasons.
“The graphics team has been hard at work on optimizing ELDEN RING for Steam Deck,” tweeted Valve progammer Pierre-Loup Griffais. “Fixes for heavy stutter during background streaming of assets will be available in a Proton release next week, “but are available to test now on the bleeding-edge branch of Experimental.”
In a video attached to his tweet, Griffais showed the game running smoother on the hand-held PC than it did on dedicated desktop machines.
The graphics team has been hard at work on optimizing ELDEN RING for Steam Deck. Fixes for heavy stutter during background streaming of assets will be available in a Proton release next week, but are available to test now on the bleeding-edge branch of Experimental. pic.twitter.com/5oSnXtF2OG
— Pierre-Loup Griffais (@Plagman2) February 26, 2022
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