Elden ring's patch just added more modern or ease of use additions. Nonfans - Does this fix most of your issues with the game?

Someone let me know if PC version stops stuttering either via a patch (not a mod) or by increasing the shader cashe size.

That's all I need to know.

If anything this is a reason to wait longer. Seeing that From are fixing NPC quest lines just now and adding functions that were cut before release because they ran out of time makes you wonder how much is left to add back before the game is feature complete.

@humanity: My thoughts exactly. There is no good reason I can think of to play any game within 3 months of its release. There will always be patches that make the experience better for those with a little patience.

I'm reading that they nerfed a bunch of weapons and skills.

For example: "Increased Ash of War, Bloody Slash's self-inflict damage while slightly lowering the damage and increasing the cast time"

I used to use Bloody Slash all the time, until I got an Ice damage Ash of War, because the self-inflict damage was actually worth the damage it did to enemies. Now it's probably worthless. Every update they do, it seems like they are just making the game worse, especially in terms of performance. I'm actually getting kind of fed up with FromSoftware at this point. They keep fucking shit up but all the 10/10 reviews are already in, and they know it's too late for refunds at this point.

@mistersims: Everything they nerfed 100% needed it so I can’t really get up in arms.

Do these NPC map markers actually help in the way you'd want them to? I am pretty close to the end of the game, and I think I've already completed most of the NPC side quests, so I can't really tell how helpful their implementation of this feature is. I generally avoid looking things up in games, but I felt this game didn't respect me as a player by just having NPCs show up in random locations in this giant world. Because of that, I did look up some NPC locations when I felt like the game didn't give me the information necessary to progress through quests.

So, my question is do these NPC map markers show you where NPCs are before you find them? If it's just reminding you where you've already encountered people, this honestly doesn't really move the needle in terms of my criticisms of the quest design. The issue isn't remembering where people you've met are, you could already put a manual map marker down. The issue is when the NPCs go somewhere random, or the next part of a quest requires finding someone in a random location with no hint at all. If this change doesn't address that aspect of the quest design, it's pretty meaningless.

@ll_exile_ll: It only keeps track of people you find.

The notes also say there is added dialogue for better direction but I can’t check any of that with my finished save.

So, it is just automating the ability to place down map markers. Sounds like a nothing change to me. The additional dialogue direction sounds better, especially since in many cases there is none. If they had dialogue recorded already, it's odd that wasn't in the game from the start. I have a hard time believing they recorded and implemented new dialogue less than a month after launch.

@ll_exile_ll: I mean it’s not a nothing change. Automating the process of manually placing markers, which I rarely remembered to do, is very useful I think.

Plus these are labeled with names, unlike mine, so are vastly more convenient.

I guess for me keeping track of just where someone is on the map is way more useful because I never really had any problems with quest lines or anything. I finished all of the big meta quests just bumbling around out of order half the time but I would routinely forget where to go back and find someone specifically.

What patch are you talking about? What was changed in the patch?

I don't have a problem running into random NPCs out in the world, that's fine. It's when NPCs move around at random during quests and don't give any indication where they're going. It's fine in the cases where they go somewhere you'll naturally go in the future, but when they go somewhere you've potentially already cleared and won't naturally return to, that's where the feeling of fumbling in the dark comes in. There are other cases where quest progression is very weirdly tied to sitting at a specific grace or resting immediately after killing a boss, or where you think you've exhausted dialogue but you have to rest to get them to say new things and progress.

As someone that scours every area, clears every dungeon, fights every boss, and pursues every quest, it can be very frustrating to still feel like I am missing things because quest triggers are tied to very weird and specific circumstances or because NPCs showed up randomly in areas I'd already completely cleared and would never return to. It's not about the world feeling like it's shaped around the player, I don't want that either, I just want the game to give me the tools to figure out how to progress quests on my own, which too often I feel it does not do.

@ll_exile_ll: The main feature of the map markers is that they’re supposed to show you where NPCs have moved to since a lot of the time they will change location without a hint to where they went.

The NPC quests were finished before the game shipped and were simply cut before release for whatever reason - this had been data mined and confirmed.

As for balance changes well, it’s mostly a single player game so I don’t see any reason why they would feel the need to balance weapons. Part of the fun is making an incredibly powerful build. Most bosses in this game are more than happy to one shot you and have insane amounts of HP so having overpowered weapons that you still need proper stats to use and you still need to farm upgrade materials to make them fully “broken” didn’t really seem like an issue to me. It’s not like you just stumbled into these things that were an instant win button - just like summoning and cheese strats it was a choice.

1 hundo with you on that. FromSoft are absurdly adept at what they do- but the NPC design has always felt a product of lack of attention/time rather than artful intention. they add great color to the world (tremendous voice acting and character)- but the mechanics and presentation that governs player interaction is wooden and unintuitive.

missing or getting locked out of something because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time never feels good, even if it "adds to your story."

@humanity: I mean it’s not my scene and doesn’t seem like yours but the Souls PVP community is pretty intense.

Plus I would say that a number of things they nerfed were very much conflicting with what I think they want design wise. Like me summoning my mimic as the real main character while I sort of lazily help it out.

@efesell: Well that’s the thing, you don’t have to summon that mimic to fight for you, I consider all the overpowered stuff to be a built in mechanic for people that simply can’t get through a boss and that’s their way out. Or for people that just don’t like a boss and are tired of trying to fight them “for real” and want to move on.

I just think the game has more serious issues at the moment they should be focusing on rather than making sure you don’t have it “too easy”. Hopefully the team making balance changes are separate from the folks working (hopefully?) but n the technical issues.

@efesell: Well that’s the thing, you don’t have to summon that mimic to fight for you, I consider all the overpowered stuff to be a built in mechanic for people that simply can’t get through a boss and that’s their way out. Or for people that just don’t like a boss and are tired of trying to fight them “for real” and want to move on.

I just think the game has more serious issues at the moment they should be focusing on rather than making sure you don’t have it “too easy”. Hopefully the team making balance changes are separate from the folks working (hopefully?) on the technical issues.

I'm glad they added some basic quality of life stuff. It doesn't fix some of the more annoying technical limitations, but at least it lets me know which merchant is where. My markers were fine, but they weren't as descriptive as the new feature is.

@humanity: I think this just dovetails into how I feel about the easy mode debate though which is that From as developers seem to have a way they want difficulty to be and I don’t know if they need to necessarily meet people halfway on it if they don’t want to. So nerfing these very cheesy things makes sense to me from that design philosophy.

I just want to throw something in as a bit of a counter to this idea. Because this is the way this conversation always goes with (primarily) single-player games like this when a nerf happens: one side says the nerfs are good because nothing should be so OP that it breaks the game, while the other side says, "leave it alone, it ain't like you're being forced to use the OP thing."

But here's the deal. While no one has a gun to my head making me use the Sword of Night and Flame or Mimic summon, I find it really dumb to need to selectively ignore certain equipment that's built into the game in order to achieve the experience the developers intended. To me it's more immersion-breaking than pretty much anything else they could do. I mean, so much of what I like about games like this is building up my character to be as powerful as they can be; I am less interested in just clearing the game per se (which is a foregone conclusion) as I am in finding the best, most efficient way to do it. So when there is something in there that is OP and amounts to an "I Win" button, I'm not going to just ignore it, because if I do, I'm not actually engaging in the way I want to engage with it, which is to look for every advantage I can get.

To go even a little deeper into the psychology of this, let me say something else. One of the things I've always liked about video games as compared to, say, card games or board games, is that the rules are baked in, and barring actual hacking or glitching, you can't break them, and anything is allowed. With a card game or board game, even if you aren't trying to actively cheat, you can end up breaking the rules unintentionally just because you forgot how it was supposed to work; you have to hold the rules in your head just to make it work. But video games aren't like that. It's why in the QL for No Man's Sky (or maybe it was UPF or a playdate? idk) Vinny took his ship and tried to fly it into the engine of a big transport and kill himself, just to see if the game would let him. I want to poke and prod at the systems and take anything they'll give me. Doing otherwise feels like I'm just leaving money on the table, so to speak, and it hurts my experience as a result.

That's why I'm happy the nerfs happened even though I have no interest in the multiplayer side of things. I had used the Sword of Night and Flame pre-patch to ROFLstomp my way through some bosses that were supposed to be hard, which was satisfying in the sense that I had found possibly the most highly optimized, OP way to shred enemies that I possibly could. That's what you're supposed to do! Kill the bad things as best you can! But now that it's been nerfed, I can continue on with trying to find the best build I can without simultaneously feeling I'd turned on an easy mode. That's why I think nerfs for a single-player game can still be a good thing.

@atheistpreacher: There are still plenty of broken weapons in the game. You are welcome to now shift your focus onto the next broken "I win" button and respec accordingly to use it. If you are going to use the most OP broken build the game has to offer every time because otherwise you feel like you're cheating yourself out of a fully optimized experience then as you said, the whole thing is a foregone conclusion. Plenty of people will play the game normally and rely on those methods when they need to. You are describing a very "you" mentality that doesn't necessarily represent the psychology of every person out there. I've had that sword for ages and I've had the ability to respect and use it but I didn't because nothing so far has pushed me to the edge where I felt that I couldn't handle things playing a "middle ground" of fair. I love stomping over enemies but I do want some pushback and thats what I'm getting with the option of an "easy button" if I ever need it. Of course when it comes to Soul games the idea of fair is extremely volatile to begin with. A true fair playthrough would have you ignore 90% of the games mechanics in order to attain some sort of honor against lines of code.

Ultimately I'm not saying this nerf ruined the game or anything. I do think nerfing OP builds in a single player game where you face off against AI is just silly because people will just go ahead and find the next OP build and document it for everyone online so that if you want to engage in that meta you can.

Just Don't Use It does feel like a really weak line of reasoning though..

I mean I used the mimic pretty regularly, because it was extremely useful. I won a lot of fights with not a whole lot of effort because of it and why wouldn't I use it when it's available to me? I don't need to tie my good hand behind my back for some reason.

But I see it get nerfed and it's hard to me not to just think "Yeah, that makes sense I was really getting up to some bullshit with that."

• Somehow Vyke is still not invading for me
• Can't find Nepheli and Kenneth anywhere in the places they were after the patch.
• Somewhat the shadow being casted on mountain top are low resolution now and I'm seeing rectangular shadows, lmao
• I dunno why, but it feels like my dodge roll feels bit slower than usual.

See, that's the BS. All those idiots who say that summoning co-op companions is "cheating," and sorcery is cheating, etc etc etc. If it's in the game, it's allowed, period. That's why I'd like the tools the game gives me to be somewhat balanced.

Another metaphor I could use is that of a boxing fight. If it's a single-player game, I'm in a one-on-one-match with the computer/game. Saying to just not use a weapon or tool is like saying, "Not hard enough for you? Just don't use your left hook, your opponent is really weak to left hooks." Like, um, what? I want to use all the best tools available to me. If the computer is bad at dealing with left hooks, it should get better at it (i.e., nerf the offending mechanic so that I can't beat the poor thing up so badly with it). Giving the player a set of tools and then asking them to forgo using the best ones is dumb... as is anyone out there who wants to shame people for playing the game with co-op summons and magic and anything else that is built right into the game for you to make use of.

On the other hand, I would not necessarily be against them adding some sort of easy mode/accessibility options, as so many people have asked for over the years. I would probably never use such options, but it doesn't hurt my experience. But that is a very different thing IMO from leaving brokenly powerful equipment in the game; it just straight-up seems like bad game design to leave things so imbalanced when players are naturally going to gravitate toward the stuff that performs better, and so a large imbalance will lead to a lot of samey builds. And of course let's not forget that there is in fact PvP in this thing, even though I have no interest in engaging with it.

Anyway, opinions! Everyone's got one.

@efesell: I guess I just don't see who an overpowered strategy hurts. Maybe PVP players? But I doubt there are that many PvP players to worry about. And even if there are, the strategies that PvP players use are so different from the ones other players use that I can't imagine the nerfs impact them that much. Maybe this hurts some players who are "doing it wrong"? But honestly, these games are unfair and spiteful by design. Why take away a crutch from players?

@thatpinguino: I think it just depends on the kind of game you want to make. If you want the difficulty of your game to be a certain kind of way it just makes sense to see something very clearly overpowered when the game is actually live and think okay that's a bit much we should tweak that.

@efesell: I guess I get that. But in a game this big where so many things are obfuscated and hidden behind big bosses and hours of grinding, I kinda want any advantage I can get. If From isn't going to adjust their difficulty or add other ways to see the game with less friction, at least don't take the powerful stuff away. These games already ask so much of their players, why ask more?

(51) Mimic Tear nerfed in Patch 1.03! How bad is it? | Elden Ring - YouTube

Still seems pretty viable. Health wasn't nerfed at all so it's still going to tank any aggro it pulls, and it still seems to pull pretty well. Wary of the behaviour changes; pre-patch when I sent it out with a seal it would cast Flame Cleanse every now and then without any poison or rot around, I'd hate if it's gonna do worse. Also worried about group bosses, stuff like Niall or Gargoyles.

Faith seems mostly untouched (other than hybrid weapons)? Incantations were slow anyway, but if one spell could get a buff let it be Elden Stars; just seems underwhelming for the level, right now it seems to only be good for posture breaking, and only sometimes.

Anyway, a lot of these tests are trying each item individually, I'm sure combining mimic with frost stomp or night and flame are still gonna be fine options in PVE, just not the only clear option.

Anyone see the "Added summonable NPCs in multiple situations" in action? Is it just more summons for bosses? Like for fog wall bosses in smaller dungeons? or open world bosses as well? Can you summon for mini dungeons?

I personally don't object to From Software adding difficulty settings to their game. This is coming from someone who played most of the other Souls games and finished Elden Ring before the patch. I know a lot of SoulBourne snobs will cry and whine, because think beating a game that is hard makes them feel special. But I think everyone should be allowed to play and enjoy a From Software game as I believe most of them are worth playing.

It's a PVE game. Nerfing things just makes the game less fun.

I like the NPC markers. Now, if they add a way to see the descriptions of the ashes when you are putting them on your weapons I'd be golden. Oh and a way to see the difference between your equipped armaments and the ones in shops.

I don't care about nerfs. If you only use the same loadout as everyone else or because it's overpowered you're missing half the fun. I have no idea if my loadout is optimal or not and don't care, I use it because I am having fun.

Edit: Still can't find that blind woman who wants fruit, even with the markers...

Another thing I found out post patch is hitches.
- The PS4 on PS5 version, had been running in 60FPS, without much issue pre-patch. But after the patch, I've encountered a number of sudden framerate drops, and very bad shadow resolution that casted just rectangular shadows.

- Vyke is still not invading.

This has always felt like a strawman argument to me. Sure, some players are elitist like that, but most are not and there are legitimate reasons why adding an easy mode could be detrimental.

What it is always come to for me is that temptation is a real thing, and players will optimize the fun out of a game if given the choice. How many players would cave into temptation and lower the difficulty after a few failures on a boss and potentially rob themselves of a rewarding and satisfying experience? I've seen many people say that there have been times they would have lowered the difficulty after encountering struggles if the option existed, but in the end were glad that option wasn't there because ultimately they would have missed out on the experience of overcoming that challenge and the rewarding feeling that comes with it.

Humans are not rational beings, sometimes we make choices due to temptation or frustration that we later come to regret. "Player Choice" is not always a good thing when it leads to players unknowingly diminishing their own experience. The difficulty in From game serves the tone, narrative, and overall experience the game is trying to convey. Demanding a developer change their vision to reach a wider audience is exactly the opposite thing we should be doing, especially given the increasing homogenization of AAA games. Every other game has difficulty options, it's okay for this one "franchise" to do things differently.

Even here though, everyone is different and even the interpretation of that art can be different. I think Radahn is a great example for this considering my experience with that boss. After about five tries I realized that I had absolutely no idea what his animations even looked like let alone how I was supposed to attack him. I was also so bad at the ally summons that each time I made it out there it was essentially just me and Blaidd out there (and you can summon, what, five or six NPCs into that fight?) so after a long time spent wandering the world and one more go at it that went just as badly, all I wanted to do was open up the back half of the game and get on with it.

So I sat on the beach for about 15 minutes desperate to summon people in, which would up being one guy named Cig with a ridiculous, clearly endgame looking outfit and another guy with a far less memorably name and dual wielding swords. They were so overpowered for that encounter that I had barely made it up to Radahn before his health was cut in half. It then seemed like all seven of us triggered our ashes of war or some wild magic or whatever all these characters were capable of because I did a single Unsheathe attack and dude was dead.

While the tone after that encounter admittedly felt a little flat because I'd barely lifted a finger, on the other hand it was far more exciting that I'd made new storylines to experience and environments available to explore available to me because that's always my favorite part of these games is the running around and looking at stuff, making the numbers go up. The bosses are an obstacle that can be truly exhilarating, but personally I've almost always in my life looked at bosses as something that gets in the way of the game I'm already enjoying playing and I rarely find boss fights to be a highlight of the game compared to the cutscene/scenario that plays out before and after those encounters.

Ultimately, it's more rewarding for me to explore the Eternal City and compare it to Siofra than it is to bang my head against Radahn for days if not weeks. On a smaller scale, I thought the Town of Sorcery was abject bullshit until I came in with my own big minotaur boy and let him mostly scout out and snipe the area while I solved the puzzle.

The only argument against Easy Mode that I subscribe to is one that if From or any other developer wants to make games that are difficult and don't want to compromise that for the sake of bringing in a different player base then that's Fine. Then if any of them pivot down the line and say you know what we've thought about it and maybe we should modulate the difficulty a bit. This is also absolutely Fine.

@atheistpreacher: I completely agree with your take here. In a game with so many options in terms of playstyle, I don't want to see one or two builds that completely blow everything else out of the water. The idea that a PvE game doesn't need balance is silly to me. They could have thrown every weapon into a random number generator, let players choose whether they wanted to use the god-destroying sword or the club that takes 100 swings to kill a rat, and we all know that game would have sucked.

Say what you want about FF: Strangers of Paradise, but one of the good things I noticed about the second demo, was how the difficulty settings mirrored that of other franchises. Story is like DMC, Normal mode is like Nioh, and Hard mode is like a Souls game. The way the game plays so different depending on the difficulty you choose is pretty impressive. And if Story mode is too hard, they have an even easier mash until you win casual mode. Rewards and the like is also linked to the difficulty like in Diablo 3 and Outriders.

@spunkyhepanda: The game has plenty of broken builds. Nerfing a few extremely overpowered weapons has just made everyone move on to the next best meta. So instead of using the Sword of Night etc everyone is just going to use the Rivers of Blood build instead. When From eventually nerfs that build people will steadily move down the ladder until every special and unique weapon in the game is no more special than regular smithing stone weapons, which defeats the purpose of them being unique in the first place. Single player PVE games certainly need balance but that usually comes in the form of making things more palatable for the player by reducing roadblocks - as they have done with Radahn which is good as many people were having problems with that particular boss fight.

@facelessvixen: I finished the game with over 100 hours played at 4k max settings and had a stable 60fps

@adamwd: No offense, but I think I'm going to periodically check the Steam forums and YouTube benchmarks since "It works for me" doesn't inspire much confidence when you're between jobs.

@av_gamer: On one hand I really like the idea of difficulty levels mapping to different experiences, because one game can appeal to multiple types of player or the same player in different moods. On the other hand, I wonder how influential the souls games would have been if they'd had an easier difficulty way back in Demon's Souls. Would people have cared enough about that game to get into the lore and world design aspects if they hadn't been intrigued by the combat? Would it have ended up being another game that players like Brad play on a high difficulty and swear by but most others don't? That's a genuine question. I'm not a die-hard souls fan so the rationale for why Demon's Souls was so beloved is still a bit befuddling to me if not for the difficulty. I'm curious what people think.