A few days after the release of Elden Ring's massive DLC, Shadow of the Golden Tree, the game's Steam rating has dropped to 68%, reaching a mixed rating.
Although there are many reasons why players give bad reviews, the word "difficult" is almost always present in the comments written by every player who gives a bad review. Whether you admit it or not, Shadow of the Golden Tree has a lot of difficult designs that are deliberately difficult for players - especially the final boss of the DLC.
Considering that most players may not have seen the final boss at this stage, this article will not mention the name of the final boss and related screens. Of course, even those players who have seen the final boss are probably struggling in front of their doors, including KaiCenat, the top streamer of the overseas live streaming platform Twitch.
Before the release of "Shadow of the Golden Tree", Kai, who had never played a souls-type game before, started a live marathon of "Elden Ring", the kind that does not clear the level and cannot be broadcast. After 166 hours and 1,701 deaths, Kai finally completed the challenge of the live marathon by killing Elden Beast before he and the audience were consumed.
With 11.65 million followers on Twitch, Kai is a veritable top streamer, and he doesn't really need this show to garner attention for his already successful streaming career, and the reason Kai insists on running the race is simple - he really likes Elden Ring, and his stream traffic has more or less warmed up for the game before the DLC release.
Publisher Bandai also presented him with a life-size Valkyrie statue for the occasion.
After the release of "The Shadow of the Golden Tree", Kai did the same and started his live marathon again. But this time, the situation is a little different, it took him more than 40 hours to come to the door of the final boss, and then spent more than 40 hours to die repeatedly under the knife of the final boss, and the live broadcast duration has approached 100 hours, and Kai is still helpless in the face of the final boss.
For comparison, in the previous live marathon, Kai spent at most 24 hours on Valkyrie Malenia.
Now the final boss of the DLC has been stuck with Kai for too long, and the battle with a very low tolerance rate has kept his heart rate at about 120 for a long time, and the pressure brought by the whole live broadcast has also greatly compressed his sleep time, so that Kai's mental state is obviously a little unstable, and everyone is beginning to worry about whether this live broadcast marathon can be successfully concluded.
When the live broadcast came to the 92nd hour, Kai's room was filled with professional psychotherapist Aubri Williams. According to Aubri, she was not Kai's guest, presumably because someone was really worried about Kai's condition and brought in a therapist for him. As for whether this is the effect of the anchor's program or the spontaneous behavior of the audience, it is unknown.
In the spirit of "everyone is coming", Kai spent the next half hour introducing Aubri to the game mechanics and pouring out bitter water on her: "For the last 60 hours of my life, I kept getting stuck with the final boss, I tried everything, I bought new weapons, I upgraded new things, I gave up my beliefs, I got more powers, but I still failed. ”
Aubri asks Kai to close his eyes and simulate the image of himself defeating the final boss in his mind, and uses various words to encourage Kai in various ways to avoid causing Kai to fall into negative self-doubt.
It's hard to say if the treatment worked as well as it should, as Kai, who had mustered up his courage, was still furious at his incompetence when he returned to the game, while Aubri, the psychotherapist, sat behind Kai with a nervous expression.
However, 6 hours after the end of the psychotherapy, Kai finally defeated the final boss of "The Shadow of the Golden Tree" with his strength and witnessed by 200,000 viewers, and successfully cleared the game known for its difficulty, at this time Kai's live broadcast time has come to 99 hours, and the number of deaths is as many as 1070.
In fact, the reason why Kai was able to successfully clear the customs within 100 hours was not so much because the psychological counseling had an effect, but because he was instructed by netizens to replace it with a blood monster arm with a considerable output, if he could use the endless "new wheelchairs" in the DLC earlier, he probably wouldn't need any psychological treatment at all.
But the fun of soul games is to constantly challenge yourself, wheelchair skipping class or stumbling to the end, it is not easy to walk the whole course on your own, Kai who has experienced 1000 attempts defeated the final boss, I believe that you can also successfully clear the level with the DLC.