“Right now even with 60 vigor you get one-shot by nearly every enemy that’s not pure fodder (like the classical wandering nobles in the base game),” Steam user ‘Flippikus’ writes. “And the Scadutree fragments that should make your damage and defense increase (exclusively while in the DLC) don’t help that much and are mostly locked behind bosses.”
The negative reviews, which also continually praise the world’s design and art direction, can’t handle some of the other choices, especially the boss fights. “Bosses in this DLC are exceptionally weak. While visually they are fantastic, their balance is totally off,” ‘Chanddy’ writes. “The combos they do are really annoying to learn [and] way too long – sometimes chaining up to ten different attacks before you get even a brief second opening to return damage.”
In terms of performance, players are upset that Shadow of the Erdtree is locked at 60 frames per second, with micro-stuttering and a lack of ultrawide or DLSS support as well. These things can be fixed or added down the line, but as of right now, it appears that the expansion isn’t incredibly well optimized.
Valve didn’t do anything in particular for Elden Ring.
The way running windows games works on Linux just meant that compiled shaders got cached, so that when they were needed again, the game wouldn’t freeze for a split second while they were recompiled.
This process is necessary on the windows side as well, when using DirectX 12 or Vulkan. Most games will do this shader compiling in advance (during a loading screen), and cache them for later so that the GPU can run full tilt generating frames during gameplay, instead of pausing to compile shaders.
Elden Ring didn’t do this. It compiled shaders as they were needed mid-gameplay, then immediately discarded them instead of caching them. This meant it was constantly freezing to compile shaders as materials that used different ones appeared on screen. And it would keep happening as it didn’t keep compiled shaders around for the next time they were needed.
Only on Linux, there was an external cache in the system that was translating the games DX12 calls to Vulkan (VKD3D), which would just go “oh I already have that, here you go” essentially making the game work as if the constant compiling could be done instantly whenever needed.
Valve did provide the cached shaders as a download, compiled in advance, as otherwise you’d still get compilation stutters each time something on screen needed a particular shader for the first time. But Valve does this for all games.
Thanks for this info, good stuff