I played and finished the game while ill (it might have been coronavirus, idk) so my opinions and impressions might be different than if I wasn’t feeling like shit all the time, but:
SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE FINAL BOSS AND VARIOUS OTHER BOSSES
It’s very difficult. It’s actually surprisingly difficult to talk about this online I’ve found, because the Scadutree blessing system, the variety of builds, and the fact that some used summons and spirit ashes and others didn’t means it’s hard to find a baseline difficulty for most of them. For the record, I went in with a fairly uninventive build with medium rolling, used the Greathammer you find near the start and later on a new heavy thrusting sword, and didn’t summon nor use ashes nor use statuses until the end. This meant I had a much more difficult time than others, who I’ve seen have gone “Oh, THIS boss isn’t really that bad, I got them in a few attempts” and it turns out they were using frenzy incantations while two summoned dudes tanked. So, yeah, when talking about DLC difficulty, it’s hard to nail down because it’s so variable. To be 100% clear, I’m not somebody who agrees with the opinions of some commentators (cough Joseph Anderson cough) that amounts to “endless combos and long charge attacks are bad and make Elden Ring bad, if you can’t do it with an R1 big greatsword like with Dark Souls 1 then the game sucks” - Margit and Malenia are a couple of my favourite bosses from the basegame, in fact, though Malenia does have genuine issues. I think boss aggression is really fun when you learn how to counter that aggression and it turns the whole thing into this elegant dance.
Personally, I greatly struggled through the new bosses, similarly to how I did through Malenia on my first playthrough. However, I didn’t get the “elegant dance” thing from these ones quite as much. Messmer fucked me up for hours before I beat him (I’ve seen people battling him with summons and it looks MUCH easier), though by the end, I thought his moveset was pretty fair and balanced overall, Scadutree Avatar took me longer than I liked and disliked his moveset, Rellana was pretty tough but fair, and so on. The final boss is just… very, very, very difficult. And unfair. And also underwhelming, in my opinion (and several others’) because we’ve seen him before. We could have gotten Godwyn, if the developers decided that they wanted to just write the lore that would allow his soul’s return to be possible. Every mention of the Godwyn possibility is invariably met with the counter of “but his soul is dead, that’s not how the lore works” as if the lore was divinely bestowed into Miyazaki’s mind by some deity and he is unable to change it. Miyazaki could have said “oh actually, reviving souls is now possible if you sacrifice two demigods which is what Miquella is doing up at the Gate” and nobody would have been like “BUT BUT THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS!” because it is how it works now, y’know?
To be clear, I don’t think Miyazaki “bought into player demands to fight prime Radahn” or anything, that’s just silly imo, I think Miyazaki knew exactly what was going to happen with Miquella before the first trailers for vanilla Elden Ring released and we knew who Radahn was. I just think his lore sucks sometimes. Oh well.
The map is a real innovation from base Elden Ring. It feels like a return of the Dark Souls 1 connectivity but in an open world, where caves and catacombs take you to entirely new areas - in fact, with enough knowledge, you can fight almost any of the ~10 remembrance bosses first if you want to. The problem is that in this excellent new map, there’s… not really much there, y’know? The devs couldn’t figure out what to give players who are already at endgame, which you almost certainly are if you’ve beaten Mohg. So instead, you get offered smithing stones from anywhere to +1 to +8, and a healthy scattering of the top-tier smithing stones. The scadutree blessings are generally found by exploring, not by killing bosses. This is both bad and good, as it at least offers some justification for exploration, but means that fighting the non-remembrance bosses feels kinda… underwhelming? Like, it’s new content and that’s great, etc etc, but it’s weird that fighting bosses isn’t how you get stronger in this DLC.
Also, there are some areas - large areas - that are overwhelmingly empty. I’m talking, less dense than Mountaintops, without contest, for at least 30-40% of the map’s total surface area. This really sucks and indicates to me that even 2 years of development was insufficient. Also, there are repeat bosses still. There are even repeat vanilla bosses - oh yes, there are Tree Sentinels and Fallingstar Beasts, Ulcerated Tree Spirits, and even regular-ass fire dragons. And they repeat some of the DLC-added bosses too.
My rating of the game was initially like 10/10 on the first couple days, but as I approached the end and then finished, the flaws suddenly came to the foreground for me, so it dipped precipitously to a 7/10. I think Dark Souls 3’s and Bloodborne’s DLCs were better both in terms of fair boss difficulty, quantity and quality of loot, and overall value of money. 40 entire dollars - 2/3 the price of an entire-ass game - for a 30 hour experience in which nearly half the map was just kinda empty? My first playthrough of Elden Ring took me 120 hours, and while some areas were certainly a little barren, there’s so much there in aggregate that complaining about a “lack of content” in vanilla just feels bonkers. But having the same complaint for the DLC feels much easier for me to make.
I have to admit, my patience with the “difficulty as a medium of storytelling” or whatever Miyazaki thinks he’s doing is getting thinner and thinner nowadays. When I killed each of the hardest bosses in the DLC, I didn’t feel elation or pride like I did in Dark Souls 1/2/3, Bloodborne, Sekiro, or even base Elden Ring. I felt a vague sense of relief that it was finally fucking over. I didn’t have to meticulously dodge and punish a boss’s 221-move combo with a single R1 before he started up again, knowing that a couple mistakes would mean my death. I wanted to prove to myself that I could still beat it solo and without spells or cheese, and I did (up until the final boss, where I simply needed mimic tear), but the reward of that hardship just feels like ashes in my mouth. I do take a sort of perverse delight in the DLC getting Mixed ratings. I know it won’t last long and it’ll eventually reach Mostly Positive and then Very Positive, but I hope for at least a few days, there was a little panic in the studio about - fuck, maybe we really have gone a little too far now, and maybe for our next game, we have to make it a little less challenging.
Should you, reading this, buy it? I don’t know. If you want, I guess. Like, it is good, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t think it’s worth that much money unless you also plan on doing further playthroughs of it and base Elden Ring with the new weapons and spells and stuff you find in there.
Revisiting this comment a while later, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that making open-world games is hard. Very hard. Too hard, even. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a developer team make a truly good open world game and I’ve played several of the big-hitters. Perhaps in a decade or two, the labour-reducing tools will be there to adequately fill up the open worlds we can create, without having to rely on repeated bosse; repetitive, dopamine-addled gameplay like with Ubisoft’s skinner boxes; or the opposite as in this DLC: “stylistic emptiness” as a cope for lack of content.
If I wanted to see empty hills and fields and marvel at the beauty of them, I would go outside. On the opposite side, if I wanted constant dopamine, I’d do drugs or something. The cleverest and most difficult thing to achieve is finding a dialectical synthesis.
I appreciate From Software’s attempt at it. I genuinely believe it was a worthwhile experiment and a world without Elden Ring is a worse one. But I hope the lesson they draw from it is that perhaps the next game should be more of a return to their roots. I don’t even think they should just fully revert to the more enclosed nature of the Dark Souls series, but instead take what is valuable from open world designs and leave what is less good. I hope that in retrospect, we see Shadow of the Erdtree as a halfway point; starting from the obvious imperfections of the very “flat” open world of the base game; beginning to constrain things once again, adding genuine verticality and lots of winding paths in SotE; and then finally, in whatever their next game is, the transition will be complete, a full synthesis from the thesis and antithesis, creating something both openworldish and metroidvania-ish. In that sense, SotE makes me optimistic despite its flaws, because it is a genuine step in a positive direction.
Not to get too personality-cult (Kojima, anybody?), but out of all the big developers out there, I think Miyazaki stands the best chance of doing it. I think he is a man who possesses a vision, borne of lifelong education in history and philosophy and literature, and with every game, he gets closer and closer to realizing that vision in all its glory. He is nothing without his dev team, of course, but my impression is that he’s aware of that too given that recent article about how he thinks the best way to get good results is to guarantee employment so employees don’t have to stress about whether they’re going to get fired and can just produce good work.
I played and finished the game while ill (it might have been coronavirus, idk) so my opinions and impressions might be different than if I wasn’t feeling like shit all the time, but:
SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE FINAL BOSS AND VARIOUS OTHER BOSSES
It’s very difficult. It’s actually surprisingly difficult to talk about this online I’ve found, because the Scadutree blessing system, the variety of builds, and the fact that some used summons and spirit ashes and others didn’t means it’s hard to find a baseline difficulty for most of them. For the record, I went in with a fairly uninventive build with medium rolling, used the Greathammer you find near the start and later on a new heavy thrusting sword, and didn’t summon nor use ashes nor use statuses until the end. This meant I had a much more difficult time than others, who I’ve seen have gone “Oh, THIS boss isn’t really that bad, I got them in a few attempts” and it turns out they were using frenzy incantations while two summoned dudes tanked. So, yeah, when talking about DLC difficulty, it’s hard to nail down because it’s so variable. To be 100% clear, I’m not somebody who agrees with the opinions of some commentators (cough Joseph Anderson cough) that amounts to “endless combos and long charge attacks are bad and make Elden Ring bad, if you can’t do it with an R1 big greatsword like with Dark Souls 1 then the game sucks” - Margit and Malenia are a couple of my favourite bosses from the basegame, in fact, though Malenia does have genuine issues. I think boss aggression is really fun when you learn how to counter that aggression and it turns the whole thing into this elegant dance.
Personally, I greatly struggled through the new bosses, similarly to how I did through Malenia on my first playthrough. However, I didn’t get the “elegant dance” thing from these ones quite as much. Messmer fucked me up for hours before I beat him (I’ve seen people battling him with summons and it looks MUCH easier), though by the end, I thought his moveset was pretty fair and balanced overall, Scadutree Avatar took me longer than I liked and disliked his moveset, Rellana was pretty tough but fair, and so on. The final boss is just… very, very, very difficult. And unfair. And also underwhelming, in my opinion (and several others’) because we’ve seen him before. We could have gotten Godwyn, if the developers decided that they wanted to just write the lore that would allow his soul’s return to be possible. Every mention of the Godwyn possibility is invariably met with the counter of “but his soul is dead, that’s not how the lore works” as if the lore was divinely bestowed into Miyazaki’s mind by some deity and he is unable to change it. Miyazaki could have said “oh actually, reviving souls is now possible if you sacrifice two demigods which is what Miquella is doing up at the Gate” and nobody would have been like “BUT BUT THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS!” because it is how it works now, y’know?
To be clear, I don’t think Miyazaki “bought into player demands to fight prime Radahn” or anything, that’s just silly imo, I think Miyazaki knew exactly what was going to happen with Miquella before the first trailers for vanilla Elden Ring released and we knew who Radahn was. I just think his lore sucks sometimes. Oh well.
The map is a real innovation from base Elden Ring. It feels like a return of the Dark Souls 1 connectivity but in an open world, where caves and catacombs take you to entirely new areas - in fact, with enough knowledge, you can fight almost any of the ~10 remembrance bosses first if you want to. The problem is that in this excellent new map, there’s… not really much there, y’know? The devs couldn’t figure out what to give players who are already at endgame, which you almost certainly are if you’ve beaten Mohg. So instead, you get offered smithing stones from anywhere to +1 to +8, and a healthy scattering of the top-tier smithing stones. The scadutree blessings are generally found by exploring, not by killing bosses. This is both bad and good, as it at least offers some justification for exploration, but means that fighting the non-remembrance bosses feels kinda… underwhelming? Like, it’s new content and that’s great, etc etc, but it’s weird that fighting bosses isn’t how you get stronger in this DLC.
Also, there are some areas - large areas - that are overwhelmingly empty. I’m talking, less dense than Mountaintops, without contest, for at least 30-40% of the map’s total surface area. This really sucks and indicates to me that even 2 years of development was insufficient. Also, there are repeat bosses still. There are even repeat vanilla bosses - oh yes, there are Tree Sentinels and Fallingstar Beasts, Ulcerated Tree Spirits, and even regular-ass fire dragons. And they repeat some of the DLC-added bosses too.
My rating of the game was initially like 10/10 on the first couple days, but as I approached the end and then finished, the flaws suddenly came to the foreground for me, so it dipped precipitously to a 7/10. I think Dark Souls 3’s and Bloodborne’s DLCs were better both in terms of fair boss difficulty, quantity and quality of loot, and overall value of money. 40 entire dollars - 2/3 the price of an entire-ass game - for a 30 hour experience in which nearly half the map was just kinda empty? My first playthrough of Elden Ring took me 120 hours, and while some areas were certainly a little barren, there’s so much there in aggregate that complaining about a “lack of content” in vanilla just feels bonkers. But having the same complaint for the DLC feels much easier for me to make.
I have to admit, my patience with the “difficulty as a medium of storytelling” or whatever Miyazaki thinks he’s doing is getting thinner and thinner nowadays. When I killed each of the hardest bosses in the DLC, I didn’t feel elation or pride like I did in Dark Souls 1/2/3, Bloodborne, Sekiro, or even base Elden Ring. I felt a vague sense of relief that it was finally fucking over. I didn’t have to meticulously dodge and punish a boss’s 221-move combo with a single R1 before he started up again, knowing that a couple mistakes would mean my death. I wanted to prove to myself that I could still beat it solo and without spells or cheese, and I did (up until the final boss, where I simply needed mimic tear), but the reward of that hardship just feels like ashes in my mouth. I do take a sort of perverse delight in the DLC getting Mixed ratings. I know it won’t last long and it’ll eventually reach Mostly Positive and then Very Positive, but I hope for at least a few days, there was a little panic in the studio about - fuck, maybe we really have gone a little too far now, and maybe for our next game, we have to make it a little less challenging.
Should you, reading this, buy it? I don’t know. If you want, I guess. Like, it is good, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t think it’s worth that much money unless you also plan on doing further playthroughs of it and base Elden Ring with the new weapons and spells and stuff you find in there.
Revisiting this comment a while later, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that making open-world games is hard. Very hard. Too hard, even. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a developer team make a truly good open world game and I’ve played several of the big-hitters. Perhaps in a decade or two, the labour-reducing tools will be there to adequately fill up the open worlds we can create, without having to rely on repeated bosse; repetitive, dopamine-addled gameplay like with Ubisoft’s skinner boxes; or the opposite as in this DLC: “stylistic emptiness” as a cope for lack of content.
If I wanted to see empty hills and fields and marvel at the beauty of them, I would go outside. On the opposite side, if I wanted constant dopamine, I’d do drugs or something. The cleverest and most difficult thing to achieve is finding a dialectical synthesis.
I appreciate From Software’s attempt at it. I genuinely believe it was a worthwhile experiment and a world without Elden Ring is a worse one. But I hope the lesson they draw from it is that perhaps the next game should be more of a return to their roots. I don’t even think they should just fully revert to the more enclosed nature of the Dark Souls series, but instead take what is valuable from open world designs and leave what is less good. I hope that in retrospect, we see Shadow of the Erdtree as a halfway point; starting from the obvious imperfections of the very “flat” open world of the base game; beginning to constrain things once again, adding genuine verticality and lots of winding paths in SotE; and then finally, in whatever their next game is, the transition will be complete, a full synthesis from the thesis and antithesis, creating something both openworldish and metroidvania-ish. In that sense, SotE makes me optimistic despite its flaws, because it is a genuine step in a positive direction.
Not to get too personality-cult (Kojima, anybody?), but out of all the big developers out there, I think Miyazaki stands the best chance of doing it. I think he is a man who possesses a vision, borne of lifelong education in history and philosophy and literature, and with every game, he gets closer and closer to realizing that vision in all its glory. He is nothing without his dev team, of course, but my impression is that he’s aware of that too given that recent article about how he thinks the best way to get good results is to guarantee employment so employees don’t have to stress about whether they’re going to get fired and can just produce good work.