Elden Ring

Updated 1,013 Days AgoPublic

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A fun game but a deeply user-unfriendly and broken one. Notes below largely for the sake of playing it on Linux, although many pertain elsewhere...

• I got a black blank screen on startup until I set -windowed in the Steam game launch options. This does not actually make it windowed other than for the first splash screen or two, after which it goes fullscreen, but it seems to fix the blank screen issue. However on Kubuntu 21.10 at least, if I change focus away from the Elden Ring window during startup it then fails to load forever on a tiny white screen.
• Button prompts default to Xbox-style controller button prompts, even with no controller detected. The option to change this, somewhat surprisingly, is under System → Sound and Display.
• The moment performance starts to lag, the game seems to do some sort of change that renders most enemies invisible, at least for me and many other people (not a Proton issue with running it on Linux like I first suspected). Important ones tend not to, and merely rotating the camera will smoothly change enemy visibility, so something very glitchy is going on. Some speculate that some performance fallback is making something go wrong with occlusion shaders. Zealously turning down graphical options in the pursuit of performance seems to make it better, but never perfect.
• For multiplayer to work, currently one needs to set Properties → Compatibility → Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool → Proton Experimental