Highlights

  • Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki struggled to play through the game's main story.
  • Elden Ring DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, is designed for skilled players and has faced some difficulty complaints.
  • Despite the challenges, Elden Ring remains a best-selling title and its DLC has been a huge success.

Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki claimed he struggled to clear the main story of FromSoftware's critically acclaimed open-world Soulslike. Since its release in 2022, Elden Ring has garnered a reputation for its brutal difficulty. While many longtime veterans of FromSoftware's previous titles believed it was the most approachable Soulslike, that didn't stop some players from debating whether the game was too hard in the weeks following its debut.

Now, over two years later, the release of the first and only Elden Ring DLC has kickstarted the topic once again, with a sizable group of fans arguing Shadow of the Erdtree was far too unbalanced to be enjoyable. The complaints regarding the expansion's difficulty were so widespread that Elden Ring publisher Bandai Namco offered tips to players, with the official Twitter account for the company reminding fans how there were ways to lower the DLC's difficulty.

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Why Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Has Brought Back Difficulty Discourse

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is finally here, and it's revived a long-running, contentious debate about FromSoftware's game design.

As it turns out, Miyazaki himself can personally sympathize with the struggles of his player base. During an interview with The Guardian, Miyazaki revealed how he played through the entire storyline of Elden Ring in preparation for Shadow of the Erdtree's release. Despite being the main architect of one of the most critically acclaimed titles in recent memory, the director stated he "absolutely sucked at video games" and that he employed every trick in the book so he could make it through Elden Ring's main story. Miyazaki also believed the many tools developers put in the game to help with player progression, such as Elden Ring's open-world design and the freedom to explore and level in other areas, might have ironically helped him more than any other player.

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Is Meant to Challenge Longtime Players

Despite experiencing Elden Ring's difficulty first-hand, Miyazaki also previously revealed the developers for Shadow of the Erdtree always intended to challenge the most skilled players with the DLC. The director explained how he and his team wanted to push veterans to their breaking point, with some of the main bosses for Shadow of the Erdtree even specifically designed to do just that. Miyazaki also notably stated the Elden Ring DLC was balanced around fans who had triumphed over most of the content in the base game, meaning the expansion was specifically meant for players who were already intimately familiar with the game's mechanics by the time they entered the Land of Shadow.

While the game is challenging, it is undeniable that Elden Ring is still one of the best-selling titles in the industry and is easily the most impactful FromSoftware project to date. Its recently released DLC has similarly been a huge success, with publisher Bandai Namco announcing Shadow of the Erdtree sold over five million copies within the first three days after its debut.