When Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree released it was met with some interesting reception. Critics absolutely loved it! Giving it insanely glowing reviews across the board. However, many actual players were pretty divided on it, giving it enough negative reviews on Steam that it was given a Mixed rating at launch! Which is quite different from the Very Positive review score the main game got. And it all seems to come down to the difficulty of Shadow of the Erdtree with players finding it to be way too hard…

Hearing the criticism of “this is too hard” about a Soulslike game, especially one from FromSoftware themselves, is honestly pretty rare to hear! At least nowadays. The genre of Soulslikes is known for it’s insane difficulty, or rather the learning curve that comes with each game as I feel each and every one does get easier the longer you play. As such, it’s rather rare to hear this criticism as most players know what they are getting into when they pick up a Soulslike. And that is exactly why I and many others were rather blind sided by this sudden wave of criticism for the Elden Ring DLC. But the more I thought about it, the more it started to make sense to me.

For many, Elden Ring was the first Soulslike they picked up. It is easily the most popular and best selling FromSoftware game to date. FromSoft has been gaining more and more popularity with each of their games but even then I don’t think anyone predicted Elden Ring would be this popular! So of course that popularity meant a ton of people would be picking up the DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, and getting to experience it as their first time playing a FromSoft DLC. And I don’t think people were prepared for that…

If you’ve played a few of FromSoft’s other DLC for their Souls games, like The Old Hunters for Bloodborne and The Ringed City for Dark Souls 3, then you know that FromSoft doesn’t pull any punches with the difficulty for their DLC! Personally I think this is because they view DLC as being optional and as anyone who has played their Souls games knows, they love to make the optional content crazy hard compared to the mandatory stuff! Regardless, knowing that they like to ramp up the difficulty for their DLC I wasn’t all too surprised when the first enemy I ran into in Shadow of the Erdtree killed me in a couple of hits! If anything it was almost nostalgic. That being said, if you weren’t expecting this and jumped into the DLC with your crazy high level end game character from the base game of Elden Ring and were instantly killed by the first random enemy, it’s understandable why you might be upset.

What I’m trying to say is that Shadow of the Erdtree is ready to show you just how much harder it’s going to be compared to the base game right from the get go! This may not have been the best choice on FromSoft’s part but I understand why they did it. First, they really do just love making their DLC hard. Second, they wanted to show that this isn’t going to be a walk in the park even for a level 200 character. And third, right out of the gate they want to show players how important it is to get the DLC exclusive new upgrades, the Scadutree fragments, which increase your stats to an insane degree! This system was put in place to try and balance things out for all players, FromSoft wanted the DLC to be hard for everyone not just the people who purposefully kept their characters a bit under leveled so they could have a challenge for the DLC, and I think that’s honestly really cool!

One of my favorite parts of Souls games is getting a feel for them, seeing what works and what doesn’t for each boss fight and figuring out how I’m going to beat them with my build. It’s a feeling you only really get when starting a Souls game for the first time because even when you start again with a low level character, you know how each boss works. The struggle to not only build up your knowledge but also your skill is one of the best parts of all Soulslikes! And to help try and capture that feeling for the DLC, FromSoft added these new Scadutree fragments and basically made them your way of leveling up. Side note, I love how these fragments are scattered around the environment rather than being dropped from bosses as it gives you an even bigger reason to explore! Getting back on topic though, I think a lot of people complaining about the difficulty for Shadow of the Erdtree honestly kind of forgot what it was like when they first played through Elden Ring. And this is mainly because of the complaints being thrown at the DLC.

The biggest complaints I’ve seen of the DLC is generally that the lock on camera can be really bad, bosses input read the players actions to attack when they aren’t ready, and that some bosses feel like walls to stop the player with how difficult they can suddenly be. And honestly, these are valid complaints! But here’s the thing… Why are people only complaining about them now?

These problems have existed since the base game! The lock on camera is bad in just about every Souls game, every boss input reads, and the bosses feeling like they have a difficulty spike to wall the player are problems that have always been there since day one of Elden Ring! So I have to ask, why now? And I think the answer is pretty simple… People just forgot.

It has been over two years since Elden Ring originally launched. The people who were jumping into Shadow of the Erdtree day one are going to be some die hard fans that have not only seen the base game all the way through to the end but probably played through it more than once. Meaning most people are pretty comfortable with Elden Ring and may have forgotten just how difficult the game was at launch! People were getting stomped left and right by some of the early game bosses like Margit and of course the Tree Sentinel. But now those bosses are beyond easy for anyone that’s played the game enough and it feels like players really forgot what it was like to struggle against them.

I feel like FromSoft really wanted to capture this early game struggle again with Shadow of the Erdtree and while a lot of players like myself were very happy to have the difficulty back, other players weren’t too happy that their crazy high level characters were suddenly getting crushed all over again. And I can honestly understand that frustration but at the end of the day players need to remember what kind of game Elden Ring is. It’s a difficult game that is meant to be difficult and that’s obviously going to carry over to the DLC.

Now I don’t want to say that players are whining too much or are complaining about things that don’t matter. Everyone has a right to complain about things they have issues with. For example I personally think the final boss of the DLC is way too tough! The sudden difficulty spike in the second phase felt kind of out of nowhere and it just wasn’t a fun fight to try and figure out. There’s also the fact that my current build was not a good one for that final fight but that’s more on me. What I’m saying is though there is a place for criticism and I’m not trying to say people should just shut up and play the DLC. What I am trying to say is, perhaps Shadow of the Erdtree and it’s difficulty just aren’t for everyone.

It’s okay to dislike something and voice the fact you don’t like it for those reasons, especially if you aren’t having fun. But there’s a big difference between saying “I’m not having fun” and “this game is bad”. At the end of the day, sometimes you just have to accept that a game might not be for you. I actually had this feeling with another FromSoft game! Sekiro.

While I have somewhat come around to the game in recent years, when I first played Sekiro I was not a fan of it. I was expecting it to be far closer to the usual Souls experience and it very much was not. There really isn’t much character customization and building, the game has a way it wants everyone to play and that play style is parrying! Parrying exists in just about every Souls game, it’s a very risky but very rewarding strategy that I tend not to bother with most of the time if I’m being honest. As you can imagine then, I wasn’t too thrilled with the fact that parrying was really the only option in just about every fight in Sekiro! As such, I didn’t have the best of times with the game when I first played, however, even back then I knew it wasn’t a bad game.

I accepted that Sekiro just isn’t the game for me. I didn’t have as much fun with it as I had with other Souls games from FromSoft. But that doesn’t mean the game is bad, that doesn’t mean it’s poorly designed no matter how much I struggled with the timing of parrying so many of the bosses. It just means that the game isn’t for me. If I were to review the game now I would honestly be singing its praises more than anything despite the fact I’d still be saying how much I didn’t enjoy my time with it for the most part.

Sometimes you just have to accept that you’re not the target audience for a game. And that’s okay! I feel like if every game tried to cater to every type of player then we wouldn’t have so many cool and unique experiences! We wouldn’t have the Souls games which are very unique and very much not for everyone. I mean the series wasn’t even really mainstream until Elden Ring came out despite having so many games like it. While it’s obviously a good thing when developers try to make their games as appealing as possible, it’s also a good thing for them to recognize that they can’t please everyone. And it’s also important for players to recognize that sometimes a game just isn’t for them but that doesn’t make it bad. We do not want to live in an age where every game is made for everyone because then we’ll just be left with bland games left and right.

To be fair though, I understand how this can be much harder to accept when it comes to not enjoying the DLC for a game you did enjoy but I still think this all applies. Maybe Shadow of the Erdtree is too hard, but that’s okay! If you don’t enjoy it then don’t play it. Trying to review bomb the DLC and tell everyone it’s terrible isn’t going to help anything and might even give the developers a wrong impression.

It really is a shame to hear that so many players didn’t enjoy their time with Shadow of the Erdtree as I had quite a blast with it! It reminded me why I loved the base game as much as I did and it gave me some great challenging bosses to struggle and overcome! Can it be brutally hard and border on being unfair? Sure! But I don’t think that makes the DLC bad, it just might mean it’s not for everyone. And at the end of the day, that’s okay! There will be many more FromSoft games and DLC to enjoy in the future, so it’s fine to not enjoy this one.

But those are just my thoughts! What are some of yours? Are you a fan of difficult games? Have you tried Shadow of the Erdtree and did you enjoy it? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

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