Golden Order Restored as Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree Recovers from Review Bombing

Is it review bombing if the criticism is about performance or difficulty curve? I'm not too fond of the suggestion that non-meta reasoning is a basis for review bombing.

If the argument is the reviewer is stupid for not following instructions that's fair but I think people are not using the term right.

Review bombing is not news y'all

Getting tired of the steam review bombing at drop of hat for no reason. I’m surprised there wasnt massive refund request to steam for the base game even if they played 100 hrs like when Helldivers 2 complaint was a thing

I’m no lore scientist but aren’t the Golden Order the bad guys?

This review bombing fad is getting boring..oh so boring. I can understand legitimate issues about games that under perform or are just crap but these numptys...sorry I meant well meaning activists are as irritating as those idiots that glue themselves to vehicles and cover stonehenge in orange paint. Where will it all end?

I think it's legitimate for users to give a negative review for a game whose performance suffers on pc which many of the pc reviews have not pointed or not accounted in their end score. Same if it is high difficulty for some users they can complain, remember how many games have been rated low in the past because they were too difficult or certain sections were , causing game reviewers to point out that it takes away the fun factor and bla bla.
I don't think most of the users come back to change their reviews, I suspect it's the fanbase who keeps on giving new reviews ultimately leading to positive on steam.

@sonicmeerkat when you give a great game a 1/10 for one issue, then yes, it's review bombing. If you give it a 6/10, then it's not. It's one thing to point out something annoying about the game and a whole different thing to give it the lowest score possible.

@ishaajo840 I agree with part of it, that poor PC performance is a valid reason to complain. But calling a Fromsoft game is too gard is like going to the Sistine Chapel and saying "great place, but I didn't like that painting in the ceiling". Hard difficulty has always been part of the games' identities. I'm not amazing at them and find them hard, but that's on me not the game

I'm a couple of hours in, and I don't understand the discourse in the first place. It's tough, but not more so then any other From game, if people managed to finish the campaign, youd think they should be battle hardened. Anyhow, happy it's been remedied.

@naruball The big problem is that Steam reviews are still binary and don't use a rated system. Its either you like it, or you dislike it which makes their review waves look worse than they likely would be otherwise.

This is why I always find it silly when people complain about review bombing. It’s to get the devs attention. Once something is addressed, the same “review bombers” will go back and change their review. Unless a game really is bad, it rarely stays that way, yet people always want to get on a high horse about decorum etc when these things happen.

Poor things, they tired themselves out stamping their feet 👶

@Intr1n5ic they are adults with baby brains afterall

I think review bombing is pathetic but I do think the DLC has some issues that people ignore because it's Elden Ring. The lands of Shadow is incredibly empty in the southern part of the map. No dungeons, bad loot, a handful of enemies and a few world bosses, it's pitiful.

@Ilyn you're right. That's a big problem with Steam, because I've read several negative reviews of certain games and they seemed to have enjoyed it, but thought there was room for improvement and some positive ones were full of (very valid) complaints. It's hard to get a sense of how enjoyable the game is.

Solid 4/10. They didn’t add trophies, basically rendering the DLC unplayable 😓

@sonicmeerkat Yes! The review section isn't a place for silly comments, that's what the community section is for. On Amazon, if you review a product saying "Silly Sony, I won't make a PSN account, eat me" — your review will be deleted as it's not constructive. It doesn't address the product nor does it reflect your experience and others can't make head or tails of how this product

Yes, performance issues are a problem but the comments we're referring to are not about performance. A review is a definite comment on the entire experience of a product. Any review that does not fall under this category is not a review. When something that is not a review is posted with the intent to be negative due to your emotions, you are review bombing. You're not being critical because the product is bad, you're being critical because you're emotional.

@DylanP this is sarcasm, right?.

I miss when gamers played games because it was a game they wanted to play and they weren't doing it for the intangible rewards that serve no purpose in life other than to say, "look at me, I did a thing".

@sonicmeerkat I woild say it is, especially if you give a game one star because it lags in one location. (Altho ive heard the perfo issues are way worse on PC)
Criticising a difficulty curve in a Fromsoft souls game is like giving RDR2 one star because theres too many cowboys.

Never really cared about user reviews when I used to see 1 star reviews on Amazon for a product like: "my package arrived late"......????? Anyway I'm more captivated by the world than worrying about difficulty, it's obvious these people haven't played Sekiro.

@naruball Its up there with 2000h+ played, Thumbs down because I dislike this feature of this current patch.

@WhiteRabbit Internet points will never cease to be a thing as "number goes up" trumps everything for a lot of people. I have played WoW for years and its the same with Achievment Points in that, for some people the collection is the goal. I won't personally criticise a game for not including them, as I don't care about trophies at all, but everyone is different and for some people they are the meta game within the game.

PC gamers are as fickle as they are entitled.

Giving a game you don’t like a low score is not “review bombing”.

If large numbers of players didn’t get the necessary information from tutorials, then what is the most likely cause?

a, Thousands of players who were capable of progressing significantly far in Elden Ring are “stupid”?

b, the developers produced a garbage-tier tutorial and it is they who are stupid?

My philosophy is that if everyone around me appears to have a problem, it’s likely not them but me.

Souls games do have garbage-tier tutorials. Show me a player who claims they haven’t had to consult an external guide or forum to complete the game, and I will show you a liar.

I don't want to look elitist, but so far the DLC is quite a cake-walk for me. I'm lvl 270 and Blessing at lvl 10. At the exception of bosses that requires some effort to learn their patterns, the rest is quite easy. Plus if you consider that you can potentially cheese any boss with the parfum trick or with the new shield in attack mode...

@CrashBandicoat @sonicmeerkat

I agree - I dont think this was review bombing (certainly not in a negative way anyway).

Difficulty - The problem most forget, is that Elden ring was marketed as more mainstream, plus as From tweaked the difficulty down it sounds like complaints were justified.

Performance - poor performance is always a 0/10 in my opinion.

@starbuck2212 couldn’t agree more.

@B0udoir yup, I still have to finish it up, but using all resources at my disposal only a few bosses so far have given me any real grief.

It’s almost like the things they tell you to find to make the game easier do just that, make it easier.

@Rmg0731 if you read any of them, you'll see that it's mostly due to performance. I'll admit, I was dipping into 45fps territory from time to time after the pre-dlc launch patch. Quite jarring going from 60fps. The latest patch seems to have smoothed things over though.

Edit: Also, the HD2 complaint was legitimate. They sold that game in countries/regions that they don't support and then told them they weren't going to have access to the game anymore

@CrashBandicoat I think you'd be surprised. There were six confirmed endings after the first week, if I recall correctly. Fromsoftware NPCs follow a similar pattern in each of their games - exhaust all dialogue, and check in from time to time before you beat a boss

@Ilyn I always wonder when it comes to such reviews if they mean it or just want attention/trying to be funny.

@CrashBandicoat it's worth keeping in mind that this game sold far more than the rest of From games. So, it's inevitable that a whole lot of them won't like it because it's simply not for them. I'm one of those people who can't stand very difficult games. But I'm informed enough to avoid buying such games. Others get caught up in the hype.

@sonicmeerkat agreed. This was 100% NOT review bombing. Nearly all of the negative reviews were for valid subjective reasons. This idea that an outlet that is trying to present itself in a journalistic nature is suggesting that every game that gets glowing critics reviews is being review bombed if a large pool of gamers fell differently.

Review bombing is deliberately leaving a negative review with the intention coming from a different/ collective agenda or as a response to something other than the game design. If it's valid ly critiquing aspects of said game design, that's an Fing valid review. Period.

Its Critiques are valid, and while I am enjoying Erdtree, I totally understand where the criticism is coming from. Especially in terms of the really poor enemy damage balancing.

@naruball Yup the likes of you and I just don't touch it with a barge pole. But the DLC is only accessible to hardcore players.

E.g. Elden Ring sold more, but you have to progress a long way through that main game, and defeat a very tricky boss, in order to access the DLC. So a dummy like me who bought the game thinking it "looked like Witcher, should be fun" wouldn't even be in the market for the DLC.

People are trying to say those players who found the expansion too hard are "idiots" and "stupid", but those players have proven their mastery already.

Not buying "the narrative" on this one as those are pretty gifted players.

Those players were already professional cheese monkeys, as I'd bet my house that 99% of players who got that far in the base game, had cheesed it out by reading forums and guides.

So I don't buy they are just too stupid or too lazy to read. Something is fundamentally up with the DLC such that it fails with the onboarding at a fundamental level.

Even asmongold practically rage quit initially. He's surely in the top 1% of players. It's his job to play games, and he has beaten the hardest bosses in the hardest games out there, and is incredibly smart.

@WhiteRabbit @B0udoir

No spoilers, but it's the artificial difficulty of the final boss of the DLC that is the issue for many long term From fans. Harder than anything they've done before, cheap and badly designed. Took me over 9 hours @ Level 205 and Max Fragments + Mimic Tear, whilst I generally breezed through everything that came before it in a handful of tries (mostly solo, too).

@Batesy125s See people can complain because there has been no accessibility feature to decrease or increase difficulty.
My main point was that game reviewers push a lot of games rating down due to difficulty but not this one, what if it's a souls game you gotta have to review with the same standards.
And difficulty standard will vary from player to player , it's not that souls game are actually difficult..play other games at highest difficulty settings or 2nd highest.. a player who play at that level will not found souls game much different infact easier I will say..it's just people don't play at that settings nor the reviewers but still they rant about difficulty if they are not able to complete a section.

@jrt87 ok, that's not good indeed. Sounds like Sekiro.

@B0udoir Beating Ishin: Sword Saint was one of my favourite moments in gaming. Remember it taking about four hours of getting the patterns down and getting a little closer each time. Nameless King in DS3 was a similar thrill. That to me is the perfect "difficult" Souls boss. Firm but (mostly) fair.

Without saying anymore, what's at the end of this DLC is not that at all. I never want to think about it again.

@jrt87 It was harder than anything they've done before for you, but what about those who had no issues with it?

I watched CohhCarnage kill him in 5 attempts with no prior knowledge of the fight, took him roughly 20 minutes. He got to the second phase in every attempt, lvl 202, hammer and shield build, used Commander Andreas instead of mimic. He's a 40 year old variety streamer. I've also seen people do it in NG+ at RL1 with no fragments whilst taking no damage.

My point is it's all relative. What's artificially difficult and poorly designed for you because you found it too hard, is a complete cakewalk for others.

I do think some of the visual aspects of it need cleaning up though, which would definitely help with a certain moveset in phase 2.

@CrashBandicoat I don't know. I've heard that it was the easiest From game because of the open world setting. So, essentially you could level up your character, especially with the help of others (right?)

But since it's DLC maybe they tried something different, i.e. to make it exceptionally difficult.

@Intr1n5ic

I understand subjective difficulty in Souls games. I wrecked Malenia first try because I happened to have ran a high strength/dex bleed build and RNG meant I only saw Waterfowl once, if at all. I couldn't believe the discourse/memes surrounding her when I finished the game and went online.

But have you completed the final DLC boss yourself? You can always find some streamer out there who can do a no hit run at SL0 at NG+7 with a dancepad, I don't find it relevant.

Compared with everything that came before, with my build and experience with the genre, the second phase was a massive difficulty spike plagued by visual clutter, framedrops and aoe spam. It will be nerfed in a few weeks, for sure.

What i'm worry from this situation is a lot of publishers / developers will take it as a "don't make your game as hard and challenging like From Soft games if you don't want your game got review bomb" lesson. From Soft / Miyazaki probably will stand their ground. But other devs like Capcom, SE, Bamco, KT, etc could make less challenging games :/

And i put half the blame on gaming journos who campaigned "games for everyone" and Difficulty as a part of "accessibility options" when it's a two different thing. This campaign limits developers artistic freedom because they also must designed their games for gamers with skills issues and non-gamers who doesn't have any legacy skill but wants to jump on the trend :/

@PuppetMaster

There's two things here.

There's the usual trite clickbaity discourse about the general difficulty of Miyazaki's games. Can be ignored as always.

Then there's the view of many longterm From fans that they are running out of ideas with bosses and leaning into the difficulty memes by programming hyper aggressive ones, who launch themselves from across the arena right out the fog gate, increasingly chain together several 8-hit combos all ending in AOE slams, and instantly run/teleport away when you evade it all and should have a punish window.

@jrt87 I haven't yet. I had the encounter spoiled for me by reading something online, at that point I stopped caring about avoiding streams of people who are currently playing.

On the weekend the last two I beat were the Golden Hippo and Gaius as a 185 mage on NG+ 2, both were horrible fights imo.

I do agree with you from watching the other, phase 2 looks extremely aggressive and in parts is a visual mess. I'm looking forward to it though, I'm interested to see if the spell loadout I'm currently enjoying is viable in the small windows he gives you.

@jrt87 "who launch themselves from across the arena right out the fog gate, increasingly chain together several 8-hit combos all ending in AOE slams, and instantly run/teleport away when you evade it all and should have a punish window"

This sound like the usual Souls boss with agressive attack & behaviour and very small punish window.

And if you a long time From Soft fans then you should know, once you enter the fog gate you must prepare that a boss can do everything including cheap attack.

@PuppetMaster

Have you finished the DLC? If not, you may understand when you reach that point for yourself presuming it's before the inevitable nerf.

@Intr1n5ic

Cool! Hope you enjoy the rest of the DLC.

@jrt87 No. But i'm sure i fought a lot of boss that was much more cheap and unfair than any boss in Souls series and i wouldn't review bomb those games just because of that.

So. If you think that validates the review bomb then well i guess we should just agree to disagreed here.

@PuppetMaster

Oh, I don't at all. I don't think I suggested support for review bombing anywhere in these comments.

I'm just saying that there are longtime From fans who are finding difficulty to the DLC above and beyond what they're used to from Miyazaki, and that's distinct from the usual noise from game journalists that surrounds these releases.