Does Shadow Of The Erdtree take things too far? (Bandai Namco)
PC gamers are complaining that water is wet when it comes to the DLC for Elden Ring although there are also legitimate performance concerns.
If there’s one thing everyone knows about FromSoftware games, whether they’ve played them or not, is that they’re really difficult. Elden Ring isn’t the hardest thing they’ve ever made but it’s certainly not easy and you wouldn’t expect its DLC Shadow Of The Erdtree to be any different – in fact, you’d assume it to be even more of a challenge, since it’s aimed at people that have already played the main game.
That certainly is the case but despite Shadow Of The Erdtree reviewing better than any other DLC in history, on Steam the PC version has had so many negative user reviews that its rating is now ‘Mixed’ – despite the parent game being ‘Very Positive.’
This is partially because of performance issues that aren’t evident in the console versions but many of the complaints are simply that it’s too hard and frequently unfair.
The poor performance has led to stuttering and other issues that won’t be making battles any easier for PC players, but many of the complaints are aimed specifically at the design and don’t mention the technical issues at all.
‘Shallow and miserable experience with an even emptier open world map than base game (yes, somehow that’s possible). Every boss is basically Malenia 2.0, designed around players using ashen summons/bleeds/fingerprint/any other BS. Hyper aggression, sticky targeting, endless combos, extremely bloated health and over the top damage are the new hallmarks of balance for Fromsoft,’ writes a rather angry sounding Korovaemae.
Steam user Erusean praises the design of the legacy dungeons but suggest that, ‘Elden Ring’s DLC doubles down on many of the things that soured the experience of the base game. The entire design philosophy of ‘challenging but fair’ has been forgotten in Elden RIng as bosses continuously spam endless combos and AoEs [area of effect] before dashing off across the map and spamming more AoEs. That was already a problem in the base game, and it’s even worse here.’
‘The worst DLC ever. There is nothing in the name of balance. Stop the clown Miyazaki from making money, don’t throw your money away,’ suggests Karol.
‘The game had smooth 1080 at 60fps before this patch, now it’s lagging even outside of the Shadow Lands on low specs, huge input delay due to this lag and some bosses nearly unplayable because of that. I will return and change this review to positive once it will be fixed,’ writes The Last Vandal.
All this was enough for the US branch of publisher Bandai Namco to issue a peculiarly brief tweet which says simply: ‘This is a suggestion to level up your Scadutree Blessing.’
Many have taken this to be a direct response to the complaints on PC and refers to new collectibles which can be used to artificially increase your character’s attack and defence (but only within the DLC and not the main game).
FromSoftware itself has said nothing about the controversy, which does not seem to be echoed by console players and was not an issue we, or most other reviewers, had with the game.
Shadow Of The Erdtree has a ‘generally favourable’ 8.3 user score on PlayStation 5 and 8.2 on Xbox Series X/S. The PC version is lower, at 7.5, but that still counts as generally favourable.
Elden Ring and Dark Souls creator Hidetaka Miyazaki has stated many times that he has no intention of lowering the difficulty of his games or adding things like a pause option.
It’s currently unclear what his next game will be, but while he seems to be hinting at a new Soulslike he’s also said he’s interested in making a more traditional Japanese style role-player.
Divine Beast Dancing Lion is difficult but not notably more so than previous bosses (Bandai Namco)
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