Since they finally received the massive DLC announcement they’d all been craving, Elden Ring players have all been basking in the warm glow of knowing that work on the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion is definitely underway.
For those who aren’t still busy doing a celebratory dance or some detective work to try and unearth clues about the DLC, now is the perfect time to undertake an intense training regimen that’ll refresh and hone your skills in time for the expansion’s arrival.
If you’re in need of a way to spice up your boss battle prep sessions and don’t fancy trying out a first-person viewpoint, only using a single finger to control your character, or dealing with an upside down version of the Lands Between, you might want to take a look at a recent challenge run from streamer Swoop Douglas for some inspiration.
Are you handy enough at Elden Ring that you think you could beat it using a Bop-It?
The streamer, who’s previously managed to beat the vanilla game using the audio-based toy as a controller, decided to take on an even more daunting trial during his most recent stream, by using Thefifthmatt’s mods to completely randomise several aspects of the game, including fog gate destinations, items and enemies.
At the start of the broadcast, Swoop Douglas revealed that following his previous run through the game using the toy, returning to a regular controller in order to make sure the randomiser mods were working properly now felt strange to him, admitting: “I had no idea what I was doing, it was like the first time I’d clever played a (FromSoft) game in my life.”
Having set up his trusty Bop-It Extreme 2 and created a character named ‘Old Gross Man’, the streamer dived into the chaotic run, briefly stopping near the beginning to start compiling a flow chart designed to help him navigate through the mixed-up worldspace and examine his randomised loadout.
Soon, he was battling some pretty fearsome foes, including a pair of spinning Cemetery Abductor Virgins, whom he felled on the second attempt to earn the reward of some useless cloth trousers and the infamous Draconic Tree Sentinel, who fell after what Douglas categorised as “way too many attempts”.
His final major foe of the stream was Magma Wyrm Makar, who’d been transported to the area of the map usually occupied by Margit, the Fell Omen and proved slightly too tough for the streamer to beat before having to call it a day.
Regardless of whether you’re now digging through your old childhood toys in order to find the basis of the next great Elden Ring challenge run, make sure to follow us for coverage of some interesting streamers and guides to Shadow of the Erdtree as soon as it arrives.