A new Elden Ring mod tries to alter the level of the entire RPG game to make it difficult but fair — the name says it all. The ‘Hard but Fair’ mod rebalances magic, poise, and the entire Mountaintops of the Giants area in order to make Elden Ring armour sets more useful.
Elden Ring is one of the best open-world games on PC and is undoubtedly a game of the year contender, but while it’s meant to be a difficult game – it is a Souls-like game, after all – some fans believe that it’s outright unfair in some areas, or at least a little unbalanced.
This new mod by KeKeffect on Nexus Mods aims to overhaul Elden Ring with changes designed to keep things difficult but, well, make them fairer. The armour change is the only optional change in the mod, but KeKeffect states that the goal is to make armour “actually useful instead of just being glorified tissue paper” with a whole range of buffs to areas such as absorption and resistance across all sets.
Poise damage has also been revamped, as apparently right now every enemy does “either 50 or 100 poise damage” so the mod corrects this to make it a little more nuanced. Magic has been nerfed by upping the cost of spells and incantations, and many Spirit Ashes have received health nerfs.
In terms of areas, the mod particularly focuses on balance changes to the Mountaintops of the Giants – which some players feel is the biggest difficulty spike in the game. To correct this, “enemy damage has been reduced and area scaling as a whole has been rebalanced to be more gradual.” As for specific enemy changes, Margit the Fell Omen has had a chunk of HP shaved off.
The mod seems like an interesting experiment in rebalancing Elden Ring, although the modder admits that it is still a work in progress and, notably, they “have not tested this mod myself but I will be doing so in my next playthrough.” So the ‘Hard but Fair’ mod might not be completely fair just yet.