Almost anyone who has played Elden Ring can name the boss that nearly made them quit. For a lot of people it's Margit, the Fell Omen, a hunched old man with a cane who waits at the gate of the first castle and conjures golden daggers out of thin air. You can lose an entire Saturday to him and still feel like you're getting somewhere. The game even hands you a hint beforehand, an item that briefly pins him in place.
FromSoftware's 2022 release has sold more than 30 million copies and won Game of the Year at The Game Awards. Critics gave it a 96 on Metacritic. It did all of that without a difficulty setting of any kind. Every player meets the same bosses at the same strength, and that shared misery became the main thing people say about the game.
A Hard Game With Side Doors
Director Hidetaka Miyazaki has been blunt about why there's no easy mode. He told The Guardian in 2024 that "turning down difficulty would strip the game of that joy," and that doing it would break the game itself. The joy he means is the feeling of finally getting past a wall you've been hitting for hours. FromSoftware has built its name on that feeling since Demon's Souls in 2009 and the Dark Souls series after it.
What the game does offer is a set of workarounds. Spirit Ashes let you summon ghostly helpers into a fight, and one of them, the Mimic Tear, copies your own character and gear. You can also ride away from a boss you can't beat yet and spend an evening leveling up in some other corner of the map. Your spectral horse Torrent makes that retreat fast, and it can double-jump.
Those tools started their own argument. You can lean on summons without a second thought and still find people online who treat them as a small admission of defeat. Challenge players post level 1 runs with no summons at all, just to prove it can be done. FromSoftware never labels any of it, so each player gets to decide what counts as beating the game.
Dying in Public
Malenia, Blade of Miquella, became the game's favorite example of pain. She heals herself with every hit that connects, even the ones you block with a shield. Data Bandai Namco released in 2023 put the number of fights against her at 329 million. She's also optional, tucked away at the far end of Miquella's Haligtree, so every one of those fights was a choice.
In April 2022, a player wearing nothing but a clay pot on his head and a loincloth started showing up in other people's games to fight her for them. Let Me Solo Her, whose real name is Klein Tsuboi, passed 1,000 wins that spring. Bandai Namco sent him a real sword with Rise, Tarnished engraved on the blade. By then he had told fans he'd passed 2,000.
The game's message system turned the suffering into something closer to a group chat. Players can leave short notes on the ground, built from a fixed list of words. The floor outside a boss door fills up with advice and jokes from strangers who died in the same spot. A glowing bloodstain nearby replays the last few seconds of someone else's failed attempt.
When It Went Too Far
Shadow of the Erdtree tested how far that reputation could stretch. The expansion arrived in June 2024 to strong reviews from critics. By its first weekend its Steam rating had slid to Mixed. About 63% of more than 30,000 player reviews were positive at that point, according to 80 Level. It still became the highest-rated expansion on Metacritic, ahead of The Witcher 3's Blood and Wine.
Many of the complaints focused on bosses that could kill a well-leveled character in one or two hits. The expansion also used its own upgrade system, Scadutree Blessings, so a character who had finished the base game could still arrive badly underpowered. Hunting down Scadutree Fragments scattered around the new map was the main way to catch up. Performance problems on PC added to the pile, and FromSoftware later rebalanced parts of the expansion, including its final boss.
The backlash didn't change the studio's direction, and Miyazaki's Guardian comments ran the same month the expansion came out. Nightreign, a co-op spin-off that sends three players against the same kind of bosses, sold 2 million copies in its first 24 hours when it launched in May 2025 and passed 5 million in under two months. The expansion that took that Steam beating has passed 10 million copies on its own.
