Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree is currently suffering one of the strangest fates in modern gaming: it has received massive critical acclaim and is selling serious copies while receiving surprisingly mixed user reviews on Steam. As history will show, however, it is hardly the first FromSoftware DLC to fall into such a predicament.

With a title of “Universal Acclaim” and an impressive aggregate score of 95 on Metacritic, Shadow of the Erdtree is certainly enjoying its status as a critical darling. And shortly before the highly anticipated DLC release on June 21, 2024, the base Elden Ring game reached a staggering 25 million copies sold. You can’t argue with those numbers.

But in what feels like a parallel universe, Shadow of the Erdtree has a “Mixed” user review rating on Steam, with 42,746 reviews at the time of writing. While complaints about the expansion’s punishing difficulty are somewhat to be expected, the majority of complaints have centered on the game’s poor performance on PC, with players reporting that their framerates are dropping to 30 or lower during certain boss battles – even for players on high-end rigs.

But it’s the constant framerate stutters that are particularly problematic for a game so focused on precision and timing. I personally experienced severe stuttering when I started playing the base Elden Ring in 2022, so much so that I had to put it aside for a few months before returning to it and finding that my issues had largely been resolved.