Elden Ring Publisher Addresses Difficulty Criticism of Shadow of the Erdtree, Offers Tips for DLC
Elden Ring Publisher Addresses Difficulty Criticism of Shadow of the Erdtree, Offers Tips for DLC
Bandai Namco responds to player struggles with the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC for Elden Ring, offering advice.
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Look at these dumbasses buying a DLC for a game that’s legendary for difficulty and then complaining its difficult. Its like buying soda and complaining there’s too much sugar in it. Go buy something else! Not everything needs to be turned into this mundane fit for everyone bullshit.
I'm not particularly interested in the game so I can't say whether the game is actually difficult (from what I saw it's still very much about learning attack patterns of bosses and spamming the roll button or something), but my god do big parts of the Souls community get salty if someone wants to have the option to reduce the difficulty in a single player game.
To me it's a completely legit complaint and request to have a difficulty setting.
Just cheat? Whatever happened to
classcheating? In the old days if the game was too hard and you didn't have a big brother to do it for you, you just put in the godmode code or turned on a trainer or something.Some games are just hard. That's what makes getting good at them feel rewarding. The Souls games haven't really been for me either (due to the pking--not so much the difficulty), but it's not like the game makers owe me anything.
ER uses anti-cheat...
Really? Didn't stop me...
which is easy to disable (unless changed since I played the last time) if you're fine with playing offline
They don't owe you anything in a sense that you don't have to purchase their product, that is correct.
Also yeah, the idea of cheating didn't even come to my mind. We used to do that a lot back in the day :D - but to be fair, trainers aside, games often actively supported cheats out-of-the-box, and I don't think From Software's games do. It's probably still trivial to cheat on the PC version, but on console, it might not be feasible.
I totally get the feeling of accomplishment that comes with playing games on high difficulties, I do play quite a few games at higher difficulties, but then again I also enjoy lower levels of challenge at times.
It's still a very valid complaint that difficulty levels aren't a thing. It wouldn't change the difficulty for anyone who enjoys the current default difficulty, and might make the game more enjoyable to other players.
The difficulty is tied to the story and the gameplay though. A lot of things start to break down if the Tarnished is able to travel through the Lands Between unfettered. Should a successful developer who develops niche games for a niche audience be forced to capitulate to the demands of players outside of their niche just because they have a fear of missing out?
Elden Ring sold more than 20 million copies, that's quite a big "niche" if you ask me.
Not sure how lowering the health pool or damage per hit of bosses (as a very trivial example on how to easily reduce difficulty) affects the story of this game. And even if this would make the game less authentic to some players, they could just play it at the default difficulty..?
There is just absolutely no reason (other than maybe ego problems, but just add an achievement for each difficulty level then) why more difficulty options make the game worse for players who enjoy the current difficulty setting, as they can simply stick to the default difficulty. These players will have the exact same experience as they have now, and others who struggled or just didn't enjoy the grind of the default difficulty could turn it down a notch and enjoy the game.
Spoken like someone who hasn't touched the game.
The single biggest issue is that the high difficulty is the only thing that actually pushes you to explore the world. If you were able to just kill every boss right away, 50% of the Elden Ring's content becomes immediately pointless busywork. It already is, but that busywork offers small, incremental rewards that allow you to last a little bit longer, or learn a little bit more about a boss' moveset. The intended gameplay experience is to run into a brick wall, explore and discover new options and opportunities, and then returning to break the brick wall. For experienced players on their second or third playthrough, you can basically strip out the open world entirely after an initial 2-3 hours of running around to grab what you want.
I'd also like to point out that 90% of the difficulty of bosses has nothing to do with their health or how much damage they do. FromSoftware has really pushed the envelope on boss design and AI, to the point where many of the hardest bosses are difficult because of their moveset. You can especially see this in the DLC, where you're able to collect Scadutree Fragments to increase your damage and health, but players still have difficulty with many bosses even after maxing them out. Dealing 3x more damage doesn't mean anything if you can never get a hit in, and taking 3x less damage won't save you from a fatal grab. You can make an argument for difficulty levels toning down boss AI and making them less aggressive, but I'll make a different one.
If a player doesn't want to engage in difficult boss fights, and doesn't want to be forced to learn combat encounters, they probably don't want to play Elden Ring. There's a lot of people who didn't actually want to play Elden Ring in that 20 million. Only about 27% ended up completing the game. FromSoftware is still making niche games for a niche audience, but now they're known for their exceptionally high pedigree, which causes people to feel FOMO. It's okay to not want to play Elden Ring, but no amount of handicap is going to change that feeling for players.
I think the Dark Souls games have kinda earned an undue reputation for being unapproachably hard. They're really not all that tricky once you learn that death isn't a huge loss condition, just a step in the journey. I initially found them frustrating, but once I learned to not be bothered by dying and simply try again, I found an immense joy in exploring the worlds and challenges within.
Some bosses I beat first try, others will take me an afternoon or a few days to beat, but I have fun with it either way. Different strokes for different folks and all that, but I think Dark Souls and it's like are good lessons on how to get over feeling bad about "losing" and just enjoy the game.
Plus, you can always explore areas to gather up whatever you need to level up and slowly get marginally stronger as you become more familiar with your character and tweak it to your liking.
Everyone dies to the capra demon. Everyone has options within the game to adjust difficulty. Change gear or tactics. Summon help. Level up. Adding an out of game difficulty slider on top seems unnecessary.
People that are like "I want it to be easier without using any of the tools" are essentially saying "I want it to be easier but I don't want to turn down the difficulty"
Additionally, the difficulty and the struggle creates a sense of community. People like feeling like they belong to a group.
Also, difficulty is poorly defined. Sometimes people get mad about like being ambushed by monsters that were in plain sight but they didn't notice. Is that too hard?
What definition of "actually difficult" are you using here? All difficulty in games boils down to learning things. If you exclude anything learnable, you reach absurd conclusions like the only true form of difficulty is colorblind inaccessibility.
Games are art. I have full respect for an artist who does not compromise their vision for someone who refuses to engage with the art, on the artists terms.
A lot of people played The Witcher 3 and thought the combat was boring, but never spent time preparing for battle by considering which oils and potions to use - because they didn't need to. They were playing on easy or normal.
These people robbed themselves of the experience of immersing themselves in the role of a Witcher, and turned each encounter into a button masher.
Imagine being a developer and seeing people shit on your game for 'unengaging combat'.
Now, sure, you can make the argument that that's just one element of The Witcher 3, and some people are playing for the story - and fair enough.
But there isn't anything analogous in the Souls franchise. The gameplay IS bashing your head against a wall for ten hours. You don't get to just turn down the difficulty, breeze through every boss on the first try, and claim the game is boring.
No. The Souls community is built over the shared experience of beating the challenging game we were put against. If difficulty was optional, the game wouldn't be nearly as popular, as there wouldn't be that common experience.
Maybe another shared experience would have allowed the game to garner a community, but then it wouldn't be a soulslike, and soulslike as a concept would not exist. If that's something that interests you, you can just play a game which isn't a soulslike.
It reminds me of some Redditor who said they always instantly killed every single named companion in BG3 because they found the dialogues of said companions annoying. I have played BG3 for hundred of hours, but I don't even think I played the same game as this person, and I think that if it was something a lot of people did, then there wouldn't be a community around the game at all.
Like for BG3, where the central point is the story and the evolution of your companion as characters, Elden Ring's has that defining element which caused the community to sprout, which is its fair but strict gameplay. If you remove that then all you get is one of those forgettable Ubisoft games, all the while completely destroying the community around soulslikes.
So you buy it, add on content for a game you already know does not have this option. Its well known at this point none of the other games in the souls / fromsoft series dont have this option. But you still buy it and leave a bad review for it? What? Why? Go buy something else
It is weird because it isn't a single player game. It can be if people take it offline, and on PC: there's mods to hell. They can cheat and singleplayer it up all they want. So it is odd to me that people want what they already have and others are mad that they have it.
Playstation players though are a little stuck without more technical efforts to cheat.