Elden Ring Nightreign won’t be out for a few more hours—3 pm PT, 6 pm ET, or your local equivalent, here’s the full rundown of all the Nightreign launch times—but the first patch is here. Which is to say, the patch notes are up on the Bandai Namco website, along with a heads-up that the PC version of the game may suffer frame rate drops on some setups.
The patch notes for Elden Ring Nightreign version 1.01 are, well, vague:
- Improved handling of playable characters
- Soundtrack addition and adjustment
- Text adjustments
- Balance adjustments
- Added character scenarios
- Bug fixes
It’s not much to go on—hopefully we’ll have a clearer picture of what “improved handling” and “balance adjustments” mean fairly soon. What’s more of note for now, though, is the warning about possible issues with the PC version of the game.
First things first, if you have trouble getting Elden Ring Nightreign to start at all, be sure to verify the game files on Steam. We probably all know how to do that but just in case, right-click on Elden Ring Nightreign in your Steam library, then select “Properties,” followed by “Installed files,” and then “Verify integrity of game files.”
Give it a few minutes to do its thing, Steam may have to re-download some files—go make a coffee or something. This is standard operating procedure for troublesome PC games on Steam, but Bandai brought it up in the patch notes, so I’m bringing it up here.
A potentially bigger issue lies in the game’s graphical performance.
“We have confirmed that some PC configurations using the latest graphics cards may experience frame rate drops,” the patch notes say. “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.”
Hopefully they’ll have that sorted quickly: Elden Ring is a very pretty game and I would expect no less from Nightreign, so having to dial back the eye candy just to get it running smoothly would not make me particularly happy.
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