Far Cry 5 performance analysis and settings guide
We’ve updated this article with the full performance results of Far Cry 5, running on all the latest graphics cards and CPUs, including SLI and CrossFire testing.
Far Cry 5 isn’t as taxing on hardware as a few games I’ve looked at during the past year, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That’s not to say anyone and everyone will be running at 60fps, but if you played Far Cry 4 or Far Cry Primal on your PC, you should be fine.
The settings are somewhat limited, and scaling of performance is pretty narrow as well. Compared to maximum quality (the ultra preset), turning everything down to low/minimum only nets about a 50 percent boost to framerates. If you can’t hit 30fps at 1080p ultra, low or normal quality might get you there, but 60fps is definitely not happening.
You’ll need a graphics card at the level of an AMD R9 390/RX 470 or Nvidia GTX 970/1060 or better to consistently break 60fps at 1080p low. Yes, that’s the minimum quality the game supports (without hacking config files or modding). For 1080p ultra, those same cards should mostly suffice, but if you want to avoid all dips below 60fps, you’ll need a GTX 1070/980 Ti or RX Vega 56/R9 Fury. 1440p ultra also averages more than 60fps on the 1070/Vega 56 and above, while the only way you’ll consistently break 60fps at 4k ultra is to run two GPUs in SLI or CrossFire. You’ll also want a good processor if you’re chasing higher framerates.
Here’s the quick overview of the features we like to see on PC games.
Far Cry 5 mostly hits all the important areas, though the graphics settings, aspect ratio support, and mod options could be better. The graphics settings consist of nine adjustable items (plus things like resolution, V-sync, and FoV), but going from max to min on all the settings doesn’t dramatically improve performance. That’s why it gets a yellow.
Aspect ratio support mostly works, with the caveat that right now your AR is based off your desktop resolution (which feels like a bug that will get fixed in a patch).
So if you’re running at 2560×1440 in Windows, and change Far Cry 5 to 2560×1080, the result is the same view you had before only crunched to a 21:9 aspect ratio. Restart the game, change your desktop resolution, and you’re fine—and that even includes things like 32:9 doublewide support. Your desktop resolution/AR also affect the range of FoV.
Finally, mod support isn’t complete, but the Far Cry Arcade does provide full map editing features. There’s potential for more to happen in the future, but right now it’s mostly just multiplayer maps.
Image 1 of 4
2560×1440 ultra + TAA + MB
2560×1440 high + SMAA
2560×1440 normal no AA
2560×1440 low no AA
Far Cry 5 settings overview
A word on our sponsor
As our partner for these detailed performance analyses, MSI provided the hardware we needed to test Far Cry 5 on a bunch of different AMD and Nvidia GPUs, CPUs, and laptops—see below for the full details.
Full details of our test equipment and methodology are detailed in our Performance Analysis 101 article. Thanks, MSI!
All the options for tweaking your graphics settings appear in the Video options menu, with most of them under the second submenu. The first submenu is for core elements like resolution, V-sync, buffering, and framerate cap, while FoV is under the fourth submenu. There are four graphics presets (plus ‘custom’), ranging from low to ultra. Using the presets with a GTX 1080 at 1440p, here’s a quick look at performance (with percentage increase relative to the ultra preset):
- Ultra: 79 fps
- High: 88 fps (11% faster)
- Normal: 99 fps (25% faster)
- Low: 114 fps (44% faster)
Even without CPU bottlenecks coming into play (thanks to the tested GPU, CPU, and resolution), that’s less than a 50 percent improvement in framerates. Most of the individual settings cause a substantially smaller change in performance. Here they are in order, with the gallery showing the various settings using the ultra preset as the base, and setting each item to minimum.
Image 1 of 11
2560×1440 ultra + TAA + motion blur (reference quality)
Performance on GTX 1080: 79 fps
Texture filtering on low
Performance on GTX 1080: 80.5 fps
Shadows on low
Performance on GTX 1080: 84 fps
Geometry and vegetation on low
Performance on GTX 1080: 82 fps
Environment on low
Performance on GTX 1080: 89 fps
Water on low
Performance on GTX 1080: 86 fps
Terrain on low
Performance on GTX 1080: 80 fps
Volumetric fog on low
Performance on GTX 1080: 81 fps
Anti-aliasing off
Performance on GTX 1080: 83 fps
SMAA anti-aliasing
Performance on GTX 1080: 81 fps
Motion blur off
Performance on GTX 1080: 80 fps
Texture Filtering: Adjusts the quality of texture filters.
Most modern GPUs easily handle anisotropic filtering at maximum quality with little impact to performance, with a two percent increase in performance by dropping to minimum.
Shadows: This mostly affects the quality of soft shadows, and the distance for the detailed shadows. Even at low, you still get decent looking shadows, which explains the relatively small six percent increase in performance.
Geometry and Vegetation: Adjusts the complexity of world geometry and vegetation, including increased LOD (level of detail) and more branches in trees at higher settings. Again, the impact on performance and visuals is relatively small, with a four percent increase using the low setting.
Environment: This adjusts the graphical details of the environment, which is a very nebulous description. However, looking at the screenshots, this appears to adjust reflections and ambient occlusion, making it the single most demanding setting you can adjust.
You can boost performance by 13 percent by using the low setting, but water in particular looks much worse.
Water: This is supposed to affect the quality of the water, but the environment setting has a far greater impact. Dropping this to low does improve performance by nine percent, though, so if you’re looking for good ways to boost framerates without impacting visuals, this is a good one.
Terrain: Sets the size (quality) of the textures used for the terrain, with a negligible impact on performance. Performance improves by just one percent going from high to low. Even at 4k ultra, Far Cry 5 only uses about 4GB of VRAM.
Volumetric Fog: Adjusts the quality of volumetric fog, including things like light shafts. Dropping to low only yields a three percent increase, however, and it’s difficult to tell what has changed in the screenshots.
Anti-Aliasing: Sets the AA mode to either off, SMAA, or TAA (Temporal AA).
TAA gives the best results, with SMAA missing many jaggies in my screenshot comparisons. Using SMAA instead of TAA increases performance by about 2.5 percent, while turning off AA gives a five percent improvement.
Motion Blur: Enables/disables motion blur. Negligible one percent increase in performance.
Cumulatively, all the performance increases stack almost perfectly, so the small improvements add up. In terms of overall image quality, there’s very little difference between the ultra, high, and normal presets, but the low preset (and particularly the low environment setting) is much more visible.
Tested graphics cards
MSI GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G
£66.04
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Yes, you can use two GPUs for a performance boost in Far Cry 5.
MSI provided all the hardware for this testing, consisting mostly of its Gaming/Gaming X graphics cards. These cards are designed to be fast but quiet, though the RX Vega cards are reference models and the RX 560 is an Aero model. I gave the both the Vega cards and the 560 a slight overclock to level the playing field, so all the cards represent factory OC models.
My main test system uses MSI’s Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC with a Core i7-8700K as the primary processor, and 16GB of DDR4-3200 CL14 memory from G.Skill . I also tested performance with Ryzen processors on MSI’s X370 Gaming Pro Carbon , also with DDR4-3200 CL14 RAM. The game is run from a Samsung 850 Pro 2TB SATA SSD for these tests, except on the laptops where I’ve used their HDD storage.
For these tests, I’m using the Nvidia 391.35 and AMD 18.3.4 drivers. Both sets of drivers are Game Ready for Far Cry 5, with limited testing showing about a five percent improvement on Nvidia hardware compared to previous drivers.
AMD’s latest drivers didn’t appear to change performance much in limited testing, but the game does wear AMD colors and possibly most of the optimizations were already baked into earlier releases.
Conveniently, Far Cry 5 keeps with recent series tradition and includes a built-in benchmark. There are areas of the game that will run slower than the results from the benchmark indicate, but many areas will run substantially faster, and as an overall representation of performance the built-in test is good and allows users to directly compare results.
Far Cry 5 graphics card benchmarks
For the low preset, I’ve disabled AA and motion blur (which aren’t affected by the presets). You’ll need at least an R9 390 or GTX 970 or similar GPU to consistently stay above 60fps, which is in line with the game’s recommended system requirements, while the minimum system requirements are for 30fps at 720p.
All the dedicated GPUs exceed the minimum requirements, but that doesn’t guarantee a steady 60+ fps—the GTX 1050 and RX 560 for example come up short.
Integrated graphics is even more painful, with Intel’s HD 630 only averaging around 20fps at 720p low, while the Ryzen 5 2400G is about 2.5 times faster.
Moving to the normal preset doesn’t really change performance much—all the GPUs run about 10 percent slower than the low preset, which is borderline noticeable. Still, this is the target I’d aim for at a minimum, if you’re interested in image quality. For 60fps, the R9 390/GTX 970 and above remain good options, with only occasional dips below that mark.
Going from the normal to high preset and enabling SMAA drops performance another 10 percent or so on most GPUs. That’s not enough to affect the standings much, with the only difference being a swap in position between the GTX 1080 and R9 380 (though they’re basically tied).
Stepping up the quality settings to ultra, along with enabling TAA and motion blur, causes another 10 percent dip in framerates. If you’re willing to play at 30fps, all the tested GPUs suffice.
For a constant 60 fps or more, I’d recommend looking for a card that shows minimums in the benchmark of 75fps, meaning only the GTX 1070 and RX Vega 56 and above will suffice—or the previous generation GTX 980 Ti and R9 Fury.
AMD GPUs continue to show slightly better performance than their Nvidia equivalents (based on MSRP) at most levels, with the Vega 64 and 56 respectively beating the GTX 1080 and 1070. The RX 580 8GB also leads the GTX 1060 6GB, but interestingly the RX 570 4GB trails the 1060 3GB by a relatively large 10 percent.
For 1440p ultra, the GTX 1070 or RX Vega 56 still average 60fps or more, though dips below that are still possible. This is why we continue to recommend 1440p 144Hz G-Sync/FreeSync displays as the best overall choice for a gaming monitor—you won’t feel any microstuttering if you stay in the 40-144 fps range. But the only way you’re going to come anywhere near 144fps in Far Cry 5 is with multiple GPUs (or maybe a Titan V).
4k gaming as usual is mostly about bragging rights, just like the ultra setting.
The good news is that SLI and CrossFire make 4k at 60fps or more achievable, but with single GPUs even the 1080 Ti comes up short. I did some testing at 4k with normal quality and it does average more than 60 fps on the 1080 Ti, but just barely (65fps).
Far Cry 5 SLI and CrossFire performance
I’ll be honest in saying that I’m not really a fan of multi-GPU these days. It has always been a bit of a crapsshoot, and in the past year a large number of games haven’t worked with multi-GPU at all—or at best, support came several weeks or even months after the initial game launch. Far Cry 5 bucks that trend, however, likely due in part to the lack of major changes in the Dunia engine.
If you have a second matched GPU available, both CrossFire and SLI work, with CrossFire in particular putting up some impressive scaling results. I’ve tested RX 580 CF, RX Vega 56 CF, GTX 1080 SLI, and GTX 1080 Ti SLI on the overclocked Core i7-8700K platform. I also ran some additional testing with 1080 Ti SLI using some other CPUs, specifically Ryzen 7 1800X, Ryzen 5 1600X, and Core i5-8400.
Image 1 of 6
3840×2160 ultra + SMAA + motion blur
2560×1440 ultra + SMAA + motion blur
1920×1080 ultra + SMAA + motion blur
1920×1080 high + SMAA
1920×1080 normal no AA
1920×1080 low no AA
At 4k ultra, the 1080 Ti SLI setup on the 8700K is just slightly faster than the i5-8400 CPU (minimums showed more variation, which is typical of multi-GPU, so I wouldn’t pay those too much attention). The Ryzen 7 1800X ends up about nine percent slower than the 8700K, and the 1600X is another two percent drop from there.
What’s interesting is how the CPU requirements change things at 1440p and lower resolutions. At 1440p, the 8700K is now nine percent faster than the i5-8400, but more critically it’s 34 percent faster than the Ryzen 7 1800X, and 41 percent faster than the 1600X. Ouch. In fact, even a single GTX 1080 Ti running on the 8700K beats the SLI configurations running on the Ryzen processors.
Looking at the multi-GPU scaling for the various GPUs I tested, all with the 8700K, the RX 580 8GB does extremely well: 91 percent scaling at 1440p and 98 percent scaling at 4k. Vega 56 is nearly as impressive: up to 92 percent scaling at 4k. The GTX 1080 SLI setup doesn’t scale nearly as well: 61 percent at 4k. Similarly, 1080 Ti SLI scaling is 56 percent at 4k—and only 26 percent at 1440p. That’s because CPU bottlenecks are playing a bigger role, especially with multi-GPU. It’s also why SLI and CrossFire become far less useful at lower settings and resolutions.
Far Cry 5 CPU performance
For CPU testing, I’ve used the GTX 1080 Ti on all the processors. This is to try and show the maximum difference in performance you’re likely to see from the various CPUs—running with a slower GPU will greatly reduce the performance gap. Far Cry 5 hits the CPU pretty good with a fast graphics card, and it makes good use of multiple cores as you can see in the charts.
Image 1 of 6
1920×1080 low no AA
1920×1080 normal no AA
1920×1080 high + SMAA
1920×1080 ultra + TAA + motion blur
2560×1440 ultra + TAA + motion blur
3840×2160 ultra + TAA + motion blur
At the low quality preset, the overclocked 8700K is up to 77 percent faster than the slowest CPU I tested, the Ryzen 3 2200G.
The gap drops to 70 percent at normal quality, 60 percent at high and ultra—all at 1080p. By 1440p, things have narrowed to a 25 percent gap, and at 4k ultra we end up with an eight-way tie.
What’s interesting is that Far Cry 5 carries AMD branding, and not just for graphics cards but for Ryzen processors as well. Despite that, all the Intel Coffee Lake chips surpass even the fastest Ryzen CPUs in performance, and only the previous generation 2-core/4-thread Core i3-7100 falls behind the two faster Ryzen parts.
That doesn’t mean AMD’s CPUs won’t run Far Cry 5, but you’ll still get better performance out of most recent Intel processors—again, provided you’re not GPU limited. If you’re doing other tasks in the background, like livestreaming, having a processor with more cores can also be beneficial, and in general the sweet spot with Far Cry 5 appears to be 6-core processors.
I don’t have any older Haswell-era processors for testing, but anecdotally it looks like Intel’s older chips may not fare quite so well—and the same goes for AMD’s FX-series parts.
You should still be able to hit 30fps or more without trouble, but for 60fps and above it’s time to start thinking about a CPU/platform upgrade.
Far Cry 5 notebook performance
The heavier CPU requirements also play a role on notebook gaming performance. I should note first that the GE63VR performance was off, and I couldn’t figure out a workaround. It showed higher VRAM use and lower performance than I expected, by about 10-15 percent, but here are the current numbers.
Image 1 of 4
1920×1080 low no AA
1920×1080 normal no AA
1920×1080 high + SMAA
1920×1080 ultra + TAA + motion blur
At 1080p ultra, the desktop 1070 beats any notebook tested, thanks largely to the CPU performance advantage. The desktop 1060 6GB also beats both the mobile 1070 and 1060 (and these aren’t even the slower Max-Q mobile parts).
The new Intel 6-core mobile parts should show up very soon, so if you’re thinking about investing in a gaming notebook, it’s probably worth holding off for a few weeks before deciding which one to buy.
Welcome to the world of Far Cry 5
Performance Analysis Hardware
Desktop PC / motherboards
MSI Aegis Ti3 VR7RE SLI-014US
MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC
MSI X299 Gaming Pro Carbon AC
MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon
MSI X370 Gaming Pro Carbon
MSI B350 Tomahawk
The GPUs
GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G
MSI GTX 1070 Ti Gaming 8G
MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X 8G
MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X 6G
MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X 3G
MSI GTX 1050 Ti Gaming X 4G
MSI GTX 1050 Gaming X 2G
MSI RX Vega 64 8G
MSI RX Vega 56 8G
MSI RX 580 Gaming X 8G
MSI RX 570 Gaming X 4G
MSI RX 560 4G Aero ITX
Gaming Notebooks
MSI GT73VR Titan Pro (GTX 1080)
MSI GE63VR Raider (GTX 1070)
MSI GS63VR Stealth Pro (GTX 1060)
If you’d like to compare performance to my results, I’m using the built-in benchmarking tool.
Rather than simply using the reported scores (which are mostly accurate), I collect frametimes using FRAPS and then compute the average and 97 percentile minimums. 97 percentile minimums are calculated by finding the 97 percentile frametimes (the point where the frametime is higher than 97 percent of frames), then finding the average of all frames with a worse frametime result. In other words, it’s the average of the worst three percent of frames.
You can see real-time framerates in the performance analysis video. The framerate overlay graphs are generated from the frametime data, using custom software that I’ve created. And that’s really why I have to use FRAPS or OCAT.
Thanks again to MSI for providing the hardware for testing. These results were collected from March 27-30, 2018, using the latest version of the game (1.2.0) and graphics drivers available at the time (Nvidia 391.35 and AMD 18.3.4).
Far Cry 5 proves to be more demanding on the CPU than previous installments in the series, likely due in a large part to the way the AI is constantly throwing ‘excitement’ at the player.
Go fishing and you can expect to get attacked by bears, mountain lions, and cultists—with some freedom fighters joining in to fend off the attacks. It’s exciting, though having traveled through rural Montana plenty of times I can’t say it’s very realistic.
We could see future improvements in performance through patches and driver updates, but for the time being AMD GPUs at the Vega 64/GTX 1080 level and below tend to hold a performance advantage over Nvidia offerings, and AMD gets better scaling from CrossFire than Nvidia gets from SLI. But if you’re running multi-GPU, you’ll also want to run the game on a modern Intel platform, as CPU bottlenecks show up on other systems.
Jarred’s love of computers dates back to the dark ages when his dad brought home a DOS 2.3 PC and he left his C-64 behind. He eventually built his first custom PC in 1990 with a 286 12MHz, only to discover it was already woefully outdated when Wing Commander was released a few months later. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Brigham Young University and has been working as a tech journalist since 2004, writing for AnandTech, Maximum PC, and PC Gamer.
From the first S3 Virge ‘3D decelerators’ to today’s GPUs, Jarred keeps up with all the latest graphics trends and is the one to ask about game performance.
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5GHz or equivalent
4GHz or AMD Ryzen 5 1600X @ 3.6GHz or equivalent
So, you’ll already need to own a beefy GPU (or two) to run Far Cry 5 at 4K, or be willing to pay a huge markup.
Body}}}
Legacy” will need at least GTX 1070
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Elden Ring Review | VRgames
Genre: Action/RPG.
Developer: FromSoftware.
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment.
Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 4-5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S.
Minimum system requirements: Win 10, Core i5 8400 or Ryzen 3 3300X, 12GB RAM, GeForce GTX 1060 3GB or Radeon RX 580 4GB, 60GB HDD.
Recommended: Core i7 8700K or Ryzen 5 3600X, 16GB RAM, GeForce GTX 1070 8GB or Radeon RX VEGA 56 8GB.
Age rating: 17+.
Optional Open World RPG Introduction
Modern role-playing games originate in the zero years, when several studios at once came up with the idea to make something like GTA, only with swords and pumping. This is the dream of any demiurge: a living independent world, controlled by a set of global laws, where the player is one of the guests, but not the center of the universe. The creative genius of the genre turned towards the creation of such open worlds, but one annoying problem was soon discovered. Close combat. Steel arms. Radically different math, due to the fact that the strike zone is comparable to the size of opponents, and the attack speed is comparable to their movement speed.
The squalor of melee combat was turned a blind eye for a long time, so even in the immortal Skyrim battles are a primitive call.
Everything changed with the advent of games from FromSoftware, where the combat system is at the forefront. Fantasy-exploding hardcore bosses broke the mold and became the envy of all RPG creators. The player was required to have masterful control and memorization of tactics, in turn, the game guaranteed fair control and the theoretical ability to fill up anyone, even with bare hands.
But where CD Projekt RED rushed to the top of the genre, fueling its own developments with all the best from its predecessors, FromSoftware closed in on itself. Demon’s Souls was followed by the Dark Souls trilogy, as well as Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, improved graphics, but in fact Souls-like fans received only new bosses to hone their skills. And if, with the recent release of Elex 2, you read somewhere ironic about Piranha Bytes stubbornly doing the same thing, know that they were once what FromSoftware is today — innovators who did not want to look around.
In fact, Elden Ring is a desperate attempt to break through the cocoon in which the Souls-like subgenre has found itself and enter the expanses of the RPG genre, just at the moment when there are no Witchers, TES 6 or surprises from Obsidian on there is no horizon. And choosing the right moment is the only thing that FromSoftware succeeded in.
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Therefore, here I will simply say to all FromSoftware fans: Elden Ring is another game entirely in the style of previous studio projects. I won’t reveal anything new about Elden Ring to you, and if I do, then maybe for the worse — there will only be a spoiler. So just congratulations, it’s a holiday on your street! And in the review, I will honestly tell my impressions as a person, so far by Souls- like uninvolved, although action/ I like RPG in the open world like no other genre. |
GreedFall plus Roach
So, in the context of all games in open worlds with Elden Ring trouble, and typical for the eighth generation of consoles. The developers decided that the open two-dimensional world can be filled with activities as if it were a linear corridor. Having received a high-speed mount almost immediately, you rush through the expanses of a huge map, occasionally bumping into traces of how FromSoftware imagined that you would be playing this game. One of our authors stumbled upon learning basic mechanics two hours after launch, but I never got there.
Another telling example is the special attacks here called Ashes of War. You can only add them to weapons when you find a special item. Which is hidden in an unremarkable basement. I only went there after reading the forums. Yes, in a linear game, without options, I would have to pass by this place, but here I have a horse, a steppe, and what is that luminous tree on the horizon? One can only feel sorry for the unknown game designer, who saw it this way: “The player, having entered the map, will notice the ruins, go there and clear them to the end.
” How naive!
An elusive steed called Potok materializes right under the hero and is a legal cheat. Firstly, in many cases he can get out of trouble, save from the enemy when there is little health left. Secondly, it doesn’t cost you anything to steal any loot right under the nose of the boss that guards him — since you can pick up things without getting down from the saddle. Finally, on horseback you have a huge advantage over your enemies on foot, so that monsters that would surround and crush you with a crowd are more likely to kill each other with awkward sweeping blows.
The world of Elden Ring appears as a desert, where scattered groups of monsters are waiting for you for dinner, and random loot is scattered between them: mountain ash, mushrooms, Elden flowers and other ingredients that can be exchanged with merchants for runes — they are experience, they are also and money. You run through the bushes and collect experience with one button — cool pumping? The artificiality of this world is reminiscent of GreedFall, an attempt to combine Souls-like with an open world, undertaken by the French studio Spiders back in 2019.
By the way, there were tons of cinematic videos, talkative companions and variable quests. Where is it in Elden Ring?
True, sometimes you have to go down into the dungeons, where FromSoftware designers feel at home, and you are like a mouse in the paws of a cat. That is, riddles, traps and mockeries are waiting every minute, so you seem to hear off-screen giggles. Mindfulness, ingenuity will not help you — the rules of the game are constantly violated. So, in the hub, the first NPC will say that it is safe here — and in five minutes a materialized magician will kill you, and you will not be able to return the runes lost due to death. And in another place, the trap will take you to the far edge of the map — and immediately prohibit fast movement: they say, first find Grace (local checkpoint).
Some kind of horror with the interface is superimposed on everything. Some rules need to be guessed by yourself (read: google on the Internet), others are communicated on loading screens, and still others are explained by an intrusive dialog box.
And which of the options when used — there is no logic. So, if our horse died in the middle of a fight with the boss, then in the dialog box we are warned again and again that resurrection costs a healing bottle. Very important and on time, yes!
George Martin wrote to desk
I would also like to compare Elden Ring with a half-empty pirate server of some Korean MMORPG. You can grind. It is possible to experience pain from imbalanced bosses. You can just run wherever your eyes look, considering the locations. Everything. I don’t like the endless dialogues in Obsidian games, I don’t like the long intros of modern video games with cutscenes following one another. Nevertheless, dialogues are a way to diversify the game, to show the world from the other side, to divide the areas into hostile and safe. Create a contrast in the feel of the game. Quests create additional connections between different points of the big world. Relations between factions and individual heroes, options for passing with a moral choice, the impact of actions on the world around them — all these are wonderful mechanics that are deservedly included in the palette of the creators of role-playing games.
Elden Ring stingy palette. You are not motivated in any way, all actions here are equivalent, and the results of efforts are not felt in the world. Monsters, except for bosses, resurrect after each rest or death, so the locations do not change, and I plundered that caravan over there, and it crawls again in the same place. Directly looted. Killing this boss or another doesn’t matter, because it’s generally not clear why someone should be killed. Especially since everyone around looks more like the dead anyway.
We are told George Martin, the master of Western fantasy, worked on the plot. Why Martin? Again, to expand the niche, to attract new players. So that not only surrealism and Japanese madness, but a style understandable to a global audience. And what? It’s ridiculous to compare Elden Ring to Game of Thrones. This is an introduction for a couple of minutes about nothing — and then there is no plot at all. Again the cursed world and the demigods to be killed.
Minimum details. Again dumb NPC, issuing mean hints. And the main character, whom everyone calls Extinguished, is just a wooden doll.
And you can get on the Internet and read lore there, partly posted by the developers, partly restored by the fans, but it will again remind you of the days of the old MMORPGs that were played with every minute looking into the browser. You read lore, read guides, read the meaning of symbols in the interface — everything that was not added to the game, you read on the Internet. And you tell yourself that the conciseness of Elden Ring is such a feature.
Something happened to you and you died.
Elden Ring’s unshakable virtue is the battles with bosses, which are found everywhere in this world. Any dungeon ends with a boss, arenas meet in the open, and sometimes you can just be caught off guard out of the blue. Therefore, conventionally, there are two types of battles.
In the first case, the boss is the owner of the closed arena, and the arena is like an extension of the boss.
We are forced to memorize all the movesets, guess the moments for somersaults and retaliatory attacks, knock out health little by little, fearing the next phases and all sorts of surprises (like healing). Here, despite special effects and dynamic music, calmness and measuredness are needed, because each action is tied to a stamina reserve. For example, the boss has a series of three attacks, and you have a reserve of strength just for three somersaults — but for a retaliatory strike, it means that there is no strength left. And if there are two attacks in your response series, then the second one will come out more powerful, the third one even more powerful, so there is something to strive for.
Bosses of the second type are usually found on the surface, and in combat with them you run around in a large area. Here you are already on an equal footing, the enemy himself obeys the laws of the open world, and there are many loopholes for cheating. But the variety of attacks, including those that kill instantly, will make these bosses sweat for some time.
For regular players in Souls-like, all the mechanics of battles will be familiar. Unless the monster’s attack zone and the distance from which it can be beaten are not always obvious. If you are new to Souls-like, alas! The appearance of a long red bar at the bottom of the screen and the change of music means that now you will die without understanding what happened. Smooth entry into the rules of duels is not provided.
Instead, you can call helpers — spirits. They are a great help. A pack of wolves, a poisonous jellyfish, and even your own clone — here you can try different options. Without your participation, the spirits will be able to defeat only the weakest bosses, but in other cases they divert attention to themselves and allow some time to do damage in the back with impunity. Spirits can be pumped, but you cannot rely on them entirely. The consequences are sad: instead of getting used to the combat easier on the bosses, you defeat them with the support of the spirits with chaotic actions, and then you face even more powerful enemies and you can no longer do anything.
Much more correct — if FromSoftware wanted to give newcomers a chance — it would be to make really weak bosses and build up the difficulty gradually. Spirits are such a cheap “crutch” from developers to implement, when there seems to be help, but the game passes you by. Reminds, again, of the techniques of Korean MMORPGs, where newcomers are given powerful buffs or temporary weapons to lure with illusory simplicity.
Numbers
Of course, you can train on ordinary opponents in the open world, but this is both boring and unrewarded. Yes, you gain experience — but there are plenty of ways to earn it quickly and effortlessly. For example, cut the inhibited giants, circling under their feet on horseback. Or go to a location where different monsters fight among themselves in order to finish off both sides unnoticed. You can crawl through the bushes in stealth, killing blind soldiers with blows in the back. There are also more outspoken ways of cheating. So specifically exhausting yourself with training is not interesting.
At the same time, the experience essentially does not change anything. The best thing about stat growth is the ability to pick up more powerful weapons. Otherwise, you will not feel the difference by raising 10-20 levels — everything is decided by tactics. And the right weapon, so after 40 hours of playing you understand: all the problems are because you didn’t take a hero with a katana at the start.
Actually, only the starting weapon is determined during character creation — other customization options are decorative and are not felt in the game. You can swing your Extinguished One in any direction, but as a person, this is a complete zero. Somewhere in a reality inaccessible to Souls-like, there are games with unique mechanics for different classes, with trees of skills that qualitatively affect the picture of the battle. There are interconnections between different aspects of leveling and unexpected builds. But FromSoftware didn’t hear anything about it. Once every ten hours, you sharpen your weapon and add an extra flask, and protection grows from pumping any stat.
But there is crafting and a million different consumables, so you can try your luck with some bombs or fire arrows. And in stores there are even items that are useful in the battle with a specific boss. Thank you that the prices of the sellers are trifling: everything that we like, we buy right away. Again, there are no obstacles to drive to the other side of the map, buy advanced recipes and armor elements, and only the general furious complexity levels out such gaps in balance.
Optimization
It’s time to hammer in the last nail, because the Internet is full of horror from the technical state of Elden Ring. I won’t add anything to this, since the game worked perfectly for me, albeit at low graphics settings — although my PC did not even reach the minimum in any of the parameters. The number of frames per second was kept above 30, so the lags did not interfere in battles. Locations were loaded without friezes, and the game could only crash from quick Alt + Tab switches.
At the same time, the work of artists is undoubtedly and objectively the strong side of the game along with the combat system. In the vast world, you can navigate even without a map, because each area is special, full of remarkable details, and in the distance you can see huge landmarks: either glowing trees, or huge castles or ruins. Part of the design replaces the plot here. Just as in high fantasy, current adventures reveal the majestic events of the past, so in Elden Ring, the squalor of a lost world is set off by the surviving relics of another era. You can, armed with fantasy, become an archaeologist of this world and try to guess how the Inter-earth came to such a life.
There are also staged episodes when you seem to be in the thick of the battle. It’s a shame when such moments are continually interrupted by deaths.
But death is not to blame
There is already a modification on Nexus Mods that reduces the difficulty of Elden Ring fights and speeds up leveling — the community itself completes what FromSoftware does not want to notice.
I hope that over time they will improve the control on the computer: they will add quick buttons to objects, and somersault, rebound and sprint will no longer hang on one key.
But the rebalanced difficulty will not change the general attitude towards the game. I can easily name other games where hardcore is an integral part of the experience: all the old Blizzard, if not half of the games of the 90s, are like that. The difference is that they were able to reward for the efforts made, they were able to arouse curiosity so that they would like to go further. They caught on with a dynamic plot, new mechanics, a sense of progress and trust in the game world. Yes, the enemies are strong, but I can also do something.
Elden Ring for the most part causes indifference with its sketchiness, monotony and turn on the theme of death. You want to contemplate the beauty spoiled by decadence, maneuvering between enemies, like a ghost that does not care about anything. Interfering with the post-life of the Interearth is useless.
It does not cause sympathy, and in addition, the invisible gaze of the creators of the game constantly hangs over you, who, if you follow their idea, test your patience by breaking their own rules. They are like children who poke a cockroach with a stick, and if in the memorable Pathologic 2 this was explained by the mercilessness of death itself, reinforced by the metaphor of the theater, here it simply prevents you from immersing yourself in the world.
It remains to explain to yourself why you need this game. Thought it was good. For dozens of hours spent in the Inter-Earth, I have not seen anything that it would be a pity to forget, having completed this review. And here is the main reason for the low rating.
Joys:
- Combat system
- Lots of content
- Artwork
- Music
Nasty things:
- The inanimate world
- No motivation
- Everything you need to spy on the Internet
- Unjustified «pianos in the bushes»
- Optimization
Score: 7.
