Elden Ring Nightreign comes out tomorrow, May 30, meaning that your wait to sample a thing we thought was quite good is almost over. Before you hop into classic ER to fight one last Malenia battle for the road, it’s worth checking out the contents of the game’s first patch – Version 1.01 – which FromSoft has handily deployed about a day early.
You can check out the full notes for Version 1.01 if you like, but the gist is that it’s pretty much what you’d expect from a day one patch, aside maybe from some advice on how to troubleshoot a couple of techy teething issues you might run into on PC, depending on your exact hardware.
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“This update brings gameplay and stability improvements to ensure an optimal experience for your first steps in Limveld,” big Bandai Namco wrote, outlining that the patch includes “improved handling of playable characters”, balance adjustments, text tweaks, and added character scenarios. The soundtrack’s also been added to, so you should have plenty of bangin’ boss-battlin’ tunes, and there are the usual bug fixes.
You want more detail than that? Well, suck it up. These are Elden Ring patch notes, and you’re gonna have to read between the lines like you do with all that lore. Maybe if you’re lucky we’ll get a video in five years time explaining that this patch actually had a deeper meaning, over the course of five very good hours.
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That said, there are a couple of things related to knopwn issues on PC that FromSoft has chosen to explain in full. If you’re on that platform and find yourself unable to start the game or sometyhing similar, verifying the integrity of its files via its properties menu in your Steam library might help. Here’s the full instruction flow for that: Go to ‘Library’ > right-click on ‘ELDEN RING NIGHTREIGN’ > select ‘Properties’ > select ‘Installed Files’ > and execute ‘Verify Integrity of Game Files’.
Meanwhile, FromSoft wrote: “We have confirmed that some PC configurations using the latest graphics cards may experience frame rate drops. We are currently investigating the cause. In the meantime, If you experience significant frame rate drops, you may be able to resolve it by setting the graphics settings from the default ‘High’ to ‘Medium’ or ‘Low’ and lowering the screen resolution, as well as installing the latest drivers for your graphics card.”
So, pretty standard stuff you’d try right out of the gate to see if it resolved teething problems while waiting for the studio ro deploy a full fix.
Once you’ve battered Malenia one more time, why not read our review of Nightreign, in which Connor outlines why he loved it, despite being “a strange beast”. If it helps your concentration to imagine him as the lead singer of Evanescence and the game as the dude yelling ‘Can’t wake up!’, then so bit.