It’s fair to say that most players knew what they were getting into when they bought Elden Ring, but even then, it seems that a lot of gamers are having difficulty getting past the game’s first major boss battle, one involving Godrick the Grafted.
After defeating Margit the Fell Omen, himself a versatile foe who can bring to heel many a Dark Souls veteran, the players traverse the Stormveil Castle, where they encounter the game’s first major boss battle. Here, you have to defeat Godrick the Grafted, though killing him is not strictly mandatory to progress through the game. Players can instead opt to fight him at a later stage, which is precisely what folks have been doing on Steam.
According to the game’s achievements list on the PC digital store, around 56% of the players have managed to defeat Godrick, while others have yet to unlock the achievement. The other 44% are either grinding through the encounter to kill Godrick, or have simply decided to bypass him.
Don’t let the mainstream appeal of Elden Ring fool you, then, because this is a FromSoftware game. More importantly, this is a Hidetaka Miyazaki game, so an excruciatingly difficult journey is all but guaranteed from the first moments you set your feet in the Lands Between.
The game’s overbearing difficulty is something that a lot of users have actually criticized, but Miyazaki himself recently addressed these complaints by first apologizing and then indirectly nudging the players to “git gud.” Some things never change, do they?