As Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree continues to pound players into the dirt, Bandai Namco calls them out in the most devastatingly polite way possible

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is hard—real hard, in fact. Having just wrapped up my ashes-free playthrough myself, I definitely feel like everything in it is a major step up when compared to the base game. Nothing insurmountable, but the exact opposite of a cakewalk, as FromSoftware DLCs tend to be.

This controversial difficulty spike—in a genre known for being a series of controversial difficulty spikes—has led to «Mixed» reviews on Steam for the time being.

Complaints are the usual suspects: bosses attack too fast, they deal with too much damage, the camera is bad, the Black Gaol Knight beat me up and stole my lunch money, I don't want to have to hunt down Scadutree fragments, and so on. As someone who is fresh off the back of having beaten the expansion without using ashes, I think a lot of these woes will fade with time—some of them are fair enough, though. Performance hasn't been great, and I have mixed feelings about the Scadutree Fragment scaling—the DLC-specific power system that increases your outgoing damage and reduces incoming pain by a considerable margin.

Bandai Namco, seemingly in response, has tweeted a devastatingly polite reminder to the player base among the melee: «This is a suggestion to level up your Scadutree Blessing». Simple, efficient, ruinous.

It's the most civilised way of saying «git gud» imaginable, though it's not without merit. I keep seeing videos of players raging at the Blackgaol Knight two-shotting them, and thanking the tree above that I decided to come back with a few more blessings under my belt. Like Margit in the base game, I feel the Blackgaol Knight (and to an extent, Rennala) are there to teach you to go explore first.

Still, the DLC's difficulty is absolutely a step up. You can dodge most bosses' strings (save for the final one) pretty reliably when you get a handle on their patterns, but that doesn't change the fact that they all still require rote memorisation on par with Malenia. They're fast, incredibly