The difficulty of FromSoftware’s games is one of the more notorious tropes in the industry today. It’s the clashing of discourse between respecting the creator’s vision, vs. making games accessible to disabled players, that is unlikely to be resolved in the near future.
But that can often cloud our eyes from other issues that can prop up in the company. For example, few gamers like to talk about the claims that FromSoftware has poor working conditions, including low pay for its workers, in light of the popularity of the studio.
Recent reports, such as those from Video Games Chronicle, claimed that the recently released Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree has been receiving negative reports on Steam primarily because of its difficulty. Their report also acknowledges that some reviews refer to performance issues, but it mainly focuses on a return to the discourse about FromSoftware difficulty.
But then, this raises the question, what are people really saying in the Steam reviews? We’ve taken a check at the DLC’s Steam page to verify further. Out of a total of 42,718 total reviews, 27,581 reviews are positive, and 15,137 reviews are negative, leading to a mixed reception. If there are a lot of new players who got into Elden Ring because of the connection with RR Martin, it would seem that most of them are satisfied with Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree as it is.
And what do the reviews actually say? We’ll share what we’ve found.
A large number of recent positive reviews are, of course, telling other players leaving negative reviews to git gud, so the current ratio of positive to negative may be because of a campaign to raise it back up.
The negative reviews are, actually, all over the place. So there are some people who do point out performance issues, and their claims seem credible. User The Last Vandal has a i5-12400f + RTX 3060 12 GB, 32 GB DDR4 build. Before Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, their build could run Elden Ring at 1080p, 60 FPS. Now, it slows down even outside the Shadow Lands.
A common complaint is that the poor performance leads to low framerates particularly in boss battles, and so there is a possible correlation between how gamers experience it. But there are also constructive criticisms of the content of the DLC itself.
Users daldaren, Dr.Acula and HungryMako all complain that in spite of the prodigious size of the Realm of Shadow, a big part of that world is actually empty, making that size completely unnecessary. There is also complaints about the boss fights, not particularly because of the immense difficulty, but because the way the difficulty has been set out makes playing it unfun.
A lot of the complaints are common for game studios that just got started making open world games, so they shouldn’t necessarily be dismissed, or reduced to complaints about difficulty. If a common sentiment from FromSoftware critics is that their games don’t given them a feeling of accomplishment, than that would be amplified if they weren’t able to create an open world where exploring and discovering gave you that accomplishment either.
This is not the first time FromSoft has faced criticism for performance of their games, particularly on PC, and we’re likely to see them implement fixes. But here and now, it is worth taking the time to see what people are actually saying that’s wrong with Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree.
