The Forsaken Hollows, the forthcoming DLC for Elden Ring spin-off Nightreign, is "definitely a little bit harder" than the main game, its director has admitted.
That's par for the course at this point. FromSoftware is notorious for releasing DLC that expands on its games with an even higher level of challenge.
Still, director Junya Ishizaki has discussed the difficulties of balancing the game for both casual players and experts, based on player feedback.
"The main takeaway we had post-release was just there was a lot of trouble trying to get the balancing right," Ishizaki told Gamespot.
"I think balancing is just so subjective, so a lot of our thoughts post-release working up to the DLC were how can we get the balancing in mind with what we were initially envisioning, and also with that balancing set, how can we take a different approach and devise new enemies, new characters, and stuff like that to play into that and utilise the new balancing that we are working with."
The studio didn't want the game to be "so hard that new players can't get into it" but even veterans required time to figure out the intricacies of Nightreign. "So whenever people who have played the main game extensively go into the DLC content, they'll be able to have a bit of that feeling like they had when they first played Nightreign, where there's still a bit that they're trying to figure out," said Ishizaki.
The Forsaken Hollows is "definitely a little bit harder," he admitted, "but it's not ridiculous or anything like that, but that's still within what we would consider to be a fair challenge."
Perhaps the most infamous DLC for its difficulty was Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree, with the final boss in particular imposing a massive challenge.
Ishizaki also discussed the influence of that DLC on The Forsaken Hollows, even if it's not directly intentional. For instance, the new Shifting Earth event has more verticality than previous events, just as Shadow of the Erdtree was more vertical than Elden Ring.
"[The] idea behind that was that the original map was definitely very horizontally-focused, and when looking at that through the lens of working on DLC, we were thinking where else [was there] to go but up, right?" said Ishizaki. "We can add verticality to this and do it in a way that doesn't detract from the horizontal aspect of the map. So that was where that came from; trying to figure out how we can add to it in such a way that it expands upon the verticality.
"It's one of those things [where] a lot of our staff have also been playing Shadow of the Erdtree as the development for Nightreign has been going on. So there's probably a little bit of influence there, but I don't think [Erdtree's influence is] necessarily intentional. It might even be almost like subconscious, but there's definitely, I think, a bit of that for sure."
The Forsaken Hollows also adds new poison swamp areas, which are surprisingly missing from the base game.
"We're definitely aware of the [swamp] meme," said Ishizaki. "It's not like there's a rule or any sort of policy here where it's like we have to have a swamp in there, but it always seems to be [that before you realise] someone's come up with the idea, it's already sort of in there, and it's just sort of taken a life of its own."
The Forsaken Hollows launches this week on 4th December, adding two new Nightfarers to play as - the Scholar and the Undertaker - along with other additions, including the return of an iconic Dark Souls boss.