Elden Ring players are having trouble with the recently launched Shadow Of The Erdtree expansion.

Shadow Of The Erdtree is the first and only expansion for Elden Ring, and has been praised for having as much scope and ambition as a standalone game, rather than a DLC.

The expansion was released last week, but players are reportedly having issues with the difficulty of the DLC, as well its performance. While the base game still has a “very positive” rating on Steam, via 633,000 different reviews, the response to Shadow Of The Erdtree is “mixed”.

“The entire design philosophy of ‘challenging but fair’ has been forgotten in Elden Ring as bosses continuously spam endless combos and area of effect attacks (AoE) before dashing off across the map and spamming more AoEs. No longer are you inching towards improvement and bettering yourself against challenges slowly; you’re smashing your head against a brick wall until it decides to dent,” reads one review, while another said it was “too much of a hassle to be fun.”

Other reviews highlighted issues with the framerate of several boss fights and lag problems across the entire DLC.

Seemingly responding to the criticism, publisher Bandai Namco took to social media to give fans a handy hint. “This is a suggestion to level up your Scadutree Blessing,” they wrote.

Speaking to The Guardian about the difficulty of the original game, Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki said: “If we really wanted the whole world to play the game, we could just crank the difficulty down more and more. But that wasn’t the right approach.”

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“Had we taken that approach, I don’t think the game would have done what it did, because the sense of achievement that players gain from overcoming these hurdles is such a fundamental part of the experience,” he continued. “Turning down difficulty would strip the game of that joy – which, in my eyes, would break the game itself.”

However, a recent update for Elden Ring has fixed one long-standing issue with the game, with the Bandai Namco logo no longer blinding players when they boot up the game.

In other news, the highly-anticipated sequel Hollow Knight: Silksong has received a promising update from a playtester.



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