Souls games have always been difficult but the discussion around Shadows of the Erdtree are particularly heated right now.

Based on circumstances around this game, there’s a number of factors I think have a larger role to play:

• Popularity – Elden Ring has reached a critical mass of mainstream popularity that the previous souls games hadn’t reached before. This means a lot of folks haven’t been exposed to a more linear Souls game where you can eventually become blocked if you’re shit at dodging.
• “Hidden” Leveling Effect – Leveling and difficulty in Elden Ring and previous games can partially be represented by your health. Bigger bar means taking more hits, so its clear less equals “you having a harder time”. This time around, the blessings provide a damage mitigation and damage improvement effect that’s harder to understand. Unless you actually look at the before and after improvement, you can’t easily sense what’s happening.
• Skill Bias – Despite Bandai’s multiple attempts at clarifying to players, players assume their higher levels will help them. While it seems true to some extent, the impact of levels in certain attributes means its only useful for establish a baseline. Then anything beyond is extremely minor improvements. And players being the creatures they are, assume that they can do content just because they overleveled content in DLC.
• Smaller Known Areas – The size of this DLC makes it harder for people to explore extremely widely for leveling material. Though there’s technically a lot of materials in earlier areas, they’re well hidden unless you put effort in exploring or going where NPCs suggest there’s a location.

The main question is it fair or is it not fair? Yes, it’s fair.

I acknowledge I’m biased having played all the previous Souls games, but at my skill level, I think I’m valid in saying it’s extremely fair. I know I cannot beat Sekiro and I also play a lot of Soul-like games on the easiest difficulties because I enjoy it more. I think with this DLC, you can tune the difficulty for yourself to a reasonable bar. You can use summons, explore more to upgrade your blessings, and there’s really not too many hyper difficult bosses. The one caveat is the baseline of you have to learn how to dodge combos enough times to stay alive.

There’s probably some other details I’m missing, but for now, this is my thoughts a few days post-release.