Elden Ring Shadow of The Erdtree has a mixed review on Steam. You’re probably wondering how the 2022 Game of the Year winner dived into a mixed review. Well, the reason why many players are review-bombing the game is because of its difficulty.
Elden Ring Shadow of The Erdtree expansion kicks the difficulty up a notch compared to the base game. At the time of writing, the expansion which was released on June 20 had received 42,718 reviews on Steam. A total of 27,581 of those reviews were positive while 15,137 were negative.
Anyone who is used to games developed by FromSoftware probably knows that they don’t make games for players to breeze through. Nevertheless, it feels odd to hate a game for being too difficult when the actual purpose of every game is to challenge yourself.
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In a post published by The Guardian on the same day that Elden Ring Shadow of The Erdtree was launched, FromSoftware President Hidetaka Miyazaki said that lowering the difficulty would break the game.
“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,” Miyazaki said.
“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. Turning down difficulty would strip the game of that joy – which, in my eyes, would break the game itself.”
Besides the difficulty banter, there are other “genuine” reasons why some players have left a negative review on Elden Ring Shadow of The Erdtree. One reviewer said the game has been unplayable with “extremely low fps drops and audio glitches almost every second”.
A streamer defeated Elden Ring Shadow of The Erdtree first boss with her mind
Streamer Perrikaryal explains how the EEG controller works
While many have complained about the difficulty of Elden Ring Shadow of The Erdtree, a Twitch streamer by the name Perrikaryal has proven that the game may not be as impossible to beat as many reviewers have claimed by beating the game with a brain-powered controller.
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For over a year, Perrikaryal has been experimenting with an EEG-powered, head-mounted controller that comes with an onboard gyroscope. To use the tool, Perrikaryal had to map her brainwaves to synchronized inputs and train her brain to know what she wanted to do in the game. Her brainwaves are captured by the headset and translated into in-game actions.
In a video published on February 1, 2023, Perrikaryal, who was still in early use of the headset, explained how it worked—while playing Elden Ring. She explained that there are different variations of EEG but that hers comes with software. Emotiv made the one she uses.
“The way that the Elden Ring works, basically, the software that comes with this particular headset can record what your brain looks like,” Perrokaryal said.
Perrikaryal shared a clip of her defeating the first boss (Divine Beast Dancing Lion) in Elden Ring Shadow of The Erdtree and it has generated lots of buzz with many people comparing the tool to Neuralink. For those in doubt about the clip shared on X, look at the streamer’s over an hour of gameplay on Twitch.
How to make Elden Ring Shadow of The Erdtree easier
Scadutree fragment
While the base game made use of in-game experience points called Rune to level up the player, Runes are not as relevant in Shadow of the Erdtree. Therefore, players who have leveled their characters significantly with Rune will still struggle.
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Instead, the expansion relies on Scadutree fragments to increase the power of the player so that they can stand a chance against the more powerful bosses. Therefore, collecting enough Scadutree fragments will make the difficulty of the game less unbearable.
What is your opinion on the difficulty of Elden Ring’s Shadow of The Erdtree expansion? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.
