Elden Ring DLC launches to "Mixed" reviews as players bemoan difficulty, PC performance in Shadow of the Erdtree: "There's a big problem with balancing"
Elden Ring DLC launches to "Mixed" reviews as players bemoan difficulty, PC performance in Shadow of the Erdtree: "There's a big problem with balancing"
The colossal Elden Ring DLC is finally here, but some players are quite frustrated with it.
Bemoaning the difficulty?
...but that's the point.
There's difficulty, then there's balancing issue. We expect difficulty, but not invalidating certain builds entirely.
Vanilla Elden Ring felt pretty good in that regard (granted it's been a while since I played it). As I recall between weapons, spells, Ashes of War and Spirit Ashes you had a lot of tool choices and were free to sort of make the game as difficult or easy for yourself as you liked.
Sounds like they lost that aspect in the DLC, which is a shame.
From Software's games and their toxic fanbase completely changed what a difficult game is. Their games aren't difficult, they're just punishing. And yes there's a huge difference.
I think I agree with you but I don't have the words for it. How would you describe a truely difficult game?
Players are complaining about the difficulty of a genre-defining game, in a genre known for its difficulty.
Just Git Gud.
Difficulty isn't black or white. There's a real difference between Monster Hunter and I Wanna Be the Guy
yeah I seriously suck and I find it like the rest of the game. The game is supposed to kick your ass. ugh. lost 100k runes the other day because I hit a kneeling shadow guy down an alley and thought it was a weak variant rather than the burly variant.
People are mad they can't just jump attack spam every boss with their base game overleveled glass cannon builds.
lol I love glass cannon builds. Fuck eating hits.
But I'm not going to complain about failing or getting one hit when I have no armor and didn't put any points into vitality.
Hey! I represent that remark!
I never minded the difficulty. I knew what I was signing up for.
What I minded (and why I stopped playing Elden Ring only a few months after release after like 120 mostly-fun hours) was that they couldn't stop fucking with the balance. Some jackass would min-max some specific PvP build, and they'd nerf the shit out of it (even in PvE), then my semi-okay build (which used one part or another of the min-max build) would go to shit and I'd have to start over. This happened like 4 times and I just said "fuck it" until the game was old enough that they'd stop fucking with it.
lol, joke's on me, here we go again.
Helldivers 2 have entered the chat
Oh that new primary weapon did damage? Sorry about that, that wasn't supposed to happen
My only real problem with difficulty is that they invalidated some builds entirely.
All the early bosses are very resistant to magic and frost, making int builds kinda useless.
Same thing happens with colossal weapons since windows of opportunity are so small, they either stagger the boss or get cooked right after.
You get several larval tears in the early areas. If you're out at night, you can find little glowing cemeteries with larval tears in them.
I myself have respec'd my character, and have had to give up a few incantations that I used to rely on, but now that I have more of the blessings, they're finding their way back into my repertoire. Thinking back, I'm not as convinced anymore that the incantations were the problem, it's very likely that I just didn't have enough blessings.
I took down a certain knight in a tomb who wielded a repeating crossbow and a greatsword. It took me maybe 30 tries with 0 blessings. I wonder how many tries I would need with 11.
I switched from dark moon greatsword to a bleed build and my dps tripled against the divine beast.
The early bosses have huge magical resistance, each regular attack from my sword dealt 700 damage vs 800 + bleed from Eleonora's Polearm despite being much faster.
I'm glad there are more larval tears I missed though, I was worried I'd run out before trying some more builds.
I've been enjoying it. The difficulty does seem a bit increased with some enemies but I'm also on NG+1.
Playing on PS5 has been fine but there was some noticeable frame dropping during the Divine Beast Dancing Lion fight.
I'm still only partially through it, but that's my experience so far.
I've been doing it on NG5 and been watching a blind playthrough being streamed on NG7.
The complaints of difficulty are pure salt tears.
I admit I do not enjoy some of the boss designs as much, but being forced to change or use specific tactics is nothing new. People mad about their 'builds' need to get over themselves.
New content dropped and the old stuff doesn't work the same. This isn't the first FromSoft DLC either.
I'm two rememberance bosses in and having a good time. My main criticism is that the bosses are AGGRESSIVE. They seem to be balanced with summons in mind because you almost have to draw the bosses attention away to get in decent damage. Still fun tho.
I've noticed some frame rate decrease in the open world and some minor bugs. I'm not sure if that's my fault tho; I bought a fancy new graphics card and cranked up all the settings, and I'm not sure if my relatively older CPU and RAM are keeping up.
From Software's PC ports are always pretty poor, but I feel like they don't get enough flak for it because it's a From Software game. Does the game still not run with an unlocked frame rate?
Then there always seems to be so much talk about the apparent difficulty of the game that talking about the actual game sometimes falls short. The difficulty of these games is mostly down to observing and learning attack patterns and reacting to them accordingly. It would also be rather trivial for the developers to add a difficulty setting to make the game more accessible or on the other hand make it harder for players that want more of a challenge (I'm aware that there are certain builds that make the game easier and new game + makes it harder in some ways).
The fact that many players always defend the games supposed difficulty often doesn't allow good discussion about actual balancing (which is different to "difficulty").
I'm a huge Dark Souls and Elden Ring fan, but there's no excusing Fromsoft's code quality. Under no circumstances should someone be able to execute invalid code on someone else's machine. I'm a software dev myself and the sheer ingenuity of effects 'hackers' can implement is astounding to me. Co-op is also just terrible, IMO. Unreliable, buggy, and kind of unrewarding that you have to do everything once for every participant. Performance has never been all that good, but it's almost expected for console ports nowadays, which I wish was not the case.
They did update the requirements on pc. I've had to take my game down from high to high with motion blur off and lower quality water and shadows. I hope they make improvements.
I am one of those people who prefers that the game only has one difficulty. My friend and I both played Phantom Liberty, and unfortunately he didn't enjoy it as much as I did because at higher difficulty he struggled too much with combat in a way he didn't find fun. I could argue my point for a while but I doubt I'd achieve anything.
I can see your point on balancing. A great deal of mobs (not even bosses) in the dlc early game can poise or recover from a heavy blow too fast (not talking about damage). It's almost like they're tuned for greatswords and greataxes. That's fine for me, I didn't mind the respec, but other people do.
As for the difficulty in the DLC, it is more difficult, but IMO not as bad as it's made out to be. Early (for me) in the day yesterday I heard people were fighting Messmer, and some have even beaten the final boss. Fucking how? You could only have done that if you did a boss rush and no exploration. People did not play the game and did not have the skills to play the way they were trying.
Whatever levels you have in the base game, they are nearly irrelevant until you get to about your 5th blessing. People need to run around and find those upgrades. I wonder if people even know that some random mobs drop them.
I am one of those people who prefers that the game only has one difficulty. My friend and I both played Phantom Liberty, and unfortunately he didn't enjoy it as much as I did because at higher difficulty he struggled too much with combat in a way he didn't find fun. I could argue my point for a while but I doubt I'd achieve anything.
Why would you care if the game had more choices in terms of difficulty? It's a single player game, you could still choose the difficulty level the game it at right now, and others could play at an easier or harder difficulty if they so chose.
For (dominantly) single player games, let players enjoy the game however they want.
That it doesn't have an unlocked frame rate should be unacceptable tbh. High refresh rate monitors are common and cheap these days.
Yeah, I'm holding off for a sale on this one. I liked Elden Ring well enough, but the performance issues are infuriating. Baffling that it still isn't fixed.
They enabled ray tracing on high by default, after I hadn't played it in months. It wasn't there before. When I turned it off, performance was back to where it ought to be.
But but but… IGN gave it a 10/10!! /s
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The long-awaited Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is finally here, and boy, it sure isn't afraid to put you in your place.
Even its first miniboss is bullying players new to the Land of Shadow, and as I wrote in my review, the battles and bosses spread throughout the expansion are some of the toughest encounters FromSoftware has ever made.
While I can't really speak to the performance side of things — Elden Ring runs fine for me on an RTX 3070/i5-12600K rig save for a rare stutter here or there, but your mileage may definitely vary — I have to say that I strongly disagree with criticisms that Shadow of the Erdtree is unfairly difficult.
Most Shadow of the Erdtree bosses are designed to punish passive play; if you roll away from their combos, you'll have to waste time you could have spent slashing them with your greatsword just to get close to them again.
These don't make enough of a difference that they trivialize fights, but you'll definitely feel the improvements to your attributes, and will be able to both survive previously lethal attacks and end boss battles quicker.
Some players claim they've already maxed out their Scadutree Fragments, but I highly doubt that unless they've been speedrunning through the Land of Shadow (which you shouldn't do, by the way, because it's full of amazing places to explore and treasures to loot).
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