We are just a week and a half away from Shadow of the Erdtree. The most anticipated DLC of the year could only be from the unbeatable Elden Ring, and the hype is through the roof. Of course, you cannot start playing this expansion right away, but you need to meet some requirements, and the most important of them has not been achieved by even half of the soulslike players. Killing Mohg escapes the community.
Mohg, the great guardian of Shadow of the Erdtree
And FromSoftware already warned: in order to enter the Shadow Land, you have to kill one of the most challenging bosses in the action RPG : Mohg, Lord of Blood. A formidable adversary that, although we can access it with relative ease in the early game if we know what we are doing, the vast majority of players stand up to it by moving towards the later parts of this adventure. With this in mind, we can know what part of the community could access the DLC today.
If we go to Steam and go to the list of Elden Ring achievements, there we also have the percentage of Sinluces who have achieved the aforementioned trophies. The Mohg Shardbearer achievement, the one you get after defeating Morgott’s brother, has a relatively low achievement rate, as only 38.7% of all those who have purchased Elden Ring have managed to defeat it. This means that not even half of the players who picked up the game could access its DLC right now. If we go to PlayStation, the percentage is 34.7%.
Let’s explain this with some data. To begin with, of the achievements that have to do with endings (Star Age, Lord of the Circle and Lord of the Frenzied Flame), the one with the highest percentage of obtaining is Star Age with 27.9% of players. Something curious considering that it requires finishing a chain of optional missions.
On the other hand, we must not forget that Mohg is not a story boss, but rather we are talking about an optional enemy. Even so, there are bosses that are not mandatory and are behind long and complicated missions, such as Astel, and Innate of the Void, which have a higher defeat rate. This one, in particular, has been defeated by 44.6% of Steam players.
Finally, we must not forget the number of players who abandoned the game as soon as it started. And, regardless of who it may be, Elden Ring became a mass phenomenon that attracted new audiences that were not prepared for its difficulty. Margit, the Fallen Omen has only been defeated by 73% of players, showing that more than a quarter of the people who bought Elden Ring did not reach the first story boss as such.
Now, let’s put all this data into perspective. Elden Ring was a phenomenon that attracted players far removed from the target audience of these games, so having lost 27% of players in its first hours is relatively normal. On the other hand, in the case of Mohg, we are talking about a difficult enemy, which most will reach by shooting at the end of the game, and which is hidden behind a relatively complex optional mission. If we add to this that, until now, this content did not act as a key to anything (Astel, for example, blocks the most popular ending of the game, the Star Age), it is understandable that “so few people” have defeated it.
With this in mind, what we are left with is a large number with many asterisks to consider. Yes, a large majority of players wouldn’t be able to get to Shadow of the Erdtree today, but that number, translated into a real-world context, isn’t that big. I do not doubt that in the coming days we will see more and more people defeat the Lord of Blood to be able to enter the DLC. If you have already done it and you do not have a character prepared for this adventure, I recommend that you use a mod to get the ideal Lightless to start the expansion.