Elden Ring hasn't even been with us for a full three weeks yet, but players are making surprisingly good progress through The Lands Between. For veteran Souls players and newcomers alike, Stormveil Castle boss Margit the Fell Omen represented the game's first major skill check. He's a tough boss—tough enough to send a lot of players back out into the wild to explore and level up for 10 or 20 hours before coming back to stomp on his oversized scorpion tail.
Most players have returned to stomp him, though: according to Steam achievements, an impressive 70.4% of all Elden Ring players have defeated Margit. And a majority have gone on to clear Stormveil Castle and beat its lord, Godrick, too: that achievement has a 61% completion rate. I feel bad for the roughly 8% of players who've beaten Godrick but haven't figured out how to restore power to the great rune he drops—that buff's a lifesaver!
Those boss clear percentages are impressive numbers for a game with as many players as Elden Ring. It's been dominating the Steam sales charts, but people aren't just buying it: they're playing it, too. Elden Ring peaked on Steam with around 950,000 concurrent players and is currently sitting above multiplayer mainstays CS:GO and Dota 2 as of this writing.
Judging by the achievements, Elden Ring hasn't been hard enough to stop a good chunk of players from clearing some other major bosses: Rennala sits at 46.1% and Radahn sits at 35.7%, and both are fights that most players are likely to tackle (you have to clear at least one, though not both, to progress).
I find it even more interesting to compare these completion rates to FromSoftware's last game, Sekiro. Since March 2019, only 59.9% of Sekiro players have felled its first boss, who for my money is easier than Margit, at least without the assistance of other human players in Elden Ring.
In three years, only 47.5% of Sekiro players have defeated Genichiro Ashina, a true skill check boss who's probably only a third of the way into the game. By comparison we know at least 61% of Elden Ring players have taken down its first castle and gotten over its first major challenges in just three weeks.
The vast majority of PC players still have a long way to go before the end, though. The Elden Ring ending achievements tally up to only 17.2%.
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