While critics and users alike are heaping praise onto Elden Ring, the game's Steam reviews paint it in a very different light. While some PC gamers have been able to run Elden Ring without any problems on their systems, other players have reported experiencing serious performance issues.
FromSoftware has been very proud of the game so far and understandably so, as Elden Ring has been receiving perfect review scores across the board. The praise the game has received with regards to its gameplay, story, and mechanics seems to be justified, however, the game's performance issues across all platforms seem to be affecting the game's image in the eyes of the public.
Bandai Namco stated that many of Elden Ring's performance issues would be fixed in patch 1.02. Unfortunately, even after the patch, many users are still reporting issues with the game's performance despite many of them having top-of-the-line systems. This has prompted users to leave negative reviews on the game's Steam page, which has resulted in Elden Ring being left with a mixed review score on the platform.
PC players are not the only ones experiencing performance issues, as Elden Ring is reportedly struggling to hit 60 FPS on both the PS5 and Xbox Series X. The game has two graphical modes on console, which are performance mode and quality mode. Elden Ring seems to run at between 30 and 60 FPS in its quality mode, and between 45 and 60 FPS in performance mode on both consoles. The quality mode of the game is not locked at 30 FPS as it has been in other recent console games. This, unfortunately, makes the framerate seem even more unstable.
Elden Ring has also recently been Steam Deck verified, and while this will be good for Steam Deck users, it does make one wonder how the game will run on Valve's handheld gaming PC. The Steam Deck has considerably less horsepower than high-end gaming PCs and the latest consoles, which means that the game will need to be exceptionally well optimized to run at a playable framerate.
While Elden Ring has had considerably fewer technical issues than some other recent games, the game still desperately needs to have its performance issues fixed if FromSoftware wants to keep its exceptionally high Metacritic score. Thankfully, the game only arrived today for many consumers, which means that the company still has ample time to fix the game.
Elden Ring is available now on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.