dafyddrogers9385: 33% of the negative reviews are from Chinese users complaining about anti-cheat aswell. The user critic scores on metacritic for other platforms are much higher
yaboyjay7202: The actual real way to play MS Flight Sim is - getting a small plane, take off, "oh, that's my house", crash into it intentionally, uninstall
kryppo4245: Nice to see that gamers did NOT learn the tree sentinel lesson back when the game released
Mia-Mendez: I wouldn’t say Black Myth Wukong’s delay is that mysterious for anyone who can think remotely critically. It’s clearly due to Series S optimizations, similar to Baldur’s Gate 3. Microsoft’s required support for that SKU is going to continue to cause issues going forward
karboush1093: when do we call it review bomb and when it is just reviews for a new release. doesn't review bomb mean negative reviews for things unrelated to the game itself?
IshTheEngineer: Closing tango reminds me of that office episode where the boss gets wasted and closes a branch while drunk then acts like it was the plan all along. lol
IrenaMilkynut: From a design standpoint I like the Scadutree Blessing, because by the time you reach the DLC, your most important stats should be soft capped. At that point, levels mainly offer a horizontal benefit, so adding a broad vertical boost makes sense.
tileychannel: Every time we call genuine criticism review bombing, we diminish the value of the term and can't use it to properly describe group initiatives to hurt a game's image anymore. People expressing opinions on actual issues, whether performance or balancing related, are not review bombing.
SA80TAGE: 10k and not even a namedrop? RIP "that one guy"
(FR tho mad respect, legends deserve some props)
VanguardSupreme: Does "indie" mean something different in gaming than elsewhere? I would think that if a game is being funded and published by Square-Enix - one of the most prominent companies in gaming - then it is by definition not
hadin9563: Calling it review-bombing is disingenuous. There is actual criticism and performance issues
AtPlume: The Elden Ring situations actually reminds me of a controversy that's been largely forgotten with DOOM Eternal. At release, "The Ancients Gods Pt 1", the first DLC, was largely criticized for it's difficulty.

What happened is that, we had a very vocal but also very small part of the fandom who was really deep into that game. YouTubers making videos about the combat and so on, people who by default, played the game on max difficulty and conquered all of the toughest challenges of that game, who were left wanting more. And Id Software listened to these people, especially.

Ancient Gods Part 1, turned everything to 11. It bragged about doing so, too, it was very clear who Id Software wanted to appeal to. The people who complained about the Marauder? Well, now there's two of them at the same time! The super aggressive quick switching style of play became a must. And those players, were happy.

However, they were not really the majority. For a ton of people, myself included even though I was used to the max difficulty, this DLC was absolutely exhausting to play. With relentless enemies constantly pushing toward you, arenas with enemy composition that sometimes bordered on being cruel, every fight felt like a test of your abilities and worse, it had this constant thing : "You thought it was over? Here's more." which can be exhilarating when done right, but it was just too much here.

It felt Id Software doubling down on everything that made the game great, but also all of the things that made some people give up on it.

When the second DLC was released, it came with a patch that revamped the first one. Some called it an over-correction. Some even said that the second DLC was an over-correction. I played the second DLC but didn't enjoy it, I feel like something broke with my experience of the first DLC and I haven't been able to enjoy the game at all ever since.

But still, if I try to understand, I honestly can see both sides here. Some people saw it as a step in the right direction, some people saw it as a massive over-correction. It all resulted from something that maybe, shouldn't have happened in the first place.

Knowing which people to listen to in your game's community is a tricky thing to do, it's easy to let yourself believe that a vocal minority actually represents a majority of your player-base.
jaritsu: The thing I learned about Erdtree difficulty is this:

You need to retool your build and weapons to make sense of the new dynamics. The thing about the base game is that you can sleepwalk through the back half of the game once you’ve sorted out your build and weapon set. Erdtree aims to undo that, and it’s great. I came in with a pretty typical bleed build and though I was able to maintain that, I had to branch out and use new weapon arts and update how I approach situations. Now in at the end and I’m just kinda sleepwalking through most things again. But the difficulty curve was welcome while it lasted.
rjistheman: kinda hard to trust video game charities nowadays especially since people like The Completionist
PoppyBennett-cl9nv: Mate, I'm not even the best Souls-like player... or a Souls-like player for the most part, but even I know that getting good is the essence of Souls-like games. As well as relentless grinding for hours until I no longer fear the bosses, they fear me.
goldglovegrappler1382: Implying Mikami leaving is why Tango was shut down is insane when he stayed at that company longer than he would've otherwise wanted to ensure that it was ready to run without him.
booey27: Historically, some of the most difficult sections of each FromSoft game have been in the DLC. I haven't had the chance to play SotE just yet but I fully expected it to be more challenging than the base game
ElenLyons: Love your creativity, it's inspiring!
yourlocalhuman3526: It's not "review bommbed", people were mostly talking about performance issues. You're doing the exact same thing is Yong guy who's twisting the fanbase to think that the only complaints are "difficulty".
Veekmon: ah yes, the indie game studio square enix
anaguma90: I do think with this DLC Fromsoft has pushed the difficulty and complexity of enemies as far as it can acceptably go. Which leaves me wondering what they'll do next as their current formula has reached its conclusion with nowhere else left to go.

I personally hope they scale back to more focused and linear games like Sekiro and Bloodborne again.
LegateSprinkles: My take on Shadow of the Erdtree is that I love it. Its like one of the best dlcs ever. This could be a standalone expansion and I feel like I stole from FromSoft. Though I do feel now a slight "annoyance" to From's design philosophies now. They have been playing an arms race against players with their games. Upping the challenge ante while doing little to meaningfully push their base gameplay. The biggest changes for Elden Ring since Demon's Souls has been jumping, guard counters and customizable weapon arts from Dark Souls 3. I guess I could say that because the Scadutree blessings work as intended because with some levels you start to treat the game like you were as a high level in the base game but enemies stay a threat because the dmg is so high.

Once you "got gud" at Demon's Souls it was pretty much knowing the dodge timings or just positioning with large boss recovery periods. Well From is still leaning on iframes to balance their movesets and now that previous single swing from the boss now has a delay to throw you off and roll catch. It has a follow up to roll catch. The boss varies to sometimes not commit to a follow up. It has an aftershock AoE to roll catch. Its the first attack in a 5 string combo from the boss. If you get caught by 1 hit you may very well be hit by the follow ups and on top those attacks hit like a truck with medium armor and high vigor even in the base game. Then on top of that bosses are very aggressive and after you get hit once and try to find a quick sip of estus the boss is likely doing a fast charge to close the distance. Oh and some of those fights that have summon signs in the boss arena? The bosses are so aggressive as soon as you go through the fog gate that you may very well eat a hit trying to summon them. Bayle's fight as an example, Im grateful that Igon was so fucking goated with their VA that I just wanted to summon him. Now that is just a complete dick move. So From is upping the bosses without meaningfully improving player kit. I feel like some From bosses are far more demanding than DMC bosses Ive played because of the kits of the player vs the boss. Hell I feel like From wants to make DMC bosses but want to stick to Souls limitations.

Im making my way through the dlc pretty well. I thought I was having a hard time but seeing how others have been struggling online I guess Im doing pretty well with like at most 30min to an hour on a boss. Its still like my favorite game these past few years. This is like the best expansion ever. Im just now more so annoyed. A "Miyazaki you hack" (affectionately) because what design of the game is breaking if you make less enemies 1-2 shot you.

Also I feel like From needs to not be given a pass over their absolutely horrendous lockon/camera they havent even attempted to fix since Demon's Souls. So for From's next game of course Im still excited and will likely play it but I am very wary of the kind of bullshit From will likely throw at me.
jwash87: Microsoft is clearly lying. The devs literally said its an optimization issue. Come on skill up.
NatrajChaturvedi: To be clear, performance is fine for me on my PC and From's DLCs have always been like this in terms of difficulty but I respect the right of other players to judge for themselves.
So its not "review bombing" if people dont like a game and give it a downvote because of either bad performance or finding the difficulty curve too high.
The games media and always trying to paint paying customers, the gamers as whinny kids!
JonOhFun: This really needs saying:
Review Bomb definition.
to manipulate an online rating system with a semiorganized campaign of unfavorable user reviews, often as a general statement of disapproval for a creator, a publisher, or other business, rather than a genuine opinion about a specific product or experience.

Its not being review bombed.

If people give it a negative review because of GENUINE OPINION ABOUT EXPERIENCE that's just a review.
crash_jj: Imo it’s fine, it’s a typical fromsoft dlc difficulty wise, they’re always harder than the game.
It’s the margit problem again I think. Most people have run headlong at the main path straight to shadow keep and are getting blitzed rather than exploring and getting stronger. The stuff off the main path isn’t really unreasonably hard, the more upgrades you get the easier the rest becomes and there is A LOT off the main path. Like a whole game’s worth of stuff
ImStillDizzy: Opened YouTube looking for this vid and saw it was uploaded 57s ago
chonkyseal7164: Every time a new Fromsoft game gets released it gets review bombed, nothing new.
Just that it gets worse this time because a lot more casuals and 1st time souls like players are surprised about getting buttfucked by a fromsoft dlc.
JONATHANP1619: I love how it is split 50/50 between the "The DLC is unfair and cheap" & "No, Fromsoft is perfect and hard means challenge no matter what, git gut."
BrianJNordon: I'm never this fast.
missedmurphy: You either die a hero or live long enough to become a games journalist
- Elden Ring players
thenotreallyfunnyguy: Calling legitimate criticism of Fromsofts game design as "review bombing" is pretty dumb. I completed the DLC, killed all the bosses and found pretty much everything and most of the criticism is more than valid.
opethmike: The Elden Ring community makes the League of Legends community look wholesome.
countryc0unt: So, i beat the DLC and killed all bosses. I had 18 scadutree blessings at the endboss, 75% dmg reduction for all necessary dmg types. Still can get oneclapped by a certain combo the endboss does which is, if you don't dodge the first hit, unavoidable. That is simply not fun. Most of the DLC is fine, but due to that boss and a some broken hitbox bosses I also left a review that doesn't recommend it, detailing that and also the base game issues are still there with boss and mob reuse etc.(They literally copy pasted some side bosses from the main game which we already fought mutliple times there, and even a new rememberance boss got copy pasted another time for some reason)
Also my high end pc can't run the game at 60 fps continously (7800x3D and 7900XTX) during some boss fights due to their full arena encompassing particle effects.
mattengland653: As a business owner - it’s glaringly obvious Tango and the other studios were dissolved primarily to facilitate the purchase of Activision - you could make a case Arkane were in trouble - but not tango.. most egregiously 2 weeks after those closures Mcsft turned around and opened Activision a new studio to make single player AAA games… no one mentions that but it’s so obvious what happened there
leithaziz2716: To be frank, I do agree with most of the criticisms against the DLC you used as example.

My problems are not inherently that the game is difficult, but that the way it is designed to be difficult encourages a rather boring playstyle that goes against the game's philosophy of having so many options. It just makes me wish I was playing Sekiro or Bloodborne instead. Those games are hard too, but I find its systems to be a lot more suited against the level of aggression that's similar to the DLC here.
Blazians: Most of the negative reviews for the DLC are about easy anti-cheat apparently
Stuffystufferfield: i was scadutree level 8 before fighting a single boss and ive been feeling too strong overall
permeus2nd: Is it really a review bomb if people just don't like a thing and give it a negative review?

I've not played the game as its just not my cup of tea so I can't judge it but we see the term review bomb used far too much normally when a company doesn't like the feedback they're getting
pileofcheese5017: An important note on the SOTE reviews; counting only English-language reviews, the review score is on 84% positive on steam, compared to the 68% of all languages. A lot of the negative reviews are being posted in Chinese. That is not to say that the Chinese playerbase doesn't matter; on the contrary. If you're going "well, I liked it and I'm not hearing much complaints from my mates that played it", then that is self-selection bias. The playerbase at large (which includes Chinese players!) does not have very positive feelings on SOTE.
interlinkedMedia: Less to do with performance or difficulty and more to do with it not being that great an experience. Feels like most critics played it for 1-2 hours and wrote a glowing review because they knew not doing so would probably face backlash.
theovermatt: Honestly the part I think I agree with the most about the complaints about Erdtree is just that some enemies feel like damage sponges for no particularly great reason, to the point I end up running past a bunch of them rather than deal with it. The thing is though, that was also present in the base game, and in the case of the bosses, I feel like the extra health largely replaces bosses whose health bars you drain only for them to completely refill in their phase 2, which I think FromSoft has gone a bit overboard with the last while.
GeremyG: Getting jumped the millisecond I step through fog gates and the Scadutree fragment system are kinda annoying.
ItsNaberius: I am about 25 hours into the DLC and having the time of my life. Cannot believe it is a DLC, the map is so enormous. Have I got my face pushed in by some bosses? Absolutely. But to the people quitting, give it another try. It is 100% worth your time, especially after FromSoft buffed the damage and resistance bonuses that you get from the Scadutree fragments. I was stuck on Spear Flame Emo Boi at 9. Ended up going and exploring until I had 12, and the fight felt so much more dooable. Not even done yet, but the dlc is 10/10

Jun 27 2024

Buy Elden Ring Runes