Believe it or not, Elden Ring is a rather tricky game. That’s kind of its whole deal. Much like the many Soulsborne titles that have come before it, the devs put everything they could into making 2022’s Game of the Year winner controller-smashingly difficult. As anyone who’s conquered the Lands Between will know, however, overcoming these challenges is what makes the game so rewarding.
Elden Ring is now over a year old, and has surpassed over 20 million sales worldwide across all platforms. When you consider that the total combined sales of the entire Dark Souls franchise is 27 million, it’s getting incredibly close to overtaking the lot, which is huge. When you have so many millions of people playing, it’s unsurprising that they’d rack up a lot of in-game deaths between them, and some new official stats published by Bandai Namco have revealed just how much the Tarnished warriors out there have been struggling.
Meanwhile, one player is so good at Elden Ring that they were able to beat it using a dance mat as a controller - take a look below.
The stats show that players have collectively died 8.9 billion times for various reasons in Elden Ring. To be exact, 69% of deaths were the result of enemies and hostile NPCs, 15% were down to nasty status effects (like Scarlet Rot and Poison), and 14% were caused by unfortunate falls. A much smaller 2% were caused by fellow players.
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Unsurprisingly, many of these deaths were caused by the game’s many tough bosses. Players have collectively initiated 5.9 billion boss battles since Elden Ring’s release - the boss with the most attempts is everyone’s favourite red-headed swordswoman Malenia, Blade of Miquella. Players have attempted fighting her 329 million times. In second place is Margit the Fell Omen at 281 million attempts - while he’s not the hardest boss in the game, he’s probably accumulated so many fights since he’s generally the first main boss that players come across.
For the magic users out there, I’m sure it comes as no shock that Rock Sling is the spell that’s been cast the most by players worldwide. The Meteorite Staff and Rock Sling combo is just too good for the early game.
It’ll be interesting to see how these statistics change when the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC releases - it doesn’t currently have a release window, so we’ll have to watch this space.
Topics: Elden Ring, Fromsoftware, Bandai Namco