The release of Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree has reawakened the typical Soulsborne debate around high difficulty, but even the game’s creator struggled to play it.
In an interview with The Guardian, FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki discussed playing Elden Ring in the run up to Shadow of the Erdtree but struggled as he’s not a very good player.
“Leading up to the release of any game, I’ll be very hands-on playing it and getting as much time on it as much as possible,” he said. “But after the release, I tend to not want to touch it, because I know I’m going to either find things that I left on the table or issues that will bug me. And once I become a player, I’m powerless to do anything significant to change it. So once a game is out in the wild, I tend to not play.”
He continued: “But in preparation for Shadow of the Erdtree, I played through the main story of Elden Ring. I want to preface this by saying I absolutely suck at video games, so my approach or play style was to use everything I have at my disposal, all the assistance, every scrap of aid that the game offers, and also all the knowledge that I have as the architect of the game … the freedom and open-world nature of Elden Ring perhaps lowered the barrier to entry, and I might be the one who’s benefiting the most from that, as a player, more than anyone else.”