Players are complaining about the difficulty of a genre-defining game, in a genre known for its difficulty.
Just Git Gud.
Difficulty isn’t black or white. There’s a real difference between Monster Hunter and I Wanna Be the Guy
yeah I seriously suck and I find it like the rest of the game. The game is supposed to kick your ass. ugh. lost 100k runes the other day because I hit a kneeling shadow guy down an alley and thought it was a weak variant rather than the burly variant.
From Software’s PC ports are always pretty poor, but I feel like they don’t get enough flak for it because it’s a From Software game. Does the game still not run with an unlocked frame rate?
Then there always seems to be so much talk about the apparent difficulty of the game that talking about the actual game sometimes falls short. The difficulty of these games is mostly down to observing and learning attack patterns and reacting to them accordingly. It would also be rather trivial for the developers to add a difficulty setting to make the game more accessible or on the other hand make it harder for players that want more of a challenge (I’m aware that there are certain builds that make the game easier and new game + makes it harder in some ways).
The fact that many players always defend the games supposed difficulty often doesn’t allow good discussion about actual balancing (which is different to “difficulty”).
I’m a huge Dark Souls and Elden Ring fan, but there’s no excusing Fromsoft’s code quality. Under no circumstances should someone be able to execute invalid code on someone else’s machine. I’m a software dev myself and the sheer ingenuity of effects ‘hackers’ can implement is astounding to me. Co-op is also just terrible, IMO. Unreliable, buggy, and kind of unrewarding that you have to do everything once for every participant. Performance has never been all that good, but it’s almost expected for console ports nowadays, which I wish was not the case.
They did update the requirements on pc. I’ve had to take my game down from high to high with motion blur off and lower quality water and shadows. I hope they make improvements.
I am one of those people who prefers that the game only has one difficulty. My friend and I both played Phantom Liberty, and unfortunately he didn’t enjoy it as much as I did because at higher difficulty he struggled too much with combat in a way he didn’t find fun. I could argue my point for a while but I doubt I’d achieve anything.
I can see your point on balancing. A great deal of mobs (not even bosses) in the dlc early game can poise or recover from a heavy blow too fast (not talking about damage). It’s almost like they’re tuned for greatswords and greataxes. That’s fine for me, I didn’t mind the respec, but other people do.
As for the difficulty in the DLC, it is more difficult, but IMO not as bad as it’s made out to be. Early (for me) in the day yesterday I heard people were fighting Messmer, and some have even beaten the final boss. Fucking how? You could only have done that if you did a boss rush and no exploration. People did not play the game and did not have the skills to play the way they were trying.
Whatever levels you have in the base game, they are nearly irrelevant until you get to about your 5th blessing. People need to run around and find those upgrades. I wonder if people even know that some random mobs drop them.
I am one of those people who prefers that the game only has one difficulty. My friend and I both played Phantom Liberty, and unfortunately he didn’t enjoy it as much as I did because at higher difficulty he struggled too much with combat in a way he didn’t find fun. I could argue my point for a while but I doubt I’d achieve anything.
Why would you care if the game had more choices in terms of difficulty? It’s a single player game, you could still choose the difficulty level the game it at right now, and others could play at an easier or harder difficulty if they so chose.
For (dominantly) single player games, let players enjoy the game however they want.
As I said I don’t think I’d achieve anything by arguing my point. Imo single difficulty is or should be part of the genre. It’s totally ok for others to also just not play it at all.
Yeah, I’m holding off for a sale on this one. I liked Elden Ring well enough, but the performance issues are infuriating. Baffling that it still isn’t fixed.
They enabled ray tracing on high by default, after I hadn’t played it in months. It wasn’t there before. When I turned it off, performance was back to where it ought to be.
I’m talking about the stuttering, caused primarily not recalculating shaders. Something I just dealt with the entirety of my first playthrough of ER. But the fact that it still isn’t fixed really makes me not want to play, or to pay them money.
Well, the reason I suspected it was this instead was because, with ray tracing turned on high, it looked like shader stutter, but that problem had actually been solved a long time ago.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The long-awaited Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is finally here, and boy, it sure isn’t afraid to put you in your place.
Even its first miniboss is bullying players new to the Land of Shadow, and as I wrote in my review, the battles and bosses spread throughout the expansion are some of the toughest encounters FromSoftware has ever made.
While I can’t really speak to the performance side of things — Elden Ring runs fine for me on an RTX 3070/i5-12600K rig save for a rare stutter here or there, but your mileage may definitely vary — I have to say that I strongly disagree with criticisms that Shadow of the Erdtree is unfairly difficult.
Most Shadow of the Erdtree bosses are designed to punish passive play; if you roll away from their combos, you’ll have to waste time you could have spent slashing them with your greatsword just to get close to them again.
These don’t make enough of a difference that they trivialize fights, but you’ll definitely feel the improvements to your attributes, and will be able to both survive previously lethal attacks and end boss battles quicker.
Some players claim they’ve already maxed out their Scadutree Fragments, but I highly doubt that unless they’ve been speedrunning through the Land of Shadow (which you shouldn’t do, by the way, because it’s full of amazing places to explore and treasures to loot).
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But but but… IGN gave it a 10/10!! /s
