It’s been nearly three months since Elden Ring was released to much fanfare. It’s sold 13.4 million copies since launch. It sold 12 million within the first two weeks. It sits at 90,000-100,000 concurrent players, which is amazing for a single-player game. It’s a bona fide hit and I could not be more thrilled about it.
I’ve been a From fan for nearly a decade. I came to the first Dark Souls late and didn’t grow to appreciate it until the second time I played it. And it wasn’t until I played Dark Souls III that I fell completely in love with the games.
Dark Souls III was my favorite game of all time. I have played it dozens of times, have the plat, and it was the first game I played after I recovered from my medical trauma. I know every nook and cranny of that game and love it with all my heart. I can talk about it endlessly and I could not imagine any game replacing it in my heart.
Then Elden Ring dropped. I had to scramble to prepare for it because the PC specs were beefy. They dropped the PC specs late in the day, which miffed me. It was ten days or so before the game was released, which is not a hell of a lot of time. To make matters worse, the specs jumped up quite substantially from Sekiro to Elden Ring. I had thought I’d be able to play on low with my current laptop, but when I saw the requirements, I knew I had to get a new computer. Remember, it was nearly impossible to get graphic cards at the time for anything less than full-computer price. Since that was the case, I might as well get a whole new compy. My brother helped me set it up and it was ready to go (with the SSD, mega-RAM, 1 terabyte of memory, and two screens).
The PC version of the game was fraught with problems from the very start. Graphic pop-ins, juttering and stuttering, and hard crashes/freezes. I was lucky that I had a bit of stuttering and one hard crash. I don’t notice pop-ins so that didn’t bother me and I’m not into effects in general. To me, it looked crisp and clean and gorgeous. The stuttering was by far the worst, but it didn’t really get into my way. Still, I felt bad for my PC kin who had base rigs because there was no way the game would have run on them.