Caltrops - Elden Ring - Dark Souls of the Wild

Forum Overview :: Elden Ring

by Rafiki 02/24/2022, 11:45pm PST

I'm probably the 5 millionth person to make that comment, but that's my 90-minute first impression. Or it's just Dark Souls, but with open world and crafting/resource gathering.

Too early to tell how it's going to hold up. Not sure how I feel about the open world yet, I haven't traveled around enough to determine whether it's a chore or not. You can teleport between bonfires you find, so that's nice. Bonfires and certain shrines you stumble across provide waypoints that vaguely point in the direction of the main story or hidden dungeons to kind of direct you around.

I've found two side dungeons that are very short and have a boss at the end. The dungeons are properly Dark Souls challenging, in contrast to the open world enemies which are pushovers. Killed one boss on the first try, which was still difficult, and haven't attempted the 2nd yet. The mini-dungeon boss didn't have phases like typical Souls bosses, but it did have a variety of attacks and seemed to increase its attack frequency as its health got lower. My reward for killing the boss was some kind of summon? I don't know how all of the items work yet.

I'm really not looking forward to crafting, since at first glance it seems to require discovering recipes to do anything.

Surprisingly, you can jump! Like, a proper vertical jump, not just the short hop of prior games.

The ability to write messages and summon co-op players isn't gated behind some stupid faction that's 5 hours and 3 bosses in, you get items for them right away.

I just looked at the Steam reviews, and people are raging because they're having huge performance problems, stuttering issues, and crashes to desktop. I didn't have a single problem. I'm running nearly every setting at maximum and have had a pretty rock solid 60fps. Doesn't look like there's a common denominator for who's having problems, so I guess beware.

People are also raging that it's capped at 60fps, and I guess it's because they're morons?

It does have some stupid anti-cheat integration. Maybe that's fucking up everyone's performance, I don't know.