Elden Ring preloading is live

Elden Ring reviews are out, and they are astoundingly good. We scored it 90% in our own review, calling it a “brilliant” open-world action-RPG whose only real failing is that it falls back on the familiar a little too often. The aggregate critical review score on Metacritic is even higher.

There's a good chance you already had your mind made up about diving into Elden Ring on launch day, but if you had any doubt, that likely settles it. And with that resolved, you are now officially clear to begin preloading the game on Steam.

Elden Ring won't actually go live until either Thursday or Friday, depending on your time zone—the PC version will unlock at 3 pm PT/6 pm ET on February 24, and you can find unlock times for other regions in Elden Ring's release timing schedule. 

The Elden Ring preload requires 49GB of storage space, which isn't very much as these things go, but the overall system requirements are actually fairly beefy: You'll need a minimum of a Core i5-8400 CPU, 12GB RAM, and a GTX 1060, and considerably more if you aim to hit the recommended spec.

While you wait for the magic moment to arrive, you can prepare yourself for a strong start with some of our handy guides: The best keepsake to choose, a rundown of the different classes, and everything you need to know to create a character in Elden Ring.