A trio of Ubisoft and PlayStation Studios’ developers are catching flack for publicly criticizing Elden Ring‘s performance, user experience, and quest design. It all started with a tweet by Ubisoft’s UX director Ahmed Salama, who has since locked his Twitter profile, complaining that Elden Ring’s metascore of 97 is “proof” that reviewers “don’t give a flaming poop” about game UX. Rebecca Fernandez O’Shea, a graphics programmer at Sony-owned Nixxes Software chimed in and suggested that reviewers didn’t care about Elden Ring’s PC graphics, stability, and performance either. Horizon Forbidden West‘s senior quest designer Blake Rebouche, whose profile is also locked, joined his peers and criticized Elden Ring’s quest design.
Elden Ring performance issues have been widely reported
The aforementioned tweets ended up upsetting Elden Ring fans, but a number of social media users have defended the developers, arguing that they’re allowed to voice their opinions on a game like anyone else. Jumping to O’Shea’s defense, Digital Foundry’s John Linneman said that FromSoftware’s tech is “flawed” and “nearly every version” of Elden Ring has “serious performance issues.”
No, I cover tech for a living and Elden Ring falls short there. It’s my favorite open world game of all time but the engine has serious issues. The frame-rate is unstable on every single platform. That deserves critique.
— John Linneman (@dark1x) March 7, 2022
Opinion: Social media strikes again
Zarmena writes… Long ago, I invoked quite a bit of backlash for awarding The Last of Us (2013) an 8/10, deducting a point for janky AI. I know how this goes. While I can’t speak for Salama and Rebouche, O’Shea made a very valid point. Elden Ring’s performance issues have been widely reported since launch, prompting a response and even an apology from FromSoftware itself. To accuse her of being “salty” is extremely silly.
In other news, critically-acclaimed Paradise Killer is headed to PS5 and PS4, and Babylon’s Fall is officially the worst-rated console exclusive on PS5.
[Source: MP1st]
