The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red – which long held the record for the best-reviewed RPG expansion for Blood and Wine – has congratulated FromSoftware for its “stellar work”.
Acknowledging that Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree has stolen the accolade after eight years of riding high, The Witcher team said that whilst it had “the honour of being the best-reviewed expansion for a role-playing gaming”, “Elden Ring gets to wear that crown now”.
In a message posted to social media platform X, The Witcher’s official X account said:
“For the last eight years, The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine had the honour of being the best-reviewed expansion for a role-playing game – but Elden Ring gets to wear that crown now. Congratulations to the entire team at FromSoftware on their stellar work!”
In other news, FromSoftware’s Soulsborne games are notoriously difficult to beat, but creator Hidetaka Miyazaki recently said it would “break the game itself” to turn down the challenge.
“If we really wanted the whole world to play the game, we could just crank the difficulty down more and more. But that wasn’t the right approach,” he said. “Had we taken that approach, I don’t think the game would have done what it did, because the sense of achievement that players gain from overcoming these hurdles is such a fundamental part of the experience. Turning down difficulty would strip the game of that joy – which, in my eyes, would break the game itself.”
“I am still impossibly fond of Elden Ring and my time spent in its grasp, but I’m just not sure if I can share the same fullness of warmth with Shadow of the Erdtree,” contributor Alexis wrote in Eurogamer’s Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree review.
“Despite its strange dispersion of ‘active’ areas, and uncharacteristically infantilising hand-holding for encounters that should be learned through repeated failure, Shadow still has its share of Elden Ring’s brilliance – weird little dudes and obscure secrets and goofy cheesing and all. But perhaps trying to combine the inherent focus of a largely self-contained DLC, with the narrative flexibility and open-world freedom of Elden Ring – the concept that set it apart from its Souls brethren – was always going to make for an incongruous match.”