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Elden Ring was critically acclaimed by press ahead of its release. As soon as reviews started streaming in, the expansion took Metacritic’s crown as the highest rate game of the year, but it didn’t take long for player reviews to start percolating following its actual launch.
Despite the irony of Eurogamer’s review being slammed by audiences for calling out the game’s difficulty – the main reasoning behind negative user reviews is that it is now too hard. Bosses such as the Blackgaol Knight and Radahn have been wreaking havoc on players, but so have the expansion’s basic mobs too. You can get two-tapped by regular enemies if your Vitality isn’t sufficient, which is something that you don’t often find even in FromSoftware’s most brutal and masochistic experiences.
Bandai Namco issued a response to the expansion’s near-impossible difficulty. “This is a suggestion to level up your Scadutree Blessing,” it wrote on Twitter / X. “Poor performance, awful enemy balancing, lore is laughably bad it’s literally a fanfic tier writing. The DLC deserves every criticism it’s getting,” writes one fan in response, while another said that “[t]hat’s not the issue with the balance. It still sucks with upgraded blessings to the point of not being FUN. Yeah sure get good whatever but it’s not even feeling fun to ‘get good’ in this thing.”
Although the Elden Ring publisher has not yet mentioned the review bombing there’s a sense that the tweet was in direct reference to the critique it’s been hammered with.
The challenge behind FromSoftware games is definitely part of the draw, though I admit that there has to be a line drawn. That said, Shadow of the Erdtree is a post end-game expansion, and much like The Old Hunters, you have to expect it to kick your butt a little. The Land of Shadow is an expansion steeped in scope enough that it’s enough of a stand-alone game. Bandai Namco’s advice is essentially, slow down and explore more.
Just the other day, Hidetaka Miyazaki said that to make Elden Ring easier would ‘break the [game] itself,’ so I don’t think we can expect any major balance patches in the near future. If you want to complete it, you’re just going to have to explore, listen to the game, and get a lot, lot better.
