The release of the Shadow of the Erdtree was met with critical and fan acclaim. I must admit, the Expansion pack is extremely good in most areas and deserves most of the accolades. From Software’s artists and designers are among the best in the industry. However, it does highlight one of From Software’s biggest issues – their engine and software engineering.
Missing simple features
Shadow of the Erdtree is missing the support for basic PC features such as Ultrawide displays or high frame rates above 60 fps. Now it should be noted that modders have managed to mostly fix those things, but at the cost of disabling the online component. The thing is, why should modders have to step up to provide such basic features? Ultrawide support is not something difficult to do. Most indie games, many mods, hell, even some 15-year-old titles support this from the get go.
The first boss of Shadow of the Erdtree is awesome though!
As for the framerate? We know Elden Ring works mostly fine above 60 FPS. There are a few issues that modders cannot fix I admit, but those should not be too difficult for the company that holds the full source code and development kit for the game itself to resolve. They are minor things related to animations and hit boxes. Many people beat the whole game without said problems ever impacting their enjoyment so even as they are, they are a minor quibble.
We have 20-year-old games that operate well with advanced physics working fine at arbitrary framerates. That a large, AAA studio from Japan cannot do this is actually something unheard of. Ironically, Armored Core 6, From’s newer game, runs at 120 fps without issues on the same exact engine, so whatever problems they had were quickly fixed for said game!
It runs poorly for how it looks (again)
This always stumps people but allow me to clarify. The game is beautiful. It is an artistic masterpiece and the artists in charge of the design for the levels, enemies, items and props – they did a fantastic job. Almost perfect and nigh peerless. The new areas look incredible and some of the designs on the new bosses or enemies are at the absolute pinnacle of epic fantasy design.
Art design is more important for a game’s looks than graphical fidelity. It is,always has been and always will be. But it is a subjective category. What I will refer to from now on is not art design, but graphical fidelity. Objective, engineering quality things, like lighting, textures, models, special effects, ambient occlusion, etcetera.
A game can be amazingly beautiful due to its art design and still be very poor, fidelity-wise. A game can be a godlike accomplishment of engineering, but also have soulless, bland art design and end up looking kind of ugly. These things are both possible. Elden Ring suffers from the former. And so does Shadow of the Erdtree.
We are dealing with 2015-2016 era graphics overall. Shadow of the Erdtree does not convincingly defeat The Witcher 3 (DX11) in objective graphical fidelity. It has better textures and PBR and I admit, more complex modelling overall too. Some might argue better lighting as well though its close. However, it has noticeably worse ambient occlusion, its AI systems and simulation are much worse and the systems managing LODs and particles are less refined. Not to mention Witcher 3’s maps are still bigger and its weather systems are more varied.
This scene took me from 60 fps to 31-32 fps… for no good reason at all! On an enthusiast GPU!
Does this matter? In this case it does. Not because I care for graphical fidelity that much though. Remember, I am a major fan of older games myself. All of them cannot even hope to match Elden Ring in terms of fidelity! It matters because the game looks like a 2016 title yet it is as demanding as some 2021-2022 games! It runs terrible for how its graphical fidelity is and its way too CPU demanding considering its simulation level and systems.
I found many locations where FPS drops for no reason but this is one of the worst.
If Elden Ring ran some 60% faster than it does right now, I would ultimately be OK with its visuals. Yes, it would not be a technological marvel, but it would run well. But alas, it does not. It is objectively unoptimized. That is what unoptimized means in this context – poor utilization of resources and a bad ratio of performance for fidelity (not art).
Consoles are affected, oh and stutter too…
We are PC-focused on Sapphire nation but I need to address this since it’s a point that is frequently brought up when it comes time to discuss Elden Ring. Namely the myth on the consoles and how they play the game…
The console experience is bad too. We have tests that showcase the power of the Playstation 5 or the Xbox faltering to keep 60 fps and 4K locked. Yes, they are weaker than a RX 7900 XTX and a Ryzen 7 7800X3D. They cannot hope to match a high-end gaming PC. But they are still hardware that should eat a 2015-2016 era game alive and spit it out at 4K/60 without major issues. Hell, the framerate modes should be touching 120 fps with a lowered resolution were this game better made!
Source from Digital Foundry
And the stutters? On PC we have traversal stutter and shader compilation stutter. On consoles the shader compilation stutter does not exist it seems, but the rest is still there! This is From’s own bespoke engine, their engineering, their source code… they should be able to spend money and time and fix these issues on both PC and consoles!
Where is FSR? Frame Generation? Why is Ray Tracing so poor?
Elden Ring uses a fairly decent Temporal Anti-Aliasing for its anti-aliasing solution. This is good, but it also means it could very easily support FidelityFX Super Resolution and Frame Generation or other similar pieces of technology.
Artistically, they are at the pinnacle of fantasy…
We have seen modders actually be able to inject these techniques into Elden Ring and they work really well to boot. If someone who does not have the game’s development kit or source code can implement frame generation and advanced image reconstruction into the game and do so quite successfully might I add, then From Software’s engineers should be able to do so as well, and in only a couple of weeks at the most to boot! So, this is not a money problem and I pray to God that it isn’t a competence problem either. It really does suck since these pieces of technology could help console gamers and people with less potent hardware the most.
Last but not least from the game’s major technological faults – its Ray Tracing implementation. Ray Tracing in Elden Ring technically works and it does make some of the close range or mid-range shadows and occlusion look better, but it is one of the worst implementations both in terms of its performance hit and impact on graphical fidelity I have ever seen. Doubly so because its an open world game with some dynamic weather and time of day simulation – it is the perfect use case for ray tracing! Comparing it to something like Cyberpunk 2077 or even Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is a frankly insulting to those games, engineering-wise.
From Software, please hire better engineers!
Look, I love Elden Ring and I really liked Shadow of the Erdtree. Most of its praise is absolutely for sure well earned. It is an amazing experience and as a game I cannot recommend it enough. But something needs to change within From Software. It is not normal for a major AAA game development studio, from a rich and peaceful country (Japan in this case), working on a successful IP and raking in hundreds of millions of dollars to be so incompetent with their own technology. They get outclassed by almost all other Western or Eastern AAA/AA game developers, most indie developers, and most modders even. We have situations where people working in active war zones can release more optimized or better looking (fidelity-wise) or more feature complete PC or console games/mods than From Software.
The final boss for From Software – someone who can debug an engine or something…
I love their games, but this is not acceptable. Something must change in their studio. Until that happens, it is not fair to ignore all of these problems while bashing other developers for similar, if less severe issues. Yes, Ubisoft and Bethesda suffer from at times poor engineering efforts too. Yes, they should be critiqued. Yes, I personally don’t like their games as much as I like Elden Ring. But they are better made, better programmed.
It is time we gamers started demanding more from Software. They nail the hardest parts of making a great game. Let’s hold them accountable to nailing the (comparatively) easier ones as well!
The articles content, opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed in SAPPHIRE NATION are the authors’ own and do not necessarily represent official policy or position of SAPPHIRE Technology.
