After 423 hours and over 15,000 total deaths, Elden Ring player finally beats Shadow of the Erdtree without the upgrades FromSoftware urged everyone to use: "Never give up"

For FromSoftware fans, the grind to make every game as excruciatingly difficult as possible never stops, and one dedicated Elden Ring player has proven that after spending 423 hours completing the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC in the most painful way he could.

When Shadow of the Erdtree first launched last year, even the most hardened Elden Ring veterans quickly discovered that having a character with a high rune level meant rather little. The DLC introduced Scadutree Fragments, adding new DLC-exclusive upgrades to boost your attack and resistances. They're so crucial that FromSoftware directly advised players to seek them out, and even gave exact instructions on where to find one. Needless to say, playing the whole DLC without them would be a pretty bad idea… and I'm sure you see where this is going.

Last year, shortly after Shadow of the Erdtree's release, streamer Dan Gheesling took to Twitter with a question. "I am playing my first Elden Ring DLC playthrough with no vigor – without spoilers many hours do you think it will take?" Turns out that he went a bit further than that, because as well as refusing to boost his HP bar, he opted to use no Scadutree Fragments, meaning he was doing very little damage to all his foes, and most likely being killed in a single hit by pretty much anything that crossed his path. On top of that, he didn't use resin to craft any greases to power up his weapons. Anyway, shoutout to the guy who said "a year," because that prediction really wasn't too far off the mark.

"423 hours. 15,522 DLC deaths. 3,469 deaths to Radahn. No HP. No scadu. No resin," Gheesling writes on Twitter, almost nine months since his challenge began. "It's over. Never give up."

You can watch the final moments of the streamer's 3,470th attempt fighting Promised Consort Radahn below, as he erupts into a motivational speech about perseverance. "You never give up, I don't care how many times you bash your head into a wall, it could be [a] 20-foot steel-enforced brick wall, you don't give up, you keep bashing your head against it, and eventually, it starts to crumble," he yells. Please, don't take his words literally.

He's been through a lot of deaths, but as I mentioned above, the lack of Scadutree upgrades means that death would have been instant most of the time. You can understand why there was so much failure when dealing significant damage took so long, too – the final (winning) fight against Radahn lasts about 15 minutes, which is agonizing when you consider that he had to play flawlessly that entire time. It's certainly not a challenge I'd fancy taking on, but I'd probably rather that than an uncapped New Game+1,000 run.

Elden Ring player becomes the first to beat every New Game+ difficulty back to back without getting hit, in an 8-playthrough run that somehow took under 12 hours.