If you want to ignore Sekiro, it’s been a minute since we had a proper Souls game. Six years to be exact and FromSoftware is finally here with their first foray into the open-world genre with Elden Ring.
Elden Ring
Developer: Fromsoftware
Price: $60
Platform: PC, PS5/PS4, XSX/XBO
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC and PS4 code for review
In typical FromSoftware format, Elden Ring has you playing as a “tarnished” who’s here to hunt down and kill a handful of lords who’ve gained power through shards of the now broken Elden Ring, and it’s up to you to fix things and become the Elden Lord. I wouldn’t blame you if you’re getting déjà vu since literally every one of these games shares this same format. The plot is as equally cryptic as it is straightforward as it ever was, and I’m sure there are going to be a dozen hour long lore breakdowns within the week. George R. R. Martin, of Game of Thrones fame, supposedly helped world build the game’s setting but honestly most of this feels like the usual Miyazaki flair so I would be curious to know how heavy GRRM’s involvement was. As eye-rolling as this series’ shtick is, Elden Ring might honestly have the best realized world out of all the Souls games (barring Bloodborne). Everything feels like the result of the style Miyazaki has been honing in each game and the world feels incredibly lived in with nothing coming off as out of place.
And that’s all incredibly important considering you’ll be exploring “the Lands Between”, as the game world is called, for quite a while. You could argue that the Souls series is open-world adjacent, but Elden Ring is FromSoftware’s first proper foray into the genre and for the most part it’s a pretty resounding success. The Souls formula transitions pretty well to the open-world format with the help of some game tweaks. The obvious change is the inclusion of your trusty steed that helps you speed across the *shockingly* sizeable map at a pretty good pace. Named Torrent, you can summon it whenever you want (except for when you’re in linear dungeons) and adds new traversal opportunities with its ability to double jump. This opens up a new style of combat with the ability to fight while on your horse. There’s honestly nothing funnier than sprinting back and forth through a crowd slashing at them and watching them fail to keep up with your horse. Things get interesting when you run into tougher enemies, or even bosses, or are on a horse of their own as you race alongside each other taking shots at the other. Torrent allows for easy escapes when a situation is looking dire as well. Because the world is so sprawling, you actually won’t expend any stamina when traversing it unless you’re explicitly in combat. It’s a minor, but incredibly appreciated thing that not many open-world games do. Additionally, defeating a group of enemies will refill a single flask in your inventory, completely eliminating the need to have to double back to a site of grace (this game’s bonfires) to refill. On top of that, you can even find special insects that will refill your flasks completely if you’re quick enough to kill one before it burrows away. These sorts of things really help keep the game moving when you’re out in the world, which is great considering it definitely slows down to the typical Souls formula when you enter a closed off area.
The thing that struck me immediately with Elden Ring’s world is how well it captured that “what the hell is that” feeling when exploring the map. There’s always some interesting piece of architecture, or bizarre looking creature, off in the distance and I have yet to explore a corner that didn’t have some sort of reward hidden there to find; whether it was a powerful new item or a hidden dungeon with an optional boss to fight. At one point I strayed off the normal path and found a graveyard filled with (mostly) friendly ghostly jellyfish. Or literal walking castles. There’s just always something to do in the game which is genuinely impressive that FromSoftware managed to capture that so well in their first shot at the genre. Now, is Elden Ring a genre defining breakthrough in the open-world space? Absolutely not. It’s perfectly described as “Dark Souls but open-world”. But like Halo Infinite last year, it sticks the landing on what should have been a difficult genre jump.
Elden Ring does have a main path to follow, and the game helpfully points you in that direction by having a flowing yellow energy emanate from sites of grace in the direction of your next objective, but from the outset you’re pretty much free to do whatever. The first main boss and story area is a castle that’s immediately visible upon entering the open-world, but I didn’t head there until I was maybe ten or fifteen hours deep in the game. I was just having too much fun poking my head in every corner I could out in the world. By the time I got to the castle I had already killed a handful of optional bosses, leveled quite a bit, and was decked out in shiny new gear. You’ll eventually find some areas that are locked behind story progress, but I’d say 80% of the map is free to explore from the get-go. It was so much fun just running around exploring, that I would try to rush a bit through the linear sections so I could hurry back to the open-world. You’re never locked in those areas either by the way. Elden Ring allows you to fast travel from any site of grace you’ve been to whenever you want. So if an area is giving you a particular amount of trouble, you can easily skip across half the map to another zone instead of having to backtrack through the entire level.
Crafting is also a big part of the game as well, as you can collect materials from various types of flora scattered around or hunt wild animals like birds or goats. This is especially helpful as a way to easily resupply on much needed items like fire bombs or the item needed to see co-op summoning signs. Materials are in quick supply too, as you can speed across the land on Torrent and tap a button to immediately pick an item up as you’re riding over it. Before where you needed to go grind out some souls to buy the stuff at a shop, you can now just quickly craft them.
Something I appreciate with Elden Ring, that’s been talked about a bit in the game’s lead up, are the ways FromSoftware went about not making the game “easier”, but making it more approachable. First off is the ability to fast travel from any site of grace you discover as I mentioned before. But while the Souls games had fast travel, Elden Ring allows you to fast travel without the need of being at a site of grace to do so. If you’re stuck in an area and need to leave but can’t find a site of grace, you can just dip whenever you want. A fast travel option like this is obviously a no-brainer in an open-world game of this size, but the Souls fanbase is full of gatekeeping masochists who throw a stink at any attempt to make the game less frustrating. Along with this are “checkpoints”, called Stakes of Marika, you’ll come across in your travels. You simply need to be in the vicinity of one of these statues, and you’ll be able to respawn at one of them instead of a site of grace that was further away. One of my favorite changes is how you’ll recover flasks whenever you defeat groups of enemies which helps speed up the game as you’re not having to double back to sites of grace to refill on flasks constantly.
And perhaps the biggest improvement is the inclusion of Spirits. These are magical abilities you can find that allow you to summon a powerful spectral aid that’s in addition to your co-op summons. These are great for those boss rooms that you might need some additional help on but can’t find a summon sign anywhere, or for the folk who play offline. The ones I found were surprisingly varied and worked better in different scenarios, like a jellyfish who was particularly useful against a boss who was weak against poison, or a pack of wolves who were great at distracting bosses for me. The spirits are honestly a lot of fun to play around with to see which works best where, I only wish they weren’t limited to boss rooms so I could play with them more.
Now performance issues and FromSoftware games go hand in hand, and I’m sure everyone is wondering how FromSoftware’s first foray into an open-world performs. We initially were reviewing the game on PC where we experienced hitching, objects popping in ten feet in front of me, severe framerate drops, and some pretty horrid screen tearing. There was also this super odd issue where when you exited the game, the application wouldn’t actually shut down and would instead go into a “suspended” status hidden in the background processes in the task manager, still hogging up resources despite the game being closed. We also encountered an issue where the game would not detect any controller we tried to use unless we booted the game with our mouse unplugged. We used the Lexip Pu94 which is a software heavy mouse (the game detected our controllers fine when we used a simple non-software enhanced mouse) so we’re not sure if the issue was because of this particular mouse or if Elden Ring is having issues with any software enhanced mice in general. It’s likely the former as this is a bit of a niche mouse, but I figured I’d mention it in case anyone runs into the same issue.
It all just reeks of lazy optimization. We tested Elden Ring on two separate machines that more than exceeded the recommended specs for the game, on a variety of graphical settings but it all produced the same result: the game was borderline unplayable. For transparency, one machine is running an i5 9600k 3.7GHz CPU, 16GB RAM, and an Nvidia 2060 Super. While the second machine is on an i7 11370H 4.8GHz CPU, 16GB RAM, and an Nvidia 3050 Ti. Both of these machines should be more than able to handle Elden Ring but the game runs like a mess on them no matter what settings I set it to. FromSoftware doesn’t have the greatest track record when it comes to PC ports, but Elden Ring is easily their worst offender.
We then received a code to try the game on PS4 which, while playable, still suffered from a noticeably low framerate and some pretty embarrassing pop-in. Anytime you’d come across big groups of enemies the game would begin to stutter and while it never got Blighttown bad, it was pretty close. I don’t think the game ever got at a steady 30fps while in the open world, looking like it was mostly staying around 20-25fps, while it behaved a bit better whenever you’d enter smaller dungeon areas. Both platforms were running on the 1.01 game build, for continued clarity. It’s definitely playable compared to the PC version though; I’d liken it to frustrating but tolerable.
Now mind you, I did get confirmation that a day-one patch was coming that might possibly improve performance on these two platforms, but my review build didn’t have that so I can’t comment on it. I’d assume current gen consoles like the PS5 or XSX are fine considering we’ve seen preview footage come out from influencers recently that were clearly running on those two consoles, so if you have either of those two machines Elden Ring is likely a safe get for you. For everyone else, however, I’d hold off on purchasing it right away until a Digital Foundry test or something comes out.
The Final Word
Elden Ring feels like the culmination of everything FromSoftware has been building upon with each of their games. Unfortunately, some severe performance issues hamper what’s easily one of their best games yet.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
