The long-suffering Elden Ring community has been vindicated by world-beating review scores

Elden Ring might be on track to be one of the best-reviewed games ever made, and its fans are barely holding it together.

The Elden Ring review embargo dropped earlier this afternoon, and at time of writing, the PS5 score on review aggregate site Metacritic is hovering between 97 and 98. If it settles on the latter, Elden Ring will become the second highest-scored game in the history of the site, sitting one point behind The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and level with GTA 5, GTA 4, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, and Soul Calibur. Over on OpenCritic, the game is currently the top-reviewed game of all time, averaged across all major platforms.

Elden Ring was originally announced in the summer of 2019, and for vast swathes of the intervening few years, FromSoftware and Bandai Namco had maintained near-silence about the project. For the developer's fans, that sometimes proved difficult to deal with, with some questioning whether Elden Ring would ever come out.

Now that release is only a few days away and review scores suggest the game will be a genuine all-timer, all that pent-up emotion is bubbling over. The Elden Ring subreddit is awash with those thrilled to see that their long-held faith has been rewarded. Several hyperbolically-titled posts are just screenshots of the game's Metacritic or OpenCritic scores, while other fans just had some big feelings to contend with.

Of course, not every review has been published yet, so the score is likely to change over the next couple of days. It's pretty clear, however, that Elden Ring promises to be Game of the Year material at the very least. Our own five-star review says that the game might be better than its Dark Souls brethren - quite the accolade in and of itself - even if its world is "as hostile as it is inviting."

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