“Right now even with 60 vigor you get one-shot by nearly every enemy that’s not pure fodder (like the classical wandering nobles in the base game),” Steam user ‘Flippikus’ writes. “And the Scadutree fragments that should make your damage and defense increase (exclusively while in the DLC) don’t help that much and are mostly locked behind bosses.”
The negative reviews, which also continually praise the world’s design and art direction, can’t handle some of the other choices, especially the boss fights. “Bosses in this DLC are exceptionally weak. While visually they are fantastic, their balance is totally off,” ‘Chanddy’ writes. “The combos they do are really annoying to learn [and] way too long – sometimes chaining up to ten different attacks before you get even a brief second opening to return damage.”
In terms of performance, players are upset that Shadow of the Erdtree is locked at 60 frames per second, with micro-stuttering and a lack of ultrawide or DLSS support as well. These things can be fixed or added down the line, but as of right now, it appears that the expansion isn’t incredibly well optimized.
If it runs that poorly and it’s still lacking basic things like ultrawide and DLSS, you’re clearly doing something very wrong as a developer. If you want to make PC money, you should also properly use the platform.
I’ve got 50 vigor and haven’t been one-shot by anything yet. Can’t say for sure about fragements ‘mostly’ locked behind bosses but I was quickly +4 just from wandering around the first map area. IMO they shouldn’t quote salty complaints like Flippikus’ because it waters down the real problems Fromsoft has and always had had porting their games to PC.
I love all their games and am a pretty big fanboy but also love PC gaming and it’s clear From is a console company. I think they’d just release on Playstation if it were up to them. But if they’re not going to resist the siren call of the PC money, they really should hire a team that knows what they’re doing. I know there’s some stereotypes that there aren’t great Japanese Windows devs - really don’t know if that’s true but even if it is, From is a AAA company with AAA sales and can afford proper devs for PC releases.
I believe part of the issue is you can only really level vigor to 50 before it stops mattering, but the enemies will do more and more damage based off your total level. So if every stat is 50, you’re way less tanky than if you were level 150 with some normal stats.
60 is really the second soft cap so there is plenty to be gained from leveling up to that point. After that it certainly matters less though.
And unless I’m misunderstanding you, the enemies in Elden Ring do not scale by your level so that wouldn’t play into the calculus at all.
In base elden ring no, the DLC is specifically stated to do so I believe.
AFAIK the fragments are the only level scaling in the DLC
A 60fps limit in 2024 is pretty shit on its own without going into DLSS and ultrawide support missing
I remember on the original release it was so poorly optimised that valve stepped in to basically patch the game themselves on the steamdeck, yielding the kinda funny situation that the steamdeck was outperforming much beefier hardware until FS patched it themselves.
They really need to look like they’re at least trying, or they’ll quickly end up on the game developer shit list
Valve didn’t do anything in particular for Elden Ring.
The way running windows games works on Linux just meant that compiled shaders got cached, so that when they were needed again, the game wouldn’t freeze for a split second while they were recompiled.
This process is necessary on the windows side as well, when using DirectX 12 or Vulkan. Most games will do this shader compiling in advance (during a loading screen), and cache them for later so that the GPU can run full tilt generating frames during gameplay, instead of pausing to compile shaders.
Elden Ring didn’t do this. It compiled shaders as they were needed mid-gameplay, then immediately discarded them instead of caching them. This meant it was constantly freezing to compile shaders as materials that used different ones appeared on screen. And it would keep happening as it didn’t keep compiled shaders around for the next time they were needed.
Only on Linux, there was an external cache in the system that was translating the games DX12 calls to Vulkan (VKD3D), which would just go “oh I already have that, here you go” essentially making the game work as if the constant compiling could be done instantly whenever needed.
Valve did provide the cached shaders as a download, compiled in advance, as otherwise you’d still get compilation stutters each time something on screen needed a particular shader for the first time. But Valve does this for all games.
Thanks for this info, good stuff
No FSR/XESS/DLSS in a game with ray tracing at all is a weird choice.
For anyone on AMD you can use Radeon Super Resolution which is basically FSR 1.0 to upscale. 1620p -> 2160p with a 7900XTX gives decent performance uplift with Max settings + Max RT.
No DLSS seems very odd. I got no love for nvidia as a corpo but DLSS is really really good and could be really great for Elden Ring.
Otherwise… get good??
So a typical FromSoft PC port then
Fromsoft getting a pass for a mess of a game? Color me shocked!
