The Elden Ring’s 1.04 patch, released on Tuesday, is full of changes to Lands Between: balance adjustments for colossal weapons and spells, buffs for lots of weapon ashes, and a bunch of bug fixes. What it does not do, despite a point that promises “other performance improvements”, is fix the Elden Ring’s frequent hack on PC.
Two months since the release of Elden Ring on February 24, FromSoftware has not indicated when or if it will try to fix the PC performance issues. The developers have at least acknowledged that these issues exist: right after launch, a Bandai Namco blog post said “We are currently experiencing some issues that prevent the game from playing properly under some conditions.” The post went on to add that they “will constantly work on improving the game so that it can be played comfortably on different PC environments and platforms”, and asked for patience.
I feel like I have been patient and I have enjoyed my time with Elden Ring despite its technical shortcomings. As we wrote in March, the success of Elden Ring is proof that frame rate is not everything. But after two months, I’m more and more frustrated with moments of slowing down (and then accelerating as the game catches up where it should be) and the notch. Every play session up to the 1.04 patch I would experience at least one hard crash to the desktop and I have not played enough since 1.04 to know if that issue has been completely resolved. Despite the fact that 1.04 promises “increased online multiplayer stability”, I still had several summoned players who simply disappeared from my game within an hour, clearly the result of a lost connection.
The Fire Ring performs at least far better than FromSoftware’s previous games when they were first released on consoles, and Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition was notoriously corrupt on PC. But as the success and prestige of Fromm’s games has grown, so have the standards – as Digital Foundry stated at launch, Elden Ring’s PC version is simply not as good as it should be. It’s a shame to see limitations like the 60 fps lock and lack of ultra-wide support, and the poor mouse / keyboard binding options are a confusing miss for something that should be relatively simple.
But it is the strain that is probably caused or exacerbated by the Elden Ring’s shift to DirectX 12 that is particularly ranking. This was not a problem with FromSoftware’s latest PC game, Sekiro – one ran beautifully even though it was locked at 60 fps with no mods. In Elden Ring, the hack even happens on advanced hardware, so there’s a frustrating little we can do other than wait for the developers to make improvements.
Hopefully they come. FromSoftware has clearly been busy updating Elden Ring, correcting bugs and making balance changes, and is traditionally not the type of studio that provides a roadmap for pending improvements. So I’m not exactly surprised that we have not heard anything about what is causing these problems or what is being done to solve them. I love that FromSoftware’s games let me reveal their mysteries without much guidance, but I can not say the same about their post – launch support.