Shadow Of The Erdtree’s mixed Steam reviews paint a different picture to the critical reception
Despite an overwhelmingly strong reception with critics, Shadow Of The Erdtree is currently sitting at a ‘mixed’ review rating on Steam, with nay-sayers citing performance issues and overbearing enemy design. The Elden Ring DLC is currently metacritic’s highest rated expansion of all time at 95, beating out the The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s Blood And Wine’s 92. However, roughly a third of the 41,000 user reviews on Steam are negative.
On the technical side, recent negative reviews highlight stutters, drops, and low frame rates. As for gameplay, there’s a thread of players hitting breaking point with boss and enemy design, both in terms of difficulty scaling and boss attack patterns. To elucidate, although not dismiss, these complaints: Shadow Of The Erdtree implements a new progression system where players are required to explore and collect Scadutree Fragments in order to be on par with much of the DLC’s content outside the base area. As such, the damage that Erdtree’s enemies both dish out and take is scaled differently from the base game. The DLC has only been out a few days, so its possible players are attempting to best the high level content without being fully prepared.
As for boss design itself, players repeatedly mention lengthy attack combos, unreadable boss tells, and encounters that otherwise seem to prioritise difficulty over enjoyment. These same criticisms were levelled against some of the bosses in the base game, and it seems the arms-race design of the DLC has, for some, exacerbated these issues.
Speaking personally, I’ve got mixed feelings on the mixed reviews. I’m sympathetic towards anyone who felt alienated by Elden Ring’s critical reception, homogeneous and aggressively superlative as it was. It feels like, in distilling both what was good and bad about the base game, FromSoft have pushed a section of the playerbase to voice their issues with the DLC. That said, and strangely enough, I’m actually finding most of Erdtree’s bosses to be far fairer
Read more on rockpapershotgun.com
