Elden Ring game director Hidetaka Miyazaki responds to DLC difficulty complaints

FromSoftware games are notoriously difficult, and typically, when a new title from the developer is released, it's met with a wave of gamers complaining about the overall difficulty.

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This sentiment has been abundantly true for the recent Elden Ring DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, with thousands of gamers taking to Steam to review the game poorly for its difficulty (and some performance issues).

However, the difficulty in FromSoftware games isn't about to change, at least that's according to FromSoftware director Hidetaka Miyazaki, who said in a recent interview with The Guardian that players need to experience extreme difficulty to be given a "sense of achievement," and that reducing the difficulty "would break the game itself."

Furthermore, Miyazaki said that reducing the difficulty to make the game available to everyone wasn't the "right approach" for Elden Ring and, by extension, its DLC, as he believes overcoming these challenges is "such a fundamental part of the experience".

Even to the point where Miyazaki said, "Turning down difficulty would strip the game of that joy - which, in my eyes, would break the game itself."

Miyazaki touched on the difference between Elden Ring and other FromSoftware titles.

"It's certainly part of the intention. Elden Ring, by its open world nature and game design, lends the player more freedom," he muses. "At no point during the game did we want players to feel claustrophobic or overly limited in the scope of what they're able to do and experience in that world.

Instead of the very grim, dark fantasy that you may be used to from past FromSoftware games ... it still has that same harshness and coldness, but we wanted to have these moments of beauty. That's where a little bit of high fantasy comes in, conceptually. Both in terms of the difficulty and the learning curve, as well as the world setting, you feel that you can come up for air."