The "Soulsborne" series of games are notorious for being extremely difficult, with them purposely designed to be punishing and to test the skills of anyone that plays them. Elden Ring is the latest game by FromSoftware, the developers behind Dark Souls, which means that it is just as punishing as the previous games.
Elden Ring is an incredibly long game, with some early 100% completions taking up to 100 hours. During a playthrough the player will level up many times, allowing their character to become extremely powerful by the time the game is completed. However, that doesn't mean that the game will get any easier as it progresses, FromSoftware has made sure to keep pushing a player's ability to its limit at all times.
On TikTok, @bearfromminecraft posted a video that has garnered 3.1 million views showing what happens if a character has 99 strength in Elden Ring. In the video, the player is facing the Tree Sentinel boss and manages to take approximately half of its health with a single attack, dealing over 1,000 damage before finishing the enemy off with another swing of their weapon.
While not impossible, to completely max out a character's stats the player will need to get to level 792, so it is very likely that cheats were used to increase the stats as the Tree Sentinel boss is faced too early in the game, with it being the first boss a player will encounter apart from the first enemy which is designed to defeat the player. Despite it being the first boss in Elden Ring, that doesn't mean that FromSoftware designed it to be an easy fight to help ease players into the game. Some players have spent many hours trying to defeat the Tree Sentinel in Elden Ring, giving them a glimpse at what is to come throughout the rest of the playthrough.
Elden Ring's launch has been incredibly successful for FromSoftware, with the game surpassing sales and concurrent players records of other titles from the developer such as Dark Souls 3 and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. This was helped in part by the addition of George R.R. Martin, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones helping to create much of the world and lore of the game, which certainly helped give the game more mainstream appeal when compared to previous titles by the development studio.
Elden Ring is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.