The release of the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion inevitably caused a surge of Elden Ring on Steam charts. On Saturday, at 15:00 UTC, FromSoftware’s latest Soulslike game registered 781K concurrent players, not too far from the all-time peak of 951K concurrent players registered when the game launched in February 2022.
However, Steam users aren’t all that smitten by the expansion, at least judging from the current reviews. Out of 34,181 users who decided to leave a review, only 65% gave Shadow of the Erdtree a positive nod, which translated into a ‘Mixed’ reception. It’s a stark contrast to the 92% user score of the base game.
Common complaints levied against Shadow of the Erdtree include the excessive difficulty of the new content and performance issues, the latter of which Wccftech reviewer Francesco De Meo also cited in his analysis.
Where Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree definitely disappoints is in the performance, at least on PC. Nothing has changed over the base game – it still fails to keep a smooth performance most of the time. In a benchmarking session held in the Scadu Altus open-world area, a pretty busy area with plenty of enemies and vegetation, the game ran at an average of 58 frames per second at 4K resolution, max settings, and no ray tracing on my machine (i7-13700F, RTX 4080, 32 GB RAM). Unfortunately, the experience wasn’t smooth, as highlighted by the recorded 18 FPS 1% low, with some frame rate drops that did not impact the gameplay in a major way but were still quite noticeable.
Though rare, I also experienced some seconds-long stutters where the game completely froze for an unknown reason, which never happened to me in the base game and on a much weaker system (i7-10700, RTX 3070, 16 GB RAM). In this regard, FromSoftware still has much to do, especially if they will go the open-world route for their next major game.
The performance issues were also present in the base game, though, and that wasn’t panned at all. Could the reaction to Shadow of the Erdtree be a sign that FromSoftware may be going too far regarding difficulty? In a recent interview with the Guardian, Elden Ring creator Hidetaka Miyazaki shared his opinion that lowering the difficulty may well break the game.
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. 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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