Lowering difficulty in Bandai Namco Entertainment and FromSoftware’s action role-playing game, Elden Ring, would strip “a fundamental part of the experience”, according to game director Hidetaka Miyazaki.
Speaking during an interview, Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki said that if the development team at FromSoftware really wanted the whole world to play the game, it could just crank the difficulty down more and more. However, according to him, that isn’t the right approach.
Miyazaki believes that had the studio taken this approach, the game would not have done what it did, because the sense of achievement that players gain from overcoming hurdles is such a fundamental part of the experience. He added that turning down difficulty would strip the game of that joy, which, in his view, would break the game itself.
There’s no doubt that the Souls-like formula relies heavily on getting players to overcome challenges through trial-and-error. While no difficulty settings have been offered in these FromSoftware titles, they have become more accessible, especially with Elden Ring. A lot of the cumbersome activities have been made simpler and the checkpoints placed more leniently than in prior titles.
Elden Ring’s new Shadow of the Erdtree expansion features more than 10 main bosses as well as additional side bosses. Defeating some of them is required to progress the story, while others are optionally available to challenge. As for the new weapons, it has been revealed that Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree will add around 100 of them for players to discover. This isn’t just limited to new weapons within the weapon type categories available in the base game, however. Players can also discover eight brand-new weapon types. One of them is the Martial Arts category. This new weapon type allows players to engage in combat bare-handed, as the Tarnished One gains the ability to dish out heavy punches and kicks into their enemies.
