Summary
- Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Steam reviews are now "Mostly Positive" as of June 27.
- The DLC originally debuted to "Mixed" user reviews.
- While this improvement in player impressions coincides with a recent Elden Ring update, the patch itself may not have anything to do with it.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Steam reviews are no longer in the "Mixed" category, having risen above the "Mostly Positive" threshold on June 27. This turn of events brings the Steam user consensus on the newly released Elden Ring expansion closer in line with its immense critical reception.
Following two years of development, the much-anticipated $40 DLC debuted on June 21. And though Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree made history as the highest-rated video game DLC ever, its initial user impressions were somewhat polarizing, with the game only earning "Mixed" Steam player reviews in its first five days on the market.
Shadow of the Erdtree Solves One Elden Ring Boss Mystery
The newly released Shadow of the Erdtree expansion solves a long-standing mystery concerning one particularly imposing Elden Ring boss.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Reviews Improve Following Calibration Update
But it didn't take long for those ratings to improve, with the expansion now boasting "Mostly Positive" reviews as of June 27, based on over 54,500 impressions. This development coincides with the recent release of an Elden Ring update that made Shadow of the Erdtree slightly easier. And while many of the previously shared negative reviews complained about the DLC's difficulty, it's unclear whether the newly observed user score improvement can be attributed to this so-called calibration patch.
Namely, the update only rebalanced the effects of the Scadutree Fragments by making the damage and defense buffs of the first ten levels more impactful than those of the last ten levels. Maxing out one's Scadutree Blessing still results in roughly the same benefits as before, meaning FromSoftware didn't make the DLC much easier but merely smoothed out its difficulty curve by having the Scadutree Blessing effects grow logarithmically instead of linearly. Players who complained about Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree's difficulty hence likely won't find the latest version of the DLC much more forgiving, especially since a lot of their grievances centered on "overtuned" boss movesets that are difficult to react to rather than mere stats.
Apart from difficulty-related criticism, another reason why Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree recently ended up with "Mixed" Steam user reviews had to do with its PC performance, which many players described as lackluster and notably worse compared to the base game. The recent update did nothing to alleviate those complaints directly, although its changelog did acknowledge a bug that causes ray tracing to be automatically enabled if the player loads a save from a previous game version, which everyone who jumped into the DLC early on did.
Given that state of affairs, it would appear that this improvement in the expansion's user impressions can mostly be attributed to new reviews that started pouring in now that more players have managed to finish Shadow of the Erdtree, rather than the old negative reviews being changed to positive. Additional Elden Ring updates aiming to address the recently surfaced DLC performance complaints are expected to arrive in the coming weeks.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
- Released
- June 21, 2024
WHERE TO PLAY
Shadow of the Erdtree is the first and only DLC expansion for FromSoftware's groundbreaking Elden Ring. It takes players to a whole new region, the Land of Shadow, where a new story awaits the Tarnished.
- ESRB
- M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood and Gore, Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Base Game
- Elden Ring
- Developer(s)
- FromSoftware
- Publisher(s)
- Bandai Namco Entertainment, FromSoftware
- Multiplayer
- Online Co-Op, Online Multiplayer
