Elden Ring - Update 1.03 Released

[ilm]

Directstorage is almost upon us. I assume the stutters are little loading hitches so some advanced loading stuff could be good. But I'm also running it off a 7200rpm hdd… With an 11 year old CPU.

They probably can't make good use of dx12. Probably would have run better if they just kept it dx11. I'm pretty sure what we have here is a dx12 "port" since it's the same engine from DS3, BB, Sekiro.

Isn't it more about shader compilation that causes the hitches, rather than streaming assets?

 

[Nereida]

I just checked, and with this update the game is still the currently most played game on Steam, only sharing that spot with a massive monster like Counter-Strike depending on the time of the day.

I'm pretty sure they are very concerned about whatever random people think about the steam score system as they rack award after award, and success after success, in the already most successful ever released PC RPG of all time.

Indeed good news to all RPG fans of the world, as this unequalled success guarantees that we are going to have Fromsoft-made games for decades.

 

[sakichop]

Yea, very curious how the steam overall score was so dramatic in its overall change.

Maybe I'm over-analyzing it, but to me, rising from a bad 59% to a now 87% (and rising!) and an overall "mixed reviews" to "very positive" reviews, should make people think twice about the integrity of the steam overall reviews scores, in general.

The next barrier will be to cross the "overwhelmingly positive reviews" overall steam review score, which I'm pretty sure this game will cross. Remarkable.
To the point of absurdity.

Anyway, as I said, just makes people like me to question the integrity of the steams overall reviews score. And how the steam reviews system can be gamed/manipulated by a large base of fanboys "10 out of 10" type mass reviews. I know steam said they would limit the overall effect of negative reviews when it seemed to be a coordinated thing, but apparently that doesn't apply on the upside.

Anyway, the metacritic PC user review score (the only one that matters, the metacritic overall "professional critics" score is silly and hopelessly corrupt [meaning inflated] on metacritic for most AAA mainstream games) for Elden Ring is at a much lower 6.7, and still considered as overall "mixed or average reviews".

That overall score also, I believe, started from a much lower overall score, but at least it seems possible and not so manipulated, that the game has risen that far, but is still sitting at a pretty lousy 6.7 among users after 2,500 plus user reviews.

For me, I always check the Metacritic user reviews score for PC games I'm interested in, because it can be eye-opening how different the overall scores can be, and I tend to trust it more, because of that. Metacritic seems lower profile for pc games, and not such a target of possible manipulation as the steams reviews score, in other words.

Obviously do what ever you want but I would suggest ignoring the scores and instead focus on the content of the review. That will make the hater and fanboy extremes irrelevant.

Also It's not a surprise to see a low scores and then it go up. The first posted scores will often be people that have issues with the game as the people that don't are playing. Those people will most likely post positive reviews later raising the score.

If I would have scored the game the first couple days I played it I would have scored it lower than I would now as it's getting better the more I play.

 

[JFarrell71]

@Arkadia7; Somehow the user scores rising (after patches were released to address technical issues) is highly suspect in your opinion and is probably the result of "10 out of 10 fanboys" who are gaming the system, and yet the 59% score couldn't possibly be a result of similar gaming of the system in the other direction. You're whatever is the opposite of a fanboy... a hater, I guess? You don't like the games, you don't want the games to be good, you don't want them to do well, and any evidence otherwise must therefore be made up and falsified. Pathetic.

 

[JDR13]

Dude…Talk about a knee jerk overreaction. Do you have to constantly react like someone is bashing the game just because they're not lavishing the same praise upon it as you?

 

[SirJames]

Isn't it more about shader compilation that causes the hitches, rather than streaming assets?

I don't think so?

I don't know much about it but I remember in some other game it would say its compiling shaders the first time you load the game and then it wouldn't do it again unless you changed the graphics settings.

I think if you change the shader quality in Elden Ring it says you have to go back to the main menu for the option to become active but it seems to be very fast, unlike the other game where it took a while. I think it's probably done while the logos are displayed at the start.

But, yeah, I just assume the little stutters are asset loading. I'm not sure. But there's also the less frequent freezes and the crashes to desktop and I don't think even the devs know whats going on there or it would be fixed. The little freezes seem to happen more outdoors and the crashes seem to happen more indoors, especially in some areas. Like, what was it…. Gelmirs… tomb? Something like that. With the chariots and the lava. My game would crash in here a heap but other than that it ran at plenty high framerate.

Seems to be a lot of mystery bugs for them to work out.

edit: Maybe they're already done and the game just detects I have a 1070 gpu and loads the one for that card. That might explain why some people with 3090 say it runs like crap? They didn't have any 3090s at the studio so they don't have a shader profile? lol, I don't know, just wildly throwing around ideas here.

 

[Nereida]

Something that shouldn't go unnoticed either about the fact that Elden Ring is selling so well and being so massively played is that it's actually a full €60 game. You don't get 2 for $5 like Terraria, or F2P like DOTA. You have to actually go through the €60 gate to even be able to launch the game.

And that's only PC, as the game is selling even better and had less performance issues on consoles. The level of success is just absurd.

It's natural that some people gave initial bad reviews, especially in PC where there were some technical issues, and where people voted without even playing the game, as it's natural that those scores are skyrocketing now.

 

[SirJames]

Yeah, the low user scores are all about performance and technical issues. They're bound to rise as the issues are fixed.

Also, while it has sold a lot of copies very quickly, I'm pretty sure Skyrim has still sold more than double what ER has. It has had a decade or more to achieve this, however.

 

[Arkadia7]

Well, the fact remains that with Elden Ring, a game went from an initial lowly 59% overall mixed reviews from steam gamers, to almost 30 points higher, to now on the threshold of 90% and super positive reviews and overall review score. And this was done, all in a matter of a few weeks time frame.

So if that doesn't make you pause, and think something is off or fishy, then I don't know what would. My opinion. I'm fine with people disagreeing with me, by the way. But I will stick with my opinion, thank you.

 

[Moriendor]

Well, the fact remains that with Elden Ring, a game went from an initial lowly 59% overall mixed reviews from steam gamers, to almost 30 points higher, to now on the threshold of 90% and super positive reviews and overall review score. And this was done, all in a matter of a few weeks time frame.

So if that doesn't make you pause, and think something is off or fishy, then I don't know what would. My opinion. I'm fine with people disagreeing with me, by the way. But I will stick with my opinion, thank you.

First off, I have no interest in defending Elden Ring. I think Souls-like games are garbage and I will never touch Elden Ring. So, I hope we are clear that I am not fanboying in favor of the game .

With that said, there is nothing fishy about it at all. This happens with a lot of games. The Steam percentage changes with the click of a button when people change their initial thumbs down to a thumbs up or if you have an initial onslaught of thumbs down (e.g. when a game has Denuvo or is made by EA) which balances out over time.

You can easily check out the review graph on the game's Steam page. There was an extremely high number of negative reviews on day one. There were 14,185 negative reviews on the day of the game's release which was 2/24. If you look at the positive reviews, I don't see anything fishy there. There is no odd spike of positive reviews.

Positive reviews peaked on release day and then became rather stable since then, just like the negative reviews trickled in at a much lower level but also at a rather stable rate with no oddities.

You can also nicely see how the patches on March 2nd and March 17th resulted in a minor (March 2nd) and rather massive (March 17th) positive review spike. It is perfectly possible that a lot of negative reviews from 2/24 were converted to positive reviews on 3/2 and 3/17.

 

[SirJames]

Anyone still having trouble with KB+M controls, who doesn't like gamepads, might like to try using bananas.

 

[Arkadia7]

You make a good argument, but even so, I will just have to agree to disagree. I have never heard of a big recent AAA game, where it rose that far (close to 30 points, and probably more soon) from an initial mixed/bad reviews overall score.

Plus, I was hanging around the steam Elden Ring forum after the game was released, and saw several huge and ongoing threads of fanboy-type threads, that were urging other fans of the game to leave positive reviews en masse, because "it was unfair" and so on, that the game had mixed reviews at that stage. Anyway, not trying to convince anyone, just my 2 cents.

 

[JFarrell71]

Dude…Talk about a knee jerk overreaction. Do you have to constantly react like someone is bashing the game just because they're not lavishing the same praise upon it as you?

Say that to me again after his most recent response to Moriendor's post.

 

[JDR13]

He isn't bashing the game. He hasn't even played it. He's just making an observation about some reviews. I don't agree that the Steam score is higher now just due to fanboys.

On Metacritic, it still only has around a 7/10 average across all platforms, so there's a very significant gap between the critics and players. To me, the critic scores are too high while the player scores are too low. I'd have it about right in the middle between the two.

 

[Silver]

The game has sold 12 million copies to date. If a fair fraction of those players leave a review then it will be sure to rise in reception over that time quite rapidly which is what has occurred.

 

[Nereida]

And also worth noting that in Steam you can only leave a review if you own the game. That might be indicative of why Steam users has a much better score and reception than MC users and keep raising and raising as more people actually finish the game and feel compelled to write down their opinion. You can be an uninformed troll, but not when the tax to do it is €60.

That alone should be a reason enough to at least consider what Steam users have to say over other non-professional reviewers.