Elden Ring's Shadow Of The Erdtree DLC yet hovers at Mixed in the blood-encrusted annals of the Steam user review consensus. As Nic wrote earlier in the week, a portion of the negative feedback is aimed at the expansion's difficulty, which is certainly a Thing To Hear after years of being told by kindly gamers that I only hand out low review scores because I can't press the buttons in the right order.
As publishers Bandai Namco have sweetly observed, struggling players are perhaps forgetting that you can raise your overall power level by gathering Scadutree Fragments, a system of collectibles designed to ensure a tough challenge even for endgame players, while giving you the option of effectively rebalancing the expansion through exploration. The downside there, as a few people have pointed out, is that some players don't want to hunt for collectibles before they can topple the bosses.
Here to save the day and reconcile the warring parties are the modders and in particular, Sereenaty, whose Normalized DLC damage mod (thanks, VG247) adjusts damage taken and received within the DLC areas to be more in line with the base game, theoretically doing away with the need for Scadutree Fragments. As the modder sums up, "if you're tired of having your entire build thrown in the Trash just because you're not into collectibles, this mod is for you". The mod also swaps out the bulk of the game's Scadutree Fragments for Rune Arcs, though you'll apparently still receive a few Fragments from enemy drops.
My schadenfreude about the internet's git-gudders being hoisted by their own quote-dunks aside, I don't have a magic disappearing goat in this particular Elden horse race. I haven't played Shadow Of The Erdtree yet, partly because a lot of people at the Treehouse are already playing it and partly because I'm more interested these days in psychedelic bee products. Still, I'm interested in the angle that searching for Fragments in Erdtree is a chore you must undertake if you want to
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