"I absolutely suck at video games" - Elden Ring's Miyazaki might back making things difficult, but his pre-Shadow of the Erdtree playthrough was a struggle

Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree DLC might have just gotten a bit of balancing designed to help make it just a little bit less tough, but prior to that, director Hidetaka Miyazaki had been pretty steadfast in saying that lowering the game's difficulty wouldn't be an ideal move. However, contrary to what you might expect, it sounds like the developer's not taking that stance because he's one of the many uber-skilled folks who've thoroughly mastered battling through tough bosses.

If you've missed it, in between pausing to gawk at the likes of someone beating Messmer on a dance pad, the FromSoft community's spent a lot of time debating whether Shadow of the Erdtree's initial difficulty pushed things a little bit too far. With all the arguments you'd expect populating both sides, it's interesting to see Miyazaki revealing that he's very much in the camp of folks generally on the ER struggle bus.

In an interview with The Guardian, Miyazaki touched on his own playing habits, revealing: "Leading up to the release of any game, I’ll be very hands-on playing it and getting as much time on it as much as possible, but after the release, I tend to not want to touch it, because I know I’m going to either find things that I left on the table or issues that will bug me."

That said, an exeption to this was made by the director for a run through the base version of Elden Ring's maion story in preperation for Shadow of the Erdtree. How'd it go, you ask?

Well, Miyazaki described it in the following terms. "I want to preface this by saying I absolutely suck at video games, so my approach or play style was to use everything I have at my disposal, all the assistance, every scrap of aid that the game offers, and also all the knowledge that I have as the architect of the game," he said, "The freedom and open-world nature of Elden Ring perhaps lowered the barrier to entry, and I might be the one who’s benefiting the most from that, as a player, more than anyone else."

So, yeah, Miyazaki's so committed to the idea of FromSoft games being about going through faliure in order to get better - the kind of sentiment you can find conveyed in array of different ways on the kind of motivationally-themed tat your older relatives' houses are likely filled with - that he's willing to live it whenever he delves into his own studio's creations.

If you're battling your own way through Shadow of the Erdtree and need a bit of help just to complete it, make sure to check out our huge array of guides that should be able to aid you regardless of what you need a hand with.