Elden Ring publisher Bandai Namco revealed the top five hardest boss fights and a plethora of other stats about FromSoftware's famously difficult RPG. This unique insight into the fandom's experiences with the game arrives amid widespread speculation about Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, its first and possibly only expansion.
Released in early 2022, FromSoftware's latest title was met with near-universal fan adoration and critical acclaim, the latter of which is perhaps best underlined by the fact that Elden Ring beat The Last Of Us 2's GOTY record. Combining open-world exploration with an unforgiving difficulty curve has once again proven to be a winning formula for the Japanese studio, with Elden Ring hitting 20 million sales in February 2023, just a year into its release.
Bandai Namco has now expanded on that recently confirmed milestone with an elaborate infographic revealing some key information about the fandom's experiences with the game, including the top five hardest Elden Ring bosses based on the total number of fight attempts. The list is unsurprisingly topped by the infamously difficult Elden Ring boss Malenia, whose encounter was attempted some 329 million times, thus accounting for 5.5% of all in-game boss fights the players initiated to date. Malenia is followed by two early-game bosses in the form of Margit and Tree Sentinel at 281 million and 277 million attempts, respectively. The list is concluded by Radagon and Starscourge Radahn, both of whom have been fought much less.
The newly shared infographic also reveals that Elden Ring fans mounted 5.9 billion boss attempts to date, averaging just under 300 per player, going by the game's latest sales milestone. Given how many of the hardest Elden Ring bosses can easily require dozens of attempts at a minimum, this particular stat suggests a significant portion of the player base has yet to beat FromSoftware's latest RPG.
The game's difficulty is also underlined by the newly revealed fact that Elden Ring fans died more than 9 billion times to date, averaging around 450 deaths per player. Enemies and NPCs were responsible for more than two-thirds of those fatalities, with the other leading causes of in-game deaths being status effects and falls at 15% and 14%, respectively.
Bandai Namco's latest stats also confirm that the Elden Ring fandom remains as cooperative as the communities that emerged around previous FromSoftware games. This is most evident by the fact that nine in ten player summons performed since February 2022 were co-op sessions as opposed to PvP invasions. With over a billion such summons performed to date, that's a lot of helping hands the Elden Ring fans extended to one another over the last year.
Elden Ring is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Bandai Namco