My Notes On Elden Ring — Part Two

Breath of the Dark Souls

Alex Rowe
7 min readMay 18, 2023
My Elden Ring character stands in front of some cool stuff like a tower and a big shiny tree.
Xbox Series S screenshot taken by the author.

And here I am, nearly two months after the first installment of this supposed series, ready to talk about Elden Ring again.

In that time, the ray tracing update’s performance has remained disappointing — so much so that I decided to take away the temptation entirely and started playing it on the Series S instead of the PS5. I’m usually a framerate guy, but if a fun new/interesting graphics setting is present before me, I’m going to feel like I have to turn it on.

Performance has never been Elden Ring’s strong suit, and since everything in the game is built around precise controller input timing, the more frames you have the better it feels to play. The Xbox Series S is a weirdly okay option for this as long as you don’t mind sacrificing some resolution.

Here then are my thoughts in my weird “notes” style after starting the game all over again, and playing through Limgrave’s vast store of content, including defeating legendary first boss Margit the Fell Omen. I started this “notes” series to function sort of like a written podcast. Yes, I know that makes no sense. I noticed though that game reviews have fallen off the traffic truck faster than last year’s hot takes, and long-form thought pieces about games, while fun to write, take much longer for me to produce. So…

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Alex Rowe

I write about gaming, tech, music, and their industries. I have a background in video production, and I used to review games for a computer magazine.