So yesterday was apparently one of those days where the entire gaming internet loses its mind at once. Elden Ring came out. Same day, Valve started actually shipping Steam Decks to the people who reserved one back in July. Two huge things, one Friday, and I only really had bandwidth for one of them.
I preloaded Elden Ring on Wednesday night, something like 45 gigs, which ate most of what was left on my SSD and forced me to finally uninstall a couple of games I hadn't touched since 2020 (sorry, Control, you were good, I just never finished you). Then I did the thing I always say I won't do and stayed up past midnight on launch night, told myself "just to see the character creator," and looked up at 1:40am wondering where the evening went. Worth it, mostly.
I'm not going to pretend to be neutral here. This is the best FromSoftware game I've played, and I've played all of them since Demon's Souls. The open world thing actually works, which honestly surprised me going in. I was half expecting Dark Souls 3 with some horse-riding bolted on. It isn't that. Riding out from the first big fog gate and just seeing how much map is actually out there, no waypoint telling you where to go, no quest marker — that's a design choice almost nobody makes anymore and it's the whole point.
Now the complaint, because there's always one. The PC version has real frame pacing problems. Not "my rig is old" problems: I'm running a 3070, this thing should not be stuttering during a menu transition. It's locked to 60fps with no way to uncap it in the options, which in 2022 feels like a decision from about ten years ago, and even at that cap there are stutters that seem tied to shader compilation or asset streaming, hard to say which from the outside. Nothing game-breaking, nothing that stopped me from putting in something like six hours already, but it's the kind of rough edge that makes you go "huh, did QA actually play this on a PC" out loud to an empty room. I've seen people on the FromSoft subreddit already compiling mod fixes for the frame cap less than 24 hours after release, which tells you everything about how a certain kind of PC player deals with disappointment: immediately, competently, and without waiting for the developer.
Meanwhile my Steam Deck reservation is sitting at some position I checked once in August and then never again, so I'm watching other people's unboxing threads instead of having my own. Mildly annoying timing, getting two things I wanted on the exact same day and only being able to actually use one of them. If you got yours already, genuinely, enjoy it, I'm choosing not to be bitter about this in any serious way.
What strikes me more than the game itself, honestly, is what it says about where FromSoftware's audience has ended up. This used to be a studio whose games sold respectably and got worshipped by a specific, kind of insufferable, corner of the internet (myself included, some years). Elden Ring feels like it's crossed over into something bigger — the marketing budget alone tells you that, full commercials during football broadcasts a few weeks back, George R. R. Martin's name on the box doing a lot of quiet work for people who'd never touch a Souls game otherwise. I don't think that's a bad thing. I do think it means the difficulty conversations that always follow these games are about to get a lot louder, because a much bigger and less patient audience just walked in the door expecting whatever they expect from a AAA open-world release.
Price was $59.99 on Steam, which by 2022 standards is almost quaint given some of the deluxe editions floating around this year at $70 plus. I bought the plain version. I don't need the art book I'll never open.
Anyway. I have a boss fight I've died to nine times that I need to go lose to an tenth time. If this post is short on any deeper point it's because I genuinely do not have one today. Some days a blog is just "a big thing came out and I have feelings about my frame rate."