FromSoftware delivered the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion to Elden Ring fans last week, bringing in a brand-new land for players to explore and struggle in. While its critical reception has been as high as the original game's, making it the highest rated expansion ever released, some in the community has not found the expansion to be such a gem, even leading to mixed Steam user reviews. This has primarily been attributed to the upped boss difficulty the experience poses.

Today, FromSoftware released a Calibration Update "to adjust the Expansion’s balance". Dubbed update 1.12.2, it tries to make the challenge a little easier, at least at the beginning.

The Shadow Realm Blessings (Scadutree Fragments and Revered Spirit Ashes) that players can find via exploring have been buffed to increase the amount of attack and damage negation levels. But this only applies"for the first half of the maximum amount of Blessing enhancement." The final Blessing enhancement for both items will now offer a slightly better upgrade for your character too.

This means the toughness of bosses at the start of the expansion can be alleviated more easily, but the overall difficulty of later fights should remain the same.

Outside of the balance changes, FromSoftware has also taken a crack at resolving the performance issues PC players are facing. One of the issues may be stemming from ray tracing being enabled without player input:

We have confirmed a bug where the raytracing settings are automatically enabled if you have previously loaded saved data from previous game versions. If your framerate is unstable, please check in the 'SYSTEM' > 'Graphics Settings' > 'Raytracing Quality' settings from the title menu or in-game menu to check if it has been unintentionally set to 'ON'. Once set to 'OFF', Ray Tracing will no longer be automatically enabled.

Elden Ring Calibration Update 1.12.2 is live now across all platforms. FromSoftware added that more balance adjustment and bug fixing updates are in development as well.

Posted: 1 day, 23 hours ago
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://www.neowin.net/news/elden-ring-update-makes-shadow-of-the-erdtrees-difficulty-spike-more-manageable/