Elden Ring received a new update that re-balanced the brutally difficult DLC making the beginning of your journey through the Realm of Shadow a bit easier. This patch comes after Steam reviews for the newly released DLC dropped from overwhelmingly positive to mixed as players began experiencing high levels of difficulty.
In the patch notes provided on Bandai Namco’s website, the update increases the damage you deal and reduces the damage you take from enemy attacks more significantly when using the new Shadow Realm Blessing upgrades. In Shadow of the Erdtree, your player character, the Tarnished, will come across items called Scadutree Fragments which, when used at a Site of Grace, increase your damage and defense when in the large map that the DLC takes place in. With this new patch, players can expect that damage and defensive bonus to be significantly more impactful early on in order to help clear some of those early game boss battles. As you collect more and progress further into the DLC, the benefits will become more gradual.
FromSoft has a long-standing history of releasing extremely difficult DLCs on top of its already notoriously difficult titles. Many of the hardest bosses in the history of Soulsborne games come directly from DLC expansions. Despite this, Elden Ring has taken on a reputation for being even more difficult than many players expected. At one point, FromSoftware itself took to Twitter/X to formally remind players to search for and use Scadutree Fragments in order to upgrade their character. This new leveling system essentially set players back onto a more even, or perhaps lower, playingfield to the enemies in the DLC leaving players wondering why their high level builds were struggling.
It looks as though FromSoft is aware of the struggles players are experiencing and are looking to help alleviate some of the pain while still maintaining the high level of difficulty the studio’s games are known for.
In addition to game balancing, the new patch also fixed a bug in which ray tracing would be automatically turned on if you were loading a save file from a previous version of the game. The patch notes end with a promise that, “other balance adjustments as well as bug fixes are also planned for a future patch,” which seems to indicate there may be more performance fixes and adjustments made to the difficulty of the DLC in the future.
