Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is too difficult for many: many negative reviews on Steam
The difficulty level of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree would be artificially set too high according to many users on Steam, who are expressing disappointment.
FromSoftware games make the level of challenge a sort of stylistic feature, often presenting a notable difficulty especially on the souls-like front, but it seems that Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree has gone a little further for many users, who on Steam they expressed their disappointment about an alleged excessive difficulty through the inevitable negative reviews .
These are also reaching a significant share, so much so that the overall rating of the game on the Valve store has dropped to “average”, with only 63% positive reviews , a share which clearly clashes with the metascore of 93 recorded on the front of critics, which places it as one of the best rated titles of this year.
Not that the push for the increase in difficulty was not noticed by many even during the review, but evidently users have fewer filters in expressing their frustration, and many negative evaluations are emerging from them.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is too difficult for many: many negative reviews on Steam
An artificially biased challenge?
There are many negative comments in this sense, even from users who seem to be quite expert in the genre, which makes them even more interesting.
The issue then does not simply concern the very selective level of challenge, which would be understandable and expected for a title of this kind, but the feeling that this is artificially set too high , even beyond any search for high-level challenge, resulting in incorrect balancing.
“The gameplay makes it difficult to recommend, with bosses with spastic movements and a plethora of moves that make no physical sense, making them difficult to face in this DLC,” we read for example in one comment. “From someone who has finished other FromSoftware games with characters purposely kept at level one just for fun, I would be willing to walk away from this one.”
“While the world design and colors are really nice and the look of many enemies too, there is a big balance issue,” says another, “At the moment even with 60 stamina you can be taken down with one shot or by almost all enemies who are not of the lowest level.”
“I was able to finish it but the bosses are so over the top and aggressive that even maxing ourselves out with Scadutree shards they don’t get any easier,” another user wrote, as collected on NeoGAF.
In short, despite an extremely positive response from critics, as demonstrated by the first votes and also by our review of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree , curiously many users are showing a certain intolerance for FromSoftware’s design choices, in explicit manner perhaps for the first time.