Despite critical acclaim, Elden Ring is currently 'mixed' on Steam

pcgamer.com:

Despite receiving critical acclaim and cementing itself one of the highest-rated games of all time, Elden Ring has been having a rough time on Steam. The game is currently sitting at a mixed rating with 60% of its 19,000 user reviews being positive.

It's all down to the squiffy performance PC players have been dealing with. It's something Tyler also grappled with in his Elden Ring review, though the hopes were that a day one patch would fix the issues. While it did squash some of the early build's major bugs, players are still experiencing major framerate drops, stuttering, crashes and screen tearing.

Complaints about poor optimisation are happening across both positive and negative reviews, with one Steam review summarising it as «Elden Ring runs like liquid ass,» while another review called it a «typical FromSoftware PC port.» Players also lamented the addition of Easy Anti-Cheat which makes modding fixes for these things more difficult.

do not buy elden ring on pc if you want to play it right now imothe pc port is VERY bad and laggy, capped at 60 and drops to 10-20 frames maybe every 5 seconds during bossfights, (ON LOWEST SETTINGS) will eat inputs and get you killed constantly. Just current first impression.February 25, 2022

Controller input also appears to be mighty sporadic, with one review claiming it only works «80% of the time.» It's not exactly clear what's causing the problem, though we've put together a few fixes if Elden Ring isn't recognising your controller. While it's a choice than a bug, reviews have also lamented the 60fps cap and lack of ultrawide support.

On the other hand, many have reported a smooth experience and very few issues while playing. It seems pretty random as to who deals with the issues.