Is Elden Ring really that hard? Well, it depends what you mean by “hard” (2024)

Grindable difficulty

Even the hardest mountain can be ground down by a gentle stream if given enough time. Similarly, some games that seem tough at first can eventually be completed if you're willing to put in the time to grind out improvements to your character's power level.

In a game like Super Meat Boy, there's no item you can find to make a difficult series of jumps any easier. In Elden Ring, on the other hand, the game can become significantly easier as you put in more time collecting the runes and items needed to power up your character level, weapons, and spells.

Some streamers have taken this quirk to its extreme, showing that even some of the game's most difficult bosses can be disposed of with a single magical attack if you put in enough effort grinding out levels. On the other end, some players have shown that the game doesn't require that kind of grinding by speedrunning through the final boss in less than three hours (and bringing to mind similarly wild Breath of the Wild runs). That's some good, flexible difficulty design right there.

But while grinding can make early game challenges seem remarkably easy, Elden Ring's extremely open design also means you can stumble into places that your character isn't yet equipped to handle. Players trained on more linear games (or even open-world games that guide players more gently) might expect that the most brutal parts of Elden Ring's map will be explicitly closed off until a certain level has been achieved or a certain item has been found. But that's just not the case in Elden Ring, where you're often better off noting the existence of a challenging area and coming back later when you've leveled up a bit.

But just because players can eventually grind out progress in Elden Ring doesn't mean the game is not "difficult." Spending hours farming low-level enemies for the runes and items needed to power up might not be "hard," per se. Still, it's not exactly satisfying when you feel like you need to spend extra time grinding out an "artificial" power boost to complete an in-game challenge. And while there are tricks to speed up the usual leveling grind, most won't be immediately apparent to gamers who don't consult outside help (see "Arcane difficulty" above).

Difficulty walls

If you run into a seemingly insurmountable in-game obstacle, is there another way around it? Early console games were full of impassable walls that fully impeded a player's progress. If you couldn't beat the boss of level 2 in Ninja Gaiden, for instance, you weren't allowed to even see level 3.

Instead of walls like these, Elden Ring is more defined by in-game bollards. These extremely hard challenges can and do block access to portions of the game. But in Elden Ring, if you can't break through a bollard (e.g., a major boss), careful exploration can almost always reveal a way to get around the obstruction and discover further interesting things on the almost never-ending map.

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.