Elden Ring’s new DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, now has fans bemoaning its grueling nature without being shamed — a sign of how much the community has grown.
It wouldn’t be a FromSoftware release without some perennial discourse over difficulty, and while Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree follows suit, this time, there’s a twist. Players aren’t debating whether or not FromSoftware’s notoriously difficult games should offer an easy mode or better accessibility options, nor is the community sneering and telling people they should simply “git gud” (derogatory). This time, we’re seeing hardcore fans bemoan the grueling nature of the new DLC, if not saying that game director Hidetaka Miyazaki has gone too far.
Shadow of the Erdtree employs an unusual mechanic that attempts to mitigate the likelihood of players jumping into the DLC with overleveled characters. While you still retain your base stats when entering the Land of Shadow, the DLC-specific location has new upgrades — Scadutree Fragments and Revered Spirit Ashes — that dictate how much damage you can deal and withstand while in this new realm. The more of these upgrades you have, in other words, the better you’ll do; the game has also recently been updated to make these upgrades even stronger. This system also means that players who have likely spent hours building and optimizing their characters are, in some ways, being forced to start from scratch. Without these new embellishments, run-of-the-mill enemies can and will destroy your character if you’re not careful. The developers warned this would be the case before Shadow of the Erdtree came out, with Miyazaki outright stating he believed the team had “pushed the envelope” of what could be “withstood” by players.
Reviews for the expansion were also published ahead of its actual release, and while many critics wrote about the DLC’s difficulty, as a whole, Shadow of the Erdtree was well received. Right now, Elden Ring’s expansion is sitting on a 95 on Metacritic, which the grading system deems to be “universal acclaim.” Despite this, a Eurogamer review that gave the expansion three stars out of five caused a fan outcry. According to these fans, who again were reading this review before playing the DLC themselves, the critic had made the mistake of saying that the game seemed too difficult this time. Worse, the critic wasn’t sure if they had the motivation to try and trudge through certain parts of it.
“This, however, feels like difficulty for difficulty’s sake, turned up to eleven, perhaps because with the added expectations of a DLC having something extra-absurd to conquer even though it technically doesn’t require finishing the core game,” the reviewer wrote of one particularly egregious optional boss fight. “I go through dozens of deaths over a period of several days, and despite taking breaks to go off and do other things and explore other areas, I realise that I just don’t want to do this anymore.”
This admission was not well received by some fans, especially given the larger, ongoing stereotype that game journalists are bad at games and therefore not fit to judge a series where part of the point is to suffer (“Prepare to die” was an official tagline for the first Dark Souls, after all). Replies to Eurogamer’s post on X (formerly Twitter) linking the review often chastised or tried to humiliate the reviewer for the perceived crime of believing the difficulty had not been well tuned. As of this writing, top responses say things like “It was to hawd fow you?”, “Perhaps stick to something like Mario it might be more your speed,” and of course, the obligatory “get good.”
The irony here is that the review spends a good chunk of its word count expressing frustration with how much the expansion tries to hand-hold the player. Specifically, the reviewer felt that the expansion doesn’t seem to trust the player to figure out what they should do, often signposting in an unusually overt way. This, the reviewer suggests, robs the player from earning a sense of discovery and worse, makes some of the unique obstacles trivial. As an example, the review mentions that the game outright tells the player to not let specific enemies see them, so the reviewer equipped an item that made sneaking around easier.
Ultimately, though, 3 out of 5 is not a bad score — and again, as a whole, Shadow of the Erdtree has been reviewed well. But for some fans, this didn’t matter.
