Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree appears to have a secret, tougher difficulty

Elden Ring is already an immensely difficult game — as was expected from a FromSoftware title — but players found that Shadow of the Erdtree was even a bit too difficult. But Redditors have discovered that there might even be a secret difficulty setting that makes the DLC even tougher.

A thread by user Spleenczar posted Wednesday noticed a feature called DLC+ at the bottom of the Fextralife new game plus page, which claims that if you’ve already played through the DLC on New Game+ and want to do another playthrough, the game gets more difficult, with enemies dealing more damage and having more health. To test this, Spleenczar made a save copy of an almost-completed DLC run, defeated the final boss in the copied save, and then compared how each character fared in an encounter with Messmer the Impaler.

“The damage was significantly different, with the character who cleared the DLC already taking more,” they wrote.

Many Redditors confirmed this difficulty spike, known as DLC+, as well. One user detailed the Messmer fight, and found that he definitely dealt more damage when the DLC had been completed once, but that it didn’t go up after two DLC rounds. So on the first playthrough, Messmer dealt 874 damage, 894 on a first New Game+, and 1,018 one a New Game+ game with DLC+ turned on.

Damage scaling is one of the key ways Elden Ring adjusts its difficulty for the player, and is the case with New Game+ runs, which stack up to an eighth playthrough. It seems DLC+ does not stack, so you’ll only have to deal with it once.

Despite any difficulty problems, Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree has been massively successful, reaching 5 million in sales in its first week. None of this means that developers have been ignoring player feedback. They issued a June Elden Ring update, which made a couple tweaks to Scadutree Blessing, a DLC-exclusive blessing that helps you deal and take more damage as it gets upgraded, and that players weren’t using to its full potential just after launch.