It feels like this discussion will last forever.
The difficulty of Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree has been a big talking point in the gaming community over the past few days, and one of the brightest streaming stars nowadays — Kai Cenat — has shared his two cents during the DLC playthrough.
Elden Ring players from all over the world, including those who completed the original game, have complained that the DLC Shadow of the Erdtree is too hard even for a soulslike game.
The criticism mostly focuses on the amount of damage enemies in Shadow of the Erdtree are capable of dealing, however, Kai has dismissed those claims even though he died a lot playing the Elden Ring DLC live on Twitch.
Kai Cenat's thoughts on Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree
Kai thinks the Elden Ring playerbase is approaching the DLC wrong, the star said during his 100-hour+ playthrough on Twitch this past weekend.
"It's a skill issue, bro," Kai told his viewers. "I'm a** and you're a**. But, you're a**, though because you're really saying it's too hard. N**** put your big boy pants on, go out there, and go fight. Like, what are you talking about? Here's the thing. This is the first major release since the actual game two years ago, correct? If you went through all that hassle two years ago, why the f*** they would they make a DLC for you to breeze past, and be done with a day or two?"
Kai Cenat basically thinks the same as one of Elden Ring's directors
Even though Kai got a lot of heat from some of his viewers for sort of defending Elden Ring DLC Shadow of Erdtree's difficulty, the Twitch star is essentially on the same boat as the game's director Hidetaka Miyazaki.
Miyazaki talked with the British newspaper The Guardian on the day of Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree release on Friday, June 21. He explained why the game needed to be hard.
"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."
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How hard is Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree?
Everybody who played the original Elden Ring game knew what they were signing up for with the DLC Shadow of the Erdtree. The 2022 game requires players to go through a 100-hour journey to beat the main and side quests, according to the website HowLongToBeat.
The average Elden Ring player, according to HowLongToBeat, will take around 28 hours to complete the Shadow of the Erdtree's main and side quests.
The reason why the DLC has been deemed "too hard" by players is mostly because enemies deal too much damage, which causes a lot of deaths during the playthrough. This factor, combined with players losing their runes after dying, is making even veteran Elden Ring players give up on completing the game fast or writing a bad review on Steam.
Shadow of the Erdtree truly is hard, but it seems a lot of players, as Kai pointed, started playing with the wrong mindset or thought for whatever reason that From Software would allow them to choose an easier difficulty level this time around.
Can players make Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree easier?
Although there are no official ways to decrease Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree's difficulty, players can easily do that with community modifications. Nexus Mods, for example, have many mods on the platform that make the expansion easier.
One of them, Easy Shadow of the Erdtree, reduces all enemy damage by nearly 25 percent. "You can also use this mod to learn [the] boss pattern without dying so many times, before getting rid of it and trying the way FS [FromSoftware] intended… if that makes you happy," the mod creator Belger suggested.
If you're mad at losing your runes, you can also download the Recover Runes immediately mod made by CheeseofAstora, which has been updated to function on DLC Shadow of the Erdtree.
