Is Elden Ring Really That Hard? Well, It Depends What You Mean By ...

Can’t beat this boss? That’s fine, just go do something else!

Elden Ring‘s use of bollards rather than walls is one of its best design features. Rather than needing to bang your head against a difficult boss or enemy-filled clearing for hours, Elden Ring makes it easy to simply bounce off and go in a different direction. Thanks to your horse, you can even gallop deep into some of the hardest sections of the game very early on, avoiding enemies wholesale as you farm new items and reveal new portions of the map. Then, once you’re more powerful, you can come back and take out the bollard that had been giving you so much trouble (see “Grindable difficulty” above).

In a way, this design doesn’t lessen Elden Ring‘s overall difficulty—you’ll still need to beat all those “impassable” challenges eventually if you want to complete the game. But this design makes that difficulty much less frustrating. Gamers can always feel there’s something new they can explore or do right now.

What do you mean by “difficulty”?

So is Elden Ring really that difficult? Yes and no. The game isn’t especially taxing on the reflexes, and it doesn’t have many challenges that you can’t defeat through dedicated grinding. It also doesn’t have many frustrating walls that impede all progress until you can break through. But Elden Ring is also a game that can severely punish even a small break in focus. And it’s willing to let you fail because you missed some “essential” element that wasn’t explained very well in the game itself.

Different players will have different reactions to each of those types of difficulty. For some players, slowly unraveling the endless mysteries of Elden Ring by talking with others is a huge part of the charm. For others, missing a key item or mechanic that the game didn’t explain leads to hair-pulling frustration. For others still, having the option to speedrun through the game quickly is a way of creating your own ultrahard challenge.

The fact that Elden Ring can be so many things to so many different gamers is a large part of its frustrating and entrancing appeal. Or, to put it another way, Elden Ring can be as hard or as easy as you want it to be.