With the Steam Summer Sale going on full, I suddenly realized that I was missing Elden Ring in my Steam library! The horrors! I’ve the game on the Xbox console (I reviewed it here) but I’ve never tried it on PC…which is a travesty given our current gaming review rig!

You know…the one with these specs:
– MSI B550M Mortar
– AMD Ryzen 9 5900X with NZXT Kraken X73 RGB Liquid Cooler
– MSI GeForce RTX 3080Ti Suprim X 12GB
– 64GB DDR4 RAM (Teamgroup T-Force Dark Z 16GB x 4 @ 3600MHz)
– Samsung 980 PRO 2TB SSD

The one that MSI kindly sponsored the GPU and motherboard?

Yeah, that one.

So I reached out to the awesome folks at Bandai Namco Singapore and straight up asked them for a key to try the game out on our PC. Bandai Namco Singapore being the great people they are, obliged with no issue! Thank you so much Justina and Irdina!

Anyways, after having some playtime in The Lands Between, I decided to make this listicle to convince stragglers (and those still without Elden Ring) to get the damn game on the PC!

Why you ask? Well…the reasons are below!

1 – The requirements are rather tame.

Ignoring the Ray Tracing requirements (which even gives our rig issues in the open areas), Elden Ring has relatively tame requirements to run it with all its bells and whistles turned all the way up. Even on 4K, you can get away with Max settings on relatively old NVIDIA GeForce 20 series cards, even older cards if you’ll settle for 30FPS!

Even if you have a console like the Playstation 5 or Xbox Series X, Elden Ring on the PC is a much better option! You don’t even need to break the bank to run it! Even laptops should have no problem getting it to run (provided of course the laptop is from the last few years).

2 – The game looks better!

Once you’re into the PC arena, you’ll realize that as good as console gaming can look, a decent PC can blow them out of the water. Elden Ring is once such game.

Even on a mediocre PC, you can get the game to look and play much better than on the consoles (without Ray Tracing enabled of course).

The highly noticeable pop-in on consoles? Mostly gone on the PC. The inconsistent FPS on consoles? Mostly gone on the PC. Murky visuals (especially if you’re playing on the Playstation 4 or Xbox One)? Completely a non-issue with high settings on a decent PC. Even the vegetation is improved.

Playing on a PC makes a game like Elden Ring much better.

For better or for worse, the PC is the ideal Elden Ring platform…well, now. It did have issues with stuttering and Ray Tracing but that’s been sorted and now the PC version stands above the console version.

There’s honestly no reason to stick with a competent console version, not when you can have the superior PC one to play.

3 – It’s futureproof.

I love consoles…but the one thing that always gets me is whether I’ll still have access to my games a couple of generations down the road. Right now, the answer is mostly no. Sure, the Xbox has backwards compatibility but I’m still missing games that I technically own but can’t play on modern consoles.

If you buy Elden Ring on Steam, that’s not a problem. Chances are the next few iterations of Windows will support the game with no issues. Something that can’t be said for the future consoles if Sony or Microsoft simply decide not to support backwards compatibility any more.

4 – Controllers work on the PC too!

I don’t know about you, but I mostly prefer to play on the Xbox controller. It’s much more comfortable than a keyboard and you can play in any position you want. Honestly, I can’t even imagine playing a game like Dark Souls or Sekiro or Elden Ring with a mouse and keyboard combo.

Thankfully, that’s not a problem at all for the PC! Hook up the long ass USB cable (or wirelessly) and you can use your favourite gaming controller on your PC.

You’ll have the best of both worlds! The great visuals and stellar performance of Elden Ring on a PC and the awesome control options of a console!

5 – It’s on sale for SG$55 on Steam now!

Like the Dark Souls series, Elden Ring rarely goes on sale on Steam.

I’ve weirdly seen it on sale on console storefronts than on Steam. So believe me when I say that it’s a great time to hop on the Elden Ring bandwagon right now on the PC if you’re balking at paying full price for a game that’s nearly a a year and a half old.

I understand completely man! Shelling out SG$79.90 (or SG$109.90) is a lot, especially with everything else also going up in price! That’s why now is the perfect time to make the leap. Elden Ring is a HUGE game and you’ll need all the time you can get in-game before the expansion hits late next year. For SG$55.93, that’s a bargain!

Think of it this way, if you buy it now, you won’t have to buy it next year alongside the expansion!

Sal's been in the industry since the early 2000s. He's written for a ton of gaming and tech publications including Playworks, Hardwarezone, HWM and GameAxis. Recently, Sal served as a juror for the Indie Game Awards at Taipei Game Show 2020. A geek and hardcore gamer, Sal will play everything, on any platform.