Elden Ring fans have just discovered a third, hidden difficulty after the DLC

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If there’s one game where things are going to be discovered weeks and even years after it’s launched, it’s Elden Ring. Now, fans have discovered a third difficulty level – something beyond New Game Plus, and it’s only available in Shadow of the Erdtree.

“After reading about this strangely obscure feature on Fextralife (which they are calling DLC+) that I couldn’t find mentioned anywhere else on the internet, I decided to test out if it actually existed. And it does!

“The FLC has a new difficulty modifier that triggers if you have already beaten the DLC’s final boss in a previous journey (NG Cycle). It increases enemy damage (and apparently health, though I didn’t test that myself.) This means that people playing the DLC for the first time on NG+ will find it noticeably easier than people who are doing it for the second time on NG+” This comes courtesy of Redditor Spleenczar.

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In order to test this, the original poster reached the final boss in the base-game, duplicated their save, then beat the DLC on one save and not the other. After going into NG+ on both saves, they tested the damage differences and found stark disparity. After taking a single hit from Messmer’s opening attack, they found that the save file with the DLC boss beaten deals nearly 200 more damage.

Spleenczar raises a valid point relating to speedrunners and challenges – “if a challenge run is in NG+ or higher, in needs to have it listed whether or not DLC+ is active,” as the difference in damage is definitely significant enough to entirely change a run.


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It’s quite on-brand for FromSoftware to have included an ultimate difficulty that doesn’t get mentioned at any point in the game, and it’s especially interesting that this was only discovered by players tinkering around.

Essentially, in order to activate this third difficulty – coined as DLC+ – you need to have beaten the base game, and beaten the DLC. It’s as simple as that. When you then return to The Lands Between, you will be playing against enemies even stronger than before, all-the-while, you deal even less damage yourself. It’s truly a From Software game.

About the Author

Amaar Chowdhury

Amaar is a gaming journalist with an interest in covering the industry's corporations. Aside from that, he has a hankering interest in retro games that few people care about anymore.