Technology

Even Elden Ring’s game director knows Erdtree is too hard

Published

2 years ago

June 22, 2024

Even Elden Ring’s game director knows Erdtree is too hard

As I work my way through Shadow of the Erdtree, the new DLC for Elden Ring, I can’t help but think that game director Hidetaka Miyazaki is trolling the shit outta me.

Speaking with him at Summer Game Fest two weeks ago, Miyazaki said that Erdtree is “by far the biggest in scale in volume” than any other FromSoftware DLC before it. But he also said Erdtree is “about the same volume as the Limgrave part of the base game,” the starting area of Elden Ring, containing “slightly more content.”

I don’t buy it. While it’s impossible to accurately compare scale in game, I’ve played the game for 30 hours and have already found the new areas in the DLC to be more expansive than Limgrave. Not only is the map itself large, it’s layered, with huge areas propped up on plateaus above, in deep valleys below, and on islands that take some creative platforming to reach.

I’d say it’s far, far larger than Limgrave, with plenty more to do as well. Shadow of the Erdtree honestly feels like it’s big enough to be its own game with its own story — one that was originally intended for Elden Ring but wound up being cut for time before being added back as DLC content.

Erdtree follows the story arc of Miquella, brother of uber boss Malenia and one of the demigods important to Elden Ring lore. To focus on Miquella was, Miyazaki told me, born of the desire to honor George R. R. Martin’s contributions to the game. “[He] gave us all this great mythology to work with,” Miyazaki said. Packaging Miquella’s story as a standalone DLC was essentially “closing the loop” on Martin’s involvement in the game. “It’s really about completing Elden Ring’s circle,” he said.

But understating the size of Shadow of the Erdtree is just one of the ways it feels like Miyazaki is misleading me. I know he’s trolling me when it comes to difficulty.

I cannot beat Rellana, Twin Moon Knight, the boss ensconced in Castle Enis that players can face five or 50 hours in depending on their exploration choices. (I met her after about 15.) None of my strategies nor any of the game’s built in assistance features — using Mimic Tear Ashes, summoning help from an NPC, changing my weapons or spells, inflicting damaging status effects — seem to work. My best attempt got her down to half of her health and I cannot seem to progress further. And she’s only major boss number two.

According to Miyazaki, this is by design. He said that Erdtree contains “10 plus boss encounters” — honestly, another hilariously absurd understatement, I’ve seen estimates of 55 bosses and up to 80. Thankfully only a small handful of those bosses are necessary to progress the story, while the rest are optional.

“And the ones that [are optional] are especially difficult,” Miyazaki said.

Whenever a new FromSoftware game releases, there’s nearly always a discussion of difficulty. With the DLC, other reviewers have suggested that its difficulty is too extreme. “It’s true that this distinct type of FromSoft-engineered frustration is an indispensable part of the Souls experience,” wrote Alexis Ong in Eurogamer. “This, however, feels like difficulty for difficulty’s sake, turned up to eleven.”

I agree. But while I think Shadow of the Erdtree could better straddle the line between pleasantly challenging and frustratingly impossible, the game was tuned to Miyazaki’s intentions, representing the lessons the development team learned from the original game’s feedback.

“Traditionally we’ve always liked the higher difficulty curve type of games and experiences, but I think that nature in and of itself alienates a good portion of the game playing audience,” he said.

A contradictory thing to say considering his comments in a recent interview with The Guardian: “If we really wanted the whole world to play the game, we could just crank the difficulty down more and more, but that wasn’t the right approach. Turning down difficulty would strip the game of that joy, which, in my eyes, would break the game itself.”

He’s not wrong. Elden Ring ceases to be the game of the year it was if it lacks the kind of difficulty FromSoftware is known for. So Erdtree must be hard, but not so hard that it’ll turn players off. But it also can’t be too easy because that will break the game. What to do? The answer, according to Miyazaki, is freedom.

“The amount of freedom that we give players helps offset that difficulty curve and makes the game more accessible and engaging,” he told me.

I think that worked for Elden Ring, less so for this DLC. In the base game, difficulty could be circumvented with leveling up — the player freedom, as it were. But with the addition of the new DLC-exclusive consumables that increase your attack and defense, becoming more powerful is now dependent on your ability to find those scarce items. As a result, I’ve often found myself fearful of the simplest enemies as encountering more than one at a time will kill me outright.

“I try to imagine different ways I would want to die as a player or be killed.”

In addition to ensuring that players die a lot, Miyazaki also said that how players die is just as important.

“I try to imagine different ways I would want to die as a player or be killed,” he said, explaining that those thoughts manifested in Elden Ring and in other FromSoftware games as his signature poison swamps. But for Erdtree, he confessed to cutting back on that indulgence — “In the original Elden Ring, I went a little too far.”

There are still poison swamps in Erdtree, “but in other parts of gameplay, there are still many ways to die.”

One of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s signature poison swamps in Shadow of the Erdtree.

Image: FromSoftware / Ash Parrish

Too many it seems. I’ve been bludgeoned, exsanguinated, frostbitten, and burned. I’ve fallen off cliffs, had cliffs fall on me — beware the fiery rocks the Furnace Golems spew — and I’ve even accidentally killed myself eating an item that refilled my HP while also inflicting poison.

Despite my tribulations, Miyazaki, like a benevolent god, has faith in me and his players, only giving us trials he believes we can bear.

“We’ve really pushed the envelope in terms of what we think can be withstood by the player,” Miyazaki said.

He clarified that one of the biggest lessons brought forward from Elden Ring into Erdtree was what the audience found fun over what was stressful. “ We tried to make that the foundation of the boss encounters of the DLC, so hopefully players will find it much more engaging and fun,” he said.

“But if that is not the case,” he added. “Then I’m sorry.”

Technology

The best PS5 games from 2025

Published

44 minutes ago

December 28, 2025

Press Room

In this new era of console… inclusivity? driven by Sony and mostly Microsoft bringing their exclusives to other platforms, it’s getting harder to highlight games that make a singular console shine. Indeed, the top-performing games year after year on both PlayStation and Xbox are multiplatform releases, and often the best games of the year, like 2025 GOTY winner Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, similarly launch on most everything. (Once again, like in all things, Nintendo is the exception.)

But while lists like this will probably disappear as we get deeper into the era of everything being an Xbox, Sony still seems committed to high-quality exclusives. Here are its best of 2025.

Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

As software exclusivity goes the way of Sega’s console business, console makers have other ways to attract consumers to their part of the video game ecosystem. For Microsoft, it’s Game Pass; for Sony in 2025, it’s the PlayStation Portal. This year, Sony launched an update for the Portal that enables cloud streaming and making the device a must-have for PlayStation households. For $200, roughly half the price of a PS5, you essentially get a second one, able to play select games without the need to stream them from the console. The list of streamable games isn’t comprehensive, but there are over 2,000 of them, and the ability to play them on the go is a literal game changer.

Get into a discussion with true Final Fantasy sickos about the top 10 games in the franchise, and you better have a lot of time and earplugs on your hands as everyone debates entries two through 10 — because No. 1, invariably, is Final Fantasy Tactics. Having finally played the game for the first time, taking advantage of the remaster Square Enix released this year, I get it. The best video games are often timeless while also able to speak to a specific moment, and Tactics’ story is and does exactly that.

But more than narrative, Tactics’ brilliance is also in its expansive job system that grants players a facsimile of godhood that’s so much fun to wield. The arithmetician class has the ability to cast any learned spell in the game instantly and without requiring mana. To offset the class’s ruinously slow speed, pair it with white mage to create the most diabolical unit in the history of strategy RPGs. Ramza Beoulve is just a guy trying to save the world, and FFT made me believe he can because I made his ragtag band of misfits into walking nuclear weapons.

Sucker Punch’s sequel to Ghost of Tsushima plays things relatively safe. It doesn’t change things up dramatically but instead polishes the experience. Which means the experience isn’t all that different from its predecessor — that means lush landscapes to explore, lots of combat techniques to learn, and, uh, plenty of hot springs to bathe in — but everything feels more finely tuned this time around. That’s especially true of the game’s tale of revenge, which is both more gripping than the original and also gives the open-world experience some much-needed structure.

The original Death Stranding was so weird that half of the fun was just wrapping your head around the experience. I’m not sure I really understood it until I was almost done (if at all). The sequel is still plenty weird, but because it builds off of the previous game, it’s also much easier to understand from the get-go. It’s still a delivery simulator where you trek across a postapocalyptic landscape to get goods and people where they’re needed. But now the setting has shifted to Australia, which means there are new environmental elements to deal with — hello, sandstorms — along with a whole new cast of weirdo characters to meet, played by everyone from Elle Fanning to George Miller.

But don’t worry; the story is still as inscrutable as ever.

Bennett Foddy sure made you feel the “walking” part of this elaborate walking simulator. In Baby Steps, your job is to walk, and you do that by controlling every move involved in taking a step, down to the fine motor details. What results is a hilarious examination of human psychology, emotional maturity, and a newfound appreciation for just how hard it is to ambulate a body with nothing more than DualSense trigger buttons.

When Lumines Arise was first announced, I made the mistake of asking, “Oh, is it a series or something?”, unfamiliar with Lumines’ days as a PSP powerhouse. My elders have never let me live that down, so I thought I’d see for myself what the game is.

Lumines Arise is Evil Dr. Tetris Effect Mean Bean Machine. Mean Bean Machine in that the game is played by globbing together matching blocks in two-by-two configurations. It’s part Tetris Effect because the game has an incredible synth / pop-house soundtrack that’s synced to the action, creating a full-body puzzle-playing experience. And evil in that the game is hard as shit. My skills as a Tetris player, limited though they are, just do not transfer to Lumines Arise. But! There is a flow state I can reach. Throughout playing, the shapes of the blocks will change from blocks, to eggs, to clocks, whatever, and I’ve found some patterns are easier to group than others. It’s interesting and fun to figure out what shapes make the game easier for me and which ones are impossible to configure.

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Ash Parrish

Technology

ChatGPT’s GPT-5.2 is here, and it feels rushed

Published

1 hour ago

December 28, 2025

Press Room

ChatGPT’s GPT-5.2 is here, and it feels rushed

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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has moved at an unusually fast pace in 2025. According to the company, it launched GPT-5 in August, followed by GPT-5.1 in November. Now, just weeks later, GPT-5.2 has launched with familiar claims of being the smartest and most capable ChatGPT yet.

At first glance, the rapid rollout might seem surprising. But there’s context behind it. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has reportedly called a “code red” inside the company, urging teams to move faster on improving ChatGPT. That push comes as competition heats up. Google recently released Gemini 3, which reportedly outperformed ChatGPT on several artificial intelligence benchmarks and delivered stronger image generation. At the same time, Anthropic’s Claude continues to advance quickly.

Against that backdrop, GPT-5.2 feels less like a routine upgrade and more like a strategic response. So what actually changed in GPT-5.2, and why does OpenAI say it matters?

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What exactly is GPT-5.2

GPT-5.2 is the newest version in OpenAI’s flagship 5-series of large language models. Like its predecessor, it includes two default variants. GPT-5.2 Instant is designed for everyday chatting and web searches. GPT-5.2 Thinking is meant for more complex tasks like long reasoning chains and multi-step problem solving. These two models are now the default for all ChatGPT users, including free users. They replace GPT-5.1 Instant and Thinking entirely. If you are using ChatGPT today, you are already using GPT-5.2, whether you realize it or not.

What OpenAI says GPT-5 brings to ChatGPT

At the same time, OpenAI continues to position GPT-5 as “expert intelligence for everyone.” The company says GPT-5 delivers stronger performance across math, science, finance, law and other complex subjects. In OpenAI’s view, ChatGPT now acts more like a team of on-demand experts than a basic chatbot. To support that claim, OpenAI points to practical examples. These include better coding help, more expressive writing support, clearer health-related explanations and improved safety and accuracy. The company showcases use cases such as generating app code, writing speeches, explaining medications and correcting mistakes in user-submitted images. In theory, GPT-5.2 builds on that same foundation. However, while OpenAI emphasizes deeper thinking and more reliable answers, those gains remain subtle for many everyday users.

What new features does GPT-5.2 add?

Here’s the short answer. None. GPT-5.2 does not introduce new tools, interfaces, or headline features. Instead, OpenAI describes a series of behind-the-scenes improvements that supposedly make ChatGPT faster, smarter and more capable. According to OpenAI, GPT-5.2 performs better at:

Building presentations
Completing complex projects
Creating spreadsheets
Understanding long context windows
Interpreting images
Using tools more effectively

Kurt Knutsson reviews the new features in ChatGPT-5.2. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)

OpenAI also released new benchmarks showing GPT-5.2 outperforming GPT-5.1 and competing models by small margins. However, big numbers on charts do not always translate into noticeable improvements for real users.

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Why testing chatbot improvements is tricky

Evaluating chatbot upgrades is harder than it sounds. Responses can vary widely even when prompts stay the same. A model might excel at one task and struggle with a nearly identical one just moments later. On top of that, OpenAI’s 5-series models already perform at or near the top of the field. When performance starts that high, meaningful gains become harder to detect. With that in mind, we tested GPT-5.2, and in most tests, it behaved almost identically to GPT-5.1.

Why benchmarks don’t tell the full story

OpenAI’s benchmarks show modest gains for GPT-5.2. That matters for researchers and developers working at scale. Still, even advanced users may struggle to see practical benefits. Other companies have delivered clearer upgrades. Google’s Gemini Nano Banana Pro model shows obvious gains in AI image generation and editing. Those improvements are easy for anyone to test and verify. By contrast, GPT-5.2’s changes feel abstract. They exist mostly on paper rather than in daily use.

What this means to you

If you pay for ChatGPT, there’s little downside to using GPT-5.2. It replaces GPT-5.1 in the model lineup and generally performs at least as well in everyday use. Free users don’t have much choice either, as model access is handled automatically. For most people, the experience feels familiar and stable.

The picture shifts slightly for programmers and those who use it for business. Early pricing details suggest GPT-5.2 may cost roughly 40 percent more per million tokens than GPT-5.1, depending on usage tier and access method. That makes testing important before committing at scale.

ChatGPT-5.2 works fine but may not feel exciting, Kurt Knutsson writes. (Michael Nguyen/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

In short, GPT-5.2 works fine. It simply may not feel exciting.

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Kurt’s key takeaways

GPT-5.2 feels like a model released under pressure rather than inspiration. It performs well, stays reliable, and moves forward in measurable ways. Still, it doesn’t deliver the kind of clear progress many people expect from a new version number. OpenAI remains a leader in AI, but competition is closing in fast. As rivals roll out more noticeable improvements, small updates may no longer be enough to stand out. For now, GPT-5.2 feels less like a breakthrough and more like OpenAI holding its ground.

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Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on “FOX & Friends.” Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.

Technology

Samsung will debut two new wireless speakers at CES 2026

Published

13 hours ago

December 27, 2025

Press Room

Samsung will debut two new wireless speakers at CES 2026

For years, Samsung has made products that try to camouflage what they are by displaying works of art. The Frame TV is the most famous example, but the company also released the Music Frame, a speaker disguised as a picture frame, at last year’s CES. Now, instead of hiding a speaker with a piece of art, Samsung worked with designer Erwan Bouroullec to make a speaker into a piece of art.

According to Samsung, the Music Studio line of speakers, debuting at CES 2026, draw inspiration from the “timeless dot concept” found throughout music and art. As a musician, the Music Studio 5 reminds me of a fermata, the symbol meant to hold a note or silence. It has a 4-inch woofer and dual tweeters with built-in waveguide.

The larger Music Studio 7 is a 3.1.1-channel speaker that can be used on its own, in a pair for wider stereo sound, or with compatible Samsung Wi-Fi speakers, soundbars, or TVs using the company’s Q-Symphony technology. The Studio 7 is capable of playing high-resolution audio up to 24-bit/96kHz, and it and the Music Studio 5 use AI Dynamic Bass Control to extend bass response.

Sometimes these aesthetic-first speakers forget about the most important part of a speaker — its sound quality. But Samsung has done an impressive job over the past few years with its audio tuning which makes me optimistic for the Music Studio’s performance.