This might be a weird one as the game is often blamed for not having difficulty settings, but Elden Ring. While it doesn’t have a straight up setting that says easy, there’s a lot of ways to make the game easier.

I really hate how Fromsoft put the “Prepare to Die” tagline onto Dark Souls when it came to PC and seems to develop into more bullshitty scenarios that kill you in unpredictable ways. Elden Ring has for example a lot of enemies that hold their attack for unintuitively long just to catch you off guard and punish you when you roll on the intuitive timing.

The community is to blame as well for the bad reputation of the games with people making fun of others using big shields and summons to beat the game. And herein lie the difficulty options of Elden Ring:

• Using greatshields makes a lot of the game a lot easier
• Using spirit ashes makes places that allow them a lot easier (as opposed to player and npc summons they don’t affect the enemies health pool)
• Using magic allows you to attack with little risk to yourself

You can also summon other players but i don’t know if that makes the game easier: As noted above it raised the enemies HP so everyone has to do their part to succeed but if you are a caster you can mostly sit back and blast enemies from afar while your summons tank. Using player summons also opens your world up for invasions and while the invader usually is in a 1v3 situation they also usually know what they are doing and how to deal with such situations.

If you’re still stuck at a boss, just go somewhere else and explore. The game is designed to teach you that lesson with the first actual boss but a lot of people take it as the game just being hard.

All of this is to say: it is okay to use the games integrated mechanics that make it easy. It doesn’t make you less of a gamer. Elden Ring has such a beautifully crafted world and if you’re looking very interesting lore and it’s a shame that seemingly all people talk about is the difficulty. It is actually the easiest Fromsoft title if you want it to be as it gives you a lot more and more powerful tools than the other games.

(Also if you see a chonky looking gal in black full body armour called Sieglinde, summon me. I have great heals, a big chonky sword and love helping people 😘)