Elden Ring DLC Faces Backlash From Players

Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree DLC: A Double-Edged Sword of Difficulty and Praise

While Shadow of the Erdtree has received critical acclaim, its Steam reception is more nuanced, revealing a split between praise and player frustration. Many cite significant difficulty and performance issues across PC and console platforms.

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Steam Reviews Reveal a Divided Playerbase

Despite pre-release Metacritic scores placing it among the highest-rated games, the Elden Ring DLC launched to a wave of negative player reviews on Steam. While the challenging gameplay was lauded, complaints centered on excessively difficult combat encounters, questionable enemy placement and boss health scaling, and performance problems.

Performance and Difficulty: A Toxic Combination

The intensity of battles is a major sticking point. Players report encounters significantly harder than the base game, with some describing enemy placement as rushed and boss health pools as disproportionately large.

Performance issues further exacerbate the difficulty. PC users report frequent crashes, micro-stuttering, and frame rate limitations, with sub-30 FPS in crowded areas even on high-end systems. Console players also report significant frame rate drops during intense combat sequences.

Currently, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree holds a "Mixed" rating on Steam (36% negative reviews). Metacritic shows a more positive "Generally Favorable" rating of 8.3/10 (based on 570 user reviews), while Game8 gives it a 94/100 rating. This disparity highlights the significant difference between critical and player reception.