Elden Ring will surely go down in history as one of the most significant innovators of the open-world genre and also as one of the finest Souls games ever. But like its punished protagonist, the game is rather tarnished. Because depending on where players play, it can be a rough experience with the PC version having the most technical problems.
Elden Ring's issues don't stop there. It sadly has some fundamental and immediate design issues that prevent it from giving a perfect Souls game experience, especially when compared to the Dark Souls trilogy. Because for every high it gives, there are also some pretty unambitious lows. All of them, however, should be easily fixed with these suggestions.
10 More Reasonable Sites Of Grace Placement
While Elden Ring's own version of the Souls series' bonfires, the Sites of Grace, are quite generous, they can be inconsistent. The game gives out plenty of these sites whenever players finish fighting bosses. In fact, players can even see these sites all clumped up too much in boss areas. The Margit or Godskin Duo boss areas are glaring examples of this.
Meanwhile, there are areas such as the starting area in Lyndell Royal Capital or the Haligtree that could have used more Sites of Grace in-between. In the open world, this isn't much of a problem since Torrent makes traversal less of a chore.
9 Fewer Enemy Squads In Late Game Areas
As Elden Ring players progress more toward the late game or endgame areas, what would seem like a frustrating rushed difficulty increase starts rearing its ugly head. That would be rooms with too many enemies per square meter. Mohgwyn Palace, the Haligtree, and Crumbling Farum Azula. Success in these encounters relies too much on chance if players don't lure the enemies one by one (in melee combat).
The previous Souls games also have this design but most of their enemy squads are just fodder that is easy to kill. So many resort to just running past these enemy squads in Elden Ring's late game. There are way too many scenarios like these in tight non-open-world late-game areas that it's hard to appreciate the game's beauty or mechanics since players are just incentivized to run past their enemies like punks instead of overcoming a fair and fun challenge.
8 A Camera That Doesn't Fight Players
For regular-sized, ground-locked enemies in Elden Ring, fights are about fair. Problems arise against enemies that fly or are too big for the screen. At that point, the camera will join the fight and spin around too much or accidentally obscure enemy movement. Such is the case in melee fights against the Death Rite Bird, Malenia, Gargoyles, Dragons, Giants, etc. Some lock-on points are also inconsistent or missing, especially for some Dragon fights.
The camera can sometimes cause unwarranted deaths. It's also worth noting that Elden Ring's big enemies are noticeably bigger compared to the big enemies in other Souls games yet its camera hasn't been updated for such fights. It's still the old stubborn Souls trilogy camera built for regular and smaller bosses.
7 Fewer Recycled Bosses
One of the chief complaints in game design in Souls games that has been around since the first Dark Souls is the recycled bosses. Dark Souls 2 took this too far and that's partly why it's usually the least popular Souls game in polls. Elden Ring committed the same mistake as Dark Souls 2 when it came to bosses.
Some bosses such as the Crucible Knight, Gargoyles, Erdtree Avatars, etc. have been repeated so many times in so many re-skins that it's more nauseating than rewarding to fight them again. Even some main bosses appear to have been re-skinned so only a few of them really stand out despite the high number.
6 Appropriate Rewards For Some Bosses
The worst part about some of these recycled and re-skinned bosses is that the toughest of them don't give rewards fitting of their difficulty. The most notorious offender here is the Crucible Knight boss(es) who only give a few thousand Souls— sorry, Runes, despite being one of the hardest bosses in the game.
More Runes would have sufficed or even items in addition to a build-specific spell that they drop. Of course, the main bosses don't suffer from this kind of problem but duo or "gank" bosses (such as dual Crucible Knights, dual Gargoyles, and that Dragon family in Caelid) give dishearteningly low rewards.
5 Less Input Lag
This one might not be a universal problem for Elden Ring. Some players might not even notice it or perhaps it's completely absent. But some gaming setups and platforms are experiencing a troublesome few milliseconds of input lag. That doesn't sound like much but this is huge for a Souls game as a dodge missed by less than a blink of an eye can spell death, especially in boss fights.
Some players even compared dodging Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3. The input lag was there alright. The cause of this issue is yet unknown at the time of writing so there might not be an actual fix or if the developers even consider it as an issue at all. But for some who are suffering from the said input lag, a fix is sorely needed. Some mods on PC even offer that remedy unofficially.
4 More Accessible UI, Especially For PC
At this point, the console-centric UI of Souls games is a tradition. PC ports have always been left in the dust when it comes to a user interface that caters to the PC hardware and peripherals. Elden Ring's UI is mostly the same as other Souls games.
It can be clunky and disorienting. To the chagrin of some PC players who use PlayStation's DualShock controllers, the game's PC version doesn't offer button icons other than those found on Xbox controllers. At times, it can even feel like the UI is also fighting against the players; this area of a Souls game could have used plenty of innovation.
3 Better, Stabler Connectivity
Elden Ring's online component is optional so players can generally avoid this issue but PvP and co-op tend to be a big part of a Souls game. To that end, even that optional feature has its own host of problems (no pun intended). Connectivity issues are not uncommon.
Players joining other games or invading sometimes get disconnected before, during, or after the process of visiting another player's world. For invaders, this can be even more frustrating for invaders; at the time of writing, if a connection error occurs while invading, the item used (the Finger) won't be refunded.
2 More Polish
As always, any AAA game that has recently been released comes with a plethora of bugs, glitches, and errors. Elden Ring is no exception. It has everything from crashes, missing textures, pop-ins, and even glitches that stall progress or cause some untimely deaths.
There's even a notable issue on PC at the time of writing where turning down the shadow settings results in unsightly artifacts. The latest Elden Ring patch might have fixed some of these as it already dealt with the Fire Giant crash. It's also worth noting that most of the major technical issues players experience right now won't last as more updates roll out.
1 Performance Issue Fixes
It's not just the PC version that's suffering from this but even the consoles (though the former has it the worst by far). The most common technical issue is lower framerate than expected, even for high-end hardware. The game is also locked at 60 FPS and has no ultrawide support activated.
Meanwhile, a technical issue that has cost players a boss fight (apart from low FPS) is the serious stuttering that happens when transitioning from open-world areas. Players can even test this out as early as the Tree Sentinel boss fight if they already have Torrent. Thankfully, the developers are currently hard at work in eliminating these issues so it's only a matter of time before players will have absolutely nothing to blame but themselves for some deaths.