The discussion around difficulty levels in Souls games is ongoing. Elden Ring’s overwhelming success expanded that conversation to millions of players who’d never touched one of the notoriously tough titles. While Elden Ring is the most approachable game in FromSoftware’s recent library, it’s still a punishing experience for the uninitiated. For those on PC who want to increase the challenge, the Elden Ring Reforged mod offers plenty of ways to do so.
The document listing all the changes the mod long makes is 61 pages long and touches on every PvE element of the game — weapons, talismans, magic, healing, and more. Some changes, like increasing player Focus Points by ten times, make using magic much easier and more available. Other changes, like adjusting enemy hitboxes to be more accurate to the weapon they’re using, require you to relearn where and when you’ll take damage from an attack.
One of the bigger ticket items is the addition of a Master difficulty mode, which weakens the player and gives every enemy more damage while giving bosses new attacks, combos, and patterns and increasing their overall aggression. Outside of Master mode, every enemy type in the game has been adjusted in some way, whether their hitboxes, the status effects they apply, or other fixes.
If you want some more Sekiro in Elden Ring, Elden Ring Reforged adds the mechanic to Elden Ring, giving you thirty active frames of deflection, provided you time it right. Also from Sekiro is an option to refight bosses as many times as you like, whether at the new difficulty or their vanilla state. You can resurrect bosses at the Roundtable Hold, then return to their arena out in the world to face them again.
You won’t be able to play Elden Ring Reforged online, as the EasyAntiCheat software will flag it as modifying the game and could ban you from playing online with the mod active or not. Provided you don’t mind playing offline, you can download the Elden Ring Reforged mod at Nexus Mods.
