Elden Ring Publisher Addresses Difficulty Criticism of Shadow of the Erdtree, Offers Tips for DLC

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 ~~class~~ cheating? 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

The response that it's too hard has been weird to me. I'm not very good at these sorts of games but it hasn't been terribly tricky compared to other parts of the base game. And I'm having a lot of fun with it.

I do think the advice of taking advantage of the balancing mechanics they literally put in the DLC to make it challenging and help mitigate that is solid.

I wanna say this is a possible symptom of people who beat the game ages ago, put it down for a year or so, returned for the DLC completely not warmed up, and then perceiving it as insane difficulty off the bat
Im actually surprised that I have liked it as much as I have. Im a horrible gamer when it comes to reaction time and man I hate the platforming. Once I got used to accepting dieing, running around to grab stuff and not worrrying about surviving after, and search cheese X on youtube its been fun. Sorta heat attack, stressing fun. Fun I sometimes want to avoid :)
The scadutree buffs are pretty big from what I can tell, I've got a bunch becauae I explore a lot on first runs and it seems to be at least 3-4% boost to attack and defenses, with some of the new talismans too found there's a lot of stuff to work with.

So far, feels pretty well balanced, it has challenge but I've not encountered anything that made me question how I died, first few big fights were pretty well telegraphed and super enjoyable. What I really like is that you can go try something else if you hit a wall, go level up a bit, try new gear or different approaches
Knowing how the vocal minority thinks, they're probably deliberately ignoring the advice because they think any form of preparation or mitigation is cheating.

The DLC is batshit difficult, but all that does is make me try harder, learn movesets, and watch videos from pros. That’s part of the fun and achievement for me personally… but I also grew up in the 80s and 90s era of gaming where we had ZERO handholding.

…all that does is make me try harder, learn move sets, and watch videos from pros.

Yep. Same. I beat the first 🔥🗑️ this evening. Not a pro, but did make a how-to video.

To be fair, I learned it watching one of VattiVidya’s recent videos. Just summarized that one part and recorded myself on my PS5 doing it.
- I’m gonna check your video out. I attempted the furnace golem once, but it was mostly to observe its moves. That thing destroyed me lmao.

Maybe it could be an issue with the level range. I feel the game well balanced with my char at 150 but same mobs destroys or two shots people at +300 looking at some videos.

Yeah. I haven't tried at a lower level yet, but the 300+ character in using is pretty glass cannon-y. It's fun, but you just have to dodge everything.

I'll be trying a lower level for the next playthrough.
60 vigor at level 80 is 60 vigor at level 700.

Having played invasions, many many people dont level up health so they're a one shot kill already. It is a comical reality of how people play the game: never levelling their health pool.

We have figured out how to no hit Elden Ring. There's walkthroughs and guides.

We haven't figured out how to no hit the DLC. The walkthroughs and guides for it are being written now though. Once those are all up this whole refrain of difficulty will pass as people will be able to spoil any surprises and feel better about it.

The base game already had some pretty badly designed fights that rely on deceptive animations and timing for their difficulty, and the DLC really triples down on that. The more games they make the more bullshit the fights get. I like a challenging fight, but when you have to die to a boss 20-30 times just to see all of their attacks, and the attacks are designed to not be legible the first time you see them... It's just not very fun game design. I think FROM is a victim of their own success and this is the inevitable result of constantly trying to one-up the last hardest flight in the series. At a certain point it stops being rewarding and just becomes a grind.

Git
- Gud

Honestly the base game was too easy and my least favorite fromsoft game. If you're telling me the dlc is harder then that perks my interest

The only thing I do NOT like about Elden Ring (and the From Software games in general) is the truly missable stuff that isn’t clearly shown as permanently missable until after you watch some YouTuber’s video talking about how after you cross this invisible line suddenly a bunch of NPCs die or disappear because of a story bit that action triggers without saying anything to you or warning you… this is real by the way and this is that line on the map. this is the line on the map

If you go north of it, the DLC IRREVERSIBLY changes a lot of stuff with pretty much every NPC you have met up to this point

Another example of this though - in the base game, I really wanted to get that “raging wolf” armor set that you see in so many videos and images promoting the game but it turns out I progressed the story and killed the NPC who gives you that quest line before he gave it to me and I can’t go back and get it now unless I want to NG+ it and make the game even HARDER for myself…

Good to know they didn't nerf bosses! I don't want to go explore and come back to a boss that was nerfed!